Joe Gores

Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

“Introduction” copyright © 1992 by Joe Gores.

“File #1: The Mayfield Case” copyright © 1967 by Davis Publications, Inc. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Davis Publications, Inc.

“The Second Coming” copyright © 1966 by Holloway House Publishing Co. First published in Adam’s Best Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Plot It Yourself” copyright © 1987 by Joe Gores. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine under the title “Detectivitis, Anyone?” Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Raptor” copyright © 1983 by Joe Gores. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author. “Watch for It” copyright © 1973 by Mystery Writers of America. First published in the anthology Mirror, Mirror, Fatal Mirror, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson. Reprinted by permission of the Mystery Writers of America.

“The Andrech Samples” copyright © 1970 by Magnum-Royal Publications, Inc. First published in Swank Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Killer Man” copyright © 1958 by Flying Eagle Publications, Inc. First published in Manhunt Magazine under the title “Pro.” Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Goodbye, Pops” copyright © 1969 by Joe Gores. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Introduction

Writing is a profession you start to get the hang of about the time your non-writing contemporaries are talking early retirement. So selecting a group of your own stories is a humbling experience. True, each brings an earlier “you” back to life. True, you read with the eyes you wore when you wrote them, you smell the smells of then, feel the textures, hear the sounds, taste the excitements, remember the enthusiasms.

But reading them now, you also see what you should have done better, what you should smooth out, update, modernize. But you can’t. Mysteries, like Hamlet’s players, are the abstracts and brief chronicles of their time; to edit and alter them after the fact destroys much of their value. Any differences the scholars among you might find between the stories here and their first publication is just a restoration of the original text.

I didn’t set out to be a mystery writer. In those early years I just kept writing anything and everything — mainstream, mystery, adventure, sci-fi, 15–20 short stories in the mail at all times — and just kept getting rejected: over 1,000 printed rejection slips during the four years between graduation from Notre Dame and my first sale. I once papered a bathroom with rejection slips — a fitting ambiance for them, actually.

I wanted to sell, to be a professional. I wanted desperately to justify Stanford University’s rejection of me for their creative-writing Master’s program because the stories I had submitted to them read “as if they had been written to be sold.”

“Killer Man,” the earliest story here, was my second published story; it appeared in the June, 1958, Manhunt — the only magazine that ever paid me with a post-dated check. “Plot It Yourself,” the most recent story here, appeared in the January, 1988, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I perpetrated the other tales of Mostly Murder during the 30 years in between, often while working other jobs to support my writing habit.

I spent a half-dozen Minnesota summers unloading boxcars of lumber, cement, bricks and coal. I became an instructor at a weight gym in Palo Alto. Hod-carrier during reconstruction of the San Fernando Mission. Roughie on a carnival making the midwest county-fair midway circuit. Dishwasher stranded in Salt Lake City. Manager of a hot-sheet motel near San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Car-parker for Giants home games at the Stick, and evenings at The Shadows restaurant on Telegraph Hill. Briefly, a logger in Alaska. Not so briefly, a teacher at an African boys secondary school in Kenya. For two draftee years, a Pentagon writer of Army generals’ biographies.

And for 12 years, off and on, a private detective working out of San Francisco. First with the L.A. Walker Company, then as a partner in David Kikkert and Associates. The first real date my wife Dori and I had, in fact, was snatching a Cadillac from Mafia hitman Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno. I quit active field work in the late Seventies and sold DKA five years later, after my dear friend and partner, Dave Kikkert, fell over dead in the company parking lot while changing a tire on a repo.

As a detective, I was getting an inexhaustible supply of material. The things that happened to me on the street, the reactions they evoked, the people I worked with and the people I hunted down — all these heavily informed my fiction. And writing agency reports that demanded the same who, what, where, when, why and how of successful fiction taught me how to tell a story — well enough, eventually, to sell it ($65 from Manhunt for my first). And when I did sell, it was usually mystery or suspense. So I began to aim for those markets.

Of course most of the other things I have done, the places I have seen and the people I have known, have also turned up in the stories, novels, and scripts I have written during the three decades since my first story was published.

But not here. Not in Mostly Murder.

In 1966, while still a full-time detective, I talked about my work to the Northern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. The late Tony Boucher suggested I approach Fred Dannay of EQMM about doing a series of private-eye procedural stories based on the real agency. Fred was amenable, and the DKA File Series was born. “File #1: The Mayfield Case” is the first and perhaps most realistic of them; real life happened just about exactly the way fictional life does in the story. There are a dozen short stories and three novels in the series; as I write this, the fourth File Novel, 32 Cadillacs, is in manuscript.

A friend named Dave Buschman told me two stories. First, a week earlier he had witnessed a penitentiary execution. The experience had shaken him badly, but he was too cool to let it show. Recounted in Dave’s laconic, hip argot, this death burned itself into my brain. His second story was about a chance meeting with an old friend in North Beach. After they had chatted for twenty minutes, Dave asked after the man’s wife. “Oh,” he said, “she killed herself last night.” My mind fused execution and meeting into “The Second Coming” — although by then the dead wife, strangely, had become superfluous to my purposes.

I wrote “Plot It Yourself” for a Japanese magazine when my novel Hammett was doing well in that country. This was shortly after I had written a script for a half-hour TV drama series, with Orson Welles as narrator, which promptly died aborning. I converted my script into this story, giving Welles’s narrative voice to the killer. Thus he could make sardonic comment on the murder he committed while challenging the reader to solve it. “Plot It Yourself” is my only locked-room story (although the DKA File novel Final Notice is a sort of “locked house” novel). Connoisseurs of crime will note that the dinner Eric Stalker serves his victims is called “the ideal dinner for The Detective” in the The Nero Wolfe Cookbook.

Notebook entry: “A man lives in the chinks of an affluent, creditcard society. Moves swiftly, like a shadow, no one is ever sure he has been there. Except for the aftermath.” What aftermath? I wrote “Raptor” to find out; the story ended up having almost nothing to do with the original note. I cut ruthlessly — first draft, 14,210 words, final, 4,800, to achieve a formal, stately gavotte where death was dealt with panache but without emotion. I used this to bring Raptor, finally, to a comprehension of the Void in Musashi’s Book of Five Rings.

Because I knew the instructor, in 1970 I was snuck into an Explosive and Sabotage Devices anti-terrorist course for police officers given at Ford Ord, California, by the Army’s 87th Ordnance Detachment. When not blowing stuff up, I talked with an FBI shrink who had developed a profile of the terrorist true believer: be he neo-Nazi militant, Communist zealot, student radical, or Middle East fanatic, he always feels that he, him alone, his actions, are going to alter the entire course of human history. Heady stuff. I wrote “Watch for It” to explore the inevitable human costs of such dangerously unreal expectations.

I got the idea for “The Andrech Samples” (then titled “Rogul for the Quota”) on a June 9th; the story was written that same day and went to market on the 22nd. Very fast for me; I don’t really like to write in the future tense — seldom do — so I write quickly, angrily, and the stories are dark, sardonic, touched with black humor, invariably grim. Bureaucracy is the true enemy, even for bureaucrats, and it can only get worse. With mankind’s finger on the self-destruct button, perhaps futuristic tales can only be written angrily.

I lived the year 1957 in Tahiti, getting up at four each day, writing non-stop until noon, then going skin-diving until dusk. Writing about death, because shortly before I left San Francisco I had been fired upon by an irate businessman and run down by an enraged cleric — in a single week. “Killer Man” was my reaction in story form. I had gotten the title months earlier on Upper Grant in North Beach when somebody with a beard and a guitar sang, “Killer man, don’t you kill kill me” in The Co-Existence Bagel Shop (it still existed then). I don’t know if this was a well-known song, or original with him; I never heard it again. But it gave me the perfect title for my hitman story.

My grandfather died during my junior year at Notre Dame. I hitched north through the snow to Minnesota to see him before he went, then wrote an angry little memoir called “Epitaph” — angry because I had loved him deeply and he was dead. Fifteen years later I was ready to make memoir into story: the angry man hitchhiking north was older, an escaped convict, the dying man was a father instead of a grandfather. Fred Dannay made me rewrite it, polish it, sandpaper its rough spots innumerable times — never letting me scour away the real emotion of the original. I called it “Goodbye, Pops,” EQMM published it, and Mystery Writers of America gave it that year’s Best Short Story Edgar.

So Mostly Murder is... mostly murder. No mainstream, no navel-gazing, no adventure tales, no hardcore science-fiction. Just criminous tales, mostly violent — with a soupçon of fantasy — and, I hope, an insight or two into the parts of human nature that give root to that violence. A pretty much representative selection of my mystery and suspense short stories that I still pretty much like. I hope you do too.

Joe Gores

San Francisco

May 1991

File #1:

The Mayfield Case

Larry Ballard was halfway to the Daniel Kearny Associates office before he remembered to switch on his radio. After a whine and a blast of static, O’Bannon’s voice came on loudly in mid-transmission.

“...Bay Bridge yet, Oakland 3?”

“Coming up to the toll plaza now. The subject is three cars ahead of me. I’ll need a front tail once he’s off the bridge, over.”

“Stand by. KDM 366 Control calling any San Francisco unit.”

Ballard unclipped his mike and pressed the red TRANSMIT button. “This is SF 6. My location is Oak and Buchanan, moving east, over.”

“Oakland 3 is trailing a red Comet convertible across Bay Bridge, license Charlie, X-Ray, Kenneth, 8-8-1. The legal owner, California Citizens Bank on Polk Street, wants car only — contract outlawed.”

Oakland 3 cut in: “Wait by the Ninth and Bryant off-ramp, SF 6.”

“Control standing by,” said O’Bannon. “KDM 366 clear.”

O’Bannon set down the hand mike on Giselle Marc’s desk, leaving it flipped to MONITOR. He was a wiry red-headed man about 40, with twinkling blue eyes, freckles, and a hard-bitten drinker’s face.

“Who’s SF 6? The new kid?”

“Right. Larry Ballard. With us a month yesterday.” Giselle was a tall lean blonde who had started with DKA as a part-time file girl while still in high school; after graduation from S.F. State two years before, she had taken over the Cal-Cit Bank desk. “He’s a green pea but he’s eager and maybe — just maybe — he can think. Kathy’s putting him on his own this week.”

O’Bannon grunted. “The Great White Father around?”

“Down in his cubbyhole — in a vile mood.”

O’Bannon grimaced and laid his expense-account itemization on her desk with great reverence. Giselle regarded it without enthusiasm.

“Why don’t you do your own dirty work, O’B?” she demanded.

Same day: 10:00 a.m.

Ballard was lanky, well-knit, in his early twenties, with blue eyes already hardened by his month with DKA. He was stopped, by Dan Kearny himself, at the top of the narrow stairs leading to the second floor of the old Victorian building that housed the company offices.

“That Comet in the barn?”

“Yes, sir,” said Ballard.

“Terrif. Any static?” Kearny was compact and powerful, with a square pugnacious face, massive jaw, and cold gray eyes which invariably regarded the world through a wisp of cigarette smoke.

“I front-tailed him from the freeway. When he parked on Howard Street, Oakland 3 and I just wired up the Comet and drove it away.”

Kearny clapped Ballard’s shoulder and went on. Ballard entered the front office, which overlooked Golden Gate Avenue through unwashed bay windows. Three assignments were in his basket on the desk of Jane Goldson, the phone receptionist with the Liverpool accent: through her were channeled all assignments, memos, and field reports.

Carrying the case sheets, Ballard descended to the garage under the building. Along the right wall were banks of lockers for personal property; along the left, small partitioned offices used by the seven San Francisco field men. He paused to review his new cases before leaving.

The most puzzling one involved a new Continental, financed through Cal-Cit Bank, which had been purchased by a Jocelyn Mayfield, age 23. She and her roommate, Victoria Goodrich, lived at 31 Edith Alley and were case workers for San Francisco Social Services. What startled Ballard was the size of the delinquent payments — $198.67 each — and the contract balance of over $7000. On a welfare worker’s salary? Even though her parents lived in the exclusive St. Francis Woods area, they were not cosigners on the contract.

From his small soundproofed office at the rear of the garage, Dan Kearny watched Ballard leave. Kearny had been in the game for over half of his 43 years, and still hadn’t figured out the qualities which made a good investigator; only time would tell if Ballard had them. Kearny jabbed an intercom button with a blunt finger.

“Giselle? Send O’Bannon down here, will you?”

He lit a Lucky, leaned back to blow smoke at the ceiling. O’B had come with him six years before, when Kearny had resigned from Waller’s Auto Detectives to start DKA with one car and this old Victorian building which had been a bawdy house in the ’90s; and reviewing O’B’s expense accounts still furnished Kearny with his chief catharsis.

He smeared out the cigarette; through the one-way glass he could see O’Bannon approaching the office, whistling, his hands in pockets, his blue eyes innocent of guile. When he came in, Kearny shook out a cigarette for himself and offered the pack. “How’s Bella, O’B?”

“She asks when you’re bringing the kids for cioppino again.”

Kearny indicated the littered desk. “I’m two weeks behind in my billing. Oh... this expense account, O’B.” Without warning his fist smashed down in sudden fury. “Dammit, if you think...”

O’Bannon remained strangely tranquil during the storm. When Kearny finally ran down, the red-headed man cleared his throat and spoke.

“Giants leading three-two, bottom of the third. Marichal—”

“What do you mean?” Kearny looked stunned. “What the—”

O’Bannon fished a tiny transistor radio from his pocket, then apologetically removed miniature speakers from both his ears. Kearny gaped.

“You mean — while I — you were listening to the ball game?”

O’Bannon nodded dolorously. Speechless with rage, Kearny jerked out the expense-account checkbook; but then his shoulders began shaking with silent laughter.

Same day: 9:30 p.m.

Larry Ballard parked on Upper Grant; above him, on Telegraph Hill, loomed the concrete cone of Coit Tower, like a giant artillery piece about to be fired. Edith Alley ran half a block downhill toward Stockton; Jocelyn Mayfield and her roommate, Victoria Goodrich, had the lower apartment in a two-story frame building.

The girl who answered the bell wore jeans and sweatshirt over a chunky figure; her short hair was tinted almost white. Wide cheekbones gave her a Slavic look.

“Is Jocelyn here?” Ballard asked.

“Are you a friend of hers?” Her voice was harshly attractive.

Ballard took a flyer. “I was in one of her Sociology classes.”

“At Stanford?” She stepped back. “Sorry if I sounded antisocial. Sometimes male clients get ideas, y’know?”

He followed her into the apartment. “You must be Vikki — Josie has mentioned you. You don’t act like a social worker.”

“‘Say something to me in psychology?’ Actually, I was a waitress down in North Beach before I started with Social Services.”

There were cheap shades at the windows of the rather barren living room, a grass mat on the floor, a wicker chair and a couch, and an ugly black coffee table. The walls were a depressing brown. It was not a room in keeping with monthly automobile payments of $200.

“We’re going to repaint eventually,” Vikki said. “I guess.”

Ballard nodded. “Has Josie mentioned selling the Continental?”

“The Continental?” She frowned. “That belongs to Hank — we both use my Triumph. I don’t think he wants to sell it; he just got it”

“Hank, huh? Say, what’s his name and address? I can—”

Just then a key grated in the front door. Damn! Two minutes more would have done it. Now the subject was in the room, talking breathlessly. “Did Hank call? He wasn’t at his apartment, and—”

“Here’s an old friend of yours,” Vikki cut in brightly.

Ballard was staring. Jocelyn Mayfield was the loveliest girl he had ever seen, her fawnlike beauty accented by shimmering jet hair. Her mouth was small but full-lipped, her brows slightly heavy for a girl, her brown liquid eyes full-lashed. She had one of those supple patrician figures maintained by tennis on chilly mornings.

“Old friend?” Her voice was low. “But I don’t even know him!”

That tore it. Ballard blurted, “I’m — uh — representing California Citizens Bank. We’ve been employed to investigate your six hundred dollar delinquency on the 1967 Continental. We—”

“You dirty—” The rest of Vikki’s remark was not that of a welfare worker. “I bet you practice lying to yourself in front of a mirror. I bet—”

“Vikki, hush.” Jocelyn was blushing, deeply embarrassed. Vikki stopped and her eyes popped open wide.

“You mean you did make the down payment on that car? It’s registered in your name? You fool! He couldn’t make a monthly payment on a free lunch, and you—” She stopped, turned on Ballard. “Okay, buster. Out.”

“Vikki, please.” Then Jocelyn said to Ballard, “I thought — I had no idea the payments — by Friday I can have all the money.”

“I said out, buster,” Vikki snapped. “You heard her — you’ll get your pound of flesh. And that’s all you’ll get — unless I tear Josie’s dress and run out into that alley yelling rape.”

Ballard retreated; he had no experience in handling a Vikki Goodrich. And there was something about Jocelyn Mayfield — private stock, O’Bannon would have called her. She’d been so obviously let down by this Hank character; and she had promised to pay by Friday.

Monday, May 29th: 3:30 p.m.

Jane Goldson winked and pointed toward the Office Manager’s half-closed door. “She’s in a proper pet, she is, Larry.”

He went in. Kathy Onoda waved him to a chair without removing the phone from her ear. She was an angular girl in her late twenties, with classical Japanese features. Speaking into the phone, her voice was hesitant, nearly unintelligible with sibilants.

“I jus’ rittre Joponee girr in your country verry littre time.” She winked at Ballard. “So sorry too, preese. I roose job I... ah... ah so. Sank you very much. Buddha shower bressings.”

She hung up and exclaimed jubilantly, “Why do those stupid s.o.b.’s always fall for that phony Buddha-head accent?” All trace of it had disappeared. “You, hotshot, you sleeping with this Mayfield chick? One report, dated last Tuesday, car in hands of a third party, three payments down — and you take a promise. Which isn’t kept.”

“Well, you see, Kathy, I thought—”

“You want me to come along and hold your hand?” Her black eyes glittered and her lips thinned with scorn. “Go to Welfare and hint that she’s sleeping around; tell her mother that our investigation is going to hit the society pages; get a line on this Hank no-goodnik.” She jabbed a finger at him. “Go gettem bears!”

Ballard fled, slightly dazed as always after a session with Kathy. Driving toward Twin Peaks, he wondered why Jocelyn had broken her promise. Just another deadbeat’ He hated to believe that; apart from the Mayfield case he was doing a good job. He still carried a light case load, but he knew that eventually he would be responsible for as many as 75 files simultaneously, with reports due every three days on each of them except skips, holds, and contingents.

The Mayfield home was on Darien Way in St. Francis Woods; it was a huge pseudo-colonial with square columns and a closely trimmed lawn like a gigantic golf green. Inside the double garage was a new Mercedes. A maid with iron-gray hair took his card, returned with Jocelyn’s mother — an erect, pleasant-faced woman in her fifties.

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with Daniel Kearny Associates.”

“We represent California Citizens Bank,” said Ballard. “We’ve been engaged to investigate certain aspects of your daughter’s finances.”

“Jocelyn’s finances?” Her eyes were lighter than her daughter’s, with none of their melting quality. “Whatever in the world for?”

“She’s six hundred dollars delinquent on a 1967 Continental.”

“Indeed?” Her voice was frigid. “Perhaps you had better come in.”

The living room had a red brick fireplace and was made strangely tranquil by the measured ticking of an old-fashioned grandfather clock. There was a grand piano and a magnificent Oriental rug.

“Now. Why would my daughter supposedly do such a thing?”

“She bought it for a” — his voice gave the word emphasis — “man.”

She stiffened. “You cannot be intimating that my daughter’s personal life is anything but exemplary! When Mr. Mayfield hears this... this infamous gossip, he... he is most important in local financial circles.”

“So is California Citizens Bank.”

“Oh!” She stood up abruptly. “I suggest you leave this house.”

