Killers Are My Meat

by Stephen Marlowe

  “I’ll get them,” she said. “No power in this world will stop me. Tell me, Mr. Drum, how does it feel to have let down the one man who made your own success possible? How does it feel to know you’re going to die? Was Gil better off, not knowing?”

  She watched my eyes. Her own eyes were brown, the whites clear but rimmed with red, the lids swollen. I had the feeling that as soon as I answered that question she would tighten her finger and pull the trigger. She was sober and not entirely sane. Temporary insanity, the courts would rule. It was the first time I had ever looked beyond my own death. She blamed me entirely because she did not want to blame herself at all. Perhaps the court psychiatrists would explain it that way. Or perhaps they would explain it in words I wouldn’t understand. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to me. Because then I would be a few lines in an obituary in an old newspaper in a newspaper morgue. Chester Drum. Private Detective. Born Baltimore 1924. Survived by an aunt in Spokane, Washington. Former F.B.I. Agent. No wives, no present lovers, no sorrows, no regrets.

  “Well?” she said. “Was he better off or wasn’t he?”

  At that moment the telephone started to ring.

  Her eyes darkened. That was all. They didn’t waver. It wasn’t much, but it might be my only chance. The telephone went on ringing. I struck at the gun and ducked. It went off and she brought the barrel down on my head and for an instant I saw white flashes of light in front of my eyeballs and nothing else. Then I grabbed the gun as my vision came back and she swung it at me again. All of a sudden she let go of it and wailed. It was a long, drawn-out, faraway sound. It seemed to come from outside the apartment and down on the street and a long way off. I slapped her face. She sank down into one of the sagging overstuffed chairs and cried silently, without tears. She looked up at me, gasping for breath. I slapped her again, harder. She made a wheezing, asthmatic sound and could breathe again. I brought her a glass of whisky. She held it without drinking it while I removed the bullets from the Police Positive. The telephone stopped ringing. She looked at the glass of whisky and threw it at me. Then she really began to cry. It was a bleating sound and the tears flowed.

  Someone rang the doorbell.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Everything okay in there?”

  It was my neighbor down the hall, a G.S. 11 with the Department of Interior. It was nice to know the world was still out there waiting.

  “Gun went off while I was cleaning it,” I said. “Sorry.”

  He knew my line of work. He was a fussy little bachelor who always looked at me with faint suspicion but not malice. He went away.

  Gloria Sprayregan stood up. “Oh God,” she said. “Oh God. I was going to do it. I was going to kill you.”

  “Just take it easy now,” I said.

  “It isn’t you I want. It isn’t you. Help me. Help me get them, please. I’ll do anything you want. Just anything. Try me. Absolutely anything. Please. Please say you’ll help me. I must have been crazy. Of course. Of course it isn’t you. You tried. You really tried, didn’t you? Just help me. Say you’ll help me get them.”

  I went over to the sofa, which was one of those contraptions they say a five-year-old kid can open in thirty seconds, which usually takes an adult five minutes to manipulate, and which took an adult who had just been shot at closer to ten minutes to open into a bed.

  “Look,” I said. “You’ll sleep here. You can’t go outside now. Stay here for the night. Then we’ll talk about it in the morning. All right?”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “We’ll talk about it in the morning. But you’d better stay here tonight and calm down.”

  “I’ll sleep here if you want. I’ll do anything you want.”

  I went into the bedroom and brought her out a sheet, a pillow and a pillowcase. I got a blanket from the linen closet.

  “We can go over there in the morning,” she said, nodding her head slowly, her eyes very wide. “To the Indian Embassy. Do you promise?”

  It was the first time she had mentioned who her husband had wanted to blackmail.

  The telephone rang again. She looked at me gravely while I picked up the receiver.

  “This is Priscilla Varley, Mr. Drum. I read what happened to you in the papers. I called the Bell Hospital in Chesapeake City but they said you had been discharged at your own request. Are you all right?”

  I said I would live.

