Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 3, March, 1953

Triple-Cross by Robert Patrick Wilmot

She’s poison, the operative told Hanley. But he didn’t believe it at first, and, in a way, he didn’t really care.

Hanley listened to the whisper of rain against the plate-glass front of the saloon and studied Spinelli’s reflection in the bar mirror. God, didn’t the guy ever shut up? The way he ran his yap made you sick to your stomach.

Spinelli swallowed his whisky, took a long gulp of the beer chaser, and flicked Hanley with a tentative, sidelong glance.

“If you ask me,” he said, “this Mark Ibberson is clean. He’s clean like a guy that’s spent three days in a Finnish bath, getting swabbed by three babes named Smetana.”

“Nobody asked you,” Hanley said, hating the only slightly flawed cameo that was Spinelli’s profile, the oily profusion of Spinelli’s tightly curling hair. Hanley was a big man himself, thick of shoulder and chest, with a dark saturnine face and a hard and bitter mouth that was like a wedge over a heavy, black-stubbled jaw. His pale eyes were red-rimmed and sunken, and fixed in the glassy stare of a man who has not had enough sleep for a long time. They gave Spinelli no hint of the dislike he felt for the smaller man; Hanley had the sort of eyes that told nobody anything at all.

“You’re the doctor,” Spinelli said. “If the Hanley Agency wants to keep diggin’ away at a guy that ain’t done anything, that’s your business and none of mine.”

“You’re getting paid for your part of it,” Hanley said.

“Sure, and who’s complaining? Only I just thought you’d like to know that Ibberson ain’t chasing babes, or doing anything else out of line, so far as I could find out. The way I figure it, he’s a sucker for Mrs. Ibberson, a guy who’s only in love with his own old lady, God help him.”

Hanley moved his whisky glass around in slow circles on the bar. “He’ll have a hell of a time proving that,” he said. “After today.”

Spinelli lifted the padded shoulders of his coat in a shrug.

“Okay, so we plant a broad on him. So then Mrs. I. can lower the boom on him and collect plenty of dough. It ain’t pretty, but I guess it’s life.”

“Ibberson’s a revolving son-of-a-bitch,” Hanley said quietly, staring down at the glass in his hand. “He beat Clare Ibberson up, a half dozen times. You know he broke her arm.”

Spinelli’s tapering, grubby fingers pinched a cigarette out of the crumpled pack on the bar in front of him. He fumbled in a pocket of his tight brown overcoat, extracted a sulphur match and snapped it into light with a black-edged thumbnail. “Funny, you mentioning that arm,” he said, his eyes narrowed over the flare of the match.

“What’s funny about it?” Hanley asked. His voice was pitched very low, and it sounded completely detached, but his hand shook, raising the whisky glass to his mouth.

“Well, I heard a lot about that busted arm,” Spinelli said. “At the Clavering Terrace, where the Ibbersons used to shack up when they were still working at being married. That arm is the hottest topic since Flying Saucers.”

“Go on,” Hanley said, his voice almost inaudible in the quiet barroom. “Go on, Sal.”

“He didn’t bust her arm. She did it herself, falling downstairs. She was cockeyed, see, stoned to the eyes. Oh, sure, she calls the cops, and tells ’em Ibberson did it. But it was no dice, ’cause one of the bellhops sees her fall and bust the flipper, and he told the cops. The Ibbersons got chucked out of the hotel afterwards, on account of her being always on the sauce.”

“You lousy punk,” Hanley said, his impersonal tone more frightening than any tone of anger. “You dirty bastard. You couldn’t have told me this before, could you?”

“What the hell!” Spinelli said, his brown eyes widening, his voice balanced between derision and fear. “I figure you must know she was an alcoholic bum, since you put in so much time with her. I wasn’t supposed to be keeping tabs on her, anyway. I was supposed to be checking her husband — remember?”

Out on the street a taxi door slammed. Hanley looked past Spinelli, out through the rain-streaked window of the saloon, and saw a girl standing on the curb. The cab pulled away and the girl stood looking uncertainly about her, head bent against the driving rain. Hanley dug a bill out of his pocket, tossed it on the bar, and jabbed an elbow into Spinelli’s ribs. “Let’s go,” he said. “Our twister just yarded herself out of a cab.”

