Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

by editor Leo Margules

  Henry knelt in the shadow, just inside the barn door, and waited for the lunatic to make his dash for the house. The man moved cautiously around the apple tree, then suddenly broke into a run. But not toward the house—he was racing off in the opposite direction, toward the elm grove just this side of the blacktop.

  Henry sprang out of the barn and sprinted after him. No, you don’t! he thought. Oh, no you don’t! You can’t cut out on me now, mister. I can outrun you any day in the week.

  He caught up with the man, in the elm grove. The lunatic slipped and fell, and scrabbled to his feet again—too late. Henry shoved the barrels of his shotgun into the crazed face and pulled one of the triggers.

  The sight of the man’s face and head sickened Henry, but only for a moment. Almost before the man’s body struck the ground, Henry had whipped out of his shirt and wrapped it around the man’s head. Even so, he couldn’t prevent considerable blood from spilling on the ground. He swore. If the constable or that deputy sheriff should come nosing around out here, a little blood could be just as dangerous as a lot.

  He worked rapidly and coolly, knowing the shotgun blast might bring a curious neighbor to investigate. He scooped dried grass and leaves over the place where the blood had spilled. Then he pushed the handle of the meat-cleaver into his belt, hoisted the dead man to his shoulder and picked up the shotgun. And, though he staggered a little under the man’s weight, he was able to move toward the house at something close to a run…

  Martha’s eyes rounded, and her face blanched, and her hands clawed at the arms of her wheelchair. “Henry!” she gasped. “Henry, what—”

  It was the last thing she ever said. Henry used the cleaver with all the practiced skill of a hundred butcherings. Then he pointed the shotgun at the wall and fired the second barrel.

  He didn’t look at Martha, as he ripped the blood-soaked shirt from the dead man’s head and ran to the bedroom. By God, he thought, killing people was easy as hell, once you set your mind to it. He stuffed the bloody shirt into the bottom compartment of his fishing tackle box and pushed the box to the rear of the shelf in the closet. Then he took a clean shirt from the bureau and buttoned it up the front on his way back to the crank phone in the parlor.

  This time he did look at Martha, and he smiled a little as he asked the operator in town to ring the constable for him. He was thinking about the way the sun had shimmered on Colleen Kimberly’s thighs. It was going to be hard to keep the happiness out of his voice when he talked to the constable, hard to sound the way the constable would expect him to sound.

  “Constable Weber left word he’d be at the Shanley place a while,” the operator told him. “I’ll try to ring him there for you.”

  “He got her, Jim!” Henry yelled, when the constable’s voice finally came on the wire. “That maniac! He’s done killed Martha with a cleaver!… Yeah, I got him, but it was too late. I seen him out in the elm grove, up by the road, and I snuck up there and fired a barrel to scare him into surrendering, but he took off like a goddamn rabbit…

  “No, I didn’t have the craw to kill him right then. I should have, God knows, but I just couldn’t do it. He got away from me. I come back to the house—and there’s poor Martha laying there, all chopped to hell and gone, and this crazy bastard coming at me with his cleaver. I just barely had time to get my gun up and pull the trigger…

  “Yeah, that’s right. He circled around me out there, somehow, and come back to the house.”

  Henry let his voice break. He sobbed for a moment, then went on raggedly. “If’n I’d been another minute sooner, I could have saved her. It was all my own fault, by God, Jim…

  “Yes, it was too…

  “Yeah, I’ll stay right here.” He hung up, shook a cigarette from his pack and strolled between the bodies toward the door.

  It was so easy, he thought—so damned easy. He walked out on the porch and leaned back against a post, to wait for the constable. It wouldn’t be much of a wait, he knew—the Shanley place was less than half a dozen miles away.

  He had just started to strike a match to his cigarette, when a flash of color in the elm grove caught his eye. He froze, staring at Colleen Kimberly, while the flame crawled up the match and burned his fingers.

