Джеймс Чейз - The Flesh of the Orchid

‘I once knew a girl who had a scar like this,’ he mattered, his fat face tightening. ‘She was mad. Damn her! She blinded me.’

‘I know,’ Carol said softly, and wretched her wrist away, ‘and now, I am going to kill you.’

An icy chill ran through Frank’s body.

‘Who are you?’ he quavered, groping for the door-handle.

‘Carol Blandish,’ she said. ‘I’ve waited a long time for this moment. First you, and then Max,’ and her fingers closed round his wrist in a grip of steel.

Blind panic seized Frank. If he could have seen her, could have been sure she wasn’t pointing a gun at him, could be sure that in a second or so no bullet would smash into him, he wouldn’t have acted as he did, and as Carol had hoped he would act. But the suffocating darkness that pressed in on him, the knowledge that he was trapped in a car with a dangerous, revengeful, mad woman, paralysed his mind. His one thought was to get away from her and into the crowd so she could not reach him.

He broke free from her grip, threw open the car door and stumbled blindly into the street. The moment his feet touched the ground he began to run.

Carol slammed the car door, gripped the steering-wheel as she leaned forward to watch the dark figure run blindly into the headlights of the oncoming traffic.

‘Look, Steve,’ she said with a sob in her voice, ‘there he goes. I hand him over to you.’

Frank heard sudden shouts around him and the squealing of car brakes. He floundered forward in his blindness, thrusting out his hands into a darkness that was so thick he could almost feel it, and he heard himself screaming.

The onrushing traffic frantically tried to avoid him. Cars swerved, crashed into one another. Women screamed. A policeman blew his whistle.

A cream and scarlet roadster suddenly shot out of the intersection and hurtled across the road. Eddie, a little drunk, his arm round Linda, had no chance of avoiding Frank. For a brief second he saw Frank facing him, the bright headlights of the car beat on his sweating, terrified face. He heard Linda scream, ‘It’s Frank!’ and he swerved, crammed on his brakes. The fender of the car hit Frank a glancing blow, threw him across the road and under the wheels of a speeding truck.

In the confusion that followed no one noticed the black Chrysler coupe pull away from the kerb and drive silently away into the darkness.

Max followed the nurse along the rubber-covered corridor of the Waltonville Hospital. His face was expressionless, but his thin nostrils were white and pinched.

The nurse signed to him to wait and went into a room, closed the door after her.

Max leaned against the wall, thrust his hands into his pockets. There was a bored look in his eyes: he wanted to smoke.

The nurse came to the door after a few moments, beckoned to him.

‘No more than two minutes,’ she said. ‘He is very ill.’

‘Dying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then why not say so? Think I’ll cry?’ Max said impatiently.

He walked into the room, stood by the bed and looked down at Frank. The fat face was yellow, the lips were blue. He scarcely seemed to breathe.

‘Here I am,’ Max said curtly, wanting to get it over.

Frank struggled to speak, and Max had to bend over him to catch the halting words. He was reluctant to do this because Frank’s breath was bad.

‘It was Carol Blandish,’ Frank gasped. ‘She said I was the first, then you. I knew her by the scar her wrist.’

Max straightened.

‘You were always a sucker for women, you fat fool,’ he said bitterly. ‘You asked for it.’ Then he added, ‘She won’t get me.’

Frank’s breath suddenly heaved up in a gasping rattle. Max looked at him, lifted his shoulders.

‘So long, sucker,’ he said.

The nurse came in, looked quickly at Frank, then drew the sheet over his face.

Max was studying her. She was young and pretty, and lie tapped Frank’s dead shoulder.

‘That’s one of ’em you won’t make a pass at,’ he said, tilted his hat over his eyes and went out.

There was a satisfied, almost cheerful expression on Max’s face as he walked down the broad steps that led from the hospital. It had suddenly dawned on him that he was now twice as rich as he had been before entering the hospital.

Neither of the Sullivans had kept his substantial savings in a bank. They knew it was easy for the police to tie up a banking account, and they kept their money where they could get at it quickly. Max’s father had charge of it; and now Frank was dead his share would automatically come to Max, for no one else knew about it: except, of course, Max’s father, but he didn’t count. It meant, then, that Max could retire, give up this murder racket and buy a bird store as he had always wished to do. The idea appealed to him.

He paused beside the black Packard Clipper, lit a cigarette, tossed the match into the gutter. For a moment or so his mind dwelt on Carol. Frank had said, ‘First me, then you.’ There could be no doubt that she had engineered Frank’s death. Max had talked with Linda, had heard about the mysterious Mary Prentiss and had put two and two together. Mary Prentiss had been Carol Blandish, and she was out for revenge. But Frank had always been a sucker for women. It would have been easy for any woman to have tripped him up. In Max’s case it was different. Women meant nothing to him. If Carol Blandish tried her tricks with him, she would be sorry. He would smash her ruthlessly as he had smashed others who had got in his way.

He was so confident of his ability to look after himself that he dismissed Carol from his mind as not worth further thought. No, the death of Frank was the end of the episode; the end, too, of the Sullivan brothers. Max Geza was about to give up his professional status as a killer and become a bird fancier. It would be interesting to see how it worked out.

He tossed the half-burned cigarette into the street, pulled his soft hat further over his eyes, opened the car door. Then he paused, his narrow eyebrows coining together in a puzzled frown.

Lying on the front seat immediately under the driving-wheel was a single, but magnificent, scarlet orchid.

Max stared at the flower, his face expressionless, his eyes a little startled. Then he picked it up, turned it between his fingers as he studied it. An expensive bloom for someone to have dropped through the car window for no reason at all; or was there a reason? Did it mean anything? he asked himself, his mind attuned always to danger. He glanced up and down the street, saw nothing to raise his suspicions, shrugged his shoulders. Then he dropped the orchid into the gutter, got into the car and trod on the starter. But lie did not engage the gear. He sat staring through the windshield, his eyes still thoughtful. He didn’t like mysteries: not that you could call this a mystery, but it was odd. At one time he and Frank used to hang two little black crows made of wool on the door-knockers of then intended victims. Once or twice it saved them trouble, as the recipient of the woollen crows had shot himself, but it was a cheap theatrical trick and Max soon put a stop to it. Warning symbols seemed to him to be undignified. Was the scarlet orchid a warning symbol? he asked himself. If it was, then whoever had dropped it into the car had better watch out. Max didn’t appreciate such tricks. He pulled at his thin, pinched nose, got out of the car and picked up the bloom. After a moment’s hesitation he stuck it in his buttonhole. Then he engaged gear and drove away.

On a hill overlooking Santo Rio’s magnificent harbour and bay stood a two-storey pinewood house surrounded by a wilderness of palm and flowering shrubs. It was a forlorn-looking place, weather-beaten, shabby and lonely. On the wooden gate hung a name-plate which read: Kozikot. Max had never bothered to remove the plate, although each time he came to the house he sneered at it.