The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse

by Michael Avallone

  I held back a shudder. I couldn’t hear any street sounds or traffic noises. The normal sounds of the city were at a standstill. I had the feeling of remoteness you’d get in a lamasery in Tibet. And that’s a pretty tough sensation to get in a crazy, crowded jungle like Manhattan.

  Footsteps thudded from the room behind me. I stopped casing the place and winked at Penny Darnell to show her everything was going to be all right. She smiled back but I’d never bluffed a wink more in my life. I felt lost. The empty area under my left armpit told me I’d been relieved of my P38. The P38 with T. T. Thomas’s remarkable dollar bill stuck in the clip. They had his wallet, too. I could tell that because my right hip pocket felt vacant against the back of the chair

  The footsteps got louder and an army of shoe leather moved past me and around the centre of the room.

  It wasn’t an army, just two men. But it had sounded like an army because one of them was big enough to be three people.

  “Don’t get up, anybody,” I said. “We’ll just have to take this sitting down.” Somebody laughed but I couldn’t tell who it was.

  The two men standing just in front of me were as mismatching as two guys can be. One of them was short and untidy and dull-looking and had my P38 clenched in one hairy hand. I dismissed him immediately as the ordinary variety of goon. The other one was different. Mucho different. He looked like somebody you could never dismiss.

  He was tall. About three stories’ worth. His shoulders looked as if a double set might have accommodated six eagles and their families. His clothes were business grey, expensively tailored and cut so that they’d never draw attention from the man who was wearing them. But his face was what held you.

  It was weatherbeaten and handsome the way the younger Gary Cooper used to be handsome. The features were all even and lean without a mark or blemish on them, as regular as if they’d been measured out on his face with a ruler. His kisser was a classic brown mask of perfectly distributed colouring. And except for his eyes, his kisser would have been a mask.

  They were as brown as chocolate caramels. But not one-tenth as soft looking. Also, he had about seventy-five pounds on the young Cooper which made him seem as formidable as a Sherman tank and twice as invulnerable. I eyed him with respect, measuring his shoulders with a mental yardstick and settling for a 36-inch spread.

  He certainly didn’t look like a gangster. Not by appearances. He looked like a plainsman who’d crashed the big time, a guy who’d traded a palomino for a Cadillac, the old water hole for a kidney-shaped swimming pool. He screamed of oil wells and Hollywood contracts than ran seven years with no options.

  He was staring down at me, his face still masklike but his eyes dancing with interest and penetration. I could see I’d been holding things up and this big, brown man found me very insignificant indeed. I felt insignificant and just a little as if I were standing in the shade of a sequoia.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” I offered lamely.

  His lips drew back and brilliant white teeth vied with his bronzed beauty for attention.

  “I’m Drill,” he boomed as if he were striking oil. “Carver Calloway Drill. And I reckon you’re the biggest frog in this little old pond right now. Seems to me like you’ve been kicking up the cabbage patch, Noon.”

  I shook my head. My ears rang with the thunder of him. And I hadn’t been far off the mark. Texas claimed him all right. Texas or anything that was the Southwest U.S.A.

  “I reckon, Mr. Drill. But you got me – tell me more.”

  Holly Hill stirred in her chair.

  “Wise up, you bastard. He doesn’t play your way. Try some funny jokes and he’ll take you apart.”

  “Dry up, Holly,” Carver Calloway Drill rumbled in his best I’ll-Shoot-Me-Some-Redskins voice. “Noon here is a right sensible fellah. Soon as he gives me what old T.T. had in that wallet, I’ll call this round-up off.”

  “You mean rodeo, don’t you?” I asked. “And what makes you think. I ever saw T. T. Thomas at all? I never saw him in my life.”

  Carver Calloway Drill reached down and placed his brown right hand against my Greek profile and pushed. Pushed hard. My nose mashed down like a pancake. I bit my lips and waited until his hand went away. The bones in my nose snapped back into place and the flesh filled out again, the way a rubber ball does after you’ve poked a finger into it. I blinked and water filled my eyes.

