Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  McCreery unlocked a door at the stairhead, keys jingling from a heavy bunch at his belt. They entered a warm, small room that seemed almost cozy by contrast with the basement. A green-shaded bulb on a long cord hung from the ceiling, casting the only light there was upon a battered roll-top desk with open ledgers spread out on it. A small oilstove burned beside the desk, casting a pattern of unsteady light upward on the ceiling and filling the room with the smell of burning kerosene.

  Chris Bond cast a casual glance around him. It was always a little startling to realize that this wasn’t really a small room at all. It might once have been a ballroom. You couldn’t tell now because of the masses of furniture that choked it. Around the sides of this little clearing towered high bookcases, massive walnut wardrobes, cabinets with glass fronts crammed with miscellany inside. A huge, ornately carved teakwood desk took up a good eight feet of space at one side of the clearing.

  McCreery crossed to the roll-top desk and with a quick, suspicious glance at Bond he flipped the ledgers shut, not before Bond had glimpsed the meticulous rows of descriptions and amounts entered in neat columns on the pages.

  “Business good?” he asked with a grin.

  McCreery held out a steady hand. “Let’s see what you’ve got”

  Bond laid the gold lighter in his palm. Then, hooking out a dusty chair with one foot, he flipped a handkerchief from his pocket and flicked the chair clean. He sat down and leaned back against the carved teak desk.

  “I’ll take a thousand bucks for that,” he said calmly.

  McCreery gave a startled squeak and jerked around to stare.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he demanded. “Why, it wouldn’t bring more than one seventy-five right over the counter. More likely less,” he added quickly, giving the gold initials a disdainful polishing with his thumb.

  “I’ll take a grand and I want it quick,” Bond told him.

  McCreery blinked red-rimmed eyes at him.

  “If this is a holdup,” he said, “it’s been tried before. It doesn’t work, Chris.” His voice was suddenly calm and cold.

  “No holdup.” Bond’s disclaimer was hasty. “I just want what’s coming to me. I need money and I need it quick. I’ve got to get out of town until the heat cools off.” He gave McCreery an ingratiating grin. “Come on, Martin. Give me a fair shake. A thousand isn’t much of a split, is it?”

  “Split of what?” McCreery demanded. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You know damn well,” Bond said, scowling suddenly. “You figured I’d never find out you got into Beverly’s place that night, didn’t you? Well, I’ve got more right than you have to the stuff you took. I want my split, or—”

  “What stuff?” McCreery’s voice rose to an indignant squeak. “I hardly got my nose in the door before they grabbed me. What stuff are you talking about?”

  “You know,” Bond said with hopeful significance. “You weren’t nosing around there for peanuts.”

  McCreery turned around and faced Bond squarely in the little, warm, odoriferous clearing of a room.

  “Now let’s get this straight,” he said. “Beverly had something valuable with her the same day she died. You think I took it?”

  “I know you took it,” Bond said, trying to sound confident.

  McCreery gazed searchingly at him.

  “More likely you got it yourself,” he said. “You were there before I was.”

  They measured each other suspiciously.

  Bond gave up the bluff first. “Oh, hell,” he said morosely. “The cops probably got it. What was it, anyway?”

  “I wish I knew,” McCreery told him, relaxing a little.

  “How much do you know?”

  “I’ll tell you,” McCreery said. “Maybe we can figure it out between us. Beverly was here the morning of the day she died. She sat right there at the desk where you’re sitting now, the way she always did.” He shook his grizzled head. “Bulwer always thought she was too flashy,” he said. “But I like a cheerful girl. We got to talking. I gave her a cup of tea and she read my fortune.” He was silent a moment, remembering. “Then she dropped her purse and made a dive for it. I made some joke about her not trusting us, and she said when big money was involved she didn’t trust anybody. She said, speaking of fortunes, she had a fortune right there in her handbag.”

  McCreery paused and looked at Bond speculatively.

  “What was it?” Bond asked. “Diamonds? Dope?”

