The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (43 page)

His voice shrill, he asked, “What was that you just called me?”

I said, “Answer my question. No. You never did. You could get the men who were in here last night out of the attic and onto the mainland. You could rip out the bunks and move the old furniture back. You could cover the floor with dust. But you couldn’t replace the cobwebs. That’s something only a spider can do.”

He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “You’re crazy. You’re out of your mind.”

I said, “We’ll leave that up to the law. And while the law is at it, I want them to check your whereabouts at the time that Zo was killed. I doubt you have an alibi. You can’t have. Because you were the guy who shot her and dusted me with a gaff hook.”

His voice grew even shriller. “And just why should I do such a thing? What was my motive?”

I nodded at Beth. “My wife. She was the one thing you couldn’t get at a bargain. You couldn’t buy her. But you could buy me. That’s why you sent Zo to meet me. That’s why you deposited the thirty-six grand to my account. That’s why you had Zo steam me up about heading straight for Cuba and Shrimp Cay. That’s why you were at the cabin, to make certain she had me in tow.

“And everything went just fine until I read Beth’s letter and told Zo it was no dice, that I was heading back to Palmetto City and Beth. It was you to whom Zo cried out just before you shot her. Shot her because you saw another way to accomplish your purpose. With me back in a cell at Raiford waiting to be burned for murder, I couldn’t very well return to Beth. And, in time, you knew you’d get what you wanted.”

He laughed. “A jury would howl at that story.”

I said, “Okay. Let’s test it. Let’s go back to the mainland. I’ll tell my story and you tell yours.”

He shook his head. “No. I’m afraid we can’t do that. I’m a prominent man in Palmetto City and my business enemies would be certain to try to make capital of this.”

I said, “You mean you’re afraid that the Feds might look at your invoices and begin to wonder where you’re getting some of your goods that you’re able to sell for less than your fellow merchants pay for it wholesale. Hell. It’s been right in front of my nose all the time. No one but you could be
Señor Peso
.”

The little man sighed. Then looking at Beth he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” she asked him.

He said, “That I can’t allow such a scurrilous story as this to be bruited about. I’m very sorry, my dear. I’d hoped to make you very happy. But now –” He thumbed the safety of his gun.

I said, “It won’t wash, Clifton. One dame on a gun is enough. Besides, just how do you intend to explain our bodies?”

His eyes overly bright, he said, “That’s simple. I’ll tell the police the fantastic story you told me. Then I’ll tell them when I called you a liar, you saw that you were trapped and shot your wife and committed suicide.”

It was still as death in the old second-floor hallway. A chorus of dust particles were dancing in the sunlight streaming in the front window. Clifton lifted the gun in his hand and the door of the bedroom behind me opened and Ken Gilly stepped out in the hall saying:

“I wouldn’t, Mr Clifton. With all your dough, you’ve got a much better chance hiring a high-priced lawyer.” Ken cocked the big gun in his own hand. “Of course if you insist.”

Around us the doors of the other bedrooms opened. There was an officer in each one, one of them a police stenographer who was still scrawling curlicues on his pad.

Clifton wasn’t a fool. He dropped his gun. “You win,” he said looking at me. “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for being.” He looked at Ken. “Well, let’s get back to the mainland so I can contact my lawyers.” His smile was thin. “But you haven’t a damn thing on me but some foolish conversation.”

Putting his gun away, Ken rubbed thoughtfully at the knuckles he had bruised beating at least a portion of the truth out of Matt Heely after I had gone to him with my story, directly from the hospital.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said slowly. “A little of this, a little of that. A guy talks here. A guy talks there. And the first thing you know, it builds into a conviction.” He waved his hand at the stairs. “Take Mr Clifton away, boys. We’re going to give him a bargain, board and lodging free for nothing.”

When they had gone, Ken turned to me, offered me his hand.

“Welcome, Charlie.” He brushed my nose with the tip of one finger. “But keep that clean now, fellow. Hear me?”

I said I did and intended to.

Then he was gone and Beth and I were alone and she was in my arms.

“I love you, love you so, Charlie,” she whispered.

