Jackie still couldn’t get mad. He said quietly, “So that’s one reason. What’s the other?”
Spud sat down wearily, staring at his fat belly. “I guess I might as well spell it out for you. It’s the only way you’ll ever get it. Because Jay Paley’s got her, tramp. That’s the only explanation. These things develop leaks always, and he’s learned of my double-cross. Or is it a triple-cross? It’s getting too damn complex to follow. Anyhow, you’ll hear from him pretty soon. Probably he’s been trying to contact you already. To the effect that Peg is his guest, I mean. Soon as you’ve lost the fight, he’ll send her home. Since you’re all messed up in a dirty fix, he won’t worry about you doing anything or going to the cops. You’ve got no call to worry, either, as far as that goes. All you’ve got to do is lose. There isn’t anything else you could do, even if you wanted, so you’ve got no worry.”
Looking down at Spud sitting there in the chair like an ugly little toad, Jackie was suddenly aware of the full significance of the deal with Ryan. The enormity of it swelled in his brain, assuming gigantic proportions.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You promised I’d win. You made the guarantee to Rudy Ryan. If you don’t think I’ve got a chance, even trying, why would you do that? You know what happens to guys who cross Ryan.”
Spud’s eyes raised to Jackie’s face and dropped again. The bloat of his body seemed to deflate, withering and drying against worn velour.
“You wouldn’t understand. That’s something I couldn’t make simple enough. Now get the hell out of here. I’m tired, and I’m sick, and most of all I’m sick of the sight and sound and smell of you. I hope I drop dead before I ever see you or speak to you again.”
Jackie turned and went out. Downstairs in the shabby lobby, he consulted a telephone directory and found the address of the Pawnee Apartments. It was out on North-line Boulevard. A fancy street. People with money lived there. One of them was Jay Paley.
Outside, Jackie flagged a cab and gave the driver the Northline address. He sat sprawled in the back seat, still filled with the strange and purposeful calm that he’d acquired in the face of Spud’s invective. When the cab stopped in front of the massive stack of the apartment building, he got out and went in, wading through thick carpeting to the elevator bank. A kid in a red monkey suit was standing outside an empty car.
“Jay Paley’s apartment,” Jackie said.
The kid looked dubious, so Jackie dug a limp five out of his pocket and fingered it obviously.
“Fourteenth floor,” the kid said, “and I told you nothing.”
They went up to fourteen about one floor ahead of their stomachs, and the kid indicated a blond door down the hall. “That’s it,” he said.
Jackie went down and thumbed a button, hearing beyond the door the spaced musical vibrations of chimes. The door was opened by a man about Jackie’s size with a hard, pocked face. Without waiting for an invitation, Jackie stepped across the threshold with his left foot and brought the lethal right up from the rear. The pocked face didn’t even have time to look surprised. It just disappeared. The body below it lifted off the floor in a short arc and came down on its head and shoulders, making considerable noise.
Jackie stood with his legs spread, massaging the knuckles of his right hand, waiting for a reaction. Down the length of the room, a door burst open and Jay Paley appeared in pink silk underwear. His eyes took in the sprawled figure of the pocked subordinate and flashed up over Jackie, widening with apprehension. Spinning, he dove back through the open door. His legs, Jackie noticed, were thin and hairy, rather repulsive.
In his bedroom, Paley was frantically pawing in the top drawer of a chest. As Jackie drove toward him, he came up and around with a snub-nosed .38. But not soon enough. Jackie’s blunt fingers locked around the wrist behind the gun, snapping it aside and down. The wrist bone snapped like a rotten stick, and Paley screamed. It was a shrill, wavering scream of fear and rage and pain in equal parts. The .38 thudded on the floor, and Jackie transferred his grip from Paley’s wrist to Paley’s throat. With his other hand, he slashed down on Paley’s mouth, driving the scream back into the throat it came from, altering it to a wet blubber. He kept holding Paley like that, by the throat, slashing his face methodically with his free hand. Paley went on blubbering, mouthing incoherencies. His face acquired a sleek red sheen.
“Where’s Peg?” Jackie said. “What’ve you done with Peg?”