  McCreery shrugged. “I asked her. She laughed and said the joke was on me. She wouldn’t explain that one. I told her she’d better put her valuables in the bank if they were worth that much. Then she turned serious and said I was probably right, except she didn’t trust the banks. I asked her who she did trust and she said nobody I knew.” McCreery sighed. “Then I paid her for the trinket she’d brought me and she went away. And that was the last I ever saw of her.”

  “Unless,” Bond said callously, “it was you who got her. And the fortune.”

  McCreery’s sallow face flushed. “Watch yourself, Chris,” he said coldly. “She was your wife. You might show a Utile more respect.”

  Bond ran a hand over his face. The fingers shook slightly. “I know,” he said, muffled, behind the hand. “I’m worried, Martin. I’m not thinking straight. I got to get out of town, Martin. I’m not leaving here without money.”

  McCreery, ignoring this appeal, said, “For all I know you were the one who killed poor Beverly yourself. What were you doing right there on the spot?”

  “I was that close to the money!” Bond said, looking up with a sudden wildness. “That close! She promised me a split. She knew the jam I was in and she was going to help me out when she got the money. The payoff was set for that night—I think.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t made at all,” McCreery suggested.

  “Maybe not. Hell, I guess it wasn’t. The Herrick dame knifed her and kept the dough and the diamonds both, or whatever it was.” He looked searchingly at Martin McCreery. “What was it?”

  McCreery measured the size of a handbag between his outstretched palms. “Something not very big. Or heavy. I know what it wasn’t, not what it was. Did the Herrick girl have time to dispose of it? If we knew where she’d gone that night, before she turned herself in…” He let the speculation die away dispiritedly.

  “God knows what she did,” Chris Bond said. “Women!” There was a kind of warm contempt in his voice.

  Behind the shelter of bookcases and wardrobes that walled the little clearing in, a sudden rustle sounded. Bond glanced toward the noise.

  “Bulwer, is that you?”

  The rustle sounded again. Martin McCreery gave it an indulgent look. “Bulwer’s very much interested in what happened to Beverly. He’s even been reading the current papers when I bring them in, and for Bulwer that’s really news.”

  “I thought he never read anything later than 1937,” Bond said without much interest.

  From behind the bookcases a gentle voice said, “Thirty-five.”

  Martin McCreery smiled. “Bulwer had a disappointment a couple of days ago. A red-haired stranger came to visit us. A man I saw with the police Sunday. They tell me his name is Gray.”

  “Gray!” Bond looked up sharply.

  “You know him? The psychoanalyst?”

  “A headshrinker?” Bond said, surprised. “Well, for God’s sake. That explains it. I thought he was reading my mind. What happened? Did he come in?”

  “Not far enough,” Martin said. “I told you Bulwer was disappointed.”

  Bond grimaced. “One of his little traps? Bulwer’s going to bite off more than he can chew someday.”

  Martin McCreery said indulgently, “Oh, Bulwer’s harmless.” Another rustle sounded, faintly indignant.

  Bond raised his voice, “Okay, Bulwer, just watch it.”

  A gentle laugh answered him, quite mellow, ending with a cracked chuckle. Chris Bond shivered a little in the warm, close air. Martin McCreery gave
him a sardonic, sidewise look.

  In the brief silence that followed, the voice from behind the walls said softly, “Martin…the camera?”

  Martin McCreery looked up, his face startled as if by a sudden idea. “The camera?” he echoed. “I’d forgotten that, Bulwer. You may be right.”

  Bond stared suspiciously at him.

  “What camera? Right about what?”

  A certain annoyance was in McCreery’s glance at him. The answer came reluctantly, as if Martin would rather not discuss it at all. Still, the answer did come.

  “Bulwer was reminding me that Beverly rented a camera from us quite some while ago. Shortly before Melissa died, it was. Time does go by so fast…”

  “So?” Bond said impatiently.

  “It puzzled us at the time. I think she only kept it overnight, and she never did explain why she wanted it.”

  Dawning enlightenment brightened on Chris Bond’s face.

