The Killer Is Mine

by Talmage Powell

  I moved quickly up the walk, around the cottage. Near the rear, a room projected so that the outer walls formed a nice dark place.

  I slipped the knife from the sheath behind my neck and cut the screen over a window. I’d figured this sort of house would have casement windows rather than the old sash variety.

  I was right, and that made the job harder.

  I turned the knife around and hit the butt end of it straight against the glass in a short, hard blow. The glass popped softly. It fell inside without a tinkle. There were too many deep rugs in the house for anything to tinkle much. Except her laughter, at the the right times.

  I put a couple of fingers through the hole. I could just touch the small brass crank. With pressure against the crank, I managed to push and pull it a few turns. The window swung inward without noise.

  I paused to wipe some sweat from my face and let my feeling reach out and touch the neighborhood. Down the street, a bunch of laughing people came out of a house. They sounded as if they were off to a party Diagonally across the street, an earnest youngster started practicing scales on a piano.

  The neighborhood seemed fine.

  I undid the screen latch and swung the screen up. Getting through the window required a few minutes. The pain in my side caught me, and I had to take it by inches.

  I rested on the plush carpet for a few seconds. Then I got to my feet and moved quietly through the house. Nobody home.

  I opened Venetian blinds and swung drapes back. My eyes were accustomed to the darkness, and enough light filtered in from outside for me to see what I was doing.

  I started the search in the bedroom. The dressing table was bare. No perfume, no cosmetics.

  I turned to the closet. It held only a couple of dresses, a suit too heavy for this season, and a pair of discarded sandals.

  She would have had luggage. But none was in the closet. None in the entire house.

  Evie had packed a couple of bags and gone.

  I stood in the darkened living room wiping sweat off my neck.

  I stuck the handkerchief in my hip pocket and turned to the phone stand. I picked up the phone book, carried it to the window, and held it against the faint light.

  Evie, I figured, was the type to jot phone numbers and addresses on a phone book.

  I was wrong.

  I dropped the book on the phone stand, opened the drawer.

  There was a small white scratch pad inside. I carried the pad to the window and saw that she had jotted an address down.

  I didn’t need to tear the address off. I’d never had any personal dealings with it, but I knew the address. It was the most expensive place in town.

  I wiggled back through the window, dropped to the ground outside, moved to the sidewalk and strolled casually to the rented car.

  I wheeled out of the Estates just under the speed limit.

  I had the sinking feeling that I was going to miss him, couldn’t get to him.

  I was keyed tight, with just one thought in mind, and when you are in that condition, you sometimes experience what some people call luck.

  There was a light in the old loft building in Ybor City. It flashed off just minutes after I parked the rented car.

  I was on the sidewalk, waiting for him to step out of the building. The hot, heavy syrup of sweat crawled down my armpits.

  A tall, vulture-faced man stepped out first. Then the shorter man, the one with the chubby, pleasant dark face. The usual cigar was stuck in the moonlike kisser.

  I jabbed him in the kidney with the .38.

  “Quinton,” I said, “you don’t want your liver spilled in that gutter.”

  He stopped, tense, but without fear. The tall man wheeled and stood in that awkward, half-turned position.

  “Tell him to get lost,” I said.

  The chubby face puffed on the cigar. “You realize what you’re doing, Rivers?”

  “I think so. Tell the goon to go see if he can jump the Hillsborough River.”

  “Go to hell,” Quinton said.

  The goon stood teetering on that knife edge.

  “Okay,” I said, unable to get my voice much further than my throat, “I never thought I’d see the day I’d have to kill just to show that I can.”

  Quinton hadn’t got where he was by lack of nerve. But he knew that I didn’t know how to back out.

  “Easy,” he said quietly and suddenly. He nodded at the tall guy. “Go have a beer.”

  The tall guy turned and walked away.

  “You haven’t leveled with me, Quinton,” I said. “No?”

  “No. City Hall pressure?”

  “I have to watch my step,” he said.

  “All I wanted was Giles Newell’s address. You knew I’d never tag the man who gave it to me.”

  “What makes you think I got it?”

  “I think you know a lot more about Giles and Evie Grove than I do,” I said.

  “Such as?”

  “Get in the car. I can’t stand here holding a gun on you all night.”

  He looked at the coal on his cigar and tossed it away. “That’s right. You sure can’t.”

  “Now, Quinton! In the car!”

  He slipped a look at me over his shoulder, angled across the sidewalk and got in the car. I shoved him over and got in beside him.

  “This climate isn’t going to be good for you, Rivers.”

  “I’ve never much liked the climate,” I said. “And I’m not afraid of you, Quinton. I’ve never wanted to tangle with you. But I’m not afraid. You carry a grudge, and even City Hall can’t help you.”

  He put another cigar in his face and lighted it.

  “How long has Evie Grove worked the ritzy house for you, Quinton?”

  “You know I don’t have any houses. I’m strictly head of the waiters’ and bartenders’ association.”

  “Not the legal association,” I said. “But skip that. I’ll phrase it another way. How long have you known that Evie Grove was connected with the call spot?”

