A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  “This it?” he asked me.

  “That’s it.”

  “Looks like a letter,” he said. It was addressed to McCoy, with a stamp and a postmark, the date of which was earlier that week. He opened it, scanned it, and said, “Reads like a note.”

  “Read it out loud,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “Humor me. I think I may be able to help you wrap this one up quick.”

  “I’m all for that,” he said, and proceeded to read out loud.

  When he’d finished, I said, “Let’s check that note for prints, and I think I can tell you whose to check it against.”

  “If there are any prints,” he said. “People who make death threats aren’t usually that helpful.”

  “Why don’t you give me a ride to my hotel,” I suggested, “and I’ll tell you a story about a man and a slip of the tongue.”

  “All right, but you better have something worth the cab fare.”

  He drove me to my hotel, listened to what I had to say, and agreed to pick me up the next day. He admitted that I might have something, however slim a hook I was hanging it on.

  “What did you get?” I asked as I got in his car the next morning.

  “Enough to keep me going along,” he said. “The man owes a bundle, his job is in danger, and we already had his prints on file from an old gambling bust. They matched the ones taken from the note.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let me go in to talk to him first. Maybe I can get him to say something that will make your case easier.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s the note.”

  “We going alone?”

  “I’m shorthanded on my squad. That’s the only reason I responded myself last night.” He started the car, then added, “I’ll have a unit meet us at the track.”

  “Quietly,” I suggested.

  “Natch.”

  I found Lew Hale watching the workouts and persuaded him to accompany me to his office. I told him I had some news about McCoy, and about the man making the threats.

  “Man?” he asked me on the way. “So you’ve determined that it was a man?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m dead sure it was a man.”

  When we got to his office, he sat down behind his desk and said, “Well, what about McCoy and the guy making the threats? You don’t mean it was him, do you?”

  I shook my head. “No, it wasn’t him. McCoy’s dead. According to the M.E.’s report, he was killed night before last.”

  “That’s too bad,” Hale said. “He was gutless, but that’s not a reason for a man to have to die.”

  “My thoughts exactly, Mr. Hale,” I said. “And yet, you did kill him.”

  “Me!?” he replied in surprise. “Are you crazy?”

  “And there must have been more of a reason than the fact he was gutless.”

  “Have you got any proof of what you’re saying?” he demanded.

  “I think I do,” I replied.

  “Well, you’d better be sure as all hell that you do!”

  “That’s what first put me onto you, Hale,” I told him. “That phrase you keep using. Most people say ‘sure as hell’ or ‘fast as hell,’ but you always add the word ‘all.’ You said Dreamland was ‘impressive as all hell,’ remember?”

  “And that makes me guilty of murder?”

  “Not necessarily, but that’s what made me start to think you might be guilty of fabricating and making threats.”

  “Fabricating? Didn’t Miss Emily tell you she got a call—”

  “She did. She told me that the caller said she’d be ‘lucky as all hell’ to make it back from Kentucky.”

  “So?” he demanded, looking uncomfortable.

  “And then there’s this,” I said, taking the envelope and note from my pocket.

  “Now what’s that?”

  “A note Don McCoy received earlier this week, which probably caused him to withdraw from his mount on Dreamland. The note says he would be ‘deader than all hell’ if he rode Dreamland in the Derby.”

  “I don’t say—”

  “Yes, you do, Hale. You don’t notice it because it’s become habit with you. But I noticed it right away. It didn’t dawn on Mrs. Nixon because she didn’t spend enough time around you that she would notice.”

  “This is ridiculous,” he sputtered. “You have to have more proof than—”

  “You owe a lot of money,” I said, cutting him off. “Gambling debts. You stood to make plenty if Dreamland lost, but if he lost you also stood to lose your job.”

  “You’re saying that I wanted him to run and lose, and that I didn’t want him to run at all. You should make up your—”

  “And then there are your prints on this piece of paper,” I said.

  “Prints?”

  “Fingerprints. You probably had no way of knowing that McCoy would keep the note, and—not being a true criminal—it probably never occurred to you to wear gloves when you wrote it. Your prints are on file with the police because of an old gambling arrest, aren’t they?”

  He made a quick move, opening his top drawer and pulling out a .38.

  “All right,” he said, “all right.” He was nervous, flexing his fingers around the gun, making me nervous. “I didn’t mean to kill McCoy.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, sensing that he needed little prodding to do so.

  “You were right, there were two ways I could go. I could allow Dreamland to run, hoping that he’d win and save my job, but that wouldn’t pay my debts. Of course if he ran and lost, without my job I wouldn’t be able to make any payments at all.”

  “Let me guess. First you scared McCoy, then you offered him a deal.”

  Hale nodded. “To pull the horse, throw the race. I’d make a bundle and the people I owe money to would make a bundle, too.”

  “What happened?”

  “McCoy got irate, the little fool,” he hissed. “He said he’d rather be scared off than bought off. When I showed him the gun, he jumped me. We struggled and it went off.”

