The Horrible Man

by Michael Avallone

  It was then nine-fifteen, Eastern Run For Your Life Time.

  ELEVEN

  FUNNY YOU DON'T LOOK HAPPY

  □ We got out of the city proper without too much trouble. I took a couple of roundabout routes, expecting the coppers to have some kind of alert out for me. I didn't know exactly how far Monks would go for our friendship. For that matter, he could be somewhere else and having nothing at all to do with the official machinery that is the law in motion. Melissa stayed buttoned-up and buttoned-down by my side as I wheeled the Olds toward the East River. I would have to go over to the Queens side of the river, hit Jamaica, Flushing and points east to get to Hempstead. It lay about twenty miles to the practical end of New York, just before the long wide finger of Long Island begins its pointed stretch into the Atlantic Ocean.

  Luck and/or Monks was on our side. I made the East River Bridge and Queens without being flagged down by a single policeman. It was a dark night, shivering cold again and a bright full moon hung over the skyline like a balloon. The kind of moon a kid pokes a toy gun at and says "Boom!" and hopes it will explode, deflate and drop out of the sky. A lover's moon, too. As cold as the night air was. The threat of more snow looked better than ever. The week's baptism still lay on the streets, iced over, mounded up on sidewalks, backed up in driveways. I kept my eye on the road, mindful of the speedometer. It was definitely no night to get a ticket.

  Babies were being born all over the city as I drove. Or being led up to with the first gleam in a man's eye. It was a nice thought even for such a lousy drive.

  "Penny for your thoughts, Ed."

  "A plugged nickel would be more like it. I'm feeling sore at the world again."

  "Lopez. Or Spanner. Or what?"

  "All of them. Everybody. Queer rich duck like Spanner. Poor little bastard like Lopez. His dead monster of a wife, may she rest in peace. Why does everybody screw up the way they do! You think we could all go along, pay our taxes and be nice to each other. Beats me. But then it always beats me."

  "Easy. You're stepping on the gas."

  "Thanks. I'll watch it."

  Ahead lay the lights of a million nameless homes, twinkling in the dark. Queens looked about ready to turn out some of those lights. Checking my watch, I saw it was after ten.

  "Cold, Mel?"

  "I feel like toast. The car's warm with the heater on. Don't worry about me."

  "We'll hit Hempstead before ten-thirty. Ought to be snug in our beds by eleven. Which will be good. We'll get some sleep and be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning."

  She laughed.

  "Funny?" I asked.

  "Nothing. Just was picturing you with a bushy tail. I'd add a specimen like that to my glass menagerie. A private detective with a bushy tail." She laughed again, muffling the sound in the collar of the fancy trenchcoat.

  I drove on, watching the lights, hating and loving the City. The Job. The Profession. The World. One day I would have to hang up. Quit. Do something else. I was beginning to show the signs of creeping old age, advancing senility. Running around town, dodging cops, acting like a detective in a bad TV show.

  It made me sore at myself. The world just naturally got in on the act.

  We found a motel on the outskirts of Hempstead. The city was a big one. Something like forty thousand people according to the last census. The place gleamed like a million candles in the wilderness. The Stop Here Motel was a small concentration of about twenty one-storey ranch bungalows, set in a column of twos beyond an oval entrance where a two-storey building with a big garish sign that could be seen from a long way off, beckoned the sleepy, the tired and the illicit in from the wide highway.

  The parking lot was full but there was a space for the Olds. I parked, locked the doors and helped Melissa and our overnight bags out. "We're going to get the fish eye from the owner," I said. "But he'll pretend for our benefit, take our money and as soon as we leave the desk, he'll say to himself or anybody that's standing around, 'See? They don't know their place' or maybe he'll just think I'm a bum and let it go at that. Do you mind?"

  "You're being defensive again," she sighed. "Why not give him the best of it? Who knows—he might envy you?"

  "I'd like to think that. No, come to think of it, I will believe that. Come on, you sinful creature."

  Again we were in luck. There was an unoccupied bungalow. A couple had just checked out, on their way back to Texas. Been visiting the grandparents to show off the new twins. The owner, a short man no wider than a Zweibach and just as shapely, vouched all the information as I signed his register. He had a big smile for Melissa too. Unless he was a clever actor or had played a lot of poker, he was colour blind.

