Killer, Come Back to Me

“Recognize yourself?”

“That isn’t me.”

“It’s enough like you to make it worth a hundred grand if we work it fast. Worth a million if we stick it a couple years. Those pics were snapped when you were Boss-man of L.A. When you cleared twenty grand a month or you thought things stunk pretty badly.”

He just sat there, waiting.

She stepped forward, slowly, her eyes full of funny, intense light. Her voice was like a sing-song prayer:

“Ricky Wolfe’s not dead any more. He’s back from the grave, in this room, now, sitting there, and he doesn’t know it. He’s going back. Back to L.A. to be Boss-man again.” She stared down into his features, and her eyes were burning amber.

“What do you think of that—Ricky Wolfe?”

He got it. He got what she meant and it was like a stiff kick in the teeth. He pulled back, yelling it:

“I know what you’re thinking. It won’t work!”

“Yes, it will. It has to!”

“You can’t fool people! Stuff like that happens in dreams, in books. Nobody’d believe I was him. I don’t look like him! We couldn’t get away with it. It doesn’t happen!”

“It happens to us, Ricky Wolfe! It happens to us!”

“Like hell it does.” He started getting up.

She cracked him across the face, hard, three times. Her lips were shaking, her eyes almost insane.

“It happens to us!”

* * *

The new dark suit fitted like grafted skin. One side padded out a little; Ricky’d been built that way. Higher heels added altitude to Broghman. He learned talking with a faint lisp, chewing a cigar; but the thing that he said to Julie was:

“I keep telling you it won’t work. I don’t look like him. For a moment, yeah, if you look quick, if the light’s bad, if you’re half-blind. You’re crazy. You want to kill us both!”

“Shut up!” she hissed. “Or I’ll do the killing now.”

He bit his cigar fiercely.

There were lists of facts, names, alibis to digest. Julie fed, crammed them down him. The leaves fell off the calendar like in a high wind. Then Julie, one day, elevated a stein of beer, yellow like her eyes and in a softer voice said:

“Tomorrow’s the big day. L.A. here we come.” She drank beer. “How’s it feel to be Ricky Wolfe?”

His hand shook. He looked at his face mirrored, distorted in the brown hip of the half-emptied bottle. The cigar. The moustache. He wanted to blurt, “It won’t work. An old gag like this won’t fool people.” But there was that look in her eyes, hot as boiling gold, so he shut up.

She was talking again, almost to herself. “I can’t say what it was like, that noon at the bank. You standing there. Something about the way you stood, your face, like Ricky made up in a slightly new package. Lord, how it yanked my insides.” He thought it was a nice gesture, this next. He clinked his glass against hers. “Let’s drink to our new life—together.”

She got mad. “No,” she snapped. “Let me say things like that. I keep telling you!” Looking at her, trying to understand what ticked, queer, inside her red hair, he sheepishly downed his beer.

* * *

It seemed right that she drove the car to L.A. all the way. It was a picture postcard day. She pressed the speed way up and kept it there when it was safe, her hair streaming like a scarlet banner.…They swerved corners to Spring Street and Third, parked the car, and walked—two dark suits reflected in shop windows—toward the bookie joint. He couldn’t figure it out. It was crazy—but he was actually enjoying it.

Broghman knew the place from Julie’s pungent description. A huge magazine shop smelling of ancient pulp magazines and old books in musty pyramids; dimly lighted; slouched figures moving around in the dimness, phones jangling far back in the twenty aisles and hundreds of tables.

Back in that dusty place, where naked light bulbs hung dying in the high ceiling, the biggest horse racket in L.A. tucked away its profits and shilled its suckers.

The door to hell. Broghman felt his heart pounding. What if he forgot facts, figures, words, names—