The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  I went up through the timber and into the lodge, and Cindy was in the living room with a glass in her hand. She was still wearing the brown velvet pajamas, and when I looked at her, there was still in my heart, in spite of everything, the pain of my love and the sadness of a great loss.

  “It’s late, Tony. You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “I went around to the other side of the lake,” I said. “I called on Evan Lane.”

  The glass moved sharply in her hand. “Why, Tony? Why?”

  “He wasn’t home when I got there,” I said, “and I sat on the veranda until he came. I learned something while I was sitting there, honey. I learned that you can’t see our beach or the raft at all from his place. He never used a telescope, as he said he did. He never saw me drown the old man. I kept trying to think how he could have known, and the only thing I could think was that you told him.”

  I waited a few seconds, and she tried to speak, but no sound could pass through her constricted throat. After a while, I went on talking in a quiet kind of way with no anger in my voice, because there was really no anger in me.

  “Yes, honey. You told him. You told him because you were hot for each other, and he could move in with a new kind of blackmail, and there would be nothing I could do about it because he knew I was a murderer. You talked about the big dream. The dream was there, all right, but I was never in it. When the time came, you’d have gone away, all right, but never with me. He was the one, honey. He was the one from the beginning, but first you had to have Grandfather dead. You had to have him dead for his money, because you wanted his money in addition to Evan’s. He didn’t have the guts to do his own killing. He didn’t have the guts, and you didn’t have the strength. So you drafted me. Well, the old man’s dead now, as you wanted him, and Evan Lane is dead, too. He’s lying on the slope in front of his lodge, and he’s dead forever.”

  She tried again to speak, but nothing came from her throat except a dry sob.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ll never know how sorry.”

  I took out the gun, and the glass fell from her hand, and her voice came at last with a hot rush.

  “I don’t care if he’s dead, Tony. Honest to God, I don’t. We can still go away together. We can still have the dream.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We’ll go away together, honey. I’ve got our tickets right here in the gun. One way and a long way.”

  “No, Tony. For God’s sake, no.”

  I pulled the trigger then, and there was only a little bang that wasn’t very loud at all, and a black spot appeared as if by magic in the golden area of skin just below the place where her heart lay hidden. Her legs folded slowly, lowering her to her knees, and she pressed one hand, with the fingers spread, over the black spot. A thin trickle of blood seeped out brightly between two of the fingers. The gold-flecked eyes were wide with shock and terrible supplication.

  “Please, Tony. Please, please…”

  Then she lay quietly on the floor, and I turned and walked out onto the veranda. I leaned against the railing, looking off into the timber where night had come, and from one of the trees came the crying of a crazy-voiced loon. I put the barrel of the gun into my mouth until the sharp sight was digging into the roof, and even then, when there was no reasonable alternative, I was a little surprised to realize I was actually going to do it.

  I’LL KILL FOR YOU

  Originally published in Giant Manhunt #2 (1953).

  She got out of the yellow cab in front of the apartment building and stood for a few seconds at the curb as she searched her purse for the fare. I stood at the corner beside a public trash can and watched her until she had paid the cabby and crossed the sidewalk. Her spike heels rapped out a brisk tattoo on concrete. The pneumatic catch on the apartment door gave a sharp gasp, trailing off into a long, expiring sigh.

  I waited until the cab had whisked its red tail light around the far corner, then I went down to the entrance and in after her. Behind me, the door gasped and sighed again. It was a sad sound. A lost and damned sound. It was like a last whimper of regret at the doorway to hell.

  Inside, the lobby was empty. From the elevator well came the soft, pervasive whine of the ascending car. I went across the lobby quickly and stood watching the arrow of the floor indicator move around to six. It stopped there, not quite half way around the circumference of the dial, and above me, echoing with hollow faintness down the deep shaft, was the distant sound of doors opening and closing.

  Turning away, walking fast, I started up the stairs, taking them two at a time, but not running. The stairs were wide, about eight feet, for the first two flights. Above that, they narrowed to four and continued upward in an economy of light. On each landing, where the angle of ascension turned back on itself, there was a single red bulb. When I passed under the bulbs, my abbreviated shadow leaped ahead of me with startling suddenness, dying in shadow as abruptly.

  I paced myself, two steps to a stride, until I came up off the stairs into the sixth floor hall. I stood there at the head of the flight, one hand on the steel post of the railing, and listened to the echo of my heart in my brain. It was a kind of accelerated tom-tom beat that was not arhythmic but was much too fast. I waited until the cadence subsided, and then I walked down the hall to a door that bore on its bleached surface the arabic identification six-o-three in chaste chrome.

  The knob of the door turned under the pressure of my fingers, releasing the catch without sound, and I stood motionless for maybe three minutes, palming the knob and listening. There was no sound within the room. Cracking the door enough for passage, I slipped through into a small vestibule and pushed the door shut behind me. The catch slipped into position with the tiniest of oiled clicks. Moving swiftly, I took three long strides to the entrance to the living room and looked in.