  How long had she been there? What might she have seen? He dropped the match, flicked the cigarette away and strode toward her. For a moment, he thought she meant to turn and run away, but then she stood still and leaned back against a tree trunk, to wait for him.

  He stepped close and nodded to her. “What are you doing up here in the grove, Miss Colleen?” he asked.

  She smoothed the blond hair back from her forehead and smiled up at him shyly. “I heard the gun,” she said.

  “You just get here?” he asked.

  She bobbed her head and pressed her back a little closer to the tree trunk. “I thought maybe you’d had an accident,” she said softly. “Like my Uncle Carl had that time he shot himself in the foot.”

  Henry drew a deep breath. “You was worried about me? Is that what you mean, Colleen?”

  She looked away from him and moistened her lips. “Yes. And I kept wondering why you never came back to the knoll. I waited and waited.”

  Colleen was really a very small girl, Henry noticed, now that they stood face to face like this. Small and perfect and all woman—and almost his. It seemed the wrong time to be telling her about Martha, but it had to be done.

  “Something pretty awful has happened here, Colleen,” he said. “Did you hear about the maniac that got loose from the asylum?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been out on the knoll all afternoon, and everybody else is visiting in town.”

  “He was here,” Henry said. He paused. “He was here—and he killed Martha.”

  Colleen sucked in her breath sharply. “He killed her?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “With a meat-cleaver.”

  She was staring at him. “He killed your wife?”

  Henry nodded, and, for some reason, the look on the girl’s face made him feel a little uneasy.

  “With a meat-cleaver?” she asked. “Some man killed your wife with a meat-cleaver?”

  Henry bit at his lip. For the first time since he’d talked to Colleen on the knoll that day, he was beginning to understand what folks meant when they said she wasn’t quite bright. She was so pretty to look at that a man didn’t notice anything else at first.

  But there was something wrong with her, he realized now. Her voice was clear and sure, but it was like a little girl’s—like a little girl reading words from a book she didn’t understand, saying the words properly without knowing what they meant.

  There was something about Colleen’s eyes, too. They never showed any expression at all—at least none to speak of. Like right now. Colleen didn’t look one way or another. She just stared at you, or smiled at you, and all you saw were those beautiful blue eyes with their long, sooty lashes, and all you could think about was how pretty they were. You thought so hard about the eyes themselves, you never even noticed that they never had any thoughts in them, that they never said anything.

  Colleen smiled at him and gestured toward the house. “In there?” she said. “He killed her in there?”

  Henry didn’t say anything. A moment ago he had been sweating. Now he felt cold.

  Colleen shook her head wonderingly, then glanced toward the blacktop. “Somebody’s coming,” she said. “I’d better get back before they see me. Pa wouldn’t like it a bit, me being over here this way.”

  The deputy sheriff’s pickup truck was already turning off the blacktop. The cage with the two bloodhounds in it rattled and slid toward the tailgate.

  “No use going now,” Henry said. “It’s too late.” He moved away from her and waited for the constable and the deputy to climb out of the truck. He couldn’t afford to think any more about Colleen now, he knew. He’d have to watch every word he said, be on guard for every question.

  The constable came up to him, his
face compassionate. “Henry!” he said. “Good Lord, man, what a terrible thing! What a terrible, terrible thing to happen!” Henry nodded, pretended to struggle for words a moment, then looked away.

  “Leave him be, Jim,” the deputy said. “He won’t be feeling like doing any more talking than he has to.”

  “Sure, Henry,” the constable said. “You just take it easy now. Me and the sheriff’ll just take a look inside.” He glanced at Colleen and frowned. “Your pa know you’re over here, girl?”

  She shook her head and smiled at Henry, and Henry got that cold feeling again. “Pa isn’t home,” she said. “Henry, do you remember what you told me that day over on the knoll? About going to a movie in town?”

  Henry stared down at the ground, trying to keep back the panic. “Maybe you’d best go home now, Colleen,” he said. “Your pa may be home.”

