Death of a Citizen

by Donald Hamilton

  “Drop it,” I said from the shadows.

  He started to turn, but checked himself. “Helm?”

  “Drop it,” I said. He’d be the kind to get excited and officious at the sight of a body full of bullet-holes.

  “But—”

  “Mister,” I said softly, “drop it. I won’t tell you again.” I was beginning to shake just a little. Maybe it showed in my voice. The revolver dropped into the sand. I said, “Now step away from it.” He did as he was told. I said, “Now turn around.”

  He turned and looked at me. “What the hell’s got into you? I thought I heard shots—” A harsh, rattling sound made him look upstream. Apparently Loris was still alive. The guy in the gray suit looked that way, shocked. “Why,” he said, “you crazy fool—”

  I asked, “What were your instructions concerning me?”

  “I was told to give you all the assistance—”

  “Calling me names doesn’t assist me much,” I said.

  “You used us to finger the man!” he protested. “To point him out to you, so you could deliberately shoot him down!”

  “What did you think I was going to do, kiss him on the cheek?”

  He said, stiffly, “I realize how you must feel, Mr. Helm, with your little girl missing, but this kind of private justice—”

  I said, “You’re the only one talking about justice.”

  “Anyway, alive he might have led us to—”

  “He’d have led us nowhere useful,” I said. “He was dumb, but not that dumb. And he couldn’t have been made to talk. Men like that have no imagination and no nervous system to work on. But he could, if something went wrong, have got to Betsy and harmed her. It’s the only way he’d have led us to her, and we’d have had to wait until the last minute to make sure he was going to the right place. We might not have been able to stop him in time. Given a chance—and you’d have insisted on giving him a chance—he could have been a hard man to stop. I can do better with him out of the way.” I glanced upstream. “I suppose you’ll want to call an ambulance, since he’s still breathing. Tell the doctor to be real careful. We wouldn’t want him to live.”

  The young man in the gray suit looked distressed at my callousness. “Mr. Helm, you simply cannot take the law into your own hands.”

  I looked at him for a moment, and he shut up. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Bob Calhoun.”

  I said, “Mr. Calhoun, I want you to listen to me very closely. I’m trying to be a rational man of sound judgment. I’m trying very hard. But my little girl is in danger, and so help me God, if you get in my way with your damn fool scruples and legalisms, I’ll swat you like a mosquito… Now this is what I want you to do. I want you to go back to that office of yours and keep that phone clear. I don’t care who calls; get him off the line fast. If you’ve got to go to the john, have them bring a pot into the room for you. I’ll be wanting you quick some time in the next couple of hours, and I don’t want to have to stand around waiting for them to run you down with bloodhounds. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Calhoun?”

  He said angrily, “Listen, Helm—”

  I said, “You have your orders. You’re supposed to assist me. Well, don’t think about it, just do it. I can assure you that higher echelons will spray it all with perfume and tie it up with a pink ribbon, once it’s over.” I drew a long breath. “Keep that wire clear, Calhoun. And while you’re waiting, get a crew of good men ready to move fast. Set up all the local cooperation you’re going to need to wrap up a whole city block the minute I give you the address. You boys are supposed to be good at that stuff. It’s out of my line; I’m leaving it to you. I’m counting on you to get my kid out safely, once I tell you where she is.”

  He said, “Very well. We’ll do our best.” His voice was stiff and reluctant, but politer than it had been. He hesitated and said, “Mr. Helm?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said, “just what is your line?”

  I glanced towards Loris, who was still breathing a little. You had to hand it to the guy, he was tough as a buffalo. But I didn’t think he’d last much longer.

  “Why,” I said gently, “killing’s my line, Mr. Calhoun.” I turned and left the two of them there.

  * * *

  It seemed very odd to be coming home, like any businessman returning from a trip. I parked in the drive. The door burst open, and Beth came running towards me and stumbled into my arms. I held her kind of gingerly. If you feel a certain way about a woman, and your work involves, say, a garbage truck or a butcher shop, you like to clean up a bit before you put your hands on her. I couldn’t help feeling I must stink of blood and gun powder, not to mention another woman.

