Killers Are My Meat

by Stephen Marlowe

  “I hope coming here hasn’t inconvenienced you in any way, Mr. Drum.”

  “No inconvenience at all, Mrs. Varley.”

  “Martini the way you like them?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Would you like another? The drinks are on me.”

  We had a second Martini. I thanked her for her check and she said: “What do you know about my husband, Mr. Drum?”

  “What everyone else knows, I guess. Son of a famous father. Following in his footsteps working for the government although your husband is independently wealthy.”

  “We’re worth in the neighborhood of thirty million dollars,” Priscilla Varley said apologetically.

  “Also, your husband has a pretty good war record.”

  “He won a Distinguished Service Cross on Tarawa as a lieutenant with the Marines. He wears a steel plate in his head where part of his skull was smashed by shrapnel. That may not sound important to you and it may seem strange for me to tell you, but it is important. And it explains so much about Stewart.”

  I watched her as she talked. I tried not to stare at her ruttishly. Once my mind wandered and I started thinking that if Stewart Varley was indeed making out with the Mojindar woman, maybe he deserved getting his head kicked in.

  “… pretty disappointing not to die when everyone is sure you’re going to die,” she was saying. “He waited. He healed. The healing process was slow. He didn’t die. He had a strange sense of disappointment. That’s the way he put it.” She looked at me and said suddenly: “Sometimes it’s almost as if Stewart has been searching for some other way to die since Tarawa.”

  She went on with hardly a pause. “No, I suppose that’s wrong. Not exactly looking for a way to die. He’s in love with life too much. Looking for something. You see, he—well, he completed the cycle of his faith on Tarawa. That’s exactly how he puts it. Now he’s searching. For the past ten years and more he’s been searching. He doesn’t know what he hopes to find. He doesn’t know where to look. But he can’t stop searching—physically, emotionally, spiritually, in every way. Tell me, Mr. Drum,” she asked unexpectedly but without self-consciousness, “would you say I’m a beautiful woman?”

  I smiled at her. I hoped it wasn’t a leer. “Yeah,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”

  “And that I could give a man what—well, frankly, what he wants?”

  I didn’t say anything. The back of my neck felt warm.

  “On several occasions Stewart has been unfaithful to me. He admits it. He can’t help himself. It tears him up inside. He drinks a great deal, as you have seen. I love him, Mr. Drum. I love my husband, you see. Despite what I have told you. And please don’t think my telling you this is peculiar. It’s part of the picture, and I do want you to have the entire picture. Do you understand?”

  I did not understand. But I nodded my head. Sometimes a private detective gets to think about putting an analyst’s couch in his office and charging per hour what he charges per day. I said:

  “What’s the rest of the picture?”

  “Stewart’s searching is the rest of the picture.”

  “He’s having an affair with Sumitra Mojindar, isn’t he?”

  She did not look surprised. She lifted her silver-gloved hand and the old waiter sprinted to the bar and sprinted back with a third round of Martinis and served them fawningly. When he went away she said: “I forgive him his affairs, Mr. Drum. I want my husband to find what he wants—wherever he finds it. But I don’t want him to die looking for it.”

  “Ambedkar?”

  “Ambedkar’s part of it. I don’t understand about Ambedkar. It ought to be the husband, oughtn’t it? But Ambedkar isn’t entirely what I wanted to see you about. My husband leaves for India on the weekend, Mr. Drum. As you may have heard, they have appointed him observer at the Benares Conference.”

  “The way I heard it, he had himself appointed.”

  “Well, perhaps. If he goes to India, Mr. Drum, I’m afraid he won’t come back to me.”

  “Ambedkar again?”

  “Ambedkar? Oh, I see what you mean. Perhaps. But I didn’t meant Ambedkar. India. I meant India, Mr. Drum. The lure of the timeless East. The hold the mysticism of the East could get on my husband. I said he had completed the cycle of his faith on Tarawa. Those are his words. But he didn’t die. He lived. He lived. Sometimes he says he feels as if he’s empty inside. Absolutely empty. A hollow space inside what used to be his skull. He loves me, but love isn’t enough. He wants to find what he has lost. He wants to find faith again. He hopes to find it in India.”

