Too Hot to Hold

by Day Keene

  He wished he knew what to do about Dix and knew even as he wondered. There was only one thing he could do. He was glad now that he had, but he’d really spooked after leaving the restaurant. Even after he’d killed Daly he should have carried out his original intention to go to the police. Without outside help he and Linda Lou couldn’t run far or fast enough to keep ahead of the Chicago mobster. Sooner or later Dix would find them and when he did find them he’d kill them. He had to maintain face in the circles where he moved.

  Brady found his cigarettes and lit one. He would get nowhere by running away. He couldn’t keep the money. He knew now that he’d realized it almost from the start. The money had merely been a symbol of his unfulfilled dreams and his keeping it as long as he had was a gesture of defiance.

  The only thing he could do now was jack up the bogged down car and take Linda Lou back to Manhattan and reclaim it. With the money in their hands they would go on down to Center Street, tell the police the whole story and ask for protection.

  He tried to remember the names in the television newscast about the Scaffidi murder and did. Sergeant Hooper and Detective Manson. They were the officers in charge of the investigation. When he reached Center Street he’d ask for them, lay everything on the line, holding nothing back.

  It would mean losing his job. But it wasn’t much of a job and the loss of it would solve two major problems, May and Alice. Without a job, he wouldn’t be a good meal ticket and May would have to dig out her bottle of peroxide and a new lipstick and bait a trap for another sucker. One thing was certain, he would never go back to 1134 E. Elm Street, no matter what happened.

  The legal aspects concerning him personally were more intangible. He’d killed a man but the man had been an armed gangster trying to kill him. Surely a judge trying the case would take that into consideration. The most he could be charged with was manslaughter or it might even be considered justifiable homicide. The judge would give him a few years sentence if any. Maybe he’d even go free when it was pointed out that he’d returned the money voluntarily.

  Linda Lou had nothing to fear. She wasn’t guilty of anything. The State would be grateful to her if she gave evidence against Morgan and Dix in the Scaffidi affair. And when he’d done his time, if he was given a prison sentence, he and she could go away together. They could get the hell out of New York, perhaps even go to France or Spain and start all over. He could always get a job abroad and they could marry and settle down and have babies and live the way a couple should live. Their attraction for each other wasn’t entirely sexual. The last thing she’d told him before they’d gone to sleep had been:

  “I don’t care what we do, Jim. You figure this out however seems best to you, as long as we can be together. I’ve been looking for you a long time and I’m not about to give you up. If you can forget what I’ve told you, as far as I am concerned, you’re the first man I ever really knew. I intend for you to be the last. And you can whop me or beat me or put babies in me, whatever you’ve a mind to do, just as long as you never send me away, just as long as you want me to be your woman.”

  Your woman. The words had a pleasant sound. And Linda Lou had more womanhood in her little finger than most women had in their entire bodies.

  He realized the coffee was boiling and drank a cup. Then turning the flame low to keep it hot until Linda Lou woke up he wrote her a short note and put it under a clean cup on the chair next to the bunk. The note was brief and to the point:

  Sweetheart:

  Back in a few minutes. Have gone to see about getting the car unstuck. Don’t worry about a thing.

  I think we can work this out. I love you very much.

  Jim

  Then whistling softly to himself he dressed and walked down the steps of the cottage and around the lake to where Daly’s rented car had bogged down…

  Seconds after Brady left, Linda Lou stretched and yawned, then opened her eyes a little and was disappointed to find herself alone. She closed her eyes again and lay for a long moment, sleepily content and filled with grateful wonder. After her previous experiences of this kind, even with Silk, she’d awakened feeling tired and soiled, disgusted with herself to think she’d allowed such a thing to happen. This morning it was different. She felt clean and refreshed and glad that it had happened. It had all been so natural, so right, as if it was meant to be. She opened her eyes and smiled at the ceiling. God had been looking after her, after all. He hadn’t allowed it to happen until she’d met the right man. She didn’t feel guilty about Jim being a married man. Not after the things he’d told her about his wife. They could wade that creek when they reached it. It would be nice if Jim would marry her. It was always so much better for the children. No one could call them little bastards, like they called her. Still she’d managed to survive. And no piece of paper or gold ring could make a woman love a man. It was something that happened inside you. All of a sudden. You suddenly were not alone any more.

  She swung her bare feet to the floor and saw the note under the cup. Jim called her his sweetheart. She wasn’t to worry about a thing. He loved her very much.

  Without conscious volition she pressed the note to her breasts. Jim didn’t just like her, he loved her. When he came back she’d prove how much she loved him. Still they couldn’t make love all the time and men were seldom amorous in the morning. She’d learned that much from Della. She had to be practical about this thing. She began by putting on her bra and sheer panties she’d hung over the back of the chair to dry. Then she made up the bunk bed and drank a cup of hot coffee.

  When she’d finished with the coffee she washed her bruised face in cold water, put on powder and lipstick and combed her hair. Starting to put on her dress, she felt sticky. After the rain and all that had happened she needed a bath. Your best friends might not tell you but the man you loved might. And she wanted to be clean and fresh for Jim when he came back.