  He took the register, turned it around, murmured, "Mr. and Mrs. Peter Barnes," out loud, took my money, presented me with a key and waved his good right hand towards the lighted bungalows huddled beyond the windows. "Seventeen. You can't miss it. Third from the end on the left. A good night to you."

  As we wended our way between the bungalows, Melissa whispered softly. "This is fun. And I do feel just the way Mrs. Peter Barnes would feel."

  "How's that?"

  "Excited. A little nervous. Thrilled. Don't you realise this is the young girl's wedding night?"

  "I'll tell her when she comes in."

  The bungalow was a duplicate of every bungalow between here and the Western Seaboard. Venetian blinds, sofa chairs, a wide plain double bed that could be opened into twin singles. One bureau with a mirror. One neat bathroom with clean towels and fresh bars of soap. And a radio and a television set. There was an innovation. This set didn't need a quarter to operate.

  There was no phone, however. If I wanted to make a call, I'd have to use the owner's Ameche in the Stop Here office.

  Melissa had her trenchcoat off and already hung in one of the two closets. She kicked her pumps off and plopped onto one of the chairs, looking at me. I locked the door, sliding a bolt-action double-lock. She laughed again.

  "Hungry?" I asked. "He's got coffee and sandwiches in the office. He said so."

  "No. Not hungry."

  I checked the Venetian blinds. You couldn't see the highway from the bungalow. Just a rising knoll of ground, some trees and a mammoth billboard advertising some real estate offices in downtown Hempstead.

  "Will you relax, Ed? Nobody's going to find us here."

  "This John Dillinger feeling is funny. Haven't been on the lam in years. Let me get used to it again."

  "Want to talk some more. Or should we turn in?"

  "Both. We might as well get into our pyjamas. It's a cold night. Race you."

  Laughing, she popped out of the chair. I took my overnight bag apart and started to unwind. A nice lazy feeling of euphoria stole over me. It's always like that. You're on the go all day, you miss a couple of personal funerals, you move fast, you don't stand still and then comes the time when you run down. The sensation is intoxicating. You want to close your eyes and collapse, it feels so good.

  "Happy, Ed?" I heard Melissa say.

  "Uh huh."

  "Funny you don't look happy. That V on your forehead is jumping out all over the place."

  I stared into the bureau mirror. She was right. Not even the maroon colour of my pyjamas could camouflage that enormous vein that came into view over the bridge of my nose when I was dead beat. Melissa loomed in the mirror behind me. She looked like a doll. The blue silk pongee again.

  "You're going to hate me, Ed," she said.

  "Now why would I do that?"

  "I dragged you out here under false pretences."

  I smiled. "Now what in hell does that mean? I want to be here. I have to be here. The funeral in the morning, remember?"

  "Yeah, but, this is cosy. And I'm here and you're here and we've been there before. And maybe you'd like to go there again. But we can't, dammit. I got my period. The worst part of it. The middle."

  "Mercer, shut up. Go sit down and let me look at you. Since when was sex so important between people that
like each other?"

  She smiled happily, putting her arms around my neck. Her pliant figure, so lithely slender and tigerish, was warming. She kissed my left ear before she bit it.

  "I like you, Tiger," she said.

  I turned around, pinning her up against me, kissing her hard. She melted to me. The urgent thrust of her body put an end to further conversation. I scooped her up in my arms and lay her down on the wide double bed. I lay down against her. She snuggled against my shoulder, hugging me across the chest.

  We stared up at the ceiling, hearing the cars roar by on the highway, listening to the sounds of the night. It was idyllic.

  If Time could have stood still, I had all I had ever wanted in the world. Good-bye to bullet holes in corpses, so long to lying clients and farewell oddballs, incorporated. A man and a woman together could stand up against everything cheap, small and inhuman.

  "Ed?"

  "Yes, baby."

  "You do love me a little—don't you?"

  "Deed I do, Missy Mel."

  She laughed and I laughed.

  I guess if the owner of Stop Here Motel could have heard us, he would have envisioned all kinds of orgies. But maybe he wouldn't at all. After all, he wasn't Tommy Spanner.

  But the evil that we assign to other people is one of the conditions, one of the prices we have to pay for the American Way of Life. Man, who is born of woman, has a dirty mind. I guess it can't be any other way. Sophistication also has a price. That price is loss of giving the next guy the benefit of the doubt.

