Deadly Joke

by Hugh Pentecost

  “What reason?”

  “Charlie hated Maxwell,” she said. “Most of all he hated the fact that they were like identical twins. He hated anything that made him like Maxwell. He tortured himself with it. One night when he was quite high and we—we were making love, he asked me some crazy questions. Like, how would I like to be making love to Maxwell, would I be able to tell the difference? Then he—he exploded. He said, ‘Well, I’ve got that sonofabitch over a barrel.’ He told me about the stealing and all. ‘And he’s not the only one,’ he said. ‘Barstow college has been a little gold mine for Uncle Charlie.’ I asked him what he meant, and he said there was someone else paying off just as big as Maxwell was. He didn’t say who, and after that he was tight-mouthed about the whole thing. I swear that’s it, Pierre.”

  “And Hyland thinks you know? That’s why he beat you up, trying to get you to admit it? And then he told you you could go to jail for what you did know?”

  She nodded. “I’m a coward, Pierre. I’m a miserable coward.” She put her head down on his shoulder, weeping. For the first time he showed something like sympathy. He touched her hair, stroked it gently. He looked at Hardy.

  “Have Miss Marsh taken back to my penthouse and have her guarded,” he said.

  “Right,” Hardy said.

  “And we’d better pick up Hyland and have him protected. He’s almost certainly on the killer’s list.”

  Chambrun vetoed Hardy’s suggestion that we telephone Hyland and warn him to stay put until he could be placed under protection.

  “He’s such a devious clod that he’ll assume we’re being devious with him,” Chambrun said. “Probably run out on us. I suggest that we don’t dally, Lieutenant. Our killer has been a step ahead of us all along the way.”

  We rode downtown to Beekman Place in a police car. At the apartment house Hardy instructed the uniformed driver to wait in the lobby. The building attendant refused to take us up without our announcing ourselves on the house phone. He wasn’t the man who had been there earlier. Hardy went through the business of showing his shield.

  “You know if he’s in?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Yes, he’s in,” the man said. “He had a caller only a few minutes ago.”

  Hardy and Chambrun exchanged glances.

  “Pass key,” Hardy said to the building attendant.

  “I can’t do that, Lieutenant. I—”

  “Pass key!” Hardy thundered at him.

  The attendant went up with us in the elevator. Outside the door of Hyland’s apartment the man produced a ring of keys.

  “As quietly as possible,” Chambrun said. “There is probably a killer inside there. He may let go at the first person he sees. Make noise and you may be the target!”

  The man’s face broke out in a sweat. Delicately, he inserted the key in the lock. He turned it very slowly, his other hand on the doorknob, holding it steady. The door moved noiselessly inward, and the moment it did, we could hear Hyland wailing, pleading.

  “For Christ sake, believe! I’ll turn over all the evidence to you, I swear. But it isn’t here. I’ll have to get it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” a familiar voice said.

  “I swear it! And you can count on it—I’ll never tell a soul! I promise!”

  “I wouldn’t take your word for the time of day, Hyland.”

  Hardy moved. He was silent and astonishingly quick for a big man. He went through the vestibule, his service revolver drawn. Chambrun and I were right behind him.

  Hyland was literally crouching in the corner of the couch, his hands raised in a protesting, pleading gesture. Standing over him was Watson Clarke. In his right hand he had a short length of tire chain. He must have been taken completely off balance, but his reflexes were extraordinary. He swung the chain over his head and brought it down.

  At the sight of us Hyland screamed like a woman and dove for us. It saved his life, I think. That brutal length of chain caught him a glancing blow on the shoulder—glancing, but sufficiently powerful to send him sprawling, face down, on the rug. If he had delayed a second longer, his skull would have been smashed.

  Hardy was on top of Clarke. The two big men went down on the couch, Hardy on top. He had his knee on Clarke’s chest, his left hand closed on Clarke’s right wrist. His gun was pressed against Clarke’s throat.

  Hyland scrambled on his hands and knees toward Chambrun. “He was going to kill me!” he screamed. “The sonofabitch was going to kill me!”

