The Long Wait Read online

  Gardiner gave me that look again so I knew I was right.

  “So after five years I come back. I get spotted and you know about it and being the kind of a guy you are you try to argue Servo into killing me right there. Servo played it cagey and wanted to wait until he saw what I was up to, but you didn’t wait. You got hold of a rifle, followed me to the library, picked out a good gun platform and waited until I came out.

  “That was an easy shot too. I should have known right there. You left the imprints of your elbows and knees in the gravel and I was looking for a short guy, almost like Eddie Packman. I should have been looking for a guy who knew so little about shooting he didn’t know how to hold a rifle and muffed an easy target.”

  He was motionless except for a slight twitching of his nostrils, staring out into the dead of night. I grinned, watching it sink in. His hand was a rigid white claw around the glass.

  “Then there was that little episode outside the Ship ’n Shore. That kept me guessing too. I wasn’t trying to work under cover so it must have been pretty easy for you to keep check on me. Maybe somebody called you from the place, or maybe you were behind me all the way. I don’t know. But I do know this.

  “Before I went out that night I stopped in a barbershop. It’s the place in town where the wheels gather to talk shop over a shave. A barber named Looth Tooth who had a brilliant memory and a gift of gab thought I was going out on a date with my old girl ... Vera West. You must have come in right after me and he mentioned it to you.”

  I stopped and looked at him. The rigidity in his spine had slackened and the glass in his hand seemed to balance normally between his fingers. I cursed the bastard in my mind because I wanted to see his soul age and crawl before my eyes. I wanted to see his guts twist and fear turn his eyeballs into hard little marbles and he wasn’t doing any of those things. He just stared at the night and I thought I saw him smile.

  “Vera, she was another key. She was another one who could spill the beans if she wanted to take the chance of dying for her trouble. You knew I didn’t know the score, but Vera did. You didn’t shoot at me out there that night ... you thought I had Vera in the car and were trying to get her.

  “Gardiner, you should have left the guns to the pros. They’re much better at it. Hell, it was you who was messing things up in your hurry to get rid of me. You sent Lenny and Eddie out to the whore house to see what I was doing with the dame in the first place. Maybe you thought she was a contact between me and Vera. Man, you just didn’t know. That woman didn’t have a thing to do with anything except give me an excuse to lay those two bastards out. She sure came up with some choice morsel after that though.”

  He was smiling. Damn it, the son of a bitch was smiling! It wasn’t on his face so much as it was in back of his eyes. He was standing there laughing at me without hardly moving a muscle. I damn near choked trying to speak when I wanted to rip him inside out instead.

  “But let’s not forget Logan. He was right with me on digging out the dirt. I think he had the whole story at one time there, but he was too drunk to do anything about it. He must have put a lot of things together including Looth Tooth. He was tanked up to his ears when your insurance boys met him. By some accident, or maybe careful planning, you happened to sit in on their conference. Logan had an envelope in his pocket. It had a lot of information about George Wilson.”

  I sucked in on the cigarette, watched him through the smoke. The bottle was half empty. He never stopped staring out the window for a minute.

  “Offhand, I’d say you sneaked that stuff out of his pocket while you were in his car, hoping that he’d think he lost it while he was drunk. You called the police, disguised your voice and tipped them off. That gave Lindsey a reason for nailing me whether I was Johnny McBride or George Wilson. You didn’t care what name I died under.

  “Logan wasn’t so drunk after all. He must have heard the news broadcast and started thinking. I wonder if he remembered that fresh haircut you had and connected things up to Looth Tooth. He sure did something, because in checking back he found out. But like everything else, Logan made a mistake too. He wanted a story. A documented story. He must have phoned you and you met him and Looth Tooth.”

  Then I knew why he was smiling when he should have been praying. I remembered that look on his face when I came in. He had been expecting somebody else and somebody else was out there in the night looking back at us through the window!

