Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

Gray guessed, or thought he guessed, from something in the sound and the wild, resolute look on Pollard’s face. He started to say, “Wait!” But in the same instant Pollard’s right hand rose with the gun in it, leveled at the crowd.

  Half a dozen guns roared almost in unison as Pollard’s finger pressed the trigger.

  He jerked this way and that to the heavy impacts. For a moment it seemed that only the jolting of the bullets into him held Him up. When he went down it was slowly, to one knee, and then over on his face. The unfired gun dropped from his hand. His feet beat the pavement a little and then he was still.

  The officers closed in slowly, watching him. He didn’t stir. Someone picked up the fallen gun, broke it, spun the cylinder.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said in a marveling voice. “Look—it wasn’t loaded!”

  Gray said softly, “I didn’t think it was.”

  24

  Zucker leaned closer over the greenish glass of the microfilm reader. He adjusted the lever under the screen and the print swam into clear focus.

  “Here,” he said to Gray. ‘Take a look.”

  Gray leaned awkwardly above the glass, fidgeting with the sling that held his arm across his chest. He had lost blood and he was feeling a little dizzy.

  Pollard had been dead for nearly three hours now. Gray had been in the emergency hospital and out of it again, and in this time Zucker and the others had pulled ahead of him.

  “What is it?” Gray demanded eagerly. “The money…?”

  “Read it,” Zucker said.

  Gray read. The document was headed PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT, and his eyes scanned the typed lines quickly. He looked up with disappointment in his face.

  “I thought it would tell where the money was,” he said, frowning. “This is nothing but a partnership agreement between Pollard and—” Here he caught himself, blinked, and bent again over the screen. “And McCreery?” he said in flat amazement. “David McCreery? But—”

  Zucker laughed.

  “That was the secret behind the great McCreery swindle of 1946,” he told Gray. “Your boy Pollard was McCreery’s secret partner. Active, but secret. McCreery was nothing but the front man, the one who took the rap. Same principle as having a front man in any racket—he gets paid for serving a sentence if there’s trouble, while the real operator stays safe. Getting Pollard to sign this thing must have been McCreery’s insurance policy, in case Pollard tried a double cross.”

  “But the money?” Gray persisted. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly, and his ears buzzed faintly with dizziness, but he couldn’t get out of his head the vision of great packets of currency hidden away somewhere, waiting for David McCreery to come out of prison.

  Zucker smacked his big palm on a sheaf of papers on the desk.

  “Forget about the money as a motive,” he said. “What do you think Neil Pollard was living so high on all these years? How do you think he bought into his public relations firm? What’s been financing his political campaign? The fraud money. What else?”

  Zucker slapped the folder again. “Mike, if you want a line on a man’s secrets, check up on his bank account. Add up his income and his outgo. Nine times out of ten, if he’s been up to something, you’ve got him. And Pollard was up to plenty.”

  Gray said, “Melissa? Did you—”

  Zucker nodded brusquely. “Okay, okay. I guess you were right there, too. We did some checking. She’d been blackmailing a Utile on the side for years. We turned up a couple of her ex-boy friends who admitted it. A week before her murder her bank account took a big jump. Pollard’s dropped by about the same amount I don’t know what happened, but it looks—”

  “I know,” Gray said. “Wait, let me think. A week before her murder…yes, that was when Beverly rented a camera from Martin McCreery. The two girls must have been in it together from the start. I haven’t told you yet about David McCreery’s desk, but one of them could have found the partnership agreement there. It had to be hidden in some out-of-the-way place like that or the police would have found it ten years ago when they were looking for evidence about where the money went.”

  “So they photographed the agreement?” Zucker said.

  “Somebody did,” Gray said, nodding toward the microfilm reader. “My guess would be Melissa approached Pollard when she realized what she’d found and began collecting a payoff. She didn’t realize how strongly he felt about bad publicity. Or maybe her demands got too high. Anyhow, I think he hired a couple of thugs to help him rob her apartment and take the agreement back.”

  “Yates and Ferguson,” Zucker said.

  “Right When Yates killed the girl, all three of them were equally guilty. That’s why Pollard had to get rid of Ferguson when Ferguson started confessing.”

  Zucker laughed grimly. “I’d like to have seen Pollard’s face when he found out Beverly Bond had a photograph of the agreement after all.”

  “It must have been a bad moment,” Gray said. “Beverly didn’t know what she was getting into. Pollard would take only so much pressure. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ferguson was getting a payoff, too. After all, he was holding a murder rap over Pollard’s head. His own, too, of course. Anyhow, the pressure got to be too much. Maybe Beverly was asking more than Pollard could pay. And the publicity right now would have ruined his hopes for good all down the line. So…”

  “He killed her,” Zucker said heavily. He looked at the green-lit glass where the film negative cast its shadow. He shook his head.

  “There’s our only real evidence,” he said. “A lot of this has been guesswork. That’s solid fact. For what it would be worth a prove murder. At that, you know, a good lawyer might have

  “He thought about that,” Gray told him in a sober voice, “I think he stood there in the alley with his empty gun and thought it over. He thought about facing a trial, and the public disgrace, and how much his good name had meant to him. And he came out with the empty gun.”

