A Choice of Murders, page 5
Eddie knocked on the aluminum door and called softly, “Alana? Alana, it’s Eddie.”
No answer. Eddie lit a cigarette, but it tasted like straw. His wet fingers discolored the paper. He threw the cigarette away and tried the door. It wasn’t locked.
Inside, Eddie could see nothing in the darkness. His hand groped for the light switch. The generator was weak: the overhead light flickered pale yellow and made a faint sizzling sound.
Alana was there. Alana was sprawled on the floor, wearing her six filmy veils. In the yellow light, her long limbs were like gold under the veils. Eddie knelt by her side. He was crying softly before his knees touched the floor. Alana’s eyes were opened but unseeing. Her face was bloated, the tongue protruding. From the neck down she was beautiful. From the neck up, it made Eddie sick to look at her.
She had been strangled.
He let his head fall on her breast. There was no heartbeat. The body had not yet stiffened.
He stood up and lurched about the interior of the small trailer. He didn’t know how long he remained there. He was sick on the floor of the trailer. He went back to the body finally. In her right hand Alana clutched a jagged strip of plaid cloth. Red carnation petals like drops of blood were strewn over the floor of the trailer.
“All right, Eddie,” Bart Taylor said softly. “Don’t move.”
Eddie turned around slowly. He had not heard the door open. He looked at Bart Taylor, who held a gun in his hand, pointing it unwaveringly at Eddie.
“You killed her,” Eddie said.
“You killed her,” Bart Taylor said. “My word against yours. I own this show. Who are you, a nobody. A shill. My word against yours.”
“Why did you do it?”
“She wouldn’t look at me. I loved her. I said I would marry her, even. She hated me. I couldn’t stand her hating me. But I didn’t mean to kill her.”
“What are you going to do?” Eddie said.
“Jeep’s outside. Tools. We’ll take her off a ways and bury her.”
“Not me,” Eddie said.
“I need help. You’ll help me. A shill. A nobody. They all know how you were carrying a torch for her. You better help me.”
“Your jacket,” Eddie said. “The carnation. They’ll know it was you.”
“Not if we bury her.”
“Not me,” Eddie said again.
“It’s late. There are maybe thirty, forty people left on the midway. We’ve got to chance it now. It looks like rain. Won’t be able to do it in the rain. Let’s get her out to the jeep now, Eddie.”
“No,” Eddie said. He wasn’t crying now, but his eyes were red.
Bart came over to him. Eddie thought he was going to bend over the body, but instead he lashed out with the gun in his hand, raking the front sight across Eddie’s cheek. Eddie fell down, just missing Alana’s body.
“Get up,” Bart said. “You’ll do it. I swear I’ll kill you if you don’t.”
Eddie sat there. Blood on his cheek. The light, yellow, buzzing. Bart towering over him, gigantic, menacing. Alana, dead. Dead.
“On your feet,” Bart said. “Before it starts raining.”
When Eddie stood up, Bart hit him again with the gun. Eddie would have fallen down again, but Bart held him under his arms. “You’ll do it,” Bart said. “I can’t do it alone.”
“O.K.,” Eddie said. “I feel sick. I need some air.”
“You’ll get it in the jeep.”
“No. Please. I couldn’t help you. Like this. Air first. Outside. All right?”
Bart studied him, then nodded. “I’ll be watching you,” he said. “Don’t try to run. I’ll catch you. I have the gun. I’ll kill you if I have to.”
“I won’t try to run,” Eddie promised. He went outside slowly and stood in front of the trailer. He took long deep breaths and waited.
Eddie gawked at the trailer. It was like magic, they always said. It had nothing to do with seeing or smelling or any of the senses, not really. You didn’t only gawk with your eyes. Not a professional shill. Not the best. You gawked with every straining minuteness of your body.
And they came. The thistle chins. The townsfolk. Like iron filings and a magnet. They came slowly, not knowing why they had come, not knowing what power had summoned them. They came to gawk with you. They came, all right. You’ve been doing this for years. They always came.