  “Why were there no calls or threats for the past four days?” I asked.

  “The people I owe found out what I was trying to do,” he explained. “They said that keeping the horse from running so he wouldn’t lose and cost me my job was small thinking. They said I’d lose my job anyway, sooner or later. They made me see that the only way to get square with them—and even make some money for myself—was to make sure Dreamland ran and lost. So I changed my plans.” He flexed his fingers around the gun some more. “Now I’ve got to change my plans again.”

  “Did you find a jockey that could be bought?”

  “There are enough of them,” he said. “I’ll give one of them the mount . . . but first I’ve got to take care of you.”

  “You’re not going to kill me, Hale,” I said. “Look at how nervous you are. You killed McCoy by accident. I don’t think you can kill me in cold blood.”

  A drop of persperation rolled down his cheek to the corner of his mouth, where he licked it off.

  “Besides,” I went on, “the police are right outside listening to everything. Kill me, and you’ll be a lot of worse off than you already are.” I raised my voice and said, “Lieutenant?”

  The door opened and Taylor walked in, followed by two uniform cops.

  I took a step towards Hale, holding out my hand. “Let me have the gun, Hale. It’s all over.”

  He hesitated long enough to scare me a little, but finally handed over the weapon.

  “Okay,” Taylor told his men, “take him out and read him his rights.”

  As they led the trainer from the office, Taylor walked over and relieved me of the .38.

  “I guess he could look on the bright side,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Maybe in prison he’ll be safe from the people he owes money to.”

  “Maybe,” the tall cop said, shaking his head, as if something were still eating at him.

  “What’s on your
mind, Lieutenant?”

  “Hm? Oh, nothing much,” he said. “This is just the first time I’ve ever built a case around a slip of the tongue, that’s all.”

  ED GORMAN

  Ed Gorman (1941– ) has been called “one of the most original crime writers around” by Kirkus Reviews and “a powerful storyteller” by Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times. He works in horror and Westerns as well as crime and writes many excellent short stories. To date there have been six Gorman collections, three of which are straight crime, the most recent being Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories. He is probably best known for his Sam McCain series, set in small-town Iowa of the 1950s (“good and evil clash with the same heartbreaking results as Lawrence Block or Elmore Leonard”). He has also written a number of thrillers, including The Marilyn Tapes and Black River Falls, the latest being The Poker Club.

  He is among the best writers of short crime fiction today—or ever.

  The Reason Why

  “I’m scared.”

  “This was your idea, Karen.”

  “You scared?”

  “No.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Because I’m not scared I’m a bastard?”

  “You not being scared means you don’t believe me.”

  “Well.”

  “See. I knew it.”

  “What?”

  “Just the way you said ‘Well.’ You bastard.”

  I sighed and looked out at the big red brick building that sprawled over a quarter mile of spring grass turned silver by a fat June moon. Twenty-five years ago a 1950 Ford fastback had sat in the adjacent parking lot. Mine for two summers of grocery store work.

  We were sitting in her car, a Volvo she’d cadged from her last marriage settlement, number four if you’re interested, and sharing a pint of bourbon the way we used to in high school when we’d been more than friends but never quite lovers.

  The occasion tonight was our twenty-fifth class reunion. But there was another occasion, too. In our senior year a boy named Michael Brandon had jumped off a steep clay cliff called Pierce Point to his death on the winding river road below. Suicide. That, anyway, had been the official version.

  A month ago Karen Lane (she had gone back to her maiden name these days, the Karen Lane-Cummings-Todd-Browne-LeMay getting a tad too long) had called to see if I wanted to go to dinner and I said yes, if I could bring Donna along, but then Donna surprised me by saying she didn’t care to go along, that by now we should be at the point in our relationship where we trusted each other (“God, Dwyer, I don’t even look at other men, not for very long anyway, you know?”), and Karen and I had had dinner and she’d had many drinks, enough that I saw she had a problem, and then she’d told me about something that had troubled her for a long time . . .

  In senior year she’d gone to a party and gotten sick on wine and stumbled out to somebody’s backyard to throw up and it was there she’d overheard the three boys talking. They were earnestly discussing what had happened to Michael Brandon the previous week and they were even more earnestly discussing what would happen to them if “anybody ever really found out the truth.”

  “It’s bothered me all these years,” she’d said over dinner a month earlier. “They murdered him and they got away with it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police?”

  “I didn’t think they’d believe me.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged and put her lovely little face down, dark hair covering her features. Whenever she put her face down that way it meant that she didn’t want to tell you a lie so she’d just as soon talk about something else.

  “Why not, Karen?”

  “Because of where we came from. The Highlands.”

