The Killer Is Mine

by Talmage Powell

  We ate in the heart of town, at a Franklin Street restaurant. The noise of the city was subdued and far away. The air-conditioning began putting new life in battered cells. The drinks were tall and cool and the food good.

  I laid the scanty notes I’d taken on the table between us. She looked at the dog-eared bit of paper and said, “Not a lot to show for the afternoon.”

  “I’ve had worse days.”

  “So have I, Ed.” She looked at me quietly as she said it. I didn’t know exactly how she meant it. She wasn’t an indirect person. I decided she meant it the way I’d like for her to mean it.

  I looked at her, and there was no sentiment between us. The thing that came to life and writhed invisibly in and around us was as vivid as a woman damp and dark with loveliness in a hot Florida night.

  She cut her eyes away. “We didn’t find out much about Giles, did we?”

  “I guess we didn’t,” I said.

  We were off the hook now and the feeling passed. She picked up the notes and studied them. She needed to do something with her hands.

  She read them over, as if expecting to find something hidden, something I hadn’t written at all. She didn’t find anything, of course. Only that Giles Newell had left his apartment and given no forwarding address. Only that no telephone or gas or electric service had been extended to him in Tampa since he’d left his last known address. Only that he hadn’t contacted any of his few known friends.

  We’d found one thing.

  He had a sister.

  We got that from a bartender at the big Spanish restaurant in Ybor City. This restaurant is quite a famous tourist attraction and the waiters and musicians are high-toned folks. Their union included employees at such spots as the Yacht Club bar, and this barkeep and Giles had once worked a Sarasota place together.

  Giles’s sister had been a real dish in those days. Her name was Carrie. Carrie Hofstetter. She’d married a mug in Miami she thought was a businessman. He turned out to be a racetrack tout. They followed the nags north and south for a few seasons and he got in trouble with a gambling syndicate.

  Hofstetter went one way and Carrie the other. She’d showed up in Sarasota while Giles was working there. She looked like a lady, but she was long-gone lush. With a few drinks under her girdle she turned into a first-class bat. Giles had cut off the help he was giving her, and she had come to the bar and made two or three scenes that were lulus. Giles had lost his job because of it. He’d drifted to Tampa and nobody heard of Carrie for a while. Then she’d turned up in Tampa also, and was living in a place in West Tampa.

  The bartender hadn’t known her address. I’d got it at headquarters. She was a regular inmate of the city jail on public drunk charges. She’d been booked once on suspicion of auto theft. Twice for assault and battery. Once on suspicion of dope peddling. She’d been fined, pulled a couple of short-term sentences and remained a little part in that morass of human flotsam the police wearily accept as chronic headaches.

  I didn’t run into Julie Patrick at headquarters. Nobody said anything about him to me. On the surface, my relation with the official body was the same. Garcia, I learned, had been temporarily relieved of duty.

  I figured Garcia would be back to shaking down dirty-picture peddlers in about sixty days. There wasn’t much I could do about that. I was no Sir Galahad jousting for the city of Tampa. The city of Tampa could damn well take care of itself—as long as it didn’t step on my toes when I was working in the interests of a client. In that case, I’d do what I could to move forward unimpeded. And I figured Julie Patrick would think twice now before trying to gum me further on the Tulman case. He was too big a man, too juicy a target for the papers to rip to pieces.

  I drank a beer while Laura Tulman finished an afterdinner brandy. I paid the check, and we went out into the bustle and swelter of Franklin Street. I whistled down a taxi and gave him the West Tampa address.

  We crossed the Hillsborough River, which, with the railroad tracks, slice up downtown Tampa and make it a hell of a place to get around in. For a moment the air was clean. Then we went quickly into West Tampa.

  We passed shacks that should have been condemned, and joints where trouble often is no farther away than the swish of a switch-blade knife.

  The address was a five-story firetrap on a corner.

  “Wait,” I told the cabbie, and he slouched behind the wheel and dropped his cap over his dark Cuban eyes.