Driving back, Ballard knew he had made the right move to bring parental pressure on Jocelyn Mayfield, but the knowledge gave him scant pleasure. There had been a framed picture of her on the piano; somehow his own thoughts, coupled with the picture, had made his memory of their brief meeting sharper, almost poignant.

Same day: 5:15 p.m.

Dan Kearny lit a Lucky. “I think you know why I had you come back in, Ballard. The Mayfield case. Are you proud of that file?”

“No, sir.” He tried to meet Kearny’s gaze. “But I think she broke her promise to pay because this deadbeat talked her into it.”

“You took a week to find that out?” Kearny demanded. “Giselle found out that the subject walked off her job at Welfare last Friday night — took an indefinite leave without bothering to leave any forwarding address.”

Kearny paused to form a smoke ring. He could blast this kid right out of the tank, but he didn’t want to do that. “I started in this game in high school, Ballard, during the Depression. Night-hawking cars for Old Man Walters down in L.A. at five bucks per repo — cover your own expenses, investigate on your own time. Some of those Oakies would have made you weep, but I couldn’t afford to feel sorry for them. This Mayfield dame’s in a mess. Is that our fault? Or the bank's?”

“No, sir. But there are special circumstances—”

“Circumstances be damned! We’re hired to investigate people who have defaulted, defrauded, or embezzled — money or goods — to find them if they’ve skipped out, and to return the property to the legal owner. Mayfield’s contract is three months delinquent and you spin your wheels for a whole week. Right now the bank is looking at a seven-thousand dollar loss.” He ground out his cigarette and stood up. “Let’s take a ride.”

Later, ringing the bell at 31 Edith Alley, Ballard warned, “This Victoria Goodrich is tough. I know she won’t tell us anything.”

Vikki opened the door and glared at him. “You again?”

Kearny moved past Ballard so smoothly that the girl had to step back to avoid being walked on, and they were inside. “My name is Turk,” he said. “I’m with the legal department of the bank.”

She had recovered. “You should be ashamed, hiring this person to stir up trouble for Josie with her folks. Okay, so she’s two lousy payments behind. I’ll make one of them now, and next week she can—”

“Three payments. And since the vehicle is in the hands of a third party, the contract is void.” He shot a single encompassing look around the living room, then brought his cold gray eyes back to her face. “We know Miss Mayfield has moved out. Where is she living now?”

“I don’t know.” She met his gaze stubbornly.

Kearny nodded. “Fraudulent contract; flight to avoid prosecution. We’ll get a grand-theft warrant for her seven-thousand dollar embezzle—”

“Good God!” Vikki’s face crumpled with dismay. “Really, I don’t know Hank’s addr — I mean I don’t know where she’s gone. I—” Under his unwinking stare, tears suddenly came into her voice. “His wife’s on welfare; he’s no damn good. Once when he’d been drinking he — he put his hands on me. I guess she’s with him, but I don’t know where.”

“Then what’s Hank’s last name?”

She sank down on the couch with her face in her hands and merely shook her head. Ignoring her, Kearny turned to Ballard. “Sweet kid, this Mayfield. She steals the woman’s husband, then a car, then—”

“No!” Vikki was sobbing openly. “It isn’t like that! They were separated—”

Kearny’s voice lashed out. “What's his last name?”

“I won’t—”

“Hank what?”

“You’ve no right to—”

“—to throw your trashy roommate in jail? We can and we will.”

She raised a tear-ravaged face. “If you find the car will Josie stay out of prison?”

“I can’t make promises of immunity on behalf of the bank.”

“His name is Stuber. Harold Stuber.” She wailed suddenly to Ballard. “Make him stop! I’ve told everything I know — everything.”

Kearny grunted. “You’ve been most helpful,” he said, then strode out. Ballard took a hesitant step toward the hunched, sobbing girl, hesitated, and then ran after Kearny.

“Why did you do that to her?” he raged. “Now she’s crying—”

“And we’ve got the information we came after,” Kearny said.

“But you said to her—”

“But, hell.” He called Control on the radio. When Giselle answered he said, “Mayfield unit reportedly in the hands of a Harold Stuber — S-t-u-b-e-r. Check him through the Polk Directory.” He lit a cigarette and puffed placidly at it, the mike lying in his lap.

“The only listing under Harold Stuber shows a residence at 1597 Eighteenth Street; employment, bartender; wife, Edith.”

“Thanks, Giselle. SF 6 clear.”

“KDM 366 Control clear.”

Driving out to Eighteenth Street, Ballard was glad it had been Vikki, not Jocelyn Mayfield, who had been put through the meat grinder. Vikki wasn’t soft, yet Kearny had reduced her to tears in just a few vicious minutes.

The address on Eighteenth Street was a dirty, weathered stucco building above the heavy industrial area fringing Potrero Hill. It was a neighborhood losing its identity in its battle against the wrecker’s ball. Inside the apartment house, the first-floor hall wore an ancient threadbare carpet with a design like spilled animal intestines.

“Some of this rubbed off on your true love,” remarked Kearny.

Ballard gritted his teeth. Their knock was answered by a man two inches over six feet, wide as the doorway. His rolled-up sleeves showed hairy, muscle-knotted arms; his eyes were red-rimmed and he carried a glass of whiskey. He looked as predictable as a runaway truck.

Kearny was unimpressed. “Harold Stuber?”

“He don’t live here no more.” The door began to close.

“How about Edith Stuber?”

The hand on the door hesitated. “Who’s askin’?”

“Welfare.” When Kearny went forward the huge man wavered, lost his inner battle, and stepped back. The apartment smelled of chili and unwashed diapers; somewhere in one of the rooms a baby was screaming.

“Edie,” yelled the big man, “coupla guys from Welfare.”

She was a boldly handsome woman in her thirties, with dark hair and flashing black eyes. Under a black sweater and black slacks her body was full-breasted, wide-hipped, heavily sensual.

“Welfare?” Her voice became a whine. “D’ya have my check?”

“Your check?” Kearny’s eyes flicked to the big man with simulated contempt. He whirled to Ballard. “Johnson, note that the recipient is living common-law with a Caucasian male, height six-two, weight two-twenty, estimated age thirty-nine. Recipient should—”

“Hey!” yelled the woman, turning furiously on the big man, “if I lose my welfare check—”

Kearny cut in brusquely, “We’re only interested in your legal spouse, Mrs. Stuber.”

Her yells stopped like a knife slash. “You come about Hank? He ain’t lived here in five months. When he abandoned me an’ the kid—”

“But the Bureau knows he gets in touch with you.”

“You could call it that.” She gave a coarse laugh. “Last Wednesday he come over in a big Continental, woke us — woke me up an’ made a row ’bout Mr. Kleist here slee — bein’ my acquaintance. Then the p’lice come an’ Hank, he slugged one of ’em. So they took him off.”

Kearny said sharply, “What about the Continental?”

“It set here to the weekend, then it was gone.”

“What’s your husband’s current residence address?”

She waved a vague arm. “He never said.” Her eyes widened. “He gave me a phone number, but I never did call it; knew it wouldn’t do no good.” Behind her the baby began crying; the big man went away. Her eyes were round with the effort of remembering. “Yeah. 860-4645.”

Back in the agency car, Kearny lit a cigarette. “If it’s any consolation, there’s the reason for her broken promise. He gets busted Wednesday night, gets word to Mayfield Thursday, on Friday she quits her job. Saturday she sees him at the county jail, finds out where he left the car, drops it into dead storage somewhere near his apartment, and holes up there to wait until he gets out. Find her, you find the car.”

“Can’t we trace the phone number this one gave us?”

Kearny gestured impatiently. “That’ll just be some gin mill.”

The next day the Mayfield folder went into the SKIP tub and a request went to the client for a copy of the subject’s credit application. Skiptracing began on the case. The phone number proved to be that of a tough Valencia Street bar. DKA’s Peninsula agent found that Stuber had drawn a thirty-to-ninety-day rap in the county jail, the heavy sentence resulting from a prior arrest on the same charge. Stuber still said he lived at Eighteenth Street and denied knowing the subject. A stakeout of the jail’s parking lot during visiting hours was negative.

Police contacts reported that the Continental had not been impounded, nor was it picking up parking tags anywhere in San Francisco. Stuber had no current utilities service, no phone listing. The time involved in checking dead-storage garages would have been excessive. By phone Giselle covered Welfare, neighbors around the Edith Alley and Eighteenth Street addresses, the subject’s former contacts at Stanford, Bartender’s Local Number 41, all the references on the credit application. Ballard supplemented with field contact of postmen, gas station attendants, newsboys, and small store owners.

None of it did any good.

Thursday, June 9th: 7:15 p.m.

Ballard was typing reports at home when his phone rang. He had worked thirteen cases that day, including two skips besides Mayfield; it took him a few moments to realize that it was her voice.

“What have I done to make you hate me so?” she asked.

“I’m all for you personally, Josie, but I’ve got a job to do. Anyway, if I let up it just would mean that someone else would keep looking.”

“I love him.” She said it without emotion — a fact by which she lived. “I love him and he said he would leave me if I let them take his car while he’s — away. I couldn’t stand that. It’s the first thing of beauty he’s ever possessed, and he can’t give it up.”

Ballard was swept by a sudden wave of sympathy, almost of desire for her; he could picture her, wearing something soft, probably cashmere, her face serious, her mouth a pink bud. How could Stuber have such a woman bestowed on him, yet keep thinking of a damned automobile? How could he make Jocelyn see Stuber as he really was?

“Josie, the bank objects so strongly to Stuber that they’ve declared the contract void; as long as he has possession, they’ll hold the account in jeopardy. Surrender it. Get him something you can afford.”

“I couldn’t do that,” she said gravely, and hung up.

Ballard got a beer from the refrigerator and sat down at the kitchen table to drink it. After only one meeting and a single phone conversation, was he falling for Jocelyn Mayfield? He felt a deep physical attraction, sure; but it wasn’t unsatisfied desire which was oppressing him now. It was the knowledge that he was going to keep looking for the car, that there was no way to close the case without Jocelyn being badly hurt emotionally.

Friday, June 17: 10:15 a.m.

“If I see her mother once more, she’ll call the cops,” Ballard objected. “Stuber gets out June twenty-ninth. We could tail him—”

“The bank’s deadline is next Tuesday — the twenty-first,” said Kearny. “Then their dealer recourse expires and they have to eat their loss — whatever it is. Find the girl, Ballard, and get the car.”

The intercom buzzed and Jane Goldson said, “Larry’s got a funny sort of call on 1504, Mr. Kearny. She sounds drunk or something.”

Kearny gestured and stayed on as Ballard picked up. The voice, which Ballard recognized as Jocelyn’s, was overflowing with hysteria.

“I can’t stand it any more and I want you to know you’re to blame!” she cried. “My parentsh hate me — can’t see Hank on weekends ’cause I know you’ll be waiting, like vultures — sho — I did it.” She gave a sleepy giggle. “I killed myself.”

“You’re a lively sounding corpse,” said Kearny in a syrupy voice.

“I know who you are!” Surprisingly, she giggled again. “You made Vikki cry. Poor Vikki’ll be all sad. I took all the pillsh.”

Kearny, who appeared to have been doodling on a sheet of scratch paper, held up a crudely printed note: Have Kathy trace call. Ballard switched off, jabbed Kathy’s intercom button. Please God, he thought, let her be all right. What had brought her to this extremity?

“I’ll trace it,” rapped Kathy. “Keep that connection open.”

He punched back into 1504. “—Ballard’s shoul when I die — lose car, lose Hank, sho—” Her sing-song trailed off with a tired sigh; there was a sudden heavy jar. After a moment a light tapping began, as if the receiver were swinging at the end of the cord and striking a table leg. They stared at one another across the empty line.

The intercom buzzed, making Ballard jump. Kathy said, “469 Eddy Street, Apartment 206, listed under Harold Stein — that’ll be Stuber. The phone company’ll get an ambulance and oxygen over there. Good hunting.”

Ballard was already out of his chair. “It’s a place on Eddy Street — we’ve got to get to her!”

As they rocketed up Franklin for the turn into Eddy Street, Ballard said, “We shouldn’t have hounded her that way. Do you think she’ll be all right?”

“Depends on how many of what she took. That address — between Jones and Leavenworth in the Tenderloin — crummy neighborhood. The nearest dead-storage garage is around the corner on Jones Street. We can — hey! What the hell are you doing?”

Ballard had slammed the car to a stop in front of a rundown apartment building. “I’ve got to get to her!” he cried. He was halfway out the car door when Kearny’s thick fingers closed around Ballard’s tie and yanked him bodily back inside.

“You’re a repo man, Ballard,” he growled. “That might not mean much to you but it does to me, a hell of a lot. First we get the car.” Ballard, suddenly desperate, drew back a threatening fist. Kearny’s slaty eyes didn’t flicker; he said, “Don’t let my gray hairs make a coward of you, sonny.”

Ballard slumped back on the seat. He nodded. “Okay. We'll drive on, damn you.”

As they turned into Jones Street, a boxy white Public Health ambulance wheeled into Eddy and smoked to a stop on the wrong side of the street. At the garage half a block down, Kearny went in while Ballard waited in the car. Why had he almost slugged Kearny? For that matter, why had he backed down?

Kearny stuck his head in the window. “It’s easy when you know where to look.” He laid a hand on Ballard’s arm. “On your way up there call Giselle and have her send me a Hold Harmless letter.”

Ballard circled the block and parked behind the ambulance. On the second floor he saw three tenants gaping by the open door of Apartment 206. A uniformed cop put a hand on Ballard’s chest.

“I was on the phone with her when she — fainted.”

“Okay. The sergeant’ll wanna talk with you anyway.”

She was on the floor by the phone stand, her head back and her mouth open. Her skin was very pale; the beautifully luminous eyes were shut. A tracheal tube was down her throat so that she could breathe. The skirt had ridden high up one sprawled thigh, and Ballard pulled it down.

“Is she... will she—”

The intern was barely older than Ballard, but his hair already was thinning. “We’ll give her oxygen in the ambulance.” He opened his hand to display a bottle. “Unless she had something in here besides what’s on the label, she should be okay.”

Ballard glanced around the tiny two-roomer. There was a rumpled wall bed with a careless pile of paperbacks on the floor beside it; he could picture her cooped up there day after day, while her depression deepened. Above the flaked-silver radiator was a large brown water stain from the apartment upstairs; it was a room where dreams would die without a whimper.

Ballard backed off; instead of talking to the detective in charge he would call her folks so that their own doctor could be at the hospital to prevent it being listed as an attempted suicide.

That afternoon DKA closed the file on the Mayfield case. She was released from the hospital a few days later and returned to 31 Edith Alley. Without really knowing why, Ballard went over there one Tuesday evening to see her; she refused to come out of the bedroom, and he ended up in the living room, drinking tea with Vikki Goodrich.

“She’s grateful for what you did, Larry. But, as far as anything further—” She paused delicately. “Hank Stuber will be out tomorrow.” She paused again, her face suddenly troubled. “She’s going to surprise him and pick him up in my Triumph; he doesn’t know about the Continental. After that I guess she’ll be — well, sort of busy.”

Leaving the apartment, Ballard told himself that ended it Yet he sat behind the wheel of his car for a long time without turning the ignition key. Damn it, that didn’t end it! Too much raw emotion had been bared...

Thursday, June 30th: 8:15 a.m.

Each short journalistic phrase in the Chronicle, read over his forgotten restaurant eggs, deepened his sense of loss, his realization that something bright in his life had been permanently darkened.

Police officers, answering a call late last night to 31 Edith Alley, were greeted by Miss Victoria Goodrich, 24, a case worker with San Francisco Social Services. The hysterical Miss Goodrich said that her roommate, Jocelyn Mayfield, 23, and Harold P. Stuber, 38, had entered the apartment at eight p.m. Stuber had been drinking, she said; by ten p.m. he had become so abusive that he struck Miss Mayfield. According to Miss Goodrich he then departed, and Miss Mayfield locked herself in the bathroom.

At eleven p.m. Miss Goodrich called for police assistance. They broke down the locked door to find Miss Mayfield on the tile floor in a pool of blood. Both wrists had been slashed with a razor blade. The girl was D.O.A. at San Francisco General Hospital. Stuber, an unemployed bartender who was released only yesterday afternoon from the county jail, is being sought on an assault charge.

Ballard thought, I’ve never even seen the son-of-a-bitch I could pass him on the street and not even know it. He felt a sudden revulsion, almost a nausea, at his own role in the destruction of Jocelyn Mayfield. Half an hour later he slammed the Chronicle down on Kearny’s desk.

“Stuber said he’d leave her if we took the Continental while he was in jail. He left her, all right.”

Kearny looked at him blandly. “I’ve already seen it.”

“If we hadn’t taken the car—”

“—she would have killed herself next month or next year over some other deadbeat. She was an emotional loser, Ballard, a picker of wrong men.” He paused, then continued drily, “It’s the end of the month, Ballard. I’d like to review your case file.”

Ballard dropped his briefcase on the littered desk. “You know what you can do with your case file, Kearny? You can take it and—”

Kearny listened without heat, then reached for his cigarettes. He lit one and sneered, through the new smoke, “What will you do now, Ballard — go home and cry into your pillow? She’s going to be dead for a long, long time.”

Ballard stared at him, speechless, as if at a new species of animal — the square pugnacious face, the hard eyes which had seen too much, the heavy cleft chin, the nose slightly askew from some old argument which had gone beyond words. A long slow shudder ran through the younger man’s frame. Work — that was Kearny’s answer to everything. Work, while Jocelyn Mayfield lay with a morgue tag on her toe. Work, while scar tissue began its slow accretion over the wound.

All right, then — work. Very slowly he drew his assignments from the briefcase. “Let’s get at it then,” he said in a choked voice.

Dan Kearny nodded to himself. A girl had died; a man had had his first bitter taste of reality. And in the process DKA bought themselves an investigator. Maybe, with a few more rough edges knocked off, a damned good investigator.

The Second Coming

“But fix thy eyes upon the valley: for the river of blood draws nigh, in which boils every one who by violence injures other.”

Canto XII, 46-48

The Inferno of Dante Alighieri

I’ve thought about it a lot, man; like why Victor and I made that terrible scene out there at San Quentin, putting ourselves on that it was just for kicks. Victor was hung up on kicks; they were a thing with him. He was a sharp dark-haired cat with bright eyes, built lean and hard like a French skin-diver. His old man dug only money, so he’d always had plenty of bread. We got this idea out at his pad on Potrero Hill — a penthouse, of course — one afternoon when we were lying around on the sun-porch in swim trunks and drinking gin.

“You know, man,” he said, “I have made about every scene in the world. I have balled all the chicks, red and yellow and black and white, and I have gotten high on muggles, bluejays, redbirds, and mescaline. I have even tried the white stuff a time or two. But—”

“You’re a goddamned tiger, dad.”

“—but there is one kick I’ve never had, man.”

When he didn’t go on I rolled my head off the quart gin bottle I was using for a pillow and looked at him. He was giving me a shot with those hot, wild eyes of his.

“So like what is it?”

“I’ve never watched an execution.”

I thought about it a minute, drowsily. The sun was so hot it was like nailing me right to the air mattress. Watching an execution. Seeing a man go through the wall. A groovy idea for an artist.

“Too much,” I murmured. “I’m with you, dad.”

The next day, of course, I was back at work on some abstracts for my first one-man show and had forgotten all about it; but that night Victor called me up.

“Did you write to the warden up at San Quentin today, man? He has to contact the San Francisco police chief and make sure you don’t have a record and aren’t a psycho and are useful to the community.”

So I went ahead and wrote the letter because even sober it still seemed a cool idea for some kicks; I knew they always need twelve witnesses to make sure that the accused isn’t sneaked out the back door or something at the last minute like an old Jimmy Cagney movie. Even so, I lay dead for two months before the letter came. The star of our show would be a stud who’d broken into a house trailer near Fort Ord to rape this Army lieutenant’s wife, only right in the middle of it she’d started screaming so he’d put a pillow over her face to keep her quiet until he could finish. But she’d quit breathing. There were eight chicks on the jury and I think like three of them got broken ankles in the rush to send him to the gas chamber. Not that I cared. Kicks, man.

