The Killer Is Mine

by Talmage Powell

  Patrick leaned forward and opened the envelope. He glanced at the contents and went absolutely rigid. He paled slightly.

  “Where’d you get these?”

  “Off Rivers,” Garcia said.

  “Where’d he get them?”

  “Off the chick, I guess.”

  “Any idea where she got them?”

  Garcia shrugged.

  Patrick nailed his glance on me. “Want to open up, Ed?”

  “There’s nothing to open up about.”

  “I believe there is. Ed, there’s one thing you ought to get straight. You’re not dealing with an Ybor City bolita ring. You’re trying to befoul one of the oldest families in Tampa. We don’t like that, Ed.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Julie.”

  “I wish you really were. The department wants no trouble.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “But you seem determined to make it. Can’t you understand the whole tragedy was explained, wrapped up, put away. Why do you want to hurt these people further?”

  “I don’t.”

  “But that’s what you’re doing. You must have a reason. Tell me, Ed. I’m aching to know the reason.”

  “I think Wallace Tulman is innocent,” I said. “I think he’s an innocent, bewildered child in a man’s body about to pay for something he didn’t do.”

  “Oh, you do?” Patrick said with briny frost in his voice. “You think that—so it doesn’t matter that all the machinery of organized law, legal procedure, trial by jury, guarantees of his civil rights were followed to the letter, only to prove him guilty.”

  “Juries can be wrong, Julie.”

  “And I guess you can’t?”

  “I’m not often wrong, Julie. Can you ever remember me being wrong? I don’t like to be wrong. It doesn’t pay. I’m not wrong, because unlike your juries I don’t presume a man innocent until he’s blackened and smeared into looking guilty. I start out thinking he’s guilty as hell until something happens to make me think otherwise.”

  “You’re talking big, Ed.”

  “I’m just telling you,” I said.

  “You need proof to back up that kind of talk.” “I didn’t want this case, Julie. Until somebody got so damned scared I was going to take it that he tried to knock my brains out right in my own apartment building.”

  “Oh, that,” Julie tried to pass it off with a wave of his hand.

  “Yes, that. And a law-enforcement agency that’s locked up its mind and thrown the key away. And a drunken woman who falls out of a slum apartment building all the way to the alley below without making a sound. You want me to keep talking, Julie?”

  “I want you to quit moving like an elephant in a flower garden.”

  “I haven’t found the flowers yet, Julie, only the weeds.”

  “Including these, I suppose,” he said, laying his hand on the pictures.

  “They’re weedy enough.”

  “Valuable, too.”

  “You charging me with extortion?”

  “I might.”

  “You better talk to the old girl first. She asked me to get the pictures.”

  “When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Why’d she pick you for the job? She hates your guts for lighting a fire under a pot that had simmered down.”

  “She thought I had the pictures.”

  “She get a call, or something like that?”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Blackmail demand?”

  “Maybe.”

  Patrick rocked back in his chair. “You’re not doing so good, Ed.”

  “No?”

  “No. She gets a blackmail demand. She contacts you—making it obvious she thought the call had come from you. She asks you to get the pictures. And—surprise—what do you know, a few hours later you’ve got them. A lot of people would read into that nothing but plain extortion. You fell off the end of the pier with this bit of fishing, Ed.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I didn’t have the pictures when Mrs. Wherry called me. I got them from Evie Grove. You asked a minute ago where she got them. I’ll tell you. From Giles Newell.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe you’d like for the papers to know that the state’s star witness against Wallace Tulman was going around with a mittful of naughty pictures of the dead little girl’s mother.”

  The office got very quiet.

  Beside me, after a moment, I could hear Garcia breathing heavily.

  Patrick simply sat and looked at me.

  “We must never lose sight of one cold fact,” I said. “A creep got hold of a little girl named Ruthie Collins. If it wasn’t Tulman, it had to be somebody else, with some strangely disordered gray matter in his skull. So, in view of his actions and these pictures, I’m beginning to wonder more and more who and what Giles Newell really is.”

  “That your hole card, Ed?” Patrick said.

  “I’ve played worse hands.”

  “You always like to have a hole card. But this time it’s a joker—and the joker isn’t wild. I used a pair of tweezers on Newell’s life, public and private. I had a hole card of my own. I was prepared to counter any move the defense might make to discredit the witness on whom our whole case depended. I can tell you definitely, Ed, that Giles Newell was behind the bar in the Yacht Club the entire evening of the little girl’s murder.”

  Patrick rose and came around the desk. “Lock him up, Garcia.”

  “On what charge?” I asked.

  “I can hold you on an open charge for twenty-four hours,” Patrick said. “In that time I may be able to show Mrs. Tulman the hopelessness and sheer nonsense of what she’s instigated.”

  “Come on.” Garcia leered at me.

  “Keep your hands off,” I said. “Julie, you’re making a mistake.”

  “I’ll take a chance,” Patrick said.