He let Paley sag to the floor, a hairy slug in pink silk. The body crumpled, folding up on itself, so Jackie straightened it with a kick in the ribs.
“Peg,” Jackie said. “Where’s Peg?”
Paley lifted an arm and let it fall, gesturing toward the door to the bathroom. The door was open, and Jackie could see through across tile to another door that was closed. The closed door had a key on the bathroom side. Bending over, Jackie got hold of Paley and hauled him up. He smashed a short right to the slack jaw and let the body drop again. Not for pleasure. Just to put Paley out of the way for sure. That done, he walked through the bathroom and unlocked the closed door.
Peg sat on the edge of a double bed, small and lovely and unhurt, her knees and ankles primly together. The glow of her pale hair was in her eyes, the way it always was when things were fine.
“I heard you out there,” she said. “I never dreamed you were so tough. How come you aren’t champ?”
Jackie felt as if someone had tied a knot in his heart. He went over and dropped to his knees in front of her, burying his face in her lap. “Peg,” he said. “Peg, Peg …”
She stroked his head, crooning a little, like a mother with a child. “I know,” she said. “You’re in a mess. I know all about it. But you’ll come clean, honey. You can give that louse out there his money back—the ten grand, I mean—and what he loses on the books is his tough luck. That we won’t worry about.”
She stroked his head a minute longer, and then said, “It’s all my fault, anyhow. Always whining for that lousy dump out on 66. I should have known I’d only get you confused. Come on, now, honey. You’ve got to get home to bed. There’s a fight to win tomorrow night.”
Taking the blame. Just as Spud had said she would.
Jackie stood up, grinning a little, pulling her after him. Tucking the bright head under his chin, he breathed the clean scent of it, wondering how any guy could be so lucky.
The blunt hand that had just done a good job on a couple of bad boys folded into a knot of hard knuckles behind her.
“Yeah, honey,” he said softly, “this one I’ll win. This one I’ll win for an ugly little bastard who loves my wife.”
And that, in the unreasonable way events sometimes have of going against the experts, is what happened. Jackie read the story of the fight aloud to Peg from page umpteen in the next morning’s paper.
Jay Paley, being a more important character, rated a bigger treatment. The story of how his bullet-riddled body was found in an alley on the east side of town was carried on page one.
MURDER OF A MOUSE
Originally published in Verdict Detective Story Magazine #5 1955.
“Justice is blind,” it’s said, and so is vanity. This is the story of a man who learned it for himself.
His name was Charles Bruce, and early in the morning he got out of bed and padded into the bathroom. Even barefooted in pajamas he gave, somehow, the effect of almost frightening arrogance and vanity. His overdeveloped ego was apparent in the set of his polished blond head that was hardly tousled after a sleepless night. It lay exposed in the clean lines of a face that might have made him a matinee idol if he had possessed even the rudiments of acting ability. His vanity was, as a matter of fact, almost a disease. It approached narcissism. It was the kind of vanity that, when it has no particular talents to exploit, acquires in frustration a special evil. It is frequently found in criminals.
; Moving quietly and quickly, he shaved, brushed his teeth and hair, made all use of the bathroom that he would need to make. When he was finished, he removed a hypodermic syringe from the medicine cabinet and loaded the barrel with a potent anaesthetic he had acquired with considerable difficulty. Carrying the loaded syringe, he went back into the bedroom.
His wife Wanda slept in peace, her lips curved in the slightest smile over protuberant teeth. Her hair, fanned untidily on the white pillow around her head, was sparse and a kind of dun color, the color of a common mouse. It occurred to him, as he stood looking down at her with the syringe in his hand, that she possessed many characteristics that combined to achieve that mouse-like impression—the hair, the teeth, an overall scurrying timidity that seemed to view the world with bright, apprehensive eyes. A strange sort of woman to have a million dollars in her own name. Tragedies sometimes develop from incongruities like that—a woman like Wanda with that kind of money. This thought occurred to him, too, in those final moments before he acted, but the thought stimulated in him no pity, no abortive remorse.