  “Any messages?” I asked after a little.

  “Yes,” she breathed, as if in answer to my thought. “A woman called. And… and there was something else…”

  “What?”

  “Something… something horrible…”

  I drew a long breath. “Show me,” I said.

  She led me onto the porch. “She... told me over the phone to look out here. I don’t know how long it had been here when she called, I didn’t hear anybody… She said it was to… to change your mind, in case you were trying to be… clever…”

  It was a shoe box, tucked back in a corner behind one of our porch chairs, I suppose so the older kids wouldn’t find and investigate it on their way to school. I pushed it out into the open with my foot, and looked at the box, and at my wife. Her face was white. I bent down and untied the string and opened the box. Our gray tomcat was inside, quite dead and rather messily disemboweled.

  The funny thing was, it made me mad. It could have been so much worse; yet instead of feeling relieved, I was grieved and angry, remembering the fun the kids had had with the poor stupid beast, and all the mornings it had been at the kitchen door to greet me, meowing for its milk... I remembered also that this cat had once scared hell out of Tina by stowing away in the truck with her. She wasn’t one to forget small injuries, if she could pay them back conveniently. Well, neither was I.

  “Cover it up, please!” Beth said in a choked voice. “Poor Tiger! Matt, what kind of person would... would do something like that?”

  I put the lid back on the box and straightened up. I wanted to tell her: a person very much like me. It was a message from Tina to me. She was saying that the fun was over and from now on everything was strictly business and I could expect no concessions from her on the grounds of sentiment. Well, I had a message for her, too. And while I’m moderately fond of animals, and capable of feeling grief for a family pet, I can take an awful lot of dead cats if I have to.

  “What are my instructions?” I asked.

  Beth said, “Take... it out back. I’ll get a shovel. It’s Mrs. Garcia’s day to clean the house. I’ll tell you out there.”

  I nodded and picked up the box, carried it into the back yard, and set it down near the softest looking spot in the flowerbed at the side of the studio. It occurred to me that I was practically making a career of disposing of bodies, human and animal. Beth joined me. I took the shovel and started to dig.

  She said, “At ten o’clock, or as soon afterwards as you get here, you’re supposed to drive out to Cerrillos Road. There’s a motel just outside the city limits on the right-hand side, a kind of truck stop with a gas station and restaurant—you remember the one, with shabby little cabins in back, red and white. Tony’s Place. You’re to go to the cabin farthest from the road. But don’t park there. First leave your car where everybody else does, by the restaurant. And if anybody follows you, or anything happens, Betsy—”

  “All right, no need to spell it out,” I said as she hesitated. I stuck the box into the hole I’d made and covered it up. I looked at my watch. “Check my time,” I said. “A quarter of ten.”

  “I have ten of ten,” she said, “but I’m just a little fast. Matt—”

  “What?”

  “She called you E
ric once, by mistake. Why? She sounded as if... as if she knew you quite well. At the Darrels’ party you said you’d never seen her before.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I did say that, but it wasn’t the truth. Beth...”

  I patted the dirt into place over Tiger’s grave, and straightened up—leaning on the long-handled shovel— and looked at her. Her light-brown hair was a little rumpled, as if she hadn’t spent much time on it this morning, but it looked soft and bright in the sunshine. She was wearing a loose green sweater and a green plaid skirt, and she looked very young, like the college girl I’d married when I’d had no business marrying anyone— young, and tired, and scared, and pretty, and innocent.

  It was time for me to remember the standing orders. Look her in the eye and lie, Mac had said that day in Washington, lie and keep on lying… Never mind exactly what I told her. It was the kind of stuff I put on paper and sell for money. It seemed that, like many other Americans overseas, I’d become involved with a black-market ring while I was stationed in London. Now some of the members had suddenly reappeared in my life with a crooked proposition which I’d nobly refused even to consider, only apparently they needed my help badly enough to resort to extreme measures…

  Beth was silent for a while after I’d finished. I could tell she was deeply shocked by this glimpse into my fictitious, criminal past. She hadn’t thought I was that kind of a guy.

