The Killer Is Mine

by Talmage Powell

  “And what do you think, Ed? About her death, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. The verdict of accidental death will hold up. Most factors point to it.”

  “Most factors?”

  “There’s one thing. I didn’t mention it to Patrick. He’s smart. Maybe he’s already thought of it. If I knew for sure that he has, and if he doesn’t bring it up at the inquest, then I’d know he’s covering something. But I guess I’ll never know for sure that he thought of this one angle.”

  “And what’s the angle, Ed?”

  “She didn’t scream. Carrie Hofstetter fell from that top floor window without making an outcry. Falling people don’t do that. Even a falling drunk lets out a bleat. If a drunk is too far gone to cry out, he couldn’t very well walk by a window and fall out.”

  I picked up a ham on rye and took a bite. “If she jumped deliberately, she might not have yelled. So she either had to jump—or she was slugged and thrown from the window.”

  A shiver crossed Laura’s shoulders. She started to push back her sandwich. Then resolutely she picked it up.

  She was white about the lips. “Could our visit have triggered her death, Ed?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God!”

  “But don’t feel bad about it. There had to be a condition for our visit to have done that. A condition of her own making. A condition that led to her death. So we’re not responsible.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Let’s think about Carrie Hofstetter for a minute,” I said. “Since she split with her husband and faced the world alone, she’s tagged and stuck with Giles like a rubber stamp on a mortgage foreclosure.

  “He drifts from Sarasota to Tampa. She follows. He was her whole means of support, and apparently he suffered her, unable to bring himself to cut her off completely. This indicates that Giles in his own way needed her as much as she needed him. He needed somebody he could pour out his bellyaches to, somebody he could feel superior to. So they were closer than might appear on the surface.

  “Giles knows he’s going to lay low for a while. He has to tell her. He doesn’t want her kicking up a fuss trying to find him. Or maybe he’s confided in her already. That point doesn’t matter. What does matter is the fact that she knew where he had gone, and why.

  “So she lets it ride—until we show up. Then she begins to get the shimmies. She’s suddenly dangerous. And somebody goes to her apartment to nullify the danger. The somebody knows that if she yells on her down trip, she’ll be heard. There are too many people packed in that old building for her not to be heard.

  “The somebody pops her on the noggin, rolls her out the window. And that’s that.”

  The shudder hit Laura again. “The same person who raped and killed a little girl.”

  “Maybe. We don’t know yet. We don’t know for sure that Giles dropped out of sight because of Wally’s trial. It might have been for some other reason. His past is spotted.”

  Laura pushed her food away for good. “Then we’re right back where we started.”

  “Not quite. I’m simply saying we shouldn’t draw only the conclusions we want to draw. We still have to find Giles.”

  “That’s proving a little difficult, isn’t it?”

  “Only because we’re not rolling yet. I’m going to need a thousand dollars.”

  “I can spare it.”

  “Good. It might buy us a door to Giles.”

  He was a round little man with a pleasant, chubby, very dark face. His teeth flashed like white fire when he smiled, which was often. He smoked the best Havana cigars, and they didn’t cost him anything. A lot of his commodities cost Quinton nothing.

  His office was in an old loft in Ybor City. It might have been the office of a loan shark. The furniture was old and scarred. The windows looked out on a drab, dirty alley. To get to the office, you had to go through an outer office where an expert in the hoodlum trade played at being secretary.

  Nobody knew why Quinton remained in his old office. Maybe it was because he had started his career there with nothing more than an endless hunger for money, a triggerquick brain and a fat body without a soul. Or maybe he kept the office because it made a deep cleavage between his personal and professional life. He lived in one of the best homes on the Bayshore. His wife was a boon to society editors. A girl had been beaten to death in one of Quinton’s houses just last year, but his own daughters—he had two—were being educated in a convent.

  To do business with Quinton you had to go to his office. His home was for social calls only.

