Brett Halliday - Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

She met him in the park, and it was dark. That was good, because nobody would notice them together. Besides, he couldn’t see her face, and she couldn’t see his, and that would make it easier to say what he had to say. They sat down on a bench behind the bandstand, and he lit a cigarette. Then he remembered that it was important to be pleasant, so he offered the pack to her. She shook her head. “No thanks — I don’t smoke.”

“That’s right. Mike told me.” He paused. “He told me a lot of things about you, Helen.”

“He wrote me about you, too. He said you were the best friend he ever had.”

“I’d like to think so. Mike was a great guy in my book. None better. He didn’t belong in a crummy hole like that.”

“He said the same about you.”

“Both of us got a bad break, I guess. Me, I was just a kid who didn’t know the score. When I got out of Service, I lay around for a while until my dough was gone, and then I took this job in a bookie joint. I never pulled any strong-arm stuff in my life until the night the place was raided.

“The boss handed me this suitcase, full of dough, and told me to get out the back way. And there was this copper, coming at me with a gun. So I hit him over the head with the suitcase. It was just one of those things — I didn’t mean to hurt him, even, just wanted to get out. So the copper ends up with a skull-fracture and dies.”

“Mike wrote me about that. You had a tough deal.”

“So did he, Helen.” Rusty used her first name deliberately and let his voice go soft. It was part of the pitch. “Like I said, I just couldn’t figure him out. An honest John like him, up and knocking off his best friend in a payroll stickup. And all alone, too. Then getting rid of the body, so they’d never find it. They never did find Pete Taylor, did they?”

“Please! I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

“I know how you feel.” Rusty took her hand. It was plump and sweaty, and it rested in his like a big warm piece of meat. But she didn’t withdraw it, and he went on talking. “It was just circumstantial evidence that pinned it on him, wasn’t it?”

“Somebody saw Mike pick Pete up that afternoon,” Helen said. “He’d lost his car keys somewhere, and I guess he thought it would be all right if Mike took him over to the factory with the payroll money. That was all the police needed. They got to him before he could get rid of the bloodstains. Of course, he didn’t have an alibi. I swore he was home with me all afternoon. They wouldn’t buy that. So he went up for ten years.”

“And did two, and died,” Rusty said. “But he never told how he got rid of the body. He never told where he put the dough.”

He could see her nodding in the dimness. “That’s right. I guess they beat him up something awful, but he wouldn’t tell them a thing.”

Rusty was silent for a moment. Then he took a drag on his cigarette and said, “Did he ever tell you?”

Helen Krauss made a noise in her throat. “What do you think? I got out of Norton Center because I couldn’t stand the way people kept talking about it. I came all the way over here to Hainesville. For two years, I’ve been working in that lousy hash-house. Does that sound like he told me anything?”

Rusty dropped the cigarette stub on the sidewalk, and its little red eye winked up at him. He stared at the eye as he spoke.

“What would you do if you found that money, Helen? Would you turn it over to the cops?”

She made the noise in her throat again. “What for? To say, ‘Thank you,’ for putting Mike away and killing him? That’s what they did, they killed him. Pneumonia, they told me — I know about their pneumonia! They let him rot in that cell, didn’t they?”

“The croaker said it was just flu. I put up such a stink over it, they finally took him down to the Infirmary.”

“Well, I say they killed him. And I say he paid for that money with his life. I’m his widow — it’s mine.”

“Ours,” said Rusty.

Her fingers tightened, and her nails dug into his palms. “He told you where he hid it? Is that it?”

“Just a little. Before they took him away. He was dying, and couldn’t talk much. But I heard enough to give me a pretty good hunch. I figured, if I came here when I got out and talked to you, we could put things together and find the dough. Fifty-six gees, he said — even if we split it, that’s still a lot of money.”

“Why are you cutting me in on it, if you know where it is?” There was an edge of sudden suspicion in her voice, and he sensed it, met it head-on.

“Because, like I told you, he didn’t say enough. We’d have to figure out what it means, and then do some hunting. I’m a stranger around here, and people might get suspicious if they saw me snooping. But if you helped, maybe there wouldn’t be any need to snoop. Maybe we could go right to it.”

“Business deal, is that it?”

Rusty stared at the glowing cigarette butt again. Its red eye winked back at him.

“Not all business, Helen. You know how it was with Mike and me. He talked about you all the time. After a while, I got the funniest feeling, like I already knew you — knew you as well as Mike. I wanted to know you better.”

He kept his voice down, and he felt her nails against his palm. Suddenly his hand returned the pressure, and his voice broke. “Helen, I don’t know, maybe I’m screwy, but I was over two years in that hole. Two years without a woman, you got any idea what that means to a guy?”

“It’s been over two years for me, too.”

He put his arms around her, forced his lips to hers. It didn’t take much forcing. “You got a room?” he whispered.

“Yes, Rusty — I’ve got a room.”

They rose, clinging together. Before moving away, he took a last look at the little winking red eye and crushed it out under his foot.

Another winking red eye burned in the bedroom, and he held the cigarette to one side in his hand so as to keep the light away. He didn’t want her to see the disgust in his face.

Maybe she was sleeping now. He hoped so, because it gave him time to think.

So far, everything was working out. Everything had to work out, this time. Because before, there had always been foul-ups, somewhere along the line.

Grabbing the satchel full of dough, when the cops raided the bookie joint, had seemed like a good idea at the time. He had thought he could lam out the back door before anyone noticed in the confusion. But he had fouled that one up himself, and landed in stir.

Getting buddy-buddy with that little jerk Mike had been another good idea. It hadn’t been long before he knew everything about the payroll caper — everything except where Mike had stashed the loot. Mike never would talk about that. It wasn’t until he took sick that Rusty could handle him without anybody getting wise. He had made sure Mike was real sick before he put real pressure on.

Even then, the lousy fink hadn’t come across — Rusty must have half-killed him, right there in the cell. Maybe he’d overdone it, because all he got out of him was the one sentence before the guards showed up.

For a while there, he had wondered if the little quiz show was going to kick back on him. If Mike had pulled out of it, he’d have talked. But Mike hadn’t pulled out of it — he had died in the Infirmary before morning, and they had said it was the pneumonia that did it.

So Rusty was safe — and Rusty could make plans.

Up till now, his plans were going through okay. He had never applied for parole — believing it better to sweat out another six months, so he could go free without anybody hanging onto his tail. When they sprung him, he had taken the first bus to Hainesville. He knew where to go because Mike had told him about Helen working in this restaurant.