Donald Hamilton: Murderers Row

I didn't have any faith in her chances of effecting a rescue single-handed, and I doubted that she did. That left her pretty well committed to the unpleasant alternative, after which she was supposed to get away-extricate herself, as Mac had put it-to tell us all about it. If she couldn't make it, she knew what to do. In the armed forces, you're supposed to be brave, if captured, and tell nothing under any circumstances but your name, rank, and serial number. We're not required to be that brave, thank God. We're merely required to kill ourselves.

It wasn't a future to which anyone would look forward with joy, and I could understand the resignation in her blue eyes. I spoke the lines I had been given to memorize.

"I think you know what I want, Jean. I'm sorry, I really am. Everybody goes through bad periods. It's a lousy, dirty business, and we understand and sympathize, up to a point."

"A point?" she whispered. "What point?"

I said, "It wasn't nice of you to fool the kid who just left. It wasn't nice, Jean, and it wasn't smart. Why do you think we sent a green youngster to keep an eye on an experienced operative like you? When you seduced him and tricked him-and made contact with certain other people right under his nose-when you did that, you crossed a line. You gave yourself away. We'd been wondering about you. You told us what we needed to know."

She gasped, "But I haven't really done-I haven't really told them-I never meant to go through with-" She swallowed hard. "I was just-a little crazy, I guess."

"It is," I said, deliberately, "a form of insanity that we can't afford to tolerate. I'm sorry."

Don't blame us for the dialogue. Somebody wrote it for us in Washington. Jean stared at me for a moment longer. Her eyes were that china-blue color that never looks real in anyone's but a child's face. They disturbed me, and I saw another disturbing thing: the glass, which she'd kept hidden from me, was full to within an inch of the top with straight whisky-it had to be that, since there was no water nearer than the bathroom, and she hadn't gone in there.

She looked at me, with those odd, blue, child's eyes staring out of the pretty, plump, dissipated woman's face. Then she ducked her head abruptly, and drank down the contents of the glass, shuddered, and set the glass aside. It took her a moment to catch her breath after that massive slug. Well, if she wanted to anesthetize herself at this point, having said almost everything she was supposed to say, I couldn't really blame her.

She licked her lips, and got out her final line with difficulty, "I know-I know, you're going to-to kill me!"

"Not kill, Jean," I said. "Not kill."

As I went to work, I was glad for her sake that she had all that alcohol inside her, but I wished she'd stuck to those corduroy pants. She was still kind of attractive in spite of everything. Nicely dressed as she was, it was kind of like taking an axe to the Mona Lisa.

I wasn't halfway through the scientifically brutal roughing-up program Dr. Perry had laid out for me when she died.

IT WASN'T THE worst moment of my life. After all, I've been responsible for the deaths of people I knew and liked: it happens in the business. Although we'd worked for the same outfit, this woman had been a stranger to me. Still, she'd trusted me to know what I was doing, and it's no fun to find yourself holding a corpse and wondering what the hell went wrong.

I caught her as she collapsed, and I felt her fight for breath-for life-and fail to make it. It took only a moment. Then she was dead. I was clumsy about easing her to the floor; I got my watch strap tangled in her necklace. Maybe I was just a bit rattled, too. Anyway, suddenly there were artificial pearls all over the rug. Several strands had been broken by the time I'd managed to lay her down and disentangle myself. The damn beads kept slipping off the broken strings by twos and threes, and rolling about in a nasty alive way while she lay among them, absolutely still. Edgar Allen Poe would have thought it was swell.

I straightened up and took a couple of long breaths and listened. She'd died practically in silence, but it had been a very loud silence, if you know what I mean; and there had been a bit of scuffling before that. It seemed as if somebody outside must have noticed something, but apparently nobody had.

I took another long breath, and knelt down and made a brief examination. There was nothing fundamentally wrong, that I could see, except that she was dead. She was kind of a mess by this time, of course. She was supposed to be. That was what I was there for. The idea had been for her to look spectacularly beat-up--to show how seriously we took her disloyalty-without having anything really broken except a certain bone in the forearm. As Mac had said, she had to have at least one broken bone or they wouldn't buy it. Besides, a nice big cast makes a person look very harmless and helpless, while at the same time it affords concealment for a number of small emergency tools and weapons, properly designed. The surgeon at the local hospital had his instructions…

But I hadn't got that far when she keeled over; and a woman doesn't die from a bruised eye or a cut lip. She doesn't die from a split dress seam or a laddered stocking. I'd been following instructions carefully. Except for the incidental damage to her clothes and necklace, nothing was broken, and she'd lost no significant amounts of blood. She was just dead, lying there.

I rose and went over and sniffed the glass she'd set aside. It smelled of whisky and nothing else. I uncapped the bottle she'd used and tasted the contents cautiously. If there was an adulterant, it had the flavor of whisky, or no flavor at all. Of course, she could have been given something slow-acting in a drink before she came in here, or in her food, if she'd eaten. Or she could have been shot with a poisoned dart, or stuck with a hypo, or bitten by a black widow spider. Or she could simply have died of heart failure.

I grimaced. Matt Helm, boy detective. It didn't matter what she'd died of, for the moment: she was dead. Scratch Jean, agent, female, five feet four, a hundred and thirty pounds. I went to the door and paused to check my watch band for telltale fibers, and my pockets and pants cuffs for beads. I kicked a slim black shoe out of the way, reflecting absently that I'd never yet met a woman, pro or amateur, who could stay in her pumps when the going got rough.

I looked back. If you can do it, you can damn well look at it, no matter how badly you've loused it up. I never trust these delicate chaps who are hell behind a telescopic sight at five hundred yards but can't bear to come up close and see the blood. I gave her a long look, lying there among her spilled pearls. What did I think about-besides wondering, again, what the hell went wrong? Well, if you must know, I thought it would be nice to be in Texas, which is a hell of an attitude for a good New Mexican.

I went out, pulled the door closed behind me, removed my gloves and put them in my pocket. I turned and walked casually towards my parked car. As I did so, I realized there were people at the pool.

We'd counted on the pool being empty after dark, this time of year. I'd gone too far to turn back without attracting attention; so I sauntered by in a leisurely way, and even allowed myself to glance in that direction, like any man curious about what kind of fools would want to go swimming this late on a cool fall night. An athletic male was doing a racing crawl down the pool. On shore there was another man and two girls. These three were making a funny, funny thing of how cold the air was, how cold the water was, and how cold they were.

Maybe I shouldn't have looked at all, though it seemed like the natural thing to do. Maybe I just looked too long. Anyway, the smaller of the two girls glanced around and, seeing me, gestured for me to stop. I couldn't very well pretend I hadn't noticed. I stopped, like any man flagged down by a pretty girl. I waited. She came up to the low fence that separated the tiled pool area from the concrete walk.