The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (82 page)

I wasn’t listening to him. I was watching his right hand. When it came out of his pocket, so did mine. I shot him.

And now we are all dead.

There were five of us on that caper. Four are in their graves. I still have the breath of life in me, but the difference between me and the other four is only a matter of two days, when I will be burned in the chair.

It was a short trial. A dozen witnesses had seen me stand in the morning sunlight and shoot down Oscar Trotter. I couldn’t even plead self-defense because he’d had no gun on him. And telling the truth as I knew it wouldn’t have changed anything. The day after the trial began the jury found me guilty.

I sent for Stella. I didn’t expect her to come, but she did. Yesterday afternoon she was brought here to the death house to see me.

She didn’t jiggle. Something had happened to her – to her figure, to her face. Something seemed to have eaten away at her.

“Congratulations,” I said.

Stella’s voice had changed too. It was terribly tired. “Then you’ve guessed,” she said.

“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it. Oscar didn’t have a gun on him. I know now what he was about to do when he took his hand out of his pocket. He was going to offer me his hand. He had started to say, ‘Johnny, I made a mistake.’ Something like that. Because he still had a brain. When he’d learned that Tiny had been knifed in bed, he’d realized I’d been right about Abby. But the irony is that I hadn’t been right. I’d been dead wrong.”

“Yes, Johnny, you were wrong,” she said listlessly.

“At the end you got yourself two birds with one stone. You told me a lie about Oscar gunning for me, and it turned out the way you hoped. I killed him and the state will kill me. I’ve had plenty of time to think back – how that night at Oscar’s, as soon as we arrived you hurried into the kitchen to give Abby a hand. Why so friendly so quickly with Abby who’d taken your man from you? I saw why. You’d gone into the kitchen to put arsenic in the chopped liver.”

“You can’t prove it, Johnny,” she whispered.

“No. And it wouldn’t save me. Well, I had my answer why you were so eager to take up with me the minute Oscar was through with you. You had to hang around his circle of friends, and you had to bide your time to work the killings so you wouldn’t be suspected. You succeeded perfectly, Stella. One thing took me a long time to understand, and that was why.”

“Wally,” she said.

I nodded. “It had to be. If you’d hated Oscar for throwing you over for Abby, you mightn’t have cared if you killed the others at that party as long as you got those two. But there was Tiny’s death – cold, deliberate, personal murder. The motive was the same as I’d thought was Abby’s. The same master plan – those who’d been in on Wally’s death must die. And so it had to be you and Wally.”

Stella moved closer to me. Her pretty face was taut with intensity.

“I loved him,” she said. “That wife of his, that Abby – she was a no-good louse. First time I ever saw her was when she came up to the apartment to see Oscar, but I knew all about her. From Wally. That marriage was a joke. You wouldn’t believe this – you were crazy over her yourself, like Oscar was – but she was after anything wore pants. That was all she gave a damn for, except maybe money.”

“I believe you,” I said. “You must have been the one who persuaded Oscar to take Wally in on the caper.”

“We fell for each other, Wally and I. One of those screwy, romantic pickups on a bus. We saw each other a few times and then planned to go away together. But we hadn’t a cent. I knew Oscar was planning a big job. He thought he kept me from knowing anything that was going on. But I knew. Always. And I was smarter. I got a guy who owed me a favor to bring Oscar and Wally together. Oscar took him in on it.” Her mouth went bitter. “How I hated the rackets! I wanted to get out of them. I hated Oscar. We had it all figured. We’d take Wally’s cut, the few thousand dollars, and go out west and live straight and clean. A little house somewhere and a decent job and children.” Her head drooped. “And Oscar killed him.”

“He might have died anyway from the bullet wound.”

“But not to give him at least a chance!” Stella hung onto her handbag with both hands. “You know why I came when you sent for me? To gloat. To tell you the truth if you didn’t know it already and laugh in your face.”

But she didn’t laugh. She didn’t gloat. She looked as sick and tired of it all as I was. She looked as if, like me, she no longer gave a damn about anything.

“It doesn’t give you much satisfaction, does it?” I said. “It doesn’t bring Wally back. It doesn’t make it easy to live with yourself.”

