Honey in His Mouth hcc-60

by Lester Dent

  “Are you worried about something, Mr. Hassam?”

  “Well, just the thing last night.”

  “There was nothing to that.”

  “Maybe. We can hope so, anyway.”

  “Mr. Hassam, the next time you guys get a wild hair up your ass I wish you would do it when I am not making a play for Miss Muirz. You sure popped off some plans I had last night.”

  Mr. Hassam grinned faintly. “I did not know we preserved your manhood as well.” He began to poke with another stick at objects which resembled small purplish balloons with roots hanging to them. These were floating in from the sea and the waterline was speckled with them. Mr. Hassam lifted one on the stick and suggested Harsh touch it, which he did, and his fingers tingled as if he had dipped them in a mild acid. Mr. Hassam threw the thing back in the water. “Portuguese Man O’War. Spectacular to look at, but another thing to fondle.” He looked thoughtfully at Harsh. “But you are the kind of man who likes to find out those things for himself. I do not suppose Miss Muirz will object to the explorations.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But there must be no more trips to town. Too risky.”

  “Yeah? I don’t think so.” Harsh shook his head. “You are a nice guy and I don’t want to argue with you, Mr. Hassam, but I am not a prisoner here. I’m not in any chain gang. I tell you one thing for sure, I am going back to town this afternoon and get the rest of my new clothes, which I left at the place to be altered.”

  “No.”

  “Look, goddamn it, Mr. Hassam, what’s eating you? Are you afraid I’ll throw in with Miss Muirz instead of you? Is that why you don’t want me out of sight with her? Well, you’re wrong, old buddy, you’re wrong, and to prove it, I would rather have you ride into town with me this afternoon than her. How is that?”

  Mr. Hassam thought this over. “What time will your garments be ready?”

  “About three o’clock.”

  “I will ride in with you then.” Mr. Hassam smiled. “I am taking you up on your bluff, you see.”

  By three o’clock Harsh had worked out a plan, and although it would take some luck to make the plan click, it was the best thing he could think up, and he felt he would have to chance getting the break. He had most of the details clear in his mind, working them out during the rest periods in the Spanish instruction. The essence of the plan was that he would pick up the wall safe key from Goldberg without Mr. Hassam knowing.

  When they arrived at Leon’s, Harsh indicated the side street where Miss Muirz had left the limousine yesterday, and Mr. Hassam agreed it was a good secluded spot for parking. Harsh wanted to smile. So far, okay. The limousine was out of sight of the salesroom when it was parked there, but in plain view from the fitting room window.

  The next step, keeping Mr. Hassam from entering the fitting room with him, he arranged nicely by pointing out some fabrics to Mr. Hassam and saying how wonderful the fat man would look in a suit made of the cloth. That was enough for the salesman; he tied into Mr. Hassam, unrolling bolts of cloth for his inspection.

  “I’ll try my stuff on, Mr. Hassam, while you’re looking over samples.”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  That got him back in the fitting room without Mr. Hassam, and he went to the telephone at once. With the phone number penciled on the directory cover, he didn’t even have to take a minute to look it up before dialing the Security Locksmithing Company.

  “Hello, Security? Is Goldberg around?”

  There was a pause. “Speaking.”

  “Edward Fry here, Goldberg. I called yesterday about needing a key. You remember?”

  “Oh, yes...Fry. We have your key here waiting for you.” The man’s voice wasn’t gruff this time, Harsh noted. No, when he had twenty-five dollars to collect he was all solicitous and honey-voiced, almost sounded like a different person entirely.

  “Well that’s why I’m calling, Goldberg. The way it is, I’ve been tied up all day, and it doesn’t look as though I can get away for quite a while yet. I was wondering, could you deliver the key right away to me here in town, so I wouldn’t have to let go of this hot business prospect I’m working on? I’m trying to put the screw in the guy.”

  “I guess I could do that, Mr. Fry, depending on where you are.”

  “Do you know Leon’s, the men’s place?”

  “Certainly. That’s only about four blocks from here.”

