by Jerry eBooks
“Take it easy?” she yelped. “They took you easy, didn’t they? I reckon you’re that fool, Jimmy Jamaica. I heard you were smart.”
“Not so smart,” Jimmy scowled. “But I’m not through yet. Do you know where they went, Mrs. Eckhart? You are Mrs. Eckhart?”
“Of course I am—but call me Granny,” she snapped. “Everybody does. And you’re damn right I know where they went. Those blasted fools forgot when they tied up my mouth they left my ears open. If you’ll quit fumbling—”
The ropes fell away. Granny bounded up like a rubber ball and darted to a bureau against the wall. Jerking open a drawer, she took out a tiny pistol.
Jimmy’s head still ached furiously. The agony was like a brake on his brain and he stifled a moan. The old woman’s eyes went soft. She patted his arm.
“Don’t mind me, Jimmy,” she said. “I’ve got a tongue like a buzz-saw and right now I’m so hellish mad I could chew glass. I know you thought you were doing Red and me a favor. Thanks for your kindness.” Her voice rose to a strident screech. “Now let’s cut out the soft talk and get the hell out of here!”
Jimmy felt decidedly better. “Yes, ma’am!” he grinned.
They ran down the steps and Jamaica opened the car door, but Granny shoved him aside. “Over there,” she said curtly. “I’m driving.”
She beat his protests down. “You’re still woozy, son. This trip is going to be fast. Got a cheroot on you?”
By the time Jimmy ran around the car she had the motor roaring. It jerked from the curb with a scream of rationed rubber and his head snapped back. The machine straightened out, rocking. Granny flung the pistol in his lap.
“Hold the hardware and look out for cops,” she panted. “This is a private expedition.”
Jimmy settled back. If it hadn’t been for worry about Red he would be enjoying himself. Granny, having lit one of his cigarettes, was pushing the car like a fire truck. She was less than five feet tall, Jimmy judged, and her gray hair was cut short. Her hands gripped the wheel and she had to sit erect to see the street. The cigarette dangled rakishly from her lips.
Jimmy said, “I thought you were sick.”
“You’ll find out how sick I am!”
“Take it easy,” he told her. “I’m not going to let you—”
“You’re not going to let me!” she mimicked angrily. “You’re going to listen, my boy. They’re not going to kill my grandson. He’s going to live to testify against Braniff. You sit still and take orders.”
Jimmy laughed.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she stormed, never taking her eyes from the traffic. “That at my age I ought to be sitting in a rocker by the fire. That’s not for me, jimmy Jamaica! I fought the world to raise my son, and when he died I kept on fighting for Red. I’ve slung hash, worked in sweatshops and even scrubbed floors to raise that kid. He’s not the man I am, but now that he’s grown and I can relax and have some fun, I’m not losing him.”
Beneath her defiance Jimmy sensed a gnawing anxiety. He said gently, “All right, Granny. You give the orders.”
She dodged a lurching truck. “Get over on your side, you hog!” she shouted at the goggling driver. In the same breath she went on to Jimmy, “Now you’re in the groove, Jay-Jay. I heard them talking. Braniff’s got a hideout in the Madison section.”
Jimmy Jamaica’s eyes sparkled. “Do you always talk like that?” he asked.
“I’m a character,” Granny laughed. “Shut up and listen. When we get where we’re going, you lay low in the car while I case the joint—”
Jimmy was beyond being astonished by the extraordinary old woman but he started to object in a half-hearted way. She said decisively: “They’d spot you in a minute, but who’d worry about an old woman?”
The speed slackened. They were in a quiet neighborhood of small homes, golden lights gleaming from peaceful doors. With motor dead the car rolled against the curb and stopped. Granny said, “Now play dead and keep your eyes open, Jay-Jay, while I rhumba around and take a gander.”
She slid from the car and began to stroll along the dark sidewalk. Granny was right, of course. If Braniff spotted him it would be too bad. Jimmy jumped when the door beside him opened softly.
“Sh!” Granny warned.
