Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  When the last stroke of nine was fading, Zucker set down his cup of chilling coffee and grumbled in a subdued voice, “If I had the sense of a half-wit I’d be home in bed.”

  Gray said unfairly, “Nobody twisted your arm. You didn’t have to come up here.”

  Zucker snorted. “And miss a chance to see you fall on your face for once? Not me.” He yawned widely. “If I were on duty I wouldn’t be here, that’s for sure. Nothing’s going to happen. Kramer and Woods are wasting the city’s money. I ought to send ’em back to headquarters right now.” He glanced at the two officers sitting patiently in chairs pushed back against the wall, out of sight from any of the windows.

  Karen on the sofa turned a magazine page restlessly and said, “You’re talking too loud.”

  Zucker dropped his voice obediently, but what he said in his heavy whisper was, “I’m going home. I’m sick of this. Nobody’s going to show up tonight.” He shoved his cup across the table and started to rise.

  Gray made a quick gesture. In a low voice he said, “Sit down, Harry. Give us a little more time—just a little. He may be outside the door right now. Remember, Karen’s supposed to be in here alone. You walk out now and you may give the whole show away.”

  Zucker looked at the clock, scowling. “Well, I’ll wait another half hour. But he isn’t outside. He isn’t going to get past the lobby without being spotted.” He yawned again. “Hell, if he were coming at all he’d be here by now.”

  Gray was beginning to feel a discouraged agreement with him. The whole thing might well be a false alarm after all. He had made mistakes before. This might be a new and major one.

  But he said, “It ought to be soon now. He can’t postpone it much longer. He knows I’m supposed to put Karen under hypnosis this evening and he’s bound to stop her somehow. But I never thought he’d jump into action without thinking things over. Quigley’s a man who plans things out in advance. Somewhere, right now, he’s—”

  The telephone pealed sharply at Karen’s elbow.

  Everybody jumped a little. Karen’s hand was not very steady as she picked up the instrument. Her voice shook slightly when she said, “Hello?” Then the tension slackened in her face and she said, “Oh, hello, Sue.” Covering the mouthpiece, she whispered, “Susan Turk,” to the listening men.

  Everybody relaxed again. Karen made polite responses with only half her mind operating as Gray whispered to her, “Cut it short,” and Zucker yawned again, widely. He and Gray were both very short of sleep and both of them were feeling it.

  Gray was trying to think himself into Roger Quigley’s mind, wondering what he would do in Quigley’s place, how he would move to meet this new threat, how he would feel and act. It wasn’t easy. Gray was tired. But the trouble ran deeper than that.

  Roger Quigley was a kind of invisible man, Gray told himself with sudden realization. A man hard to identify with because, somehow, he seemed emotionally invisible. Nobody involved with him seemed to love or hate him. Nobody had any strong feelings about him at all.

  It was a curious thought. Not even Quigley seemed to have very strong feelings. He had shown violent emotion only once, when the news of his wife’s love affair with Albano came to light. But thinking back, Gray realized that even that hadn’t seemed based on jealousy. The love affair’s existence had put Quigley himself in the number one spot as suspect in Albano’s death. That shook him. Nothing else seemed to.

  Karen said into the telephone, “Well, thanks for calling, Sue. I’ll see you soon. Good-by.” She laid down the phone. “Nothing,” she told the others. “Just asking about Dennis. Wanting to know if there’s anything she can do.”

  Zucker grunted.

  “Something had better happen pretty soon, or I’m going home.”

  Gray lit a cigarette. Karen picked up her magazine.

  The telephone rang again.

  Karen picked it up and said, “Hello?” She listened for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you have the wrong number.”

  She laid the telephone down again, met Gray’s eyes, looked at Zucker. “A man,” she said. “Wrong number.”

  Gray glanced at Zucker. Zucker was frowning. They all sat in silence for a moment, testing this event. Did it mean anything? Was it an accident? Or was it—

  The telephone shrilled again.

  Karen picked it up, listened briefly. “Oh,” she said. “Just a moment.” And she held out the phone to Zucker.