  “Oh, that close. That’s fine. In the side street on the north side of Leon’s place you will find a large limousine parked. It’s my car, and I can see it from the window of this place where I’m tied up in conference. Suppose you come over in the next few minutes and bring the key. When you get here, sort of lean on the limousine and I’ll be watching and I’ll come down, get the key and pay you. Oh yes, and sign your paper. Bring your paper along. That way I won’t lose but a minute or two. Can you accommodate me that much, Goldberg?”

  “Of course. I will be right over, Mr. Fry.”

  Harsh hung up, went to the nearest fitting booth, put on one of the pairs of pants he’d left to be altered, and seizing the fabric of the slacks at the crotch, pulled a bag into the cloth. Then he walked out to show Mr. Hassam they were too full and put up a holler, demanding the slacks be fixed right now while they waited. That was to get him more time, time enough to get the key from Goldberg, and also make sure Mr. Hassam was not going to pop up looking to leave while he was down in the street getting the key.

  Back in the fitting rooms, Harsh glued himself to the window. He unlatched the hook-and-eye keeping the back door shut and kept his hand on the doorknob.

  Presently a solid-looking man about Harsh’s build wearing a gabardine suit and sport shirt came from the north and stopped walking when he saw the limousine. The man wore dark sunglasses and had on a large straw hat, and Harsh recognized him from the day before: the tourist, the one who’d been watching from the orange stand across the way. Goddamn it, of all the times for him to show up—

  The man stopped beside the limousine, looked it over, then walked around to the back and glanced at the license plate. He wrote the license number in a notebook. Then he opened the back door and got into the limousine.

  Harsh hurried out the side door and strode to the limousine. Some sort of cop, for sure. The regular sort or maybe a private cop, like the guy from Kansas City. Writing the license number down, the nosy bastard.

  Harsh flung the car door open. “What the hell, get out of there, you. This is my car.”

  The man was sitting on the long padded bench in the back of the limousine. Though it was dark inside he hadn’t taken off the sunglasses or the hat. He held up a key strung on a piece of twine. “That what you wanted?”

  The honeyed voice was familiar to Harsh from the phone and the key looked like the one Brother had given him, the one he was now carrying alongside the money in his pocket. But this guy couldn’t be Goldberg. It was impossible. He’d spoken to Goldberg on the phone yesterday while this guy was at the orange stand, watching through the window.

  But—

  But he could have found out I called Goldberg, Harsh realized. It wouldn’t have been hard, if the cop was any good at his job. All he’d have needed to do was come into Leon’s sometime after Harsh had left, go back to the fitting rooms, take a look at the phone book, and there was Goldberg’s number penciled right on the cover. Hell, he might have seen me writing it, Harsh thought bitterly. And if he called the number and went over to Goldberg’s shop, forced Goldberg to tell him what the call had been about, waited there for Harsh to call again...

  Harsh reached out and took the key. His hand shook.

  The cop had a sour breath and he seemed to be panting gently. Something wrong with him, Harsh decided, maybe a little sick or something.

  Harsh wondered how far the man would take the masquerade. “Okay...Goldberg. Give me your paper and I’ll give you the money.” Harsh held out twenty-five dollars of Vera Sue’s money which he had counted out and had ready. The man took it a
nd handed back a printed form. Must’ve picked it up from Goldberg, Harsh figured, the same time as he picked up the key. Harsh scribbled Edward T. Fry at the bottom, on a line where there was a penciled X. “Well, Goldberg, I guess that does it. I’ll let you know if the key don’t do the job.”

  The man spoke woodenly. “One more thing. May I see your driver’s license?”

  “Huh?”

  “Your driver’s license, please. Let me see some identification, Fry.”

  I bet you’d like to see my identification, you bastard. “Look...Goldberg...I can afford a chauffeur to drive this car, so what the hell would I be doing carrying a driver’s license that I don’t need? I haven’t packed a driver’s license around with me in years.”

  “But I need to confirm your identity. Some cards will do. Some business cards, no? Just show me something that says on it the name of Edward T. Fry.”

  “Listen, my wallet is upstairs in the office and I am damn well not going to run up there and get it just because you want to see something that doesn’t amount to a damn anyway. The hell with you, mister, you and I are done with our business.”

