Kill Now, Pay Later (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback)) Read online

  Raves For the Crime Novels of ROBERT TERRALL!

  “A succession of explosive amusements, breathless, harassed, handsomely diverting.”

  —New York Herald Tribune

  “Ben Gates proves himself a much better than average private eye...refreshingly unhackneyed, and the telling is crisp and well paced.”

  —The New York Times

  “Best...thriller since Cain’s ‘Double Indemnity.’ Don’t miss it!”

  —King Features Syndicate

  “A riotous flurry of extortion [and] impersonations.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Fast-moving adventure...filled with slick skullduggery.”

  —New York Post

  “Ingenious...Blue-chip humor...Cheerful chicanery.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Imaginative...Hair-raising...A great deal of fun.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Come on in,” a girl’s voice called. “It’s not locked.” I went in. She was up on a stepladder painting a wall yellow.

  “Why, Mr. Gates,” she said. “This is an honor.”

  She came down the ladder. Her hair was two shades of light brown. She was in her early twenties, and if she wasn’t married already I didn’t think she would stay unmarried long.

  “Painting,” she said unnecessarily. “How’s the private detective business?”

  “About the same. How did you know my name was Gates?”

  “The girls were talking about you last night. Most of us hadn’t ever seen a real live private detective, and we thought you were pretty stimulating. You know how girls are?”

  “Within limits.” I took out a cigar and began peeling off the cellophane. “What I wanted to ask you—”

  “Come on in and sit down,” she said.

  I followed her through an open arch and sat on a couch. She settled on a sort of hassock, tucking one foot under her. She had fewer buttons on her shirt than I had thought at first. Even with close scrutiny, and this is a matter which I like to give close scrutiny, I could only count one.

  I bit the end off the cigar. “Do you always put on makeup this early, even when you’re not expecting anybody?”

  She gave a little laugh. “All right, I knew you were coming. They want me to watch out, because you’re supposed to be pretty shifty.”

  She got up for a cigarette. The cigarettes were on a low table in front of the couch. She had to bend over, and the shirt responded to the pull of gravity. The final button was hanging by a thread. She shifted position, and the crucial button came off with a pop.

  “Just as I suspected,” I said. “You’re a girl.”

  She was smiling. “Don’t you like girls?”

  That was when a police car came to a noisy halt in front of the house and two uniformed troopers jumped out...

  SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:

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  THE GUTTER AND THE GRAVE by Ed McBain

  NIGHT WALKER by Donald Hamilton

  A TOUCH OF DEATH by Charles Williams

  SAY IT WITH BULLETS by Richard Powell

  WITNESS TO MYSELF by Seymour Shubin

  BUST by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

  STRAIGHT CUT by Madison Smartt Bell

  LEMONS NEVER LIE by Richard Stark

  THE LAST QUARRY by Max Allan Collins

  THE GUNS OF HEAVEN by Pete Hamill

  THE LAST MATCH by David Dodge

  GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange

  THE PEDDLER by Richard S. Prather

  LUCKY AT CARDS by Lawrence Block

  ROBBIE’S WIFE by Russell Hill

  THE VENGEFUL VIRGIN by Gil Brewer

  THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN by David Goodis

  BLACKMAILER by George Axelrod

  SONGS OF INNOCENCE by Richard Aleas

  FRIGHT by Cornell Woolrich

  Kill Now,

  PAY LATER

  by Robert Terrall

  A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK

  (HCC-035)

  First Hard Case Crime edition: September 2007

  Published by

  Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street

  London

  SE1 0UP

  in collaboration with Winterfall LLC

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should know that it is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 1960 by Robert Kyle

  Cover painting copyright © 2007 by Robert McGinnis

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Print edition ISBN 978-0-85768-330-4

  E-book ISBN 978-0-85768-390-8

  Cover design by Cooley Design Lab

  Design direction by Max Phillips

  www.maxphillips.net

  Typeset by Swordsmith Productions

  The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter 1

  The bride wore a bouffant gown of off-white silk taffeta with a fitted bodice of Alençon lace. The groom wore striped pants, a carnation and a look of bitter regret. As for me, Ben Gates, I was wearing my .38 in a shoulder rig inside my best dacron and worsted. But I wasn’t a guest. Most of the wedding receptions I go to socially take place in bar-and-grills. An insurance company had hired me to come to this one and make sure that nobody went home with any of the wedding presents.

