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

The gun, its treachery accomplished, fell inert to the floor.

The gap between them closed, as if they were in a final parting embrace. Her hand even crept up his shoulder toward the turn at the top of it, but whether in last conscious longing or whether in blind instinctive seeking of support, there was no way to know. And his arm went around her waist, to try to keep her upright.

So that at the very last moment, death had turned back to love again. Or at least the postures of it.

Then she tumbled downward in a straight line, slipping through the half-circle of his arm, which was only meant to keep her from falling outward and back. And rolled over once at his feet, with the ricochet of the fall, and then a second time, with the final galvanic death-spasm itself. And then didn’t move any more.

The girl gave a whinny like that of a frightened little foal. There was a blurred kaleidoscopic impression, swirling like a spinning pin-wheel, of clothes being snatched at from every direction and all being whisked inward toward a common center, too quickly for the eye to follow. Then, still only half-clad, she scissored her long legs to clear the form on the floor and scampered toward the outside door and the public stairway beyond, two shoes held in her hand by their straps knocking together clackingly all the way.

He, meanwhile, was chopping the edge of his hand down on the telephone-brackets, trying to get a connection, and then shouting hoarsely when he had: “Get the police! Tell them to send someone up here quick! There’s been a fatal accident! My name’s Jacquard, I’m on the third floor, Boulevard Suchet, number—”

And on the floor lay the gown that had caught every eye at the party only a little while before, a shroud now, with a little red-rimmed hole in it like a pair of puckered lips parted in astonishment at what had happened.

The girl came out of the prefecture of police with the bedraggled air of a kitten that has been soaked in the rain. A moment later, after he had shaken hands with the lawyers (it had taken three of them to obtain her temporary release from custody), Boniface came out after her.

“So this is how you played around with me,” he said through grimly clenched teeth as he hustled her over to his waiting car. “Behind my back the whole time, with this young sprout— If poor Fab hadn’t thrown a monkey-wrench into the whole thing by showing up there tonight, you would have gone on fooling me like this indefinitely, I suppose—”

He got out of a taxi anti went into the hotel, about ten on the evening this thing starts. He went up to the desk and asked: “What room’s Mike in?”

“Mike who?” the clerk answered evasively.

Terry showed him 2941. “This Mike.”

“He’s in the corner-suite up on the fifth,” the clerk said then. He knew all about what was going on, but he figured it wasn’t any of his business. He wasn’t the one it was all about; that made the difference.

Terry rode up there and rapped respectfully on the door. Affectionately, almost. Not like he rapped on other doors sometimes.

Another detective opened it immediately, as if he’d been waiting for him to show up and take over. They simply nodded, like men so used to working together they don’t waste time on spoken greetings.

“How’s he doing?” Terry asked, the way you would ask about God.

“He slept a little. Then we watched the games on t. v. He sent down for another bottle.” He looked down and gave a remorseful head-shake. “Try to hold him down on it a little if you ran.”

When men are tender, no tenderness of women can match theirs. The tenderness of women is in small things, in their fingers, in their hands. The tenderness of men is more like a flame of devotion, burning fiercely toward some leader, some idol, some chief. It occurs mostly in groups, such as armies in wartime, and in that other war-just as much a war as any — between the police and their eternal adversaries.

“It can’t be done, you ought to know that by now,” Terry grunted, irritable at what he took to be the other’s obtuseness.

“But how long can he last, the rate he’s going? Day and night, night and day. Even the doctors can’t do anything with him when he goes into the hospital for his check-ups. He sends out for bottles, and lies awake all night cursing and banging his fist against the bed in his frustration and his fury.”

“You know what he wants as well as I do. That’s what’s eating him. When he gets it, he’ll quit drinking and cut out raging, and be a different man.” Terry’s jaw was stony with hate. Second-hand hate at the start, but now his own fully as much as Mike’s and all the rest of them. The thwarted hate of the pack when the rabbit has eluded them and yet stays there in full sight, unreachable and immune. And when the pack happens to be the police, unaccustomed to such defiance, this can be a terrible thing. Far better to lose the game than to win it. For it can’t be won anyway. One thousand years of human cleverness and ingenuity, the best brains of the race, have gone into the making of the police, the punishers, the avengers, and one man alone cannot stand against them, no matter how wealthy he is, no matter how adroit or basically non-criminal or legalistically unpunishable. “No, he won’t die. Not until this is taken care of for him. This is what’s keeping him alive.”

“I want to see him get it,” the other man said, looking down. “I want to see him die in peace, die happy, if he has to die.”

“We all do,” Terry said reverently. “He was the greatest one of them all, in his day. They don’t come like him any more. I love him like a father. I love him better than a father. I want him to get what he wants. I want to give it to him. I want to be the one.” He pushed his thumb backward against his chest. “Me.” There was a light almost of fanaticism in his eyes, of dumb devotion to a chieftain.

The bedroom-door suddenly gave an audio-illusion of buckling outward toward them along its middle, as when a flattening blast takes place inside a shut-up room. Then the shattering cause of it roared through. A voice, human but like that of twenty bulls.

“Will you stop standing there gossiping like a pair of washwomen the two of you! Terrance the Cleary! I want you in here with me!”

The other detective quietly closed the door after him and left. Terry went into the bedroom and stood just inside the doorway, at a sort of semi-attention.

The man sitting up in the bed was a large man, huge, in his sixties. One side of his face had been marked by a stroke, but it was not paralyzed, just distorted a little out of its normal contour. He could move it freely when he spoke, or used his jaw, or did anything with his eyes. It looked about as skin does when a barber pulls it back behind the ears so that he can get a tight surface on which to shave. His over-all color was a high-blooded maroon, that spoke of the stroke, and of pent-up hatred, and of whiskey. The hatred was in his eyes too. They were terrible to see. They were sick with it, worried with it, crazy with it. They were so loaded with it they seemed to hate everything they rested on — even a table, even a chair — but this was only because they were so saturated; actually they didn’t, they only hated one thing in the entire world. One thing: one man.

“You can lay off that,” he glowered, taking in the semi-attention. “I’m not on active duty any more, and you know it.”

“You always will be to me, Mike,” Terry said devoutly. “Always and always, no matter what the roster says. And always to the captain too.”