5 Detective Novels Magazine — page 42: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

42 with my shoulders hunched and the au- tomatic straight out in front of me. The shadow jerked erect. It meta- morphosed into a wide-shouldered man with the top of his head above the roof of the convertible. Just as I fanned the trigger, he disappeared behind the car. The gun went off like a thunderclap. The bullet clanged off the back of the car and spanged into the far side of the garage. J lunged toward the car, wondering why he hadn’t fired that .22. As I round- ed the rear end, I saw him leaning through the open front door of the car. He jerked at something on the front seat and then he turned, and there was a snarl on his lips and hate in his eyes. “You bastard!” he snarled, and jerked his right arm from the car. ITTLE things dropped into the right slots in my mind and were suddenly as clear as the lake’s name. I had no time for thought. I was too far from him to jump him and beat him over the head with the automatic in my hand. But I waited, just to be sure. When his hand came out of the car, when the .22 gun started to swing towards me, I stood flat-footed, rooted to the floor of the garage. Then I pulled the trigger. It was him or me. I know that little automatic and how to handle it. The bullet caught him dead center in the chest. His chin jerked up, and the curse died on his lips. He fell backward against the open door. His shoulders slid slowly down the door and his right arm dropped tiredly. Then he slid down to the concrete and lay there, unmoving, his fingers relaxed on the butt of that deadly .22 gun. He was dead by the time I reached him. I leaned across the front seat. Joe Macon still slumped forward with his head buried on the wheel. He didn’t need the beret any more. He would no longer go scooting about the country- side, lolling at the wheel, with one hand draped across the top of the front seat. FIVE DETECTIVE NOVELS MAGAZINE The .22 had finished Joe Macon. There was a hole just behind his right ear, a hole. the width of a pencil. The killer on the floor had finished off his third corpse and left the .22 in Joe Macon’s right hand. | I shivered as if I had the ague. I put the automatic away in my right coat pocket. I knew, now, why the killer on the floor had had to retreat to the front seat of the Cadillac before he could fire. He had killed Joe Macon, arranged the gun in his hand to make it look like suicide, to leave a murder trail that would lead straight to Joe Macon and far, far away from the deadly killer on the floor. I bent over the man on the floor. I didn’t know him, but I knew his last name, maybe. He carried a wallet in his hip pocket. The words on his driver’s license told me that he was George M. Watrous, was Kitty Watrous’ husband, fresh back from Los Angeles. So he had killed his pretty, young wife—probably for playing around with Joe Macon or to silence her lips. He had killed An- thony .Y. Norelli in Joe Macon’s Pater- son apartment so there’d be only two cuts—or one— into the roll that Joe car- ried. The roll of bills, twenty-one thousand dollars worth? The diamonds that Mrs. Macon hadn’t bothered to check against the inventory in her safe? The diamonds, six of them, were in Watrous’ coat pocket. They glittered, for a moment, in the palm of my hand, then I put them back into his pocket where the police could find them. The roll of bills were in Watrous’ other coat pocket. I stood there in the bright light from the Cadillac’s head- lights and counted the bills with numb fingers. All one-hundred and five-hun- dred-dollar bills, totaling twenty-one thousand dollars. A lot of money, Dar- ling. More than you’ll ever see in one roll again. A lot of temptation, Darling, isn’t it? I thought back, trying to drop all the little things into the right slots. When COnNICLO® (C S