The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

I’ll Kill for You

Originally published in Giant Manhunt #2 (1953).

She got out of the yellow cab in front of the apartment building and stood for a few seconds at the curb as she searched her purse for the fare. I stood at the corner beside a public trash can and watched her until she had paid the cabby and crossed the sidewalk. Her spike heels rapped out a brisk tattoo on concrete. The pneumatic catch on the apartment door gave a sharp gasp, trailing off into a long, expiring sigh.

I waited until the cab had whisked its red tail light around the far corner, then I went down to the entrance and in after her. Behind me, the door gasped and sighed again. It was a sad sound. A lost and damned sound. It was like a last whimper of regret at the doorway to hell.

Inside, the lobby was empty. From the elevator well came the soft, pervasive whine of the ascending car. I went across the lobby quickly and stood watching the arrow of the floor indicator move around to six. It stopped there, not quite half way around the circumference of the dial, and above me, echoing with hollow faintness down the deep shaft, was the distant sound of doors opening and closing.

Turning away, walking fast, I started up the stairs, taking them two at a time, but not running. The stairs were wide, about eight feet, for the first two flights. Above that, they narrowed to four and continued upward in an economy of light. On each landing, where the angle of ascension turned back on itself, there was a single red bulb. When I passed under the bulbs, my abbreviated shadow leaped ahead of me with startling suddenness, dying in shadow as abruptly.

I paced myself, two steps to a stride, until I came up off the stairs into the sixth floor hall. I stood there at the head of the flight, one hand on the steel post of the railing, and listened to the echo of my heart in my brain. It was a kind of accelerated tom-tom beat that was not arhythmic but was much too fast. I waited until the cadence subsided, and then I walked down the hall to a door that bore on its bleached surface the arabic identification six-o-three in chaste chrome.

The knob of the door turned under the pressure of my fingers, releasing the catch without sound, and I stood motionless for maybe three minutes, palming the knob and listening. There was no sound within the room. Cracking the door enough for passage, I slipped through into a small vestibule and pushed the door shut behind me. The catch slipped into position with the tiniest of oiled clicks. Moving swiftly, I took three long strides to the entrance to the living room and looked in.

She was standing almost in the middle of the room, just at the end of the sofa, with her back to me. Even from a distance, I could see that her muscles were as still as wood, that her flesh, to the touch, would be as cold as ice. She stood with her head bent forward and her eyes focused on the floor beyond the sofa, the light gleaming on the pale, silken cascade of her hair.

I stirred, made a sound, and she whipped around with a shrill intake of breath that tore at her constricted throat and must have hurt like the hacking of a dull blade. Her eyes flared in her drawn face, and scarlet lips that were all paint and no blood opened on the shape of a projected scream. But the scream never materialized. Closing in on her, I slashed my open hand across her cheek with a flat smack. She swayed, choking on the scream with a little animal whimper, but her feet didn’t move on the carpet. The marks of four fingers were livid on her flesh.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t scream.”

She stared at me with her eyes wide and dry and hot and the marks of my fingers like a brand on her face. She didn’t speak or make another sound until her breasts rose finally on a deep, ragged breath that held them for a long moment high and tight against the thin stuff of her dress. They descended on a long, controlled exhalation. I knew then that there was no more danger of hysteria, and I moved around her and beyond the sofa and stood looking down at the body on the carpet.

He lay sprawled on his face with one arm stretched out beyond his head with the fingers clawed, as if in the last instant he had been clutching for the light that had escaped his brain through a matted mass of hair and blood and bone and soft gray matter. Beyond the reaching fingers, lying on its side in the thick pile of the carpet, was a highball glass. A wet stain spread out from the lip of the glass, and in the stain there were still two tiny fragments of melting ice cubes.

“A good, thorough job,” I said, hearing behind me the soft hiss of her breath as the brutal remark slugged home.

Turning back to her, I saw that blood had returned to modify the livid smear of paint on her lips. Feverish stains were spread under the taut skin over the high bones of her cheeks.

“Why?” I said.

“Why?” She repeated the word on a suction, giving it shrill, rising inflection.

