Scattershot nd-8

by Bill Pronzini

Her eyes snapped at me, full of sudden savagery.

  “You fat son of a bitch-how dare you! Give it back to me!”

  “No,” I said, thinking: Fat son of a bitch. Yeah. I put my back to her and went down the hall into the bathroom. She came after me, calling me more names; clawed at my arm and hand while I emptied the gin into the washbasin. I yelled to Craig to get her off me, and he came and did that.

  There was blood on the back of my hand where she’d scratched me. I washed it off, dabbed the scratch with iodine from the medicine cabinet. Speers was back on the chaise longue when I returned to the porch, Craig beside her looking nonplussed. She was shaking and she looked sick, shrunken, as if all her flesh had contracted inside her skin. But the fury was still alive in those green eyes, — they kept right on ripping away at me.

  I asked her, “What happened here today?”

  “Go to hell, “she said.

  “Why did you kill Bernice Dolan?”

  “Go to-What? My God, you don’t think I did it?”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “But I didn’t, I couldn’t have …”

  “You were drunk,” I said. “Maybe that explains it.”

  “Of course I was drunk. But I don’t kill people when I’m drunk. I go straight to bed and sleep it off.”

  “Except today, maybe.”

  “I told you, you bastard, I didn’t kill her!”

  “Look, lady, I’m tired of you calling me names. I don’t like it and I don’t want to listen to it anymore. Maybe you killed your secretary and maybe you didn’t. If you didn’t, then you’d better start acting like a human being. The way you’ve been carrying on, you look guilty as sin.”

  She opened her mouth, shut it again. Some of the heat faded out of her eyes. “I didn’t do it,” she said, much calmer, much more convincing.

  “All right. What did happen?”

  “I don’t know. I heard the shot, I came out of the bedroom, and there she was all twisted and bloody, with the gun on the floor….”

  “A.25 caliber Beretta. Your gun?”

  “Yes. My gun.”

  “Where do you usually keep it?”

  “In the nightstand in my bedroom.”

  “Did you take it out today for any reason?”

  “No.”

  “Did Bernice have it when you got back?”

  A blank look. “Got back?”

  “From wherever you went this afternoon.”

  “Away from Xanadu? In my car?”

  “Are you saying you don’t remember?”

  “Okay, I have memory lapses sometimes when I’ve been drinking. Blackouts-an hour or two. But I don’t normally go out driving …”

  The misery in her voice made her sound vulnerable, almost pathetic. I still didn’t like her much, but she was in a bad way-physically, emotion ally, and circumstantially-and she needed all the help she could get. Beginning with me. Maybe.

  I said, “You normally come back here, is that right?”

  “Yes. I thought that’s what I did today, after lunch. I remember starting back in the cart … but that’s all. Nothing else until I heard the shot and found Bernice.”

  Out on the main path I heard the whirring of an oncoming cart. A short time later two middle-aged guys, both dressed in expensive summer suits, came running through the trees and up onto the porch. The taller of them, it developed, was Resident Director Mitchell; the other one, short and sporting a caterpillarlike mustache, was Xanadu’s chief of security.

  The first thing they did was to go inside and gape at the body. When they came out again I explained what had happened so far as I knew it, and what I was doing in Xanadu in the first place. Speers did not react to the fact that I’d come to serve her with a subpoena. Death makes every other problem inconsequential.

  She had begun to look even sicker; her skin had an unhealthy grayish tinge. When Mitchell and the security chief moved off the porch for a conference, she got up and hurried into the cottage. I went in after her, to make sure she didn’t touch anything or go for another stash of gin. But it was the bathroom she wanted this time; five seconds after she shut the door, retching sounds filtered out through it.

  I stepped into her bedroom and took a turn around it without putting my hands on any of its surfaces. The bed was rumpled, and the rest of the room looked the same-scattered clothing, jars of cosmetics, bunches of dog-eared paperback books. There were also half a dozen framed photographs of well-groomed men, all of them signed with the word “love.”

