Graveyard Plots

by Bill Pronzini

  When the coroner and the lab crew finally got there, and the doc had made his preliminary examination, I asked him about the wound. He confirmed my earlier guess—a small-caliber bullet, probably a .22 or .25. He couldn't be absolutely sure, of course, until he took out the slug at the post-mortem.

  I talked things over with Sherrard and we both agreed that it was pretty much improbable for somebody with a .22 or .25 caliber weapon to have shot Chillingham from the roof of the nearest building; a small caliber like that just doesn't have a range of a hundred yards and the angle was almost too sharp. There was nowhere else the shot could have come from—except from inside the office. And that left us with George Dillon, whose story was obviously false and who just as obviously had killed the attorney while the two of them were locked inside this office.

  You'd think it was pretty cut-and-dried then, wouldn't you? You'd think all we had to do was arrest Dillon and charge him with homicide, and our job was finished. Right?

  Wrong.

  Because we couldn't find the gun.

  Remember, now, Dillon had been locked in that office—except for the minute or two it took Hearn to examine the body and slip out and relock the door—from the time Chillingham died until the time we came in. And both Hearn and Miss Tower swore that Dillon hadn't stepped outside the office during that minute or two. We'd already searched Dillon and he had nothing on him. We searched the office—I mean, we searched that office—and there was no gun there.

  We sent officers over to the roof of the nearest building and down onto the landscaped lawn; they went over every square inch of ground and rooftop, and they didn't find anything. Dillon hadn't thrown the gun out the open windows then, and there was no place on the face of the sheer wall of the building where a gun could have been hidden.

  So where was the murder weapon? What had Dillon done with it? Unless we found that out, we had no evidence against him that would stand up in a court of law; his word that he hadn't killed Chillingham, despite the circumstantial evidence of the locked room, was as good as money in the bank. It was up to us to prove him guilty, not up to him to prove himself innocent. You see the problem?

  We took him into a large book-filled room that was part of the Chillingham suite—what Hearn called the "archives"—and sat him down in a chair and began to question him extensively. He was a big husky guy with blondish hair and these perfectly guileless eyes; he just sat there and looked at us and answered in a polite voice, maintaining right along that he hadn't killed the lawyer.

  We made him tell his story of what had happened in the office a dozen times, and he explained it the same way each time—no variations. Chillingham had locked the door after they entered, and then they sat down and talked over some business. Pretty soon Chillingham complained that it was stuffy in the room, got up, and opened the French windows; the next thing Dillon knew, he said, the attorney collapsed with the bullet in him. He hadn't heard any shot, he said; Hearn must be mistaken about a muffled explosion.

  I said finally, "All right, Dillon, suppose you tell us why you came to see Chillingham. What was this business you discussed?"

  "He was my father's lawyer," Dillon said, "and the executor of my father's estate. He was also a thief. He stole three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of my father's money."

  Sherrard and I stared at him. Jack said, "That gives you one hell of a motive for murder, if it's true."

  "It's true," Dillon said flatly. "And yes, I suppose it does give me a strong motive for killing him. I admit I hated the man, I hated him passionately."

  "You admit that, do you?"

  "Why not? I have nothing to hide."

  "What did you expect to gain by coming here to see Chillingham?" I asked. "Assuming you didn't come here to kill him."

  "I wanted to tell him I knew what he'd done, and that I was going to expose him for the thief he was."

  "You tell him that?"

  "I was leading up to it when he was shot."

  "Suppose you go into a little more detail about this alleged theft from your father's estate."

  "All right." Dillon lit a cigarette. "My father was a hard-nosed businessman, a self-made type who acquired a considerable fortune in textiles; as far as he was concerned, all of life revolved around money. But I've never seen it that way; I've always been something of a free spirit and to hell with negotiable assets. Inevitably, my father and I had a falling-out about fifteen years ago, when I was twenty-three, and I left home with the idea of seeing some of the big wide world—which is exactly what I did.

