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

He looked for a moment as though he was going to throw up. Then he got control, and said: “She was. Don’t let’s talk about it any more, Van. It’s all over.”

“You’re bluffing!” I shouted it at him. “What do you think I am, a chump? There wouldn’t be enough left of her to move.”

“Okay,” he said. “Have it your way. Now get out, before I call someone to throw you out.”

I went back to the mail room but I kept thinking about it and the more I thought the more I knew he wasn’t bluffing. Yet he couldn’t have done what he said. I had to find out. I borrowed Joe’s car again that night and drove up there. Along that same dark, dirt road, to the same spot. It gave me the creeps a little. I hadn’t brought a flashlight and in the dark it took me a little time to find the clearing. But I found it. The only thing was, he was right; he hadn’t been bluffing. The shallow grave was still there but it was all dug up. It was empty. She was gone.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, out loud.

“Yeah,” someone said, and I whirled around to stare into the blinding beam of three flashlights. Three flashlights held by cops.

They took me back into the city and I told the cops the whole story. I had to. They thought I’d killed Vera, buried her out there, just as Harry Owen had first said that they would. They’d gotten an anonymous phone tip about the corpse and where it was buried, earlier in the day. They’d gone out and dug it up. The same tip told them to watch me.

I told them, of course, that their phone tip had been Harry Owen. They said they questioned him, after that, investigated him. He denied knowing anything about any of it. Apparently, as he had said, they weren’t able to dig up any connection between him and Vera. They couldn’t find anybody who’d ever seen them together, or knew they were seeing each other. They’d been circumspect, all right. He was clean. I wasn’t, as far as the cops were concerned.

I knew what had happened. I’d pushed him too far. He’d finally decided to take a chance on winding the whole thing up, getting rid of me, by putting the cops on me. It hadn’t been much of a chance. He’d realized that the police couldn’t see anybody but me. It was cut and dried. They wouldn’t investigate him, too much, Harry Owen figured. And he was right.

I couldn’t talk the cops out of it and my lawyer couldn’t convince the jury, either. After the trial he told me that he’d heard Harry Owen was drinking himself to death, had wound up in the Alky ward a couple of times, already. A lot of good that did me.

The stupid part about the whole thing, the Police lab worked on the remains. And like I’d heard it happens sometimes, Vera may have had all the symptoms, but according to those lab boys, it must have been something else, because they said she wasn’t that way at all.

How far can you get with a bullet in your chest and two thousand dollar bills?

When Joe Carlin was tired, the jagged scar along the left side of his jaw turned red. Now, as he stood staring down at Paul Velco, the scar was like a heavy scarlet thread stitched on his white skin.

“Don’t hurry any on my account, Velco,” he said quietly. “I got nothing better to do. Enjoy yourself.”

Velco plucked a grape from the cluster of Concords on the silver dish and stuffed it into a mouth that was already filled with bread and cheese. He took a long gurgling drink of wine from a tall glass, wiped his mouth, belched, and leaned back on the sofa and looked at Carlin as though Carlin were not really there at all. “I wouldn’t even give you a piece of fruit,” Velco said, in a voice that was thick with distaste. “I wouldn’t even ask you to take a chair.”

“You can keep your fruit,” Carlin said. “You can keep your fruit and your chair.”

Velco picked up a linen napkin that lay on the coffee table alongside the silver dishes of bread and fruit and cheese. He wiped his neck where the pink flesh hung in sweaty folds over the collar of his silk dressing gown and spat grape seeds into the fireplace. “I oughtn’t to pay you nothing,” he said. “I ought to throw you right out on your can. You think I should pay you, go ahead and convince me. Make it good. Make me believe it.”

“I did the job,” Carlin said in his hoarse low voice. Carlin was a small man with powerful sloping shoulders and heavy hands. His sullen, handsome face was as pale and hard-looking as bleached bone. His eyes were a shade of gray-blue that was almost white, the color of dirty ice under dark brows, and his hair was Indian black.

Velco’s heavy lips sneered over the rim of his glass. “You did a job!” he said savagely. “You went after the woman’s stuff, and there was nobody there but her, and all you had to do was tie her up and walk out with the loot, as easy as that. So what did you do, you cheap punk?”

“You know what I done,” Carlin said tonelessly. “You know what I done — so why chew me about it any more?”

“You don’t give me any reason,” Velco said. “A guy should have a reason for a nutty caper like that.”

“I had a reason,” Carlin said. “You ever pull any time, Velco?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Velco asked, and his eyes came up quickly from the glass and stared at Carlin’s face. His eves, under their heavy lids, were like polished jet. “What the hell kind of bug question is that to ask? You must be stir simple, asking me a question like that.”

“I was trying to tell you why I messed around with the broad,” Carlin said. “I’d been out of Auburn exactly six days when I pulled that job. You ever see this Eve LaMotte, this babe I took for the stuff?”

“I’ve seen her,” Velco said. “I’ve met her. I owned a piece of a show she was in once. I’m even a kind of an acquaintance of the guy that’s keeping her now.”

“Okay,” Carlin said. “Then you know what she’s like. A babe like you think about all day and dream about all night, when you’re doing time. Like I said, I’d been out of Auburn six days, after doing three years. I walked into her apartment and there she was and I guess I went a little crazy.”

“A little crazy,” Velco said scornfully. “A little crazy! That girl, that beautiful girl, only got out of the hospital yesterday, and it’s four weeks since you snatched the stuff.”

Carlin lifted his thick shoulders in a shrug, and a faint reminiscent smile twisted his hard mouth. “She didn’t want to play,” he said softly. “She had on a negligee a guy could push through a keyhole with his thumb, and she must have taken a bath in perfume. I shoved her in the bathroom and when I told her I wanted more than the jewelry, she started to yell. So I clipped her. What else was there for me to do?”

Velco stood up, a big man, thick of waist and chest, with a belly that sagged over his fat thighs. “And your handkerchief came off while you were playing,” he said, moving towards the desk in the corner of the room. “The handkerchief you used for a mask fell off and Miss LaMotte got a good long look at your stupid puss. Guess what, punk?”

Carlin pulled a loose cigarette from the breast pocket of his shabby coat, lit it with steady hands. “Maybe you better tell me, Mr. Velco,” he said, his voice almost a whisper. “I never was good at guessing things. I never liked guessing games, either.”

“A smart piece of goods too, aren’t you?” Velco said. “A fresh punk as well as a creep. All right, Carlin, listen! This afternoon, LaMotte went down to police headquarters. She looked at the mugg books and identified your picture without half trying.”