  Carrying her dress and shoes and a bar of soap, she walked to the open door and looked at the lake. It looked a lot like the river back home except that it was bigger and probably deeper and there were no mangrove or palm trees or white herons.

  She was halfway down the path to the lake before she realized she wasn’t limping and her ankle no longer hurt. She stopped and looked down at her ankle, then felt it. It was no longer tender to the touch. The swelling had almost disappeared. And that was one for the book. Now that she had a man of her own she knew how to cure a sprained ankle.

  She continued down the walk covered with fallen pine needles and reached the edge of the lake. She felt the water with her toes. It was cold but not too cold. Linda Lou put her shoes on a fallen log and laid her dress on top of them. Then after removing her underthings, she took the bar of soap and waded into the water.

  It was much colder than her river had been but even this late in the year the sun here was almost as hot as Florida sun. Compressing her lips she waded on doggedly until the water was thigh deep. Then holding her breath, she dashed the icy water on her upper body and soaped it thoroughly and sank to her shoulders to rinse the soap away.

  After the initial shock the water didn’t feel so cold. So she swam for a few minutes, being careful not to wet her face or hair. In a few minutes, Jim had said. And she wanted to look pretty for him. She got to her feet and looked at the bruises on her body. As pretty, she thought, as she could look after Morgan and Daly had finished with her.

  “Talk, you little bitch,” Daly had grunted as he’d punched her in the stomach. “Where’s the money?”

  As if she’d known. She still didn’t know. All she knew was that Jim had it. And what he did with it was up to him. He was the man. She was glad he’d killed Daly. It was going to take days, perhaps weeks, for the discoloration to fade. Now, when she wanted, for the first time in her life, a man to like the way she looked.

  She studied her body. Bruised and discolored as it was it seemed incredible to her that Jim could have been attracted to her. But he had been.

  In betw
een times they’d talked and he’d told her more about the fascinating places in which he’d lived as a boy. She decided she liked Paris best. Even the names of the streets and districts had a romantic sound. Rue de Longchamps. Place de la Bastille. The Bois de Boulogne. The Left Bank. Montmartre. The Champs Elysées. She pretended she was living in Paris and she was Mrs. James A. Brady and she and Jim had six children. She named each child as she pointed to imaginary little heads in the water. There was Jim Junior and Honore, Henri and Gigi, Yvette and Paul.

  Linda Lou stopped pretending and ran her hands over her flat body. She could be carrying the first of them now. The thought made her blush. After the way she’d acted, if it was possible for a woman to conceive more than once in one night, she probably had a whole family inside her.

  A drifting cloud covered the sun and both air and water were suddenly cold. She waded ashore wishing she’d remembered to bring a towel. Now she’d have to run for the cottage and dry herself there before she dressed.

  Snatching her clothing from the log she ran up the path to the cottage and stopped just inside the doorway, her lips working but the screams welling up inside her unable to get past the constriction in her throat.

  As big and fat and flabby as ever, Mr. Dix was eyeing her with approval. “Come in. Come in, Linda,” he invited. “You look very pretty this morning. The night must have agreed with you.”

  Linda Lou covered herself with her dress as she looked past him at the bunk. His eyes agonized over the wide strip of tape plastered over his lower face and mouth, blood streaming from a cut on his forehead, Jim Brady was sitting on the bunk with the muzzle of Morgan’s pistol pointed at his head.

  “Very pretty,” Dix continued sourly. “I offered you everything a girl could want. But no. You couldn’t see me. You had to go for a lousy lone-wolf hijacker.” He nodded at Morgan. “Hit him again. The chump likes to be hurt.”

  Morgan slapped Brady with the barrel of his gun. “A pleasure.”

  Linda Lou crossed the room and tried to protect Brady with her body. “No, please,” she begged. “Don’t hurt him. You can do anything you want to me. But please don’t hurt him.”

  Morgan paid Brady grudged admiration. “You must be good, fellow.”

  “Take off his gag,” Dix said. “Now that we don’t have to worry about him warning Linda, I want to hear the bastard yell when you hit him. So who’s to hear? You picked quite a hideout, Brady. If we hadn’t been smart, also a little lucky, we could have looked for you for ten years.”

  Linda Lou sat on the bunk beside Brady. “How did they find us?”

  Brady wiped blood out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “They haven’t said. I just blundered up to the car like a fool and there they were, waiting for me.”

  Linda Lou tried to stanch the flow of blood from the cut on Brady’s forehead with her underwear and Brady stopped her.

  “No. Put them on,” he said curtly. “They’ll hurt me worse before they’re through. And just because they’re going to kill me is no reason for you to give them a free show.”

  Morgan hit him again. “How noble. That one’s for Daly, you bastard. And just wait until I get around to myself and all the trouble you’ve caused us.”

  Linda Lou turned her back and dressed as hurriedly as her fear-numbed fingers would permit.

  Dix continued to admire her. “Broads. When I was twenty I thought I understood them. Now I’m sixty-five I’m beginning to wonder.” He used the barrel of the gun he was holding to wave the subject aside. “All right, Brady. You can make it as easy or as tough on yourself as you want, before you get what that cab driver got. What’s the set-up? Were the three of you in on this?”

