“Sally...”
“Don’t speak, Eddie. There’s nothing to say.”
“You love me, Sally.”
“I love a boy named Eddie Green. With all my heart and soul. And with all of me I loathe Dash Smith who wrecked my life. Please. Just go. I’ve dreamed of killing you. Now I know I can’t do that. But I never want to see you again!”
There was nothing left for me to do but turn and go. Woodenly. Like a walking dead man.
Marlene and Felix were in the apartment when I got back there. They were having a drink together. The gayness in Felix Varden’s smile should have warned me.
Varden stood up as I crossed the room. I stood over Marlene. “You like this guy pretty well, don’t you?”
“Dash, whatever—”
“I’m not blind! Well, take him! I’m through, understand? Finished.”
“There’s only one way to quit,” Varden said in a cold, dead voice.
I spun. He had slipped a gun from his shoulder holster, was holding it on me.
“The talk of the mob has been Dash Smith going soft,” he said. “You were right. I found out tonight. Even Blackie wasn’t afraid to step out of line against you. He did try to have you killed. Ever since the fire, the talk has been you’re through. Well, that fire saved you then, Smith. I guess you knew that? Yes, I’m sure you suspected. I thought we — Marlene and I — would have to kill you at the first chance when you came from the hospital. But with Smith going soft, I decided to play a wait-and-see game.”
“You want control? And Marlene?”
“I want everything.” he said simply. “I started in your organization as a numbers runner. I set my eyes on the top. Even before that cottage fire, I was about ready to move in and take over, with key men in the- mob seeing things my way. I figured you were beginning to suspect when I discovered you were quietly salting money away in secret before the fire. Well, none of it will do you any good, Smith. You’re finished all right. But not the way you mean!”
Under the prodding of his gun, I moved toward the door of the apartment. For the second time, a discovery hit me hard. So hard it almost toppled the blank wall to my memory. With the gun in his hand, Felix Varden was no longer fearful to me. He was just another hood, and for him, I felt only contempt.
I heard him speak to Marlene. “My car is in the alley. When I’m through with this, I’ll be back. I never left here tonight, understand?”
Marlene’s face was white, her lips like blood. She said, “You can depend on me to alibi you, Felix!”
I guess her one aim in life was always to be sure she picked the winner.
The stairs were long, the alley dark. I saw the hulk of Varden’s car before us.
“Here are the keys,” he ordered. “You’ll unlock the heap.”
It was my last chance. I reached for the keys, but caught his wrist instead, spun his body with a snap, my other hand stabbing for his gun. Lithe and quick, he jumped back, slashed my forehead with his gun barrel. I shouted in hoarse rage, trying to close in on him. My shoulder was on fire from the bullet wound.
But Felix Varden was cautious, too. He was afraid of the noise of gunfire here in the confines of the alley.
He struck me again, and I staggered back. The next blow of the gun barrel across my temple knocked me nearly senseless.
Then I was waking again. Waking with an urgency, with lights blurred and flitting against my closed lids. But there were no lights. My eyes snapped open to darkness, the darkness of the alley. The scrape of feet, the gasping for breath came from two men locked in struggle near me. I pushed my way up the wall. In the dim light of the alley, I saw the shadowy figures sway.
One of them fell. It was Sergeant Saul Levine.
As Varden brought up his gun, I lunged against him. I carried him back hard against his car. I saw his gun coming in a sweeping arc. I threw up my hand to ward it off. Then Levine was moving behind me. Varden groaned and doubled from Levine’s blow.
Levine looked at me. “I heard a man shout in here, the sounds of a struggle. I was covering your apartment, Smith. But I don’t want any thanks for coming to your rescue.”
Through the blinding pain in my head, only one thing was clear, a fact that wrung my throat. I said thankfully, “The name isn’t Smith, Sarge. It’s Quincy. Lieutenant Les Quincy.”
He snorted. “You’ll have to think up a better one than that!”
“No,” I said quietly. “We’ll just go to headquarters and check my fingerprints against those of Les Quincy on the civil service records.”
It took some explaining, but when it was over, the boys at headquarters threw a party for me. I’d been hot on some of Dash Smith’s rackets. I’d cornered a stoolie who would talk and had gone out to his lake cottage to pick up Smith that night.
But he’d known he’d just about played out his rope, known too that Marlene and Varden were going to take over his organization.
He’d salted away nearly a hundred grand for a rainy day. And it was raining plenty in his life. He’d slugged me that night as I had approached his lake cottage.
Then and there, he’d seen what he believed a safe and sure way out. Dash Smith would die, and he would be free forever with a hundred grand. Free from the long shadow of the law and the vile shadow of intrigue in his own organization.
It was so simple and logical, a far lesser brain that Smith’s could have thought it out. We were the same build, the same coloring. He’d loaded me with his identification, watch, ring, clothes, removing all trace of Lieutenant Les Quincy. He’d seared the prints from my fingers, which accounted for the bad burns I’d suffered, then he’d set the dry, flimsy lake cottage afire, sure that the flames would finish his work.
When the young couple had pulled me out of the burning cottage, no one who knew Smith saw my face until it came through the ordeal of skin grafting, surgery, and from under the heavy pile of bandages.
I had looked different, but they had expected that, and hairless and changed, I had looked nothing at all like Les Quincy, the lieutenant of the Rackets Squad.
It was a face that belonged to no man. But it belonged to me now, and I was proud of it. I was glad too that memory had been trying to come back, that the doctors said it would have returned in time.
Felix Varden’s blows to the head there in the alley had only hastened things, brought memory back at once.
Levine said, “We’ll get Smith, Les, and when his organization starts cracking, it’ll go like a rotten melon.” He smoked thoughtfully a moment. “And Marlene — attempting to pick only winners will end up an also-ran. She’ll be lucky to get a job singing her blues in a cheap club after this.”
That night I went back to Sally’s place. I saw that she had been reading the papers. They were scattered over the couch. We stood a little awkwardly for a moment in the living room. Tears brimmed on her lids, and then a smile broke on her lovely face.
“There is only one question,” she said. “Does Lieutenant Les Quincy have a wife?”
I laughed. “He does not. But he will have shortly,” I said.