You could sense them coming, Eddie thought. You didn’t have to look. In fact, you shouldn’t. Just gawk, at the trailer. Shuffling of feet behind you. A stir. Whispering. What am I doing here? Who is this guy?
Presently there were half a dozen of them. Then an even dozen. Drawn by Eddie, the magnificent shill.
There were too many of them for Bart to use his gun. They crowded around the trailer’s only entrance. They waited there with Eddie. Unafraid now, but lonely, infinitely lonely, Eddie led them inside.
They found Bart Taylor trying to stuff carnation petals down his throat.
* * *
AUTHOR’S POSTSCRIPT: There are shills in carnivals and along midways everywhere—like music, they know no national boundaries...I’ve seen shills in Coney Island and in Rockaway Park, and I’ve seen them in the Prater in Vienna and along the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris’ St. Germaine, and wherever I’ve seen them, their soft-lure of the paying customers is uncanny. For “The Shill,” then, it only remained to carry a professional shill’s skill to the ultimate: the soft-lure not to gaming, but to revenge.
Mr. Wickwire’s “Gun Moll”
Mignon G. Eberhart
She was a singularly attractive lady with a singularly unattractive dog, and I had no idea, naturally, that either of them was involved in murder. While the dog looked capable of any perfidious crime, the lady did not. She was fresh as a rose.
A rather full-blown rose it is true, slightly middle-aged, but charming; a delightful perfume drifted from her corner. I sat opposite her; we were both waiting for the vet to return to his office; it was about seven o’clock of a rainy spring night. I held my dog Happy firmly by the leash and eyed the lady. She held her dog absently and eyed the door to the street. Her bare wrists were round and white; her hand wore no wedding ring, which pleased me.
Now I do not wish to give a wrong impression; I am and intend to remain a bachelor; my name is James Wickwire. I am rather on the elderly side, being a senior vice-president of a bank. Since my duties include the care of various estates, those duties have also included the task of dissuading some of my clients from diving into capital in order to finance sundry get-rich-quick schemes— those particular clients being, all too frequently, widows. This is merely a professional hazard; I only say that, in consequence, the absence of a wedding ring on the lady’s hand rather pleased me. I had no thought of amorous dalliance.
It was different with Happy; amorous dalliance was pre-eminent in his mind; he had taken one look at the lady’s dog and fallen in love. He gave a frenzied lunge in her direction and I pulled him back hard. The lady said absently, “Down, Lola,” and watched the door.
Lola did not obey; she flopped an ungainly paw in a lumberingly coquettish gesture which appeared to drive Happy out of his few wits with delight. I restrained him and glanced at my watch; it was twelve minutes after seven. I said politely to the lady, “Dr. Sherman was called on an emergency just as I arrived. He said he’d be right back.”
She nodded. “It’s twelve minutes after seven,” she said and watched the door anxiously.
I supposed her anxiety concerned Lola, although I have never seen so revolting a creature; she was a brown, ungainly animal, a veritable Jukes of a mongrel, with the nose of a terrier and the ears of a German shepherd except that one of them slanted backward while the other slanted forward in an indescribably raffish way. However, there is no accounting for the vagaries of human affection. I said, “Dr. Sherman is an extremely fine vet. I’m sure he’ll see to your dog...”
She gave me a surprised glance. “Oh, I’m only going to board Lola here. She’s not got anything wrong with her.”
There was, of course, everything wrong with her. My own dog. Happy, is a gigantic, liver-colored creature, predominantly Great Dane, although I have suspected a touch of the husky, in his pedigree; but he is a prince of dogs compared to Lola. I winced as I watched Lola rolling a waggish eye at Happy. He made another lunge at her and the door opened and a man came in.
It was not the vet. He was a small, thin man in a raincoat with a Lady’s handbag, bright red, under his arm. I had a swift impression that he did not see me, for my chair was behind a large filing cabinet, and in the same instant it occurred to me that the lady herself carried no handbag at all. And then a number of things happened.
He said, “I want to talk to you,” and seized the lady’s arm.
She sprang up and cried, “No! No!” Happy conceived one of his whimsical dislikes and surged the length of his leash at the man, who jerked around with a look of surprise and alarm.
