The Essential Noir Bundle, page 123
When she turned, an automatic pistol was in her hand. Its one eye looked at Billie.
“Now, lechón,” she purred, “go out!”
The red man wasn’t a quick thinker. It took a full minute for him to realize that this woman he loved was driving him away with a gun. The big dummy might have known that his three broken fingers had disqualified him. It took another minute for him to get his legs in motion. He went toward the door in slow bewilderment, still only half believing this thing was really happening.
The woman followed him step by step. I went ahead to open the door.
I turned the knob. The door came in, pushing me back against the opposite wall.
In the doorway stood Edouard Maurois and the man I had swatted on the chin. Each had a gun.
I looked at Inés Almad, wondering what turn her craziness would take in the face of this situation. She wasn’t so crazy as I had thought. Her scream and the thud of her gun on the floor sounded together.
“Ah!” the Frenchman was saying. “The gentlemen were leaving? May we detain them?”
The man with the big chin—it was larger than ever now with the marks of my tap—was less polite.
“Back up, you birds!” he ordered, stooping for the gun the woman had dropped.
I still was holding the doorknob. I rattled it a little as I took my hand away—enough to cover up the click of the lock as I pushed the button that left it unlatched. If I needed help, and it came, I wanted as few locks as possible between me and it.
Then—Billie, the woman and I walking backward—we all paraded into the sitting-room. Maurois and his companion both wore souvenirs of the row in the taxicab. One of the Frenchman’s eyes was bruised and closed—a beautiful shiner. His clothes were rumpled and dirty. He wore them jauntily in spite of that, and he still had his walking stick, crooked under the arm that didn’t hold his gun.
Big Chin held us with his own gun and the woman’s while Maurois ran his hand over Billie’s and my clothes, to see if we were armed. He found my gun and pocketed it. Billie had no weapons.
“Can I trouble you to step back against the wall?” Maurois asked when he was through.
We stepped back as if it was no trouble at all. I found my shoulder against one of the window curtains. I pressed it against the frame, and turned far enough to drag the curtain clear of a foot or more of pane.
If the Whosis Kid was watching, he should have had a clear view of the Frenchman—the man who had shot at him earlier in the evening. I was putting it up to the Kid. The corridor door was unlocked. If the Kid could get into the building—no great trick—he had a clear path. I didn’t know where he fit in, but I wanted him to join us, and I hoped he wouldn’t disappoint me. If everybody got together here, maybe whatever was going on would come out where I could see it and understand it.
Meanwhile, I kept as much of myself as possible out of the window. The Kid might decide to throw lead from across the alley.
Maurois was facing Inés. Big Chin’s guns were on Billie and me.
“I do not comprends ze anglais ver’ good,” the Frenchman was mocking the woman. “So it is when you say you meet wit’ me, I t’ink you say in New Orleans. I do not know you say San Francisc’. I am ver’ sorry to make ze mistake. I am mos’ sorry zat I keep you wait. But now I am here. You have ze share for me?”
“I have not.” She held her hands out in an empty gesture. “The Kid took those—everything from me.”
“What? Maurois dropped his taunting smile and his vaudeville accent. His one open eye flashed angrily. “How could he, unless—?”
“He suspected us, Edouard.” Her mouth trembled with earnestness. Her eyes pleaded for belief. She was lying. “He had me followed. The day after I am there he comes. He takes all. I am afraid to wait for you. I fear your unbelief. You would not—”
“C’est incroyable!” Maurois was very excited over it. “I was on the first train south after our—our theatricals. Could the Kid have been on that train without my knowing it? Non! And how else could he have reached you before I? You are playing with me, ma petite Inés. That you did join the Kid, I do not doubt. But not in New Orleans. You did not go there. You came here to San Francisco.”
“Edouard!” she protested, fingering his sleeve with one brown hand, the other holding her throat as if she were having trouble getting the words out. “You cannot think that thing! Do not those weeks in Boston say it is not possible? For one like the Kid—or like any other—am I to betray you? You know me not more than to think I am like that?”
