Stephen Barr - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 4. Whole No. 131, October 1954

There was memory in that sneer alone, in that characteristic tone that never gave the benefit of the doubt. The man’s shoulder blades went a notch lower on the door-seam. “You better know me,” he said. And then he jeered, “Or don’t you want to?”

His eyes found the picture, rested on it, guessed, came back again with a mocking gleam. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Sturgess knew by now.

He’d never been good at saying things. He said, “You’re the fellow, you’re the man — the lake, that time.” His face lit up with long-stored gratitude, but then the light died again as the man brushed by him, seemed not to see the friendly start Sturgess’ hand had made. The man found his own way across the room, pitched into a chair.

There was blood on one side of his face, or rather vestiges of it, a thin dark patina.

Sturgess was awake now. He was frightened too, by some kind of foreknowledge. He ran his tongue across his lower lip, said, “What’d you do, hurt yourself?”

The man lowered his head abruptly, glared challengingly. “No, I didn’t hurt myself. A bullet grazed me getting over here. From one of your crowd.”

Sturgess was getting whiter by the minute. The other’s eyes held him derisively, forcing knowledge on him that he didn’t want. “Why don’t you ask me why I’m here?”

Sturgess flinched. “Don’t tell me anything you’re liable to be sorry—” he said quickly.

The man in the chair started to repeat what he’d just said. “Don’t you want to find out why I’m—”

“Shut up!” Sturgess shouted.

“No you don’t! I’ve got something coming to me. What’re you trying to do — leave an out for yourself, welsh out of it? So that when they come ganging around here in a minute or two — See no evil, hear no evil, eh? Well, you’re looking at Murray Forman, and what are you going to do about it?”

Sturgess ran a hand through the bird’s nest tangle of his hair. “My God!” he groaned. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“D’you suppose I’d be here if I didn’t? You’re my trump card, the last one I hold. Somebody else told me who you were that night. I came across your picture in the paper once after that, when you were promoted for running down those cop-killers. It gave your address.” He laughed mirthlessly. “It pays to change addresses more often, when you’ve got debts outstanding.”

He looked rested now, fit, compared to Sturgess. His color was high alongside Sturgess’ agonized pallor. His pores were dry, not glistening like the other man’s.

Sturgess flung the door open, folded it back flat against the wall as if he couldn’t get it wide enough. “Get out!” he said in a choked voice. “Get out of here! That’s the most I can—”

Forman kept looking at the picture, as though he hadn’t heard. He said softly, “Is her hair gold-brown like it looks on there? Is that how she smiles all the time, with a little dent in the middle of her cheek?”

“Get out, you dirty killer!”

“I know how they do; sometimes they slip their arm around your neck from behind your chair, and hug you tight. Sometimes they get down on the floor at your feet and lean their head against your knee, and look up and over at you, backwards. She wouldn’t do all that, Sturgess, if it wasn’t for me. What’s her name, Sturgess?”

“Barbara,” said Sturgess limply, and closed the door again very slowly, as though it weighed a ton.

They didn’t say anything for a long time — either of them. It seemed like a long time anyway. Forman stayed in the chair, which was the most comfortable one in the room. Sturgess stood against the door.

Forman spoke finally, as matter-of-factly as though they had known each other all their lives. “Gimme a cigarette. Got one on you?”

Sturgess felt absently for his coat pocket without looking up. He didn’t have any. Forman must have got up and helped himself from the humidor. The next thing Sturgess noticed he was back in the chair smoking.

Sturgess said finally, as though the trivial request had managed to restore his own power of expression, “I’m a police officer, Forman. There isn’t anything I can do.”

The man in the chair snapped ashes from his cigarette. “You don’t have to do a thing. Just let me stay here till the heat cools a little, then you’ll turn your back and I’ll be gone, the way I came. That’s all, and then we’re square — quits.”

“You struck down and murdered a man in cold blood—”

“That doesn’t cancel your obligation. I’d already croaked someone long before that night you first came across me. That didn’t keep you from accepting your kid’s life from my hands, did it? She breathes just as good, her lungs are just as empty of water, her eyes are just as wide open, as if a right guy saved her, aren’t they? I didn’t argue the right and wrong of it before I went in, did I? You owe me a life—”

(“Two lives,” Sturgess admitted to himself. It was clever of him, good psychology, not to mention having saved Sturgess himself, to emphasize only the one that really mattered.)

“— and I want a life back from you. My own.”

Sturgess said fiercely, “D’you want a drink? I do!” Three times he started out in the wrong direction, before he could remember where the liquor was kept.

Forman was thoroughly at ease now, sure of himself. Or else that was his game, to seem sure of himself, to appear not to have any doubts, to take it for granted.

He said, holding his little whiskey glass up to the light and studying it idly, “Don’t take it so hard.” He went on with detached curiosity, as though confronting for the first time some rare trait he’d often heard of but never encountered until now: “You’re dead on the level, aren’t you? So straight it hurts.” He made a grimace. “Gee, it must be hell to be like that! I had you figured that way even that night. The way you jumped in without knowing how to swim. I’m good that way at sizing people up. I’ve had to be. That’s why I came here. D’you think I’d have taken a chance like this on one of those other guys you string along with?

Sturgess had sat down now, staring sightlessly at the problem as though it were spread out on the carpet before him. He heard the man say, “Is this the only bottle in the place?”

He nodded absently. He heard the thudding of liquid on the carpet and he looked up. Forman was holding the uncorked bottle upside down. Sturgess didn’t say anything. A million little things like that didn’t matter; there was only one thing that mattered. Forman explained, “I want to keep your thinking straight. And mine too. I can’t take a chance. What it’s all about might get too foggy for us to handle — right.”

Sturgess nodded again, to himself. That was right, from his own point of view too. Liquor made him sentimental. That could be just as dangerous either way, in this case — romanticize his duty or his debt. He slashed the contents of his little glass jigger viciously across the floor.

“It’s simple enough,” Forman remarked. Meaning: nothing to lose your temper about, nothing to go up in the air about.

“Shut up,” Sturgess growled. “The less you say the better.” He looked over at the open bedroom door. “When’d you sleep last? You can go in there and lie down if you want to. Get out of here!” Then as Forman rose to his feet, crooked his arms behind his head, and yawned — he was that composed — Sturgess added: “Wait a minute. Have you got a gun on you?”

“Sure. Want it?” He brought it out and indifferently pitched it across at Sturgess butt-first. “You didn’t have to worry about that,” he assured him. “You’re my trump card. I have everything to lose and nothing to gain by—” The rest of it was lost as he went, calmly and leisurely, into the bedroom.