Victor picked me up at seven-thirty in the morning, an hour before we were supposed to report to San Quentin. He was wearing this really hip Italian import, and fifty-dollar shoes, and a narrow-brim hat with a little feather in it, so all he needed was a briefcase to be Chairman of the Board. The top was down on the Mercedes, cold as it was, and when he saw my black suit and hand-knit tie he flashed this crazy white-toothed grin you’d never see in any Director’s meeting.

“Too much, killer! If you’d like comb your hair you could pass for an undertaker coming after the body.”

Since I am a very long, thin cat with black hair always hanging in my eyes, who fully dressed weighs as much as a medium-sized collie, I guess he wasn’t too far off. I put a pint of José Cuervo in the side pocket of the car and we split. We were both really turned on: I mean this senseless, breathless hilarity as if we’d just heard the world’s funniest joke. Or were just going to.

It was one of those chilly California brights with blue sky and cold sunshine and here and there a cloud like Mr. Big was popping Himself a cap down beyond the horizon. I dug it all: the sail of a lone early yacht out in the Bay like a tossed-away paper cup; the whitecaps flipping around out by Angel Island like they were stoned out of their minds; the top down on the 300-SL so we could smell salt and feel the icy bite of the wind. But beyond the tunnel on U.S. 101, coming down towards Marin City, I felt a sudden sharp chill as if a cloud had passed between me and the sun, but none had; and then I dug for the first time what I was actually doing.

Victor felt it, too, for he turned to me and said, “Must maintain cool, dad.”

“I’m with it.”

San Quentin Prison, out on the end of its peninsula, looked like a sprawled ugly dragon sunning itself on a rock; we pulled up near the East Gate and there were not even any birds singing. Just a bunch of quiet cats in black, Quakers or Mennonites or something, protesting capital punishment by their silent presence as they’d done ever since Chessman had gotten his out there. I felt dark frightened things move around inside me when I saw them.

“Let’s fall out right here, dad,” I said in a momentary sort of panic, “and catch the matinee next week.”

But Victor was in kicksville, like desperate to put on all those squares in the black suits. When they looked over at us he jumped up on the back of the bucket seat and spread his arms wide like the Sermon on the Mount. With his tortoise-shell shades and his flashing teeth and that suit which had cost three yards, he looked like Christ on his way to Hollywood.

“Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do unto me,” he cried in this ringing apocalyptic voice.

I grabbed his arm and dragged him back down off the seat. “For Christ sake, man, cool it!”

But he went into high laughter and punched my arm with feverish exuberance, and then jerked a tiny American flag from his inside jacket pocket and began waving it around above the windshield. I could see the sweat on his forehead.

“It’s worth it to live in this country!” he yelled at them.

He put the car in gear and we went on. I looked back and saw one of those cats crossing himself. It put things back in perspective: they were from nowhere. The Middle Ages. Not that I judged them: that was their scene, man. Unto every cat what he digs the most.

The guard on the gate directed us to a small wooden building set against the outside wall, where we found five other witnesses. Three of them were reporters, one was a fat cat smoking a .45 caliber stogy like a politician from Sacramento, and the last was an Army type in lieutenant’s bars, his belt buckle and insignia looking as if he’d been up all night with a can of Brasso.

A guard came in and told us to surrender everything in our pockets and get a receipt for it. We had to remove our shoes, too; they were too heavy for the fluoroscope. Then they put us through this groovy little room one-by-one to x-ray us for cameras and so on; they don’t want anyone making the Kodak scene while they’re busy dropping the pellets. We ended up inside the prison with our shoes back on and with our noses full of that old prison detergent-disinfectant stink.

The politician type, who had those cold slitted eyes like a Sherman tank, started coming on with rank jokes: but everyone put him down, hard, even the reporters. I guess nobody but fuzz ever gets used to executions. The Army stud was at parade rest with a face so pale his freckles looked like a charge of shot. He had reddish hair.

After a while five guards came in to make up the twelve required witnesses. They looked rank, as fuzz always do, and got off in a corner in a little huddle, laughing and gassing together like a bunch of kids kicking a dog. Victor and I sidled over to hear what they were saying.

“Who’s sniffing the eggs this morning?” asked one.

“I don’t know, I haven’t been reading the papers.” He yawned when he answered.

“Don’t you remember?” urged another, “it’s the guy who smothered the woman in the house trailer. Down in the Valley by Salinas.”

“Yeah. Soldier’s wife; and he was raping her and...”

Like dogs hearing the plate rattle, they turned in unison toward the Army lieutenant; but just then more fuzz came in to march us to the observation room. We went in a column of twos with a guard beside each one, everyone unconsciously in step as if following a cadence call. I caught myself listening for measured mournful drum rolls.

The observation room was built right around the gas chamber, with rising tiers of benches for extras in case business was brisk. The chamber itself was hexagonal; the three walls in our room were of plate glass with a waist-high brass rail around the outside like the rail in an old-time saloon. The three other walls were steel plate, with a heavy door, rivet-studded, in the center one, and a small observation window in each of the others.

Inside the chamber were just these two massive chairs, probably oak, facing the rear walls side-by-side; their backs were high enough to come to the nape of the neck of anyone sitting in them. Under each was like a bucket that I knew contained hydrochloric acid. At a signal the executioner would drop sodium cyanide pellets into a chute; the pellets would roll down into the bucket; hydrocyanic acid gas would form; and the cat in the chair would be wasted.

The politician type, who had this rich fruity baritone like Burl Ives, asked why they had two chairs.

“That’s in case there’s a double-header, dad,” I said.

“You’re kidding.” But by his voice the idea pleased him. Then he wheezed plaintively: “I don’t see why they turn the chairs away — we can’t even watch his face while it’s happening to him.”

He was a true rank genuine creep, right out from under a rock with the slime barely dry on his scales; but I wouldn’t have wanted his dreams. I think he was one of those guys who tastes the big draught many times before he swallows it.

We milled around like cattle around the chute when they smell the blood from inside and know they’re somehow involved; then we heard sounds and saw the door in the back of the chamber swing open. A uniformed guard appeared to stand at attention, followed by a priest dressed all in black like Zorro, with his face hanging down to his belly button. He must have been a new man, because he had trouble maintaining his cool: just standing there beside the guard he dropped his little black book on the floor like three times in a row.

The Army cat said to me, as if he’d wig out unless he broke the silence: “They... have it arranged like a stage play, don’t they?”

“But no encores,” said Victor hollowly.

Another guard showed up in the doorway and they walked in the condemned man. He was like sort of a shock. You expect a stud to act like a murderer: I mean, cringe at the sight of the chair because he knows this is it, there’s finally no place to go, no appeal to make, or else bound in there full of cheap bravado and go-to-hell. But he just seemed mildly interested, nothing more.

He wore a white suit with the sleeves rolled up, suntan that looked Army issue, and no tie. Under thirty, brown crewcut hair — the terrible thing is that I cannot even remember the features on his face, man. The closest I could come to a description would be that he resembled the Army cat right there beside me with his nose to the glass.

The one thing I’ll never forget is that stud’s hands. He’d been on Death Row all these months, and here his hands were still red and chapped and knobby, as if he’d still been out picking turnips in the San Joaquin Valley. Then I realized: I was thinking of him in the past tense.

Two fuzz began strapping him down in the chair. A broad leather strap across the chest, narrower belts on the arms and legs. God they were careful about strapping him in. I mean they wanted to make sure he was comfortable. And all the time he was talking with them. Not that we could hear it, but I suppose it went that's fine, fellows, no, that strap isn’t too tight, gee, I hope I'm not making you late for lunch.

That’s what bugged me, he was so damned apologetic! While they were fastening him down over that little bucket of oblivion, that poor dead lonely son of a bitch twisted around to look over his shoulder at us, and he smiled. I mean if he’d had an arm free he might have waved! One of the fuzz, who had white hair and these sad gentle eyes like he was wearing a hair shirt, patted him on the head on the way out. No personal animosity, son, just doing my job.

After that the tempo increased, like your heartbeat when you’re on a black street at three a.m. and the echo of your own footsteps begins to sound like someone following you. The warden was at one observation window, the priest and the doctor at the other. The blackrobe made the sign of the cross, having a last go at the condemned, but he was digging only Ben Casey. Here was this M.D. cat who’d taken the Hippocratic Oath to preserve life, waving his arms around like a TV director to show that stud the easiest way to die.

Hold your breath, then breathe deeply: you won't feel a thing. Of course hydrocyanic acid gas melts your guts into a red-hot soup and bums out every fiber in the lining of your lungs, but you won’t be really feeling it as you Jerk around, that’ll just be raw nerve endings.

Like they should have called his the Hypocritical Oath.

So there we were, three yards and half an inch of plate glass apart, with us staring at him and him by just turning his head able to stare right back: but there were a million light years between the two sides of the glass. He didn’t turn. He was shrived and strapped in and briefed on how to die, and he was ready for the fumes. I found out afterwards that he had even willed his body to medical research.

I did a quick take around.

Victor was sweating profusely, his eyes glued to the window.

The politician was pop-eyed, nose pressed flat and belly indented by the brass rail, pudgy fingers like plump garlic sausages smearing the glass on either side of his head. A look on his face, already, like that of a stud making it with a chick.

The reporters seemed ashamed, as if someone had caught them peeking over the transom into the ladies’ john.

The Army cat just looked sick.

Only the fuzz were unchanged, expending no more emotion on this than on their targets after rapid-fire exercises at the range.

On no face was there hatred.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I was part of it. I wanted to yell out STOP! We were about to gas this stud and none of us wanted him to die! We’ve created this society and we’re all responsible for what it does, but none of us as individuals is willing to take that responsibility. We’re like that Nazi cat at Nuremberg who said that everything would have been all right if they’d only given him more ovens.

The warden signaled. I heard gas whoosh up around the chair.

The condemned man didn’t move. He was following doctor’s orders. Then he took the huge gulping breath the M.D. had pantomimed. All of a sudden he threw this tremendous convulsion, his body straining up against the straps, his head slewed around so I could see his eyes were shut tight and his lips were pulled back from his teeth. Then he started panting like a baby in an oxygen tent, swiftly and shallowly. Only it wasn’t oxygen his lungs were trying to work on.

The lieutenant stepped back smartly from the window, blinked, and puked on the glass. His vomit hung there for an instant like a phosphorus bomb burst in a bunker; then two fuzz were supporting him from the room and we were all jerking back from the mess. All except the politician. He hadn’t even noticed: he was in Henry Millersville, getting his sex kicks the easy way.

I guess the stud in there had never dug that he was supposed to be gone in two seconds without pain, because his body was still arched up in that terrible bow, and his hands were still claws. I could see the muscles standing out along the sides of his jaws like marbles. Finally he flopped back and just hung there in his straps like a machine-gunned paratrooper.

But that wasn’t the end. He took another huge gasp, so I could see his ribs pressing out against his white shirt. After that one, twenty seconds. We decided that he had cut out.

Then another gasp. Then nothing. Half a minute nothing.

Another of those final terrible shuddering racking gasps. At last: all through. All used up. Making it with the angels.

But then he did it again. Every fiber of that dead wasted comic thrown-away body strained for air on this one. No air: only hydrocyanic acid gas. Just nerves, like the fish twitching after you whack it on the skull with the back edge of the skinning knife. Except that it wasn’t a fish we were seeing die.

His head flopped sideways and his tongue came out slyly like the tongue of a dead deer. Then this gunk ran out of his mouth. It was just saliva — they said it couldn’t be anything else — but it reminded me of the residue after light-line resistors have been melted in an electrical fire. That kind of black. That kind of scorched.

Very softly, almost to himself, Victor murmured: “Later, dad.”

That was it. Dig you in the hereafter, dad. Ten little minutes and you’re through the wall. Mistah Kurtz, be dead. Mistah Kurtz, he very very goddamn dead.

I believed it. Looking at what was left of that cat was like looking at a chick who’s gotten herself bombed on the heavy, so when you hold a match in front of her eyes the pupils don’t react and there’s no one home, man. No one. Nowhere. End of the lineville.

We split.

But on the way out I kept thinking of that Army stud, and wondering what had made him sick. Was it because the cat in the chair had been the last to enter, no matter how violently, the body of his beloved, and now even that feeble connection had been severed? Whatever the reason, his body had known what perhaps his mind had refused to accept: this ending was no new beginning, this death would not restore his dead chick to him. This death, no matter how just in his eyes, had generated only nausea.

Victor and I sat in the Mercedes for a long time with the top down, looking out over that bright beautiful empty peninsula, not named, as you might think, after a saint, but after some poor dumb Indian they had hanged there a hundred years or so before. Trees and clouds and blue water, and still no birds making the scene. Even the cats in the black suits had vanished, but now I understood why they’d been there. In their silent censure, they had been sounding the right gong, man. We were the ones from the Middle Ages.

Victor took a deep shuddering breath as if he could never get enough air. Then he said in a barely audible voice: “How did you dig that action, man?”

I gave a little shrug and, being myself, said the only thing I could say. “It was a gas, dad.”

“I dig, man. I’m hip. A gas.”

Something was wrong with the way he said it, but I broke the seal on the tequila and we killed it in fifteen minutes, without even a lime to suck in between. Then he started the car and we cut out, and I realized what was wrong. Watching that cat in the gas chamber, Victor had realized for the very first time that life is far, far more than just kicks. We were both partially responsible for what had happened in there, and we had been ineluctably diminished by it.

On U.S. 101 he coked the Mercedes up to 104 m.p.h. through the traffic, and held it there. It was wild: it was the end: but I didn’t sound. I was alone without my Guide by the boiling river of blood. When the Highway Patrol finally stopped us, Victor was coming on so strong and I was coming on so mild that they surrounded us with their holster flaps unbuckled, and checked our veins for needle marks.

I didn’t say a word to them, man, not one. Not even my name. Like they had to look in my wallet to see who I was. And while they were doing that, Victor blew his cool entirely. You know, biting, foaming at the mouth, the whole bit — he gave a very good show until they hit him on the back of the head with a gun butt. I just watched.

They lifted his license for a year, nothing else, because his old man spent a lot of bread on a shrinker who testified that Victor had temporarily wigged out, and who had him put away in the zoo for a time. He’s back now, but he still sees that wig picker, three times a week at forty clams a shot.

He needs it. A few days ago I saw him on Upper Grant, stalking lithely through a gray raw February day with the fog in, wearing just a T-shirt and jeans — and no shoes. He seemed agitated, pressed, confined within his own concerns, but I stopped him for a minute.

“Ah... how you making it, man? Like, ah, what’s the gig?”

He shook his head cautiously. “They will not let us get away with it, you know. Like to them, man, just living is a crime.”

“Why no strollers, dad?”

“I cannot wear shoes.” He moved closer and glanced up and down the street, and said with tragic earnestness: “I can hear only with the soles of my feet, man.”

Then he nodded and padded away through the crowds on silent naked soles like a puzzled panther, drifting through the fruiters and drunken teenagers and fuzz trying to bust some cat for possession who have inherited North Beach from the true swingers. I guess all Victor wants to listen to now is Mother Earth: all he wants to hear is the comforting sound of the worms, chewing away.

Chewing away, and waiting for Victor; and maybe for the Second Coming.

Plot It Yourself

Wasn’t it Shakespeare who suggested that we kill all the lawyers? Too drastic? Well, then, what about one lawyer?

I am his murderer.

Can you catch me?

I won’t lie to you. Oh, I might tease you a little. Do a bit of business over here with my left hand to hold your eye, say, while over here my right hand is doing, oh, maybe, murder.

A widely held misconception is that Beverly Hills is inhabited by movie folk. But only eight percent of the mansions on those wide, shady, deserted streets, drowsy with the swish of automatic sprinklers and the clip-clip of hedge shears, are owned by the Sly Stallones and the Jane Fondas. In the rest live doctors and dentists and psychiatrists and attorneys and clothes-hanger manufacturers and Rolls Royce salesmen.

Take that white mansion with stately southern pillars set well back from Beverly Glen on an acre of lawn. It houses — pardon me, housed — an entertainment law attorney named Eric Stalker. On the night of his murder, streetlights were going on as Stalker parked his Lagonda (one of twenty-four imported into the U.S. that year) behind a white Continental, a midnight-blue Rolls, and his stepdaughter’s red bat-wing Mercedes coupe.

Stalker was a handsome, gray-haired, vital fifty-six, with the tanning-salon’s all-over mahogany skin color and the spring to his step that only hours in the gym can give. As he closed the car door — a solid, monied clunk — an eight-year-old Chev Nova, with one fender a different color from the rest, crunched to a stop on the gravel drive behind the Lagonda.

Chuck Hoffe fit his machine: early thirties, tough-looking, mean of face and cold of eye, wearing the sort of off-the-rack suit associated in the popular mind with the honest cop.

“Chuck — you don’t mind if I call you Chuck, do you? I’m delighted that you—”

Hoffe shook Stalker’s arm off his shoulder almost testily. “If you invited me here tonight hoping I’ll change my testimony tomorrow—”

Stalker shifted his slim attaché case to emphasize it. “Let’s go to my study before we join the others, Chuck. I have something in here that you’ll find intriguing.”

Eric Stalker, leading this vice cop off toward the French doors to his study, is playing a dangerous game with Hoffe and with his other guests now congregating in the dining room. Did I say dangerous? Deadly, rather. Because, as Dickens once pointed out, if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers. Stalker is a very good lawyer. And his guests — well, they’re the sort of people who need very good lawyers.

It was a small formal dining room, the walls covered by Thirteenth Century tapestries depicting the cardinal sin of gluttony with all the hypocritically self-indulgent detail so beloved of the medieval artist. The chandelier was Czechoslovakian crystal and the flatware so solidly silver that the forks could be easily bent by hand if one were so gauche as to do so.

No nouvelle cuisine here: shad roe aux fines herbes, a duckling in Flemish olive sauce, and pork fillets braised in a nice spiced Burgundy, served with polenta. They had lingered over the fig-and-cherry tart. Stalker finally rose and tapped his water glass with his knife. Conversation ceased abruptly.

“Yes, of course. You each know why you’re here, don’t you?” He began walking slowly down the length of the table behind their chairs, all eyes moving with him. “I hinted—”

He stopped behind his stepdaughter, Merrilee, a sensual, spoiled-looking woman in her early twenties, not at all beautiful but with an obviously very bedable look about her. As he leaned over to speak above her, she stared straight ahead, a sullen expression on her face.

“Right, Merrilee? I no more than hinted—”

“Yes, Father. Only hinted.”

He paused behind Jon Norliss, a distinguished, white-haired man of about seventy who was lighting a cigar as if at peace with himself and the world. He seemed indifferent to Stalker’s face beaming over his shoulder.

“Yes. Hinted that I might give each of you something.”

Norliss nodded, turning his cigar to get it burning evenly. Stalker nodded also, and moved on to Andy Bowman, an obvious health addict in his mid-forties, with a handsome face and an assured, slightly sardonic air.

“Something that you want very much.” Stalker’s voice suddenly snapped. “Isn’t that so, Andy?”

“Yes, Eric,” said Bowman evenly.

Stalker had passed around the end of the table to Chuck Hoffe’s place. The plainclothesman was half turned to watch him.

“I have thought each of your situations over very carefully indeed,” said Stalker. “And I have decided that I’m not giving any of you one damned thing.”

He nodded, beaming, and slipped out of the room through the door behind him. Hoffe already was halfway to his feet, his face contorted, exclaiming, “I could kill you for this, Stalker!”

All of them, stunned, were on their feet by this time, crowding through the doorway after Stalker.

“You promised me!”

