I raised my eyes slowly and saw the lawyer standing quietly over me, a small gun in his hand. Small, but quite capable of killing.
“For a bright lawyer with the lust for power and wealth, the cold-blooded drive to tear himself out an education and start at the bottom of the heap in criminal law … for such a lawyer, Eppling,” I said, “you pulled some bloopers. But maybe no human brain is smart enough to deal in murder — unless you’re a totally brainless gunsel who contents himself in going out and knocking off other gunsels in gangland killings.” “Name me a blooper, Rivers.”
“Sure,” I said. “Always glad to oblige. Where shall I start? With Ben McJunkin? One of those pro killers who should have stayed with the mobs and mob killings. Just any citizen can’t hire a guy like McJunkin, Eppling. How many ordinary working stiffs would even know how to go about hiring a murderer?
“Sigmon might have had some shady connections in Caracas who could have whispered a name in his ear. But neither he nor Ginny knew where to find a hired gun in Tampa. Van or Natalie Clavery? Nonsense. They wouldn’t know where to start looking for a man like McJunkin.
“But you, Eppling … Everybody was ruled out but you. One-time small-peanuts criminal lawyer. A gunman in and out of Tampa for many years. It was a natural for you, Eppling, when you realized Jean Putnam had to be silenced.
“Want another blooper? Okay, serve up Keith Sigmon and Ginny Jameson. Keith could palm her off here as his daughter provided that no one here had ever seen the real Elena. Or — and this is how you cut yourself into a twenty-million-dollar gravy, Eppling — if anyone here who’d ever seen the real Elena would accept Ginny as a proxy.”
“If you’re trying to ring me in the middle of this thing,” Sigmon burst out, “you’re wrong. I never saw Fred Eppling until he met our plane.”
“So you told me,” I said. “But Myrtle Higgins let it slip that Fred Eppling made one trip to Caracas for the señora while the old lady was still alive. Mostly Eppling never had to do more than drop by the house here occasionally. But on that one trip, he would have met Elena, and you as well, Sigmon.
“Your instincts told you that you were two of a kind, greedy and ruthless. Before you could bring in Ginny as Elena, Sigmon, you had to make sure that Eppling, the lawyer handling the estate, would go for the deal. I’m sure we’ll find a record of an overseas call when the cops start digging out and putting all the evidence and minor details together.
“Twenty million dollars was more than enough to go around, and when Eppling agreed to come in, the scheme got off to a flying start.”
“But I never killed anybody,” the old, hard man said. “It was Eppling who hired McJunkin, just as you say, Rivers. When Jean Putnam began to question us, I wanted to grab what was convenient for grabbing and make a run for it. Eppling wouldn’t let me. He insisted that twenty million was too much to lose — “
“Even if I was fond of Jean,” Eppling said quietly.
“Fond of her,” I said, getting slowly to my feet. “Just more fond of twenty million smackers.”
“I’m afraid that’s the case,” Eppling said. “You see … Jean came to me at the outset with her suspicions. Natural, I suppose, since I had been the señora’s lawyer and was handling the estate. I tried to dissuade Jean, convince her that her ideas were groundless. I was unable to do so. I had destroyed everything among the old
señora’s personal things that might have pointed to the real Elena.”
“Including that missing portfolio?” I said.
“Including the crummy old briefcase.” Eppling’s lips twisted. “Jean remembered there’d been some snapshots of the old señora’s family in the portfolio. She had reached the point where she wanted to see a picture of Elena. Jean … You see, she gave me no choice, Rivers.”
“And Van Clavery’s confession and promissory note?”
“In my office safe,” Eppling said. “I planned to let them conveniently be found in some odd corner here in the house when things had quieted down.”
“I think we’ve talked enough,” Ginny said.
“Yes,” Eppling said. “Of course. You’re quite right, Ginny.”
“Blackbeard … Blackbeard darling,” sang a drunken little voice in the hallway. “You didn’t keep your promise to come back … Where are you, Blackbeard?”