  “Of course,” she said slowly, “I always knew there was something… You were never quite frank about... I thought it was just what you’d seen some terrible things over there and didn’t want to talk about them.”

  She might look like an innocent college girl, but there were times when she was practically clairvoyant. It was very hard to keep up the act in the face of her steady regard. I forced myself to make a clumsy, embarrassed gesture, like a man who’s got everything off his chest.

  “Well,” I said, “that’s the story, Beth.”

  “And this woman,” she said, “this woman who called you Eric…?”

  I said, “We had code names for each other. But that’s not what you’re asking. The answer is yes.”

  After a moment, she asked, “What are you... What will you do?”

  “Get Betsy back,” I said. “Don’t ask me how. You wouldn’t want to know.”

  29

  It was a dreary-looking place, mostly a great dusty parking lot with big trucks standing around—tankers, vans, and refrigerator jobs with compressors going, setting up a constant racket, like outboard motors. There was a big sign saying: TRUCKERS DISCOUNTS. The restaurant—cafe, we usually call it in this part of the world—wasn’t as bad as it might have been, and there were some surprisingly shiny and expensive-looking cars with out-of-state license plates parked alongside. Somebody once told somebody that the place where the truckers stop is the place to eat, and tourists have been acting on that advice ever since. There may even be something to it.

  In back, like poor relations, stood a bunch of little red-and-white clapboard shacks, relics of the days when a tourist cabin was a cabin, not a disembodied hotel room with TV, air-conditioning, and wall-to-wall carpeting. I stuck the Plymouth between an Arizona Chrysler and a California Volkswagen with a little sign on the back: DON’T SQUASH ME—I EAT HARMFUL INSECTS. It reminded me, for some reason, of the little blue Morris I’d encountered in Texas, also with a sign on the back; and I wondered what Mac had Shorty doing these days. I hoped it was something easy, after the rough time I’d given her in San Antonio.

  But it was no time to be thinking of the women I’d known except one, and I took the paper-wrapped parcel from the seat beside me, got out of the car, walked along the line of cabins and, reaching the last one, knocked on the door.

  Tina opened it. We looked at each other for a moment. She was wearing something that looked like a feminized bull-fighting costume, with a ruffled white shirt and tight white, embroidered pants ending approximately at the calves of her legs. I was glad she wasn’t wearing a pretty dress. As I’ve mentioned before, my trousers-resistance is very high. She was making it easy for me.

  “Come in, chéri,” she said. “You are right on time. Your wife said you might be late.”

  I went past her into the gloom of the cabin. “I pushed right along,” I said, turning to face her as she closed the door behind me. “Kind of a dump,” I said, indicating the room.

  She moved her shoulders. “One lives where one must. I have spent more time in worse places.” She looked up at me and smiled. “What, Eric, no recriminations? Will you not tell me I’m an evil woman?”

  “You’re a bitch,” I said, “but I knew that fifteen years ago. I just made the mistake of forgetting it temporarily.”

  “I hated to deceive you,” she said. “Really I did, Liebchen. I hated to trick you.”

  “Cut it out,” I said. “You loved it. Every bit of it, playing me like a fish on a light leader, getting me to bury your dead and help your getaway, pretending to call up Mac for further instructions, heading me off with a lot of talk about security whenever I started getting nosy... Oh, it was a beautiful snow job, querida, and you enjoyed every minute of it. And you’re enjoying this, too, aren’t you? Bringing my family into the act—you resent them like hell, don’t you, Tina?—and wondering just how I’m explaining all this to my wife.”

  She smiled. “You make me sound like a terrible person. But it is quite true, of course. I hate them. I hate her. She took you away from me. If it hadn’t been for her, you would have come back to find me after the war. We would have been together, and maybe I would never... never have become what I am today.”

