Continental Op Stories · The Whosis Kid (7/7)

XII

Huddled close to the wall inside the door, I stowed the silk bag away, and regretted that I hadn’t stayed plastered to the floor behind the Frenchman. This room was dark. It hadn’t been dark when the woman switched off the sitting-room lights. Every room in the apartment had been lighted then. All were dark now. Not knowing who had darkened them, I didn’t like it.

No sounds came from the room I had quit.

The rustle of gently falling rain came from an open window that I couldn’t see, off to one side.

Another sound came from behind me. The muffled tattoo of teeth on teeth.

That cheered me. Inés the scary, of course. She had left the sitting-room in the dark and put out the rest of the lights. Maybe nobody else was behind me.

Breathing quietly through wide-open mouth, I waited. I couldn’t hunt for the woman in the dark without making noises. Maurois and the Kid had strewn furniture and parts of furniture everywhere. I wished I knew if she was holding a gun. I didn’t want to have her spraying me.

Not knowing, I waited where I was.

Her teeth clicked on for minutes.

Something moved in the sitting-room. A gun thundered.

“Inés!” I hissed toward the chattering teeth.

No answer. Furniture scraped in the sitting-room. Two guns went off together. A groaning broke out.

“I’ve got the stuff,” I whispered under cover of the groaning.

That brought an answer.

“Jerry! Ah, come here to me!”

The groans went on, but fainter, in the other room. I crawled toward the woman’s voice. I went on hands and knees, bumping as carefully as possible against things. I couldn’t see anything. Midway, I put a hand down on a soggy bundle of fur⁠—the late purple Frana. I went on.

Inés touched my shoulder with an eager hand.

“Give them to me,” were her first words.

I grinned at her in the dark, patted her hand, found her head, and put my mouth to her ear.

“Let’s get back in the bedroom,” I breathed, paying no attention to her request for the loot. “The Kid will be coming.” I didn’t doubt that he had bested Big Chin. “We can handle him better in the bedroom.”

I wanted to receive him in a room with only one door.

She led me⁠—both of us on hands and knees⁠—to the bedroom. I did what thinking seemed necessary as we crawled. The Kid couldn’t know yet how the Frenchman and I had come out. If he guessed, he would guess that the Frenchman had survived. He would be likely to put me in the chump class with Billie, and think the Frenchman could handle me. The chances were that he had got Big Chin, and knew it by now. It was black as black in the sitting-room, but he must know by now that he was the only living thing there.

He blocked the only exit from the apartment. He would think, then, that Inés and Maurois were still alive in it, with the spoils. What would he do about it? There was no pretense of partnership now. That had gone with the lights. The Kid was after the stones. The Kid was after them alone.

I’m no wizard at guessing the other guy’s next move. But my idea was that the Kid would be on his way after us, soon. He knew⁠—he must know⁠—that the police were coming; but I had him doped as crazy enough to disregard the police until they appeared. He’d figure that there would be only a couple of them⁠—prepared for nothing more violent than a drinking-party. He could handle them⁠—or he would think he could. Meanwhile, he would come after the stones.

The woman and I reached the bedroom, the room farthest back in the apartment, a room with only one door. I heard her fumbling with the door, trying to close it. I couldn’t see, but I got my foot in the way.

“Leave it open,” I whispered.

I didn’t want to shut the Kid out. I wanted to take him in.

On my belly, I crawled back to the door, felt for my watch, and propped it on the sill, in the angle between door and frame. I wriggled back from it until I was six or eight feet away, looking diagonally across the open doorway at the watch’s luminous dial.

The phosphorescent numbers could not be seen from the other side of the door. They faced me. Anybody who came through the door⁠—unless he jumped⁠—must, if only for a split-second, put some part of himself between me and the watch.

On my belly, my gun cocked, its butt steady on the floor, I waited for the faint light to be blotted out.

I waited a time. Pessimism: perhaps he wasn’t coming; perhaps I would have to go after him; perhaps he would run out, and I would lose him after all my trouble.

Inés, beside me, breathed quaveringly in my ear, and shivered.

“Don’t touch me,” I growled at her as she tried to cuddle against me.

She was shaking my arm.

Glass broke in the next room.

Silence.

The luminous patches on the watch burnt my eyes. I couldn’t afford to blink. A foot could pass the dial while I was blinking. I couldn’t afford to blink, but I had to blink. I blinked. I couldn’t tell whether something had passed the watch or not. I had to blink again. Tried to hold my eyes stiffly opened. Failed. I almost shot at the third blink. I could have sworn something had gone between me and the watch.

The Kid, whatever he was up to, made no sound.

The dark woman began to sob beside me. Throat noises that could guide bullets.

I lumped her with my eyes and cursed the lot⁠—not aloud, but from the heart.

