A Killer is Loose Read online

  He didn’t say anything else and I got to thinking how everybody has to get old like that, and die, and here he was, and here I was. Then I saw we were coming down along the yacht basin. I reached up and yanked the buzzer cord.

  “So long, Pop,” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He was way back there someplace in his dream, chewing his gums, his beard bobbing and curling where it lay down along his chest.

  Chapter Two

  I WALKED THROUGH the wooden gate and out onto the pier at the slip where Harvey Aldercook’s yacht, the Rabbit-O, was moored. She still looked fine. The weather was touching her a bit here and there, but all that work I’d done on her was really holding up fine. I had scraped and sanded and painted and scraped and varnished and polished and refitted and painted and rebuilt and stripped both engines to nothing, overhauled them both, and put them back. She would need some work because Aldercook would let her go to hell. Only somebody else would get taken this time. Not me.

  I stood there looking at her, thinking how he had paid me exactly ten dollars out of the two hundred and eighty that he owed me. That left two-seventy, and it would be like buying a pack of cigarettes to Harvey Aldercook, only he wouldn’t pay.

  Well, the bastard would pay.

  A woman with whisky on her tongue laughed, then said, “Harvey-honey! There’s a great big beautiful animal with yellow hair out there. I think he’s watching me. Are you a Peeping Tom?” she called. “Harvey-honey, he’s coming aboard just like a cat. Oh, boy, where’s that bottle! Here, there! He’s looking right at me. Hello, there.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Is—”

  “Fooled you, didn’t I?” she said. “It’s only Coca-Cola. I finished the bottle. Harvey’s got to get some more.”

  She was an insult to the female gender, a short circuit in the voluptuous, tender woman flesh man dreams upon. She was one of these ash-blonde, bony, saucer-eyed, skull-grinning, jut-jawed, false-breasted, fake-fannied, angle-posing, empty-thighed in-betweens they stamp out like tin slats for Venetian blinds in some bloodless, airless underground factory to supply that increasingly bewildering demand for sexless models such as she for certain women’s fashion magazines, where they loll backward gaping and pinch-nostriled in tight red and silver sashes, over an old freshly varnished beer barrel, holding long skinny umbrellas, point down in a sand dune. Sometimes you see them swooning pipe-lidded, paper-pale over a swirling Martini in a triple-sized cocktail glass with their long fleshless golden-tipped claws clamped buzzard-like around the stem. Give me curves, dimples, and swollen thighs, every time. I’m an easy man to please.

  “I’d like to see the skipper,” I said.

  “Skipper? Skipper?” She went vacant, then erupted with vacant laughter and flipped her wrist. I wondered if maybe that’s where Harvey Aldercook had picked up the gesture. “Oh, you mean Harvey, don’t you?”

  I nodded. All the time she’d been talking, she was stretched out on a padded beach chair behind the cabin screen door. She was dressed in one of these shorty nightgowns they wear and her legs were not like toothpicks, they were like matchsticks, with the heads of the matches her fine, full, excitingly curved hips.

  “Logan?”

  I turned and there was Harvey Aldercook. He must have gone forward, come up through the hatch, around the cabin deck, and into the stern.

  “I’d like to talk with you,” I said.

  “Go ahead, Logan. Go ahead and talk.”

  “Honestly,” she said from in there. “You’re a scream, Harvey-honey!”

  Harvey Aldercook was a big, droopingly handsome pale slug, dressed in white tennis shoes, blue linen slacks, white T shirt, and white yachting cap with a black bill. Somehow, even owning and living on a boat, he never saw the sun.

  “Alone,” I said.

  “Look, Logan,” Harvey Aldercook said. “I haven’t got all day. Get on with it. If you have something to say, get it off your chest.” He slapped both hands against his belly, glanced in over my shoulder at Spindleshanks, and winked at her, as if to say, “Be right with you, sweetheart. We’ve got a secret, haven’t we?”

  The Luger was like a melting chocolate cake in my hip pocket.

