Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  “No, it isn’t,” Gray said. “All I can do is—”

  “I don’t want him to get a jury trial,” the voice broke in. “Understand? You see he doesn’t get a jury trial or what happened tonight is just the start. You’ll get a bellyful of delinquents before I’m through with you. Tonight you got off easy.”

  “Wait a minute,” Gray said desperately. “I don’t understand. You don’t want a jury trial for Eddie Udall?”

  “That’s right,” the whisper said.

  “I don’t get it,” Gray told the voice. “I thought—”

  “You don’t have to get it. I know this set-up. Get that kid up on the stand with a smart defense lawyer and a lot of psychiatrists and the first thing you know public opinion will start swinging the other way. They’ll claim he’s being crucified because the papers hate him. A hung jury is all he’d need to walk out free. The hell with that. I want the little skunk to get what he deserves. If he gets a jury trial, I’ll know what your verdict was. Tonight was just a beginning unless you do as you’re told.”

  Gray said, “I tell you I don’t have the authority—”

  “You better have it,” the voice whispered. “Now you know what delinquents are really like. Next time it’ll be worse.”

  Gray tried to say something convincing enough to make the voice believe him. But a soft click in his ear and the hum of the wire told him the connection was dead.

  A cold wind blew against his thinly pajamaed back. He held the phone in a shaking hand and listened. No sound. He said into the stillness, “I’m going to turn around now.” No answer.

  Gray turned slowly. The room was empty. The front door creaked just a little in the cold wind blowing down the hall.

  Gray put his finger on the telephone cradle. When he took it up the dial tone sounded, and he dialed a number.

  “Is Captain Zucker there?” he asked after a moment.

  6

  Half an hour later Gray and Zucker watched two men photographing the splintered wood of the doorframe. Another was blowing grayish dust on the telephone.

  Gray wiped ink from his fingers.

  “I picked up the phone by the mouthpiece end,” he said. “The kid’s prints ought to be around the middle.”

  Zucker glanced at the flower bowl lying wrapped in paper ready for the police lab.

  “Photograph it?” he asked. The man at the telephone nodded.

  “We’ll bring out any latents,” Zucker told Gray.

  “What about my door?” Gray asked plaintively.

  One of the men working on it said, “The wood was old. It broke easy. You want to get a metal plate put in and the lock changed to one of these new kind that can’t be slipped.”

  “I will,” Gray said. “But what about the rest of the night?”

  The man shrugged. Zucker said, “Move some furniture across it. You’ll be okay.” He poised his pencil over a small notebook. “Anything to add to the description, Mike?”

  Gray was silent, considering.

  Zucker said, “We ought to have enough, with the prints. And if that Whitey gag wasn’t a phony.”

  “It wasn’t,” Gray told him. “He said it by mistake, before he thought. There’s one other thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s a narcotics addict.”

  Zucker looked up sharply.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Symptoms. Yawning and sniffing. Nervous—hell, you know the symptoms as well as I do, Harry. It might have been something else, but I doubt it. When I asked him if he needed a fix he got mad. And the voice on the telephone said something about a deck. Unless I heard it wrong.”

  “Was he hopped up?”

  “I don’t think so. One thing’s for sure, it wasn’t with marijuana, anyway. He could see the second hand on the clock moving, and with—”

  “Sure, I know,” Zucker said. “Things go plenty slow with you when you’ve been hitting a reefer. But it might have been something else.”

  “Might have been. Only the kid wasn’t hopped up. He needed his drug. The way he talked on the phone sounded as if the man on the other end was telling him where to go to get it. Geary and something was how it sounded.”

  Zucker looked alert for a moment. Then he subsided. “Geary’s a long street. Not a chance of catching them now. Still, I’ll pass the word. Somebody may have noticed something.”

  He made a note in his book. Then he glanced at the broken television, the ripped sofa.

  “He didn’t try robbery?”

  Gray said, “No, he didn’t. Somebody sent that kid up here for just one reason. To scare me off the Udall case. My guess is the kid was promised a fix if he did the job right. The man at the other end telephoned to make sure the kid was on the job, and then gave me his pitch about Eddie.”