  The retching noises had stopped when I came out, and I could hear water running in the bathroom. I moved down to the other, smaller bedroom. Desk with an electric portable typewriter and a dictating machine on its top. No photographs and nothing much else on the furniture. No sign of a manuscript, either; that would be locked away somewhere, I thought.

  The sliding closet door was ajar, so I put my head through the opening. The closet was empty except for two bulky suitcases. I nudged both with my foot and both seemed to be packed full.

  Half a minute after I returned to the living room, Lauren Speers reappeared. When she saw me she ducked her head and said, “Don’t look at me, I look like hell.” But I looked at her anyway. I also blocked her way to the door.

  Using my handkerchief, I took out the piece of notepaper I had found earlier and held it up where she could see what was written on it. “Do you have any idea what this is, Ms. Speers?” She started to reach for it, but I said, “No, don’t touch it. Just look.”

  She looked. “I never saw it before,” she said.

  “Is the handwriting familiar?”

  “Yes. It’s Bernice’s.”

  “From the looks of it, she was left-handed.”

  “Yes, she was. If that matters.”

  “The three names here-are they familiar?”

  “Yes. James Huddleston is the former state attorney general. Edward Boyer and Samuel Rykman are both prominent businessmen.”

  “Close friends of yours?”

  Her mouth turned crooked. “Not anymore.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because they’re bastards.”

  “Oh?”

  “And one is an out-and-out thief.”

  “Which one?”

  She shook her head-there was a feral gleam in her eyes now-and started past me. I let her go. Then I put the paper away again, followed her onto the porch.

  The security chief had planted himself on the cottage path to wait for the county police; Craig was down there with him. The resident director had disappeared somewhere, probably to go do something about protecting Xanadu’s reputation. Nobody was paying any attention to me, so I went down and along a packed-earth path that skirted the far side of the cottage.

  At the rear there were steps leading up onto the balcony. I climbed them and took a look at the strip of film I had noticed earlier, caught on a wood splinter through one of several small holes along its edge. It was the stiff and sturdy kind they use to make slides-the kind that wouldn’t bend easily under a weight laid on it edgewise.

  I paced around for a time, looking at this and that. Then I stood still and stared down at the ocean spray boiling over the rocks below, not really seeing it, looking at some things inside my head instead. I was still doing that when more cart noises sounded out front, two or three carts this time, judging from the magnified whirring and whining. County cops, I thought. Nice timing, too.

  When I came back around to the front two uniformed patrolmen, a uniformed officer in captain’s braid, a civilian carrying a doctor’s satchel, and another civilian with photographic equipment and a field lab kit were being met by the security guy. I walked over and joined them.

  The captain, whose name turned out to be Orloff, asked me, “You’re the private detective? The man who found the body?”

  “That’s right.” I relinquished the.25 caliber Beretta, saying that I had only handled it by the barrel. Not that it would have mattered if I had taken it by the grip;
if there were any fingerprints on it, they would belong to Lauren Speers.

  “It was just after the shooting that you arrived?” Orloff asked.

  “Not exactly. I was in the vicinity before the shooting. I broke inside after I heard the shot- not much more than a minute afterward.”

  “So you didn’t actually see the woman shoot her secretary.”

  “No. But I wouldn’t have seen that if I’d been inside when it happened. Ms. Speers didn’t kill Bernice Dolan.”

  “What? Then who did?”

  “The man standing right over there,” I said. “Joe Craig.”

  TEN

  There was one of those sudden electric silences. Both Craig and Lauren Speers were near enough to hear what I’d said; he stiffened and gaped at me, and she came up out of her chair on the porch. Craig’s face tried to arrange itself into an expression of innocent disbelief, but he was not much of an actor; if this had been a Hollywood screen test, he would have flunked it hands down.

  He said, “What the hell kind of crazy accusation is that?” Which was better-more conviction- but in my ears it still sounded false.