“I was led to believe—”

“Your own daughter, you couldn’t—”

But Stalker stepped into his study and closed the door behind him. They heard the bolt being shot home. Hoffe strode angrily to the massive front door, face set and eyes murderous.

What was it The Saint used to say Chief Inspector Teal from Scotland Yard was being afflicted with? Detectivitis, I believe. I can see you sharpening your wits for the challenge I am setting you, my friend. Beware of detectivitis — what is needed here is observation. Watch closely now. No detail is too miniscule to be unimportant Don’t let your eyes deceive you.

Stalker paused to grin at himself and fuss with his carnation in the ornate full-length mirror fastened to the back of the door. Then he crossed the thick oriental carpet to a painting beside the French doors behind his desk. He swung the hinged painting back against the wall and worked the combination of the safe it concealed. After opening the safe door against the back of the painting, he left it that way, taking nothing from it.

He sat down in the heavy leather swivel chair behind his desk and surveyed the room with a self-satisfied look on his face. He was quite alone. He took paper and an envelope from the top side drawer and began writing with an old-fashioned inkwell pen. The pen made scratching sounds in the silence of the study.

I told you I wouldn’t deceive you, so we will take a quick peek at the rest of the characters in our little drama as Stalker writes his rather nasty screed in his locked study.

Stepdaughter Merrilee is at the makeup table in her room on the second floor, shredding a handkerchief with her teeth and cursing her stepfather. She abruptly gets to her feet and starts for the door with great resolve.

Stalker’s partner in the law office, courtly looking Jon Norliss, is out in back by the pool, pausing to knock the ash off his cigar. He loses control, shreds it against the retaining wall. Now he is turning determinedly back toward the house.

Stalker’s Beverly Hills physician, the dashing Andy Bowman, is throwing up into the toilet on the second floor. He suffers a spastic stomach in moments of ultimate decision.

The vice-cop, Chuck Hoffe, has been walking in circles on the front lawn, smoking a cigarette down to the filter. He throws it away with sudden resolution and strides rapidly off.

Detectivitis, anyone?

Stalker looked up into the face of the person in the middle of the room. In that frozen moment of realization, he could see himself exactly as that person saw him.

A handsome, distinguished man, old-fashioned pen in his left hand, inkwell open on the upper-left-hand corner of the desk blotter. Behind him, the painting swung back against the wall to the right of the wall safe it usually concealed, with the safe door still open against the back of the painting. To the left of the opened safe were the French doors, drapes closed, door latched.

After a moment, as if there were no one else in the room with him, he turned over the sheet of foolscap to blot it, then folded it into the envelope. As he wrote on the envelope, he looked up into that face again.

“You can’t possibly think you’re going to get away with this, you know,” he said in a voice which strove for lightness.

There was no response. Was that perhaps a flicker of fear in Stalker’s eyes? He licked the envelope and put it in the desk, his hands resting on the edge of the still-open drawer.

“Take some time to reconsider?” he asked almost hopefully.

There was no response.

He shouted, “All right, then, damn you, get it ov—”

There was a single gunshot, shockingly loud in the enclosed room. Stalker was slammed backward against his chair by the blast, his arms flying wide with its force.

A smoking .357 Magnum thudded to the carpet several feet from the desk. Stalker was tipped back as if sleeping, legs splayed out under the desk, arms hanging laxly outside the arms of the chair. Red had blossomed on his shirt-front.

A silhouette loomed up against the French doors. Cupped hands circled a face pressed against the glass as the person outside tried to peer in through the closed curtains. The latch rattled, but held.

From beyond the bolted door of the study came confused sounds, muffled voices. Someone began beating on the door, then a key was turned in the lock. The knob was turned, rattled. The door would not open. The bolt held.

From the French doors came the sound of breaking glass.

In the hallway, Merrilee was still trying her key in the lock when the bolt was drawn from the inside. Bowman was crowding her shoulder as the door swung in to frame Chuck Hoffe and Jon Norliss in the opening.

“Stalker’s dead,” Hoffe said matter-of-factly.

Merrilee and Bowman shoved past him into the room without speaking, to get a glimpse of the body slumped behind the desk.

Ah, yes, my friend, these are the vital moments for the little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot was fond of calling them. Everything is laid bare for the inquiring mind that wants to know. Remember, there are only the study door and the French doors. Remember, also, that everyone is suspect.

“Look — don’t touch,” warned Hoffe. “I have to call forensics. But before I do—”

He stood on the other side of the desk from the dead man, the others ranging naturally behind him. He pointed as he spoke. “Just so we agree on the physical evidence. Stalker is slumped in his chair behind his desk, dead, shot once through the old pump. Powder bums around the wound. The inkwell on the upper-right corner of the desk has been overturned and the ink has spilled out. A .357 Magnum is lying on the floor approximately ten feet from the right edge of the desk. It is probably the murder weapon, probably dropped there by the killer. Okay so far?”

There were several assenting sounds. He went on.

“On the wall behind the desk is a hinged painting, swung open so it is lying against the wall to the left of a wall safe, which is also open. To the right of the safe, the French doors are now open. One pane is broken and glass is shattered inward across the floor. Those doors were locked when I tried them from the outside — I had to bust one of the panes to get in.”

No reactions. Hoffe wrapped a handkerchief around his hand to pick up the phone receiver. He tapped out a number. “Since we’ve agreed on the crime scene, I’ll call it in.”

No one dissented. Bowman, ever the physician, crouched beside the body to check the obviously dead wrist for a pulse. Norliss stared glumly at the body.

Bowman stood up and shrugged. “The Grim Reaper and all that.”

“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” intoned Norliss.

“Vengeance is a .357 Magnum slug through the heart,” said Hoffe, coming up beside them.

“Stop this! All of you!” cried Merrilee suddenly. They turned to look at her in surprise. There were tears in her eyes. “Sarcasm and platitudes when — when my father is dead. Murdered!” She turned suddenly on Hoffe. “And you just said, a few minutes ago, that you were going to kill him.”

For just an instant, Hoffe looked guilty, then his normal brash, cocky manner reasserted itself. He started striding up and down the carpet beside the desk, gesturing as he did.

“Sure, I’ll admit I was steamed. That’s why I went out to smoke a cigarette, to get control of myself. But then I heard this shot. I ran back, tried the French doors — they were locked, as I said. I looked through the curtains and saw him here — dead. So I—”

“You could have opened those doors earlier!” cried Merrilee.

“I didn’t like him any better than the rest of you,” said Hoffe patiently, “but why would I kill him?”

At that moment, a strange voice said, “Raoul, I want you to put your hand on her shoulder.”

See everyone look in different directions? Now look at the twenty-nine inch screen of the floor-model TV console in the corner. Yes, a pornographic film now flickers there! A bedroom with a handsome naked man in bed with a naked blonde girl who doesn’t look out of her teens. Might not this be a clue?

The man put his hand on the girl’s shoulder. The unknown voice said, “Turn her toward you—”

There was a loud click and the screen went blank. Hoffe had pushed past Bowman to the video-machine controls.

“I think we should see the rest of it,” said Bowman. “A porn flick — and Mr. Hoffe here is a vice cop.”

Hoffe, meeting nothing but stony dislike in any eye, stepped back with a shrug. “All right,” he said, “show the damned thing. See what it gets you.”

The porn movie flickered back on. But this time, as the man reached again for the naked girl, the director’s voice burst in, “Who the hell is this clown? Somebody get him out of here!”

The camera slewed wildly around the empty warehouse with the bedroom set and lights clustered in the middle of it, then focused on Hoffe and the young vulpine-looking director.

“She’s underage, baby,” Hoffe said, flashing his tin. “In this state, seventeen’ll get you twenty.”

“Take Jive, everybody!” yelled the director. In a stricken undertone to Hoffe, he added, “Hey, man, gimme a break!”

The camera maintained follow focus as they moved away from the set. The director took a roll of bills from his pocket.

“I can beat this thing in court — the girl’s older than she looks. But our production deadlines would suffer. I wouldn’t want you to lose by not making an arrest—”

Hoffe clicked the machine off again. “That’s when I busted him. So you see, Stalker didn’t have any knives sticking in me.”

“He told me he was going to force you to change your testimony in court tomorrow on this case,” said Bowman. After a beat, in an almost admiring voice, he added, “Our Eric was good at things like that.”

Hoffe sneered. “Not this time. I have this guy cold.”

But the porn scene flashed back on — Bowman’s work. “Oh, I won’t lose.” Hoffe pocketed the roll of money, then clapped cuffs on the startled director. “Because you’re under arrest, pal, for making pornographic films with an underage girl.”

The screen went to snow, then blank. Hoffe sneered at the distaste in their faces.

“Okay, so Stalker had me over a barrel with this film and made me promise in writing to change my testimony tomorrow. He said he’d give me the tape after supper, but—”

“But he didn’t and you killed him,” said Merrilee.

“Except the tape is still here, girlie!” sneered Hoffe. “Would I kill him and then not take it? Hell, no! This was a grudge job.” He turned suddenly. “And you had a hell of a grudge against him.”

Norliss, caught off-guard, wet suddenly dry lips. He stammered, “That’s nonsense. I don’t know what you might have heard, but that disagreement in his office was just business.”

Bowman, still crouched in front of the VCR machine to check the tape cabinet beneath it, had taken out Hoffe’s tape and inserted another. He pushed the PLAY button and stood up. “Maybe this will tell us what kind of business.”

On the TV monitor flashed Stalker’s office, taken from a hidden camera. Stalker was behind his desk, dictating a memo. The sound quality was excellent.

“He wired his own office!” gasped Norliss.

The door burst open and Norliss stormed in. He stopped in front of his partner’s desk.

“I arrived this morning and found my name removed from my door! I’m going to tell the Bar Association and—”

“Tell them about the Gorsuch case?” asked Stalker silkily.

“I... I don’t know what you mean.”

Stalker was on his feet, towering over the older, frailer man. “I don’t mind your suborning witnesses, Jon, but when you do it so clumsily that I have to spend a great deal of money to get back the evidence and save the firm’s name, well—”

“But, Eric, you’re the one who demanded I offer—”

“Just sign this letter of resignation, Jon, and I’ll turn over the evidence to you. Otherwise—”

The screen went to snow.

I believe it was Cervantes who said that the only comfort of the miserable is to have partners in their woes. But Jon Norliss found small comfort with his partner here tonight. I’m sure he expected to get back the evidence at dinner, and when he learned that he wasn’t going to, well, perhaps he—

But there, I’m displaying a touch of detectivitis myself!

Bowman chuckled and shook his head as he took the tape back out of the VCR. “So Eric stiffed you, too, Jon. Just like he did Hoffe. Had you sign the resignation, then kept the evidence against you. So typical. But—”

“What about you?” Norliss burst in angrily. “Your motive for wanting him dead was better than mine. He could have taken my past — but he planned to take your future.”

Bowman swept an angry hand across the tape titles in the cabinet. “Where’s the tape with my name on it, then?”

Before Norliss could answer, Hoffe shot a hand into Bowman’s inside coat pocket and yanked out a video tape.

“Right here,” he said, shoving Bowman roughly aside.

In a moment, Stalker’s office again came up on the screen. Now it was Bowman and the attorney facing each other across the familiar desk, seen from the familiar angle.

“I’ve decided not to invest in your clinic, after all, Andy,” said Stalker in an almost indifferent voice.

Bowman’s face crumpled.

“But... but, I... If you don’t give me the money — I pledged everything, my home, my—”

“I’ve just found out there was nothing wrong with my gall bladder that a change of diet wouldn’t have cured. But you—”

Bowman was pleading now. “Eric, please! Maybe the operation was marginal, but... but in checking the X-rays afterward I found a... a shadow on your lung. I’m not a specialist in that field, but it could be—”

“Malignant?” Stalker laughed coarsely. “You’d say anything to save the clinic, wouldn’t you? Well, crawl for me, Andy. Convince me. If you do, next week, maybe — just maybe...”

I think it was an ancient Roman who said it was better to use medicine at the outset than at the last moment. Poor Dr. Bowman! All those financial ills, and he went to Stalker for his medicine. And what did he get for his troubles? Being prime suspect in a murder case. Unless you believe him, of course.

Bowman was clutching his video tape anxiously to his chest. He gave what he thought was a little laugh. “Oh, Eric liked to make people sweat, sure, but I know he was going to back my clinic.” When nobody spoke, he went on, “If he did have cancer, he would have died in a few months. I’d have been a fool to risk a murder charge just so all his money would go to — her.”

His voice and gesture directed all eyes to Merrilee. They found her using the mirror on the back of the door to freshen her lipstick. She caught their reflection in the glass and laughed.

“Me? Kill Daddy? I loved him!” She turned to face them, a sneer on her full lips. “I don’t need Daddy’s money. I have the trust fund my mother left me.”

“Administered by Eric!” exclaimed Norliss. “He had full discretion to revoke the trust, and just last week he told me he was drawing up papers to that effect — to sign tomorrow.”

“And when I came down from the second floor,” exclaimed Bowman, “she was right beside that door, with the key in her hand. She said she heard a shot, and I believed her. But—”

“Well, well, well,” interrupted Hoffe softly. “The little stepdaughter had motive, means, and opportunity — the classic big three for premeditated murder.”

Merrilee had paled. She whirled back to the mirror and pressed her face against it, making a double image of herself. “Stop it,” she cried, “all of you! I did hear a shot, just like I said! And I heard Daddy in here talking with someone, but I couldn’t hear the words.” She faced them again, pale features contorted. “You can’t prove that Daddy planned to—”

She stopped, mouth gaping, as Eric Stalker’s rich, sardonic tones filled the room. “A tender — if drunken — scene.”

They looked at the corpse, then at the TV. Merrilee’s bed was wide, opulent, with a trail of scattered masculine and feminine garments leading to it across the floor. On it, two naked people were leaping guiltily apart.

“The tape was in the safe,” explained Hoffe from the VCR machine. “He had his own kid’s room wired for pictures.”

“Stepkid’s,” corrected Bowman almost lasciviously.

On the screen, boy and woman had gotten tangled up in each other and the black satin top-sheet had fallen on the floor beside the bed. Stalker entered the frame.

“You — out.”

The boy scrambled to his feet. “Hey, old man, I ain’t scared of you!”

“You should be. Now get out before I—”

“Jerry, do what he says,” said the film Merrilee.

“Stop it!” shrieked the real Merrilee.

“We've gone through it,” said Hoffe. “Now it’s your turn.”

On the screen, the boy stormed out with his clothes, slamming the door behind him. Stalker was staring at Merrilee as she hastily pulled on a robe over her nakedness.

“I’m cutting off your allowance, Merrilee.”

She tried to embrace him, fawning. “Daddy, I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I had too much to drink and — you can’t!”

He shook her off. “I can and will. It was important to your mother that you be a decent person. I’ll revoke the trust if that’s what it takes to—”

Merrilee slammed her hand down on the VCR controls and the screen went blank. She turned to glare at the others. “All right, he’d taken my allowance and was threatening to revoke the trust. But he promised that if I straightened up he’d give it all back to me!”

“But tonight at dinner he told all of us that he wasn’t giving us one damned thing,” said Hoffe.

“It could have been any one of us,” breathed Norliss.

“Or all of us,” said Bowman.

“Sure — or none of us,” Merrilee added sarcastically.

Hoffe merely laughed.

What was it that Holmes told Watson? That when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? Of course, our suspects’ stories should have told you who I, the murderer, am — as well as why I did it. But if you’re still confused, remember those three classic elements of premeditated murder: motive, means, and opportunity.

“What are you laughing at?” snapped Bowman.

“You all act like this is one of those board games,” said Hoffe. “Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with a noose. But this is real murder, not—”

“Do you know who did it?” demanded Norliss.

“I’m a detective, aren’t I?”

“The police will be here any minute.”

“I didn’t call them yet. No use going down unnecessarily.”

“For — murder?”

“Nah, little girl — for taking a bribe. As for murder—” Hoffe began pacing beside the desk again. Their eyes followed him. “Was it Hoffe, the corrupt cop? No, I had to smash the French doors to get in here and Norliss was with me when I did. Which takes care of him, too. We alibi each other.”

Bowman broke in. “If you’re saying it was me—”

“You couldn’t profit from his murder — you’d still be ruined. And why give him a quick and easy death when he might face a long and lingering one? Besides, Merrilee was at the study door when you came downstairs.”

Heads swiveled back to Merrilee, cowering against the now-silent TV.

“Merrilee, the disaffected stepdaughter,” said Hoffe. “Motive, means, opportunity. Even had a key to get in here.” He grinned. “But the door was bolted on the inside, her key couldn’t do her any good. It’s just like she said. How’d she put it’ ‘Or none of us?’ Yeah. Or none of us.”

“But... but there wasn’t anyone else,” Norliss said.

“Sure, there was,” Hoffe told him. “Stalker blew himself away.”

But you knew I was the killer all the time, didn’t you? Because I was the only person who could have done it, from the moment I shot the bolt on that door. I warned you that no one could be eliminated as a suspect.

Who was I talking to just before I died? Why, to my own image in the mirror on the back of the door, of course. I even saw myself and the room reversed, if you will remember — pen in my left hand, inkwell on the left corner of the blotter, the picture and the safe door open to the right-hand side, the French doors to the left of the safe.

Hoffe, in repeating the scene after they broke in, listed each item in its proper place. The gun was ten feet from the desk — where my involuntary death spasm threw it. That spasm knocked over the inkwell. There were powder bums because I put the muzzle against my chest before I pulled the trigger.

Yes, I committed the perfect crime.

“Almost,” said Hoffe. He was holding the sheet of paper on which Stalker had been writing just before his death. On the opened envelope was written: To be opened one year after my death. “Lucky I don’t believe in dying wishes,” he added.

Then he read aloud from the letter:

“ ‘To whom it may concern: When this is read, I will be dead a year — by my own hand. Last week I was told I might have cancer, and yesterday confirmed the diagnosis with a specialist. Inoperable. Since I do not wish to be reduced to ridicule by pain and fear, I am ending it now, arranging it so that one of my so-called friends will be convicted of my murder. A conviction each of them more richly deserves than I do this death sentence passed upon me by nature.’

“That’s a matter of opinion,” said Hoffe.

There was the snap of a cigarette lighter. Stalker’s note started to bum. Each person already had his own videotape.

Damn! I should have foreseen that none of them would honor the last wishes of a poor, dying, betrayed man.

It was one of the Victorian novelists, I believe, who said that when you go into an attorney’s office, you will have to pay for it, first or last.

What I have realized only too late, alas, is that this holds tree even if you’re the attorney.

Raptor

At eleven p.m., Spiro Gounaris, a hawk-nosed man carrying fifty years and forty extra pounds, locked the door of the second-hand store which fronted his treasury book. He crossed the sidewalk to the phonebooth, as he had done for six nights in a row. As he dropped his dime and tapped out the Federal Prosecutor Task Force number, Raptor came bopping along in shades and a floppy beret — on my way home from an early gig, man.

Unlike the previous nights, Raptor saw no other pedestrians on the street. Gounaris was saying, “Seven-thousand two-hundred and eighty” into the phone when Raptor pressed the muzzle of the short-barreled .357 Magnum against the back of his head and pulled the trigger...

At three minutes to midnight, Raptor walked into a gas station three miles away and laid five twenties with a note clipped to them on top of the pump the night man was locking up.

“The pay phone,” said Raptor.

The phone was saying, “Hello, this is Dunstan Trevis speaking,” as the night man, a kid in his twenties, came up tentatively. Raptor handed him the receiver to hear the rest of the message. At the tone, the kid cleared his throat and read from the note, “Uh... this is Raptor. Uh... I gave the gentleman the message. It... uh... really blew his mind.”

Dunstan Trevis was a compact man in his thirties, a shade over five-ten and under 170, with tired dispassionate eyes behind bookish hornrims in a cool, uninvolved face. He switched off the phone machine’s playback mechanism and walked through the apartment to his bedroom.