  Quinton knew how I felt about him, and I knew he regarded me as a dumb sucker. We let it lay like that, each knowing there’d never be any minor trouble between us. If anything ever caused us to buck each other, it would mean dirty trouble.

  After we shook hands and he had seated himself behind his battered desk, I asked him how the waiters’ and cigar-workers’ unions were doing. He said they were doing all right. I didn’t ask him about the houses. Quinton didn’t own any houses. He simply collected off of that phase of life in Tampa.

  We went through the whole rigmarole. He offered me a cigar, which I declined. Then a drink, which I turned down also. He didn’t have a drink, either. He believed that only fools and weaklings messed with the stuff.

  He folded his fat, short-fingered hands on his desk. “I see you’re on the Tulman case, Ed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sordid affair.”

  “Right again. But I don’t think Tulman did it.”

  “Of course you don’t. Giles Newell turn up yet? I saw in the papers that you’re looking for him.”

  “Not yet.”

  “So you wondered if my waiters’ union knows his whereabouts?”

  “Something like that.”

  He popped his hands together in delight. He laughed.

  A happy, little-boy laugh. He was as pleased as a kid on a quiz show. Or so it seemed.

  While the laughter bubbled out of him, he said, “You want to scratch backs, Ed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How much?”

  “A thousand dollars.”

  He shrugged. “Peanuts.”

  “There’s money in peanuts, if you get enough of them.”

  “True. Anyhow, I wouldn’t want payment for a favor. I’d accept it as a token.”

  “I don’t care how you accept it, Quinton. Just give me Giles Newell’s present address and I’ll give you a thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t have it at the moment, Ed.”

  “I can’t wait too long, you know. Phone me, and I’ll send the thousand by special messenger.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, standing up. He came around the desk, shook my hand, slapped me on the shoulder with his other hand.

  I didn’t like his touch. It made me think of the houses, and the venereal disease, and the long shifts the girls worked.

  Quinton noted my reaction, but he was immune to it. It struck him as funny. He was still chuckling when I closed his office door behind me.

  CHAPTER

  12

  I NEEDED to check the office and the telephone-answering service.

  When I got to the office, I found Max the Giant waiting outside the door. He stood with the solid patience of a creature out of a. Greek myth. He might have been there for minutes, or hours.

  “Mrs. Wherry wants to see you,” he said, without moving from the office door.

  “All right,” I said, getting out my keys.

  “Mrs. Wherry wants to see you—now,” he said.

  He didn’t intend to let me into my own office. He had a monorail brain, and Mrs. Wherry wanted to see me.

  I looked him up and down. When I say up, I mean it. Compared to him, I was an undersized runt. I wasn’t afraid of Max, but I had no yen to tangle with him. If I forced my way in and made a big issue out of a little one, it would be with the cold knowledge that I was going to get hurt. I could stand such a knowledge, if the price
was right, but under the circumstances I decided the office could wait.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I have a car.”

  He waited for me to turn and go out of the building ahead of him. The car was the big, black limousine. It was parked near a fire plug, but it didn’t have a ticket on it. It was an easily recognizable car.

  “You ride up front with me,” Max said.

  We got in the car.

  He started it, and it hissed away from the curb.

  “What’s on Mrs. Wherry’s mind?” I asked.

  “She’ll tell you.”

  “You don’t like me very much, hey, Max?”

  “No. You’re troubling Mrs. Wherry.”

  “Not intentionally.”

  “Your intentions don’t matter to me. You just quit troubling Mrs. Wherry. She’s got enough worries.”

  “I’ll agree, but I’ve got a few worries of my own.”

  “I ain’t interested,” Max said, “in your worries. You just leave her alone, or I’ll break your back.”

  He said it with mildness and simplicity.

  We rode awhile in silence.