I do not think that Happy would in fact dismember anybody, but occasionally he gives the impression of so intending. Lola instantly joined in the fray and got her teeth in the man’s trouser leg. He dropped the red handbag, which fell open, and it was stuffed with money.
I had a flashing but unmistakable glimpse of a huge roll of bills. The lady made a quick dive at the handbag, the man gripped her and seemed to be trying to pull her toward the street; she resisted violently and, while I do not believe that I dropped Happy’s leash intentionally, still Happy did get away from me. The man saw him coming, kicked Lola to free himself, released the lady and scooped up the handbag full of money all in one motion, and made it to the door, closing it behind him just as Happy thudded against it.
The door quivered; the man disappeared into the rainy night I snatched up Happy’s leash. Lola licked her chops and the lady turned breathlessly to me.
“What is your name? Please...”
I replied automatically, “Wickwire. James—”
“Thank you,” she said and to my dismay thrust Lola’s leash into my hand and whipped out the door herself, leaving nothing of her presence save a fragrance of flowers. And Lola. The dogs lolloped wildly around my legs, and as I was endeavoring to disengage myself from the tangle of leashes, a sudden crash of sound from the street outside froze the dogs, and me, too, for it was undeniably a gunshot.
Immediately the door was flung open again. Dr. Sherman dashed in, shouted, “There’s a man shot!” and dashed wildly out again. He left the door open and, as Happy is devoted to the vet, Happy shot out after him. Happy being a very vigorous dog, willy-nilly Lola and I were forced to follow.
A little crowd had already collected in the street about thirty feet away. It parted as Happy thundered upon it. I had a swift glimpse of the little dark man in the raincoat, huddled now in the gutter.
The street light shone down brightly through silver slivers of rain. There was no red handbag anywhere. The lady, like the handbag, was nowhere to be seen.
I am strongly opposed to murder; I exerted all my influence over Happy and got him—and Lola, like the end of a remarkably animated kite—back into the vet’s office.
And presently the vet returned. “Guy’s dead,” he said. “Patrolman on the job. Squad car on the way—now, then, what’s Happy eaten this time?”
I was listening to the shriek of the approaching squad car, thinking of a lady who refused to take a handbag stuffed with money, ran into the street scarcely a moment before the murder, and left her dog. I replied that a box of carpet tacks had disappeared in Happy’s immediate vicinity and the vet saw Lola and put a hand to his head. “What’s that?”
I replied that to the best of my belief it was a dog.
“Your dog?” The vet pointed an outraged finger at Lola, who grinned cozily at him. “Mr. Wickwire, have you gone out of your head?”
“Certainly not,” I snapped and described the lady, the incident, and then made the mistake of trying to put the leash in the vet’s hand.
“No!” he cried in a voice of anguish. “A thousand times no! I never saw that creature before. I don’t know who the lady was. And I’m not going to keep that dog here!”
I daresay a career of inducing dogs with gleaming white teeth to swallow pills they do not wish to swallow develops a certain iron in a man’s nature; an hour later when I went home, I took Lola with me. It was an hour not without incident, for we had scarcely got Happy under the fluoroscope—which revealed no carpet tacks in his capacious interior—when the police arrived to inquire if either of us had seen or knew anything of the murder.
It was a triumph of my civic nature that I conquered a sneaking reluctance to do so and told them all about the lady, the handbag, and the dog. Lola wore no tags, as a reasonable and law-abiding dog would do, and there was no possible way of identifying the lady. After taking various notes the police went away. And so did I—taking, as I’ve said, Lola with me; it was that or the pound for Lola, owing to the lack of tags and the vet’s intransigence. Besides, the lady had asked me for my name.
I pass over the greeting Wilkins, my only servant, gave Lola; she was unaffected by it save to give him a nip in the calf as he passed the soup, which then spilled over on Lola’s head. Lola screamed pettishly and made a fretful dash at Wilkins, who displayed a feat of remarkable agility in ascending to the tabletop, from whence he bitterly remarked that either he or Lola would depart from the house immediately.