  Chambrun shook off a clutching hand. “I almost wish we’d been a minute later,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what it’s all about!” Hyland promised. He sounded like a high-pitched girl. “He’s like Doug Maxwell, so high and mighty. He’s been paying to keep Charlie silent for years. I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll tell you what kind of a creep he is.”

  “For God sake let me tell it!” Clarke said in a deep, angry voice. “I don’t want to hear him making filth out of it.”

  I looked back at the couch. Hardy had managed to snap on a pair of handcuffs. He was standing to one side with the length of chain in his hand.

  “He’s a killer, a murderer!” Hyland screeched. “He killed Charlie and Shaw. He was going to kill me!”

  Clarke sank down on the couch, lifting his manacled hands to his face. Presently he lowered them and there was something tragic about the look of him. His dark eyes were fixed on Hyland. “I don’t know what the law can do to you, Dicky. But if I am allowed to testify, if my word in court means anything, you’ll spend the rest of your miserable life in jail.” He turned his gaze to Chambrun. “You came after me? You guessed?”

  “We came after someone,” Chambrun said. “I had begun to wonder.”

  Clarke nodded wearily. “You knew about the blackmail. What you didn’t know was that Douglas wasn’t the only victim.”

  “I knew that, too,” Chambrun said.

  “That it was me?”

  “I thought it was not impossible,” Chambrun said.

  “You see, the reason Grace went away is that she guessed it was I who had killed Charlie and Shaw.”

  Chambrun’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak. “I knew about Douglas, of course,” Clarke said. “He’d discussed it with me. But he didn’t know about me. I couldn’t tell him.”

  “You bet he couldn’t tell him!” Hyland said. “Sleeping all over the country with Doug’s wife. Maybe even—”

  Clarke heaved himself up off the couch, but he was blocked off from Hyland by Hardy.

  “Can’t you keep him still? Can’t you let me tell you?” Clarke said.

  “You don’t have to make a statement without your lawyer present,” Hardy said. He went through the rigamarole of the prisoner’s rights.

  “I don’t want a lawyer now,” Clarke said. “I want to tell it my way. Could somebody give me a cigarette?”

  I went over to him, gave him one of mine, and held my lighter for him. He inhaled deeply and then took it out of his mouth with his chained hands. “Douglas married Grace two days before he was shipped overseas, back in 1942,” he said. “I—I was his closest friend. He begged me to look out for her, to see that she had everything she needed, that she had friends, that she wasn’t left alone.”

  “Oh, boy, what a laugh!” Hyland said.

  Hardy turned to the building attendant who was still standing in the doorway, his eyes popping. “There’s a patrolman waiting in the lobby,” he said. “Send him up here.” He turned to Hyland. “You open your mouth again and I’ll put my foot in it. Understand? Go on, Mr. Clarke. Or would you rather wait till I have this man taken away?”

  “I was attacked!” Hyland said. “He’s the guilty one, not I.”

  “He let me in here just now,” Clarke said, “because he thought I was coming to pay off. I wasn’t. I came here, frankly, to kill him. He meant to take over where Charlie left off. I’d had all of that I ever intended to take. Something blew up inside me last night. I decided to put an end to it, a
ll the way down the line.” He lifted the cigarette to his mouth again. He was going to wait.

  A moment later the patrolman appeared. Hardy ordered him to take Hyland to headquarters. “Hold him as a material witness,” he said. “I’ll bring other charges against him later, such as extortion, assault on Melody Marsh, and some other goodies.” Then, when a protesting Hyland had been dragged off: “Go on, Mr. Clarke.”

  Clarke drew a deep breath. “As it happened, Douglas was in the Pacific for three years,” he said. “He never got back to this country in all that time. I—I began by calling Grace once or twice a week, taking her to dinner, to parties. You think you can live by certain rules, certain loyalties. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t. It wasn’t too long before I knew that I had fallen in love with Grace, but it never seemed possible to me that she could care for anyone but Douglas. Then, one day, we both knew. We tried separating, not seeing each other. It was impossible. One thing she wouldn’t do was to write Douglas a ‘Dear John’ letter. He would be back on leave. She would tell him then. But three years! By that time we had a way of living, a way of hiding.