  "I traveled from one end of this country to the other, working at different jobs, and then I went to South America for a while. Some of the wanderlust finally began to wear off, and I decided to come back to this city and settle down—maybe even patch things up with my father. I arrived several days ago and learned then that he had been dead for more than two years."

  "You had no contact with your father during the fifteen years you were drifting around?"

  "None whatsoever. I told you, we had a falling-out. And we'd never been close to begin with."

  Sherrard asked, "So what made you suspect Chillingham had stolen money from your father's estate?"

  "I am the only surviving member of the Dillon family; there are no other relatives, not even a distant cousin. I knew my father wouldn't have left me a cent, not after all these years, and I didn't particularly care; but I was curious to find out to whom he had willed his estate."

  "And what did you find out?"

  "Well, I happen to know that my father had three favorite charities," Dillon said. "Before I left, he used to tell me that if I didn't 'shape-up,' as he put it, he would leave every cent of his money to those three institutions."

  "He didn't, is that it?"

  "Not exactly. According to the will, he left two hundred thousand dollars to each of two of them—the Cancer Society and the Children's Hospital. He also, according to the will, left three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the Association for Medical Research."

  "All right," Sherrard said, "so what does that have to do with Chillingham?"

  "Everything," Dillon told him. "My father died of a heart attack—he'd had a heart condition for many years. Not severe, but he fully expected to die as a result of it one day. And so he did. And because of this heart condition, his third favorite charity—the one he felt the most strongly about—was the Heart Fund."

  "Go on," I said, frowning.

  Dillon put out his cigarette and gave me a humorless smile. "I looked into the Association for Medical Research and I did quite a thorough bit of checking. It doesn't exist; there isn't any Association for Medical Research. And the only person who could have invented it is or was my father's lawyer and executor, Adam Chillingham."

  Sherrard and I thought that over and came to the same conclusion. I said, "So even though you never got along with your father, and you don't care about money for yourself, you decided to expose Chillingham."

  "That's right. My father worked hard all his life to build his fortune, and admirably enough, he decided to give it to charity at his death. I believe in worthwhile causes, I believe in the work being done by the Heart Fund, and it sent me into a rage to realize they had been cheated out of a substantial fortune that could have gone toward valuable research."

  "A murderous rage?" Sherrard asked softly.

  Dillon showed us his humorless smile again. "I didn't kill Adam Chillingham," he said. "But you'll have to admit, he deserved killing—and that the world is better off without the likes of him."

  I might have admitted that to myself, if Dillon's accusations were valid, but I didn't admit it to Dillon. I'm a cop, and my job is to uphold the law; murder is murder, whatever the reasons for it, and it can't be gotten away with.

  Sherrard and I hammered at Dillon a while longer, but we couldn't shake him at all. I left Jack to continue the field questioning and took a couple of men and re-searched Chillingham's private office. No gun. I went up onto the roof of
the nearest building and searched that personally. No gun. I took my men down into the lawn area and supervised another minute search. No gun.

  I went back to Chillingham's suite and talked to Charles Hearn and Miss Tower again, and they had nothing to add to what they'd already told us; Hearn was "almost positive" he had heard a muffled explosion inside the office, but from the legal point of view, that was the same as not having heard anything at all.

  We took Dillon down to Headquarters finally, because we knew damned well he had killed Adam Chillingham, and advised him of his rights and printed him and booked him on suspicion. He asked for counsel, and we called a public defender for him, and then we grilled him again in earnest. It got us nowhere.

  The F.B.I. and state check we ran on his fingerprints got us nowhere either; he wasn't wanted, he had never been arrested, he had never even been printed before. Unless something turned up soon in the way of evidence—specifically, the missing murder weapon—we knew we couldn't hold him very long.