How now! A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!

He drew a mental line through Gounaris, S. on the list he carried in his head. Five dead rats in the two-plus years he’d been controller for Prince Industries. He felt as he always did when there was a message from Raptor on the machine: ready to throw up, yet determined to go on. No one on the Board knew it, but he’d set Gounaris up so that going to the Feds must have seemed the only way out. And so the Board had ordered the hit.

Trevis undressed and got into bed. Only five years before he’d been a computer software designer for United Electrodata, with a brilliant future, a growing portfolio, some very nice stock options, and a wedding date set.

Then Teresa had died.

Out of that terrible time had come his resolve. He started drinking, methodically, destructively. The folio dwindled, the options lapsed, the future disappeared. Once he was far enough down, he dried out, found a bookkeeping job with the Dahlgren subsidiary of Prince Industries, and in two months was head bookkeeper. He was made controller of Prince Industries when they realized he had a remarkable ability to invent new and startling ways to launder illicit cash.

Now, Trevis slept.

the dum dum smashed through her skull.

He came up out of it screaming. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he wiped the sweat from his face with a corner of the sheet. Always the same, it never varied — except they were more frequent.

He courted sleep, as usual, with Miyamotu Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, the great Seventeenth Century guide for samurai intent on defeating their enemies in battle. But sleep continued to elude him. It wasn’t fear of death — too much of him had died with Teresa for that. It was that he had to change the equation. When you cannot see the enemy’s spirit, said Musashi, make a feint attack to discover his resources. He will show his long sword, thinking he sees your spirit.

Risk everything in a feint, in hopes of uncovering whoever had been responsible for Teresa’s death.

But meanwhile, sleep. One of his functions was to act as the Board’s buffer man. Through him people who didn’t want to meet while conducting business didn’t have to. Hence, he was the buffer between Raptor and the Board. And between the Board and Letter-man, their tame cop who had fingered Gounaris to the Board. Tomorrow he had to meet Letterman, and Letterman would be howling.

Lieutenant Jack Letterman of the city’s Organized Crime Squad had a hard, lined face and doleful blue eyes tipped down at the outer corners like a bloodhound's. His suit was not quite expensive enough to raise questions about his income. He entered one of Vince O’Neill’s porn parlors past the garish yellow and red sign: HOT STUFF — 25¢ ARCADE — FANTASY IN FLESH! Covering the walls were intimate photos of women wearing nothing but expressions seldom seen in full daylight. In a raised change-cage, a stout middle-aged woman reading that morning’s Wall Street Journal said, “The-hottest-show-in-town-have-a-good-time” without looking up from her stock quotations.

Letterman entered the labyrinth of coin machines where mobile masks of light flickered over the features of the male viewers peering into the eyepieces. Perfumed disinfectant gave it a county-jail smell. In the rear was Trevis, showing no slightest interest in what he was seeing. Letterman fed three quarters, good for three minutes, into the machine next to his.

“I didn’t expect a hit on Gounaris,” he complained. “The boys down at the federal building are really burned. There’s going to be too much heat for me to pass anything on for a while. I’ve got a pension to protect.”

Trevis shrugged almost sullenly, handed him a newspaper with his blood money folded inside, and walked out.

Milton Prince was in his mid-fifties, dynamic, corrupt, kept fit by massages, saunas, and heroic avoidance of the pasta he loved. His name had once carried extra syllables — rhymes with spaghetti had been the schoolyard taunt of the predominantly Irish kids at St. Paddy’s across the river. The syllables had been dropped just about the time some of those erstwhile youthful taunters had started walking funny, or seen their businesses torched, or watched with a gun at their heads while three or four strangers entertained their wives.

“How was the weekend?” he asked Trevis.

Trevis removed his glasses to ponder the question, as he always did. He finally admitted, “I tried the intermediate run for the first time, Mr. Prince.”

Prince chuckled. “You? Skiing! I just can’t—”

But the time for small talk was past. The glasses had gone back on. Trevis, sorting through his paper-stuffed briefcase, said, “You’ll find Raptor’s payment on the Gounaris matter under Write-off Against Depreciation on page six of the printout.” He paused. “Our friend downtown tells me the Feds were very upset to lose their star informant before they could get him in front of the grand jury.”

Prince’s eyes sharpened. “How upset is very?”

“Letterman is trying to back away from us.”

“And if the Feds find out he’s on the pad?”

“He’ll get into bed with them.” Then, because Letterman, while venal, was not on his mental list, Trevis added, “I recommend no action by the Board at this time, Mr. Prince. It would remove the immediate problem but create a long-term one. The police are very stubborn when one of their own is taken.”

Not that Trevis expected Prince to follow his recommendation. Prince would do exactly as he wished. Prince was answerable only to the Board, locally.

“Uh... this is Raptor,” said the cassette player on Prince’s desk. “Uh... I gave the gentleman the message. It... uh... really blew his mind.”

“I got it off Trevis’s answering machine yesterday,” said Eddie Ucelli. He was a skull-crusher who had worked his way up from union strongarm to made-man to a member of the Board.

“My friend at the police lab voice-printed it,” said Otto Kreiger, the firm’s corporate counsel and also on the Board. “Another different voice — just like all the others.”

“Raptor doesn’t make mistakes,” said Prince in admiration. “He doesn’t give us a handle on him.”

Nearly three years earlier, the Board had determined to put out a contract on Christiansen, who was getting too ambitious, but before they could a man named Raptor hit him — for free. A sample of his work. Since then, he had carried out four other impeccable internal eliminations for the Board, but they knew absolutely nothing about him. From the first he had insisted on a buffer man and a series of mail cut-outs beyond the buffer. The Board had chosen Trevis as buffer man, and it seemed a safe arrangement. But they still kept trying to find out about Raptor, just for insurance.

Ucelli tossed a newspaper clipping on the desk. “I thought I’d snoop Trevis’s desk while I was there, and I found this. Maybe it don’t mean nothing, it’s five or six years old, but she used to work for the Dahlgren subsidiary—”

A woman named Teresa Bianca had been shot and killed instantly in a downtown bar by an unknown assailant who escaped into the Christmas-shopper crowds. One of the dozen listed witnesses was a Dunstan Trevis.

“I remember the case,” said Kreiger. “A very professional-seeming hit. But the Board never ordered—”

Prince was nodding. “Not one of ours.” He shrugged and crumpled up the clipping, tossing it into the wastebasket.

But after the other two had gone, Prince recovered it and smoothed it out on his desk blotter. His shirt was suddenly stuck to his back. Teresa Bianca, Whittington’s secretary and a snoopy little broad. No, the Board hadn’t ordered the hit on her. It hadn’t ordered the hit on Whittington either, but he’d been lucky because everyone bought that as an accident, pure and simple.

Put Driscoll on Trevis, that was it. Driscoll was a small-time private eye owned by Prince. Nothing would get back to the Board from Driscoll, but Driscoll could find out if there was anything to worry about with Trevis. Meanwhile, just for his own peace of mind, he wanted to find a way around Trevis to Raptor, direct, without anyone else on the Board knowing about it. To do that he would have to call a Board on Letterman.

It was a full Board, very formal and full of all that man-of-respect drool they had picked up from The Godfather. Held in the executive boardroom, because who wanted to meet in a drafty warehouse or upstairs over a pizza joint when this was comfortable and secure? Prince, as capo, presided. Around the table were the men who controlled shylocking, porn, whores, drugs, garbage, linen, jukeboxes, trucking, and gambling in the city and the southern half of the state.

“Mr. Ucelli is recommending a contract be let on Lieutenant Letterman,” said Prince. “Our buffer man, Mr. Trevis, opposes such action at this time.”

Trevis, not being a member of the Board, was not present, of course, but his view had its adherents. Gideon Abramson, loan shark and a grandfather eight times over, said, “There is a great deal of heat over this Gounaris thing. The Feds have so many people on the street my collectors keep tripping over them. To hit an Organized Crime Squad cop at this time—”

“He talks, he can hurt us bad,” objected Spignola, garbage and linen.

“Who? Who can he take down?” Friedman’s street-drug sales were being curtailed by the federal heat. “The buffer man? Trevis? Big deal. Mr. Nobody, am I not right?”

Prince, who was worried by the possibility that he wasn’t right, waited while Kreiger made the point that Raptor might not want to hit someone outside the organization itself, then said smoothly, “I believe it should be put to a vote. All those in favor so indicate.” And he raised his own hand.

Following the Board’s directive, Dunstan Trevis typed Mr.Porter Edwards, Edwards’ Tow Truck and Wrecking Service, 4853 Harbor Drive on a six-by-nine manila clasp envelope with first-class postage already affixed. In this he put a small sealed unaddressed white envelope containing a three-by-five index card on which he had typed:

Jack Letterman

accident

As always, he was using one of the public typewriters in the third-floor stacks of the public library. As he stood up, a young woman with an armload of books ran into him. Her books flew in every direction. She seemed to be in her early twenties and wore no bra under her see-through blouse.

“I’m really sorry,” she said in a flustered voice, retrieving his fallen envelope as he picked up her books.

He assured her it was all right and departed to mail the envelope. The girl, who was actually a woman in her thirties, dumped her books on the floor and dictated the Porter Edwards address into her micro-mini cassette recorder before she forgot any of it. That night, well after dark, her employer Larry Driscoll delivered the cassette to Milton Prince.

Jack Letterman was two-fingering a report while trying to remember if counselor — as in attorney — had one “1” or two when the phone rang. Picking up and barking, “Crime Squad, Letterman,” he heard the high-pitched, high-speed delivery of Burkie, one of his snitches, which could be stemmed only by interruptions.

“This one’ll cost you, sweetheart, it’s hot, in writing. You can use it to cool out the Feds if they come down on you—”

“The usual place?”

“Yeah, the door’s sticking, you gotta almost kick it—”

“Fifteen minutes.”

Letterman checked out a car and drove to Burkie’s latest drop, another deserted tenement. Burkie was just a voice on the phone who had started selling Letterman information about a year and a half before. For the first few times Letterman had gone into the condemned buildings in a rush, with his piece drawn, but there was never anything except envelopes of incredibly good intelligence for which he left envelopes of cash and which he peddled to the Feds and the wise guys with even-handed impartiality.

Letterman huffed up the narrow exterior back stairs to the third-floor landing, where he rammed the sticking door with his shoulder when it refused to open.

Tiny flames spurted from the kitchen matchheads stuck between the edge of the door and the thin strip of flint paper fixed to the frame. With a whoosh, gas from the ruptured line just inside the door ignited.

The explosion rocked the deserted building. Raptor, wearing a repairman’s bulky overalls and a flowing bandido mustache, had to duck back into the ground-floor rear entryway across the alley to avoid being hit by part of Letterman. He was boarding a city bus two blocks away when the first police and fire units arrived on the scene.

I was working late, clearing my desk, and Mr. Whittington left with this man. An hour later he was dead. They’re saying it was an accident, but, Dun, I don't believe that. And now I’m afraid there’s someone following me...

He laughed at her fears.

And be was late for their Christmas-shopping excursion.

Walking into the bar, he saw her welcoming smile, but then the man who’d walked in ahead of him shot her once in the head from a foot away. It was such a heavy caliber the man’s arm flew a foot into the air with the recoil.

Someone is following me. I’m frightened. Help me, darling.

He’d actually laughed.

She'd actually died.

Trevis came awake, hearing the slug enter her brain, feeling it bulge her laughing eyes. He read Musashi. Musashi said: Become the enemy. Musashi said: The enemy, shut up inside his own spirit, is a pheasant. You, becoming him, are a hawk. Consider this deeply, Musashi said.

Prince paced. He absently put down Driscoll’s reports, and paced. It was raining; water streamed down the outside of his study windows. Nobody had ever turned up Trevis’s connection with the Bianca broad because until Driscoll’s sieve job nobody had looked.

Prince built himself a strong drink and paced the sumptuous study while he sipped it. The shape of it all was easy to see, now he had the facts. Six years before, he’d gotten in deep and had had to start skimming — using Whittington, bookkeeper of the Dahlgren subsidiary. But Whittington had gotten scared. If he’d talked, the Board would have canceled Prince’s ticket, so Whittington had to go. But then his secretary, Teresa Bianca, got suspicious, so she had to go, too. Afterward, the whole thing seemed to have blown over.

But she must have told things to Trevis before she was hit. So he turned into a drunk just so he could get fired from where he worked and then sober up and get himself hired by the Dahlgren subsidiary. And then, as he was using his brilliance to burrow into the guts of the organization, trying to find out who had ordered the hit, the Board had made him buffer man and had given him Raptor, the ultimate killing machine. He didn’t have to dig any more. He just had to start setting up the men who’d been on the Board when she was killed, one after the other, using Raptor as a personal hit man. And he’d just keep on manufacturing evidence and having Board members killed until he reached Milton Prince anyway. By accident.

Only now it wasn’t going to happen. Because now Prince could reach the killing machine without putting Trevis’s finger on the trigger. He sat down to compose his letter to Raptor.

Porter Edwards was a big easygoing black who ran a one-truck tow service from his junk yard on the mud flats near the river. As he tore open the six-by-nine manila envelope to remove the smaller white envelope, he felt not the slightest curiosity about what was inside. He got twelve hundred bucks a year to not be curious. That money had kept the truck running lots of times, and had paid for the birthing of their fourth child. He wrote a name and address on a manila envelope just like the one he had tom open, and posted it.

The sign said CISCO’S TEXAS TACOS. Cisco shoved the small sealed unaddressed white envelope into a new six-by-nine manila and remembered. Three years ago, three-thirty in the morning, the place deserted and the door open to let out the hot grease smell of deep-frying taco shells as he swept up. A man dressed in black, with black gloves, and wearing a Porky Pig Halloween mask, had come in and taken a stool. Then he had taken a gun with a silencer screwed onto it out of his pocket. His voice had been distorted by the mask.

“Are you interested in a hundred dollars a month, payable twice yearly?”

Cisco, transfixed by the silenced muzzle, managed to say, “Yes.”

“I thought you would be.” And Porky Pig had put the gun away.

The squat man tried to kick Tommy Yet in the stomach. Tommy blocked the kick outward with his left forearm, simultaneously countering with a right forward kick which would have ruptured his opponent if Tommy hadn’t stopped it two millimeters short.

They dropped their arms and bowed. The students clapped.

Tommy Yet was a slight, compact man who could break bones and mangle flesh, smash bricks with his fists, knock down walls with his feet. He also was a Zen Buddhist who revered all life and dealt, not in violence, but in discipline and control.

Unfortunately, three years before, his daughter Perching Bird — named after one of the stylized movements of the Great Circle — had been born with pyloric stenosis. This narrowing of the stomach, which prevented the ingestion of any food, cost ten thousand dollars to correct surgically. When Tommy couldn’t keep up on the loan shark’s three-for-two vigorish, men came around to tell him what they were going to do with his wife and child the following week if he didn’t pay them.

Tommy cast the Ching, which confirmed that he must kill them upon their return, and then kill himself to wash away the stain of the dishonor. But an hour before they showed up, a man walked in with fifteen thousand dollars in cash for the loan shark. All he asked in return was that Tommy forward to a certain post-office box any mail that might come for him.

Tommy never saw the man again.

He locked up the dojo and went out to the car when his wife honked the horn. He asked her to stop at a mailbox on the way home so he could drop in a six-by-nine manila envelope.

At one fifty-four a.m., Raptor leaned forward and thrust a twenty-dollar bill and a long-shanked brass post-office key to the driver through the plexiglass partition which had on it, Thank You for Not Smoking in My Cab. The box to which Tommy Yet had mailed the manila envelope had an automatic forwarding on it to this box. There was a message waiting from Milton Prince.

Our firm now wishes to deal with you direct, as we are terminating the services of our controller as soon as possible. Your rate of renumeration is doubled, effective immediately.

Please advise acceptance through a classified personal ad in the morning newspaper, to Worried from R.

Prince read it in the newspaper a week later.

Worried:

His ski lodge, Saturday night, seven.

R.

Trevis left the office at one-thirty Saturday afternoon with his usual bulging briefcase and trudged across the deserted acre of blacktop company parking lot to find Mr. Prince waiting in the front seat of his two-year-old Datsun hatchback. Prince was wearing heavy clothes and hiking boots.

“I want to go up to that ski lodge of yours, Dunstan.”

Trevis was silent for a few moments. “Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Prince, it’s more a shack than a—”

“I came prepared,” said Prince jovially and gestured at the pile of equipment in the back of the Datsun. He dropped his voice and leaned closer. “I want to talk to you about something I don’t want the rest of the Board to know.”

When they reached the snowline, where the sleet of lower elevations turned to large wet flakes that hit the windshield and slid down, Prince was still talking.

“In the last few years five of our top people — members of the Board — had to go because they put self-interest ahead of their commitment to the organization. So I need someone at the Board meetings I can trust — someone logical, who understands business practices.”

Trevis pulled off onto the shoulder of the road just beyond a flip-down sign which read, CHAINS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT.

“I’m not a made-man,” he pointed out.

“There’s a way around that. If I can get national approval to expand into the northern half of the state we’ll have to fill Gounaris’s empty seat on the Board. I want you to have that seat, Dunstan.”

He sat in the car, soaking up the heater warmth, as Trevis moved around outside fixing the chains through the thickly falling flakes. That notion of expanding, that was actually a hell of a good idea. Maybe after Trevis was eliminated he’d fly down to the Bahamas, get some sun, put out a few cautious feelers with Bruno as to how the national organization would react to such a move.

After Trevis had got back in, bringing icy air with him, Prince listened to the chains thump in their even, hypnotic rhythm, and wondered how Raptor would do it. This one, he knew, he wanted to watch.

The cabin was a big central room with a couple of little bedrooms partitioned off, and a tiny kitchen in back with a three-burner kerosene stove. Prince wandered around looking at the pictures on the walls with his hands in the pockets of his fancy new down jacket while Trevis got the fine started. The photos were of skiiers, hunters, fishermen, and hikers who had used this place and seemed to enjoy it, all grins and rough clothes.

As the iron potbellied wood stove started to take the chill off the room, Trevis pumped up the kerosene pressure lamp until the double mantles glowed white-hot.

“I’ll close the shades,” said Prince. “They’ll keep the heat in.”

He went from window to window, pulling down the cheap roller shades and staring out through the cold glass of each window. It was two minutes to seven.

Are you out there waiting somewhere, Raptor? Are you ready, Raptor?

Raptor checked the luminous face of his watch.

6:59:01 and:02 and:03...

It was time.

Trevis heaved his bulging briefcase up on the table and opened it “I’ve got some printouts here, Mr. Prince, that might suggest some avenues for initiating expansion.”

Prince stopped him with a wave of the hand. He had an unpleasant smile on his face. “You won’t need those, Trevis. I’ve had a full report on you and Teresa Bianca. I know what you’ve been doing these past three years.” He chuckled. “You’ve finally found the man you’ve been looking for.”

Trevis slowly let the papers he had started to bring out slide back in the case. His face was very white.

“I used the Letterman hit to bypass you, Trevis. Raptor is going to kill you. Here. Tonight. Right now.”

As he spoke, Trevis’s eyes shifted beyond him to the door. His eyes widened.

Prince looked at the door, almost feeling the icy blast from outside. The door was still closed. He turned back to see Trevis’s right hand come out of the briefcase holding a Walther MPK machine pistol. The muzzle of the Walther, extended by a gas cylinder silencer, was pointed at Prince.

“I couldn’t stomach any more random killing, Prince, so I put that newspaper clipping where Ucelli would find it. I hoped it would bring whoever I was after out into the open.” He paused. “I’m Raptor.”

Prince’s face felt suddenly bloodless. His mouth was without saliva. He thrust out his hands, palms forward. “Money...”

