“That would have been interesting,” I said.
I caught a whiff of his breath as he threw a big fist at me. I stepped inside the clumsy swing and brought one up through the middle. It was harder than I wanted it to be and it hurt the hell out of my hand. But it made me look good. He went back into the room and smashed a cheap chair as he fell on it. I followed him closely and when he staggered up, I put a hand on his thick chest and shoved him back toward the bed. He sat down.
As he tried to get up I stood over him with the right hand cocked. “Better keep sitting, laddie,” I said. He relaxed. He had a florid face, unkempt hair, a soiled blue shirt open at the neck and puffy eyes. I moved back and kicked his door shut.
He took the cigarette I offered him and held still for the match. His one room apartment was as neat and sweet as the inside of a hobo’s shoe.
I pulled a chair around and straddled it, my forearms resting on the back of it. “Now, laddie, suppose you tell me what you expected to gain by bashing me one out there in the hall.”
He mumbled, “I don’t like wise guys.”
“Nobody does. I didn’t know I qualified. Are you a self-appointed guard for the little lady?”
“What the hell is it to you?”
“I’d be happy to hit again, laddie.”
“It’s none of your business — but she lives off me, friend.”
I felt sick in the middle. She’d seemed so right, somehow. “You ought to keep her home nights then,” I said.
He scowled. “It isn’t what you think. I’ve got no claim on her like that. We’re both from the same town. I’m keeping her going until she gets a job. I want to marry her.”
I looked at the cluttered room. “You mean you work! And still find time to keep your place so clean?”
He said sullenly, “I make good money, I’m an industrial designer.”
“So you just live next to her and keep her going and expect her to drop into your lap when the debt gets high enough.”
“Put it anyway you want to.”
I stared at him for a few minutes. I checked back through my memory of the faces of the people on the subway platform. I couldn’t build laddie into the picture, but there had been more people there than I’d had time to look at. It might just fit. If laddie had taken care of Lortz, he might have practiced on Graff and McQuade.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Michael Burns. What’s it to you?”
“Where were you today at four-fifteen?”
“I was right here. I had my day off.”
He had powerful hands. Hands that could have shoved Lortz off the edge of the platform. He sat too still. I didn’t like the look of him. There was nothing to go on. If Judy had suspected him, she would have mentioned it when she told me to leave her.
“I’m Ralph Lortz,” I said quietly.
He looked at me steadily. “You pack a hell of a good punch for a ghost, Lortz.”
“How do you know Lortz is dead?” I asked quickly.
He waved a big hand at the radio. “Seven o’clock news.” He smiled. “She has a rough time with her boys friends, doesn’t she?” It wasn’t a pretty smile.
I fell asleep two minutes after I climbed into bed, but awakened a half hour later. Michael Burns, three times life size, was straddling the front car on a subway train, bearing down on me. I was tied hand and foot and stretched across the tracks. Burns was smiling. We weren’t down in the underground, but out on a flat expanse of Daliesque desert. Judy was on her face in the sand ten feet away. I was screaming at her to untie me, but the train was making too much noise...
Clicking on the light, I sat on the edge of the bed and sucked a cigarette like a little kid with a straw in somebody else’s soda. My hands shook and the breeze from my open window chilled the perspiration on my back.
Right then and there I decided that I’d better arrange to be number four in Burns’ hit parade. That was the way out for Judy. It would either prove that all the others had been accident, or that Burns was little boy grue.
The next afternoon was warm and Judy and I walked in the park. In the side pocket of my jacket was the comfortable weight of the little Spanish automatic I had won in a crap game in Paris. I had decided that if I told her my suspicions about Burns, she might spoil my play. It had to work right. The only way it could work properly was by being on my toes all the time.
It was tough work to take my eyes off Judy every few minutes and take a look around. There was color in her cheeks and her lips were made for laughing. Once when we got behind a stack of shrubbery, I pulled her close and kissed her. She was laughing at the time, but after the kiss she stood close to me and I looked down into her eyes and everything was very solemn between us — like a chord of organ music you overhear as you walk by a church.
“You better not see me again, Joe,” she said. “I’m bad luck.”
“It’s too late, now. Isn’t it?” I said softly.
She didn’t answer. She nodded her head quickly and lifted her face to be kissed again. It would always and forever be too late to ever leave her.
May in the month to be in love in Manhattan. You can be in love almost any month anywhere else, but it’s good to save it until May when you’re in the big town. We went everyplace that people go and did everything that people do and there was nobody in Manhattan except the two of us.
All except Burns. Burns was the quick look I gave behind us whenever we approached a curb. Burns was a light shining under a door after I took her home. Burns was the fear that kept me from taking a subway.
He was always around the corner from us. When I glanced behind us and saw the empty sidewalk, I knew that he had just stepped into a doorway. Always I remembered his smile.
I tried to make plans for us, but Judy always steered me away, saying, “Oh, Joe. Don’t be dull. We’ve got a million tomorrows with sunshine every day.”
It looked as though she was right.
During the first week of June she began to be jittery. She wouldn’t tell me why. Her cheeks were gaunt. On a warm night she said, “Joe, let’s go back to the park. Let’s go back to the place where you kissed me the first time. Please, Joe.”
In the cab she clung to my arm and her eyes were bright. There was a bench near the place where I had kissed her. It was near a sharp curve in the path. She pulled me over to the bench and we sat down, side by side. She was on my right side. A cool breeze came along and she shivered. She slipped her hand down into my jacket pocket, said, “What on earth have you got in that pocket, Joe?”
I took it out. A distant light glimmered on the blued steel. “It’s a gun, darling. I won it in a crap game during the war.”
“Do you always carry it?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“I like to have it around, darling.”
“Is it loaded?”
“Sure. It’s got a shell in the chamber. This little thing here is the safety. All you have to do is push that down and pull the trigger.”
She shivered. “It frightens me. How do you hold it?”
“Like so. You’ve got to be careful not to get your hand too high on the grip.”
“Let me hold it, Joe.”
I handed it to her. She was awkward with it. I could just see her face in the dim light. She slid away from me, turned toward me and scowled with mock fury. “Grrr! I’m going to kill you, Joe.”
The look of the gun in her hand was an absurdity. I laughed. Then I heard the faint bitter sound of the safety. The scowl had faded. Her eyes were far away.
I slapped the gun with my right hand. The flare burned my wrist and a brilliant slash of pain creased my arm. She swung the gun back, and I grunted as I hit her in the face with my left fist. She crumpled and slid off the bench.