The Smasher

  The Smasher

  Talmage Powell

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Also Available

  Copyright

  TO MIMI

  1

  At the tail end of the day I went up to my hotel room. It was like a thousand other hotel rooms, each as barren as all the others no matter how fine the furnishings. It shared with all the others an aloofness, a loneliness, a feeling of being unoccupied even if someone were living in it.

  I propped my brief case against the leg of the kneehole desk and dropped my hat and coat across the bed. I thought briefly of home; and then I sat down at the desk, opened the brief case, and got to work on the report.

  It was a lengthy report and I lost track of time while I was working on it. Finished at last, I paused to light a cigarette. My eyes were gritty, my neck and back dull with fatigue.

  As I leaned back in my chair, I happened to catch a glimpse of myself in the bureau mirror. I was just moody enough to study the mirrored face for a moment. I hadn’t really looked at myself in a very long time. Women know what they look like. Few men do. We shave—and see the whiskers. Few of us know honestly what we look like.

  The tiredness in the face gave me a faint jolt. It wasn’t a face with greatness reflected in it, nor was it an evil face. The face of Mr. Everyman, who was five feet eleven, weight one-seventy. If there was deep tiredness in the face, there were also an open honesty and decency in the strength of jaw, chin, and forehead. A lock of black hair had fallen out of place and the gray eyes were squinted. The face was brushed with the day-end, black beard stubble.

  I yawned, stretched, then turned my attention to the report again. I signed it: Steve Griffin.

  I stood up, arching my back against the kink in it, and discovered that I was hungry.

  It had grown dark outside while I’d worked, and with the darkness had come a fine rain, wet bits of anger against the windowpane.

  I decided a shower would make for a more enjoyable dinner. While I got a fresh shirt from the bureau, I thought of Maureen and Penny and home. The three were components of a single unit in my mind. A wife, a fine little daughter, a comfortable living—I figured the loneliness and fatigue of the road work were worth while.

  I was hungry for Maureen, for the warmth of her flesh and the passion I could stir in her.

  And then the jangling of the telephone cut my thoughts short. I sighed, pitched my clean shirt on the bed, and walked to the small phone table at the head of the bed.

  “Hello,” I said. “Steve Griffin speaking.”

  “Long distance calling,” the operator said. “Just a moment, please.”

  There was a pause. The operator said, “Go ahead, please.”

  And Maureen’s voice came to me faintly, like the voice of a child lost in a long, dark tunnel. “Steve—I’m glad I caught you in!”

  “Maureen!” I said. “This is a surprise. Wait a second. The connection seems bad. I’ll tell the operator …”

  “The connection’s all right,” she said in a stronger voice.

  I gripped the phone. “Are you ill?”

  “No, I …”

  “Then it’s Penny!”

  “Penny’s all right. She’s watching some kid TV show.” I relaxed.

  “The sound of your voice had me worried for a second.”

  “Steve,” she faltered, “it isn’t a pleasure call.”

  I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. “If both you and Penny are okay, then it must be some other kind of trouble.”

  “Yes, Steve. I want you to come home. Right away.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Leave this minute! Please, Steve!” Her voice moved up the scale. Then she said quietly, simply, “A man’s trying to kill me, Steve.”

  She was not a woman given to hysterics or wild imaginings. There was a chilling, my-back’s-to-the-wall seriousness in her tone.

  I sat a moment in shock.

  “Did you hear me, Steve?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll leave here immediately.”

  “Thank you, darling,” she sobbed. “He made the second attempt today. The first time might have been an accident. But not twice.”

  Twice. Twice someone had tried to kill my wife while I’d been going about my business knowing nothing of it.

  There wasn’t a reason in the world for anyone to want to do something like that.

  “Are you certain, Maureen?” I asked, knowing that she wouldn’t have called me without being certain.

  “Yes, Steve,” she said, her voice beginning to crack. “He’s trying to run me down. With a car. He’s trying to smash the life out of me, Steve!”

  “Easy,” I said.

  “He tried the first time two days ago. I’d been out to the plant nursery to get some shrubs for Dudley to set. The car came swinging into the intersection, tires screaming. He’d been waiting for me—in a heavy green sedan.”

  We had a heavy green sedan.

  “A car exactly like ours,” she said. “I jumped aside, and he missed me. It shook me—but I didn’t think it was deliberate until today, Steve, when he had his second go at me. I went to the supermarket. I parked on the street instead of using the parking lot because the lot was jammed and hard to get into and out of. When I stepped from the curb, he came from nowhere. The same car. Heavy green sedan, turned into a monstrous weapon… .” Her words ended in a choked sound.

  “My God, Maureen! Why?”

  “Why?” she said. And she began crying. It wasn’t like her. Maureen never cried, except over a homeless kitten or a sentimental story. It hit me suddenly that she wasn’t crying because somebody was trying to kill her. She hadn’t started crying until I’d asked that simple question, probed for the reason.

