Call Me Killer (Prologue Crime)

by Harry Whittington

  He turned on the bed, faced her. “But I don’t. I don’t even remember your name.”

  “Marion,” she told him. She frowned, and bit her lip. “Listen to me, David. I know you’re afraid of the police — ”

  “I’ve got to find out if I killed Lambart!”

  She stared at him. “You didn’t kill him,” she said flatly. “But what do you want of me? What do you want me to do? I’ll do anything I can to help you — David.”

  He touched her, and wanted her. He could feel the responsive warmth flow from her arms into his fingers. He dropped his hands. “I want you to tell me all you know about me. Everything. From the first moment you saw me.”

  She looked at him, her black eyes searching his face. Finally, she smiled crookedly. “This will take a long time,” she said, “and we may as well be comfortable.” She snapped out the lamp on the table. For a moment she was a blurred shadow in the darkness. Gradually, the darkness cleared and he could see her face, lovely in the moonlight. His pulses quickened. “Darling,” she said. “I may be a stranger to you. But you’re no stranger to me!”

  She pushed him gently back upon the bed. She lay down beside him, doubled up her pillow so that her face was slightly above his. “First,” she said quietly, “I better tell you how we met. You were with Lambart and his bodyguard, this man Heron. You and Lambart argued. I heard you every time I came near the table. I could see you seething with rage. I noticed you at once. But I don’t think you even saw me. You were too angry, too full of your thoughts. You didn’t see me until Lambart’s bodyguard grabbed my arm when I was taking Lambart’s order. You told Lambart angrily to tell Heron to let me alone. When Lambart only smiled, you leaped up and jumped at Heron. He hit you with the side of his gun. You fell. Lambart rushed away, and Heron followed him. Dominic took you to the back room and fixed up your head wound. They revived you and you left. But you kept coming back all evening. When Slow Joe’s closed at midnight, and I came out, I saw you leaning against a lamp post.

  “I tried to talk to you. Tried to get you to tell me your name, and where you lived. You seemed not to know. I could see you were hurt and dazed. You’d stuck your neck out for me. So I brought you here. You slept on a pallet on the floor — at first. I got you a job as bartender at Slow Joe’s. And we had a wonderful life, David. A good life. You had a temper, and you didn’t like to see people get kicked around. But when we were alone together, we were happy.

  “I told you all about myself. You said nothing about your past. That was the only thing that ever came between us. Then there was this man Hal Slimer who came to see you after we’d been together about three months. He talked with you here. You got angry, and he went away. But he kept coming back.

  “Sometimes I would see this Hal Slimer with Ross Lambart. So I was sure it must be that Lambart knew something about you, and his hired man Slimer was hounding you for him. I knew that Lambart arranged charity payments for the poorer families in the neighborhood. I’d heard whispers that in every case, the families kicked back part of the payments to Slimer who collected for Lambart.”

  Sam could feel her breath warm against his face. But not even her nearness could dispel the anxiety knotted in the pit of his stomach. “What did Lambart know about me? What did he want?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t know. One afternoon, I told you and Dominic that I was too ill to work. I took a taxi and went uptown to Lambart’s office in the Citizens Trust Building.”

  She shivered. “From the first moment when Lambart invited me into his private office and closed the door, I knew I’d made a mistake. I wasn’t afraid of him, his smiles and his flabby white hands. It was just the creepy feeling of the place, it was unwholesome and dishonest.

  “He looked me over like I was some blue ribbon animal while I talked. I began to get mad, but I said what I went there to say. I told him that if you owed him money, I would try to pay it. If you had done something and there was anyway to settle and pay it off, I would try to do that. I told him if he would accept payment to leave you alone, I would try to make it.

  “The smile never left his face. He leaned over and patted my leg. He told me that he would come to see me. That he was sure it could be worked out between him and me.

  “It all happened at once then. It was the same night that we heard about Helen Dugan’s death that Lambart came to see me here at the hotel. I left work to meet him here.”