  “Sure it was a man at the other end?”

  “Slip of the tongue,” Gray said. “It could have been a woman. You can’t tell much from a whisper.”

  The crew had finished its work. Zucker said, “You boys wait for me downstairs. I’ll be right along.” He turned back to Gray.

  “What do you think the angle was, Mike?” he asked.

  “First, about this narcotics angle,” Gray said. “How about that? Is Eddie a user?”

  “No. At least, not an habitual. Not a mark on him and no withdrawal symptoms after two weeks in custody.”

  “Anybody else involved in the case a dealer or a user?”

  Zucker thought. It seemed to Gray he was feeling a little uncomfortable at this line of questions. But he shook his big gray head positively.

  “Nobody we know of. I could ask Narcotics. Look, Mike, about that voice on the phone—”

  “Somebody in the drug business must have an interest in the Udall case,” Gray persisted. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve heard of a full-scale raid in town against narcotics dealers. A port city like San Francisco must be a major reception center for drugs, Harry. I’m interested in this tie-in with the case. We ought to find out if—”

  “Mike,” Zucker broke in uncomfortably. “Just drop it, will you?”

  “Why?”

  “Lots of reasons. You’re right, there is a syndicate operating in this area distributing narcotics. It’s a damned dirty business, and we’re doing all we can to break it up. If there’s a tie-in with the Udall case, we’ll find out about it. But I doubt if there’s a connection. Anyhow, that’s out of your field. Narcotics knows its business. Just leave it to the experts, will you?”

  Gray shrugged. “If you say so. But I still wonder. It seems obvious to me there is a connection.”

  “Well, Mike, the Udall kid comes from a fringe neighborhood. His school’s probably honeycombed with pushers. Don’t think we aren’t after them. Under the circumstances lots of distributors must know Udall at least by sight. It’s no coincidence in one way that this could have happened.”

  Gray looked at Zucker keenly. There was a slight flush of discomfort on the seamed face.

  Gray thought to himself, “There must be some big undercover movement shaping up in Narcotics and the word’s gone out to keep it quiet. Either that or Zucker’s taken up drug peddling himself in his old age.” He grinned and said, “Okay, Harry, I’ll try to keep my nose out of police business. All the same, when young hopheads start moving in on me with loaded .38’s—”

  “You’ve got a right to be worried,” Zucker said. “Okay, I grant you that. I still want to know what you make of the things the guy on the phone said.”

  Gray rubbed his chin. “At the time I was too damn scared to think much about it. Whoever it was didn’t want Eddie to be tried as an adult before a jury. He said he was afraid the kid would get off. How does that strike you?”

  “The guy was screwy. Sure, you need a better case in adult court. In juvenile all you need is preponderance of evidence. But we’ve got an air-tight case.”

  “What about a hung jury?”

  Zucker shrugged.
“One chance in a thousand.”

  Gray shut his eyes, trying to recapture the moment half an hour ago when the whispering voice had sounded in his ear.

  “Panic,” he said slowly. He opened his eyes. “That’s funny. When I try to remember, the first word that comes into my mind is panic. The way the voice sounded. Tight and choked, like somebody really scared. Scared, and maybe doing something rash in a fit of panic. Now I wonder.” He thought back carefully.

  “He said he’d been reading the papers. That was what triggered him into action. Why? And the whole argument was phony when you think it over. Too much rationalizing. It just doesn’t hold water. If he really hates the Udall boy, surely he’d want him tried before a jury and convicted. The other idea doesn’t make sense.”

  Zucker said, “Who was he? A crank? A real public-spirited citizen carried away by the Sinnott column? You wouldn’t know the voice again, I suppose?”

  “I might. I doubt it.”

  Zucker went on, “So he was a crank. A fanatic. He just wasn’t thinking straight, that’s all.”

  “Maybe,” Gray said. “But let’s try it this way. Suppose he isn’t a crank. Suppose he knew what he was doing. Why would he do it this way? If Eddie goes to juvenile instead of adult court, then what?”