  His eyes laughed at me.

  “That’s just to cut the nonsense. Don’t bunkhouse me, boy. Now I got me old T.T.’s wallet out of your hip pocket, fellah. Me and my partners have gone through that thing like a Texas twister. What we were aiming for isn’t there, so I reckon it’s pretty plain you been doing some fancy whingdinging and hid it someplace.”

  My nostrils sucked in some necessary oxygen.

  “Sounds reasonable. But suppose I told you I found the wallet on the sidewalk outside my office?”

  His eye-smile faded.

  “I wouldn’t buy that. Just to stop you from lying again, I’d tell you I know the Chinee fellah handed you that wallet because he thought it was yours, when the truth is, it dropped out of T.T.’s stuff when he brung his duds in for cleaning. I figured that’s what happened to it when it didn’t turn up anywhere else. You see, T.T.’s laundry ticket didn’t turn up nothing but his socks and shirts. And when I thought about it a mite longer, there was nowhere else it could be. Holly here was looking for it ’most as bad as I was and she’s been telling me all about how you planted your boots in my business.”

  I gave him some ice. “Your business killing and butchering, Mr. Drill? A man isn’t something for the slaughterhouse.”

  “Shut your flapper.” His voice was quiet but he prodded a big brown finger in my left eye. I cursed as tears flooded it and red lights danced around. And Penny Darnell couldn’t take any more.

  “Leave him alone, you coward,” she shrilled. “He can’t fight back and you’re taking advantage of it.”

  Carver Calloway Drill looked at her and laughed loudly. “Don’t horn in, you little filly. So keep still.”

  Nobody had ever talked to Penny Darnell like that before. Ever. Her cheeks turned as red as her lipstick. but she clamped her lips shut and lowered her head.

  “All right, lover,” I said. “Let’s swap horses.”

  His eyes came back to me.

  “Swap? You got nothing to swap, fellah. One way or another, you’ll hand the goods over. And pronto.”

  I stared up at him. We locked eyes. I kept right on staring at him. He must have been some kind of judge of character or men because he suddenly took a pack of cigarettes from one pocket of the grey suit and placed one in my mouth. He lit it with a jewelled lighter slightly smaller than a hamburger.

  “Talk, boy. Let’s hear what kind of horse you got to swap. Ten minutes more won’t hurt none.”

  My mind was flying. “Aren’t you going to offer the ladies a smoke?”

  “Talk,” he said. He wasn’t going to say it again.

  “Okay, Drill. We’ll play it your way.” I took a deep lungful of smoke and exhaled noisily. “I’ve got it all right. I give it to you and we all wind up in an alley somewhere. D-E-A-D – dead. That’s not much inducement to co-operate, is it? You look as if you’ve come up the trail a long way. Probably worked for nickels when you were a kid. So why not give me a good reason for handing it over? Just as one self-made man to another.”

  He came close to sneering. And guys his size never have to sneer.

  “I could make you die slow or fast. Fast if you hand it over. Slow if you don’t. How’s that grab you?”

  “Great. Real great. Not much to choose from.” I decided to try him out. “Well, I haven’t got it on me. Now what do you do?”

  His smile was deadly.

  “Just tell me where it is, that’s what.”

  “You’ll have to beat it out of me,” I suggested. “And I can take plenty.”

  “Bet you can, Noon. But how would you feel watching me go t
o work on your filly here? I’d like to slap my branding iron to her anyway. Bet that’d open your mouth real fast.”

  Penny Darnell cursed. Real loud and hard. Carver Calloway Drill laughed and the tommy-gunner joined in. They were killing each other.

  I sighed. “I was hoping you’d pick Holly Hill. That I wouldn’t have minded seeing. Okay, you win.” I jerked my head at Holly Hill and Ace. “How can you be sure they haven’t got what you’re looking for?”

  Drill put his broad, brown mitts on his hips.

  “Man, you really beat the bunkhouse. They were roping you in because they knew you had it. That’s why I rode herd on them. Can’t you figure that one for yourself?”

