The Avenger. Matthew Blood
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hour, and down at the other end of the room a bucket lamp threw a yellow glow where the hot-piano man was fingering some arrangements.
Wayne turned in to the deserted bar and the beefy bartender came alive. “What’s yours, Mac?”
Wayne knew that bar rye was what you got in a joint like this no matter what you ordered, so he didn’t mince matters.
“Bar rye and soda.”
It came in a heavy glass thimble that nicked him ninety cents. Wayne carefully gathered up the dime left from his bill and pocketed it, smiling gently at the glowering look this action earned from the bartender. He dribbled the drops of whisky over ice cubes in his highball glass and asked casually, “Anybody around?”
The bartender rested a chunky forearm on the bar and shook his bullet head slowly. “Only a cheapskate dropping in from the street now and then.”
Wayne didn’t say anything. He carefully poured soda in his glass, swished it negligently for a moment, then threw the contents of the glass in the man’s beefy face.
The man ducked and sputtered, swiping at his face with a bar rag and stooping to reach beneath the bar.
Morgan Wayne didn’t alter his casual posture. He said, “I wouldn’t,” and something in his voice jerked the man to a halt before he came erect.
Their eyes locked across the bar and the chill blue of Wayne’s drilled into the veined milkiness of the other’s. “I asked,” Wayne reminded him, “if anybody was around.”
“Trouble, Pete?”
The voice came from behind Wayne’s right shoulder. He turned casually. A man had emerged from the sick dimness of the rear. He wasn’t big like the barman. He didn’t even look tough. But in the half-light from behind the bar he exuded menace. Maybe it was his eyes.
His hair was slick and black. A slight figure and a boyish face. All but the eyes. They weren’t boyish. They weren’t anything you could describe. Holes for him to see through. Mirroring nothing. No imagination, no feelings. Nothing.
He stood hard on the heels of two-toned Oxfords, hands thrust deep in the slanting pockets of a tan sports jacket. He could be holding a pocket gun. At any rate, Wayne caught the bulge of a shoulder rig that the carefully tailored jacket had been built to hide.
“Bastard got nasty and trun his glass at me,” the bartender sputtered. “You want I should—”
“Shut up, Pete.” The man’s voice was like his eyes: flat and devoid of expression, yet somehow imbued with the reptilian menace of a Gila monster. He didn’t look at the bartender as he spoke. He asked Wayne:
“Why?”
Wayne shrugged. He was leaning sideways with one elbow on the bar. He said, “Tell your boss Morgan Wayne is here.”
“Will that make him clap his hands?”
“Try it, Sutra. Or should I call you Willie?”
“Where’d you get my name?”
“Saw you on TV. Don’t you know you’re famous, Willie, since your testimony in front of Kefauver? About how you think the drug traffic stinks and no decent crook should sell the stuff to kids.”
The trace of a smirk appeared on Willie Sutra’s face. “No kiddin’? I done that good, huh?”
Wayne sighed. He said, “Nuts to this.” He looked over Willie’s head to the end of the long room, where a girl was now standing in the pool of light over the piano. She was looking at Wayne, humming softly while the piano player soft-keyed. She was tall and slender and impossibly lovely, and at thirty feet her gaze had an impact that hit a man in the midriff. Her eyes held Wayne’s and she kept on humming softly. He straightened slowly and moved away from the bar in her direction.
Willie Sutra was in his way. Willie didn’t move. He spoke in a voice so soft it was barely audible. “The other way is out.”
Wayne paused, wrenching his gaze away from the girl with an effort to look down consideringly at the little man. “I don’t think the boss would like seeing the floor all messy with blood.” His tone was almost as soft as Willie’s. “Your blood.”
He started forward and this time Willie stepped aside.
Wayne paid no more attention to him. He was headed for the girl standing in the soft pool of light beside the piano. He didn’t know what he was going to say to her when he got there, but he knew she was in it somehow. The key to the whole situation was here. If she had it, she would give it to him. He knew that with certainty as he moved slowly toward her.
It happens that way sometimes. You look at a girl and she looks at you and you both know how it is, how it has to be. How it’s going to be if you both have to tear down a dozen stone walls to make it so.
It was more than just desire. Hell, you could desire a sexy twerp like the hat-check girl. Call it lust if you like. That’s a good four-letter word. No matter what name you give it, Wayne knew he had been clubbed.
Maybe because she seemed so out of character here. You wouldn’t think a girl in a cellar joint could look demure, but this one did. You looked at her once across thirty feet of dimness and you thought of everything the hat-check girl made you think of. But you also thought of home and mother. Climbing rosebushes and a white cottage with lighted windows.
Her dress matched the gingham décor of the place. A material of small green checks that looked like gingham, but had the radiance of silk. A wide neck, but not immodestly low. An old-fashioned bodice hugging her incredibly slender waist, giving her breasts what you knew was an unbrassiered uplift that made you think of a pair of hands cupped beneath them. Your hands. But on her it wasn’t lewd, somehow. Beneath the bodice, a wide skirt flared to just below her knees. If she moved fast you’d expect it to show flashes of a peek-a-boo petticoat playing tag with sheer nylons.
Wayne was close to her now. She had stopped humming and was just standing there. Watching him. He didn’t know what he was going to say. But he didn’t think it was going to be difficult to get started.
It wasn’t. She cued him with coolly perfect lips that had been lightly touched with pale lipstick that hadn’t ruined the contour:
“Don’t look now, mister, but I think you’re being followed.”
Wayne stopped in front of her. He didn’t look around. He said, “Tell him to go away.”
She said, “Go away, Willie.” Her eyes smiled at Wayne.
Wayne had always thought that only girls in fiction had green eyes. But this girl was real. And her eyes were green. Limpid sea green, with bluish depths that invited him to sink into them and drown deliciously. Wayne did a double take on that one. When you begin to get lyrical about a cellar wren’s eyes . . .
But, goddamnit, they were green. Limpid sea green. With bluish depths. . . .
A cold kill with her red hair. Because the hair wasn’t just red. It was unbelievably red. But you wanted to believe it. On her it was easy to believe. Pouring in a smooth flow to her shoulders, alive and vibrant and with a tinge of gold. It couldn’t be real, but you knew it was.
He heard Willie Sutra’s voice behind him, disappointed and sullen: “But this here goop—”
“I said to go away, Willie.”
Wayne lifted his gaze to her face again. “They’ve got the wrong girl in the picture outside.”
She made a bashful-girl curtsy, and an honest-to-God dimple dented her left cheek. “Thank you, sir, she said. But don’t you think it might be a mite egotistical, since I own the joint? Pardon me—my highly paid promotion man is trying to teach me to call it an establishment.”
“My God,” said Wayne softly. “Of course. The Gingham Girl, they called you when you first turned up as a warbler for Lon Kagle’s band. And six months later you ended up