Monroe was staring at the stamps and chewing his lip. He looked physically ill. The girl was watching me now, her fingers picking at the edge of the housecoat, her face white and drawn and filled with silent fury.
I said, “It would almost have to be stamps. I should have guessed as much two hours ago. How much are they worth?”
“How would I know?” Monroe said sulkily. “They weren’t sent to me. I never saw them before.”
I slid the stamps back into the envelope and put the envelope in my pocket. “You’d know, brother. If you’d kept a better eye on Amos Spain you might even have gotten away with the whole thing.”
“You’ve got nothing on us. Why don’t you just shove off?”
“I’ve got everything on you,” I said. “Not that I deserve any credit. The Army mule could have done the job. I can give you the State Attorney’s case right now.”
I picked up the gun and swung it lightly between a thumb and finger and sat on the couch arm. Rain beat against the windows in a muted murmur. From the kitchen came the lurch and whine of the refrigerator motor.
“Somebody named B. Jones,” I said, “gets hold of some rare stamps. Illegally. Jones knows there are collectors around who will buy stolen stamps. Amos Spain is such a collector. A deal is made by phone or letter and the stamps are mailed to Spain. In some way you two find out about it. After the stamps are in the mail, perhaps. No point in trying to get them away from Uncle Sam; but there’s another way. So the two of you show up here early this morning and force your way in on old Amos, who is still in bed. You tie him up a little, let’s say, and gag him, leave him on the bed and come out here in the living room to wait for the postman with the stamps.
“But Amos isn’t giving up. He gets loose, dresses and goes down the fire escape. He can’t be sure when you’re going to open the door and look in on him, so he puts on just enough clothes to keep from being pinched for indecent exposure. That’s why he wasn’t wearing socks, and why his clothes were mismatched.
“But by the time he’s going down the fire escape, you look in. No Amos, and the window is open. You look out, spot him running away without topcoat or hat, and out you go after him. Tackling him on the street wouldn’t do at all; your only hope is to nail him in some lonely spot and knock him off. How does it sound so far, neighbor?”
“Like a lot of words,” Monroe growled.
“Words,” I said, “are man’s best friend. They get you fed, married, buried. Shall I tell you some more about words?”
“Go to hell.”
I put down the gun and lit a cigarette and smiled. “Like I told you,” I said, “you’ve got a simple mind. But I was telling you a story. I wouldn’t want to stop now, so let’s get back to Amos. You see, Amos had a big problem at this stage of the game. He couldn’t go to the boys in blue and tell them about you and Cora, here. Doing that could bring out the business about the stamps and get him nailed for receiving stolen property. He had to get the two of you thrown out of his apartment before the envelope showed up.
“How to do it? Hire a strong-arm boy who won’t ask questions. Where do you find a strong-arm boy on a moment’s notice? The phone book’s got half a column of them. Private detectives. Not the big agencies; they might ask too many questions. But one of the smaller outfits might need the business bad enough to do it Amos’s way. At least it’s worth trying.
“So Amos gets my address out of the phone book, the nearest one to him, and comes up to hire me. He has no idea you’re following him which means he’s not too careful about keeping out in the open where nothing can happen to him. He comes up to my office and I’m not in yet. He sits down to wait. You walk in and leave a switch knife in him. But that’s only part of your job. You’ve got to fix it so there’ll be a delay in identifying him – enough of a delay, at least to keep the cops away from here until the mailman comes and goes. Lifting his papers may slow things down, but you want more than that. Being a crook, you make a habit of carrying around phony identification cards. You substitute these for his own, lift whatever cash Amos had on him, slip out quick and come back here. Right so far?”
The fear had gone out of Monroe’s eyes and there was the first faint sign of a smirk to his thin bloodless lips. He said airily, “If this is your idea of a way to kill a rainy afternoon, don’t let me stop you. Mind if I sit down?”
“I don’t care if you fall down,” I said. “There’s a little more and then we can all sit around and discuss the election until the cops arrive. A little more, like Cora knowing my name the first time I was here this afternoon. I hadn’t told her my name, you see; just that I was a private dick. But to Cora there was only one private detective – the one whose office you’d killed Amos Spain in.”
Behind me a quiet voice said, “Raise your hands.”
I froze. Cora Monroe’s .32 was on the couch arm, no more than six inches from my hand. I could have grabbed for it – and I could get buried for grabbing. I didn’t grab.
A slender stoop-shouldered man in his early forties came padding on stocking feet in front of me. He had bushy graying hair, a long intelligent face and a capable-looking hand containing a nickel-plated Banker’s Special revolver. The quiet voice belonged to him and he used it again, saying, “I won’t tell you again. Put up your hands.”
I put them up.
He went on pointing the gun at me while knocking the .32 off the couch with a single sweep of his other hand. It bounced along the carpet and hit the wall. He said gently, “I’ll take those stamps.”
“You will indeed,” I said. My tongue felt as stiff as Murphy, the night he fell off the streetcar. “I guess I should have looked in the bedroom after all. I guess I thought two people should be able to lift three little stamps.”
“The stamps, Mr Pine.” The voice wasn’t as gentle this time.
“Sure,” I said. I put my hand in my coat and took out the envelope. I did it nice and slow, showing him I was eager to please. I held it out as he reached for it and I slammed my shoe down on his stocking foot with every pound I could spare.
He screamed like a woman and the gun went off. Behind me a lamp base came apart. I threw a punch, hard, and the gray-haired man threw his hands one way and the gun the other and melted into the rug without a sound.
Monroe was crouched near the side wall, the girl’s .32 in his hand and madness in his eyes. While he was still bringing up the gun I jerked the Police Special from under the band of my trousers and fired.
He took a week to fall down. He put his hands together high on his chest and coughed a broken cough and took three wavering steps before he hit the floor with his face and died.
Cora Monroe hadn’t moved from the leather chair. She sat stiff as an ice floe off Greenland, her face blank with shock, her nails sunk in her palms. I felt a little sorry for her. I bent down and picked the envelope off the floor and shoved it deep into a side pocket. I said, “How much were they worth, Cora?”
Only the rain answered.
I found the telephone and said what had to be said. Then I came back and sat down to wait.
It was ten minutes before I heard the first wail of distant sirens.
WE ARE ALL DEAD
Bruno Fischer
The caper went off without a hitch except that Wally Garden got plugged.
There were five of us. My idea had been that three would be enough, figuring the less there were the bigger the cut for each. But Oscar Trotter made the decisions.
Looking at Oscar, you might take him for a college professor – one of those lean, rangy characters with amused, intelligent eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. He sounded like one, too, when he didn’t feel like sounding like somebody else. Maybe he’d been one once, among all the other things he’d ever been.