The Brass Cupcake

by John D. MacDonald

  A moment like that is frozen forever in time and in memory. Every cinder in the small parking area stood out. She was fifteen feet away and about ten feet below me. I could feel the grain of the gray wooden railing under my hand. A .45 makes a hole on the way out the other side that you can bury your fist in. She wore a sun suit just like the other one, but this one was aqua. Her blonde hair was ratty and tangled. Her face was bleared and puffed with weeping so that she looked fifty.

  “Now, wait!” I said, and my voice creaked.

  I couldn’t have picked a worse place. To run down the stairs would bring me closer. I could run to the top and she could take her time. If I slid under the railing I would drop almost in her lap. She looked up at me, foreshortened by the height. Her eyes were like broken stone.

  “Stand still for it, you son of a bitch,” she said.

  “Letty, listen, I didn’t…”

  Her lips slid back away from her teeth and the sun glinted on a gold filling as the muzzle came up a little farther. It seemed to be aimed at my eyes when it went off. The authoritative blam of the .45 was deepened by the walls of the buildings that surround the parking area.

  Death whispered softly by my left cheek and I let myself drop hard, falling up the steps, rolling over tight against the cinder blocks so the target would be smaller. I heard a yell in the distance, mingled with another two shots. The muzzle kick of the big .45 slammed it up so that her third shot went almost straight up into the air. She was biting her underlip now, and I saw her bring the muzzle down. I saw her shut her eyes in the instant of firing and concrete dust bit the back of my neck as the slug slapped the wall inches above my shoulders. This time it was a burst of three, and I began to hope as I let myself slide down the steps, feet first, belly down.

  The inexhaustible weapon hammered again and the slug hit the edge of the step my hand was on, stinging my palm. Then she was trying to pull the trigger and I blessed the dead Horace for knowing enough not to keep a full load of eight pushing down on the clip spring. I rolled over and dropped under the railing. I pulled the gun out of her hand and she went heavily down onto her knees, sobbing with great indrawn breaths, the heels of her hands digging into her eye sockets.

  The first guy to come arunning gave me a startled look and tried to turn around in midstride and head back the way he had come. He wound his legs up and slid about ten feet on his chest, never taking his eyes off me.

  I began to laugh, helplessly, from reaction.

  Five minutes later, as they were bundling the two of us into the police sedan with about five hundred people looking on, one of the Kreshak twins, with his white shirt open down to the belt buckle to show off his manly bronze chest, shouldered up and said, close to my ear, “Tony wants you over there. Right away.”

  “I think I’m busy,” I said. “What do you think?”

  He gave me a look of disgust. “All he told me to do was tell you.”

  The stupid driver blasted the siren for the short run back to headquarters. He cowboyed into the drive and swung around in back of headquarters so fast that gravel rattled off the inside of the fender wells.

  They herded the two of us into the basement room. Gowan was the booking sergeant. Powy was there, his thumbs inside his belt, his fingers fanned out across his belly. Gilman stood behind him, figuratively spitting on his knuckles.

  “Nice to have you back, Lootenant,” Gilman said.

  The traffic man, a new one since I left the force, made his report. “I heard the shots. There were seven altogether. Bartells was on the steps going up to his room. The woman had waited for him to show. She shot at him seven times and she missed him every time. From about fifteen feet, too, Chief.”

  Gowan was scribbling. Powy looked coldly at Letty. “You admit it?”

  She had stopped crying. “I admit it. I tried to kill him. I’m sorry I missed him.”

  “Where’d you get the cannon, Mrs. Franklin?”

  “Horace has—had a license to carry it on account of the money and things Miss Stegman carried around. It was in his drawer at the Belle-Anne Courts.”

  Powy pulled Gilman over and whispered something to him. Gilman trotted off. The silence was heavy until Gilman came back with the nervous proprietor of the Bomb Run, who obviously had been waiting upstairs.

  “You see the man?” Powy asked.

  The proprietor looked at me and tried to tell me how sorry he was by his expression. “Right there. That one. He took off with that woman around eleven, maybe a little after.”