  And even that, Gray realized, had been a fraud…

  “But he had to confess,” he said. “After all, in his own way, he confessed.”

  They sat silent, gazing at the shadow of the document floating in the glass screen.

  Then Gray, easing his arm in the sling, said, “How soon can we get Eileen out? How’s she taking it?”

  Zucker grinned. “She’ll have to wait for a little red tape. Not much. The last time I saw her she was crying on Dan Abel’s shoulder and saying how happy she was.”

  Gray smiled back at him. Eileen would be all right, he thought. She’s young enough, flexible enough. And she wants to change. As for Philip and Zoe Herrick—who could say? Not so young, not so flexible, perhaps not so strongly motivated to change. They might go one way—they might go another. In the last analysis it would be up to them to make their own choice.

  “Eileen will be all right,” he said aloud. “The others—well, they’ve got a good chance, that’s all.”

  “That’s all anybody has,” Zucker reminded him soberly.

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1958 by Henry Kuttner

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition August 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-380-9

  1

  Karen Champion tried to open her eyes. If she could just wake up in time, everything could still be all right. She would be here in bed in her apartment, the shades down, the doors locked, the black night sh
ut out.

  But the dream, the nightmare, was on its way.

  She was hurrying along a silent street, and something was coming after her, very fast. It was dark, this follower, and when she looked back she could see that it was quite small. It seemed to be wearing a dress; she could see the whipping fabric in the wind. But the face was hairy, an animal muzzle glistening wetly with foam.

  In a moment its outstretched hand, palm forward, would touch her, the animal face would laugh, the foam would spray about her. She had to get away. But she couldn’t. If she took one backward step she would fall and fall and die …

  Now she wanted terribly to wake up. She made one tremendous, convulsive effort without moving a muscle. Karen tried to scream.

  A heavy crash in the bedroom released her from her bondage. She leaped awake in a single second. She was sitting upright in bed, her eyes wide open, her heart thudding with triphammer blows.

  What had the noise been? A crash? Had she dreamed it? The window shade was up, flooding the bed with moonlight. She shivered as the cold air flowed around her. Was it the shade, flying up, that woke her? And why was she so frightened?

  It must have been a dream, she told herself shakily, swinging her feet out of bed. She couldn’t sleep with all that moonlight shining on her face. She would close the shade again. Groping after the dream, she threw the bedclothes aside. A terrifying dream about—what? Something chasing her, that much she knew. Something too awful to look at. For some reason she found herself thinking of poor old Spot, dead and buried twenty years at least. Whatever had been in the nightmare, it certainly wasn’t Spot. The dream seemed to tatter into fragments as she tried to recapture it.

  Groping with one bare foot for her slippers, she felt her toe touch something slick and cold. She said aloud, “What in the world—” and bent to look. In absolute disbelief she saw the shattered fragments of a little glass lamp scattered across the carpet, broken edges gleaming wickedly in the moonlight.

  She thought dazedly, “I must be dreaming,” and turned toward the bureau where the two glass lamps should be standing.

  A dark shape moved between her and the bureau.

  This was the nightmare come to life, the dark follower moving into reality at last. Her heart contracted and seemed to stop. She tried to scream, but her throat wouldn’t open. She could only stare.

  She knew she wasn’t dreaming. This time it was real.

  The figure loomed toward her in the shadow, a black thing with eyes that seemed to strike sparks from the moonlight. The breath came so short in her throat that she couldn’t get air enough down into her lungs. One of the dark arms was raised, holding something that glittered from a dozen trembling points of light.

  Then it came toward her into the moonlight.

  She had one glimpse of a face she surely knew. The glint of the eyes was from horn-rimmed glasses. The moustache and the shadows hid the mouth, but surely, surely—

  “Dennis?” she asked in a little, shaken voice.

  The figure heaved up its arm and struck downward at her. It struck with the other glass lamp as a weapon. Karen’s throat opened and she screamed wildly, mindlessly, an animal noise, as she lurched sidewise in a frantic effort to escape.

  The lamp struck the wooden headboard with a splintering crash, making the whole bed rock under its impact. Bits of glass flew past her face. She sucked air deep into her lungs and shrieked again and again.

  Windows thudded open outside in the court of the apartment house. Someone called in sleepy alarm.

  The dark figure chuckled and backed away from the bed. Karen heard the door open and close. She sat still, without breathing or stirring, until the outer door opened and shut too.

  Then, barefoot, careless of the glass on the floor, she hurled herself across the room toward the telephone. Her hands shook so hard she couldn’t dial. She spun O for Operator after great effort.

  “Get the police!” she gasped into the shaking black mouth of the instrument. “Quick, quick! This is Karen Champion—my husband just tried to kill me!”

  2

  Michael Gray, psychoanalyst, sat with his elbows on his desk, as he concentrated hard on a case history folder spread out before him.

  The telephone, ringing sharply at his elbow, barely ruffled his thoughts at first. He dragged himself out of his concentration finally, picking it up on the third ring.

