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

“What happened?” I asked. “Who gave Charlie the knife slash?”

The Moose kept nodding his head as if he hadn’t heard me. I looked at him over the edge of my glass, and finally his eyes met mine. They were veiled, crowded with something nameless.

“What happened?” I asked again.

The Moose blinked, and I knew what the something nameless was then. Fear. Cold, stark, unreasoning fear.

“I don’t know,” he said. “They found him outside his store. He ran a tailor shop, you know. You remember Charlie’s father, don’t you, Matt? Old Joe Dagerra? When Joe died, Charlie took over the shop.”

“Yeah,” I said. The whiskey was running out, and the tears were running in all over the place. It was time to go. “Moose,” I said, “I got to be running. I want to say goodbye to the old lady, and then I’ll be...”

“Sure, Matt. Thanks for coming up. Charlie would have appreciated it.”

I left Moose in the bedroom and said goodbye to Mrs. Dagerra. She didn’t remember me, of course, but she took my hand and held it tightly. I was a friend of her dead son, and she wanted to hold everything he’d known and loved for as long as she could. I stopped by the coffin, knelt, and wished Charlie well. He’d never harmed a fly as far as I could remember, and he deserved a soft journey and maybe a harp and a halo or whatever they gave them nowadays.

I got to my feet and walked to the door, and another of Charlie’s relatives said, “He looks like he’s sleeping, doesn’t he?”

I looked at the coffin, and at the red, stitched gash on Charlie’s neck, where it was already beginning to show through the makeup. I felt sick all of a sudden. “No,” I said harshly. “He looks dead.”

Then I went downstairs.

The neighborhood looked almost the same, but not quite. There was still the candy store huddling close to the building on the left, and the bicycle rental shop on the right. The iceman’s wagon was parked in the gutter, and I remembered the time I’d nearly smashed my hand fooling with the wagon, tilting it until a sliding piece of ice sent the wagon veering to the gutter, pinning my hand under the handle. I’d lost a nail, and it had been tragic at the time. It got a smile from me now. The big white apartment house was across the street, looking more worn, and a little tired now. The neighborhood had changed from Italian-Irish, to Italian-Irish-Puerto Rican. It was the same neighborhood, but a different one. I shrugged and walked into the candy store.

The guy behind the counter looked up when I came in, squinting at my unfamiliar face.

“Pall Mall,” I said. I fished in my pocket for change, and his eyes kept studying me, looking over my clothes and my face. I knew I was no Mona Lisa, but I didn’t like the guy’s scrutiny.

“What’s with you?” I snapped.

“Huh? I...”

“Give me the goddamn cigarettes and cut the third degree.”

“Yes, sir. I... I’m sorry, sir.”

I looked into his eyes and saw the same fear that had been on the Moose’s face. And then I recalled that the guy had just called me “sir”. Now who the hell would call a bum “sir”? He put the cigarettes on the counter and I shoved a quarter at him. He smiled thinly and pushed the quarter back at me. I looked at the quarter and back into his eyes. In the days when I’d been a licensed private eye, I’d seen fear on a lot of faces. I got so I could smell fear. I could smell it now, and the odor was almost overpowering.

I pushed the quarter across the counter once more and said, “My change, Mac.”

The guy picked up the quarter quickly, rang it up, and gave me my change. He was sweating now. I shrugged, shook my head, and walked out of the store.

Well, Cordell, I told myself, where now?

I knew where, of course. The nearest bar. Like a homing pigeon. Matt Cordell, boy bird.

“Matt?”

The voice was soft, inquisitive. I turned and found its owner. She was soft, too, bundled into a thin coat that swelled out over the curves of her body. Her hair was black, as black as night, and it curled against the oval of her face in soft wisps that didn’t come from a home permanent kit. Her eyes were brown, and wide, and her lips looked as if they’d never been kissed — but wanted to be.

“I don’t think I know you,” I said.

“Kit,” she said. “Kit O’Donnell.”

I stared at her hard. “Kit O’Donn...” I took another look. “Not Katie O’Donnell? I’ll be damned.”

“Have you got a moment, Matt?”

I still couldn’t get over it. She’d been a snot-nosed brat when last I’d seen her. “Sure,” I said. “Plenty of time. More than I need.”

“There’s a bar around the corner,” she said. “We can talk there.”

I grinned and pulled up the collar on my coat. “That’s just where I was heading anyway.”

The bar was like all bars. It had whiskey and the people who drink whiskey. It also had a pinball machine and two tables set against the long front window. We sat at one of the tables, and she shrugged out of her coat. She shrugged very nicely. She was wearing a green sweater and a loose bra, and when she shrugged I leaned closer to the table and the palms of my hands itched.

She didn’t bother with a preamble. “Matt,” she said, “my father is in trouble.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

“You’re a private detective. I’d like you to help.”

I grinned. “Katie... Kit... I’m not practicing any more. The Law took my ticket.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, doesn’t it?”

“Matt, it’s the whole neighborhood, not just my father. Charlie... Charlie was one of them. He... they...”

She stopped talking, and her eyes opened wide. Her voice seemed to catch in her throat, and she lowered her head slightly. I turned and looked at the bar. A tall character in a belted camel hair coat was leaning on the bar, a wide grin on his face. I stared at him and the grin got bigger. Briefly, I turned back to Kit. She raised her eyes, and I was treated to my third look at fear in the past half-hour.

“Now what the hell?” I said.

“Matt, please,” she whispered.

I shoved my chair back and walked toward the bar. The tall character kept grinning, as if he were getting a big kick out of watching a pretty girl with a stumble bum. He had blond hair and sharp blue eyes, and the collar of his coat was turned up in the back, partially framing his narrow face.

“Is something wrong, friend?” I asked.

He didn’t answer. He kept grinning, and I noticed that one hand was jammed into a pocket of the coat. There was a big lump in that pocket, and unless the guy had enormous hands, there was something besides the end of his arm there.

“You’re staring at my friend,” I said.

His eyes flicked from the swell of Kit’s breasts where they heaved in fright beneath the green sweater.

“So I am,” he said softly.

“So cut it out.”

The grin appeared on his face again. He turned his head deliberately, and his eyes stripped Kit’s sweater off. I grabbed the collar of his coat, wrapped my hand in it, and yanked him off the bar.

He moved faster than I thought he would. He brought up a knee that sent a sharp pain careening up from my groin. At the same time, his hand popped out of the pocket, and a snub-nosed .38 stared up at my face.

I didn’t look at the gun long. There are times when you can play footsie, and there are other times when you automatically sense that a man is dangerous, and that a fisted gun isn’t a bluff but a threat that might explode any second. The knee in my groin had doubled me over so that my face was level with the .38. I started to lift my head, and I smashed my bunched fist sideways at the same time. I caught him on the inside of his wrist, and the gun jerked to one side, its blast loud in the small bar. I heard the front window shatter as the bullet struck it, and then I had his wrist tightly in my fingers, and I was turning around and pulling his arm over my shoulder. I gave him my hip, and he left his feet and yelled “Hey!”