  “You can’t blame a guy for trying, Drill.” I shrugged in my bonds.

  Ace cleared his throat.

  “Noon, get some sense. Play ball. All he wants is the map. He doesn’t really have a reason to knock us off.”

  Map. So that’s what it was. A map.

  “Says who?” I sneered. “You and Holly wanted the damn thing bad enough to kill people for it. He wants it too. He also kills people and blows up stores for it. Now you’re trying to tell me if I hand it over he’ll pat me on the back, give me a cigar and I can walk out of here whistling ‘Dixie.’ Save it before I laugh in your silly face.”

  The ugly little guy holding my P38 stretched up and whispered in Drill’s mile-high ear. Drill nodded. “How come you got this peculiar kind of hogleg, Noon? You own a Colt, don’t you?”

  “I do,” I admitted. “But Holly Hill grabbed it. That’s a spare I picked up in War Two. I can’t go around in my kind of business unprepared.”

  Carver Calloway Drill looked at Holly Hill. She avoided his eyes. Her mountainous breasts jutted out between the ropes. Drill scowled.

  “Damn you, Holly,” he roared. “You started this whole ruckus. T.T. tearing after you like a bull. Crossing up his old saddle buddy just cause he’d seen you undressing yourself with that two-bit circus in Houston. None of this would have happened if T.T. had played square with me. I ought to hogtie you and leave you for the worms.”

  “ – you.” She said what no lady should ever say. “Find your damn treasure and do what you want. I’m sick to hell of all this. And I hope T.T.’s ghost haunts you till the day you drop!”

  You just never talked back to guys like Carver Calloway Drill. Not this year or any other. He took two quick, angry strides to where she sat. He drew back one ham-sized fist and rammed it against her chin. Her head went thataway. She collapsed like a rag doll in the chair. But he hadn’t knocked the stuffing out of her. The way she was built nobody could.

  Penny Darnell whimpered, her voice lost in pity. Ace stifled an oath. Carver Calloway Drill threw back his head and roared. Then he stopped roaring.

  “That ties it, Noon,” he said. “Tell me now or I’ll go to work on your filly.”

  “You win, cowboy,” I said. “It’s in my office. Under the rug on the floor. Right-hand corner as you come into the room.”

  He looked at me for a long time.

  “What shape is it in? What I mean is – what’s it on?”

  I couldn’t see what difference it made now. But I also knew why he hadn’t thought of looking for it in my P38. He hadn’t known what it was.

  “A one-dollar bill with a lot of figures written on the back. Naturally, they were Sanskrit to me. The buck was in a secret compartment of his wallet. I didn’t spot it until a few hours ago.”

  He whistled. “Old T.T. He sure could be real cute. Must have been all them movies he saw. Real cute. Just like a treasure hunt.” Suddenly, he turned to the guy holding my P38. “Go on, Luke. Take his keys. Ought to take you no more than an hour. If he’s lying, God help him.”

  “God?” I couldn’t help it. It shot right out of me. “When did you ever hear of God?”

  He surprised me by not kicking my teeth down my throat. “I’d knock your head off ’cept I want to palaver with you. Holly’s just a tramp. Forget about her. She had it coming.”

  “Old T.T. didn’t think she was.” I reminded him because I wanted to find out more. “He was in love with her.”

  Luke had left the room on his mission when Carver Calloway Drill answered my notion.

  “Love? Grown man like you talking about love? Old T.T. sees her rolling and bumping in that cheap circus and you call it love? Well, I don’t. All he had was the heat. So she talks him into a double-cross. What kind of love is it when it can make you cross the best buddy you ever had?”

  “Okay, you had a legitimate beef. But what do you call what you did to him?”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “I ain’t going to talk about that with you, Noon. But I’ll tell you this much. Ten months we spent in the Texas hills locating that damn place. Ten months in the middle of nowhere, eating dust, going without food or water for days till you found a little of both. Living like animals. Then we made the strike. And I trusted him. Let him mark off the map because I never was much for writing or reading. You know what it feels like to be let down by a buddy you share the same blanket with for ten months? Then this circus comes to Houston and he saw her –” His mouth twisted viciously. “Damn softie. Him and his lily-white fingers. Never did a lick of work anyhow.”