  Zucker half reached for it before he realized what she had done. Then he made a violent gesture, waving it away, while in the same moment Gray jumped to his feet, realizing too late what had happened.

  Karen realized it too, now. She slapped her hand over her mouth and looked, wide-eyed, from the telephone to Zucker and then back. Zucker waved at it. “See who it is!” he mouthed.

  “Hello?” Karen said into the mouthpiece. “Hello? Hello?” Then she laid it down in its cradle. In a small, flat voice she said, “The line’s dead.”

  They all sat silent. Karen drew in a shaken, quavering breath, and the tears came into her eyes. She said, “I—I gave it away, didn’t I?”

  “What was it?” Gray asked.

  “A man’s voice. He—he just said, ‘This is police headquarters. Let me speak to the officer in charge.’” Karen swallowed audibly. “And I—oh, God, what a fool I am! I fell for it!”

  “Well, we’ll see,” Zucker told her gruffly. “Here, let me have the phone.” He dialed and waited. After a moment he said, “Give me Homicide, Myers’ desk.” There was another pause. Then, “Myers? This is Zucker. Did you just call me?” He listened briefly. “Well, has anyone asked for this number? Have you told anyone I could be reached here?” The voice at the other end spoke distantly. Zucker said, “Well, thanks. No, that’s all.” He laid down the telephone and looked at them, frowning.

  “Nobody but Myers knew I was here. Myers didn’t call.”

  Gray said, “What would you do if you were the killer?”

  Zucker shrugged. “Telephone to make sure Mrs. Champion’s here. Hang up when she answers. But how would I suspect anything’s fishy?”

  Gray said, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I didn’t plan this very well. Now that I think about it, I realize I’ve hurried things more than I really had to. Somewhere along the line, I slipped a little. Nobody ever suggested Quigley isn’t sharp.”

  Zucker said uncertainly, “This doesn’t prove anything. It could have been a bona fide call, you know. Cut off by accident.”

  “If it was, he hasn’t called back,” Gray pointed out. He turned to Karen. “What did the voice sound like? Was it Quigley?”

  Karen had begun to cry. Dabbing at her eyes, she said, “I couldn’t tell. He sounded as if he had a terrible cold.”

  Gray and Zucker exchanged a long look.

  Zucker said heavily, “I want to talk to Quigley.”

  Gray said, “Then you think—”

  “I don’t think anything, yet. I just want to talk to him.” Zucker reached for the telephone. Then he drew his hand back. “No—I want to spring it on him. We won’t have him picked up. We’ll go to his place.”

  “Think he’ll be home?”

  “We’ll chance it. I want to talk to Mrs. Quigley again, too. About that alibi of theirs. I still can’t buy your theory, Mike, but those phone calls worry me. They worry the hell out of me. I don’t like to be worried.” He turned to the waiting officers. “Kramer, you stay here. Keep your eyes open. Don’t let Mrs. Champion run any risks. Woods, you come with us.” He reached for his hat. “Come on, Mike. If Quigley isn’t the guy, there’s no harm done. If he is—well, God knows what he’ll do next.”

  29

  Roger Quigley felt very calm and confident. His heart was beating only a little fast; he worked best, he reminded himself, under pressure. He closed the front door behind him.

  “Joyce?” he called.

  “I’m in the kitchen.”

  She was eating a sandwich at the table, the e
vening newspaper propped before her on a wire stand. She picked up a glass of milk as he came in.

  “Joyce—something’s come up.”

  She drank. “About Dennis?”

  “In a way.” He felt suddenly hungry. “What’s in that sandwich?”

  “Roast beef.”

  He opened the refrigerator, took out the roast, and began making himself a sandwich as he talked.

  “Everything’s fine, providing we’re careful. Dennis hasn’t got a chance. So I suppose Karen will inherit. One way or another we can get control and run CQD the way we want to. The right way.” He poured milk and sat down opposite her at the table, taking a bite out of the corner of the sandwich. Chewing, he said thickly, “But something’s come up. Some screwball idea. I think they may start asking questions again about my alibi for last night.”