  “I should have told you everything days ago, Steve,” she said. “I wanted to. I’ve resolved to tell you, countless times—but when the moment came I never could get the words out. I haven’t been very brave, Steve. I thought that time would swallow up the whole thing and I could get by without hurting you and Penny. And when you start hiding a thing, it gets harder and harder to drag it out into the light.”

  “Maureen—nothing could hurt me so much as having you in serious danger.”

  “Thank God for you, Steve! I’m ready to go to the police. But I want you here. I need you with me when I tell them.”

  “Tell them what, Maureen?”

  “That I …”

  “Yes, Maureen?”

  “When you get home,” she said very softly. “Hurry, darling!” The line went dead.

  A hundred miles of blackness and rain. I was driving a coupe that belonged to the sales department. It was light, but I pushed it to the limit, skidding on the curves and chancing speed traps in the small towns I whipped through.

  The night held an unreal quality. As unreal as our first meeting. That had happened in Korea, in the first weeks of the police action. Holding a commission in the reserves, I’d been recalled and shipped out when the Commies rolled over the 38th parallel.

  Maureen was with a USO troupe, and when the Commie plane came over, a prope
ller-driven fighter of World War II vintage, Maureen and I had landed in the same ditch.

  It was a muddy ditch, but as the strafing guns burped closer, I slammed her down and threw myself across her. Some wicked chunks of steel were sailing around in the air for a while, and a siren was wailing.

  Maureen was far from relaxed, but she wasn’t trembling, either. “Pardon me,” she squeezed out, “but you’ve got your elbow in my mouth.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and shifted my arms a little as the sound of the plane became a high-pitched scream.

  I could hear his guns. I could sense the lacy pattern his bullets were making on the ground. I felt their hot fire stitching across my back.

  It was over in seconds. The plane went away and activity returned to the ground. There was a lot of confusion. A strafing was the last thing expected in the area, and the job in Korea was still so new that a lot of people hadn’t learned that the only predictable thing about a Commie is his unpredictability.

  “Hey, soldier,” Maureen tapped my shoulder, “he’s gone.”

  I looked at her, a dumb grin on my face. I was grayed-out from shock.

  “Get off me, you big lummox!” she said. She wriggled free of me, outraged, disgusted, and then she saw my back. “Blood,” she said, and went green.

  She bounced out of the ditch and came back with two guys who had a stretcher between them. They lifted me out of the ditch. She ran alongside as we jogged toward the ambulance.

  She looked small and breathless, and the breeze feathered her short, curly blond hair.

  “I’ll come to the hospital to see you, soldier,” she said as they slid me into the ambulance.

  “Swell,” I said, speaking through my teeth because the numbness was going away.

  She was bowed and penitent as she took a last look at me before they closed the ambulance door. The attendants were going around the ambulance to get into the seat. Then I saw her face framed in the rear window. Her eyes were wide. “What’s your name?” she yelled.

  The motor of the ambulance started. “Steve Griffin,” I said. I wondered if she’d got it over the surge of the motor.

  She’d got it. She was at the hospital when I came out of surgery, and every day afterward as long as she was in the area. Later, I tried to remember what we’d talked about. I couldn’t. But I could remember that we were both eager to talk, interrupting and laughing.

  I promised to look her up if I ever got back stateside.

  My wounds were not serious in themselves. They healed quickly. But the aftermath was a muscle a bit too tight here, another slightly loose there. I felt fine and looked the same as ever, but the doctors said I’d never do any pick-and-shovel work.

  The Old Man read me out of the service with a crack about needing weaker minds and stronger backs. Then he forgot his rank, shook hands, and I was booked for passage home. I’d had my war—without ever coming face to face with a Commie.

  I kept my promise to look Maureen up when I got back. We were both unattached. We went around together for a while. It wasn’t a violent courtship. We were good company and enjoyed being together. We didn’t have to do a lot, or chase to a flock of expensive places, to have a good time.

  We were lonely. The things we’d seen overseas had changed us. We needed something. We decided it was each other.

  One night we went to a party, and when it was over neither of us wanted to go home. We drove the rest of the night, crossed a state line, and got married early the next morning.

  We rented a suite in a good hotel, had breakfast sent up, and later, when I held her in my arms, her eyes were deep, her body yielding.

  “Steve,” she whispered, “there’s one more vow I’d like us to make.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “To work at making our marriage a success. So many people go into it nowadays expecting some kind of magic, expecting it to work automatically. A good marriage is something that has to be built.”

  “You’re old-fashioned,” I said.

  “I only want to be married once, Steve.”

  She was at once femininely helpless and strong, scared and brave. This was the tenderest moment I’d ever experienced.

  “It will work,” I said.

  And it had. It was not the perfect marriage, but we tried. We were not, I suppose, in love in the strictly romantic sense; we enjoyed and liked and appreciated each other. We had companionship and understanding. We were willing to accept each other’s minor imperfections without hurt or irritation simply because neither was judging the other by the yardstick of a romantic ideal.

