Manhunt Is My Mission

by Stephen Marlowe

  “She don’t like air conditioning in her bedroom. It’s open, she says. She don’t hear the maintenance’ man and then all of a sudden she hears him right behind her. She turns. He tries to shove her out the goddam window. She screams and snatches up a vase and conks him one. She keeps on screaming. He runs for it. Then she calls downstairs hollering bloody murder.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yup.”

  “She describe him?”

  He looked at me reproachfully. “Far as she’s concerned, he was just a place to hang a hotel maintenance-staff uniform.”

  “What about the vase?”

  “Busted all right. All over the floor,” Myrtle admitted dolefully, but added on a brighter note: “She could of done that later, couldn’t she?”

  “She could have bayed at the moon and crawled down the wall headfirst like Count Dracula. Let’s go ask her.”

  The last time I’d seen Samia Falcon she had gone up the gangway of a British freighter in Shughur City. That was less than a month ago, but now Samia looked like her own older sister—the one who had been raised on the wrong side of the tracks by a poor-relation aunt.

  She wore a white dress with big red roses splashed all over it. The almost frantically gay pattern emphasized the look of dissipation and neglect which had aged her. She had lost weight. There were swollen blue pouches under her dark eyes and deep hollows in her cheeks. Her short hair, though combed the way I remembered it, seemed ropey. It lacked the healthy sheen and auburn highlights I remembered. When she shook hands with me, her hand wasn’t steady. She gleamed a smile at me that didn’t reach her eyes.

  The house doctor was packing his bag and scowling at its contents. “You ought to let me give you a sedative,” he said.

  “We’ve been all through that. No, thanks. I’m all right now.” She was still pretty enough to dismiss him by angling her shoulder at him when she turned to face me again. Captain Myrtle followed him to the door, where they held a huddled conference. The doctor left. Myrtle sat down across the room from us on a wing chair and crossed his legs and noisily removed the cellophane wrapper from a cigar and stuck the cigar unlit in his mouth.

  “Now, let me look at you,” Samia said, as if we were old friends meeting after a long time. We weren’t old friends. I hardly knew her. The long time was what Samia had been through. “Would you like a drink?”

  I could have used a drink as hairy as an orangutang, but I didn’t want Samia hitting the bottle. I shook my head.

  I said: “Captain Myrtle here doesn’t know if he should swallow your story or go back to his opium pipe.”

  “Hey, don’t go putting words in my mouth,” Myrtle said.

  “You mean he doesn’t believe me?” Samia gasped.

  “I mean he’d rather not believe you if he had any reason not to.”

  Myrtle said pugnaciously: “I got my job.”

  “But why should I lie to you? Why?”

  Leering at her, Myrtle said: “Lady, you’re a room number and a name on a card. Before I ring the buttons in on a thing like this I got to—”

  “You mean you haven’t?” I cut him off.

  He looked smug. “I call ’em how I see ’em. I’m a licensed private man, just like you. The cops know I wouldn’t try to pull a fast one. If this is a cop case, I call the cops. Show me it’s a cop case.”

  “Get up,” I said. He looked at me: He yanked the cigar from his mouth and looked at that. He got up.

  “Yeah? So?”

  “There’s the phone. Use it.”

  “You ain’t showed—”

  “I just came from Alexandria General Hospital. A man died there tonight. He was killed by the same people who tried to kill Miss Falcon.”

  Myrtle bit on his cigar again. “You wouldn’t snow me?” he asked in a subdued voice.

  Samia gasped. “Oh, no! It wasn’t Dr. Capehart?”

  I just nodded. Myrtle picked up the phone and spoke into it for a while. Samia sat down where he had been sitting. She stared down at her lap. Her shoulders moved. The part in her hair wasn’t straight. When she raised her head she was crying. “They killed my father. They killed Dr. Capehart. They tried to kill me. They … oh Chet, Chet, when is it going to stop?”

  She told me what had happened tonight. She told it again a few minutes later when a detective lieutenant named Borah who worked out of Central Bureaus and Squads arrived. Myrtle and Borah kept exchanging dubious glances. Borah listened with that total silence so many cops have, not a passive silence but an active one which can get more answers out of you than a firecracker string of questions.