He went down the bar, moving with ponderous speed, and the girl smiled at him, recognizing him as he lumbered out into the rain with Spinelli at his heels. She was a tall blonde with a coarse-boned, sullen face and heavy-lidded dark eyes. Inside the shell of her transparent raincoat, a black dress lay sheath-tight on long, curving thighs and full breasts.

“Hello, Mr. Hanley,” she said in a harsh metallic voice. “Swell weather for ducks, huh?”

Hanley nodded, unsmiling. He took the girl by the arm and began walking. Spinelli fell into step with them. They moved silently to the corner and crossed Lexington Avenue, into the street in which Mark Ibberson lived. It was a quiet street, tree-shaded, almost empty, a street scoured clean of life by the raw wind of the rainy afternoon.

Neil Garson, one of Hanley’s part-time operatives, sat in a car parked half way down the block from the apartment house in which Ibberson lived. Slouched over the wheel with a book in his hands, young Garson looked like a college student.

Hanley gave him an almost imperceptible nod, walked on with Spinelli and the girl and entered the foyer of the apartment house. The foyer was a small chamber, dark, deserted, and quietly elegant.

“You know what you’re supposed to do,” Hanley said to the girl, his voice no louder than a rustling leaf in the silence of the room. “The guy’s not too well, and he sleeps a couple of hours after lunch every afternoon. I’ll go in and unlock the door first, and when I come out you go right in.”

“How long before you boys come busting in?” the girl asked.

“We’ll give you a minute,” Hanley answered. His pale eyes looked at the tight dress beneath the raincoat, and his hard mouth twisted into a brief sardonic grin. “A minute oughta be plenty for you, baby. The guy’s bedroom is across the living room, first door to the left.”

“Suppose he isn’t asleep? Suppose he hears me, and I don’t even get time to take my coat off, let alone anything else? What do I do then?”

“I’ll take a peek at him and see if he’s sleeping,” Hanley told her. “But just in case you don’t get time to do a full strip routine, I’ll tell you what you do. You grab the guy and smear a yard of that lipstick on his puss, and hope for the best.”

“What I can’t figure out is how come you guys have got a key to this john’s apartment. It don’t make much in the sense department, to me. Of course, I’m just a innocent country girl from Dakota, and there’s lots of things I don’t understand.”

Spinelli smiled and stepped close to the blonde. “I’ll bet you burned up more of Dakota than the drought, too,” he said, and put a hand inside the girl’s raincoat. “But the way you’re built, honey, you should worry if you ain’t smart. You got a body will answer all the important questions.”

“Well, you aren’t answering my question doing what you’re doing, Buster.”

“If we want a key to a place, we know how to get it. Keys come a lot cheaper than you do, baby.”

The blonde giggled. “But it isn’t exactly legal, is it?”

“You’d be surprised how many things aren’t,” Spinelli said, and now he had both of his hands inside the raincoat.

Hanley cursed them softly. “Break it up,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He turned, took a key from his overcoat pocket, unlocked the inner door of the foyer and disappeared into the darkness of the hall beyond. In a few moments he was back, his face impassive, a heavy and weary mask. He had a grimy ten dollar bill wrapped around two thick fingers of his right hand, and he held it out to the girl, jabbing his finger tips against her breast.

“The john ain’t home,” he said. “The deal’s off for today. Take ten for your trouble, and I’ll phone you when I rig the thing again.”

The blonde looked at the ten dollar bill, her harsh mouth crimped into a scornful knot. “I was supposed to get a hundred bucks for this caper,” she said. “Can I help it if the mark isn’t home? It oughta be at least twenty for a girl to go out of the house on a day like this.”

“You’d never really be worth more than two dollars,” Hanley said tonelessly, “even as pork. You want the sawbuck, baby, or you want the back of my hand?”

The girl took the ten dollar bill. She gave Hanley a single glance of hatred, smiled bitterly at Spinelli, and walked out onto the street.

