Murder Run-Around

Chapter One Death for Three

As he had expected, it was no trick to buy a gun in Mexico City. The plane from San Antonio had towered high over the flat dryness until at last the Sierra Madre, jutting steeply up from tropical slopes, reached toward the belly of the plane and the motors droned a new song.

He had been by the window, and, except for the upholstery, except for his quiet business suit instead of battle dress, it was like that dawn four years before when, at the jump master’s signal, he had snapped onto the static line, tested, moved toward the door, hand on the shoulder of the man in front of him, fear tight in his throat. Then the whip of the slip stream, the jar of the harness, the pendulum swing down through three hundred feet of tracer fire...

This was very different, and yet somehow the same.

When he shut his eyes he could see the outline of a gun that would fit his hand, a grip that would jar solidly back against the heel of his hand with each shot, sending the faint impact through wrist and elbow to shoulder.

And he could see three faces. The wide florid face of August Brikel, with salesman’s smile and eyes like flecks of polished flint. The bird-face of Gowan Teed, with flat hard forehead, sharply pointed nose, greenish eyes constantly in motion. And of course, Laena Severence. Hair the precise shade of ancient and invaluable ivory — a rich gold-white — contrasting with the dark brows. Flare of nostrils, sway of cheekbones, lips of subtle savagery.

He wondered how it would feel to kill a woman. Would you feel forever soiled? Impact of slug on dancer’s body.

After he checked in at a small hotel near Alameda Park, he used the daylight hours to find the gun. He avoided the shops of Juarez and Madera, took a taxi down to the Plaza de la Merced. There he found what he wanted. It was a .38 Special with the barrel sawed short, and the front sight removed. He tucked it inside the waistband of his trousers and went back to the hotel. It was not a gun for long-range work, but it satisfied Brendon Harris. He wanted to be close. Very close.

He sat on the bed with the gun beside him. He looked at his turista card. “Motivo del viaje” — purpose of the trip. “Recreo” — Recreation. The smile strained his lips. Maybe it was recreation. Maybe it would be the most delightful recreation he had ever enjoyed. Tomorrow he would look for them. And tomorrow he would find them.

Dusk had turned to night. He opened the shutters and looked down on the noisy brawling traffic. The lights of the Del Prado shone on the other side of the park. He decided that on this first night here he would go out alone...

At eleven o’clock he walked slowly down a block of luxury. The Reforma on the corner, Nick’s bar close by, a plush nitery on the other side, a swank restaurant beyond that. He was a big man with square hands and coarse brown hair that wouldn’t respond to brush or comb. There was, about him, a look of controlled force, of energy held in check, a hint of ruthlessness.

During the evening he had drunk in many places, but sparingly and cautiously. In one little bar there had been a man at a piano, a girl sitting alone on a stool at the bar. For a moment he had wanted a girl beside him during this evening. But when he looked at her carefully, he saw the puffiness around her eyes, the liquorglaze, the hand uncertain with the match, and he turned away.

In the restaurant he sat at the counter, ate ham and eggs and drank two tarros of the strong black draught beer. He left the place, yawning, half-willing to go back to the hotel. He walked away from Reforma, turned a corner to the left, and stopped as though he had run into an invisible wall.

The place was called El Torero, A small blue neon sign spelled out:

“Con Laena Severence.”

He remembered another club in another city in another country. Her name had been in lights there, too.

As he stood there two girls in short dresses, arm in arm, giggled as they brushed by him, turned to look at him and giggle again, calling out something in Spanish which he could not understand.

He took a breath so deep that it made his lungs ache. He walked to the doorway of El Torero, pushed by the deep red curtain that hung just inside the door. The bar was at the left, the tables directly ahead, with dance floor and tiny orchestra playing Cuban music beyond the tables. As the waiter stepped up to him, Harris motioned toward the bar. He went to the end of the bar nearest the dance floor, where he saw an empty stool.

The bartender spoke English. Harris ordered a scotch and water and asked when Laena Severence would dance again. In fifteen minutes.

He sat with his back to the bar and sipped his drink as he looked around the small club. It was nearly full. There was a sprinkling of turistas, but most of the clientele was Mexican. Against the far wall, two over-dressed American women in their late forties were using shrill schoolgirl Spanish on the two sleek young men accompanying them. On the floor, a vastly drunken Britisher was attempting to dance with a slim Mexican girl. The hot fierce rhythm of the music was as stirring as a scream in the night.

When he was on his second drink, his lips faintly numbed, his reflexes a shade slow, a man in a white mess jacket pulled a mike out in front of the band and a chord of music cleared the floor. The sidelights dimmed and a blood-red spot shone on the M.C.

The Spanish was like the sputter of firecrackers. The crowd laughed. Then Harris caught the name of Laena Severence. The crowd applauded. The man dragged the mike to one side and the spotlight moved to pick her up as she came through a side door, onto the floor.

