The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

Fair Game

Originally published in Manhunt, September 1953.

There were lots of advantages to being the mayor’s personal chauffeur and bodyguard. Ray Butler thought. For instance, besides earning you a small percentage in this and that, it gave you many excuses to see the mayor’s wife.

A maid told him that she was on the terrace, and he found her there in a sunsuit that almost wasn’t. She was stretched out on a chaise longue behind a pair of dark glasses. His eyes flicked over golden legs and torso broken briefly by scraps of thin fabric. The muscular action incidental to his smile didn’t disturb his face much. It was smooth and hard and brown, like the polished hull of an acorn. There was only a swift flash of white in a margin of red, a deepening toward black of eyes that were normally a shade darker than the face. A hard and handsome boy, Ray Butler. A lot of women carried him around in their heads a long time before they finally lost him in the confusion of things that come and go.

For the maid’s benefit, he said, “Good morning, Mrs. Cannon. I understand you have an errand for me.”

“Good morning, Ray.”

She swung her long, sleek legs off the lounge and stood up, stretching lazily in the sunlight. Her full, firm breasts were thrust up by a deep breath against the frail restraint of her halter. “It’s hot out here. Perhaps we’d better go inside.”

She shrugged into a thigh-length jacket that increased, by paradoxical design, both the coverage of her body and the impression of its nakedness, and he followed her through glass doors into a room that was cool and shadowed. She turned, then, and surged back against him with a little sound that was almost like a whimper, her face lifted and her eyes suddenly glazed.

“Ray,” she said. “Ray...”

The palms of his hands were damp with sweat that had nothing to do with the temperature, and he dried them in her honey-colored hair, dragging her head back savagely and talking into her throat.

“It’s been a thousand years, baby. A thousand long years!”

“I know, Ray, I know.”

Their bodies strained for maximum contact, groping hungrily with countless tiny receptors, and after a long time she relaxed with a sigh, hanging limply in his arms. Her voice was a spent whisper.

“How long, Ray, how long?”

“As long as it takes, baby. Until I say when.”

“Say it now. Say it right now.”

He laughed softly. “You didn’t read your fables when you were a kid. Don’t you remember the one about the goose that laid the golden eggs? The moral is, you don’t kill it. Not literally, not figuratively. Dixie Cannon, mayor of this town and your husband, is the goose, baby.”

“Listen to me, Ray. Over half of everything he owns is in my name. It has to be that way, for the looks of it. It’s mine legally. We don’t need Dixie. We don’t need him at all.”

He laughed again, and there was a sudden tension in the sound. “That’s not the point. It’s not just the lettuce. Think, baby, think. Dixie grabbed me off the force for his personal bodyguard. I’m the strong-arm guy. I do the dirty work. In the last couple years I’ve made more enemies than any one guy ought to have, and every one of them would love to see me dead. Who keeps me alive? I’ll tell you, baby. Dixie Cannon. Fat little Dixie Cannon. God knows how he ever got the power he’s got, and God knows how he keeps it, but he did and he does. He’s all that stands between me and something I don’t like to think about. Just one little man between Ray Butler and the full treatment. Just one fat little man who looks like Santa Claus with a shave.”

He stopped, tucking her fair head under his chin, his hands moving along the sidelines of her torso, and after a while he added dreamily, “But I’m growing. Slowly, I’m growing. I’ll let you know when I’m ready, and when that time comes, there’ll be no question and no more waiting. We’ll take care of Dixie Cannon, and we’ll take care of anyone else who thinks he wants a piece of Ray Butler.”

She lifted her face again to his pleasure, her bright hair hanging, and again there was the molten merging of their bodies. After a long time, she shuddered and twisted from his arms.

“Okay, Ray. Maybe we ought to have a drink to the time.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Sorry, baby, but I just stopped off on my way to somewhere else. I’m on a job for Dixie.”

“Where?”

“Out to Club 44–40. The Schultz twins’ place. Dixie’s moving in.”

“Be careful, Ray. I’d die if anything happened to you.”

He lifted a hand with thumb and index finger tip to tip in the okay sign. “Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen to Ray Butler, baby. Nothing but good luck. The kind that was meant for the two of us.”

He went out into the hall past the maid, who was dusting, and outside to Dixie Cannon’s blue Caddy in the drive. Thirty minutes later he was at Club 44–40.