  “We’ll make up the statement. Drop around tomorrow to sign it, Dennison. You can go now.”

  Dennison gave me one more regretful look and left. I guess he hated to lose a potential customer.

  Powy swung around and glared at Letty. “So it was him, eh? But you couldn’t tell me who it was, could you? Why not?”

  She looked at me. “I wanted to kill him.”

  Powy went to her and rested a fat, fatherly hand on her shoulder. “I know, my dear. You wanted to kill him for killing your husband, didn’t you? Did you see him do it?”

  I could see her get the general drift. And I could see that she liked it.

  “I’m not saying.”

  “You know, Mrs. Franklin, you can be charged with assault with intent to kill, with carrying a deadly weapon.”

  She sneered up at him. “Go ahead. Charge me.”

  Powy nodded to Gowan. “O.K. Book her. Phone county headquarters and have a couple matrons come over and get her. We won’t need her testimony anyway.”

  Powy looked at me with heavy satisfaction. “O.K., Bartells. Take the laces out of your shoes and take off your belt. Empty your pockets. Put everything on the corner of Gowan’s desk.”

  “What’s the charge?” I asked, giving him a stupid look.

  “Murder, you damn fool!”

  “How long can a man get, Chief?”

  He colored up. “Nothing’s going to help you this time, Bartells. Nothing in this world. We’ve got witnesses that saw you sweet-talk the Franklin woman and sneak her away from her husband. We got another witness saw you and Franklin mixing it up by the Belle-Anne Courts.” He stared reflectively at Letty’s sturdy haunches as she stood answering Gowan’s questions. “Can’t say much for your taste, Bartells, but it’s as plain as the nose on her face. You busted him a little too hard.”

  I didn’t like the look on Gilman’s face. De Rider had come in and he was standing muttering to Gilman. It was time to stop the game. “You’ve had your fun,” I said, “but you’d better not book me on that charge. Get hold of Harry Banson.”

  Powy grinned so that he showed his big tombstone teeth. “Smart, aren’t you? Harry left a half hour ago. I let him go so he could fly to New Orleans and meet Angela. You know what, Cliff? I think we can get a confession out of you.”

  They put me in the isolation cell. It’s not off the corridor where the tank and the other cells are. Gilman and De Rider took me there. The cell door was open.

  “Turn around,” Gilman said. I did.

  They both inspected me. “Geeze, a lootenant,” De Rider said.

  “Put your hands up in the air, Lootenant,” Gilman ordered.

  “I haven’t got any belt. I have to…”

  “Up, up!” he said.

  I shrugged and put my hands up. My pants fell down.

  “Lootenant, you’re indecent,” De Rider said. I was standing in the doorway to the cell.

  “I don’t think he wants to go in the cell,” De Rider said. I caught on and started to back up but I wasn’t quick enough. Gilman pushed me hard in the chest with both hands. My feet were tangled in the trousers. I went down hard onto the end of my spine on the concrete.

  “See you later, Lootenant,” Gilman said. The cell door slammed and the bolt snicked over. They stood and gave me a mock salute, and went down the corridor chuckling to each other.

  They let me sit for an hour. I wanted a cigarette badly. Then I heard the footsteps and the creak of leather
as they came back. “Here we come, Lootenant!” Gilman shouted in falsetto. I remembered the goings-over I’d given him when he had been under me. I remembered the times I’d put De Rider on probation for excessive brutality.

  They came in and De Rider was carrying the chair, Gilman the equipment. De Rider thumped the heavy oak chair down.

  “Why’d you kill the guy?” Gilman asked. “Over that blonde bag?”

  “Don’t ask him anything,” De Rider said. “Not yet. Hell, he might answer you and spoil the fun.”

  I told Gilman what he could do to De Rider and vice versa.

  Gilman slapped his hands together like a pistol shot. “That’s what I want to hear. Promise me, Lootenant. Be tough, will you? Make this a long afternoon.”

  The oak chair had sturdy arms. Gilman bowed. “Get on the throne, Lootenant.”

  “Go to hell,” I said, hoping they couldn’t hear the shake in my voice.