She was an actress. She was appealing, and pathetic, and anything else you like—including dangerous.
The Frenchman took his sleeve away from her and stepped back a step. White lines ringed his mouth below his tiny mustache, and his jaw muscles bulged. His one good eye was worried. She had got to him, though not quite enough to upset him altogether. But the game was young yet.
“I do not know what to think,” he said slowly. “If I have been wrong—I must find the Kid first. Then I will learn the truth.”
“You don’t have to look no further, brother. I’m right among you!”
The Whosis Kid stood in the passageway door. A black revolver was in each of his hands. Their hammers were up.
It was a pretty tableau.
There is the Whosis Kid in the door—a lean lad in his twenties, all the more wicked-looking because his face is weak and slack-jawed and dull-eyed. The cocked guns in his hands are pointing at everybody or at nobody, depending on how you look at them.
There is the brown woman, her cheeks pinched in her two fists, her eyes open until their green-grayishness shows. The fright I had seen in her face before was nothing to the fright that is there now.
There is the Frenchman—whirled doorward at the Kid’s first word—his gun on the Kid, his cane still under his arm, his face a tense white blot.
There is Big Chin, his body twisted half around, his face over one shoulder to look at the door, with one of his guns following his face around.
There is Billie—a big, battered statue of a man who hasn’t said a word since Inés Almad started to gun him out of the apartment.
And, last, here I am—not feeling so comfortable as I would home in bed, but not actually hysterical either. I wasn’t altogether dissatisfied with the shape things were taking. Something was going to happen in these rooms. But I wasn’t friendly enough to any present to care especially what happened to whom. For myself, I counted on coming through all in one piece. Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed. I’ve had twenty years of experience at dodging that. I can count on being one of the survivors of whatever blow-up there is. And I hope to take most of the other survivors for a ride.
But right now the situation belonged to the men with guns—the Whosis Kid, Maurois and Big Chin.
The Kid spoke first. He had a whining voice that came disagreeably through his thick nose.
“This don’t look nothing like Chi to me, but, anyways, we’re all here.”
“Chicago!” Maurois exclaimed. “You did not go to Chicago!”
The Kid sneered at him.
“Did you? Did she? What would I be going there for? You think me and her run out on you, don’t you? Well, we would of if she hadn’t put the two X’s to me the same as she done to you, and the same as the three of us done to the boob.”
“That may be,” the Frenchman replied; “but you do not expect me to believe that you and Inés are not friends? Didn’t I see you leaving here this afternoon?”
“You see me, all right,” the Kid agreed; “but if my rod hadn’t of got snagged in my flogger you wouldn’t have seen nothing else. But I ain’t got nothing against you now. I thought you and her had ditched me, just as you think me and her done you. I know different now, from what I heard while I was getting in here. She twisted the pair of us, Frenchy, just like we twisted the boob. Ain’t you got it yet?”
Maurois shook his head slowly.
What put an edge to this conversation was that both men were talking over their guns.
“Listen,” the Kid asked impatiently. “We was to meet up in Chi for a three-way split, wasn’t we?”
The Frenchman nodded.
“But she tells me,” the Kid went on, “she’ll connect with me in St. Louis, counting you out; and she ribs you up to meet her in New Orleans, ducking me. And then she gyps the pair of us by running out here to Frisco with the stuff.
“We’re a couple of suckers, Frenchy, and there ain’t no use of us getting hot at each other. There’s enough of it for a fat two-way cut. What I say is let’s forget what’s done, and me and you make it fifty-fifty. Understand, I ain’t begging you. I’m making a proposition. If you don’t like it, to hell with you! You know me. You never seen the day I wouldn’t shoot it out with you or anybody else. Take your pick!”