  The next day I received the lab report and the coroner's report, and the ballistics report on the bullet taken from Chillingham's neck—.22 caliber, all right. The lab's and coroner's findings combined to tell me something I'd already guessed: the wound and the calculated angle of trajectory of the bullet did not entirely rule out the remote possibility that Chillingham had been shot from the roof of the nearest building. The ballistics report, however, told me something I hadn't guessed—something that surprised me a little.

  The bullet had no rifling marks.

  Sherrard blinked at this when I related the information to him.

  "No rifling marks?" he said. "Hell, that means the slug wasn't fired from a gun at all, at least not a lawfully manufactured one. A homemade weapon, you think, Walt?"

  "That's how it figures," I agreed. "A kind of zipgun probably. Anybody can make one; all you need is a length of tubing or the like and a bullet and a grip of some sort and a detonating cap."

  "But there was no zipgun, either, in or around Chillingham's office. We'd have found it if there was."

  I worried my lower lip meditatively. "Well, you can make one of those zips from a dozen or more small component parts, you know; even the tubing could be soft aluminum, the kind you can break apart with your hands. When you're done using it, you can knock it down again into its components. Dillon had enough time to have done that, before opening the locked door."

  "Sure," Sherrard said. "But then what? We still didn't find anything—not a single thing—that could have been used as part of a homemade zip."

  I suggested we go back and make another search, and so we drove once more to the Dawes Building. We re-combed Chillingham's private office—we'd had a police seal on it to make sure nothing could be disturbed—and we re-combed the surrounding area. We didn't find so much as an iron filing. Then we went to the city jail and had another talk with George Dillon.

  When I told him our zipgun theory, I thought I saw a light flicker in his eyes; but it was the briefest of reactions, and I couldn't be sure. We told him it was highly unlikely a zipgun using a .22-caliber bullet could kill anybody from a distance of a hundred yards, and he said he couldn't help that hedidn't know anything about such a weapon. Further questioning got us nowhere.

  And the following day we were forced to release him, with a warning not to leave the city.

  But Sherrard and I continued to work doggedly on the case; it was one of those cases that preys on your mind constantly, keeps you from sleeping well at night, because you know there has to be an answer and you just can't figure out what it is. We ran checks into Chillingham's records and found that he had made some large private investments a year ago, right after the Dillon will had been probated. And as George Dillon had claimed, there was no Association for Medical Research; it was a dummy charity, apparently set up by Chillingham for the explicit purpose of stealing old man Dillon's $350,000. But there was no definite proof of this, not enough to have convicted Chillingham of theft in a court of law; he'd covered himself pretty neatly.

  As an intelligent man, George Dillon had no doubt realized that a public exposure of Chillingham would have resulted in nothing more than adverse publicity and the slim possibility of disbarment—hardly sufficient punishment in Dillon's eyes. So he had decided on what to him was a morally justifiable homicide. From the law's point of view, however, it was nonetheless Murder One.

  But the law still had no idea what he'd done with the weapon, and therefore, as in the case of Chillingham's theft, the law had no proof of guilt.

  As I said, though, we had our teeth into this one and we weren't about to let go. So we paid another call on Dillon, this time at the hotel where he was staying, and asked him some questions about his background. There was nothing more immediate we could investigate, and we thought that maybe there was an angle in his past that would give us a clue toward solving the riddle.

  He told us, readily enough, some of what he'd done during the fifteen years since he'd left home, and it was a typical drifter's life: lobster packer in Maine, ranch hand in Montana, oil worker in Texas, road construction in South America. But there was a gap of about four years that he sort of skimmed over without saying anything specific. I jumped on that and asked him some direct questions, but he wouldn't talk about it.

  His reluctance made Sherrard and me more than a little curious; we both had that cop's feeling it was important, that maybe it was the key we needed to unlock the mystery. We took the mug shots we'd made of Dillon and sent them out, along with a request for information as to his whereabouts during the four blank years, to various law-enforcement agencies in Florida—where he'd admitted to being just prior to the gap, working as a deckhand on a Key West charter-fishing boat.