  “If you want me to keep him from going—”

  “No, of course not. I want him to go. But I want him to come back. I don’t want Ambedkar or Sumitra Mojindar or India itself to stop him. I want him to go and search for what he hopes to find. But, Mr. Drum, I want you to bring him back to me.”

  We sat on either side of a small round table at cocktail hour in one of Washington’s best hotels. The coolest dream of a lovely woman I had ever seen had just asked me to follow her husband halfway around the world and bring him back. I was still trying to swallow all of it. I couldn’t say yes. I wouldn’t say no. I asked:

  “Your father-in-law hire a P.I. named Sprayregan to look into your husband’s love life? Excuse me, I mean—”

  “You mean exactly what you said, Mr. Drum. Yes. Yes, he did. I’m a little startled to find that you know about it, but I’m pleased. You really dig into a case, don’t you?”

  “Coincidence,” I mumbled, but not very loud. The back of my neck was warm again. Priscilla Varley could make you feel like a first-grader given a gold star by the teacher.

  “As for my father-in-law, I’m very much afraid he threw his money away. After all he only had to ask me. I’d seen it coming with Sumitra Mojindar, you see. I suppose I know the symptoms. It isn’t Mrs. Mojindar as much as what Mrs. Mojindar symbolizes to him. Although in this case, as I understand it, the woman is perfectly available.” She smiled and shook her head deprecatingly. “I’m afraid that’s catty. And she is lovely. Well, Mr. Drum. Will you do it? Stewart’s father can cut all the red tape that will have to be cut for you. I’ll pay all your transportation expenses and of course all your expenses while in Benares, and then we could settle on some figure over and above your expenses. How does two thousand dollars sound to you?” She looked at me, uncertain of herself for the first time. “Of course that’s an arbitrary figure. If you want more, say so.”

  I didn’t want more. I wanted to tell her what she wanted me to do was something out of the best lurid TV melodrama. It was like hiring a nurse to keep her husband away from liquor or mainlining or a bodyguard to steer him clear of the racetrack or what they used to call a shooting gallery. It could be done—if her husband cooperated. But if he wanted to cooperate you wouldn’t need a nurse or a bodyguard and if he didn’t want to cooperate all the nurses or bodyguards in Washington wouldn’t help. Or all the private detectives.

  But I didn’t say any of that. She gave me a dazzling smile and I smiled back at her, still hoping mine wasn’t a leer. And she said: “Of course I couldn’t hope to have your answer now. But don’t call me, Mr. Drum, please. I’ll call you.” She stood up and offered her silver-gloved hand and that smile again. “Thank you so much for coming!” she said a little breathlessly. It was like a caress.

  I floated out of there and into the cold rain.

  Gloria Sprayregan was waiting outside my office the next morning. Her husband hadn’t come home that night, she said in that flat, undemonstrative way she had. She had seen him once the previous afternoon and he had been scared. She had never seen him looking so scared.’ He wished he hadn’t gone ahead with his plans, but of course it was too late for that. He didn’t know what to do. Did she have any ideas? She had no ideas.

  She wanted to know what I thought he ought to do. There was no answer to that one, except look for him. Even looking for him might prove dangerous if she blazed a trail to him. I was almost sorry I
had suggested that and was going to offer to find him myself when the telephone rang. It was a Congressman who had what he called a prodigal son and I called a juvenile delinquent. I had been hired to yank him off somebody’s chandelier on several occasions before, the pay was good, and I was being hired again. At first I thought of turning it down because Gil Sprayregan might need finding in a hurry. But even I couldn’t guarantee covering my trail and it might turn out better all around if Sprayregan went on an anonymous bender until after the Mojindars left for India, so I told Gloria to let it ride a day or so if she could, to keep in touch with me and to call me if she thought she knew where to find her husband. She went out without a word.

