Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

“Half a million dollars,” he repeated.

“Give or take a few thousand,” McReady said, and puffed on his pipe with his eyes still narrowed. “Who told you all this?”

“Kruger.”

“Ahhh,” McReady said.

“You still haven’t said whether or not you know him,” Mullaney said.

“I know him.”

“He wants that money,” Mullaney said. “So do I.”

“What gives you any claim to it?” McReady asked reasonably.

“I almost became a corpse for it.”

“You may still become one,” McReady said, again reasonably. He seemed like a very reasonable fellow, except for the way he kept his eyes squinched up so narrow, never taking his gaze from Mullaney’s face. The cottage was still. Outside, the cemetery ghouls groaned into the wind. Mullaney took another swallow of whiskey.

“Would you like to hear my theory?” he asked.

“Yes, certainly,” McReady said.

“It’s my theory that you substituted the paper scraps for the money.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“No,” McReady said.

“It’s my theory that you have that five hundred thousand dollars.”

“No,” McReady said, and shook his head for emphasis, and puffed on his pipe again, and again said, “No.”

“I went to a lot of trouble finding you,” Mullaney said, and swallowed more whiskey, emptying the glass. McReady poured it full to the brim again. Mullaney lifted it, and said, “By the way, that was a nice job of chiseling on Martin Callahan’s stone.”

“Thank you,” McReady said.

Mullaney drank. “So?” he said.

“So what?”

“If you didn’t put those paper scraps in the jacket, who did?”

“Let us say that where there is cheese, there is also sometimes a rat,” McReady said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean that half a million dollars can be a very tempting sum.”

“Very tempting indeed,” Mullaney said. “If I had it, I would take it to Monte Carlo and play seventeen red.”

“Black,” McReady said.

“What?”

“Seventeen is black.”

“Then that’s what I would play,” Mullaney said. “If I had the money.”

“Unfortunately, you don’t have it.”

“Do you?”

“Not yet,” McReady said.

“What does that mean?”

“Ahhh,” McReady said, and puffed on his pipe.

“Why were you sending it to Rome?” Mullaney asked.

“Ahhh,” McReady said.

“This is a big international gang, isn’t it?” Mullaney said shrewdly. “This is an enormous criminal cartel, isn’t it? This is a big heroin operation, right? Or white slavery, right, am I right, McReady?”

“You are wrong,” McReady said.

“Then what is it?” he asked, and suddenly realized he was drunk.

“It is none of your business,” McReady said, “that is what it is.”

“It’s my business because you made it my business.”

McReady put down his pipe. Mullaney saw that his hand was very close to the knife on the table, which was a very large and sharp-looking kitchen knife, something he had not noticed while he was slicing the salami. McReady’s eyes were still narrowed. Mullaney was beginning to think he was simply nearsighted.

“I would like to ask you some questions,” McReady said.

“Oh, would you now?” Mullaney said, feeling suddenly very exuberant, feeling again the way he had felt when he’d stood up to Kruger back on Sixty-first Street, somewhat like a hero, albeit a drunken one.

“Yes, and I would like you to answer them.”

“Well now, maybe I’ll answer them, and maybe I won’t,” Mullaney said.

“We shall see,” McReady said, and Mullaney was positive now that he was a member of an international crime cartel because all the members thus far had the same corny way of sounding terribly menacing when they talked to you, as if they had all learned to threaten in the same exclusive school run by Fagin or somebody, Three six nine a bottle of wine, Mullaney thought, I can lick you any old time. But McReady’s hand was on the knife.

“Did you open the jacket?” McReady asked.

“I did.”

“And found the paper scraps?”

“I did.”

“Where?”

“Inside the jacket. Sewn into the jacket.”

“I meant... where did you make this discovery?”

“Oh, I get it,” Mullaney said. “I get it now, pal. Go ahead, torture me, I’ll never tell you where I left those heroin-impregnated scraps of paper. Or is it LSD? Huh? Is that what The New York Times was soaked in? LSD? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

“You have a vivid imagination,” McReady said.

