Killer, Come Back to Me Read online

  She got mad. “No,” she snapped. “Let me say things like that. I keep telling you!” Looking at her, trying to understand what ticked, queer, inside her red hair, he sheepishly downed his beer.

  * * *

  It seemed right that she drove the car to L.A. all the way. It was a picture postcard day. She pressed the speed way up and kept it there when it was safe, her hair streaming like a scarlet banner.…They swerved corners to Spring Street and Third, parked the car, and walked—two dark suits reflected in shop windows—toward the bookie joint. He couldn’t figure it out. It was crazy—but he was actually enjoying it.

  Broghman knew the place from Julie’s pungent description. A huge magazine shop smelling of ancient pulp magazines and old books in musty pyramids; dimly lighted; slouched figures moving around in the dimness, phones jangling far back in the twenty aisles and hundreds of tables.

  Back in that dusty place, where naked light bulbs hung dying in the high ceiling, the biggest horse racket in L.A. tucked away its profits and shilled its suckers.

  The door to hell. Broghman felt his heart pounding. What if he forgot facts, figures, words, names—

  Julie shoved him on. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark after sun. People’s faces blurred in the gloom, and he was moving, his hard heels rapping like knuckles, following the sullen redhead with the pendulum walk.

  A lot of seated men jerked up, a lot of reading men stopped reading, a lot of talking men caught their tongues in their teeth, a lot of smoking men choked on their cigarettes. It was like flinging a boulder into a stagnant pond, watching ripples skim out and rush back:

  “Ricky! For God’s sake, fellas, it’s him!”

  “Ricky!”

  “I’m seein’ things!”

  A sound of bodies stirring, shadows moving, and then one single voice saying:

  “That’s not Ricky Wolfe.” And again, “That’s not Ricky.”

  It was a flat statement.

  Broghman felt his gun in his palm slip like a frightened animal. His breath hissed in his nostrils. In the silence that followed, he stopped dead still and there was only the sound of Julie’s high heels tacking along the wooden floor and slowly, with a kind of frozen dread, coming to a halt, too.

  Broghman turned. Out of the shadow a guy slipped who was too well-dressed for his own good. With a long white horse-face and red-rimmed, tired eyes and sweat on his cheeks. A sort of balding guy, whose features set off a trigger in Broghman’s mind. Merritt. Julie’d given a description. Merritt, from the old days. One of Ricky’s sidekicks, a jealous kind of gunsel. Merritt. The name clicked.

  There was something in Julie’s expression. Almost fear. It looked strange on her. Out of place. Lost. Lost and crying in the dark. Her hand crawled along her dark purse, vaguely.

  Broghman knew it was no use. It was no use all along. “That’s right,” somebody else agreed. “It ain’t Ricky at all.” The voice sounded awed, funny, disappointed in its surprise.

  Merritt said, “What you trying to pull, wise guy? You and the redhead?”

  Broghman’s jaw stiffened.

  “No,” he admitted evenly. “No, I’m not Ricky.”

  He heard Julie’s gasp. He continued:

  “I’m not Ricky Wolfe. Not at all. I don’t have to be him. I’m me. I’m myself! You, you Merritt, you don’t count for beans!”

  The darkness began to swim. Everybody was sort of held by Broghman’s voice, waiting.

  “You can’t get away with an old trick like that,” was Merritt’s quick reply. “What are you—kids to try something like this?”

  Broghman pulled his gun, and while the darkness got darker, and there was only Merritt in front of him, and the others waiting, he swore, tightened up and fired three shots.

  Merritt folded over the bullets, taking them into him with curious, pushing, helpful fingers. He fell flat down on his head, choking.

  “Ricky!” it was Julie’s voice. He had a flash of the metal jaws of her purse flipping wide, her gloved hand burrowing like a white squirrel inside, extracting a little blue gun.

  “I’m in!” said Broghman. There was a sort of power to the way he mouthed it. He sort of grew upward. He seemed to fit his suit better. Everybody else still stood, looking at his face, like they were seeing the devil and couldn’t run away.