  “Well, what I told you still stands. All expenses and two thousand dollars. It is expected that the Benares Conference will last about a week. Stewart leaves on a T.W.A. flight tomorrow. Well, what do you say?”

  I told her I thought I had better spend some time recuperating. She said they had discharged me from the hospital, hadn’t they? She refused to take no for an answer and said she would call me again in the morning. I let it stand at that and hung up.

  “In the morning,” Gloria Sprayregan said after I had hung up, “we can go over to the Indian Embassy and find them and shoot them. There were two of them. I saw them in the car. No. Not a car. A station wagon. A little man and a big man. I couldn’t see their faces. Well, good night.”

  I went into the bedroom and took off the bathrobe which had cost a dollar ninety-eight at a Washington’s Birthday sale last year and crawled between the covers naked and was fast asleep either a split second before or a split second after I shut my eyes.

  Her hands awoke me.

  They were cold and moving up and down my back. She was breathing on my neck and her breath was not cold.

  She had crawled into bed with me.

  “Anything,” she whispered. “I told you I would do anything you wanted. Name it. Say the word. Anything, if you’ll help me. I wasn’t fooling. I’ll bet you thought I was fooling. Do you think I’m fooling now?”

  I turned around toward her. A hammer of pain throbbed at the base of my skull. She thought I was going to take her in my arms. I was going to push her out of the bed. She came against me, her big high breasts softly pushing against my chest. She was wearing exactly what I was wearing. Her thighs moved against my thighs. Her belly was hard. Step one: kill the man. Step two: if you fail, make love to him. Logical? She was determined. She was determined to do just one thing. It was almost dawn and gray light seeped into the room through the down-slatted Venetian blinds. In the gray light she had a look of either intense rapture or intense pain or intense loathing on her face.

  I got my hands on her shoulders and pushed her away from me. She started to come back. I climbed out of the bed. “You sleep here,” I said. “I’ll sleep inside. I said I’d talk about helping you in the morning. Maybe it’s morning to you, but it’s not morning to me. I’ll get your clothing for you. When you come out—in the morning—come out only when I call you and come out wearing it. You got that?”

  Tough guy, I thought. Tough guy with your tough routine. She’s going to love you in the morning. Oh yeah, she’s going to love you. First you don’t let her kill you. Then you don’t let her sleep with you. The first she needs to get rid of her own feelings of guilt. The second she thinks she needs to make you a blood brother in vendetta. Oh yeah. She’s going to love you. And she’s just going to love herself.

  She didn’t move when I returned with her clothing and dropped it on the floor inside the bedroom. I shut the door and stretched out on the sofa-bed with my bathrobe draped over me. Drifting off to sleep I decided to call a psychotherapist I knew in the morning and have him decide what ought to be done for Gloria.

  When she came out of the bedroom it was before I called her.

  She came out fully dressed and walking briskly toward the door. It was the brisk walking and the opening of the door which started to get me up. It was the slamming of the door behind her which really woke me. I jumped into a pair of slacks and a T-shirt and ran barefoot into the hall and downstairs and outside. It was a bright, sunshiny morning, not at all cold for May.

  By the time I reached the street of course she was gone.

  7.
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  THAT MAY, the Indian Embassy was still in its temporary quarters on M Street a couple of blocks from Embassy Row. It was a big brownstone house which had belonged to a retired general who had come to Washington to peddle his influence, if any, until they had found him one morning with an empty bottle of sleeping pills. He had died intestate and the Indian Ambassador had picked the place up for a song. It looked like a museum.

  I found a parking slot about a block from the Weather Bureau and double-timed back up M Street. It was a peaceful Saturday morning with very little traffic, as if all the cars had gone down to the Tidal Basin to drive past the cherry trees. A panel truck pulled to the curb in the no-parking zone in front of the Embassy as I got there. It was a refrigerator white truck with blue Air France lettering on the side. Two fellows in white Ike jackets and blue ducks and wearing white caps with blue visors got out, stretched their muscles in the morning sunshine, and dropped their cigarette butts on the sidewalk.

