Loot for the Unlucky Lady

Bald-headed Harry, the smoking automatic in his hand, stepped from the kitchen into the small living room. Wesley Gibb, a full head shorter, waddled along behind him, a beaming smile on his suety face.

Gloria, the towel still clasped in her hands, stared down at the broken face of Al Barnard.

“Al!” she said. “Al!” And it was the tone of voice that a woman would use to an obstinate, yet well-loved child who has fallen and who stubbornly refuses to get up.

Steve sagged with reaction. Wesley Gibb pushed by Harry, walked over to the small table at the end of the couch and picked up the box, sewed into gay oilcloth in a checked pattern. “Come home to daddy,” he said.

“For once I’m glad to see you, Harry,” Steve said, trying to smile. He walked over to pick up the heavy revolver.

“Ah-ah!” Harry said. “Mustn’t touch.”

Steve turned and glared at him.

A glance he couldn’t decipher passed between Harry and Wesley Gibb. Harry moved in close, slapped his left armpit, his jacket pockets.

Gloria still stood and looked down at the dead face of Al Barnard. Gibb stepped to the front door, strolled out onto the shallow porch and looked up and down the street.

He came back in and said, “This lovely neighborhood is undisturbed, Harry.”

Steve said, his voice sounding curiously hollow: “Gibb, you’ve got your dough. There it is. Count it and take out my slice and I’ll be on my way.”

“How did it happen, Harry?” Gibb asked. Harry still held the automatic.

Harry frowned. “The big rod belongs to Barnard. I guess his prints are on it pretty good. Use a handkerchief and they won’t smear too bad. I guess Barnard knocks off the girl and Stevie and we come in just in time to gun him down. Okay?”

“She might scream if I give it to him first, Mr. Gibb. And shooting women is worth a little bonus. I’m saving you some money, Mr. Gibb. Say a five-thousand bonus?”

Gibb shrugged. “Okay, Harry.”

Gloria turned and looked at Harry and at Wesley Gibb, actually seeing them for the first time. An odd little frown appeared between her eyebrows. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked. There was no hysteria in her voice. Only bewilderment at something she couldn’t understand. “You killed Al. Are you going to kill me too?” The towel was still clutched in her right hand.

Her answer was the way Harry licked his lips and coughed nervously. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket with his left hand, glanced toward the revolver which still lay ten inches from Barnard’s dead hand.

Her mouth opened and she gasped. She put the back of her hand to her head, reeled helplessly a few steps toward Steve and then fainted against him. Instinctively he caught her, and though her body was limp, her eyes closed, her right hand, shielded by her body, thrust the towel at Steve.

He comprehended immediately and gently lowered her to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Harry make two quick strides, snatch up the revolver, the handkerchief between his hand and the metal.

As he lowered her to the floor, his hand flashed up under the folds of the beach towel, grasped the butt of the Belgian automatic, his thumb pushing the safety down. He swiveled it toward Harry, and pulled the trigger back and held it there for a moment.

The five shots were an almost continual roar, the automatic bucking in his hand. Harry coughed, a high shallow cough.

Steve twitched the towel off the gun, stepped across Harry’s body and said, “I still don’t like your methods, Gibb.”

Gibb put his fat hands up, palms toward Steve as though, with pudgy fingers, he could halt death. “No, Stevie.”

Steve cut the minute pressure on the trigger. “Why not?”

“It... it was bad judgment. I would have stopped him.”

“What’s the story?”

Gibb licked his suddenly pale lips. “Like this,” he said eagerly, “Harry got big ideas. He saw the money here. He was going to kill all of us and get the cash.”

“There’s some paper and I see a pen in your pocket. Sit down and write what I tell you to write: I, Wesley Gibb, do hereby confess that on the seventh day of January I gave my employee, Harry Something-or-other, orders to kill both Stephen Harris, licensed investigator, and Gloria Gerald, friend of Albert Barnard, who would have been a witness to the killing of Harris. It was my intention to thus avoid paying Harris his promised portion of monies recovered by him from the said Albert Barnard, who stole the money from my crooked gambling house, The Candor Club, Long Island. Harris killed my employee a few seconds before he was to have been shot. Now sign your name.”

Gibb humbly signed, held out the note to Harris.

Steve looked at her and saw that in Al Barnard’s last few words, he had killed her love for him. Steve saw that she was essentially decent, and he remembered what she had been willing to do to prevent Al from killing him, remembered how she had gotten his gun back to him.

He said, “Will you witness this, Miss Gerald? It goes into my safety deposit box as soon as I take you back to New York. I think we can keep the law off you.”