Hanley took a cheap cigar from his breast pocket, lighted it deliberately and nodded at Spinelli, speaking no word. He went ahead of him out onto the street, a shambling lonely figure in a shabby overcoat, a soiled gray hat pulled low on his brow.

The wind had died, and the rain had turned into a substance that was neither rain nor snow, but both — drizzling wet flakes that melted almost instantly against their cheeks. Hanley walked down the street to where Neil Garson sat in the parked car, and tapped on the front window.

“No ball game today, Neil,” he said. “Wet grounds. I’ll call you later, kid.”

He turned away from the car, without another glance at Garson, and plodded on down the sidewalk, with Spinelli following slightly behind him. He walked twenty yards farther along the street, stopped before a half-opened gate of wrought iron. Beyond the gate a short, blind alley led to the service door of an apartment house.

“A real blister, that babe,” Spinelli said, making uneasy conversation, as if suddenly frightened by the complete lack of expression in the eyes Hanley turned on him. “A bum, of course, but built like a brick smokehouse. If you like them like that, huh, Boss?”

Hanley hit him twice, suddenly, savagely, with a left hook that gashed Spinelli’s right eyebrow and a short, chopping right hand that smashed the cupid’s bow lips into crimson pulp. Spinelli staggered half a dozen feet into the alley, spun entirely around by the force of the second blow, and fell upon his hands and knees. He crouched a moment, shaking his head as if to clear it, and then slowly rose to his feet.

“You found out a lot about Clare Ibberson, didn’t you?” Hanley asked, his hands at Spinelli’s throat. “You found out a lot while you was supposed to be checking her husband, huh?”

Spinelli spat blood, and clawed at Hanley’s fingers. “All of us knew about her,” he quavered. “Me and Garson and Anderson, too. Only we were scared to tell you, because we knew you’d gone overboard about the broad.”

“Tell me,” Hanley said in his emotionless whisper. “Come on, Spinelli, talk!”

“She’s strictly bad coffee,” Spinelli said, sobbing. “She’s a real monster, Hanley, so help me God! She killed her first husband in California, when she was only eighteen. Got off, after the jury was hung, in two trials. She married another guy and had a kid, and then run off and left him and the kid when they was sick and broke. Ibberson’s a decent guy, a good egg. She only married him for his money, and she hired you to get something on him, because she figured you’d frame the guy if she got her hooks into you deep enough. She’d go to bed with anybody wore pants, and still had strength enough to get ’em off.”

“Prove it,” Hanley said. “Tell me something to prove it before I kick your face through the back of your head!”

Spinelli was silent for a moment, and then his voice rose in a frantic wail. “I’ll tell you something will prove it! I was in her apartment at twelve-thirty, just before I left to meet you. You thought she went to Connecticut, didn’t you, after you and her had a late breakfast? Well, she didn’t. She come back to the apartment, and I was there, because I know where she keeps her key, and I let myself in. Only she kicked me out — she kicked me out because it was plain she was expecting some other guy.”

Hanley’s fist blurred toward Spinelli’s jaw, and with his other hand he jerked Spinelli’s head forward to meet the blow. Then he stood back as Spinelli’s eyes clouded and he slumped slowly down to the alley floor.

Hanley looked down at him a moment, his face completely without expression, and then turned and left the smaller man lying there with his eyes staring sightlessly up at the gray autumn sky.

Hanley watched Clare Ibberson shut the door of her bedroom and stand with her back against it, her smile like something carved on a face that was pale beneath its rouge. She had hair the color of burnished copper, and enormous gray-black, faintly slanted eyes. The negligee she wore was a filmy cloud of black chiffon, a gossamer robe that seemed to dissolve like mist against the lights of the living room. Beneath it, Hanley saw the remembered loveliness of her body, the satin and ivory sheen of flesh that was unclothed except for the thin brassiere that held the pointed, up-thrust breasts, and the V-shaped wisp of silk that covered her where her stomach curved to meet her thighs.

Hanley suddenly stirred as though someone had struck him with a whip. His gloved hands clenched and unclenched at his sides.