  I went over to them. “Little early in the day for you, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Rush order, Mac.”

  “Delivering or picking up?”

  The bigger of the two Air France men looked me over. “Who wants to know?”

  I took out my wallet and showed them my buzzer. They weren’t impressed. I got a ten from the money compartment of the wallet, and before the bill came clear of the leather the big fellow said, beginning to smirk, “To do what?”

  “For the jacket and the cap. And you get to sit this one out in the back of the truck while your buddy and I get to do the work.”

  They looked at each other. The little fellow seemed doubtful, but the big one thought it was a good way to start the day’s work. A couple of minutes later he was ensconced in the rear of the panel truck with a knowing smirk on his face. The little fellow and I wrestled a trundle-cart down from the truck and wheeled it through the wrought-iron gate and around the side of the Embassy on a cobblestone drive which led to the delivery entrance. The driveway widened to a small courtyard in back of the brownstone house, with a delivery entrance and greenhouse in which exotic plants grew on one side and a garage big enough for half a dozen cars on the other.

  “Why didn’t you drive the truck back here?” I asked.

  “Those were our orders,” he said sullenly, and went over to ring the bell at the delivery entrance.

  A butler let us in and told us where to find the cartons. There were about fifteen of them, and they were heavy. They were stacked in a library with most of the shelves empty, so I figured we were moving books. When my partner saw the size of the cartons, he went back outside for the trundle-cart. But when it clattered over the threshold the butler didn’t approve, the little fellow in the visored cap managed to look politely exasperated, and we carried the cartons out one at a time.

  If Gloria Sprayregan had got here before I did, she was doing a good job of hiding. And if anyone had recently rattled the skeleton in the Embassy closet, the butler didn’t show it. He was as high strung as an overfed Guernsey cow.

  When we finished loading the cart and the butler closed the door behind us, I told my partner to grab himself a smoke. “Let’s load up the truck first, huh?” he said.

  I shook my head and walked across the cobbled courtyard to the garage while he leaned unhappily against the cartons piled on the cart. The garage was stucco painted to look like brownstone, two stories high, with a peaked roof and living quarters upstairs for the hired help. Two big overhead doors faced on the courtyard. They were locked. Around the side of the garage I found another door. This one was the kind that opens on hinges, and it wasn’t locked. I opened it just enough to slip through, and closed it behind me.

  There was a faint exhaust smell in the garage. It was of cinderblock construction with a concrete floor. Of the four vehicles parked in there, only one was a station wagon. It was a dark green Merc which I had seen before outside the Anacostia tavern. And it had a spotlight on it.

  The spotlight was up front on a portable stand and it wasn’t really a spotlight. It was one of those baking lamps used to bake the finish on a spot auto paint job. It glowed bright orange and left a black double afterimage in the dim interior of the garage when I turned away from it. Whoever had placed it there had done so to bake a new finish on the left front fender of the Merc station wagon. I ran a finger lightly along the fender and could feel where it had been sledgehammered back into shape. A smudge of green came off on my finger.

  In front of the station wagon a big tarp had been spread on the concrete under an auto-wrecker’s toolkit and the Merc’s front bumper, which had been taken off and disassembled. The bumper was badly twisted and a new one, still in its packing tape, lay alongside it.

  I started crouching to have a look at the bumper, but something touched my shoulder.

  What little noise he had made coming up behind me had been swallowed by the hum of the baking lamp. He was my size and had a face but I couldn’t see it with the black afterimage of the lamp before my eyes. With the light behind me he wouldn’t be able to see my face at all. That didn’t seem to bother him. He used his fingers like the jaws of a monkey wrench on my upper arm and said, “Well?”

  “Pretty good job,” I said.

  He didn’t make a speech but his fingers remained where he had put them. If I shook them off I had a hunch I was in for a fight.

  “I used to be in the business,” I said. “I thought I saw a baking lamp and came in to have a look.”

  “You couldn’t have seen it from the courtyard.”