  Joyce looked at him sharply. “Oh, damn. I’ve been afraid of that. Roger, I think we made a mistake. There’s really no sense in telling lies to the police when you don’t have to. I wonder if we shouldn’t make a clean breast of it, after all.”

  “And confuse the issue all over again? I thought we had that out last night. Look—Dennis is guilty. That’s self-evident I’m innocent—we know that, too. So why get the police interested in me?”

  “But if we tell the truth—”

  “Do you think they’d take my word for it I was just walking around the streets worrying? They’ve settled on Dennis. I don’t want to start them thinking about me.”

  Joyce looked at her sandwich. In a level voice, without glancing up, she said, “Why not, Roger?”

  “What do you mean, why not?”

  “I mean—is there some reason you’d rather they didn’t start asking too many questions?”

  He gave her a rather blank glance. “Look, Joyce. Let’s not eel around hunting for ways to make trouble. The point’s this—that God-damned psychoanalyst has some screwball idea of his own. I don’t know what it’s about. But I do know we’re going to get questioned very closely about that alibi. I want to be damn sure neither of us slips up.”

  “We rehearsed it, didn’t we?” Joyce said, still not meeting his eyes. “They think you were at the movies with me. I told you everything that happened in the picture. What could go wrong now?”

  “Just stick to the story we agreed on and everything will be okay.” He was keeping his temper with some effort now.

  Joyce got up, went to the stove, and turned on the heat under the coffeepot. Quigley chewed bread and beef, scowling. Neither of them spoke for several minutes. Joyce was standing motionless, watching the gas flames leap under the coffeepot. Finally, with an abrupt motion, she turned toward Quigley.

  “I’ve got to know what the trouble is. You’ve got to tell me, Roger.”

  He said, hunching his shoulders, “There isn’t any trouble.”

  “Then why—”

  “Oh, hell. Stop digging, will you? It’s just—well, Karen’s a patient of this guy Gray now. He can get her to say anything he wants her to. But all we need to do is sit tight. They can’t prove a thing. There isn’t a scrap of evidence.”

  “What do you mean, evidence? Evidence of what? I thought Dennis was the man who killed Fenn and—and Oliver Albano.” She closed her hands tightly together for a moment and stood looking at Quigley’s bent head. She asked, “Why should Gray stir up trouble for no reason at all? What could Karen say?”

  Quigley pushed back his dish with an angry shove. “She could say it was me instead of Dennis tried to scare her that night in her bedroom. Gray can make her say anything.”

  “Tried to scare her? She said Dennis tried to kill her.”

  “That’s not the point. The big thing is, Dennis is guilty. If he gets what’s coming to him, you and I get the company. We can buy Karen out. Isn’t that what you want?” When she didn’t answer, he twisted in his chair to look at her. “Well, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” she said abstractedly. “One of the things.”

  “All right, then. We’re wasting time.” He glanced toward the front of the house. “We ought to run through that alibi story again. I don’t know when the police may get here.”

  “Police?” she echoed, staring at him. “Coming here? Why? Roger, you haven’t—” She broke off, searching his face with a troubled gaze. After a moment she gathered up her plate and glass and carried them to the sink. With her back to him, she said casually, “You haven’t done anything I don’t know about, have you? Tonight, I mean?”

  He said sullenly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She rinsed her glass and turned it upside down in the dish rack to dry. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Roger. Don’t underestimate me. I know you pretty well by now. But I guess I’ve been pretty dense. It wasn’t until last night I began to—” She shrugged and put the dish in the rack. “I want to ask you something, Roger. Did you hate Oliver Albano?”

  “Hate him? What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “No, I didn’t hate him. I only met him a few—”

  “I mean, after you found out about—about Oliver and me.”

  Quigley said, “No, no. I didn’t hate him. You don’t think—”

  He paused, looking at her averted face. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  Her voice was level. “Yes. I believe you. You didn’t even hate him.”

  “Well, there you are. I didn’t have any motive for killing the guy. Dennis did.”

