The Horrible Man

by Michael Avallone

  "He's right, you know."

  "Who's right?"

  "The Captain. You could get me killed someday. Get yourself killed too. Maybe you ought to go into another business."

  "Maybe. I'll think about it. Will you still be my secretary?"

  She laughed. "Why don't we stop again at the Stop Here Motel? I'd like to see Mr. Ames again and how's that for an answer?"

  I put the car in gear and squeezed her left knee. It felt full and warm and good.

  "You're shameless and I thought it was that time of the month."

  "It was," she said softly, turning to stare at me.

  "We'll talk about it on the way."

  I nosed out of the driveway. The motor throbbed. The Olds found the curve, followed it and cruised down to the front gate. The cop on duty there, Cristo's replacement, waved us on through, the iron pickets going up again. Monks had obviously phoned ahead to pass us through. I headed down the rise, the Spanner Estate receding in the rear-view mirror.

  That receded but something else protruded. I got one of the small shocks of my life. I only say small because the grinning, frozen smile of Garcia Lopez was looking back at me. The gun in his hand wasn't pointed at me. It was pressed, barrel first to the back of Melissa Mercer's head. She hadn't even the strength to cry out a warning of surprise.

  "I hate to ruin your plans for a romantic rendezvous, Mr. Noon. But you have ruined my life. Keep driving. I'll tell you where and when to stop."

  FIFTEEN

  THE HORRIBLE MAN

  □ I kept the gas pedal at about thirty-five miles an hour. The highway was still a quarter of a mile away, hidden behind a dozen more bends in the curving pathway.

  "You don't seem too surprised," Garcia Lopez said calmly.

  "I'm not. We've been through this before. I keep forgetting to look on the floor, little man. You doing this for your poor old father and mother in Cuba again?"

  "No," he said. "I don't think you believed me then either."

  "Oh but I did. Sort of. I didn't know then what I know now."

  "And what's that?" The face and the gun still showing in the rear-view was as solid as a rock. The gun barrel had never left Melissa's head.

  "Mady said you'd do a lot for a lot of money. I should have believed her. You came to hire me in the first place because you knew she knew something about Tommy Spanner she didn't tell you. That and the business of the will. The truth of it was she pushed you around a lot. Probably beat you up, made you do whatever she wanted in the sack. Big dames are like that too. Mady was the type to be a little abnormal. I saw her in action with Paul Arnet, remember? So you saw a chance to get back at her. Stick a private eye on her tail, learn something and then start wearing the pants in your own family again. That's about the way it was, wasn't it?"

  "If you say so," he said. "Keep driving."

  "So I got the pictures. You got them. But before that, Mady found out you had hired me. So she told you about the will because she had to stay married, if Spanner wasn't kidding about the will and the conditions of that will. She dangled the money bait in front of you and you took it. And then along about that time, you must have been approached by Mr. Villez and dear Mr. Cristo. Besides appealing to you as a Cuban, they too must have offered you a lot of money. They looked you up because they wanted to see your wife. Wanted to find out what she knew about Spanner and his back. Stop me if I'm going too fast or if I'm wrong."

  "You ought to be a detective," he said dryly. "When you get to the highway, turn left. Back to the City. I'll tell you where to turn off again."

  "Sure. Why not? It's a beautiful day and we have all the time in the world."

  "Tell me the rest of your story, Mr. Noon. I'm anxious to see where your guessing has led you. You are doing fine so far."

  I spun the wheel slowly, so he wouldn't get rattled, turning left as he had ordered. I fell in line behind a truck in the slow lane going west. The sun had gone behind some misty clouds. There was frost on the windshield. I couldn't hear Melissa breathing. She was holding her breath, I guess.

  "So Cristo or Villez or both decided that Spanner's body had to be substituted. They wanted that map or diagram or whatever the hell it is. It was also decided to get rid of me because I had somehow gotten in the centre of things. Maybe you saw that funny coloured phone on my desk. Maybe you know I'm a government agent, as it were. Did you know that?"

  His chuckle wasn't far from my ear.

