Warrant for an Old Flame

Chapter Three Bullets to Spare

At ten o’clock I was on the upper terrace of the hotel proper, eating breakfast, carefully watching cottage eighteen. After breakfast I drank one slow cup of coffee after another. It was quarter after eleven when Beth, a cape around her shoulders, her legs, long and slim and brown, accentuated by the white two-piece swim suit, came out and walked slowly toward the pool.

I caught her at the pool edge just as she was about to dive in.

There were shadows under her eyes, but she looked wide awake and alert. Her fingers were strong on my wrist. “I couldn’t sleep, Burnsie. I kept thinking about a divorce. How much did you mean it about that three-room apartment?”

“I never get emotional before lunch. Princess, would you please be a good girl and stay the hell away from the cottage? I want a heart to heart talk with Schaegan. A nice long talk. I have a new idea.”

She gave me a level stare. “You wouldn’t be thinking of—” She doubled a brown fist and gave a respectable version of a left hook.

“How could you think such a horrible thing!” I said, grinning.

“He’s tougher than you might think.”

A man in swimming trunks sat on the edge of the pool on the other side, watching us. I remembered him from the day before. He was average looking, but with the flat, opaque, unreadable expression of a very rough citizen. I stared at him and he looked away. I wondered if he were the visitor in the night. Or maybe he just liked Beth’s looks.

“I’ll chance it,” I said.

Schaegan’s heavy chest was bare. He wore baggy slacks and a heavy beard and even his neat little mustache was rumpled.

“Go away, Burns,” he said in a scratchy voice. “Go hide.”

I reached almost straight up in the air with my left hand. His hands instinctively lifted. As they did I pivoted and put my full weight into a short right hook that traveled eight fast inches and ended with a sound, half splat and half thud, against his bare diaphragm.

His mouth sagged open and his eyes rolled half out of sight. He held the door frame in both hands and sagged slowly to his knees. I grabbed him under the arms, kicked the door shut, lugged him over to a chair. He was fighting for each breath.

I had previously noticed a portable radio on the table. I dropped the front open, found some Cuban music and turned it up.

He looked greenish around the mouth. He said, “I didn’t care for that, Burns. You killed any chance you might have had.” He had to talk up to be heard over the music.

I had my personal hunch that he would crack wide open if I could convince him that it was my firm intention to spoil his face for all time. I was banking on his basic vanity.

I put more anger in my voice than I felt. I said, “I’m out of reach of department regulations, Schaegan. I’ve never liked you. I hope you’re real stubborn. I hope it takes you a long, long time to make up your mind to talk. Because I’m going to get a hell of a lot of pleasure out of giving you a face that not even a mother could love.” This time my bluff had to work. If I had marked him, the department would have me filling out forms for the rest of my natural life.

He licked his lips. “You’re crazy, Burns,” he said in a loud scratchy voice. “You people aren’t allowed to get rough.”

“Maybe not in the States. But here it’s something else. Where would you like the first one? Like a nice flat nose, friend?”

I saw his eyes move, saw him look over my shoulder, saw his eyes widen with intense surprise.

I grinned. “Schaegan, you ought to know that you can’t fool me that way. That only works in the movies.”

There was a faint whisper of sound behind me, and I spun endlessly down into a black cavern where Cuban music echoed and re-echoed, faint, distant and unearthly...

It couldn’t have lasted long. Somebody had dragged me over the tile floor. My cheek felt like it was on fire. My head felt like it was made of rough bone fragments floating on the brain jelly.

When I opened my eyes, all colors were jangled and too harsh and the light was too bright.

The man I had seen at the swimming pool was inside the room. I was in a corner beyond Schaegan’s chair. The music still clicked and thumped and rattled. The man was wet. He dripped. His feet made marks on the floor.

He held a gun in his hand. I had a childish wonder that a man in swimming trunks should suddenly appear with a gun.

I sat up and the man made a quick and threatening swing of the barrel toward me. I inched over against the wall, against something that would support my head so that it wouldn’t roll off.

