She turned then and faced me, the bright glass behind her, looking at me with eyes that were dead, holding the fragile cup in her hands below her breasts.
“I’ve committed adultery,” she said softly. “You killed Bruce Caldwell because you thought the killing was a way to get me back. I ought to be grateful for such a love.” She stopped, looking at me across the cradled cup, and when she spoke again her voice was no more than a whisper. “But I’m not. I’m very sorry, but I loved Bruce so much that there’s nothing I want now but to see his murderer dead.”
The tiredness inside me was like nothing I’d ever known before. “That’s a lot of love,” I said.
“I’m very confused,” she answered. She shook her head and came beside my chair. “You were wrong in what you did, but you didn’t know you were — and you did it for me. I wonder... I wonder if you would like to have me one more time.”
I looked up at her, at the strange blankness on her face, the beautiful body that was freshly bathed and clothed. I understood the ritual she had performed now, as nearly as such things can be understood. She came to me, and she was stiff and cold, the way a woman can be when she is giving herself in payment for something.
And when it was all over, I was not surprised to find a gun in her hand pointing at my head.
A Long Way To K.C.
Originally published in Giant Manhunt #3 (1954).
Dickie Cosmos went to Greenview on vacation for two reasons. In the first place, he had just enough money to pay train fare that far from Kansas City. In the second place, Greenview was a burg Buck Finney wouldn’t be caught dead in, and this increased Dickie’s chances of not being caught there in an identical condition.
It had started in a poker game in Finney’s hotel room. They were playing five card draw, Jacks or better and no limit, and Dickie drew one card to two pairs and filled a house. He was holding aces and eights. This combination is well-known in the folklore of Americana as the dead man’s hand, and that’s the way it turned out for Dickie. He backed the full house in a succession of raises and counter-raises to the amount of a cool grand in the face of Finney’s straight flush, and he wound up dead. Figuratively, that is, with a good prospect for making it literal.
This was because he’d been betting the hand and nothing else. He didn’t have the grand. He hung on desperately, hoping to recoup, but he only doubled his deficit. When the game broke up, he turned his charm on and his pockets out. His handsome face and the palms of his hands were clammy, but he put on a pretty good front. Unfortunately, however, Big Finney was impervious to fronts, even charming ones. He looked at Dickie across the poker-table, and his own face was like something left over from the Paleolithic Age.
“You welshing, Dickie?”
“No, Buck. Hell, no. I just need a little time, that’s all.”
Finny built a neat little stack of blue chips and then knocked it over with a flip of his thick fingers. The chips clattered and rolled, and Dickie wondered if the gesture was supposed to be significant. He decided that it was, and the cold sweat glistened on his smooth face.
“Sure, Dickie,” Finney said. “I’ll give you time. I’ll give you just twenty-four hours.”
Dickie looked stricken. “Twenty-four hours isn’t much time to raise two grand, Buck.”
Finney shrugged and said, “I’m giving you a break. It’s for the sake of the dames, Dickie. I wouldn’t want to break their hearts if I could help it.”
It was true that Dickie knew a lot of dames. He usually managed to live pretty well on their collective donations, as a matter of fact. None of them had two grand, however, and after eighteen hours had passed without any appreciable improvement in his financial condition, Dickie checked schedules at Union Station and caught the train south to Greenview.
He didn’t even have the nominal price of a room in the town s solitary hotel. It was a dismal clapboard dump, anyhow, and Dickie took a dim view of being its guest, even on a non-paying status. While he was trying to figure an angle, he wandered out of town along a narrow, rocky road. This was Ozark country, and all round him the earth lifted ancient bones bristling with scrub oak. Farm buildings cling precariously to the slopes of hills and ridges.
Dickie walked quite a way, mostly uphill, it seemed, and after a while he was aware that his feet were burning inside his narrow shoes. Moreover, he was as dry as a bag of popcorn, and he wanted a drink of water. Turning off onto a private drive that climbed to the yard of a shabby farmhouse, he labored up and looked around for a well. Spotting it off behind the house a short distance, he went back and helped himself. The water was sweet and cold, and he sat down on the well-cap to smoke a cigarette, feeling somewhat better.
It was then he saw the dame. She came out the back door of the house and stood on the porch looking across the yard at him. She was wearing a man’s blue work shirt, open at the throat, and a pair of jeans that were too big for her and must have belonged to die same man who contributed the shirt. The outfit did nothing for her, but Dickie had a sharp eye for dames, and he could see that there was a nice distribution underneath. She had dark, tangled hair with enough natural curl to minimize its unbrushed condition, and her face was the soft, heavy type that would someday become gross, though now, in its brief prime, it possessed a kind of full, sulky sensuality that was more vital than beauty. Dickie lifted a hand in greeting and projected his charm.
“I helped myself to a drink. Do you mind?”
She came down off the porch and crossed the yard.
“It’s all right. You can have all the water you want.”
Her voice suited her body. Heavily sensual, throaty, it achieved the effect of a caress that was as tangible as the intimacy of fingers. Dickie stepped up the voltage of his smile, flashing enamel and lifting an eyebrow in a practiced boyish expression.
“My name’s Cosmos. Dickie Cosmos. I just walked out from town.”
“I’m Rose Flannery. From Greenview?”
“That’s right.”
She sat down beside him on the well-cap, and he noticed a petulant droop to her full lower lip. She hiked the loose legs of her jeans up over her knees, exposing slim ankles, slightly soiled, that swelled upward in beautiful calf lines.
“I don’t blame you for walking out,” she said. “Greenview’s a damn good town to be from.” Oh, oh, he thought. A discontented dame. A restless rustic lovely. What could be sweeter? Or more vulnerable?
“It didn’t look like much of a place,” he said cautiously.
She laughed bitterly and gave him a sidewise look from under thick lashes. “Not that this rock pile is any improvement. You don’t look like the kind of guy who’d be wasting his time in the sticks. You from Kansas City?”
He wondered if he should play it straight, and decided that it couldn’t do any harm. As a matter of fact, he was getting a fast impression that he might have blundered onto something rare. Not as slick as the chicks around Twelfth, of course, but pretty good compensation for the time it would take a guy to figure a way out of exile.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been to Kansas City. St. Louis, too. I liked KC better. I always planned to go back.”
“It’s a pretty good town, as towns go. Not as good as it used to be, though. Not like it was when Old Tom ran it.”
“Just so, it’s a town. Just so it’s got people and places.”