Killers Are My Meat Read online

  He had glanced at the check too casually, had dropped a ten-spot on it also too casually, had smiled and said:

  “Well, how’s it strike you, Drum? I told you I ran into one would knock you on your duff, didn’t I?”

  “I’d like to help you, Mr. Sprayregan,” I said. “But the answer’s no.”

  “You’re kidding,” he said in a shocked voice.

  I shook my head.

  “No?” Sprayregan gasped. “Then just what the hell’s wrong with you?” He had a big, rugged face with brush-cut gray hair as thick as the bristles on a military brush, cold gray eyes with too much blood in the whites, and a jutting chin with dewlaps beginning to sprout below it.

  “Maybe I’m all tied up with a case,” I said.

  “Maybe you’re yellow.”

  I stood up and pushed my chair back. “Well, I’ll see you around the divorce courts.”

  He stood up too. He was a big man getting heavy around the middle. “Jesus, I’m sorry for blowing up at you, Drum. Maybe you want to think about it for a while. You don’t have to give me your answer right away.”

  We went outside through the Statler lobby together. It was one of the first warm days of May and the government secretaries out for their lunch and the sun were showing more flesh than they had since last September. We walked up the block toward Sixteenth Street, where my De Soto was parked.

  “Drop you somewhere?” I asked.

  He nodded and got into the car, giving me the address of a rundown office building on E Street. Then he said, his voice rising to a thin bleat of self-pity, “At least tell me why, will you please? I got B.O. or something? What’s the matter, don’t you like to earn a few grand for playing delivery boy? Or is it on account of the boys say I’m slipping? Well for crying out loud, which it is?”

  I made a left turn in the heavy traffic near Farragut Square and drove south on Seventeenth Street past the White House Executive Offices. “I’ll give you some advice,” I said. “You’ve got a client. Write him a report, send him a bill, and forget it.”

  Sprayregan mopped sweat off the back of his thick neck with a handkerchief. It wasn’t that hot. “You think I’m nuts?” he said. “You think I’d chuck it all out the window because the first dumb shamus I take it to pulls a lot of holier-than-thou crap on me? Well, your name ain’t the only one in the Yellow Pages, wise guy.”

  “If you’re so hot about it,” I asked, “why don’t you do it yourself?”

  At first he didn’t say anything. Then very softly he said: “I can’t. I wish to Christ I could but I can’t. So now you know.”

  “You’re scared. Is that it?”

  He called one of us a name under his breath and sat there staring straight ahead, a big man who somehow had lost whatever had once been inside of him to make him tough.

  “Let me get it straight,” I said. “Your client’s a rich old bird, now retired, who used to be a big shot in the administration. He hired you to do a routine make on a girl his son was playing around with. You did the make and—”

  “Christ, I did everything but sleep with her.”

  “—decided the girl, whose identity would knock me on my duff, as you put it, would pay more for what you found than your client would.”

  “The girl nothing. Sure, she’d give her right eye to keep what I’ve got to herself. But it’s her husband I’m thinking of. He’d have to play ball, or else. His wife’s been denting every crisp white sheet in Washington with her fanny, and I can prove it.”

  “Go ahead and prove it,” I said, pulling up in front of his office building on E Street, “but count me out.”

  “I suppose your hands are lily white.”

  “White enough for me.”

  I watched him lean out of the car and slide his backside across the seat. He wanted to say something else, then changed his mind, slammed the door so hard that the De Soto shook, and stomped in anger across the sidewalk to the rundown office building. I sat for a minute thinking of the big suite of rooms he’d had on New York Avenue a couple of years back, and the string of six dicks working for him, and the tie-in with the Burns Agency, and feeling a little sorry for him, and wondering if losing his guts had made him slip or slipping had made him lose his guts. Then I drove over to F Street and parked my car half a block from the Treasury Building and started thinking reluctantly of the paperwork piling up in my own one-man agency.

  3.

