The McBain Brief Read online

  She walked into the office then, and my whole life changed. I took one look at the blonde hair piled high on her head. My eyes dropped to the clean sweep of her throat, to the figure filling out the green silk dress. When she lifted her green eyes to meet mine, I almost drowned in their fathomless depths. I gripped the desk top and asked, “Yes?”

  “Mr. Sledge?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is Melinda Jones,” she said.

  “Yes, Miss Jones.”

  “Oh, please call me Agnes.”

  “Agnes?”

  “Yes. All my friends call me Agnes. I . . . I was hoping we could be friends.”

  “What’s your problem, Agnes?” I asked.

  “My husband.”

  “He’s giving you trouble?”

  “Well, yes, in a way.”

  “Stepping out on you?”

  “Well, no.”

  “What then?”

  “Well, he’s dead.”

  I sighed in relief. “Good,” I said. “What’s the problem?”

  “He left me ten million dollars. Some of his friends think the money belongs to them. It’s not fair, really. Just because they were in on the bank job Percy . . .”

  “Percy?”

  “My husband. Percy did kill the bank guards, and it was he who crashed through the road block, injuring twelve policemen. The money was rightfully his.”

  “Of course,” I said. “No doubt about it. And these scum want it?”

  “Yes. Oh, Mr. Sledge, I need help so desperately. Please say you’ll help me. Please, please. I beg you. I’ll do anything, anything.”

  “Anything?”

  Her eyes narrowed, and she wet her lips with a sharp, pink tongue. Her voice dropped to a husky whisper. “Anything,” she said.

  I belted her over the left eye.

  That was the beginning, and now they were all outside, all twenty-six of them, waiting to close in, waiting to drop down like the venomous vultures they were. But they hadn’t counted on the .45 in my fist, and they hadn’t counted on the slow anger that had been building up inside me, boiling over like a black brew, filling my mind, filling my body, poisoning my liver and my bile, quickening my heart, putting a throb in my appendix, tightening the pectoral muscles on my chest, girding my loins. They hadn’t counted on the kill lust that raged through my veins. They hadn’t counted on the hammer that kept pounding one word over and over again in my skull: kill, kill, kill!

  They were all outside waiting, and I had to get them. We were inside, and they knew it, so I did the only thing any sensible person would have done under the circumstances.

  I set fire to the house.

  I piled rags and empty crates and furniture and fish in the basement, and then I soaked them with gasoline. I touched a match, and the flames leaped up, lapping at the wooden crossbeams, eating away at the undersides of the first-floor boards.

  Melinda was close to me. I cupped her chin in one hand, and then tapped her lightly with the .45, just bruising her. We listened to the flames crackling in the basement, and I whispered, “That fish smells good.”

  And then all hell broke loose, just the way I had planned it. They stormed the house, twenty-six strong. I threw open the front door and I stood there with the .45 in my mitt, and I shouted, “Come on, you rats. Come and get it!”

  Three men appeared on the walk and I fired low, and I fired fast. The first man took two in the stomach, and he bent over and died. The second man took two in the stomach, and he bent over and died, too. I hit the third man in the chest, and I swore as he died peacefully.

  “Agnes,” I yelled, “there’s a submachine gun in the closet. Get it! And bring the hand grenades and the mortar shells.”

  “Yes, Dud,” she murmured.

  I kept firing. Three down, four down, five down. I reloaded, and they kept coming up the walk and I kept cutting them down. And then Melinda came back with the ammunition. I gathered up a batch of hand grenades, stuck four of them in my mouth and pulled the pins. I grabbed two in each hand and lobbed them out on the walk and six more of the rats were blown to their reward.

  I watched the bodies come down to the pavement, and I took a quick count of arms and legs. It had been seven of the rats.

  “Seven and five is thirteen,” I told Melinda. “That leaves eleven more.”

  Melinda did some quick arithmetic. “Twelve more,” she said.

