Murder Most Foul Page 8

  “I chew some gum and suck on some drops I’ve got before I go home,” George said, and dismissed the subject, getting back to another statement of Reed’s that his present mood rejected. “And don’t call it any ‘so-called bookkeeping job.’ We hire accountants, not bookkeepers. And I’m the assistant office manager down there. It’s a real enough job, all right.”

  “You’re also a professional killer,” Reed reminded him gently. “Working for me.” He smiled, continuing to avoid the subject of Morton’s next hit, still waiting for the proper mood to be established. The third drink would do it. The dapper man’s tone was idle. “How do you manage to get those afternoons off when you have a job to do?”

  Morton shrugged. “The place is owned by my brother-in-law. He probably thinks I’m sneaking out for a dame.” He shook his head. “He doesn’t care. He only thinks I’m doing it. I know he is.” He took his last drink.

  “And you never do?”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t.” The third drink was already working; Morton smiled. “One woman gives me all the grief I need.”

  He finished the beer, pushed both glasses from him, and swung about on the stool, facing Reed. The last drink had acted as usual; he seemed calm, thoughtful, almost detached. Jerry stared at him curiously.

  “So if your wife gives you grief, and she doesn’t know about the money, why not just do a disappearing act? In a town this size, you could do it right here, and still keep doing jobs for me.”

  “Oh, Janie isn’t so bad,” Morton said, and then added patiently, “Besides, I told you. I like the job. Old Thomason—he’s the office manager now—isn’t going to last forever. Two, three years and I ought to be holding down his job.”

  Jerry Reed studied the fleshy face a moment. It certainly took all kinds! Yet he knew that no professional gun in New York City could hold a candle to Morton. Nor did any other command—and get—as high a fee.

  He shrugged. “About the hit—”

  Morton was ready. He relaxed against the bar. “Yes?”

  “It’s Marcia Collingswood.”

  “What?” Morton sat straighter, surprised. “But why—” He cut the question off as soon as he started it; only his amazement had made him begin to ask it in the first place. The whys were not his department. “The movie actress? I didn’t even know she was in town.”

  “Well, she is. She’s staying at the Hotel Belleville. Room 509.”

  Morton snorted. “The Belleville? You’ve got to be kidding! That fleatrap? Kept dames, quick rentals, and floating crap games—I know the place. That’s where I hit Quinleven just last month. Remember?”

  “I remember,” Reed said dryly. “Anyway, that’s where she’s staying. Incognito.”

  Morton considered this. “So,” he said at last, simply. “Incognito. Except everybody in the world seems to know where she is.”

  “Nobody knows where she is. Except you, me, and the man who’s paying his good money for the job.”

  “The Belleville, eh?” Morton considered, then nodded slowly. “Fifth floor… Well, that shouldn’t be any great chore. When does the curtain go up?”

  “Tomorrow evening, between five and six,” Reed said.

  “Between five and six?” Morton shook his head decisively. “We’re doing our annual audit today and tomorrow, I took this afternoon off to come up here and see you, but I told my brother-in-law I’d stay late tomorrow to make up for it. I ask him for tomorrow off, even one minute, and he’s going to scream bloody murder.” His tone became accusing. “I’ve just been telling you I’ve got a job I like, and I’d rather not get canned, if you don’t mind.”

  “Tomorrow evening,” Reed said with no change in his voice. “Between five and six. She’s meeting somebody for cocktails and dinner at seven—or at least she thinks she is—and she’s scheduled to fly back to the coast on a midnight flight. But she’ll be in her room between five and six, and expecting a caller.” He studied Morton calmly. “There’ll be a bonus for this one.”

  The heavy man sighed unhappily. “I’ll have to say I’m sick, which means I can’t even go back to the office afterward. Which means I’ll not only miss the time at the office, but I’ll have to catch the seven o'clock train to Jersey. Which also means I miss the bus, and either wait half an hour, or walk. In all this snow—”

  “Tough,” Reed said evenly, and came to his feel, indicating the conference was over. He stood while Morton climbed down from the stool, walked Morton to the door, waited while the heavy-set man struggled into his overcoat.