  When she finished, Borah ignored her and ignored Myrtle and turned to me. “Captain Malawister at the P.D. says you’re a pretty level-headed guy, Drum. What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “Are you here on business?”

  I glanced at Samia. “That’s right,” I said.

  “Okay, we’ll figure for now it wasn’t a hotel maintenance man. Guy can get a uniform made.” Myrtle heaved a sign of relief, but Borah added: “Of course, we’ll want to check out the staff too. Okay,” he said again. “Guy has the means: a hotel uniform. He has the opportunity: Miss Falcon here’s alone in the room, she’s expecting you, the window’s open.”

  Borah leaned forward and stabbed a finger in Myrtle’s direction. “Even Myrtle can see that much,” he said sarcastically, “though why he didn’t wait till a week from next Friday to call us is beyond me.” Myrtle sighed and stared at the ceiling and lit his cigar. “Anyhow,” Borah went on, “we all can see that much: a would-be killer who had the means and the opportunity. What’s missing is the motive. Can you supply him with a motive, Drum?”

  Means, opportunity and motive: the sacred trinity in a murder case or an almost-murder case. I started talking, and ran on for ten minutes, showing how the Motamar revolution and its aftermath supplied the motive. The vertical groove between Borah’s eyes seemed to get deeper and deeper as he listened.

  When I finished he said: “You gave Mr. X a motive all right.” He grinned ruefully. “Me you gave a headache because this one I’ve got to kick upstairs. They’ll be bringing the State Department in on it too, or I don’t know my Mass from a scroll in the ground. Where’s that phone?”

  “Just a minute, Lieutenant,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “Miss Falcon. They tried once and missed. They’ll try again. They’ve got to, and they’ve got to make it look like an accident. If they’re good at it—and they would be—that’s the hardest kind of murder to detect. But it’s the easiest kind to prevent.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “Miss Falcon. Does she get protection?”

  Borah nodded. Then he took me aside. “Listen,” he said, “you’ve been around. Okay, she merits protection and she’ll get it around the clock. But how long do you think that can go on? You said yourself they must have recruited out-of-town talent for the Capehart job and this one. A contract job like that, if your man swings and misses they send him to the showers and another guy steps in off the on-deck circle to take his cut. We’ll get cooperation in New York and Chicago and wherever else we think they may have done their recruiting. But Christ, it’s going to take time. Six months from now maybe a boozer runs off at the mouth and a stoolie hears it in a bar on Livonia Avenue in Brooklyn or like that, and it can be proved a Kings County hired gun spent this week in Washington. Six months from now, or maybe six years, or maybe never. And to guard her around the clock will take three men. Mister, you gave me a headache all, right.”

  “Well, what do you suggest?”

  “The impossible,” Borah shrugged. “Find them, and find them fast.”

  “What good would that do? The woods are full of hired guns.”

  “Then have a crack at the guy who’s paying them.”

  “How? We know who it is. We know why. But we know we can’t touch him.”

  Borah said: “We call Central Bureaus and Squads
Ulcerville on account of every case involving diplomatic immunity gets dumped in our laps. You didn’t just give me a headache, mister. You gave yourself one.”

  As cops go, Borah was a pretty nice guy. But maybe he could afford to be because he knew his hands were tied. He used the phone and told Myrtle a brace of detectives would be down and that he expected cooperation. He told me Samia’s first-shift guard could be expected in half an hour. He took me aside again. “I know how these things work. The captain will say forty-eight hours. We’re under-manned, as what police force in what city isn’t? He’ll stretch it to seventy-two hours. Then maybe he’ll break his heart and say until she testifies. And then, mister, she’s on her own. And if she really can crucify them before the AUC they’ll know she can do it again, won’t they?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck. Samia was watching us anxiously. She couldn’t hear us. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s the part that eats at you. Say thanks to Samia the AUC gives El Thamad the cold shoulder. He’s liable to try again at the World Bank. But not until Samia gets what Dr. Capehart got.”

