The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories by Bill Pronzini Martin H Greenberg

Author:Bill Pronzini, Martin H Greenberg [Bill Pronzini, Martin H Greenberg]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

STEPHEN MARLOWE

Wanted—Dead and Alive

(Chester Drum)

I was drinking an ouzo-and-water on the aft deck of the car-ferry Hellas and watching the lights of Brindisi fade into the Mediterranean darkness when a stocky figure came toward me, lurching slightly with the ship’s roll.

“What the hell are you doing aboard?” I said.

“Did I ever say I wouldn’t be?”

“Wife see you yet?” I asked.

“In the lounge. A real touching scene. She was looped. As usual.”

That made two of them, I thought. Sabastian Spinner’s lurch hadn’t been all ship’s roll. He was gripping the rail hard with both hands to keep the deck from tilting.

“What about the hired gun?”

“Christ, no. If he’s aboard, I haven’t made him.” Spinner sighed ruefully. “Provided I remember what the sonofabitch looks like.” A foghorn tooted in the bay, sounding derisive.

Sebastian Spinner was producer-director of Lucrezia Borgia, which was being filmed on location all over Italy. Twenty-five million bucks, not Spinner’s money, had been pumped into it so far. The studio was near bankruptcy, the picture still wasn’t finished and never would be if Spinner’s wife kept wandering all over the map, with or without whatever stud struck her fancy at the moment.

It seemed even less likely that the picture would be finished if Spinner’s wife, Carole Frazer, who was playing La Lucrezia, wound up dead on the twenty-six hour steamer trip between Brindisi, Italy, and Patras, Greece. Neither Spinner nor I would make book that she wouldn’t. Spinner had hired a Neapolitan killer to hit her in the head.

I’d first bumped into Sebastian Spinner in Rome a couple of weeks ago, when I’d blown myself to a vacation after the Axel Spade case. It was a party, the kind they throw in Cinecita or Hollywood, where somebody dressed to the earlobes always gets tossed into the pool, where an unknown starlet named Simonetta or something like that peels to the waist to prove her astonishing abundancy and where guys like me, if their luck is running bad, get hired by guys like Sebastian Spinner.

“Drum?” he’d said, scooping a couple of martinis off a tray and handing me one. “That wouldn’t be Chester Drum?”

I admitted my guilt.

“The private dick?”

“Not very private if you keep shouting it like that.”

Spinner laughed phlegmily and clamped my arm with a small, soft hand. He was a stocky bald man, and his face and pate were shiny with sweat.

“They say you’re the best in the business,” he said, and added modestly: “I’m the best in my business. Sweetheart, if we get together it could be you’re gonna save my life. Though sometimes I ain’t to sure it’s worth the trouble.” Spinner was alternately egotistic and self-deprecating, a typical Hollywood type who made me glad I usually worked out of Washington, D.C.

He steered me outside and we drove off into the hot Roman night in his low-slung Facel Vega. He said nothing until we’d parked on the Via Veneto and took a curbside table at Doney’s.

“Somebody’s gonna hit my wife in the head,” he said then.

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