The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  “Well, perhaps I misjudged the man. Perhaps—”

  “Murchison hated you, Mr. Beale. If he found he was dying his one source of satisfaction would have been the knowledge that you were in prison for a crime you hadn’t committed. I told you that you were an innocent, Mr. Beale, and a few weeks in prison has not dented or dulled your innocence. You actually think Murchison wrote that note.”

  “You mean he didn’t?”

  “It was typed upon a machine in his office,” the lawyer said. “His own stationery was used, and the signature at the bottom is one many an expert would swear is Murchison’s own.”

  “But he didn’t write it?”

  “Of course not.” Martin Ehrengraf’s hands hovered in the air before him. They might have been poised over an invisible typewriter or they might merely be looming as the talons of a bird of prey.

  Grantham Beale stared at the little lawyer’s hands in fascination. “You typed that letter,” he said.

  Ehrengraf shrugged.

  “You—but Murchison left it with a lawyer!”

  “The lawyer was not one Murchison had used in the past. Murchison evidently selected a stranger from the Yellow Pages, as far as one can determine, and made contact with him over the telephone, explaining what he wanted the man to do for him. He then mailed the letter along with a postal money order to cover the attorney’s fee and a covering note confirming the telephone conversation. It seems he did not use his own name in his discussions with his lawyer, and he signed an alias to his covering note and to the money order as well. The signature he wrote, though, does seem to be in his own handwriting.”

  Ehrengraf paused, and his right hand went to finger the knot of his necktie. This particular tie, rather more colorful than his usual choice, was that of the Caedmon Society of Oxford University, an organization to which Martin Ehrengraf did not belong. The tie was a souvenir of an earlier case and he tended to wear it on particularly happy occasions, moments of personal triumph.

  “Murchison left careful instructions,” he went on. “He would call the lawyer every Thursday, merely repeating the alias he had used. If ever a Thursday passed without a call, and if there was no call on Friday either, the lawyer was to open the letter and follow its instructions. For four Thursdays in a row the lawyer received a phone call, presumably from Murchison.”

  “Presumably,” Beale said heavily.

  “Indeed. On the Tuesday following the fourth Thursday, Murchison’s car went off a cliff and he was killed instantly. The lawyer read of Walker Murchison’s death but had no idea that was his client’s true identity. Then Thursday came and went without a call, and when there was no telephone call Friday either, why the lawyer opened the letter and went forthwith to the police.” Ehrengraf spread his hands, smiled broadly. “The rest,” he said, “you know as well as I.”

  “Great Scott,” Beale said.

  “Now if you honestly feel I’ve done nothing to earn my money—”

  “I’ll have to liquidate some stock,” Beale said. “It won’t be a problem and there shouldn’t be much time involved. I’ll bring a check to your office in a week. Say ten days at the outside. Unless you’d prefer cash?”

  “A check will be fine, Mr. Beale. So long as it’s a good check.” And he smiled his lips to show he was joking.

  The smile chilled Beale.

  —

  A week later Grantham Beale remembered that smile when he passed a check across Martin Ehrengraf’s heroically disorganized desk. “A good check,” he said. “I’d never give you a bad check, Mr. Ehrengraf. You typed that letter, you made all those phone calls, you forged Murchison’s false name to the money order, and then when the opportunity presented itself you sent his car hurtling off the cliff with him in it.”

  “One believes what one wishes,” Ehrengraf said quietly.

  “I’ve been thinking about all of this all week long. Murchison framed me for a murder he committed, then paid for the crime himself and liberated me in the process without knowing what he was doing. ‘The cut worm forgives the plow.’ ”

  “Indeed.”

  “Meaning that the end justifies the means.”

  “Is that what Blake meant by that line? I’ve long wondered.”

  “The end justifies the means. I’m innocent, and now I’m free, and Murchison’s guilty, and now he’s dead, and you’ve got the money, but that’s all right, because I made out fine on those stamps, and of course I don’t have to repay Speldron, poor man, because death did cancel that particular debt, and—”

  “Mr. Beale.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this, but I fear I must. You are more of an innocent than you realize. You’ve paid me handsomely for my services, as indeed we agreed that you would, and I think perhaps I’ll offer you a lagniappe in the form of some experience to offset your colossal innocence. I’ll begin with some advice. Do not, under any circumstances, resume your affair with Felicia Murchison.”