  I cut loose with the sub-machine gun. Kill, kill, my brain screamed. I swung it back and forth over the lawn, and they dropped like flies. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Nine more to go. Seventeen, eighteen, and they kept dying, and the blood ran red on the grass, and the flames licked at my back. They all ran for cover, and there was nothing to cut down, so I concentrated on a clump of weeds near the barn, shooting fast bursts into it. Pretty soon there was no more weeds, and the barn was a skeleton against the deepening dusk. I grabbed a mortar and tossed it into the yard, just for kicks. Pretty soon, there was no more barn.

  Behind me, I heard Melinda scream. I whirled. Her clothes were aflame, and I seized her roughly and threw her to the floor. I almost lost my mind, and I almost forgot all about the nine guys still out there. I tore myself away from her, and I ran into the yard with two mortar shells in my mouth, the sub-machine gun in my right hand, and the .45 in my left. I shook my head, and the mortar shells flew, and three more of the rats were dead and gone. I fired a burst with the machine gun, and another two dropped. There were four or five left now, and I picked them off one by one with the .45. The yard ran red with blood, and the bodies lay like twisted sticks. I sighed heavily and walked back to the house—because the worst part still lay ahead of me.

  I found her in the bedroom.

  She had taken a quick sponge bath, and her body gleamed like dull ivory in the gathering darkness.

  “All right, Agnes,” I said. “It’s all over.”

  “What do you mean, Dud?”

  “The whole mess, Agnes. Everything, from start to finish. A big hoax. A big plot to sucker Dudley Sledge. Well, no one suckers Sledge. No one.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Dud.”

  “You don’t know, huh? You don’t know what I mean? I mean the phony story about the bank job, and the ten million dollars your husband left you.”

  “He did leave it to me, Dudley.”

  “No, Agnes. That was all a lie. Every bit of it. I’m only sorry I had to kill twenty-six bird-watchers before I realized the truth.”

  “You’re wrong, Dudley,” she said. “Dead wrong.”

  “No, baby. I’m right, and that’s the pity of it because I love you, and I know what I have to do now.”

  “Dudley . . .” she started.

  “No, Agnes. Don’t try to sway me. I know you stole that ten million from the Washington Heights Bird Watchers Society. You invented that other story because you wanted someone with a gun, someone who would keep them away from you. Well, twenty-six people have paid . . . and now one more has to pay.”

  She clipped two earrings to her delicate ears, snapped a bracelet onto her wrist, dabbed some lipstick onto her wide mouth. She was fully dressed now, dressed the way she’d been the first time in my office, the first time I’d slugged her, the time I knew I was hopelessly in love with her.

  She took a step toward me, and I raised the .45.

  “Kiss me, Dudley,” she said.

  I kissed her, all right. I shot her right in the stomach.

  She fell to the floor, a look of incredible ecstasy in her eyes, and when I turned around I realized she wasn’t reaching for the mortar shell on the table behind me. Nor was she reaching for the submachine gun that rested in the corner near the table. She was reaching for the ten million bucks.

  There were tears in my eyes. “I guess that’s the least I can do for you, Agnes,” I said. “It was what you wanted, even in death.”

  So I took the ten million bucks, and I bought a case of Irish whiskey.

  Chinese Puzzle

 
The girl slumped at the desk just inside the entrance doorway of the small office. The phone lay uncradled, just the way she’d dropped it. An open pad of telephone numbers rested just beyond reach of her lifeless left hand.

  The legend on the frosted glass door read Gotham Lobster Company. The same legend was repeated on the long row of windows facing Columbus Avenue, and the sun glared hotly through those windows, casting the name of the company onto the wooden floor in shadowed black.

  Mr. Godrow, President of Gotham Lobster, stood before those windows now. He was a big man with rounded shoulders and a heavy paunch. He wore a gray linen jacket over his suit pants, and the pocket of the jacket was stitched with the word Gotham. He tried to keep his meaty hands from fluttering, but he wasn’t good at pretending. The hands wandered restlessly, and then exploded in a gesture of impatience.

  “Well, aren’t you going to do something?” he demanded.

