Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

“You’re still all twisted up,” I said brusquely, standing now and adjusting my borrowed crutch. “You think I’m a man and you’re a woman. That’s wrong. I’m a manhunter and you’re something that has been running in front of me. There’s nothing human about it. You might just as well expect a hound to play tiddly-winks with the fox he’s caught. We’re wasting time anyway. I’ve been thinking the police or Marines might come up here and save me a walk. You’ve been waiting for your mob to come back and grab me. I could have told you they were being arrested when I left them.”

That shook her. She had stood up. Now she fell back a step, putting a hand behind her for steadiness, on her chair. An exclamation I didn’t understand popped out of her mouth. Russian, I thought, but the next moment I knew it had been Italian.

“Put your hands up.”

It was Flippo’s husky voice. Flippo stood in the doorway, holding an automatic.

I raised my hands as high as I could without dropping my supporting crutch, meanwhile cursing myself for having been too careless, or too vain, to keep a gun in my hand while I talked to the girl.

So this was why she had come back to the house. If she freed the Italian, she had thought, we would have no reason for suspecting that he hadn’t been in on the robbery, and so we would look for the bandits among his friends. A prisoner, of course, he might have persuaded us of his innocence. She had given him the gun so he could either shoot his way clear, or, what would help her as much, get himself killed trying.

While I was arranging these thoughts in my head, Flippo had come up behind me. His empty hand passed over my body, taking away my own gun, his, and the one I had taken from the girl.

“A bargain, Flippo,” I said when he had moved away from me, a little to one side, where he made one corner of a triangle whose other corners were the girl and I. “You’re out on parole, with some years still to be served. I picked you up with a gun on you. That’s plenty to send you back to the big house. I know you weren’t in on this job. My idea is that you were up here on a smaller one of your own, but I can’t prove that and don’t want to. Walk out of here, alone and neutral, and I’ll forget I saw you.”

Little thoughtful lines grooved the boy’s round, dark face.

The princess took a step toward him.

“You heard the offer I just now made him?” she asked. “Well, I make that offer to you, if you will kill him.”

The thoughtful lines in the boy’s face deepened.

“There’s your choice, Flippo,” I summed up for him. “All I can give you is freedom from San Quentin. The princess can give you a fat cut of the profits in a busted caper, with a good chance to get yourself hanged.”

The girl, remembering her advantage over me, went at him hot and heavy in Italian, a language in which I know only four words. Two of them are profane and the other two obscene. I said all four.

The boy was weakening. If he had been ten years older, he’d have taken my offer and thanked me for it. But he was young and she — now that I thought of it — was beautiful. The answer wasn’t hard to guess.

“But not to bump him off,” he said to her, in English, for my benefit. “We’ll lock him up in there where I was at.”

I suspected Flippo hadn’t any great prejudice against murder. It was just that he thought this one unnecessary, unless he was kidding me to make the killing easier.

The girl wasn’t satisfied with his suggestion. She poured more hot Italian at him. Her game looked surefire, but it had a flaw. She couldn’t persuade him that his chances of getting any of the loot away were good. She had to depend on her charms to swing him. And that meant she had to hold his eye.

He wasn’t far from me.

She came close to him. She was singing, chanting, crooning Italian syllables into his round face.

She had him.

He shrugged. His whole face said yes. He turned—

I knocked him on the noodle with my borrowed crutch.

The crutch splintered apart. Flippo’s knees bent. He stretched up to his full height. He fell on his face on the floor. He lay there, dead-still, except for a thin worm of blood that crawled out of his hair to the rug.

A step, a tumble, a foot or so of hand-and-knee scrambling put me within reach of Flippo’s gun.

The girl, jumping out of my path, was half-way to the door when I sat up with the gun in my hand.

“Stop!” I ordered.

“I shan’t,” she said, but she did, for the time at least. “I am going out.”

“You are going out when I take you.”

She laughed, a pleasant laugh, low and confident.

“I’m going out before that,” she insisted good-naturedly.

I shook my head.

“How do you purpose stopping me?” she asked.

“I don’t think I’ll have to,” I told her. “You’ve got too much sense to try to run while I’m holding a gun on you.”

She laughed again, an amused ripple.