The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  I felt as if someone had reached inside me and grabbed a handful of entrails. “How do you know that?” I said.

  “I got the idea from the way he was lying. Like he’d been heading for the phone, you know. It figures, too. Once Caldwell got on the phone, it might have been too late for murder. Because he might just mention that Frost was there, and that would never do. You know how these phone conversations go. ‘Busy, Caldwell?’ ‘Not particularly. Just having a drink with Henry Frost.’ You see what I mean? Once he said that, there couldn’t be any murder. I’ll check to see if there was a call through the switchboard.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use my name,” I said.

  His mirthless chuckle came up again behind the gentle smile. “You shouldn’t be so sensitive. Like I said, it’s just a convenience. How come you came here tonight?”

  “I had an appointment.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m a lawyer. Caldwell wanted to see me.”

  “So that’s it. I guess a guy like Caldwell needed a lawyer pretty often. You ever handle anything for him before?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you have an office? You make a practice of calling on clients to do business?”

  “I don’t make a practice. Sometimes I make an exception.”

  “Well, that’s a fast answer. I can see you’re a lawyer, all right. What was it about?”

  “Why he wanted to see me? I don’t know. He was dead when I got here.”

  “Sure. DOA. He never put out any hints earlier?”

  “None whatever,” I replied.

  “Okay. What’s your address?”

  I told him, and he wrote it down in a little book. He wrote it very slowly, in tiny characters, with the stub ot a pencil. He read it back, and I said it was right, and he put the book and the pencil in the breast pocket of his coat.

  “You can go now’,” he said. “Later we’ll want you to make a formal statement and sign it. By that time, I may have thought of something else to ask you.”

  I said all right and good-night and went out through the living room. The guy who’d come in with Dunn was sitting on the sofa with his feet up. Everyone else was gone, and some of those who’d come and gone had taken Bruce Caldwell with them. I went out into the hall and down in the elevator and outside.

  A police car was standing by the curb. A cool wind was blowing down the deep canyon of the street, and I could see, looking up beyond the faint flush of city lights, the cold and distant stars.

  I’d parked my car on a side street.

  I walked down to the corner and around it and stopped in the shadow of the building. I stood quietly for a moment with my shoulders braced against brick, then I moved to the corner of the building and looked back at the police car. There was one guy in it, in the driver’s seat, and he had his head down on the steering wheel.

  Moving swiftly, I crossed over to the trash can and reached in and got the gun and walked back down the side street to my car. At home, I drove the car into the basement garage and shoved the gun tip on one of the hot air ducts that ran overhead from the furnace. Later I’d dispose of it permanently. Upstairs in the dark kitchen, I found a bottle of rye in a cabinet and took a long pull from the bottle. The whisky burned in my throat and flared like phosphorus in my stomach. I waited in the darkness, gagging, until the heat had subsided to a diffusive warmth, and then I went through the living room to the front hall and upstairs to the bedroom.

  Meg was asleep on her side in her twin bed. If she was not asleep, she pretended that she was. Moonlight slanted through the half-shut slats of the blinds and flowed along the contour of her rounded hip. I found pajamas in a drawer of my chest and undressed beside my bed. Lying on my back, I looked up at the ceiling and thought about everything that had happened. There was nothing, even then, that I wanted changed. And that was good, at least, because it was far too late for change, even if I’d wanted it.

  I didn’t sleep. I was still lying on my back, in the position I had first taken, when the electric alarm went off beside Meg’s bed. It was the first time I’d ever known her to set the alarm.

  I lay silently with my eyes half open and watched her silence the alarm and swing out of bed. She went over to the bathroom door and snapped on the light inside, and I could see against it, through the sheer stuff of her nightgown, the lithe loveliness of her body. She closed the door behind her, and the shower began running in its stall. Alter about five minutes, she came back into the bedroom and turned on the small lights on both sides of her dressing table mirror. Sitting on the bench before the mirror, turned a little to the side so that I was looking at her profile, she began to paint her nails. The sheer robe that had replaced her gown fell open across her thighs from its narrow belt, and she crossed her knees, resting each hand palm down on the upper knee as she painted the nails with the little brush that was fastened to the stopper of the bottle. She worked very slowly and carefully. She didn’t look in my direction at all.

  When the paint on her nails was dry, she turned on the bench and began to brush her hair with long, even strokes. She brushed the hair until it shone like white gold in the light. When she lifted the brush to the crown of her head to start the long sweep down the fall of her hair, I could see clearly in the glass the firm protrusion of her breasts against the thin robe.

  The stroking done, she lay the brush down on the glass top of the table and picked up a thin gold tube of lip rouge. She applied the scarlet stuff to her lips in a bright smear, leaning forward to look into the mirror, smoothing it with the tip of a little finger and tucking her lips in together to give it the shape of her mouth. Standing, she loosened the robe and let it drift down in a thin cloud over the bench behind her.