“You didn’t go to Connecticut,” he said slowly. “You didn’t go to Connecticut at all.”

“The funniest thing happened,” Clare Ibberson said, and her laugh was high and shrill and uncertain, a nervous laugh that jangled like vibrating wires. “I’d left all my money at home. So I took a taxi and came back here after it, and just as I got in, the phone rang, and it was Sally French. To tell me she was ill, and asking me if I couldn’t come next week end instead.”

Hanley stood quietly, looking at the woman, saying nothing. She came towards him quickly, staggering slightly, more than a little drunk. Her arms went up and around his neck and she pressed herself against him, the planes of her body groping like fingers against Hanley’s unyielding flesh.

“God, but you startled me,” she said. “Coming in like that without making a sound. I didn’t even know you were in the living room, until I heard you cough.”

Hanley smelled the perfume that was like a cloud around her, the heavy scent that was like the distilled fragrance of all the gardenias in the world. He raised a hand, instinctively, to touch her body, then checked himself, and pushed her away from him with the palms of both hands.

“So there’s a guy in the bedroom,” he said. “A guy in there, after all you said I meant to you.”

The woman’s voice rose again in shrill, nervous laughter.

“Are you crazy?” she asked. “A man in there! You ought to know better than that.”

“Maybe I ought to,” Hanley said, “but I don’t. I’m going to have a look at the bedroom, Clare.”

The woman turned, ran unsteadily to the bedroom door, then turned to face Hanley, her face twisted with drunken fury. “All right!” she said. “There is a man in there! Do you think I’d wait forever for you to dig up something on Mark? You think I could live on the chicken feed you’ve been giving me, you flat-footed ape?”

Hanley’s pale eyes began to darken slowly, like empty glasses filling with some blackish fluid. A muscle quivered in his cheek, but his face remained impassive.

“You didn’t mean any of it, huh?” he whispered. “You didn’t mean any of it about us, at all?”

“Of course I didn’t mean it,” she said scornfully. “Oh, you were mildly interesting at first — the big, strong, silent man — but I’m sick of slumming. Now get out! I’m going into the bedroom, and I’d advise you not to come after me. And if you don’t get the hell out of here, right away, I’ll call the cops. Real cops, and not a cheap, grafting private eye.”

Clare Ibberson turned, went into the bedroom, and slammed the door behind her.

When she had gone, Hanley moved swiftly. He went to an ash tray that was heaped high with cigarette stubs, all of which bore traces of the bright coral lipstick that Clare Ibberson wore. He scooped up a score of the stubs with his gloved hands, dumped them into an overcoat pocket. He took a half-emptied bottle of bourbon from a coffee table, corked it, and put it into another pocket. On a sofa, he found a black suede glove and a handkerchief that reeked of Clare’s heavy perfume, and he tucked the glove and the handkerchief away in an inside pocket. Finally, he took out a handkerchief of his own, wrapped it carefully around a glass that was standing on the coffee table. The rim of the glass was smudged heavily with the bright lipstick, the oily cosmetic forming an almost perfect print of the woman’s lips.

Ten minutes later Hanley was in the neat living room of Mark Ibberson’s apartment. Working with methodical speed, he transferred the cigarette stubs from his pocket to a clean ash tray stand near the living room sofa. He wadded up the perfume-soaked handkerchief, stuffed it behind a cushion on the sofa and tossed the suede glove on the floor. He put the bourbon bottle on Ibberson’s coffee table, unwrapped the lipstick-stained glass and placed it beside the bottle. When he had finished, he walked to the telephone in the corner of the room, called police headquarters and asked to speak to Lieutenant Mike Baker, in Homicide.

“Emmet Hanley speaking, Mike,” he said, when he heard the familiar voice at the other end of the wire. “I just walked into the apartment of a guy named Mark Ibberson, and found him dead.” He gave Baker the address of the apartment house in a matter-of-fact voice. “I hate to lose a client, but I think it was Ibberson’s wife that knocked him off, and she’s a client of my agency. A drunken babe with a bad past record, and she’s left clues all over the place.

