MEERKAT MARAIS WAS wasting away in the toils of a total obsession, and looked each day more like a mongoose than ever.
The nympho from the telephone exchange was wantonly candid in her reactions to this unappealing metamorphosis. She told him that his tiny red eyes would soon be so red and tiny through staring at the wall that they would glow in the dark. She said his thin cheeks were becoming so pinched with never eating that they made his teeth look like small yellow fangs which needed cleaning. Finally, she also remarked on how creepy his skinny, hairy little body was beginning to feel, and rashly added that perhaps his cobra was past it, because it hadn’t raised its hooded head to her in a week. So Meerkat beat the hell out of her with the steam iron she was using, ironed her nipples flat, and took himself home to the scene of the crime above the dry-cleaning depot.
He had a vague description, that was all.
Vague because it had been given to him by an epileptic who also suffered from poor vision, and yet it did provide him with a basic impression of at least one of the two gun thieves. The man was white, he had darkish-brown hair, he was tall and aged somewhere between eighteen and perhaps as much as thirty. His clothes had seemed smart enough to suggest someone from a much better part of town, and they had included a dark suit, a blue shirt and a striped tie, the colors of which eluded her. He had carried a black briefcase and had walked with a spring in his step. He had knocked on Meerkat’s door two or three times, before taking out a white card and disappearing into the flat. He had been there a very short time, and then had walked quickly away again.
“Come on, Dynamite! Let’s hear the rest, hey?”
“Grrrrr,” said Dynamite, wolfing down the whole can of Kit-eez Delite that his provider had thoughtfully shoplifted on the way home.
“You’re some watch dog,” grumbled Meerkat, not without a smidgeon of affection. “What I want to know is which Monday was this? Is that too much to ask?”
“Grrrrr,” warned Dynamite.
The trouble was of course that Meerkat had been away for eight days before he discovered the outrage, and for several other days here and there before that, making it impossible to be sure when the thing had occurred. Not that this was all that important in the final analysis, but his mind had taken to worrying over every single detail. That striped tie, for instance: the only striped ties that Meerkat knew about were either the fancy sort or the ones schoolboys wore, and the description, vague as it was, certainly didn’t describe a schoolboy. In fact the class of person it described was also bewildering, because smart young men never ventured down to his end of town unless they were selling insurance, and Meerkat had already pursued that line of enquiry to no useful conclusion. The other thing that sorely perplexed him was that the epileptic had seen only one person come to his flat, whereas the fingerprints on the tumblers indicated there must have been two.
Humming to himself, temporarily elated as always by a good beating, Meerkat decided to go back and take another look at those tumblers. It was just possible that one of them would provide him with the sort of a clue that Kramer went wild for—a missing middle-finger among the impressions, for instance. The tumblers lay broken on the floor by his bar, but in quite a short time he had managed to sort them into two piles of their respective pieces, some of which were big enough to examine. The fingerprints seemed much fainter than they had done originally, and no matter how he twisted them to the light, a clear image eluded him.
“Prrrt?” said Dynamite, coming through and settling on his jacket.
But Meerkat was lost in thought. The men from Fingerprints used chalk dust, he remembered, and wondered if talcum powder would work as effectively. Not that he had any at hand, but he could always whip down to the corner and steal some. They also used a black powder a bit like soot from an oil lamp, but he hadn’t any of that around. They sort of puffed it on out of a rubber-ball thing, and then lifted the prints with a piece of Sellotape.
He had Sellotape all right, five cartons of it. Then he remembered that he also had a puffer filled with graphite powder, which was marvelous for lubricating locks and allowing a key to turn without a sound. Perhaps that would do the trick.
“Stand aside!” he said to Dynamite, “Sherlock Houses is on his way!”
Dynamite fell into a deep, digestive sleep, and paid no heed to the excited activities that filled the next five minutes. Fortunately there was nothing in Meerkat’s jacket pockets that he wanted.
“Hell, look at that!” exclaimed Meerkat, as he peeled away the Sellotape and found on it a set of clear impressions. “Now let’s see what we can see.…”
He screwed a jeweler’s eyepiece into his right eye, having always believed that he would find a use for it eventually, and tried to detect what Fingerprints men detected in such circumstances. He was amazed by how distinctive the patterns were, with spirals on one finger contrasting with a sort of banana shape on another. He went on to make further comparisons with his own fingerprints, which had also been lifted by the Sellotape in his handling of it. But instead of his fingerprints looking entirely different, they looked exactly the same to him. His hands began to shake. He checked and double-checked.