  “Marcia Collingswood,” Reed said. “Hotel Belleville, Room 509. Between five and six.” He didn’t give the name under which she was registered; Morton would know her by sight. Actually, the repetition was merely force of habit; George Morton, he knew, had the information stored unforgettably in his mind. He smiled at the heavy man in friendly fashion. “If you make it close enough to five you might still catch your regular train.”

  “Not a chance,” Morton said mournfully, and opened the apartment door. “You ever try to get a cab up near the Belleville at that hour? Even in good weather? Not a hope.” He shook his head dispiritedly, and closed the door behind him.

  George Morton glanced at his watch and nodded. The smoke-filled bar a block down from the Belleville was infinitely more comfortable than the freezing weather outside—the bar was too warm, in fact, since he was standing, one foot on the rail, still wearing his overcoat. But then, he wasn’t being paid to be comfortable. He picked up the small change before him, finished his beer, and moved toward the door.

  It had begun to sleet heavily when he emerged. Morton smiled faintly. Good! True, he would have greater trouble getting to the station afterward, but at least in this kind of weather heads were bent against the driving wind, eyes buried in coat collars, minds preoccupied with their owners’ discomfort rather than the faces of strangers. And, too, the Belleville suited his purpose better than any other hotel he knew. Privacy being the sole reason for the hotel’s continued existence, and hence prosperity, the lobby and desk were around a corner from the entranceway, and both the staircase and self-service elevator could be reached without a person necessarily being seen.

  Morton paused before the entrance, under the canopy flapping in the icy wind, and glanced through the heavy glass of the swinging doors. The immediate vicinity of the elevator was deserted; the door of the small cab was open, electrically awaiting custom; the light streaming obliquely from it added to the weaker illumination of the corridor.

  Morton nodded in satisfaction, pushed through into the area, and stepped quite routinely into the empty elevator, pushing the button for the sixth floor. If one considered walking a flight a necessary precaution, George preferred it to be down rather than up.

  The door slid shut; the cab slowly began its whining climb. Morton removed his gloves, opened his overcoat, and brought out a revolver from one jacket pocket and a silencer from another. He carefully screwed the silencer into place, stuffed the lethal assembly into his overcoat pocket, then pulled one glove on. His bare hand was placed into the pocket over the gun, hiding its projection. It made one side of his coat bulge suspiciously, but he knew that the only person who might possibly notice would be in no condition to report it.

  At the sixth floor the elevator paused, considered, and then allowed its doors to slide jerkily open. Morton stepped out quite naturally, moving down the hallway with assurance. There was nobody to be seen. From behind most of the doors there was an almost watchful silence, but he did not allow this to disturb him in the least. The other rooms projected muffled music from cleap radios.

  Morton pushed beneath the red light illuminating the entrance to the stairway, trotted down the uncarpeted stairs, his face calm and assured. He paused at the fifth-floor landing, glancing through the small glass window set in the upper part of the door. Like the sixth floor, the fifth was also deserted; he was not particularly surprised, nor did he allow it to detain him. With a nod he thrust the door a
side and walked with confidence to the door marked 509, rapping on it evenly, loud enough but not too loud, with aplomb. Confidence was everything. It removed suspicion from his victims until it was too late; it added to his anonymity in case he was ever noticed. Confidence, but not overconfidence…

  The door opened. Instantly he recognized the woman facing him, although in person, without makeup, she appeared much older than her publicity photographs. He spoke quickly, before she could recover from her evident surprise at the strange face.

  “Miss Collingswood? I’m from the Daily News. Chamberly is my name. We heard that you—”

  The surprise and disappointment had disappeared; her face had turned hard. “You heard what? What are you doing here? If I wanted to see reporters I wouldn’t be staying at this—this—’’

  She clamped her jaws shut, starting to close the door. It caught on his heavy shoe, wedged in the opening.

