He turned and stared out the window. A few lights met his gaze. But his mind was seeing something more; the dingy part of Pratt Street, the milling crowds on East Baltimore, the newsboy and bur-le-cue barker and penny arcade crowd. Johns Hopkins and life and death.
Giovani and his kid Tony. Tony had died, sure, but every man had to die, and Tony might have died in the electric chair, or lived bitterly in and out of grey prison walls. And for all her wealth Marcellene Grayson could have died in the gutter, along with a poverty-stricken, uneducated pack of ratty little guys like Mouser Cline.
He saw a red-headed rookie named Donnavan, polishing a nutty kind of gold with his life’s blood, and rows of white crosses over men who’d been fighting side by side with Donnavan even though oceans and thousands of miles had separated them.
He saw Inspector MacLaren out in the night, heard the aged man’s words: It’s the way you got born, Brennan, the way your brain works and your body moves. And Mouser had said, You’re murdering me…
He could take no credit for having these things Mouser didn’t have, either. He’d just got born that way. It wasn’t as if he’d created something with his own hands to have and to hold exclusively.
Donnavan had tried to give, but hadn’t had it, only his life. And Brennan knew in that moment that a man who had those things, those workings of his brain and movements of his body, had no right to withhold them. No more than he did the air mankind breathed.
And if he withheld those things—what was it MacLaren had said? Here’s hoping you’ll have a good time living with yourself…
He would have a rotten time, Brennan knew now. Wondering how many Marcellene Graysons were sliding in the gutter; how many Giovanis were knowing their boys were going to the electric chair; how many Mouser Clines he had condemned to death and how many Mondellos were riding roughshod through life… And knowing, living with himself in the long years ahead, that the Donnavans had bled for nothing.
Sure, he couldn’t do much in one lifetime, and he himself would die one of these days. But there’d be others born his way, lots of them, if he helped to make it possible now.
He turned slowly from the window. His gaze met Jean’s. “These tickets—now that it’s here—I’d make a lousy insurance salesman, hon.”
“I know you would,” she said. Then her arms were about him, clutching him very tightly. She was laughing, and tears were streaming down her cheeks. “I’m alive again—”
He said, “You know, it’s funny. But I feel the same way myself.
KILLER BE GOOD
Originally published in New Detective Magazine, December 1952.
I was murdered at exactly eleven o’clock on a Monday evening. I am able to recall the time exactly because the tall clock in the foyer was striking the hour as I shoved the papers to the back of the desk and started up the long, dark stairway to the upper hall.
There were many things on my mind that night. I wondered where Vicky was, for one thing. She’d said at dinner that she was playing bridge at Thelma Grigsby’s tonight. Was it okay with me? Sure, I said. I had some work to do anyway. She’d pouted prettily, her hair like spun gold about her face in the soft candle light in the dining room—Vicky always liked dinner by candlelight.
“If only you could be a husband and an important man at the same time, Doug,” she’d said. “All this work and no play—”
“Gives mama spending money,” I said.
After dinner I went in the study. For a moment I stood looking at the desk. I didn’t want to sit down to it and face the mass of papers on it. I was tired, and I had that pain across my abdomen again. Maybe I was developing an ulcer. Was it worth it, the work and strain required to keep a few steps ahead of the rest?
Then I pushed the smothered feeling aside, ripped the cellophane off a fresh package of cigarettes, and sat at the cluttered desk.
I heard Vicky pass through the hallway and without quite realizing it I listened until I heard the car start in the driveway outside. The motor raced until it sounded as if it would throw a rod. Vicky had never been able to get a motor started smoothly.
I heard the motor whisper away to an idle and the liquid, golden sound of her voice came through the open study window that overlooked the driveway.
“Mr. Shoffner, we’ll cut some glads for the house tomorrow morning.”
I heard the old, tired voice of Wendel Shoffner answer, “Yes, mum.” He was our gardener and general handy man. He’d been with us a month now, a tired, sagging man with watery blue eyes and baggy pants.
The car engine raced again as Vicky left the driveway. Shoffner’s slow footsteps crunched by the window as he went to his room over the garage. I was still too taken with lassitude to get to work. Could we afford a glad garden and a man to keep it and the grounds up? Of course we couldn’t. You don’t live that way on the pay of an investigator attached to the office of the district attorney. But there are ways. You don’t have to act in an illegal manner, either. You just have to stretch a point here and there. Politics, some people call it.
I told myself that I had to get rid of this feeling of depression, the nagging sense that I was caged and on a treadmill. I had to shake loose the insinuation in my mind that it was all for nothing. Life was still sweet, very much so.
I wanted to live a very long time that night.
Lew Whitfield phoned me about