  He sat thinking it over.

  He took the cigar out of his mouth and used the thumb of his other hand to pick a fleck of tobacco from his front teeth.

  A grin split his face.

  “Ed, I don’t want to have to fool with a small-timer like you.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “I could make you plenty of trouble, but I don’t see any profit in it.”

  He looked innocent and bland. I had to remind myself: He keeps close check on all of them. It’s part of his business. He would have known about her association with Giles. She couldn’t leave town without his knowing.

  “I simply don’t want you feeling like you scared me into anything, Rivers,” he said. “You understand?”

  “I think I do.”

  “I could take care of you,” he said, “but I don’t see why I should value the risk.”

  I waited.

  “Why don’t you,” he said, “drive over to Madeira Beach and have a look at 1242 Bayside Boulevard.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  FROM TAMPA, take the six-mile bridge across Tampa Bay and you hit St. Petersburg. Go west on Central Avenue for ninety-odd blocks and you reach a beautiful causeway lined with hula-swaying Australian pines. This causeway will get you across Boca Ciega Bay. Boca Ciega Bay and the Gulf of Mexico hug the long fingers of islands, parallel to the mainland and twenty miles or so in length, known to the natives as “The Beaches.”

  The Gulf side of the beaches is an almost continuous stretch of pure white sand with sighing tropical water breaking in gentle swells and lapping dry rasping foam.

  From Pass-A-Grille on the south to the northern end of Indian Rocks, the beaches have divided themselves into endless little independent municipalities. There are probably more city councils and mayors on the beaches than in any comparable area in the country.

  There is luxury on the beaches, hundred-thousand-dollar homes and motels so beautiful they seem to have been made by magic f
rom sea froth.

  And there is squalor, with shacks and joints squatting on the sand and huddling close.

  Madeira had a little of all the elements of the beaches compounded into itself.

  I drove past the open-air hot-dog stands, the shacky frame tourist courts crowding against Gulf Boulevard, the bars, seafood places, souvenir stands and bait houses.

  I turned off into a filling station just beyond John’s Pass, where a channel joins the Gulf and Boca Ciega Bay. I bought some gas and asked the attendant how to find Bayside Boulevard.

  He’d never heard of the street, and while he was asking another man at the grease rack, I bought a ready-made sandwich wrapped in wax paper from a vending machine and an icy Coke from a second machine.

  As I ate my dinner, the attendant told me how to find the street. It was less than a dozen blocks away, on the bay side of the island. A new street in a new development that had been recently pumped up out of the bay.

  A few minutes later I was driving down Bayside. There were long stretches of new fill. The land looked powdery and uncured. Here and there were houses and private docks in various stages of construction. The several newly completed houses looked nice—pastel stuccos and glass.

  Most of the houses had numbers plainly visible. I got out of the car three times to see a number.

  There was no 1242.

  I sat in the car, thinking of Quinton and feeling a metallic edge come to my teeth.

  Half a mile ahead, a lighted cabin cruiser was coming up the bay. The lights disappeared briefly, then reappeared.

  It took me a few seconds to realize that a building down on the point had cut the lights from view.

  I started the car and drove down there. A low, sprawling cottage was on the end of the fill just before the road made its circular turn-around.

  I cut the ignition and lights, got out of the car and walked to the cottage.

  There was a metal number plate keeping company with the sparse grass sprigs and bedraggled, newly set baby palms.

  1242.

  I put my hand in the pocket that held the .38 and moved up the walk to the front door. I put my finger on the buzzer button. I could hear the buzzer skirling inside, but no other sounds came from the dark house.

  The cruiser had gone on up the bay and the nearest house was a half-mile away. Across the lagoon formed by the land fill the lights of Madeira Beach twinkled. But they were a mile away.

  I tried the door. It was locked.

  I made a circuit of the house. All the windows were locked.

  In this weather.

  There was a three-year-old convertible in the carport adjoining the house.

  I went back to the front door.

  There are good developers in Florida and bad ones. This one had cut a few corners. I wedged the tip of the knife blade past the door molding and sprung the spring-type lock.

  Inside, the house was stifling. I heard the low hum of a refrigerator clicking on, the sound of a heavy flying insect throwing itself against the window that showed the lights a mile away.

  I guessed from the indistinct outlines of furniture that I was in a living room. Attached would be a glassed-in Florida room. A little hall would lead off the living room to a couple of bedrooms and a connecting bath. The refrigerator hum told of a compact kitchenette to my left.

  I moved forward a few steps.

  My foot struck a yielding mass.

  I stepped back.

  I didn’t want any light right away.

  I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, reached in my pocket and got out a paper book of matches. They were damp and contrary. I mashed one up; then I got one to light.

  The pale glow fell across her face. The blond hair flowed out from her scalp to make a golden fan on the carpet. Gone were the vague dreams, the fear of someday finding herself without money, the disorganized morality.

  Evie had been shot under the left breast. I knew the bullet had struck her heart, for she hadn’t bled much.

  The man lay a dozen feet beyond her. He had been shot in the temple, and he hadn’t bled much either.