Hildy’s sunny hair was a bright spot of color in the doorway. Keyed tight, the sound of her voice had brought a quiver and a glance from Eppling.
I went in under the the gun. With a snarl, Eppling swung it down, trying to slug me. The gun glanced off my back muscles as I hit him with my shoulder and carried him backward.
“Sigmon!” the word was jolted from Eppling as we hit the floor.
From the perimeter of my vision, I saw Sigmon’s foot swinging at me. I ducked, grappling with Eppling for the gun.
Hildy started screaming.
Sigmon piled on me and Ginny joined the fray with fingernails reaching for my eyes. I’d half risen, holding Eppling’s wrist. The bunch of us hit the floor in a writhing mass.
I felt Sigmon being yanked off me as the summons of Hildy’s scream was answered. I got an impression of Van Clavery using those tense, wiry muscles behind a small, hard fist. I heard Sigmon crash into a table, make kindling of it, and roll to the floor, an unconscious old man.
Eppling was trying to knee me in the groin and writhe from beneath me while Ginny kicked at my kidneys. Holding onto that gun hand, I took a second to grab her ankle and jerk her feet from under her.
While I had the hand free, I doubled it and stuck it in the side of Eppling’s face. My fist glanced off his cheekbone. He quit trying to rupture me with his knees. I stood, dragging him up with me. With his left he swung a roundhouse. I blocked it, got punching room, and aimed one straight at his nose.
My aim was good. His eyes rolled up. His knees folded, and he dangled from my grip by his gun wrist.
I let him slide to the floor and picked up the small gun where it had fallen from his fingers.
“Ginny,” I said.
She drew to a stop short of the door where sunny Hildy stood. She turned slowly, saw the gun, the wreckage in the room. She went gropingly to a chair, sat down, pressed her knees tightly together, and stared at nothing, at sheer emptiness. At her future, possibly.
“Catch,” I said to Clavery, pitching him Eppling’s small gun.
“I don’t think there’s time for a long explanation right now. So get this. Keep this trio covered. She’s not Elena Sigmon. She’s Ginny Jameson. It was a twenty-million-dollar hoax that didn’t quite pan out, even though Eppling hired Ben McJunkin as a long-reaching weapon. Get the cops and tell them to get with Caracas while they start a third-degree on these creeps. I’ll report in at headquarters as soon as possible, but they can tie up the Putnam-Thackery case, now that they knew where to start the knots.” “Rivers — ”
“Later,” I said. “Your note and confession are in Eppling’s safe.”
“How could Fred have — ”
“For a slice of a twenty-million-dollar estate,” I said. “Now for cripe’s sake, can you do as I ask?”
“Of course,” he said quietly. The gun was steady, quite deadly in his high-strung, capable hand.
The ruckus had proved too much for Hildy. She had made herself scarce. I’d probably never have the chance to apologize for the destructive thoughts I’d had in regards to her very nice little rump.
A bigger, more lush, far more female woman than Hildy opened her door to me a short time later. She stood there looking at me, the light behind her spilling through the mane of dark-blond hair.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in, Myrtle?”
“I’m really tired, Ed. Like I told you … a good book is my present limit, as fetching as your costume is.”
“I want Ben McJunkin, Myrtle.”
“What makes you think — ”
“It all adds up.” I pushed into the small living room of her apartment and looked at the open suit
cases she’d been packing. An emptiness began to fan out inside of me. “Packing your books too?”
“Ed …”
“No,” I said. “Let’s not talk about it. I understand now. You almost fainted when I returned from the San Salvador Hotel. But not from relief. It was because my return meant I might have killed him. You did it all for him, didn’t you? Sticking close. As close as a bedsheet, if necessary, to keep tabs on his enemy, to help him in any way you could. When did you first meet him, Myrtle?”
“A long time ago … in an emergency ward … I was on duty. They brought him in one night. A colored fellow had cut him all to pieces, but he refused to die … He was too tough, too much a man to die like that.”
