“If I’d just waited two more seconds-bang. You’d have been out of my hair forever, Menace.”
I wanted to say something like “What hair, cueball?” But I wasn’t about to push my luck. He could still change his mind and let her shoot me retroactively. It was just a matter of how he wanted to write it up in his report.
Sickles stepped into the room and bent down over Mary Smith. He was followed quickly by the lackey I’d seen him with earlier in the day. At least it looked like the same guy from the shins down.
“She dead, Mike?” Sickles’ partner asked.
“Nah, she’s just hibernatin’. Now call the meatwagon, knucklehead.”
Knucklehead scooped up the phone off my desk and asked the operator for the coroner’s office.
Sickles waved his meaty hand back and forth before my eyes. “Hey, anybody home? Snap out of it, Menace. She scare you to death or somethin’?”
I blinked, maybe for the first time in a good minute. “Thanks,” I said.
Sickles grimaced. “Don’t thank me. I handed you a break because you wouldn’t give the broad the script. Next time I might not feel so merciful.”
“How long were you there in the doorway?”
“Not long. I only moseyed over when things started to heat up.”
“Moseyed over?”
“Sure. Knucklehead and me, we were next door listening to the whole conversation. It was mighty entertainin’, too. Like The Bickersons and Suspense rolled into one.”
“You’ve got my place bugged?”
Sickles cocked his head and gave me a don’t-ask-stupid-questions frown. “Course not. We had tin cans pressed up against the wall.”
I didn’t push it. Besides, I had other questions on my mind. I nodded at Mary Smith’s body without letting my eyes move that way.
“So what’s her real name, anyway?”
Sickles ran his hands over his smooth, sweaty skull. He was obviously trying to decide whether or not to tell me the truth. The truth won out. What a day for sworn enemies. Around the world, cats and dogs stopped fighting and kissed each other on both cheeks.
“Beats me, Menace,” Sickles said. “I didn’t even know she existed until she walked in here and started gabbin’ with you.”
He saw my confusion and went on. “You were the one we were following. Ever since we walked in on you at John Smith’s place.” He cracked a cock-eyed smile. “You were hidden O.K., but that beer you were guzzling wasn’t. It was still cold when we came in. All the windows were closed and bolted, so I knew somebody was still in there somewhere. I dropped a little hint about Dominic Van Dine-the next stop on my hunt for Smith-then stepped back to see what happened.”
I grunted with grudging admiration. “You amaze me, Sickles. You played this one better than Machiavelli himself.”
Sickles glared at me. “He some kinda Commie?”
I shook my head.
He allowed himself a half-smile. “Yeah, well, maybe. Only if I’m so smart, how come I’ve got boils on my butt the size of grapefruit from all the hours I spent sittin’ in the car today? I tell ya’, Menace, tailin’ you is like getting in a high-speed chase with a three-legged turtle.”
What a charming development. Sickles and I were so thoroughly bonded now he felt free to tell me about his carbuncles. I stifled a sigh.
My eyes drifted back to the body of Miss X, the Unknown Communist. I hadn’t killed her, but I hadn’t helped her, either.
What kind of revolutionary was I? What kind of detective was I? What kind of man was I?
“All that is solid melts into air,” Marx wrote. That was me alright. Fred Menace, the Red Detective, had melted. I’m just vapor now, part of the smog that chokes L.A.
I still charge thirty dollars a day plus expenses, though. Even vapor’s gotta make a living.
The Dying Artist by SHELLEY FREYDONT
EVERYONE LOVED WATCHING George MacCready die. His dying was unparalleled. No one could clutch at his throat quite like George MacCready. No one’s knees buckled with the gusto of George MacCready’s. Nor could they sprawl ontheir backs, legs quivering ever so slightly, as they gasped their final breath. Only for him would the ermine trim of a velvet tunic kiss the floor as he fell, then twine about his outstretched legs like fingers of a foggy night.
No one could die quite like George MacCready. And no one enjoyed watching him die more than I.
For you see, George MacCready learned how to die from life. Not his life, for that would have been pointless-to die in order to perfect the business of dying. George MacCready learned by watching others die.
The first time I saw him watching death was after a performance of Macbeth. I left my seat in the stalls and hurried outside to wait for the great expirer at the stage door. MacCready had just exited the theatre when a cry rose up from the street behind us. MacCready lifted his head, listening. Then he strode down the alley, brushing away his admirers as if they were mere coal dust. I joined the others who followed in his wake.
When next I spotted him, he was standing among a crowd that had gathered to watch two constables pull a boy from beneath a hansom’s wheels. His body was mangled and crushed. A strange gurgling sound arose from within him. His head rolled and spurted blood with equal abandon. But his legs. Ah. His legs hopped around much in the same manner of that other great expirer, Edwin Forrest.
It seems only fitting that EF would pattern his death scenes after the snuffing out of a lower class soul. EF was all blast and bombast in his dying. His whole body would spasm and his arms shoot heavenward. Then he would fall and roll along the floor, his legs kicking out with as much grace as that poor urchin who lay in the street. EF didn’t understand finesse in dying.
I watched MacCready study that poor boy-draw closer and peer over him until the constable eased him aside. And all the while, I watched him watching. I could tell the moment when he dismissed the boy’s demise as beneath his study.
After a time, he sauntered away and I sauntered after him. Watched him walk along the cobbled street, opening and closing his fist just as the boy had done.
He stopped outside the Three Bells Oyster Bar and lifted his hand to the gaslight. Slowly, he contracted his fingers and spread them out again. He shook his head once, dropped his hand and went inside to dine.
I followed him. Studying the man who studied the dying. I leaned against the wall nursing a mug of flat beer while MacCready sat at a table for one, and a plate of oysters was placed before him. I watched him lift the corner of the napkin, shake it, and fold it into his shirt collar. Then his hand made a graceful arc toward the plate. In one deft movement, his fingers closed around a shell, while MacCready stared into the oyster’s face.
Slowly he brought it to his lips, all the while his fingers throttling the shell. My own throat closed against the beer I had been drinking, and I had to spit out the mouthful onto the floor.
Later that night in my rooms above the Majestic Theatre, I practiced bringing my hand to the light, clenched and unclenched my fingers as MacCready had done. When finally I put out the lamp and went to bed, I was filled with a sense of purpose that I had never known before.
Every night, I watched him from the stalls; Lear, Hamlet, Richard III, Othello. It didn’t matter, though I liked his Hamlet best. Afterwards, I would wait with the crowd at the stage door until the great man appeared. Sometimes he would catch my eye, and a thrill would shoot through me. I felt his kindred spirit. And I was sure he must have felt mine.
I took a job with the theater company as a bit actor just to be near him. To witness the discovery of some new detail-the tiniest nuance that could be incorporated into his death scenes. I, too, learned to die-as a Roman soldier, a Capulet, a Nubian slave. Even when I wasn’t dying, I stood on stage watching MacCready take his final breath. Night after night, I watched him as a lover might watch his beloved. I stayed in the wings after my exits, went early for my entrances, practicing his gestures as he performed them on stage.