“Fine. See you, Burn.” The line went dead at Sargasso’s end.
He stood there with the receiver in his hand, staring with unseeing eyes at the view he had once enjoyed so much. He could think it over but there was only one answer Sargasso would accept. And the Vegas thing would not be the last. There would be another and another and another until he eventually bungled and had to pay the penalty.
Finally he stirred and placed the phone back on its cradle. The sound that made was the requiem for the good life...
1970s
Michael Kerr
(b. 1933)
Although gifted and imaginative enough to be able to turn his typewriter to a variety of popular-fiction genres, Michael Kerr (Robert Hoskins) seems never to have fully utilized this talent. His identifiable output is not extensive. As Kerr, he wrote a good deal of science fiction during the mid-1970s, appearing in many of the leading magazines as well as writing a paperback original, The Gemini Run (1979). Under his real name, he edited the anthology series Infinity (1970–1973), whose five volumes regularly featured new material from the best science-fiction writers, including Robert Silverberg, Arthur C. Clarke, and Poul Anderson.
Kerr began his novel-writing career by penning modern Gothics. A Place on Dark Island (1971) was the first of seven titles to appear under the pseudonym Grace Corren. As Susan Jennifer, he wrote two Gothics, the first of which, The House of Counted Hatreds (1973), was reissued in 1980 under the Corren name. During the 1980s, he turned to the action-adventure field, contributing such titles as Argentine Deadline (1982) and The Fury Bombs (1983) to the Mack Bolan spinoff series, Phoenix Force, under the house name Gar Wilson. According to certain reference books, Kerr appears to have ceased writing altogether in the mid-1980s.
Under his real name, Kerr wrote only a handful of mystery shorts, all more or less hard-boiled in concept and execution. “The Saturday Night Deaths,” a fine, moody shocker, appeared in the July 1976 issue of Mystery Monthly; a second story, “Candy Man,” was published in the same issue as by Robert Hoskins.
J. A.
The Saturday Night Deaths
(1976)
Dolan was the first: he died at 5:48 P.M.
Technically it wasn’t yet Saturday night, for just like the traffic council, counting usually starts at 6 P.M. And it was early for a family-triangle blowup. But Dolan was known as a morning drinker and an any-time skirt chaser, and when the police finally picked through the blood painted throughout all three rooms of the floosie’s apartment, it was fairly obvious that Mrs. Dolan had reached the point where she could take no more. They figured she took care of her husband first, ripping him open from groin to breastbone, then used the blonde for a pincushion. It’s amazing how much strength an aging woman can have: the Medical Examiner counted over one hundred stab wounds on the girl. But it looked as if Mrs. Dolan was neatest with herself — one slash on each wrist, letting her life run out and soak the cushions of the sex-stained sofa.
7:07 P.M.: Lettoli was next to die.
They found him in the alley behind one of his own cheap hotels, ordinarily a place Lettoli avoided like the plague. They found him with his wallet ripped open and the credit card section missing. The gun was a .32 and most probably a Special — good enough to do the job.
According to Mrs. Lettoli the thief didn’t get much besides the credit cards, for her husband did not believe in carrying cash — twenty bucks at the most, maybe only four or five, in case he decided to pick up a newspaper or if he ran out of cigars. Of course, in a way it was his own fault, wearing that three-hundred-dollar suit in an area where cops went only in pairs. Still, nobody — not his wife, his lawyer, even his boys — could figure out what brought him to that alley on that particular night. He didn’t make his own collections. Of the hotel staff, the only one to see him that Saturday was the janitor, who came out into the alley to dump garbage into the already overflowing cans, and thus discovered the body.
It wasn’t a bad night for murder in one sense — at least as far as the cops were concerned. The weather was cooperative, almost warm, the temperature just breaking through the fifty mark and the smell of spring in the air. There was no drowning rain to blur the vision of men bending over the chalked outline of Lettoli’s body, no water running in the streets or brown slush to slop over the side of one’s shoes. Of course, they still had to breathe in the stink of violent death, but that goes with the job.
7:55 P.M.: Huegens was number three, only forty-eight minutes after Lettoli.
His wife was screaming hysterically while the cop rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital. Although the intern tried to sedate her against the pain of the broken arm and ribs, the officer did manage to gather that some maniac had forced them off the road after first riding their tail so closely that Huegens had sped up in fear of being rammed. He was pushing eighty on the old parkway with its treacherous curves when the guy behind cut out on the worst curve on the whole damn road — cut too close. The red paint of the other car was deep in the scratch that went from Huegens’ rear fender halfway across his door. It was at that point that Huegens lost control of the Cadillac: the car went through the low stone fence and knocked over a dozen hundred-year-old gravestones before it came to a stop fifty feet inside the cemetery.
Death by violence is not something unknown in a city the size of this one — the average annual rate of murders since 1960 comes out to just over seventeen. That’s enough to justify maintaining a homicide division at detective central, although in slack periods some of the four men assigned there go on loan to divisions cut short by the economy-minded, tight-fisted city council.
August can be a bad month most years, particularly during a summer of drought. The city sizzles then, for days and sometimes for weeks under the relentless sun, the heat captured by the concrete streets and concrete buildings. Christmas can be bad for murder too, as can any other holiday season — when the pressures to achieve can seem the heaviest, and those who are failing — at least in their own eyes — can easily break. But the average rate for murder means that over the course of a year there will be no more than one death by violence every three weeks.
And so three times in one evening was definitely unusual. Not yet a record, but certainly bringing this day to the top of the list of deadly days.
9:50 P.M.: Pelk was number four. He tied the record.
He got it coming back from the candy store two blocks from his house with the early edition of the Sunday paper. He always took the dog out for a walk at that time of the evening, and his habits were well known in the neighborhood and among his friends and business acquaintances. All of the cops agreed that this death was deliberate. Why else would a car coming from no farther than the stop sign at the end of the block not have time to slow down, not be able to swerve to avoid him? But there had been no unusual traffic noises noted by the neighbors, and certainly no squeal of brakes just before the impact.
The retired captain showed up at the investigation of what was still officially being called the hit-and-run death of Pelk, arriving perhaps twenty minutes after the boys from downtown. Peter Lorgos was in charge, one of the up-and-coming bright young men of the department. When he saw the captain, he moved away from the cluster of reporters.