Mickey Spillane - I, The Jury

“Well, do you like it?” she asked again.

“Lovely. And you know it.” I grinned at her. “You remind me of something.”

“What?”

“A way of torturing a guy.”

“Oh, please, I can’t be that bad. Do I affect you like that? Torture you, I mean?”

“No, not quite. But if you take a guy that hasn’t seen a woman in five years, let’s say, and chain him to a wall and let you walk past him the way you did just now—well, that would be torture. See what I’m getting at?”

Her laugh was low and throaty. She threw back her head a little and I wanted to grab her and kiss the beauty of her throat. Charlotte took my arm and led me to the kitchen. The table was laid out for two. On the table was a big pile of fried chicken and another equally large basket of French fries.

“Just for us. Now sit down and eat. I’ve already held supper an hour waiting for you.”

I was dumbfounded. Either she kept a complete file of my likes and dislikes or she was clairvoyant. Chicken was my specialty.

As I pulled out a chair and sat down, I said, “Charlotte, if there was an angle to this, I’d think the chow was poisoned. But even if it is, I’m going to eat it anyway.”

She was putting a red-bordered apron on. When she finished she poured the coffee. “There is an angle,” she said casually.

“Let’s have it,” I said through a mouthful of chicken.

“When you came in to see me I saw a man that I liked for the first time in a long time.” She sat down and continued. “I have hundreds of patients, and surprisingly enough, most of them are men. But they are such little men. Either they had no character to begin with or what they had is gone. Their minds are frail, their conception limited. So many have repressions or obsessions, and they come to me with their pitiful stories; well, when you constantly see men with their masculinity gone, and find the same sort among those whom you call your friends, you get so you actually search for a real man.”

“Thanks,” I put in.

“No, I mean it,” Charlotte went on. “I diagnosed you the moment you set foot in my office. I saw a man who was used to living and could make life obey the rules he set down. Your body is huge, your mind is the same. No repressions.”

I wiped my mouth. “I got an obsession though.”

“You have? I can’t imagine what it is.”

“I want a killer. I want to shoot a killer.” I watched her over a drumstick, chewing a mile a minute on the succulent dark meat. She tossed her hair and nodded.

“Yes, but it’s a worth-while obsession. Now eat up.”

I went through the pile of chicken in nothing flat. My plate was heaped high with bones. Charlotte did all right, too, but I did most of the damage. After a piece of pie and a second cup of coffee I leaned back in my chair, contented as a cow.

“That’s a wonderful cook you’ve got there,” I remarked.

“Cook, hell,” she laughed. “I did all that myself. I haven’t always been wealthy.”

“Well, when the time comes for you to get married, you’re not going to have to go out of your way to get a husband.”

“Oh, I have a system,” she said. “You’re getting part of it right now. I lure men to my apartment, cook for them, and before they go home I have my proposal.”

“Don’t look now,” I told her, “but it’s been tried on me before.”

“But not by an expert.” We both laughed at that. I suggested we do the dishes and she handed me an apron. Very politely, I laid it on the back of a chair. It just wouldn’t go well with my mug. If anyone I knew happened to breeze in and catch me in a rig like that I’d spend the rest of my life living it down.

After we finished the dishes we went into the living room. Charlotte curled up in the armchair and I half fell on the sofa. We lit cigarettes, then she smiled at me and said, “All right, you can tell me why you came up to see me. More questions?”

I shook my head. “I confess. Don’t beat me with that whip. I started out with two things in mind. The first one was to see you with your hair down. It turned out better than I expected.”

“And the other?”

“To see if you, as a practicing psychiatrist, could throw some light on the murder of my good friend, Jack Williams.”

“I see. Perhaps if you tell me more explicitly what you want, I’ll be able to help you.”

“Good enough. I want details. The murder isn’t old enough to get well into it yet, but I will. It’s entirely reasonable that someone at the party knocked off Jack. It’s just as reasonable that it was someone completely outside. I’ve made some character studies, and what I’ve found I don’t like. However, that may not be a good reason for murder. What I want from you is an opinion, not one based on fact or logic, but an opinion, purely professional, on how you think those I mentioned may tie into this thing and whom you’d line up for the killer.”

Charlotte took a deep drag on her cigarette, then crushed it out in an ashtray. Her mind was working hard, it was reflected in her expression. A minute passed before she spoke. “You are asking me to do a difficult thing, pass judgment on a person. Usually it takes twelve men and a judge, after hours of deliberation, to do the same thing. Mike, after I met you, I made it my job to look into your character. I wanted to know what a man like you was made of. It wasn’t hard to find out. The papers have been full of your episodes, editorials were even written about you, and not very favorable ones, either. Yet I found people who knew you and liked you. Little people and big people. I like you. But if I were to tell you what I thought I’m afraid I’d be passing a sentence of death on a person. No, I won’t tell you that, you’d be too quick to kill. That I don’t want. There’s so much about you that could be nice if only your mind wasn’t trained to hate too fiercely.

“What I will do is give you that which I have observed. It takes time to think back, and I’ve taken the whole afternoon to do just that. Little things I thought I had forgotten are clear now and they may make sense to you. I’m used to personal conflict, the struggle that goes on within one’s mind, not with differences between two or more people. I can notice things, put them in their proper places, but I can’t do more than file them away. If a person hates, then I can find the reason for his hatred and possibly help him to rationalize more clearly, but if that hatred has consumed him to the point of murder, then I can but say I might have expected it. The discovery of murderers and motives belongs to more astute minds than mine.”

I was listening intently to every word, and I could see her point. “Fair enough,” I said, “then tell me what you have observed.”

“It isn’t too much. Jack had been in a state of nervous tension for a week before the party. I saw him twice and neither time had he seemed any better. I remarked about it, but he laughed and told me he was still trying to rehabilitate himself to civilian life. At the time it seemed reasonable to me. A man who has lost a limb would naturally find life awkward for some time.

“The night of the party he was still as tense as ever. Somehow, it radiated to Myrna. She worried about him anyway, and I could see that she was nearly as upset as he was. Nothing visible, however, just those little things. A tendency to anger at the dropping of a glass or a sudden sound. Both Jack and she covered it up nicely, so I imagine that I was the only one who noticed anything.

“Mr. Kalecki came to the party in a grouch. Perhaps anger would be a better word, but I couldn’t figure out with whom he was angry. He snapped at Harold Kines several times and was completely uncivil to Mary Bellemy.”