  “He has a hearing, not a trial, if juvenile accepts jurisdiction. As a ward of the court, he’d probably be sent to some school like Preston. And that’s about it.”

  “Suppose he gets into a lot of trouble at Preston?”

  “Oh, they’d expect him to run away a time or two. Or anyhow, try to. But if he got into bad trouble I suppose he’d be declared incorrigible and remanded back to adult court for trial before a jury for the felonious murder, first degree, of Ann Avery.” Zucker rolled the words off his tongue as if he liked the sound of them.

  “But later,” Gray said thoughtfully. “Much later, probably, after the trail’s good and cold. How about that, Harry?”

  “How about what?”

  “Suppose Eddie Udall didn’t kill Ann Avery? Suppose somebody else did. Suppose he’s been counting on Eddie’s taking the rap as a juvenile, without a jury trial. Now he’s doing his best to make sure that’s what happens, so the evidence against the real killer won’t be traced. Suppose the voice on the phone, Harry, was the—”

  “That,” Zucker said, “is one hell of a lot of supposing.”

  “The person who phoned was in a panic, Harry,” Gray said. “If there’s anything to this theory, it ought to mean now’s the time to dig further. If that person’s scared, there’s a reason for it.—Maybe there’s evidence lying around somewhere that could be turned up. He’s rattled—or she is. A few months from now maybe the evidence could be buried somehow. The person won’t scare so easily later on. Harry—”

  “I won’t buy it,” Zucker told him. “It’s all guesswork. We’ve got the real killer in custody right now and plenty of evidence to prove it. You’re building up a crank phone call into some kind of big deal. Just leave this end of the work to us, Mike. It’s out of your line.”

  Gray said, “My job is to give a report to Judge Sheffield on Eddie Udall.”

  “You know already what that’ll be, don’t you?”

  Gray hesitated. “Tell me this much anyhow, Harry. Who in this case might that voice have belonged to?”

  “Anybody,” Zucker told him largely. “Blanche Udall, the kid’s mother, if it was a woman. The foster parents could have done it. They seem to feel pretty strongly about Udall. He took them in for sure—they like the little thug.”

  “What about that man Eddie beat up?”

  “He’s clean. He’s been up in Seattle for a couple of months.”

  “Ann Avery’s husband?”

  “Not a chance. He’s very hot to see the kid lynched. Wouldn’t you be, in his shoes?”

  “Who else?”

  Zucker looked harassed. “Anybody. Only one thing I’m sure of—it wasn’t Ann Avery.”

  Gray thought it over. “I want to talk to some of these people,” he said. “Before I turn in my report.”

  Zucker said unwillingly, “Well, I can’t stop you. But for God’s sake, stay out of the newspapers.”

  “I’ll try.” Gray looked around the wrecked room. “I’ve got a personal interest in this now, Harry, don’t forget. I wish you’d have the cop on this beat keep an eye on the place. I’ll have the door repaired, but I suppose there’s always a way to break in if you want to bad enough.” He frowned.

  “Look at it this way, Harry. Anybody who’d send a hophead kid on an errand like this isn’t safe walking around loose. I came within seconds of getting killed more than once tonight. No matter who murdered Ann Avery, there’s somebody loose who doesn’t care a damn about human lives.”

  Zucker looked at him soberly.

  “You’re right.”

  “Will you do me a favor, Harry?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to talk to Tod Avery tomorrow morning. Want to come along and make it look official?”

  Zucker hesitated briefly. “Well, all right. A couple of things I want to check on myself over there. I’ll pick you up about ten, okay?”

  Gray yawned. “Thanks, Harry. I’ll be ready.”

  Zucker said in a sour voice, “Well, pleasant dreams.”

  Tod Avery lived in a well-kept apartment house on a steep street below Russian Hill. Gray followed Zucker into the carpeted lobby. A self-service elevator sat waiting behind its ornate metal grille. The two men rose smoothly to the third floor, and Zucker led the way down the thickly carpeted corridor. He pressed a bell beside Avery’s door. They waited. Nothing happened. After a while Zucker rang again.