I gestured downward at the sprawled body. “Why did you kill him?”

“Kill him? Me?” Comprehension seemed to filter into her mind slowly, in a slow seepage, as water soaks through the pores of old brick.

I shrugged angrily, and my voice sounded loud, needlessly harsh, in my own ears. “Look, honey. He’s dead. He’s lying there with the back of his head blown off. I come in and find you standing over him, and his bourbon not even dry on the floor where he spilled it. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

“I didn’t kill him. I loved him. I would never have killed him.”

“Loving and killing aren’t incompatible. Sometimes, under the right circumstances, killing is a natural development. It’s happened more times than you or I could count.” Her hot eyes seemed to cloud with confusion, as if her mind were groping dumbly for a convincer, and then they cleared suddenly, acquiring a glittering intentness.

“Where’s the gun?”

The question was like a short jab to the solar plexus. I stood very still, not breathing, watching in her face the slow signs of returning assurance. After a few seconds, I dropped to my knees and looked under the sofa. Getting up, I prowled the room, looking in all the places a gun might have been dropped or thrown or placed. When I’d worked back to her, she hadn’t moved. Her eyes, still hot and dry, had completely lost their dilation, shining now with that bright intentness. Her lips were parted, fluttering very slightly with the passage of long, deep breaths. The tip of her pink tongue flicked out and around them. Reaching out, I separated her stiff fingers from the suede purse they were clutching. I rummaged for a minute and gave it back.

“Okay,” I said. “No gun. The killer must have taken it away.”

She said abruptly, “What are you doing here?” Her voice broke.

I shrugged, looking into her dry, fever-infested eyes. “What’s the difference? It makes no difference now.”

“Maybe not. Unless you’ve been here before.”

I laughed harshly. “To kill him, you mean? So then I come right back and show myself. Don’t be a fool, honey.”

Her head jerked around under a sudden strong compulsion, and her eyes dropped again to the husk on the door. She may have experienced, in that instant, an intense sensory recollection of the look and smell and feel of him in the neural rand glandular riot of the passion they had shared. However it was, when she turned back to me her eyes had lost their bright wariness and were filled instead with an incredible, flaring anguish.

I felt, all at once, very tired. “You’d better get out of here,” I said. “You’d better get the hell home in a hurry.”

“What about you?”

I turned my back and fumbled in my coat for cigarettes. The smoke of the tobacco was caustic in my lungs, leaving an acrid taste on my tongue.

“There’s a dead man on the floor, honey. Someone killed him. It adds up to cops. When you leave, I’ll call them.”

I stood there with my back to her, and for quite a while there was no sound at all. Then there was the silken rustle of movement and, from a long, long way off, maybe the distance to the end of everything, the faint, oily click of the door catch. My ear drums picked up the sound and amplified it, rolling it around the interior of my skull like the thunder of artillery around a rim of enclosing hills.

The telephone was on a table beyond the body. The outstretched arm seemed to be pointing to it, showing the way like a sign on a map. Making a careful detour, I went over and called the police.

“I want to report a murder,” I said.

I waited until the call was channeled to Homicide and a tired voice came on. We went through a weary-routine of question and answer.

Name?

Address?

Sit tight and don’t touch anything.

I cradled the phone and went out into the kitchen.

In the kitchen, I sat on a tall stool and lit another cigarette. The faucet was dripping in the sink. I figured that it took about three seconds for a drop of water to form on the lip of the faucet and fall off into the sink. The drops struck the porcelain with almost mathematical regularity, making small tapping sounds. Tap... tap... tap. I started to count the sounds of the drops striking the porcelain, and I had counted four hundred and six when there was movement in the living room. I got off the stool and went in.

A medium-sized guy in a loose brown suit was standing just inside the vestibule. His eyes toured me as I came through the door, moving off to a point of focus on the wall, as if they’d had all they wanted in short order. He had a narrow face with a long hooked nose and flesh that sagged from the bones. His voice was resigned, characterized by a heavy patience that remained as a habit even when it wasn’t appropriate.

“Your name Henry Frost?”

“That’s right.”

“You call Homicide?”

“Yes.”

