Микки Спиллейн - The Long Wait

And over by the wall there was Wendy. Blondie. Beautiful blonde Wendy with the lovely legs and round hillocks that tried to peek out of the dress. She was a good-looking twist if you didn’t get too close. She was smiling and shrugging out of a light trench coat and the motion shoved her breasts out for inspection. It didn’t take a second look to see that if she had anything on under the white blouse it must have been painted on with a brush. The skirt part of the ensemble was too tight around the hips, but it was designed that way. There was the suggestion of a rumba in every motion she made and for good measure a slit ran up the side seam to let the flash of nylon show through, and if you looked hard enough the slippery sheen of skin above where the nylon ended.

She threw the coat over the back of a chair and sat down. Nick did too.

Not me.

I stood there with my back against the door looking at the two of them and my face must have made a picture of everything that went on in my mind. Wendy’s lips moved as if to say something, but Nick cut her off. He frowned at me: “What’s wrong with you? I...”

My mouth pulled tight in the corners. “Did I ever tell you what was going to happen to three people?” They looked at each other wonderingly, then back to me. “One’s going to die,” I said. “One’s going to get his arms broken. The other one is going to get the hell kicked out of her.”

Wendy’s fingers locked on the arms of the chair. She was half up and her eyes were a nasty blaze. Like a fast fuse. “Say it,” she snapped out.

“I got shot at.”

Pop let out a startled grunt. “Johnny...”

“Shut up. I’ll get to you.”

Wendy was a sharp little cooky. She caught wise in a hurry. So she had nice legs and a nicer bosom, but she wasn’t drawing any admiration from my side of the room at all. I looked at her and looked at her, trying to decide if a sweet dish like her could bump a guy and decided she could. I said, “Where you been all day?”

“Why?”

“Answer me.”

The eyes got brighter if anything. “Don’t be so damned domineering. I don’t like tough guys... if you’re a tough guy.”

“I’m tough enough. You can find that out if you want to. Some other people already did.”

The corners of her mouth looked strained. “So now you think one of us shot at you?”

“Maybe, sugar, maybe. It’s pretty simple when you think of it. Who else knew I was in town? I can rattle them off on my hand if you want. Nick here. You. Lindsey. Tucker. Maybe I should throw in the bellboys at the hotel and the taxi driver.” My eyes closed down on themselves and I watched her face. “It even gets simpler. Lindsey or Tucker wouldn’t have missed.

Nick couldn’t see that far. The bellboys and hack jockey weren’t important enough to try a stunt like that. That leaves you. Funny, isn’t it?”

I smiled at her.

She didn’t smile back. The white lines at each end of her mouth faded. For the first time it grew soft and pretty and if I didn’t know better I would have thought she was feeling sorry for me.

She said, “At a quarter to nine the mailman awakened me. I had to sign for a registered letter. You can check on that. About twenty minutes later the milkman got me up again and I paid my bill. His name is Jerry Wyndot and you can reach him at Lyncastle Dairy. Before he left Louie drove by with my new costume and stayed until noon. He had a friend with him from ASCAP. Then at...”

“That’s enough,” I said. I felt a little foolish. I went over to the table and reached for the coffee. When I took a good pull I set it down and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Nick was shaking his head sadly. “Sorry, kid. I never make little mistakes, only big ones.”

Her eyes came up to mine and the fire was out of them. “That’s all right, Johnny, I understand.” The little smile she gave me said she meant it, too.

I laugh when I feel good. Hell, I felt good! When do you meet a dame that lets you throw an attempted murder in her teeth and then understands why without being sore about it for a week?

I laughed, Nick thought I was nuts, but Wendy, she laughed too. In a way it was a pretty good joke. I parked on Nick’s window stool and passed the butts around. “I get in trouble a lot that way,” I told them.

Nick agreed readily. “You’ll get in too much to get out of if you do that to the wrong people. Maybe now you’re ready to say what you came to say.”

“I didn’t come to say, Nick. Ask is the word. I’m stuck. What do I do now?”

Wendy pulled on her cigarette.“Stuck for what?”

“Ideas. Information. I can’t go to the cops and nobody else knows anything. Lindsey has a murder charge written out with my name on it and he can’t serve it. Someday he’s going to find a way to do it, but before then I have to get clear of the thing. Unless I do I can’t make a play without sticking my neck out.”

Nick slid his chair closer to the table and propped his elbows on it. “You tell us, Johnny. Shucks, I know plenty of people I can go to. What’s it you need?”

Things I never even thought about before started popping in my head. “I don’t like the way Minnow died. He was sitting there and bang, just like that he caught it. Neat. Clean. No fuss. And there I was with a beautiful tailor-made motive for bumping him.”

“The gun,” Wendy said quickly. Her eyes sprayed me with a cool glance. Nick looked at my hands automatically and waited to hear what I had to say about it.

“Yeah, the gun,” I repeated. The big question. Lindsey asked it. Wendy asked it. Inside, I was asking it myself. “I wonder what Minnow was doing there that night.”

“The papers said he was working,” Nick muttered. “It was his office.”

“It was pretty late, too.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Back to what I said first. I didn’t like the way he died. He should have been out of his chair on the floor or something. If he was surprised in the office by the killer, especially me, he would have tried to make one move, at least.”

Nick pulled at his whiskers. “You got medals for shooting quick and fast in the army, Johnny.” There wasn’t any hedging about him at all.

“Not that fast,” I said. “I like it better to think that the killer was there all the time. Maybe Minnow even went there to meet him. What about that?”

They said it together. “Maybe.” They meant me. It was getting rougher.

“How can I find out?”

Wendy crossed one leg over the other. White, slippery white above nylon showed through the slit in the skirt. “Minnow left a widow. She might know.”

“Know where she lives?”

“I can find out.”

I got down off the stool. “Come on, then. Let’s find out.”

She lived in a white frame house in the suburbs. It was a quiet neighborhood and all the houses had plenty of lawn space around them. There were swings out in the back and kids playing on the lawns and people gathered in hammocks on open porches. The house we wanted had a fence around it, a bird house on a pole and a rustic sign that said “Minnow.”

I opened the gate and let Wendy go in ahead of me. She went up on the porch, rang the bell and smiled at me while we waited. The door opened and a woman in her fifties said, “Hello, can I do something for you?”

“Mrs. Minnow?”

She nodded at Wendy. “That’s right.”

It was hard trying to find the right words. I stepped forward and said, “If you have a few minutes, we’d like to talk to you. It’s pretty important.”

She held the door open wide. “Certainly, come right in. Make yourselves at home.” We stepped inside and followed her into the living room. It was a nice room that told you that whoever lived there liked things orderly and in good taste. Wendy and I sat together on the couch while the woman settled herself. She smiled again and waited.