I took another step toward him and kept on talking. I said, “There are still men in Randal’s flat, right under us. They’ll hear that gun. You won’t have time to muffle it, like when you shot Randall.”
I kept walking, slowly. I knew if I moved suddenly, he’d shoot. My hands were going down slowly, too. I said, “Give me that gun, Barranya. Figure out what a rope around your neck feels like before you pull that trigger, and don’t pull it.”
I was reaching out, palm upward for him to hand the gun to me, but he backed away. He said, “Stop, damn you,” and the urbanity and mockery were gone from his voice. He was scared.
I kept walking forward. I said, “I saw a cop-killer once after they finished questioning him, Barranya. They did such a job that he didn’t mind hanging, much, after that. And don’t forget the boys below us will hear a shot. You won’t have time to pull those wires up through the wall before they get up here.”
And then he was back against the wall, and I must have pressed him too hard, because I saw from his eyes that he was going to shoot. But my hand was only inches from the gun now, and I took the last short step in a lunge and slapped the gun just as it went off. I felt the burn of powder on my palm and wrist, but I wasn’t hit. The gun hit the wall and ricocheted under the sofa.
The burn on my hand made me jerk back, involuntarily, off balance, and he jumped in with a wallop that caught me on the jaw that knocked me further off balance.
I took half a dozen punches, and they hurt, before I could get set to throw one back effectively. I took half a dozen more before I got in my Sunday punch and Barranya folded up on the carpet.
I staggered across the room to the phone. My nose felt lopsided and one of my eyes was hard to see out of. There was blood in my mouth and I spat it out. A tooth came with it.
I got Holding on the phone, and told him. I said, “I guess there’s no one downstairs at the moment or they’d sure as hell be up here by now.”
He said, “Swell work, Sarge. We’ll be right over; sit on the guy till we get there. How’s your toothache coming?”
“Huh?” I said, and then it dawned on me that my whole face and head ached, except for my tooth. I felt to see which one had been knocked out in the fight, and it was!
After I’d hung up, I found Shultz, too, was a good host; his whiskey was poorly hidden. My knees felt wobbly and I figured I’d earned this one. I had another, and then heard voices and footsteps out in the hall, and knew the homicide boys were back.
I walked over to the sofa where Barranya lay, to see if he was conscious again. He wasn’t, but bending over made my head swim and suddenly my knees just weren’t there any more. I don’t know whether it was the whiskey, or the fight I’d been through, or the relief that I didn’t have to go to the dentist.
But I’ll never live down the fact that they came in a second later—and found me sleeping peacefully on top of the murderer.
Mad Dog!
I GOT it the minute I saw that distorted face peering around the corner of the turn in the hallway. I wasn’t looking toward the hallway, of course, but toward MacCready. Back of Mac’s desk was a mirror and it was in the mirror that I saw it.
For just a minute I thought I had ‘em, then I remembered Mac’s screwy ideas on mental therapeutics, and I grinned. I kept the grin to myself, though. Here’s where I have some fun with good old Mac, I thought to myself. Let him pull his gag and pretend to play along.
So I kept on with what I was saying. “Mac, old horse,” I told him, “can’t you get it out of your head that this isn’t a professional call? Quit psychoanalyzing me, dammit, or I’ll leave you flat and hike right back to Provincetown over these bloody roller-coaster anthills you call dunes, and get myself drunk.”
He snorted, a well-bred Scotch snort. “You’d fall flat on your lace before you got halfway. Bryce, how you ever made it out here’s got me beat. And how you ever write plays that get on Broadway, when you keep yourself so full of whiskey that—” He shook his head in bewilderment.
“Ever see any of my plays, Mac? Maybe you’d get the connection. But—”
I caught sight of that face again in the mirror, and I calculated the angle and decided that Mac couldn’t see it from where he sat. The guy in the hall had come around the corner now, and was pussy-footing up to the door. He was smiling, if you could call it a smile; one corner of his mouth went up and the other down so his mouth looked like an unhealed diagonal wound across the bottom of his face. His eyes were so narrowed you couldn’t see the whites. I thought crazily that if the British had done that at Bunker Hill they wouldn’t have got fired on at all.
All in all it wasn’t a nice expression. I shuddered a bit, involuntarily. Whoever was stooging for Mac on this gag of his ought to be on the stage. He could do Dracula without makeup, unless he already had the makeup on, and if he did, it was a wow.
Mac was talking again, it dawned on me. “If this wasn’t my vacation—” he was saying. “Listen, Bryce, even if it is, I’ll take you on. It’d take me three months to get you wrung out so you’d stay that way, but I’ll do it if you say the word. You’re darned far on the road to being an alcoholic. At the rate you’re going, pal…”
I grinned at him. “You underestimate me, old horse. I’m a lush of the first water, right now. I like it. But listen, Mac, there is something that worries me. I’m three months overdue on starting my next play, and I haven’t a ghost of an idea. I thought a summer in Provincetown would fix me up. Cape Cod and all that and the picturesque fishing smacks and all that sort of tripe. But—well, I’m worried stiff.”
I was, too. There’s nothing worse than not having an idea when you need an idea. That’s the trouble with being a playwright. If you need a house or a horse or a multiple-head drill or a set of golf clubs, you go out and buy it, but if you need an idea and need it bad, you sit and stew and maybe it comes and maybe it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you go slowly nuts.
You get to the stage where you remember that an old friend of yours is a psychiatrist and has his summer home on the other side of the cape, with the waves of the Atlantic rolling into his front yard, and you hike across the dunes to see him to find out what’s wrong that you haven’t got an idea.
He said, “How to help you there, Bryce, I’m not sure. But this should be good country for you. Eugene O’Neill got his start here, and Millay, and others. Harry Kemp has a place only a few miles from here, and…”
That was when the guy in the hallway reached around the door jamb and switched off the light. Mac’s head—I could still see dimly because it was only eight-thirty and not completely dark out yet what with daylight savings time and a bright moon—jerked around toward the doorway and I saw his eyes widen. He reached quick for a drawer of his desk and then slowly started to raise his hands up over his head instead. He was going to take it big, I could see that.
I turned my head slowly toward the doorway. The man had stepped fully into the room now, and although his face was in the shadow now, I could see how big and powerful he was. He wore an overcoat three sizes too large for him, and he held something in his hand that looked like a cross between a pistol and a shotgun. It must be, I decided, a scattergun—one of those things cautious householders keep on hand for burglars. It’s useless at any range to speak of, but up to twenty feet it can’t miss a man, and it can’t miss doing unpleasant things to him. It shoots a small gauge shotgun shell.
Of course, this one wouldn’t be loaded. Maybe my pal Colin MacCready didn’t know I’d read his most recent book, but I had. In it, he told his ideas about what he called “shock treatment.” Alcoholism was one of the things it was supposed to help. I won’t go into details, but the basic idea is to scare the pants off the patient.