  As it happened, the Congressman’s son had involved himself in a drunken brawl in Richmond, Virginia. That meant a hundred-mile drive and a session with a lawyer I knew in Richmond and forty-eight hours in all before the Congressman’s prodigal and/or delinquent son could walk out of the Richmond jail a free if not wiser young man. Meanwhile, Gloria Sprayregan had thought to look for her husband at their cabin on Little Chesapeake Island, had found him and visited him a couple of times, bringing food which he hardly touched and watching him drink liquor steadily and without pleasure.

  “I know my husband,” she had said. “He’ll drink and drink until he gets drinking tough, and then he’ll do something absolutely wrong, all wrong, Mr. Drum, and he’ll be killed. I know it. I know it.”

  She had decided to go out there again—her fourth visit. I decided her husband would be better off if I went with her than if she went alone. I decided to bring him back.

  But apparently other people had other ideas.

  6.

  THE STOCKY, square-faced and bleak-eyed deputy sheriff from Chesapeake City, whose name was Malloy, massaged his chin with a fat-fingered hand, sat back and looked up at the ceiling of the ward in the Michael Bell Memorial Hospital, then sat forward and scowled at me.

  “You think them foreigners did it?” he said.

  “I never saw the hit-and-run car.”

  “But you think so?”

  “I told you all I know. Don’t you?”

  “That’s a laugh,” he said bitterly, and laughed to prove it. “You didn’t tell me hardly anything at all.”

  Actually I had told him a great deal of it but not all of it. I had omitted the names of the Stewart Hoffman Varley Juniors, figuring that if Sprayregan had been murdered and if their involvement with Ambedkar was more than coincidence, it was police business to involve them, not my business.

  “You two-bit private punks from D.C. are all alike,” Malloy said, his voice still bitter. “Think I ain’t seen your kind before? I want you should tell me the name of your client, Drum, and I want you should tell me now.”

  I sat up. The walls tilted some and then straightened. “That’s right, buddy,” I said. “Show me how grateful you are. I could have called it as a straight hit-and-run for you and you never would have known the difference. So the Sprayregan’s cabin gets visited by the Sprayregans on a cold rainy day in May. There’s no law against it. So they throw a party and I’m invited. So we get run down by a hit-and-run driver on the way home. I could have told it to you like that. All I’m trying to do is keep my client’s name out of this business if it belongs out. You’ve got to prove it belongs in, not me.”

  “Yeah?” Malloy shouted. “I’ll go right downtown and get an order and have you booked as a material witness, you smart son of a bitch.”

  “You’d need a court order even in Chesapeake City, buddy, and you’d never get it. You didn’t take down a word I said and if you start pushing me like that I didn’t say a thing. Try holding a material witness to hit-and-run homicide and they’re liable to take away your tin badge.”

  He was bewildered and angry, like any small town cop who thinks the hot shots from the big city are pushing him around. He said furiously, “You think you got connections, huh? I’ll show you what freaking good your connections are gonna do you.”

  I sighed. He had had that kind of look on his face all along. He was the kind of cop who was a cop because it was one way of making a living, usually a pretty easy way in a town like Chesapeake City. I jerked a thumb toward the hospital screen. “Now be a good boy and get out of here so I can sleep.”

  He called me a dirty name in a loud voice and a nurse came running in with her face beet-red and her breath coming in little gasps. She told him to leave. She looked mad enough to hit him and maybe capable enough too. She was built like a lady wrestler before the lady wrestlers turned into glamour girls for the Midwestern TV circuits. She came back to my bed and clucked over me and told me don’t you worry none, mister, and outside the range of my vision someone moaned in his sleep and then it was dark and I felt calm and lethargic, and I slept.

  I slept until the late afternoon, when a doctor came and told me I would need two or three days on my back to rest after the concussion. I asked him how almost one day would be. He said I had had almost one day and asked how I felt. I felt lousy and said so. He asked if I could wait. I thought about Gloria Sprayregan. I thought about Ambedkar, who came from India where the life-expectancy is under thirty years, where death doesn’t mean what death means here, and where murder, like death from malaria or smallpox or diphtheria or starvation, comes easy. I thought about a beautiful dream of a silver-blonde named Priscilla Varley and her husband, who kind of gave you the idea he belonged in the pages of a story by Somerset Maugham.