The music had masked the sound of the opening door. My vision seemed too intense. I could see a few dark hairs clinging to a little clot of blood near the end of the gun barrel. I knew what he’d hit me with.

Schaegan was almost yelling, his voice high and shrill. “Stevie, boy, you’ve got it figured all wrong! All wrong, Stevie. You shouldn’t have listened. Wait and let me tell you, Stevie!”

But Stevie had that flat killer-look on his face, that hard cold look of a man who has killed and who has found it to be a good feeling for him and who wants that feeling again.

The door opened behind Stevie the way it had opened behind me, and he didn’t hear it any more than I had. Beth came in that white swim suit with the big straw purse in her hand.

One hand was inside the purse. It came out and I saw the gleam of steel. Her mouth was open, the parted lips shining with wetness, her eyes wide and staring.

She lifted the gun and the little whip-cracks were almost absorbed in the riotous music. Still dulled by the blow on the head, I could only marvel that it was the same piece that had been playing when I turned the radio on.

She fired eight times. Three and three more and then two. Stevie staggered and tried to spin around. As he did so, a long red line appeared across the back of his shoulder. He stood, wavering, and his swaying body concealed the gun from my view.

When he fell he went down slow, first onto his knees and then over onto his face, trying to get his arms out to protect his face from the hard floor, but not quite succeeding.

She lowered the gun just as the music stopped. The gunfire Spanish of the announcer filled the room. I hauled myself to my feet and went to her.

Schaegan sat with his chin on his chest, his hairy arms limp on the arms of the chair. One of the little slugs had penetrated right at the part in the middle of his little mustache. Another had penetrated at the corner of his left eye. I had to kneel in front of him to see the damage. The perspiration on his heavy chest had thinned the blood so that it had spread in a wide, smooth pattern.

I slammed up the front of the portable radio and the silence was like a blow.

She made a weak sound in her throat. “Oh, Burnsie, I didn’t mean to kill Wally too! I saw you there on the floor. I thought that man had killed you. I just pointed the gun and pulled the trigger!”

She collapsed into a chair at the other end of the room.

“That your gun?” I asked.

“Yes. But it can’t be traced, and I haven’t got a license for it and I didn’t declare it. Can we say that man in the swimming trunks had it?”

“I think we can say almost anything. We’ve got a chance to fix the story.”

She stood up and clung tightly to me. She was shaking. She said, “Burnsie, Burnsie. I love you, Burnsie.”

And so we rigged it. The Acapulco police seemed willing to swallow our story. She and I had come back to the cottage to find a man with two guns robbing her husband. He had hit me over the head, and in the struggle he had dropped one gun. He had already shot Schaegan. Beth had snatched up the gun and killed the stranger. He was registered at the hotel as a Mr. Robert Stevens of Kansas City.

There were endless statements to be made to interpreters and endless papers to sign. Beth was congratulated on her quickness and her courage. The necessary arrangements were made to ship the body of Schaegan to his hometown of Lockport, New Jersey, where a maiden aunt still lived.

It took six days to get the formalities over. Enough money was found on Schaegan to pay the expenses of shipping the body. I presented my credentials and received permission to go through his things. There was no clue to the hiding places of the rest of the money stolen from the syndicate.

At the end of the six days, Beth looked considerably less flamboyant. We sat at a table for two and she said:

“I’m hungry for the States, Burnsie. Take me back with you. You’ll have to, I guess. I haven’t the money to make it on my own.”

“Glad to,” I said.

“How far will you take me, Burnsie? All the way to Alexandria? All these last years sound like a bad dream when I try to tell myself they really happened. I’m the girl you knew six years ago, Burnsie.”

“I know you are,” I said gently.

“It’ll be fun to shop in a super market, darling,” she said.

“It’ll be fun to come home to you, princess,” I said. “We’ll forget the last six years.”