  “I never been to a movie,” she said quietly. “Never once in my whole life. Pa would never let me.” She was studying Henry’s face, and beginning to frown at what she saw there. “You promised me, Henry,” she said. “You said that if something happened to your wife, you and I could go to the church suppers and the movies. Don’t you remember, Henry?” She stopped, and now the blue eyes held a sheen close to tears.

  The constable glanced sharply at the deputy; then both men looked at Henry, with eyes grown suddenly narrow. No one said anything. The seconds pounded away for a small eternity, and then, abruptly, Henry realized that the only sound in the elm grove was his own rapid breathing.

  At last, Constable Weber cleared his throat. “You look just a little sick, Henry,” he said. “Maybe you’d best go inside and stretch out a while.”

  Henry walked the mile it took to pass the constable, and the second mile it took to pass the deputy, and walked into the house on legs that threatened to collapse beneath him at every step.

  They suspect me, he thought. They suspect me—and pretty soon they’ll know for sure. They ain’t fools—now that they’ve got their suspicions they’ll keep at it till they know.

  He picked up his shotgun, reloaded it from the box of shells in the kitchen and carried it with him into the bedroom. He was still cold. He took off his shoes and socks and lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up over him, keeping the gun beside him, pressed close to his body.

  He listened to the sounds of the constable and the deputy, as they came into the house and moved about in the parlor. He listened to them leave again. He listened to the grating sound of the bloodhounds’ cage being opened, then to the deep voices of the dogs themselves. He heard them, up in the grove for a long time, making the sounds bloodhounds always did, when they were trying to pick out a scent. Then he heard the grate of the cage again, and the sharp click, as someone secured the hasp on the cage door.

  Then, for a long time, there was. no sound at all, until he heard the clump of boots across the floor in the parlor, and along the hall to the bedroom. He lay very still, hardly breathing at all, the shotgun still held tight against his side.

  The constable and the deputy came in and shut the door, and stood staring at him. Outside, one of the bloodhounds bayed sadly, then was still.

  “Henry,” the constable said, not meeting Henry’s eyes. “Henry, we know what you done.” He took a heavy breath and let it out slowly. “It was the girl that got us started,” he said. “The girl, and what you said about loading your shotgun with birdshot in one barrel and buckshot in the other, just like I told you I’d loaded mine.”

  “That man was killed with buckshot,” the deputy said. “But you said you killed him out there in the parlor. That lead in the wall out there isn’t buckshot, Mr. Ferris—it’s birdshot. The buckshot was fired out there in the elm grove. We picked some of it out of a tree trunk.” He paused.

  “And we found that blood out there, too. Those leaves should have been scattered around even, not all bunched up like that in one place.” He waited, watching Henry’s face expectantly.

  Henry tightened his grip on the shotgun and said nothing.

  The deputy shrugged. “We know just how you did it, Mr. Ferris,” he went on, “We even took the dogs up there to the grove. They knew the scent they was after all right, but they couldn’t come near the house, because the man never did. Once we knew you’d done him in, up there in the trees, and carried him down here to the house, we knew all we had to know.”

  The constable’s face was gray. He shook his head slowly. “Henry,” he said softly, “I’ve known you all my life. I just thank God I don’t have to take you in.” The deputy took a short step forward. “It’s my territory out here, Mr. Ferris,” he said. “I’ll ask you not to give me any trouble.”

  Henry looked at the deputy, but his vision went through him and beyond him, and he smiled at the play of sunlight on Colleen Kimberly’s curving thighs, as she sat there on the knoll beyond the orchard.

  He was still thinking of her, when he put the shotgun barrels in his mouth and pressed both triggers with his toe.

  THE MUSICAL DOLL

  by HELEN KASSON

  The doll turned slowly, its china arms spread, its hard toes stretched taut in the immemorial position of ballet. The tiny music box beneath her played a sad, nostalgic tune. Minor notes tinkled down, then up, then down again through three weeping phrases. Then the box was silent for a moment while the doll kept turning, until the faint little tune began again. It was a gypsy song but, because of the small mechanism, it held no gypsy joy—only hopelessness and a heartbreaking melancholy.

