“How did you find out?” asked Justinian. “I didn’t tell you anything. The Harding job, yes. But about Marjorie. I didn’t tell anybody.”
“A guy like me,” said Eddie, “can find out an awful lot if he sets his mind to it. Besides, I’d been feeding Marjorie what she wanted to know about Harding.”
“Sure,” I said. “How else could she have found out? You’ve been taken, Joe. You’re through.”
I motioned him to get up. And then Brian remembered who Justinian was, and what he had just admitted he had done, and he got up and rushed in between us and flung himself on Justinian, and I was helpless.
They rolled together, making ugly sounds. They rolled out from the shelter of the chair into the open center of the room. And I saw Eddie Sego raise his gun.
“Eddie,” I said. “Let them alone.”
“What the hell,” he said, “now he knows what I did I have to get him, or he’ll drag me right along with him. I’m clean on those killings, but there’s plenty else.”
“Eddie,” I said. “No.”
He said, “I can do without you, too,” and I saw the black, cold glitter come in his eyes.
I shot him in the right elbow.
He spun around and dropped the gun. He doubled up for a minute, and then he began to whimper and claw with his left hand for his own gun, in a holster under his left shoulder. I went closer to him and shot him again, carefully, through the left arm.
He crumbled down onto the floor and sat there, looking at me with big tears in his eyes. “What did you have to do that for?” he said. “You wanted him dead, too.”
“Not that way. And not Brian, too.”
“What do you care about Brian?” He rocked back and forth on the floor, hugging his arms against his sides and crying.
“You make me sick,” I said.
I went to where Justinian and Brian were in the center of the room, locked together, quiet now with deadly effort. I didn’t look to see who was killing who. “You make me sick,” I said. “All of you make me sick.” I kicked them until they broke apart.
I felt sorry for Brian, but he still made me sick. “Get up. Brian, you get on the phone and call the police. Prioletti and the decent cops, not Hickey’s. They’ve been waiting a long time for this. Go on!”
He went, and I told Justinian to sit down, and he sat. He looked at Eddie Sego and laughed.
“Empires aren’t so easy to inherit after all, are they, Eddie?” he said.
Eddie was still looking at me. “I just don’t see why you did it.”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “Because I want to see you hang right along with the others. Did you think I was going to do your dirty work for you, for free?”
I turned to Justinian. “How did you find out Marjorie was so close to you on the Harding thing?”
“Why,” he said, “I guess it was a remark Eddie made that got me worried.”
“A remark that got Marjorie killed. But you didn’t care, did you, Eddie? What’s another life, more or less, to you?”
His face had turned white, with fear instead of pain. Justinian was looking at me with a sort of astonishment. And then Brian came and took my arm, and I stepped back and shook my head, and we sat down and waited until Prioletti came.
When they were all gone and the house was empty and quiet again, I stood for a minute looking around at all the things that had been Marjorie’s, and there was a peacefulness about them now. I went out softly and closed the door, and drove away down the long drive.
Helen Nielsen
(b. 1918)
From 1955 to 1958, Helen Berniece Nielsen wrote just six short stories for the seminal hard-boiled digest, Manhunt. Yet these stories add up to some of the toughest tales of the mid-century, written by an author who was unusually gifted in a number of fields.
A newspaper and commercial artist before World War II, Nielsen transferred from illustration to aeronautical draftsmanship during the conflict, working on the U.S. Defense Engineering Program. From her mid-twenties until her sixtieth year, she owned an apartment building. Managing this caravanserai, with its ever-shifting population, gave her a unique, invaluable view of her fellow humans — their foibles, their passions, their outlooks, and their obsessions. This insight later proved useful in such books as A Killer in the Street (1967), which begins in an apartment house in New York, and The Woman on the Roof (1954), in which murder takes place in the bungalow court owned by the heroine s brother.
Nielsen was also adept at most subgenres in the mystery field, from the pursuit thriller (the superb and claustrophobic Detour [1953], for instance, in which a man finds a whole community ranged against him) to the novel of bafflement. A good example of the latter is Nielsen’s second book, Gold Coast Nocturne (1951), in which the hero cannot even remember his own marriage because he was drunk at the time. Her later books generally concern the resolution of situations that threaten either career or life.
Nielsen seems to be appreciated most by British aficionados, and her last two books, The Severed Key (1973) and The Brink of Murder (1976), were published only in England. By the mid-1970s, Nielsen had virtually ceased writing, and her remaining work moved well away from her hard-boiled, Manhunt period. One of her last stories, “The Boom at the End of the Hall,” written for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1973, is an out-and-out ghost story, familiarly set in a residential hotel.
Chameleonlike, Nielsen could subtly alter her style with each new direction she took, each new subgenre she conquered. But none of her later work can compete with the early stories, celebrated in her one paperback-original collection, Woman Missing (1961). “A Piece of Ground” is a bleak and uncompromising noir tale that first appeared in 1957 in Manhunt.
J. A.
A Piece of Ground
(1957)
They called him the farmer. He had a name the same as any man; but it was seldom spoken. Names weren’t important in the city. A number on a badge, a number on a time card, a number on the front of a rooming house — that’s all anyone needed. Names were for people who got into the newspapers; and, down around the warehouses that backed up against the river, a man didn’t get into the newspapers unless he was found with his throat cut or his head bashed in. Even then he rarely had a name. He was just another unidentified body.
He was a tall man. He stooped when he went through doorways, out of habit. He had long arms with big hands stuck on the ends of them — calloused and splinter-cut from handling the rough pine crates of produce; and he had large feet that hurt from walking and standing all the time on cement and not ever feeling the earth under them any more. He had a large-boned face and sad eyes, and he never laughed and seldom smiled unless he was alone, to himself, and thinking of something remembered. He worked hard and took his pay to the bank, except for the few dollars he needed for the landlady at the rooming house, the little food he ate, and some pipe tobacco. He never spent money for liquor or women. It was a joke all along the river-front.
“The farmer ain’t give up yet. He’s saving to buy out the corporation that took over his farm.”
It was a big joke, but it wasn’t true. Not quite. Once a week he wrote home: