The Shaggy Dog and Other Murders Page 15

  Carl Harlow grinned. "No two-fisted drinking, huh? Well, it's my left side, and I guess I can make out with one hand. Gosh, I could use a drink right now! My nerves are playing ring-around-the-rosy!"

  After the clubhouse and the inevitable explanations and not too many drinks, because they'd have to go to the police station, Carl found himself talking about it to Captain Wunderly.

  By that time, Carl was sure it had been a kid with a twenty-two and it sounded silly to admit that he'd been scared enough to lie there doggo for nearly half an hour. But Captain Wunderly, just the same, sent a couple of men out to look around.

  And then Carl and Doc stopped in at a bar and had a few, and Carl wanted to keep on going. But Doc Millard insisted that Carl was drunk already—although it was only dusk—and that he should go home and sleep it off. Es-pecially because he was wounded, and that made him a patient.

  Carl Harlow had argued, and then capitulated.

  He really was feeling quite a bit woozy by the time he got home. He'd forgotten that Elsie wouldn't be there, but the decanter of rye on his bureau was still there. After a while, there wasn't much in it.

  But that didn't matter. It was quite dark outside and he was getting sleepy. He remembered

  about the clock and the cat, and decided he'd better take care of them, just in case he dropped off and stayed asleep.

  He couldn't find the cat. He stuck his head out of the back door and called, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty—" and was pleased as Punch that he could still articulate those rather difficult syllables. But no cat.

  Lots of shadows on the lawn, though. Dark shadows.

  Those shadows might have worried him, perhaps, had he noticed the hole in his golf bag. An inconspicuous hole near the bottom, but definitely the size of a thirty-thirty rather than a twenty-two. And kids don't hunt squirrels or birds with thirty-thirty rifles. Old Lady Nemesis, may-be-Yes, still on the job, this gal Nemesis. For twenty awful minutes during the afternoon, Carl Harlow had felt her presence. Carl Harlow, though, had forgotten. Nemesis hadn't.

  It was Carl Harlow who shut the back door, but it might have been Nemesis who left it unlocked. Not because murder pauses long before a locked door, but its being unlocked would make things easier.

  Carl went up the stairs, and the staircase was pitching under him like the deck of a wallowing ship. The drinks were getting at him now. This was the unpleasant stage; it had been pleasant up to now, and pretty soon he'd feel better again. This was the in-between period—when things went around and stood not upon the order of their going.

  He got to his room with something of the feeling of a storm-tossed ship reaching a safe harbor, a harbor in which the angry waves still lapped, but less high, less deadly. Where the rocking of the ship becomes almost a friendly thing, like the rocking of a cradle.

  Being home. It's a lot different from being out in the open of a field, with no cover and bullets whizzing around you. He sank into the Morris chair and for a while seemed to live over again those terrible minutes of dread out there under the dead-blue sky. The horrible open sky. There on the flat trap of the ground, held by gravity as a fly is held upon flypaper.

  And after a while he shook his head and remembered that it had been a kid with a twenty-two.

  Getting to feel better now. He got up, holding on to the arm of the chair until he was sure he could walk without lurching, and crossed over to the bureau. He had another drink; it was really wonderful rye, smooth and mellow and golden.

  That left enough for only one more drink, and he'd want it the minute he waked up, if he dropped off. He poured it carefully into the glass and put the glass on the little table near the chair.

  He looked around the room, feeling there was something else he'd ought to do. He stared at the typewriter a while. He almost had an impulse to sit down at it and write out how it felt to be shot at. Maybe sell it somewhere, to a magazine. Oh, to hell with it!

  Sleepy, and the Morris chair was too comfortable. His head went back and his eyelids weighed a stone apiece, and there was a gentle glow in the room and in the whole house. He could see it through his closed eyelids. He could—or thought he could—hear the cat walking in the back yard—so plainly that he almost got up and went down to call it again at the back door.

  Then, of course, it came to him that he was dreaming.

  One damn thing after another. The cat was on the roof. It came down the chimney and mewed in the grate, and pointed a rifle at him and said, in Doc Millard's voice, "Now this isn't going to hurt much," and pulled the trigger and the gun seemed to shoot backward and shot the cat back up the chimney.

  And Bill Owen was there, and saying, "Carl, Tommy Pryor tells me the bank is out of money and can't give you your five million dollars, and so Roger Keefe and I have decided to give you the agency free. All yours, Carl, and I'll work for you if you want me to, and there are new orders coming in like wildfire and you'll be able to sell out for a billion in a year."

  And then Bill Owen's friendly smile seemed gradually to freeze into a gargoyle grimace, and he pulled a rifle out of his pocket, a toy rifle, and said, "Twenty-three, skiddoo," and it was Keefe who had the rifle, grinning like a fiend, and he told Carl he was going to use it for a mashie to make a hole in one, and wanted Carl to guess in one what. And then he wasn't there any more.

  It was all very strange and confusing. Elsie was there, too, and she said, "Why do you drink so

  much, Carl?" and he looked at her owlishly and wanted to say that he was sorry, but that she just didn't understand, and that he loved her and was sorry. And she told him that she loved him, anyway, and she danced around the room.

  And sat down at his typewriter and wrote something on it, with the keys going clickety-click like a twenty-two but faster. Just like when she'd been a stenographer at the agency so long ago, and he couldn't move out of the chair and take her in his arms and tell her what an awful fool he was. And she said, "Good-by, Carl, and don't forget your eye-opener when you wake up."

  And then there was Doc Millard again, pointing to the fireplace and explaining that "eternal" was an overworked word and that the Eternity Burial Vault Company was now making their vaults disguised as fireplaces, so the worms wouldn't know—and would he change the copy to explain that, but to be very careful not to let it out to the worms.

  "It's just a scratch," he added... But then it was different. It seemed later, a long time later, because there was a two-o'clock feeling in the air, and the door was opening, and a man was walking into the room, and this was real.

  The man was standing there, and Carl Harlow opened his eyes and looked at him without having to look through his eyelids this time, and it was Tom Pryor. His friend. Really there, with a pistol in his hand.

  Carl said thickly, "T-Tom! What—?"

  Yes, the man with the revolver was really there, really Tom Pryor. Tom said, "Damn!" And then, "Why didn't you stay asleep? God, I hate to—"

  Carl said, "The golf course? You?" and Tom nodded. He said, "I ... I had to. I mean have to. I was six thousand short, and when you tore up the wrong check and didn't notice—"

  "When I—what?"

  Tom's face was whiter than paper, his voice strange. "Carl, it wasn't planned. I picked up the wrong check, one of my own. You took it and tore it up and didn't look, and you walked out and left me your own check for ten thousand dollars. And with the examiners nearly due—I put it through.

  "With you dead, Carl, nobody'll ever know you didn't take the money today. I'm sorry, Carl, but ...it's me or you."

  "My friend," said Carl Harlow, surprised that he was grinning just a little. Because he was still more than a little drunk, and all of this was still less than completely real.

  The gun muzzle lifted. It shook. Tom was saying, al-most plaintively, "You want to ... to pray or anything, Carl? I... there isn't any hurry—"

  It was like a scene in a play. Any minute the audience would start applauding. It wasn't really happening, Carl knew. Murder happe
ns to John Smith, and you read about it in the paper. Nemesis is a gal who follows somebody else—

  But he stared owlishly at Tom Pryor. Tom was waiting there to see if he was going to say something. Had to say something.

  He grinned a little again. He said, "Give Elsie my love, Tom. Tell her I'm sorry I—"

  Tom said, "Your wife? She wants you out of the way—-dead—as much as I do! We're going away together with the balance of this money! I thought you knew! Oh, hell, why am I telling you now? Here goes. Good luck!"

  What a damn silly thing to say!—that last part. But the first part of what Tom had said was sinking in slowly and Harlow was going rigid with anger, only he couldn't move.

  Now he wanted to kill Tom Pryor, and the gun muzzle yawned in his face, but out of reach. Tom's hand held the gun, and his pudgy fingers were white at the knuckles.

  The trigger hadn't pulled yet, and there was sweat beaded on Tom's forehead. Tom said, "Hell, I—" and his free hand reached out for the glass of whiskey on the little table near the Morris chair. Dutch courage.

  He tossed it down neat.

  Or started to. The whiskey spilled, and Tom made a horrible strangling sound and the gun went off wild—with a roar in the confined space of the room that sounded like the end of the world.

  A cannonlike roar that brought Carl Harlow to his feet out of the Morris chair. Watching Tom on the carpet. Standing there looking down at Tom, and wishing in that awful moment that Tom had killed him.

  For Carl Harlow was cold sober now. And going cold, cold, all over—as the hideous pieces fell into place. As he bent over dead Tom Pryor and caught the strong scent of bitter almonds. And then, like a man hypnotized, turned and saw the white sheet of paper in the typewriter, and knew before he read it what it was.

  The typewriter that had gone clickety-click while he had slept and had typed out a farewell note from Carl Harlow to the world. The typewriter that had gone clickety-click while he had slept, and while Elsie had really been here and had typed that note and put the prussic acid in the waiting pick-me-up shot of whiskey!

  BY FREDRIC BROWN

  THE DEAD RINGER

  COMPLIMENTS OF A FIEND

  HERE COMES A CANDLE

  MURDER CAN BE FUN

  THE BLOODY

  MOONLIGHT

  THE FABULOUS CLIPJOINT

  THE SCREAMING MIMI

  NIGHT OF THE JABBERWOCK

  DEATH HAS MANY DOORS

  THE FAR CRY

  WE ALL KILLED GRANDMA

  THE DEEP END

  MOSTLY MURDER

  HIS NAME WAS DEATH

  WHAT MAD UNIVERSE

  THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY ARE STARS

  ANGELS AND SPACESHIPS

  THE WENCH IS DEAD

  MARTIANS, GO HOME

  THE LENIENT BEAST

  ROGUE IN SPACE

  THE OFFICE

  ONE FOR THE ROAD

  THE LATE LAMENTED

  KNOCK THREE-ONE-TWO

  THE MURDERERS

  THE FIVE-DAY NIGHTMARE

  THE SHAGGY DOG AND OTHER MURDERS

  Table of Contents

  The Shaggy Dog Murders

  Life and Fire

  Teacup Trouble

  Good Night, Good Knight

  Beware of the Dog

  Little Boy Lost

  Whistler's Murder

  Satan One-and-a-Half

  Tell 'Em, Pagliaccio!

  Nothing Sinister