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

The next night at eight, I was at Kirby’s door. I rang the bell, and Kirby let me in. He was wearing most of a tux, the exception being a maroon smoking jacket with a black satin sash. I happen to have an aversion to satin sashes, on smoking jackets or anything else, and this put me in a bad humor. It made it more difficult than ever to be reasonable about the beating he had bought for me. Apparently I was wearing nothing to which he had a comparable aversion. His long, sallow face, divided under a long nose by a long, thin moustache, was perfectly amiable.

“Hello, Mark,” he said. “Glad to see you.”

“Even broke?” I said.

“Sorry.” His face lost its amiability. “Poverty depresses me.”

“Never mind. I’m not one of your huddled masses. I come loaded.”

“Good.” The amiability was back. “I was sure you could manage if you really tried.”

I took the ready bundle from a pocket, two grand exactly, and handed it to him. He transferred it to a pocket of his offending jacket with hardly more than a glance, and this put me in a worse humor than I was already in, which was bad enough. I knew he would count the money the moment I was gone, and it would have been less annoying if he had counted it honestly in front of me.

“Now I’ll have the IOU, if you don’t mind,” I said.

“Certainly, Mark.” He took the paper out of the same pocket the money had gone into. “I hope you don’t resent the little reminder I was forced to send you.”

“Not at all. It was very courteous and regretful, and it only hit me where it doesn’t show.”

“I’m glad you understand. Will you have a drink before you leave?”

“Bourbon and water.”

“Good. I’ll have one with you.”

He turned and walked over to a liquor cabinet and worked for a minute with a bottle and glasses. “I’m sorry I can’t ask you to stay for more than one, but I’m expecting company.”

“Company’s nice if it’s nice company.”

“This is nice. Someone you once knew, I believe. Nora Erskine? Charming girl. Beautiful. She has a very warm nature. Very generous.”

He came toward me with a glass in each hand, and I hit him in the mouth. Don’t ask me why. Maybe a disciple of Freud could tell you, but I can’t. He fell backward in a shower of bourbon and came up with a little gun in his hand, which seemed to indicate that he hadn’t been quite so amiable and trusting as he’d appeared. The cut-glass decanter was there on a table beside me, and I picked it up and smashed it over his head, and he fell down dying and was dead in less than a minute.

Stripped to the bone, that was how I killed him. I tried to remember if I had touched anything besides the decanter and the outside of the door, and there seemed to be nothing, and so I wiped the neck of the decanter with my handkerchief and retrieved the two grand, which was no good to him, and left. I went home and thought about it, wondering if I should leave town incognito, but I decided that there was no need. The goons knew that I was supposed to be at Kirby’s, of course, but the goons were old pros. They’d done a job and were through with it. They couldn’t care less that Jack Kirby had got himself killed. As a matter of fact, if they made the logical deduction, I would probably go up immeasurably in their regard. The result of my thinking was the decision that it was unnecessary to take any precipitate action. I only needed to proceed with caution, as the signs beside the highways say, in the direction I was going.

But that was then, and now was different. Now I knew that Nora knew, and Nora was not an old pro, and Nora would surely someday tell. Maybe not now or soon, but someday, the day she couldn’t stand the pressure any longer, and the passage of time would not help or save me, for there is no statute of limitations on murder, not even murder which might turn out to be, with luck and a good lawyer, of lesser degree than first. And there was always the solid possibility, of course, of that grim first.

I could see that I had come to the time of decision now, and I didn’t want to face it. Like many another in the same predicament, I found a way to avoid it temporarily, if not permanently. In any case it was simple. I simply went to sleep.

When I awoke again, it was evening, but the hour of the day was the only thing that had changed, not me or the problem or anything that had to be considered and done or not done. I got up and washed my face in cold water and put on a tie and jacket and went downstairs onto the street. There was a newsstand on the corner, half a block away, and I went down there and bought an evening edition and carried it back to the apartment without looking at it. In the apartment, I poured another double shot and drank half of it and sat down and opened the newspaper, and there was the story on page one: Material Witness in Kirby Slaying Flees State. I read the story slowly, finishing the second shot of the double as I read, and it was reported about the way Corey had told it to me in the morning, how Nora was believed to know the identity of Kirby’s visitor at the time of the murder, and how she had refused to talk, and how, finally, she had escaped into the next state, from which she could not be extradited. It was also reported in the story exactly where she had gone and now was, the home of her childhood not more than a hundred miles away, and this was what I needed in order to make the decision I had to make, and you can see why. Now that her location was no longer a secret shared by me and the police, Nora was in greater danger and, as a consequence, so was I. There was therefore no longer any reason for indecision or delay, although there was probably no reason to hurry either.

I sat there for quite a long while, and it began to get dark outside in the city streets, and the incandescents and fluorescents and neons came on to drive the darkness back. I finally became aware, via my stomach, that I hadn’t eaten all day, and that I had better eat something before I took another drink, which I wanted, and so I went out and had a steak in a restaurant down the street a few blocks. After eating, I walked back and had a couple more drinks in the apartment, and then I went down and got my car out of the garage in the basement and drove across town to a place where they were having a stud game. I won five hundred skins in the game, the good streak still running in the wake of the bad streak, and at some point in the time it took to win that much money, my mind made itself up and I knew what I was going to do. I dropped out of the game about three o’clock in the morning, a little after, and it was almost four when I got home.

In the bedroom of the apartment, I changed into slacks, sport shirt and jacket, heavier shoes. From a shelf in the closet I got a leather case that contained a .30 — .30 rifle. I had been very good with a rifle when I was younger. There was no reason to believe that I wasn’t still almost as good. I assembled the rifle and checked it and took it apart again. I put the parts back into the case and half a dozen cartridges into my jacket pocket. I don’t know why I took so many, for chances were long that a dozen would not be enough if one wasn’t. Carrying the case, I went back downstairs to my car and drove out of town.

It took me about three hours driving slowly, to reach the town where I had grown up a hundred years or so ago, and I did not drive into it after reaching it. Instead, I drove around it on roads I remembered, and beyond it on another road until I saw ahead of me, quite a distance and on the left, the white house of the Erskines. It sat rather far back from the road at the end of a tree-lined drive, though not so far as memory had it, and it had once been considered the finest farm home in the county, if not the state. Now it did not seem one-half so grand, a different house than I had known before, as if the first had been razed and a second built in its place in an identical design, with identical detail, but on a reduced scale.