  “Well?” Harvey Aldercook said.

  “I need some money,” I said, hating every minute of it, hating myself for forcing myself to ask him. “You owe me two hundred and seventy bucks. I’m here to collect,” I said.

  “How do you figure?” Harvey Aldercook said. He was perfectly serious, a little amazed, maybe. His eyes even widened a little with astonishment and the whites of his eyes were perfectly white in a clean rim around the lids, but when the lids parted a bit it was all bloodshot and brown underneath. It was almost as though he had double sets of lids on each eye.

  “You know how I figure,” I said.

  “Really, Logan, you’re not joking, are you?”

  “No.”

  “But, see here, Logan. I don’t understand.” Absolutely serious, earnestly puzzled.

  We watched each other for a minute, like two dead men strapped to chairs across the newly dry-cleaned green cover on a poker table beneath a brilliant white light. Then somebody stripped a clean deck and tossed it on the table.

  “Four and a half months ago,” I said, “I worked on your boat, remember? For quite a time I worked. I have a list of the things I did, if you’d care to see it. For that job, you owe me two hundred and seventy dollars.”

  “Why don’t you pay the poor jamoke?” Spindleshanks said from in there. “Or, better yet, send him for a bottle and tell him to keep the change.”

  “Let me handle this,” Harvey Aldercook said.

  “Well, for hell’s sake, handle it, then!”

  He looked at me again, still with that profoundly puzzled air, touched now with a veneer of hurt.

  “Logan,” he said, “you know as well as I that I paid you for that job.”

  “Ten dollars. You paid me ten dollars.”

  “Certainly,” Harvey Aldercook said. He broke into smile now. “You remember, after all, Logan. Gosh, for a time there we were both befuddled, weren’t we? How about a drink, now?”

  “Wait,” I said. “The job was two-eighty, you paid me ten of it. You still owe me two-seventy.” I was onto his angle, all right, but I was going to play it to the end.

  “See here,” he said, serious again and allowing a little anger to show in his eyes. “You’d better get off this ship. I paid you what that job was worth.”

  “Yes!” Spindleshanks said from in there. “Tell him if he’s blown that ten dollars, it’s his worry. He shouldn’t be so careless with his money.” She broke into more vacant laughter. “What a jamoke!” she said.

  “Besides,” Harvey Aldercook said, “the job wasn’t even done right. I had to do everything all over myself. It was a lousy job. You got ten dollars too much, Logan.”

  I had been going to use the gun on him, at least point it at him, scare him, because I figured he would scare. Now, somehow, I knew I couldn’t even do that. He had me and he knew it, and he knew I knew it.

  There was nothing to say. I could stand here and argue, but it would get me no place. I fumbled around for the gun, but it was jammed upside down in my hip pocket and I couldn’t get it out without a struggle. I let it go.

  “Get off the ship,” Harvey Aldercook said.

  “Listen,” I said, swallowing whatever was left of whatever pride had survived these last few months. “My wife’s going to have a baby—any day now. I need that money bad.”

  He shook his head. “Everybody’s got troubles.”

  “I’ll call it square for a hundred.”

  “I ask you for the last time, get off this ship.”

  “Why don’t you throw him off, Harvey-honey? Throw the rummy into the drink.”

  “Maybe I will,” Harvey Aldercook said, with what was supposed to be a sneer. He stepped toward me. I blew up. It was like Popeye with his spinach.

  I reached out, caught the back of his neck, then sw
ung with my right fist and sank it hard into his gut, just right. He doubled over, his eyes praying. I put my other hand on the back of his neck, laced my fingers, and yanked his head down. I brought my knee up fast and his nose made a noise and I felt it go, like pretzels in a damp bag. Then there was blood and he wanted to fall face down. I propped him up with my left hand and brought my right fist up again from down under. He arched backward over the rail like a big dead fish and struck the water and sank.

  “All right,” I said, turning to the cabin screen door. “You better do something, Gorgeous, or your boy friend will drown himself.”