He murmured, “Where did you come from?”
““I’ve been around in the rear,” she whispered. “It’s the second house up there—the one that sits back from the street. Braniff and the girl have got Red in the bedroom. There’s a man watching just inside the front door, but the back door’s not locked.”
“You’re a whiz, Granny!”
“Uh-huh,” she wheezed. “Do we call the cops, Jay-Jay?”
Jimmy said grimly, “This is our problem.”
“Good boy! I’ll walk along in front and keep the lookout interested. You slip around the back and do your stuff.”
Jamaica felt good now. He climbed from the car and flexed his legs. The last traces of pain dribbled from his frame with the prospect of action.
“Okay, Granny,” he muttered. “You’re calling the signals.”
She clutched his sleeve for an instant. “If anything goes wrong I’ll manage to let you know,” she promised. She gave him terse directions to the rear of the house. “And for the Lord’s sake hurry!” she finished anxiously. “My grandson’s in there!”
Jamaica moved swiftly into the darkness. An alley bisected the block and he turned in. The ground was rutted like a country lane. Beyond the property line ending the street-front lots, in a jungle of fences, hedges and patches of victory gardens, he faced to the left. Jimmy moved cautiously, Granny’s pistol in his hand. The house was not just dark—from the rear it was wrapped in the blackness of abandonment. A single room—the kitchen, Jimmy judged—jutted from the rectangle of the main section and a dinky little porch led to the rear door. The kitchen had windows at two sides as well as at the back.
Jimmy moved soundlessly onto the porch and was reaching for the door when he jerked back. From the direction of the street came an explosion of sound, a hoarse maudlin song in a terrible falsetto.
Jimmy swore silently. The source of that bedlam was unmistakable. “Couldn’t she think of some other way to keep the lookout occupied?” he thought in irritation and was reaching for the door again when the song changed.
“K-k-k-ka-ty—” Granny roared from the distant street.
Jimmy jerked back again. He huddled against the wall in puzzled concentration, listening. Granny bawled out the words in a perfect imitation of drunken glee. She was probably capering about in a weird dance. If that was her idea of giving him a break—
He followed the words of the old song he remembered from the last war.
“—waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door!”
He grinned then, and if Granny had been near he could have kissed her. He knew. Those last two words, not sung, but shouted. She was telling him of death that lurked on the other side of that door, if he barged in as he had planned. They had found out, somehow.
Jimmy realized he was squatting on a litter of junk and trash. His fumbling fingers made out a tangled mass of heavy twine. He held it for a second, planning, then crept like a cat toward the door, hugging the wall. He reached up, hooking an end of the twine over the knob. It took more than a minute to ease the knob just enough to free the catch. Then, holding the twine, he crawled around to the side of the projecting kitchen and crouched beneath a window that was a square of solid blackness just above his head.
Jimmy drew a deep breath, jerked the cord, and straightened up.
The door banged open. Jimmy stared into the well of ebony that was the window. He saw two spurts of orange flame as the hidden men fired at the entrance where he would have been standing.
He fired four careful shots, aiming just behind those flaring targets. Then he dived headlong through the window and fell sprawling into the floor.
There was no more shooting. One figure, only slightly blacker than the shadows
, was slumped in an awkward position against the wall. The other lay moaning on his face.
Jimmy went crab-wise across the floor, kicking pistols out of reach. The moaning man was Braniff, the other a huddled frame that had no more use for a name. Jimmy put down his pistol to rip up Braniff’s shirt for bandages.
Without warning the light came on. Jimmy blinked painfully at the figure in the dining room.
“Little Red Riding Hood!”
Marge Perry still wore red, but now she stared at him with a tight bitterness in which there was little resemblance to the girl who had visited him in the office. She held a gun in her steady fist.
Jimmy watched her warily. While he held her glance she could still see Braniff lying so still in the spreading pool of crimson on the linoleum. She seemed to stiffen and grow white with frantic hysteria.
