Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1953

Because, lying sprawled there on the front seat in the dim reflected light of a street lamp, was the naked body of Gloria Gayle.

I don’t know how long I stood there. A full thirty seconds, maybe. At last I got back enough presence of mind to yank the door open and say her name. There was no answer. Not that I’d expected any. She was dead, and I’d known that the first instant I saw her. No living person looked like that. Dead bodies are always different, somehow.

I reached out and put my hand flat against the flesh just beneath the left breast long enough to confirm what I already knew. There was no heartbeat. The skin against my palm was still warm and a little moist. So far as I could see, there wasn’t a mark on her any place.

I heard footsteps coming along the street and I closed the door and walked around behind the car until they passed the mouth of the alley.

It was coming to me — in pieces. But the pieces were coming fast. And every one of them was like a kick in the belly.

It had to be Al Prince. I would have bet my life on it. Here in Greenwich Village, anything can happen, sure — she might even have been murdered by a passerby. Somebody who saw a pretty girl sitting in a car alone in the mouth of an alley and decided to take advantage of it. Maybe rape, maybe robbery. Maybe both. But I didn’t think so. The odds on Al Prince were far too heavy.

I went around to the driver’s side and opened the door and lifted Gloria’s head and got beneath the wheel. The keys were in the dash, where she had put them. Then, with her head on my lap, I backed the Caddy up the alley to the darkest shadows I could find. I got the small flashlight out of the glove compartment and flicked it over her body.

I turned her completely over twice. She was a small girl, but it was cramped in the seat, and she was a little slippery. Her clothes, except for stockings and spike-heels, were nothing but a pile of shredded cloth on the floorboard. There was no money.

I felt the wound before I saw it — a tiny crescent-shaped cut on her left temple where it had been hidden by her hair. There was a bad bruise beneath it, and when I put my hand down on the upholstery it came away sticky with what I knew had to be blood.

It looked to me as if Gloria had been killed with a hammer.

Then another thought came to me, and I started the motor again and gunned the Caddy out of there. I didn’t stop until I was a dozen blocks away, down another dark alley. I was a patsy, I knew, and whoever had made me one would sure as hell tip the cops the moment he knew the frame-up was exactly right. And I knew who “whoever” was — Al Prince.

He’d done a beautiful job of it. New York cops were the best in the world, sure, but what good was that going to do me in this situation? A man and a girl have a stormy affair and break up — and then the girl slaps the guy in a cellar jive joint, and fifteen minutes later the girl’s dead and naked in the guy’s car. Beautiful. A certain number of patsies are fried and hanged and gassed every year — a statistical fact.

I don’t know why, but I didn’t think of Ed Farr, the song writer, just then. There’s no good reason; I just didn’t.

I got out of the car and lugged Gloria’s body to the back seat and put it down on the floorboard. I didn’t like to do it, you understand. I just didn’t have any choice. I put her shredded dress over her and covered her as best I could with the small lap robe I keep in the back seat, and that was all I could do.

For the first time since I’d bought it, I was glad the Caddy wasn’t a convertible. At least no onlookers would know I had a dead girl in there, unless they opened the back door. And if they got that far, I was cooked anyhow.

I had a date with Al Prince. Only he didn’t know it. He’d need no alibi himself, of course, and the best place he could be when the police came calling — if they even bothered — was at home.

I had about as much chance as an ice cube in a blast furnace. I didn’t have a gun, and didn’t know where I could get one. But I had a knife. And I knew how to use it. You remember those things, after four years in the Marines.

Al Prince’s apartment house was a converted brownstone front in the west seventies, scabby on the outside but plush on the inside. I’d been there a couple of times just after he hit the big time. I rang the buzzer beside his mailbox, and after a while the lock on the door clicked and I climbed the stairs to the second floor and knocked on the door of his apartment.

I let half a minute go by, and then I knocked again. Loud. I knew he was in there because he’d tripped the lock on the downstairs door. I knocked a third time.

Behind me a voice said, “You want something, Marty?”

I whirled around. Al was grinning at me with those pale yellow eyes of his. I didn’t see his fist. I only felt it. It wasn’t calculated to knock me out. It stunned me, the way he’d meant for it to, and for a moment the lights in the corridor swung around in lazy circles and the floor tilted and swayed beneath my feet. I felt one of my arms jerked behind me in a hammerlock, and in another few seconds Al had got the door open and walked me three-fourths of the way across the room.

“I saw you coming from the window,” Smuggy said pleasantly. “I knew you weren’t up to any good — not at this time of the morning. I waited for you on the back stairs.” He yanked my arm up another couple of inches. “Now what the hell do you want?”

The room had stopped spinning. It was a big room, sound proof, I remembered, with full-length French windows. There were several large photographs on the walls — all of them of Al Prince, and most of them in fight poses. I thought of the knife in my pocket: a hell of a lot of good that was going to do me.

He jerked my arm up again. It was like having someone ram a red-hot ice pick into your shoulder.

“I asked you what the hell you wanted,” he said, still pleasantly. “You come over here about Gloria?”

Was he kidding? “You’re damn right,” I choked out over the pain in my shoulder. “What’d you think?”

He pushed me ahead of him to a sofa. I barked my shins on a heavy bronze cocktail table. He liked that. He laughed softly and forced me down on the sofa, my face twisted around toward the back of it.

“You came over to tell me she belongs to you again, eh, Marty? You got the decision, eh?”

Another couple of inches and he was going to twist my arm right out of its socket. “Ease up, you punk,” I said. “There’s a bone in that arm.”

I might as well have talked to a wall.

“I saw her come out of that crummy dive you play in,” Al said. “A big bruiser like you, playing a little piano like that. That’s real funny. And her going for a guy like you — a damn piano player! That’s even funnier.” He put some more pressure on my arm. I yelled. I had to.

“Holler all you want,” he laughed. “Nobody’s going to hear you. Not with these walls. Go on! Holler, you bastard!” And then he laughed. It was the kind of laugh you hear only in a nut-house. Damn it, the guy was crazy! He’d taken too many punches, or Gloria had knocked him off his rocker, or something. But he was nuts. Plain simple nuts.

“You know something?” he said. “I can’t see why she’d think you were so hot in bed. She used to keep harping on that, all the time — about what a hell of a good lover you were. Sometimes, right in the middle of it even, she’d tell me she wished I was you.”

“For God’s sake, Al,” I said. “Let go my—”

“Shut up! Do you know how it is. Can you imagine how it is? She’s up here, see? Right on this damn couch. And she’s moaning and sweating and crying sort of, and all at once she starts biting you on the face and digging her fingernails in your shoulders and saying, ‘Marty, Marty — Marty!’ It’s me, see, but all the time she’s pretending it’s you, and wishing it was you. You think that made me feel good? You think that didn’t make me feel like killing you, you son of a bitch?”