It was a sweet joint. Even on a day as hot as this, it had a cool, secluded look. Remote from the blistering concrete highway at the end of a white gravel drive, it sprawled with an effect of leisure beneath the drooping pale green branches of weeping willows.

Ray parked the Caddy in shade and went up to heavy double doors. They were unlocked, and he pushed his way inside, standing for a moment in the soft air-conditioned shadows of the lobby to tune his senses to the reduced momentum and volume of the club’s interior stirrings. Looking straight ahead through the small lobby, he could see a litter of chairs and tables, a dance area that was hardly more than a nominal concession to active patrons. Swinging his gaze clockwise through an arch, he picked up in dark glass a reverse view of a section of the bar. The angle showed him the back of a bald head that was not visible directly, and he went over to the arch and through.

The bartender watched his approach from under heavy lids. He stifled a yawn with a clean bar rag and shot a glance upward at the lighted dial of a clock.

“We’re not open yet. Mac. Come back in a couple hours.”

Ray covered red leather with the seat of his cords and leaned forward on his elbows.

“It’s nice in here. Nice and cool and quiet. I’ll have a Collins, I think. While I’m drinking it, you can tell the twins I’m here. Tell them it’s Ray Butler with a word from Dixie Cannon.”

Heavy lids flicked up reflexively and then dropped over a glitter of pupils. The bar rag made a swift swipe at mahogany that didn’t need it.

“Maybe. And maybe you’re Joe Blow with a bag full of brushes. You got identification?”

Ray laughed. “You’re hurting my feelings,” he said. “A guy gets to thinking he’s known around, and then some joker wants credentials. You’d better fix the Collins and see the twins.”

The bartender vacillated a moment longer between the unknown reaction of the twins and the nearer threat of a still, brown face. Then he reached for the gin. He mixed the Collins and left the bar through a door at the rear. Ray watched him go and began the pleasant work of uncovering the maraschino cherry that lay on the bottom of his glass. Spinning on the stool, he saw beside the door through which the bartender had gone a garish monster of a juke box, with bubbles rising endlessly in colored tubes. He went back, carrying the Collins, and deposited a nickel. A female voice with a cultivated sob lamented. It struck Ray as rather amusing. A fine laugh, really. He leaned against the box and heard the platter through, working at the Collins as he listened. The Collins was just finished and the platter back in the stack when the bartender returned. He jerked a thumb at the door.

“You can go on back. It’s the door at the far end of the game room.”

Ray nodded and set the empty glass on top of the juke box. He went through the door into the game room, and the reason for the nominal concession of space up front was immediately apparent. Most of it was utilized here, in the main business of the club. A nice layout. Better than that, it was a beautiful layout. Facilities for the works — roulette, dice, blackjack, everything for the luxury separation center. Expensive stuff. A lot of lettuce had gone into it.

At the indicated door, Ray knocked and waited for an invitation. Getting it promptly in a guttural voice, he stepped into deep pile and surveyed three faces. In point of differences, there might have been one face less. That is two of them were identical. They were heavy, swollen, with flesh like dough with too much yeast in it that encroached on eyes and gave to mouths a tucked, parsimonious quality. The brothers Schultz, Jake and Theo, who had, with characteristic economy, split an egg between them. They owned the place.

The third face was a study in contrast. Though its structure was almost exactly opposite that of the twins’, it achieved an equal ugliness. Long, gaunt and yellow, with a sour, twisted mouth. Sheriff Caleb Kirk. Prince Caleb, they called him. A county power. He’d bought, in his day, enough votes to elect a president.

Ray leaned against the door, palming the knob behind him, and smiled lazily. “Well, well. The sheriff himself. Glad to see you, Kirk. Finding you here will save me a trip to the county seat. It’s too damn hot for driving today.”

Kirk’s lips twisted. His eyes were flat and lusterless. “Detective Ray Butler. Personal bodyguard to the mayor. To Dixie Cannon himself. Word’s around that you’re a comer, Ray. Cops don’t usually work up so fast.”

Half of the twins, Jake or Theo at even money and take your pick, wiped an oily face with a wad of damp cloth and blew out a wet breath. He lowered his bulk into a chair behind a desk, tugging at the tie that tortured his bulging neck. “It’s too damned early. Too early for this heat.”

“You never know when the heat’ll come on.” Ray divided a pleasant look between the Schultz brothers, his brown face perfectly smooth and non-committal. “No heat in here, though. No reason at all for you boys to be sweating. The conditioning system must have set you back something. You’ve got a nice place.”

