Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

He didn’t dare leave that here. He started back.

“That’s it,” a voice behind him commanded harshly. “Don’t turn! Just stick your thumbs in your ears! And stand still! I said — don’t turn around!”

Don froze rigidly, head tipped back, hands tensed at his sides. He held his breath waiting for the shock of the bullet. Sweat trickled down his nose, dropped to his chin.

An ugly, blood-caked face stared at him from the round gilt mirror on the wall directly in front of him. His own face, distorted by reflection in that convex surface! But the blood smear wasn’t any optical illusion; half his face was covered with reddish-brown streaks.

“Give him the pat!” The harsh voice. But it wasn’t addressed to Don.

Thick fingers fumbled at his hips, armpits, belt.

“Clean,” announced another, less aggressive voice close behind him.

In the mirror, Don saw the man’s cold eyes and hard-jawed face.

“Poosh him in,” ordered Harsh Voice.

A gun poked into the small of Don’s back. He stalked stiffly into the living-room.

The hard-jawed man moved the muzzle of his gun up a little, so it prodded Don’s spine between his shoulder-blades.

“Ha. A casket case. Why’d you kill him, bud?”

Don let his breath go out in a long whoosh. “I didn’t. I never saw him before in my life until a few minutes ago. You cops?”

Harsh Voice came around Don to inspect the body. “You think we was brush salesmen?” He was a barrel-chested individual with a face like a prize fighter’s, battered, flattened nose and scarred eyebrows. “Siddown there.” He waggled his revolver at a lowslung chair. “Call in, Eddie.”

Don thought he was going to be sick, soon, as he plumped down into the chair. It wasn’t merely the cobblestones being cracked, up there in the top of his skull, either. It was the realization he was in a very nasty corner indeed.

“Say you never saw this lug before?” The broken-nosed plainclothesman squatted beside the corpse, his gun still aiming carelessly toward Don’s wishbone.

“Not until about five minutes ago. When I came out of it after somebody dropped the boom on me.” Don heard Eddie, out in the hall, asking for Lieutenant Wiley at headquarters. That might be a break. Don and Annalou both knew Wiley; the Lieutenant and his prowl partner sometimes dropped into Outside Inn for a snack, late at night.

Frank stuck out his lower lip. “How you happen to be here, alone with this stiff?”

Don told him.

“Anybody with you when you got this phone call, Rixey?”

“No... I don’t have anyone working for me in the shop.”

Eddie came back. “Lieutenant’ll be over in two shakes, Frank.”

“Sniff around, see if you can get onto that dame who phones in that tip.” Frank dismissed his side-kick. “See anybody on the way over here, Rixey?”

“Nobody I know.”

“Ha. An’ you never did get a peek at this dame you claim phones you this hurry-up call?”

“No.” Don was about to say he’d know her, on account of her voice, if he ran into her again. But then he remembered how affected she’d been on the phone — probably she’d been disguising her voice, anyway.

“Say you didn’t see the party who you figure slugged you?”

“Didn’t see anybody. Until I came out of my fog an’ found him... on the floor beside me.”

“You couldn’t of got that smack on the conk, fightin’ with Slenz, could you?” Frank lifted the muzzle of his pistol speculatively.

“Slenz?” Don was hypnotized by the black, staring eye of the gun. “No. I wasn’t fighting with him. Or with anybody. I tell you 1 never saw him before. Didn’t even know his name.”

Frank rocked back on his heels.

“Don’t recognize him, hah?”

The hair at the back of Don’s neck prickled. He hadn’t really looked at the man’s face until right now. The bullet wounds, the gaping mouth... they’d kept him from noticing the cleft chin; the sharp hawk-beak of a nose — the small, delicate ears.

Don recognized him now, all right — from the descriptions in the papers!

“This is the gun goof who shot that paymaster an’ got away with thirty yards this morning,” Frankie corroborated Don’s guess. “1 don’t suppose you been anywheres near Clark-McGeekin’s fact’ry recently?”

“Not since yest—” Don caught himself. But too late...

Frank was up on his feet. “Keep on pourin’, Rixey. We’ll get all this stuff sooner or later, anyway. Just save yourself a lot of trouble if you spill it now.”

“The office manager called me over yesterday to tune down the amplifiers on the office intercom system,” Don said. “That’s all! 1 don’t know one single thing about the robbery!”

“Lessee.” Frank’s chin dropped to his chest in concentration. He scratched his ear with his free hand. “You case the job. Slenz pulls it. You come here to get your split. He won’t give it to you. You mix it up...”

Don pointed to the Klaravox console against the wall, beyond the dead man. “1 came to fix that radio. For Mrs. Garnet. That’s all. Period. You can’t ring me in on any holdup!”

Frank stepped over the corpse, snapped the ON knob of the big set. “I never hear of a radio man acting as caser for a mob. But they’s a first time for everything.”

The radio began to emit a queer, muffled croaking, as a popular song came over the air.

“I guess a little tunin’ is all it needs,” Frank said.

“No!” Don cried. “That’s—”

The hall door opened abruptly. Frank wheeled around, eyes on the arched doorway.

Don came out of the chair, got to the console. He swung it out from the wall, was peering in the open back of the set before Frank realized it.

The detective’s pistol swung in a sharp arc.

“I tol’ you to siddown. You want to be able to plead, in court tomorrow, you stay set! Hear?”

Don backed over to the low-slung chair, dropped into it. “I—” he began.

“Shuddup,” growled Frank. “Hello, Lieutenant. I think we got this ball a yarn pretty well wound up, already.”

The body’d been removed. The camera crew’d come and gone. Tarpaulin covered the carpet stains. The console had been shoved back against the wall.

Eddie and Frank were combing the building for the mysterious informant who’d phoned headquarters. Only Lieutenant Wiley remained in the living-room with Don and Annalou.

She’d been there long enough for worry to congeal into cold fear. When the patrol car picked her up at Outside Inn, she’d been angry — after waiting an hour for Don to show up.

When they brought her to the apartment she was horrified at the murdered man — at Don’s battered head. Now — watching the skepticism on Wiley’s long, collie-dog face — she was panicky. Plainly, the Lieutenant didn’t believe a word Don was saying:

“This dame is tall, thin, holds herself kind of stuck-up. Maybe twenty years old. Not much color in her face — uses lipstick that makes her look like her mouth’d been cut with a razor. Wearin’ a sort of grayish suit—”

“Powder blue,” Annalou corrected. “Hat to match.”

The Lieutenant ran fingers through silver curls at his temples. “Thought you told Frank you’d never seen her.”

“Didn’t realize I had. Came to me just a minute ago. She was at Annalou’s counter, around seven. When she came in with this boy-friend of hers, I was telling Annalou how I’d been at Clark-McGeekin’s yesterday on a job. Then I said I’d go back to my shop an’ work till nine.”

Annalou nodded. “That’s right, Lieutenant. Because—”

“One at a time.” Wiley was sardonic. “Hard enough to follow him.”

“My truck was parked there,” Don went on, earnestly. With Regal’s phone number on it. All she had to do was come back here to her apartment, ring me up. Why I’m so sure it was her — just when I was leaving the Inn, she says something to this guy with her about a Patsy. She meant me... to be the patsy. Site thought it would be a cinch to frame me.”