Read In the Still of the Night Online
Authors: Dorothy Salisbury Davis
In the Still of the Night
“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —
The Denver Post
“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —
The Miami Herald
“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes,
Los Angeles Times
“A joyous and unqualified success.” —
The New York Times
on
Death of an Old Sinner
“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —
Daily Mirror
(London) on
Death of an Old Sinner
“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —
The New York Times
on
A Gentleman Called
“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —
Chicago Tribune
on
A Gentleman Called
“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —
The New Yorker
on
The Judas Cat
“A book to be long remembered.” —
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
on
A Town of Masks
“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —
The New York Times
on
The Clay Hand
“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —
The New York Times
on
A Death in the Life
“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —
Library Journal
on
The Habit of Fear
“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and
Shock Wave
is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Shock Wave
Tales to Lock Your Doors By
Dorothy Salisbury Davis
To Forget Mary Ellen
T
HE TWO MEN SAT
in Gibbons’s 1990 Ford Taurus in the parking lot of Freddie’s Diner on the West Side of Manhattan. In November it was already dark at five-thirty. Everyone on the street, except the homeless, was bucking the wind, homeward bound. The two men were unnoticed.
Joseph (Red) Gibbons was a retired New York detective. The subject of unproven charges of corruption and misconduct, he’d been given early retirement several years before. It was widely suspected also that he abused his wife, but Mary Ellen simply would not swear out a complaint against him. He was an affable man most of the time, generous, with a glib tongue and a ready handshake. He was also a bully, and it came out when anyone of lower rank crossed him, or when he’d had a few drinks, or, unpredictably, with his wife.
Billy Phillips was crouched down on the passenger side. The round-shouldered Phillips had crouched so much of his life it was his natural posture. On the move he was quick and simian; huddled in a chair or a car seat he had very nearly the inanimacy of a rag doll. In the neighborhood he was thought to be a kind man, he was very good to Marge, his wife, and he adored their ten-year-old son, William. There were rumors that he was connected with the Rooney Gang, but nobody suspected in what capacity. Some said it had to do with gambling. Phillips was a hit man, a paid killer. His wife took for granted that they lived on the horses and what she earned as a hairdresser in a neighborhood beauty salon. Billy was a good handicapper and every once in a while took off without notice for a few days at whatever track was in operation at that time of year.
Gibbons and Phillips had met only once before, when Gibbons was still a working detective. Phillips had made a rare slip-up: he had left evidence that would eventually incriminate him on the scene. Rooney had told him he might get lucky, Gibbons was on the case. By appointment he had gone to Gibbons’s home, a loft in the West Thirties, and Mrs. Gibbons, Mary Ellen, had opened the loft door to him, not even curious about how he got into the building. He wouldn’t have told her the truth anyway. He observed an ugly bruise on her cheek, but he recognized her as a battered woman more from the wary look in her eyes, the hang of her head, the sloping shoulders, especially the shoulders. The slope had particular meaning to him—it recalled his attempts to diminish himself, to become invisible if possible, in childhood, to slip under the blows aimed at him by a runaway father whenever he was coaxed home by the parish priest. Billy Phillips had never laid a hand on his own son, even in just punishment.
The night he had gone to Gibbons’s home he was prepared to mortgage his life to get the incriminating evidence back in his own hands or destroyed. He represented himself to Gibbons as an intermediary, the messenger for a friend in trouble. He spoke as an outsider, even though he knew deep down that Gibbons did not believe for a minute he was there on behalf of anyone other than himself. No promises had been given. Both men realized, despite Phillips’s sham, that they were prisoners to each other whether or not any word of commitment passed between them.
A few months after that Gibbons was retired. The evidence Phillips was concerned about never surfaced. The case, like his other homicides, remained open, but inactive. The police lacked both time and new evidence. His success was attributed in part at least to his never using the same weapon twice. After making a hit he took the weapon at once to Fitz Fitzgerald, a gun fence with an overseas outlet. When he needed a safe replacement Fitzgerald always came through for him.
Phillips had a beer now and then in McGowen’s Pub on Eighth Avenue and he had seen Gibbons there a few times. They had made eye contact, but that was all. They’d not spoken again until the phone call from Gibbons that set up their meeting in the parking lot of Freddie’s Diner.
Phillips appeared, as out of nowhere, got into the car and closed the car door almost soundlessly.
“Been waiting all this time to hear from me?” Gibbons asked him.
“I had a little package ready for you, but I didn’t hear so I figured I’d better wait.”
“Five years?”
