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

So the world wasn’t ending, and I wasn’t dying. In that instant, with everything coming alive inside me with the wonderful organic pain of birth, I knew who had killed Ivan. The realization was almost parenthetical, a sudden aside of small recollection tucked into the principal clause of Hannah’s homecoming. I went over to her and put my arms around her, and it was as if she’d never been away.

“Ivan?” I asked. “Who the hell is Ivan?”

It was fine then, there in the room with the cool air coming through the open doors from the Mexican night, and after a while she went to sleep. I waited a little, and then I went out and back up to Eva Trent’s room. I knocked and kept knocking until she opened the door, still in the ice blue robe, and stood looking out at me. I heard her breath catch sharply in her throat.

“You’re good,” I said. “You ought to be on the stage. All that love... all that hate. But now I know you killed Ivan yourself. I know because I remember what you said, and I’d have caught it at the time if I hadn’t been stupid with alcohol. In that hot room, you said, and it wasn’t hot. It wasn’t hot because I opened the windows and let the night air in. But it was hot earlier, when I found him dead. And even earlier than that, when you killed him. Have you decided as yet whether it’s hanging or shooting?”

Then, without sound, the plump little man named Smith was behind her with a gun in his hand.

“Come in, Mr. MacCauley,” he said.

There was no sensible alternative, so I went.

“So that’s how you vanished so easily,” I said. “A simple matter of moving from one room to another.”

He chuckled pleasantly. “These things can always be arranged, just as Ivan’s death was arranged... just as yours will be.” His eyes flicked over to Eva Trent. “I hardly know why I bother, really. Such a stupid mistake, my dear. I’ll have to think of an appropriate penalty.”

I shifted weight, and the gun jerked significantly in his hand.

“You mentioned the border,” I said. “That much, I think, was real. You ought to know, because you direct the operations that run across it, whatever they are. It must be quite an organization, and Ivan wanted out. The poor guy was really gone on Hannah, and he wanted out. So you put him out, very permanently. With me around, a guy discarded, a perfect patsy, the setup was perfect. Just get me in the right area at the right time, and the whole thing took care of itself. With Eva’s help, of course.”

He shrugged. “It’s dangerous to have apostates in an organization like mine. The risk is too great. Ivan understood that. He has only himself to blame.”

It was late. For me, almost too late. Even as he spoke, my muscles were drawing tight, and I drove toward him, clutching for the wrist above the gun. He skipped back and tripped. The blast of the gun was hot on my neck as I fell sprawling. Rolling over, I looked across into the mouth of the gun barrel, and it looked as big as a manhole, and I thought that it was rotten luck to die with Hannah just back. Then there was another blast, but it seemed to come from behind me, from the vicinity of the door. The plump little man who called himself Smith, kneeling on one knee, coughed softly and folded over, settling himself on the floor as if he were trying to find a comfortable position.

From the door, the sonorous voice of Ramon Tellez, Mexican cop, had a tone of gentle reproof. “You should have consulted the authorities, señor. As I said, the police of my country are not children. Did you think we would leave you unobserved?”

After that, there was little or nothing I could do, and pretty soon Tellez shook my hand and said everything would of a certainty be alright, and I went back to my room... mine and Hannah’s. She was still asleep, with her hair spread on the pillow, and there was a warm and aching happiness inside my ribs as I stood for a while looking out at the paling stars.

It’s time to head north , I thought . It’s time to go home .

Originally published in Manhunt , August 1953.

Frankie looked through a lot of bars before he found the old man. He was sitting in a booth in a joint on lower Market Street with a dame Frankie didn’t know. They were both sitting on the same side of the booth, and Frankie could see that they were plastered together like a couple of strips of Scotch tape.

“Come on home, Pop,” Frankie said. “You come on home.”

The woman looked up at him, and her lips twisted in a scarlet sneer. The scarlet was smeared on the lips, as if she’d been doing a lot of kissing, and the lips had a kind of bruised and swollen look, as if the kisses had been pretty enthusiastic.

“Go to hell away, sonny,” she said.

She lifted her martini glass by its thin stem and tilted it against her mouth. Frankie reached across the booth in front of the old man and slapped the glass out of her hand. It shivered with a thin, musical sound against the wall, and gin and vermouth splashed down her low-cut dress. The olive bounced on the table and rolled off.

The woman raised up as far as she could in the cramped booth, her eyes hot and smoky with gin and rage.

“You little punk,” she said softly.

Frankie grabbed her by a wrist and twisted the skin around on the bone.

“Leave Pop alone,” he said. “You quit acting like a tramp and leave him alone.”

Then the old man hacked down on Frankie’s arm with the horny edge of his hand. It was like getting hit with a dull hatchet. Frankie’s fingers went numb, dropping away from the woman’s wrist, and he swung sideways with his left hand at the old man’s face. The old man caught the fist in a big palm and gave Frankie a hard shove backward.

“Blow, sonny,” he said.

For a guy not young at all, he was plenty tough. His eyes were like two yellow agates, and his mouth was a thin, cruel trap under a bold nose. From the way his body behaved, it was obvious that he still had good muscular coordination. He was poised, balanced like a trained fighter.

Frankie saw everything in a kind of pink, billowing mist. He moved back up to the booth with his fists clenched, and in spite of everything he could do, tears of fury and frustration spilled out of his eyes and streaked his cheeks.

“You get the hell out of this,” he said. “You ought to be ashamed, drinking and playing around this way.”

The old man slipped out of the booth, quick as a snake, and chopped Frankie in the mouth with a short right that traveled straight as a piston. Frankie hit the floor and rolled over, spitting a tooth and blood. He was crazy. Getting up, he staggered back at the old man, cursing and sobbing and swinging like a girl. This time the old man set him up with a left jab and threw a bomb. Frankie went over backward like a post, his head smacking with a wet, rotten sound.

No one bothered about him. Except to laugh, that is. Lying there on the floor, he could hear the laughter rise and diminish and rise again. It was the final and utter degradation of a guy who’d never had much dignity to start with. Rolling over and struggling up to his hands and knees, he was violently sick, his stomach contracting and expanding in harsh spasms. After a long time, he got the rest of the way to his feet in slow, agonizing stages. His chin and shirt front were foul with blood and spittle.

In the booth, ignoring him, the old man and the woman were in a hot clinch, their mouths adhering in mutual suction. Turning away, Frankie went out. The floor kept tilting up under his feet and then dropping suddenly away. All around him, he could hear the ribald laughter.