  She was standing almost in the middle of the room, just at the end of the sofa, with her back to me. Even from a distance, I could see that her muscles were as still as wood, that her flesh, to the touch, would be as cold as ice. She stood with her head bent forward and her eyes focused on the floor beyond the sofa, the light gleaming on the pale, silken cascade of her hair.

  I stirred, made a sound, and she whipped around with a shrill intake of breath that tore at her constricted throat and must have hurt like the hacking of a dull blade. Her eyes flared in her drawn face, and scarlet lips that were all paint and no blood opened on the shape of a projected scream. But the scream never materialized. Closing in on her, I slashed my open hand across her cheek with a flat smack. She swayed, choking on the scream with a little animal whimper, but her feet didn’t move on the carpet. The marks of four fingers were livid on her flesh.

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t scream.”

  She stared at me with her eyes wide and dry and hot and the marks of my fingers like a brand on her face. She didn’t speak or make another sound until her breasts rose finally on a deep, ragged breath that held them for a long moment high and tight against the thin stuff of her dress. They descended on a long, controlled exhalation. I knew then that there was no more danger of hysteria, and I moved around her and beyond the sofa and stood looking down at the body on the carpet.

  He lay sprawled on his face with one arm stretched out beyond his head with the fingers clawed, as if in the last instant he had been clutching for the light that had escaped his brain through a matted mass of hair and blood and bone and soft gray matter. Beyond the reaching fingers, lying on its side in the thick pile of the carpet, was a highball glass. A wet stain spread out from the lip of the glass, and in the stain there were still two tiny fragments of melting ice cubes.

  “A good, thorough job,” I said, hearing behind me the soft hiss of her breath as the brutal remark slugged home.

  Turning back to her, I saw that blood had returned to modify the livid smear of paint on her lips. Feverish stains
were spread under the taut skin over the high bones of her cheeks.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why?” She repeated the word on a suction, giving it shrill, rising inflection.

  I gestured downward at the sprawled body. “Why did you kill him?”

  “Kill him? Me?” Comprehension seemed to filter into her mind slowly, in a slow seepage, as water soaks through the pores of old brick.

  I shrugged angrily, and my voice sounded loud, needlessly harsh, in my own ears. “Look, honey. He’s dead. He’s lying there with the back of his head blown off. I come in and find you standing over him, and his bourbon not even dry on the floor where he spilled it. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

  “I didn’t kill him. I loved him. I would never have killed him.”

  “Loving and killing aren’t incompatible. Sometimes, under the right circumstances, killing is a natural development. It’s happened more times than you or I could count.” Her hot eyes seemed to cloud with confusion, as if her mind were groping dumbly for a convincer, and then they cleared suddenly, acquiring a glittering intentness.

  “Where’s the gun?”

  The question was like a short jab to the solar plexus. I stood very still, not breathing, watching in her face the slow signs of returning assurance. After a few seconds, I dropped to my knees and looked under the sofa. Getting up, I prowled the room, looking in all the places a gun might have been dropped or thrown or placed. When I’d worked back to her, she hadn’t moved. Her eyes, still hot and dry, had completely lost their dilation, shining now with that bright intentness. Her lips were parted, fluttering very slightly with the passage of long, deep breaths. The tip of her pink tongue flicked out and around them. Reaching out, I separated her stiff fingers from the suede purse they were clutching. I rummaged for a minute and gave it back.

  “Okay,” I said. “No gun. The killer must have taken it away.”

  She said abruptly, “What are you doing here?” Her voice broke.

  I shrugged, looking into her dry, fever-infested eyes. “What’s the difference? It makes no difference now.”

  “Maybe not. Unless you’ve been here before.”

  I laughed harshly. “To kill him, you mean? So then I come right back and show myself. Don’t be a fool, honey.”

  Her head jerked around under a sudden strong compulsion, and her eyes dropped again to the husk on the door. She may have experienced, in that instant, an intense sensory recollection of the look and smell and feel of him in the neural rand glandular riot of the passion they had shared. However it was, when she turned back to me her eyes had lost their bright wariness and were filled instead with an incredible, flaring anguish.

  I felt, all at once, very tired. “You’d better get out of here,” I said. “You’d better get the hell home in a hurry.”

  “What about you?”

  I turned my back and fumbled in my coat for cigarettes. The smoke of the tobacco was caustic in my lungs, leaving an acrid taste on my tongue.

  “There’s a dead man on the floor, honey. Someone killed him. It adds up to cops. When you leave, I’ll call them.”

  I stood there with my back to her, and for quite a while there was no sound at all. Then there was the silken rustle of movement and, from a long, long way off, maybe the distance to the end of everything, the faint, oily click of the door catch. My ear drums picked up the sound and amplified it, rolling it around the interior of my skull like the thunder of artillery around a rim of enclosing hills.