  * * *

  Broghman took in every face. Names, data, facts, figures that Julie’d given him. Here. One face, a fat red one with beer smelling from its lips. “Kelly!” he snicked it out, with a jerk of his gun. “You know what to do. Get moving with this body!”

  “Sure, Boss!” Kelly moved his big stomach and big shoulders and fat, long arms.

  Broghman glanced around. “You, Rhodes, help him. Get your car around in the alley, on the double.”

  Rhodes hesitated.

  “Well?” asked Broghman.

  “Sure,” said Rhodes, hastily. “Sure, Boss.”

  Other shadows were becoming men now, taking the cue from the others. Someone grabbed Merritt’s feet, someone else his arms; and there was a shuffling of running feet back through the dark little office, more orders, more swearing.

  You keep people running so they don’t have time to think. No time to get mad, thought Broghman. Keep them excited, keep their eyes fixed on something else, then you fool them.

  It didn’t take more than a minute for the body to vanish through the back door into the alley. A car roared outside. A small crowd gathered in the front door of the shop.

  “Clear them away!” Broghman flipped his gun through the air. “Catch, Sammy,” he told one of them. Sammy scuttled through the back office with the gun. To the others Broghman gave a brief going over. “Any of you want to pull out, pull now. Any of you don’t like me, say so. I’m in.”

  Kelly emerged from back, wheezing, mopping sweat off his huge pink face. “Everything’s okay, Ricky.” He caught himself. “I mean—” He groped for a name.

  Broghman gave him one. “If it makes you feel better—call me Ricky, too.”

  Kelly felt better. He grinned. “Okay—Ricky. We always did get along, didn’t we?” He stopped and thought about that. “Didn’t we—almost—I guess—” He stood there.

  There’d be a cop in a moment. Broghman shook his head, and he and Julie and Kelly went into the back office with two others. Before closing the door, he poked a finger at the young guy named Knight. “For the cops it was all a mistake. Nothing happened. You don’t know anything.”

  He slammed the door hard. His hands began to shake so he hid them in his pockets.

  Julie was just watching him, all this while, holding onto her purse, examining his face. “It happened,” she said. “It happened when you shot Merritt.”

  “What?” he asked.

  She didn’t have to answer. A cracked mirror hanging on the dirty wall told him. He saw his eyes there, and shivered.

  Out of the past he heard Julie’s voice saying, “You’re no killer. It’s not in your face. Your eyes are open too wide for killing.”

  In the mirror, now, they were narrowed to hard slits.

  Maybe there was more than one way to be like Ricky Wolfe. Maybe you didn’t have to look like him. But you could act like him. The guts inside made the difference. And—the eyes.

  He broke away from looking at himself. “Let’s move. Brent-wood. That’s where my house is, the one with the swimming pool, huh, Julie?”

  “Sure,” she said, softly. “Sure it is.”

  “Come on, then. You too, Kelly. And you boys. Lots of work for us.”

  “Sure, Boss.”

  They meant a lot, those two words: “Sure, Boss.”

  They all went out together.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Guns Are Old-Fashioned

  It was a big impressive house in Brentwood; you could fall in its swimming pool if you didn’t watch out; the bathrooms had glass doors. It glittered.

  Walking around the huge garden surrounding the place, Broghman figured ho
w it had all worked, how Merritt had been an unpopular sort of guy, how Ricky’s spot had been vacant, discounting Merritt, for weeks now following Ricky’s death. Things hadn’t jelled yet.

  So a lot of guys had wanted Ricky back. When people want things bad enough, they get them. Even if they have to make believe. So Broghman filled the part. He was near enough to the original, so they made him into a kind of duplicate of the old boss. Something strictly from a psychological text. Something for mind doctors to kick around. Mob instinct, leader instinct, desire to put upon a pedestal.…What the hell. He was IN, now. That counted. No matter how a psychiatrist explained it—the wishful thinking, the acceptance of a new shape from the old mold, he was in!

  But, seeing the house and the garden, now after all the excitement died down, he realized that it meant nothing to him. Not a thing. What in hell did he want then? What? Even, there was something about Julie.…

  There had to be a party.

  So Los Angeles could meet a guy named Broghman.