The other half of the twins lumbered to a liquor cabinet with a gelatin-like quivering of fat hips. “You like a drink, maybe, Ray boy? Real good stuff?”

“No, thanks. I had a Collins in the bar.”

“This is good. Old stuff. Stuff like this you don’t get at the bar.”

“The Collins was good enough.”

Caleb Kirk’s long, bony body jerked violently, as if the stringy muscles had contracted in a sudden seizure. “To hell with this folderol. You didn’t come here on any goddamned social call, Butler. What you got on your mind?”

Ray released the knob behind him and took a couple of steps into the room. His eyes drifted casually over the sheriffs sour, yellow face. “Like I told the boy up front, I’ve brought word from Dixie Cannon. It’s business for the twins. You their agent, sheriff?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay. Dixie said to remind you there was an election some time back. You remember?”

“Sure. Dixie got elected, like always. So?”

“It’s not his own election Dixie’s thinking about. It’s the vote out here in the county. In case you’ve forgotten that part of it, this area voted for annexation. It’s inside the city limits now.” Ray pivoted in a quarter turn to include the twins impartially in a deliberate inspection. “Dixie’s a patient man, boys, but now he’s getting a little annoyed. He waited for you to contact him, and you didn’t do it. That wasn’t polite. Not polite at all.”

Kirk’s voice intruded, rasping, grating on the nerves like sand underfoot. “What the hell you getting at, Butler? Cut the fancy talk and lay it on the line.”

Ray didn’t even bother to look at him. He lifted his eyes above the heads of the sweating twins and let them wander lazily along the line of junction where wall met ceiling. His voice descended to a deadly softness.

“Sure, sheriff. I’ll lay it on the line. The line’s the one where the city ends and the county begins. And you’re on the other side. Out in the county. Prince Caleb of the brush. Like I mentioned, this is a nice place. A place like this must separate the suckers from plenty. Just like you’re separating the twins from plenty. You’ve been collecting ice for years, and up to now it was all right, because you had jurisdiction. Now the line’s changed, and it’s different. You’ve got no more jurisdiction. Dixie Cannon’s got it.”

Kirk moved in on the flank. Ray could feel the heat of his breath on his neck. The sour odor of it offended his nostrils.

“To hell with the line. To hell with Dixie Cannon. You tell the fat little bastard that Prince Caleb Kirk isn’t moving out for any lousy city politico. Not any whatever.”

Ray moved swiftly and smoothly, like a machine, driving his bent arm back like a piston. The elbow buried itself in the soft area above the diaphragm where Kirk’s ribs converged. Spinning with the motion, Ray chopped into the base of Kirk’s neck with the hard edge of his right hand. That made everything easy. Catching the sagging body, he lifted the sheriff’s yellow face up into a savage, cadenced chopping that produced, in seconds, a red pulp. The job done methodically, he let the body collapse and turned to the twins.

“Dixie Cannon’s a big man,” he said. “It’s not right for a bush-league bastard to talk about Dixie like that. If I overlooked it, after a while no one would have any respect for Dixie at all. You boys ready to listen?”

The brothers Schultz were motionless mountains of frozen meat. After a few seconds, the one behind the desk lifted his hands and spread them carefully on the desk’s surface. His head jerked.

“You’re talking, boy. We’re listening.”

“Good. I told Dixie you’d be reasonable. You can always depend on the Schultz boys to play it cool, I told him. It’s as simple as this: Dixie wants the ice. If you don’t like that arrangement, he’s ready to buy you out. Thirty grand, he said to tell you.”

“Thirty grand!” The Schultz in the chair heaved upward to his feet, his voice skidding up the register ahead of him to a shrill squeal. He stood for a minute bent forward, his fat belly overlapping the oak, and then he sank slowly into the chair again. His lips twitched in a sickly smile. “You’re joking, boy. Young guys like you always got to have their joke. We got eighty grand invested in the joint, me and Jake. It’s worth a hundred.”

Ray shook his head sadly. “Dixie said thirty. He said if you didn’t like thirty, he’d settle for ice.”

“What’s Dixie’s idea of ice?”

“It’s simple. A kid could figure it. There’s you two and Dixie. It comes out a third each way, however you slice it.”

“An even split? You’re killing me, boy. You’re killing me dead with your corny jokes.”

