David Alexander - Masters of Noir - Volume 4

The surprise and horror in Handsome’s face were deeper even than Curt’s had been. All the hours he must have spent planning the way it would be... and now he, too, was in her way. She’d knocked him out of her life, because I’d stepped into it.

He looked as though somebody had hit him in the chest and left a dirty brown stain on his shirt. He rocked backward under the impact of the bullet but his knees buckled first and he toppled forward and fell slowly down to the floor.

I didn’t move. I stared at him, knowing he was dead. I didn’t have to touch him. His gun lay on the ground at my feet. I didn’t touch it either.

Celia’s voice seemed to be coming at me from across the widest everglades. I could hardly hear her.

“You’ll say you shot him, Jim. It’ll look better that way. He was prowling and you shot him. He really was prowling, wasn’t he? They won’t even hold you. Then we’ll meet, in Rio — anywhere. But we won’t have to stay, Jim. We can come back, live on the west coast or in the northwest. Anywhere, in fact. Jim, it’ll be like you wanted!”

Like I wanted. I’d told her I’d do anything to have her and she’d dealt me in. Her hand was double-murder and she was making me her partner. I heard her that first night saying You might be held to that. And soon .

I was hearing Curt Carmic asking if I thought I’d have her, if I thought I’d be different than all the other men she’d had. Old men and new money...

I was Number One on her hit parade now. I’d won the jackpot — the quarter million dollars and Celia — because I’d owned a ’copter, and was six-two and rugged and had fallen in love with her. But six months from now, a year? I felt Handsome looking up at me, sightlessly, and was sorry for him.

Who will be next, Celia? What man will you want tomorrow, next week, next year? How will I get it, Celia, when I’m the one who stands in your way?

She was staring at me, lips parted, breathing hard, reading my thoughts, the questions in my eyes. “You don’t love me,” she whispered softly. “You’re like the rest of them. Just talk. I killed for you — and you’re afraid of me. You’ll turn me in, won’t you? You’ll tell them. All this money — and you’d tell them.” Her voice rose, was almost a shriek.

I lunged as the gun came up in her hand. I grabbed her right wrist; the satchel flew out of her left hand. I twisted hard.

She fought at the trigger, and never fought me at all. Her arm went limp and I heard the gun blast between us, rocking the very earth. For a moment she quivered as though in a spasm and then she relaxed all over. I held her to keep her from falling. But it could do no good. She was falling away from me.

I let her down gently. She was no good, a killer. Mad, maybe, for all I knew. But all the same, my eyes blurred as I got into my car to go for the sheriff.

It was noon and the stocky detective with the swarthy face waited in the corridor of the City Hospital. He was a middle-aged man with heavily defined features. His coarse dark hair was salted with gray and a little string of sweat beads glistened on his forehead. His heavy shoulders drooped from fatigue. His eyes were large and dark and there was weary compassion in them as if they had looked upon the thousand faces of human life, neither with despair nor hope, but only with a patient acceptance. The whites of the eyes were filamented with bloody threads. He had not slept the night before. He had stayed on duty because the psychopathic killer the papers called The Butcher was loose again.

The detective’s name was Romano. He was a lieutenant of Homicide, Manhattan West.

A doctor in a white coat came out of a nearby hospital room and closed the door after him. He was accompanied by a nurse. The nurse was dark and young and pretty and Romano thought of his own daughter who was a student at Marymount College. Romano rose slowly from the hard chair in the corridor, sighing with exhaustion. His feet had begun to throb and ache. That was always the first sign that his body was rebelling against the demands he made of it. Soon his nervous stomach would start acting up and he’d feel the painful little twinges of rising blood pressure. He was getting old. He would have to take his pension soon. Years ago he would have been driven and sustained by excitement, when a big squeal was this close to the break. He felt nothing like that now. He was just dead-tired.

The man in the hospital room was the only living person who could identify The Butcher, who had murdered five women and dismembered their bodies in a manner horrible enough to justify the name the papers had awarded him.

Romano lumbered slowly toward the doctor, his big feet slapping heavily on the rubber linoleum of the floor.

“Has he come out of it, Doc?” Romano asked.

The doctor was a thin man with high cheekbones and a small mustache. His slim, white fingers toyed with the stethoscope that dangled around his neck.

“He’s out of coma, if that’s what you mean,” the doctor answered. “But he’s hardly rational. I would say he’s still suffering from shock. He has a heart condition, we’ve determined that. The experience he went through last night — well, it’s a wonder he’s alive under the circumstances. It might be better to wait awhile, Lieutenant.”

Romano said, “It’s pretty urgent, Doc. It’s about as urgent as it can get. Time may mean a lot.”

The doctor hesitated. The pretty nurse looked disapprovingly at Romano. She does look kind of like my daughter Ellie, Romano thought. She doesn’t like me. Maybe she hates me, even, because she thinks I’m callous, that I want to torture a poor, sick man.

The doctor said, “I suppose you can go in for a little while, if you insist. But try to be considerate. Don’t press him too much. You have to realize what he’s been through.”

Romano nodded. “I know,” he said.

It sounded false, perhaps. But he did know. That was the tough part about being a cop. You saw all the violence and sadness and suffering there was and unless you were made of rock it became a part of you and you understood it and shared it. You understood afresh each time you saw the wild anguish in a woman’s face, each time you looked into a man’s dazed eyes and saw his quivering lips.

The doctor drew aside, said, “Just a few minutes, then. A very few minutes, please.”

Romano opened the door and walked into the hospital room. He closed the door behind him.

The man on the bed stared wide-eyed at the ceiling. His name was Lester Ferguson. The Butcher had murdered his wife the night before. Ferguson had found her body on the floor of their bedroom when he returned from choir practice.

Romano stood quietly by the bed for moment. The man did not even look at him.

Romano said, “Do you remember me, Mr. Ferguson?”

With an obvious physical effort, Ferguson turned his head toward the detective. He said, “I–I’m not quite sure.”

“I’m a police officer, Mr. Ferguson. Lieutenant Romano, Homicide. I talked to you a moment last night at your house before you collapsed. You told me you saw his face. You said you could identify the man.”

Ferguson’s voice was a whisper. “The face,” he said.

Romano waited. Ferguson said nothing else. He was off in a world of his own again.

“You told me you saw the murderer’s face, Mr. Ferguson,” Romano persisted. “When I asked you if you could identify it, you answered, ‘Yes, yes, I will remember it forever.’ It was right after that you became ill. Can you describe the face to me, Mr. Ferguson? I hate to do this. I know what you’ve been through. But this man is an insane killer. Your wife was the fifth woman he has killed. The same sadist, the same psychopath committed all the murders, because his method was always the same. He’ll kill again, Mr. Ferguson, unless we find him first. And you’re the only person on earth who can identify him.”