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

“There’s a dead man on the floor, honey. Someone killed him. It adds up to cops. When you leave, I’ll call them.”

I stood there with my back to her, and for quite a while there was no sound at all. Then there was the silken rustle of movement and, from a long, long way off, maybe the distance to the end of everything, the faint, oily click of the door catch. My ear drums picked up the sound and amplified it, rolling it around the interior of my skull like the thunder of artillery around a rim of enclosing hills.

The telephone was on a table beyond the body. The outstretched arm seemed to be pointing to it, showing the way like a sign on a map. Making a careful detour, I went over and called the police.

“I want to report a murder,” I said.

I waited until the call was channeled to Homicide and a tired voice came on. We went through a weary-routine of question and answer.

Name?

Address?

Sit tight and don’t touch anything.

I cradled the phone and went out into the kitchen.

In the kitchen, I sat on a tall stool and lit another cigarette. The faucet was dripping in the sink. I figured that it took about three seconds for a drop of water to form on the lip of the faucet and fall off into the sink. The drops struck the porcelain with almost mathematical regularity, making small tapping sounds. Tap... tap... tap. I started to count the sounds of the drops striking the porcelain, and I had counted four hundred and six when there was movement in the living room. I got off the stool and went in.

A medium-sized guy in a loose brown suit was standing just inside the vestibule. His eyes toured me as I came through the door, moving off to a point of focus on the wall, as if they’d had all they wanted in short order. He had a narrow face with a long hooked nose and flesh that sagged from the bones. His voice was resigned, characterized by a heavy patience that remained as a habit even when it wasn’t appropriate.

“Your name Henry Frost?”

“That’s right.”

“You call Homicide?”

“Yes.”

“I’m it. Dunn’s the name. Detective-Lieutenant.”

Maybe I was supposed to make like a host. Maybe I was supposed to smile and be amiable. His eyes crossed me again to another point of focus, and he waited with that heavy patience and gave me no help whatever.

“The body’s this side of the sofa,” I said.

He moved to the sofa with a kind of easy shuffle and looked over the back. “So it is,” he said.

Behind him, another man materialized from the vestibule and leaned against the jamb. He had something in his teeth and was working at it with a wooden match. He didn’t bother to look at me at all.

“Who is he?” Dunn said.

“His name was Caldwell. Bruce Caldwell.”

“Who’s been here with you?” He stabbed a linger at the body. “Besides him, I mean.”

“No one.”

“You wearing perfume?”

“Do I look like the kind of man who’d wear perfume, for God’s sake?”

His eyes smeared me again with their weary patience. “I don’t know. I don’t know what a man who’d wear perfume is supposed to look like. As far as I’m concerned, you look like a man who’d do anything, even murder. No offense. That’s just a way of saying you look a hell of a lot like every other man I’ve ever seen.” He stabbed again with the finger. “I wonder if he’s wearing it.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

His eyebrows arched hairy backs. “That supposed to mean something?”

“You might figure it to mean something.”

“Lover-boy, you mean? Hot number with the dames?”

“Something like that.”

“You married?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if I could figure that to mean something?”

“You could try, but you’re wasting your time.”

He shrugged and a ragged little sound that might have been a chuckle came out of his throat. “Hell, I’m wasting time right now.” He moved around the sofa, the thin edges of his nostrils quivering. “You smell the perfume? Don’t you?”

I smelled it, all right. A delicate Stringency suspended in cordite It made me sick.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know any dame who wears perfume that smells like that?”

“I can’t think of any. It’s probably a common scent.”

“Sure. Probably. It may have been a dame who got him. If he was the kind of guy you imply, a dame’s a good bet.” He stopped and looked up at me again, and his lips curved in a gentle smile. “Or a husband,” he said.

Kneeling beside the body, he got a handful of hair and lifted the head, looking in at an angle at the exposed profile. When he stood up, his hand was bloody. Taking a white handkerchief from his hip pocket, he wiped the hand carefully.

“Pretty,” he said. “Real pretty. Lay him in a casket so the back of his head doesn’t show, he’ll be a real tear-jerker for those dames you mentioned. Well, we got work to do. You go on back in the kitchen and wait around. I’ll talk to you some more later.”

I went back into the kitchen and crawled onto the stool again. I heard more men come into the living room from the hall. They moved around, talking, and after awhile I heard the explosion of flash-bulbs and caught the acrid odor of powder.

I could also hear the faucet dripping. I started counting the small sounds again, and the higher I counted the louder the sounds got, until finally each drip was like the detonation of a grenade inside my skull. I quit counting then and tried to ignore the drips, but by that time it was impossible, and the grenades kept right on detonating in my head. It was like the old Chinese torture chestnut, and I was about to go out and tell Dunn that I had to get the hell out of there when he came in, instead.

He pulled himself up onto the edge of the cabinet beside the sink and peered at me through a thin, drifting plume of smoke.

“I guess we’re about finished in there,” he said. “We didn’t find much of anything that looks like it would be any help. Way I got it figured, he had someone with him, and they were having a drink. A guy named Henry Frost, say. Just to give him a name, you understand. It simplifies talking about him if he’s got a name.”

“I thought you’d settled for a woman,” I said.

He smiled his gentle smile and looked at me through the pale blue, transparent plume. “Anyhow,” he went on, “the phone rang. This guy Caldwell turned around with his glass in his hand to go to the phone, and that’s when he was killed.”

I felt as if someone had reached inside me and grabbed a handful of entrails. “How do you know that?” I said.

“I got the idea from the way he was lying. Like he’d been heading for the phone, you know. It figures, too. Once Caldwell got on the phone, it might have been too late for murder. Because he might just mention that Frost was there, and that would never do. You know how these phone conversations go. ‘Busy, Caldwell?’ ‘Not particularly. Just having a drink with Henry Frost.’ You see what I mean? Once he said that, there couldn’t be any murder. I’ll check to see if there was a call through the switchboard.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use my name,” I said.

His mirthless chuckle came up again behind the gentle smile. “You shouldn’t be so sensitive. Like I said, it’s just a convenience. How come you came here tonight?”

“I had an appointment.”

“Oh?”

“I’m a lawyer. Caldwell wanted to see me.”

“So that’s it. I guess a guy like Caldwell needed a lawyer pretty often. You ever handle anything for him before?”

“No.”

“Don’t you have an office? You make a practice of calling on clients to do business?”

“I don’t make a practice. Sometimes I make an exception.”