  I got dressed and signed some forms which absolved the Michael Bell Memorial Hospital of any blame in the event that something happened to me. My pants were torn at both knees and my jacket at one elbow, and both were caked with mud, but they would have to do until I got back to Washington. I hung around for the hospital dinner, which wasn’t good but filled your stomach anyway. Then I told the people at the administration desk to send me a bill. They didn’t seem to think much of the idea, but nobody barred the door on my way out.

  Deputy Sheriff Malloy wasn’t waiting outside for me. He would probably take it out on every out-of-state visitor who came to Chesapeake City for a few late-hour beers the next week or so by running him into the clink if he raised his voice above a whisper.

  A taxi pulled up in front of the hospital and the driver ran around the front of his car to open the door for a pregnant woman with an overnight bag and a shy, expectant smile. He carried the bag inside for her as if it had a million bucks in it. When he came out I was standing near his cab. He gave me a look which said he thought I didn’t have enough money to pay the fare to downtown Chesapeake City. I asked him how he would like a long trip all the way into Washington. He smiled with interest but suspicion and said he wanted to see the color of my money. I showed it to him. He said the fare would be fifteen bucks. That was steep, but I wanted a long drink, a hot shower and a good night’s sleep in my own bed in that order, and wanted them badly. I didn’t argue with him.

  The drink went down fast and hit hard and asked for company. I gave it company, then undressed and got under a shower as hot as I could stand it. I looked down at the blue marks and contusions on my body. The combination of two long drinks and a hot shower did wonders for stiff, aching muscles, but a rubdown would perform even greater miracles, so I decided to go over for one at the Ambassador tomorrow. I climbed out of the shower and into a towelcloth bathrobe and padded barefoot into the living room for another drink and a cigarette. It wasn’t much of a living room. The furniture came along with the three-room apartment for a hundred and thirty bucks a month, utilities included. The overstuffed chairs sagged in the wrong places like a matron who has lost interest in her figure. But I sat down in one thinking it was the most comfortable chair in the world anyhow.

  Just then the doorbell rang.

  When I opened the door Gloria Sprayregan shoved the muzzle of a .38 Police Positive which had probably belonged to her husband against my chest, placed the flat of her free hand alongside it and pushed me into the room. She didn’t push very hard
. She didn’t have to. The muzzle of the .38 did her pushing for her along with the absolutely blank expression on her face. She looked about ten years older than she had on our trip out to Chesapeake City. The lines on her forehead had etched in deeper and the pouches under her eyes were really black. She looked sick, but her hand holding the Police Positive was as steady as Lincoln’s marble hand on the chair-arm over at the Memorial. She removed her free hand from my chest and used it to shut the door behind her. When she did that the world outside ceased to be. There were only the two of us and her husband’s gun. She said, softly and hardly moving her lips: “I’m going to kill you, you dirty no-good rat.”

  I stood there looking at her. There is no repartee to such a statement.

  “You could have helped him. I asked you. I begged you. You were always too busy. You never wanted to help. When you finally did, you led them to him and they ran him down and killed him. Well, aren’t you going to say anything?”

  Her index finger went through the trigger guard of the .38. The knuckle was white, its skin taut and waxy-looking. If I breathed through my mouth instead of my nose she might decide to exert the tiny erg of energy which would put my name in the obituary columns in the morning. If I twitched my ears she might decide to do it. On the other hand if I did absolutely nothing at all she might decide to do it.

  “I didn’t kill your husband, Mrs. Sprayregan,” I said quietly.

  “Look at you. Expensive liquor on your breath. A bathrobe which probably cost you more than he averaged a week the last year or so. The clean, scrubbed-looking Mr. Chester Drum. Look at you. Do I detect a twitch in your lips, Mr. Drum? Are you scared because you know you’re going to die? Gil didn’t know it. Oh Jesus God he never knew what hit him.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead and shoot. That will get you a lot closer to his murderer, won’t it?”

  She bared her teeth. Our faces were quite close. She did not smell of liquor. She did not smell of perfume. She wore a black suit and no makeup. She was perfectly, entirely, inexorably sober. She was going to kill someone.