  I took a shower in the morning as Melissa went out to rustle up some breakfast. The stinging cold water, following a spray of steaming Niagara, woke me up faster than a run into a porcupine. She came back with containers of hot coffee and some bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches wrapped in plastic bags.

  "Best I could do. Mr. Ames said the sandwiches are really better than they look."

  "And how is Mr. Ames this morning?"

  "Sunny as ever. You know he's a fine man. A grandfather seven times and he won a Purple Heart in Europe. With the Eighty-second Airborne."

  "That little guy? You two must have got along fine."

  She smirked. "He came close to giving me a lecture. Not in so many words. But he kind of hinted that I ought to protect myself. I don't think he believes for a minute that we're married."

  "I didn't expect him to. He didn't offend you in any way?"

  "I told you. He's a sweet old guy. Whatever he hadto say was based on the proposition that you might be a smart city boy who was giving me a fast shuffle. I like him."

  "Then I do too. After we finish this grub bag breakfast, I'll call the Hempstead estate. I'm not going to sneak up on old man Spanner. We'll announce ourselves."

  "What are you going to say to him? Have you thought of that?"

  "It'll come to me after I have my coffee. You know I do my best thinking after I have my coffee."

  She unscrewed the lid of one and passed it over to me. "Think," she commanded. She opened the plastic bags and laid a sandwich on a plate.

  I sipped the coffee. It was bad but hot. That was all that mattered.

  "I liked last night, Ed. It was—nice."

  I pressed her hand, blowing a kiss. "Can't think of a better way to fall asleep."

  "You really didn't mind about—"

  "You mention that once more, you're fired. I'll throw you out into the street and Mr. Ames can look after you until you're both old and grey. Now shut up and eat and let me think."

  She grinned happily into her sandwich and chewed vigorously. The coffee container looked enormous in her slender little hand.

  I thought.

  "Do you remember the name of the butler you talked to when you phoned the place the other day?"

  "Whipley," she answered immediately. "Not hard to remember a name like that."

  "Good girl. Whipley, is it. My knowing his name will throw him a little off stride in case he starts to give me the brush-off."

  "Liable to be a big crowd out there today, Ed. Stallings Spanner must have a million rich friends. Big people, big names. They say he owns half of Long Island. We could get lost in the crowd."

  "But not the way I figure it. I want to see the Old Man personally."

  She stared at me, her jaws no longer chewing.

  "How do you work that trick?"

  "I'm the friend," I said, "of a very good friend of his."

  I sure was, exaggeration to one side. I had Grade A references.

  The President of the United States.

  TWELVE

  THE GREAT RICH FATHER

  □ The Spanner Estate was on top of a hill. You followed a private, macadamised road up to the crest of a rise overlooking a forest of trees that hid the main highway. The house, more castle than manor, was something like Xanadu out of Orson Welles. I had a feeling of driving into a different world. Melissa must have felt the same way. She didn't say a word as the Olds navigated the winding, forty-five degree angle road. When the Olds slid to a stop before the house, the engine was puffing like a tired runner. There was a high stone wall, an iron grated entrance and a man in a blue uniform standing there, cradling a .20 gauge pump gun.

  Up here the wind blew free, as if it didn't dare to snow. The pale sun trickled pure gold into the branches of a row of tall chestnut trees. The Spanner wealth had triumphed over nature itself.

  "Let me do the talking," I said to Melissa, waiting for the front gate guard to ask us what our business was.

  "You kidding? I can't think of anything to say."

  The guard came over. His blue uniform was matching trousers and shirt with brass buttons. A billed cap with no markings was rammed over his eyes. He was medium sized, his face was pitted and there was a small scar on his left cheek. The pump gun was brand new as if he had just bought it. He held it idly across the span of his linked arms.

  "Turn around and go back," he said loudly. His voice was faintly accented and yet as flat as a board. "You got no business here today." He pronounced you like the word Jew.

  "Don't I know you from someplace?" I smiled easily. He would never see the .45 ready on my lap. He must have known who I was since we had spent some of yesterday together. It was Garcia Lopez's taxicab driver, the one who gave free rides. But he couldn't know that I knew that.