  Naked, she padded across the room to the closet, gathering clothing. Carrying the garments, she came back to her bed and began to dress. In a couple of frail black wisps, she sat on the side of the bed and smoothed nylon onto her long legs, holding each leg in turn out stiffly with the toes pointed, bending far forward from the hips to draw her hands up slowly from the ankle along calf and thigh. Standing again, she lowered a soft black dress over her head. The dress was slashed low in front, a narrow V between her breasts, and was like lacquer on her hips. In high-heeled sandals, she returned to the mirror and repaired her hair, looking at herself with quiet appraisal in the glass. Then she turned and went out of the room.

  She still hadn’t looked at me. Not even briefly.

  I kept on lying there in bed, and pretty soon the good smell of coffee came up the stairs and into the room, and for just a second it was a morning like any other morning, with the paper to read and a trip to the office around nine. I lifted my arms back and above my head, stretching, feeling the muscles pull tight along the length of my body. I showered and dressed and went down.

  Meg was in the breakfast room. She was standing at the wide window overlooking the back lawn, and I saw that she was holding a cup of coffee in her hands. I went up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, but she was still as stiff as wood, and the chill of her flesh came through her dress into my fingers.

  “There’s coffee on the sideboard,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  I went over and poured coffee into a cup. I carried the cup over to the table and sat down. Meg still stood at the window with her back to me, looking out into the bright sunshine of the morning. The steam from my coffee ascended into my nostrils. It was a good smell. It was a smell a man might miss if he were never to know it again.

  “You said bourbon,” Meg said. “You said his bourbon wasn’t dry on the carpet.”

  I looked down into the black liquid with the steam rising lazily from its surface. “Bourbon’s a word, honey. You see a man taking a drink, you say, ‘Look at that man drinking bourbon.’ It stands for anything.”

  She
shook her head. “No. You say highball, or cocktail, or just drink. You don’t say bourbon, or rye, or scotch, unless you know for sure it’s bourbon, or rye, or scotch. That’s why you said bourbon, Hank, because you knew it was bourbon. Because you saw him mix it and even had one with him out of the glass that was sitting on the little table at the end of the sofa. That was the first time you were there, Hank. The time you killed him.”

  She stood waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say, because there was no use in confessing something she already knew, and there was no use lying when a lie would do no good. After a while, she said quietly, “I’ve been wondering why you came back. I think it must have been because you saw me arrive and didn’t want me to get into trouble. I think it was because you love me very much. I think that’s why you stayed and called the police, too. Because you love me, I mean. Because you thought I wouldn’t think you’d killed him if you did a thing like that. It was an awful chance to take.”

  She turned then and faced me, the bright glass behind her, looking at me with eyes that were dead, holding the fragile cup in her hands below her breasts.

  “I’ve committed adultery,” she said softly. “You killed Bruce Caldwell because you thought the killing was a way to get me back. I ought to be grateful for such a love.” She stopped, looking at me across the cradled cup, and when she spoke again her voice was no more than a whisper. “But I’m not. I’m very sorry, but I loved Bruce so much that there’s nothing I want now but to see his murderer dead.”

  The tiredness inside me was like nothing I’d ever known before. “That’s a lot of love,” I said.

  “I’m very confused,” she answered. She shook her head and came beside my chair. “You were wrong in what you did, but you didn’t know you were—and you did it for me. I wonder… I wonder if you would like to have me one more time.”

  I looked up at her, at the strange blankness on her face, the beautiful body that was freshly bathed and clothed. I understood the ritual she had performed now, as nearly as such things can be understood. She came to me, and she was stiff and cold, the way a woman can be when she is giving herself in payment for something.

  And when it was all over, I was not surprised to find a gun in her hand pointing at my head.

  A LONG WAY TO K.C.

  Originally published in Giant Manhunt #3 (1954).

  Dickie Cosmos went to Greenview on vacation for two reasons. In the first place, he had just enough money to pay train fare that far from Kansas City. In the second place, Greenview was a burg Buck Finney wouldn’t be caught dead in, and this increased Dickie’s chances of not being caught there in an identical condition.

  It had started in a poker game in Finney’s hotel room. They were playing five card draw, Jacks or better and no limit, and Dickie drew one card to two pairs and filled a house. He was holding aces and eights. This combination is well-known in the folklore of Americana as the dead man’s hand, and that’s the way it turned out for Dickie. He backed the full house in a succession of raises and counter-raises to the amount of a cool grand in the face of Finney’s straight flush, and he wound up dead. Figuratively, that is, with a good prospect for making it literal.

  This was because he’d been betting the hand and nothing else. He didn’t have the grand. He hung on desperately, hoping to recoup, but he only doubled his deficit. When the game broke up, he turned his charm on and his pockets out. His handsome face and the palms of his hands were clammy, but he put on a pretty good front. Unfortunately, however, Big Finney was impervious to fronts, even charming ones. He looked at Dickie across the poker-table, and his own face was like something left over from the Paleolithic Age.

  “You welshing, Dickie?”

  “No, Buck. Hell, no. I just need a little time, that’s all.”

  Finny built a neat little stack of blue chips and then knocked it over with a flip of his thick fingers. The chips clattered and rolled, and Dickie wondered if the gesture was supposed to be significant. He decided that it was, and the cold sweat glistened on his smooth face.