She walked to the window and watched the star-shells burst over the river. “I don’t suppose anyone would understand,” she said after a moment. “He never married me. He was restless and would be gone a large part of the time. But he always came back. Nothing else was more important. From the time he met a green kid wearing her first nurse’s uniform, he always came back.”
“For whatever he needed,” I said. “If it was medical attention he had a fine trained nurse — while the cops checked all the doctors for a wounded man.”
“Is that what put you onto me?” she asked quietly.
“Your hurry to leave my apartment tonight and get to him clinched it,” I said. “There were other things. The size of the garments in McJunkin’s hotel room. The fact that Jean Putnam kept a diary, a fact a co-worker of Jean’s would know and could relay to McJunkin.
“I know now it was you, Myrtle, trying to call him right after I slipped into his room. You weren’t able to warn him; so you tipped his principal, Fred Eppling, that I’d located McJunkin’s address. Only you could have done that, Myrtle. Only you knew I’d discovered where McJunkin was staying. I’m sure you thought Eppling would head McJunkin off, warn him. Instead, Eppling had no choice but to start shooting at me through McJunkin’s window.
“Then there was a statement you made in my apartment, Myrtle, when I told you the fingerprint on my doorknob belonged to a man named McJunkin. Almost immediately, you used the full name. Ben McJunkin. It went over my head at the time. When the parts shaped up, I remembered.”
She had the attitude of listening for a cry from some great distance or a whisper in the nearby darkness. After a long, long moment, she seemed to remember I was there. She made a little motion toward the open suitcases. “All my things, Ed. None of his.”
“Where is he, Myrtle?”
She looked through the window to the endless dark skies. The Gasparilla stars had all quit falling. The party was over. The skies were totally black.
“Where?” she said. She looked at the floor. I followed her glance, saw the still-damp places where she had tried to scrub the traces of blood from the carpet.
I turned my head to look at the bedroom door. My hand dropped to the gun beneath the blue pirate’s sash.
“No, Ed …” she said in a tone beyond grief. “You can open the door. You won’t need the gun. He managed to get here, but he was beyond help. You killed him, Ed … back there at the San Salvador Hotel.”
I looked at her, and I believed her. I felt empty and slightly defeated. My lips were very dry. I touched them with the wetness of my tongue, and said “Ben McJunkin, Myrtle … when you could have had any man. After all these years, still Ben McJunkin … Why?”
She looked past me, thinking of the years, picking out and recalling the individual hours that lived in her memory. For the barest fraction of a second, Myrtle Higgins wasn’t incomplete. The power of her feeling changed her. And I glimpsed beyond the two dimensional physical surface that she had always presented to me or any other man — except one.
I would remember what I had seen for a long time.
The longhairs with degrees papering their walls can study it a lifetime and write a library of books about it. They’ll never have her knowledge of it. To Myrtle Higgins it was very simple. Right or wrong, for good or for evil, she expressed it all and told the whole tale in three words.
“I loved him,” she said.
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Man Killer
1.
AT LAST a spider came to the silent brush screening me and began trying to spin a web. She hung from a gossamer thread, trying to swing to a twig and anchor the skein. Each time she was uncessful. Then I added a gust of my breath to the thin mountain breeze. It gave the spider the necessary impetus, but it was the wrong thing to do. It was an artificial factor forced into the natural order of things. My movement was something out of the Unknown; and now the spider hung clumped into a tight ball at the end of her thread. She would never spin a web in this place.
I turned my attention from the spider. The Winchester was heavy across my knees. The late shadows were picking up a chill. Above me the damp, cool, wooded mountain strained toward the sky. A hundred yards below ran the narrow ledge of road. Beyond that, the mountain dropped dizzily toward a valley half hidden by the blue mists of twilight.
Far down in the valley a feeble finger of smoke wavered toward the sky as a hill woman started corn pone and collards for supper. A faint gray cloud formed across the yawning distance, moving across the face of the mountain beyond the valley. The dust smudge, I knew, was stirred up by a moving car. This time it had to be Clarence Oldham’s car and not a muddy pickup truck or rattling Ford. I didn’t think I could stand the waiting much longer.
