The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (24 page)

“Why doesn’t the fat fool go, get out of that doorway?” Vivian said. “Of all the fool places for a cop to stand around and kill time!”

Please
, I begged,
Please, God, don’t let him move. Don’t let him move, make him stay there. Right there!

“Listen,” Vivian said. “Turn the radio on again. You can shoot him. Make it look like
he
did it, himself. I’m getting nervous. I want to get this over with and get out of here.”

“Oh, sure,” Smitty said. “With this gun. It can be traced, you goon. That’s no good. There’s got to be some other way. That damned cop looks like he’s settled for the night over there.”

There was silence for a moment. I felt my leg twitch and jerk, uncontrollably. Vivian said: “Hurry up. He’s coming to, again.”

I lay very still. I got cramped from the huddled position they’d let my limp figure fall into. But I didn’t move again.

“His wrists,” Vivian said, “We can break a glass. A sharp piece of glass and cut the veins in his wrists.”

Smitty thought about that. I got afraid they would hear the thunder of my heart, know I was listening. Then Smitty said: “No. First place, the police would wonder about him being all bruised up. Going out the window, that wouldn’t have been noticed or thought anything of. Besides, the bleeding would take too long. We’ll wait. That cop’s got to leave sometime.”

It came to me quite clearly, then, what I had to do. I didn’t like the idea. I wasn’t brave about it. I just didn’t have any choice. It came to me that as far as they were concerned, I was already dead. There was no question but what they were going to kill me, by one method or another, sooner or later. They had to.

Knowing that I was going to die, anyhow, I suddenly knew that I’d make it as tough as possible for them, at least make a fight for it. Being shot wouldn’t be any worse than being tossed out that window. I braced both hands against the wall and lunged away from it, scrabbled to my feet, staggering back away from them. I was weak and trembling. Both Vivian and Smitty looked at me in surprise. Vivian still held the gun.

“Well,” Smitty said. “Snookums woke up.” He put his hands in his pockets, took out the rolls of nickels. “I’ll have to rock him off to sleep again.”

I started backing away, slowly, toward the door. I saw Vivian raise the revolver, saw her fingers tighten, whiten, around it. I heard Smitty say: “Don’t use that gun. We don’t have to. The radio’s off. They’d hear a shot all through the hotel. And there’d be no powder burns. It wouldn’t look like suicide. I’ll take care of him.”

He came at me fast, half running. I whirled and got to the corner of the room where it turned into the hall leading to the door. I stopped and swung around again. He was almost on me and his own momentum was too much for him to stop. I hit him. I swung with all my might, from the knees. The blow smashed into his cheeks. But nothing happened. He just swayed and looked at me with a sort of puzzled look in those wide-set, level gray eyes. I knew then that I was too weak to hurt him much.

I knew then that this was going to be like a dream I often had, where I was fighting somebody and I kept hitting them, hitting them, but nothing happened and they didn’t seem to be hurt. They’d keep laughing at me. This was going to be like that. For one crazy moment I thought that maybe all this was just part of some nightmare. Maybe I’d awaken any moment and find myself at home in bed, with Fran curled up warmly beside me.

Then I heard Vivian say: “Get out of the way, Smitty. I’ve got to shoot him. We can’t let him get away!” She sounded hysterical.

That was when I swung again. This time my fist hit Smitty on the point of the jaw and he staggered backward until his legs hit the edge of the bed and he sat down on it. I went down the hall toward the door, sprinting. I got the door open and looked back and saw Vivian turn the corner of the room and level the gun at me. The door slammed shut, blocking off the picture of that snarling, feline face of hers. I didn’t think of direction. I just turned to the left and ran and turned a corner of the hall and saw ahead of me on the right a door marked Fire Exit. I went through it and stopped. If they came after me, they’d assume that I’d gone down the stairs. So I went up. I went up two flights, three steps at a time, on my tiptoes, making as little noise as possible. At the top, I sprawled, exhausted, against the wall and listened. There was no sound from the fire stairs at all. Only the sound of my own labored breathing.