  Harsh started to get out of the car. The man seized him by the shoulders with both hands. The fellow was surprisingly strong. Harsh’s left arm twinged with pain beneath his grip. “We are not done. You will tell me who you are. That face of yours—”

  “I’ll tell you just once, friend, take your goddamn hands off me. I don’t care who you are, cop or P.I. or what.”

  “You will tell me, all right, but it will be what I want to know. Who are you and what are you plotting to do?”

  The use of the word plotting put a coldness into Harsh’s midriff. “I told you to take your hands off me.” Harsh gave the man the edge of his hand the way they had taught him in the army, the edge of the hand delivered hard from a bent elbow against the man’s throat just below the Adam’s apple. The man fell down on the floor between the front and back seats. He lay at Harsh’s feet, not knocked out, but paralyzed with pain, unable to speak, barely able to breathe.

  Now what happens? Harsh thought. Will a good kick or two in the gut send him away happy to leave me alone? Harsh looked down at the man squirming on the floor. Suddenly he saw the man tugging at a coat pocket. Oh Jesus, Harsh thought, a gun, a gun in his pocket. Harsh pulled back one foot and stamped on the man’s face, causing something to crush, a jawbone or something. He stomped again on the man’s belly, and this threw air out of the man’s lungs and a spray of blood and spittle across the floor carpeting of the limousine. He’s not so tough, Harsh thought. They used to make cops of harder stuff. It was not going to be difficult to render the man senseless, then drag him into an alley and leave him until Harsh could re-join Mr. Hassam and clear out of the vicinity. It would serve the fellow right to wind up in an alley. What else could he expect for being a nosy bastard?

  Harsh realized he was feeling about the man the way he always commenced feeling about someone with whom he was in trouble. The first occasion he’d had such a feeling, and he remembered it very well, was as a kid in a fight with another kid, one of the earliest things he could recall, a fight with a kid eight years old, about his age, back of the outhouse in the country schoolyard near Novelty, Missouri. A fight with a kid who was a teacher’s pet, who had come upon Harsh getting an eyeful at a crack in the girls’ donnicker and yelled he would tell their teacher on him. Harsh could not remember who won the fight, which was rather odd; the only thing he could recall, and he recalled it vividly, was the feeling that came over him of nothing mattering except reducing the opponent to helplessness. It was not winning that was important, it was reducing the opposition to complete nothingness.

  This was the feeling he had now. He was stamping the man with both feet simultaneously. The man’s right hand was still in his coat pocket groping about there, and Harsh became sure there was a gun in the pocket when he heard a metallic object strike the footrail. Christ! Harsh fell upon the man and seized the coat-pocketed hand with all his strength. He could feel the gun in the pocket. The cop was trying to shoot him with it. Harsh twisted the gun hand, bending it upward and trying to get the arm twisted against the small of the man’s back. If he could hammerlock the guy, Harsh felt, he could get the gun, and Jesus Christ he had to get the gun. Harsh strained every muscle he had, using his cast for leverage. The gun went off. The noise was a lot, yet not so much either for a gun, muffled because the gun was wadded in the coat cloth and Harsh lying on top of it. A big cough, a jolt against his chest, that was about all. But the cop’s legs shot out stiffly, his whole body gave a heave, then went limp.

  The thing Harsh noticed now was a brassy taste in his mouth that came from straining with everything he had. Then there was the smell of the other man’s sour breath, the smell of powder, the sweetish digested smell of stuff that started coming out of the cop’s smashed and bloody mouth. There was a kind of ringing in Harsh’s ears too, and he had to listen through the ringing in order to hear anything. He listened and waited. He waited for someone to come and hoped no one would come, for he knew that what he was lying on was a dead man. And no one came.

  He reached into the man’s pocket and took out the gun—a small gun, strangely flat, maybe a .22, it was hard to tell in the darkness. He jammed it in his own jacket pocket. He’d get rid of it later. The bigger problem—the thing that would be much harder to get rid of—lay at his feet.

  There was a laprobe folded over a rail on the inside of the door, and he spread this over the cop, relieved that there was enough robe to cover the body.