  Brady shook his head. “No. No one was in it with me.”

  “You just opened the door of a cab and there was two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re lying. You and the girl and the driver were in this together. Then you left him to take his lumps and you and the girl were going to take a powder with the money. But Daly and Morgan got to the warehouse too soon.”

  “That isn’t so,” Linda Lou cried. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine. You talked so much about what could happen to me I got frightened and left the money in the cab. Then last night in the restaurant, even if he was a stranger to me, I couldn’t let you kill Jim. That’s why I warned him and we tried to get out the back way.”

  Morgan smiled thinly. “You never met the guy before last night?”

  “No.”

  Morgan glanced at the rumpled bunk on the far side of the room, then looked at the girl. “Well, you sure got acquainted in a hurry.”

  Dix motioned him to be silent. “What the broad did or did not do is immaterial now. The only thing that matters now is the money.” Perspiration beaded on his flabby jowls. “I’m going to level with you, Brady. Just so you understand how far I’ll go to get it back. The money is a Mafia pay-off, what I owe the boys from my last year’s take. And if I don’t get it back and deliver it to where it’s supposed to go within the next few hours what happened to Scaffidi and what is going to happen to you could happen to me. Do I make myself clear?”

  A piece of adhesive was clinging to Brady’s upper lip. He picked it off. “Very clear.” He’d never wanted anything so badly as he wanted to turn over the claim check in his watch pocket. The two men had overlooked it when they were searching him. But he knew the moment he did, he and Linda Lou would be killed. His knowledge of where the money was was their only insurance. “So—?”

  Morgan suggested, “Maybe I’d better belt him a few more times.”

  Dix shook his head. “No. You’d probably hit him too hard, like you did that dumb cab driver. And he has to stay alive long enough to tell us where the money is.”

  Brady tried to think. He didn’t have the least idea how the two men had found him. Coming to the cottage had been a mistake. They could beat him to death in here without anyone being the wiser. He should have holed up somewhere in the city where there would have been people and potential witnesses. The thought gave him an idea. It was a slim chance at best but seemingly the only one they had.

  “How about making a deal?” he asked.

  “What sort of a deal?” Dix asked.

  Brady put his arm around Linda Lou’s waist. “Our lives for the money.”

  “The money is intact?”

  “It is.”

  “Where is it?”

  Brady shook his head. “Oh, no. That’s part of the deal. You take us back to town and agree to turn us loose and I’ll tell you.”

  “Where back to town? What part?”

  Brady thought quickly. This thing had begun on a Monday morning. That made today Wednesday. After school on Wednesdays, Jimmy went to his gym class at the Y. Alice took her dancing lesson. And May played bridge with a neighborhood club that met at one of the members’ houses. None of them would be home until after six o’clock. He knew. Unless May stopped on her way home for a container of chop suey or a couple of pizza pies, he had cold cuts and potato salad for Wednesday night supper.

  So there would be no one at the house all afternoon. If he could trick Dix into taking him and Linda Lou to the house he might possibly be able to get hold of the loaded service revolver he’d brought home from Korea and kept in the top right hand drawer of the dresser he and May shared. Even if Morgan and Dix gunned him down in the bedroom before he could kill them, at least he had a ghost of a chance and someone was almost certain to hear the shots. Anything was better than being beaten to death and watching Linda Lou be beaten and then wind up at the bottom of the lake.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Morgan said. “I can beat the truth out of him.”

  Brady didn’t feel brave. He was merely stating a fact. “I doubt it. Because as soon as I talked, you’d kill me. And my only chance of staying alive would be to keep my mouth shut.”

  Dix seemed undecided. “Where in town would you want us to take you?”
>
  Brady told him. “My house in Stamford.”

  Dix and Morgan exchanged quick looks and Morgan asked, “Who do you think you’re kidding? We—”

  “No,” Dix stopped him. “Let him talk.” He looked back at Brady. “The money is in your house?”

  Brady shook his head. “No, it isn’t. But the key to a certain locker in Grand Central is.”

  “A locker in Grand Central, eh?” Dix mused. “And just where in your house is this key?”

  “Oh, no,” Brady countered. “No deal. If I told you you’d kill us here. And the deal I offered is the money in exchange for our lives.”

  Linda Lou protested, “But you can’t trust them.”

  “He has no choice,” Dix said. “A locker in Grand Central, eh? That sounds correct. From what we’ve learned of your movements you had to pass through the station several times. And what better place to hide the parcel than a locker. I’ve used that dodge myself.” He made his decision. “Okay. We’ll take you back to Stamford. You give us the key. Then while one of us stays to keep you company, either Morgan or I will ride in and see if the money’s where you say it is.”

  “And if it is?” Brady asked.

  “We’ll see,” Dix said. “We’ll see.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE TRAFFIC WAS normal for a week day. Instead of driving back to Manhattan on U.S. 9W, Morgan crossed the river on the Bear Mountain Bridge and drove through Peekskill and down an interlinking system of secondary roads to Stamford.