“I’m it. Dunn’s the name. Detective-Lieutenant.”

Maybe I was supposed to make like a host. Maybe I was supposed to smile and be amiable. His eyes crossed me again to another point of focus, and he waited with that heavy patience and gave me no help whatever.

“The body’s this side of the sofa,” I said.

He moved to the sofa with a kind of easy shuffle and looked over the back. “So it is,” he said.

Behind him, another man materialized from the vestibule and leaned against the jamb. He had something in his teeth and was working at it with a wooden match. He didn’t bother to look at me at all.

“Who is he?” Dunn said.

“His name was Caldwell. Bruce Caldwell.”

“Who’s been here with you?” He stabbed a linger at the body. “Besides him, I mean.”

“No one.”

“You wearing perfume?”

“Do I look like the kind of man who’d wear perfume, for God’s sake?”

His eyes smeared me again with their weary patience. “I don’t know. I don’t know what a man who’d wear perfume is supposed to look like. As far as I’m concerned, you look like a man who’d do anything, even murder. No offense. That’s just a way of saying you look a hell of a lot like every other man I’ve ever seen.” He stabbed again with the finger. “I wonder if he’s wearing it.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

His eyebrows arched hairy backs. “That supposed to mean something?”

“You might figure it to mean something.”

“Lover-boy, you mean? Hot number with the dames?”

“Something like that.”

“You married?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if I could figure that to mean something?”

“You could try, but you’re wasting your time.”

He shrugged and a ragged little sound that might have been a chuckle came out of his throat. “Hell, I’m wasting time right now.” He moved around the sofa, the thin edges of his nostrils quivering. “You smell the perfume? Don’t you?”

I smelled it, all right. A delicate Stringency suspended in cordite It made me sick.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know any dame who wears perfume that smells like that?”

“I can’t think of any. It’s probably a common scent.”

“Sure. Probably. It may have been a dame who got him. If he was the kind of guy you imply, a dame’s a good bet.” He stopped and looked up at me again, and his lips curved in a gentle smile. “Or a husband,” he said.

Kneeling beside the body, he got a handful of hair and lifted the head, looking in at an angle at the exposed profile. When he stood up, his hand was bloody. Taking a white handkerchief from his hip pocket, he wiped the hand carefully.

“Pretty,” he said. “Real pretty. Lay him in a casket so the back of his head doesn’t show, he’ll be a real tear-jerker for those dames you mentioned. Well, we got work to do. You go on back in the kitchen and wait around. I’ll talk to you some more later.”

I went back into the kitchen and crawled onto the stool again. I heard more men come into the living room from the hall. They moved around, talking, and after awhile I heard the explosion of flash-bulbs and caught the acrid odor of powder.

I could also hear the faucet dripping. I started counting the small sounds again, and the higher I counted the louder the sounds got, until finally each drip was like the detonation of a grenade inside my skull. I quit counting then and tried to ignore the drips, but by that time it was impossible, and the grenades kept right on detonating in my head. It was like the old Chinese torture chestnut, and I was about to go out and tell Dunn that I had to get the hell out of there when he came in, instead.

He pulled himself up onto the edge of the cabinet beside the sink and peered at me through a thin, drifting plume of smoke.

“I guess we’re about finished in there,” he said. “We didn’t find much of anything that looks like it would be any help. Way I got it figured, he had someone with him, and they were having a drink. A guy named Henry Frost, say. Just to give him a name, you understand. It simplifies talking about him if he’s got a name.”

“I thought you’d settled for a woman,” I said.

He smiled his gentle smile and looked at me through the pale blue, transparent plume. “Anyhow,” he went on, “the phone rang. This guy Caldwell turned around with his glass in his hand to go to the phone, and that’s when he was killed.”

I felt as if someone had reached inside me and grabbed a handful of entrails. “How do you know that?” I said.

“I got the idea from the way he was lying. Like he’d been heading for the phone, you know. It figures, too. Once Caldwell got on the phone, it might have been too late for murder. Because he might just mention that Frost was there, and that would never do. You know how these phone conversations go. ‘Busy, Caldwell?’ ‘Not particularly. Just having a drink with Henry Frost.’ You see what I mean? Once he said that, there couldn’t be any murder. I’ll check to see if there was a call through the switchboard.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use my name,” I said.