  "Yes, they knew. Your wires were tapped. They didn't ever hear anything but a scramble. They reasoned that a man who has a phone like that has something to hide. So they enlisted my aid in the taxi-cab affair. That should have worked. I'm sorry it didn't. If it had they might have let Mady live. I know you don't believe me but I loved her. I didn't want her dead. But when she went to your apartment, you forced their hand. They decided a good way to rid themselves of you was to kill Mady and have you blamed. What could you do to them behind bars? Poor Mady. If only she hadn't talked so much."

  "She's dead. Villez is dead. And Cristo is out of circulation. Why are you playing out the hand, Garcia? What could possibly be in it for you now? Or have they gotten to you again?"

  "No," he said curtly. "I don't know anything about them. I came out here to see Villez. I arrived when all the shooting started. I saw the police cars coming. I hid in your car. It was all I could do."

  "Then put that gun away. Stop scaring my secretary. I'll forget all about the Belt Parkway. You're clean. The Cuban business is done. If you didn't have anything to do with snatching Spanner's body, you're clean. What's all this hold-up business about?"

  "You don't understand," he sighed. "As Mady's husband I will naturally inherit anything that Spanner leaves her. I can't afford to have you give any kind of character evidence against me that might discredit my claims."

  I gaped at him in the mirror.

  "You're kidding. You'd risk all this just so I won't make any trouble for you? Forget it. If Spanner left you anything, it's yours. I won't let out a peep."

  "How can I trust you? No," he shook his head. "It's only money to you, perhaps. But to me it's a way out. You don't know what it's like to be a dwarf. A freak. To be something that people always look at, wonder about. Laugh at. Make jokes about. I must kill you, Mr. Noon, and your secretary. What other guarantee can I have?"

  He was beyond convincing. I could see that. I could also see that getting the gun away from him, while driving along the highway at fifty miles an hour, without him shooting Melissa, was an impossibility. But I had to keep him talking, before we made that turn off on the route that he had obviously picked out for the murder place.

  "Garcia, Captain Monks knows about you. If we have to get killed now, no matter how you make it look, he's going to have to look you up. Use your head. Wouldn't you feel silly if you plugged us and then found out that Tommy Spanner lied to Mady? That he didn't leave her a dime? And that if he did leave her money, it could be as little as ten thousand bucks?"

  He blanched at the idea. "No. He wouldn't do that. He couldn't."

  "How sure can you be of a thing like that?"

  He smiled. A winning smile. "You're forgetting that Villez was the family lawyer? That's how he learned about Mady in the first place. That's why he looked me up. He said the bequest was one hundred thousand dollars. I could do a lot with that."

  "Yes," I said, "I guess you could."

  There it was. Everything all wrapped up except the disappearance of Tommy Spanner's body and the little man was going to kill us. A real harmless dwarf who hadn't had a mean bone in his body until the chance came along to get his hands on some real alfalfa. Green, folding money. The root of all the ancient evils. No, the world hasn't changed in two thousand years. Maybe it never will.

  "Melissa," I said. "You all right?"

  "Fine," she lied. "But the gun is making me nervous. Don't hit any bumps."

  "I won't. Guess we'll have to go to that motel some other time. Please forgive me."

  "S
orry about that, Chief."

  There was an intersection up ahead where the westbound traffic had to allow for vehicles going north and south. I slowed down, watching Garcia Lopez very carefully in the mirror. I was waiting for the single instant when he would get tired or careless and shift the gun for one second away from Melissa's head. I had to be careful, very very careful. I knew he didn't want to shoot us in a moving car. That would spoil all his plans. I had to gamble on that.

  The Olds always was a fast-starting car. It's a '61 model but it's been kept in prime condition for six years by careful garaging and an expert bunch of mechanics in Manhattan. I had practically stopped for the intersection. I watched Lopez in the mirror. The second came. He suddenly blinked and absentmindedly scratched the right cheek of his face with the gun barrel, taking it away from Melissa's defenceless head. Lifetime habits are hard to break. As are some of mine. Like wanting to live. I stepped on the accelerator, ramming it to the floorboards. The Olds leaped forward like a stallion.