  “At last Douglas came home. We met him together. My God, you should have seen him! How overjoyed he was to be back, how wildly in love he was with Grace. He swept her away from me. We’d agreed, she and I, that she’d tell him before—before he could claim her. But she wasn’t able. She—she couldn’t hurt him that much on his first day, after three years. And then she was torn to pieces between us. Doug had done nothing to turn her away from him to me. He was a wonderfully kind, generous, considerate person, head over heels in love with her. She got in touch with me. She simply had to give him a chance.

  “And so, down through all these years, it has never been resolved. It had been torture for me. Douglas and I have shared this one woman, he not knowing. But long before it became this kind of ghastly impasse, another factor entered into the situation. Charlie Sewall had somehow found out the truth. He had copies of hotel registries; he had somehow gotten his hands on one or two letters we’d been careless about. And so—and so I paid for his silence. Then, when Douglas agreed to run for office, Charlie put the screws on both of us. More pay or scandal on top of scandal.

  “That’s when something snapped inside me. I decided to get rid of Charlie somehow, once and for all. It was Grace who told me that this joke was coming. She heard it from Diana. It seemed a perfect setup. Charlie would enter the hotel, posing as Douglas. I would shoot him from the balcony. Everybody would think it was someone gunning for Doug. With any kind of luck I would get away unseen, and that would be that.” He put out his cigarette in an ash tray on the coffee table.

  “It was hard to believe that so many things could go wrong. I came to the hotel carrying my Walthers P-38 wrapped in a raincoat. I made my appearance in the ballroom, checked my lists, greeted the people I had to greet. I’d left the raincoat in my car in the hotel garage. When the time approached, I excused myself. I went up to check out on the balcony. It was locked!” Clarke shook his head. “I should have quit then, but I couldn’t give up. I went down to get the raincoat. I figured I’d have to chance the shooting from some other position. As I was coming back from the car, I passed the door to the maintenance office. Your man MacDonald was there. He knew me. He’d been involved with some of the earlier arrangements. I told him I was interested in watching Doug’s arrival from the balcony but that someone had locked the doors. Evidently no one had told him why. He made no bones about lending me his key. Simple as that. I went upstairs, waited until Charlie made his entrance, stepped out on the balcony and let him have it. Not a damn soul saw me. I went back downstairs, put the raincoat and gun back in my car, and headed back into the hotel. MacDonald wasn’t in his office, so I left the key on his desk. I thought I could persuade him later that someone else had had a key. That it had all happened before I got there.”

  “But there was Shaw,” Chambrun said.

  “Yes, there was Shaw. When the riot started, I headed upstairs to help protect Doug. I met Shaw in the hall. He told me he’d seen me on the balcony. He didn’t mind that I’d shot Charlie. Charlie was Doug’s enemy and he was Doug’s friend. But he thought it might be worth a little money for him to keep still again.” Clarke’s face hardened. “That’s when my cork popped. I’d grabbed a bat from one of those kids on the way upstairs. I saw red. I beat Shaw over the head with it till he stopped grinning at me. I dragged him into that linen closet and threw the bat out the window. I—I was spattered with blood, but so were a lot of other people. I went out into the hall and stood with the guards outside Doug’s door. Everybody took it for granted I’d been in the brawl downstairs. Or didn’t you take that for granted, Chambrun?”

  “At the time,” Chambrun said. He had on his Sphinx face.

  “Later I made the excuse of going home to change my clothes,” Clarke said. “On my way through the tunnel to the garage, MacDonald stopped me. Here it was all over again. Was it worth a little money for him to keep silent about the fact I’d borrowed his key? That piece of chain was lying on his desk. I killed him with it. Then I went to my car and drove home. I cleaned the Walthers P-38 and put it back in my gun case—only just in time. Your man arrived, Hardy, to check out on whether I had such a gun.” Clarke raised his hands once more to cover his face. Finally he lowered them again. “That’s it, gentlemen. You’ll want to ask about many details, I’m sure. But that’s it.”

  Hardy looked at Chambrun.

  “I think it would be a good idea,” Chambrun said, “if you got a special bulletin to all the radio and TV stations to the effect that Mr. Clarke has confessed to the murder of Charlie Sewall and the others. I also think you might ask the airport and bus terminal people to put the same bulletin on their P.A. systems.”