  “By God!” he said abruptly. “You think it was pictures she had? If she got some shots of old man Herrick in bed with her—”

  Martin McCreery said, “Chris!” in a shocked voice.

  “Well, why not?” Bond said, still excited by the thought. “Hell, Melissa was still alive then. She could have helped take ’em. You want to bet this wasn’t the stuff she had in her purse? It fits right down the line.”

  “Beverly wouldn’t do a thing like that,” Martin McCreery said positively. “I knew those girls too well. Beverly wouldn’t—”

  “You didn’t know Beverly,” Chris Bond said, grinning.

  McCreery turned abruptly to his roll-top desk. He picked up the gold cigarette lighter and looked at it appraisingly.

  “I’ll give you twenty-five,” he said. “Take it or leave it. And get out of here. We don’t like that kind of talk.”

  Bond gave a howl of anguished protest.

  “Twenty-five bucks! It’ll bring you a hundred even if it is hot!”

  “Take it somewhere else,” McCreery said, holding the lighter out.

  “Now wait a minute. Okay, maybe that wasn’t the kind of pictures Beverly took. All the same, the Herricks would pay big, and the Herrick girl was the one who—All right, all right. I won’t say another word. How about fifty bucks?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “God damn it, Martin, I told you I’ve got to leave town. How far can I go on twenty-five lousy dollars? You want me to get beat up in the city limits so the local cops can pick up the pieces? No telling how much I might blab when I’m out of my head.”

  “I had hoped your friends might kill you,” Martin said coolly. “You seem pretty sure they won’t.”

  “They won’t. They’re too smart. They’ll just—” Bond shivered again, and the smothered anxieties he had been managing to repress for a while drew the lines of his swarthy face taut. “I’m not kidding, Martin. They’re not either. If I’m delirious, I could spill everything I know. I might even talk about who my fence is. I might—”

  Martin McCreery reached irritably into his coat pocket and brought out a wad of greasy bills. He counted off four and thrust them at Bond, who paused in his plaintive threats long enough to count them fastidiously.

  “Is that all?” he demanded.

  “It’s enough to get you out of town.”

  “And then what? I’ll need a stake—”

  McCreery reluctantly added another bill.

  “You’ve got plenty more where that came from,” Bond said, giving the wad a covetous glance. He hunched forward tentatively.

  McCreery said in a cold, calm voice, “Are you threatening me, Chris?”

  It was for a moment as still as death in the little room within a room. Behind the bookcases something rustled twice and was silent.

  “You want to get out of here alive?” McCreery asked, still cold and calm. “It’s a long way out, Chris…”

  “All right, all right. This will do me fine.”

  Again, behind the walls, something rustled. There was a low, crooning laugh.

  16

  Gray sat in Pollard’s office and listened all over again to the story of Chris Bond’s visit here. It had happened very much as Gray thought. Bond had come up with a thinly veiled offer to serve as a suborned witness for Eileen’s defense, if it were made worth his while.

  Pollard had told him to go to hell.

  Bond hinted that he could easily testify against Eileen.

  At that point emotion had taken precedence over logic, and Pollard swung on Bond. Obviously he still felt good about that, though Gray realized Bond had gone down only because he was surprised by the blow.

  But Pollard was in a good mood. He felt talkative. And Gray took advantage of it by taking him carefully once again through the events in the night club the night Beverly Bond died. Once launched on the story, Pollard filled in the details meticulously, skipping nothing. And Gray listened with intent interest. Once he looked up alertly and started to interrupt, but restrained himself and sat quiet until the end.

  “That’s fine,” Gray said when he had finished. “Let’s backtrack for a minute. You walked Beverly Bond to the curb. Then what?”

  “I put her in a taxi. I wanted to be sure she’d stay out of Eileen’s way. When I got back inside, a waiter met me and said I had a phone call waiting. It was my secretary with the time of the senator’s plane flight. So I—”

  “Did the waiter hand you the phone?” Gray asked. “I mean, was it a plug-in for table service, or did you go to a booth.”