Swede had been right about a lot of things. He’d told me:

“
A man can starve a dame. He can cuss her. He can beat her every night and twice on Sunday and she’ll still think he’s her personal Marshall plan in a silver champagne bucket. But only if she knows she’s the only woman in his life
.”

I hadn’t known how really big a lump in the throat could be. All I could say was her name. But that was all right with Beth. She understood. The bloody tide was over for both of us. There was nothing ahead but clear sailing in clean water.

She lifted her face to mine. “Hey, you, Mister Man. Remember me? How’s about a kiss?”

And that was all right with me, too.

Sergeant Burt Moran was a tall man with hard flat features and eyes that were cold and dull, like those of a snake. He was that comparatively rare thing among cops, a man equally hated by crooks and by his fellow officers. Operators on both sides of the law forgot their differences and came to agreement on one point at least: that Moran was a heel by any or all standards.

Moran was a bully who shook down petty crooks for a few bucks whenever he got the chance. But he left the big boys alone. He lacked the imagination to serve them and, consequently, he never got in on the important payoff. There would have been some dignity in being a big grafter, but Moran grubbed for his few extra dollars the hard way, the cheap way, the way that earned him nothing else but contempt.

There was a streak of savage brutality in him that caused the underworld to mingle their contempt with a certain fear. Moran had killed six men in the line of duty, three of whom were unarmed at the time, and another who had died after Moran had worked him over with a sap for fourteen hours. The story of the men he’d killed wasn’t told because a corpse is an unsatisfactory witness. Moran knew this. He knew all about killing.

Now, at two o’clock in the morning, in the cheap room of a cheap hotel, Moran was going to learn about murder. He had to commit a murder because of something new in his life, something that he had always sneered at in the lives of other men.

Moran was in love. And he had learned that love, like anything else, costs money.

He stood just inside the doorway of the room and watched the scrawny, thin-faced man who was staring at him from the bed. The man was Dinny Nelson, a small-time bookie who, Moran knew, carried all his assets in a hip wallet.

Dinny brushed a hand over his sleep-dulled features and said, “What’s the pitch, Moran? You got no right busting in here.”

Moran drew his gun and leveled it at Dinny. He knew what would happen with crystal clarity, not only to Dinny and the portions of his body hit by the heavy slugs, but after that, to Dinny’s corpse, to the police department and to himself, Moran. It was an old story to him. He had killed six men in the line of duty and he knew the way everything worked. No one would doubt his story.

Dinny saw his fate in Moran’s face. He began to beg in a cracked voice. “No, no, you can’t,” he said. “There’s no reason to kill me – I ain’t done nothing. Don’t.”

Moran fired three shots and they were very loud in the small, thin-walled room. Dinny’s body jack-knifed with the impact of the slugs, rolled from the bed to the floor. He didn’t live long. Moran watched expressionlessly as Dinny’s limbs twisted spasmodically, then became rigid and still. Underneath Dinny’s body the roses in the faded pattern of the rug bloomed again, bright and scarlet.

There was two thousand three hundred and thirty dollars in Dinny’s wallet. Moran left thirty. The money made a comfortable bulge against his leg as he sauntered to the phone . . .

While the coroner did his work and two lab technicians went over the room, Moran told his story to Lieutenant Bill Pickerton, his immediate superior at Homicide.

“Tonight I seen him taking bets in the lobby,” Moran said. “This was eleven. I started across to him but he seen me and ducked into the bar and then out to the street. So I drifted away. Around two I came back, came right up here to his room. I told him to get dressed but the fool went for me. I had to shoot him.”

Lieutenant Pickerton rubbed his long jaw. “This stinks worse than your usual stuff, Moran. You could have handled him with your fists. He doesn’t have a gun.”

Moran shrugged. “Why should I risk getting beat over the head with a chair or something?”

Pickerton looked at him with active dislike. “Okay, turn in a written report tomorrow morning. The old man won’t like this, you know.”

“To hell with the old man,” Moran said. “He wants us to bring ’em in with a butterfly net, I suppose.”

“All right,” Pickerton said. He paid no more attention to Moran, but studied the body and the room with alert, careful eyes.