  The telephone was on a table beyond the body. The outstretched arm seemed to be pointing to it, showing the way like a sign on a map. Making a careful detour, I went over and called the police.

  “I want to report a murder,” I said.

  I waited until the call was channeled to Homicide and a tired voice came on. We went through a weary-routine of question and answer.

  Name?

  Address?

  Sit tight and don’t touch anything.

  I cradled the phone and went out into the kitchen.

  In the kitchen, I sat on a tall stool and lit another cigarette. The faucet was dripping in the sink. I figured that it took about three seconds for a drop of water to form on the lip of the faucet and fall off into the sink. The drops struck the porcelain with almost mathematical regularity, making small tapping sounds. Tap…tap…tap. I started to count the sounds of the drops striking the porcelain, and I had counted four hundred and six when there was movement in the living room. I got off the stool and went in.

  A medium-sized guy in a loose brown suit was standing just inside the vestibule. His eyes toured me as I came through the door, moving off to a point of focus on the wall, as if they’d had all they wanted in short order. He had a narrow face with a long hooked nose and flesh that sagged from the bones. His voice was resigned, characterized by a heavy patience that remained as a habit even when it wasn’t appropriate.

  “Your name Henry Frost?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You call Homicide?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m it. Dunn’s the name. Detective-Lieutenant.”

  Maybe I was supposed to make like a host. Maybe I was supposed to smile and be amiable. His eyes crossed me again to another point of focus, and he waited with that heavy patience and gave me no help whatever.

  “The body’s this side of the sofa,” I said.

  He moved to the sofa with a kind of easy shuffle and looked over the back. “So it is,” he said.

  Behind him, another man materialized from the vestibule and leaned against the jamb. He had something in his teeth and was working at it with a wooden match. He didn’t bother to look at me at all.

  “Who is he?” Dunn said.

  “His name was Caldwell. Bruce Caldwell.”

  “Who’s been here with you?” He stabbed a linger at the body. “Besides him, I mean.”

  “No one.”

  “You wearing perfume?”

  “Do I look like the kind of man who’d wear perfume, for God’s sake?”

  His eyes smeared me again with their weary patience. “I don’t know. I don’t know what a man who’d wear perfume is supposed to look like. As far as I’m concerned, you look like a man who’d do anything, even murder. No offense. That’s just a way of saying you look a hell of a lot like every other man I’ve ever seen.” He stabbed again with the finger. “I wonder if he’s wearing it.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  His eyebrows arched hairy backs. “That supposed to mean something?”

  “You might figure it to mean something.”

  “Lover-boy, you mean? Hot number with the dames?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You married?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder if I could figure that to mean something?”

  “You could try, but you’re wasting your time.”

  He shrugged and a ragged little sound that might have been a chuckle came out of his throat. “Hell, I’m wasting time right now.” He moved around the sofa, the thin edges of his nostrils quivering. “You smell the perfume? Don’t you?”

  I smelled it, all right. A delicate Stringency suspended in cordite It made me sick.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You know any dame who wears perfume that smells like that?”

  “I can’t think of any. It’s probably a common scent.”

  “Sure. Probably. It may have been a dame who got him. If he was the kind of guy you imply, a dame’s a good bet.” He stopped and looked up at me again, and his lips curved in a gentle smile. “Or a husband,” he said.

  Kneeling beside the body, he got a handful of hair and lifted the head, looking in at an angle at the exposed profile. When he stood up,
his hand was bloody. Taking a white handkerchief from his hip pocket, he wiped the hand carefully.

  “Pretty,” he said. “Real pretty. Lay him in a casket so the back of his head doesn’t show, he’ll be a real tear-jerker for those dames you mentioned. Well, we got work to do. You go on back in the kitchen and wait around. I’ll talk to you some more later.”

  I went back into the kitchen and crawled onto the stool again. I heard more men come into the living room from the hall. They moved around, talking, and after awhile I heard the explosion of flash-bulbs and caught the acrid odor of powder.

  I could also hear the faucet dripping. I started counting the small sounds again, and the higher I counted the louder the sounds got, until finally each drip was like the detonation of a grenade inside my skull. I quit counting then and tried to ignore the drips, but by that time it was impossible, and the grenades kept right on detonating in my head. It was like the old Chinese torture chestnut, and I was about to go out and tell Dunn that I had to get the hell out of there when he came in, instead.

  He pulled himself up onto the edge of the cabinet beside the sink and peered at me through a thin, drifting plume of smoke.

  “I guess we’re about finished in there,” he said. “We didn’t find much of anything that looks like it would be any help. Way I got it figured, he had someone with him, and they were having a drink. A guy named Henry Frost, say. Just to give him a name, you understand. It simplifies talking about him if he’s got a name.”

  “I thought you’d settled for a woman,” I said.

  He smiled his gentle smile and looked at me through the pale blue, transparent plume. “Anyhow,” he went on, “the phone rang. This guy Caldwell turned around with his glass in his hand to go to the phone, and that’s when he was killed.”