The Killer Is Mine

by Talmage Powell

  “Yet—there were questions. Had I really been sure about the time? Why the strange inner calm as I’d gone to sleep on the couch? Because my mind had substituted a brief dream for a horror-filled reality? And why would Giles Newell lie?

  “The questions got larger as the days passed. When I went into the courtroom, I carried them with me. Laura was sure I was innocent and would be acquitted. But I wasn’t so sure—and if I had really done what they said, I didn’t want to be acquitted.

  “So you see, Mr. Rivers,” he said without taking his eyes from my face, “I think I’m innocent. But I can’t tell you with absolute certainty. I believe I came home when I said I did. I think I could never touch a hair on anybody’s head, much less that of a child to whom I was attached. But Lieutenant Patrick’s question remains. Maybe I am thinking and believing what I want to think, what I have to believe.”

  “And if the truth is in the question?” I asked.

  “If the question reveals the real Wallace Tulman,” Wally said, “he deserves to die. I would want him to die, because I couldn’t live with him any longer.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  “DON’T TAKE everything Patrick said too seriously,” I said. “In the first place he isn’t a professional head shrinker. He’s a cop. He’s getting to be a big man in Tampa. He not only likes convictions, he has to get them to be what he wants to be. This case was made to order for him.”

  I glanced at my watch. The guard would be moving Wally Tulman back to his cell. “How well did you know Giles Newell?” I asked. “Not too well.” “What is too well?”

  “Not as a friend. An acquaintance. A bartender. I always tried to treat him as a friend, but he didn’t understand.” “He thought you were being condescending?”

  “Yes—or afraid of him.”

  “Were you afraid of him?”

  “No.”

  “There was no reason for you to be afraid of him?”

  “No, other than his dislike of me.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “Giles,” Wally said, “disliked a lot of people. He wanted wealth and he disliked some who had it. Some he played up to. Some he simply fawned over. He didn’t like me because I’d married wealth. That’s what he wanted—to marry wealth. He’s a very handsome heel, Mr. Rivers.”

  “You ever tell him so?”

  “No, sir. I tried to be friendly because I’ve never liked the idea of having enemies. When I saw he misunderstood my actions I simply let him stay on his side of the bar and I stayed on mine.”

  “You never had words?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t dislike you enough to lie your life away?”

  “I’m sure it didn’t reach that point with him.”

  “How well did your wife know him?”

  Wally glanced at Laura. “No better than I did.”

  “He ever taxi her home when you were drunk?”

  Laura looked at me quietly.

  “No—and I don’t like your insinuations, Mr. Rivers,” Wally said gently.

  “I’m not insinuating anything,” I said. “I have to think of every possibility. If Giles Newell lied you into this spot, he had to have a reason.”

  “You won’t find it in Laura,” Wally Tulman said.

  “Which leaves us at a dead end,” I said.

  Unless Giles Newell hadn’t been lying.

  But nobody said it, and the guard said time was up. Wally was taken back to his cell, and Laura and I went back to the world of open blue skies and beaming sun and free balmy air.

  As I drove the rented car, Laura let her head rest against the back of the seat. Her hair lay on the upholstery, a sheen of polished ebony.

  She was a beautiful woman, a damned beautiful woman. It didn’t seem to have made her ugly inside, like a lot of beautiful women I’d known.

  For my money, Wally Tulman had never been man enough for her.

  Muggy night had crawled over Tampa when I let her out at her house. We’d eaten on the outskirts of Tampa. We hadn’t talked much. She hadn’t put the question a lot of women would have voiced.

  She did now. “What did you think of him?”

  “He appears to be a gentle, sweet kind of guy, the kind the world needs more of.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “I’m sure of very little. I knew a kindly old lady once who poured kerosene over her bedridden husband and struck a match to him.”

  Her face was a pale cameo in the darkness.

  “Monsters have some strange hiding places,” I said. “I didn’t see anything in Wally to make me think he’s other than what he appears to be.”

  My hands were on the steering wheel. She reached out and laid her fingers on mine. “Thanks for being honest with me, Ed Rivers.”

  She got out of the car, and I watched her walk to the house. She disappeared in shadows. She had time to get a key out. Lights went on in the house and I saw her shadow pass a window.

  I didn’t start the car right away. From the window, I glanced over the neighborhood. I couldn’t see much, but I knew what daylight would have showed me. The houses were sprawling, airy examples of modern architecture, built of steel, concrete and glass so that when you were inside you felt as though you were outside. Except that all of them would be air-conditioned. The roofs were flat and slanting, giving the appearance of dark, thin planes straining toward the sky.

  Parallel to the broad, palm-lined parkway were broad, deep canals opening into Tampa Bay. Each house would have its private dock, cruisers bobbing at some, runabouts at others. There was no front or rear to these houses. A street level, a waterfront side. On the waterfront side were open patios and barbecue pits, tables and huge beach umbrellas and outdoor bars.

  With a slight turn of my head, I could see the Collins house. It was almost a hundred yards away, most of it obscured by a high box hedge. You’d reason that you could never find a better place to bring up a little girl, a safer place.

  I started the car, tooled it out of the driveway and ambled it down the street.

