Ричард Деминг: Hit and Run

By two thirty A.M. the custom at the Haufbrau had been reduced to three patrons at the bar and four couples in booths. The bartender, a lean, angular man with narrow cheekbones and a high forehead, surveyed the house, decided no one would want drinks during the next few moments, and relaxed with his elbows on the bar across from the big man seated at its end.

“Nightcap, Barney?” he asked. “On the house, I mean.”

Barney Calhoun shook his head. He was a powerfully built man in his early thirties, with square features and thick, dusty-blond hair. Despite his size there was a suggestion of litheness about him, as though he could move with amazing speed if he had to. There was an aura of recklessness about him, too, only partly tempered by the deep cynicism that showed in his eyes. He was the sort of man all women would give at least a second glance, and many couldn’t take their eyes off. At the moment his expression was morose as he stared at the nearly empty glass with which he was making circles on the bar.

“What’s your trouble, buddy boy?” the barkeep asked. “Women?”

“Money,” the big man said. “Always money, Joe.”

“Need a fin or two?”

Calhoun gave him a brief smile. “It’s not that bad, pal. No pressing bills. It’s just the whole goddam bleak future. I can’t see anything but hamburgers in the next ten years.”

Joe poured a shot of bourbon in the big man’s glass despite the previous refusal, added ice and soda. “Maybe you shouldn’t have left the force,” he suggested.

Barney Calhoun snorted. “How many cops you see eating steak? I’m no worse off.”

Joe leaned his elbows on the bar again. “Maybe you play it too straight, Barney. Some private eyes clean up. If they’re willing to shoot angles.”

Barney took a sip of his drink. “Don’t fret about my ethics, Joe,” he said cynically. “Show me an angle and I’ll shoot it.”

“Yeah?” Joe said. He eyed the big man speculatively. “How far will you go?”

Calhoun’s eyes narrowed. He said dryly, “I should have suspected a drink on the house. What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing in particular. Just occurred to me, I see a lot of stuff going on on the other side of the bar. You got a license, know how to investigate things and so on. We might make a team.”

“Doing what?”

Joe shrugged. “Different stuff. I give you a steer. You follow it up. We split the take.”

Calhoun circled his glass a time or two. “Give me a for instance,” he said finally.

The bartender dropped his voice to a confidential whisper. “See the couple in the corner booth?”

The big man didn’t turn. He searched out the reflection of the indicated couple in the bar mirror. The man was about forty, tall and sleek and handsome, with prematurely gray hair and a small gray mustache. The woman was ten years his junior, a slim, lovely, perfectly groomed brunette. Raven-black hair outlined a pale, delicate face whose skin was so clear it was nearly translucent.

“Uh huh,” Barney said.

“Harry Cushman,” Joe said.

Calhoun looked thoughtful. “The café society Harry Cushman?”

“Yeah. Two million dollars, two ex-wives. The doll with him isn’t either ex.”

“Sor?”

“She’s wearing a wedding ring.”

Calhoun took a sip of his drink. “Maybe she’s number three.”

The barkeep shook his head. “It would have been in the gossip columns. The saloon-beat boys stick to his tail like hounds after a fox. She’s somebody else’s ever-loving.”

The big man shrugged. “About half of them stray, according to Kinsey.”

“Look at her again,” Joe suggested.

Calhoun studied the woman’s reflection in the mirror. Aside from her wedding band and an engagement ring that looked like a small emerald, she wore no jewelry. Her plain blue dress was of conservative cut. Yet she somehow managed to convey an impression of wealth. A certain poise, and the unconscious grace of her movements in doing so simple a thing as picking up her drink or leaning across the table for a cigarette light, stamped her as a woman of breeding as well as wealth.

“Ummm,” Calhoun said. “Expensive.”

“You’re not fooling,” Joe said. “That’s no chorus cutie. I’ve looked across this bar at too many phonies not to know the real thing when I see it. That’s class. There’s as much money behind that dame as there is behind Cushman.”

“Maybe,” Calhoun conceded, and gave the barkeep an inquiring look.

“Do I have to spell it out for you?” Joe asked. “There’s a guy who’s loaded, out with a married gal who’s probably loaded. Find out who she is. Somebody ought to be willing to pay off for something — Cushman to protect the gal, the gal to protect her happy home, or her husband for a tip that she’s straying.”

The big man wrinkled his nose. “I haven’t sunk to blackmail yet. I might nudge the cue ball to get a better shot, but I don’t batten on people’s troubles.”

Joe straightened up and poured another shot. “Well, you asked for an angle.”

“Try another one.”

Joe shrugged. “Mostly what I had in mind was stuff like that. You’d be surprised how many guys I spot in here playing footsies with other guys’ wives. Think it over.”

He moved up the bar to tend to one of the two other remaining bar customers. Calhoun thoughtfully studied the corner-booth couple in the bar mirror.

Cushman and the woman rose from the booth as he watched them; the man dropped a bill on the table and helped the woman into a light coat that had been hanging on a hook next to the booth. They headed toward the rear door of the barroom, which gave onto a parking lot in back of the building.

Calhoun glanced sidewise as they passed the end of the bar, within two feet of him. The woman’s figure was as beautiful as her face, he noted. But there was no warmth to her beauty. Her lovely features were absolutely expressionless. The absence of any lines of any sort in her smooth face-even the tiny laughter lines that the most well-preserved woman of thirty is likely to have developed at the corners of her eyes — suggested that if she ever felt an emotion, she wasn’t accustomed to showing it by facial expression.

Her gaze briefly touched Calhoun as she passed, but there was no reaction. He was used to women noticing him, but she showed about as much interest in him as she might in a piece of cooked salami. On impulse he deliberately looked her up and down.

Again there was no reaction. She looked neither pleased nor offended by his obvious admiration. She merely ignored him.

As the couple passed through the rear door, Calhoun rose from his bar stool, scooped up his change, leaving a quarter tip, and raised one hand in a casual salute of good-by to the bartender. Joe glanced at the door by which the couple had left, then raised his eyebrows questioningly. With a slight shake of his head, Calhoun went out the street door.

Outside, he turned right without hurry. But as soon as he was beyond the range of Joe’s vision through the plate-glass front window, he increased his pace to a rapid walk. A half block up the street he slid under the wheel of a four-year-old Plymouth club coupe and settled back to wait.

He knew the car containing Cushman and his woman companion would have to pass where he was waiting. The exit from the Haufbrau’s parking lot came out on Court Street, which was one-way here. They would have to turn right, pass the barroom’s front door, and drive past Calhoun’s parked car and at least as far as the next intersection.

In the rear-view mirror he saw headlights swing from the parking-lot exit and turn toward him. Apparently the driver believed in a fast getaway, for the motor began to roar as soon as the car reached the street. Calhoun had barely had time to switch on his engine when a green Buick convertible swished by him at a speed of at least fifty miles an hour.