Shark Infested Custard (33 page)

       "He was trying to hurt me," she sid. She patted her high round ass, unable to say it. "Back here. I—I wouldn't let him do it, and he got the gun and said he'd make me. I thought maybe he was funnen me, but he was mad, really mad. So when he kept on, I tried to get the gun and it went off. It was so quick, so quick, quick—"

       "Who pulled the trigger? You or Don?"

       "I don't know, but not me. I didn't do nothin'. I just tried to get the gun and it went off."

       "That's all right," I said. "Let's go back to my apartment."

       I locked the door, and we went back to my apartment. I didn't worry about the Sinkiewicze's hearing the shot. They went to bed at ten-thirty when he wasn't at the fire station, and nothing would wake them after midnight. They had lived in Chicago for forty some odd years; all their lives.

       "Don's dead," I told Eddie and Hank. "He shot himself. It wasn't Merita's fault."

       "Jesus!" Eddie said. "Are you sure he's dead?"

       I touched my chin with my thumb. "It went in here, and came out back here." I patted the back of my head.

       Hank reached for the scotch bottle. "You never know, do you? He seemed so damned happy when he left," Hank said.

       "Pour a double for Merita, Hank," I said. He did, and I handed the glass to her. She shook her head.

       "Drink it, girl," I said. She held the glass with both hands and drank it down, shuddering.

       "What do we do now, Fuzz?" Eddie said.

       "Let me think a minute." Cradling my left hand, I walked back and forth across the room a couple of times, thinking. Then I snapped the fingers of my right hand. "Okay!" I said. "Here's the first thing we've got to do—!"

       "Oh, shit!" Hank laughed. "Here we go again!" He kept on laughing, and Eddie joined him. I caught a glimpse of Merita's startled face. Her mouth was a large round carmine 0, and her humid eyes bulged from her head as she looked at Eddie, then at Don, and then at me. She performed her awkward, shuffling dance from one foot to the other, back and forth, and a big wet stain appeared on her white satin trousers as she wet them. I had to laugh myself. All three of us were laughing, and we couldn't stop.

       Poor Merita.

       She probably thought we were crazy.

The End

About the Author

Born January 2, 1919 in Little Rock, Arkansas, Charles Ray Willeford was orphaned at the age of eight. He lived with his grandmother in Los Angeles until he reached the age of twelve and realized she could not afford to support both of them during the depression. He hit the roads as a young hobo, a period detailed in the autobiographical volume 'I Was Looking for a Street''. His life story continues in 'Something About a Soldier'' as Willeford, a high school dropout, lies about his age and joins the army at the age of sixteen. He went on to become a twenty-year Army-Air Force man, and was a highly decorated tank commander with the Third Army, fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, though his nagging ambition was to be a poet. His first book, the poetry collection 'Proletarian Laughter'', appeared in 1948. The first of his 'noir'' paperback original novels, 'High Priest of California'', saw print in 1953. In the 1980s, after forty years of writing, his series of novels about Hoke Moseley—'Miami Blues'', 'New Hope for the Dead'', 'Sideswipe'', and 'The Way We Die Now—'proved his breakthrough, and placed his name firmly in the ranks of the greatest writers of hard-boiled crime fiction. Willeford died on Palm Sunday, 1988, in his home in Miami.