Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“I have,” I said abruptly. “I think I will take out a policy after all. That your car?”

His eyes lighted up. “Good!” he said. “Step in. I’ll ride you down to the office myself, turn you over to our ace salesman.” I knew what he was thinking, that the salesman could back him up in his identification of me.

I got in next to him. When the first light stopped him I had the gun out against his ribs, under my left arm.

“You don’t need to wait for that,” I said. “Turn up the other way, we’re lighting out. Argue about it and I’ll give it to you right here in the car.”

He shuddered a little and then gave the wheel a turn. He didn’t say anything.

“Don’t look so hard at the next traffic cop you pass,” I warned him once. When we got out of the business district, I said: “Take one hand off the wheel and haul that signature out of your wallet.” I rolled it up with one hand, chewed it to a pulp, and spit it out in little soggy pieces. He was sweating a little. I was too, but not as much.

“What’s it going to be?” he quavered. “I’ve got a wife and kids—”

“You’ll get back to ’em,” I reassured him, “but you’ll be a little late, that’s all. You’re going to clear me out of town. I’ll turn you back alone.”

He gave a sigh of relief. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Can you drive without your glasses?” He took them off and handed them to me and I put them on. I could hardly see anything at first. I took off the light-gray coat and changed that with him too. The briefcase on my lap covered my trousers from above and the car door from the side.

“If we’re stopped and asked any questions,” I said, “one wrong word out of you and I’ll give it to you right under their noses, state police or no state police.”

He just nodded, completely buffaloed.

The suburbs petered out and we hit open country. We weren’t, newspapers to the contrary, stopped. A motorcycle cop passed us coming into town; he just glanced in as he went by, didn’t look back. I watched him in the mirror until he was gone. Twenty miles out we left the main highway and took a side road, with fewer cars on it. About ten minutes later his machine started to buck.

“I’m running out of gas,” he said.

“See if you can make that clump of trees over there,” I barked. “Get off the road and into it. Then you can start back for gas on foot and I’ll light out.”

He swerved off the road, bumped across grassy ground and came to a stop on the other side of the trees. He cut the engine and we both got out.

“All right,” I said, “now remember what I told you, keep your mouth shut. Go ahead, never mind watching me.”

I stood with one elbow on the car door and one leg on the running-board. He turned and started shuffling off through the knee-deep grass. I let him get about five yards away and then I shot him three times in the head. He fell and you couldn’t see him in the grass, just a sort of hole there where it was pressed down. I looked around and there wasn’t anyone in sight on the road, so I went up to him and gave him another one right up against his ear to make sure.

I got back in the car and started it. He’d lied about the gas; I saw that by looking at his tank-meter. It was running low, but there was enough left to get back on the road again and make the next filling station.

When I’d filled up, an attendant took the twenty inside with him and stayed in there longer than I liked. I sounded the horn and he came running out.

“I can’t make change,” he said.

“Well, keep it then!” I snapped and roared away.

I met the cops that his phone call had tipped off about ten minutes later, coming toward me not after me. Five of them — too many to buck. I’d thrown the gun away after leaving the gas-station, and I was sitting on the briefcase. I braked and sat there looking innocently surprised.

“Driver’s license?” they said. I had the insurance fellow’s in the coat I was wearing.

“Left it home,” I said.

They came over and frisked me, and then one of them took it out of my pocket. “No, you didn’t,” he said, “but it’s got the wrong guy’s description on it. Get out a minute.”

I had to. Two of them had guns out.

“Your coat don’t match your trousers,” he said dryly. “And you ought to go back to the optician and see about those glasses. Both side-pieces stick out about three inches in back of your ears.” Then he picked up the briefcase and said, “Isn’t it uncomfortable sitting this way?” He opened it, looked in. “Yeah,” he said, “Hogan,” and we started back to town, one of them riding with me with my wrist linked to his. The filling-station fellow said, “Yep, that’s him,” and we kept going.

“I’m Walter Lynch,” I said. “The real Hogan died down by the tracks. I took the money from his room, that’s all — changed places with him. Maybe I can go to jail for that, but you can’t pin a murder rap on me. My wife will identify me. Take me over to 35 Meadow-brook, she’ll tell you who I am!”

“Better pick a live one,” he said. “She jumped out a window early this morning — went crazy with grief, I guess. Don’t you read the papers?”

When we got to the clump of trees, they’d found the insurance guy already. I could see some of them standing around the body. A detective came over and said, “The great Hogan at last, eh?”

“I’m Walter Lynch,” I said.

The detective said, “That saves me a good deal of trouble. That insurance guy, lying out there now, put in a call to his office just before he left his hotel — something about a guy named Lynch trying to pull a fast one on the company. When he didn’t show up they notified us.” He got in. “I’ll ride back with you,” he said.

I didn’t say anything any more after that. If I let them think I was Hogan, I went up for murder. If I succeeded in proving I was Lynch, I went up for murder anyway. As the detective put it on the way to town, “Make up your mind who you wanna be — either way y’gonna sit down on a couple thousand volts.”

“Just one night,” Miss Dulcy Harris was saying dramatically. “Just one night is all I ask! One night without hearing all about who you arrested and what they were wanted for and what their past record was and what they said in the line-up! Just one night away from crime!”

She put her foot down, both literally and metaphorically. A little puff of dust rose from the ground at the impact. “Is this your night off, or isn’t it? Well, you can take those tickets to ’X-Men’ and just tear them up, because I’m not going to sit through any more crime pictures with you and then spend the rest of the night listening to why the detectives aren’t like detectives in real life. I’ve planned our evening for us, for once! You’re taking me out to that showboat in the river.”

Inspector Whittaker (Whitey) Ames, her affianced, unhappily swiveled his neck around inside his starched collar. “Aw, gee, honey,” he pleaded, “not a showboat. Anything but that.”

“Just why so?” she queried suspiciously.

“Because I’m a total loss on anything floating. It upsets me—” She hooted incredulously. “You mean you get seasick? But it’s anchored, it isn’t even moving!”

“But it probably jiggles a little with the current.”

Dulcy narrowed her eyes determinedly. “Everyone but me has been there by now—” She had more to say, much more. Before she had half finished he took her heroically by the arm.