Murder Run-Around

Chapter Two Devil’s Doublecross

Pain rolled and rumbled and surged through his head, pulsing against the back of his eyes. His skin was greasy with cold sweat and the sunlight that came between the blinds was a shower of golden needles piercing his brain. He sat up and gagged, pressing hard against his lips with his knuckles.

Remembering the night, he forced his eyes open again. The room was large, sparsely furnished. He yanked the covers away, swung his feet out of the bed, cautiously stood erect on the cool tile floor. He swayed, clutched the bedpost, then walked heavily over to the closet and flung it open. It was empty. He felt his way around the wall to the door and tried the knob. It was locked. A tall pitcher of water stood on the bureau. He ignored the glass and, bracing his hip against the bureau, tilted the pitcher high, drained most of it without taking it from his lips.

He ripped a strip from the top sheet, soaked it in the remaining water, lay on the bed again, the wet cloth across his eyes.

Then he heard the grate of the key in the door. Laena Severence came in. Her gold-white hair was braided, tied with bits of colored yarn. She wore a cotton print dress, too short to be fashionable, and red sandals on her bare feet. She looked like a small girl playing house.

He said thickly, “I should have been smart enough to expect a mickey from you, Laena.”

“It was chloral hydrate. I know how miserable you must feel.”

“Your solicitude touches me deeply.”

She pulled a chair over near the bed and sat down, her back straight, her eyes on him. She said, “We are going to talk, Bren.”

“Is there anything to talk about?”

“I’ve sent the maid out. Bren, you were heading for trouble. I knew you wouldn’t listen unless I could force you to listen. I told the barman what to do for your own good, Bren. Believe me.”

“Believe you? I wouldn’t believe you if you were on fire and I stood in front of you with a bucket of water. And there’s nothing you can say that I’m interested in hearing. When I see you dead, Laena, I’ll feel that one third of a debt is paid.”

There was no expression in her eyes. She stood up quickly and left the room.

She was back in a few moments with the gun and a towel. She wrapped the towel around the muzzle.

“We’re alone in the apartment. The walls are thick. The towel will muffle the shot. Your clothes are in the closet in the next room. If you go down the back stairs, no one will see you leave.”

She thrust the gun into his hand, her fingers still holding the towel around the barrel, and came close to the bed. “Go ahead, Bren. I found out once that I don’t have what it takes to do it to myself. You have to pull the trigger.”

His finger was on the trigger. The seconds stretched out interminably. Suddenly he laughed hoarsely. “Oh, fine! You want to see just how far I’ll go. Just how serious I am. Then when the gun clicks, you can run off and tell the other two that Harris really means business. Nice act, Laena.”

He twisted the gun away from her and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked and the slug punched a hole in the plaster across the room, high up in the corner.

“That’s twice you haven’t done it, Bren,” she said unsteadily.

The scorched towel dropped to the floor. He held the gun and looked at it as though seeing it for the first time. His mouth was dry.

He laid the gun gently on the counterpane and said, “You wanted to tell me something, Laena.”

She sat down again. There was no triumph on her face or in her tone. “You are like a child with a cap pistol, Brendon. You are like a little boy mad because he caught his finger in a screen door. You said you had a report on me. Then you know that my father was an expatriate.

“In 1929, when I was five, my mother drowned in the Mediterranean. She was drunk at the time. A month later my father killed himself in a car, doing a hundred and ten miles an hour on the Paris road. There was enough money left to educate me in Switzerland. Although I was born on a French passenger ship, the little matter of my American citizenship was something that slipped my father’s mind. In 1939, when I was fifteen, I was dancing in a little club off the Rou Pigalle. I had no interest in politics.

“After the German occupation, I was still dancing. I met a young German officer. He was sweet. I was in love, I thought. He hated the war. We tried to get to Portugal together. He was captured and shot for desertion. I spent seven months in a French prison. France was no good for me after the war. Suspicion of collaboration. I wanted to come to the country where my parents had been born. I worked hard on colloquial English. I had my French papers. I went to Portugal. I danced in Lisbon.

“In Lisbon, I met August Brikel. He was nice to me and arranged forged papers. I could not get into the United States legally because of my ‘bad’ record. But I wanted to get to the states so badly that it was like an incurable disease. August helped me through the four months before I went to work for the Corner Club. I liked you when I met you. One night August came to my room and told me that I must make you fall in love with me. He said that I must quiet any suspicions you might have about what they were doing at the Corner Club.

