Тэлмидж Пауэлл - Manhunt. Volume 5, Number 1, January, 1957

Henry Croft, with a violent twist of his shoulders, knocked Gwen to one side. “You put that hat down,” he ordered Paul, cords in his neck distended, arms tensed, fists clenched. “Put it down, you sonofabitch, or I’ll kill you!”

A long silence. Paul spun the hat on his forefinger.

“Put it down.”

As Paul put the hat down on the bar with exaggerated care, he shrugged and said, “He says he wants me to put his hat down.”

They all laughed. All of them except Henry Croft. He took the gun from his pocket that they had given him in Jim Wheeler’s home and he said, “Now. My forty dollars.”

Gwen said: “Isn’t he the big, big man.”

They all laughed again.

Henry Croft gestured with the gun. He told Gwen: “Right in the face,” he said. “So help me, the bullet right in your face.”

The place turned very silent. Henry felt himself quivering. Not with fear. Rage had carried him beyond fear.

Juney said, finally: “He’s sore. He’s real sore.” He laughed. It was a very flat laugh.

Gwen’s face was white.

Carley rang up No Sale on the register. As he took bills out, he said, “He didn’t go snitchin’ to the cops. No cop’s been here. Henry’s okay.” He was almost placating. “You deadheads chip in on this. Get it up, before he shoots my place all to hell.”

Paul turned the hat over on the bar and each of them dropped their contribution into it, laughing, making cracks, but dropping it in.

Henry Croft counted the money before he left. He drank his scotch, neat. Then he walked straight out, not backing out, but straight out.

Tomorrow by God he was going in to Peters’ office and demand his old route back. Peters had no goddam right taking it away from him. He hoped his kid’s fever had subsided.

His hands were big. They were gloved. Sustained pressure was all the job required.

Hamilton sat in the car and waited. The night was stifling hot, more like July than September, and he had all the car windows down. The windows of most of the apartments in this suburban neighborhood were open, so that he could hear snatches of sound coming from them: a radio announcer unctuously, sincerely extolling the merits of a motor car; a hi-fi set blaring out the blasting beat of Little Richard’s rock-’n-roll; a woman shrilling at her children.

At times Hamilton could pick out the individual sounds quite clearly; at others, they all blended into a maddening cacophony of noises. All this was quite in keeping, almost in rhythm, with his own thoughts. At times he was able to think about himself and about Kay and about Don Stafford, quite clearly and separately. More frequently, thoughts of all three blurred together in his mind in a seething mixup that made his head hurt.

All the time he sat there in the car, listening and thinking, he never took his eyes from the entrance of the apartment house where Kay had entered almost an hour ago — and from which she would eventually leave. He was afraid to take his eyes from the apartment entrance because he was afraid he might miss seeing Kay come out. Her exit would be the final pressure to make him do what he had to do.

Sitting there, waiting, Hamilton tried quite coldly and logically, to figure why Kay was doing something like this to him. What did she need, what was lacking in him, that she could find in a man like Stafford? Wasn’t he, Hamilton, just as attentive and gallant? How could anyone else worship Kay more than he did? Didn’t he give her everything she could possibly want in this world? Sometimes he just didn’t understand women. Of course, Stafford was somewhat younger, but Hamilton didn’t think that was the answer. The man must have put some kind of a spell on her to make her do something like this. Well, the spell would be ended tonight.

It was not quite thirty minutes later that Hamilton finally saw Kay leave Stafford’s apartment building. It almost sickened him to see the furtive way she looked about her when she came out, the obvious guilt in her movements. He did not worry about her seeing him, though; his car was well hidden in the shadows of a tree, out of range of a street light, and in the opposite direction from that which Kay would take to go home.

Hamilton waited until Kay was well out of sight and then he took the pair of rubber surgical gloves that he had bought at a downtown drugstore earlier in the day and put them on. He had some difficulty getting them over his huge hands. When they were finally on, he got out of the car. He walked with rather short, mincing steps for such a tall and bulky man, toward the entrance of Stafford’s building.

He rang Stafford’s bell. There was hardly any wait before the buzzer sounded to release the catch on the vestibule door. With his big hands, now sweating and itching under their tight rubber casings, thrust into his pockets, he climbed the stairs to the third floor where Don Stafford was standing in the doorway of his apartment, waiting to see who his caller was.

Stafford was a big man, too, but a couple of inches shorter than Hamilton and at least sixty pounds lighter in weight. Hamilton was somewhat startled to see, at this moment, that in many ways Stafford resembled him. There was a similarity in the high broad forehead, the thinning, silky brown hair and the wide, mobile, good natured looking mouth. In that instant, Hamilton had the momentary crazy notion that Stafford could almost be mistaken for his younger brother.

“Yes?” Stafford said. “What can I do for you?” He seemed quite surprised to see Hamilton, and Hamilton knew that this was probably because he thought that it was Kay who had returned for some reason. Stafford relaxed as he saw Hamilton’s mild smile.

Quietly, almost meekly, Hamilton said: “Mr. Stafford, I wonder if I might speak with you for a moment about something highly important. And confidential.”

Stafford hesitated and then stood aside to permit Hamilton to pass him and enter the apartment. Inside, after Stafford had shut the door behind them, Hamilton looked around the big living room, but he didn’t even notice how it was furnished. He wasn’t seeing, looking; he was smelling.

“Even if I hadn’t known Kay had been here recently, I could still tell,” he said. “The scent of her is quite prominent in here.” His eyes swung past Stafford toward the opened door of a bedroom, where the covers and sheets were drawn back on a rumpled bed.

“Kay?” Stafford said. He seemed to momentarily choke on the name. His gaze darted now to Hamilton’s hands, clenched and bulging the pockets of a sport jacket.

“Yes. Kay Hamilton. Kay.”

Stafford swallowed hard and cleared his throat. “I — ah — I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir. Who are you and what’s the purpose of your visit?”

“My name is Hamilton. The same as Kay’s.”

Hamilton watched Stafford’s rather prominent Adam’s apple move up and down, saw that he had been rendered speechless.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Stafford finally said. “I didn’t know. Honestly, I didn’t. Why, Kay swore she wasn’t—”

“I didn’t come up here to discuss that,” Hamilton interrupted, “but simply to see to it that you don’t bother Kay any more. I will not have her doing things like this.”

As Hamilton moved toward him in his peculiar, short-stepped, mincing gait, Stafford flung an arm up protectively. “She won’t — I mean — I won’t,” Stafford said. “I promise you, sir. There’s no need to get physical about something like this.”

Hamilton kept moving toward him and Stafford kept backing up until he hit a wall of the room. Hamilton said: “I don’t want you to holler or try to stop me, do you understand. I don’t want this to be messy.”