The man addressed as Hench said: “Listen, picklepuss—” and heaved forward with his right foot in a hard stamp.
The carroty man’s left foot didn’t wait to be stamped on. The lean body moved back quickly and the thrown bunch of keys hit the floor behind, and clanked against the door of Apartment 204. The carroty man’s right hand made a sweeping movement and came up with a woven leather blackjack.
Hench said: “Yah!” and took two big handfuls of air in his two hairy hands, closed the hands into fists and swung hard at nothing.
The carroty man hit him on the top of his head and the girl screamed again and threw a glass of liquor in her boy friend’s face. Whether because it was safe to do it now or because she made an honest mistake, I couldn’t tell.
Hench turned blindly with his face dripping, stumbled and ran across the floor in a lurch that threatened to land him on his nose at every step. The bed was down and tumbled. Hench made the bed on one knee and plunged a hand under the pillow.
I said: “Look out—gun.”
“I can fade that too,” the carroty man said between his teeth and slid his right hand, empty now, under his open vest.
Hench was down on both knees. He came up on one and turned and there was a short black gun in his right hand and he was staring down at it, not holding it by the grip at all, holding it flat on his palm.
“Drop it!” the carroty man’s voice said tightly and he went on into the room.
The blond promptly jumped on his back and wound her long green arms around his neck, yelling lustily. The carroty man staggered and swore and waved his gun around.
“Get him, Del!” the blond screamed. “Get him good!” Hench, one hand on the bed and one foot on the floor, both knees doubled, right hand holding the black gun flat on his palm, eyes staring down at it, pushed himself slowly to his feet and growled deep in his throat:
“This ain’t my gun.”
I relieved the carroty man of the gun that was not doing him any good and stepped around him, leaving him to shake the blond off his back as best he could. A door banged down the hallway and steps came along toward us.
I said: “Drop it, Hench.”
He looked up at me, puzzled dark eyes suddenly sober. “It ain’t my gun,” he said and held it out flat. “Mine’s a Colt .32—belly gun.”
I took the gun off his hand. He made no effort to stop me. He sat down on the bed, rubbed the top of his head slowly, and screwed his face up in difficult thought. “Where the hell—” his voice trailed off and he shook his head and winced.
I sniffed the gun. It had been fired. I sprang the magazine out and counted the bullets through the small holes in the side. There were six. With one in the magazine, that made seven. The gun was a Colt .32, automatic, eight shot. It had been fired. If it had not been reloaded, one shot had been fired from it.
The carroty man had the blond off his back now. He had thrown her into a chair and was wiping a scratch on his cheek. His green eyes were baleful.
“Better get some law,” I said. “A shot has been fired from this gun and it’s about time you found out there’s a dead man in the apartment across the hall.”
Hench looked up at me stupidly and said in a quiet, reasonable voice: “Brother, that simply ain’t my gun.”
The blond sobbed in a rather theatrical manner and showed me an open mouth twisted with misery and ham acting. The carroty man went softly out of the door.
10
“Shot in the throat with a medium caliber gun and a soft-nosed bullet,” Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze said. “A gun like this and bullets like is in here.” He danced the gun on his hand, the gun Hench had said was not his gun. “Bullet ranged upwards and probably hit the back of the skull. Still inside his head. The man’s dead about two hours. Hands and face cold, but body still warm. No rigor. Was sapped with something hard before being shot. Likely with a gun butt. All that mean anything to you boys and girls?”
The newspaper he was sitting on rustled. He took his hat off and mopped his face and the top of his almost bald head. A fringe of light colored hair around the crown was damp and dark with sweat. He put his hat back on, a flat-crowned panama, burned dark by the sun. Not this year’s hat, and probably not last year’s.
He was a big man, rather paunchy, wearing brown and white shoes and sloppy socks and white trousers with thin black stripes, an open neck shirt showing some ginger-colored hair at the top of his chest, and a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage. He would be about fifty years old and the only thing about him that very much suggested cop was the calm, unwinking unwavering stare of his prominent pale blue eyes, a stare that had no thought of being rude, but that anybody but a cop would feel to be rude. Below his eyes across the top of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose there was a wide path of freckles, like a mine field on a war map.
We were sitting in Hench’s apartment and the door was shut. Hench had his shirt on and he was absently tying a tie with thick blunt fingers that trembled. The girl was lying on the bed. She had a green wrap-around thing twisted about her head, a purse by her side and a short squirrel coat across her feet. Her mouth was a little open and her face was drained and shocked.
Hench said thickly: “If the idea is the guy was shot with the gun under the pillow, okay. Seems like he might have been. It ain’t my gun and nothing you boys can think up is going to make me say it’s my gun.”
“Assuming that to be so,” Breeze said, “how come? Somebody swiped your gun and left this one. When, how, what kind of gun was yours?”
“We went out about three-thirty or so to get something to eat at the hash house around the corner,” Hench said. “You can check that. We must have left the door unlocked. We were kind of hitting the bottle a little. I guess we were pretty noisy. We had the ball game going on the radio. I guess we shut it off when we went out. I’m not
