“You didn’t run away again,” I said.
“No. I knew it would be no use. A week later, after I’d cooked supper one night, she called to me to bring her food to the living room so she could finish watching one of her interminable TV programs. A strangely nerveless feeling came over me. I found myself with the knife in my hand. Funny…when the knife disappeared in her, she gave a little squeak for all the world like a fat, gray mouse.”
We rode a little in silence. We were almost at the prison now. Hervie Taylor sat at his window to catch the first sight of it.
“Relax,” I said. “There are no whips or sadistic guards in displace.”
“Relax?” He turned to look at me. “But I understand it’s a model prison. Weekly movies, a machine shop, a prison brass band, a nice library, even a baseball team.”
“That’s right,” I said.
His reply was brief, simple, and straight to the point. A beatific smile brought out the boyishness in his face. He looked out the window toward the distant grey walls of the prison. “Freedom,” he said.
MONEY, MURDER, OR LOVE
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1961.
The call came in shortly before I was due to go off duty at 7 A.M.
York stuck his head in the squad room. “We got a job, Nick. A kid just found a stiff in an alley off Kilgo Street. ”
We went downstairs to the garage and got in one of the black, unmarked cars. As I drove across the city to Kilgo Street, York kept up a barrage of talk. He’s been a cop almost as long as I have, twelve years, but he’s never got used to the idea of death. He talks to cover his nervousness.
He talked about his wife and kid, as if really interested in selling me on the idea of marriage. He talked about the weather and of Sergeant Delaney’s gall stone operation. He talked of anything except the violation of a human life.
The city was awakening, and for this brief moment it felt vital and clean, qualities that never extended to the street we were headed for.
By the time we reached Kilgo Street, York had run out of extraneous talk. “Well,” he muttered, as I stopped in the mouth of the alley, “I guess he can’t be much. Some bum. Who else would get himself killed in a Kilgo district alley?”
We got out of the car. The beat cop—a heavy, porcine guy intended by birth, reflexes and mentality never to rise far—came forward to meet us.
Hemmed in by scabby brick walls, a Kilgo Street alley is a particularly unpleasant place to die.
The beat cop grimaced. “He’s back there.”
“Touch anything?”
“No, sir.”
“That kid find him?” I asked, pointing toward the skinny youth pressed against the wall.
“Yes, sir. He was short-cutting it through the alley, on his way to work at the produce market.”
I saw York had that pale look about him. So I said, “Take over with the kid.”
“Sure, Nick,” he said quickly.
In our society, few people find their natural place. York should have been an insurance salesman. Instead, he’d needed a job years ago and the civil exams had been open. It’s the little fates that put us where we are.
I walked back to the dead man and stood looking down at him. He was not big. He was slender, wiry, with a narrow, cruel face. I guessed that he had been arrogant and vicious when he hadn’t had his way. He looked to be about thirty-five.
The strangest thing about him was the fact that he didn’t belong in that alley. His clothing—suit, shoes, shirt, tie—had cost about what I draw for working a month.
I kneeled beside him. He’d been shot under the heart. Most of the bleeding had been internal. He hadn’t lived long after the small bore bullet had struck him.
I touched his pockets, turned him slightly. His wallet had been jerked out of the hip pocket of his trousers. The wallet, soft, hand-tooled calfskin, was ripped. It had been cleaned of money. There was a driver’s license, a club membership card, a diner’s card, and a picture remaining in the wallet.
I had to look at the picture first. Even in that pocket-sized image, she was that kind of woman.
I stood up, holding the wallet York had been wrong. This was a big one. The dead man was Willard Ainsley, according to the driver’s license. And Willard Ainsley was a financier and playboy. Worth so much, if you believed the newspapers, that it was a remote, unreal figure to a man like me. Seven or eight million. No one knew for sure. In that category, it seemed to me that a million more or less wasn’t terribly important.
The gun that had killed Willard Ainsley was nowhere around. There were two parallel lines in the cinders of the alley, marks his heels had made. He’d been killed elsewhere and dragged into the alley.
On the sidewalk, the beat cop was breaking up a gathering crowd. A siren growled the approach of the meat wagon and lab boys.
* * * *
Ainsley had lived with his wife in the penthouse of the Cortez, the sumptuous apartment hotel overlooking the lake.
I was on overtime, but I wasn’t sleepy. The doorman didn’t want to admit me. The desk man endured the shock of having a policeman on the premises. I pocketed my identification, told him I was seeing Mrs. Ainsley, and asked him not to announce me. For York it would have been an ordeal. I didn’t much care.
On the top floor, I crossed the wide, carpeted hall and knocked on Ainsley’s door. It opened as I
