Evan Hunter - A Horse’s Head

He could not understand why she was leaving her apartment without him even though he was more than an hour late (he was always late for dates; she knew that by now). The two men flanked her like storm troopers (Is she being abducted? he thought in panic), and led her to a blue Chrysler convertible parked illegally alongside a fire hydrant, its top down. Mullaney, pulling up to the curb, shouted, “Irene!” in shock and surprise, but when she heard her name, she only turned and smiled and waved at him, and then got into the Chrysler, which, Mullaney now saw, was sporting California license plates and a foxtail flying from the radio aerial. The radio erupted in that moment with what was undoubtedly the Country Western forerunner of today’s Rock and Roll, the Emperor’s New Music, erupted on that silent July avenue with all the bursting energy of a mortar explosion, zoooooooom, the Chrysler pulled away from the curb in a roaring California surfing-type rock and roll lousy handsome bronzed gods abductors of Irish maidens display of horsepower and élan, “Hey!” Mullaney cried out pitifully.

He climbed out of the decrepit Chevy and stood in the middle of the street watching the disappearing rear end of the convertible and thinking They are taking my girl away, and that was the beginning of the chase.

The chase roared up West End Avenue to Ninety-sixth Street, the battered old Chevy valiantly trying to keep up with the sleek and musical Chrysler, managing to do so only because the California professors (it took him three weeks to accept the fact that they really had been professors) were unfamiliar with the trip-light system in New York and kept getting stopped by red lights on almost every other corner while Mullaney kept his speed down, making all the greens, and steadily gaining on them, Mullaney’s System in embryo. All the while, he kept seeing Irene’s hair blowing free in the wind, Irene occasionally turning to look back, certain she knew he was following, certain she was urging her professor friends to step on the gas, enjoying this enormously while he kept swearing and mumbling under his breath and hoping his car would not overheat.

The Chrysler turned left on Ninety-sixth and hit the downhill straightaway to the Henry Hudson Parkway, almost leaving Mullaney in the dust, but shrieking to a stop when a gasoline truck unexpectedly pulled out of the garage on the right-hand side of the street, just before the viaduct, enabling him to gain on them again, but causing him to wonder what would happen when they got on the parkway and could really give their powerful machine its head. He pressed his own accelerator to the floorboard — the chase was beginning to get somewhat exciting now, he was beginning to think of Irene as some sort of rare woodland sprite captured by barbarians, the prize he must rescue, he had written sonnets about girls like this — and heard the valiant old Chevy rattling away on all six cylinders, and thought Come on, Bessie (he had never, before this, called the car anything at all), we’ve got to catch that submarine up ahead. The submarine up ahead, dispensing Country Western music that was assuredly being picked up on a shortwave radio hookup to some foreign land, perhaps California, flying its foxtail flag from the radio aerial, zoomed onto the parkway, and left Mullaney’s Chevy rattling and steaming at the Full Stop sign.

They were very clever, those California hot-rod professors, but they forgot just one thing as they raced away on the parkway with the Hudson River gleaming in hot July sunshine on their left and the George Washington Bridge uptown spanning New York and New Jersey, they forgot Ford’s Law, which stated that an automobile will continue to roll forward only in direct ratio to the amount of gasoline in its tank. They ran out of gasoline some five hundred yards short of the parkway’s Mobil station, and both mad professors jumped out of the car and began running along the edge of the road, hoping not to get hit by the Saturday traffic, glancing back over their shoulders to shout words of encouragement to Irene, who was standing on the front seat of the Chrysler and cheering as Mullaney drove into view in the puffing Chevrolet. Keen of eye and strong of muscle in those days, Mullaney sized up the situation in a flash: The bronzed surfers had run out of gas and were jogging to the station for a replenishing gallon or two; Irene was alone in the automobile, wearing, he saw now, a bright-yellow shift, a yellow ribbon in her windblown red hair, a saucy impudent grin on her wide Irish mouth — she was daring him, the wench, she was daring him to kidnap her from her kidnapers.

Which he did.

He parked his old heap directly parallel to the sleek shining California submarine, threw open the door on her side, reached in and scooped her into his arms, skirts flying, white nylon panties flashing for an instant, she shrieking, he wanting to make love to her right there in the middle of the parkway, zip , he ran around the nose of the Chrysler, zam , he threw her onto the front seat of his own car, whap, he threw the car into gear, whooosh, he was off in a belching cloud of carbon monoxide. “Hey!” the surfers cried this time, “Hey!” their voices every bit as full of pitiable despair as Mullaney’s had been outside Irene’s apartment building. “Ho-ho!” Mullaney shouted as the Chevrolet rolled by, Irene laughing, her hair whipping about her face, green eyes sparkling, “I love you,” he shouted, and she stopped laughing.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

“You lovely wench, I love you,” he said. “I’m mad about you.”

“Well now,” she said, and was solemnly quiet as he drove recklessly and wildly up the parkway, glancing now and again into the rear-view mirror for sight of the long blue submarine pulling out of the Mobil station. They do not know New York, he reasoned correctly, they are surfers from California, they do not know about such hidden nooks as the Cloisters, ah-ha, he thought, I will foil them.

“I will foil your surfboarding California friends,” he said to Irene.

“They are professors,” she answered.

“Ha!” he said.

The Cloisters was silent in mid-July heat, ancient rocks and stones baking in the sun, flowers blooming, insects droning lazily in the turreted stillness. He made love to her on a secret knoll overlooking the Hudson in the shadow of the timeless walls, feeling sacrilegious and daring and adventurous, telling her he was wild about her, “I adore you, mmm, I am stark raving mad about your mouth and your eyes and your legs and your pert tiny breasts...”

“Tiny?” she said.

“Oh, mmm, you are all peaches and cream, all soft and round and perfect, oh, I want to marry you,” he said.

“When?” she said.

“Now,” he said.

“Love me now,” she said, “concentrate on that. You can marry me later if you like.”

That was the chase, that was how the chase had ended, with Irene in his arms and the crisp yellow shift up above her waist, while perhaps the parkway traffic watched below, who knew or cared, though later, much later, she would not do it on a Ferris wheel. That day had been the most exciting day in his life, that day he first knew the dizzying excitement of her, that had been the most exciting day in his life until now, today, when he was being chased by two thieves in a black Cadillac, racing to retrieve a jacket worth half a million dollars.

“Are they still behind us?” the driver asked.

“No, I think we’ve lost them,” Mullaney said, but was not at all sure.

He asked the driver to wait for him at the curb and then went into the apartment building, trying to decide where he should begin — top floor? bottom floor? middle floor? A clock in the lobby told him it was now twenty-five minutes past five, which meant that any self-respecting housewife was already preparing dinner for her spouse and children. He thought this might be a very bad time to go knocking on a hundred and thirty doors, but he could not think of a better time, what with K and Purcell possibly sniffing around and lending urgency to the situation. He was beginning to regret his promise to the cab driver. He had, after all, taken all the risks involved with locating the jacket; he had figured out exactly why and how the jacket was valuable; he had been gambling on its worth since early yesterday; why in hell should he now give the cab driver one percent of the take simply for driving him from Brooklyn to Queens and back again? Well, he thought, we’ll renegotiate that after I find the jacket, the first thing to do is find the damn jacket.