  His guilt was not so obvious to Orloff or any of the others. They kept looking from Craig to me as if trying to decide whom to believe. But I was on pretty firm ground; I would not have accused Craig publicly unless I thought so. The fear I’d felt earlier was gone. The Hornback murder still had me wrapped up in the middle, but this one, at least, was going to be resolved in a hurry.

  The security guy said, “How could Joe be guilty? The balcony door and each of the windows are locked from the inside; you said so yourself. You also said there was no one else in the cottage except Ms. Speers and the dead woman when you broke in.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “But Craig wasn’t in the cottage when he shot Bernice Dolan. And everything wasn’t locked up tight, either.”

  Craig said, “Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about-”

  “The living room smells of gin,” I said to the security guy. “You must have noticed that when you were in there, ft smelled just the same when I first went in. But if you fire a handgun in a closed room, you get the smell of cordite. No cordite odor means the gun was fired outside the room.”

  “That’s true enough,” Orloff said. “Go on.”

  “I’d been here less than ten minutes when Craig showed up. He claimed he’d come to keep a tennis date with Ms. Speers. But the parking lot attendant told me earlier that she drinks her lunch every day and then comes here to sleep it off until Happy Hour at four o’clock. People on that kind of heavy-drinking schedule don’t make dates to go play tennis at three.”

  That also made sense to Orloff and the others; a couple of them cast sidelong glances at Craig.

  “He said something else, too-much more damning. When I asked him if he knew the dead woman, he identified her as Bernice Dolan. Then he said, ‘Did Ms. Speers do that to her? Shoot her like that?’ But I didn’t say anything about hearing a gunshot until later, — and the way the body is crumpled on the rug, with one arm flung over the chest, all you can see is blood, not the type of wound. So how did he know she was shot? She could just as easily have been stabbed to death.”

  There was not much bravado left in Craig; you could almost see him wilting, like an uprooted weed drying in the sun. “I assumed she was shot,” he said weakly. “I just… assumed it.”

  Lauren Speers had come down off the porch and was staring at him. “Why?” she said. “For God’s sake, why?”

  He shook his head at her. But I said. “For the money, that’s why. A hundred thousand dollars in extortion payoffs, at least some of which figures to be in his own cottage right now.”

  That pushed Craig to the breaking point. He backpedaled a couple of steps and might have kept right on backing if one of the patrolmen hadn’t grabbed his arm.

  Lauren Speers said, “I don’t understand. What extortion?”

  “From those three men I asked you about a few minutes ago-Huddleston, Boyer, and Rykman. They figure prominently in the book you’re writing, don’t they? Large sections of it are devoted to them, sections that contain material either scandalous or criminal?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Craig told me; he was trying to make it seem like you had a motive for killing Bernice. And you told me when you said those three men were bastards and one of them was an out-and-out thief. This little piece of paper took care of the rest.”

  I fished it out of my coat pocket again as I spoke, handed it to Orloff. He looked at it and then said, “What do all these numbers mean?”

  “The first series after each name are page numbers-pages in the book manuscript, pages on which the most damaging material about that person appears. The numbers after the dash are the amounts extorted from each man.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “It was on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. Right near where Ms. Speer’s bag was. I think that’s where it came from-out of the handbag.”

  She said, “How could it have been in my bag?”

  “Bernice put it there. While she was out impersonating you this afternoon.”

  Now everybody looked bewildered. Except Craig, of course; he only looked trapped and sick, much sicker than Lauren Speers had earlier.

  “Impersonating me?” she said.

  “That’s right. Wearing a red wig and your white coat, and carrying your bag. You didn’t go anywhere after lunch except back here to bed; it was Bernice who took your Porsche and left Xanadu. And it was Bernice who passed me in the cart, Bernice I saw enter the cottage a couple of minutes before she was shot.”

  The security guy asked. “How can you be sure about that?”

  “Because Bernice was left-handed.”