  She was plastered up against the tiller, with her hands stretched out, screaming in a whisper. “Get away! Get away! Don’t you dare touch me, you—you horrid man!”

  • • •

  Standing out there on the sea wall, I looked back at the Rabbit-O. Spindleshanks was helping a muddy, bleeding, soaking-wet Harvey Aldercook back over the side into the stern. As I watched, he flopped down onto the deck and lay there bleeding on the brightly varnished mahogany planks.

  Then Spindleshanks saw his face and got sick.

  I turned and started off toward town. As I moved along, two girls in bathing suits ran leaping across the lawn from the sidewalk and jumped from one of the piers onto the deck of a sloop. Both were really stacked firm and flashing and it was sure good to know they weren’t all like that one back there aboard the Rabbit-O.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was sick without being sick; numb and confounded and maybe a little crazy right then. Things could not get worse. I kept telling myself that, knowing all the time that I’d been telling myself that for months and it was getting worse all the time. I was confused. I walked, not knowing where I walked, and I was tired without reason.

  The sun was hot. There was no wind. Along the park the trees hung green and dark and heavy, like dead hands, and the world was a winding tunnel, spaced with motionless shadow in black splotches, and the decaying lawns turned up and over into a pale yellowing sky, and far away through the dying bleat of traffic the City Hall clock tolled a slow and darkly maddening reminder of noon.

  Noon and busy lunch counters, the restaurants, with business deals over cooling coffee, across polished tables and bread crumbs, among empty, gravy-stained plates, or the homes filled with searing sizzles of frying meat and laughter and sadness and the loneliness of empty waiting and the hushed whisper-touched trays of sickrooms or the cold stoves and silent unhungry patience of death.

  I went on past the big hotels with the bright yellow or red or green marquees, their en trance ways touched with that nostalgic assurance of shadowed sanctuary beyond the depthless shade of muted lobbies where a switchboard buzzed and buzzed. Pretty soon I was in the business section of town, trying not to think at all any more, or remember. It was like being lost. There was no way to turn, nowhere to go, nothing to do. Ruby was waiting, and that’s what I was really doing, waiting.

  The streets were quite empty with noon. About a block away a city bus was tearing along toward me, with papers gusting in its wake. Then I saw him.

  He was standing on the corner, looking down my way.

  “Hey!” I called. “Watch it!”

  He didn’t hear me. Still looking absently down the street, he stepped briskly off the curb into the path of the speeding city bus.

  Chapter Three

  I MOVED FAST. I left the curb and ran up the street toward the bus. Already I saw the driver in the window up there, over the big flat wheel, wrestling, and probably trying to find the brakes, only the brakes weren’t doing anything and the bus kept coming.

  “Jump!”

  He didn’t jump. He just ceased walking directly in the path of the bus and stood there staring at me as I came up to him. The bus was on us. I heard the brakes then. Somebody across the street screamed. I rammed my right arm under his left with all my weight, diving. We rolled over against the curb and the bus screeched to á halt in the middle of the street.

  I stood up and my leg hurt. He pushed himself onto the curb and sat there with one shoulder against a big aluminum can lettered with the black warning:

  DUMP TRASH HERE HELP KEEP OUR CITY CLEAN

  • • •

  I had fallen on my knees and left shoulder, so the Luger was all right. I wanted to haul it out and look at it, but I couldn’t because people were crowding around now.

  “You all right?” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  The bus driver came around the rear of the bus. He had left it parked in the middle of the street now. Some bus driver. He’d been going like hell and he knew it and he was scared, it showed in his face.

  “What you trying to do?” he said. “My God,” he said. “Look where you’re going. My God.”

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Did your foot go to sleep? Or was it your head?”

  “Where’s a cop?” the driver said, looking wildly around.

  “He’s probably having a sandwich and a beer someplace,” I said. “Like everybody else. Maybe you’ve had the beer,” I said. “Is that right?”