  A WOMAN was seated in the waiting room, flipping through the pages of Time without reading anything. When I came in she put the magazine down and said, “You must be Drum.” She looked around at the bare walls of the waiting room, without the testimonials from J. Edgar Hoover or anyone else, at the identical sagging leather chair across from the one she was seated on, at the door to my inner office. “I sure expected a bigger layout,” she added, her voice bitter and spiteful.

  “You can always try the Pinkertons down the block,” I suggested. “They have armored cars and everything.”

  She showed me her teeth in a reluctant little smile. She was on the wrong side of thirty by a couple of lean, hard years and had bags under her eyes and a furrowed forehead to prove it. Except for that she had a pretty face and the kind of slightly plump high-busted’ figure that wears very well until forty or so and then sags overnight.

  “I guess I deserved that,” she said. “But after the buildup my husband gave you, I expected—”

  “Who would your husband be?”

  “Gil Sprayregan. You saw him?”

  “Yeah, I saw him.”

  “You’re going to team up with him?” she asked with absolutely no expression on her face.

  “No, I’m not, Mrs. Sprayregan.”

  “Oh, thank God, Mr. Drum! Gil’s so confused lately, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Was it hard talking him out of it?”

  “I didn’t talk him out of anything. How the hell could I talk him out of it?”

  “But Gil thinks the world of you. He’s always talking how you’re the fair-haired boy of all the private dicks in D.C.”

  I grinned. “He didn’t exactly show it at lunch.”

  “Well he’s envious too. You can’t blame him. He was once up where you are. And you’re young, too. That’s what makes Gil so bitter, all the young ones taking his business. He’s still a good sleuth, Mr. Drum, if only—if only—”

  All of a sudden she started to cry. I led her inside and helped her sit down in the client chair, then opened the deep drawer of the desk and took out the bottle of Jack Daniels. I poured her a stiff one in a paper cup. She drank it without looking at it and probably without tasting it.

  “Please,” she said, “I beg you. Please. Please stop him. Oh, please. They’ll kill him. I know it. They’ll kill him.”

  She raised her left fist to her mouth and bit the knuckles. Her lipstick left a mark like a crimson gash. “All right,” I said. “Try and pull yourself together. Who’ll kill him?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh God no, I couldn’t tell you that. How could I tell you that?”

  “I don’t know how you could tell me that or how you could tell me anything. I also don’t know how I could stop your husband. Just what do you want me to do?”

  She looked at me and laughed, the sound tearing from her throat like a cry of anguish. “It was six years ago, wasn’t it?” she said, unexpectedly calm again, her face showing nothing but the tears streaking her pancake makeup. “Or don’t you want to remember?”

  “I remember, Mrs. Sprayregan.”

  “Do you? I didn’t think you would.”

  “I said I remember.”

  “Go ahead. I want to hear you say it.”

  “Gil Sprayregan gave me my first case when I thought I never was going to get one. We split a fee. It was a pretty big case and it gave me a pretty fair rep which I probably didn’t deserve. I’ve never split a fee since.”

  “So now you’re going to let him get himself killed. Just like that.”

  “I admired your
husband for not bringing that up at lunch, Mrs. Sprayregan. I’d honestly like to help you, but if you refuse to tell me—”

  “Wasn’t that convenient for you? Just how sanctimonious can you get?” she cried.

  I waited. There was nothing I could say. If her purpose in coming to my office was to make me feel like a first-class heel, she’d done a splendid job. But if she really wanted me to help her husband, she hadn’t given me anything to help him with.

  “They’re going out of town,” she said. “They’re leaving the country in a few days. If you can stall Gil for a few days, you’ll save his life.”

  “Good. That’s something. I’ll try to stall him.”

  “I have very little money of my own. We’re in debt. I’ll do anything you want. Anything.”

  “I’ll try to stall him.”

  She thanked me, we shook hands, and she got out of there. I dialed her husband’s office. An answering service girl told me he had gone for the day and I left a message for him to call me. I looked at the bottle of Jack Daniels and wondered if that was Gil Sprayregan’s trouble. He had needed both hands to raise his first cocktail to his lips at lunch.

  The middle of that night, the telephone rang.