  The Yacht Club bar was only a few blocks away. It snuggled discreetly behind a high, wrought-iron entry arch. Seaward was a quarter-mile-long row of boat slips where the bay had been dredged and a channel connected to the main channel to handle boats of any size. The landscaped grounds encompassed a nine-hole golf course and half a dozen tennis courts.

  I parked the rented buggy on the circular driveway that reached around to the canopied entry to the club building. The heap was out of place, sandwiched between a Caddy and an Imperial.

  I walked in. There was a small foyer, a dining room to my right. Beyond that, I guessed, were private club rooms where you could find a heavy sugar poker or gin game.

  The bar was to my left. Its outer wall was a circular sweep of glass overlooking the water. This wall was lined with red leather booths. The bar curved out from the inner wall of the room and back again. A slim, jaded-looking guy was tinkling on a grand piano at the far end of the room. A couple strolled past him through the open glass doors to the terrace outside.

  I went to the bar and sat down on a high leather stool. A short guy with olive skin and a small black mustache gave me a sidelong glance as he mixed a cocktail. He poured the cocktail into a glass and set it before a guy a few stools down from me.

  He moved to me, raised his brows and inquired discreetly, “Are you looking for someone, sir?”

  “I’ll have a beer,” I said.

  He didn’t move right away, and I looked directly at him and smiled.

  He opened a beer and when he put it in front of me, I said, “Is Mr. Newell around?”

  “Mr. Newell, sir?”

  “Giles Newell.”

  The customer a few stools down the way lowered his cocktail, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at me.

  “Mr. Newell is no longer employed here,” the bartender said.

  “Since when?”

  “I really couldn’t say
, sir.” The bartender glanced at the man down the bar and moved away.

  I swung around on the stool as the customer got up, killed his cocktail with one gulp and walked to me. More exactly, he floated down the bar until he was swaying beside my stool.

  He was a big, blond, youngish, handsome man. His features were rough enough to keep him from being a pretty boy. He had a jut to his lower jaw like he was used to having people listen and do as he said. He had powerful, sloping shoulders, a flat gut and a look about him of golf, tennis and helming a yacht in a white-capped sea.

  But he was a bird pulling his good looks and strength soft at the edges. His eyes were bloodshot There were those first little broken veins in his cheeks and at the tip of his nose. The initial bit of flesh had sagged under his craggy chin.

  “What do you want with Newell?” he slurred. He looked sore as hell. His eyes were dangerous.

  I stayed on the stool, but I wasn’t sitting the same way now.

  “It’s a business matter,” I said.

  “Well, find him someplace else,” he said. “We don’t allow bohunks and bums coming around here to talk to the help.”

  The bartender looked worried. He eased to the gate at the far end of the bar, lifted the gate and went through it. To get the manager, I guessed.

  The guy in front of me put his hand on my arm. All the mugginess of the heat left me.

  “Don’t you know to speak when you’re spoken to?” he asked.

  “Take your hand off my arm,” I said.

  “I’ll take my hand off when I’m damned good and ready,” he said.

  I relaxed. He was already so drunk he could hardly stay on his feet. His breath had that smell of an old drunk, a seriously built-up state three or four days in the manufacture. The final gulped cocktail brought color to his face and threatened to knock his pins from under him.

  I turned back to the bar. The manager might know something of Newell.

  The guy beside me pawed at my arm a second time. “You must be the lousy bastard she hired!” he said with sudden drunken clarity and certainty. “You’re that damned detective, that’s what,” he added, running the words together. “But it won’t get the bitch a thing! Newell isn’t here and even if you found him, it wouldn’t do you any good.”

  I looked at him and got a mental click. I’d seen his picture in the papers that reported the trial.

  “How’d you know she’d retained me, Mr. Collins?”

  Milt Collins glowered. “The whole damned neighborhood knows it. She made no bones about her intention to hire a lousy hoodlum to help get her husband off.”

  He weaved his face close to mine. He couldn’t focus his eyes, but he tried. He meant to look mean and he managed to do so to some extent.

  “Nobody’s going to get that little creep out of the death house,” Milt Collins said. “He’s going to die up there for what he did to my kid—and to my wife.”

  His eyes clouded up.

  He stumbled back from the bar. He stood in a swaying crouch with his hands knotted into fists. They looked like capable fists. Big fists of a man who’d once been a worker.

  The bartender came back, bobbing behind a suave, dark man in a white dinner jacket.

  The man in the dinner jacket had quick dark eyes. He smiled at Milt Collins and said good evening. As he did so, he stepped between Collins and me.

  “I’m Mr. Ordway, the manager,” he said. “I understand you’re looking for Giles Newell.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He no longer has a connection here. He left our employment right after the trial of Wallace Tulman. No one here knows where he went or presently might be. Is that clear?”

  “Sounds clear,” I said.

  “We don’t like our guests bothered,” he said. “Nor our help. Please accept your drink on the house—and good evening.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Ordway relaxed.

  “It’s all right.” I got off the stool. “You got a job. I guess you’re okay at it. I’m not sore.”