  Beale stared.

  “You should have told me that was why you and Murchison didn’t get along,” Ehrengraf said gently. “I had to discover it for myself. No matter. More to the point, one should not share a pillow with a woman who has so little regard for one as to frame one for murder. Mrs. Murchison—”

  “Felicia framed me?”

  “Of course, Mr. Beale. Mrs. Murchison had nothing against you. It was sufficient that she had nothing for you. She murdered Mr. Speldron, you see, for reasons which need hardly concern us. Then having done so she needed someone to be cast as the murderer.

  “Her husband could hardly have told the police about your purported argument with Speldron. He wasn’t around at the time. He didn’t know the two of you had met, and if he went out on a limb and told them, and then you had an alibi for the time in question, why he’d wind up looking silly, wouldn’t he? But Mrs. Murchison knew you’d met with Speldron, and she told her husband the two of you argued, and so he told the police in perfectly good faith what she had told him, and then they went and found the murder gun in your very own Antonelli Scorpion. A stunning automobile, incidentally, and it’s to your credit to own such a vehicle, Mr. Beale.”

  “Felicia killed Speldron.”

  “Yes.”

  “And framed me.”

  “Yes.”

  “But—why did you frame Murchison?”

  “Did you expect me to try to convince the powers that be that she did it? And had pangs of conscience and left a letter with a lawyer? Women don’t leave letters with lawyers, Mr. Beale, anymore than they have consciences. One must deal with the materials at hand.”

  “But—”

  “And the woman is young, with long dark hair, flashing dark eyes, a body like a magazine centerfold and a face like a Chanel ad. She’s also an excellent typist and most cooperative in any number of ways which we needn’t discuss at the moment. Mr. Beale, would you like me to get you a glass of water?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be all right, Mr. Beale. I’m sure you will. Mr. Beale, I’m going to make a suggestion. I think you should seriously consider marrying and settling down. I think you’d be much happier that way. You’re an innocent, Mr. Beale, and you’ve had the Ehrengraf Experience now, and it’s rendered you considerably more experienced than you were, but your innocence is not the sort to be readily vanquished. Give the widow Murchison and all her tribe a wide berth, Mr. Beale. They’re not for you. Find yourself an old-fashioned girl and lead a proper old-fashioned life. Buy and sell stamps. Cultivate a garden. Raise terriers. The West Highland White might be a good breed for you but that’s your decision, certainly. Mr. Beale? Are you sure you won’t have a glass of water?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Quite. I’ll leave you with another thought of Blake’s, Mr. Beale. ‘Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds.’ That’s also from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, another of what he calls Proverbs of Hell, and perhaps someday you’ll b
e able to interpret it for me. I never quite know for sure what Blake’s getting at, Mr. Beale, but his things do have a nice sound to them, don’t they? Innocence and experience, Mr. Beale. That’s the ticket, isn’t it? Innocence and experience.”

  Villain: Quarry

  Quarry’s Luck

  MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  QUARRY (no first name) is a laconic hit man who appears in thirteen books, beginning with Quarry (also published as The Broker) in 1976, every one of which is highly readable and less predictable than one might expect of a series of adventures about a man hired to kill people.

  After he returns from the Vietnam War, Quarry finds his wife has been cheating on him. When he locates the guy, tinkering under his car, Quarry kicks the jack out, crushing him. Unhappy and largely unemployable, Quarry is hired by a man known only as the Broker to be a contract killer. He is careful, methodical, and conscience-free, regarding the hits as nothing more than jobs. “A paid assassin isn’t a killer, really,” he says. “He’s a weapon. Someone has already decided someone else is going to die, before the paid assassin is even in the picture, let alone on the scene. A paid assassin is no more a killer than a nine millimeter automatic or a bludgeon.”