  The Highlands is an area that used to ring the iron foundries and factories of this city. Way before pollution became a fashionable concern, you could stand on your front porch and see a peculiarly beautiful orange haze on the sky every dusk. The Highlands had bars where men lost ears, eyes, and fingers in just garden-variety fights, and streets where nobody sane ever walked after dark, not even cops unless they were in pairs. But it wasn’t the physical violence you remembered so much as the emotional violence of poverty. You get tired of hearing your mother scream because there isn’t enough money for food and hearing your father scream back because there’s nothing he can do about it. Nothing.

  Karen Lane and I had come from the Highlands, but we were smarter and, in her case, better looking than most of the people from the area, so when we went to Wilson High School—one of those nightmare conglomerates that shoves the poorest kids in a city in with the richest—we didn’t do badly for ourselves. By senior year we found ourselves hanging out with the sons and daughters of bankers and doctors and city officials and lawyers and riding around in new Impala convertibles and attending an occasional party where you saw an actual maid. But wherever we went, we’d manage for at least a few minutes to get away from our dates and talk to each other. What we were doing, of course, was trying to comfort ourselves. We shared terrible and confusing feelings—pride that we were acceptable to those we saw as glamorous, shame that we felt disgrace for being from the Highlands and having fathers who worked in factories and mothers who went to Mass as often as nuns and brothers and sisters who were doomed to punching the clock and yelling at ragged kids in the cold factory dusk. (You never realize what a toll such shame takes till you see your father’s waxen face there in the years-later casket.)

  That was the big secret we shared, of course, Karen and I, that we were going to get out, leave the place once and for all. And her brown eyes never sparkled more Christmas-morning bright than at those moments when it all was ahead of us, money, sex, endless thrills, immortality. She had the kind of clean good looks brought out best by a blue cardigan with a line of white button-down shirt at the top and a brown suede car coat over her slender shoulders and moderately tight jeans displaying her quietly artful ass. Nothing splashy about her. She had the sort of face that snuck up on you. You had the impression you were talking to a pretty but in no way spectacular girl, and then all of a sudden you saw how the eyes burned with sad humor and how wry the mouth got at certain times and how absolutely perfect that straight little nose was and how the freckles enhanced rather than detracted from her beauty and by then of course you were hopelessly entangled. Hopelessly.

  This wasn’t just my opinion, either. I mentioned four divorce settlements. True facts. Karen was one of those prizes that powerful and rich men like to collect with the understanding that it’s only something you hold in trust, like a yachting cup. So, in her time, she’d been an ornament for a professional football player (her college beau), an orthodontist (“I think he used to have sexual fantasies about Barry Goldwater”), the owner of a large commuter airline (“I slept with half his pilots; it was kind of a company benefit”), and a sixty-nine-year-old millionaire who was dying of heart disease (“He used to have me sit next to his bedside and just hold his hand—the weird thing was that of all of them, I loved him, I really did—and his eyes would be closed and then every once in a while tears would start streaming down his cheeks as if he was remembering something that really filled him with remorse; he was really a sweetie, but then cancer got him before the heart disease and I never did find out what he regretted so much, I mean if it was about his son or his wife or what”), and now she was comfortably fixed for the rest of her life and if the crow’s feet were a little more pronounced around eyes and mouth and if the slenderness was just a trifle too slender (she weighed, at five-three, maybe ninety pounds and kept a variety of diet books in her big sunny kitchen), she was a damn good-looking woman nonetheless, the world’s absurdity catalogued and evaluated in a gaze that managed to be both weary and impish, with a laugh that was knowing without being cynical.

  So now she wanted to play detective.

  I had some more bourbon from the pint—it burned beautifully—and said, “If I had your money, you know what I’d do?”r />
  “Buy yourself a new shirt?”

  “You don’t like my shirt?”

  “I didn’t know you had this thing about Hawaii.”

  “If I had your money, I’d just forget about all this.”

  “I thought cops were sworn to uphold the right and the true.”

  “I’m an ex-cop.”

  “You wear a uniform.”

  “That’s for the American Security Agency.”

  She sighed. “So I shouldn’t have sent the letters?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if they’re guilty, they’ll show up at Pierce Point tonight.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe they’ll know it’s a trap. And not do anything.”

  She nodded to the school. “You hear that?”

  “What?”

  “The song.”

  It was Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red.”

  “I remember one party when we both hated our dates and we ended up dancing to that over and over again. Somebody’s basement. You remember?”

  “Sort of, I guess,” I said.

  “Good. Let’s go in the gym and then we can dance to it again.”

  Donna, my lady friend, was out of town attending an advertising convention. I hoped she wasn’t going to dance with anybody else because it would sure make me mad.

  I started to open the door and she said, “I want to ask you a question.”

  “What?” I sensed what it was going to be so I kept my eyes on the parking lot.

  “Turn around and look at me.”

  I turned around and looked at her. “Okay.”

  “Since the time we had dinner a month or so ago I’ve started receiving brochures from Alcoholics Anonymous in the mail. If you were having them sent to me, would you be honest enough to tell me?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Are you having them sent to me?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You think I’m a lush?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I asked you first.”

  So we went into the gym and danced.