There was a bit of trouble with plane connections. She had surprisingly little baggage. Two suitcases and a big floppy, fat, long-legged doll that I remembered as being on her dressing table at Zarro’s. It was thirty-two hours later that, still buzzing with vibration, we stepped out of the plane and waited to go through customs examination at San Antonio.

She held my arm and smiled up at me and said, “New beginning, Burnsie?”

I turned her around and held her hands in mine. I held that ridiculous doll of hers under my right arm. I looked down into her eyes and said softly, “Newer than you might think, princess.”

I winked over her shoulder at Fred Sarazen elbowing his way through the crowd. He saw the way I held her and he caught wise. He reached neatly around her and snapped the handcuffs onto her slim wrists with a hearty click.

She looked up at me and her eyes narrowed. I let go of her hands and stepped back, grinning. Her face twisted into animal lines and her voice was a mad harsh screech as she jumped for my eyes with curved fingers. Bill grabbed her and yanked her back.

As he did so, I ripped open the body of the fat doll. It was there, a very hefty roll of very large sized bills, plus a little collection of safety-deposit-box keys, each tagged with city, bank and signature used.

She looked at me with cold hate in her eyes.

I said, “Cheer up. Maybe you can land a job in the prison laundry. Ten years of that, or probably fifteen and, let me see, you’ll only be about forty-five. That laundry work will put some meat and muscle on you, but you’ll probably lose your tan.”

She called me a string of names so foul that even Fred blushed.

Fred turned her over to his boys who took her away in the sedan. He shoved his hat back. “Burns, my lad, that is a rugged dish. Leave us partake of a beer.”

Over the beer I told him how it had shaped up. Schaegan had been working his way up in the syndicate when she had come into his life. Some of this, of course, was guesswork, but we proved it later. She was good businesswoman. She had advised Schaegan so well that within a year they were the big guns in the syndicate. He grew to defer more and more often to her judgement. She had him right around her little finger. She was the real boss, and stayed in the background. He was front man.

They smelled the tax boys closing in and she developed a plan. They delayed their payoffs until they had accumulated a good package. Some of it was theirs, but a large slice of it was money that had to be paid out if they were to stay in business.

They made a swing around the country while she planted large wads of the money here and there, under assumed names, faked credentials. Apparently Schaegan was too much taken with her to get suspicious of her planting the money where only she could get at it.

Schaegan had been necessary to pull the caper, but his usefulness was at an end. She got in touch with the one called Stevie, and had asked him to come down and do a job on Schaegan. With Schaegan dead, no one would be able to hook her up with the boss job in the syndicate.

Stevie had arrived before I had, and he was waiting around, staying out of Schaegan’s sight, waiting for Beth to set the stage properly. My showing up was a complication. She saw that I might make the best way of getting back to the states and getting out of sight. But Schaegan had to be out of the way. I moved too fast. She sent Stevie up to the cottage to knock me out and kill Schaegan. When she arrived Schaegan wasn’t dead. He was talking. And I was listening.

So she did both jobs at once.

Fred, on the other side of the booth, frowned at me. “It seems to fit, Burns, but how the hell did you catch on?”

“I didn’t get it until Schaegan was dead. And then a few things clicked. The only place Stevie could have gotten the gun was out of that big straw shoulder-bag Beth took down to the pool. And in her Mississippi girlhood she had learned to be a good shot. She forgot that I knew that from our early amusement-park evenings. At a distance of nine feet, she could hardly kill Schaegan by accident.”

“You think she would have married you?”

“Certainly. And one fine day when the heat was off, she would have gone.”

Fred sighed. “I’m always after grubby little characters that don’t wash and speak baritone. What sort of luck do you have to have to go after a dish like Beth?”

I couldn’t answer that. But if Bill had attended the hearing sixty days later, he wouldn’t have been as intrigued.

Beth had gained twenty pounds on the starchy prison food. Her dead-white face was bloated and puffy. She made a full confession in a flat, monotonous voice without once looking toward me.