  Sam’s heart was hammering unremittingly now. “Helen Dugan?” he said. “What about her?”

  “She was Tom Dugan’s sixteen-year-old daughter. Tom was a widowed railroad worker who spent most of his evenings at Slow Joe’s. He was a friend of yours. They found Helen dead on the rocks at the side of the bridge. She was six months pregnant — ”

  Sam felt the word slip across his dry lips. “Lambart?”

  She nodded, close against him in the darkness; “Tom told you about it. He accused Lambart of killing his daughter. He tried to attack Lambart. You took Tom home. You must have bought a gun at a pawn shop. I didn’t know that though when you came home that night.

  “I went to the hotel,” Marion said. She touched his forehead. It was wet with sweat. “Lambart came. His proposition made me want to laugh at first. The things he wanted sickened me, but actually were funny when you looked at him, when you thought of what the City believed about him. In return, he promised he would never speak to you again, David. He would never go near you. You were free to stay with me as long as I wanted — and that would be forever.

  “It wasn’t funny any more then. I couldn’t stand the thought of his touching me. And yet I knew I’d do things a lot worse than he suggested if it meant you were going to be all right.

  “But just then, Don, the nightclerk called. He said only, ‘Miss Dyana, David Mye just crossed the lobby on the way upstairs.’ But Lambart must have heard him. He grabbed up his coat and hat and ran to the door. He stopped and said, ‘You two fixed this up between you. Don’t worry. It won’t end here. I’ll fix your friend now so you’ll wish you’d never planned a trick like this!”

  “I didn’t have a chance to say anything. I was at the door. I saw him run past you at the head of the stairs. You came into the room. You wanted to know why he was here. I couldn’t lie to you. I tried, and I just couldn’t. I told you about Lambart’s rotten proposition. You told me then that Lambart was responsible for Helen Dugan’s death. You said you knew now how Lambart worked. The way he got holds on people through their mistakes. And what he did to them. But that Lambart had hurt the last person on earth he was ever going to hurt. I tried to beg you to forget him. I told you I couldn’t stand to lose you.

  “Dominic and old Tom Dugan came then. They were afraid of your anger the way I was. Tom Dugan said he should never have told you about Helen and Lambart. But you told them coldly that it didn’t matter, what you were doing was for yourself and for me, as much as for Helen.

  “They took you in the hall and tried to reason with you. While you talked with them, I took all the bullets out of the .32 automatic, and put it back on the table empty. I dropped the clip in the waste basket and covered it with a newspaper. The gun was lighter then. I was afraid you’d notice.

  But you shoved it in the pocket of the sport coat we’d bought for you to wear on picnics. Picnics that I knew we’d never have again. Happiness that was all dead and finished.

  “You tried to get me to stay here at the Monterey. But I went with you — ” She was sitting up in bed now. He stared at her. He sat up and grabbed her arms.

  “Marion! You mean that I went into that office with an empty gun?”

  “You had to,” she whispered. ‘I had to take the bullets out. If I let you kill him, I lost you — and oh, God, David, I couldn’t stand that — ever!”

  12

  OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, a car horn sounded sharply, once.

  Marion leaped up from the bed, ran across the darkened room, and stood peering down into the street.

  “It’
s there, David,” she said. “Hurry.”

  She reached for the sash cord, her outstretched arm drawing a tightened silhouette of her trim body against the light through the window. Hastily, she pulled down the shade.

  “Hurry,” she said again. She ran around the bed, and snapped on the light. Both were forced for a moment to close their eyes against its brightness. When she opened her eyes, she found Sam looking at her, smilingly.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said simply.

  She laughed and shook her dark hair at him. “Thanks,” she answered. “But we haven’t time now. Get dressed, David. Quickly.”

  “What are we going to do?” he said.

  She hurled a look at him as she wriggled into a brown skirt. “We’re running away, David. We’re getting away. We’re going where they’ll never find us. Where no one will ever know us. Where you’ll be safe, darling, and — I can love you all I want to.”

