Murder — Paid in Advance

Quinn Norman watched his ex-wife come out of the lighted doorway of the apartment house across the quiet street. He felt a shiver go all the way through him as he pulled back into the shadows — as though Cindy would recognize him now after five years in the pen.

He stood there in the darkened doorway for a moment, watching Cindy move along the street. A tall, poised woman who looked younger than thirty. He wondered if other men still thought her as lovely as he had, before he knew how shallow and empty she actually was.

Go after her Norman, his desires urged. This is what you wanted. This is the moment you waited for. Get it over with. Give the world a break.

But he didn’t move. He stood watching as she rounded the corner, and was lost to sight. He wiped his sweating palms on his shabby coat. Slapped his right fist softly against his left hand. He knew where she was now. There wasn’t the urgency that had hurried him three thousand miles west here to the brink of the Pacific.

The strange urgency driving him to kill her. In place of that urgency settled a cold calm. To kill her wasn’t enough. To kill her and get away with it was the thing he wanted. He had paid for a murder he hadn’t done. It was simple arithmetic that he was owed a kill.

When he knew she was gone, Norman stepped out of the doorway and moved off in the opposite direction. His shadow bumped along ahead of him on the gray walk. For a while he watched it: elongated, shortened, widened, thinned. He had cast that shadow in a lot of places in his search for Cindy. It had been long and tiresome, asking about her, seeking, being sure and then finding: a blind alley, a stone wall.

Then, begin all over again. Start and ask and check and keep moving until your money ran out. Then you took a job for a while, and then it began again. He’d been here in San Jueneme for a month, and he hadn’t even been sure he’d found Cindy yet.

Until tonight.

He entered the paint-peeled boarding house and started up the stairs, his mind full of Cindy and all the things she had done to him. As he turned on the second landing, a girl’s cheery voice called out to him through an open door.

“Coffee, Quinn?”

He stopped with his hand on the bannister. He tensed his lean, wide shoulders. It had been all right, he’d told himself, to be friendly with dark-eyed Judy Conroy.

But it couldn’t be any more. Not since he had found Cindy. That changed everything. Quinn knew he had tried to keep it light and casual, but the way Judy felt about him wasn’t casual... And he refused to analyze the way he felt about her, at all.

“Tired,” he mumbled over his shoulder.

She had a dimple in her right cheek when she smiled. “Then you do need coffee, man!”

She stood in her open door, her smile growing more unsure as he hesitated. The light spilled out around her slender, lovely body. She’s so damned young, Quinn told himself. She spoke again.

“Please, Quinn? I won’t even make you stay for a second cup. Word of honor.”

Unwillingly, letting her see that he was unwilling, he followed her into her one-room apartment. Coffee was warming on the small stove, all right. Probably she’d lighted it when she heard his footsteps on the stairs.

He hurled his battered hat at a straight chair, and missed again. He always missed, and Judy smiled. Sitting at the oilcloth-covered table, he stared at the gray steam crawling from the coffee spout.

Judy poured his coffee, filled her own cup, and returned the pot to the stove. He drank his coffee absently, black, but Judy didn’t sit down facing him. She stood before him and smiled.

“Lose your job, Quinn?”

He looked up at her. He didn’t have a job to lose; he was still living on the last of the money he’d made on a job in Nevada. But he had let Judy think he worked. It was easier than explaining where he was all those hours, all those days he’d been seeking Cindy this month.

He sighed heavily. He’d let Judy believe a lot of things in the month since he’d met her on the stairs out there. He’d been going down hurriedly, and she’d been coming up, arms loaded with groceries. By the time they’d gathered up all the spilled apples and canned goods, they were friends.

He knew Judy was a model agency receptionist. Infrequently, she made extra money modeling. She thought he was a loader in a wholesale fruit place. It was one of the jobs he had held in his trek across the country. It was the first lie he could think of when Judy asked him.

Grimly, he gulped down the steaming coffee. She thought he was a working stiff, honest and down at the heels. She was forever fixing meals for him, on any pretext — except the truth: it was charity. She was sorry for him, and wanted to be sure he had enough to eat. In many women, he thought, it’s a simple transition from a feeling like that to love. Cooking for a man. Seeing him across a table. Neither was the male of the species immune to that kind of chemistry.

Standing, Quinn looked down into her troubled brown eyes.

“Everything is swell,” he told her. He tried to smile. But his mouth felt stiff, and his rigid face muscles wouldn’t relax. You couldn’t find the woman you meant to kill, and then smile lightly.

“Sure,” she said, trying to keep it light and casual, “you’ve found another girl. I bet she can’t even make coffee.”

His voice was suddenly rough and brutal. It surprised both of them. “I haven’t found another girl,” he said harshly. “I never even knew any other girl but you. Do you understand?”

She laughed with sudden relief. “I’ve had men try to kiss me,” she said. “But you’ve certainly got a new approach. Scare-’em-to-death-Norman, he is known as.”

Quinn tried to laugh as he went past her to the door.

Upstairs, in the bleak quiet of his room, he did not bother turning on the light. He stood by the window in the darkness, tasting five years poison. If he wasn’t any good any more, it was Cindy’s doing.

When he had married her, he had been sole owner of one of Miami’s swankiest night spots. Quinn Norman whose friends were columnists and actors, senators and publishers, gamblers and bankers, and all of them big time. He shook his head, unable to believe it himself, any more.