Ray shrugged. “There are worse ways to die.” He turned, moved to the door, turned again. “Dixie doesn’t want to crowd you any, but he thinks you owe him an answer. He’s been waiting ever since election, and he thinks twelve hours more ought to be plenty.”

His eyes deserted the twins, wandered over to Prince Caleb Kirk. The lank sheriff had dragged himself into a chair, and he sat slumped there with his long legs sprawled and his body canting over the arm.

He’d wiped some of the blood off his face with his handkerchief, and held the bloody cloth wadded in his hand. His eyes were as yellow as his jaundiced hide, filled with the pus of a malignant hatred. His smashed lips writhed wolfishly off stained teeth.

“You’re riding high, sonny. You’re riding high enough to get hurt if you fall. I’ll tell you something. You better take real good care of that body you’re hired to guard. If anything happened to it, you might lose altitude awful fast.”

Ray studied him briefly and then went out through the game room and the bar to the Caddy under the willows. Wheeling around in the parking area, he followed the drive back to the white welt of concrete. Slipping into the tide of traffic, he drifted with it into the heart of the city. Outside City Hall, he tucked the Caddy into Dixie Cannon’s reserved spot and went up a wide sweep of stairs into the main floor hall, where he caught a fast elevator at the bank. Upstairs, he got out and exercised his privilege by turning the knob of Dixie Cannon’s private door.

Dixie was pink and white and plump. He had pale, silky hair brushed smoothly over a round skull, and he looked like a happy child. He possessed the natural, amoral cruelty of a child, too. The voters loved him and crammed the ballot boxes to prove it. With plenty of indications to the contrary, they just couldn’t believe that Dixie would ever do anything really wrong.

He smiled a welcome at Ray across the polished expanse of the huge desk that made him look like a small boy playing executive.

“You see the twins. Ray?”

“I saw them. I gave them the deadline. They’re squealing like stuck pigs, but they’ll come around. I saw Prince Caleb Kirk, too. He was at the club.”

“So?”

Ray lilted his shoulders and let them fall. “He’s got a nasty tongue. I had to work on him a little.”

“Yes? Well, watch yourself, boy. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the devil. He’s mean as a rattlesnake.”

Ray repeated his shrug. “A guy beats his gums, you take action. It’s bad for discipline to let a guy get away with loud-talking you.”

Dixie dry-washed his plump hands, his soft mouth pursing with gentle approval. “Sure. Ray. You look after Dixie like an angel.” He stood up and patted his neat little pot with satisfaction. “Well, it’s been a nice, profitable day. I think I’ll knock off.”

“Shall I drive you home?”

“Never mind, boy. I’ll make it all right. You go buy yourself a couple beers or something.”

Ray made it another Collins and took his time with it. In the afternoon he sat in a small-stakes poker game in the back room of a friendly cigar store and rode a moderate run of luck to a small profit. Later, as lights came up in the end of the long evening, he sat in his room in the Commerce Hotel with rye and water in his hand and a dark restlessness in his brain. He thought of a golden body reclining in sunlight, and closing his eyes, he developed the thought behind his lids in vivid imagery. Myra. Myra Cannon. He pronounced the magic syllables aloud, but softly, and when the telephone rang shrilly at his elbow at that moment, he had a sudden intense conviction that she was, through some kind of supersensory awareness between them, responding to the name.

The voice was a woman’s, but not Myra’s.

“Mr. Butler?”

“Yes.”

“This is the Cannon maid. Mr. Cannon would like you to come out.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes. A car will be sent for you.”

“All right. I’ll be waiting.”

He hung up and stood tor a minute beside the phone, wondering what urgent deal Dixie Cannon now had cooking. While he waited for transportation, he mixed another rye and water, sipping it slowly until he finally heard knuckles on his door. The guy in the hall had a bullish, blocky body and an undersized head. The left corner of his mouth was lifted in a perpetual leer by a puckered scar that ran across his cheek at a tangent. Ray had seen him around. He was called Rhino.

On the way downstairs, Ray said, “What’s the pitch?”

He didn’t expect a solid answer, and he didn’t get it. Rhino lifted thick shoulders. “Business. That’s all I know. Just business.”