“August told me what they were doing and said that if any trouble occurred through you, he would make an anonymous report to the immigration people. I still had my French papers, hidden away. I did what he said. But I loved you. I couldn’t bear to deceive you. And then I realized that I never could relax in the States, because just by being there I was cheating what I considered to be my country.

“When I had saved enough money, I crossed into Mexico on the forged papers, used my real papers to apply for Mexican citizenship. Now I’m an immigrants. Brikel has no hold over me. I knew nothing about Tommy. After I ran away from you I cried every night. I don’t cry any more, Bren. You are the only thoroughly decent thing that has ever happened to me. I ran away because I was doing wrong, and I was tired of doing wrong.”

He looked up at the ceiling in the long silence after she stopped speaking. He said softly, “The report wasn’t as complete as that. I... I don’t know.”

“I didn’t have you drugged just to plead my case, Bren. I know that as far as we are concerned, it’s all over. I wanted to tell you about Brikel and Gowan Teed. They have an organization here, as well as in South America. You can’t walk up and shoot either of them. You’d be dead the moment your hand touched the gun. And I couldn’t bear the thought of that.

“When August came into El Torero two weeks ago, he had two men with him. They were wary men, Bren. It was the second time I’d seen him since I came down here. He has a house he rents in Cuernavaca. He wanted me to come down and visit him. I told him that he could no longer tell me what to do.”

He turned quickly toward her, “You fool! You poor, golden-headed fool!”

Her face stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“When August Brikel told you to be nice to me, why on earth didn’t you come to me with the whole story? Why? I can’t understand it.”

She looked down at her hands. “Because you would have known I was a criminal. That’s what I was, Bren, when I was in the States. And even without that, I... I’m hardly a bargain. My life hasn’t been a round of sorority teas, and sleigh rides and Sunday picnics. It’s been scabby little dressing rooms and prison and dirt.”

“Shut up, Laena!” he said quickly.

“I left while you could still remember me as something... nice.”

Slowly she raised her head until their eyes met. He spoke firmly to her. She came to him with a thin lost sound in her throat, and curled against his chest, her forehead pressing against the lean angle of his jaw, a gold-white braid across his face. Tears were a tempest and he enclosed the storm in the circle of his arms until, at long last, it died slowly away.

The words he whispered to her were not connected in orderly sequence. They did not shape themselves into neat and orderly sentences.

When at last she raised her head, her cheeks were streaked, her eyes puffy, but she was smiling.

“You cried too,” she said softly.

“Maybe it was contagious. Laena, I feel as though I’d been ill for a long long time.”

“Maybe you have been,” She laughed softly. “I know you were ill when I brought you here last night.”

“I owe you a mickey, darling.”

She stood up. “You will need a great deal of food. And then we will talk.”

He reached out and caught her hand. “I guess that I wouldn’t have killed you. I guess that I couldn’t have done it.”

Laena raised his hand to her lips. “I guess that you will kill no one, Bren.”

He snatched his hand away, said coldly, “A very slight error, Laena. Nothing that has happened between us has changed the fact that Brikel and Teed are walking around. And Tommy isn’t.”

“No, Bren! No! Even if you succeed, the policia will have you. And once again... I shall have nothing.”

“You almost make me think that all this was a gag so you could save their lives.”

“I know you’re trying to be cruel, Bren. I’ve been hurt too much. It is very difficult to hurt me with words now.”

He gave her a long look. “We will talk about it at breakfast.”

She handed him a brown paper bag containing comb, razor, blades and shaving cream, as well as tooth brush and paste. “I sent Maria after those,” she called.

“Then your horrible secret is out.”

“I know that Maria has thought me a strange one — until now. She is singing in the kitchen. I think she likes having a man in the house.”

At the door he paused, as they were ready to leave and said, “The gun, Laena. Where is it?”

“But, Bren, I—”

“The gun, Laena.” She went obediently off, but without the usual proud lift of her head. She brought it back and silently handed it to him. He checked the cylinder, snapped it shut and shoved it back in the waistband of the trousers. She watched him passively. To lighten the tension he said, with a smile, “You take orders nicely, honey.”

She didn’t smile. She said, “My people were American but I was brought up as a European girl.”

“And yet you ran out,” he said thickly. He caught her to him, found her lips...

Over the breakfast table he talked of Tommy. It was the first time he had talked of him since his death.

When he had quite finished, Laena said, “You call him a ‘crazy kid’ and you say that the biggest job you had in the war was keeping Tommy out of trouble. You must have loved him very much.”