  “To a booth.”

  Gray nodded. “Let’s see if I have this straight. You came back into the night club and met the waiter. He told you about the phone call. You went over to the booth—”

  “And picked up the phone and took the call,” Pollard finished as Gray paused. “Then I went back to the table and we had a drink, and I left for the airport.”

  Gray listened to the rest of the story with half his attention. He was conscious of a rising excitement in his mind as he considered one small omission Pollard had just made. When Eileen told this story, and when Pollard’s secretary told it, Eileen was the one who took the call. It was Eileen who handed the telephone over to Pollard.

  Why had Pollard left out that one detail?

  He was revolving the question in his mind as he thanked Pollard and stood up.

  “Any time,” Pollard said, holding out his hand. “Glad to help if I can.”

  Gray went out thoughtfully. The secretary looked up and smiled. Gray’s eyes dwelt speculatively upon her earrings. On a sudden impulse he said, “Would you do me a favor? Call my office for me?”

  She smiled again and reached for the phone. Gray gave her the number and stood there watching, his muscles going tense with anticipation to see if she would do what he thought she would do. He could guess, but he wanted the proof actually before him.

  She picked up the instrument with her left hand and dialed with her right. When she finished dialing she picked up a pencil and drew a note pad toward her, pencil poised.

  As the ringing began on the line, she reached up with the pencil hand, shifting the pencil out of the way between her fingers, and pulled off her large earring___

  She laid it down on the desk, set the receiver flat to her ear, and sat waiting patiently. It seemed to Gray that the thing was done so automatically she hadn’t the least awareness that she had done it.

  Gray almost laughed aloud.

  So that’s how it could have happened! he thought. Eileen in the phone booth pulling off her earring and laying it down absent-mindedly. Pollard taking the telephone from her and seeing the gold gleam on the ledge as he talked. Dropping the earring into his pocket, forgetting it until much later—until he looked up from his search of the dead girl’s apartment to hear Eileen hammering at the door.

  But Eileen was certain her father had killed Beverly Bond.

  Was she wrong? Was it Pollard? He had omitted nothing else at all from his story of that night’s events. If he left this one thin
g out, then did he have a reason for wanting to forget it?

  Gray said hastily to the girl at the telephone, “Wait—I’ve just remembered something. I’ll have to leave. Thanks, anyhow.”

  Mystified, she watched him down the hall.

  Gray stood at the elevator waiting for a down car, frowning at nothing. Pollard? he asked himself.

  Was it Pollard in Ferguson’s room last night?

  Ferguson’s killer had wanted to kill Gray, too. Why? Because he feared him. Feared what Gray knew and what he might later find out. Then how would the killer react if Gray invited him to submit to a series of tests?

  Gray laughed softly. He turned and went back with long strides to Pollard’s office. The receptionist looked up in surprise.

  “I forgot something,” Gray said. “Would you ask Mr. Pollard to step out here for a minute?”

  He waited, his thoughts spinning around and around. One of the thoughts, it seemed to him, kept getting out of step with the rest. It kept tripping the others up. Something inconsistent. What…?

  Something Pollard had said. Pollard across the lunch table on Sunday, his face haggard, his eyes burning. “I’m going to get Eileen out of this mess…I don’t care how…I’m not going to follow the rules…But I’m going to save her.” That was Pollard—in theory.

  But Pollard in practice? When Chris Bond came to him with an offer of helpful lies, Pollard not only said no. He swung on the bigger man and knocked him flat

  Why?

  Because he doesn’t want Eileen free? Maybe Dan Abel was right, Gray thought. Maybe it’s the Herrick money and influence Pollard’s really marrying. He takes Eileen with them only because he has to. Eileen herself is an embarrassing burden, with her bad publicity that could hurt a politician. But maybe Pollard needed the Herrick backing enough to put up with Eileen as long as he had to.

  Until he saw his chance to solve everything with one bold stroke. Pin his own crime on her, get rid of the unwanted bride, and still keep Herrick’s friendship. A perfect solution to a bad situation.