“The gun? Yeah, it’s here, Mike. I don’t think you’ll find any prints on it, though, because the lady was wearing gloves. I know, because she left one of ’em here, on the floor. Sure, I’ll stay here, Mike. I’ll stay right here till you arrive.”

He hung up, and then walked across the room and pushed open the bedroom door. Mark Ibberson lay on his back on the bed, his pale face serene in death. Hanley stood looking down at the body for a moment, and then let out an involuntary cry of astonishment as he saw that the black automatic was missing from the dead man’s hand.

He heard a sound behind him, whirled, and saw Spinelli standing in the bedroom door. There was a dried crust of blood over his half-closed right eye, and blood still seeped from his gashed and swollen lips. In one hand Spinelli carried the suicide weapon, and in the other he held the suicide note that had lain on the bed table when Hanley had first entered the apartment, forty minutes before.

“I figured you were lying when you said Ibberson was out,” Spinelli said thickly. “I figured something was wrong, and that you’d go tell Clare. So when I come out of the ether in that alley, I headed for here and found the guy dead, a suicide — just like you found him when you were in here before. You’d be kind of in the soup, wouldn’t you, if they didn’t find no gun, and no suicide note, and people knew you’d been here?”

Hanley’s eyes came up to meet Spinelli’s. For a moment he had known fear, and then the sickness of defeat. But now he felt only numbed. He was suddenly very tired; almost too tired to stand.

“Whatever you’re going to do, you’d better do it,” he said wearily. “The cops are on their way here.”

“I heard you call ’em,” Spinelli said. “After I come in here and got the note and the gun, I hung around outside, trying to figure out my next move. When I seen you come in here, I followed. I was in the hall, while you was planting the evidence.”

“You punk,” Hanley said. “You’re queering me good, aren’t you?”

Spinelli suddenly shook the paper in his hand, spitting out blood and excited words. “Boy, what a setup! The poor guy even puts it in his note that it’s her gun. One she’s got a license for, and that he took with him when they split up. Only she didn’t know he took it. The poor guy loved her so much he apologizes for swiping her gun, and says he was too tired to look for one some place else.”

“You punk,” Hanley said again. Spinelli laughed. “Brother, when you swear you didn’t have breakfast with her, and when they find out it’s her roscoe, Clare won’t have an alibi in the world.”

Hanley stood staring at Spinelli, saying nothing.

Spinelli ran his tongue across his crushed lips slowly, and then he shrugged and his gloved hand made a small movement. The automatic hit the floor and skidded across it to Hanley’s feet.

Hanley’s jaw sagged in amazement, and his tired eyes widened as he watched Spinelli fold the suicide note and put it into his pocket, his face twisted into a painful grin.

“I guess I oughta blast you for working me over the way you did,” Spinelli said. “But that wouldn’t pay no hospital bills. I’ll settle for making you pay for getting me a new face.” He glanced toward the dead man. “I know why you want to frame her, but I don’t give a damn. All I know is I want to see that bitch get what’s coming to her. She killed Ibberson, just as much as if she’d pulled the trigger herself. She’s the worst kind of bitch there is. Somebody’s got to stop her, and it might as well be us.”

Hanley sat down on a chair, his big body trembling and weakened.

Spinelli moved toward the door. “I’ve gotta shove, now, before the cops get here. It’d sort of complicate things if they saw me the way I look.”

Hanley tried to speak, but there were no words in him.

“It’s always tough the first time, Hanley,” Spinelli said. “First love is tough for anybody. But don’t worry about little Clare getting the hot seat, because that baby ain’t for frying. They’ll put her away long enough so that age will cure most of what ails her, but with a build and looks like hers, there’s no electric chair made that will ever cook her. Not even on one side.”

He opened the door and was gone. The door slammed behind him.

From somewhere across the city came the keening wail of a siren. Hanley listened to the sound for several seconds, and then he picked up the gun and tossed it onto the bed near Mark Ibberson. Then he walked slowly back to the living room and slumped into a chair. He sat without moving, his pale eyes staring at nothing, waiting for the police.

He was very sick.