Fletcher Flora - The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™ - 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

“A frame,” Terry said. “A beautiful frame.”

“So it’s a frame. Guy Sebastian’s made a fortune peddling dope without ever touching a grain. He directs operations, and he reaps the fat profit, but he never touches the stuff. He’s too smart for that. He keeps himself clear all the way. If we plant it on him, it’s nothing more than he’s got coming.”

“I wasn’t questioning the justice. I was just admiring the beauty.”

The contact looked down through suds into his amber beer, and his lips curved in a soft smile.

“Oh, it’s beautiful, all right. We’ve been yearning for Guy Sebastian for a long time. He’s a sleek, arrogant wholesaler of every kind of vice. Now, thanks to you, we’ll get him.”

He finished his beer fast, and slipped off the stool. A step away, he turned.

“Don’t louse it up, Terry. Not for any woman... not for anything on earth.”

He went away without waiting for reassurance. Terry listened to his light, fast footsteps until they were gone, and then he spun his glass down the bar. The bartender rinsed it, filled it, and sent it back.

And at precisely that moment the stools on both sides of Terry were suddenly occupied.

A voice said, “You’re a naughty boy. Terence!”

The words were facetious, and the tone was facetious, but somehow the net effect was not facetious at all. The net effect was a kind of deadly and irrational levity. Turning. Terry looked at the face behind the words. Round as a dime, the color of olive oil. Full lips so red they looked rouged, not quite meeting over prominent teeth. Large, liquid, swimming eyes.

It was a face Terry had seen in and out of Sebastian’s place. There was a name that went with it. Sulla, it was. There was also an odor. A heavy and nauseous sweetness, like death three days old.

In Terry’s heart there was an icy, pervading fear. He felt spiritually naked and more than a little stupid... Eight months of servile degradation in the house of a louse, and nothing to show for it, in the end, but the final degradation of an ugly death... In the end, they’d trailed him to his last contact as easily as trailing a kid from a jam pot... By the exercise of tremendous effort, he managed to keep his voice casual, just a little bored.

“You think so? Just for having a couple beers with all these strippers?”

Sulla laid a soft hand on his arm. The hand was perfectly smooth, except for a tuft of long black hairs about an inch above the base of the little finger. The fingers dug gently into the muscle of Terry’s arm.

“It’s not the strippers. It’s not the beer. And it’s too late to play it innocent, Terence. You been the fair-haired boy. You been the baby brother who got all the breaks without working for them. You should’ve taken care of yourself.”

His first reaction was one of vast relief.

He’d been tailed, all right, but not because he was suspected of high treason. It was because of Liza. Because the great Guy Sebastian had an average, gray little soul like any average citizen — and was simply jealous.

Terry wanted to laugh.

The desire ended abruptly with his consciousness of hard steel digging into his ribs. Even with a layer of cloth over it, the steel was recognizable as the snout of a gun. He remembered with sudden renewal of the cold wash of fear that treason and philandering would come, in this case, to the same end. Either would come, in some quiet place, to the same ugly death. And worst of all, maybe, Terence Pope would not be at the Municipal Terminal at midnight, where he was supposed to be.

Out of the near past, repeating themselves in his mind, were words he remembered vividly: “I’d never do you any harm if I could help it. I’d never do it, Terry .” And, in another voice: “ Don’t louse it up, Terry. Not for any woman. ”

Bright red lips curled back off white, protuberant teeth.

“Let’s go, Terence. Just nice and quiet, like a good boy.”

He lay on a hard bed in the bedroom of a two-room apartment in an old brick house on the lower south side of town. It had been light in the room when he came, but now it had been dark for a long time. There was no exit from the room, other than the one out through the living room, unless he wanted to jump three stories into a brick-paved court. There was a small bathroom off the bedroom, but there was no exit from the bathroom, either.

Through the partially open door to the living room, weak yellow light sliced a wedge from the darkness. Out in the living room, tilted against the wall by the hall door, the liquid-eyed man with bright red lips whose name was Sulla sat in a straight chair and cleaned his nails with a shiv. A gun lay handy in his lap. His nails didn’t really need cleaning, but apparently he liked the nice, cold feel of the shiv in his hands.

Terry couldn’t actually see Sulla from the bed, but he knew he was doing these things because he had been doing them steadily for hours. He didn’t seem to tire from his position on the hard, straight chair. No doubt his fat hips and buttocks were adequate cushioning, making him impervious to discomfort in the area.

After a while, Terry got up from the bed and swept an arm in circles above his head in the darkness until his hand contacted a hanging string. He pulled the string, and a 60-watt bulb came to feeble life near the ceiling. Moving to the open door, he looked across the living room to the tilted Sulla. Red lips parted wetly over gleaming teeth. The shiv held still, arrested in its useless work.

“It’s eleven o’clock,” Terry said. “This going to be a formal execution, maybe? Death at dawn and all that stuff?”

Sulla shook with silent laughter, his belly bouncing above the handy gun.

“Nothing so nice, Terence, boy. You don’t rate any ceremony. Like I said, the boss is busy, and he wants to see you before you go. I think maybe he wants to see that you don’t go too fast. I think maybe he wants to see that you stay around awhile to enjoy things.”

Terry turned back out of the doorway and crossed the bedroom to the bath. Above the lavatory, a bulb was screwed into a tarnished brass socket projecting from the wall. He pulled the short chain hanging from the socket, heard the crackle of a faulty connection, saw a brief flurry of sparks preceding the diffusion of light. Looking at the reflection of his face for a moment in the mirror, he wondered what was in it to make a gal like Liza go off the deep end. He tried immediately to close his mind to the thought, because the thought of Liza was now an added burden of pain for which he had no heart.

Turning, he stood leaning against the lavatory and looking at the old-fashioned water heater at the foot of the bathtub. He let his eyes drift up and along a string clothesline that someone had stretched back and forth between the walls above the tub. After a minute, he knelt beside the heater and turned the tap on the gas ring, which emitted a soft hissing and an acrid odor.

He closed the tap and went back into the bedroom. Stripping the bed of a dirty sheet, he carried the sheet into the bathroom and began tearing it into strips. Some of the strips he stuffed into the cracks around the frame of the small window above the tub.

Removing the string, he tied one end to the end of the chain hanging from the old socket above the lavatory. And then he turned on the gas full force under the heater and went out, quickly threading the string through the keyhole of the door and closing the door behind him. The remainder of the strips he stuffed in the crack around the door.

Sitting on the bed, he waited fifteen minutes, checking the time by the watch on his wrist. When the time had passed, he was beginning to smell, in spite of the stuffing, the faint odor of gas. Getting up, he took the mattress from the bed and dropped it against the living room wall. He returned, taking the loose end of the string, and went over to the wall. He lay down between the wall and the mattress, then, saying something like a prayer, he pulled the string.