  Borah scowled, shrugged, shook hands with me and wished me luck. He said a polite good night to Samia and got out of there with Myrtle.

  Samia stood with her back to the window. She looked at me and smiled a nervous smile. She went to the vanity table and brushed her hair. She got up and searched in her pocketbook for a pack of cigarettes. I lit one for her.

  “I’m scared, Chet,” she said. “I’m scared.” She blew smoke past my cheek. “They’re going to … try again, aren’t they?”

  “You’ll be getting police protection around the clock. Looks like I don’t take you out to dinner after all. We eat up here.”

  “I’m not hungry. I could use a drink.”

  “Cocktails before dinner—but only if there’s dinner after them. Fair enough?”

  “You’re talking as if I …” Her voice trailed off.

  “As if you what?”

  “As if you thought I was a lush.”

  “Are you?”

  “What difference does it make to you?” she snapped. She crushed her cigarette out and sat down heavily on the bed. She looked small and vulnerable then. “All right,” she said, and her voice was small too. “All right, all right, all right. I’ve been drinking too much. Maybe I’m a lush. Maybe I don’t care any more. Now please pick up the phone and order me a drink. Anything at all as long as there’s alcohol in it. Order me one before I start crawling up the walls.”

  I ordered the fixings for martinis, and two big steaks, rare, with tossed salad and baked Idaho potatoes. Neither of us said anything important until the hall waiter knocked and wheeled a service table into the suite. He set the table while I made the drinks. Samia didn’t wait for me to give her hers. She picked it up and spilled a little getting it to her lips and drank until the chilled glass was empty.

  “Steak time,” I said. Her dark eyes were brighter.

  “Another first.”

  “Compromise. Another with your steak.”

  All of a sudden she started to talk. “You remind me of him,” she said. “A little. I don’t know why. My father. I shouldn’t have left him. I should have stayed with him, Chet. I should have stayed. I left. I left him and they killed him.”

  “You left him. Then they killed him,” I said. “Don’t try to make it sound like cause and effect. It isn’t.”

  “Those are just words,” she said bitterly. “I could have stayed with him. Maybe he would have been more careful.”

  “There wasn’t a thing he could be careful about. He lost a war. They needed a scapegoat. They shot him.”

  She nibbled at that, and found another reason to hate herself. “I could have gone to Galib. He wanted to marry me. If I was there and if I asked him to he would have spared my father. I know it.”

  “Like he tried to spare you tonight?”

  “Those are just words too. You have a clever answer for everything I say. I appreciate it, but it doesn’t change a thing. My father’s dead because I left Motamar when he needed me.”

  “Even if you’re right, blame me. Don’t blame yourself. I practically dragged you to the freighter.”

  “No you didn’t. I knew what I was doing. I could have refused. I didn’t.”

  “The point is, you’re not right. You’re wrong six ways from Sunday. It was you who overheard Galib and Baki Osman plotting the king’s death. Galib or no Galib, your life wasn’t worth two cents then.”

  She smiled the same smile as before—a smile which reached my eyes but not hers. “Just like it isn’t worth two cents now?”

  “You’ll get protection. They won’t be able to come near you.”

  She ate a little of her steak, and reached for the gin bottle. “A bargain’s a bargain,” she said, pouring straight gin and drinking it. She glanced a challenge at me. I just sat there eating. She poured again and drank again.

  “In case they miss,” I said, “you can always drink yourself to death.”

  I’d wanted to turn some of her anger outward, and it worked. She glared at me and said: “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?”

  I stood up. Her eyes were defiant, but hurt too. “Maybe Myrtle was right,” I said. “If you want another try at it, I’ll get going.”

  “Right? Right about what?”

  “Nobody pushed you. You tried to jump and lost your nerve.”

  She sat there a minute. She dropped her knife on the plate. Her fists clenched. “What are you waiting for then? Get out of here. Go on, get out.”

  When I didn’t move, she stood up. She came around the table facing me. Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. “I thought you were my friend,” she almost wailed.