She swayed. “Oh, God! So much death and emptiness. And I can’t sleep, Johnny. I’ve had my revenge, but I can’t sleep.”

“Why don’t you try arsenic?” I said softly.

She looked at me. Her mouth started to work, but she didn’t say anything. Then she was gone.

That was yesterday. Today Bill Brant visited me and told me that Stella had taken poison and was dead.

“Arsenic?” I said.

“Yeah. The same way Georgie Ross died. What can you tell me about it?”

“Nothing, copper,” I said.

So that makes five of us dead, and very soon now I will join them, and we will all be dead. Except Abby, and she was never part of the picture.

Wasn’t she?

Stella was kidding herself by thinking she’d killed Oscar and me. Georgie and Tiny and finally herself, yes, but not us.

I needn’t have been so quick with my gun on the street outside the brownstone house. I could have waited another moment to make sure that it was actually his life or mine.

Now, writing this in my cell in the death house, I can face up to the truth. I had shot him down in the clear bright morning because he had Abby.

The gate handle was rusty. I didn’t want to touch it. But that was the only way of getting in, unless I wanted to climb the high walls and leave part of my trousers on the iron spikes studding the top.

I grabbed the handle, pushed the gate open and walked down the flagstone path to the house.

If I were a botanist, I’d have been interested in the weeds growing along that path. As it was, they were only something to stumble over. I ignored them and stared at the mansion ahead.

The Petroff house was not quite as big as a castle and not quite as old as Noah’s Ark. It looked like the kind of a place the Phantom of the Opera would pick for a summer home.

As far as I was concerned, it was something to donate to the next scrap drive.

But that was none of my business. My business was to sneak inside and wangle old Petroff into giving me an interview about his art treasures. The Sunday supplement needed a feature yarn.

I walked up to the big porch, climbed the stairs, and jangled the old-fashioned door pull. Nothing happened, so I did it again. Same result. It looked as though the Butler’s Union had pulled its man off this job.

Just for fun I edged over and turned the doorknob. As I did, I noticed a garland hanging down from the metal projection. It was a wreath of smelly leaves. Not a funeral wreath – just leaves.

That was none of my business, either. I was interested in whether or not the door was unlocked.

It was. So I walked in.

Why not? When Lenehan gave me the assignment, he told me it was a tough one. He had talked to old Petroff over the phone, and Petroff had refused to meet the press or drool over his art treasures.

I expected to be met at the door by a bouncer with a shotgun. But this was easy, and I took advantage of it. It wasn’t polite, but newspaper reporting isn’t a polite occupation.

The door swung shut behind me, and I stood in a long hallway. It was hard to see anything specific in the afternoon twilight, but I got a musty whiff of stale air, mothballs, and just plain age and decay.

It made me cough. I coughed louder, hoping to rouse my host.

No results. I started down the hallway, still coughing from time to time. An open door led into a deserted library. I ignored it, passed a staircase, walked on.

Behind the stairs was another door. I halted there, for a faint light gleamed from underneath it. I groped for the handle and coughed again. Once more the cough was genuine – for hanging on the doorknob was another garland of those leaves.

Inside here the smell was terrific. Like a Bohemian picnic. Suddenly I recognized the odor. Garlic.

According to the stories going around, old Petroff was a bit of a screwball. But it couldn’t be that he had turned the house into a delicatessen.

There was only one way to find out. I opened the door and walked into the parlor where the lamp burned.

It was quiet inside – quiet enough to hear a pin drop. In fact, you could tell which end hit the floor first: the head or the point.

But a pin had not hit the floor in this room. Petroff had.

He looked like his photo, all right. He was tall, thin, with black hair, curled and gray at the temples. A beaked nose and thick lips dominated his face.

He lay there on the floor, his nose pointing up at the ceiling. I got to his side in a hurry, and the floor creaked as I bent over him.

It didn’t matter. The noise wouldn’t bother him. Nothing would ever bother Igor Petroff again.

His hand was icy. His face was paper-white. I looked around for a mirror but didn’t spot any. I pulled my cigarette case out and put it against his lips. The shiny metal clouded slightly. He was still breathing, at any rate.

Probably he’d had a stroke. I lifted his head and stared into his bloodless face. His collar was open. I felt for a pulse in his neck, then took my hand away, quick.

