I dragged Feldman out, Maxie shuffling along after me. He closed the door to the den. Myart’s gaze flicked at Maxie, darted to me. “He wants Georgie,” I said.
“Georgie’s covering the service stairs,” Myart said. “In the basement.”
I rode the elevator down, all the way to the basement. I stepped out in the warm, dry, heavy shadows. My feet scraped and sent echoes over the cement floor.
I moved back toward the service entrance. “Georgie?”
He didn’t answer, and I didn’t see him. I opened my mouth to say his name again; then I saw him. Georgie was a big mass of flesh near the dark yawning mouth of the service stairs. I dropped to one knee beside him. He was breathing, but as unconscious as a guy could get, a lump like a golf ball on the side of his head. I felt it then, the faint, cold draft of an open window.
I spun around fast, wanting to get the wall at my back, my hand dipping toward my gun.
“Do it and die,” a voice said.
I saw his face, hovering there in the shadows beside a boiler. He came toward me, a big gun stuck out in his fist. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. I tried to tear my eyes from his face and couldn’t.
“You’ll take me up, Hilliard,” he said, mouthing the words thickly. “You’ll take me right up to Maxie.”
“Listen, Meek, you can’t do it! You’ll never get out of the building alive.”
“Do you think I care?” Roy Meek said. He was doped to the gills, the rims of his eyes like frozen trickles of blood. But maybe he wouldn’t have needed the drug anyway.
“Do you know what it was like?” he whispered. “The same cell every day, every night. I had given her everything, my money, my very life, everything! I lived only to get out, to come back! No other man would ever have the pleasure of looking at that angel face and tawny hair again!”
Roy Meek looked at my face and laughed, so softly it was a bare whisper of sound in the stark basement. “Just take me to Maxie,” he breathed dreamily. “One minute with Maxie — and then I’ll never be sad again.”
He herded me with the gun. I was breathing hard. My collar was limp with sweat. Into the elevator.
The elevator rose slowly. The fifteenth. Maxie’s floor. “Open the door,” Meek hissed.
I opened the door. He slammed me with the gun, and I stumbled out into Maxie’s living room and fell to my knees.
Feldman wasn’t in the same place where I’d left him. And I saw that Maxie’s knuckles were covered with blood, and dimly I knew that Cecil Calhoun had crept out of the rumpus room. There must have been another tussle between Maxie and Feldman, and she had heard it, heard Maxie knocking Augie unconscious for the second time.
I tried to crawl to my feet. I got one glimpse of Maxie’s face, like a blurred, frozen thing. Behind me, Meek was sobbing out laughter. “It’s me doing it, rat! Me — Roy Meek!”
Then he began shooting. He shot Maxie four times. Myart had dived behind a couch. I had rolled out of the way, yelling to Calhoun to get down.
Then everything was silent. Meek whirled, leaped into the elevator, slammed the door, and the cage dropped away.
Myart came crawling out from behind the couch. Calhoun was helping me to my feet.
I stood up, shook my head to clear it. Myart snarled, “Get him, Steve! Get the stinking, hopped-up rat!”
Calhoun grabbed my arm, her face very intense. “Have you ever done anything like that before? Like killing a man on Myart’s orders?”
“No,” I said.
“Then it’s not too late.”
Staring into her face, thinking of all the blood and violence, I realized what she meant.
I said, “Myart, if you want Roy Meek go get him yourself.”
I took Calhoun’s arm, and led her out.
A week later I was in Calhoun’s house, showing her how to grill a steak.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“I’ve quit fighting the alarm clock every morning.”
“That’s fine. One of these days you’ll own that brokerage house.”
After we finished off the steak, she said, “I want to show you something.” I followed her into her studio. She turned on a white, bright light. My heart skipped a beat as I looked at the waxen head on the table. “Melissa!” I said.
“I had to do it,” she said. “It was inside my mind. It kept bothering me. I had to get it out.”
I looked at the head a long time, thinking of Maxie who was dead and whose organization had ruptured at every seam like a rotten apple bursting. And I thought of Augie Feldman and of Roy Meek, whom the cops had cornered after he’d killed Maxie.
I saw then what Calhoun had done with the head; after a few minutes the head seemed to change, and beneath the soft oval face and tawny hair it seemed I could see the real Melissa, a death’s head, a grinning skull. I don’t know how Calhoun managed to get that in her piece of work, but I knew the head would be around a long time, to remind us, to make us remember...
Heist in Pianissimo
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1964.
Judy put her hands over her ears. “I won’t hear another word of it Davie! We’re not criminals, you know.”
In the moonlight beside the lake, she was a lovely, petite brunette. I took quick steps after her as she flounced her skirt and moved toward my jalopy, which was parked nearby.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Just pretend I never opened my big mouth.”
I held the door for her to get in the car.
“The very idea, Davie, the two of us robbing the bank! Why, we come from decent respectable backgrounds. We’ve never had a mark against us, even when we were in our teens. We’re about the last pair of young people anybody in town would associate with a bank robbery.”
I went around the car and got in. “I know,” I said. “So forget it will you?”
She sneaked a look at me as I started the car, turned it around, and headed back toward town.
“Davie...” she said in the murmuring tone that indicated a mountain of thought behind a single word. Davie anticipated it.
“Uh-huh?”
“Whatever gave you the thought?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just wishing you and I could make with life while we’re still young, I guess. Maybe it was looking at old man Peterson, your boss at the bank, or Mr. Harper at the hardware store. Tomorrow morning, for example, they’ll be standing not six inches from the spot where they started standing thirty or forty years ago.”
“Both our bosses are nice people, Davie. They’ve bought homes, raised families...”
“...And seen the same faces, talked the same talk, moved through the same routine day after day. They might as well be vegetables, Judy. One day or a million days adds up to the same for them. Because they’ve never lived. They’ve just existed in a kind of vacuum. Now it’s too late for them. A few more years of the same malarkey and they’ll be planted out in a marble orchard and somebody else will have moved into their same dull spots.”
“It’s best not to think about those things, Davie.”
“Sometimes you can’t help it,” I said. “Not if there is somebody special that you want special things for.”
She reached forward and turned on the car radio loud enough to drown out my voice. But we’d ridden less than half a mile when she turned it down again.
“Now mind you, Davie,” she murmured. “I’m not planning on doing anything so crazy, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we woke up tomorrow morning or the next day and had fifty or sixty thousand dollars?”
“That’s what I tried to point out, there at the lake,” I said. “It isn’t like we were turning into pathological criminals. We just do this one thing. We keep right on about our business until the furor over the robbery dies down. Then I tell Mr. Harper one day that I’ve got an offer of a job in California. We get married. Our friends give us a going-away party. We promise to write, but somehow we never do. You know how those things go.