McBain, Ed - Killer's Payoff

And each of the firemen wished he’d become a cop.

6.

HAL WILLIS was a detective 3rd/grade.

He earned $5,230 a year.

He earned this whether he was being shot at by a thief, or whether he was typing up a report in triplicate back at the squad. He earned it even when he was tailing a woman who tried to hide the swell of her curves by wearing potato-sack suits. The potato-sack suits, he supposed, made it interesting—like watching a stripper who never took off her clothes.

I am getting sick, he thought. There are no strippers who never take off their clothes.

In any case, and in any sense of the word, he did not mind the tail on Lucy Mencken. It had been agreeable work thus far, and he could not imagine how this charming housewife with a peekaboo body could possibly have shaken Meyer. Meyer is getting old, he thought. We’ll have to put him out to pasture. We’ll have to make him a stud bull. He will become the sire of a proud line of law-enforcement officers. They will erect a statue to him in Grover Park. The chiseled lettering at the base of the statue will read, MEYER MEYER, SIRE.

Sick, Willis thought. Sick, for sure.

He was a small man, Willis, barely clearing the five-foot-eight minimum-height requirement for policemen. Among the other detectives of the squad, he looked like a midget. But his deceptive height and his deceptively small bone structure did not fool any of the bulls who worked with him. There were not many men on the squad who wanted to fool with Willis. He was, you see, expert in the ways of judo. Hal Willis could, if you will allow your imagination to soar for a moment, seize the trunk of a charging elephant and—within a matter of seconds—cause that beast to sail through the air and land on his back with possible injury to his spinal column. Such was the might and the power of Hal Willis. Along more prosaic lines, and during the mundane pursuit of his chosen profession, Willis had disarmed thieves, dislocated bones, dispensed severe punishment, dispelled foolish notions about small men, disturbed virile giants who suddenly found themselves flat on their asses, dismayed crooks who did not realize bones could break so easily, and discovered that judo—good, clean fun that it was—could also become a way of life.

Weight and balance, that was the secret. Fulcrum and lever. Wait for your opportunity, seize it, and you had the world on its back.

Lucy Mencken was not, at the moment, on her back—although the thought, in all honesty, had often crossed Willis’s mind since he’d begun tailing her. He had been warned by Carella, and later by Meyer, that Mrs. Mencken bore all the characteristics of a camouflaged munitions dump. Both Carella and Meyer were respectable married men who rarely, if ever, thought lewd, lascivious, or obscene thoughts. If they had seen fit to warn Willis about the necessity for keeping his mind on his work, then Mrs. Mencken was indeed highly explosive.

He had, at first, been disappointed. The woman who emerged from the house in Peabody looked more like a dowdy librarian than a bawdy libertine. It was after he’d been tailing her for a while that he began to appreciate the warnings of his colleagues. It was the most annoying damned thing, not that it wasn’t also pleasant. The woman wore a suit that had surely been manufactured by Omar the tent maker. And yet, beneath that suit, there was the suggestion of vibrant flesh. The suggestion became more than that when the material tightened over her thigh as she stepped from her automobile, or molded the persistent flesh when she stooped to pick up her dropped purse. Lucy Mencken, no matter how she dressed, was voluptuous. And Willis did not at all mind tailing her, except that it was difficult to concentrate.

The tail, that morning of July fifth, led him directly to the Peabody railroad station. Willis had not anticipated this. He hastily parked the police sedan alongside the red MG and followed Lucy into the waiting room. He hoped to get to the ticket window in time to overhear her destination, but she was just turning away from the counter as he entered the waiting room. He didn’t know whether she’d be heading north or south. South led to the city. North led to the next state and then beyond and beyond and beyond. For all he knew, Lucy Mencken could be heading for Canada, or the North Pole, where she planned to sell bootleg whisky to the Eskimos. Willis shrugged and went to the magazine stand, where he bought a copy of Manhunt. Under guise of reading the magazine, he watched Lucy Mencken.

He was amazed by the number of men she fooled. Surely it did not take a detective to know what the baggy linen suit concealed. Surely John Doe could look at her face and detect sensuality despite the severe hairdo and the absence of makeup. And yet, hardly a man in the waiting room turned for a second look at her. Even when she sat and crossed her legs—and there was, for a moment, the flash of thigh, the exalted glimpse of well-turned knee and calf, before her hand lowered the skirt like a linen curtain—none of the men in the waiting room seemed to care very much. Willis shook his head sadly. We are raising a generation of unobservant, impotent robots, he thought. Thank God for Meyer Meyer, Sire.

He could hear a train in the distance. Lucy Mencken looked at her watch, and then rose from the bench. Willis followed her onto the platform. She was, then, taking the southbound train. The last stop would be the city. Was that her destination, or would she get off at one of the stations along the line?

The train roared into the station, hissing steam, sounding its horn. A rush of air caught at Lucy’s skirt. She backed away slightly, holding the skirt about her legs in a completely feminine gesture. She boarded the train and went directly to a smoking car. Willis followed her, and sat across the aisle and several seats behind her. When the conductor came around, he bought a round-trip ticket to the city. Then he sat back and read his detective magazine, glancing up every now and then to make sure Lucy had not moved.

She did not move until the train reached the city. Then she rose and disembarked.

This is great, Willis thought. We send a tail out to Peabody, and she leads the tail back to the city. Women, women.

He did not enjoy being back in the city. The city was a hell of a lot hotter than the exurbs had been. He cursed his bad luck, and stuck with Lucy Mencken. She caught a cab just outside the station. Willis got into the cab behind hers. He flashed his shield and told the cabbie not to lose her. The cabbie did not. Lucy Mencken’s cab cut through the crosstown traffic heading toward the River Harb. It pulled up in front of an office building on Independence Avenue in midtown Isola. Willis paid his hackie and went into the building after her. He had to run across the lobby in order to get into the same elevator with her.

She wore no perfume. He was standing close enough to her to detect that. He was standing close enough to see that her eyes were a clear blue flecked with tiny chips of white. He was standing close enough to see that her nose was spattered with freckles, and he suddenly wondered if she had originally been a farm girl.

“Eight,” the elevator operator said.

Lucy stepped forward. Willis stepped forward with her. The doors slid open. Lucy stepped into the corridor. Willis waited until she was out of the car, and then followed. He made a great show of studying the numbers on each door he approached, as if he were looking for a specific office. Lucy walked directly to the end of the hall, opened a frosted-glass door, and entered. Willis waited a decent interval, and then went to the end of the hall. The lettering on the door said:

806 PATRICK BLIER Photographers’ Representative

Willis moved away from the door. He walked back to the elevator banks, and then flipped open his pocket pad and jotted down the number and name that had been on the door. He rang for the elevator and went down to the lobby. He checked the building to make sure there was only one entrance, and then went to the phone booths from which he could watch the elevators. Rapidly he dialed Frederick 7-8024.