  “What’s the hurry?” Hardy asked.

  “I think if Mrs. Maxwell should hear that Mr. Clarke has confessed to killing Charlie Sewall, she might come back.”

  “I don’t get it,” Hardy said.

  “She’ll never let him take the rap for a crime she committed,” Chambrun said.

  Clarke covered his face with his hands. He made a groaning sound.

  “It won’t wash, Clarke,” Chambrun said. “There’s one thing we’ve known for certain from the start. You never left the ballroom. You could never have been on the balcony. One thing you never did was to shoot Charles Sewall.”

  “Oh, God,” Clarke whispered, his face still hidden behind his hands.

  “I can’t believe that you ever planned any of last night’s butchery,” Chambrun said. “The whole thing, after Sewall was dead, is the action of a man who goes berserk on the spur of the moment. How did you find out that Grace had killed Sewall, Mr. Clarke? Was it she who told you? Was it Shaw?”

  Clarke just moved his head from side to side, a low, moaning sound coming from behind his hands.

  Chambrun shrugged. “I suspect it was Shaw. That he approached you and told you he’d seen Grace on the balcony at the time of the shooting. From what I know of Shaw, he was deeply loyal to Douglas Maxwell. He must have been shocked to realize that Douglas’s wife was a murderess; he must have been desperately uncertain about what to do. That’s why he didn’t report it instantly to Douglas when he rejoined him just after the shooting. He had been sweating it out when he encountered you on the fourteenth-floor hallway. How was it? Did he tell you what he’d seen and that he had decided that he had no choice but to go to the police? Even then I suspect he was concerned for Douglas. You were his friend. He wanted you to stand by Douglas when the terrible truth came out. He had no idea what Grace meant to you, I’d guess. And you? Well, you’ve described it yourself. That’s when your ‘cork popped.’ Am I right, Mr. Clarke?”

  There was nothing from Clarke. He still swayed from side to side, his face covered.

  “After that I imagine you confronted Grace with it. She had a key to your apartment, didn’t she? After all, you must have met there often. She had taken your gun, your Wal
thers P-38. She knew how to use it. The Maxwells had been on safaris with you. Her reason for planning to kill Sewall? She had come to the end of her rope. Both the men in her life were being whipsawed by Sewall. But things went wrong for her. She found the balcony locked. It was she, not you, who asked MacDonald for a key. He gave it to her. Why shouldn’t Maxwell’s wife have a box seat for his arrival at the hotel? I daresay it never even occurred to him she could have been involved in the shooting, which he supposed was meant for Maxwell. But you couldn’t risk it.” Chambrun drew a deep breath. “Grace probably told you where she’d hidden the gun, and you took it back to your apartment when you went to change your clothes. Then there was one more thing. You had to silence Hyland. Because I think you had the wild idea that you were going to get away with all this, Clarke. How was it to be? You and Grace would disappear and there would be a letter to Douglas, admitting your long affair. No one would tie in your disappearance with the violence here. You hoped we would go on forever looking for a killer we’d never find.”

  Clarke lowered his hands. He stared at Chambrun, his eyes sunken, like a man in a trance.

  “At the end there was, I suspect, a near disaster,” Chambrun said. “Grace, because she was in shock over what she’d done—and what it had driven you to do—and because she’d been drinking heavily, simply wasn’t able, and couldn’t be trusted, to carry out the last step in the plan. You had to have help. You had to throw yourself on someone’s mercy. Diana was your only hope. She was on her way to have a drink with Mark when you stopped her, told her the whole truth. You needed her to make arrangements. Is it a plane, Mr. Clarke? A bus? A train? Diana, I imagine, was stunned by what you told her, but she was willing to help her mother, at least for now; at least until she had a chance to think it out. God help her. You’ve given her a nightmare to live with for the rest of her life.”

  Clarke didn’t move or speak. He didn’t need to confess. The answer was in his stricken eyes.

  Chambrun turned to Hardy. “I suggest you get those bulletins on the air, Lieutenant. If Mrs. Maxwell takes off for wherever she’s headed, you may never get her back.”