I went through into the sixteenth floor hallway, made my way to the elevator, rang the bell. It seemed like hours before the indicator crawled up to fourteen. I held my breath to see if it would stop there. It didn’t. It came on up to sixteen. The elevator operator, a middle-aged man with a hawk nose and glasses, peered at me curiously as I got in.

“Listen,” I said. “If you get a buzz at the fourteenth floor, don’t stop. Please. It – it’s a matter of life and death.”

I looked at the indicator bank and so did he. We both saw there was no signal to stop at fourteen. I leaned against the wall of the elevator and for the first time became really aware of the throbbing aches in my ribs and kidneys and at my left temple. There was a welt there from Smitty’s knuckles. I took out a handkerchief and wet it with my tongue, wiped some of the blood away from my lips. There wasn’t much. My lip was cut on the inside, was a little puffy.

“What happened?” the operator asked. He looked at me with that curious but unemotional expression that spectators at an accident always have.

“I–I had some trouble, that’s all,” I said. Sure. Just some trouble. Beaten up, almost thrown out of a window, but for the intervention of some kind providence. I got to trembling again, thinking about it.

The elevator reached the main floor and I walked, wobbledy-legged, across the lobby to the desk. The clerk, a needle-thin man with great horned-framed glasses and a pointed nose said, “Yes, sir?” without hardly looking at me.

I took a deep breath. Down here in the brightly lighted, rather ancient and shoddy austerity of this hotel lobby, what I was going to have to say would sound melodramatic, ridiculous. I said. “You’d better send the house officer up to room fourteen-o-nine. I just escaped from there after being beaten up and robbed and almost killed. I—”

I stopped. A sickening shock went through me. I had forgotten that letter of confession I’d signed. Smitty and Vivian still had that. I looked up at the desk clerk again. He was peering at me as though I’d just crawled out of the woodwork. “Are you – uh –
sure
, sir?” he said.

“Look.” I took out my blood-smeared handkerchief and showed it to him. I curled back my upper lip with one finger so he could see the cut there. I pointed to my temple and the lump right in front of my ear. I said: “A girl accosted me here in the lobby and forced me up to her room at gunpoint. There was a man there and he—”

“Here in
this
lobby?” the clerk cut in. “What room was this, sir?”

I told him. I got sore. “Are you going to send the house dick up there or do I have to call outside police? I want you to hurry. They’ve probably left that room already as it is. But check it anyhow. And they can’t get out of this hotel without my seeing them. I’ll stay here with a cop until they
do
try to get out.”

The desk clerk was looking over his file card. “Room fourteen-o-nine,” he said. “We don’t have a girl registered for that room. It – well – I suppose it
could
be a girl. The name is K. Morgan. No baggage. Paid one day, in advance.”

“Morgan,” I repeated after him. “That’s
my
name. Let me see the registry.”

He showed it to me. The signature was a reasonable facsimile of my own.

They hadn’t made any mistake. They’d registered the room in my name. It would look like I’d taken it with the express purpose of leaping fom the window, killing myself. At the same time I realized that they probably had another room of their own, on the same floor, that they could flee to, hide out in, if anything went wrong.

“Do you remember what the person looked like who registered for that room?” I said.

The clerk shook his head, looked at the registration. “Whoever it was, signed in at noon. I didn’t come on until four P.M.”

I watched the clerk pick up a desk phone, heard him ask for 1409. He waited quite a while, then hung up. “Nobody answers,” he said.

“Of course not. They’ve gone.”

But they were still in the hotel. I thought:
I’ll have them call the police. We’ll go to every room on the fourteenth floor. If we don’t find them, we’ll go through every room in the hotel. We’ll get them.

Then I realized that wasn’t bright. Supposing I did find them. I couldn’t prove anything. There were two of them, their words against mine. Even Herb, the bartender, recognizing that the girl was the one who’d been in the bar with me, left when I did, wouldn’t prove anything. That was out.

I got a better idea. I told the clerk: “Never mind. Skip it. I’ll handle it myself.”

I turned away from the desk and went out onto the street. I crossed the street and got into a darkened doorway over there, where I could watch the hotel exit. I stood there. This would be better. One or both of them would have to leave the hotel sometime. They would have to report to whoever had hired them to do this to me. I’d follow, find out who it was. Then I’d really have something to work on. But maybe they wouldn’t go to their boss. They might telephone him or her and report on what had happened. Well, that was a chance I’d have to take.