  De Rider rushed me back onto the hard bunk and pinned my arms. I tried to writhe free as I saw Gilman hovering over us, the hard rubber sap upraised on the spring handle, looking for the right spot. It came down and the lights thundered out.

  I came out of it sitting in the chair. My ankles were tied to the legs. Gilman was tightening the wide leather strap that bound my left forearm to the chair arm. He put his foot against the seat of the chair at the side in order to get leverage.

  “Take a look at that face,” De Rider said. “How are they going to tell if we marked him up or not?”

  “How they can go for a face like that, I don’t see.”

  “Do you have to be pretty to grab something like that Franklin squab?”

  “Me, I was thinking of the dolly in the office. Now, there is something. And did you see the way the Chance girl took off for Tampa with him?”

  “I’ll be out of here sometime,” I said. “Sometime I’ll get you two.”

  “Talk big, Lootenant.” Gilman stepped back. “That’s tight enough.”

  “Me first?” De Rider asked.

  “Go ahead. You bring the water bucket? I’ll get it.”

  They had spun the chair around so that it faced the bunk. De Rider put the night stick on his lap and carefully rolled it in the big bath towel. He said, “This doesn’t leave any marks, Lootenant. I think you were the guy told me it makes pin-point concussions on the surface of the brain, whatever the hell that means.”

  He smiled at me, leaned over, and hit me squarely on top of the head with the padded night stick. I could feel the thud down to my heels. The room made one wild dip and steadied. My mouth had that numb feeling that comes when you get close to the edge of consciousness.

  He grinned and belted me over the ear with it. The blackout lasted a fraction of a second. “You can talk any time, Lootenant.”

  I grinned at him. “You poor dumb bastard,” I said softly. He swung and the lights went out. I woke up as the water slapped me in the face. I gasped for air.

  De Rider and Gilman sat side by side, staring soberly at me. Gilman put the dipper back in the water bucket.

  He took the wrapped night stick. “My girl told me the other night on the dance floor that I got a wonderful sense of rhythm. Look at here.”

  I shut my eyes. The old ryhthm. Shave and a hair cut, two bits. The last thud drove me close to blackness again. There was a dull ache deep in my brain.

  Then I was trying to tell them that they could ruin a man’s mind permanently. They nodded and agreed with me and kept belting me with the stick. I began to lose track of the times they threw water on me. Their faces and pale eyes floated in front of me and there wasn’t any sense in the words they said. There wasn’t any sense in anything. They beamed and nodded and the brain in my skull was a soft jelly that seemed to smash outward against my eardrums with each blow.

  I thought I had felt anger before. Like every man, I had had my moments of wild red rage. But the thing growing in my heart was something new. It had a hard core of ice. It had a color. Steel blue. It had an angular shape, with broken edges. It told me that someday I would get my hands on the throats of Gilman and De Rider. It told me that once I had my hands on a thick throat, nothing would stop the pressure until they cut my hands off at the wrists.

  And then the blue anger told me to be sly. I kept my chin on my chest while four dippers of water struck my face. My mind cleared a little.

  “He isn’t out. He’s faking,” one of them said.

  Hard fingers pinched down on the end of my nose and twisted. The blue anger helped me bear the pain though tears ran from the corners of my closed eyes. I heard a match strike.

  “If he’s faking, this’ll bring him out of it.”

  There was an area of heat on the back of my hand. It sharpened and deepened and the blue anger helped me hold my hand there, limp and lax. As the heat deepened it turned into a pain that could not be distinguished from cold. It was as though an icicle were being pressed slowly down through my flesh.

  I could smell the sick taint of burned flesh.

  “Softer than I thought,” one of them said. The other cursed. Deep inside me something was laughing.

  The straps loosened. I made myself stay limp as I slid out of the chair. My mouth hit the concrete and I tasted blood. There was a scraping sound and the clang of the door and footsteps receding. I waited a long time before I moved. Then I crawled to the water bucket they had left. It was half full. On my knees, I thrust my head down into it, the displaced water rising until it covered my face. Three times I did that and then I had the strength to pull myself up onto the bunk. It seemed as high as a ten-foot wall.