  Mr. Hassam was mildly irked with Harsh. “It took you long enough.”

  Harsh turned around slowly before Mr. Hassam, showing off the pants he’d raced to put on the instant he’d gotten back into the store. “They got them altered, finally. How do you like them? I didn’t want to make any more trips to this place. Fit pretty good, huh?”

  Mr. Hassam shrugged, for he had grown tired of the efforts of the salesman to sell him something, and the salesman looked discouraged also, so Harsh knew Mr. Hassam had bought nothing. But the salesman was very polite still, as they would always be in such a classy place; he helped them get together the boxes containing Harsh’s clothes, and he offered to carry them to the limousine. “Where is your car, gentlemen?”

  “Never mind, I can carry the stuff.”

  “But your arm, sir—”

  “I said never mind.” Harsh did not want the salesman opening the limousine to put the package in and finding the body in the back seat. “I want to carry them myself.”

  “Very well. I hope you find everything satisfactory. If not, we will certainly make it right.”

  “Thanks, buddy.”

  There were not too many packages this time for Harsh to manage with one arm. The salesman opened the shop door for them. Harsh and Mr. Hassam approached the limousine, and Harsh made his move to keep Mr. Hassam from opening the rear door or even looking in the back.

  “Hey, how about me driving this pot back, Mr. Hassam? I bet it will do a hundred and twenty. How about you giving me a chance to try her out on that beach stretch?”

  Mr. Hassam hurriedly got behind the wheel. Harsh sighed in relief. He had noted Mr. Hassam was a very cautious driver. Harsh piled boxes on the back seat. Under the laprobe the cop did not make much of a pile. Harsh slammed the back door, got in front with Mr. Hassam. “Okay. Home, James.”

  The limousine was hardly moving before Harsh noticed the smell in the car, coming from the back. He hurriedly rolled down his window. Mr. Hassam glanced at him. “You feeling all right, Harsh?”

  “Huh? Me, oh sure, I guess twisting around with this busted arm to try on them clothes got me sweating a little is all. Sure, I’m fine.”

  At the supermarket where Miss Muirz had turned in last night, Mr. Hassam also stopped. “I have to pick up some groceries, Harsh.”

  “Okay. Suppose I stay here in the car. No point in being seen around any more than necessary, is there?”


  Mr. Hassam parked in the back about where Miss Muirz had parked the previous night. “This should take only fifteen minutes or so, Harsh.” Mr. Hassam entered the market. Harsh sat very still, thinking over what had happened. He was not sweating or shaking or anything. He wondered if anyone had noticed anything. He hoped not. Who notices a parked car on a city street, he thought, and the answer he gave himself was, nobody, mostly. The gun had not made much of a disturbance, and neither had the cop. Harsh felt pretty good about it as a whole. But he reminded himself he could be sliding over a detail and not know it. He kept thinking.

  The printed form that said Edward T. Fry was the legal owner of the safe for which the key had been made, that was still in the cop’s pocket! Or was it? He had sure better find out—Edward T. Fry might be a made-up name, but it was signed in Harsh’s handwriting. He glanced about to make sure no one was in sight, then opened the sliding panel between the front of the car and the rear seat and leaned through to lift the blanket and put his hand in the cop’s pockets. He found the paper. He covered the cop again with the laprobe, drew back into the front seat, struck a match to the paper and waved it about to make it burn rapidly, then fanned the smoke out of the limousine interior.

  Now what else? He was very alarmed. He felt he should not have overlooked the printed form, since it had not just his handwriting on it but his fingerprints, too. His fingerprints—Christ, his fingerprints might be on the twenty-five dollars! Did paper even take fingerprints? It did if you inked the fingers, that was for sure; and who was to say that sweat didn’t show up just the same as ink under some special light bulb the police had? He leaned back through the panel opening again and searched the cop’s pockets once more. He found the twenty-five dollars, which he folded and put in his pocket.

  And as long as he was at it, he thought, why overlook any spare change the cop might have been packing? He found a large, new-looking folded wallet in the cop’s inside coat pocket and took it. He did not dare take time to look at the contents.