She screamed, “This is for Carl, you sanctimonious b—”
Jimmy tensed for a desperate leap.
“I’ll take her,” said a calm voice behind her, and Marge pivoted. In one motion Jimmy scooped up his gun and threw it. It hit Marge on the elbow. She yelped in sharp pain and her weapon clattered to the floor.
Granny Eckhart, with Freddy peering anxiously over her shoulder, marched resolutely into the kitchen.
“Stand back, Jay-Jay,” she commanded. “I’ll show you how to handle her.” She reached up and slapped the girl. When Marge, wild with frustration, tried to fight back, Granny really went to work. In a few seconds the girl crouched against the wall, whimpering with fear. Granny snatched her upright. “Come on, you little painted Jezebel,” she roared. “Jay-Jay, you and Red carry Braniff to your car. I’ll handle the wench. We’ll leave the stiff for the meat-wagon.”
“Yes, ma’am,” grinned Jimmy Jamaica.
She marched the terrified girl through the house and the two men lifted the groaning Braniff and followed.
Jimmy puffed, “Your grandmother, Red, is a remarkable woman.”
“She’s a character, all right,” Red chuckled. “For the Lord’s sake, show some life,” Granny yelled from the street. “You think we’ve got all night?”
Jimmy glanced at his watch. “Keep your shirt on,” he shouted back. “I promised Gross we’d be back by eleven. We’ll make it easy.” The old woman shook her indignant head. “You think I’m worrying about your affairs? I got problems of my own. I’m due on the graveyard shift at the bomber plant in half an hour!”
SAVE A GRAVE FOR ME!
Dane Gregory
She lives in the middle of the block, the little old lady to whom it is always summer of 1920. No winter can reach her there—not even the long winter of a killer’s frozen heart . . .
You go six blocks south along Garfield Avenue and turn due west past the alkali tract, where they’re collecting old scrap iron for the war effort. You’ll find her place about midway of the block; it has a wrinkled rubberoid roof and a rosebush that will be scattering petals all over.
All the other houses in the block are vacant; people moved elsewhere after the epidemic, but the taxes still went on, of course, and no one ever came back. It’s queer walking down that way at night—a whole block of houses with their windows caved in so you can look through and see the shadows floating across the walls . . . Bull-bats, maybe.
Even with the annuity they’d already bought her, people around town all wanted to chip in and get Miss Morrow a nice little place somewhere out of that neighborhood. Or at least a housekeeper—a companion of some kind—and there were several who’d have been pleased to take the job. But she wouldn’t hear of it.
Why on earth should she need a housekeeper, she’d ask; and why should she leave the neighborhood when the fall term of school would be opening in only a few more days now? That was her story winter and summer, and nights she would get out her blue Webster speller and her arithmetic book and—It’s a little on the pathetic side when you stop to think about it! She was still doing that, twenty years after the Denny Blaine tract had grown up to alkali weeds.
They tore the schoolhouse down, you know; put up a new brick building clear across town from the slough, though there isn’t any slough now either. Anyhow, she must have passed that vacant lot a hundred times on her way to the bank, but either she saw it as it had been or didn’t see it at all.
And how do you suppose she accounted for the annuity checks? Would she have thought, say, that teachers were being provided for in the in-between months, nowadays?
The doctors had a phrase for it: psychic trauma. It was as if the clock had stopped in her head, so it would always keep on being that year for her—spring of 1920, it was—when the kids came down with the tyhphoid fever and she helped nurse them through it. Twenty-two hours at a stretch for weeks, and her so sick with the fever herself that afterwards people couldn’t excuse themselves for not having known it from the first.
We always took as good care of her as she’d let us, you understand. When the boy from McNeff’s brought the week’s groceries, he’d make a careful check to see whether there was anything else she needed—coal for the cookstove or kerosene for the lamps. None of the houses roundabout were wired back in 1920.
Other people dropped in, too. They did their best. And they had a right to suppose she was safe there, wouldn’t you say?