“Where’d you learn to talk that way?” Mullaney said. “Did Fagin teach you to talk that way at his international crime school, all menacing like that?”

“Mr. Mullaney...”

“Oh, so you know my name, huh?”

“Yes, we got it from your driver’s license.”

“We is it, huh? Big criminal organization, huh? Go ahead, torture me, I can take torture of any kind, Irene and I once lived in an apartment that had ten thousand cockroaches, you think I’m afraid of torture? I’ll never tell you where I left those paper scraps!”

“I don’t care where you left the paper scraps,” McReady said. “All I want to know is where you left the jacket .”

“So that’s it, huh?” Mullaney said. “It’s the jacket that’s important, huh? Go ahead, torture me.”

“Have some more schnapps,” McReady said quickly.

“Oh no you don’t!” Mullaney snapped. “Trying to get me drunk, huh, so I’ll spill everything I know, huh? No you don’t,” but he poured himself another drink and raised his glass and said, “Skoal, buddy, I could have won a fortune at Aqueduct today if you louses hadn’t come along and spoiled it. You happen to know who won the fourth race?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Jawbone, right?”

“I have no idea.”

“I thought so,” Mullaney said. “Jawbone, huh? I knew it.”

“Where did you leave the jacket?”

“Ha ha,” Mullaney said, and shoved back his chair defiantly and exuberantly, and then almost fell flat on his face. He staggered back from the table, suddenly ashamed of himself, not because he was drunk but only because he had become drunk in the presence of someone he did not like. There are many many ways to get drunk, he thought, and one way is as good as any other way; the only thing that can be bad about getting drunk is the company you’re in while you’re doing it. He did not like McReady any more than he had liked K or Gouda or Kruger or any of the other members of this vast cartel, perhaps two cartels (so the jacket is important, huh? he thought, never tell a book by its jacket), and yet he had allowed himself to get drunk in the man’s presence, which was a mean and despicable thing to do.

The most fabulous drunk in his life, the only one he could really distinguish from every other drunk in his life, small or large, was the one he had thrown with Irene in their apartment the day she discovered the Cache. She only discovered the Cache because they were at that time waging war against the ten thousand cockroaches who shared their place on East Sixteenth Street, which meant they were opening cabinet doors and dispensing roach powder, lifting dishes and pots and pans, and spraying sharp poofing puffs of poison into dark comers and niches, watching the cockroaches flee in disorganized retreat. The Cache consisted of four ten-dollar bills which she had hidden in a casserole against a rainy day, and then completely forgotten. She had tilted the casserole so that he could get a better shot at the nest of little scurrying bastards hidden in the corner, and suddenly the money had fallen out of it, payment for mercenaries, and it began raining. They had by now sprayed everything in sight or out of it, and since it had begun raining, and since the money had been put aside for a rainy day, Mullaney suggested that they spend the afternoon (it was Saturday) getting delightfully crocked, which suggestion Irene thought was capital, repulsed as she was by the hordes of insects breeding in their closets. They had taken a taxicab up to Zabar’s on Eightieth and Broadway, where they bought a tin of Beluga caviar, and then had come back downtown and bought two fifths of Polish vodka and a box of crackers, and had spent the rest of the afternoon and evening eating caviar and drinking the vodka neat. It had been a marvelous drunk. They tried to make love several times during the afternoon and evening, but neither could manage it because they were positively squiffed, laughing and reeling all over the apartment, drinking to the cockroaches and also to the Beatles (who were fairly new at the time) and drinking to Queen Elizabeth (“Up the Irish!” Irene shouted) and also to Khrushchev (Mullaney took off his shoe and banged it on the counter top, less in imitation of the Russian premier than in an attempt to squash a poison-drunk cockroach who was making his dizzy way toward the sink — and missing) and they drank to J. D. Salinger for having listed all the ingredients in Zooey’s or Franny’s or somebody’s medicine cabinet, without which literary feat American fiction that past year might have been barren and bleak, and oh, it had been a marvelous drunk.