  “Sure, Dickie,” Finney said. “I’ll give you time. I’ll give you just twenty-four hours.”

  Dickie looked stricken. “Twenty-four hours isn’t much time to raise two grand, Buck.”

  Finney shrugged and said, “I’m giving you a break. It’s for the sake of the dames, Dickie. I wouldn’t want to break their hearts if I could help it.”

  It was true that Dickie knew a lot of dames. He usually managed to live pretty well on their collective donations, as a matter of fact. None of them had two grand, however, and after eighteen hours had passed without any appreciable improvement in his financial condition, Dickie checked schedules at Union Station and caught the train south to Greenview.

  He didn’t even have the nominal price of a room in the town s solitary hotel. It was a dismal clapboard dump, anyhow, and Dickie took a dim view of being its guest, even on a non-paying status. While he was trying to figure an angle, he wandered out of town along a narrow, rocky road. This was Ozark country, and all round him the earth lifted ancient bones bristling with scrub oak. Farm buildings cling precariously to the slopes of hills and ridges.

  Dickie walked quite a way, mostly uphill, it seemed, and after a while he was aware that his feet were burning inside his narrow shoes. Moreover, he was as dry as a bag of popcorn, and he wanted a drink of water. Turning off onto a private drive that climbed to the yard of a shabby farmhouse, he labored up and looked around for a well. Spotting it off behind the house a short distance, he went back and helped himself. The water was sweet and cold, and he sat down on the well-cap to smoke a cigarette, feeling somewhat better.

  It was then he saw the dame. She came out the back door of the house and stood on the porch looking across the yard at him. She was wearing a man’s blue work shirt, open at the throat, and a pair of jeans that were too big for her and must have belonged to die same man who contributed the shirt. The outfit did nothing for her, but Dickie had a sharp eye for dames, and he could see that there was a nice distribution underneath. She had dark, tangled hair with enough natural curl to minimize its unbrushed condition, and her face was the soft, heavy type that would someday become gross, though now, in its brief prime, it possessed a kind of full, sulky sensuality that was more vital than beauty. Dickie lifted a hand in greeting and projected his charm.

  “I helped myself to a drink. Do you mind?”

  She came down off the porch and crossed the yard.

  “It’s all right. You can have all the water you want.”

  Her voice suited her body. Heavily sensual, throaty, it achieved the effect of a caress that was as tangible as the intimacy of fingers. Dickie stepped up the voltage of his smile, flashing enamel and lifting an eyebrow in a practiced boyish expression.

  “My name’s Cosmos. Dickie Cosmos. I just walked out from town.”

  “I’m Rose Flannery. From Greenview?”

  “That’s right.”

  She sat down beside him on the well-cap, and he noticed a petulant droop to her full lower lip. She hiked the loose legs of her jeans up over her knees, exposing slim ankles, slightly soiled, that swelled upward in beautiful calf lines.

  “I don’t blame you for walking out,” she said. “Greenview’s a damn good town to be from.” Oh, oh, he thought. A discontented dame. A restless rustic lovely. What could be sweeter? Or more vulnerable?

  “It didn’t look like much of a place,” he said cautiously.

  She laughed bitterly and gave him a sidewise look from under thick lashes. “Not that this rock pile is any improvement. You don’t look like the kind of guy who’d be wasting his time in the sticks. You from Kansas City?”

  He wondered if he should play it straight, and decided that it couldn’t do any harm. As a matter of fact, he was getting a fast impression that he might have blundered onto somethi
ng rare. Not as slick as the chicks around Twelfth, of course, but pretty good compensation for the time it would take a guy to figure a way out of exile.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been to Kansas City. St. Louis, too. I liked KC better. I always planned to go back.”

  “It’s a pretty good town, as towns go. Not as good as it used to be, though. Not like it was when Old Tom ran it.”

  “Just so, it’s a town. Just so it’s got people and places.”

  He let his eyes drift over her obviously, and got a spontaneous reaction, a kind of instinctive stationary strutting of her body. “You look like you do all right in KC, baby.”

  “And you look like you might be able to show a girl the way. How come you’re so far from home? Don’t tell me you came just to see the beautiful Ozark scenery, like they talk about for the summer suckers.”

  “Okay. I won’t tell you that.”

  She shrugged and lay back flat across the well cap. “Don’t tell me anything, if you don’t want to. A fat damn I care.”

  He laughed, leaning back against his braced arms. He felt a strange, warm affinity with this big country doll. He decided she’d do to play along with. Up to a point, of course.

  “Just say I’m here for my health,” he said.

  “You in trouble?”

  “You might call it that. Nothing that can’t be worked out eventually. Meanwhile, I need a place to hole up in.”

  “You figuring to stay in that flea bag in Greenview?”

  “I’m wide open to a better suggestion.”

  “Maybe this would be better.” She rolled her head on the well-cap and slanted a look at him from hooded eyes. The pulse in his throat leaped and hammered, and his insides were shaken by silent ribald laughter. Like a school kid, he thought. Like a damn green kid with the first time coming up. “Is that an invitation?”