The silenced sub-machinegun made a series of earnest busy clicking sounds. Blood and bone leaped from the front of Prince’s head. Splinters and chips flew from the wall behind him. The gun followed him down, clicking and chattering to itself until the magazine was empty.

Raptor stood for a long moment with the machine pistol hanging straight down at his side. Even an excised tumor leaves a felling of loss.

Trevis returned the gun to the briefcase, shut it, and with his gloved left hand turned the pump on the lantern. There was the hiss of escaping pressure. By the mantles’ dying glow, he picked his way across the unfamiliar room he’d rented by phone, in Prince’s name, earlier in the week, and had paid for with a cashier’s check. He had never been skiing in his life.

Outside, the snow had stopped. Stars crowded the black sky. A nice night for a drive down the mountain. Then he thought: To what? Wasn’t he by this time so steeped in blood that—

But then, in a sudden blinding moment of insight, he understood the ultimate truth in Miyamotu Musashi’s book which had eluded him until now. The Fifth Ring, said Musashi, was the final strategy. The Fifth Ring was the way of the Void. In the Void was only virtue, without evil.

Raptor was in the Void. Raptor was of the Void.

Two men had died back there in the cabin.

Trevis was now free of both of them.

Watch for It

Eric’s first one. The very first.

And it went up early.

If I’d been in my apartment on Durant, with the window open, I probably would have heard it. And probably, at 4:30 in the morning, would have thought like any straight that it had been a truck back-fire. But I’d spent the night balling Elizabeth over in San Francisco while Eric was placing the bomb in Berkeley. With her every minute, I’d made sure, because whatever else you can say about the federal pigs, they’re thorough. I’d known that if anything went wrong, they’d be around looking.

Liz and I heard it together on the noon news, when we were having breakfast before her afternoon classes. She teaches freshman English at SF State.

Eric Whitlach, outspoken student radical on the Berkeley campus, was injured early this morning when a bomb he allegedly was placing under a table in the Student Union detonated prematurely. Police said the explosive device was fastened to a clock mechanism set for 9:30, when the area would have been packed with students. The extent of the young activist’s injuries is not known, but—

“God, that’s terrible,” Liz said with a shudder. She’d been in a number of upper-level courses with both Eric and me. “What could have happened to him, Ross, to make him do... something like that?”

“I guess... Well, I haven’t seen much of him since graduation last June...” I gestured above the remains of our eggs and bacon.

“‘Student revolutionary’ — it’s hard to think of Eric that way.” Then I came up with a nice touch. “Maybe he shouldn’t have gone beyond his M.A. Maybe he should have stopped when we did — before he lost touch.”

When I’d recruited Eric without appearing to, it had seemed a very heavy idea. I mean, nobody actually expects this vocal, kinky, Rubin-type radical to go out and set bombs; because they don’t. We usually avoid Eric’s sort ourselves: they have no sense of history, no discipline. They’re as bad as the Communists on the other side of the street, with their excessive regimentation, their endless orders from somewhere else.

I stood up. “Well, baby, I’d better get back across the Bay...”

“Ross, aren’t you... I mean, can’t you...”

She stopped there, coloring; still a lot of that corrupting Middle America in her. She was ready to try anything at all in bed, but to say right out in daylight that she wanted me to ball her again after class — that still sort of blew her mind.

“I can’t, Liz,” I said all aw-shucksy, laughing down inside at how straight she was. “I was his roommate until four months ago, and the police or somebody might want to ask me questions about him.”

I actually thought that they might, and nothing brings out pig paranoia quicker than somebody not available for harassment when they want him. But nobody showed up. I guess they knew that as long as they had Eric they could get whatever they wanted out of him just by shooting electricity into his balls or something, like the French pigs in Algeria. I know how the fascists operate.

Beyond possible questions by the pigs, however, I knew there’d be a strategy session that night in Berkeley. After dark at Zeta Books, on Telegraph south of the campus, is the usual time and place for a meet. Armand Marsh let me in and locked the door behind me; he runs the store for the Student Socialist Alliance as a cover. He’s a long skinny redheaded cat with ascetic features and quick nervous mannerisms, and is cell-leader for our three-man focal.

I saw that Danzer was in the mailing room when I got there, as was Benny. I didn’t like Danzer being there. Sure, he acted as liaison with other Bay Area focals, but he never went out on operations and so he was an outsider. No outsider can be trusted.

“Benny,” said Armand, “how badly is Whitlach really hurt?”

Benny Leland is night administrator for Alta Monte Hospital. With his close-trimmed hair and conservative clothes he looks like the ultimate straight.

“He took a big splinter off the table right through his shoulder. Damned lucky that he had already set it and was on his way out when it blew. Otherwise they’d have just found a few teeth and toes.”

“So he’d be able to move around?”

“Oh, sure. The injury caused severe shock, but he’s out of that now; and the wound itself is not critical.” He paused to look pointedly at me. “What I don’t understand is how the damned thing went off prematurely.”

Meaning I was somehow to blame, since I had supplied Eric with the matériel for the bomb. Armand looked over at me too.

“Ross? What sort of device was it?”

“Standard,” I said. “Two sticks of dynamite liberated from that P.G. and E. site four months ago. An electric blasting cap with a small battery to detonate it. Alarm clock timer. He was going to carry the whole thing in a gift-wrapped shoe box to make it less conspicuous. There are several ways that detonation could—”

“None of that is pertinent now,” interrupted Danzer. His voice was cold and heavy, like his face. He even looked like a younger Raymond Burr. “Our first concern is this: Will the focal be compromised if they break him down and he starts talking?”

“Eric was my best friend before I joined the focal,” I said, “and he was my roommate for four years. But once we had determined it was better to use someone still a student than to set this one ourselves, I observed the standard security procedures in recruiting him. He believes the bombing was totally his own idea.”

“He isn’t even aware of the existence of the focal, let alone who’s in it,” Armand explained. “There’s no way that he could hurt us.”

Danzer’s face was still cold when he looked over at me, but I had realized he always looked cold. “Then it seems that Ross is the one to go in after him.”

“If there’s any need to go at all,” said Benny quickly. I knew what he was thinking. Any operation would entail the hospital, which meant he would be involved. He didn’t like that. “After all, if he can’t hurt us, why not just...” He shrugged.

“Just leave him there? Mmmph.” Danzer publishes a couple of underground radical newspapers even though he’s only twenty-seven, and also uses his presses to run off porn novels for some outfit in L.A. I think he nets some heavy bread. “I believe I can convince you of the desirability of going in after him. If Ross is willing...”

“Absolutely.” I kept the excitement from my voice. Cold. Controlled. That’s the image I like to project. A desperate man, reckless, careless of self. “If anyone else came through that door, Eric would be convinced he was an undercover pig. As soon as he sees me, he’ll know that I’ve come to get him away.”

“Why couldn’t Ross just walk in off the street as a normal visitor?” asked Danzer.

“There’s a twenty-four hour police guard on Whitlach’s door.” Benny was still fighting the idea of a rescue operation. “Only the doctors and one authorized nurse per shift get in.”

“All right. And Ross must not be compromised. If he is, the whole attempt would be negated, worse than useless.” Which at the moment I didn’t understand. “Now let’s get down to it.”

As Danzer talked, I began to comprehend why he had been chosen to coordinate the activities of the focals. His mind was cold and logical and precise, as was his plan. What bothered me was my role in that plan. But I soon saw the error in my objections. I was Eric’s friend, the only one he knew he could trust — and I had brought him into it in the first place. There was danger, of course, but that only made me feel better the more I thought of it. You have to take risks if you are to destroy a corrupt society, because like a snake with a broken back it still has venom on its fangs.

It took three hours to work out the operational scheme.

Alta Monte Hospital is set in the center of a quiet residential area off Ashby Avenue. It used to be easy to approach after dark; just walk to the side entrance across the broad blacktop parking lot. But so many doctors going out to their cars have been mugged by heads looking for narcotics that the lot is patrolled now.

I parked on Benvenue, got the hypo kit and the cherry bombs from the glove box, and slid them into my pocket. The thin strong nylon rope was wound around my waist under my dark blue windbreaker. My breath went up in gray wisps on the chilly wet night air. After I’d locked the car, I held out my hand to look at it by the pale illumination of the nearest street lamp. No tremors. The nerves were cool, man. I was cool.

3:23 a.m. by my watch.

In seven minutes, Benny Leland would unlock the small access door on the kitchen loading dock. He would relock it three minutes later, while going back to the staff coffee room from the men’s lavatory. I had to get inside during those three minutes or not at all.

3:27

I hunkered down in the thick hedge rimming the lot. My palms were getting sweaty. Everything hinged on a nurse who came off work in midshift because her old man worked screwy hours and she had to be home to babysit her kid. If she was late...

The guard’s voice carried clearly on the black misty air. “All finished, Mrs. Adamson?”

“Thank God, Danny. It’s been a rough night. We lost one in post-op that I was sure would make it.”

“Too bad. See you tomorrow, Mrs. Adamson.”

I had a cherry bomb in my rubber-gloved hand now. I couldn’t hear her soft-soled nurse’s shoes on the blacktop, but I could see her long thin shadow come bouncing up the side of her car ten yards away. I came erect, threw, stepped back into shadow.

It was beautiful, man; like a sawed-off shotgun in the silent lot. She gave a wonderful scream, full-throated, and the guard yelled. I could hear his heavy feet thudding to her aid as he ran past my section of hedge.

I was sprinting across the blacktop behind his back on silent garage attendant’s shoes, hunched as low as possible between the parked cars in case anyone had been brought to a window by the commotion. Without checking my pace, I ran down the kitchen delivery ramp to crouch in the deep shadow under the edge of the loading platform.

Nothing. No pursuit. My breath ragged in my chest, more from excitement than my dash. The watch said 3:31. Beautiful.

I threw a leg up, rolled onto my belly on the platform. Across to the access port in the big overhead accordion steel loading door. It opened easily under my careful fingertips. Benny was being cool, too, producing on schedule for a change. I don’t entirely trust Benny.

Hallway deserted, as per the plan. That unmistakable hospital smell. Across the hall, one of those wheeled carts holding empty food trays ready for the morning’s breakfasts. Right where it was supposed to be. I put the two cherry bombs on the front left corner of the second tray down, turned, went nine quick paces to the firedoor.

My shoes made slight scuffing noises on the metal runners. By law, hospital firedoors cannot be locked. I checked my watch: in nineteen seconds, Benny Leland would emerge from the men’s room and, as he walked back to the staff coffee room, would relock the access door and casually hook the cherry bombs from the tray. I then would have three minutes to be in position.

It had been 150 seconds when I pulled the third-floor firedoor a quarter-inch ajar. No need to risk looking out: I could visualize everything from Benny’s briefing earlier.

“Whitlach’s room is the last one on the corridor, right next to the fire stairs,” he’d said. “I arranged that as part of my administrative duties — actually, of course, in case we would want to get to him. The floor desk with the night duty nurse is around an ell and at the far end of the corridor. She’s well out of the way. The policeman will be sitting beside Whitlach’s door on a metal folding chair. He’ll be alone in the hall at that time of night.”

Ten seconds. I held out my hand. No discernible tremor.

Benny Leland, riding alone in the elevator from the basement to the fourth floor administrative offices, would just be stopping here at the third floor. As the doors opened, he would punch four again; as they started to close, he would hurl his two cherry bombs down the main stairwell, and within seconds would be off the elevator and into his office on the floor above. The pig could only think it had been someone on the stairs.

Whoomp! Whump!

Fantastic, man! Muffled, so the duty nurse far down the corridor and around a corner wouldn’t even hear them; but loud enough so the pig, mildly alert for a possible attempt to free Whitlach, would have to check...

I counted ten, pulled open the firedoor, went the six paces to Eric’s now unguarded door. Thirty feet away, the pig’s beefy blue-clad back was just going through the access doors to the elevator shaft and the main stairwell.

A moment of absolute panic when Eric’s door stuck. Then it pulled free and I was inside. Sweat on my hands under the thin rubber gloves. Cool it now, baby.

I could see the pale blur of Eric’s face as he started up from his medicated doze. His little night light cast harsh, antiseptic shadows across his lean face. Narrow stubborn jaw, very bright blue eyes, short nose, wiry, tight-curled brown hair. I felt a tug of compassion: he was very pale and drawn.

But then a broad grin lit up his features. “Ross!” he whispered. “How in the hell—”

“No time, baby.” My own voice was low, too. I already had the syringe out, was stabbing it into the rubber top of the little phial. “The pig will be back from checking out my diversion in just a minute. We have to be ready for him. Can you move?”

“Sure. What do you want me to—”

“Gimme your arm, baby.” I jammed the needle into his flesh, depressed the plunger as I talked. “Pain-killer. In case we bump that shoulder getting you out of here, you won’t feel anything.”

Eric squeezed my arm with his left hand; there were tears in his eyes. How scared that poor cat must have been when he woke up in the hands of the fascist pigs!

“Christ, Ross, I can’t believe...” He shook his head. “Oh, Jesus, right out from under their snouts! You’re beautiful, man!”

I got an arm around his shoulders, as the little clock in my mind ticked off the seconds, weighing, measuring the pig’s native stupidity against his duty at the door. They have that sense of duty, all right, the pigs: but no smarts. We had them by the shorts now.

“Gotta get you to the window, cat,” I breathed. Eric obediently swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

“Why... window...” His head was lolling.

I unzipped my jacket to show him the rope wound around my waist. “I’m lowering you down to the ground. Help will be waiting there.”

I slid up the aluminum sash, let in the night through the screen. Groovy. Like velvet. No noise.

“Perch there, baby,” I whispered. “I want the pig to come in and see you silhouetted, so I can take him from behind, dig?”

He nodded slowly. The injection was starting to take effect. It was my turn to squeeze his arm.

“Hang in there, baby.”

I’d just gotten the night light switched off, had gotten behind the door, when I heard the pig’s belatedly hurrying steps coming up the hall. Too late, you stupid fascist bastard, much too late.

A narrow blade of light stabbed at the room, widened to a rectangle. He didn’t even come in fast, gun in hand, moving down and to the side as he should have. Just trotted in, a fat old porker to the slaughter. I heard his sharp intake of breath as he saw Eric.

“Hey! You! Get away from—”

I was on him from behind. Right arm around the throat, forearm grip, pull back hard while the left pushes on the back of the head...

They go out easily with that grip, any of them. Good for disarming a sentry without using a knife, I had been taught. I hadn’t wasted my Cuban sojourn chopping sugar cane like those student straights on the junkets from Canada. I feel nothing but contempt for those cats: they have not yet realized that destroying the fabric of society is the only thing left for us.

I dragged the unconscious pig quickly out the door, lowered his fat butt into his chair and stretched his legs out convincingly. Steady pulse. He’d come around in a few minutes; meanwhile, it actually would have been possible to just walk Eric down the fire stairs and out of the building.

For a moment I was tempted; but doing it that way wasn’t in the plan. The plan called for the maximum effect possible, and merely walking Eric out would minimize it. Danzer’s plan was everything.

Eric was slumped sideways against the window frame, mumbling sleepily. I pulled him forward, letting his head loll on my shoulder while I unhooked the screen and sent it sailing down into the darkness of the bushes flanking the concrete walk below. I could feel the coils of thin nylon around my waist, strong enough in their synthetic strength to lower him safely to the ground.

Jesus, he was one sweet guy. I paused momentarily to run my hand through his coarse, curly hair. There was sweat on his forehead. Last year he took my French exam for me so I could get my graduate degree. We’d met in old Prof Cecil’s Western Civ course our junior year, and had been roomies until the end of grad school.

“I’m sorry, baby,” I told his semiconscious, sweat-dampened face.

Then I let go and nudged, so his limp form flopped backward through the open window and he was gone, gone instantly, just like that. Three stories, head-first, to the concrete sidewalk. He hit with a sound like an egg dropped on the kitchen floor. A bad sound, man. One I won’t soon forget.

The hall was dark and deserted as I stepped over the pig’s outstretched legs. He’d be raising the alarm soon, but nobody except the other pigs would believe him. Not after the autopsy.

The first round of sirens came just after I had stuffed the thin surgical gloves down a sewer and was back in my car, pulling decorously away from the curb. The nylon rope, taken along only to convince Eric that I meant to lower him from the window, had been slashed into useless lengths and deposited in a curb-side trash barrel awaiting early morning collection.

On University Avenue, I turned toward an all-night hamburger joint that had a pay phone in the parking lot. I was, can you believe it, ravenous; but more than that, I was horny. I thought about that for a second, knowing I should feel sort of sick and ashamed at having a sexual reaction to the execution. But instead I felt... transfigured. Eric had been a political prisoner anyway; the pigs would have made sure he wouldn’t have lived to come to trial. By his necessary death, I would be changing the entire history of human existence. Me. Alone.

And there was Liz over in the city, always eager, a receptacle in which I could spend my sexual excitement before she went off to teach. But first, Armand. So he could tell Danzer it was all right to print what we had discussed the night before.

Just thinking of that made me feel elated, because the autopsy would reveal the presence of that massive dose of truth serum I had needled into Eric before his death. And the Establishment news media would do the rest, hinting and probing and suggesting before our underground weeklies even hit the street with our charge against the fascists.

Waiting for Armand to pick up his phone, I composed our headline in my mind:

PIGS PUMP REVOLUTIONARY HERO FULL OF SCOPOLAMINE; HE DIVES FROM WINDOW RATHER THAN FINK ON THE MOVEMENT

Oh yes, man. Beautiful. Just beautiful. Watch for it.

The Andrech Samples

Riding the personnel transport belt up to the level of Rogul’s office, I wiped my hands down my thighs. I never had killed anyone before. Never had wanted to. Hell, I didn’t want to now. But since yesterday it had been sure. I wiped my hands again. Clammy, even though I had seen no one since entering the building. They all had gone, all had crowded to the heliports, all had been fed by aerial arteries into the residence blocks for the usual evening tele.

All except Rogul.

I stopped outside his office, wiped my palms nervously again; then I stepped forward to break the light beam. The tele-screen above glowed with the color image of Rogul, made familiar by two months of patient stalking and watching.

“Mr. Andrech?”

“That’s right.” I was amazed at the steadiness of my voice. “I hope I’m not too late...”

“Oh, no, no. I had a lot of work to catch up on. Come in please.”

I broke the second light beam and went through the opening door to his inner office. First time I’d been there, of course; wouldn’t do to have his secretarial robot able to identify me later.

Rogul was behind his desk, standing: a tall, gray-haired, well-conditioned man in his late forties. A self made man who had come up a dozen years before with a new design for mass transport of planetary settlers which had made him wealthy. We shook hands.

“So, Andrech. You claim to have developed cheap artificial atmospheres for small, low-gravity planets. Is that true?”

“I have.”

I’d needed a cover story, in case his secretary still had been switched on, or a business associate still had been present But we were alone. I seemed to see each second stretch out long and thin around us, thinner and thinner, until finally it snapped and fell away.

“I hope so, Andrech. Even if there is overlapping between your design and the encased bubble atmosphere, a workable new process would be worth a great deal of money.”

I went past him toward some abstract figurines on the window sill; I wanted him on his feet — with his back to me. I wasn’t sure I could do it if he were sitting, and I didn’t want to watch his face as the blade went in.

“These statues are... damned interesting.”

“Unique, aren’t they? The indigenous humanoids of Akaniam used to make them before...” His voice trailed off absently as he moved over beside me. “Seems a damned shame, actually.”

I picked up a figurine, and then set it down again. “Before what?”

“Before they were exterminated. We had to, of course; Akaniam’s close in, easy access.” His eyes momentarily were sad: large, intelligent eyes, with whites so clear they had a bluish tinge. “We needed the land for settlers. We always do.”

He turned from the window. Turned away from me.

Reflexes took over. My right arm flicked, the sleeve-knife slid its thin, razor-edged length from the plastic sheath strapped to my forearm. The same flow of movement swept the blade forward and into his kidney.