  “We just got here, Mr. Godrow,” I said. “Give us a little . . .”

  “The police are supposed to be so good,” he said petulantly. “This girl drops dead in my office and all you do is stand around and look. Is this supposed to be a sightseeing tour?”

  I didn’t answer him. I looked at Donny, and Donny looked back at me, and then we turned our attention to the dead girl. Her left arm was stretched out across the top of the small desk, and her body was arched crookedly, with her head resting on the arm. Long black hair spilled over her face, but it could not hide the contorted, hideously locked grin on her mouth. She wore a tight silk dress, slit on either side in the Oriental fashion, buttoned to the throat. The dress had pulled back over a portion of her right thigh, revealing a roll-gartered stocking. The tight line of her panties was clearly visible through the thin silk of her dress. The dead girl was Chinese, but her lips and face were blue.

  “Suppose you tell us what happened, Mr. Godrow,” I said.

  “Freddie can tell you,” Godrow answered. “Freddie was sitting closer to her.”

  “Who’s Freddie?”

  “My boy,” Godrow said.

  “Your son?”

  “No, I haven’t any children. My boy. He works for me.”

  “Where is he now, sir?”

  “I sent him down for some coffee. After I called you.” Godrow paused, and then reluctantly said, “I didn’t think you’d get here so quickly.”

  “Score one for the Police Department,” Donny murmured.

  “Well, you fill us in until he gets back, will you?” I said.

  “All right,” Godrow answered. He said everything grudgingly, as if he resented our presence in his office, as if this whole business of dead bodies lying around should never have been allowed to happen in his office. “What do you want to know?”

  “What did the girl do here?” Donny asked.

  “She made telephone calls.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Freddie does that, too, but he also runs the addressing machine. Freddie . . .”

  “Maybe you’d better explain your operation a little,” I said.

  “I sell lobsters,” Godrow said.

  “From this office?” Donny asked skeptically.

  “We take the orders from this office.” Godrow explained, warming up a little. It was amazing the way they always warmed up when they began discussing their work. “My plant is in Boothbay Harbor, Maine.”

  “I see.”

  “We take the orders here, and then the lobsters are shipped down from Maine, alive of course.”

  “I like lobsters,” Donny said. “Especially lobster tails.”

  “Those are not lobsters,” Godrow said indignantly. “Those are crawfish. African rock lobster. There’s a big difference.”

  “Who do you sell to, Mr. Godrow?” I asked.

  “Restaurants. That’s why Mary worked for me.”

  “Is that the girl’s name? Mary?”

  “Yes, Mary Chang. You see, we do a lot of business with Chinese restaurants. Lobster Cantonese, you know, like that. They buy the Jumbos usually, in half-barrel quantities for the most part. They’re good steady customers.”

  “And Miss Chang called these Chinese restaurants, is that right?”

  “Yes. I found it more effective that way. She spoke several Chinese dialects, and she inspired confidence, I suppose. At any rate, she got me more orders than any Occidental who ever held the job.”

  “And Freddie? What does he do?”

  “He calls the American restaurants. We call them every morning. Not all of them each morning, of course, but those we feel are ready to reorder. We give them quotations, and we hope they’ll place orders. We try to keep our quotes low. For example, our Jumbos today were going for . . .”

  “How much did Miss Chang receive for her duties, Mr. Godrow?”

  “She got a good salary.”

  “How much?”

  “Why? What difference does it make?”

  “It might be important, Mr. Godrow. How much?”

  “A hundred and twenty-five a week, plus a dollar commission on each barrel order from a new customer.” Godrow paused. “Those are good wages, Mr. . . .”

  “Parker, Detective Ralph Parker.”

  “Those are good wages, Mr. Parker.” He paused again. “Much more than my competitors are paying.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. Godrow, but I’ll take your word for it. Now . . .”

  A shadow fell across the floor, and Godrow looked up and said, “Ah, Freddie, it’s about time.”

  I turned to the door, expecting to find a sixteen-year-old kid maybe. Freddie was not sixteen, nor was he twenty-six. He was closer to thirty-six, and he was a thin man with sparse hair and a narrow mouth. He wore a rumpled tweed suit and a stained knitted tie.