  “I should have killed Tulman,” he said finally. “Before the police came and arrested him. It would have settled a lot of things, including all the courtroom business and people like you. I could have killed him and closed it up once and for all and told the police that he was trying to get away and I killed him in the fight.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “She wouldn’t let me. I think she wanted to. She knew all the mess that lay ahead, but she said we had to call the police instead.”

  “That was smart of her,” I said.

  “I don’t think so. I believe Mr. Wherry would have done it the other way. Ruthie out there in the patio, and Tulman in our hands—I don’t think Mr. Wherry would have hesitated. He’d have killed Tulman himself. Then called the police and said he’d ridded the world of a sonofabitch.”

  “You miss the old man.”

  “Yes, I do. He understood. He hated people sometimes for the way they felt about the other people they called freaks. It wasn’t pity he gave to us. Dammit, he understood!”

  Max turned the Caddy into a palm-lined driveway. We passed through an open iron-grille gate. The driveway skirted a wide green lawn and wrapped itself around a white colonial-style house.

  The house was an oddity for Florida, like an outlander who has come with all the earmarks of his northern clime and different way of living. You expected stables and good horses to go with a house like that.

  Max and I got out of the car and went in the house. There was a high, long entry hall. A long living room opened off to my left. To my right was a sort of den. It must have been old Spicola Wherry’s office. It held heavy leather furniture, a huge dark-colored desk. Pictures and streamers from a dead era in show business were all over the walls. Life-sized canvas paintings of freaks covered every inch of wall and ceiling space and gave the feeling that the freaks were about to run riot. The biggest painting was that of Max the Giant. Weather-stained from its years of service on the carnival circuits, it hung at the far end of the room. It showed Max dressed in a leopard skin, a glower on his face. His arms were cocked in a strongman pose, his biceps flexed, breaking the chains that had been linked around his biceps.

  “Mr. Rivers!”

  I turned. The old lady was standing in the room across the hallway. She looked as solid and dogged as the freighters in Port Tampa.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Wherry?”

  “I do quite well,” she growled as she walked toward me, “and you can save the amenities. Come into my office. I want to talk with you.”

  We went a few steps down the hall and turned into a small, cluttered room. It held a desk, two wooden chairs, a filing cabinet and a bookcase. It had the aspect of being a country lawyer’s office. The bookcase was stacked with papers, not books. The chairs were well worn and old. The desk held a litter of papers, a telephone and two Tampa telephone directories. One of the directories was the standard edition. The other was a yellow directory, a numerical index.

  The old lady wedged herself behind the desk and sat down. Max the Giant stood breathing over my left shoulder.

  Mrs. Wherry looked at me with blunt and bitter contempt. “At least,” she said at last, “you’re running true to form.” “Am I?”

  “I knew you’d get around to naming a price.”

  There are times when you can learn more by keeping your mouth shut. So I kept my mouth shut.

  She yanked open a desk drawer, took out a checkbook, and scribbled.

  She ripped out the check and showed it to me. The check was for twenty-five-hundred dollars.

  It was made payable to me.

  I didn’t reach for it, and she didn’t hand it to me. She sat holding it and looking at me with those old, cold, contempt-filled eyes.

  “Did you bring the stuff, Mr. Rivers?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t get the check.”

  “I see.” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “Max was a little abrupt about bringing me here.”

  “You have the pictures in your office?”

  “No.”

  She rose slowly. There was wrath and menace in every line of her strong old body. “I’ll not be bamboozled—Mr. Bloxton.”

  “Aren’t you getting the names mixed?”

  “Bloxton, Rivers. They’re one and the same.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “I am sure, Bloxton-Rivers. Did you think to hide behind a telephone? Did you think I couldn’t trace you?” She dropped her eyes to the check. “You don’t deserve this, you know. There’s nothing lower than a creature who would trade on misery and scandal—especially when the victims have already borne too great an invasion of privacy. I should have you locked up, run out of Tampa for good. But I’m tired, Rivers. I’ll take the easy way—this once. Don’t think I will again. And don’t think you’ll get the money without surrendering the pictures.”

