Lawrence Block - Masters of Noir - Volume 1

I became aware of quietness without at first realizing what it meant; and then dimly I heard a door slam out in the market, heard the murmur of voices. Footsteps thudded over the floor toward the refrigerator as my momentary paralysis ended and I whirled around.

The door swung wide and Hecker loomed before me. He yelled aloud as he saw me, then leaped backward so quickly that I almost didn’t follow after him in time. He started to swing the door shut before I understood what he meant to do, but I leaped forward, jarred into it a moment before it closed.

I strained against it with all my strength, then suddenly the weight was gone from its other side. The door swung open and I saw Hecker running across the floor toward the meat block, saw him grab the massive cleaver in his right hand, whirl and run back toward me raising the cleaver above his head.

On the far side of the room stood his wife; it was she I had heard come in and speak moments ago. I glanced around for something, anything I could use as a weapon, knowing Hecker could send that cleaver slashing through my skull and brain and neck in one blow of his thickly muscled arm. Hanging from iron rods behind and above me, stretching from wall to wall were several unused hooks, S-curved and double-pointed like those, from which the beeves hung. I grabbed one of them, leaped out of the refrigerator room as Hecker slowed his rush, stopped and stared at me, the cleaver held on a level with his head.

For a second he didn’t move, then he walked toward me, not hurrying, just steadily coming closer, holding the cleaver tightly. I let him get six feet from me, then backed away toward the market’s rear wall. I took my eyes off Hecker’s face for one quick look at his wife, but she stood motionless near the meat case, eyes fixed on us.

The wall, I knew, was close behind me. I stopped. Hecker didn’t falter in his slow stride but he raised the cleaver higher, his face almost expressionless.

I moved back and turned sideways until my left elbow brushed against the wall. Holding the hook in my right hand I crossed my arm in front of my body just as he jumped toward me swinging the cleaver down in a blurred arc at my head.

With the wall for leverage I shoved hard, let my body drop toward the floor, slashing my right arm toward his face with all my strength. The cleaver hissed past my head and struck the wood behind me as I felt my hand jar against him, pain ripping through my palm as the second point of the hook dug into it. It ripped across my skin and the hook was jerked from my hand, but as my knees hit the floor I saw where that other point had gone. It had entered Hecker’s throat, the curving metal hanging down upon his chest. But it hadn’t killed him.

He jerked the cleaver from the wood as I rolled a few feet across the floor and scrambled to my feet, then he jumped toward me, swinging the cleaver downward. I threw my left hand up, clamped my fingers around his huge wrist, but couldn’t stop the blow. I slowed it, changed its direction, but felt the cleaver’s edge bite into my chest muscles as I slammed my right hand up to grab that dangling hook, to jerk and twist it. His weight hurled me to the floor and the cleaver thudded against the boards as I rolled away, pain burning in my chest. When I got to my feet I swung around, but Hecker was on his hands and knees, coughing horribly, his life draining from his throat.

Then he rolled over and lay on his back, eyes staring upwards, and I saw that he was trying to talk. I went over and listened, and I was damn glad I did, because the thing he told me was the craziest fact in the whole crazy case. He managed only a single sentence before he died, but it was enough to make me realize that he wasn’t The Butcher at all.

It took quite a few hours for the medics to patch and bandage me up, and it was late afternoon before Samson, Louis, and I sat in Room 42 again. Sam had just been talking on the phone, and he turned and said, “They’ve got Hecker’s wife in a padded cell.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“Me, neither,” Sam said. “She’s been raving for hours — drooling about the killings. Well, there’s no doubt about your story any more, anyway...”

I shook my head. “I’m getting old,” I said. “I should have been tipped the minute Norma told me Hecker’d been trying to date every dame in that neighborhood — I should have realized that a sex killer has got to have violence and attack, and wouldn’t be trying to date women.” Sam pushed a bottle into my hand, and I took a deep slug of it. I coughed, and went on, “It just never occurred to me that Hecker’s wife was the way she was, and Hecker was just looking for some normal, natural outlets. Who the hell would ever figure that Hecker’s wife was The Butcher, that she was so dominant that Hecker was under her thumb and cutting up the bodies for her after she did the killings?”

Sam took the bottle out of my hand, and took a deep dip before he answered.

“Nobody’d figure it,” he said. “Nobody’d figure it because it’s the kind of fact that just never occurs to people — even people in jobs like ours. A cop’s bound to go looking for a man when he’s got some sex murders to solve. But it makes just as much sense the other way now that we know the whole story.”

He paused, and I guess we all looked a little sick. “Because naturally,” he went on, “it would also be women who were murdered if the sex killer was a female queer...”

She was beautiful.

She was, and she knew that she was — not only by the image in her mirror, the full and petulant mouth and the high cheekbones, the silkiness of the long blond hair and the deep blue color of her eyes. The image in her mirror at home told her she was beautiful, and so did the image she saw now, the image in the mirror in the tavern.

But she didn’t need the mirrors. She was made aware of her beauty by the eyes, the eyes of the hungry men, the eyes that she felt rather than saw upon her everywhere she went. She could feel those eyes caressing her body, lingering too long upon her firm ripe breasts and sensuous hips, touching her body with a touch firmer than hands and making her grow warm where they rested. Wherever she went men stared at her, and the intensity of their stares undressed their passions and hungers just as thoroughly as the stares attempted to strip her body.

She sipped at her drink, hardly tasting it but knowing that she had to drink it. It was all part of the game. She was in a bar, and the hungry men were also in the bar, and now their eyes were wandering over her. But for the moment there was nothing for her to do. She had to drink her drink and bide her time, waiting for the men — or one of them, at least — to get up the courage to do more than stare.

Idly, she turned a few inches on the barstool and glanced at the other customers. Several men were too busy drinking to pay any attention to her; another was busy in a corner booth running his hand up and down the leg of a slightly plump redhead, and it was easy to see that he wouldn’t be interested in her, not that night.

But the other three customers were fair game.

She regarded them thoughtfully, one at a time. Closest to her was a young one — no more than twenty-one or twenty-two, she guessed, and hungry the way they are when they’re that age. He was short and slim, dressed in a dark suit and wearing a conservative bow tie. She noticed with a little amusement the way he was embarrassed to stare at her but at the same time was unable to keep his eyes off her lush body. Twice his eyes met hers and he flushed guiltily, turning away and nervously flicking the ashes off his cigarette.