A little before five o’clock in the morning, Morten parked the car in front of the Pagoda Palace Apartments on North Berendo. There couldn’t be any mistake about it, of course. It had all been a plot from the start. Joe Pollak and Rose Oparin. Rose was the only one who knew he was going to Barstow. Joe was the man who had kept him in the shack. He was sure of the first, guessing at the second. Whether it was Joe or not, that wasn’t so important now anyway.
What was important was very important to Morten. He knew that every night when he left the apartment he had paid for and furnished, Joe had walked in. Morten had been afraid there, too, of taking what was his. Afraid of the shadow in the water.
He was sure that the apartment where he had first visited Rose would be vacated now. And there was only the slightest chance that they hadn’t left Joe’s apartment yet.
He touched the jeweled gun in his coat pocket. His clothes were suddenly soaked with perspiration. He got out of the car, shut the door, and walked toward the grotesque jumble of flaking plaster and ridiculous concrete Buddhas, back among the ratty palm trees.
Joe Pollak needed a special kind of place, he had once told Morten, because of his women. A private entrance on the ground floor, preferably in the rear with plenty of screening vegetation — palm trees, poinciana bushes, orange, pepper, and avocado trees. Joe liked this place; he had been living here for several years.
Morten walked between the trees, past a crumbled dragon, with half its plaster tongue missing. The door was red with the lacquer flaking away, and with a moldy brass knocker which Morten lifted and then stood holding as he listened. He thought he heard rustling movement behind the door. He made a rattling sound in his throat as if something had broken loose inside of him.
He kept on standing there like a flower growing in a pot, struggling instinctively like an animal in a net. And this blind struggle drew a shuddering breath out of him. His round moonface had no discernible expression, except for a line of white that circled the thin contours of his lips.
He banged the knocker twice. After some moments, Joe Pollak opened the door cautiously, only a crack, and Morten fired several times. He pushed the door open then and stepped over the body curled up on the floor.
In the shadows, he moved over to the bed where Rose’s gray face strained toward him, the mouth open. Closer, he could see the incredible exposed jewel of her nakedness, the jewel that had been denied him — but which was rightly his. He began to quiver as his hands went out to her white breasts, a tremor passed through his body.
He pushed her head back against the pillow and dug his hand into her neck. He could feel her body writhing under his weight, her legs kicking at him. She began to moan, but he bit into her lips and stopped the sounds. He took Rose with all the lust and hate and passion of which he had become capable.
And then he saw the uncut diamond on the table beside the bed. He reached out his hand and grasped it, felt the sharp, hard edges. He towered over Rose now, one hand holding her polished black hair, looking down at her stunned face, her swollen lips.
Someone was banging and kicking at the door.
Morten said softly, “There was the famous Mogul ruby which passed from the hands of the Emperor Jehangir into the hands of Shah Jehan. He gave it to his lovely wife, the same lady for whom as a sorrowing widower, he built the Taj Mahal. And royal gem that it was, it came at last into the hands of Queen Victoria, a few years before the great diamond Koh-i-noor...”
Morten slid the uncut diamond through the stretched tendons of her throat.
It was as though someone had drawn a red drape across his eyes.
Bait for the Red-Head
by Eugene Pawley
Most traffic cops spend their departmental lives trying to switch to Homicide. Because women found him irresistible, Ron made it in one day.
1.
Ron Jordan saw the relief man coming across Berkeley Street and knew something was up. Jordan was standing in the gore on the Trimount Avenue side, letting the traffic flow by on both sides of him. At three o’clock the traffic was full but not bad. The sun was behaving for June, and Ron Jordan was standing there letting it flow and looking at the girls going away from him in the crosswalk. Then this relief, an old traffic fixture named Dennehy, walked out and gave him a funny look.
“You’re wanted at the station,” said Dennehy.
“What for?”
Dennehy’s face, with its puckered round mouth, had a knowing and maybe pleased shape to it. He shot a veiled glance up at Jordan’s cap, which sat at a jaunty angle like a flying colonel’s; he let his eyes travel slowly down Jordan’s trimness and thought the gesture was explanation enough. “I don’t know,” he said.
“You know. Give, my friend, give.”
“I said I don’t. But the sergeant was talking to the inspectors’ bureau before he sent me to relieve you. When he hung up he said, 'Send Lover Boy back here, and tell him to hump it.’ ” The relief gave Jordan a sidelong glance. “So maybe you know.”
A girl in the crosswalk crowd said, “Hi, Ron.” She was a chick from the office building on Berkeley below Trimount. Ron said, “Hi, honey,” and answered her smile, and absently watched her tick-tock gait as she walked away from him. At the curb she looked back and smiled again.
Jordan put his whistle in his pocket. “It’s all yours.”
At the station, Sergeant Gillchrist said, “Get down to the inspectors’ bureau. Report to Captain Sline, and hightail it.”
“What for?” Jordan asked, again.
The sergeant put his lips against his teeth and sucked in air. It was a gesture; it meant suction — pull, influence. Gillchrist thought Jordan was finagling a transfer to the bureau. Rookies under a year in the department didn’t get into the bureau, even as clerks. Not without pull. The sergeant thought it was pull, the relief thought Jordan was in trouble over a girl. So neither of them really knew anything.
The inspectors’ bureau was high in the chopped-up warren atop the City Hall building. It was strange territory.
Jordan knew the two men in the captain’s office because they were who they were. He had never seen either up close before. Captain Sline, the broad one, sat behind his desk, his back more rigid than the clerk’s had been. The other one, the little one with the quick, burning, black eyes and the hat on, was Shorty Eglin. Chief Inspector Bernard Eglin of the homicide detail. They said he didn’t like the Shorty and he didn’t like the Bernard; so everybody called him Ben Eglin. He sat slumped and loose as a sleeping child, so very loose that Jordan knew he was doing it because he was even more taut inside than the other man. They were talking when Jordan came in. They looked at him and then at each other, leaving some question suspended in the air between them.
“I’m Jordan. You wanted me?”
“You took your sweet time,” Eglin said.
Jordan looked at him. The pressure was infecting Jordan, too, making him sore at the relief with his puckered mouth, sore at Gillchrist who wasn’t going any higher and so found pull in the promotion of every other cop. Ron was sore at this little man with the raspy voice, the hot eyes and sardonic lips. Jordan said to himself, You’re an ugly runt with a reputation and so you shove rookies around. I ought to call you Shorty to your face. Aloud he said, “I came as soon as I was told to.”