  “I seem to have lost the pictures, Mrs. Wherry.” I was beginning to see light in the riddle. Somebody had put the blackmail touch on her, and she thought it was me.

  “Then,” she said regretfully, “we had best find them. Max!”

  I turned in time to catch the judo chop on the base of my neck. My left side sagged in paralysis.

  I reeled back and threw my right fist in his face. My knuckles glanced off his cheek. He located another nerve center, and I couldn’t raise my arms.

  Max raised his fist. I knew how big it must have looked to some of the bumpkin challengers who’d tried to lift old man Wherry’s thousand bucks off the carny circuits.

  The old lady was around the desk. She touched Max’s arm and he stood rigid.

  “Where are those pictures of Stephanie?” Mrs. Wherry said.

  I drew my eyes from the expressionless seal’s head and looked at her. Feeling, a dim ache, was coming back into my arms. I wouldn’t let Max get away with that trick again.

  I looked directly into the old girl’s eyes. “I don’t have any such pictures, Mrs. Wherry.”

  “Then you had no right to call and demand—”

  “I didn’t call you,” I said.

  She stood unmoving. Her gaze slipped my hair off, peeled back my scalp and examined every cell under my skull.

  I didn’t say anything more. She would either believe it, or she wouldn’t.

  She didn’t want to believe it. If I were Bloxton, it would simplify things for her.

  We stood that way for several seconds. Then, like pain, a doubt came to her eyes.

  “I seem to have added fat to the fire,” she said in a dismal voice.

  “Referring to me? No, you haven’t, Mrs. Wherry.”

  “Surely you’ll use what I’ve told you—”

  “To hold over you?” I said. “No. Not unless it concerns the guilt or innocence of Wallace Tulman.”

  “It has nothing to do with your client,” sh
e said bluntly.

  “Then you don’t have to be afraid of me, Mrs. Wherry. Do you think I’ve remained in business all these years by being untrustworthy? “

  Our eyes met again. “I suspect,” she said softly, “that one reason I dislike you, Mr. Rivers, is because you’re very much like me.”

  “Maybe.”

  She moved away from Max. The giant relaxed. She made her way around her desk as if her feet were aching.

  She stood with her hands on the desk, resting a moment. “I still want those pictures, Mr. Rivers. If you haven’t got them, I’ve no earthly idea who might have. Will you work for me?”

  “I’ve got a client.”

  “And you’re looking for the man responsible for the pictures. I don’t expect you to sell your client short, but you might keep a weather eye for the pictures. I’ll pay you the amount that this Mr. Bloxton, whoever he is, demanded.”

  “If I find the pictures in the course of my work for Mrs. Tulman,” I said, “I’ll be glad to get them back in your hands.”

  “And no more publicity, Mr. Rivers. No more publicity at all.” “Not unless it will help Tulman.”

  “I see. That was your reason for those news stories?”

  “In a hot climate, Mrs. Wherry, I don’t spend any energy uselessly, if I can help it.”

  She sat down heavily. “You allay my fears, Mr. Rivers. Much as I dislike you, I’m beginning to feel I can trust you.”

  “You’ll have to use your own judgment for that.”

  “Then find the pictures, and keep them quiet.”

  “I’ll do what I can. I’ll have to know what I’m looking for.”

  Shadows dropped over her face. “Nasty pictures, Mr. Rivers. Of my daughter.”

  “Who made them?”

  “Giles Newell.”

  “What was the occasion?”

  “Stephanie,” she said, keeping her voice even and strong with an effort, “has always been consumed with anxieties and fears. At times these took an escape route through things of the flesh. Do you understand?”

  “You make yourself clear,” I said. “She seems to have considerable company in this day and time.”

  “Perhaps. I don’t care about that. Let the world hang itself, if it will. I’m thinking of my daughter, her family, myself, my husband’s memory.”