  “I want a cop,” the driver said. He had a pad and pencil in his hand now. “Hey, you,” he said to an old lady in a straw hat, holding a shopping bag. “You see this thing? Eh? Eh?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I saw it, young man.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “What’s your name, young man? You were going too fast.”

  He turned quickly away from her, brandishing the pad and pencil. The crowd was already dispersing. “Somebody must of seen it,” he said. He took a step toward me. “He hurt? He ain’t hurt. He’s drunk, that’s what.”

  The man seated on the curb stood up. His face was very pale. He leaned over and brushed his pants two or three flicks with his hand, hitched at his belt, stepped up to the bus driver.

  “Case out,” he said softly.

  The bus driver blinked at him.

  “Look,” the man said kindly. “Go back to your bus, get in, and drive away.” He turned, came over to me, rapped me lightly on the arm. “Come on, pal,” he said softly.

  I stood there a moment as he walked off.

  He stopped, turned, grinned at me. He jerked his head. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go have a drink.”

  I went on over. He looked at the few people still standing around and they got out of our way and we went on up the street. I glanced back once. The driver was climbing into his bus. I heard it start with a roar.

  We walked along. It was a fine, sunny spring day, as I said, with not much traffic and very few people on the streets, and we walked along.

  He was whistling through his teeth, no tune, not even a whistle, just hissing something or other through his teeth with the melody back there in his head someplace. He walked fast and purposefully, rolling his shoulders some. He wasn’t quite as tall as I was, but broad in the shoulder and with a big chest and cross-swinging arms. He wore a dark gray single-breasted suit with the coat flapping open across a white shirt that was unbuttoned at the throat. He wore no tie. The suit was too heavy for down here at any time of year. The suit looked brand-new, yet it was a mass of wrinkles, as though it had been slept in on a clean bed for maybe three days running.

  We walked along like that, with him whistling through his teeth, for a good three blocks. He walked too fast for down here. I was sweating plenty, but he wasn’t. He looked pale and cool.

  “You feel O.K. now?” I said.

  He turned his head, still whistling through his teeth, swinging his arms. “Sure, pal.” He started whistling again and we walked along.

  The hell with this. “Well,” I said, “I’ll see you. I turn off here.”

  “Me too, pal.”

  We went around the corner and walked along for a while. The Luger was banging against my hip and beginning to chafe, what with all this fast walking and the sweat. Up ahead on the far corner by the railroad tracks was Jake’s Place. Jake Halloran owned the place and he
had seen the Luger and wanted to buy it. Well, maybe I should sell it to him. We’d have a little money, anyway, enough to stock up on some food. I didn’t feel much like holding up a gas station any more, not much like anything. And now this guy.

  A car stopped by the curb and somebody called my name: “Steve!”

  It was Betty Graham.

  I went over to the car. The guy in the suit stood there watching, then he looked down the street and just stood there.

  “Stevie, Stevie!” she said. “You get your tail right over to the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “It’s happening,” she said. “Ruby called me over and she was having pains and I took her to the hospital and the doc says any time. She told me you might be at Jake’s—that’s where you used to hang out, anyway. What a break, my finding you!”

  “The baby,” I said.

  “Get over there, Steve. Ruby’s worried about you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall I drive you over, Steve?”

  “No, I’ll walk. It isn’t far, only a couple blocks.”

  She grinned behind the wheel of her old blue coupé. She was still in the shorts and sweater and her red hair was in damp ringlets across her forehead. She looked over my shoulder where I leaned on the door of her car and whispered, “Who’s that guy there? He with you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Listen. All right. I’ll get right over there. Is Ruby all right?”

  “Sure. She’s fine.” Betty frowned. “Only she’s worried about you, Steve. She wouldn’t tell me what, but she’s plenty worried. Everything all right, Steve?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Everything’s fine. You go ahead now. I’ll get right on over there.” I backed away from the car. “And thanks, Betty. Thanks for taking care of Ruby.”

  “Forget it.” She grinned, slapped the car in gear, shot another look at the guy who still stood waiting, and drove off.