  Laura and I crossed the sidewalk. A couple of guys lounging in the doorway of the building found her pretty easy to look at. I shouldered them aside, and we stepped into the foyer.

  The paint was peeling on the walls, and the plaster was cracked. The row of mailboxes was battered, and some of them lacked names.

  Her name had been scrawled in ink on a bit of cardboard and slotted on one of the boxes.

  Carrie Hofstetter. 514.

  We walked up the five flights. There were plenty of kids in the building. You could hear their chatter and cries. A guy was cursing them on the second, and the heat brought the stench of their urine out of a partially opened door on the third.

  I wondered if she ever remembered the days at Hialeah.

  Five fourteen was a front corner apartment. I knocked, and the door was opened immediately.

  She was a bloated redhead, gone the way only a good-looking, delicate redhead can go. Her puffy, soft body was clad in a greasy wrapper. Her hair was a stringy mop. The prettiness of her face had all dripped and run out of shape. Yet there was still a hint of it there. If your imagination could pull the sags and straighten the lines, you could see that she’d once been very pretty. The kind of delicate prettiness that you find in a face with blue shadows under the eyes. The kind that’s easily destroyed.

  “Mrs. Hofstetter?”

  She nodded. She was holding the wrapper with her hands. It clung enough to show that she still had a figure of sorts. Like her face, it had run at the edges.

  “My name is Rivers,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if I could talk to you for a minute.”

  “Well, I’m busy. I was getting dressed to go out.”

  She’d opened the door like she was expecting somebody.

  “This won’t take long,” I said, “and it’s very important.”

  “Well, all right.” She glanced at Laura. Furtively, she caught the length of Laura and there was the briefest pang of regret and hate in her eyes.

  “This is Mrs. Tulman,” I said. “If you don’t mind, we’d like to talk inside.”

  “I really haven’t long.”

  She let us in and closed the door. The apartment was close, hot, dense with the smell of powder, whisky, and heavy perfume. We were in a living room furnished with an old wicker set. Through an open door I could glimpse a bedroom with all the blinds closed and an unmade bed.

  Carrie Hofstetter sat on the edge of a wicker chair. She was nervous. Her glance drifted toward a rickety wicker table holding a fifth of whisky and some scaly-looking glasses.

  “Would you care for a drink?” she asked hopefully.

  Laura and I shook our heads. I said, “We just had dinner, but why don’t you go ahead?”

  “If you don’t mind,” she mumbled. She got up, went to the table, and poured herself a stiff drink. Her hand was shaking a little.

  She threw that one down the hatch without batting a lash. She poured a second, bigger than the first, and brought it back to her chair.

  “What was it you wanted, Mr. Rivers?”

  “I want to see Giles,” I said.

  Her eyes went bright, then cloudy. “What makes you think he’s here?”

  “I don’t. But he’s your brother. You know where he is, don’t you?”

  “No. I’m sorry, I don’t.”

  She was lying.

  “It’s very important that I see him, Mrs. Hofstetten.”

  “He don’t have anything much to do with me.”

  “I see. Have you seen the papers today?”

  “No, I only j
ust got up.”

  “Giles figures in them.”

  She paled a little. But she tried not to show any feeling.

  “What’s he done?”

  “Nothing. That’s the whole trouble. You know he testified at the Tulman trial.”

  “Sure, I know all that. What’s he done now? What’s with this stuff in the papers today?”

  “It still concerns the Tulman case, Mrs. Hofstetten.”

  I could see fright taking form in her eyes. “Yeah? Who are you anyway, a cop?”

  “A private cop.”

  She glanced from me to Laura and back again. “I get it. But you lay off Giles, you hear!”

  “You think a great deal of your brother.”

  “Never mind that. Just leave him alone, I say!” I watched her expression. A few things added up. She knew more than she was telling. Giles was her last prop, her final means of support. She saw trouble forming up for him, trouble that might leave her facing the world alone, and it scared the parities off her.

  “You get out of here!” she yelled. “The both of you!”

