Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 2, April 1961

Connie was sitting in a homey, old-fashioned chair; the kind you’d expect to find in any comfortable middle-class home; with her ankles tied to either leg and her wrists taped to each other.

She smiled at me and said, “I’m sorry, Darling. I didn’t help any.”

I looked at Gertrude Armitage. “She won’t hurt you. Can’t you at least undo her wrists?”

“We’ll wait.”

Gertrude Armitage had evidently had her say. From this point on she held the shotgun on me and stood silent. And fifteen minutes later Gus Largo rolled in.

He was a big man and roll was the word. He looked Connie and me over with thoughtful regard, acknowledging Gertrude Armitage’s presence only when she said, “You came alone?”

He glanced at her sharply. “Of course. You know I never bring anyone here.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“We can kill Bowman. That will work out all right. With what they’ll find in the woods it will be logical — him coming here to get rid of a witness.”

This didn’t shock Armitage in the least. Largo could have been talking about a chicken for supper. “Do you want me to do it?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Connie sat speechless; stunned at cold-bloodedness she’d not thought possible in human beings. Largo turned his bland eyes on her. “The girl is different. She complicates things a little.”

“You’ll have to get rid of the car before we call the police.”

“I’ll drive it down the road and have someone pick it up there. We were too slow about that. It shouldn’t have been brought here.”

“You had to get it out of sight.”

It was easy to see that Largo could do no wrong so far as Gertrude Armitage was concerned. She wouldn’t even let him criticize himself.

I said, “You can let this girl go. I swear she won’t say a word. It will be just as though she hadn’t come.”

Largo looked at me. “That’s pitiful.”

He was right, but I had to say something. “What are you going to do with her?”

As he pondered I gauged the distance to Gertrude Armitage’s shotgun. Could I get it? Probably not but I was going to make a try because there was nothing to lose. At the worst I would make them kill me right here and get blood on the rug. Blood on the rug has tripped killers up before and I thought it might work again.

“I know what we could do with her,” Gertrude Armitage said.

We never found out what she had in mind, though, because the doorbell rang at that moment. Largo blinked. “Were you expecting anyone?”

“No.”

“I’ll hold the gun. You answer it.”

The woman handed him the weapon and left the room. A few moments later she came back, took the gun from him and resumed her former position and Largo was staring at the man who had followed her in. It was Jim Palos.

“What are you doing here?” Largo asked.

“Gambling,” Jim said. “I’m betting this is the place I’ve been hunting for — where you keep the records.” And there was a gun in his hand as he finished. “FBI, Largo. This is it. I’m making my play.”

I knew instantly that Gertrude Armitage was going to blow him in two with the shotgun if she could; that she didn’t care about herself. If he didn’t get her first, he was dead and so I hit her with a tackle as the gun barrel moved.

She would have gotten him too because no matter how well-trained he was Jim Palos would have waited too long before killing a woman.

As it was we went over in a pile and the shotgun blasted out like seventeen cannon. That didn’t quite end it though because I had a fighting she-tiger on my hands. She was on me like the seven furies and I got the worst of it until I threw politeness to the winds and knocked her cold with a right to the jaw.

Largo stood frozen during the whole interlude. You could tell from looking at him that he still didn’t believe things could have gone so miserably wrong. That he’d misjudged a man and let an FBI agent part-way into his organization.

Then he sat down on the floor and began to cry and that was the way it finished...

Later Jim Palos spoke gravely of the perils involved. “They could have shot you and gotten away with it, Larry. They’d have probably taken the girl out of the country where she would never have been heard of again. They could have gotten away with that and the other too, sent you to the chair, if things had tipped that way, because I didn’t know enough about Largo’s operations to do you any good in court.”

“You fooled me, all right.”

“I had to work my way in somehow and as a disgruntled employee of Largo’s rival I was able to do business with him. But he was cagey. He didn’t let me in too far, and we might never have found what we had to have if you and the girl hadn’t charged in on the Armitage woman.”

“It was Connie’s idea.”

Palos grinned. “Marry her. That girl’s got a brain.”

I did. Two months later, during Largo’s trial. I’d like to end this nicely and say he hadn’t done away with Gloria Dane, but I can’t. He killed her, out in woods, after the frame had put the police on my trail. Killed her in a way I don’t like to think about; one that would have sent me to the chair and labeled me a monster.