She was sleeping on her back, her left arm curled up around her head on the pillow. Her hand was turned palm upward, which exposed the soft underside of her wrist, and this made the job easier, of course. He could see without difficulty, even standing erect, a linear bulge of pale blue vein. He sat down beside her on the edge of the bed, and she sighed and stirred but didn’t waken. Taking hold of the hand on the pillow and leaning his weight suddenly down upon her body, he slipped the sharp needle of the syringe into the soft flesh of her wrist and forced the plunger down.
She awoke with a sharp little cry, her eyes flying open with almost instantaneous understanding and terror, the understanding that what should have been the beginning of only another day was in fact the beginning of the last day. The initial cry repeated itself over and over, issuing from her throat like a pathetic, stereotyped plea, and her small body threshed futilely against the pressure of his. The anaesthetic injected, he placed both hands upon her shoulders and pinned her firmly, applying no more force than necessary and being careful not to dig into her flesh with his fingers. For he wanted no bruises. No signs of struggle.
The anaesthetic worked swiftly, and it was hardly any time at all until she slipped into an imitation of death that was, for her, a prelude to the real thing. He stood erect again, breathing deeply, sucking in and expelling air in a slow, rhythmic cadence. The needle, he saw, had torn the flesh of her wrist a little, but not seriously. The tiny wound would, as he had planned, be easily included in a later and larger one.
Turning away, he returned to the bathroom and ran cold water into the tub. While the water was running, he unwrapped a new razor blade and laid the shining and deadly bit of edged steel on the lavatory in readiness. Then, watching the water rise slowly in the tub, he considered details. How would she do it? Would she sit in the tub in the water? The idea of the bloody water staining the flesh of her body was repulsive to him, and he was certain that it would be repulsive to her. It was something she wouldn’t do, to sit in the water like that. No. She would be more likely to kneel beside the tub and let her arm hang over the edge. Or, better yet, she would sit. She would sit at one end, sidewise to the tub with her back against the wall, letting the arm hang over into the water. That would be the natural way, the comfortable way, the way she would probably do it if she were doing it of her own volition. Satisfied, he shut off the water taps and went back to her bed.
She was light in his arms. So very light. She must have weighed no more than a hundred pounds. Cradled in his arms, she looked like a sleeping child, her head dropping forward against his shoulder with an appearance of affection. Of this appearance, however, he was unaware. He was unaware of everything except the dominant necessity to do the thing right. In the bathroom, he set her on the floor in the position he had decided upon and recovered the tiny blade from the lavatory. He wiped it clean on a bit of tissue and put it between the thumb and index finger of her right hand. Holding it that way, between the two digits, he made the necessary quick incision in her left wrist and permitted the blade to drop free into the water. That’s what would happen, he thought. She would certainly let the blade drop into the water.
Around her submerged hand and wrist, the water reddened swiftly, the depth of the color fading at its spreading fringe to a sickly pink. He watched for a moment the spreading stain, and then he left the bathroom for the last time. He left her for the last time, too, of course, but he felt no particular sense of parting. Even in the intimacy of marriage, he had been aware of her only vaguely as a person. Primarily as a symbol, a source of supply, a kind of million dollar personification.
He moved unhurriedly around the bedroom, gathering his clothes. He dressed with his usual fastidious attention to details, and the result of all this careful attention was, strangely, an effect of casual perfection, as if he’d just thrown his clothes on anyway and they had somehow assumed just the right drape and lines. When he was dressed, he packed an expensive leather bag with additional items of clothing and set the bag on the floor by the door through which he would leave. Crossing the room from the door, he sat down at a desk between windows and wrote a few lines on a single crisp sheet of paper, the top sheet of Wanda’s stationery, which she’d touched, so that her prints were undoubtedly on it. He already had the lines formulated in his mind, and so he wrote swiftly: Dear Wanda, I’ve tried to be honest with you about Carol, and I’m trying to be honest now. We’ve decided to marry as soon as I can get free. I’m going to a hotel and will send later for the rest of my things. Please don’t try to contact me personally, but I’ll be happy to talk with your lawyer about a divorce. I assure you that I’ll cooperate fully, and I’m very sorry if this causes you any distress.