The Frenchman didn’t say anything for a while. He was converted, but he didn’t want to weaken his hand by coming in too soon. I don’t know whether he believed the Kid’s words or not, but he believed the Kid’s guns. You can get a bullet out of a cocked revolver a lot quicker than out of a hammerless automatic. The Kid had the bulge there. And the Kid had him licked because the Kid had the look of one who doesn’t give a damn what happens next.
Finally Maurois looked a question at Big Chin. Big Chin moistened his lips, but said nothing.
Maurois looked at the Kid again, and nodded his head.
“You are right,” he said. “We will do that.”
“Good!” The Kid did not move from his door. “Now who are these plugs?”
“These two”—Maurois nodded at Billie and me—“are friends of our Inés. This”—indicating Big Chin—“is a confrere of mine.”
“You mean he’s in with you? That’s all right with me.” The Kid spoke crisply. “But, you understand, his cut comes out of yours. I get half, and no trimming.”
The Frenchman frowned, but he nodded in agreement.
“Half is yours, if we find it.”
“Don’t get no headache over that,” the Kid advised him. “It’s here and we’ll get it.”
He put one of his guns away and came into the room, the other gun hanging loosely at his side. When he walked across the room to face the woman, he managed it so that Big Chin and Maurois were never behind him.
“Where’s the stuff?” he demanded.
Inés Almad wet her red mouth with her tongue and let her mouth droop a little and looked softly at the Kid, and made her play.
“One of us is as bad as are the others, Kid. We all—each of us tried to get for ourselves everything. You and Edouard have put aside what is past. Am I more wrong than you? I have them, true, but I have not them here. Until tomorrow will you wait? I will get them. We will divide them among us three, as it was to have been. Shall we not do that?”
“Not any!” The Kid’s voice had finality in it.
“Is that just?” she pleaded, letting her chin quiver a bit. “Is there a treachery of which I am guilty that also you and Edouard are not? Do you—?”
“That ain’t the idea at all,” the Kid told her. “Me and Frenchy are in a fix where we got to work together to get anywhere. So we’re together. With you it’s different. We don’t need you. We can take the stuff away from you. You’re out! Where’s the stuff?”
“Not here! Am I foolish sufficient to leave them here where so easily you could find them? You do need my help to find them. Without me you cannot—”
“You’re silly! I might flop for that if I didn’t know you. But I know you’re too damned greedy to let ’em get far away from you. And you’re yellower than you’re greedy. If you’re smacked a couple of times, you’ll kick in. And don’t think I got any objections to smacking you over!”
She cowered back from his upraised hand.
The Frenchman spoke quickly.
“We should search the rooms first, Kid. If we don’t find them there, then we can decide what to do next.”
The Whosis Kid laughed sneeringly at Maurois.
“All right. But, get this, I’m not going out of here without that stuff—not if I have to take this rat apart. My way’s quicker, but we’ll hunt first if you want to. Your con-whatever-you-call-him can keep these plugs tucked in while me and you upset the joint.”
They went to work. The Kid put away his gun and brought out a long-bladed spring-knife. The Frenchman unscrewed the lower two-thirds of his cane, baring a foot and a half of sword-blade.
No cursory search, theirs. They took the room we were in first. They gutted it thoroughly, carved it to the bone. Furniture and pictures were taken apart. Upholstering gave up its stuffing. Floor coverings were cut. Suspicious lengths of wallpaper were scraped loose. They worked slowly. Neither would let the other get behind him. The Kid would not turn his back on Big Chin.
The sitting-room wrecked, they went into the next room, leaving the woman, Billie and me standing among the litter. Big Chin and his two guns watched over us.
As soon as the Frenchman and the Kid were out of sight, the woman tried her stuff out on our guardian. She had a lot of confidence in her power with men, I’ll say that for her.
For a while she worked her eyes on Big Chin, and then, very softly:
“Can I—?”
“You can’t!” Big Chin was loud and gruff. “Shut up!”
The Whosis Kid appeared at the door.
“If nobody don’t say nothing maybe nobody won’t get hurt,” he snarled, and went back to his work.
