Флетчер Флора - Leave Her to Hell

“How do you do?” she said.

“How do you do,” I said, as polite as anybody. “Is Colly in?”

“Mr. Alder?”

“Excuse me. Mr. Alder.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Not I. I just dropped in.”

“Would you care to state the nature of your business?”

“I’m not sure. I may only ask Colly a few questions, and I may pull his nose.”

She flushed and looked at once hostile and wary, which led me to believe that others had dropped in to pull Colly’s nose and that she resented it. She was, definitely, more than merely employed.

“Who shall I say is calling?” she said coldly.

“Percy Hand. Tell Colly I’m determined.”

She stood up and smoothed her skirt over her hips and walked on her agreeable legs into Colly’s private office. In a couple of minutes she came back, leaving the door open behind her.

“Mr. Alder will see you,” she said.

“That’s generous of Mr. Alder,” I said.

I went in and closed the door that she’d left open. Colly was sitting in a swivel chair behind a desk that was big enough to emphasize his runtiness. He didn’t bother to get up and welcome me, but neither did he look as if he wished especially that I hadn’t come. As a matter of fact, he looked rather friendly.

“Hello, Colly,” I said. “What a fancy den you’ve got here. I didn’t dream you were so prosperous.”

“Business is good,” he said smugly. “Sit down and have a cigar, Percy.”

“Cigars even! I’ll just have a cigarette, though, if you don’t mind.” I sat down in an upholstered chair beside his desk and lit the cigarette and looked around the room. “YOU must have quite a bit of overhead here, Colly.”

“Quite a bit.”

“Everything nice and fairly expensive. Even that little red-headed item in the outer office. I’ll bet she’s fairly expensive too.”

“Rosie? I never counted the cost. Anyhow, you get what you pay for.”

“Sure. It’s a sweet sentiment. It’s fine as long as you keep a good set of values.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve got no idea. I had an idea it might sound profound or something.”

He shifted his weight in the swivel and stuck one of his cigars in his mouth. It was long and fat, king-size, and it looked almost ludicrous in the middle of his midget mug.

“You didn’t come here to moralize and make an inventory, Percy. What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I got to thinking about our little encounter last night, and the more I thought, the curiouser and curiouser I got. Like Alice.”

“Like who?”

“Never mind. It’s an allusion. Incidentally, you aren’t sore about what happened, are you, Colly?”

“It’s all in the business.” He shrugged and rolled his cigar from one corner to the other. “Why should I be sore?’

“Has Markley called you today?”

“No. Why?”

“He’s going to fire you. I told him he might as well, and he agreed.”

He sighted me over the unlit tip of the cigar, and for the merest instant his little eyes turned yellow, but then he shrugged again and managed what might have been a laugh.

“I couldn’t care less, Percy. I was ready to give it up anyhow.”

“That’s a sensible attitude. Let me congratulate you. What I’ve been curious about, though, is how you got on the job in the first place.”

“It was a job. It was offered to me. Like you said, I’ve got quite a bit of overhead.”

“But why you? Colly Alder specifically?”

He looked at me in silence for a few seconds, and I began to feel that there was something turning over and over in his mind. I’m pretty sure that he was wondering whether to lie or tell the truth or simply to invite me to go to hell, and I was also pretty sure, when he finally answered, that he’d decided for his own reasons to tell me the truth.

“We’d had a previous contact,” he said. “I did some work for him.”

“What kind of work?”

“I tailed his wife when she was on the prowl with Regis Lawler. Back before she and Lawler broke loose and ran.”

“Why did he want her tailed? According to my information, he wasn’t much concerned with what she did.”

“True enough. He wasn’t. But it doesn’t hurt to have evidence on your side in case it’s needed. It might save some alimony.”

“I see. So you tailed Constance Markley. What did it come to?”

“Nothing. I did the job and made a few reports, and then she and Lawler made their break. That was the end of it.”

“Were you on her tail the night she disappeared?”

“I started on it, but I fell off. I lost her.”

“Where’d you lose her?”

“At Lawler’s apartment. She went in, but she didn’t come out. Not the way she went in, I mean. They must have left together by a back way or something.”

I was pretty sure, as I said, that Colly had started telling the truth, but I wasn’t so sure at all that he was keeping it up. Somehow, I had lost my conviction.

“No wonder Markley’s firing you,” I said. “It seems like every time he’s given you a job, you’ve fumbled it.”

If he was raw, he didn’t show it. He leaned back and closed his eyes, and his face had in repose the kind of dry and bloodless and withered look that I have seen in the faces of aging midgets. Not that he was a midget, of course. He was just a runt.

“It makes no difference,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of the racket anyhow. I’m thinking of giving it up.”

“Is that so? What are you thinking of doing instead?”

“I don’t know. I been thinking about going south. Out of the country south. Maybe Mexico. Maybe South America. I’ve got a yen to lie on a beach and soak up some sun. I been thinking about taking Rosie and going.”

“How does Rosie feel about it?”

“Agreeable.” He opened his eyes and stared at me with an odd kind of quiet assurance. “Rosie’d go anywhere with me, and I wouldn’t go anywhere without Rosie. She’s the only person in the world I’ve ever trusted, and I guess that’s because she’s the only one who’s ever trusted me.”

I had again the conviction that he was levelling. Colly and Rosie forever. One of those odd and dedicated pairs that sometimes stick together in the attrition of things that happen. There was a kind of pathos in it that made me, for a moment, feel almost partial to them.

“You and Rosie at Acapulco,” I said. “It sounds like fun, and it sounds like money.”

“Could be I’ve got money.” He leaned forward earnestly. “How’d you like to earn a little of what I’ve got?”

“I wouldn’t. Why do I have to keep repeating to people that I’m poor but honest?”

“This is honest, Percy. All you have to do to earn a century is one simple thing. One simple thing.”

“Nothing doing.”

“Maybe you’d do it as a favor.”

“Why the hell should I do you a favor?”

“Look, Percy. I know how you feel about me. You don’t like me, and you don’t trust me, and I don’t give a damn. You’ve got a reputation for being honest, and I need an honest, dependable guy for one hour to do one honest, simple thing.”

There was something compelling in the runt’s earnestness. He had something on his mind, that was certain, and whatever it was, whatever piece of sordid craft for the sake of Colly Alder, it was something big by the dimensions of Colly’s world.

“What one honest, simple thing?” I said.

He took a deep breath and released it in a long sigh that seemed exorbitant as a reaction to my slight concession of asking for information that committed me to nothing.

“This is it. You go to your office tonight at nine and stay until ten. Just an hour. If I haven’t called by ten, you go see Rosie in her apartment. She’ll have something interesting to tell you. I promise it’ll be interesting.”