  “Logan isn’t dead, Gardiner. He may die and he may not. Someday he’ll be able to tell if you conked him with something before you steered his car over a cliff, or not. If he lives he’ll tell because you won’t be alive to see that he conveniently dies in the hospital. Money can do a lot of things that way.”

  I leaned into the light. Deliberately. I moved a step so the light bathed me from top to bottom. I propped my shoulder against the wall and didn’t move anything except my mouth while I counted the seconds it would take for a good shot with a service revolver to line up the sights on my chest, hold his breath and squeeze the trigger.

  “And I’ll be able to tell how I called you up just as you came home after you did the job. Your housekeeper tried to tell me you were out and I thought it was a stall, but you were out ... on a murder ... and came back in time to take the call. I’m sure we’ll all be glad to tell a jury about it if we have to.”

  I moved as the shot blasted the picture window into a million fragments. For a millionth of a second there was the yellow tongue of flame still licking toward me out of the blackness, a fiery yellow tongue with a red tip and the brighter white of the eye behind it. The gun in my hand bucked once. The room split open with the sound of it and died away to a brief, unholy silence.

  There was no refraction now that the window was gone. The night outside was a warm, friendly thing trying to spew out the hideous face with the hole in it that seemed to stagger toward the gaping window. It staggered out and stopped and the mouth of Tucker bubbled red a moment then dropped out of sight.

  Havis Gardiner hadn’t moved. Not an inch. But the smile was gone and the rigidity was back in his spine and his hand was a talon around the glass again.

  I grinned at his back as if nothing much had happened at all. As if death was part of my life and always had been. As if I didn’t give a damn or a wonder why I was so good with a rod I could pot a guy by instinct who stood twenty feet away in the night.

  Yeah, I went right on talking and this time Gardiner’s soul was crawling in the mud. I dropped the gun in my pocket and spoke to his back.

  “Servo must have cursed you plenty, Gardiner. Servo must have cursed the day he met you because you had him by the short hair and made him do things he knew shouldn’t have happened. It would have been better if you hadn’t done anything at all. I doubt if anything would have come of my little venture at all.

  “No, you got so damn scared it ocurred to you that Harlan might want to team up with you for a squeeze play to get even for having to take a back seat, so you found out where she was staying and sent Eddie Packman out to get her. What Eddie didn’t know was that Harlan shared a room and he didn’t bother to look and see who was in the bed. He just killed the girl and that was all.

  “Harlan knew what happened. She knew that murder was headed her way and couldn’t stop it. She knew it had to come someday and she must have lived with that fear from one hour to the next. She knew that even the photograph she had wouldn’t stop it because you were quite mad by then, so she got that photo to somebody who would take care of it for her and got under cover.

  “Too much whisky and too big a fear killed Harlan. She stood it as long as she could and killed herself. She didn’t realize that she put Troy in a spot all the time. He figured on getting rid of Troy if and when he found it. Maybe even if he didn’t find it, because if he couldn’t nobody else could either. So Troy took off. One of the cops on your pay roll found her.

  “Everybody made a mistake all at once. They didn’t look hard enough for a gun and tho
ught I was a sucker to boot. I was picked for a sucker all along the line when the biggest suckers of all are right here. You especially. It’s done. You’re left. You’re the chief sucker.”

  In a minute now he was going to prove it to himself. I was wondering how long it would take before he made his mind up.

  He had the gun right there beside the bottle now. All the time I had been talking he was fooling around the ice well in the bar set until he had it almost under his hand.

  I dropped the butt in my fingers and fished around for another one in my pocket. I took it out and wedged it between my lips and lit a match very elaborately, staring into the flame I had cupped between my hands.

  Gardiner’s mouth peeled back, pulling his eyes wide open so the insanity that had been there right along and so neatly covered was a naked thing, a living thing that contorted his face into a mask of madness.

  He grabbed, turned and fired faster than I thought he could move and faster than I could get my hand back to my pocket. The bullet slammed into the door beside my head. The shock of the explosion staggered him and he wondered why I didn’t fall.