“And that’s why Brikel and Teed are going to pay off. In spades. You might as well tell me if you know where they are. I can find out anyway. You’ll just save me some time.”

She drew on the tablecloth with a fork tine. Tiny frown wrinkles appeared between her dark eyebrows. “All right, Bren. If I tell you, can I come with you?”

“Of course not!”

“There is no way you can keep me from coming with you. They are in the rented house in Cuernavaca. It’s Wednesday now, but they’ll be in Mexico City this weekned. Their house is in the Colonia Miraval, a large house with a high wall and a staff of servants. I do not think you could get in there. When they come to the city, they stay at a large hotel. They come in a group, usually with women. They are seen with men who, here in the city, are known to be criminals, but who seem to be outside the grasp of the law. Bren, I don’t think you should try to kill them.”

He leaned closer to her. “I have to shave this face every morning. I have to look into these eyes. I want to be able to go on doing it without being ashamed of myself.”

“Revenge is childish.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Back in Nazi France I saw some samples of revenge, Bren. Did I say childish? The word is right if you can visualize a child with a deformed mind and the eyes of a beast.”

“This is the job I’ve laid out for myself.”

“Then, of course you must go through with it,” she said bitterly.

The illegal fires, lit by the charcoal vendors, shrouded the flanks of the mountains in drifting smoke that clouded the afternoon sun. The driver sped the heavy rented car through the mountain village of Tres Cumbres, down the tangled ribbon of road to Cuernavaca, golden in the sunset.

Harris rented a room in a hotel facing the zocolo in the center of the city. An hour later, in the gray dusk, he leaned against a gray wall and studied the house in which August Brikel lived. The dark young man he had encountered in the central square spoke adequate English. For ten pesos he had been glad to come along.

“Go over,” Harris said, “and rattle the gate until somebody comes out. Ask them if Mr. Brikel or Mr. Teed are there. Say there is someone down at the hotel asking for them. Tell them that it is a Miss Severence waiting down at the Hotel Linda Vista.”

The boy repeated the names. Bren Harris moved further back into the shadows. He went across to the gate. The gate tender came out and they talked. The boy came back. “He say, Señor, that the dos señores have go away today at the five hours.”

“Did he say where?”

“Si, he say they go on business over the montanas to Mexico and that they do not come back until... como se llama... how you say, the day after Sunday.”

“Monday. Go back and talk some more. Tell him that this is urgent. Where are they staying in Mexico City?”

This time it took a little longer. The boy came back and said, “He say he not know. I think he know, but the señores is giving orders for not saying.”

Bren Harris went back and checked out of his room at seven-thirty and ordered the driver to take him back to Mexico City. Heavy buses and trucks choked the mountain roads. Harris sat on the edge of the seat in a fever of impatience. He dropped his bag off at the hotel and had the driver take him to El Torero. It was quarter after nine when he arrived. He paid the bill and dismissed the rented car.

The club was nearly empty. The bartender gave him a quick look of surprise. “Scotch and water,” Bren said. “Without the chloral.”

“I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

“Skip it. Where’s Miss Severence? I want to see her immediately.”

“She telephoned here over an hour ago, sir. She is too ill to work tonight. Everyone will be disappointed.”

“I’m sure they will be.”

Bren drained his drink, threw a five-peso bill on the bar, searched his pocket until he found the slip of paper on which he had written her address.

There were no cars parked in front of the apartment house. He stood as the taxi drove away, tiny warning bells ringing in the back of his mind. The outside door was not locked. He went quietly up the front stairs, placed his ear against her door and listened. He could hear no sound.

He tapped on the door. It opened quickly. Laena looked at him with a start of surprise. “Bren, darling!” She wore a pale green terrycloth robe that reached to the floor.

“Are you alone?” he asked.

“Of course! Just Maria and me, Bren. Close the door and kiss me.”

His suspicions faded. He grinned and closed the door and took her in his arms. She lifted her lips. As he bent his head toward them, she made a sudden motion with her right arm and the impact behind his ear had all the dull weight of an explosion. The bones in his legs melted and he went heavily down onto his knees, his arms too weak to grasp her.

Bren swayed drunkenly on his knees, shaking his head, his vision clouded. But he saw her raise her arm again. He tried to lift his arm to fend off the blow. The last thing he remembered was her gray eyes, her expressionless face as he melted over against the floor into an utter darkness...