Лесли Чартерис - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 3, March, 1953

“They’ll promise not to say we were here,” Pop said.

“A hell of a lot his promise is worth. He hates my guts. Anyway, I’m not arguing. She’s coming.” Kester stuck his thumbs in his belt.

“Baby, you pack your clothes and come along nice and peaceful if you don’t want to see me blow his head off.”

Her face showed nothing. She was going to do it, I thought. She had no choice, any more than she had had a choice last night.

Pop stood at my side, his gun hanging loosely in his hand. Kester was looking the other way, at Lucy.

“You’ve got to let her be,” Pop said very softly.

I knew he understood the situation now, realized there was only one way to stop Kester from taking Lucy. I snatched the gun out of his hand, and he didn’t even fight me when I took it. Then I pointed the gun at Kester.

“All right, Pop,” I said. “I’ll stop the bastard. I’ll stop him!” I fired the gun, and the bullet caught him in the stomach, and he doubled over and screamed like a woman. I kept firing the gun long after he was dead.

I stood on the porch with Lucy and watched the old man get into the jalopy.

Behind me in the bungalow lay the dead man, and the revolver that had shot him was on the table. We would give Pop quite a head start before Lucy went for the police. We wouldn’t mention him at all. I would take all the blame — or the credit. The police wouldn’t mind that I had killed an escaped convict.

Pop turned my car around on the grass. When it faced the road, he stuck his hand out of the window and waved at me. I waved back.

I hadn’t asked Lucy if he was her father. I hadn’t had to ask. I supposed I’d known since last night when he had begged me to understand that what remained of his life depended upon his sticking to Roy Kester.

We stood on the porch watching the jalopy until it was hidden by the trees.

“I couldn’t tell you about him,” she said suddenly. “I was too — ashamed.” She shivered, and I put my arm around her. “He won’t get far,” she said. “He has nowhere to go.”

“I know,” I said.

“He was always a thief,” she said. “He ruined his own life and my mother’s, and he almost ruined mine. He introduced me to Roy, and he let me marry him without telling me he was a thief, too. And he brought Roy here when they escaped. Pop knew where we were because I wrote him every month. A kind of duty to my father in prison, though I never felt anything for him. He—” She paused and turned her face away.

I didn’t say anything. What in hell was there to say? I tightened my arm around her shoulders, and we walked slowly back into the house.

She’s poison, the operative told Hanley. But he didn’t believe it at first, and, in a way, he didn’t really care.

Hanley listened to the whisper of rain against the plate-glass front of the saloon and studied Spinelli’s reflection in the bar mirror. God, didn’t the guy ever shut up? The way he ran his yap made you sick to your stomach.

Spinelli swallowed his whisky, took a long gulp of the beer chaser, and flicked Hanley with a tentative, sidelong glance.

“If you ask me,” he said, “this Mark Ibberson is clean. He’s clean like a guy that’s spent three days in a Finnish bath, getting swabbed by three babes named Smetana.”

“Nobody asked you,” Hanley said, hating the only slightly flawed cameo that was Spinelli’s profile, the oily profusion of Spinelli’s tightly curling hair. Hanley was a big man himself, thick of shoulder and chest, with a dark saturnine face and a hard and bitter mouth that was like a wedge over a heavy, black-stubbled jaw. His pale eyes were red-rimmed and sunken, and fixed in the glassy stare of a man who has not had enough sleep for a long time. They gave Spinelli no hint of the dislike he felt for the smaller man; Hanley had the sort of eyes that told nobody anything at all.

“You’re the doctor,” Spinelli said. “If the Hanley Agency wants to keep diggin’ away at a guy that ain’t done anything, that’s your business and none of mine.”

“You’re getting paid for your part of it,” Hanley said.

“Sure, and who’s complaining? Only I just thought you’d like to know that Ibberson ain’t chasing babes, or doing anything else out of line, so far as I could find out. The way I figure it, he’s a sucker for Mrs. Ibberson, a guy who’s only in love with his own old lady, God help him.”

Hanley moved his whisky glass around in slow circles on the bar. “He’ll have a hell of a time proving that,” he said. “After today.”

Spinelli lifted the padded shoulders of his coat in a shrug.

“Okay, so we plant a broad on him. So then Mrs. I. can lower the boom on him and collect plenty of dough. It ain’t pretty, but I guess it’s life.”

“Ibberson’s a revolving son-of-a-bitch,” Hanley said quietly, staring down at the glass in his hand. “He beat Clare Ibberson up, a half dozen times. You know he broke her arm.”

Spinelli’s tapering, grubby fingers pinched a cigarette out of the crumpled pack on the bar in front of him. He fumbled in a pocket of his tight brown overcoat, extracted a sulphur match and snapped it into light with a black-edged thumbnail. “Funny, you mentioning that arm,” he said, his eyes narrowed over the flare of the match.

“What’s funny about it?” Hanley asked. His voice was pitched very low, and it sounded completely detached, but his hand shook, raising the whisky glass to his mouth.

“Well, I heard a lot about that busted arm,” Spinelli said. “At the Clavering Terrace, where the Ibbersons used to shack up when they were still working at being married. That arm is the hottest topic since Flying Saucers.”

“Go on,” Hanley said, his voice almost inaudible in the quiet barroom. “Go on, Sal.”

“He didn’t bust her arm. She did it herself, falling downstairs. She was cockeyed, see, stoned to the eyes. Oh, sure, she calls the cops, and tells ’em Ibberson did it. But it was no dice, ’cause one of the bellhops sees her fall and bust the flipper, and he told the cops. The Ibbersons got chucked out of the hotel afterwards, on account of her being always on the sauce.”

“You lousy punk,” Hanley said, his impersonal tone more frightening than any tone of anger. “You dirty bastard. You couldn’t have told me this before, could you?”

“What the hell!” Spinelli said, his brown eyes widening, his voice balanced between derision and fear. “I figure you must know she was an alcoholic bum, since you put in so much time with her. I wasn’t supposed to be keeping tabs on her, anyway. I was supposed to be checking her husband — remember?”

Out on the street a taxi door slammed. Hanley looked past Spinelli, out through the rain-streaked window of the saloon, and saw a girl standing on the curb. The cab pulled away and the girl stood looking uncertainly about her, head bent against the driving rain. Hanley dug a bill out of his pocket, tossed it on the bar, and jabbed an elbow into Spinelli’s ribs. “Let’s go,” he said. “Our twister just yarded herself out of a cab.”

He went down the bar, moving with ponderous speed, and the girl smiled at him, recognizing him as he lumbered out into the rain with Spinelli at his heels. She was a tall blonde with a coarse-boned, sullen face and heavy-lidded dark eyes. Inside the shell of her transparent raincoat, a black dress lay sheath-tight on long, curving thighs and full breasts.

“Hello, Mr. Hanley,” she said in a harsh metallic voice. “Swell weather for ducks, huh?”