Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 5, April 1968

Never Kill a Victim by Arnold English

She was little, helpless, an unwilling partner in a murder which would send her soon to ruin. But a certain type of lady doesn’t die easy. There was one last chance, and she had to take it...

Albert brown settled the car in a parking space, then swivelled around urgently to his companion. “You’d better go in there and get him out.”

“I suppose so,” Laura Dermody agreed nervously, darting a hand through her jet-black hair and down the back of her long, graceful neck. She closed the car door softly and looked around at the roadhouse fifty yards away. Her face glowed from the mechanical reflection of the neon sign: Punchinello’s. Dine. Dance.

There was the sound of laughter when she opened the outside door a couple of minutes afterwards and when she opened it again later on. A man was next to her in the lighted doorway. Two pairs of footsteps came along a gravel pathway then, and over to the parking lot.

Tom Ulric stood in front of Brown’s car and moved back and forth as if he were drunk. His blond hair fell halfway down to his deep-set, burning eyes. He was breathing heavily.

“You want your money back!” He grinned, slurring the words together. “Laura and Bert want their money back.”

“Miss Dermody put up fifty thousand dollars, and I did, too, because we were certain that you’d invest it properly for us. You took it for yourself. Now Miss Dermody wants her shares back and I want mine.”

“That’s tough on her,” Ulric grinned. “And you.”

Brown lunged out of his car and practically pushed Ulric towards it, Ulric protesting much more than Brown’s impact against him made necessary. Laura, her blue dress crinkling as she leaned forward in the dimness, said, “Go easy on him, Mr. Brown. Please don’t hurt him.”

Brown finally pushed Ulric into the seat next to the one he’d be taking, and slammed the door shut. He walked around noisily to the driver’s door, then opened and closed it with savage fury. The car started with a teeth-gritting mesh of gears.

“Home, James,” Ulric said in that drunken tone he was using too broadly. He belched loudly and unnecessarily.

Brown drove along a wide road past the outskirts of town. Ulric stopped singing to ask loudly, “Where you taking me?”

“To a quiet place where we’ll talk,” Brown said grimly.

“Talk? You sound like you’re going to try and beat the money out of me. Let me get away from here!”

“Don’t try anything,” Brown said. “I can knock you out if I have to, and I’ve given Miss Dermody a gun that she’s carrying in her pocketbook, and she won’t hesitate to use it.”

Ulric laughed. “She’ll never hurt me, never, never.”

“She will when fifty thousand dollars are concerned,” Brown told him. “And if you think I’m going to let an old friendship stand in the way of the fifty thousand you took from me, then you’re mistaken about that, too.”

“I want out of here,” Ulric bellowed.

The shifting weight of his body signaled that he was going to make a grab toward the car’s wheel. Brown was given more than enough time to stop at the side of the road and turn to meet Ulric’s body with his own. He raised a fist and grunted before letting it travel towards Ulric, who pulled back and called out loudly just the same when he was touched by the tip of it.

Ulric reached both hands around Brown’s neck. The pressure was a shade harder than Brown would have expected; Tom Ulric generally annoyed him by making things a little too realistic.

Ulric’s weight was on him, and the two men were grunting and swearing. Brown raised his head and called to Laura, “The gun, the gun.”

Laura Dermody’s fear showed in her, despair curling her lips. She pulled the gleaming .25 out of her pocketbook and pointed it wildly.

“Get away from him,” she called. “Don’t fight with him, please.”

Brown called out, “The gun. Shoot!”

Laura Dermody quavered as she said, “I’ll shoot, Tom. I swear I’ll shoot.”

Brown’s gurgle could hardly be made out, even by Brown himself, because Ulric was shouting hoarsely: “I’ll fix you good.”

And he sounded as if he meant it. The pressure on Brown was increased; not dangerously, of course.

But Ulric was throwing himself into the part even more vigorously than usual. Brown could hardly hide his anger.

Laura fired at last. Tom Ulric gasped loudly, almost deafening Brown for seconds. Then Ulric arched his back and clasped a hand across his chest. A red stain that looked like anything but ketchup appeared on the shirt-front. Ulric became quiet.

Laura asked, “Did I... did I—”

Brown was careful to let her watch him feel the pulse on Ulric’s wrist. “He’s dead, and there goes our hundred thousand dollars.”

“Is that all you can think of at a time like this?” Laura Dermody asked shakily.

“Each of us gave him fifty thousand in cash, and I didn’t Care about anything else. How... well, you were seen coming to get him in that night spot.”

Laura Dermody gasped, then dropped the gun with blanks in it and put both hands to her mouth to keep from screaming!

“I was probably seen threatening him at the parking place and pushing him into the car,” Brown went on. “There’s only one way to help ourselves and I don’t like it any more than you will. But there’s no choice.”

“You mean, go back to that night club and act as if nothing happened?”

“No, of course not,” Brown said in real alarm. “But I’ve got some winter equipment in the car and this won’t take long to arrange.”

He got out of the car, opened the trunk and took out a shovel. Then he walked away and past a line of gaunt trees. When he knew that she couldn’t see him any longer, Brown shovelled enough earth to get the implement dirty. He walked back to the car.

Laura Dermody glanced down at the shovel, and kept herself from crying out. “Are you going to — to bury him?”

“There’s no choice, like I said.” Brown noticed that Ulric lay back with eyes open, and made a point out of closing them. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll be right back.”

He lifted Ulric onto a shoulder and carried him past the line of trees. Ulric caught his balance as soon as he was dropped to his feet and glanced around disapprovingly at the various small holes — he had told Brown more than once that things would look more realistic at this stage of a swindle if his partner dug an actual grave.

But he extended a hand for the handshake that had always been part of the team’s ritual at this point, and Brown turned away without accepting it. As Ulric walked off silently, Brown purposely ran back to the car.

“I’m planning to forget my fifty thousand and beat it out of this town,” he told the girl as soon as he had rejoined her. “I’d advice you to do exactly the same thing.”

Albert Brown got to his home in the next state a couple of days afterwards. He lolled around it as usual when a job had been finished, tending to the postage-stamp sized garden while he waited for Ulric to arrive with the fifty thousand in loot. Ulric didn’t arrive.

A letter addressed to him arrived several days later; the handwriting seemed unfamiliar.

The letter was addressed to him in the name of Albert Brown, which wasn’t his real name, and he had to persuade the postman to give it to him. The signature at the letter’s foot was, “Laura D”.

Brown read the letter over many times, then shuddered and destroyed it.