  I groped for it in the darkness, knocking the luminous-dialed clock off my night table. I picked the clock up and saw it was almost two in the morning, then jerked the telephone receiver off its cradle and made a sound into it.

  “This Mr. Drum?” a woman’s wide-awake voice asked. “Mr. Chester Drum?”

  I made another sound into the telephone, trying without success to place the voice.

  “I’m terribly sorry to disturb you at this hour, Mr. Drum, but it’s important. I’m Mrs. Stewart Hoffman Varley, Jr. Would you know my husband on sight?”

  That got me wide awake. Mrs. Stewart Hoffman Varley, Jr’s father-in-law was the recently retired Secretary of State. The younger Varley and his wife stood well up in the District pecking order. I would know her husband on sight, all right, and I said so.

  “Fine, Mr. Drum. At the moment my husband is at the Anacostia Tavern, a roadhouse on Good Hope Road across the Maryland border. You know the place?”

  “No. I know Good Hope Road, though. I can find it.”

  “Then that’s fine too. Would you bring Mr. Varley home for us, please?”

  “That’s it?” I said. “That’s the job?”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “I gather Mr. Varley’s got a load on. Why don’t you fetch him yourself? Or surely there must be a family friend could do the job?”

  In an amused voice Mrs. Varley said, “I don’t fancy myself a match for the hoodlums waiting outside the Anacostia to bat my husband’s brains out. I don’t know any family friends who are, either.”

  “You know this how?”

  “Mr. Varley called and told me. He sounded amused. It was an interesting problem, he said, but he had drunk too much to find its solution.”

  “So do you,” I said.

  “So do I what?”

  “Sound amused. Why not call the cops?”

  Suddenly her voice went cold on me. “Really, Mr. Drum, if we had been able to notify the police, do you think I would have bothered you? Or aren’t you awake yet?”

  “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

  “Really, Mr. Drum.”

  “Well you’re not exactly tearing your hair out.”

  “I see what you mean, but then you don’t know Mr. Varley. When you live long enough with him you come to realize he’s indestructible. You also come to view the world as he does, with detached amusement. But that’s neither here nor there. You’ll do it?”

  I said I would do it.

  “I meant it about those hoodlums, Mr. Drum. You’d better go armed.”

  I told her the idea had occurred to me. She mentioned the name of a Senator who thought I was a good P.I. and a discreet one. We hung up without discussing price.

  While I dressed I wondered why this was suddenly the day to save wayward husbands. In the morning it had looked like any other day, but then you never know.…

  The red neon of the Anacostia Tavern blurred out of the southern Maryland fog about a mile and a half on the Maryland side of the border along Good Hope Road. It was a big barn of a place catering to District dwellers who liked their drinking late and in public places and to Virginians who liked their drinking any way at all as long as they didn’t have to bring the bottle along and pay for setups.

  I pulled into the parking lot at a little before three. A dozen cars sat out there on the gravel, beaded over with condensed moisture. Fog had painted the windows of the Anacostia tavern gray too. If any hoodlums were waiting out in the dark and the fog for Mr. Stewart Hoffman Varley, Jr., I didn’t spot them.

  Inside, a juke wailed its preference for tender love, a half-dozen teen-agers from Virginia who would have to wait a few more years for hard liquor on their side of the state line slouched and petted in a row of booths, and Stewart Hoffman Varley, Jr., leaned the elbows of a two-hundred-dollar tailormade suit on the surface of a long bar.

  “…. C.B.I. during the war,” the stout, bald barman was telling Varley. “You don’t have to say a word about those Indians, no sir.”

  Varley was a tall, lean lad in his middle thirties, with a grave, gaunt face mirrored behind the bar. He turned swiftly as I moved over next to him at the bar.

  “Drum’s the name,” I said, taking out my wallet and showing him the photostat of my P.I. license. His shoulders relaxed and the fingers of his big right hand, which had made a fist around a highball glass, opened. “Your wife thought it would be a good idea if I saw you home.”