  George Morton was extremely apologetic. The important thing was that nobody appear from another room, or from the elevator, before he gained entrance.

  “Look, Miss Collingswood, we’re a newspaper. I’ve got an editor who eats reporters alive. When a good story breaks—”

  “Take your foot out of the door. Do you hear?” Her white face studied his for a moment and seemed to see something in it. She came to a decision. “If you don’t I’m going to call the desk and have them send a policeman up here. And if you print one word about my being here, I’ll deny it and sue your newspaper for more money than it’s got. Do you hear? Is that clear?”

  The foot remained. “Look, Miss Collingswood—”

  But the girl had had enough. She marched to the small table beside the bed, swinging about to hide the sight of him, reaching for the telephone. Morton stepped inside, closing the door quickly behind him. Her hand didn’t have time to raise the receiver; he shot her through the nape of the neck, and then once more, slightly higher, even as the body was crumpling helplessly to the bed. The only sounds were the diffident coughs of the silencer.

  Morton unscrewed the silencer, put the gun in one jacket pocket and the silencer in the other, and walked to the door, pressing his ear against the thin panel. He didn’t even look back. He could hear no voices; he straightened up, buttoning his overcoat, slipping on the other glove. He opened the door slowly, calmly, walking out and carelessly closing it behind him. The elevator was in use, the pointer moving. He walked to the stairway, backing into the door to open it, and then trotted down the steps.

  The entranceway was empty when he made the last turn at the final landing and descended to the street level. He stared through the glass with a frown. The sleet had stopped beating down, but the hazards of walking were evident in the figures lurching past. The seven o’clock train? He’d probably be lucky to make even the eight o’clock!

  He pulled his coat collar up over his ears and pushed his way to the street. A thin figure, face hooded in a fur collar, hunched in the protection of the doorway, partially blocked his passage. He pushed past and then heard the familiar voice.

  “Hello, George.”

  He swung about, staring, and then smiled in unbelieving amazement. Whatever had brought Janie to the city that day, she couldn’t have picked a better time, because no matter where she went, Janie always drove. So she’d have the car, and slippery or not, a car was always better than walking. His smile suddenly faded. Janie? Here?

  “Janie! What are you doing here?” A further question came to him, disturbing, inexplicable. “And how did you know where I was?”

  “Because I followed you here about a month ago when I called you at the office and my brother said you were going to be away for the afternoon.” Her voice was spiteful, scathing. “I followed you from the office when you left. And when I called to talk to you today and my brother told me he was fed up with your taking time off, I knew where you were. Do you understand? I knew!”

  She stared up at him, her thin face almost wolfish. “I know what kind of hotel this is. You think I’m a fool, but I know what goes on here—”

  “But you don’t understand, Janie—”

  She fumbled in her purse as for a handkerchief; her hand emerged with a small gun. Morton stared at her incredulously. She raised the weapon evenly.

  “I said—I know—what kind—of hotel—this is.”

  Her words were soft although half-strangled, punctuated by the sharp splat of the gun. Morton’s eyes had widened in amazement at the sight of the weapon; now they suddenly squeezed closed.

  The bullets drove him back inexorably, relentlessly; he struck the glass doors leading into the hotel as if in relief for their support, collapsing, sliding slowly down to the small step before the entrance, then leaning sideways as if resting against the doorjamb, lifeless.

  She moved to him, bending over the rigid figure with its grotesquely open mouth, oblivious of the tableau of startled spectators frozen in their tracks by the sight, oblivious of the shrill whistle from the corner of the street and the figure of the policeman running toward her, sliding, slipping; oblivious of everything but her all-consuming bitterness at her recognition of her failure as a woman.

  The revolver dangled from her hand, unnoticed, like an admonishing finger, scolding.

  “And you’ve been drinking, too,” she said, and suddenly began to cry.

