He raised his face toward the ceiling and covered it with his hands, the cords in his neck taut, and I thought he would scream, but then I realized he was crying.
“Read him his rights as you’re walking him to a cell, Julio,” I said.
When Julio came back, he stood silently for a moment and then said, “You think his wife’s body is still in the funeral home?”
When I spoke, I spoke carefully because until I had seen the expression on Milford’s face I had been doing exactly what I told him I was doing — testing pieces of a puzzle to see if they fit. “That would take a search warrant. I said court order, which is what is required to open a grave and disinter a body.”
Julio’s eyes widened and he said, “He buried her with someone else.” He turned away and took a few steps before turning to face me again. “It would work. Zoe Milford couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds. The pall bearers wouldn’t hardly notice the added weight. But which one? If he doesn’t tell us, we’ll have to open the graves of everyone he buried during the week until we find her. The man must have been insane.”
“More so than you think, Julio,” I said. “You didn’t see the look in his eyes. I have the feeling she isn’t in just one.”
Julio was lean and tough, but he stared at me for a moment, then moved to the window to stand in the warmth of the bright October sun — and, almost imperceptibly, he shivered.
Killer Instinct
by Jerry Jacobson
Morris couldn’t come in for the kill...
I hadn’t planned on stopping in at McGuire’s that morning. It was 4:00 a.m. and I was beat from playing and from lack of sleep. My hands were shaking from too much coffee, but not out of nervousness or fear. I haven’t shot a scared stick since I was nine years old back in Omaha shooting with the old timers and the young slicks who’d play their own mothers for quarters at one-pocket, making them show their money in front of the rack. I wasn’t nervous, just tired, like a machine that was a little overused and needed its plug pulled so it could cool off.
Alter midnight, McGuire’s can be a pretty bad place. Bad people crawl out of the woodwork, like mice in homes when the family’s gone to bed. There’s more commerce in McGuire’s some nights than in the whole damn town from nine to five. Drugs, hot merchandise, dock jobs for a week’s pay — the works.
I do most of my hustling out of Packy’s on Jade Avenue and Palladium Billiards and Kosko’s Smoke Shop out on Drumheller Street, and a few bars and taverns downtown. McGuire’s has never been a hot spot for any of the pros. It’s about six cue-lengths from the city college — a bad location, since you can turn a dozen college kids upside down and shake them and not see five bucks in change hit the pavement. Nobody plays much pool at McGuire’s. There’s just too much other big business floating around to make it profitable.
But that morning I felt drawn to McGuire’s, whether on the faint promise of action or that the visit might be providential for me I can’t say. I moved on tides of hunch and promise in those days, always thinking I would have a long life and a painless death. I was like a thrown cat that continually landed on its feet.
McGuire’s always smelled of beer and fried green-pepper sandwiches and cheap perfume. I took a seat at the counter alongside all the furred pimps with their women clustered around them — Mickey Stollson, a fading second-story man; Ace McCausland, who ran poker games all over town; and a couple of strange male faces, who looked gaunt and secretive and on the run from a wife or a crime — you never knew which and so you never asked, because that could have you crawling around on the floor looking for your head.
Greta, pursing her full rose-petal lips in a mock kiss, leaned over at me. “You got serpentine eyes, Tony. There’s nobody in here worth hustling.”
“All hustled out,” I told her.
“Where you been bein’ bad? Jade Avenue?”
“Some there.”
“Packy’s?”
“It was profitable to stay an hour or two, yes.”
“But you brought your stick in with you. I seen you sneak it down to the floor when you sat down.”
“It’s an anatomical part of me. If I left it behind, I’d bleed to death.”
She winked. Her mascara was washing and running. She’d been on duty since 8:00 P.M. No woman ever looks good at 4:00 A.M., so she could be forgiven. “You don’t bleed, Tony. If I cut you open I wouldn’t have to use the ice machine for a week. You want a pepper sandwich?”
I nodded and Greta swished off to the grill, advertising her parts. A stripper’s habits never die, they merely become less and less alluring. The day before her father died, I scooped him up out of an alley near Polk Street. The poor guy was lying in his own vomit and a pool of tokay, his face the color of silver. That single act made Greta my friend for life, no matter what horrible or despicable things I would do to her or anyone else in the future.
There was another man at the counter whose presence had completely escaped me at first. He sat two stools down from Mickey Stollson, who was whispering with a college kid, wheeling and dealing some sort of stolen merchandise. The guy was thin, with an educated face. His suit was narrow and dark grey. He didn’t look like the kind of man who’d be sitting at the counter of a place like McGuire’s in the small hours. If he was a thief, he was either a poor one or a petty one. If he had just come from murdering someone, he was a solid 8-to-5 to have loused it all up from beginning to end, and would be propped up in a detective’s interrogation room by dawn. He wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the pimp and his circle of girls, making it clear he didn’t want or need a woman just then.
Greta brought my pepper sandwich and a cream soda. A bleary-eyed boy hustled in an armload of morning papers wrapped tightly with a strip of wire and placed them on the floor behind the cigar stand at my back. When he left I got up and slipped one out of the middle of the stack without disturbing the others and took it back to my seat.
I started to consume box scores of the pro basketball games when out of the corner of my eye I saw the thin guy in the bland suit get out of his seat and come walking tentatively my way. Conscious of the wallet on my hip fat with pool winnings, I watched him furtively, ready to make him part of a wall if he was another of those fleet-footed wallet grabbers finishing up a night of sweeping small change from tavern bartops and coats and jackets from all-night restaurants.
He slipped onto the stool next to me carefully, as if he were sensitive about disturbing the volume of space occupied by another human. Very softly he said, “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”
I looked at his eyes. They had a lazy, tired look.
“Not yet,” I said to him.
“I notice you have a pool cue down on the floor.”
I told him he was very observant for such a late hour.
“I’m a graveyard supervisor at the post office. Down at the Terminal Annex Building, Registry Section.”
I recognized a hint of apology in his manner, as if he were saying he was sorry for having reached a dead end in his life so soon. There was something else in his manner as well — a fool’s eagerness, a desperate man’s reckless courage. He wanted to play pool. A thin sweat began to rise on my palms. Damn! A mark in McGuire’s at 4:00 A.M.! Were there any more wonders for fate to toss down?
“I wondered if you wanted to shoot a couple of games,” the man said. “My name is Morris Dunkirk. I don’t feel much like going straight home. My wife and I are on the outs at the present. She’s a nurse at Providence Medical Center and she leaves for work around six A.M.”