  “You can’t bluff us this time, Rivers,”. Garcia said. “I guess the papers will give me a different break now.”

  “There’ll be nothing in the papers from you,” Patrick told him.

  “Aw, chief, something to counteract—”

  “You talk to a single reporter,” Patrick said, “and I’ll see your next retirement is permanent. Now get Rivers out of here.”

  I preceded Garcia out of the office. At the doorway, I stopped. “Do I get a lawyer?”

  “You’re incommunicado for twenty-four hours, old friend,” Patrick said mildly. He crossed the office and closed the door in my face.

  Garcia chuckled as he took me down to the desk, booked me and sent me upstairs with a couple of cops in uniform.

  They gave me a private cell, and I stood at the window looking through the bars at what I could see of Tampa.

  Patrick was in a position to mount a real assault on Laura’s intention and determination. Tulman was still the patsy, and there seemed less that could be done about it than there had been two or three days ago.

  The trial, imprisonment, the prospect of death in the electric chair, had put a lot of uncertainty in Wallace Tulman. Now let a mild-speaking official visit him, tell him of failure, give him that extra nudge. Could be that the confusion would clear from Tulman’s mind. He might decide once and for all that he was guilty, no questions remaining. He might communicate that message to her, asking her to call off the whole thing.

  Patrick was capable of arranging it. I tried to keep myself from thinking it, but the thought was there:

  If Patrick arranged it, she would be free.

  CHAPTER

  15

  I HAD a breakfast of hominy grits and sausage. From the looks of the early sun outside, the day was going to be a scorcher. My flesh was heavy with the heat, dull with sweat. I brushed my pants with my hands and shook out my light seersucker coat. It didn’t help. The suit was a wrinkled, sweat-stained, heat-tormented rag.

  I got the loan of a razor. The jailer stood by while I shaved. He gnawed some conversation, but I didn’t talk back, an
d finally he gave up. I sat alone until almost noon.

  At that time, the jailer came back to the cell and said, “You got company.” “Well, show him in.” “He’s on his way.”

  The jailer walked down a steel-lined corridor, clanging a couple of steel-barred doors behind him.

  At the end of the corridor, the elevator indicator arrow swung to a stop. The lift opened and a man got out. The jailer clanged the doors again, bringing the man back to my cell.

  The caller was Milt Collins. His big, softening face was pale. There were pouches under his eyes, and his eyeballs were laced with red threads. He looked a little disheveled, and more than tired.

  But he was sober. Painfully, coldly sober. He still wore an invisible mantle of power and ego, exuding a feeling that it was his natural right to boss men. But he carried another little air about him today. Maybe it was a touch of indecision and humility.

  He had his panama hat in his hand, and the big, blunt fingers opened and closed on the brim of the hat.

  “Hello, Rivers.” He stood at the cell door, looking between the bars at me.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked.

  “I came over to get you out of here.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  After a minute, he said, “You want out, don’t you?”

  “I dunno.”

  His face pinked. “What the devil do you mean? Any man would want out.”

  “I don’t figure to be in long.”

  “You might have some surprises in store for you. Patrick could build a strong case of extortion against you. That would mean about twenty years.”

  “I’d be an old man when I got out.”

  His jaw made like a heavy-set steel trap. “This isn’t a joking matter, Rivers. I’m not so sure you didn’t have the pictures the whole time.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  He let go a breath. He was a man eaten inside and for a moment I had a glimpse of what it was like to live in his house, his body, his skull.

  “Okay,” he said, “I came to ask a favor.”

  “Well, why didn’t you?”

  He passed a big capable-looking hand through his hair. “Because I’m me, I guess. I like to give the orders, the favors.”

  “It could work both ways.”

  He raised his eyes. His gaze was steady, held that way with an effort. “Keep it out of the papers,” he begged.

  “And you’ll spring me right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll have to go further than that.”

  “There’s a limit to what I can do.”

  “This had better not be beyond the limit,” I said. “If I keep mum, Patrick’s department has got to do the same. I’m not going to have Garcia pictured as the brave and honest detective, framed by a shady shamus, who on his own time put said shamus in the clink.”

  “Surely, it wouldn’t matter—”

  “It does matter. I’ll tell you something. You don’t have to live in the Estates to worry about your reputation.”

  “Of course not,” he said quickly. “If I sounded a little snobbish, I’m sorry, Rivers.”

  “Well, that’s it. My rep in a way is worth more to me than yours to you. My rep is part of my living—and I’ll fight back to keep it intact. You’d better tell Patrick that.”

  “I’m sure Patrick will understand.”

  “Okay. Get your high-priced lawyer ready.”

  “He’s already at work. In Patrick’s office. I—we got the pictures, Rivers. Thanks.”

  “Patrick turn them over to you?”

  Milt Collins nodded.

  “I worked to get them back,” I said. “I landed in the clink to get them back.”

  “You’ll be paid.”

  “I want two days’ pay. The rest I promised to the young lady I got the pictures from. Evie Grove. Know her?”