  She said, “Roger. Did you ever wonder why I—why I got involved with Oliver?”

  He sighed heavily. “That’s water over the dam, Joyce. It doesn’t matter now. You want to look ahead. With Dennis out of the way we’ll make CQD the biggest outfit on the West Coast. The two of us, Joyce—we’re a damned good team. The sky’s the limit now Dennis isn’t blocking us any more.”

  “A damn good team,” she said. Her voice was brittle. “It sounds fine. And all I have to do is keep backing you up in your alibi. Because you didn’t have any real reason to kill Oliver, did you? You weren’t even jealous of him, actually.”

  “That’s right. All we have to do is sit tight and—”

  “Roger,” she said, “were you ever in love with me?”

  He gave her a look of blank astonishment. “For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with you? We’ve got to pull this thing off.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We do, don’t we?” She was drying the carving knife now. She hung it up on its rack beside the sink and stood watching it swing.

  Quigley got up and poured himself a cup of coffee. “Want some?” he asked. She shook her head. He sat down again at the table.

  “I was nearly in love with you, once,” she said. “I could have been. Only that wasn’t what you wanted, was it? You liked me this way—efficient. A good partner. Nothing else.”

  “What are you talking about?” Quigley demanded uneasily. “I don’t get it. We live together. We’ve got a good business, a nice house. We go to bed together. Anybody’d think I’d been giving you a rough time. Pull yourself together, Joyce. We’ve got a big career ahead of us—if we can just get past this tight squeeze.”

  She swung around to face him with a sudden motion. She looked paler than usual, and there was a tightness around her eyes and mouth he couldn’t remember seeing there before.

  “All right, we’re a good team,” she said. “But I can’t play it blind. I may make mistakes if I don’t know what the police are looking for. Roger—do you really think I’d stop at murder?”

  He set his cup down softly. “What?” he said, almost in a whisper.

  “We know what we want. Do you think I give a damn about how we get it? You should have let me help you, Roger. We’d make fewer mistakes as a team.”

  He licked his lips, his eyes wary on hers.

  “I’ve been thinking, ever since last night when you asked me to fake your alibi,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that other alibi, after—” She
swallowed. “After Oliver died.”

  “You woke up when I came in,” he said quickly. “You saw the clock. I couldn’t have done it.”

  “You could have turned the clock back before you woke me. You could have set it again after I went back to sleep. I’ve been your guinea pig, Roger. Does that make me an accessory, or whatever they call it?”

  “Don’t be a damn fool,” he said irritably.

  “I’ll cover for you tonight,” she went on inexorably. “But I want to make sure I’m safe too. I want to know everything’s been taken care of. Has it, Roger?”

  “Joyce, for God’s sake, stop pounding at me! I’ve had as much as I can stand.”

  “I can’t help it. We’ve got to be sure. You didn’t leave any fingerprints?”

  Quigley’s face twitched. “Shut up, will you? All I want is to make sure of our alibi. I haven’t killed any—”

  “Gloves?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “Did you wear gloves?”

  He clenched his hands on the table top and pounded his fists down once, hard enough to make the dishes dance. But he didn’t answer.

  Joyce went on relentlessly. “You know how smart the police are. Sometimes one thread, or a little dust, in the wrong place, and somebody’s convicted of murder. Roger, how can you be sure you haven’t made any mistakes?”

  He had begun to sweat a little. He shook his head, not speaking.

  “We’re a team, Roger,” she went on mercilessly. “That’s how we’ve got this far without any bad mistakes. But you can’t do it alone. And you know what one mistake could mean now. Maybe you’ve already made it. I’m in this too. We’ve got to be sure.” She paused, looking down at his bent head.

  She said in a low voice, “You did kill them, didn’t you? Both of them?”

  He struck the table suddenly. “No! I tell you I didn’t do it!”

  As if he hadn’t spoken, she said, “I think Fenn was—a mistake. Why did you have to get rid of Fenn?”

  Quigley was looking at his clenched hands on the table.