  Odendahl

  Joe Gores

  Franz Odendahl dealt in perishables: sunsets, paradoxes, morning breezes through Nandi flame trees, forgotten loves, men’s souls. Some might believe that summed him up, as the preachers try to sum up the man they’re burying, but I don’t agree; now that I’m past forty. I’ve got bloody little regard for others’ opinions anyway.

  Anyone raised up to love a piece of ground will understand my original hatred for Odendahl. My father homesteaded in the Kenya White Highlands in the nineteen twenties. I was born on the farm and lived there until World War Two. The Old Boy was killed by a leopard when I was in Burma with Wingate; it wasn’t until nineteen forty-nine, when I was twenty-seven, with a war behind me, that I got off the train from Nairobi and hiked ten miles home, finally ready to take over the running of the farm from Mater. “Farm” can be misleading: it was two thousand acres of bad land, some in wheat, more in cattle, most in forest, with bush pig, leopard, buffalo, and elephant. And at an eight-thousand-foot elevation, even on the Equator, mornings get cold enough for ice to form on the wash bucket.

  As I shrugged off my pack, a stranger walked from the five-room house the Old Boy had put together with his bare hands, stone on stone. Surprise made me hostile: I hadn’t expected Mater to hire a foreman.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Odendahl.” He stated it like the existence of a mountain: six feet six tall, three broad, with the Boer’s heavy, Germanic features and light, fine hair. Many of them had been coming up to East Africa from Natal to settle since the war.

  “I’m Canning.” I shouldered my pack, but Odendahl didn’t move.

  “Canning. Ja. This is not any longer your place. Your mother it has sold to me, a year ago, when you do not answer her letters.” No attempt to soften it, you see. And then he went on: “Two months ago, in Nairobi, she died.”

  I didn’t even realize that pain and guilt at the unanswered letters had brought up the light Springfield I’d gotten for antelope until I saw that my finger was crooking the trigger and that I meant to shoot. Odendahl crouched to throw himself sideways into the bougainvillea along the house, but then a black arm came over my shoulder and twitched the rifle away.

  “Hapana…ngoja dadika moja…”

  Morengaru, of course, the Wanderobo-Masai who had taught me to read sign, to skin out game, to think like an elephant or buff when I had to. And now he’d just saved me from a murder charge.

  Odendahl turned coolly, as if we’d merely shaken hands, and went into the house.

  Morengaru and I left an hour later and camped that night by a stream we’d stocked with trout ten years before. He told me how th
e farm had declined until Mater, getting panicky at my silence, had sold to Odendahl. Maybe no woman ever has a man’s almost mystical love of the land.

  “Na Bwana Mkubwa?” I’d heard no details of my father’s death.

  Morengaru began emoting, his lean, black face shining in the firelight, and the shotgun he used for everything from buck to buff jutting past his ear into darkness. It had been in the bush—therefore, to him, a legitimate end. Stalking a leopard which had killed one of our dogs, the Old Boy was careless and looked up; his eyes met the leopard’s. Morengaru got there fifteen seconds later to stick his shotgun in the cat’s ear and blow half its head away, but the pumping back legs already had eviscerated my father.

  He flashed his sudden, infrequent grin. “Now we two landless rogues. Now we go hunting.”

  “You cheeky bastard,” I grunted. But my heart wasn’t in it.

  For a month. I hung around Nairobi, drinking too much and brooding on getting the farm back; then I sorted myself out and joined a safari outfit. Putting clients up in romantic-sounding hotels like the Outspan in Nyeri, hiking them a few miles a day through the bundu, and finally “finding” the game that Morengaru already had spotted, wasn’t really hunting. But it was better than Nairobi. And in those years before the Emergency, there was money in it.

  The Emergency, the Mau-Mau uprising of nineteen fifty-two, had a four-year active phase, took the lives of twelve thousand Kikuyu and thirty-one Europeans, and involved eleven British Army battalions. At the first whiff of fighting, I joined the Security Forces.