The woman valued herself too highly to be easily discouraged. She didn’t put anything in words again, but she looked things at Big Chin—things that had him sweating and blushing. He was a simple man. I didn’t think she’d get anywhere. If there had been no one present but the two of them, she might have put Big Chin over the jumps; but he wouldn’t be likely to let her get to him with a couple of birds standing there watching the show.
Once a sharp yelp told us that the purple Frana—who had fled rearward when Maurois and Big Chin arrived—had got in trouble with the searchers. There was only that one yelp, and it stopped with a suddenness that suggested trouble for the dog.
The two men spent nearly an hour in the other rooms. They didn’t find anything. Their hands, when they joined us again, held nothing but the cutlery.
“I said to you it was not here,” Inés told them triumphantly. “Now will you—?”
“You can’t tell me nothing I’ll believe.” The Kid snapped his knife shut and dropped it in his pocket. “I still think it’s here.”
He caught her wrist, and held his other hand, palm up, under her nose.
“You can put ’em in my hand, or I’ll take ’em.”
“They are not here! I swear it!”
His mouth lifted at the corner in a savage grimace.
“Liar!”
He twisted her arm roughly, forcing her to her knees. His free hand went to the shoulder-strap of her orange gown.
“I’ll damn soon find out,” he promised.
Billie came to life.
“Hey!” he protested, his chest heaving in and out. “You can’t do that!”
“Wait, Kid!” Maurois—putting his sword-cane together again—called. “Let us see if there is not another way.”
The Whosis Kid let go of the woman and took three slow steps back from her. His eyes were dead circles without any color you could name—the dull eyes of the man whose nerves quit functioning in the face of excitement. His bony hands pushed his coat aside a little and rested where his vest bulged over the sharp corners of his hip-bones.
“Let’s me and you get this right, Frenchy,” he said in his whining voice. “Are you with me or her?”
“You, most certainly, but—”
“All right. Then be with me! Don’t be trying to gum every play I make. I’m going to frisk this dolly, and don’t think I ain’t. What are you going to do about it?”
The Frenchman pursed his mouth until his little black mustache snuggled against the tip of his nose. He puckered his eyebrows and looked thoughtfully out of his one good eye. But he wasn’t going to do anything at all about it, and he knew he wasn’t. Finally he shrugged.
“You are right,” he surrendered. “She should be searched.”
The Kid grunted contemptuous disgust at him and went toward the woman again.
She sprang away from him, to me. Her arms clamped around my neck in the habit they seemed to have.
“Jerry!” she screamed in my face. “You will not allow him! Jerry, please not!”
I didn’t say anything.
I didn’t think it was exactly genteel of the Kid to frisk her, but there were several reasons why I didn’t try to stop him. First, I didn’t want to do anything to delay the unearthing of this “stuff” there had been so much talk about. Second, I’m no Galahad. This woman had picked her playmates, and was largely responsible for this angle of their game. If they played rough, she’d have to make the best of it. And, a good strong third, Big Chin was prodding me in the side with a gun-muzzle to remind me that I couldn’t do anything if I wanted to—except get myself slaughtered.
The Kid dragged Inés away. I let her go.
He pulled her over to what was left of the bench by the electric heater, and called the Frenchman there with a jerk of his head.
“You hold her while I go through her,” he said.
She filled her lungs with air. Before she could turn it loose in a shriek, the Kid’s long fingers had fit themselves to her throat.
“One chirp out of you and I’ll tie a knot in your neck,” he threatened.
She let the air wheeze out of her nose.
Billie shuffled his feet. I turned my head to look at him. He was puffing through his mouth. Sweat polished his forehead under his matted red hair. I hoped he wasn’t going to turn his wolf loose until the “stuff” came to the surface. If he would wait a while I might join him.
He wouldn’t wait. He went into action when—Maurois holding her—the Kid started to undress the woman.
He took a step toward them. Big Chin tried to wave him back with a gun. Billie didn’t even see it. His eyes were red on the three by the bench.