  The gun came up for a second try and I shot him in the belly a little above the belt and saw the dimple in his coat where the bullet went in. “For Bob Minnow and Mrs. Minnow,” I said.

  I shot him again, a little lower. “For Logan and Looth Tooth.”

  His mouth gaped. He couldn’t get his breath. The gun dropped out of his hand and his fingers ran up his body and covered the two little holes. Slowly, like a stalk bending m the breeze, he went to his knees.

  I shot him in the head. “For Johnny McBride,” I said. There was a scream from inside. I went out the door and the housekeeper was standing there, a grotesque figure in a loose cotton robe. She was right next to the telephone stand. “Don’t bother with a doctor,” I told her. “Call the police. Ask for Captain Lindsey and tell him he can forget about watching his buddy Tucker. He’s dead too. Tell them it was self-defense.”

  It was, wasn’t it?”

  Dawn was sprinkling the sky with gray. The streets were still wet, glistening under the mist that rose from the hot surface. There were no busses in the ports, no mail trucks on the platform and nobody in the station.

  The ticket window was closed.

  I had to slam the door twice to break the lock.

  I went over to the drawer where Nick kept my picture and opened it. I was still there. Under the pictures there were more pictures of me and more legends and they all went back a few years. I closed the door and walked back to the Ford. Now I was even sure of the very last detail.

  Pontiel Road. A white house on a hill half hidden by the fog. Seven steps to the porch and a key in the flowerpot. Dark downstairs, but a shaft of light coming down the stairs. Fourteen steps to the landing and three doors. A spare bedroom on the right. A bath in the middle. A bedroom that smelled of powder and perfume on the left.

  A bottle-blonde sitting in a boudoir chair nervously reading a paper. A face that wasn’t hard as it was when I first saw her.

  A voice that exclaimed breathlessly, “Johnny!”

  “Hello, Wendy.”

  She threw the paper down and ran to me. Her arms went around my neck and she buried her face against my shoulder. Her hair smelled nice. She seemed to see my face for the first time and almost got sick looking at me. Her fingers came up and touched my mouth, my eyes, then my ears. Was it terror or horror in her eyes?

  She said, “Johnny ... what was it?”

  I wasn’t easy on her. I put my hands on her chest and shoved her halfway across the room. Her back slammed into the dresser and she stood there with her hands pressed to her ears not able to believe what was happening.

  “They’re dead, Wendy. Servo, Packman, Gardiner, Harlan, Troy. Hell, everybody’s dead. It’s all over.”

  I think then she realized what I had come for. Her whole body trembled violently but not having the power to move.

  “I should have said, ‘Hello, Vera’ when I came in. That’s the name, isn’t it? Vera West.”

  Her lips got dry and she licked them. It didn’t help any.

  “Smart guy, Nick. He knew the score right along. He knew damn well I wasn’t Johnny McBride and steered me straight to you so you could get back at Servo through me. Revenge, wasn’t it? Like me.”

  I took off my coat and threw it over the chair. The gun in the pocket clunked on the floor. I stripped off my belt and dangled it from my hand. “Take off your clothes, Vera.”

  It was horror I had seen in her eyes. It got bigger and brighter as she watched me swing that belt in a slow arc. “Take off your clothes,” I repeated. “I know I’m right but I want to make sure. See, you’re getting every break.”

  I saw it happen and didn’t know why. The horror faded into defiance and a sob choked her up. Her fingers went to the top button of her blouse and flipped it open. Then the next, and the next until it was wide open. It slipped off one arm, then the other and fell to the carpet too softly to hear.

  “There were a couple of things that never did make sense to me, Vera. They looked good, but really didn’t make sense and I never gave them much thought. One was that quick way I got around to meeting you. Not many people would want a suspected killer to have the run of their house. You didn’t put up much objection at all.”