  "No," he said, tilting the pump gun. "You go. Today nobody is welcome here. Except family and friends. You'd better go."

  "Don't you want to know who I am? I'm sure Mr. Spanner does, amigo. You got a gate phone to call the house? Tell Whipley that Ed Noon is here."

  The guard scowled. "J'know Whipley?"

  "I do. So before you chase us away, go call, huh? Don't keep us waiting too long. I have to go to the bathroom."

  I watched his eyes and his hands on the gun. I was confusing him but he had to be no more than a mere flunky to be guarding a gate and no flunky ever does his own thinking.

  "J'you say your name is Noon?"

  "Yeah. N-o-o-n. What time do all the goings on start today?"

  "Three hours. One o'clock. J'you wait here. I call."

  He backed off, going into a tall, sentinel-type box that was more glass than wood. We watched him talking into a wall phone.

  "Some customer," Melissa whispered.

  "One of the Cuban lads that Garcia mentioned. Wonder what he's doing at the Spanner gate? Look, if we don't get past him with that phone call, I may have to try something else. Make yourself as small as possible—"

  The guard was coming back. But he went past the nose of the Olds and stood to the left of the wide iron gates. Something hummed somewhere and the gate pickets rose right out of the hard earth. The guard motioned with his right hand, his left clutching the pump gun. The gate angled out almost parallel to the ground, above our heads. Whatever magic my message held, had worked. We were being granted ingress to the Spanner Estate.

  I put the Olds in gear and moved forward. The gate, the sentinel box and the scowling guard fell behind. There was a
continuation of the macadamised road for another quarter of a mile, climbing still higher to the horizon. Suddenly, the trees thinned out, there was a lawn that looked like a golf course and the front door of the house stood behind a concrete plaza that held a water fountain in the middle of the oval. A stone cupid stood shooting arrows under a shower of twinkling aqua. The cupid looked ancient and cold.

  There were two dark limousines bumper to bumper at the rim of the plaza pointed back towards the way he had come. Civilisation and the main highway. The limousines weren't hearses but they were the sort of vehicles you'd expect to see in a funeral retinue.

  "Spanner's got company," Melissa said.

  "Could be some of the Faraway Hills folks. Or—maybe some of the family friends. It's too early for the President to be here."

  I slid the Olds in behind the second limousine but I left enough space for another car. We might want out in a hurry.

  We got out and stretched. I took Melissa's hand and guided her up a wide marble stoop of only four steps and walked across the tiled patio to the main door. It looked big enough and wide enough for a man carrying a piano to get through without danger of banging into anything.

  There was an old-fashioned wrought-iron knocker on the door but there was also a white nipple of enamel. A buzzer. I used that, digging out my Camels as we waited. Melissa was gazing around at all that money can buy, awed.

  Whipley was what I might have expected. He looked more like an undertaker than any manservant should. He was taller than me, as leathery as old shoes and it would have been very difficult to tell how old he was. His eyes were patient, wise and properly servile, as if he existed only to light cigarettes, open doors and answer telephones. He already had my cigarette lit from a silver miniature lighter before I could even find a match.

  "Mr. Spanner is waiting for you in the library."

  I marvelled at that. "You know me?"

  "Mr. Noon, isn't it? And your secretary, Miss Mercer. Yes, sir, I know you. No one comes in from the main gate that I do not know. This way, please."

  Wordlessly, we followed him. The interior of Spanner House was like the cathedral of a great church. The ceiling disappeared up into a vaulted maze of spires and stained glass. There was a pink marble staircase that looked bigger than the main escalator stairway in Grand Central. You could have fielded a game of soccer in that main hallway. Everything was polished mahogany, thick rugs, armoires and sturdy chairs and settees from the days of old. I expected a suit of armour, complete with halberd, and I wasn't disappointed. There was one standing under an alcove just to the left of the marble staircase. Also, there was that tremendous hush of silence that is a volume of noise in itself. I could hear our footfalls murdering the parquet flooring as we trooped after Whipley. He, of course, was as quiet as a Sioux. Rebecca lived here, and all the ghosts of Rebecca. I tried to imagine a younger Tommy Spanner sliding up and down the balustrade of the marble staircase. I couldn't. He didn't go with the house, his personality was all wrong. The house was more Maxim De Winter's speed.