  “Okay,” I said. “If you value Giles’s neck, you’ll have a little talk with him. About a big question mark that’s been dropped in the Tulman case. About his testimony.”

  “I already told you—”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just mention it to him when you see him at this spot where you don’t know where he is.”

  Laura and I went out. I knew she was glad to escape the building. I helped her into the waiting taxi and told the driver to pull around the corner.

  When the cab stopped after the half-block haul, I told Laura, “You might as well go on home.”

  “No, Ed, I’ll wait. I’d rather.”

  “All right,” I said.

  I looked around and spotted a convenient doorway. I took my heat-blistered feet over there.

  All I did was run up a big taxi bill. Carrie Hofstetter was no dummy. She couldn’t see me, but she knew I was out there. She stuck inside her building with the tenacity of the cockroaches.

  CHAPTER

  9

  IT WAS almost midnight when I took Laura home. She was tired and quiet as she keyed open the front door. “Keep your chin up,” I said. “It’s been a long, rough day, but you never know about such days. We might have accomplished a lot more than it seems right now.”

  “I expected this to take time, Ed,” she said. “Would you like a drink before you go home?”

  “Have you got some beer?”

  “I think so.”

  I stepped to the driveway and told the cabbie he could go.

  Laura had gone inside the house and turned on the lights in the living area. It was tricky lighting, soft, diffused. The sprawling, spacious luxury of the home could have had no other lighting.

  “I’ll only be a minute, Ed.”

  While she went to powder her nose, I sank down in one of the big, square chairs. It didn’t look comfortable, but it was.

  I didn’t have much chance to get settled in it. A scream came from the wing of the house where Laura had gone.

  I got out of the chair fast. An opening in the end of the living area gave access to a hallway. Down the hallway, a door was standing open, throwing an oblong of light in the hall.

  Beyond the lighted door, there was a crash. Another scream, quickly muffled this time. And a burst of wild laughter.

  I reached the bedroom door and shot inside the room. A slender young woman was trying to carve Laura up with a butcher knife. Laura had her fingers locked about the woman’s wrist. She was bigger and stronger than the other woman, but she couldn’t break the grip on the knife.

  As I stepped up to them, the woman tore loose from Laura and made a lunge at me. Her thin, sensitive face, misted in a cloud of blond hair, was as blood-hungry as a starving Everglades panther’s.

  She didn’t know how to fight with a knife. She came in slashing from every direction at once. She had only this crazy strength and the desire to kill.

  I grabbed at the arm swinging the knife. She was too quick for me. The tip of the knife laid a furrow down my forearm. As the blood spurted down my arm, she cackled in her throat and shot the knife toward my face. I threw my arm up, crossed with my other hand, and grabbed her wrist.

  She flopped and floundered in my grasp like a fear-maddened fish on a line. Suddenly, she was screaming shrilly.

  “Let me go, please let me go!”

  I snapped her arm around hard and she dropped the knife. When it left her grasp, her mood changed again. She used her free hand to claw at my eyes. She began mouthing some very unladylike words. They didn’t make sense. They were disjointed brickbats of filth.

  I threw my free arm about her tiny waist and turned her back to me. She kicked my shins. Then her head came jerking around and she tried to grind her teeth together in the flesh of my cheek.

  I ducked my head, hung onto her writhing, sweatslick form, and said, “Spread a sheet on the bed, Laura!”

  The struggling girl hammered an elbow against my ribs as Laura riffled a sheet over the bed.

  I threw the girl down hard on the sheet. She grabbed the edge of the bed and tried to crawl away. I jerked her hands back, wedged them against her sides, and threw her body over. She began kicking, methodically and hard.

  I got the end of the sheet over her and started rolling her in it.

  “No, no, no!” she screamed, each word higher.

  She arched her back until it seemed her spine would break. She went limp suddenly, throwing me off balance. Her face twisted about, her fine, even teeth snapping. She was anything but beautiful now. Still wistful, still hauntingly delicate. But her hair was plastered about her face, her eyes were bottomless. She was something right out of a Freudian nightmare.

