Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

Vanya sprang, caught him as he fell. She slumped on the floor, held his head in her arms, whimpering.

Helen struggled to sit up. “You and the U.S. Cavalry, Jerry,” she mumbled.

He helped her to stand. “I was a sap to lose you, there in the subway.”

Helen pressed her hands on top of her head, winced. “Peter — I mean Harold — or Stefan— Gone?”

“Thanks to your hiding that .32 in the Yulett dame’s bonnet.”

Vanya whined, wretchedly: “I know you’re glad he’s dead. I ought to be glad, too. After all the terrible crimes he’s committed. But I’m not, I’m not.”

The lieutenant limped over to her. “It was a good act, while it lasted, Mrs. Kalvak. But it couldn’t last forever. You can take off the disguise.”

She stopped rocking. “You mean I knew about Stefan’s having committed murder? Yes, I knew. When it was too late to prevent them.”

“I’ll say you knew.” He picked up Meyer’s pistol. “The one who didn’t know — for sure, anyway — was Stefan!”

Helen said, “What?”

The girl sat there, as if stupefied.

“All right. O.K. See what that innocence stuff gets you after Patrolman Taylor identifies you as the woman who ran downstairs at Eighty-eighth Street to tell him there was a fight going on over your room. Why’d you chase over there after your husband, anyway? Because you’d read that story in the newspaper about the kid finding the Lansing girl’s bones?

“That’d be my guess. You were up there in the room Stefan had rented as Harold Willard, so he could get his hooks into another dame,” he waved ironically toward Helen, “and you were packing up the clothes he had in the closet, or maybe just arguing with him so he wouldn’t think you knew too much about those bones under the pier. Then who should ride up on his charger but T. Chauncey Helbourne. When he heard about the disappearing dames and the dough that vanished along with them, he wanted a cut of that, too. And he went to the right place to get it.”

Vanya laid her cheek against the bloodless one in her lap. “You do not really believe such horrible things. No one could believe them.”

Helen was at the sink, using cold water. She held up a small camp hatchet. “Could it be this Boy Scout meat axe? Somebody’s been scouring it with steel wool.”

“The head of it would fit the gash in my fedora just ducky,” Teccard answered. “But it didn’t kill Helbourne. It knocked him cold. He was shot after I’d had my light put out. You shot him, Mrs. Kalvak — so I’d either get blamed for bumping him myself or think Helbourne was the rat responsible for the Happiness murders.”

“I was there at Eighty-eighth Street.” Vanya stroked the corpse’s forehead. “I did hear the fight. I told the truth to the policeman. You shot that man yourself.”

“No cop shoots a man lying down, lady. The blood stain on Helbourne’s vest was round, with the bullet hole in the center. If he’d died on his feet — the way it would have been if he was shot in a fight — the blood stain would have been tear-shaped — with the point down. How’d you beat it out of the house? Rush your husband down to that bathroom on the second floor — have him wait there, while you murdered Helbourne without Stefan’s knowing it? And then take a powder after the patrolman ran up to the third floor?”

The sergeant went over to pick up what was left of Miss Yulett’s hat. She picked up the brown-paper market basket at the same time. “Don’t tell me this girl cut up that Lansing woman, all by herself, Jerry!”

“Yair. Probably did it all with her little hatchet.”

“But why?” The sergeant held the bottom of the market bag up to the light. “If Stefan got the money out of these women, with his honeyed words...?”

“Stefan wheedled it out of them — and turned the cash over to Mrs. Kalvak. She’s the sort of skirt who wouldn’t mind her husband monkeying with other femmes, if it paid enough.”

Vanya kissed the corpse on the lips. “Darling! Listen to the hideous lies they make up about me!”

“Talk about lies, Mrs. Kalvak! You must have lied plenty to your husband. You’d probably promised to get the lovelorn out of his way after he’d garnered in the gold.” Teccard turned his back to inspect the wound on his hip. “Maybe he thought you scared them off by that ‘he’s-a-married-man — I’m-his-wife’ line. I don’t know. But I’m damned certain you thought the easy way to keep the suckers quiet was to plant them. Why you had to hack them to pieces—”

Helen held up the market bag, by its brown-twine handle. “Recognize those brown fibers that clung to the oilcloth, Jerry? From this twine. Goes through the bottom of the bag to give it strength. She used this to carry... them... in.”

“Yair. Yair. That’s why she had to axe them in small hunks. So she could carry the pieces out of here and down to the wharf, without being conspicuous!” He went over, hauled the girl to her feet. “Or maybe it’s you just like cutting up people. Like Agousti.”

Vanya touched the wound in Stefan’s neck, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. “Stefan went to... see Agousti. I know nothing of that.”

“Don’t, eh? Then it won’t be your prints on that stem-cutter or the doorknob downstairs, eh? You didn’t decide Agousti’d have to be shut up before he prevented your getaway, then?”

Mrs. Kalvak looked up at him. There was murder in her eyes.

Helen hurried to the front room. “I’m going to call the wrecking crew, to take over here.”

“I’ve had all of this I want,” Teccard agreed. “And I’ll sure be glad when you don’t have to muck around in this kind of slop.”

“Man works from sun to sun,” the sergeant twiddled the dial, “but woman’s work is never done. In the police department.”

“Far as that goes,” he got out his twisters, “one cop is enough... in any one family. Don’t you think?”

G-Men Detective, July 1948

It really was one devil of a night, “Demon” Ames told himself bitterly. Stinging cold, pitch black — with a gale from the Adirondacks to whip freezing rain off the lake with biting force. Just the kind of night a gun-crazy killer would pick to blast his way free from the Great Meadow pen.

Bad enough for the Demon himself to have to be out in this devil’s brew of sleet and slush — a lot worse for Minnie, his motorcycle, to be here with him. He should have come without her. The ole gal wasn’t used to this rugged exposure. It wouldn’t take much to lay her up for a few days. He patted her rear, consolingly.

“We’ll stick it out five minutes more, Minnie.” He pulled up the cuff of his sheep-lined jacket to glance at the radium dial on his wrist. “If we don’t pick up any scent by ten o’clock, we’ll scoot back to barracks. This Medini gunned his way out of that mess hall at suppertime. Say around six-thirty. Comstocks’ seventy-five miles south of here. If the creep is making his getaway in anything speedier’n an ox cart, he’d be long gone past Crown Point, hours ago.”

He broke an icicle off Minnie’s tail light; removed one leather mitten, warmed the lens to dissolve the film of sleet. Across the road, the three red flares he’d set out flickered fitfully in the gusts lashing westward from the Champlain bridge along NY 46 — died momentarily to thin scarlet tongues tasting the witches’ broth of swirling air, ice and water.

There’d been no traffic for his one-man road block to halt, anyhow, the last half-hour. It was too early for the big sixteen-wheelers thundering through freight up from the south — too late for stray vans or empty tank trucks to be rumbling down US 9 from Plattsburg up north. And nobody with sense enough to shift gears would be crossing the lake into Vermont in weather as foul as this.