“I thought maybe you’d forgot about it. Maybe you wanted to forget it.”
“Cops and elephants don’t forget. How big was the little package?”
Phillips shrugged. “I’m not a rich man.”
“Maybe you’re in the wrong business.” Gibbons gave a snort of laughter.
Phillips didn’t say anything. He felt like a mouse under the cat’s paw.
“When the P.D. put me out to pasture, I went into the insurance business,” the retired cop said. “I had a couple of good years in there before things dried up. I’ve got what my old lady calls a gift of the gab. It worked miracles when there was money around. The way things are now, half my clients can’t pay their premiums. I can hardly pay my own …”
The more Gibbons talked about himself, the more uneasy Phillips felt. Why was he supposed to give a damn what Gibbons was doing? He was being set up for something and it was going to come like a kick in the groin. Was the old evidence still around? Was the case going to open again? Gibbons sure as hell wasn’t trying to sell him life insurance. But it had to have something to do with insurance. That made him even more nervous. Insurance companies had their own detectives. He pulled in tighter on himself, pushing back on the cushion, down on the seat as though he could disappear into the upholstery.
Gibbons continued, “Want to know what all this bullshit’s about?”
“I want to know what size package you’re thinking of, yeah.”
The ex-cop chortled. “You’ve got it all wrong, my friend. It was you mentioned the package, not me. I’ve got a job for you, Phillips, something in your line.”
He ought to have known, probably did. Only he didn’t want to admit it. He didn’t want the job, not for Gibbons. But he was afraid to say so. “You know how I make a buck these days? I handicap horses—all over the country. I guess you knew that, huh?”
“Twenty thousand,” Gibbons said, ignoring Phillips’s attempt to head him off. “Five when we shake hands, five when the job’s done, and ten two years later. We can set the date.”
Phillips bit his tongue. It was enough money to choke a horse. His instant calculations ran to where it would be safe to invest it, and how much it would grow to by the time William was old enough for college. It happened to him every time there was a possibility of real money. “What’s the two year business?”
“Two years minimum. We’re talking insurance. They don’t pay till they can’t get out of it. They want absolute proof whatever the claimant says happened did happen. We can handle that. We can see it happens the right way.”
Phillips thought he had it now: proof that the deceased died by the rules set down in the policy fine print. Gibbons had got himself named beneficiary of some old Bridget or Norah he’d charmed with his Irish gab. Now he was ready to pull the plug on her. It had to look like a break-in or a street crime. High risk and tricky as hell. Twenty thousand wasn’t all that much money.
But he said, “Tell me about it.”
“I couldn’t do that, Billy, without a commitment from you.”
“I can’t give you a commitment till I know what I’m getting into. Who? Where? How much time have I got?”
“I’ll be working with you all the way.”
Phillips was suddenly wary for another reason: Gibbons could be undercover, working for the cops again. He could’ve got religion. “I work alone,” he said. “It’s done my way or it ain’t done by me.”
“I buy that,” Gibbons said, “but you might feel different in this case.” The lights of a passing car flashed across his face. They caught the screwed-up eyes, the smug grin on his pudgy face.
“I do every case different,” Phillips said, “but they all come out the same. See what I mean?”
“Whoever you take a contract on, they’re dead. Is that what you’re saying? What in hell would I be doing here if I didn’t know that?”
“What’s the job?”
“I want you to kill my wife.”
Phillips wasn’t prepared for that one, but he should’ve been, he thought: Gibbons the wife beater. He had an instant memory of the battered woman who opened the door to him that night five years ago. Gibbons would be working with him all the way. He believed him. And he hated him. Not that he’d loved any bastard he had ever done a job for. “I never did a woman,” he growled.
“You know the sign in the window of the beauty shop where your wife works—UNISEX? Look at it that way.”
The son of a bitch.
They met the next night two hours later in the same place. Freddie closed early. His main business came at noon from workers in nearby industry and warehouses. A few neighborhood stragglers hardly made it worthwhile to serve evening meals. By eight o’clock the only cars left in the lot would stay overnight. Freddie paid half his rent that way. Gibbons was one of his regulars, familiar to anyone who observed his comings and goings. No one did that night. Phillips considered himself invisible. He’d worked at it long enough, a master of every detail of misguidance. Even Gibbons didn’t see him until he opened the car door and slipped in.
“I was thinking,” Gibbons started, “you might want to come up to my place and look over the setup. She’s home most of the time except on card party nights, but I don’t see what difference it makes whether she’s home or not. Except on the big night, of course.”
“The big night,” Phillips repeated.