  I said, “A man who questioned me in San Antonio thought the card you showed me was your own.”

  “He was right,” she said. “It is my card, and I am proud of it. There are very few of us who have earned that card. But it does not mean that I would not rather have done something else with my life. But you did not come. And I had to do something.”

  I asked, “Why did you change sides, Tina?”

  “You ask that? Can you think of no reason why I should turn against America and everything American?” She laughed quickly. “No, chéri, I am not a silly, sentimental fool. I do not make the whole world pay for my broken heart. The fact is, I had certain talents, and when there was no longer a war to fight, I sold those talents to the highest bidder, as did many others of your wartime comrades. Ask Mac, he will tell you.” She smiled. “I am very good, Eric. I command a very high price these days.”

  I nodded. “I got that impression.” I patted the package under my arm. “This would be part of your price, no doubt.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something you left behind in San Antonio. Nobody seemed to want it, so I brought it along.”

  “My furs?” She looked pleased. “That was sweet of you. I missed them very much. Put them on the bed... But we are wasting time. You are prepared to cooperate?”

  “How?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Is it important? Did you ever ask Mac that question?”

  “The circumstances were slightly different.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Then it was only your life that was at stake.”

  I looked at her for a moment, and said, “Okay. You’ve made your point. Shoot.”

  She said, “You yield a little too easily, Eric. Could it be that you hope to be clever in spite of the warning I left at your house?” She waited. I didn’t say anything. She said, “You have been followed ever since you left home. We are being watched right now, from a discreet distance. If anything at all should go wrong here, or if I should give a certain signal, the person watching us will go directly to where your little girl is being kept. He has his instructions, and he is not at all sentimental about children. Do you understand?”

  I said, “It’s clear. Who do I kill?”

  She glanced at me quickly. “Do not say that as a joke, my dear. Would I require you for anything else but to kill?” After a moment, she said, “
You know the target. I told you his name days ago. Everything I said then was the truth. I merely rearranged the cast of characters slightly.” When I didn’t speak, she went on: “It was always my intention to use you here in Santa Fe—under the pretense of working for Mac, of course. I was going to be very clever, so that you did not suspect our real purpose until too late.

  But that girl intervened and delayed the execution of our plan. In a way this is much nicer. Now I can be frank. We want Amos Darrel dead. You will kill him for us.”

  There was silence in the little cabin, except for the chattering noise of a compressor unit on a truck parked outside. I looked at Tina thoughtfully, considering her proposition. You’ll say it was a ridiculous idea. You’ll say no sane person would expect another sane person to go out and kill somebody in cold blood, not even to save a child’s life. But then, you didn’t fight the war as we did. She was asking nothing really unreasonable, since she was asking it of me. We knew each other very well. I knew she’d do anything to Betsy she considered necessary. And she knew I’d do anything for Betsy I considered necessary— and if I had to do it to Amos, it was just tough on Amos. He wasn’t that good a friend of mine.

  I asked, “Why me, Tina? You’ve got experts in your outfit, I’m sure. You’re pretty damn expert yourself, as I recall. Why complicate it by dragging strangers off the street to do your dirty work?”

  She smiled. “My outfit, as you call it, must not be known to exist. Because of the political repercussions. That is why we prefer to work through local people, when suitable ones are available. Besides, usually they know the ground better. That is particularly true in your case, since you’re well acquainted with Dr. Darrel.”

  I said, deliberately naive, “But I have my home here! You can’t just ask me to go out and commit murder!”

  She laughed. “Chéri, don’t be childish. What is your home to me? Nothing. Less than nothing. It is your problem. If you can do it without being suspected, that will be quite satisfactory to us. If you can’t, you will stand trial and go to prison. And you will tell a story of jealousy or hatred or greed, or blind irresistible anger, anything to satisfy the stupid authorities. Because you will know that your wife and children are still vulnerable, and that if you breathe a word of the truth, there will be a knife in the night, or a bullet, a club, or a runaway car... You should not have married, Eric. It puts you at the mercy of ruthless people, people like me.”