  Although in a successful series, Quarry is not the best-known character created by the versatile Max Allan Collins (1948– ), an honor that falls to Nate Heller, a Chicago private eye whose cases were mainly set in the 1930s and 1940s. Many involve famous people of the era, including Al Capone, Frank Nitta, and Eliot Ness in the first book, True Detective (1983), as well as such famous cases as the kidnapping of Charles and Anne Lindbergh’s baby in Stolen Away (1991), the disappearance of Amelia Earhart in Flying Blind (1998), and the Black Dahlia murder in Angel in Black (2001).

  Collins is also the author of the graphic novel Road to Perdition (1998), the basis for the 2002 Tom Hanks film; numerous movie and television tie-in novels; and the Dick Tracy comic strip after Chester Gould retired. He coauthored many books and stories with Mickey Spillane, completing works that were left unfinished when Spillane died.

  “Quarry’s Luck” was originally published in Blue Motel (Stone Mountain, Georgia, White Wolf, 1994); it was first collected in Quarry’s Greatest Hits (Unity, Maine, Five Star, 2003).

  QUARRY’S LUCK

  Max Allan Collins

  ONCE UPON A TIME, I killed people for a living.

  Now, as I sit in my living quarters looking out at Sylvan Lake, its gently rippling gray-blue surface alive with sunlight, the scent and sight of pines soothing me, I seldom think of those years. With the exception of the occasional memoirs I’ve penned, I have never been very reflective. What’s done is done. What’s over is over.

  But occasionally someone or something I see stirs a memory. In the summer, when Sylvan Lodge (of which I’ve been manager for several years now) is hopping with guests, I now and then see a cute blue-eyed blond college girl, and I think of Linda, my late wife. I’d retired from the contract murder profession, lounging on a cottage on a lake not unlike this one, when my past had come looking for me and Linda became a casualty.

  What I’d learned from that was two things: the past is not something disconnected from the present—you can’t write off old debts or old enemies (whereas, oddly, friends you can completely forget); and not to enter into long-term relationships.

  Linda hadn’t been a very smart human being, but she was pleasant company and she loved me, and I wouldn’t want to cause somebody like her to die again. You know—an innocent.

  After all, when I was taking contracts through the man I knew as the Broker, I was dispatching the guilty. I had no idea what these people were guilty of, but it stood to reason that they were guilty of something, or somebody wouldn’t have decided they should be dead.

  A paid assassin isn’t a killer, really. He’s a weapon. Someone has already decided someone else is going to die, before the paid assassin is even in the picture, let alone on the scene. A paid assassin is no more a killer than a nine millimeter automatic or a bludgeon. Somebody has to pick up a weapon, to use it.

  Anyway, that was my rationalization back in the seventies, when I was a human weapon for hire. I never took pleasure from the job—just money. And when the time came, I got out of it.

  So, a few years ago, after Linda’s death, and after I killed the fuckers responsible, I did not allow myself to get pulled back into that profession. I was too old, too tired, my reflexes were not all that good. A friend I ran into, by chance, needed my only other expertise—I had operated a small resort in Wisconsin with Linda—and I now manage Sylvan Lodge.

  Something I saw recently—something quite outrageous really, even considering that I have in my time witnessed human behavior of the vilest sort—stirred a distant memory.

  The indoor swimming pool with hot tub is a short jog across the road from my two-room apartment in the central lodge building (don’t feel sorry for me: it’s a bedroom and spacious living room with kitchenette, plus two baths, with a deck looking out on my storybook view of the lake). We close the pool room at ten P.M., and sometimes I take the keys over and open the place up for a solitary midnight swim.

  I was doing that—actually, I’d finished my swim and was letting the hot tub’s jet streams have at my chronically sore lower back—when somebody came knocking at the glass doors.

  It was a male figure—portly—and a female figure—slender, shapely, both wrapped in towels. That was all I could see of them through the glass; the lights were off outside.

  Sighing, I climbed out of the hot tub, wrapped a towel around myself, and unlocked the glass door and slid it open just enough to deal with these two.

