“No!”
“You want me to keep driving?”
“Yes.”
“Then take off your sweater.” She stared at him. “Your choice,” he said. “Take off the sweater or I put on the brakes. Come on. Take it off.”
“Why are you making me do this?”
“The same reason some people make other people dig their own graves. It saves time and effort. First unhook your seat belt, make it easier for yourself. Oh, very pretty, very pretty. You’re terrified now, aren’t you? Say it.”
“I’m terrified.”
“You’re scared to death. Say it.”
“I’m scared to death.”
“And now I think it’s time to find a parking place.”
“No!” she cried. Her foot found his and pressed the accelerator flat against the floorboards, while her hand wrenched the wheel hard to the right. The car took flight. Then there was impact, and then there was noise, and then there was nothing.
She came to suddenly, abruptly. She had a headache and she’d hurt her shoulder badly and she could taste blood in the back of her throat. But she was alive. God, she was alive!
The car was upside down, its top crushed. And he was behind the wheel, his head bent at an impossible angle. Blood trailed from the corner of one eye, and more blood leaked from between his lips. His eyes were wide open, staring, and rolled up in their sockets.
The passenger door wouldn’t open. She had to roll down the window and wriggle out through it. She felt faint when she stood up, and she had to hold on to the side of the car for support. She looked in the window she had just crawled through, and there, within reach, was the leather drawstring pouch.
She had not willed her foot to press down on the gas pedal, or her hand to yank the steering wheel. She did not now will her hand to reach through the window and extract the leather pouch. It did so of its own accord.
You don’t have to open it, she told herself.
She took a breath. Yes you do, she thought, and loosened the drawstring.
Inside, she found a small bottle of aspirin, a package of cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers, a small tin of nonprescription stay-awake pills, a bank-wrapped roll of quarters, and a nail clipper. She looked at all of this and shook her head.
But he’d made her take her sweater off. And it was still off, she was bare to the waist.
She couldn’t find her sweater, couldn’t guess where it had landed after the car flipped and bounced around. She tried one of the rear doors and managed to open it. When she did so the dome light went on, which made it easier for her to see what she was doing.
She found a sweatshirt in one of her bags and put it on. She found her purse — it had somehow ended up in the backseat — and she set that aside. And something made her open one of his bags and go through it, not certain what she was looking for.
She had to go through a second bag before she found it. A three-blade pocketknife with a simulated stag handle.
She cut off the little finger of his left hand. This was harder than it sounded, but she kept at it, and she seemed to have all the time in the world. Not a single car had passed on that desolate road.
When she was done she closed his knife and put it in her purse. She dumped everything else from the drawstring pouch, put the finger inside it, and tucked the pouch into her purse. Then, her purse on her shoulder, she made her way to the road and began walking along it, toward whatever came next.
Some Things a Man Must Do
Just a few minutes before twelve on one of the best Sunday nights of the summer, a clear and fresh-aired and moonlit night, Thomas M. “Lucky Tom” Carroll collected his black snap-brim hat from the hat-check girl at Cleo’s Club on Broderick Avenue. He tipped the girl a crisp dollar bill, winked briskly at her, and headed out the front door. He was fifty-two, looked forty-five, felt thirty-nine. He flipped his expensive cigar into the gutter and strolled to the Cleo’s Club parking lot next door, where his very expensive, very large car waited in the parking space reserved for it.
When he had settled himself behind the wheel with the key fitted snugly in the ignition, he suddenly felt that he might not be alone.
Hearing a clicking sound directly behind him, Carroll stiffened, and then the little man in the backseat shot him six times in the back of the head. While the shots echoed deafeningly, the little man opened the car door, jammed his gun into the pocket of his suit jacket, and scurried off down the street as fast as he could, which was not terribly fast at all. He peeled his white gloves from his tiny hands, and managed to slow down a bit. Holding the white gloves in one hand, he looked rather like the White Rabbit rushing frenetically to keep his appointment with the Duchess.
Finney and Mattera caught the squeal. The scene was packed with onlookers, but Finney and Mattera didn’t share their overwhelming interest in the spectacle. They came, they looked, they confirmed there were no eyewitnesses to question, and they went over to the White Tower for coffee. Let the lab boys sweat it out all night, searching through a coal mine for a black cat that wasn’t there. Fingerprints? Evidence? Clues? A waste of time.
“Figure the touch man is on a plane by now,” Finney said. “Be on the West Coast before the body’s cold.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So Lucky Tom finally bought it. Nice of him to pick a decent night for it. You hate to leave the station house when it’s raining. But a night like this, I don’t mind it at all.”
“It’s a pleasure to get out.”
“It is at that,” said Finney. He stirred his coffee thoughtfully, wondering as he did so if there were a way of stirring your coffee without seeming thoughtful about it. “I wonder,” he said, “why anyone would want to kill him.”
“Good question. After all, what did he ever do? Strong-arm robbery, assault, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, extortion, three murders we knew of and none we could prove—”
“Just trivial things,” said Finney.
“Undercover owner of Cleo’s Club, operator of three illegal gambling establishments—”
“Four.”
“Four? I only knew three.” Mattera finished his coffee. “Loan-shark setup, number-two man in Barry Beyer’s organization, not too much else. We did have a rape complaint maybe eight years ago—”
“A solid citizen.”
“The best.”
“A civic leader.”
“None other.”
“It was sure one peach of a professional touch,” Finney said. “Six shots fired point-blank. Revenge, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“No bad blood coming up between Beyer and Archie Moscow?”
“Haven’t heard a word. They’ve been all peace and quiet for years. Two mobs carve up the city instead of each other. No bad blood spilled in the streets of our fair city. Instead of killing each other they cool it, and rob the public.”
“True public spirit,” said Finney. “The reign of law and order. It makes one proud to serve the cause of law and order in this monument to American civic pride.”
“Shut up,” Mattera said.
Approximately two days and three hours later, three men walked out the front door at 815 Cameron Street. The establishment they left didn’t have an official name, but every cabdriver in town knew it. Good taste precludes a precise description of the principal business activity conducted therein; suffice it to say that seven attractive young ladies lived there, and that it was neither a nurses’ residence nor a college dormitory.