  A striped marquee had been pitched on the lawn. The bride’s father, the president of a big pharmaceutical company and obviously loaded, had supplied thirty cases of imported champagne and another fifty of domestic, to be broached when the guests were too far along to care about the difference. From the library, where I was stationed, the popping of corks sounded like target practice on a 4.2 mortar range. At dusk the Japanese lanterns hanging from the edge of the marquee were turned on. The cars thinned out, the State Trooper went off duty, only a hard core of serious drinkers remained. I continued to get visitors from time to time, but most of them were trying to find a bathroom. One of the maids, a small fair-haired girl who looked pleasantly warm inside her black uniform, brought me a pot of coffee and a platter of sandwiches from the buffet. I considered this thoughtful of somebody. She put her tray down in a space I cleared
for her on the coffee table. Her uniform was perhaps a half size too large, and she was doing a certain amount of moving around inside it. We exchanged some boy-girl conversation, as one non-guest to another, and I asked her when she was due to go off. Eleven-thirty, she said, which I considered an interesting coincidence. I was due to go off at eleven-thirty myself.

  The sandwiches were small, oddly shaped and a little soggy. I ate them all, down to the last anchovy and the last globule of caviar. The coffee was hot and strong. I poured a second cup and lighted a cigar. A piano was playing somewhere in the house, and a pickup vocal group was singing dirty limericks. The steady popping of corks outside had made me edgy, but I was finally beginning to think that it might turn out to be an uneventful evening. I try not to have that kind of thoughts, because I always have them just before the trouble starts.

  Sure enough, a blonde in a blue dress was poking in at me from the doorway.

  “So here’s where they’re hiding the wedding presents,” she said.

  She had a glass in one hand, a champagne bottle in the other. As she came into the room I saw that she was barefoot. I didn’t need to take her blood count to know she had enough little bubbles inside her to lift her off the floor, like those speedboats which travel on a cushion of foam. I had seen the same blue dress on other girls that afternoon, which probably meant she was one of the bridesmaids. It was a demure dress, but there was nothing demure about what was inside it. The dress had been engineered to be worn with high heels, and the shock-waves set up an interesting play of movement, chiefly in an up-and-down direction, but accompanied by a small amount of sway. Her lipstick was slightly crooked.

  I set my coffee cup on the arm of the leather sofa.

  “Don’t get up,” she said as I got up. “Just browsing.”

  The most valuable presents were displayed on a big refectory table in the center of the room, with the overflow on two trestle tables against the walls. I rotated my cigar to get it burning evenly, not looking at the girl directly as she made a clockwise circuit of the main table. She stopped in front of a tea service of heavy silver to finish the champagne in her glass, holding the stem between her middle fingers in what as far as I know may be the approved grip. She leaned forward to read a card propped against the teapot. Her nose wrinkled.

  “Pretty awful, isn’t it? But that uncle lives in Texas, so they can take it back to Tiffany’s and trade it in for some salad forks.”

  She rode the bubbles around the table. “Excuse me. They already have salad forks.”

  A little further she said, “They certainly have salad forks.”

  Suddenly she gave a little cry, put down the bottle and the glass and picked up a bracelet. “The girls have been gossiping about this one.”

  There was a prominent notice directly in front of her, requesting guests not to handle the presents, but I didn’t bother to point it out. I drifted to the right, getting between her and the door. She fastened the bracelet on her wrist and held it up.

  “Now that is gorgeous,” she said with approval. “What’s your name?”

  When I didn’t answer she looked at me. “You.”

  “Ben Gates,” I said without taking the cigar out of my mouth.

  “Who do you work for, the insurance company?”

  “Today I do,” I said. “I’m a private detective. They sent me out to keep good-looking blondes from helping themselves to the diamond bracelets.”

  She laughed. “The trouble with you is, you’re sober.”

  “That’s one of the rules.”

  As she came around the corner of the table toward me, I felt an unreasonable flicker of alarm. She couldn’t have weighed more than one-ten stripped, in itself an interesting thought. But I was getting a good look at her eyes for the first time. She wasn’t a solemn drunk. She was one of the wild ones. She was quiet enough at the moment, but it was the quiet of an unexploded torpedo.

  I started counting backward from ten.

  “Let me hold this,” she said.

  She took the cigar out of my mouth before I could do anything to stop her. We were as close as we could get without colliding and she kept on coming. Her free hand glanced off my chest and slid up around my neck. Without her shoes on, the top of her head was on a level with my chin, but she didn’t let that bother her. She came up me like a caterpillar climbing a wall. I didn’t help her, except insofar as the wall can be said to help the caterpillar.