His club, the Casa Mañana, had caught on, and he’d hired two managers who knew all there was to know about swank night spots. Ansel Breen, suave, poised and smooth; women loved his lifted brow and his small mustache, and his quick glittering smile that actually didn’t mean a thing in the world except that Breen had pretty teeth, and knew it. Rudy Mackalvain, the other manager, had been tall, very dark and very quiet, but he was a financial wizard.

Rudy Mackalvain had been a financial magician, too. After the fire that had destroyed the Casa Manana beyond repair, Mackalvain had disappeared from the face of the earth, and with him went most of Quinn Norman’s money.

After the fire, Breen’s body had been found in a storeroom behind the club. All that was left of him was his expensive, charred wrist watch, and a round bullet-hole in his skull. Quinn was accused of the murder. But he had been alone, driving with Cindy.

Except that at the trial, Cindy shook her lovely head. She wanted to lie to save Quinn, she said. But she couldn’t. Knocked cold by the very hugeness of her lie, Quinn heard himself sentenced to five years for manslaughter, the most they could pin on him. With him safely in the pokey, Cindy had sold out his holdings, divorced him, and disappeared...

When Cindy opened the door of her apartment at eleven-thirty that night, Quinn Norman was in a chair facing her. She had closed the door and snapped on the light before she saw him.

What happened to her face was hell to watch when you remembered how lovely Cindy had been. She looked suddenly old, with her rouged cheeks pulled down into shadowed hollows, the corners of her mouth shaking.

Quinn Norman stood up.

“Where — how did you — get here?” she whispered.

“The service entrance. The fire escape. I had to crack a pane in one of your windows to get it unlocked.”

He took a step toward her. “After all, Cindy, you’ve had five years. Five years on my money while I sat in prison. Cindy, even you must have known five years wouldn’t last forever.”

He put his hands on her shoulders. She trembled, sucked in a breath and swallowed hollowly, but she didn’t move.

His fingers closed at the base of her throat. The small pulse, like a tiny heart, pounded out its terror against him. Her throat felt as it had in all his nightmares these five years of waiting for this moment.

His haggard face drawn with hatred, he stared down into her eyes. What was he seeking? Repentance? Regret? Sorrow at what she had done to their lives? None of it was there. Only self-pity, and agony and fear. That was her face.

Suddenly he flung her from him to the floor. She pulled herself back against the wall, trying to dig herself into it, to get away from him. He looked at her. His breathing was a whispered sound.

“I guess the laugh is on me, Cindy. In five years I never stopped to think you weren’t worth the effort it would take to kill you.”

He heard the door latch click, twisted to see the door swing open.

The man at the door was smiling suavely, and his perfect teeth glittered. Then Breen stiffened, mirroring the astonishment in Norman’s face.

Breen was fast. The small automatic was out of his pocket before Quinn could move. Breen stepped into the room and kicked the door closed with the toe of his expensive oxford.

Quinn stood there with his shoulders pulled round, his mouth parted as he stared at Breen. But Breen had died in the nightclub fire five years ago! I ought to know, Norman thought crazily, I paid the penalty for killing him.

“As you can see, Norman, any reports of my death are grossly exaggerated,” Breen said evenly. “I suppose it’s all very clear to you now?”

Quinn nodded numbly. He looked at Cindy, who had pulled herself up from the floor and was straightening her blonde hair before the mirror.

Norman said, “You and Cindy. You planned it. You fired the club and got away with my money.”

Breen laughed sharply, remembering. “We got rid of Rudy Mackalvain, too, and his prying. All it cost me, Quinn, was a very expensive wrist watch. Mackalvain dies, everybody thinks it’s me, and Cindy and I are on our way with a fortune. Simple?”

He cut a glance at Cindy. “Now that he knows, we’ll take Quinn where it’s quieter — someplace where he can get lost — for good.”

Quinn Norman dragged in a deep breath. If they got him out of this apartment, out of this building where the sound of a small automatic might go unnoticed, he would emulate the proverbial snowball in hell.

As Cindy turned away from the end table, Quinn faded. He clutched at her.

Cindy screamed. Breen flipped the automatic smoothly in his fist and clubbed at Norman’s head. Quinn felt it rake a red, hot path across the back of his skull.

He kept moving. Clutching Cindy’s arm, he thrust her between them, shoved her against Breen and followed in fast. He closed his fingers on Breen’s gun arm.

Breen tried to wrench free. They reeled back, slammed against the wall.

There was a sharp, sudden pop, and the acrid gray gun smoke wreathed up between them. Quinn staggered back. The gun clattered to the floor from Breen’s hand, and rolled off the rug.

Cindy scooped it up. She moved fast, away from Quinn, covering him with the gun. He heard the loose, dull sound of Breen’s sliding down the wall to the floor.

“He’s dead,” Cindy said. “You’ve killed him, Quinn!” The words weren’t screamed, but they had that effect.

“Stand there,” Cindy said, her face contorted. “You’ve killed the only man I ever loved. I’m going to call the police. This time you’ll rot in jail forever!”

Quinn Norman looked at her empty, angry eyes. What did I ever see in her?

“Sure,” Quinn said, “call your cops, and explain how Breen got here. I killed him five years ago in Miami, remember? And I’ve already paid the bill. Sweetheart, this time you figure a way to get rid of the body!”

The last time he looked at Cindy, her eyes had lost all contact with reality. She stood staring down at Ansel Breen with a slow, hard shaking beginning to crawl over her...

By the time Quinn reached the silent street, he was feeling better. Free. Clean. Wonderful. He began to take long, rapid strides toward that apartment house and the open, bright door on the second landing. In his mind he could already hear Judy’s cheery call:

“Coffee, Quinn?”