  Garcia Lopez, as light as a bag of feathers, shot up and then forward. Melissa twisted out of the way. No dope she. She had been watching me. The little man, gun and all, came down with a loud thump over the front seat, bent double. I tugged the gun from his fingers, almost breaking his trigger-finger doing it. He howled in pain but I had the gun. I braked the car to cut its speed, probably giving the driver behind me cats and conniptions. A car horn blared. Garcia Lopez swore in a voice that sounded like the angel Gabriel. Only he was no angel. A little devil with bells on.

  And then he really upset things. The only way you can. He made a real wrong move. Maybe because he didn't know what to do next. Or maybe he was just mad with fear and rage. He flung open the back door of the Olds and scrambled out. A little monkey of speed and bobbing arms and legs. He raced away from the Olds. Melissa Mercer tried to stop him, hollering a warning.

  He never did hear. If he had, it might have been too late anyway.

  Car horns rose in chorus, setting up a hideous din.

  A zooming foreign sportscar in the fast lane knocked his poor misshapen body a good thirty feet over the divider and set him down somewhere on the other side. I saw the whole thing happen and couldn't do a damn thing about it but sit and stare and curse a blue streak that was compounded of sorrow and anger.

  The poor little bastard had been run down like a dog on the highway. Not even sixty million dollars would ever bring him back to life.

  The highway leading into New York proper sounded like Bedlam. Full of banshee horns, screaming sirens and shouting motorists. I might have imagined it was Melissa screaming at the top of her lungs.

  But it wasn't.

  It was the hounds of hell barking furiously, howling up a storm to greet the newest member of the club.

  Garcia Lopez.

  I dropped Melissa Mercer off at the front door of her apartment. The sun had disappeared. Slate-grey clouds were chasing each other across a dead sky. It was cold.

  "Coming up?" she asked.

  "Call you later. I want to wind this up at the office."

  "All right. Take care."

  "I will. You get some rest. You've been a peach as usual. All the way. You're aces with me, Mel."

  She nodded, blew a kiss off her hands and said nomore. I watched her rush into the lobby. The iridescent trenchcoat gleamed weirdly in the half-light of a terrible day.

  I drove back to the office, garaging the Olds in a Kinney's parking lot close by and went up to the house auditorium. It was almost four o'clock. I used a back stairway so I wouldn't run into anyone on the way. Monks had said my mug was all over the papers. I didn't want to jaw with anyone who didn't know how things had worked out.

  The office was dark, dusty looking, as if we'd been away for a month instead of one day. The dust motes lying in the half-light laying across the furniture lent the illusion size, solidarity and truth. I locked the door behind me. The red-white-and-blue phone stood waiting on the desk. I lit a Camel, taking my time, composing my thoughts. I wanted to get it all off my chest, finished and done. I had begun to get the crazy feeling that I was a marionette, pulled and manipulated by invisible strings. Not even the President of the United States had the right to make me feel like that.

  After three puffs, I dialled the White House.

  He was in. He must have been waiting for my call.

  "Yes, Ed. I was waiting for your call."

  "I thought so. I was in Stallings Spanner's house when he called you. You know what happened?"

  "I do. I want to thank you for your help."

  That's what I had expected. I took a deep breath, trying to keep sight of the fact that I was talking to the Number One Man in the country.

  "Then it doesn't worry you that Tommy Spanner's corpse is still missing? That I can't tell you where it is or how he got there or who has him?"

  There was one of those pregnant pauses that mean so much between people. I waited for him to speak first.

  "You've guessed, haven't you?"

  "I think so. I think I'm talking to someone who has let his heart rule his head. Who let his love for an old friend commit him to a useless proposition."

  His voice came back, a bit more steely.

  "Go on. I have this coming, I'm afraid."