My eyes smarted. Moisture filmed them. I blinked it away, losing sight of the watch for precious instants. The butt of my gun was slimy with my hand’s sweat. I was thoroughly uncomfortable, inside and out.

Gunpowder burned at my face.

A screaming maniac of a woman was crawling all over me.

My bullet hit nothing lower than the ceiling.

I flung, maybe kicked, the woman off, and snaked backward. She moaned somewhere to one side. I couldn’t see the Kid⁠—couldn’t hear him. The watch was visible again, farther away. A rustling.

The watch vanished.

I fired at it.

Two points of light near the floor gave out fire and thunder.

My gun-barrel as close to the floor as I could hold it, I fired between those points. Twice.

Twin flames struck at me again.

My right hand went numb. My left took the gun. I sped two more bullets on their way. That left one in my gun.

I don’t know what I did with it. My head filled up with funny notions. There wasn’t any room. There wasn’t any darkness. There wasn’t anything.⁠ ⁠…

I opened my eyes in dim light. I was on my back. Beside me the dark woman knelt, shivering and sniffling. Her hands were busy⁠—in my clothes.

One of them came out of my vest with the jewel-bag.

Coming to life, I grabbed her arm. She squealed as if I were a stirring corpse. I got the bag again.

“Give them back, Jerry,” she wailed, trying frantically to pull my fingers loose. “They are my things. Give them!”

Sitting up, I looked around.

Beside me lay a shattered bedside lamp, whose fall⁠—caused by carelessness with my feet, or one of the Kid’s bullets⁠—had K.O.’d me. Across the room, face down, arms spread in a crucified posture, the Whosis Kid sprawled. He was dead.

From the front of the apartment⁠—almost indistinguishable from the throbbing in my head⁠—came the pounding of heavy blows. The police were kicking down the unlocked door.

The woman went quiet. I whipped my head around. The knife stung my cheek⁠—put a slit in the lapel of my coat. I took it away from her.

There was no sense to this. The police were already here. I humored her, pretending a sudden coming to full consciousness.

“Oh, it’s you!” I said. “Here they are.”

I handed her the silk bag of jewels just as the first policeman came into the room.

XIII

I didn’t see Inés again before she was taken back East to be hit with a life-sentence in the Massachusetts big house. Neither of the policemen who crashed into her apartment that night knew me. The woman and I were separated before I ran into anyone who did know me, which gave me an opportunity to arrange that she would not be tipped off to my identity. The most difficult part of the performance was to keep myself out of the newspapers, since I had to tell the coroner’s jury about the deaths of Billie, Big Chin, Maurois and the Whosis Kid. But I managed it. So far as I know, the dark woman still thinks I am Jerry Young, the bootlegger.

The Old Man talked to her before she left San Francisco. Fitting together what he got from her and what the Boston branch got, the history runs like this:

A Boston jeweler named Tunnicliffe had a trusted employee named Binder. Binder fell in with a dark woman named Inés Almad. The dark woman, in turn, had a couple of shifty friends⁠—a Frenchman named Maurois, and a native of Boston whose name was either Carey or Cory, but who was better known as the Whosis Kid. Out of that sort of combination almost anything was more than likely to come.

What came was a scheme. The faithful Binder⁠—part of whose duties it was to open the shop in the morning and close it at night⁠—was to pick out the richest of the unset stones bought for the holiday trade, carry them off with him one evening, and turn them over to Inés. She was to turn them into money.

To cover up Binder’s theft, the Whosis Kid and the Frenchman were to rob the jeweler’s shop immediately after the door was opened the following morning. Binder and the porter⁠—who would not notice the absence of the most valuable pieces from the stock⁠—would be the only ones in the shop. The robbers would take whatever they could get. In addition to their pickings, they were to be paid two hundred and fifty dollars apiece, and in case either was caught later, Binder could be counted on not to identify them.

That was the scheme as Binder knew it. There were angles he didn’t suspect.

Between Inés, Maurois and the Kid there was another agreement. She was to leave for Chicago with the stones as soon as Binder gave them to her, and wait there for Maurois and the Kid. She and the Frenchman would have been satisfied to run off and let Binder hold the sack. The Whosis Kid insisted that the holdup go through as planned, and that the foolish Binder be killed. Binder knew too much about them, the Kid said, and he would squawk his head off as soon as he learned he had been double-crossed.

The Kid had his way, and he had shot Binder.

Then had come the sweet mess of quadruple and sextuple crossing that had led all three into calamity: the woman’s private agreements with the Kid and Maurois⁠—to meet one in St. Louis and the other in New Orleans⁠—and her flight alone with the loot to San Francisco.

Billie was an innocent bystander⁠—or almost. A lumber-handler Inés had run into somewhere, and picked up as a sort of cushion against the rough spots along the rocky road she traveled.