  “I’m not your friend. I don’t know one damn thing about you except what you’ve been telling me and how you’ve been behaving tonight. What you’ve been telling me is that you’re a shirker and a coward. As to how you’ve been behaving, go ahead and wallow in self-pity. You seem to like it.”

  She cried out wordlessly and socked me one with her small clenched fist. It hit my ear and it was no love-tap. When she swung her other hand I caught her wrist.

  “All right,” I said. She came against me panting. She was as stiff as a board, until suddenly I felt her weight on me, heavy, and she went flaccid all over. She made a high keening sound and when that stopped she was crying, clinging to me and sobbing against my neck.

  “On the boat,” she said. “They picked it up on the radio. About my father. They told me. Then the way they were all … watching me. Waiting for me to break. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. There was Mahmoud. He’d seen them shoot his parents down like dogs. Then, on the boat, he got sick. Some kind of flu. They took him away from me. I got drunk that night. I swear it was the first time in my life. They had to put me to bed. The next night again. I was floating, all in a haze. Nothing seemed quite real. I dreamed about my father and I was a little girl and he was tucking me into bed. Then I wasn’t dreaming but I was in bed and there was this Frenchman, you saw him at the gangway. He’d undressed me. He was … doing things to me. I tried to scream. He held his hand over my mouth. I must have made enough noise. He hit me and then I heard them pounding at the door and then my cabin was full of people. The purser, a cabin steward, the Frenchman’s wife. She called me a name in French, I won’t repeat it. Not her Henri, she kept saying. He wouldn’t do a thing like that. But after all he was a man, she said. All men are weak. He was provoked. I led him on, she said, I provoked him. She kept shouting at me, shouting in my face. I just wanted her to go away, just wanted them to get out, all of them. I said yes, all right, yes, I led him on, leave me alone, all of you just leave me alone.”

  The words had come spilling out compulsively in a breathless whisper. Samia was clutching my lapels, her fingers opening and closing on them. She looked up at me and then nuzzled against my chest and snuffled there; then looked up at me again and smiled anxiously, this time her eyes smiling, too, though she was cry
ing at the same time. Then she took out my breast-pocket handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose. “I can talk to you,” she said. “I don’t know why. I couldn’t before. Not to anyone. I can talk to you.”

  “You look like a little girl,” I said. “Your nose is red.”

  “My nose always gets red when I cry, darn it. Give me a cigarette.”

  I gave her one and lighted it. “Go ahead and talk.”

  “Now all of a sudden I feel self-conscious.”

  “I’m your friend if you want me to be.”

  “You say I look like a little girl. Now you’re talking to me like one.” But her indignation was feigned.

  “I’m your friend. That was a lot of bunk before. I wanted to get you mad.”

  “You succeeded.”

  “Go ahead and talk.”

  She sat down and puffed moodily at her cigarette. Then, calmly, she said: “The rest of the way to England, I took my meals in my cabin. I’m afraid I drank most of them. When we got to London I knew I was going to adopt Mahmoud. I couldn’t just let them put him in some kind of an institution. Everything frightened him, but he trusted me. I had an interview. I had to fill out lots of papers. They said it was unusual, I wasn’t married, could I give him a decent home? One day they sent someone. I was nervous. I hadn’t heard from them in a while. It was a woman. She just popped in on me. I’d been drinking. I had a load on and tried not to show it. Which is impossible. The woman was frigidly polite. A few days later they wrote to tell me some Near Eastern refugee organization would find a home for Mahmoud. That was my own fault. I deserved it, of course.”

  She sighed, stood up and went to the window. I looked over her shoulder. The pool area below us was lit up like a Christmas tree.

  Samia turned so suddenly that she brushed against me. “For the first time I feel better,” she said. “It was all bottled up inside of me. You have a mighty convenient shoulder.” She stood up on tiptoes and lightly kissed my lips.

  I pushed her gently away. “That comes under the heading of provocation. You’re a pretty girl, Samia.”

  “All dressed up and no life to live.” A while ago that would have sounded morbid, but now it didn’t. She said: “I like you, Chester Drum.”