  I started out of the bar. Milt Collins dropped a vile word softly and started after me. I kept moving. I heard Ordway say something with a brittle laugh in an attempt to get Collins in a conversation.

  Collins’ voice got a little higher. “I don’t like Ybor City bums trying to get creeps out of jail.”

  I heard a stool turn over. I stopped then, and looked around.

  As I did so, I bumped into a kid who was coming out of the foyer.

  “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said politely.

  He was a slender, taut boy of about thirteen with fair skin, hair and eyes. He was dressed like a junior fashion plate and his hair was neatly combed. His wide, deep eyes rested on me for a moment. Then he continued into the bar.

  Milt Collins was about a dozen feet from me when the boy paused before him. The child looked up like a little old man. “Father,” he said, “will you come home with me?”

  Milt Collins wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared at the kid. “Go home,” he said.

  “Yes, Father, if you will accompany me.”

  “You got no damned business here.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Please, Mr. Collins—” Ordway said, standing beside Milt.

  “Go crawl back in your office,” Collins told the club manager. Then to young Bryan, “Your granny send you here after me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’re lying, you creepy little punk.”

  “No, Father,” Bryan said tonelessly.

  Collins drew back his hand. His face twisted into a terrible mask.

  The boy didn’t flinch or try to defend himself.

  Collins took a roundhouse slap at him before anybody could move. The swing was wild, and Collins kept on turning. Then he fell flat on the floor. He’d passed out cold.

  Ordway looked at Collins with disgust. The boy looked calmly at the prone figure with nothing in his wide eyes.

  A deadly little silence had come to the bar. Now there was a sudden buzz of strained talk and laughter from the red-leather booths. The jaded lad at the piano started tinkling again.

  I moved to Collins and touched Ordway’s arm.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll get him home.”

  Ordway jerked his angry face around to me. Then it dawned on him that I was relieving him of an irksome chore and responsibility.

  “As you wish,” Ordway said. “Juan will help you get him in your car.”

  “I don’t need any help for that,” I said.

  I picked up Milt Collins and swung him across my shoulder. With the kid tagging at my heels, I walked out.

  CHAPTER

  5

  IN THE BACK SEAT of the car, Milt Collins slobbered as he slept.

  The little boy sat beside me in the front seat. He was as aloof and calm as dead tropic air. He sat stiffly straight with his eyes directly ahead and his hands clasped in his lap.

  “I’ll direct you to our home, sir,” he said.

  “I know the way, son. You’re Bryan, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t you want to know who I am?”

  “I really don’t feel it my business, sir.”

  “You mean you don’t care.”

  “No, sir, I don’t. I presume you’re some friend of Father’s.”

  “Not exactly. I’m a detective. Mrs. Tulman hired me.”

  I waited for him to say something. He didn’t. Just sat there looking straight ahead.

  “You know Mrs. Tulman, of course?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you knew Mr. Tulman?”

  “It will do no good for you to try and pump me, sir.”

  I boomed a laugh. The kid had a cold-steel, nerveless kind of spunk.

  “Okay, Bryan,” I said. “Chalk one up for you. I guess I know when I run into a stone wall.”

  He looked at me then. Coolly. Carefully. I had the feeling he saw a lot more than most ad
ults would have. “I didn’t get your name.”

  “Ed Rivers,” I said.

  “You’re a sinister-looking individual,” he said. “Am I?”

  “Yes—as a sleepy-eyed bloodhound is sinister. I suppose you’re a very good detective.”

  “I work at it.”

  “Most interesting. I suppose you meet many strange people.”

  “A few.”

  “And deal with all sorts of perverted ones.”

  “A few.”

  “I should like to hear something of your experiences sometime,” he said. “Like my grandfather, I’m interested in unusual things. You’ve heard of my grandfather, of course.”

  “Sure, kid. Who in Tampa hasn’t?”

  “Mr. Spicola Wherry was the greatest collector of freaks of all time,” he said. “He journeyed the world over to find them. They loved him. He said it. was the freak, not the normal person, who saw and knew the world for what it was. At one time he had twenty-two carnival circuits in operation in North America and the freak shows were the greatest attractions. Did you know that?”

  “I knew he made a boodle in show business.”

  “But the money never mattered much to him,” Bryan said. “I’ve heard my granny say that. I went with Granny one Sunday to the town of freaks just south of Tampa. Have you ever been there?”

  “Passed through it,” I said.

  “A marvelous place to visit. The mayor is a midget and the police chief is eight feet tall and the town clerk is a woman who was born with the skin and hair of an ape. I shall never forget how they came from their trailers and houses when they heard the grandson of Spicola Wherry was there. Many of them wept just at the mention of Grandfather’s name.”

  We were close to the Collins house.

  “Of course,” Bryan said, his tone holding its recent spark of animation, “the greatest freak of all time is Max the Giant. Have you ever seen him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He watches after Granny. When Grandfather died, Max was his valet and servant. I can remember what Max did after the funeral. I was a small boy then, but I remember clearly. I was peeking through a doorway. I’d started in to see Granny, and I saw Max kneeling down before her. He said his only wish was to carry on in the service of Grandfather’s ghost and Grandfather’s widow.”