  “This is my boy,” Godrow said. “Freddie, this is Detective Parker and . . .”

  “Katz,” Donny said. “Donald Katz.”

  “How do you do?” Freddie said.

  “Since you’re here,” I said, “suppose you tell us what happened this morning, Freddie.”

  “Mr. Godrow’s coffee . . .” Freddie started apologetically.

  “Yes, yes, my coffee,” Godrow said. Freddie brought it to his desk, put it down, and then fished into his pocket for some silver which he deposited alongside the paper container. Godrow counted the change meticulously, and then took the lid from the container and dropped in one lump of sugar. He opened his top drawer and put the remaining lump of sugar into a small jar there.

  “What happened this morning, Freddie?” I asked.

  “Well, I got in at about nine, or a little before,” he said.

  “Were you here then, Mr. Godrow?”

  “No. I didn’t come in until nine-thirty or so.”

  “I see. Go on, Freddie.”

  “Mary . . . Miss Chang was here. I said good morning to her, and then we got down to work.”

  “I like my people to start work right away,” Godrow said. “No nonsense.”

  “Was Miss Chang all right when you came in, Freddie?”

  “Yes. Well, that is . . . she was complaining of a stiff neck, and she seemed to be very jumpy, but she started making her phone calls, so I guess she was all right.”

  “Was she drinking anything?”

  “Sir?”

  “Was she drinking anything?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did she drink anything all the while you were here?”

  “No, sir. I didn’t see her, at least.”

  “I see.” I looked around the office and said, “Three phones here, is that right?”

  “Yes,” Godrow answered. “One extension for each of us. You know how they work. You push a button on the face of the instrument, and that’s the line you’re on. We can all talk simultaneously that way, on different lines.”

  “I know how it works,” I said. “What happened then, Freddie?”

  “We kept calling, that’s all. Mr. Godrow came in about nine-thirty, like he said, and we kept on calling while
he changed to his office jacket.”

  “I like to wear this jacket in the office,” Godrow explained. “Makes me feel as if I’m ready for the day’s work, you know.”

  “Also saves wear and tear on your suit jacket,” Donny said.

  Godrow seemed about to say something, but I beat him to the punch. “Did you notice anything unusual about Miss Chang’s behavior, Mr. Godrow?”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact. As Freddie told you, she was quite jumpy. I dropped a book at one point, and she almost leaped out of her chair.”

  “Did you see her drink anything?”

  “No.”

  “All right, Freddie, what happened after Mr. Godrow came in?”

  “Well, Mary started making another phone call. This was at about nine-thirty-five. She was behaving very peculiarly by this time. She was twitching and well . . . she was having . . . well, like spasms. I asked her if she was all right, and she flinched when I spoke, and then she went right on with her call. I remember the time because I started a call at about the same time. You see, we have to get our orders in the morning if Boothbay is to deliver the next morning. That means we’re racing against the clock, sort of, so you learn to keep your eyes on it. Well, I picked up my phone and started dialing, and then Mary started talking Chinese to someone on her phone. She sits at the desk right next to mine, you see, and I hear everything she says.”

  “Do you know who she was calling?”

  “No. She always dials . . . dialed . . . the numbers and then started talking right off in Chinese. She called all the Chinese restau . . .”

  “Yes, I know. Go on.”

  “Well, she was talking on her phone, and I was talking on mine, and all of a sudden she said in English, ‘No, why?’ “

  “She said this in English?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you hear this, Mr. Godrow?”

  “No. My desk is rather far away, over here near the windows. But I heard what she said next. I couldn’t miss hearing that. She yelled it out loud.”

  “What was that, sir?”

  “She said ‘Kill me? No! No!’ “

  “What happened then?”

  “Well,” Freddie said, “I was still on the phone. I looked up, and I didn’t know what was going on. Mary started to shove her chair back, and then she began . . . shaking all over . . . like . . . like . . .”