  The zipper at the side of her skirt hissed metallically. She let go of the hem. It fell at her feet in a circle and stayed there. Automatically her fingers worked the slip up, then her arms crossed and she lifted it over her head. The defiance came out again when she flicked it across the room and stood there in the sheerest black underwear that could be made. Tall, tanned. Calendar legs. Smooth. The curve of her thighs sweeping into her stomach and on up around the proud beauty of her breasts. The flesh rippled with her breathing across the flat of her waist and her hands came up again to the bra, very slowly.

  “You live here on the edge of a wide-open town where a girl like you could rake in a pile yet never once did you go near that town. You work out on the highway under a lot of make-up and a phony name and whenever I wanted you to see the bright lights you turned me down. That’s something I should have thought about. You were afraid to go near town. Afraid somebody might recognize you. You stuck to a nice safe spot waiting for something to happen that would put you in a spot to make Lenny pay off to you and when I came along you grabbed the big chance.”

  The bra had another zipper. It was right down the middle and she opened it with two fingers. Her breasts were alive and vibrant, a lighter tan than the rest of her, standing firm and proud in the excitement that coursed through her body. Her shoulders were wide and square, a sleek taper down to her waist.

  My mouth felt drawn and it wasn’t as easy to speak any longer. “You dug up a lot of information on friend Tucker in a hurry. I bet you and Nick put in many a week collecting all the stuff you had in that package. Instead of looking around like I wanted you to you sat in the beauty parlor and had your hair done to waste time.”

  She was almost ready to do it. My whole body started to crawl. The belt was limp in my hand.

  “You had a lot of handy information about Everybody. You knew about Harlan and made sure I knew it with that ad in the paper and that phone call. You knew right where to steer me for more information. You had a long time to figure out the angles and knew just what was what. All you needed was a strong arm to make the play for you. All I want to know is why, Vera. You won’t die like the rest, but you’ll hurt like hell for a long time and always show the marks. I’d just like to know why. Johnny was such a nice guy.”

  She didn’t answer me. Her forefingers ran under the elastic of the panties, then they unfolded down around her hips. She stepped out of them, held them up, then tossed them casually after the other things. She stood there like a statue, naked except for her shoes, her hands leaning on the dresser behind her.

  I looked at her hungrily, knowing it would be the last time I’d see her so nakedly beautiful. My
head nodded and the belt swung in my hand again. “It was a good gimmick, Vera. A lovely disguise. A natural blonde making herself an unnatural blonde right down to phony dark roots. The hairdresser must have had a hell of a time, but it was a nice trick in case somebody looked too close and thought you were familiar. It would fool anybody.

  “No wonder you didn’t want me to see you in the light without any clothes on.” My mouth felt dry. There was a nasty taste behind my teeth. “It’s been a long wait, Vera. You’ve changed a lot since that picture Logan gave me of you was taken, but you’re still beautiful. Johnny must have suffered every time he thought of you. It’s been one hell of a long wait but you’re finally going to suffer a little bit like Johnny did.”

  I raised the strap.

  The dresser drawer opened and shut fast and she was pointing a gun at me. It was a little gun, but big enough. I had talked myself right into another trap again.

  Her face was a curious mixture of emotion. She pointed the gun at the dressing table beside me. “Look in the top drawer.”

  I was so damned mad I could hardly move. I was nearly ready to let her shoot then knock her teeth out with the barrel and if the same curious emotion that was in her face hadn’t been in her voice too I would have.

  I opened the top drawer. I was looking at myself again. A lot of George Wilsons. “Nick had them too.”

  “Look at the date.”

  At the bottom of each one was a stamped date of delivery with notice to post. The ones on the bottom of the pile went back seven years.

  She watched me until I shut the drawer. “I’ve known about George Wilson ever since Johnny McBride left town. Nick has always had them. It scared me until we learned that George Wilson was wanted long before anything ever happened to Johnny. Now look in the next drawer.”

  My mind was numb. I felt cold all over. A lot of crazy things were going on in my head and I couldn’t understand it. I opened that drawer and emptied an envelope out on the dresser. There was a deed there to the house on Pontiel Road made out to John McBride. There was an army discharge certificate and a letter from the War Department.