Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“Inside,” he said.

The man Jackie found himself facing might have been, except for the evening clothes, a middle-class merchant watching the approach of a customer. He had a round, placid face under a naked skull rimmed by a gray fringe. Rimless glasses covered his eyes, reflecting the light in a way to give him an appearance of bright blindness. His mouth was small, like a child’s, and the lips were pink and tender and pleasantly bowed.

The hood said, “This is Jackie Brand. He wants to know where Peg is. Me, I don’t even know who she is.”

Eyebrows raised above rimless glass. “Peg?”

“You know damned well who Peg is,” Jackie said. “And I know damned well you snatched her.”

The placid pink face was not visibly affected. “Kidnapping is a serious charge, Mr. Brand. I’m sure you’ll want to retract it. Perhaps, if you’ll tell me precisely what’s on your mind, I can reassure you.”

“Okay. I’ll play along for a minute. I’m going in a fixed fight tomorrow night with Emmet Darcy. You know that. A little while ago your errand boy served notice that I was to go for a win. You know that, too, because you sent him to tell me. I told him nix, and he told me I’d think different when I got home. At the time, I didn’t know what he meant. When I got home, I found out. Peg’s gone. My wife Peg, as if you didn’t know. Like I said, you snatched her to make sure I’d follow instructions.”

Ryan laughed. “I suppose that’s the kind of reasoning one should expect from a punched-out pug. Let’s get this straight. I have a guarantee that you’ll win your fight tomorrow night. If that arrangement is violated, I’ll hold responsible the man who made the guarantee, not you. On the strength of the understanding I’ve invested a considerable amount with the bookies. Although the money is important, it is really incidental. The primary object is to discipline an upstart. I consider the arrangement adequate as it stands, and I’ve taken no steps to reinforce it. In brief, I don’t know where your wife is, and I don’t care.”

Maybe, as Ryan suggested, you couldn’t expect much from the brain of a punched-out pug. But it could still solve elementary problems when someone gave it a hint. It could see, for instance, that the only person who could have dealt with Ryan was Spud Perkins. Nasty little pop-eyed Spud.

But Spud wouldn’t have snatched Peg. Whatever else he might have done, he would never have touched Peg. Not for any reason whatever. Peg was the only person on earth that Spud gave a damn for.

But he might have an idea about it. He’d been mixed in the business from the start, and he might have an idea. Inside all that deceptive thyroid ugliness, Spud had a brain that worked like a fine watch. Standing there in front of Ryan with rage and fear a riot in his entrails, Jackie was aware of a driving compulsion to find Spud right away. Without another word, he spun away to the door.

Spud lived in a single room on the third floor of a dilapidated hotel on the south side of town. He sat slumped in a chair by a window that looked down into the dark well of an interior court. His shirt collar was open around his scarred and sunken throat. His lips were split and swollen, and every time he opened them his shrunken upper gum showed through. He looked old and sick, ready to die. But his eyes, looking up at Jackie, had the familiar expression that made Jackie want to smash his lower plate just the way he’d smashed the upper.

“What the hell do you want, tramp?” he said.

The words came out like mush, leaking air around their edges. Jackie closed his eyes and clenched his fists, cutting off the sight of Spud, fighting the effects of a tumultuous stirring of nausea and hate.

“Peg’s gone,” he said.

Spud just sat quietly in his chair for a minute, as if he were trying to comprehend what Jackie meant, and then he went crazy. He bounced out of the chair with a little squeal and grabbed Jackie by the lapels of his coat, twisting and jerking. His voice was shrill and frightened, like a woman’s.

“Gone? What you mean, gone? Damn you to hell, what’s happened to Peg?”

Seeing Spud go to pieces that way seemed to have a reverse effect on Jackie. He felt calmer and stronger, suddenly very sorry for the ugly little man. Looking down at the hand twisted in his lapels, he said nothing until the hand relaxed and dropped away.

“I thought maybe you’d know.”

“Me? You think I’d do Peg any harm?”

“No. I just thought you might have an idea.”

Spud turned and walked away. Across the room, he stood quietly, thinking, rubbing a finger along the hard edge of his upper gum.

“Rudy Ryan sent a gunsel to see me today,” Jackie said. “The gunsel said Ryan wants me to win tomorrow night. Thanks to you, Ryan knows all about my deal with Benny Lester and Jay Paley. At first I thought Ryan might be holding Peg as insurance, but I went to see Ryan, and now I don’t think so. He says he’s got a guarantee that I’ll win and that’s all he needs. A guarantee from you. No one but you could have made a deal like that.”

Spud turned back, and now there was no evidence of his brief insanity. His eyes smeared themselves all over Jackie, and his bruised lips curled back off his gums.

“It’s what I get,” he said softly. “It’s what I get for playing nurse to a second-rate pug who should have been a plumber. You got no talent, you got no brains, you ought to drop dead. Sure, I made the deal with Ryan, all right. I knew Ryan was ripe to cut Jay Paley down, and I thought this would be a good time to begin. You know why I did it, tramp? But that’s a silly question. You wouldn’t know. You haven’t got the brains to know. I’ll tell you why I did it, but first of all I’ll tell you it wasn’t for you. For all I care, you could sell your stinking soul, and I wouldn’t lift a hand to stop you or spend a nickel to buy it back for you. It was for Peg I did it. It was for the only person on this sour earth I give a damn for. And she has to be married to you. Of all the guys available to a girl like her, for some damn reason no sane man could understand, she has to be married to you.”

It was strange, but Jackie wasn’t mad at all. It was as if, at last, Spud had lost the power to affect him. “You did a pretty good job,” he said. “I’ll have to win now. I’ll have to win to save your hide from Rudy Ryan. You made the guarantee, and I’ll have to keep it.”

Spud began to laugh, a soft, hysterical quivering of his flabby body. “No. You won’t win. You won’t win for two reasons. The first reason is, you haven’t got the stuff. Emmet Darcy’s a tough kid coming up. A hard, fast boy headed for the top, if the lice he works for don’t wreck him before he makes it. He’ll cut you to shreds in six, eight rounds. You haven’t got a prayer. It’s a laugh, it’s a great big belly laugh, to think of Benny Lester and Jay Paley buying a fight that was already on ice.”

“If I’ve got no chance, why this fat deal of yours? Why nudge Rudy Ryan into forcing me to go all out?”

Spud hammered his forehead gently with the heel of one hand. “Stupid,” he said. “So damn stupid. It was just to make you try. It was just to keep you straight. You really think you could take a dive and make it look legitimate? Not in a million years. It’d stink. It’d stink like the rendering works. And right in the middle of the stink would be Peg. Realizing that you’d done it for her in the only way a dim wit like you could figure to do it. Blaming herself and breaking up in little pieces. I couldn’t let it happen. Not to Peg.”

A trickle of saliva ran out of the corner of his mouth and down across his chin. He found a handkerchief and wiped it away, his lips twisting bitterly.