  He had fallen so that he lay on his side with his left arm stuffed under him and his right arm a little outflung, crooked at the elbow.

  The match flared out and I lit another.

  He was a tall, wide-shouldered, athletic-looking man. His face was squarish, rugged, masculine. He had been good looking, and it hadn’t got him that rich wife after all.

  Just to make sure, I pulled a wallet out of his pocket. The driver’s license was made out to Giles Newell.

  I put the wallet back in his pocket and turned his body. His other pocket yielded only some keys and change.

  But the gun was revealed. He had fallen on it.

  The match scorched my fingers. I blew it out. Hunkered beside Giles, I put it together. Giles’s sister, the Hofstetter woman, had known the score. Crowded, she’d got scared—and written off. This had caused Giles to decide the water was too deep. The promise of more easy money than he’d ever heard of, or direct force, had lured him from his appointment with me. He’d let Evie know where he was and she’d turned up.

  Now it was all wrapped up, closed for all time. The picture was here for the cops. Doors and windows locked from the inside. A lovers’ quarrel. Man shoots woman, then himself. It happens often enough not to be unique.

  And a great silence covers forever whatever it was that Giles Newell knew.

  It could have been that way.

  Tulman could be guilty.

  Mrs. Hofstetter might have fallen.

  Giles could have committed murder and suicide.

  Each thing a separate event from every other.

  It could have been that simple. And I wished it was, as a dark, haunting picture of beauty took form in my mind. I remembered the way she moved as she walked, how she’d looked on the beach with the storm breaking over us.

  I remembered, and I wished. And I thought: How easy. Just walk out. Let the spring lock fasten the door as the last person out of here let it.

  I stood up with the gun in my hand. I knew it would carry only one set of prints, Newell’s.

  I wiped the gun, carried it to the far side of the room, and dropped it on the carpet.

  It was double murder now.

  With my handkerchief, I wiped everything in the room I’d touched. I set the snap on the spring lock, stepped outside, and closed the door with the handkerchief between my hand and the doorknob.

  I turned away from the unlocked door, walked back to the car and got in.

  I swung the car in the circular turn-around, gave it the gas.

  I didn’t look back.

  CHAPTER

  19

  I DROVE back to Tampa. I knew I hadn’t much time. I had to be right. Quinton could reveal that I’d had the Madeira Beach address. The service-station attendant would peg me as the man who’d asked directions to Bayside Boulevard. Julian Patrick could depict me as a sometime violent man who’d hunted hard for Giles Newell.

  I dodged through Tampa traffic out to the Estates. I parked the car at the curbing, crossed the street and went up the walk to Laura’s house.

  She answered my ring quickly. I moved inside and closed the door.

  She laid her hand on my arm and led me to the couch. “You look very tired, Ed.” I nodded.

  She asked, “Would you like something to eat?” “A sandwich, a cold beer.” “I’ll bring it to you,” she said.

  She went to the kitchen. I sank down on the couch. She came back with a tray of sandwiches, a carafe of coffee and an icy-beaded open bottle of beer. She put the tray on the cocktail table in front of the couch.

  I picked up a sandwich. “I want you to go away for a few days.”

  She raised her eyes in a question.

  “It’s just a safety measure,” I said.

  “Safety measure?”

  “I saw Giles Newell tonight.”

  “Did he—”

  “He was dead. Al
ong with his woman friend.”

  I saw the shock hit her. She swayed a little. I put my sandwich down and took her hands in mine.

  “Then we’ve failed, Ed Rivers,” she said.

  “Not yet. It was made to look like murder and suicide. It doesn’t look that way now. I tampered a little with the scene of the crime.”

  Her large, dark eyes looked into mine. “The person you’re after will surmise you’re behind it. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Something like that.”

  “This will arouse desperation in that person.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “And you don’t want me near you.”

  “I guess I’m a little dangerous,” I said, “like a walking time bomb.”

  “Where could I go, Ed?”

  “Take a trip.”

  She withdrew her hands. They lay in her lap. She sat looking at them.

  “In some ways,” she said, “you’re like Wally.”

  “I am?”

  “Oh, you’re poles apart, but you have decency and consideration. He wanted me to take a trip too, during and after the trial.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t. Most of the women I know would have traveled a long way from the scandal and pain. I guess I just felt it wouldn’t be right.” She raised her eyes. “I’m sorry I got you into this, Ed.”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “You tried, but I wasn’t in it until somebody tried to knock my brains out. You could say I was pitched into it by the scalp.”

  “If I’d left you alone—”

  “You couldn’t have, for you were fighting for him. I’m glad I’m in it. I’ve found something I lost a long time ago—somebody I can believe in.”

  She forced a grin. “Maybe you don’t know me well enough, Ed.”

  “I know you’re a lady. I know you live by a code. That’s enough.”

  “You idealistic roughneck. Your beer’s getting warm.”

  The food and drink gave me back some strength. We didn’t say anything more as I finished eating.

  The door buzzer sounded.

  Laura started to get up, but remained seated as I made a motion with my hand. I moved along the wall to the window beside the front door. I cracked the edge of the drape and looked out.