Brendon Harris felt the old and familiar tightness in his throat. Her hair was longer. She wore a tight silver bandeau and a shimmering silver skirt that almost touched the floor. It was V cut in front like a harem-dancer’s skirt. The drum alone picked up the rhythm and, as always, she danced without the faintest shade of expression on her face, contorting her body into postures of angular gracelessness that were somehow more enticing than any amount of grace would have been. Her magic stilled the last whisper in the room.

As the drum beat quickened, as the dance grew more abandoned, the thin clear clarinet picked up an oriental counterpoint, a wail that had in it all of the sorrow and poignancy of the East. At the.climax of the dance she spun like a silver top. Then, on the last, almost physical blow of the music, with a stamp of her bare feet, she stopped, head thrown back, feet spread, clenched fists raised. The roar of applause was like the crash of a storm wave.

Her next number was pure Spanish, the costume, the castinets as crisp as the stamp of her metal-shod heels against the floor. In this number she was grace itself, holding the gun-fire of castinets over her head as she leaned back, spinning slowly, with a ballet dancer’s sureness.

The following dance was the one she had created, had done with so much success in the other club. The M.C. announced it and Harris knew that he was explaining to the crowd that Miss Severence was going to do her imitation of a very proper young girl from the country who goes to the city to become a great actress and is talked into trying to do a hula — to the great loss of her dignity.

Harris leaned against the bar and half shut his eyes. He could almost imagine that this was taking place back in the Corner Club. He watched her through the mists of memory. The dance was the same, with a howl of laughter greeting its finale.

That ended her turn. He borrowed paper, scribbled a note and handed it to a passing waiter along with a twenty-peso bill. He turned back to the bar and ordered his third drink. His fingers were cramped with the tightness with which he had held the glass as he watched her.

Her voice at his elbow was as much a part of him as his memories of childhood. “Bren,” she said. “Bren, darling.”

He turned slowly. The tinyness of her was always a new shock. Great gray eyes under the dark brows, face so delicate as to almost be too thin, framed by the lush and silky mass of the white-gold hair. She wore a black evening dress, the bodice supported only by two thin black cords attached to the black collar that encircled her slender throat.

The bulge of the gun was hard against his flat stomach. He could hold the muzzle against the front of the dress. Two shots would forever smash the dancer’s body. She read his eyes and he saw the shadow of fear, the tiny compression of lips.

“We can’t talk here, Bren. Come to a table. That one.”

She walked in front of him, her bare shoulders straight, her chin high. He was so much taller that he could look down onto the part in the white-gold hair, its clean white scalp.

He held the chair for her, then sat opposite her.

“Why did you come here, Bren?”

“It’s a very trite story, Laena. Sure you want to hear it?”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“No doubt. Maybe seeing me makes you remember how easy it was for you to put so many stars in my eyes that I couldn’t see what was going on. Or maybe you’ve done that job so many times that you can’t even remember the names and faces. Who are you working on here? Another sucker like good old Bren Harris?”

“I have to know what you want, Bren,” she said tightly.

“She has to know what I want! Honey, you left before the fireworks started. But you know what happened.”

He held the gun in his hand, leveled it under the table. He wondered how her eyes would look — if he shot her in the stomach.

“Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do, Bren.”

“Poor, abused little girl, forced to do nasty things by nasty men.”

Her voice had a small quaver in it. “You were a good memory, Bren. Don’t spoil it for me. There aren’t many... memories that are good.”

“Turn it on like a faucet, honey.”

“You hate me, don’t you, Bren?”

“Hate is a flavorless and colorless word for what I feel about you and your two partners.”

“Your eyes look... funny, Bren.”

“Maybe I’ve grown up too fast. That could be it. My brother Tommy and I had such big fat plans. And we had the seventy-thousand bucks my father left us. We talked about our plans in the barracks at night. You wouldn’t understand about that. And we walked in where angels fear to tread. We went into partnership with your two pals, Brikel and Gowan Teed.

“They convinced us they knew the ropes. Boy, they knew them all right! The Corner Club was going to be a combination of everything Tommy and I liked. When Brikel brought you in to dance for the people, Tommy and I loved it. I even thought I loved you. That’s silly to think of now, isn’t it?”

“If you say so, Bren.”

“You put the big stars in my eyes, honey, while your pals used the Corner Club as a front for peddling the shakes to a lot of miserable hopheads.” He dropped his napkin over the gun.

“There are things you don’t understand.”

“That I’m willing to admit, Laena. I didn’t understand why Brikel and Gowan Teed got jittery. I didn’t understand why those quiet little government men in dark suits were hanging around the club. I was too busy adoring you. It all went to hell when you pulled out without a note or a word to me.