  “I’ve met her.”

  “Friend?”

  “To a certain extent. She was around the club a lot. Sometimes she rounded out a party.”

  “She worked with Giles Newell.”

  “Most people around the club knew that.”

  “Did you know there was anything between Giles and your wife?” I asked.

  “I don’t like a direct question of that nature, Rivers.”

  “And I don’t like to ask them. That makes us even. But if you don’t answer, I might think the worst.”

  His eyes slid over me. “Damn you,” he said. “I find myself liking some of your qualities, Rivers.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “To answer your question, I didn’t know there was anything between Stephanie and Giles. I assure you that the pictures shocked me more than anybody else. I didn’t know her discontentment was running so deep.”

  “A man sometimes finds he doesn’t know a lot of things that were under his nose.”

  “Yes, he does,” Collins said, and there was a note of real humility in his voice. It was almost shocking, coming from him.

  “I guess you hate Giles,” I said.

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to find out?”

  “I said,” his voice got harsh, “that it seems a little late for all that. What are you driving at, Rivers?”

  “I was wondering,” I said, “if you had run him to cover.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If a man like you found out about his wife and Newell, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that an explosion had taken place.”

  He studied me for a moment. We were standing close together, only the cell door separating us.

  “There might have been an explosion,” he said. “I guess I would have killed the sonofabitch.”

  “I guess you would have.”

  “But I didn’t—because I didn’t know. I’ve told you the truth.”

  “There had to be a reason for him pulling the Houdini.”

  “I think you’re attaching too much importance to his vanishing act.”

  “I like to know the whys and wherefores,” I said.

  “It seems very simple. After the trial, he simply decided to drop out of sight and recover from the strain.”

  “How about his job?”

  “It was either resign or work out a notice from the club. Remember that he’d been the star witness in a sensational trial. He would attract attention. Drunks would quiz him for details. The club couldn’t use him any longer.”

  “Ordway didn’t tell me that.”

  “Ordway is a very discreet club manager,” Milt Collins said.

  “So there were other jobs.”

  “Not in the sort of places where Giles wanted to work. No, his disappearance was a perfectly natural thing, Rivers.”

  Milt Collins took his leave. Thirty minutes later, Julian Patrick came up to see me.

  “How you feeling, Ed?”

  “Okay.”

  “Sensible?”

  “That depends.”

  “We’re going to let you out of here.”

  “How nice. Good thing I knew the dope on those pictures or I’d have rotted in here.”

  “It’s a thought. You won’t have the pictures next time—if there is a next time.”

  “There won’t be, Julie.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. When my friends have to walk tightropes I like to see them keep their balance.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  “You’d better be good,” Julie said. He nodded to the jailer. The big bohunk put a key in the lock and turned it.

  I walked out of the cell. Patrick and I rode the elevator down without speaking.

  In the downstairs corridor, Patrick turned in one direction and I went in the other.

  Evie Grove was waiting for me outside the building. She looked willowy and sleek in a summery print dress, her blond hair loose about her face.

  “Well,” she sighed in relief, “I thought they
’d changed their minds and were going to leave you in the dungeon for mouse bait.”

  She linked her arm in mine while I stood on the curb and flagged a cab.

  “Ed,” she said, “I hate to bring up business—”

  “You’ll be hearing from the Wherrys,” I said. “They’ve got the pictures. They’ll honor their commitment.”

  “Thanks, Ed.”

  A cab swung to the curb and stopped. I opened the door, and Evie Grove got in. I closed the door.

  She looked at me out of the window. “Aren’t you going with me, Ed?”

  “You don’t need me for this errand. Just go someplace and phone the Wherrys.”

  I turned and walked away.

  I went up to the office. It shimmered with a dry, heavy heat. I opened the windows, got a couple of fresh handkerchiefs out of a desk drawer, mopped some sweat off my face and neck.

  Then I sat down behind the desk and thought about the whole thing. I thought of each, person involved, and each incident, and each word that had been said, and each inflection with which it had been said.

  I’d never seen little Ruthie Collins, but I thought about her, too. About her short, lonely life. About the moment of terror she had known.

  I’d told Milt Collins that a man doesn’t know things that are right under his nose sometimes.

  I was nagged with the feeling that the whole thing was right under my nose.

  But I couldn’t pin it down.

  I reached for the phone and dialed Laura’s number.

  She answered as if she’d been sitting with her hand hovering over the phone. “Ed.”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “At my office. You know I’ve been in the jug?”

  “Milt Collins told me.”

  “Did he tell you why I was there?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll explain the whole thing later.”

  “You’re all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. I wanted to hold onto the feeling the concern in her voice gave me. “Ed?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m tying a knot in the end of my rope just to hold on. Couldn’t we take the rest of the day off? Go to the beach. Just rest a few hours? We’ve been so close to it.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll check the morgue—”

  “I did that this morning, Ed. The Hofstetter woman is still there. Giles hasn’t shown up to claim his sister’s body yet.”