  Our daughter Penny—four years old, blond curly hair, angels and imps in her blue eyes—cemented the marriage.

  If it sounds dull, I’ve given the wrong impression. We visited and partied among a sizable group of friends. Maureen was intelligent, and quick to laugh. Her minor failing was her hatred of details, which was reflected in her housekeeping. The house was never dirty, but always a little cluttered. I didn’t mind; it was comfortable.

  If Maureen had a major failing, it was her need for constant appreciation. She wasn’t catty or flirtatious, but when she entered a room she had to know that others knew she was there. The actress in her? Maybe. I was inclined to think the trait came from a sense of insecurity, never visible but never far from her.

  The first lights of the city flashed by the coupe: drive-in theaters and restaurants, street lights making yellow halos in the rain.

  I kept my foot heavy on the accelerator, threading my way through traffic. I hit the downtown red-light changes with luck. Office buildings and dark stores dropped behind. Streets began to be lined with trees, houses nestled in back of the shelter of lawns and hedges. I swung into the residential section where we lived—Meade Park—and my fingers were gripping the wheel so hard they ached.

  It was midnight, and the rain was heavier than when I’d begun to drive. White, snug houses, some showing lights, flashed by.

  I turned the corner onto our street, Tarrant Boulevard. Our house was halfway down the block. The living room was lighted and our car was parked under the carport.

  I let out a long breath of relief.

  2

  I pulled the coupe in behind our heavy green sedan and sank back in the seat. I had such a cramp in my back muscles that getting out of the car was going to be an effort, but mostly I just wanted to sit there and look at the car and the lights and snugness of the house.

  I got out of the coupe and put my hands against my kidneys to relax my back after the strain of the drive. I turned up my trench-coat collar and ducked across the lawn to the front door of the house.

  I opened and closed the door, expecting Maureen to rush to me.

  The living room was empty.

  “Maureen?”

  I waited until the house had swallowed the last echoes of the word.

  Still in hat and coat, I gave the downstairs a quick search.

  The silence of the house began to live.

  I paused at the foot of the stairs, the emptiness and deserted aching of the house closing in about me.

  After that phone call she would have been watching for me. She wasn’t in the house. I knew that, even before I started up the stairs.

  I went up anyway, taking the stairs two at a time. I reached the door to our bedroom, opened it, reached for the wall switch. Light flooded the room, which was empty. I turned back into the hall, breathing hard. I went to the door of Penny’s room. I touched the knob, but was too weak for a moment to turn it. Finally, the door swung open. The light in the hallway fanned into her bedroom, sweeping across the little yellow ducks in the wallpaper design, splashing across her bed.

  I held to the door jamb. She was in bed, sound asleep, one arm flung over her giant panda doll. The dim light caused her to stir. Her child’s face was clean and fine in the light. She sighed, and sank back into deep sleep.

  With a backward step, I closed the door on Penny’s sleeping form. My head felt tight and dizzy as I ret
raced my steps to the stairwell and down the stairs.

  I kept telling myself the main thing to do was not to go to pieces, to think what to do. She might have stepped out for a few minutes.

  To that, the rain whispered a laugh.

  I lighted a cigarette, forcing myself to keep calm. As I dropped the paper match in the ash tray, I saw the cigarette butt that was there. I picked it up. The butt was still soft and moist; it hadn’t been snubbed out long. There was no lipstick on it, so Maureen hadn’t smoked the cigarette. A man might have. And I tried to keep from thinking of which man.

  I found myself at the front door, wet darkness in my face. For a second it was difficult to keep from yelling her name. She might have got away from him. She might be somewhere out there.

  I could see no sign of her.

  My mind was frantic in its efforts to avoid the big answer. I wanted to think that anything else was true. She’d got away from him and gone to a neighbor’s house. But the surrounding houses, those close by, were all dark.

  I closed the front door. I was beginning to shake.

  Her phone call kept repeating itself like a very real whisper in my ear. The call that couldn’t have come from a person who couldn’t have possibly been touched by anything so fantastic as this sort of disappearance.

  I found myself doing something with my hands. I looked at them. I’d taken the handkerchief from my pocket and begun wiping my palms. Already the handkerchief was sodden. I jammed it in my hip pocket and turned toward the alcove off the lower hallway. I had the average man’s reluctance to call the police, but I didn’t know what else to do.

  In the small alcove, I picked up the phone and dialed. A quiet, bored voice cut short the ringing at the far end. “Police station, Precinct Five.”

  “I want to report a missing person.”

  “I’ll connect you with the bureau.”

  A pause. I managed to light another cigarette while I waited.

  A click. “Missing persons. Decoster speaking.”

  “I want to report a missing person.”

  “I figured as much. Your name?”

  “Steve Griffin.”