I timed the passing seconds with the sensitivity of raw nerves. There was a rustle of clothing as the gun came down, aiming at the back of my head.
I slipped to one side, lashing out with my foot, and dropping to the sandy carpeting of pine needles.
A meaningless sound caught in his throat. My heel had caught his kneecap. He thudded against the car.
Spinning and lunging toward him beneath the gun, I glimpsed his pain-contorted face. He forced the throbbing knee to support him, shifted his position, and the gun was swinging down again.
I slammed into his middle, grabbing for his wrist. I had it momentarily, but he was sweating. He slipped loose as we fell.
I tried to turn on him a second time. I had lost the advantage of surprise. He took a side step. A fresh look of viciousness was in his face. Halfway to my feet, I suddenly covered my head with my arms. The impact of the gun barrel made my right elbow feel as if it had dissolved.
I stumbled backward, concerned only with defense now. He danced in and out, in and out. The third or fourth blow with the gun knocked me cold. I’m not sure which. Johnny had ample time for a clean getaway.
I suppose an hour or more passed. The fog began to clear. I rolled over on the pine needles and sat up. The trees around me did a dizzy dance. I groaned, and cradled my throbbing elbow, lowered my aching head, and finally tried to brush away the swarm of sweat bees that made life right then even more hellish.
Another thirty minutes passed before I staggered onto the highway. I looked up and down the road, aching for the sight of a car, or a farmer in a truck. The road was devoid of all movement, except for the shimmering heat waves that made the road look like black water in the distance.
I started walking. A southbound car passed at last, but swooped by without even slowing for my frantic, waggling thumb.
I was on the point of passing out again when I reached the motel. I needed a doctor, but that could wait.
In an outside phone booth. I placed a call to Gervasi. He wasn’t in his room. I guessed a faceless bellhop had to page him.
His cultured tones reached me at last, “Gervasi speaking.”
“Nick Ramey here.”
He took a breath. “You couldn’t be anywhere near Dallas yet. What went wrong?”
“I lost the stuff.”
He let the breath out. “Are you — confined?”
“No.”
“Can you return under your own power?”
“Yes,” I answered him bereftly.
“Then it wasn’t the police?”
“No, Gervasi. It was a punk bellhop who followed me from the hotel.”
“A what?”
“Look,” I groaned, “I’m nearly dead. I’ll give you the details later. He got the money. He got away. I did the best I could, and I won’t apologize.”
He gave himself a moment for it to sink in. When he spoke again, his voice was less strident “I know you always do your best, Nick. Did he take the car?”
I looked across the motel parking lot where my car was still parked. “No, just the money. All of it. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him, either. He kept shutting me up.”
“Then you’d better get back here as fast as you can, Nick.”
“You don’t have to tell me.” I was practically weeping. “Better start winding up things right now. That bellhop is going to have Federal men like a dog has fleas, when he hits the first bright spot and starts scattering two hundred grand of counterfeit dough...”
A Head off Her Shoulders
Originally published in Dime Mystery Magazine, August 1949.
Maxie Bemelmens’ penthouse was like a huge nerve center in a state of morbid, quiet excitement. Atop a fifteen-story apartment hotel that Maxie owned, the penthouse was everything a penthouse should be, down to the last shrub growing on the terrace. I stood at the French doors, listening to myself breathe. Now and then the phone tinkled and Leon Myart’s smooth voice murmured into it. He was talking to the nerve-ends, men out scouring the city, putting little pieces of information into a pattern.
Myart said, “He want to see you, Hilliard.”
I looked at the closed door across the room. “I hate to go in there.”
“I know, but you’d better go on in.”
I went in the room. It was a kind of den. There was Maxie pushed back in a big club chair with that sad, sour, dead expression on his face. His thick lips looked grey. I wanted to yell at him to snap out of it. I have never seen anything like it happen before.
Right near Maxie’s chair was a large plush couch. On it lay a figure. The silk dress clung enough to show the lines of the body and the hands were at the sides in calm repose. But Melissa’s face was missing. In fact, her whole head was missing, severed just above her shoulders.
“Steve,” Maxie said, “get Cecil Calhoun. Bring Calhoun here for the job.”
“Calhoun, the sculptor?”
“That’s right. He’s one of the best in the country. Promise up to fifteen grand if you have to.”
He reached for a bottle. I saw that he was blind drunk. “Here’s the address, Steve.”
I took the piece of paper and went out. Men were on guard at the top and bottom of the elevator shaft. Archie was the one on guard at the front entrance to the building. While I waited for the car to pull around Archie chatted with me. “Nothing showing down here,” he said.
“Myart’s narrowing the time element down fast now,” I said.
“I don’t like that Myart,” Archie said. “Colder’n a snake’s belly in zero weather.” He rolled his eyes up. “Maxie still in there with her?”
When I nodded, Archie looked worried. “It ain’t right,” ‘he muttered. “It ain’t normal. Couldn’t you talk to him, Hilliard? Get him to tell the cops about this thing, the way he should?”
“He’d let the cops dog Melissa’s murder the way he’d give his dough to charity.”
“Nothing good’s going to come from it,” Archie said. “Somebody is really gunning for Maxie this time, sending him that trunk with Melissa in it that way. Maybe,” he added hopefully, “it ain’t Melissa after all?”
“It’s Melissa, all right. Whoever did it wanted Maxie to know right off that it was Melissa. The shoulder of her dress was pulled down enough to show that birthmark.”
Archie fogged smoke out of his nose and shook his head. “Somebody sure hates Maxie!”
“And Melissa,” I said.
Oldham pulled the car up to the curb then and I crossed the sidewalk. I got in and handed Oldham the piece of paper with Cecil Calhoun’s address.
The address turned out to be an old gingerbread house. A card on the bell button read: “Out of Order.” I knocked.
When nothing happened I knocked again. A woman’s voice, husky and impatient, called out, “All right, all right. I’m coming!”
The door was jerked open. She was very good looking in a tall, rangy way, the kind of dame you imagine on an archery range or gracing a sleek saddle mount or floating down in a perfect swan dive from a high board. She had long auburn hair that glinted in the sunlight. Her mouth was red and wide, and her eyes were a liquid brown, capable of great expression. She was wearing a smock stained with clay and paint, and there was a clay smudge on her cheek where she’d brushed the back of her hand.
“The Calhoun residence?” I said.
“I’m Cecil Calhoun.”
“I hadn’t expected to find a woman.”
“Neither did my father,” she smiled, “and unfortunately named me before I was born. Would you come in?”
She closed the door behind me and crossed the room to get herself a cigarette. The flash of her bare calves and ankles was easy to watch. When she turned she caught me peeking. It didn’t fluster her.