Torran was dead. That look of affability was gone in death. He looked weak, vicious, cruel. He looked like a punk, a dirty small-time killer. I searched the house. The kitchen was small. The girl in the white dress lay with her head under the sink, face down, the big red purse under her stomach, her white dress high on the bare strong brown thighs. The slug had made an evil mess of the back of her head. Her companion, a dark man I had never seen before, was one eighth alive. At least he was breathing. His pulse had a flutter like the wings of a captive moth. He had two in the belly.
When Torran had regained the belt, he had put it where a sick person could be expected to put it. Under his pillow. I opened it. Each compartment was hard as a stone with money. It was crammed in so tightly the belt would have to be cut to get it out without tearing it.
I looked at it. All the money in the world. Fresh money, still in the mint wrappers. All the money in the world for all the things in the world. I sat on the bed that smelled of fever and sickness in the room with the drawn blinds and ran my fingertips back and forth across the visible edges of the stacks of bills. I thought of crazy but possible things.
It was done very, very neatly. It was done the way experts do it. A gardener was working in front of my cabaña at the Hotel de las Americas. Another man was coming down the path with a covered tray. I unlocked the door and went in. When I was three steps inside the room the gardener shoved the muzzle of the weapon through the screen of the side window. The waiter tossed napkin and tray aside, kept the light machine gun the napkin had covered. He held it centered on the small of my back. At the same instant the third man stepped out of my bathroom and covered me with a professional-looking revolver.
I raised my arms and stood there. With no accent at all the man in front of me said, “Sit down and hold onto your ankles.”
I did as directed. They took the gun first. Then they took the money belt off me. They put the gun and the money belt on the bed. They seemed to be waiting for someone. I felt better. I had a lovely idea. “Police?” I asked. My voice sounded like something crawling up the side of a wall.
“But of course,” the English-speaking one said.
We all waited. Broughton came in. The white caterpillar eyebrows showed no surprise, no elation. He looked like the deacon standing at the end of the pew waiting for the collection plate to be handed back.
“You saved us some trouble, Gandy,” he said.
“Glad I could help.”
“We didn’t find Brankis until yesterday. We’ve gotten excellent cooperation from the Mexican authorities.”
“Put that in your report, Broughton.”
He nodded. “I will. You nearly made it, Gandy. One day later . . .”
“My hard luck, I suppose,” I said. “Can I get up on my feet?”
He nodded. I got up. He showed expression for the first time. I was something low, dirty and evil. Something you’d find under a wet rock. Something he wanted to step on.
“We’re taking you back,” he said.
“Kind of you, sir.”
I grinned at him. I gave him a big broad grin and he turned away from it. I was laughing inside. I was laughing so hard I hurt. Let him have his fun. Sooner or later he was going to find out about the wire I sent before returning to my cabaña – that wire to Washington Bureau Headquarters, giving the case code name, reporting recovery, requesting instructions.
You see, it looked like all the money in the world, but sometimes even that isn’t enough.
THE MURDERING KIND!
Robert Turner
1
It started off just like any other Friday night. I left my office in the Emcee Publishing Company building on Forty-Sixth Street at five-oh-five. I went across the street to the quiet, dim little bar in the Hotel Marlo where every Friday night for the past year or so, I’d been stopping off after work for a dry Manhattan. I felt good. I had that Friday-payday glow of satisfaction that you get when you’ve got a good tough week’s work behind you, money in your pocket and two free days at home with Fran and the kids ahead of you.
I wasn’t looking for any trouble. I would have the one drink, leave the Marlo and make the five thirty-seven Express bus to Jersey. I’d meet Johnny Haggard on the bus, and we’d bull it all the way home about our jobs and what we were going to do about the crab grass on our so-called lawns. Johnny lives next door to me in Greenacres, a new development just outside of Wildwood in North Jersey. There are plenty of acres there, but not much of it green, what with the thin layer of topsoil the builders used over all that fill. Anyhow.
No trouble. No excitement. Nothing different. Everything the same as usual. That’s what I thought . . . But a couple of things happened.
The Marlo is a small, old, side-street residential hotel. The bar is tiny, very dimly lighted, quiet, with no jukebox and usually not very crowded. Sometimes I’m the only one in there having a drink at five-ten. But not tonight. There was a girl there, all alone at the bar when I came in.
There was nothing special about her at first glance. And that’s all I did, at first, was glance at her. Believe me. Listen, I’ve been married ten years and I appreciate a good-looking woman the same as the next guy. I kid with the guys and sometimes with Fran, just to needle her a little, about stepping out and fooling around. You know. But you also know it’s talk with most of us guys. After all, a man’s got a swell wife, a couple of fine kids, a nice home. You can’t have everything. So you make up your mind to that and forget about the things you don’t have.
Herb, the tall, gloomy-looking bartender at the Marlo, saw me come in the door and had my Manhattan half made by the time I got onto one of the leather barstools. I sat there, savoring the first lemon-peel-tart smooth burn of the drink in my mouth, trickling down my throat, and looked at myself in the backbar mirror. I was not the only one. The girl at the other end of the bar was looking at my reflection, too. Our eyes met. She let them hold for a moment and then dropped her gaze, almost shyly.
Some girls can do a lot with their eyes. This one could. I don’t know how to explain it. Her eyes were very dark, extremely widely set, kind of intense and brooding-looking. With that one look she seemed to say: “You seem interesting to me. I think I could get to like you. If you study me closely I think you’ll feel the same way. And if you spoke to me, if you did it nicely, not in a wise-guy way, I wouldn’t brush you off. But you’ll have to make the approach. I wouldn’t dare.” You know what I mean?
So using the backbar mirror, I looked her over more carefully. She wasn’t well dressed. She was wearing a trench coat, with the back of the collar turned up and no hat. Her hair was thick and blonde and hung gracefully about her shoulders but that’s all you could say about it. Her nose was a little too broad and her mouth too wide and full-lipped, but somehow those features seemed to fit just right with the dark, brooding eyes and although she wasn’t striking, she was a damned attractive girl. The quiet type. The kind who wouldn’t want a lot of money spent on her, who would be content to just sit and have a couple of drinks with a guy and talk and maybe go to a movie or something . . . You can see the way my mind was working.
I’d almost finished the Manhattan when our eyes met in the mirror again and this time, they held longer and I got the feeling that both of us were trying to tear our gaze away and couldn’t. It was as though we were looking very deep into each other, hungrily. And then when she finally yanked her gaze away, I felt shaken and a little giddy, as though this was my third Manhattan instead of my first.
I glanced sideways at her and she had her legs angled off the stool and crossed. She was wearing high heels, not extreme, but enough to give her naturally gracefully curved legs what seemed like extra length and sleekness. I suddenly realized that my heart was pounding too hard, and so were the pulses in my wrist.