Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 6, June, 1953

“You still want to go?” Her voice was dull.

“Sure.”

We each had a short drink and some rather deadly and dragging conversation, then we left. She was awfully quiet going down in the elevator and I said, “Lois, honey, give me a grin. Let out a whoop or something. Come on, we’ll have a big kick tonight, let down your hair.”

She smiled slightly. “I suppose there’s no sense wasting the evening.”

“Of course not. We’ll run around screeching, we’ll get higher than rockets and yip at people. Baby, we’ll dance in the streets—” The elevator stopped, so I stopped, but she shook her head at me and the smile was a little wider, a little brighter.

She looped her arm through mine and we went out onto Wilcox Street. I steered her toward the Cad, but just before we reached it I heard something scrape on the sidewalk and Lois said, “Why Cannon! What—”

And then there was a grunt, and a great whistling and roaring and clanging of bells, and my last sad thought after that monstrous list landed like an artillery shell alongside my head was: There’ll be no dancing in the streets tonight.

I came to this time in my Cad, slumped behind the wheel. The first time this had happened, I had been more than a bit peeved at Cannon. But now I was seriously considering killing the son. I was so mad that it felt as if the top of my head were going to pop off and sail through the roof of the Cad like a flying saucer. It was five minutes before I calmed down enough to start thinking about anything except smashing my fists into Cannon’s ugly face.

Then I got out of the car and went back to Lois’ apartment. She wasn’t there; at least there was no response to my ringing the buzzer and banging on the door. I checked the Zephyr Room but Lois had “gone home with a headache” and hadn’t come back. No, neither Cannon nor his pals had been in. Yes, I did have a black eye, and would you like a couple? I left the Zephyr Room and went back to my apartment, still burning.

It was a little after ten. I looked up Lois Sanders in the phone book and called her half-dozen times, but each time the line was busy. Finally I flopped on the bed, still in my tux. The phone ringing woke me at midnight.

I woke up with everything still fresh in my mind, grabbed the phone and I suppose I snarled into it, “Yeah?”

“Scotty... Scotty, I’m plastered. Oh, woo, am I drunk. Scotty? That you, Scotty?”

I groaned. Diane. Oh, Lord, now Diane. I’d completely forgotten about her. I said, “Where the hell are you?”

“I’m at the Groove, Coc’nut Groove, an’ you’re not here, Scotty, you’re not here.”

She sounded moist. I said roughly, “For Pete’s sake don’t bust out bawling. I’ll come down and get you.”

“Will you? Will you, Scotty?”

“Yes, of course. Just hang on, I’ll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

She said, “Goodie,” and I hung up. Well, at least I was dressed for the Grove. Almost. I hadn’t been wearing my gun up till now. I went into the bedroom, dug out the .38 Colt Special and shrugged out of my jacket, slipped on the gun and harness. With the jacket back on it bulged over the gun, but that was all right. Now I was dressed. If I saw Cannon, and he so much as sneered at me, I was going to aim at his right eye and pull the trigger. Then when he fell down I was going to aim at his left eye and pull the trigger. Then I was going to kick him in the head, real hard too.

In the bathroom I took a look at myself, and I looked terrible. The left side of my jaw was swollen considerably and my right eye was purple and almost closed. I could see out of it still; well enough to aim a .38, anyway. I headed back toward the front room and somebody outside pressed the buzzer. I opened the door and gawked at the guy in a gray suit and the cop in uniform.

“What’s the matter?” I asked them. I know a lot of guys in the department, but these were strangers.

“You’re Scott?”

“Yeah.”

“Better come with us.”

“Huh? What for? What is this?”

They were both medium height, both husky, one about twenty-five, the other in his forties. The older one was in plainclothes, the other in a patrolman’s uniform.

The older guy showed me his shield and said, “Where’d you leave your Cad, Scott?”

“It’s down in front. I parked it on the street, sure, so I get a ticket. I was pooped, and—”

He interrupted. “What happened to your face? You have an accident?”

“I was in a fight. I guess it was a fight. This some new kind of traffic citation?”

“No ticket, Scott. Hit and run. You didn’t leave your car on the street. Not this street.”

“What?” It hadn’t even penetrated.

He smelled my breath. “Drunk? All sharped up, too. You usually have fights in those clothes?” His voice hardened. “Come on with us, Scott. We want you to look at somebody. In the morgue.”

We were in the prowl car and headed toward downtown L.A. before it hit me. Oh, my God, I thought. Not... not Lois.

They took me downstairs in the Hall of Justice and back into the morgue. The body was covered with the usual cloth and they stood me alongside the table and peeled the cloth back.

The plainclothesman said, “Well? You know who it is?”

I felt sick. I said, “I’ve told you twenty times you've got the wrong guy. I didn’t do it.” I looked at the battered corpse again. “But I know who it is. His name was Joseph Raspberry.”

The next few hours were long ones, and lousy ones. It seemed that I answered a thousand questions a thousand times each, but finally the pressure eased off a little. About twenty of the cops I know in the department, all friends of mine, came around and they were on my side as much as they could be. Even Phil Samson, the Captain of Homicide and my best friend in L.A., climbed out of bed and roared down when word reached him. He threw his substantial weight about the place for half an hour; and I about half convinced the cops that I wouldn’t slam into a guy with my car, then leave the car out where it could be spotted.

The police story was simple enough once I got it. Calls concerning both the body lying at the side of a darkened road and the black Cadillac coupe convertible parked a mile away had come in at almost the same time, close to eleven-thirty p.m. The Cad’s right front fender was caved in, with blood and bits of hair on it. My name, of course, was on the Cad’s registration slip. The cops had looked into the trunk, too, where I keep all kinds of gadgets useful in my work, ranging from loaded grenades to an infra-red optophone, and not knowing me they’d figured I was either a master criminal or a mad scientist about to blow up the city. But that was all squared away when Samson and some of the other cops came around at Headquarters.

My story was simple enough, too: I told them exactly what I’d done all evening, except that I didn’t mention the fact that Joe had given me the tip that set me off — I had a reason — and I didn’t mention Cannon’s name, just told them I didn’t see who had slugged me and I figured it was a jealous suitor, which was true. My car obviously had been stolen and used to rub out Joe, apparently, I said, by somebody who wanted to give me trouble, and had.

It was long and wearisome, and the only break was when, at one-thirty in the morning, I sprang out of my chair and almost to the ceiling yelling “Jesus, Diane!” It had come to me in a flash that she was probably lying under the table by now, her eyes glassy. Samson was ready to leave then, so he said he’d pick her up and sec that she got home and — ha, ha — tell her I was in jail.

The upshot of it all was that I got mugged and printed, but out on bail shortly after eight a.m. Before nine I was back in my office without the thousand-dollar bill in my kick, all the morning papers spread on the desk before me, and the gripe, the anger, the fury in me feeding on itself and growing big enough to fill all Los Angeles and a substantial part of the Universe.