Richard Deming: Gallows in My Garden

I felt the hair rise along the back of my neck.

The taller gunman shook his head. “He’d probably put up a fight and make noise. We better use the car.”

“I’ve decided to take the ten thousand and the vacation,” I said. “Maybe I better pack.”

“Maybe you better shut up,” the tall man said. “Get moving.”

Lifting his straw hat from the mantel, he dropped it over his little revolver and gestured with the hat toward the door. His short friend glanced at him admiringly and tried his own hat over his gun. But the automatic was too large, so he thrust it in a side pocket instead and kept his hand on it. Then he courteously held the door for me.

We met no one in the hall, nor on the half-flight of stairs to the street entrance. But no more had we reached the sidewalk than a long black Cadillac convertible swooped around the corner and skidded to a stop in the “no parking” space directly in front of the apartment. Two people were in the car, and my heart by-passed a beat when I saw the driver was Grace Lawson.

At the same moment she saw me and waved gaily, the squat man whispered hoarsely, “Geez! It’s the kid! What we do now?”

“We lose the pot,” the tall man said quickly. “Scram, and fast!”

Immediately both turned and headed down the street side by side at a fast walk. I stared after them with my mouth open until they rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.

I approached the car and said to Grace, “Were you in the Girl Marines?”

“No,” she said, startled. “I wasn’t old enough. Why?”

“Because you’re so prompt. Early, aren’t you?”

“A little. Arnold makes me get everywhere early.” She turned her eyes to the skinny lad of twenty-two or twenty-three who sat next to her, and her tone changed to the one radio announcers use when they say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” But what she said was, “This is my fiancé, Arnold Tate, Mr. Moon.”

As we shook hands I examined him in an effort to discover what he had that gave rich and beautiful girls the blind staggers. He seemed to possess none of the traditional great-lover attributes. No bulging muscles, no Grecian profile, no silken lashes, nor golden curls. His frame was big-boned but skinny, his face long and narrow, with very black eyes, an aquiline nose, and a thin but prominent jaw. His black hair was straight and possibly had been combed, but riding with the top down had spilled it all over his forehead. He had a firm handclasp and looked like a nice guy.

I said, “How are you, Arnold?” which he recognized as a rhetorical question, for instead of answering, he asked me the same thing.

“I was just walking to the street with some callers who dropped in,” I told Grace. “Be back soon as I get my bag.”

My P-38 still lay in the middle of the front-room floor. I hid it under my arm, got my grip from the bedroom, and returned to the car.

Grace drove as though she were rushing to a hospital and was afraid she would have a baby before she got there. She was a good driver, but the only times we got under fifty were at stop signs and red lights.

I was conscious of some sort of strain between her and Arnold Tate. During the first mile of our eight-mile drive to Willow Dale neither said a word, Arnold sitting still and aloof, as though he heartily disapproved of both of us, and our beautiful chauffeur occasionally casting appealing sidewise glances at him. Abruptly Arnold started the conversation.

“I want you to know I don’t approve of this at all, Mr. Moon,” he announced.

“Of what?” I inquired.

“This subterfuge. It’s ridiculous, when Grace’s life is in danger, to consider anything so inconsequential as unfavorable publicity. I think the police should have been called long ago.”

“So do I,” I said.

He flashed me a surprised glance. “Then why didn’t you recommend that procedure to Grace?”

“I did.”

“Now, Arnold,” Grace broke in. “Let’s not go all over that again. Mr. Moon is a professional bodyguard and knows all about keeping people from getting killed. Don’t you, Mr. Moon?”

“No. I only know how to try. The last woman I was hired to protect managed to get killed anyway.”

For a moment there was silence.

“If it will make you feel better, I caught the murderer,” I said.

This time the silence was longer. When it began to look as though it would last indefinitely, I said, “The two men in white you saw me with when you drove up weren’t exactly friends. They were professional gunmen come to warn me out of town.”

Both of them looked at me sharply.

“They seemed to know you, too, which is why they departed so quickly. But if they are the ones trying to kill you, I don’t know why they didn’t take this opportunity. They had me covered, and they could easily have taken over your car, forced you to drive somewhere lonely, and rubbed all three of us out.”

Grace had paled, but Arnold only looked angry. “How did they know Grace had engaged you?” he asked.

“That’s the question I intended asking you two. Who knew she was going to?”

“No one but the two of us and Fausta Moreni,” Arnold stated positively, then glanced quickly at Grace.

She shook her head, “I didn’t tell anyone.”

“You can rule Fausta out,” I said. “She chatters, but she doesn’t talk. She wouldn’t pass on anything told her in confidence to her own mother. That’s why so many people tell her their troubles. If neither of you let it out, the only answer is that someone’s been tailing Grace.”

Arnold started to twist in his seat.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ve been watching and there’s no tail on us now.”

Arnold said loudly, “I’m going to call the police the minute we get to the house!”

“You do,” Grace threatened, “and I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Haw!” Arnold snorted. He turned to me. “Understand, Mr. Moon, I’m not objecting to your being engaged. As a matter of fact I think a professional bodyguard is an excellent idea. But I think it’s absurd not to call the police, also, or for you to attempt to pass yourself off as anything but a bodyguard. If you’ll pardon my frankness, you don’t look like a graduate student in English literature.”

I grinned at him. “What do I look like?”

“A prizefighter or a stevedore or an army first sergeant.”

“You win first prize,” I said. “I’ve been all three.”

Grace flicked her eyes curiously at my face.

“The nose and the bum eyelid aren’t from the ring,” I told her. “I picked them up in stevedore days.”

She flushed crimson. “I’m sorry,” she said almost inaudibly. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

For some obscure reason her embarrassment embarrassed me. I am not sensitive about my face, for it isn’t exactly ugly, but only battered. So it was not the subject of my appearance that embarrassed me, but the feeling that I had caused Grace discomfiture. Which indicates the effect she had on people, for normally I am about as sensitive to others’ feelings as a Nazi prison guard.

As we neared Willow Dale, Grace pulled over to the side of the road and stopped.

“Now promise you’ll behave, Arnold,” she said. “I don’t want you spoiling the week-end by exciting everybody at home.”

“I’m going to phone the police.”

She chewed her lip petulantly. Suddenly she smiled, threw the car in gear, and started again.

“Go right ahead,” she said in a deliberately sweet voice. “I’ll tell them you’re crazy and I don’t know a thing about it.”

For a few moments he examined her in silence, half exasperated and half amused. Then he shrugged resignedly. “She would,” he told me wryly, and did not speak again the rest of the trip.