While I waited, I went over the whole thing in my mind. I got the setup pretty clearly. They were trying to frame me for the embezzlement, so it must’ve been worked in a way that would have been possible for me to accomplish. There was only one way that was possible. I didn’t actually handle any company cash. But I got the checks for other people and mailed them to them. To our artists and writers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in checks.

The procedure was this. I had to voucher for a script or art work when it was turned in, as managing editor of the comics magazine group. The business office made out checks for those vouchers and the individual checks in turn were given back to me to mail to the artists and writers. The average writer’s check for a single script was sixty to seventy dollars. The average artist’s check was for twenty dollars a comic-book page, which meant their checks averaged about one hundred and sixty dollars. We paid editorial bills twice a week. It would be a comparatively simple thing for me, in connivance with somebody in the business office, to make out vouchers to phoney names, for scripts and/or art work that hadn’t even been done, a couple of times a week. Then, when I got the checks, to sign them with the name they were made out to, then double-endorse them with another phoney name, with which I’d already established a bank account, and deposit them to that account.

Liz Tremayne, the bookkeeper, if working with me on this deal, could easily cover for me on the books, until the end of the fiscal year when the regular annual auditing took place.

I had never thought of this possibility to defraud Emcee Publications out of thousands of dollars before. But I thought of it now. Plenty. The more I thought of it, the more I realized how badly that confession would make things look for me.

But since I hadn’t done this, I had to figure out who had. Nobody but me handled checks and vouchers in the editorial department. Almost anybody in the business office could have worked the deal. All they had to do was get hold of a stack of editorial voucher forms from the stock room, learn to forge my handwriting, and – working with Liz Tremayne, who kept books and made out the checks – they wouldn’t even have to be too clever with that. But how about the people who signed the checks? Wouldn’t they get suspicious over a couple of extra checks being there twice a week?

The checks bore two signatures, M. C. Malkom’s, the president’s, and the authorized counter-signature, which would be Ronny Chernow’s, as head of the Business Office. Chernow! Since Emcee Publications put out other books besides comics – Confession magazines and a string of pulps – there would probably be twenty or thirty checks to be signed twice a week.

Mr Malkom probably never even looked at them, but went through them and signed them one right after the other as fast as he could. Especially since the checks always went up for his final signature close to five o’clock in the afternoon. But Chernow wouldn’t rush through those checks, signing them, without examining them. That was part of his job, to double check on things like that, make sure a mistake hadn’t been made and two checks made out in error for the same material.

That did it. I knew then that Ronny Chernow was the one who had been working this embezzlement deal, who had decided to frame me for it. It all stacked up. Chernow, himself, gambled, played the market a lot. I’d seen the newspapers on his desk, turned to the racing entries and the market listings, many times. This was the answer to how he lived a life that would seem to take three times his salary.

I thought, then, too, about Liz Tremayne, the bookkeeper. She was a girl you could not figure. She was tall and neat, but you could never tell much about her figure. She always wore loose-fitting dresses or severely tailored suits. She wore double-lensed glasses and little if any makeup. She wore her brown hair pulled back into a severe bun. I remembered that she had nice features, but the way she dressed and wore her hair, you’d never notice that. She impressed everyone as being a very plain, unattractive girl. No sex appeal at all.

Yet, I also remember now, a long time ago, hearing Ronny Chernow, standing with a bunch of other men from the office by the water cooler one day, watching Liz Tremayne go past. Ronny had said: “You see all that protective coloration? But it doesn’t fool me. Put some makeup on that baby, fix her hair right, get her into the right dresses and take those horrible glasses off and I’ll bet she’d knock your eyes out. And
that
kind – once you break through that icy surface – man, oh, man!”

We’d all thought Ronny was crazy, then. But I saw now where he could be right. And that tied in with Liz helping him out with this deal. The quiet, plain, bookish type like that often went crazy for a man who was a complete opposite like Chernow. Especially once he’d started paying a lot of attention to her, began softening her up. And a woman in love with a man, often would do anything for him.