His mirthless chuckle came up again behind the gentle smile. “You shouldn’t be so sensitive. Like I said, it’s just a convenience. How come you came here tonight?”

“I had an appointment.”

“Oh?”

“I’m a lawyer. Caldwell wanted to see me.”

“So that’s it. I guess a guy like Caldwell needed a lawyer pretty often. You ever handle anything for him before?”

“No.”

“Don’t you have an office? You make a practice of calling on clients to do business?”

“I don’t make a practice. Sometimes I make an exception.”

“Well, that’s a fast answer. I can see you’re a lawyer, all right. What was it about?”

“Why he wanted to see me? I don’t know. He was dead when I got here.”

“Sure. DOA. He never put out any hints earlier?”

“None whatever,” I replied.

“Okay. What’s your address?”

I told him, and he wrote it down in a little book. He wrote it very slowly, in tiny characters, with the stub of a pencil. He read it back, and I said it was right, and he put the book and the pencil in the breast pocket of his coat.

“You can go now’,” he said. “Later we’ll want you to make a formal statement and sign it. By that time, I may have thought of something else to ask you.”

I said all right and good-night and went out through the living room. The guy who’d come in with Dunn was sitting on the sofa with his feet up. Everyone else was gone, and some of those who’d come and gone had taken Bruce Caldwell with them. I went out into the hall and down in the elevator and outside.

A police car was standing by the curb. A cool wind was blowing down the deep canyon of the street, and I could see, looking up beyond the faint flush of city lights, the cold and distant stars.

I’d parked my car on a side street.

I walked down to the corner and around it and stopped in the shadow of the building. I stood quietly for a moment with my shoulders braced against brick, then I moved to the corner of the building and looked back at the police car. There was one guy in it, in the driver’s seat, and he had his head down on the steering wheel.

Moving swiftly, I crossed over to the trash can and reached in and got the gun and walked back down the side street to my car. At home, I drove the car into the basement garage and shoved the gun tip on one of the hot air ducts that ran overhead from the furnace. Later I’d dispose of it permanently. Upstairs in the dark kitchen, I found a bottle of rye in a cabinet and took a long pull from the bottle. The whisky burned in my throat and flared like phosphorus in my stomach. I waited in the darkness, gagging, until the heat had subsided to a diffusive warmth, and then I went through the living room to the front hall and upstairs to the bedroom.

Meg was asleep on her side in her twin bed. If she was not asleep, she pretended that she was. Moonlight slanted through the half-shut slats of the blinds and flowed along the contour of her rounded hip. I found pajamas in a drawer of my chest and undressed beside my bed. Lying on my back, I looked up at the ceiling and thought about everything that had happened. There was nothing, even then, that I wanted changed. And that was good, at least, because it was far too late for change, even if I’d wanted it.

I didn’t sleep. I was still lying on my back, in the position I had first taken, when the electric alarm went off beside Meg’s bed. It was the first time I’d ever known her to set the alarm.

I lay silently with my eyes half open and watched her silence the alarm and swing out of bed. She went over to the bathroom door and snapped on the light inside, and I could see against it, through the sheer stuff of her nightgown, the lithe loveliness of her body. She closed the door behind her, and the shower began running in its stall. Alter about five minutes, she came back into the bedroom and turned on the small lights on both sides of her dressing table mirror. Sitting on the bench before the mirror, turned a little to the side so that I was looking at her profile, she began to paint her nails. The sheer robe that had replaced her gown fell open across her thighs from its narrow belt, and she crossed her knees, resting each hand palm down on the upper knee as she painted the nails with the little brush that was fastened to the stopper of the bottle. She worked very slowly and carefully. She didn’t look in my direction at all.

When the paint on her nails was dry, she turned on the bench and began to brush her hair with long, even strokes. She brushed the hair until it shone like white gold in the light. When she lifted the brush to the crown of her head to start the long sweep down the fall of her hair, I could see clearly in the glass the firm protrusion of her breasts against the thin robe.