Downstairs, Moran hailed a cab and gave the driver the address of the Diamond Club. He stared out the window at the dark streets of the Loop, his impassive face hiding the mirth inside him.

When Moran had realized that a nightclub singer couldn’t be impressed by a cop’s salary, he had looked around in his dull, unimaginative fashion for a way to get some money. Nothing had occurred to him for quite a while. Then the idea came, the idea that a cop could literally get away with murder.

After he got that much, the rest was easy. He had picked Dinny because he wasn’t big-time, but big enough as far as money went. Now it was all over and he had the money. There would be a routine investigation of course, but there was no one to come forward with Dinny’s version of what had happened. Therefore, the department would have to accept Moran’s story. They might raise hell with him, threaten him some, but that didn’t matter.

Moran’s hand touched the unfamiliar bulge of money in his pocket and a rare smile touched the corner of his mouth. It didn’t matter at all.

He paid off the driver in front of the Diamond Club on Randolph Street and walked past the head waiter with a familiar smile. The head waiter smiled cordially, for Moran’s visits to the club had been frequent over the past two months, dating from the time Cherry Angela had joined the show.

Moran found a corner table and watched the girl singing at the mike. This was Cherry Angela. The blue spot molded her silver evening dress to her slim, pliant body, revealing all the curving outlines. She wore her platinum hair loose, falling in soft waves to her shoulders, and her eyes and features were mocking as she sang an old, old story about a man and a woman.

Moran forgot everything watching the girl. And there was an expression of sullen hunger on his face.

She came to his table after the number and sat down with lithe grace. “Hi, copper,” she said, and her voice was amused. “Like my song?”

“I liked it,” Moran said.

Her lean face was mocking. “I should do a black-flip from sheer happiness, I suppose. Would a beer strain your budget?”

“Go ahead,” Moran said, flushing. “I’ve spent plenty on you, baby.”

“You tired of it?” she said lightly.

Moran put his hands under the table so she wouldn’t see their trembling. She was in his blood like nothing else had ever been in his life. But he got nothing from her but mockery, or sarcasm that shriveled him up inside.

He knew that she let him hang around for laughs, enjoying the spectacle of a forty-year-old flatfoot behaving like an adolescent before her charms. For just a second then he wanted to tell her what he had done tonight, and about the money in his pocket. He wanted to see her expression change, wanted to see respect for him in her eyes.

But he resisted that impulse. Fools bragged. And got caught. Moran wasn’t getting caught.

Some day he’d have her where he wanted. Helpless, crawling. That was what he wanted. It was a strange kind of love that had driven Moran to murder.

He took her home that night but she left him at the doorway of her apartment. Sometimes, if he’d spent a lot of money, she let him come up for a nightcap, but tonight she was tired.

Leaving her, Moran walked the five miles to his own apartment, hoping to tire himself out so that he could sleep without tormenting himself with visions of what she might be doing, or who she might be with.

But once in bed, he knew the walk hadn’t helped. He was wide awake and strangely nervous. After half an hour of tossing he sat up and snapped on the bed lamp. It was five-thirty in the morning, and he had a report to make on the murder in about four hours. He needed sleep, he needed to be rested when he told his story, and thinking about that made sleep impossible.

He picked the evening paper from the floor, glanced over the news. There was a murder on page one, not his, but somebody else’s. He thought about his murder then and realized with a slight shock of fear that it had been on his mind all the time. It was the thing keeping him from sleep. Not Cherry Angela.

He frowned and stared out the window at the gray dawn. What was his trouble? This killing tonight was just like the others. And they hadn’t bothered him. There must be a difference somewhere, he decided. It came to him after a while. The others had been killings. This one was murder. And the difference was that murder made you think.

Moran lay back in the bed, but he didn’t go to sleep. He kept thinking.

At ten after eleven Moran had finished his report. He read it over twice, frowning with concentration, then took it down to Lieutenant Bill Pickerton’s office.

There was someone with Pickerton, a young man with mild eyes and neatly combed hair. He was sitting beside Pickerton’s desk, and the two men were talking baseball.