  He knew the voice on the wire. He said, “Oh, hello, Bob. What can I do for you?”

  It was Bob Ettinger, Gray’s physician. Ettinger coughed a little and said, “Well, I don’t know. I may have just played you a dirty trick, Mike. I gave your name to a patient of mine, a girl named Karen Champion. I’ve been twisting her arm trying to get her to see you. I know how busy you are, but if she does call, could you at least see her once?”

  Gray said, “Sure, why not? And where does the dirty trick come in?”

  Ettinger coughed again. “Strictly off the record,” he said, “you can’t believe a word she says. Karen’s a pathological liar. She’s off on a new kick now. I’ll leave it to her to tell you, but she’s called in the police and God knows where it’ll end. All I’m sure of is the girl needs help. Whether she’ll accept it is something else again. She won’t admit anything’s wrong with her.” He gave a small, half-hearted laugh. “I admit it doesn’t sound promising.”

  “It doesn’t,” Gray agreed. “Still, if she shows up at all, it’s a beginning. I’ll do my best for her if she calls.”

  After Gray had hung up he sat scowling at the telephone a while. Then he scribbled the name Karen Champion on his calendar and added a large question mark.

  Karen Champion sat back in Gray’s office chair and looked at him with anxious blue eyes. She wore a hat like a flower basket anchored on smooth, light-brown hair, and her plain suit looked expensive. She kept sliding one white-gloved hand back and forth on the chair arm, smoothing the polished wood. Gray noticed and made a mental note that now and then the hand stopped and tightened.

  “Dr. Ettinger thinks I may be able to help you with a problem you have,” he said.

  “Oh, I only hope you can!” Her voice was eager.

  Gray nodded, feeling a little flash of pleased surprise. Ettinger hadn’t thought she would admit there was anything wrong with her.

  “Just what is the problem?” he asked.

  “It’s very simple, really.” Karen Champion straightened herself in the chair and fixed him with an earnest blue gaze. “How do you get somebody declared insane?” she asked.

  Gray blinked.

  “That’s a pretty complex question,” he said. “I’d need to know more of the details.”

  “But I have to know!” She leaned forward anxiously. “I may be in a terrible spot! I’ve got to protect myself somehow if things go wrong, and I can’t think of any other way.”

  “Suppose you tell me about it,” Gray said patiently. “Just what’s happened that puts you on this spot?”

  She drew a long, shuddering breath. “Something that happened Wednesday night. I woke up and saw my husband standing over me with a glass lamp in his hand. He tried to kill me.”

  She told Gray in detail of the terrifying minutes in her bedroom that night. He listened silently, watching her face.

  “And then I called the police,” she finished. “And they didn’t believe me. Nobody believes me. But it’s true! It happened! So I did the only thing I could do. I brought charges against Dennis myself.”

  “The police wouldn’t act?”

  “Nobody will. I’ve tried everything. I wanted to swear out a peace warrant against him. I tried to charge him with assault. But they said the District Attorney wouldn’t take it before the Grand Jury. So I found out I could go direct to court myself—I saw a lawyer who told me I could make a direct complaint, a—an—”

  “An information?”

  “That’s what it is. Anyhow, that way the judge has to hear the case. So that’s what I did. Now there’ll be a hearing.” She paused. “That
’s what scares me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because of Dennis. He—he’s furious about what I’ve done. And now—well, suppose the judge doesn’t believe me either? Suppose he just lets Dennis go?”

  “What do you think will happen?”

  “Dennis will kill me,” she said in a flat voice.

  Gray looked at her alertly, waiting for her to go on. He didn’t want to speak yet. He was mentally checking over her appearance, her voice, her mannerisms. A pathological liar can often be wonderfully convincing. She looked and acted now much as he would expect a woman to do who is telling the simple truth about a terrifying experience.

  “He’ll kill me,” she said again. “So the only other thing I can think of to protect myself is to get him declared insane. And that’s why I’m here, Mr. Gray. This is your field, isn’t it? Can’t you tell me how I go about it?”

  “Well, as I say, it’s a pretty complicated thing,” Gray told her. “It could be a civil or a criminal matter. In either case you’d have to convince the court, you know. Do you think you have enough evidence?”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “Well, behavior on your husband’s part that seems abnormal, for instance. Could you give me an example?”

  “It’s his temper, mostly,” Karen Champion said. “It’s worse than just a bad temper. It’s like—a volcano. He usually keeps himself pretty well controlled. But when he does get into a rage—well, he’s not a sane man.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Look at last Wednesday night,” Karen said. “Isn’t that bad enough?”

  Gray nodded thoughtfully. “Maybe we’d better get a clearer background picture first on all this,” he said. “Could you give me some details about your husband? What happened between you, what the situation is now?”

  Karen smoothed the chair arm slowly.

  “Well, we’ve been married for five years. Dennis is fifteen years older than I am. Everything was fine until lately, actually. I do want to be fair. Dennis can be a wonderful person when he wants to be. But—then he started to change.”