They left it that way, driving in silence to Dixie Cannon’s suburban stone stack and walking in silence up from the drive into the front hall, Rhino keeping pace a step left and to the rear. The maid was waiting in the hall, and guided them to the door of the room off the terrace in which Ray and Myra had been that morning. Rhino followed Ray into the room, obviously on orders, and so did the maid. That was queer, a little too queer, and it was then, for the first time, that Ray had a feeling of something wrong.

Dixie was standing in the middle of the room with a glass in his hand. He was wearing a spotless white dinner jacket, and his benign face had a scrubbed, rosy look. His small mouth curled affectionately.

“Hello. Ray. You’re a good boy to come so soon.”

Behind him, sitting in a chair with motionless rigidity that was the antithesis of her usual seductive grace, was Myra. Her face was stiff, drained of blood, and her eyes in the startling pallor were like burned-out cinders, her mouth like a crimson wound.

The wrong feeling intensified. Twisting at the hips, Ray could see Rhino by the door at his rear. He stood there indolently, shoulders braced against the wall, his right hand resting in the pocket of his coat.

The maid had advanced on Ray’s other side. Her stance, for a woman, was oddly erect, almost military, and it prompted in him a strange kind of disgust. It seemed, for some reason, a physical perversion.

“I always come soon,” he said carefully.

Dixie lifted his glass and sipped, looking at Ray over the rim. “Thanks. But I had better explain why I called you out tonight. Also why I’ve invited Rhino and Mitzie to attend this little conference. I’ve made use of them, you see and I believe in permitting the people I’ve used in an affair to see its finish. And then, too, it is good for personnel to be made aware of certain consequences.” He smiled gently. “You know what I am, Ray? I’m a foolish, fat little man with a beautiful wife, and that’s the trouble. Perhaps there is nothing quite so unfortunate as a man like me with a wife like Myra. Because he has no confidence, you see. He has no faith. It corrupts his personality. It makes him suspicious, and it degrades him. If he were like you, it would be different. If he were a tall and handsome guy, he wouldn’t be forced to measures a man should scorn.”

It was all clear then, of course.

Even before Dixie walked to a table and flipped a switch. Even before the sultry, vibrant voice whispered his damnation through the room: Ray, Ray...

Dixie flipped the switch again, cutting off Ray’s line, and he was suddenly a sick old man. The smooth skin seemed to darken and wither on his bones. “The machine was in a cabinet in the hall,” he said. “This was only one of the rooms it could have picked up. Mitzie’s very clever about operating it. For a dame, Mitzie’s clever about a lot of things.”

He lifted his glass and drained it greedily. “What would you do, Ray, if you were Dixie Cannon? What would you do to the guy who made your wife? As you said in the office today, it’s a matter of discipline. Some things you can’t let pass.”

It seemed to Ray at that moment, in retrospect, that the whole day had been pointed toward this bad end and he wondered dully how he had been so blind as to miss the signs of destiny — his own words to Myra about needing Dixie’s protection, the malignant threat of Prince Caleb Kirk, all the dark signs pointing. He tried to speak, but he found that he couldn’t. Bones and muscles functioned, permitting his mouth to open, but no sound would come from his throat.

“At first I thought I’d ruin your handsome face.” Dixie said. “I thought I’d let Rhino cut it up for me. But then l remembered something you said to Myra. Something on the tape there. ‘Who keeps me alive?’ you said. So now I’ve decided it will be best it we simply part company. From this moment, we are at liberty from each other. I will take steps to make it known that you are no longer my man and therefore no longer my concern. For example. I’ve already notified the men I’m presently dealing with — the Schultz twins. Prince Caleb Kirk. They were quite interested.”

Then there was an unexpected sharp sound of splintering glass and blood dripped brightly from Dixie’s soft fingers. His voice rose to a shrill, womanlike scream.

“Get out, you double-dealing son of a bitch! Get the hell out before I have Rhino cut you to shreds!”

Ray turned away with a bleak sense of loneliness that was more terrible than fear. For a moment his eyes sought the face of Myra, but there was nothing in it now but defeat and the shadow of terror, so he gave up and went past Rhino into the hall and out of the house. All the way hanging in disembodied suspension before him there was a second face. It was long and yellow, with a sour mouth, and hate-filled eyes, the symbol of his enemies.

Fair game. Open season on Ray Butler. He felt a frantic, irrational compulsion to start running, but all growth and structure on the surface of the earth around him seemed, of a sudden, to disintegrate and disappear leaving no place, no place at all, for a man to hide.