  "You love Stallings Spanner. You felt sorry for the shame that his wastrel son brought to him. So when Tommy Spanner was in Russia and playing at being a spy, you allowed him to tattoo himself and come back with the plans or designs of something. They were useful probably and the kid was a hero to his old man even if the world didn't know. Your old army buddy was vindicated. You gave him something to be proud of. Maybe he had the tattoo already and you and the CIA went along with it. But once Spanner was back in this country and you had the information, there was no further use for it. Spanner's dying changed all that and you wanted to make sure he was finally buried or cremated where the tattoo would never be known about."

  "How did you guess?"

  "It was easy. If the plans on the back were still valuable, still meant something, you could have gone over New York's head and gotten the body to Washington a thousand different ways. You didn't, so it couldn't have mattered. Also, there were no Red agents anywhere in this operation at all. As there would have been if Spanner's back was contemporary information. Just a lousy little behind-the-scenes Cuban who thought he had glommed on to something for his big boss in Havana."

  "You're a rare man, Ed . "

  "I feel like a fool. Who has the body now?"

  "The F.B.I. picked up the truck. At Pier 40, readyfor shipment on a cargo vessel to the Bahamas. Your Captain Monks is delivering the body back where it belongs. Tommy Spanner will be cremated on schedule tomorrow. And my old friend will still be proud that his son served his country at least on one occasion. I'm sorry I had to deceive you, Ed. But it was necessary. Russia could still make something of the tattoo business if they ever get wind of it. Tommy Spanner, alive, was a walking threat to international security and diplomatic relations. He was never able to eradicate the tattoo."

  "Russia won't hear. Tell me one thing. How good was Tommy's info when he first got back from behind the Iron Curtain?"

  "Ed, that boy gave us their entire organisational set-up, by streets and zones, in the New York area. You understand? It set them back a good three years. That's how much time it will take them to install a new espionage complex. As you said, the Spanner boy was too perverse, personally, to be steadily employed for such work. Pity."

  I sighed. "I feel better about him myself then. Thanks, Chief."

  "Thank you, Ed. I do hope we get a chance to talk in person some day. You're a fine American, Mr. Noon. That is something that will always make you a friend of mine."

  We both hung up.

  The White House seemed closer to West Forty Sixth Street than it ever had been. I sat for a long time, watching the oncoming shadows of a new night stealing over the crooked city. The secretaries in the building across the way were covering up th
eir typewriters and making with the lipsticks. Everybody was knocking off for the day. It was closing time. Going home time. Home.

  I wondered if Tops Billings still wanted to take Melissa Mercer's picture. I wanted a good portrait for the living-room of the apartment. Thinking about that, I reached for the black phone, not the red-white-and-blue one, and dialled Melissa. Somehow as beat as she had been, I didn't think she had really hit the sack yet.

  "Yes?" Her voice was low, tired and still very, very feminine. It would always be feminine.

  "It's me," I said, brightening up like a town drunk in full sight of the local bar. "What's for dinner?"

  Mady Lopez, Garcia Lopez and the whole horde of Tommy Spanner perverts had fled from the darkened corners of my mind on silent, running, unlamented feet. I had let the fresh air in again.

  Nobody loves a horrible man.

  SIXTEEN

  MIRROR, MIRROR

  □ They caught The Taxi-cab Killer that Sunday. It took a smart, brave cabbie and a plucky beat cop to hold him down to the sidewalk on East Eighty Fourth Street, while he foamed at the mouth, spewed invective and tried to use the .38 calibre Smith and Wesson he was waving like a maniac. The cop had to slug him to quiet him. In the end, one John Charles Axelson was hauled off to the nearest precinct and New Yorkers were once again relieved of a temporary threat. The cab-drivers celebrated. I don't know how they did it—they didn't give free cab rides—but there might have been more than one beer party at taxi garages all over the City.

  When a Bellevue psychiatrist asked John Charles Axelson why he had taken out his hate on cab-drivers, the answer he got was Page Oned all over the country. Not even the Spanner kill could match a poor psychotic's reason for terror and death.

  "The Off Duty sign," John Charles Axelson sobbed. "They leave you standing in the rain and they come by. Passing you. Lying, lying, lying! I can't stand people lying to me. Laughing at me. It isn't nice."