  He bought a corsage for Julie for the party. He gave it to her in a cellophane box and watched her face change at sight of it. She twisted the box apart and tore the flower into pieces and dropped it on the floor:

  “That’s not what I want. I keep telling you. Don’t give me anything like that.”

  She walked off.

  He picked up the mashed flower, smelled it. It smelled all right. He shook his head.

  * * *

  The house was full of mist from cigarettes, coming and going in great nicotine fog-banks. Bottles rattled shapely glass hips one against another, champagne tumbled into glasses, everybody talked too much. It was Friday night, Merritt had been killed and taken away Wednesday. Broghman stood in the middle of the noise. This was the circus Julie ringmastered for him, so all the big lions could look at their new tamer, sit up, give a jealous greeting, shake hands maybe. Things were smooth. Julie saw to it that people who were small-time stayed on the outer fringe, while the big Joes got through. There were plenty of them—

  “So they call you Ricky, too?”

  This was an old man with white hair. Name of Vanning. Some sort of contact with one of the biggest lawyers. Soft pink face, long and intelligent looking, slightly wrinkled, constantly smoking imported cigars. “Like to see you after the party, Ricky,” he said, softly.

  “What about?”

  Vanning chuckled a little. “We’re surprised at your showing up, Ricky. We’re respectable business men, yes we are. It’s like having a ghost coming among us. But I must admit you were clever. Used a psychological trick. Very good.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “In spite of the fact that you showed some originality in the way you took Ricky Wolfe’s place, you’re still one of the old school gangsters. The kind of person who used to rob a bank with a gun—”

  “What’s wrong with that!”

  “Unscientific. We’re—businessmen. We do our work with hints, words, a little pressure here and there. Quiet transactions. We use psychology, too, but use it all the time.” The old man brushed back his soft white hair. “Now, listen to me, young man. From now on, criminality works behind a desk. It’s been tending that way a long time, but now it’s here to stay. Science prevents you from being out in the open any more. People won’t stand for it.”

  “So what do we talk about after the party?”

  “About you quieting down, my boy. You attract attention. You’re old-fashioned, make too much noise.”

  “So I gotta change!”

  “We can give you an office downtown—”

  “I’m not made that way!”

  The old man kept smiling, his eyes twinkling. “On occasion, if we are forced to, we can revert to old-fashioned gangsterism, too, let me tell you. We can kill you, legally, any time, and take credit for having done the public a service. See how clever we are?”

  Broghman considered Vanning a moment, his heart pounding, his eyes narrowed down to hard slits.

  Vanning looked at Broghman’s eyes. “Hill Street and Sixth. The Leighton Building, after midnight.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  When Vanning walked away, Julie’s face said “No,” to Broghman, with an exclamation point after it. But liquor and self-power both were fogging his brain and he could hardly see her.

  The rest of the party wasn’t even a decent memory. It was blotted out by a kind of excitement, the same excitement that had followed him ever since he met Julie. It was like a big drum being pounded in his brain, louder and louder and louder.

  The door slammed on the last of the departing guests. Julie held onto the doorknob, feeling it. All of the steel had poured out of her as if through a secret release. She was hardly a healthy cat animal any more. She trembled.

  They padded upstairs together, through the suddenly quiet house, no words passing between them. They closed the door to her room and the first words that she said were:

  “You’re not going down tonight to see Vanning. He knows he can’t handle you. He’s afraid of you. So he’ll kill you!”

  He kissed her on her full, obstinate lips. She smelled fresh after the nicotine and liquor. He kissed her on the neck, the ears, the cheeks, and again on the lips, and she responded. It was a long kiss.

  Her fingers bit into his arms.

  “Oh, Ricky, Ricky,” she gasped.

  He let her go.

  He fell back as if she had struck his face.

  She put up her hand, as if to catch those words, but she was too late. She couldn’t bring them back.

  He just looked at her as if she were invisible and said: “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t mean it.”

  “You said Ricky! You said it!”

  * * *

  Weakly, then, dazed, he repeated her words and then said, “You love him. You love a dead man. I should have guessed. You made me try to look like him, you risked your life on it. You made me look, walk, talk like him, so he could hold you again, so he could kiss you again, hurt you again!”