  This time they heard feet thudding toward them with hard, quick steps, and the door was jerked open abruptly. A tall man in a tan terrycloth robe said impatiently,

  “Well, what is it?”

  Half his face was covered with lather, the other half scraped clean. The visible half was lean and strong-jawed, the muscles drawn tight around the mouth. The eyes were bleak. Avery looked about forty. He had been through a bad time in the past two weeks, and he looked it. The bad times weren’t over yet, and his face showed that, too.

  He saw Zucker and said grudgingly, “Oh, it’s you.” He weighed the safety razor he held in one wet hand, hesitated, and then said, “Well, come on in. What can I do for you this time?”

  Zucker said, “I’d like you to meet Michael Gray, the psychoanalyst who—”

  Avery said, “I know who Mr. Gray is. I read the newspapers.” He wiped his wet hand on the terrycloth robe and extended it, not very cordially. “Come on in,” he said. “I’ve got to get down to my office as soon as I finish dressing. Is it something important?”

  Zucker said, “Yes, it is. We won’t take more than a few minutes.”

  Avery shrugged. “You can talk while I finish shaving if you want to. Come on.”

  They followed him across a living room with wide windows, quiet, well-chosen furniture, and a look of faintly dusty neglect. In the two weeks since Ann Avery’s death, the feeling that the apartment was lived in seemed to have faded out of the room.

  Avery led the way toward the bathroom, walking just a little wide around the front of the fireplace, as if he couldn’t forget what he had found lying there one night two weeks past.

  The bathroom was tiled in chilly blue. Ann Avery had undoubtedly chosen the thick pale-yellow towels that hung there, but they were crumpled and a little dingy now. Gray wondered if it had yet occurred to Avery to change them. If he had a cleaning woman, it obviously hadn’t yet occurred to her.

  Avery hung the tan robe on the door, ignoring his companions. He wore pajama bottoms and a sleeveless undershirt of a somewhat old-fashioned vintage that showed his square, solid chest and hairy arms. He picked up the shaving brush that stood on the basin, squeezed lather out of a tube, and began to apply it to the drying lather already on his face. Gray wondered how many men still used shaving brushes. Avery seem
ed like a conservative citizen.

  “I want to ask you a couple of things about Eddie Udall, Mr. Avery,” Gray said.

  Avery swung around to face him, the square jaw set tight, the mouth a thin line. “I know you do. I read the Sinnott column yesterday. Maybe we’d better get one thing straight, Gray. Don’t expect any help from me in getting Udall off.”

  “I don’t,” Gray said mildly. “It’s not my job to convict him or turn him loose. I’m just trying to get a clearer picture of the set-up. I’d like to know how it was you happened to hire him at the theater.”

  Avery turned back to the mirror and whipped the foaming brush across his jaw with an angry motion.

  “It was Ann’s idea,” he said.

  “Do you know how she happened to meet the boy?” Gray asked. “Was she interested in helping young people, or was Eddie Udall the first—”

  “First and last,” Avery told him grimly. He reached over the top of his own head to draw the skin tight along his cheek. He drew a neat path through the foam with the razor. Speaking one-sidedly, he went on. “I don’t know where she met him. She just told me she’d met a boy who’d been in trouble and needed help getting readjusted. I gave him the job because she asked me to, not because I liked Udall.”

  “Did he cause any trouble around the theater?”

  “No.” Avery spoke with some reluctance. “He was a pretty good worker.”

  “Do you employ other boys there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any trouble with them? Do teen-agers in general give you any trouble in the theater?”

  “My boys are a pretty fair bunch. Oh, sure, we have a bad time now and then with show-offs in the audience. I pick my kids for size and influence in the neighborhood when I can. They know how to handle the troublemakers. I’ve never had to call in the police, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Did you ever see Eddie with a switchblade?”

  Avery closed his eyes suddenly. He stood quite still, not answering, the razor pausing on his cheek. Then in a controlled voice he said, “Yes, he had one. I’ve seen it.”

  “Recently? He claims he lost it some time ago.”