Roy Carroll - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 4, April, 1953

“Slow down. Speed up. What the hell do you want?”

“Gil,” Alf said, “you know what’s wrong with you?”

“Huh?”

“You just don’t like women,” Alf said.

Gil sniggered softly. “That’s a lot of crap.” And then, more emphatically, “That’s a lot of crap!”

“You trying to kid people, Gil? You think the guys on the paper didn’t tumble the first time you started yapping about how many scores you make? You ever figure out exactly what it is you’re trying to prove? You think yapping about what a man you are is going to fool anybody?”

“Shut your goddam mouth!”

“Or maybe,” Alf said evenly, “maybe you’re just trying to fool yourself.”

“Shut up!” Gil yelled. He fed gas savagely. “And what the hell do you know about it? What the hell gives you the right to tell me what’s wrong with me? You one of them goddamned psychiatrists or something?”

Alf let his breath out slowly. “All right,” he said. “Skip it, Gil.”

“What you so damn smart for? You ain’t able to get anything but home stuff. What the hell you know about it?”

Alf snubbed his cigarette out in the ash tray and turned to stare out the window. His lips trembled.

Gil watched the reporter out of the tail of his eye. “I’ll show you, by God. You take this one tonight. From motel row. She’ll holler her number right away. I’ll have my bare feet on her back in a couple of days.” He snorted again and made the moist, kissing sounds.

“Anybody ever tell you that you’re a louse, Gil?”

“I told you twice to cut that kind of crap,” Gil said. “Some day I’ll beat your damned face in, Alf. Sure as hell.”

Alf’s lips drew into a thin, taut line.

There was an ambulance traffic at 124th Street; a prowler on 9th; a drunk down in a yard on Bonnie Brae. An attempted suicide on Sherbourne.

“Just don’t get so damned smart,” Gil said. “You want to stay on the good side of me, Alf.”

He guided the car into the driveway of Mulvey Receiving. He cut the wheel sharply to the right and slammed on the brakes at the last moment, stopping the car with a jolt inches short of the retaining wall of the Press Section.

The reporter opened the door and waited half in the car and half out for Gil to get his Speed Graphic from the back seat. After the hollow, explosive sound of car doors closing, the two of them walked in silence up the dimly lighted steps of the hospital. In the tile and whitewashed corridor, Gil exchanged laughing insults with two uniformed policemen. They stopped in front of the metal guard doors of the elevator and Gil jabbed the Up button with the meaty ball of his thumb. When there was no response, he said, “Stinkin’ city ought to put in a Press elevator.”

The elevator announced its arrival with the metallic click of uncoupling doors. The young man responsible for its delay wore a white silk scarf as a sling for his right arm. As he stepped into the corridor he moved his left hand apologetically and nodded with a faint, self-effacing smile at the sling.

“Goddamned fairy,” Gil said loudly as the doors closed behind them. He slammed his thumb at the red button for the third floor. “I can tell fairies a mile away. Ugh. They make me sick.”

He jostled Alf in order to be the first out of the elevator. He sniffed importantly and hitched his camera more comfortably on his hip. Beside the drinking fountain, a white-clad orderly was finishing a cigarette. The reception hall smelled sharply of sterilization and soap and sickness, and a child was crying monotonously in one of the curtained rooms.

“Where’s the dame?”

Startled, the orderly looked around. He shrugged and nodded toward the emergency room on the left.

Gil put a plate in the camera and aimed it at the door. “I’ll get it from here when they wheel her out.”

“How is she?” Alf asked.

“Couple of pretty bad cuts.”

The high, flat table in the emergency room was partially concealed by the half-drawn curtain. The woman was lying on her side, facing away from the hall. Only the back of her head was visible above the covering sheet. Some of her hair lay in a damp pile on the floor. What had not been shaved hung in straight, blood-drenched, ropy strands that revealed a little of the natural yellow near the unstained ends. She was whimpering softly.

Smiling faintly, Gil ambled toward the doorway. The intern treating the woman came to the head of the table. When he noticed the photographer, he jerked the curtain closed savagely.

Gil reddened. “Who the hell he think he is?”

“Aw, skip it, Gil,” Alf said.

“By God, I ought to go in there. I’ll take my goddamned pictures while he works if I want to.”

“Cut it out,” the orderly said. “The doc’s new.”

Alf looked around the room and then started toward the policeman leaning against the coke machine.

“It’s time he learns the city runs this place, then,” Gil said indignantly. “Why, God damn, I ought to phone the superintendent. That punk sawbones’ll learn damned quick he can’t push around the press.”

The crisp, starched nurse at the reception desk looked toward Gil, her face a frown of annoyance.

When Alf brought out the folded sheets of copy paper, the policeman straightened. “You bring her in?” Alf asked quietly.

“You the press?”

“Yeah. The Star. ”

“Oh, the Star. Yeah, me and Mick — that is, Sergeant McCabe.”

Alf took their names. “When did you get the call?”

“About one o’clock. Me and Mick.”

Alf nodded.

“We found her on the sidewalk. You want the address? It was — I think it was 916 Temple. In the nine hundred block — motel row. There was already a crowd when we got there. From the blood, you’d have thought she was dead.”

“Uh-huh...?” Alf said, writing.

“Well, this guy — she’d been at the Air Flow Motel — this guy she was shacked up with sent her out for a pint. The drug store was closed, there in the nine hundred block, but there’s a liquor store three blocks up. She starts up to the liquor store, and this car — a Ford, she thinks, an old-looking coupe — well, this car pulls up. The driver tries to drag her inside and she starts screaming. He must have had the tire iron in his hand. He hits her with it. He hits her maybe half a dozen times. And then she gets up and starts to run for the motel. She falls down there at the corner — in front of the drug store that was closed. There was already a crowd when we got there.”

“She didn’t recognize him, is that right?”

“Just one of them crazy bastards. You know — picks on the first dame he sees.”

“Well...” Alf closed the notebook. “Thanks, officer. They have her name at the desk?”

“I think they got it.”

“A real looker, huh?” said Gil, as he came up to the policeman.

The officer shrugged. “She had blood all over her.”

Gil nudged him. “She’s out cheatin’, huh? Not gettin’ enough at home?”

“You from the same paper?”

“Yeah. Gil Bratcher.” Gil wet his lips. “Didn’t get to see what she looked like, huh? One of them anytime, all-the-time babes, I bet?”

The policeman stared coldly at him, said nothing.

Gil nudged him again, and chuckling, shook his upper arm. “Maybe her husband’s a fairy, huh?”

Alf cleared his throat. “Well... ah... Thanks, officer,” he said, and moved quickly away.

At the reception desk across the room Alf asked the nurse, “Do you have a card yet on the assault case?”

The nurse began to hunt through the new admission slips on her desk. “You from the press?”

“Yeah.”

Gil strolled over. “Where’s Jean, hey, baby?”