As the keening sound of the car’s motor insinuated itself into the mountain stillness, I brought the Winchester from its resting place on my knees. Through rifts in the brush I commanded a good view of the road, but looking into the brush from the road a person would have a hard time seeing enough of me for recognition.
I knew Vicky would be sitting beside Oldham as he drove, and I wondered if at this very moment she was laughing at something he was saying.
The car came around a curve with a speed and deftness sufficient to make me admire Oldham’s driving in this terrain, lowlander that he was.
The car was a black sedan, and I squeezed the trigger of the Winchester and laid a bright furrow across the left front fender of the car. Oldham jammed on the brakes when the gun crashed, and the car slithered to a stop in a cloud of dust.
I had clean creek gravel in my pocket. I popped it in my mouth and yelled, “Get out, both of you!”
Oldham hesitated, saying something to Vicky. Then he got out of the car alone. “What is this, a mountain stick-up?”
There was just enough of a sneer in his voice to have got him killed if it had been a hooger pulling a heist. I had to admire his nerve, although I wasn’t too surprised by it. From the time he’d first showed up in Big Hominy, I’d pegged him for a cool, arrogant fish.
I didn’t want to talk much, and I wished Oldham weren’t so cool. The mouthful of pebbles was only a partial disguise for my voice.
“I told both of you to get out,” I yelled.
Vicky slipped out of the car.
“That’s better,” I shouted. “Now you come up here, Mrs. Hustin.”
“Listen,” Oldham said, “if it’s money you want—” “It isn’t. So save your breath. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I want to give Mrs. Hustin a message from her husband.”
She and Oldham traded a glance; then she moved away from the car, slipping once as she started up the steep embankment from the road. The sun was at her back and she seemed to be etched in red fire, with the mountain breeze skipping through the burnished copper of her hair. She was taller and more slender than most hill women, and for my money more beautiful than any woman anywhere.
She walked to the thicket and said, “Wade!”
“Not so loud.”
A flash of anger touched her eyes. “Are you drunk, Wade?” “No.”
“Then what kind of prank—”
“It’s no prank. Something has happened to Rock Hustin and I don’t want you going back to town right now.”
She looked at me a moment, and when her voice came it was very quiet. “Are you trying to tell me that Rock is sick or hurt, Wade? I’m through with him. I’ve been through with him for a long time. What could I do to help him?”
“Not him. Yourself.”
“You needn’t be afraid for me. There’s nothing he can do to hurt me.”
“I wish that were true. How I wish it!”
From the road, Oldham yelled, “What is it, Vicky? I’m coming up there.”
“You take one step,” I called, “and I’ll break your knees with rifle slugs.”
Vicky gave me a look that meant she was sore at me. “Wade, I’m going back to the car. Mr. Oldham isn’t used to this kind of thing.”
“You won’t ever believe me or trust me, will you, Vicky? Okay, here it is. Rock was murdered last night at Deaf Joyner’s fish camp. His body was found late this morning.”
It took a second for her mind to absorb it. Then she went pale and a shiver coursed over her body. She closed her eyes. “Rock is dead,” she said in a shaky voice, “and I don’t feel any tears, Wade. Isn’t that rotten of me?”
“But you’re crying.”
“Only for myself. Only because I’ve grown so callous I don’t feel sad over a man’s death. Wade, I don’t want to be a mean or cruel person. I want to feel tender and gentle and clean inside, where it matters.”
I knew what she was trying to express. She was begging life not to beat her down any more, not to warp or twist her. Looking at the blind plea in her face, I felt as if I wanted to strike and break something. A man, a law, anything.
She rubbed her palm across her cheek. “Thanks for telling me, Wade. I’ll go now.”
I looked away from her, staring at Oldham down there in the road. “You can’t go,” I said. “They’re looking for you. They think you killed Rock.”
I heard the intake of her breath. I knew she was looking at me with the knowledge in her heart that I wasn’t kidding about this, that I had made sure before I came here.
Corpus Delectable Page 13
