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

That was the first instant that Charles was aware of a fourth person in the room. The man called Creely stood up from his chair against a wall and came forward. He was about the same height as Charles but much thinner, with narrow shoulders, and he must have been twenty years older. He was dressed in a conservative gray suit that was obviously expensive, and he used the cane in his right hand, leaning upon it heavily, as if it were utilitarian. His face was deeply lined, beginning to sag a little from its frame.

Tomlinson said, “Mr. Creely’s the one who found your wife.”

Charles stood to face Creely. “How could that be so? I believe I know all my wife’s friends, and this man is a stranger. If she was dead in the apartment, who let him in?”

“No one let me in, Mr. Bruce.” Creely’s voice was dry and precise. “I let myself in. With this.”

He extended a hand, palm up, and lying in the palm was a key. Charles lifted incredulous eyes from the key to Creely’s face, and he experienced a feeling that might have been terror when he saw the steady, virulent hatred in the man’s eyes. It’s always a shock to see hatred in the eyes of a stranger.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t you?” Creely’s laugh was an arid whisper. “Surely a man like you has no difficulty in understanding the significance of a key to a lady’s apartment. I used it discreetly, Mr. Bruce. Only on those occasions — rather frequent, I must say — when you were using the one you have to another lady’s apartment.”

Tomlinson cut back in, speaking slowly in a kind of cadence timed by the shaking of his head, “Your wife was apparently having an affair, Mr. Bruce, just as you were. Mr. Creely has been able to establish pretty definitely that he and your wife planned marriage. It seems she intended to tell you within a few days.” He stopped talking, but his head kept right on shaking, and after a moment his voice picked up the tempo again. “So you see, Mr. Bruce, it isn’t likely your wife would have killed herself because you’d left her. It isn’t likely she’d have cared at all.”

That was the wholly incredible thing. The thing that had never seriously crossed his mind. That she wouldn’t care. Most of all, that she had planned to leave him — him! — for a gray, sagging, crippled specimen like Creely. And in the final phase of his destruction, with the terrible realization that the police would pin it on him since they knew Wanda was not a suicide, it was the cruel cut to his vanity that hurt him most. It actually drove him a little mad.

It took both Tomlinson and Benson to pull him off Creely.

Originally published in Manhunt , June 1954.

I drew an ace, and I needed it. With the pair that I already had, it established something substantial. Luck was going my way. I lifted my eyes from the cards to the face of Leo Gall, and I thought to myself again that it was like a fat olive with features. His eyes were screwed back into little puffs of skin as he examined his hand, and his pimento-red lips were pursed into the shape of a wet kiss. It was a face I didn’t like, though I pretended to like it for my health’s sake, so I slanted my line of vision off over his shoulder to the face of Hilda Hearn.

Hilda was tired. About midnight she’d gone into the bedroom for a nap, but when she’d returned a couple of hours later, it was obvious that the nap had been too late and too short to do her much good. The muscles of her face had a tight, drawn look, her eyes were smudged, and her mouth was a soft scarlet smear. She slept too little and smoked too much, ate too little and drank too much, did too much of everything bad for her and too little of anything good, but tousled and smeared and worn to the bone, she was still a lovely assembly of female parts. Sprawled on the sofa with a highball in her hand, she combed free fingers through copper curls and sent me a smoke signal from smoldering eyes.

“One grand,” Leo Gall said.

Beside me, between me and Leo as the betting went, Hugh Lawson cursed softly and bitterly, slapping his hand into the discard. His mouth and eyes were pinched at the corners by the long strain of losing, and his fingers shook as they fumbled a cigarette out of a limp pack and carried it to his lips. I did some quick calculation and figured he must have dropped at least twenty grand. Just about what I’d contributed myself to the fat welfare of our host. I also figured Hugh could afford it about as much as I could, which was not at all. He was a slim guy with a lean, hungry face and blond hair cut very short and square on top the way a lot of college boys wear it. He’d got most of his education in pool rooms and clip joints, but he looked a hell of a lot like a college boy.

“Out,” he said.

I put my faith in three bullets and met the thousand. I couldn’t bump it, because I didn’t have a good bump left. A couple of hundred in chips, that was all.

“One raise, I’m a dead duck,” I said.

Leo laughed softly and wetly behind a red, white and blue mountain. “Credit’s good, boy. With me, it’s always good.”

Around the circle 90 degrees, Kal Magnus sighed and rolled his soaked cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. His hand struck the discard and flew apart, but his expression was genial, signifying his indifference to luck that always ran one way or the other and would be good next time, or the next or the next, if it happened to be bad tonight. Being able to carry your luck comfortably from bad to good makes a hell of a difference in your attitude. Kal’s was bad tonight, all right, ten grand bad, but you’d have thought he was playing for matches.

He said, “If you’re worried about me, you’re wasting it. I’m out.”

Leo smiled. It was a very small smile, slightly sad. It was the one he’d been using all night. The one he used when he was looking down your throat.

“No raise? That’s too bad. Well, you paid to see them, Andy, so have a good look.”

He spread them slowly in ascending order, five little cards worth my last grand, and whichever end you read them from, going up or down, they came out straight. Better any time than three lousy aces.

I added my junk to the discard and said, “Take it away.”

He took it. On the ring finger of his right hand was a diamond worth more than the pot. In the thick nest of black hair growing above the second joint of the finger, it looked like a glittering egg. And it was then, watching his fat hands rake in my dough, that I got one of those crazy ideas a guy sometimes gets when it’s late, too late, and the world’s gone sour. It was then that I began to think what fun it would be to clobber him. We began to settle the score, and all the time we were settling it, I kept seeing those fat white fingers with the black hair growing out of them. I saw them over and over in a dozen repellent engagements — dealing cards that brought me no luck, dragging in the fat pots, creeping like slugs over the soft flesh of Hilda Hearn.

I closed my eyes and kept them closed for half a minute, but the fingers were there behind the lids, so I opened them again, and the first thing I saw was his red, wet mouth. The lips were so soft and thick and full of blood. They looked as if they’d smash on his big white teeth like a glutted leech.

I went sort of blind, I guess. Blind to everything and everyone but Leo Gall. And I functioned for a few seconds in the terrible urgency of a single grim compulsion.

I stood up and leaned across the table and clobbered him.

He got a glimpse of knuckles coming at him, and his face had, for a split second, a ludicrous expression of surprise. His chair rocked back on its rear legs, hung for a moment in balance, and then crashed over. He hit the floor on his shoulders and skidded like a clown on ice, but there wasn’t really anything funny about it. His head smacked the sharp edge of the frame of the sofa Hilda was sprawled on, and there was a dull, sodden sound like the bursting of a rotten melon, and he lay very still on his back with his fat gut rising like a strange and ugly growth from the floor, and it was not funny at all.