Lawrence Block - Masters of Noir - Volume 1

“That all you folks have on your mind?” I sneered.

“Of course, it’s been rough, losing Mr. Ambler, who has done so much for us, and on top of that you policemen disrupting everything. But the show must go on, you know.”

“That so?” I started toward the door and stopped. Burnett had his arm around Holly’s waist and she was leaning against him. I said, “I didn’t annoy you too much, did I, miss?”

She hesitated, but not long enough for anybody but me to notice it. “No,” she said.

I struck a match. They watched me silently, all three of them. I rolled the flame around the tip of the cigarette and blew out the match and left the apartment.

Five minutes after I was at my desk the Skipper called me on the phone from his office down the hall.

“Why didn’t you report in this morning, Gus?”

“I’ve been out trying to catch me a killer,” I said.

“None of your lip, Gus. I’m having a tough enough time with the Mayor and the Commissioner. Seems they think it’s against the law for big-shots like John Ambler to be murdered and want me to do something about it. As if I haven’t got the whole department looking for knives and witnesses. Who’d you see?”

“The killer,” I said. “The girl.”

“How’d you make out?”

“Not so good. But I will.”

“Look, Gus. You may be a bit too — uh — single-minded. We don’t know enough at this time to be able to concentrate on one suspect.”

“You call her the suspect. I’ll call her the killer.”

There was a silence on the line. Then the Skipper said, “All right, Gus, keep at it,” and hung up.

I went through the reports of the half a dozen other detectives working along with me on the case. Nothing.

I sat back in the chair and lit a cigarette. When I’d had her by the hair in her apartment, I should have kept the pressure up. A little more pain, a couple of slaps across her damned pretty face, and she might have broken before Burnett and Hoge had arrived. But I’d let her go. I’d let her walk to the closet with that clinging rose nightgown molding every curve of the back of her.

I closed my eyes, remembering how sometimes I would come home from lunch and find Martha not yet dressed, puttering around the house in nothing but a sheer nightgown, with her golden hair unpinned and loose down her back. I would pull her down on my lap and stroke that hair and bury my face in it, and I would push down her nightgown and spread her hair over the fullness of her breasts, making a golden, transparent net over the white, richly curving flesh. But then she would smile and she would say, “Not in the daytime,” and I would say, “What’s wrong with the daytime?” and she would say, “I’ve got to get your lunch,” and wriggle off me, tugging up the straps, and head for the bedroom, her nightgown clinging, her hair flowing, and come out wearing a housecoat. Not in the daytime, and toward the end seldom at night either. Because by then there must have been the accountant, the skinny guy I never suspected, and one evening there had been that note from her saying she would never be back. She never was.

Something snapped. It was a pencil I had been holding between my fingers. I stared at the two pieces and then dropped them into the wastebasket. After a while I went out to lunch.

When I returned, Bill Burnett was waiting for me outside the headquarters building.

He stood against the wall, and when he saw me he came out on the sidewalk to meet me. Both his hands were sunk deep in the pockets of his jacket and there was a fever in his eyes. I could guess what had happened.

“If you ever go near her again,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”

Burnett’s right pocket bulged more than his left, which meant that was where he had it. “What are you talking about?” I said, watching his right hand.

“You beat Holly up, you bastard!”

“She told you I did?”

“I made her. After George Hoge left. I knew something had happened. She’d been crying. She didn’t want to tell me. You’d threatened her, frightened her, I don’t know how. But I made her tell me,” He took his left hand out of his pocket and put it on my arm. “I’m warning you, I’ll kill you!”

Imagine a pretty-faced actor punk trying to throw his weight around with me! I drove my left up to his jaw. It slammed him back against the wall where he’d been waiting for me.

That was a busy street and a couple of women seeing me hit him screamed. They didn’t bother me. I leaped after him and rammed my fist into his belly.

I’ll say this for the actor — he wasn’t soft. Most other men would have gone down after having been socked twice by me. He stayed on his feet, swaying, and his right hand came out of his pocket. I could have beaten him to it with my own gun, but I couldn’t be bothered with a punk like that. I swung at his pretty face, and that did it. He slid down along the wall.

His right hand was in sight and empty. But there was a gun in his pocket, as I’d guessed. Hardly more than a toy, a .22 automatic, but at close range it could have done damage.

Burnett wasn’t out. Sobbing brokenly, he was trying to get up to his feet. I raked his face with his own gun, slashing a bloody swath down his cheek.

He wasn’t so pretty any more.

By then people were all around us. A woman was shrieking, “Stop that man! Stop him!” I tried to explain that I was a cop, but I couldn’t be heard. Then three harness bulls poured out of the building. They knew me, of course. I told them the punk had tried to assault me with a gun and let them take charge of him.

Burnett was sitting up, holding his bleeding face. He was able to walk hanging onto two of the harness bulls. I followed them in and had the desk sergeant book him for armed assault. After he was patched up, he was thrown into the can.

If I had any regrets, it was the one I usually felt at a time like this — that the guy I had beaten up hadn’t been the accountant who had run off with Martha.

Yesterday John Ambler’s wife had been questioned along with a lot of other people, but since then a question or two had come up that hadn’t been asked her. Especially about Holly Laird. I drove up to that big fieldstone house on the hill and found her on a side terrace with George Hoge.

She was stretched out on a chaise longue, getting the sun on her body. Since all she had on were a pair of shorts and a skimpy halter, plenty of her body got it. Hoge sat on the grass, a cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth as he talked to her. They both looked up when they saw me appear around the corner of the house.

“Hello, Gus,” Celia Ambler greeted me. She sounded very cheerful considering she’d become a widow so recently.

“You seem to know each other well,” Hoge said, surprised.

“Oh, but we do. Gus and I went to high school together here in Coast City.” She stretched like a kitten, her tanned skin rippling. “I imagine, Gus, you’re here strictly in your professional capacity.”

“Why else? What’s the chance of seeing you alone for a few minutes?”

“George was just about to go.” She threw him a smile. “Weren’t you, George?”

His pinched, intense face scowled. “Everywhere today I keep running into this cop. But all right, I’m dismissed.” He got to his feet. “Then it’s agreed, Celia. You’ll continue to support the theater as generously as John did.”

“I said only for the remainder of the season. After that, we’ll see.” She turned her head to me. “Poor George is worried about his job.”

“That’s not so,” he said indignantly. “I can make ten times as much in Hollywood. Any time. But I prefer working in a little theater. It gives one a chance to fully express oneself.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth for the first time since I’d arrived; it was less than an inch long. “How is the case going, officer?”