  Her lips were open, and I tasted champagne. I’m not enough of an expert on champagne to know if it was domestic or imported. I took a backward step. She stayed with me, and we were now in position to go into the juvenile-delinquent dance known as the fish. Contact was total, and I felt a strong pressure against my eyeballs. It wasn’t painful. It wasn’t even exactly unpleasant. It was just there, and it seemed out of proportion. She shouldn’t have been affecting me that much.

  She pushed off. If she had waited a fraction of a second longer we would have gone over backward.

  “Weddings always make me feel amorous,” she said. “I start kissing people.”

  “Didn’t the bracelet have anything to do with it?”

  “Maybe a little.” She studied me as though I had just blown in from extra-galactic space. “Without the cigar, you know you look quite nice? Sort of rugged. You’ve been around, haven’t you?”

  “Here and there,” I said.

  She tapped the ash off the cigar elaborately, and put the cigar in her mouth. She didn’t quite succeed in carrying it off. She gave a single sharp cough, laughed and handed it back. The pressure on my eyeballs, whatever it was, had relaxed.

  “Now suppose you take off the bracelet,” I said.

  “Oh, Ben,” she said, disappointed in me. “You can’t really think I expected to accomplish anything with just one kiss? But you’ve heard of buying things on installments. That was the down payment.”

  She found the champagne bottle. “If I got another glass would you join me?”

  “I just had some,” I said.

  She laughed again. “That wasn’t nearly enough. I want you to get so drunk you’ll forget I’m wearing somebody else’s bracelet.”

  She sipped at her champagne, using the same backhand grip. She kept looking at me and I had a feeling she was laughing. I couldn’t help that. I stayed between her and the door, hoping that I looked incorruptible.

  “If you change your mind about the champagne,” she said, “I’ll let you use my glass.”

  She sat down in one of the leather armchairs, stretching her feet out in front of her. Her legs were clearly outlined under the blue dress, from the painted toes all the way up. She lifted her wrist and tilted it slightly, to get a glint from the diamonds.

  “Are you going to wrestle me for it?”

  “I hope not,” I said.

  “And first you’d have to catch me,” she went on. “I can move fast when I have to. Maybe I can trip you up and get out the door. I know my way around the house. You’d never find me.”

  “All I’d have to do is ask for the wedding picture,” I said. “The big one, including the bridesmaids. I don’t want to get your hopes up by paying you any compliments, but I think I’d recognize you.”

  “Then it would be your word against mine, right?”

  I was beginning to get the same odd fuzziness I had felt when her tongue was in my mouth. “But they’d believe me.”

  She sighed. “I suppose you’re right. But I wish it was mine! It makes me feel—completely different. I just had a fight with somebody, not that you’d be interested. I looked all over for a certain son of a bitch, and I found him in the back seat of the family Cadillac with one of my fellow bridesmaids. Of course we’re wearing the same color dress today, and maybe he was confused. Don’t be so square, Ben. Let me keep it.” She looked at me seriously, as though she were asking for something of no value, like my autograph. “What would happen if one tiny little bracelet was missing when you turn in the rest of the stuff?”

&nb
sp; “First they’d rip off my fingernails,” I said. “Then they’d put me in the hole for six months on bread and water. After that they wouldn’t give me any business. They have an association. They’d put the word around—when you need somebody, don’t call Gates, because he’s a man who gives away bracelets.”

  I locked the door to the hall and put the key in my pocket. She watched warily.

  “Now we start chasing each other?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’m supposed to be able to handle a little thing like this without working up a sweat. As soon as I found out they had eighty cases of champagne for five hundred people, I called New York and talked them into sending out another man. His name’s Irving Davidson, and he played pro football after college. Between the two of us we should be able to take off that bracelet.”

  “It sounds like fun,” she said.

  “It would be a lot simpler to take it off yourself.”

  She lifted the champagne glass and smiled at me without replying. There was a tiny point of light in each eye, like a reflection from the diamonds. I went to the window. I heard a shout outside, followed by a burst of feminine laughter. The mixed chorus, wearying of “Sweet Violets,” had moved along to “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” I, too, would have liked to be shown that way. I was tired and I wanted to go to bed.

  I saw Davidson at the far end of the terrace, looking down at the parked cars. A girl in a white dress was talking to him eagerly. Davidson is easily the best-looking private investigator in New York, and girls have difficulty keeping their hands off him. With me and girls, it’s usually the other way around.

  I rapped on the glass with a half dollar. He heard it and turned.

  “All right,” the girl said behind me. “I won’t make any more trouble. Here.”

  She was standing. She put down her glass and began picking at the unfamiliar clasp of the bracelet.

  “I like competent men,” she said, “and, dear God, do I need one right now. Maybe I could hire you. How would I—”