The stroking done, she lay the brush down on the glass top of the table and picked up a thin gold tube of lip rouge. She applied the scarlet stuff to her lips in a bright smear, leaning forward to look into the mirror, smoothing it with the tip of a little finger and tucking her lips in together to give it the shape of her mouth. Standing, she loosened the robe and let it drift down in a thin cloud over the bench behind her.

Naked, she padded across the room to the closet, gathering clothing. Carrying the garments, she came back to her bed and began to dress. In a couple of frail black wisps, she sat on the side of the bed and smoothed nylon onto her long legs, holding each leg in turn out stiffly with the toes pointed, bending far forward from the hips to draw her hands up slowly from the ankle along calf and thigh. Standing again, she lowered a soft black dress over her head. The dress was slashed low in front, a narrow V between her breasts, and was like lacquer on her hips. In high-heeled sandals, she returned to the mirror and repaired her hair, looking at herself with quiet appraisal in the glass. Then she turned and went out of the room.

She still hadn’t looked at me. Not even briefly.

I kept on lying there in bed, and pretty soon the good smell of coffee came up the stairs and into the room, and for just a second it was a morning like any other morning, with the paper to read and a trip to the office around nine. I lifted my arms back and above my head, stretching, feeling the muscles pull tight along the length of my body. I showered and dressed and went down.

Meg was in the breakfast room. She was standing at the wide window overlooking the back lawn, and I saw that she was holding a cup of coffee in her hands. I went up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders, but she was still as stiff as wood, and the chill of her flesh came through her dress into my fingers.

“There’s coffee on the sideboard,” she said.

“Thanks.”

I went over and poured coffee into a cup. I carried the cup over to the table and sat down. Meg still stood at the window with her back to me, looking out into the bright sunshine of the morning. The steam from my coffee ascended into my nostrils. It was a good smell. It was a smell a man might miss if he were never to know it again.

“You said bourbon,” Meg said. “You said his bourbon wasn’t dry on the carpet.”

I looked down into the black liquid with the steam rising lazily from its surface. “Bourbon’s a word, honey. You see a man taking a drink, you say, ‘Look at that man drinking bourbon.’ It stands for anything.”

She shook her head. “No. You say highball, or cocktail, or just drink. You don’t say bourbon, or rye, or scotch, unless you know for sure it’s bourbon, or rye, or scotch. That’s why you said bourbon, Hank, because you knew it was bourbon. Because you saw him mix it and even had one with him out of the glass that was sitting on the little table at the end of the sofa. That was the first time you were there, Hank. The time you killed him.”

She stood waiting for me to say something, but I had nothing to say, because there was no use in confessing something she already knew, and there was no use lying when a lie would do no good. After a while, she said quietly, “I’ve been wondering why you came back. I think it must have been because you saw me arrive and didn’t want me to get into trouble. I think it was because you love me very much. I think that’s why you stayed and called the police, too. Because you love me, I mean. Because you thought I wouldn’t think you’d killed him if you did a thing like that. It was an awful chance to take.”

She turned then and faced me, the bright glass behind her, looking at me with eyes that were dead, holding the fragile cup in her hands below her breasts.

“I’ve committed adultery,” she said softly. “You killed Bruce Caldwell because you thought the killing was a way to get me back. I ought to be grateful for such a love.” She stopped, looking at me across the cradled cup, and when she spoke again her voice was no more than a whisper. “But I’m not. I’m very sorry, but I loved Bruce so much that there’s nothing I want now but to see his murderer dead.”

The tiredness inside me was like nothing I’d ever known before. “That’s a lot of love,” I said.

“I’m very confused,” she answered. She shook her head and came beside my chair. “You were wrong in what you did, but you didn’t know you were — and you did it for me. I wonder... I wonder if you would like to have me one more time.”

I looked up at her, at the strange blankness on her face, the beautiful body that was freshly bathed and clothed. I understood the ritual she had performed now, as nearly as such things can be understood. She came to me, and she was stiff and cold, the way a woman can be when she is giving herself in payment for something.

And when it was all over, I was not surprised to find a gun in her hand pointing at my head.