“Tommy was the one who got the evidence on your friends. He wanted to save our investment. So like a damn fool he tried to bargain with your pals right after you left. They were to turn the place over to us and clear out. This is only a guess, you understand.”

“A guess? What does Tommy say?”

Harris stared at her for a long incredulous moment. Then he laughed harshly.

“For a minute, honey, you had me going. Brikel and Teed cleaned out the account. I was drinking too much because you had left. I was easy to manage. I woke up in Police Headquarters. They had had to use a stomach pump on me to drain out the liquor that your pals poured down my throat. It took me a long time to realize that they had found me in my apartment, dead to the world, with a gun in my hand and Tommy on the floor. Only he was really dead to the world. Did you get a big bang out of it when Brikel told you how he’d worked it?”

Her eyes widened. She held her clenched hand against the side of her mouth and said faintly, “No, Bren. Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes. And don’t get theatrical. Amateur acting turns my stomach.”

“But how did you...”

“Get out of it? They horsed around with me long enough to give Brikel and Teed a chance to use their plane reservations. They weren’t even citizens. You knew that. They’d been chased out of the country years before and had established citizenship in a nice understanding South American country and had smuggled themselves back in to set up a drop-off for their dope shipments, with me as the stooge.

“They took a wax test of my hand and proved that I hadn’t fired the gun. The war record helped me. They got me unraveled from the frame that Briket and Teed had set up. The property reverted to me. It just happened to be on a corner that a chain wanted. I still own the corner and I have a fat lease which pays me twenty-one thousand a year.”

“Why do you tell me that?”

“Because I want to brag a little. It cost me three thousand dollars for complete reports on you and August Brikel and Gowan Teed. Honey, I know when and where you drew your first breath. And two weeks ago the agency told me that all three of you are in Mexico City for an extended stay. Brikel and Teed are up here on visas. You are here on an immigrante basis. So I’m paying a friendly visit. For Tommy. He couldn’t come, you understand.”

“Bren, don’t talk like that. You don’t sound... well.”

“If you’re well, do you just forget it? Do you just talk about good ole Tommy and say that it’s too bad that they can’t extradite the killers? Do you just say that it’s a big rotten shame, or do you come down here and do something about it yourself?”

Her eyes narrowed. “What are you trying to say?”

“I’m trying to say that big jovial Brikel and birdy little Teed and Laena, the lush angel, have lived too long already. Don’t you think you’ve lived too long, darling?”

Her gray eyes were steady on his. “Yes, Bren. I do.”

“For what you helped do to Tommy?”

“You won’t believe me, so there’s no point in telling you that this is the first I’ve heard about him. You won’t believe me if I tell you that there is no personal or business relationship between me and Mr. Brikel and Mr. Teed. I ran out on you, Bren. I ran fast, because I hated myself and what I was doing to you. I tried to run away from you, Bren. But I brought you with me. In my heart.”

“Poetic, angel. Very, very poetic.”

She stood up quickly. Her lip curled. She said, “I go on again, soon. If you have a gun, Bren, I’ll walk away slowly. Make it quick, Bren. Very quick.”

She turned. She walked slowly. At the end of the dance floor, she turned and gave him one quick bitter stare. He was surprised to see the glint of tears.

Bren put the gun back in his waistband. The waiter brought a fresh drink. He remained at the table and watched her as he sipped the drink. In the middle of her second number, he shook his head slowly. The bright spotlight on her seemed to retreat to a vast distance as though he held a telescope reversed. The sound of the music set up counter-echoes in his head, fuzzing the rhythm, blurring the tempo.

He was conscious of faces turned toward him, of wise smiles. He tried to stand up but slumped back on the chair. His head was a stone, a weight too heavy to support. His forehead rested on the white tablecloth. A careless movement of his hand tipped over the dregs of the drink. He felt the coolness of it against his cheek...

...aircraft lurching in turbulent currents... he sat on the bucket seat with the grease gun across his knees... they sat opposite, August, Gowan and Laena... wise smiles... you have to jump soon, darling, Laena said... Soon, soon, sang August and Gowan... gray flint eyes, quick bird movement of head, Laena’s silver clothes... jump soon, out into the night, and he knew that the parachute pack was empty... they had taken it... stand up, darling, Laena said. Stand up, darling... stand up, darling... dizzy sway of the plane...

He opened dulled eyes. Most of the lights were out. A waiter was shaking him by the shoulder.

“Stand up, darling,” Laena said.

He tried to curse her. There were no words, only a thickness in his throat. She spoke rapid Spanish to the waiter. He came back with another man. They lifted him, supported him out to the waiting cab. Then the cab was hurtling through streets that tipped dizzily and Laena was scent of perfume beside him.

Once again he was being shaken. There were other men. Hallway. Elevator. Clink of key against the lock face. Room that swam in light. Bed. Darkness.

Then there was blank nothingness.