Rogul gave a hoarse cry of agony, his body arching back as it tried to contain the searing pain. My cupped left hand went over his shoulder to jerk his chin up and to the left as the knife pulled wetly free, slashing, then darted up in a lethal arc at his throat.

Bright arterial blood splashed across my fingers and jacket sleeve, making me jerk back as if it were scalding. The flaccid corpse collapsed on the tiles. It didn’t even twitch. Rogul was finally dead.

I leaned against a corner of the desk, panting, sweat searing my eyes and dripping on the polished plastic so my fingers dragged wet smeary marks across the surface. I had done it, just as Delia and I had rehearsed a thousand times in the months since making our decision.

After slumping there for an eternity of those elastic seconds, head down, breath whistling raggedly through my clenched teeth, I straightened up with something like a sob. Averting my gaze from the pathetic huddle of cloth and flesh which had been Rogul, I went to his private sink and washed my hands. I didn’t want to waste it all by drawing attention on the nearly deserted, post-rush helitrans home.

Delia knew the moment she saw me, with that instant rapport of people deeply in love; but she could say nothing because of the twelve other tenants with whom by regulation we shared a dwelling area. When we finally were in a bed cubicle with the beam switched on for privacy, she sank down slowly beside me on the edge of the bed.

“Poor darling. What have we done to each other? Killing...” Under the light synthetics of her pajamas, I could see the almost childish wings of her shoulder blades. She turned great tear-stained eyes at me. “Maybe we should just... stop—”

I stilled her words with my lips. This was the moment to be strong, I knew. I could feel her body heat through the pajamas. Her stomach still was flat but in that body, right now, was our child, embryonic yet, little more than a tiny heart pulsing in its warm dark bath of amniotic fluid, but ours. Yesterday’s tests had confirmed it.

“We’ve been over all this, Delia. We’re going through with it.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “So Mrs. Rogul too...”

“Not until tomorrow,” I whispered against her fragrant hair.

We spent the time afterwards, until lights-out, giggling over our attempts to find mutually acceptable names for the baby.

Neither Delia nor I were psychologically prepared for waiting: time to study, to plan, to foresee, also meant time to remember the hot sticky gush of life’s blood across my wrist, the broken cry of Rogul’s anguish. And waiting might give Mrs. Rogul time to begin wondering whether it had been more than a random killing. So I went after her the next night, almost blindly. As it turned out, my direct approach made it ridiculously simple.

Amelia Rogul was childless, of course, a few years younger than her husband had been. A modem woman who loved life, used it, spent it, and thus who needed no friends beside her for support in grief. This meant she was alone, since the Roguls, as wealthy people, had a separate dwelling unit, even the luxury of separate cooking facilities.

I broke the entryway light beam and waited, an idiotic look of sorrow on my face, a blank tape deck prominent in my hand. I felt no compunction. Perhaps I had been brutalized by the first killing; perhaps, instead, it just was knowing that success was one body nearer.

“What is it, please?”

She hadn’t illuminated, so I couldn’t see her in the tele-screen as she studied me; but no nerves trilled in her voice. Good.

“I have a message of condolence from your husband’s employees, Mrs. Rogul.” Then, in a stroke of genius, I added, “If you want me to leave it here in the hall—”

That made her break the inner beam, of course, and step to the door to reach for the tape. “No need of that. I’ll take it and—”

My hands came up to close about her throat. She made a sound like that of the great sea birds on tele’d historicals. The door had shut behind me; with the tele-screen blanked one-way, nobody passing in the hall could see us at all.

Even then I almost lost her. She brought a knee up, hard, just missing my manhood; I squinted and clawed my hands deeper into her throat. We went about it in an odd, clumsy, ritual dance. Her breath hissed in my face. Her hands flapped ineffectually against my steeled forearms, desperate fingers peeled skin from my forehead and shredded my jacket pocket. My own fingers were slimy with our mingled sweats.

Finally the movements lost volition. She became too heavy to support My hands let the inert body slide to the floor, then felt for a pulse at the base of her throat. None. Spittle-flecked lips drawn back in a canine snarl, and I was surprised by a moment of acute nausea: her eyes protruded far enough to be knocked off with a sweep of a hand.

The sickness passed. I checked the hall through the tele-screen, then went home to give Delia the news.

Once again, sweaty palms. Personnel transport belt again, but this time to the Investigation Section, Metro Police. Waiting in the interrogation cubicle with nerves screaming. For Delia, it had to go right. For us both.

“Mr. Andrech?” The voice jerked my thoughts back. “I’m Inspector Ngaio. No, that’s all right, please remain seated.”

He was a big, solid man with probing eyes and a square chin. My voice came out almost falsetto. “I...” I stopped to clear my throat. “I came about... the Roguls.”

“Right,” he said easily. His manner was relaxed, and I felt my tensions ease a bit. “I have gone over the facts of your statement.”

He stopped there. Sweat started up under my arms, the seconds began stretching as they had before I’d put the blade in Rogul’s back.

Finally I blurted, “Inspector, the fingerprints alone—”

“—could have been made at an earlier date. None in the blood, remember, Andrech; just on the figurine and on the desk top.”

“His secretarial robot will confirm that I was never there before...”

“You thought of that, did you?” Ngaio had a deep voice and deep masculine laugh. He was a good interrogator. “You’re right, of course. Your photo elicits no response from the secretary’s memory banks, yet your name is on Rogul’s calendar. And your fingerprints are in his office. You were there that night, all right, after the robot had been closed down. But the killing could have occurred after your departure.”

“What about his wife, strangled the next day? Surely—”

“Coincidence, perhaps. Or even you, trying to cash in on the husband’s death.” He leaned forward. “Where’s the murder weapon?”

My months of practice paid off. A single fluid movement and the stiletto lay gleaming on my palm. Ngaio sat up abruptly with a look of genuine pleasure on his face, as I said, “I didn’t clean the blade.”

“I’ll be damned. A sleeve knife. Haven’t seen one in years.” He held out his hand for the knife. “That was very good. And the blade uncleaned. I begin to believe you are a very determined man, Andrech.”

His robot, which had been tuned to monitor the conversation, came in. He handed it the knife. “Lab.”

“It isn’t just me, Inspector,” I said earnestly. “Both Delia and I want this Certificate very much. We knew this method of meeting the quota would be difficult, perhaps self-destructive, but we—”

“Why didn’t you just buy a pair of emigrations? With new planets opening up all the time—”

“We can’t afford to purchase someone’s passage, Inspector. Not on the pay of a clerk in telemetry.”

He switched the conversation abruptly. “How about blood from Rogul? Any get on anything except the knife?”

“The jacket sleeve. I wore the same one for Mrs. Rogul.”

“Indeed? We found cloth fibers clutched in her hand...”

“The pocket. I took the liberty of leaving the garment with your laboratory on my way in. Also, since she scratched my forehead, I asked them to take blood samples.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said again. He was impressed, I could see that; behind the detached official manner was a warm, genuine human being. He turned to punch into the laboratory. “The Andrech samples?”

“Positive,” said the white-coated technician. “Victim’s blood on knife and jacket sleeve; subject’s blood and epidermis under second victim’s fingernails; one-hundred percent match on the jacket fibers.”

“Good. Thanks.”

Ngaio blanked the screen and opened the folder on his desk. I felt the old clamminess start as he bent to write. What would a negative report do to Delia? But when Ngaio closed the file and stood up with two slips in his left hand, there was a wide grin on his face. My heart gave a leap of more than joy: of emotion too pure, too ethereal for mere words. He stuck out his right hand.

“Congratulations, Andrech. To you and your wife.”

I felt I was beaming fatuously; it was all I could do to take his hand. “Thank... thank you, Inspector. For everything. I don’t think we could have gone through it again.”

“Now you won’t have to.” He handed me the slips. “The first is a regular pro forma misdemeanor citation, even though my investigation shows the killings were justified. You can pay the fine at the front desk on your way out. And this other one...”

I was beaming idiotically again. “Our Certificate.”

“Right. Give it to your wife’s gynecologist; it orders him not to abort her pregnancy as usual. Since you successfully have removed from the population rolls one couple, childless, you have met the quota requirements. As per law, you can have one child. And I hope it’s a boy.”

“So do I. Then we can name him after you, Inspector.”

That pleased him; as I said, he was a genuinely decent human being. Then I was on the personnel transport belt again, descending to my waiting, beautifully pregnant Delia. As I watched the joy spring into her face at the sight of my own obvious elation, there was only one small cloud to darken the rosy glow on my mental horizon.

What if she were carrying twins?

Killer Man

The stewardess came by checking reservations.

“Your name please, sir.”

“Simmons,” said Falkoner. He was lean and dark, with long-fingered hands shaped like a piano player’s and cool gray eyes that observed almost everything. A thin white scar running across his chin made his otherwise pleasant face sullen. In his shoulder holster was a .357 Magnum on a cut-down frame and in his bleak heart was death. Falkoner was a professional murderer.

During the thirty-five minute flight from Los Angeles the lone woman huddled across the aisle aroused his melancholy contempt. She wore a cheap brown hat and had an old straw purse on the seat next to her. Updrafts over the rim of the desert made her tight fists whiten with strain and her eyes bum with fear. She was disgusting: he knew dying was swift and easy.

A slight sandy-haired man took his arm as he left the plane at Palm Springs and said: “Did Mr. David send you down?” His voice was soft and intimate and he wore a red and green sports shirt, khaki pants, and open sandals.

Looking him over, Falkoner nodded coolly. Little men who did not deal in the two great realities of life and death held scant interest for him.

“Fine. I’m Langly. My car’s over here in the lot.”

It was a blue and white 1957 Chrysler. On the blacktop road beyond the airport the sun was warm but the air dry and fresh; scraggly clumps of dusty green vegetation spotted the flat desert like regimented billiard balls on a giant yellow table. They passed a man and woman on horseback, wearing riding breeches, who waved gaily. A Cadillac Eldorado roared by like an escaped rocket, manned by two bleached blondes goggled with bright-rimmed sunglasses.

“Where’s the woman?” asked Falkoner.

“She’s got a shack in a date grove near Rancho Mirage — it’s a new section this side of Palm Desert.”

“Works?”

“Mex place in Palm Desert. She tells fortunes, goes to work at five — she’ll be home now.” Langly’s voice tingled and his bright eyes sparkled ripely. “I guess Mr. David wants her pretty bad, huh? I just notified Los Angeles last night, and you’re here from ’Frisco today to—”

“Let’s go out to her place.”

Langly drove swiftly as if stung by Falkoner’s abruptness. They passed the plush Thunderbird Club and turned left onto a dirt road before the Shadow Mountain Club. Dry clouds of tan dust swirled out behind them.

“When word came she’d left Scottsdale I thought she might try it here — the country’s a lot the same. Then I spotted her at the Mex place from her photo and—”

“Are we close?”

Langly drove across an old wash beyond which the date groves started.

“Next road to the right, first house on the left,” he said. His voice was sharp and piqued. “Only house.”

“Okay. Drive past.”

Down the narrow roadway Falkoner saw the tail of a black Mercury station wagon protruding from behind a palm tree. The shack was hidden by trees.

“That her Merc?”

“Yes. A ’55 Monterey with wood paneling. A beauty.”

After a moment of thought Falkoner said: “Turn around up here and let me off at the roadway. Then you go back to town.”

As he followed directions the other’s actions had a slightly feminine quality. Falkoner got out, walked around the car, and dropped a sealed envelope through the window into Langly’s lap. The envelope crinkled.

“What sort of work do you do?” Falkoner asked.

“I’ve been parking cars at one of the clubs.” Then the voice got malicious; excitement made it almost lisp. “But I did good work on this and I’m going to make sure Mr. David knows about it and about how you’ve treated me.”

“Stick to parking cars, nance,” Falkoner replied. Leaning very close he added confidentially: “You’ve got a leaky face.”

In his steady eyes Langly saw death’s cold scrutiny. He rammed the drive button hurriedly and the Chrysler swept him away down the dusty road.

Palm fronds tickled the roof drily and something gnawed with cautious haste under the sagging wooden porch. Falkoner’s shoes made cat sounds as he crossed to the screen door. After knocking on the frame he cupped his eyes to peer into the living room. The linoleum was so old it was worn almost white. Across the room sagged a beaten-down green couch, in one corner a red easy chair that looked almost new. There were three straight-backed chairs and one leg of the wooden table in the center of the floor had been cracked and stapled. A plaque reading GOD BLESS OUR HOME decorated one wall.

Before he could call, Genevieve came through the inner doorway. She was as tall as he, nearly six feet, her face fine-featured: straight nose, high cheekbones, thin hungry lips. A red silk scarf was knotted loosely around her neck and her striking figure was displayed by a tight black dress. There were three hairpins in her mouth and her hands were smoothing her hair.

“Yes?” Her voice was husky.

The screen door was unlocked so Falkoner stepped in. When the light touched his features she went stark white and her mouth dropped the hairpins. She ran against him, slanted dark eyes smoky with terror, but he pushed her back.

“Rather a come-down, Genevieve,” he said.

He went through the inner doorway to see a small dirty kitchen with dishes piled in the sink, and a bedroom with a double bed that looked as if two large animals had been fighting on it. The room had a close, intimate smell. As he donned a pair of thin gray gloves he let Genevieve’s voice draw him back to the front room.

“What does he want with me? He — whoever killed Max... I didn’t see who killed Max.”

“If you hadn’t left Arizona he might have believed you.”

“I got tired of the stinking desert and the stinking men with only one thing on their stinking minds.”

Falkoner raised his eyebrows. “The men at the Mex place are different? The desert here is different?”

“I had to eat.” Her mouth made the next word a curse. “Men. You and Mr. David and all the rest. Money and power and women, that’s all you want.” Then the strength left her and her hands crawled up the black dress like broad white spiders to her bosom.

“Isn’t he ever going to let me live in peace?” she whispered.

Falkoner asked: “Did you really think he could let you live at all?” His quick hands closed around her throat like an act of love.

She scrabbled wildly at the iron-hard forearms, reached for his eyes, tried to kick him. She was strong, but the piano-player fingers possessed all the immeasurable strength of evil. A chair was overturned. They went around the table in a slow grotesque dance like cranes mating. He drove her down on the couch and kneed her viciously. The thrashing body, the smell of sweat and perfume aroused him: it was a pity there was no time to have her before she died. A great pity.

Her face darkened, her movements became erratic, lost volition, ceased. Finally her tongue, pink as a baby’s thumb, came out of one corner of her mouth and spittle ran down her cheek. There was a muted sound like cloth tearing. She sprawled under him in a lewd doll-pose of surrender, eyes staring beyond him into the infinite horror of death.

From a payphone at a gas station on South Palm Drive, Falkoner reversed the charges to a Tuxedo exchange number in San Francisco. While awaiting his connection he placidly smoked a cigarette. The operator said:

“I have a collect call for anyone from a Mr. Simmons in Palm Springs. Will you accept the charges?”

A flat voice answered: “Put him on.”

Falkoner ground out his cigarette against the window of the booth and said “Yes” into the receiver. There was no response so he hung up, paid for his gas, and left Palm Springs, driving west across the desert on U.S. 101. At U.S. 99 he went north to Colton, cut across to U.S. 66 on a dirt road, and again pointed the Mercury at the far thin glow of Los Angeles. He counted bugs as they squashed against the windshield, and at nine o’clock ate Mexican food in a small adobe diner. It had been a clean hit: her body, wrapped in a blanket, was stuffed in the spare tire well under the floor section of the Mercury, and a suitcase full of her personal things rode beside him. Yet he lacked the usual drained empty peace. Around midnight some instinct made him pull in at a motel near Glendora, two hours from the city.

The single row of white cottages was neat and freshly painted; each unit had a covered carport with a door leading directly inside. Above the first cabin a large red neon sign proclaimed MOTEL with vacancy underneath in smaller pink letters. After he had rung the bell twice, the office light went on and an old man with a sour face like the taste of lemon came out of the back room rubbing his eyes. An old-fashioned nightshirt covered bowed legs.

“Is your last unit in the line empty?”

Clicking his false teeth together, he leaned past Falkoner as if to make sure there was a last unit. He smelled sourly of sleep.

“Yep.”

“Fine. I have trouble sleeping if I can hear traffic passing. How much?”

“Five bucks.”

“Commercial rates.”

“Well — four, then.”

Falkoner did the other careful things the years had taught him: wrote ‘Simmons’ on the register in a slanting backhand script that was not his own, mixed up the license number in a way that could have been accidental, and took Genevieve’s suitcase with him before locking the car. Opening the motel room door, he breathed deeply; orange groves flanking the highway made the air faintly sweet. Maybe it was getting to him. Five years ago he’d never considered the possibility of anything going wrong. Tomorrow I'll dump her with Dannelson, he thought, and maybe get lined up with a little piece. I've been living like a monk lately.

“Let me talk to Danny,” Falkoner said, rubbing his eyes and cursing the gray fingers of smog reaching out from Los Angeles. Sunday morning traffic made it difficult to hear.

“Who’s calling?”

“Falkoner.”

“Falkoner? I’m sorry, Mr. Dannelson is out.”

Falkoner squeezed the receiver tightly. The palm of his hand had gone sweaty.

“Is Dannelson out or did he say he was out?” he asked.

“Mr. Dannelson is out.”

There were muttered angry words, a click, and Dannelson’s voice came jovially over the wire.

“Hello, Jack? That damned fool didn’t get your name right. Listen, boy, S.F. said you had a parcel for us. Where in hell are you?”

Falkoner hung up abruptly, returned to the car, and tuned the radio to a ten o’clock newscast. It carried the item for which Dannelson’s clumsiness had prepared him.

Palm Springs police were investigating the disappearance and possible murder of Genevieve Ostroff, fortune-teller at the Green Cactus bar in Palm Desert. Two boys playing near her house had seen a man carrying what looked like a blanket-wrapped body to her black station wagon. Investigating police had found no sign of violence and her clothes had been gone, but there had been over seven hundred dollars in small bills under the paper lining of a dresser drawer. After the first newscast Chester Langly, parking lot attendant at the Blue Owl, had furnished the description of a man who had hitched a ride with him from the airport to a point near Genevieve’s house. A man who had called himself Simmons.

Damn that fairy Langly, Falkoner thought. The police were easy, but Mr. David had given him the contract for Genevieve personally... now he was too dangerous to live. The word was already out: lucky Danny’d been so anxious. Los Angeles and Las Vegas and San Diego — probably Tucson and El Paso, too, because they’d figure him to try for Mexico. No place to run: and to run would mean admitting to himself he was afraid. Suddenly his pale morose face cleared. What if he went back to San Francisco after Mr. David? That was it. It was what they should expect of Jack Falkoner.

The maid had finished his room. He paid at the office for a week in advance, then carried the heavy unwieldy package that was Genevieve in through the side entrance and dumped it on the bed.

A light blue 1955 Ford pulled out behind him on the traffic circle at Bakersfield. The tail job was clumsy. Falkoner drove fast: this boy mustn’t have time to get to a phone. On the new freeway north of Delano he suddenly floored the accelerator and squealed into the right-angle turn for the Earlimart overpass, swung over to old U.S. 99, and pulled up in front of a little general store he had remembered. It was the run-down country crossroads sort of place occasionally surviving in the San Joaquin Valley. The sort of place to do what had to be done.

A short man wearing dirty overalls and chewing a large cud of tobacco came out.

“Fill it up — regular,” said Falkoner.

He waited in the store by the vegetable counter. Three dirty bare-footed children slammed through the screen door and began noisily clamoring at the candy counter like puppies worrying a bone. A tall faded lady in a washed-out dress came from the bowels of the store to scream harsh threats at them.

When the blue Ford rounded the corner and braked sharply, Falkoner went out the door and around behind the store to the primitive outdoor restrooms. Lattice works into which thick vines had grown flanked the entrance. He slammed the lean-to door loudly, stepped out of sight behind the vines, and took the Magnum from its shoulder holster. Feet scuffed in the dust and foliage rustled. Door hinges squeaked cautiously.

