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

He had taken the deck of cards from one of the two bags he had carried upstairs at three o’clock. It was on a chair beside the bed now, spread open to make available the items in it, which were merely some clothing and some toilet articles. The other bag, much smaller, was on the floor beside the bed, closed and locked. Inside it was one hundred thousand dollars in bills.

He kept looking at intervals down into the street because he was waiting for someone. He had arranged to meet someone here today, a woman, but the time was indefinite, and there was no reason to expect that he would just happen to be looking into the street at the time when she appeared, if she appeared there at all.

His reasons for arriving at three o’clock in the morning in this small town and registering under a false name in this small hotel were related to the money in the small bag, and to the woman for whom he was waiting. Last night he had taken the money from another man’s safe, and the woman he was waiting for was another man’s wife. The money and the woman had belonged to the same man, and the man was powerful and dangerous.

Steve Miklos, playing solitaire and looking at intervals down into the street, was neither. He wasn’t even very intelligent, as intelligence is measured. He was, however, very handsome, and women usually liked him in excess of discretion. As if to reassure himself that this was true, that he was handsome and frequently desired by women, he got up suddenly from the table by the window and went into the bathroom. He snapped on the light above the lavatory and inspected himself in the mirror with what seemed narcissistic absorption, but as a matter of fact, he accepted his good looks with no more than lethargic satisfaction and a kind of undirected gratitude. He was not inordinately vain, and valued his appearance only for the advantages it gave him. Removing a comb from the hip pocket of his trousers, he began to draw it through his black hair, which was thick and lustrous and curly. The curls, released from the teeth of the comb, sprang crisply into soft coils. After a minute or two, he replaced the comb in the hip pocket and returned to the table beside the window. Gathering the cards, still lying in the precise arrangement of his last defeat, he began to shuffle them swiftly with a skill that suggested professional intimacy; and this was indeed the case, for he had worked, among other things, as a dealer of blackjack.

Holding the deck in his left hand, prepared to lay out another game, he paused to look down into the street, and he continued to sit very still in that position, suddenly fixed, the cards cupped neatly in his left hand and the right poised above them, for a bus had pulled up to the curb in front of the hotel, which also served as a depot, and a woman was descending from the bus. He could see, as she descended, a flash of nylon knees below a short skirt. She took a couple of steps along the side of the bus and stood waiting with a kind of arrogant grace that was apparent, even from the sharp angle of his vision from above, while the driver got her luggage from a compartment, matched cases, and put it out on the sidewalk. After he had closed the compartment, the driver picked up the bags and carried them into the hotel, the woman following two or three paces behind. She walked with the same grace with which she had stood waiting, breasts high and long legs scissoring, and she gave the effect of an expensive woman, which was what she was. She was an expensive and well-kept woman, the wife of a rich man, the woman Steve Miklos was waiting for.

He had risen and leaned toward the window as she walked behind the bus driver toward the hotel entrance, to sharpen his angle of vision and keep her in sight for seconds longer, and he was aware of a rising excitement within him. This was unusual and slightly disturbing, for he was usually rather brutally phlegmatic in his response to women, although he disguised it, and his intensity with this one, who was different from all the others who had been and would be, made him feel naked and vulnerable. He had a strong compulsion to go downstairs immediately to meet her, but this was contrary to their plans, which had been carefully made, and so he sank back onto the chair, acutely conscious of the hard beating of his heart.

She would take a room, paying for a day in advance, as he had paid for two. She would give as a reason, as he had, that she planned to leave very early in the morning of the next day and did not wish to be delayed by paying when she left. In her room, after an interval, she would call the desk and ask to be connected with the room of Stephen Miklos, using, of course, the name that Stephen Miklos had used. The disclosure of a room number, his or hers, would then bring them together, here or there.

In the meanwhile, there were the long, last minutes of waiting to be endured and survived. Getting up again from the chair, he lit a cigarette and went over and lay down across the bed on his back, drawling on the cigarette and blowing smoke upward in long plumes. The smoke rose and thinned and disintegrated against the faded ceiling. Waiting for her to call, in order to relieve the tedium of time, he began to review deliberately the way they had come from where they had been to where they now were.

Her name was Hannah Archer, and she was married to a man named Hugo Archer, who was a man with many interests in many places about which certain authorities had more curiosity than knowledge. One of his local places, a minor interest, was a combination restaurant and casino. You could eat fine food on the first floor to the muted sounds of a string ensemble that played routinely the music of such composers as Victor Herbert and Rudolph Friml and Jerome Kern, and was capable of playing something else upon request. On the second floor was the casino, and it was here that Steve Miklos worked. It was here, at least, that he was seen each night, although the character and purpose of his work were never clearly defined. He merely moved among the guests, being charming and decorative in a white tie, especially to the guests on the distaff side, and extra especially, among those, to Hannah Archer, who was entitled to preferred treatment by virtue of being, not a guest, but Mr. Big’s wife. Hannah had spent many nights in the casino, for she loved the quiet crowd, richly dressed, and the subtle suspense that was part of the quality of games of chance. If she began spending even more nights there after the sudden appearance of Steve, Hugo Archer seemed not to notice, or if he noticed, not to mind. This could have been a result of Hannah’s discretion, of course, for even after she began seeing Steve alone and away from the casino, she managed to sustain with him in company an overt attitude that was never more than the kind of sophisticated flirtation that she engaged in harmlessly with a dozen others.

Even when they were alone, her discretion, although considerably qualified, was not abandoned, and she was clearly not inclined to commit herself in passion to some-thing she would regret in satiety. There was far too much to lose, and Hugo Archer was always a threat. Squat and ugly in a strangely alluring way, he was richer than anyone knew, and he wielded immense power in a shadowy world without appreciable inhibitions. He commanded, Steve knew, a small army of dedicated men who would do for him at a word whatever he wanted done but no longer wanted to do for himself, having acquired a certain position. He was not a man, in brief, to betray. He could, when it suited him, forget a friend or a favor, but he never forgot an enemy or an offense.

And so that was the way things had been before becoming as they now were, and they had begun to change, to become different from before, suddenly yesterday afternoon, only twenty-four hours ago. They had been then, yesterday, in Hannah’s home, which was a place he had rarely been, and he was there at this time only because Hugo Archer was away on one of the mysterious business trips that sometimes took him out into his shadowy world. Hannah was lying propped on her elbows on the floor. She was wearing a white jersey blouse and a pair of tight black velvet pants, her legs bent back above her thighs from the knees and her heels dangling above her lovely stern. She looked beautiful and at least ten years younger than she was, which was thirty-five. Balanced precariously in the thick pile of off-white carpeting a few inches from her nose was a tall glass filled with ice and vodka and orange juice. A long, transparent plastic straw was leaning against the glass on the inside, and every once in a while, Hannah, without ever touching the glass with her hands, would stretch a little forward and suck briefly on the straw. Doing this now, she smiled lazily at Steve, who was sitting on a soft white leather ottoman and watching her with candid desire in brown eyes that looked black in passion and anger.