  He looked surprised for a moment. I wondered if I would have trouble with him, but he smiled slowly and said, “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” He waved a hand at the barman. “So long, Max. Taking off now.”

  “So long, Mr. Smith. Too bad the lady friend didn’t show. She’s nice.”

  “Better shut your face, Max,” Varley said, still smiling. “You see a station wagon outside, Drum?”

  “Yeah. But with diplomat plates.”

  “That’s them.”

  “Indians,” Max said. “Nonviolence. Hah!”

  “Listen,” I told Varley. “You wait here. I’ll drive my car right out front. It’s a De Soto convertible with the top up. Give me about a minute, then come out running. Right?”

  “I don’t know about the running bit,” he said. “I guess I could walk a straight line if my life depended on it.”

  He didn’t look drunk and he didn’t talk drunk, but some guys can hold their liquor like that. “All right, then I’ll come in and get you.”

  I went outside. Running footsteps crunched across the gravel and a car door slammed. I looked at the station wagon with the Washington DPL plates. No lights and a dead engine.

  I got into the De Soto and drove it to the narrow sidewalk in front of the Anacostia. Before I could go in after Varley he came out squinting at my headlights. I punched the light switch and shouted for him to jump in. The lights had pinned him like a butterfly specimen to the double doors of the Anacostia.

  Shoe leather came crunching across the gravel again as I slid across the seat and opened the door for Varley. He didn’t make a move toward the car. He stood there not doing anything but waiting, so I got the crazy notion that he wanted to wait. Then two dark figures came running past the car. The one in front was a little fellow that moved like greased lightning. He went right up to Varley and Varley just stood there and then the little fellow whipped his left fist into Varley’s stomach and as Varley sat down the little fellow grunted and kicked him in the head.

  I jumped out of the car just as the Anacostia’s double doors swung open and. Max rushed out in a streaming yellow rectangle of light. Max swung a sawed-off bat but the little fellow blurred under it, moving with incredible speed, and kicked Varley in the head again. Then the big fellow who had done nothing till then closed with Max.
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  I got a mugging grip on the little fellow. He stamped on my instep with his heel. His head jerked to one side and down. He bit my wrist and flailed back at me with his right arm. That was a mistake. I shoved my own right arm under his and brought it up behind his neck. His feet drummed. Gravel flew. I did the same thing with my left arm. Then I pulled him back against me and started to lift him. His feet ceased their drumming.

  “Cut out the struggling,” I said, “or I’ll break your neck.”

  He stopped writhing and twisting. Holding half of the Nelson on his neck with my left arm, I clawed the Magnum from my shoulder holster and shoved the muzzle against his ear.

  “Hey!” Max hollered just then. The big fellow broke away from him and ran off into the darkness and the ground fog. Max took half a dozen lumbering strides after him before pulling up short.

  The whole business had only taken a minute or two. Varley crouched vomiting on the narrow sidewalk in front of the Anacostia while Max went inside and came out with a wet towel. “Some nursemaid you turned out to be,” Max told me as he patted Varley’s face with the towel.

  I took the little fellow over to the De Soto and told him to sit down behind the wheel. Then I got a pair of handcuffs from the glove compartment and used one of the bracelets around his right wrist and one around the curve of the steering wheel. He sat staring straight ahead as if I weren’t there. He had light brown skin and a very handsome and very arrogant face. He wore a tennis sweater with a red-and-blue V over white wool. He looked as much like a hoodlum as I looked like Lady Godiva. I searched him and found a clasp knife in his right-hand pants pocket but decided he couldn’t reach it the way he was handcuffed. Then I took the key out of the ignition and returned to Varley.

  Max helped me get him into the rear of the De Soto. Then Max went back to the teen-aged petting party in the Anacostia and I climbed in the front seat of the car alongside the handsome, brown-skinned and arrogant-looking man handcuffed to the wheel.

  “You drive,” I said. “The Varley house in Georgetown.”

  He sneered and started the car. I held the revolver on the seat alongside my right leg and watched him. He had small, fine-boned hands. In profile his face looked like a boy’s. I didn’t think he was twenty-five years old.