  She’d hitched herself around now, zipping up the skirt along her hip. Her black hair was awry. Her fingers trembled in their speed.

  He stood up. She threw back a cheap muslin drape from a doorless clothes chest. “Wear this,” she said, tossing him a coat almost as repellent to him as had been the one he’d shoved down the culvert with a broken baseball bat.

  “That thing?”

  “I saw what you’ve been wearing,” she said. “Wear these things, David. You’ll feel so much better. And hurry, darling.”

  He pulled on the brown pants, the wine colored sport shirt. He watched her as she raked a brush through her hair, touched rouge to her cheeks, a lipstick to her soft mouth, and gave the results one final, hurried glance.

  “Whose car is it?” he said.

  “It’s Tom Dugan’s,” she told him. “It’s a very nice car. He bought it because when they were poor his daughter Helen had always wanted a fine car. He wanted to please her. Now Helen won’t need it, and Tom wants us to have a chance to get away.

  “Tom is down there watching it until we get there. He has signed the title over to us. It will be in the glove compartment. Helen’s driver’s license is there for me to use in case we’re stopped. We’ve got it all planned. We can drive the car down the coast to Fisherman’s Cove. Tom has friends there. He’ll telephone them we’re coming. We can sell the car then. Tom says there are dealers who will give us almost two thousand dollars for it. The fisherman friend of Tom’s will only take us to the seaplane port at San Ortnec. We’ll get a plane from there to Mexico, to Central America — anywhere, David — we’ll be safe and together — forever.”

  “But if I didn’t kill Lambart, Marion? I came back to find out. I had to know before I could give myself up to the police — I knew what they were like. If the gun was empty, how could I have killed him? If we run away — we can’t ever come back. We’ll be hounded.”

  “Darling, please don’t argue. Not now. We’ve not much time. Let’s go while we can: I promise you, it’ll be all right”

  “Do you think I killed Lambart?”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “Then let’s stay here. I can’t run away. I’ve been in trouble before. I know. You can’t run away. They never let up on you.”

  She came close to him. Her black eyes were swimming in tears.

  “Please, David. Come with me. We mustn’t stay here. If we stay, I lose you. I can’t stand to lose you again. Don’t you see, we haven’t a chance here. Even Tom Dugan, doing everything he can to help because he loves you, thinks you killed Lambart. He knows that David Mye was quick-tempered, and capable of murdering Ross Lambart. He knows that David Mye left Slow Joe’s Bar firmly resolved to kill Lambart. We’ve no way in the world to prove you didn’t. It is only a matter of time now until the police come — our only chance is to get away.”

  Sam shook his head. Before his eyes flashed images from those terrible years when he had been hounded by the police, captured, jailed and sentenced to prison. For a crime of which he was absolutely innocent. And even more frightening was the knowledge they must have known he was guiltless. He wouldn’t even have had to go to the reformatory, they told him, if he would turn State’s witness against his friend. The suffocating feeling of being penned, barred and held in, swept over him now, so that he opened his mouth wide to drag in a full breath of air. To spend the rest of his life, feeling as he had those six months in the State reformatory was unbearable. He shook his head again.

  “Darling, don’t you see what they’ll do to you?” Marion pleaded. “There is no way to prove you’re innocent. We’ve got to get away.”

  He allowed her to hurry him. But Sam Gowan’s life habit, set during the past eleven years, was caution. He had learned a frightened way of obeying every law no matter what it did to a man’s natural impulses, drives and personality. Life far him had become a maze of contradictory laws leading into blind alleys and dead-end streets. But Sam had become accustomed to run with the law through each clearly lighted doorway, always frustrated and always banging his head against sudden, unseen walls of laws made by men unlike him, for the clear advantage of men unlike Sam.

