A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

He, meanwhile, was chopping the edge of his hand down on the telephone-brackets, trying to get a connection, and then shouting hoarsely when he had: “Get the police! Tell them to send someone up here quick! There’s been a fatal accident! My name’s Jacquard, I’m on the third floor, Boulevard Suchet, number—”

And on the floor lay the gown that had caught every eye at the party only a little while before, a shroud now, with a little red-rimmed hole in it like a pair of puckered lips parted in astonishment at what had happened.

The girl came out of the prefecture of police with the bedraggled air of a kitten that has been soaked in the rain. A moment later, after he had shaken hands with the lawyers (it had taken three of them to obtain her temporary release from custody), Boniface came out after her.

“So this is how you played around with me,” he said through grimly clenched teeth as he hustled her over to his waiting car. “Behind my back the whole time, with this young sprout— If poor Fab hadn’t thrown a monkey-wrench into the whole thing by showing up there tonight, you would have gone on fooling me like this indefinitely, I suppose—”

The Clean Fight

He got out of a taxi anti went into the hotel, about ten on the evening this thing starts. He went up to the desk and asked: “What room’s Mike in?”

“Mike who?” the clerk answered evasively.

Terry showed him 2941. “This Mike.”

“He’s in the corner-suite up on the fifth,” the clerk said then. He knew all about what was going on, but he figured it wasn’t any of his business. He wasn’t the one it was all about; that made the difference.

Terry rode up there and rapped respectfully on the door. Affectionately, almost. Not like he rapped on other doors sometimes.

Another detective opened it immediately, as if he’d been waiting for him to show up and take over. They simply nodded, like men so used to working together they don’t waste time on spoken greetings.

“How’s he doing?” Terry asked, the way you would ask about God.

“He slept a little. Then we watched the games on t. v. He sent down for another bottle.” He looked down and gave a remorseful head-shake. “Try to hold him down on it a little if you ran.”

When men are tender, no tenderness of women can match theirs. The tenderness of women is in small things, in their fingers, in their hands. The tenderness of men is more like a flame of devotion, burning fiercely toward some leader, some idol, some chief. It occurs mostly in groups, such as armies in wartime, and in that other war-just as much a war as any — between the police and their eternal adversaries.

“It can’t be done, you ought to know that by now,” Terry grunted, irritable at what he took to be the other’s obtuseness.

“But how long can he last, the rate he’s going? Day and night, night and day. Even the doctors can’t do anything with him when he goes into the hospital for his check-ups. He sends out for bottles, and lies awake all night cursing and banging his fist against the bed in his frustration and his fury.”

“You know what he wants as well as I do. That’s what’s eating him. When he gets it, he’ll quit drinking and cut out raging, and be a different man.” Terry’s jaw was stony with hate. Second-hand hate at the start, but now his own fully as much as Mike’s and all the rest of them. The thwarted hate of the pack when the rabbit has eluded them and yet stays there in full sight, unreachable and immune. And when the pack happens to be the police, unaccustomed to such defiance, this can be a terrible thing. Far better to lose the game than to win it. For it can’t be won anyway. One thousand years of human cleverness and ingenuity, the best brains of the race, have gone into the making of the police, the punishers, the avengers, and one man alone cannot stand against them, no matter how wealthy he is, no matter how adroit or basically non-criminal or legalistically unpunishable. “No, he won’t die. Not until this is taken care of for him. This is what’s keeping him alive.”

“I want to see him get it,” the other man said, looking down. “I want to see him die in peace, die happy, if he has to die.”

“We all do,” Terry said reverently. “He was the greatest one of them all, in his day. They don’t come like him any more. I love him like a father. I love him better than a father. I want him to get what he wants. I want to give it to him. I want to be the one.” He pushed his thumb backward against his chest. “Me.” There was a light almost of fanaticism in his eyes, of dumb devotion to a chieftain.

The bedroom-door suddenly gave an audio-illusion of buckling outward toward them along its middle, as when a flattening blast takes place inside a shut-up room. Then the shattering cause of it roared through. A voice, human but like that of twenty bulls.

“Will you stop standing there gossiping like a pair of washwomen the two of you! Terrance the Cleary! I want you in here with me!”