I hadn’t known how really big a lump in the throat could be. All I could say was her name. But that was all right with Beth. She understood. The bloody tide was over for both of us. There was nothing ahead but clear sailing in clean water.
She lifted her face to mine. “Hey, you, Mister Man. Remember me? How’s about a kiss?”
And that was all right with me, too.
DEATH COMES GIFT-WRAPPED
William P. McGivern
Sergeant Burt Moran was a tall man with hard flat features and eyes that were cold and dull, like those of a snake. He was that comparatively rare thing among cops, a man equally hated by crooks and by his fellow officers. Operators on both sides of the law forgot their differences and came to agreement on one point at least: that Moran was a heel by any or all standards.
Moran was a bully who shook down petty crooks for a few bucks whenever he got the chance. But he left the big boys alone. He lacked the imagination to serve them and, consequently, he never got in on the important payoff. There would have been some dignity in being a big grafter, but Moran grubbed for his few extra dollars the hard way, the cheap way, the way that earned him nothing else but contempt.
There was a streak of savage brutality in him that caused the underworld to mingle their contempt with a certain fear. Moran had killed six men in the line of duty, three of whom were unarmed at the time, and another who had died after Moran had worked him over with a sap for fourteen hours. The story of the men he’d killed wasn’t told because a corpse is an unsatisfactory witness. Moran knew this. He knew all about killing.
Now, at two o’clock in the morning, in the cheap room of a cheap hotel, Moran was going to learn about murder. He had to commit a murder because of something new in his life, something that he had always sneered at in the lives of other men.
Moran was in love. And he had learned that love, like anything else, costs money.
He stood just inside the doorway of the room and watched the scrawny, thin-faced man who was staring at him from the bed. The man was Dinny Nelson, a small-time bookie who, Moran knew, carried all his assets in a hip wallet.
Dinny brushed a hand over his sleep-dulled features and said, “What’s the pitch, Moran? You got no right busting in here.”
Moran drew his gun and leveled it at Dinny. He knew what would happen with crystal clarity, not only to Dinny and the portions of his body hit by the heavy slugs, but after that, to Dinny’s corpse, to the police department and to himself, Moran. It was an old story to him. He had killed six men in the line of duty and he knew the way everything worked. No one would doubt his story.
Dinny saw his fate in Moran’s face. He began to beg in a cracked voice. “No, no, you can’t,” he said. “There’s no reason to kill me – I ain’t done nothing. Don’t.”
Moran fired three shots and they were very loud in the small, thin-walled room. Dinny’s body jack-knifed with the impact of the slugs, rolled from the bed to the floor. He didn’t live long. Moran watched expressionlessly as Dinny’s limbs twisted spasmodically, then became rigid and still. Underneath Dinny’s body the roses in the faded pattern of the rug bloomed again, bright and scarlet.
There was two thousand three hundred and thirty dollars in Dinny’s wallet. Moran left thirty. The money made a comfortable bulge against his leg as he sauntered to the phone . . .
While the coroner did his work and two lab technicians went over the room, Moran told his story to Lieutenant Bill Pickerton, his immediate superior at Homicide.
“Tonight I seen him taking bets in the lobby,” Moran said. “This was eleven. I started across to him but he seen me and ducked into the bar and then out to the street. So I drifted away. Around two I came back, came right up here to his room. I told him to get dressed but the fool went for me. I had to shoot him.”
Lieutenant Pickerton rubbed his long jaw. “This stinks worse than your usual stuff, Moran. You could have handled him with your fists. He doesn’t have a gun.”
Moran shrugged. “Why should I risk getting beat over the head with a chair or something?”
Pickerton looked at him with active dislike. “Okay, turn in a written report tomorrow morning. The old man won’t like this, you know.”
“To hell with the old man,” Moran said. “He wants us to bring ’em in with a butterfly net, I suppose.”
“All right,” Pickerton said. He paid no more attention to Moran, but studied the body and the room with alert, careful eyes.
Downstairs, Moran hailed a cab and gave the driver the address of the Diamond Club. He stared out the window at the dark streets of the Loop, his impassive face hiding the mirth inside him.
When Moran had realized that a nightclub singer couldn’t be impressed by a cop’s salary, he had looked around in his dull, unimaginative fashion for a way to get some money. Nothing had occurred to him for quite a while. Then the idea came, the idea that a cop could literally get away with murder.
After he got that much, the rest was easy. He had picked Dinny because he wasn’t big-time, but big enough as far as money went. Now it was all over and he had the money. There would be a routine investigation of course, but there was no one to come forward with Dinny’s version of what had happened. Therefore, the department would have to accept Moran’s story. They might raise hell with him, threaten him some, but that didn’t matter.
Moran’s hand touched the unfamiliar bulge of money in his pocket and a rare smile touched the corner of his mouth. It didn’t matter at all.
He paid off the driver in front of the Diamond Club on Randolph Street and walked past the head waiter with a familiar smile. The head waiter smiled cordially, for Moran’s visits to the club had been frequent over the past two months, dating from the time Cherry Angela had joined the show.
Moran found a corner table and watched the girl singing at the mike. This was Cherry Angela. The blue spot molded her silver evening dress to her slim, pliant body, revealing all the curving outlines. She wore her platinum hair loose, falling in soft waves to her shoulders, and her eyes and features were mocking as she sang an old, old story about a man and a woman.
Moran forgot everything watching the girl. And there was an expression of sullen hunger on his face.
She came to his table after the number and sat down with lithe grace. “Hi, copper,” she said, and her voice was amused. “Like my song?”
“I liked it,” Moran said.
Her lean face was mocking. “I should do a black-flip from sheer happiness, I suppose. Would a beer strain your budget?”
“Go ahead,” Moran said, flushing. “I’ve spent plenty on you, baby.”
“You tired of it?” she said lightly.
Moran put his hands under the table so she wouldn’t see their trembling. She was in his blood like nothing else had ever been in his life. But he got nothing from her but mockery, or sarcasm that shriveled him up inside.
He knew that she let him hang around for laughs, enjoying the spectacle of a forty-year-old flatfoot behaving like an adolescent before her charms. For just a second then he wanted to tell her what he had done tonight, and about the money in his pocket. He wanted to see her expression change, wanted to see respect for him in her eyes.
But he resisted that impulse. Fools bragged. And got caught. Moran wasn’t getting caught.
Some day he’d have her where he wanted. Helpless, crawling. That was what he wanted. It was a strange kind of love that had driven Moran to murder.
He took her home that night but she left him at the doorway of her apartment. Sometimes, if he’d spent a lot of money, she let him come up for a nightcap, but tonight she was tired.