  “We want a swim!” the man said. He was probably fifty-five, with a booze-mottled face and a brown toupee that squatted on his round head like a slumbering gopher.

  Next to him, the blonde of twenty-something, with huge blue eyes and huge big boobs (her towel, thankfully, was tied around her waist), stood almost behind the man. She looked meek. Even embarrassed.

  “Mr. Davis,” I said, cordial enough, “it’s after hours.”

  “Fuck that! You’re in here, aren’t you?”

  “I’m the manager. I sneak a little time in for myself, after closing, after the guests have had their fun.”

  He put his hand on my bare chest. “Well, we’re guests, and we want to have some fun, too!”

  His breath was ninety proof.

  I removed his hand. Bending the fingers back a little in the process.

  He winced, and started to say something, but I said, “I’m sorry. It’s the lodge policy. My apologies to you and your wife.”

  Bloodshot eyes widened in the face, and he began to say something, but stopped short. He tucked his tail between his legs (and his towel), and took the girl by the arm, roughly, saying, “Come on, baby. We don’t need this horseshit.”

  The blonde looked back at me and gave me a crinkly little chagrined grin, and I smiled back at her, locked the glass door, and climbed back in the hot tub to cool off.

  “Asshole,” I said. It echoed in the high-ceilinged steamy room. “Fucking asshole!” I said louder, just because I could, and the echo was enjoyable.

  He hadn’t tucked towel ’tween his legs because I’d bent his fingers back: he’d done it because I mentioned his wife, who we both knew the little blond bimbo wasn’t.

  That was because (and here’s the outrageous part) he’d been here last month—to this very same resort—with another very attractive blonde, but one about forty, maybe forty-five, who was indeed, and in fact, his lawful wedded wife.

  We had guys who came to Sylvan Lodge with their families; we had guys who came with just their wives; and we had guys who came with what used to be called in olden times their mistresses. But we seldom had a son of a bitch so fucking bold as to bring his wife one week, and his mistress the next, to the same goddamn motel, which is what Sylvan Lodge, after all, let’s face it, is a glorified version of.

  As I enjoyed the jet stream on m
y low back, I smiled and then frowned, as the memory stirred…Christ, I’d forgotten about that! You’d think that Sylvan Lodge itself would’ve jogged my memory. But it hadn’t.

  Even though the memory in question was of one of my earliest jobs, which took place at a resort not terribly unlike this one….

  —

  We met off Interstate 80, at a truck stop outside of the Quad Cities. It was late—almost midnight—a hot, muggy June night; my black T-shirt was sticking to me. My blue jeans, too.

  The Broker had taken a booth in back; the restaurant wasn’t particularly busy, except for an area designated for truckers. But it had the war-zone look of a rush hour just past; it was a blindingly white but not terribly clean-looking place and the jukebox—wailing “I Shot the Sheriff” at the moment—combated the clatter of dishes being bused.

  Sitting with the Broker was an oval-faced, bright-eyed kid of about twenty-three (which at the time was about my age, too) who wore a Doobie Brothers T-shirt and had shoulder-length brown hair. Mine was cut short—not soldier-cut, but businessman short.

  “Quarry,” the Broker said, in his melodious baritone; he gestured with an open hand. “How good to see you. Sit down.” His smile was faint under the wispy mustache, but there was a fatherly air to his manner.

  He was trying to look casual in a yellow Ban-Lon shirt and golf slacks; he had white, styled hair and a long face that managed to look both fleshy and largely unlined. He was a solid-looking man, fairly tall—he looked like a captain of industry, which he was in a way. I took him for fifty, but that was just a guess.

  “This is Adam,” the Broker said.

  “How are you doin’, man?” Adam said, and grinned, and half-rose; he seemed a little nervous, and in the process—before I’d even had a chance to decide whether to take the hand he offered or not—overturned a salt shaker, which sent him into a minor tizzy.

  “Damn!” Adam said, forgetting about the handshake. “I hate fuckin’ bad luck!” He tossed some salt over either shoulder, then grinned at me and said, “I’m afraid I’m one superstitious motherfucker.”