  “I don’t see-”

  “Ms. Speers is right-handed,” I said. “I could tell that a while ago when she started to pour from a decanter into a glass-decanter in her right hand, glass in her left. But the woman who got out of the cart carried the straw bag in her right hand, and when she got to the cottage door she used her left hand to take out the key and to open the door.”

  Lauren Speers looked at the lock of her red hair, as if to make sure it was real. “Why would Bernice impersonate me?”

  “She and Craig were in on the extortion scheme together, and it was part of the plan. They must have worked it something like this. As your secretary she had access to your book manuscript, your personal stationery, your signature, and no doubt your file of incriminating letters and documents. She also had access to your personal belongings and your car keys, particularly from one to four in the afternoons while you were sleeping. And she’d have known from your records how to contact Huddleston and the other two.

  “So she and Craig wrote letters to each of them, on your stationery over your forged signature, demanding large sums of money to delete the material about them from your book and to return whatever documents concerned them; they prob ably also enclosed photocopies of the manuscript pages and the documents as proof. The idea was to keep themselves completely in the clear if the whole thing backfired. You’d get the blame in that case, not them.

  “To maintain the illusion, Bernice had to pretend to be you when she collected the payoffs. I don’t know what sort of arrangements she and Craig made, but they wouldn’t have allowed any of the three men to deliver the money personally. An intermediary, maybe, someone who didn’t know you. Or maybe a prearranged drop site. In any event, Bernice always dressed as you at collection time.”

  Orloff asked, “Why do you think Craig killed her?”

  “The old double cross,” I said. “They’d collected all the extortion money; that’s evident from the way each of the three names is crossed out on that paper. Today was the last pickup, and I think they had it worked out that she would resign from Speer’s employ and Craig would resign from Xanadu and they’d go off somewhere together. Her closet is all cleaned out, and her bags
are packed.”

  “But Craig had other ideas?”

  I nodded. “He knew when she was due back here, and he was waiting for her-outside on the rear balcony. When she let herself in he knocked on the window and gestured for her to open the two halves. After she did that he must have said something like, ‘Quick, lock the front door, take off the coat, and give me the wig and the money.’ She’d have thought there was some reason for the urgency, and she trusted him; so she did what he asked. And when she pulled the money out of the handbag she also pulled out the slip of paper. In her haste it fell to the floor, unnoticed.

  “As soon as Craig had the wig and the money he took out the Beretta, which he’d swiped from Speer’s nightstand, and shot Bernice. And then threw the gun inside and pulled the halves of the window closed.”

  “And locked them somehow from the outside,” the security guy said, “in the minute or two before you broke in? How could he do that?”

  “It wasn’t all that difficult, considering the catch on those window halves is a bar type that flips over into a bracket. The gimmick he used was a thin but stiff strip of film. He lost it afterward without realizing it; you’ll find it still caught on a splinter on the balcony railing.

  “The way he did it was to insert the filmstrip between the two halves and flip the catch over until it rested on the strip’s edge. Then he pulled the halves all the way closed, using his thumb and forefinger on the inner frames of each, and with his other hand he eased the strip downward until the catch dropped into the bracket. And then he withdrew the strip from the crack. With a little practice you could do the whole thing in thirty seconds.

  “So far he had himself a perfect crime. He’d only have had to return to his cottage, get rid of the wig, stash the money, pick himself up a witness or two, and come back here and ‘find’ Speers locked up with the body. Under the circumstances he’d arranged, she would be the only one who could have committed the murder.

  “What screwed him up was me showing up when I did. He heard me pounding on the door as he was working his trick with the filmstrip; he had just enough time to slip away into the woods before I broke in. But who was I? What had I seen and heard? The only way he could find out was to come back as soon as he’d dumped the wig and money. The fact that he showed up again in less than ten minutes means he didn’t dump them far away; they won’t be hard to find. There might even be a fingerprint on that filmstrip to nail your case down tight-”