  A man cannot be knocked unconscious without a severe shock to his nervous system. There was no specific point of soreness on my skull. It felt as though the solid bone had been pulped. I lay on my back and pressed my hands to my temples and tried to think clearly. Even memory was disjointed and confused. Cumulative shock had given me the feeling of madness.

  But the blue anger was there. It was too big for just De Rider and Gilman. It was big enough to fit around those two and Powy and Guilfarr and Lavery. It was big enough to fit around every self-righteous fat-gut crooked official in the county.

  I lay there and thought of the Laverys, the syndicate boys. They sell a good story. Leave us alone and you’ll have a clean town. We’ll help you keep it clean. No trouble. The mobs don’t gun each other any more. There’s enough for everybody. So a cop sees the white beaches and the expensive blondes and the six-thousand-dollar convertibles, and he thinks about his $3,180 a year and the mortgage payments and braces for Nancy’s teeth. A nice clean fifty rustles when you fold it up. So when they tell you to frame some scared kid, what can you do? Are you a Christer cop like Bartells? Look what happened to him. No, you’ve pocketed the payoffs, Copper. Now earn your change. Make Florence City safe for the crooked wheels and sticky dice and edged decks. Everybody’s grabbing theirs. Don’t be a sucker too. Grab yours now—while it’s hot. But don’t forget where it comes from, Copper.

  9

  POWY WOKE ME up by shaking me. “On your feet, Bartells.”

  I sat up, slapping his hand away. The pain in my head wasn’t so bad, but I was as shaky as though I were coming out of a long illness. My eyes were grainy and my tongue was thick and furred.

  He threw my personal belongings on the bunk beside me.

  I stared up at him. “How come?”

  “Never mind how come. You’re out.”

  His small eyes were blazing and his color was high. I knew he was sore about it, but that it was something he had to do.

  “How come you’re doing something intelligent, you fat fud?”

  “God damn that mouth of yours, Bartells!”

  “How did that peanut brain ever discover that I didn’t kill Horace?”

  “You killed him, all right,” he said huskily. “You’re guilty as hell. Everybody has gone crazy. Tony ought to know that…” His mouth clamped shut.

  I laughed at him. “Tony says let me go and you
have to let me go. That’s great. Suppose Tony told you to burn down the building, Fatty?”

  He controlled himself with an effort. “I’m supposed to tell you that Tony wants to see you just as soon as you can get over there.”

  I picked my wrist watch out of the brown manila envelope with my name on it and strapped it on. It was a quarter after two. That shocked me a little. I expected it to be nearly dusk.

  “Come on, come on,” he said impatiently.

  I stood up and I had to put a hand out and brace myself until the wave of dizziness wore off. I looked down into his face. “Powy, you turned me over to Gilman and De Rider. I’m not going to forget that. Ever.”

  He backed up a little and snorted. “You aren’t scaring me, Bartells.”

  “What did Doc say about the time of death?”

  “I guess it won’t help you any to know. Three o’clock, give or take ten minutes.”

  I thought back. It had been just about three when I unlocked my door. I had left Melody at about quarter of. According to Harry, Franklin had driven out at probably twenty after two. The gas station was a five-minute drive from the Belle-Anne Courts. It would fit. A little conversation with the man or men who had killed Aunt Liz, and then boom.

  I pulled my belt tight. “Ready.”

  He had me walk ahead of him through the steel door and along the tier of cells and out into the corridor that led to the front door.

  “Remember, Tony wants you to…”

  I cocked my head on one side. “Shut up a minute.” I listened. I had been right. It was a very familiar voice and it took only a moment to learn that it was coming over the transom of the nearest closed door.

  I turned the knob and yanked the door open. Melody was sitting very straight and very pale beside Powy’s desk. Gilman had a heavy hip balanced on one corner of the desk and he was bending over her, talking right down into her face.

  “You can’t say that sort…” Melody said angrily. She broke off as she saw me. Gilman turned around with a startled expression.