Фредерик Браун - Ed McBain’s Mystery Book, No. 3,1961

But bad as he looked, I didn’t pull any punches. “Ollie,” I said, “it didn’t work, your little frame-up. I didn’t go to the police and accuse Eve of trying to murder you. On the other hand, Eve given you this break, so far. I didn’t go to them and tell them you tried to commit suicide in a way to frame her for murder. You must love Dorothy and Jerry awfully much to have planned that.”

“I... I do,” he said. “What... made you guess, Ed?”

“Your hands, for one thing,” I said. “They were dirtier than they’d have been if you’d just fallen. That and the fact that you were lying face down told me how you managed to bring on that attack at just that moment. You were doing push-ups — about as strenuous and concentrated exercise as a man can take. And just kept doing them till you passed out. It should have been fatal, all right.

“And you knew the pills and ampoules had been on your dresser that afternoon, and that Eve had been home since I’d seen them and could have taken them. Actually you took them yourself. You came out in a taxi — and we could probably find the taxi if we had to prove this — and got them yourself. You had to wait till you were sure Eve and I would be en route downtown, and that’s why you were so late getting to the Pump Room. Now Uncle Am’s got news for you — not that you deserve it.”

Uncle Am cleared his throat. “You’re not married, Ollie. You’re a free man because your marriage to Eve Packer wasn’t legal. She’d been married before and hadn’t got a divorce. Probably because she had no intention of marrying again until you popped the question to her, and then it was too late to get one.

“Her legal husband, who left her ten years ago, is a bartender named Littleton. He found her again somehow and when he learned she’d married you illegally, he started blackmailing her. She’s been paying him two hundred a month, half the pin-money allowance you gave her, for three years. They worked out a way she could mail him checks and still have her money seemingly accounted for. The method doesn’t matter.”

I took over. “We haven’t called copper on the bigamy bit, either, because you’re not going to prosecute her for it, or tell the cops. We figure you owe her something for having tried to frame her on a murder charge. We’ve talked to her. She’ll leave town quietly, and go to Reno, and in a little while you can let out that you’re divorced and free. And marry Dorothy and legitimize Jerry.

“She really will be getting a divorce, incidentally, but from Littleton, not from you. I said you’d finance that and give her a reasonable stake to start out with. Like ten thousand dollars — does that sound reasonable?”

He nodded. His face looked less drawn, less gray now. I had a hunch his improvement would be a lot faster now.

“And you fellows,” he said. “How can I ever—?”

“We’re even,” Uncle Am said. “Your retainer will cover. But don’t ever look us up again to do a job for you. A private detective doesn’t like to be made a patsy, be put in the spot of helping a frame-up. And that’s what you tried to do to us. Don’t ever look us up again.”

We never saw Ollie again, but we did hear from him once, a few months later. One morning, a Western Union messenger came into our office to deliver a note and a little box. He said he had instructions not to wait and left.

The envelope contained a wedding announcement. One of the after-the-fact kind, not an invitation, of the marriage of Oliver R. Bookman to Dorothy Stark. On the back of it was scribbled a note. “Hope you’ve forgiven me enough to accept a wedding present in reverse. I’ve arranged for the dealer to leave it out front. Papers will be in glove compartment. Thanks for everything, including accepting this.” And the little box, of course, contained two sets of car keys.

It was, as I’d known it would be, a brand-new Buick sedan, gray, a hell of a car. We stood looking at it, and Uncle Am said, “Well, Ed, have we forgiven him enough?”

“I guess so,” I said. “It’s a sweet chariot. But somebody got off on his time, either the car dealer or the messenger, and it’s been here too long. Look.”

I pointed to the parking ticket on the windshield. “Well, shall we take our first ride in it, down to the City Hall to pay the fine and get right with God?”

We did.

Eyes wary, jaws hard, wide-legged stance as if about to draw, and rubbing his thumb across the raised gold initials of his money clip gave Tucson (name chosen by 4-Square Productions as suitable for the star of their Western series) a fillip of confidence and, more important, moments to think. He recognized the ma’am — girl — on his sofa; saw she was drinking his good Scotch, and had made herself free with ice, soda and cigarettes, all of these his property.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” Rhoda said.

“You didn’t?” he repeated but permitted his features to relax, and he moved to the fireplace. Above the mantelpiece was a pair of twisted steer horns, tips ringed with gold.

“Of course not,” she continued. “You wouldn’t mind because we’re friends. Or aren’t we any more?”

“That’s hard to say,” he said. “I haven’t seen you since when.”

Rhoda raised both legs and swung them around to strike her heels against the carpeting as she sat erect. Now her heavily made-up eyes, shadowed in royal blue and framed by false lashes, each of them beaded, actually glowed as she beckoned for Tucson to come closer.

“I want to take a look at you.” She continued to waggle an index finger. “After all, seeing you inside a twenty-one-inch screen or so isn’t the same as seeing you in person.”

“Right now, Rhoda, I’d rather either one of us was inside the idiot box.”

“But then we’d be just like all the other idiots who won’t do anything on Wednesday nights between seven thirty and eight because Tucson Cross, the All-American saddle tramp, the restless wanderer of the wasteland” — she parroted the voice that rose above banal woodwinds to announce “Saddle-Sore” and its story theme of the restless hand who sought to find himself and peace but always rode into injustice and violence, which he corrected by killing in twenty-six minutes, interrupted this year by three dentifrice commercials, bullies, villains, cheats, land sharks, and other menaces to the good frontier society; once the justice by violence was fulfilled, he could no longer remain in this place, so, saddle-sore and weary, Tucson rode off, head bowed and shoulders slumped, hating himself and his fast gun hand, into the last commercial, where he flashed his choppers to plug his sponsor’s product and advised his fans to meet with him next week; thanks, friends — “is bringing justice to the West. And you wouldn’t want me to be that way, Sam? Or would you since they changed your name to Tucson? Man,” she reflected, “if that handle isn’t gaslight.”

He was twenty-two, but looked several years older, and had known Rhoda since he was nineteen, when he had been dropped off in front of Schwab’s, at the east end of the Strip, by the swell people from Ohio; they had picked him up in Las Cruces and provided him with food, shelter and five dollars for luck because he had admitted having some coins in his pocket that didn’t add up to a dollar; the swell people hadn’t known he had already stolen ten dollars from the woman’s purse. Now his gold money clip held at least five hundred, because fifty dollars less than that magic number made him nervous.

But to get back to that afternoon. He had stood before Schwab’s and gaped at the interior through a plate window, felt thirsty and walked into Googie’s next door because there were too many people in the drugstore. The interior of the small restaurant with its large mosaics in primary colors was cool, the piped music soft but with a good beat, and the waitresses in their neat uniforms cool, crisp and understanding, because as he was about to seat himself at the counter, one of them with really made-up eyes tilted her head toward the rear of the restaurant and he had understood.