The young red-haired man had freckles and a homely face and a switchblade knife in one broad paw. As he turned from the empty shanty, puzzled, Falkoner stepped around the lattice work and slammed the Magnum down on his hand. Pimples of sweat popped out on his hard young face. The knife fell. He snatched clumsily for the Magnum with his left hand, breathing hoarsely, his eyes already sick with the sure frightful knowledge of defeat.

Falkoner’s gun rammed him in the stomach, bending him over, then it clipped him across the back of the neck and knocked him to his knees. A knee driven into his freckled face upset him against the wall. The Magnum struck his bright hair with a sound like a wet rag slapping concrete. He tipped forward on his face and was still.

Falkoner dragged him around the corner of the shanty and killed him.

The short man was still cleaning bugs from the Mercury’s windshield when the blue Ford dug out and sped past the gas pumps.

Night had darkened San Francisco when Jack Falkoner took the down ramp off the freeway at Seventh, crossed Market, and went up Larkin. He drove over the hill to Pacific, turned right, crossed over the Broadway tunnel on Mason, and parked the Ford. His hands shook a little as he checked the Magnum: going after Mr. David was something like going up against God.

Turning downhill at Glover, a narrow one-block alley, he walked on the right-hand side, crossed over, and came up the other side breathing heavier from the incline. There were no cars he knew, no people at all, so he turned in at an ornate wooden gate and climbed a series of stone steps. In less than a minute he had opened the heavy oak door with a small metal pick and was prowling the five-room apartment. His rubber soles made no sound on the polished floors and thick carpets. On Sundays Mr. David and the girl he kept there usually watched Ed Sullivan, but tonight the apartment was empty.

I can wait, Falkoner thought as he returned to the Ford, and slid in behind the wheel.

A round hard object poked the base of his neck and a smooth voice said:

“Hands on the head, Sweets, and slide over slow.”

Strangely, he thought of his first hit. It had been in a car like this and the man had said: 'I'm not afraid of you.' He did not say anything. A dark figure came erect in the back seat and another crossed the street swiftly to get in under the wheel and hold a gun on Falkoner while the first one took the Magnum. Later the man had cried and babbled and even prayed. Falkoner had been much younger then and had laughed before shooting him in the back of the head.

A long black sedan drifted around the corner and crawled up behind them. It was remarkably like an undertaker’s car. When the man at the wheel flipped his lights twice the Ford pulled out. The sedan followed. They took Pine to Presidio, cut over to Balboa, and drove out through the dark still Avenues decorously, like a funeral procession. Falkoner’s head ached and he felt sick to his stomach. When he looked at the unfamiliar face of the driver, the man in the back seat said, “Don’t try it, Sweets.” The driver stayed hunched over with both hands on the wheel. They would not let him smoke a cigarette.

Surf grumbled against the concrete breakwaters as the Ford turned left onto the Great Highway at Playland on the Beach. Only a few rides and stalls were open, for a chill March mist had rolled in off the Pacific. The wipers monotonously sucked haze from the windshield. After several miles they swung in facing the ocean on a wide dirt lot where neckers parked on moonlit nights. The sedan drew up behind them, parallel to the highway, with dimmed lights. There were no other cars. A tangled hedge of dark twisted cypress, bent and gnarled by the incessant wind, screened them from the houses beyond the highway.

The doorhandle felt cold and slippery to Falkoner’s fingers. Bitter words flooded his mouth like bile and his lips bled keeping them in: Jack Falkoner is not afraid, Jack Falkoner is not afraid... He flung open the door and threw himself at the opening. Behind him something plopped twice. Eyes staring in disbelief, he fell dizzily out of the half-open door and crashed down on one shoulder. He tried to say something, he wanted to say it, it was important: the whole significance of his life had been only death. He had meant no more than a casual accident or a mild epidemic that snuffs out a few people by blind chance. If they would just give him a little time for change, another month for living... Before he could ask, orange flame spurted and lead ripped his throat, slamming his head into the dirt with an ineluctable finality.

“Pay me,” chortled Mr. David in high good humor. The sedan had turned by Fleishaker Zoo and was threading through an expensive residential district on broad Sloat Avenue.

The man in the back seat with him was dressed in a camel’s hair coat and had crisp wavy hair receding from his forehead. He had once been a lawyer but had been disbarred. With obvious reluctance he took a hundred dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to his employer.

“I still don’t see how you knew he’d come up here. I thought one of the boys along the border would tag him.”

Mr. David chuckled richly. He wore too much cologne in a vain effort to disguise the constant odor of perspiration that clung to his obese body like the smell of bad cooking. His heavy features were shadowed by his hatbrim.

“Psychology, Norman, psychology. Jack wasn’t afraid of me or the Organization or Old Nick himself. It was his sort of stunt, to try and take me with him. I’m sorry about Red, though. I told him to be careful but you know how kids are.”

“How can you be so sure Falkoner got him?”

“The Ford. Jack would never have had that car if Red was alive, that’s for sure. And Jack was a bad one, at that.”

“I like ’em bad,” put in the man in the middle of the front seat. He was removing a steel cylinder from the muzzle of his .32, his deadly hands fondling the revolver with the quick and supple movements of a musician fingering his guitar.

“And you can’t tell me Sweets wasn’t scared. I saw his face when he went under.”

Mr. David delicately shifted his ponderous bulk and belched. His weight made the seat coils creak slightly.

“We’ll never know now, will we?” he demanded with unction. As the car stopped for the light on 19th Avenue he added: “Take a left here, Freddie. I’ve got a date with a new girl.”

Down toward Playland, a motorcycle siren whined thinly, like a short-haired mongrel in cold weather. The chilled huddle of people could see the flat pink glow of its close-set red eyes coming up at them through the fog. Moaning wind tore their breaths away in gray tatters. Occasional cars whipped past, wet tires hissing on the shiny pavement. By the white empty glare of their patrol car spotlight, two wet-tunicked policemen resembled grave robbers rolling bodies as they lifted Falkoner’s corpse by one shoulder to see if it bore any life. On his face, almost ferocious in its intensity, was frozen an immutable expression of pure terror.

Goodbye, Pops

I got off the Greyhound and stopped to draw icy Minnesota air into my lungs. A bus had brought me from Springfield, Illinois to Chicago the day before; a second bus had brought me here. I caught my passing reflection in the window of the old-fashioned depot — a tall hard man with a white and savage face, wearing an ill-fitting overcoat. I caught another reflection, too, one that froze my guts: a cop in uniform. Could they already know it was someone else in that burned-out car?

Then the cop turned away, chafing his arms with gloved hands through his blue stormcoat, and I started breathing again. I went quickly over to the cab line. Only two hackies were waiting there; the front one rolled down his window as I came up.

“You know the Miller place north of town?” I asked. He looked me over.

“I know it. Five bucks — now.”

I paid him from the money I’d rolled a drunk for in Chicago, and eased back against the rear seat. As he nursed the cab out ice-rimed Second Street, my fingers gradually relaxed from their rigid chopping position. I deserved to go back inside if I let a clown like this get to me.

“Old man Miller’s pretty sick, I hear.” He half turned to catch me with a corner of an eye. “You got business with him?”

“Yeah. My own.”

That ended that conversation. It bothered me that Pops was sick enough for this clown to know about it; but maybe my brother Rod being vice-president at the bank would explain that. There was a lot of new construction and a freeway west of town with a tricky overpass to the old county road. A mile beyond a new subdivision were the 200 wooded hilly acres I knew so well.

After my break from the Federal pen at Terre Haute, Indiana two days before, I’d gotten outside their cordon through woods like these. I’d gone out in a prison truck, in a pail of swill meant for the prison farm pigs, had headed straight west, across the Illinois line. I’m good in open country, even when I’m in prison condition, so by dawn I was in a hayloft near Paris, Illinois some 20 miles from the pen. You can do what you have to do.

The cabby stopped at the foot of the private road, looking dubious. “Listen, buddy, I know that’s been plowed, but it looks damned icy. If I try it and go into the ditch—”

“I’ll walk from here.”

I waited beside the road until he’d driven away, then let the north wind chase me up the hill and into the leafless hardwoods. The cedars that Pops and I had put in as a windbreak were taller and fuller; rabbit paths were pounded hard into the snow under the barbed-wire tangles of wild raspberry bushes. Under the oaks at the top of the hill was the old-fashioned, two-story house, but I detoured to the kennels first. The snow was deep and undisturbed inside them. No more foxhounds. No cracked com in the bird feeder outside the kitchen window, either. I rang the front doorbell.

My sister-in-law Edwina, Rod’s wife, answered it. She was three years younger than my 35, and she’d started wearing a girdle.

“Good Lord! Chris!” Her mouth tightened. “We didn’t—”

“Ma wrote that the old man was sick.” She’d written, all right. Your father is very ill. Not that you have ever cared if any of us lives or dies... And then Edwina decided that my tone of voice had given her something to get righteous about

“I’m amazed you’d have the nerve to come here, even if they did let you out on parole or something.” So nobody had been around asking yet. “If you plan to drag the family name through the mud again—”

I pushed by her into the hallway. “What’s wrong with the old man?” I called him Pops only inside myself, where no one could hear.

“He’s dying, that’s what’s wrong with him.”

She said it with a sort of baleful pleasure. It hit me, but I just grunted and went by into the living room. Then the old girl called down from the head of the stairs.

“Eddy? What — who is it’”

“Just a salesman, Ma. He can wait until Doctor’s gone.”

Doctor. As if some damned croaker was generic physician himself. When he came downstairs Edwina tried to hustle him out before I could see him, but I caught his arm as he poked it into his overcoat sleeve.

“Like to see you a minute, Doc. About old man Miller.”

He was nearly six feet, a couple of inches shorter than me, but outweighing me forty pounds. He pulled his arm free.

“Now see here, fellow—”

I grabbed his lapels and shook him, just enough to pop a button off his coat and put his glasses awry on his nose. His face got red.

“Old family friend, Doc.” I jerked a thumb at the stairs. “What’s the story?”

It was dumb, dumb as hell, of course, asking him; at any second the cops would figure out that the farmer in the burned-out car wasn’t me after all. I’d dumped enough gasoline before I struck the match so they couldn’t lift prints off anything except the shoe I’d planted: but they’d make him through dental charts as soon as they found out he was missing. When they did they’d come here asking questions, and then the croaker would realize who I was. But I wanted to know whether Pops was as bad off as Edwina said he was, and I’ve never been a patient man.

The croaker straightened his suit coat, striving to regain lost dignity. “He — Judge Miller is very weak, too weak to move. He probably won’t last out the week.” His eyes searched my face for pain, but there’s nothing like a Federal pen to give you control. Disappointed, he said, “His lungs. I got to it much too late, of course. He’s resting easily.”

I jerked the thumb again. “You know your way out.”

Edwina was at the head of the stairs, her face righteous again. It seems to run in the family, even with those who married in. Only Pops and I were short of it.

“Your father is very ill. I forbid you—”

“Save it for Rod; it might work on him.”

In the room I could see the old man’s arm hanging limply over the edge of the bed, with smoke from the cigarette between his fingers running up to the ceiling in a thin unwavering blue line. The upper arm, which once had measured an honest 18 and had swung his small tight fist against the side of my head a score of times, could not even hold a cigarette up in the air. It gave me the same wrench as finding a good foxhound that’s gotten mixed up with a bobcat.

The old girl came out of her chair by the foot of the bed, her face blanched. I put my arms around her. “Hi, Ma,” I said. She was rigid inside my embrace, but I knew she wouldn’t pull away. Not there in Pop’s room.

He had turned his head at my voice. The light glinted from his silky white hair. His eyes, translucent with imminent death, were the pure, pale blue of birch shadows on fresh snow.

“Chris,” he said in a weak voice. “Son of a biscuit, boy... I’m glad to see you.”

“You ought to be, you lazy devil,” I said heartily. I pulled off my suit jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, and tugged off my tie. “Getting so lazy that you let the foxhounds go!”

“That’s enough, Chris.” She tried to put steel into it.

“I’ll just sit here a little, Ma,” I said easily. Pops wouldn’t have long, I knew, and any time I got with him would have to do me. She stood in the doorway, a dark indecisive shape; then she turned and went silently out, probably to phone Rod at the bank.

For the next couple of hours I did most of the talking; Pops just lay there with his eyes shut, like he was asleep. But then he started in, going way back, to the trapline he and I had run when I’d been a kid; to the big white-tail buck that followed him through the woods one rutting season until Pops whacked it on the nose with a tree branch. It was only after his law practice had ripened into a judgeship that we began to draw apart; I guess that in my twenties I was too wild, too much what he’d been himself 30 years before. Only I kept going in that direction.

About seven o’clock my brother Rod called from the doorway. I went out, shutting the door behind me. Rod was taller than me, broad and big-boned, with an athlete’s frame — but with mush where his guts should have been. He had close-set pale eyes and not quite enough chin, and hadn’t gone out for football in high school.

“My wife reported the vicious things you said to her.” It was his best give-the-teller-hell voice. “We’ve talked this over with Mother and we want you out of here tonight. We want—”

“You want? Until he kicks off it’s still the old man’s house, isn’t it’”

He swung at me then — being Rod, it was a right-hand lead — and I blocked it with an open palm. Then I back-handed him, hard, twice across the face each way, jerking his head from side to side with the slaps, and crowding him up against the wall. I could have fouled his groin to bend him over, then driven locked hands down on the back of his neck as I jerked a knee into his face; and I wanted to. The need to get away before they came after me was gnawing at my gut like a weasel in a trap gnawing off his own paw to get loose. But I merely stepped away from him.

“You... you murderous animal!” He had both hands up to his cheeks like a woman might have done. Then his eyes widened theatrically, as the realization struck him. I wondered why it had taken so long. “You’ve broken out!” he gasped. “Escaped! A fugitive from... from justice!”

“Yeah. And I’m staying that way. I know you, kid, all of you. The last thing any of you want is for the cops to take me here.” I tried to put his tones into my voice. “Oh! The scandal!”

“But they’ll be after you—”

“They think I’m dead,” I said flatly. “I went off an icy road in a stolen car in downstate Illinois, and it rolled and burned with me inside.”

His voice was hushed, almost horror-stricken. “You mean — that there is a body in the car?”

“Right.”

I knew what he was thinking, but I didn’t bother to tell him the truth — that the old farmer who was driving me to Springfield, because he thought my doubled-up fist in the overcoat pocket was a gun, hit a patch of ice and took the car right off the lonely country road. He was impaled on the steering post, so I took his shoes and put one of mine on his foot. The other I left, with my fingerprints on it, lying near enough so they’d find it but not so near that it’d bum along with the car. Rod wouldn’t have believed the truth anyway. If they caught me, who would?

I said, “Bring up a bottle of bourbon and a carton of cigarettes. And make sure Eddy and Ma keep their mouths shut if anyone asks about me.” I opened the door so Pops could hear. “Well, thanks, Rod. It is nice to be home again.”

Solitary in the pen makes you able to stay awake easily or snatch sleep easily, whichever is necessary. I stayed awake for the last 37 hours that Pops had, leaving the chair by his bed only to go to the bathroom and to listen at the head of the stairs whenever I heard the phone or the doorbell ring. Each time I thought: this is it. But my luck held. If they’d just take long enough so I could stay until Pops went; the second that happened, I told myself, I’d be on my way.

Rod and Edwina and Ma were there at the end, with Doctor hovering in the background to make sure he got paid. Pops finally moved a pallid arm and Ma sat down quickly on the edge of the bed — a small, erect, rather indomitable woman with a face made for wearing a lorgnette. She wasn’t crying yet; instead, she looked purely luminous in a way.

“Hold my hand, Eileen.” Pops paused for the terrible strength to speak again. “Hold my hand. Then I won’t be frightened.”

She took his hand and he almost smiled, and shut his eyes. We waited, listening to his breathing get slower and slower and then just stop, like a grandfather clock running down. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. I looked around at them, so soft, so unused to death, and I felt like a marten in a brooding house. Then Ma began to sob.

It was a blustery day with snow flurries. I parked the jeep in front of the funeral chapel and went up the slippery walk with wind plucking at my coat, telling myself for the hundredth time just how nuts I was to stay for the service. By now they had to know that the dead farmer wasn’t me; by now some smart prison censor had to remember Ma’s letter about Pops being sick. He was two days dead, and I should have been in Mexico by this time. But it didn’t seem complete yet, somehow. Or maybe I was kidding myself, maybe it was just the old need to put down authority that always ruins guys like me.

From a distance it looked like Pops, but up close you could see the cosmetics and that his collar was three sizes too big. I felt his hand: it was a statue’s hand, unfamiliar except for the thick, slightly down-curved fingernails.

Rod came up behind me and said, in a voice meant only for me, “After today I want you to leave us alone. I want you out of my house.”

“Shame on you, brother,” I grinned. “Before the will is even read, too.”

We followed the hearse through snowy streets at the proper funeral pace, lights burning. Pallbearers wheeled the heavy casket out smoothly on oiled tracks, then set it on belts over the open grave. Snow whipped and swirled from a gray sky, melting on the metal and forming rivulets down the sides.

I left when the preacher started his scam, impelled by the need to get moving, get away, yet impelled by another urgency, too. I wanted something out of the house before all the mourners arrived to eat and guzzle. The guns and ammo already had been banished to the garage, since Rod never had fired a round in his life; but it was easy to dig out the beautiful little .22 target pistol with the long barrel. Pops and I had spent hundreds of hours with that gun, so the grip was worn smooth and the blueing was gone from the metal that had been out in every sort of weather.

Putting the jeep in four-wheel I ran down through the trees to a cut between the hills, then went along on foot through the darkening hardwoods. I moved slowly, evoking memories of Korea to neutralize the icy bite of the snow through my worn shoes. There was a flash of brown as a cotton-tail streaked from under a deadfall toward a rotting woodpile I’d stacked years before. My slug took him in the spine, paralyzing the back legs. He jerked and thrashed until I broke his neck with the edge of my hand.

I left him there and moved out again, down into the small marshy triangle between the hills. It was darkening fast as I kicked at the frozen tussocks. Finally a ringneck in full plumage burst out, long tail fluttering and stubby pheasant wings beating to raise his heavy body. He was quartering up and just a bit to my right, and I had all the time in the world. I squeezed off in mid-swing, knowing it was perfect even before he took that heart-stopping pinwheel tumble.

I carried them back to the jeep; there was a tiny ruby of blood on the pheasant’s beak, and the rabbit was still hot under the front legs. I was using headlights when I parked on the curving cemetery drive. They hadn’t put the casket down yet, so the snow had laid a soft blanket over it. I put the rabbit and pheasant on top and stood without moving for a minute or two. The wind must have been strong, because I found that tears were burning on my cheeks.

Goodbye, Pops. Goodbye to deer-shining out of season in the hardwood belt across the creek. Goodbye to jump-shooting mallards down in the river bottoms. Goodbye to woodsmoke and mellow bourbon by firelight and all the things that made a part of you mine. The part they could never get at.

I turned away, toward the jeep — and stopped dead. I hadn’t even heard them come up. Four of them, waiting patiently as if to pay their respects to the dead. In one sense they were: to them that dead farmer in the burned-out car was Murder One. I tensed, my mind going to the .22 pistol that they didn’t know about in my overcoat pocket. Yeah. Except that it had all the stopping power of a fox’s bark. If only Pops had run to handguns of a little heavier caliber. But he hadn’t.

Very slowly, as if my arms suddenly had grown very heavy, I raised my hands above my head.

Content

Joe Gores
Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

Introduction

File #1: The Mayfield Case

The Second Coming

Plot It Yourself

Raptor

Watch for It

The Andrech Samples

Killer Man

Goodbye, Pops