“Oh no.…” groaned Meerkat, “one of those glasses was mine all the time!” And he should have realized this at the start, being hopeless at taking things through to the kitchen to wash up, instead of jumping to wild conclusions that had cost him weeks of fruitless endeavor. “I’m looking for only one guy, Dyna, not a gang of two, and that makes all the bloody difference, hey?”
Or was the other glass marked with his prints as well? he wondered with a shudder. “That would really put the cat in among the penguins, hey?” But it wasn’t; those fingerprints looked to him entirely different.
“Now what?” said Meerkat, taking an unbroken tumbler and trying to find something left he could put in it. “Where do we go from here?”
Before trying to sort that out, his mind went back to the smart young man and did some fresh reasoning. Maybe he wasn’t a professional after all. Maybe those drawers had been pulled out, starting with the bottom one and working upwards so time wasn’t wasted by pushing them in again, by Meerkat himself, acting through sheer habit and training. Maybe he was just a clown from the smart side of town who wanted a gun and had somehow heard that Meerkat was in the market. That fitted: only that type of person would be mad enough to come buying guns in broad daylight, carrying his briefcase full of used notes, and expecting to take the gun away in it afterwards. And then? No answer to his knock, and he had knocked again, needing a gun very urgently. So badly, in fact, that he had decided to break in, and had used a trick with a credit card that he had seen on the films, and which actually worked. Once inside, however, the baboon had started to panic, unsure of where in all the mess he would find what he was seeking. He had gone to the bar and steadied his nerve with a slug of Scotch. But why suddenly look in the fridge? That was simple: because he just might have seen the same television program as Meerkat had seen—and now he came to think about it, fridges had featured more than once in such stories, making it not such a smart place to hide things. Anyway, the youngster had gone through, found the revolver in the ice compartment, which did look a little like a safe on reflection, had kicked Dynamite and hurried out, too scared by then to check that he had closed the door properly. No wonder the epileptic had said he’d had a spring in his bloody step!
Meerkat drank three fingers of creme de menthe and felt quite certain that this time he had it right; it was more than a hunch, it was a dead certainty. Then his mood changed abruptly from euphoria to a blind rage at the thought of having had something stolen off him by a brat whose parents had always given him what he wanted. Meerkat’s parents had never given him a thing, apart from abuse, scalds, cigarette bums, fractured arms and a starvation diet, and the shrieking injustice of the crime made him clasp his hands to his ears, sob and sit on the floor rocking to and fro.
He was still rocking to and fro on the floor of his living room when he heard a cheery voice from above him.
“My God, Meerkat! It must be some hangover you’ve got there!”
Meerkat looked up and saw Basil “Silver Touch” Benson, a con-man who specialized in cleaning out stupid old women, in one of his best suits and happiest moods. “Go,” said Meerkat, unable to trust himself to say more.
“Steady on, old thing,” murmured Benson, who also dabbled in porn films, dirty magazines and almost any other sudden yen felt by the mugs at his end of the trade, “I do think I’ve been frightfully patient.”
“About what, hey? Because I’m not in a patient—”
“That spot of commission you owe me—y’know, young gent making vague enquiries about a shooter. Well, it has been well over a month since then, and I was getting just a little concerned about our—er, little arrangement? Been looking for you everywhere. Been holed up, what? Pretty young thing, was she?”
Meerkat sprang for Benson’s throat and sank his uncut nails into it. “You! You sent him here?”
“Ste-steady on,” gasped Benson, collapsing backwards onto the sofa. “Not been involved in any jobs, y’know! Pure collector interest, every reason to believe—ugh!”
“Basil,” said Meerkat, very softly, and Dynamite fled the room. “I’m not going to hurt you, Basil, but don’t try biting me again, hey? Just tell me who wanted—”
“Gun-gun enthusiast, collects ’em, I only spoke to the chap in between, of course, very discreet, very very discreet, that I can assure you! Old ammuni—”
“When?” demanded Meerkat, breaking a standard lamp. “And who?”
“Mon-Mon-Monday just over a month ago! Oh God, I’m going to have a heart—”
“Who?” screamed Meerkat.
But Benson was out cold, blue-lipped and breathing like a pair of leaky bellows. Meerkat took his hands away, wiped them on the seat of his trousers, and picked up his jacket. He would have a cigarette to calm him down while the old fool completed his act. Once a con-man, always a con-man, and Meerkat Marais felt confident that his terrible revenge was only a matter of hours away now. He could afford to relax for a bit.