  “Please…Johnny!”

  His eyes were wide open again. “You don’t love me. You tried to dig up Ricky out of the grave. I should have guessed when the gang acted the way it did at the magazine shop. They wanted Ricky back, too. They took a substitute for want of the real article. And all the other little things—”

  He started groping for the door like a blind man. “You didn’t want me to kiss you. You kissed me. That’s the way it was with Ricky. You did things for him. When I did things, you resented it, you slapped me. It was off-key, off-character. It wasn’t Ricky, it wasn’t him at all. The flower I gave you, you didn’t want. Ricky never gave flowers. And if I said nice things, you were angry—”

  Julie got in front of the door, her breath hissing. “You can’t go out! Vanning’ll kill you.”

  “You afraid I’ll get killed? Afraid Ricky will die again?”

  He beat it at her, like fists, while his unfeeling hand sought the gun in its leather vest under his arm. “Afraid Ricky’ll die again! Couldn’t stand that, could you? Couldn’t stand having him killed again!”

  “No.” She said the word so simply, so softly. “I couldn’t stand it. I’m sorry, Johnny, but that’s how it is.”

  She shook her head, as though trying to fight out of a dream. “Don’t you see, Johnny? We’re both the same. I’m not Julie. You don’t want me. You want—your mother. Somebody you can cling to. Somebody to take care of you. The mother you never had, Johnny. And I—I want Ricky. We met in front of a bank, Johnny, you and I, and we both wanted something and we tried to get it and it fell apart in our faces.” She gripped him, spoke convulsively, “Oh, Ricky, hold onto me tight—”

  Ricky! The name was like an iron poked into his brain, stirring all the self-doubts and longings that wracked him. He didn’t say anything, but what he was thinking through the liquor fog was, “I’m Johnny Broghman! I’m myself! Damn them—all of them, I don’t need a woman to lean on. Not my mother, not Julie�
��not anybody. I’m Johnny Broghman—the strongest thing in the world.”

  He tried to push her away and she only clung tighter. Like a leech she was, feeding on his strength, trying to make him into somebody who wasn’t Johnny Broghman. As if Johnny Broghman wasn’t good enough.…

  What his hands couldn’t do, his gun did for him.

  He didn’t will it precisely. But there it was. His eyes were closed almost down, the Ricky way. His gun shot twice and knocked her back. He could feel her hands pull away from him, clinging to the last. She fell, sprawled, and lay unmoving on the floor.

  He leaned against the door, swallowing, wiping at his eyes which were blurred. Then he went downstairs, the gun still in his hand. With every step he could feel himself growing stronger. Now he was free. He didn’t need a woman to lean on, and now he had proved it.

  He had killed twice and now he would kill again. The old man with the pink face, Vanning. The one who called himself a businessman, and who thought he could make a desk punk out of Johnny Broghman. Vanning, who thought he could boss Johnny Broghman the way he had bossed Ricky Wolfe. Johnny Broghman was a better man than Ricky Wolfe had ever been. Julie had found that out.

  Broghman opened the front door.…He got it before he had walked halfway down the drive to his car. Vanning’s men, in the black car parked in the night shade of bulking trees, reached for him with tommy-guns. The line of bullets hit him and he folded over them like a man folds over an invisible wall.

  The guns kept spitting long after Johnny Broghman slumped down like a little kid on the lawn to take his evening sleep.…

  * * *

  So that’s Johnny Broghman’s story, take it or leave it, with or without the benefit of the scalpel. It’s all here on the slab.

  Now, I’ll take the heart of Johnny Broghman’s and place it back inside the body where it never had a chance to love, but was only a guy in a cell. I’ll put all of Johnny back inside himself where it belongs, all the agony and hatred and sullen burning flame of Johnny, back in upon himself in the cold cavern of the bullet-torn body, and I’ll perform suture upon it with a needle and thread. Drop one, purl one, sewing Humpty-Dumpty back up again so they can bury him. I’ll go on to other bodies, but I won’t be able to write stories about them like Johnny’s story. I won’t be able to scalpel those brains apart, to know how the heart pulsed or the stomach turned in agony.