Even though it’s an out-of-the-way neighborhood and it takes all kinds to make a world, who’d have imagined—why, it’s still unthinkable that it could have happened.
You might write it up.
There was a little story in the city papers the year of the epidemic—about the annuity and all that. But this is something else again; and when you stop to think of it, almost like a story for a book.
If you could find any way to explain a man like that.
If you could make him come clearer in your mind, or anyone else’s.
If you can believe, as some of us still can’t, that anybody in this town could have wanted to murder Miss Morrow . . .
He had been afraid for weeks; but not quite like this. It had been a dull, cumulative fear that expressed itself in smaller ways—too many cigarettes, too little sleep, a too critical inspection of what he said to others and what was said to him. The other day at the gun club, for instance, when Roy Basler made some inane remark about honor among thieves. It meant nothing at all; but to any kind of a psychologist his uncontrollable reaction would have meant everything.
Even Basler had been a little startled. “Watch where you’re pointing that shotgun!” he’d said. “Anyone would think you’d never handled a gun before.”
This was different. Walking down the icy hill, he had been able to repress his thoughts into casual patterns: One step here, one step there; something should have been done about this grade a long time ago. Or: Isn’t it cold! But when he came to the street below, there were occasional lighted houses to pass, some of them set not far from the sidewalk in the manner of small-town houses. A short-wave addict in one; young shadows jiving across the blinds of another . . . He had to run the lights like a Yaqui gauntlet, huddled into the heavy overcoat so his mind could no longer accept the premise that he really was on his way to the bank.
He had not, until then, been quite certain. Or at least had tried not to be. There had been nothing conclusive or binding about the preliminary steps to murder: selling his shotgun to Basler so he would not have one, getting out the little derringer which no one would remember he owned, pressing into its chambers the two shotgun shells no one would logically expect to have been discharged from a derringer . . . He had been conscious of a certain icy progressiveness to the steps, as when he sent his wife out of town for the week-end and, later, dropped the derringer in his overcoat pocket. But even the act of leaving the house did not finally commit him—after all, he had some paper work to catch up at the bank.
This new kind of fear was the determining factor; as much so as if it were post facto guilt. It gathered the muscles of his stomach and thighs into a tension that meant yes, anything, anything at all.
He knew he would turn before he did turn, walking not into the quiet town but south past Keilsmeier’s weighing shed and the kids’ natatorium. And the N. P. depot, shallowly lighted but just as empty.
In a way, he welcomed it. The decision: the clean break. Whatever he might be suffering from it now, it was at least caustic—it would burn out the prolonged, uncertain ache of the other. No more waiting for the examiners to come; with any luck at all, he would soon be able to look the world in the face.
If she’s got the money, he thought.
Oh, she’s got the money! he thought.
Rounding Old Church corner, he thought: And tomorrow it will be as if it had never been.
The thought kept him company all the way along Garfield Street, which was lightless but also treeless so that the surface of ice caught what starlight there was. At the Denny Blaine tract with its tower of piled junk, he traced the words instantly to their source. It was a childhood invocation, he remembered; one acquired from Miss Morrow the time old Dunlevy came smiling into the room with a doubled length of hose in one hand. And Miss Morrow had wept a little, still not believing he had stolen the fifty-cent piece.
“Say to yourself: Tomorrow it will be as if it had never been, George. Or better yet, say with Julius Caesar: Some day even this may be pleasant to remember.”
He pressed his gloved hands to his eyes.
Men of my stamp, he thought as usual, don’t do this. I’m respected, I’m respectable—president of a bank in my early thirties, which is not bad, hey, boy? Everyone ought to understand about the investment. I couldn’t have foreseen what priorities would do to it.
He let his hands fall to his sides.
He put one of them in his right-hand pocket and went on as he had expected to, passing the windowless houses now and a fishbone of tacky fence paling. He heard the bats.
He looked at his watch.
It was later than he had thought.
The house was low and ramshackle, recessed from the dead street. He walked past the bare rosebush and up to a front door mat that said: You Are Home. The windows were dark. He knocked.