  It was the longest speech I could get out of him. He didn’t have any accent I could identify, but he didn’t speak like an American either. He hadn’t budged since I’d turned around. He had cinderblocks for legs. The only way I could get by him was to knock him over. After a while I got the idea he wanted me to try it.

  Instead I said, “It’s a pretty good job but not good enough so you’d want the sheriff of Chesapeake County to have a look at it.”

  The first thing he moved was his legs. He did a little shuffle like a marcher who’d been out of step. Then his right shoulder went down and his fist swung up. I moved my chin and air went rushing by. Because he had hit nothing he followed through awkwardly, exposing his right side long enough for me to use the edge of my left hand against his kidney. He grunted and sagged to one knee, letting go of my right arm. I moved around him, heading for the door.

  Then three things happened. The door opened and a woman in a sari was silhouetted there before it closed behind her. There was a click and white light glared overhead and splashed harshly off the whitewashed cinderblocks. Then metal clanked behind me.

  “Rukmini!” the woman shouted.

  Rukmini was the other fellow in the garage. He wore jodhpurs and a crew-necked shirt. His absolutely bald head gleamed. He had been at the pile of tools on the tarp. He came at me in a crouching run with a sledge hammer in his hand.

  He brought it up and around like a discus thrower. I did the only thing I could. I went down under it, all the way down. The sledge clanged against the body of the station wagon. I was at his knees, driving him back off balance before he could use the hammer again. We crashed back together into the baking lamp. The portable stand went over and the lamp shattered. Then he came down on top of me, chipping concrete with the hammer about six inches from my face. We rolled over on the floor. He had the flattest, deadest eyes I had ever seen. They looked like glass eyes in an expressionless plaster face a shade lighter than Ambedkar’s. He never made a sound. He never even opened his mouth. All he wanted to do was kill me.

  He might have, too, except for the hammer. He was strong. He was surprisingly agile. But he had a one-track mind. We rolled over and fought for the hammer. It was the only weapon he would deign to use. He didn’t try to protect himself at all. I used my left hand to keep the hammer out of reach. He sent sparks flying from the concrete with it twice. I used my right hand, the fingers stiff and extended, against the side of his size-seventeen
neck. Then I searched for his eyes with the stiffly extended fingers. I found his high, protective cheekbones with them. Then my finger slipped upwards, the middle finger going numb against his brow and the index finger encountering something soft. He dropped the hammer, rolled off me, and covered his face. I began to get up. On his knees, he groped blindly for the hammer. I kicked it away and he went crawling after it. There didn’t seem to be any way of stopping him short of killing him.

  I had forgotten about the woman. She said, “That’s enough, Rukmini.” It didn’t stop him. She said something in a language I had never heard. That stopped him. She said some more. He got up and lurched blindly toward the stairs at one end of the garage.

  The woman was panting as if she’d had a part in our fight. Spots of color glowed on her tan cheeks. She wore a red sari flecked with silver. A woman without a, superb figure shouldn’t be seen in public in a tightly wrapped sari. She didn’t have anything to worry about on that score. Her glossily black hair was drawn back and down tightly from the straight white line of her part to a bun at the nape of her neck. I didn’t know if she was beautiful or not. Her standards weren’t ours. But I do know she was the most striking woman I had ever seen, or I wouldn’t have noticed her at all, not then. Then overhead I heard footsteps moving heavily and outside the trundle-cart clattered on cobblestone. Like that, the world came back.

  She said throatily, “When you fight, you mean business.”

  I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were amber and belonged in the Vale of Shalimar, halfway around the world.

  “Rukmini usually is quite docile,” she said. She was panting more than I was.

  “You ought to keep him muzzled,” I said.

  “He’s a kshatriya of an ancient warrior family. Once he’s aroused … what did you do to arouse him?”

  I grinned at her. She waited expectantly with a sheen of sweat on her upper lip. I said, “The night before last he ran two of us down in that station wagon of his. I pulled a dirty trick and managed to come out of it alive. He must have been plenty mad, all right.”