  Time dragged on, and nothing turned up, and we were reluctantly forced by sheer volume of other work to abandon the Chillingham case; officially, it was now buried in the Unsolved File. Then, three months later, we had a wire from the Chief of Police of a town not far from Fort Lauderdale. It said they had tentatively identified George Dillon from the pictures we'd sent and were forwarding by airmail special delivery something that might conceivably prove the nature of Dillon's activities during at least part of the specified period.

  Sherrard and I fidgeted around waiting for the special delivery to arrive, and when it finally came I happened to be the only one of us in the squad room. I tore the envelope open, and what was inside was a multicolored and well-aged poster, with a picture of a man who was undeniably George Dillon depicted on it. I looked at the picture and read what was written on the poster at least a dozen times.

  It told me a lot of things all right, that poster did. It told me exactly what Dillon had done with the homemade zipgun he had used to kill Adam Chillingham—an answer that was at once fantastic and yet so simple you'd never ever consider it. And it told me there wasn't a damned thing we could do about it now, that we couldn't touch him, that George Dillon actually had committed a perfect murder.

  I was brooding over this when Jack Sherrard returned to the squad room. He said, "Why so glum, Walt?"

  "The special delivery from Florida finally showed up," I said, and watched instant excitement animate his face. Then I saw most of it fade while I told him what I'd been brooding about, finishing with, "We simply can't arrest him now, Jack. There's no evidence, it doesn't exist anymore; we can't prove a thing. And maybe it's just as well in one respect, since I kind of liked Dillon and would have hated to see him convicted for killing a crook like Chillingham. Anyway, we'll be able to sleep nights now."

  "Damn it, Walt, will you tell me what you're talking about!"

  "All right. Remember when we got the ballistics report and we talked over how easy it would be for Dillon to have made a zipgun? And how he could make the whole thing out of a dozen or so small component parts, so that afterward he could break it down again into those small parts?"

  "Sure, sure. But I still don't care if Dillon used a hundred components, we didn't find a single
one of them. Not one. So what, if that's part of the answer, did he do with them? There's not even a connecting bathroom where he could have flushed them down. What did he do with the damned zipgun?"

  I sighed and slid the poster—the old carnival side-show poster—around on my desk so he could see Dillon's picture and read the words printed below it: STEAK AND POTATOES AND APPLE PIE IS OUR DISH; NUTS, BOLTS, PIECES OF WOOD, BITS OF METAL IS HIS! YOU HAVE TO SEE IT TO BELIEVE IT: THE AMAZING MR. GEORGE, THE MAN WITH THE CAST-IRON STOMACH.

  Sherrard's head jerked up and he stared at me open-mouthed. "That's right," I said wearily. "He ate it."

  MULTIPLES

  (With Barry N. Malzberg)

  Kenner murdered his wife for the tenth time on the evening of July 28, in the kitchen of their New York apartment. Or perhaps it was July 29. One day is much the same as another, and I cannot seem to keep dates clearly delineated in my head. He did it for the usual reasons: because she had dominated him for fourteen years of marriage (fifteen? sixteen?), and openly and regularly ridiculed him, and sapped all his energy and drive, and, oh I simply could not stand it anymore.

  He did not try to be elaborately clever as to method and execution. The simpler the better—that was the way he liked to do it. So he poisoned her with ten capsules of potassium, I mean nitrous oxide, disguised as saccharine tablets, which he neatly placed in her coffee with a twist of the wrist like a kiss. Nothing amiss.

  She assumed almost at once the characteristic attitude of oxide poisoning, turning a faint green as she bent into the crockery on the table. A cigarette still smoldered unevenly beside her. She drank twenty cups of coffee every day and smoked approximately four packages of cigarettes, despite repeated warnings from her doctor. Kenner found it amusing to think that her last sensations were composed of acridity, need, and lung-filling inhalation. It was even possible that she believed, as death majestically overtook her, that the cigarette had done her in.