I stared down at his throat, stared down and saw the two tiny punctures in his neck, shook my head and stared again.

They looked like the marks of human teeth!

There was no use asking if there was a doctor in the house. I got up and dashed out into the hall to get to the phone. I got to it. I jiggled the receiver for nearly a minute before I noticed the dangling cord trailing on the floor. Whoever had bitten Petroff had also bitten through the cord.

That was enough for me. I made the two miles back to town in about ten minutes and five hundred gasps. I still had a gasp left in me when I ran into Sheriff Luther Shea’s office at Centerville and knocked his feet off the desk.

“Accident out at the Petroff place!” I wheezed. “Get a doctor, quick!”

Sheriff Luther Shea was a fat little bald-headed man who seemed to enjoy keeping his feet on the desk. He put them right back up and scowled at me over his Number Elevens.

“What’sa big idea of bustin’ in here? Who are you, anyhow?”

I faced my genial quiz-master without a thought of winning the sixty-four-dollar question.

“Can’t you hear?” I yelled. “Call a doctor! Mr Petroff has been injured.”

“Ain’t no doctor in this town,” he told me. “Now state your business, fella.”

I stated it, but loud. He perked up his ears a little when I told him about Petroff, but he didn’t take his feet off the desk until I flashed my press badge. That did it.

“No sense trying to find a doctor – nearest one’s back in LA,” he decided. “I’m pretty handy at first aid. I’ll get the car and we’ll go out and pick him up.”

Sheriff Shea banged the office door behind him, and I grabbed a phone. I got hold of Calloway right away and he promised to send the ambulance out to Centerville. Somehow, after having had a good look at Petroff, I didn’t have much confidence in Sheriff Shea’s “first aid”.

Then I put through a call to the paper.

Lenehan growled at me, and I barked right back.

“Somebody bit his throat? Say, Kirby – you drunk?”

I breathed into the phone. “Smell that,” I said. “I’m cold sober. I found him lying on the floor with two holes in his neck. I’m still not sure he wasn’t dead.”

“Well, find out. Keep on this story and give me all you’ve got. We can hold three hours for the morning edition. Looks like murder, you say?”

“I didn’t say a blamed thing about murder!” I yelled.

“Come on, quit stalling!” Lenehan yelled back. “What’s your angle on this?”

I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Confidentially,” I said, “my theory is that old Petroff bit himself in the throat just for the publicity.”

Lenehan apparently didn’t believe me, because he launched off into a discussion of my ancestry that was cut short when Sheriff Shea appeared in the doorway. He wore a rancher’s black Stetson and a shoulder holster. On him it didn’t look good.

“Come on, fella,” he said, and I hung up.

His rattletrap Chevvy didn’t deserve a C card, but we made time down Centerville’s single street and chugged out along the highway.

“From the LA papers, huh?” he grunted. “Whatcha doing up at Petroff’s?”

“My editor gave me an assignment to write a feature story about the art treasures of the Irene Colby Petroff estate. Do you know anything about them?”

“Don’t know nothing, fella. When old man Colby was alive, he and the missus would come into town and do a little trading once in a while. Then he died and she married this foreign gigolo, Petroff, and that’s the last we seen of them in town. Then she died, and since then the place has gone to pot. This business don’t surprise me none. Hear some mighty funny gossip about what goes on out at Petroff’s place. All fenced off and locked up tighter’n a drum. Ask me, he’s hiding something.”

“I got in without any trouble.”

“What about the guards? What about the dogs? What about the locks on the gate?” I sat up. “No guards, no dogs, no locks,” I told him. “Just Petroff. Petroff lying there on the floor with the holes in his throat.”

We rounded a bend in the highway and approached the walls of the Petroff estate. The setting sun gleamed on the jagged spikes surmounting the walls. And it gleamed on something else.

“Who’s that?” I yelled, grabbing Sheriff Shea’s arm.

“Don’t do that!” he grunted. “Nearly made me go off the road.”

“Look!” I shouted. “There’s a man climbing up the wall.”

Sheriff Shea glanced across the road and saw the figure at the top of the wall. The car ground to a halt and we went into action. Shea tugged at his shoulder holster.