  The walls of the room were covered with unframed pictures, experiments in color, style and feeling, groping and unrealized. They might have been dream experiences which, for an instant, the dreamer had understood but had been unable to recapture on awakening.

  In one corner stood an easel supporting a half-finished picture of interblending planes, while on a tray at its base lay a palette smeared with daubs of paint and poppy-seed oil from an overturned can.

  The little girl with the honey-colored pigtails sat on a chair in front of a flat-topped desk, her round amber eyes fastened solemnly on the dancing doll, her body moving in a small circle which continued for a moment even after the notes slowed and finally stopped. She stared thoughtfully, then picked up the box, wound it and set it back on the desk again.

  The tune started once more, a little faster now, yet still without gaiety, still mournful. The slightly off-key notes cascaded down and up and down again in weird, disconsolate sequence.

  For a moment longer she let her eyes follow the ballet doll in its ceaseless turning. Then, remembering, she looked at the clock on the wall. She arose, walked across the room to a table on which a telephone stood, picked up the slip of paper which lay beside the receiver and dialed a number.

  “Hello,” she said, in a thin and reedy voice. “Is this the Police Station?” The tinkling notes sounded in counterpoint behind her, making her voice seem even thinner for an instant.

  “My name is Betty Lorman. I live at nine hundred and twelve River Lane, River Hills.” Holding the slip of paper with one hand where she could read from it, she added, “Please send a policeman over. Someone is dead.” She hung up the receiver, replaced the slip on the telephone table and crossed the room, past the outstretched body on the floor, and back to the desk where the doll still turned.

  Three minutes later, when the knock sounded, she was still watching the doll. For the third time the notes were slowing. She picked up the music box and twisted the key on its bottom a few times before she arose, and went to open the door.

  Immediately the room was filled, both with the bodies of the two policemen (they were close to six feet tall) and with their involuntary recoil. One was young and one was old, but against the duality of the small child and the inert body they stood as one, aghast and incredulous, unable even to admit to consciousness, as yet, the incongruous tinkling tune to which the doll still turned in its interminable dance.

  Tom Wallace, the old Inspector, pushed the child behind h
im, shielding her with his big body from the corpse with its bullet-pierced chest and glazed, half-open eyes. “’Phone in the report, Burns,” he murmured, and walked with her to the chair in front of the desk, sat down on it and drew her onto his lap.

  The notes from the music box slowed and died. The sound of dialing scraped unevenly and then Burns’s low, almost whispering voice took over.

  Betty reached toward the musical doll but Wallace stayed her hand, covering it with one of his own big ones. With the other, he stroked her honey-colored hair back from her forehead.

  “Who is it, child?” he asked.

  “My Uncle Bob.”

  “Who killed him?”

  Her eyes strayed toward the music box. He was startled to see how calm they were. “He died from natural causes,” she said evenly.

  “Who told you to say that?” The words came in harsh staccato, though he had not intended that they should. “You’re only about ten, aren’t you?”

  “I s’pose so. Daddy didn’t believe in counting years. He always said Mother was younger than I was.”

  “All right. Even at ten you ought to realize that being shot through the heart isn’t dying from natural causes.”

  He let go of her hand to remove his hat. The moment it was free, she reached out and picked up the doll.

  “Put that thing down!” He snatched it from her.

  “Give it back. Give me back my doll!” Tears filled her amber eyes as she lunged futilely for it, her tiny arm reaching no farther than his elbow.

  “So you can get excited,” Wallace said. “Not about a dead man but about a doll. What’s the matter with you, anyway?” His voice softened a little. “Your uncle’s dead. Didn’t you like him?”

  “Of course I did. We played games—Uncle Bob and Mother and I.”