He signed the note with his first name only and then crumpled the paper in his hand and dropped it on the floor, as it might have been crumpled and dropped by someone in a powerful emotional reaction. By a mousy little woman, for example, whose handsome and adored husband was leaving her. A pathetic little woman, really, in spite of a million dollars, who could find, in the bitterness of desertion and in the distorted satisfaction of a terrible recrimination, the final strength it would take to slash her wrist.
His lips twitched with a touch of irony at the idea of recrimination, and he went over and picked up his bag and left, locking the door of the apartment behind him.
Walking down the hall to the elevator, he was a picture of ease and well-being, one of life’s lucky boys, broad shoulders and narrow hips accentuated subtly by fine tailoring. The rhythmic scissoring of his legs was crisp and certain but managed to convey an impression of effortless motion that contributed to a total effect of thoroughbred arrogance. He was a man whose mind was untroubled by intimations of misfortune or suffering or disgrace. He was a man to whom such things just didn’t happen.
The elevator boy, who secretly hated his guts, smiled pleasantly with a professional regard for the side of the bread the butter was on. “Good morning, Mr. Bruce. Leaving us for a while?”
Charles glanced down at the bag in his hand and nodded shortly. “Yes.”
His incisive monosyllable discouraged further questions, and the operator, watching the straight back, almost military in bearing, cross the lobby downstairs and exit through the street doors, compensated for the feeling of inadequacy Charles always gave him by calling him mentally a conceited bastard.
Outside on the curb, Charles waited a few moments until he caught the eye of a cruising cabby. “Ambassador Hotel,” he said, and relaxed in the back seat. The cabby shot a glance at his reflected face in the rear view mirror, and he also, like the elevator boy, used mentally the word bastard. The term was prompted by a kind of impersonal envy, however, and was qualified by the word lucky instead of conceited. Some guys have all the luck. Looks and dough. Nothing on their minds but spending the next buck on the next beautiful d
ame.
As a matter of fact, Charles wasn’t thinking of money and women at all. Not that he didn’t think of them quite often. It was just, at the moment, that he was absorbed by another matter that had gained temporary dominance. Sitting there in the back seat of the cab, watching through glass the streets that assumed in the early sun a sparkling, deceptive look of cleanliness, he wondered how long it took for a life to drain away through a neatly opened artery in the wrist. He had for a moment a very vivid vision of darkening water, but he was, apparently, not disturbed by the vision. Looking out at the sparkling streets he didn’t see, he even smiled a little now and then.
He was admitted to the lobby of the Ambassador by a doorman six and a half feet tall (all the doormen at the Ambassador had industrious pituitarics; this gave them a special look; in their vivid uniforms, a kind of Queen’s Guard look) and he was relieved of his bag by a bellhop who looked like a sophomore out of the best frat in a good college, which was another calculated specialty of the Ambassador. At the desk, he was subjected to a cool appraisal by a cool clerk who might have been, from his appearance, a controlling stockholder in the corporation that owned the string of fancy hotels of which the Ambassador was one. Charles did not mind the appraisal. He was hardly aware of it. He was so used to acceptance, even privilege, that the possibility of anything else had ceased to be a concern in his life. He signed for a room and ascended ten floors with the bellhop.
Alone in his room, he unpacked his bag and disposed of the contents neatly. Then he put the bag in the closet and sat down for a cigarette. Reviewing his activity dispassionately to that point, he could think of nothing that he had done or failed to do that was sufficient to crack his calm assurance. He had proceeded throughout with bold strokes. Except for the one major point of murder, he had been perfectly open. He had mentioned Carol in the note, and his affair with her could be verified by several parties, although he had been careful that Wanda herself had known nothing of it. He had been so open that no one, not even the most obtuse investigator out of Homicide, if it came to that, would suspect him of murdering Wanda for motives that could so easily be pinned on him. But he didn’t for a moment really think that it would ever come to Homicide. The alternate was too credible. An ugly, neurotic little woman like Wanda and a man like him. Suicide, indeed, would be the only really credible disposition of the case.
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 10