In the end we shut Lola in a bathroom and Happy in my bedroom. After dinner I endeavored to ignore the sound of howls, moans, thuds, and at ten o’clock I turned on the radio and heard the news. The murdered man’s name was Sol Brunk. And Sol Brunk together with one or two confederates—the police were uncertain about this—had held up a payroll messenger at six o’clock that evening and got away with what I believed is called the swag, amounting in this instance to fifty thousand dollars. One of Brunk’s confederates had shot the messenger, who had, however, lived long enough to identify a photograph of Sol Brunk, which, not remarkably, the police had on file. It had been Sol Brunk who assailed the messenger directly, but the messenger had been shot from behind; so Sol Brunk was not his murderer.
The murderer of Sol Brunk was not known. The accomplice—or accomplices—had escaped. It was known that on occasion a woman, a gun moll so to speak, accompanied Sol Brunk on his nefarious excursions.
There was no description of the gun moll. There was no mention at all of a red handbag stuffed with money. There was no mention of the dog Lola.
After some thought only one conclusion emerged; the lady had made one half-hearted grab for the handbag and the money; she had also strongly opposed Sol Brunk’s company. But she had then hurried out into the street and disappeared altogether too coincidentally with murder. And thieves have been known to fall out.
It depressed me. Such white little hands and wrists to aim a revolver so very efficiently!
Wilkins set out my mild evening highball in a foreboding manner and went to bed. And it was about then that it struck me that there was something odd about the lady’s—or rather the gun moll’s—pretty white wrists, something inconsistent yet puzzling. I could not pin it down and analyze it.
In fact, as the clock ticked on I fell into a curious sort of reverie in which blossoms of some kind formed a very agreeable background, not orange blossoms exactly but blossoms and sunlit paths and most delightful company; the company was not precisely identifiable either, except that it was not that of a gun moll.
Indeed, the faint ting of a distant bell blended so suggestively with my dream that for some time I did not rouse to the fact that it was not, say, something resembling a wedding bell but the ting of the back door bell, touched lightly but repeatedly. I hurried back through the dining room and opened the kitchen door.
The lady flung herself into my arms. The scent of flowers surrounded me most delectably; a soft strand of her hair brushed my cheek. “Somebody’s trying to kill me!”
Since it seemed rather more than likely that she had killed somebody herself, I steeled myself against the kitten warmth and softness of her clinging figure. “Where have you been?” I demanded sternly.
“Riding the subways. I had some change in my pocket. Then I looked up your name in a phone booth and had just enough money for a taxi here. If you’ll loan me taxi fare and give me Lola—”
“You can have Lola and welcome,” I said austerely. “But I’d like to know...”
Her blue eyes were amazingly candid. “Well, you see, I left my handbag in the bar Lola likes.”
Nothing in the way of dissolute behavior on Lola’s part could surprise me. I said, frostily, I fear, “Indeed.”
“But then, you see, the bartender didn’t give her peanuts and then they saw me, so I had to get away. And they’ll not take Lola in a hotel; at least, they’ll not keep her,” she said candidly. “I don’t suppose you’d see to her for a few days, Mr. Wickwire?”
This really horrendous request brought me to my senses like an electric shock, with the result that I shortly extracted the story—or a story, at least. According to the lady, at one time she had visited a bar not far from the vet’s—“with friends,” she said hastily, fluttering her eyelashes—and the bartender had had the shocking lack of foresight to give Lola peanuts. The lady had been walking Lola the evening of the murder and had tried to lead her past the bar; Lola, however, wanted more peanuts; quite logically they had entered the bar and settled themselves in a booth.
Her blue eyes widened; she said, “And you see there are high partitions, between the booths. Nobody can see you unless they pass right by.” And at six-thirty she saw two men enter and settle themselves in the next booth to hers and Lola’s.
They had talked in low but, to the lady, audible voices about their successful coup in robbing a payroll messenger; they were concerned not about shooting the messenger, but about establishing an alibi for themselves, which they believed they had done by coming into the bar. “And I was terrified!” she cried, opening her blue eyes still wider. “I didn’t know what to do. And then they saw me.”