  We were all listening now. Penny, Ace and me. The gunner looked bored. But I kept thinking of my P38 and what would happen when Luke came back from the mouse auditorium and proved I was handling the truth carelessly.

  But there wasn’t much more to hear. Carver Calloway Drill had shut down for the time being. I could see he had said all he was going to say. Memories, bitter ones, had made him go silent.

  In this business, nothing ever stays the same, though. The tables are one way one minute, and the next they are really turned.

  I say that because Carver Calloway Drill suddenly spun on his heel and left the room. And the machine-gunner lolling back in his chair looked as if he was dozing off.

  That wouldn’t have meant a thing, tied up as we were, except that I was looking across the room at Holly Hill, who had come to while I was chinning with Drill.

  And unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, she had managed, I didn’t know how, to loosen her bonds.

  FIFTEEN

  Everybody seemed to notice it at the same time, except the half-dozing gunner in the chair. Ace’s slitted eyes suddenly widened with elation, then Penny Darnell’s face opened up with comprehension and Holly Hill wagged her head furiously at them not to give it away. Me, I just stared across the dirty wooden floor at her and the smile she gave me was contemptuous.

  It was quite a trick. Now I could see how she had done it. Clothesline is clothesline, but as I told you, Miss Holly Hill was the owner of the biggest bustline since the Forida coast. And Carver Calloway Drill or the machine-gunner or the guy with my P38 had made a big mistake in tying her to the chair. They had run the cord around her chest to tie her to the chair, and it was a fine idea except for one thing. Holly Hill had worked the old Houdini trick with great results. You know – throw your muscles out, let them tie you and when they walk out of sight, relax, sag back to normal and you’ve got enough slack in the rope to at least move around. She must have puffed her chest out an extra six inches and nobody had been able to tell the difference. Now there was a good foot of free rope, and Holly Hill hadn’t been a strip teaser for nothing. The way she was twisting her catlike body around in the chair would have done credit to the boa constrictor that Penny Darnell had compared her to.

  But she had to go slow. The machine-gunner was the big fly in the ointment. Something had to be done about him. Even half-dozing as he was, the slightest noise or false move would arouse him. Luckily, Penny Darnell’s chair was between him and Holly Hill.

  In the middle of her quiet slithering in the chair, I caught Holly’s eye. She looked surprised until I indicated the gunner with a slight nod of my head. I was glad she was quick on the uptake. I certainly couldn’t spell it out for her. And we had to move fast.
Carver Calloway Drill might be coming back any time now.

  I waited until I was sure that Holly Hill was just about ready to be able to walk away from her chair a free woman. She never could have gotten the jump on the boy with the Tommy gun. He was a good ten feet away and not really asleep yet. Still half-dozing.

  What I was going to do was going to hurt a little, but there was no other choice.

  I swung my weight all over to one side and kicked with my heels to get leverage. The manoeuvre was a howling success. I crashed to the floor, taking the chair with me, making a racket that would have disturbed the whole graveyard. But I got what I wanted. The machine-gunner jerked erect and braked his chair forward with a sudden plunge, bringing his automatic weapon up muzzle first.

  I groaned. And it wasn’t all make believe. My shoulder ached with all my weight on it.

  For some reason the machine-gunner thought I was very funny. His cruel face crinkled and the holes in his face looked uglier than ever.

  “Serves you right,” he said in a voice that would have drilled through concrete. “Trying to pull a fast one.”

  I tried to roll over but the legs of my chair made it almost impossible. I felt pretty silly – I must have looked silly – but the gunner wasn’t budging from his chair. And I didn’t dare risk a glance in Holly Hill’s direction. And Carver Calloway Drill’s big voice was booming from the other room wanting to know what the hell was going on.