  Over the years, I’ve had to take on what was thrown at me. I never wanted to, never asked for it. Some of the trouble that’s come my way has been big and tough. I’ve always managed.

  But this little woman was a new chapter in the book. She got those teeth in the lobe of my ear and nearly tore the ear off. She put a knee in my crotch and I went blind for a second with the pain.

  She was whipping the hell out of me.

  I was too busy trying to keep the storm from bursting all over me to take my hands off her. So I jerked my ear lobe free and butted her.

  I hit her hard with the top of my head right under the point of her chin.

  She gagged briefly. Then she was limp.

  I reeled from the bed. My arm was burning where the knife had laid the furrow. My crotch was pumping, like it was swelling to twice its normal size. My ear was numb. I touched it to make sure it was still there.

  I stood gasping for breath with sweat rivering down my face.

  “It’s Stephanie Collins, Ed,” Laura said. Her voice was quiet and sad.

  I looked at Mrs. Collins in repose. A little of that elusive beauty had come back to the hollow cheeks and the hollows about the closed eyes. Looking at her, you knew she’d always been finely tuned. And it was easy to realize what the death, and the manner of the death, of her little girl had done to her.

  Laura touched my arm and looked at my ear. “You need some doctoring fast, Ed.”

  “It’ll hold for a second,” I said.

  I rolled Stephanie Collins in the sheet. Then I told

  Laura to get a couple more sheets from the linen closet. I ripped those into six long bands and bound Stephanie Collins snugly in the makeshift strait jacket.

  The bleeding had just about stopped on my arm and ear. My crotch pain had eased so that I figured I still had my manhood.

  I followed Laura into the bathroom and she washed the blood off my arm and ear. Then she swabbed the wounds with merthiolate. She wrapped the arm in gauze and taped it down. The ear, I decided, didn’t need a bandage.

  Stephanie Collins had come out of it when we went back in the bedroom. Every muscle was rigid against the homemade strait jacket. She looked at me and I had the feeling the lid
s of her eyes were going to strain wrong side out.

  “Rape you,” she said.

  “Mrs. Collins …”

  “Ruthie was raped,” she said.

  “Stephanie …” Laura said with a break in her voice.

  Stephanie Collins turned her burning eyes in the direction of Laura’s voice. “Rape,” she said.

  “Don’t you know me, Stephanie?” Laura cried.

  “Rape,” Stephanie Collins said.

  She lapsed into thought for a second. Then she whispered the word and began laughing. The laughter broke off as quickly as it had started. A blob of spit came rolling out the side of her mouth.

  “He raped Ruthie,” she said. “The dirty little rat.”

  She repeated the phrases in a singsong voice, gradually built them into a weird melody.

  Laura was standing with the knuckles of her hand pressed against her mouth.

  “Laura,” I said.

  Slowly she looked at me.

  “Do you know the hospital?” I asked.

  Her gaze was impelled again to Stephanie Collins. She shook her head. Her face was gray and ill with grief. “The family slipped her away quietly when she tried to kill herself after Ruthie’s death.”

  “Kill myself,” Stephanie Collins said. “Kill Ruthie … I’ll kill you … Where is the pretty knife?” She rolled her head from side to side.

  “Better get Milt Collins over here,” I told Laura, “if he’s home.”

  Laura nodded and went out. I moved to the open window and wished we could get some breeze tonight.

  The room became very quiet.

  Stephanie Collins giggled. I looked at her over my shoulder. Her eyes were furtive and cunning.

  “Is Mother here yet?”

  “Not yet, Mrs. Collins.”

  “I do wish she’d hurry. We’ll be late for the party. You’re coming to the party with us, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Collins.”

  “Do you know,” she whispered, “that while we’re at the party Ruthie will be raped and murdered?”

  I didn’t know how to play along with this. I didn’t want to get her upset again. I wished Laura would get back with Milt Collins.