  To run away with Marion, even as badly as he suddenly wanted to, was to make himself a fugitive. Outside the law again, when he had ten years ago sworn never to live like that again. He could not tell himself, as Marion tried to tell him, that he was simply up against the law of one group of men. Law without mercy any more, a frightening number of times without justice even. “If they catch you now,” Marion said tensely, “do you think they’ll care whether you’re guilty or not? You’ll look guilty — and that will be enough for them. They’ll tell you that you’re innocent until you’re proved guilty — but you’ll be guilty from the minute you’re caught.”

  “But can we run all the rest of our lives?” Sam muttered. “What sort of life would we have?”

  She caught his arms in her small hands. “Oh, David. David. What has happened to you? Where have you gone? What sort of life did we have together for six months? We’ll have a brave and free life — an honest life. If you’re caught — will the police who arrest you be honest, or will their lives be filled with petty viciousness that they’ve gotten away with? Will the judge who tries you be honest, or will he be a politician, corrupt, his hands in a hundred sly deals to make himself richer and more corrupt? Will the jury who listens and decides your fate be any different from You? Or will they be little, frustrated and frightened people who have been told so much wrong that they don’t even know right and wrong any more?”

  She shook him with all her strength. “David, when we lived together, it hurt you to see injustice being dealt little people. But you didn’t run to the police with it. Because you knew that the police belonged to the people working that injustice. Now, you’re in trouble, David, and there’s no one who can help you enough to save you from them We’ve got to get away, David. It’s our only chance!”

  She pushed him toward the window. She snapped off the light, and returned to him. “We’re taking nothing, David. Just what we have on. I have a little money in my purse. When they come to look here, they’ll be delayed, because it will not seem that we have run away and left all our things behind us.” She pulled his head down and kissed him, hard. “Go out the window, David. Down the fire escape. Wait in the alley in the dark until I come. I’ll walk by you and get in Tom Dugan’s Buick down at the curb there.”

  She ran the shade up half way. He opened the window. Cold, damp air curled in about them. Sam shivered.

  “See it down there, darling,” she said. ‘That will get us away. Away from Eddie Heron and his hatred. Away from those thugs in police clothes — away from all our troubles. And we’ll be together — and safe.”

  He put his right leg over the sill, and then sat there for a moment, a battle raging inside him. This meant, he thought, that he was deserting Elsa, knowingly leaving her abandoned. He felt Marion’s firm hand on his shoulder, hurrying him.

  He stepped out on the fire escape, feeling the cold air cutting into hi
m. He breathed in deeply, feeling it swell his chest. For the first time in ten years, Sam Gowan felt that he was on his way to freedom. And then he wondered, is there still a place left on earth where a man can live at peace, in honesty and dignity?

  He bent to pull down the window.

  He heard the sharp, heavy sound of knuckles against the door of Marion’s room.

  He felt Marion sink against his hand on the window. His heart was thudding raggedly. He heard her sharp intake of breath as she stood up and walked across the room. The fists were pounding again.

  She came running back. She leaned out of the window.

  The drumming of those insistent fists grew louder.

  “Get away,” she whispered. “Take the car. Drive down to Fisherman’s Cove. Wait for me, David. It will still be all right.”

  She turned back to the door. “All right,” she said clearly. “I’m coming.”

  She snapped on the light, threw the bolt, unlocked the door. Outside it, grinning hungrily, stood Detective Sergeant Barney Manton.

  13

  “YOUR NAME Marion Dyana?” Manton inquired. He had one hairy hand against the door facing.

  “Yes.”

  “Know a guy named Sam Gowan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mind if I come in, baby?”

  “Yes.”

  Barney grinned. “Fiery little witch Gowan tools up with, ain’t you?”

  He pushed by her and closed the door behind him.

  “You alone, Sweetie? All by yourself?”

  “Yes. The room is not very large. Why don’t you look for yourself?”

  “I will, baby. I will. Oh, I intend to.”

  He went across to the clothes closet. For a moment he stood there with his hat pushed back on his head and grinned at her. Then he drove his fist hard into the middle of the muslin drape. It carried almost to the back wall.

  She didn’t appear impressed. “Are you satisfied?”