Vanish in an Instant

by Margaret Millar

  “Go on.”

  “She smiled at me and said hello. I was flattered, think­ing she might have remembered me. Then I saw how drunk she was, eyes glassy and out of focus, and her smile not real at all, just sort of painted on like a doll’s smile.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “You mean her exact words?”

  “Yes.”

  Loftus thought a moment. “She said, ‘God, this place stinks.’“

  Meecham made a sound like a laugh and covered it with a cough. Cordwink turned and stared at him. “Is some­thing amusing you, Meecham?”

  “No.” Meecham coughed again. “I have a slight cold.”

  “Is that a fact? Dunlop.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dunlop said.

  “Read that back. Mr. Meecham wants a good laugh.”

  Dunlop bent over his notes. “‘God, this place stinks.’“

  “There. Is it as funny as you thought it was, Meecham?”

  Meecham looked as if he intended to make a sharp reply but he held it back. “No.”

  “All right then. What else did Mrs. Barkeley say to you, Loftus?”

  “She said she wanted a drink but she’d left her purse in the car. I bought her a beer. She had just started to drink it when Margolis came in. He was an impressive-looking man. I’d seen him before at the county hospital where I go for my X-ray treatments and shots. His firm was building the new T.B. wing and he used to hang around a lot, talking to the nurses. Margolis remembered me too. I’m quite a—freak.” He looked down at the floor. “Margolis asked Mrs. Barkeley to leave. She said she didn’t want to go home, and why didn’t all three of us go to another place for a drink. Margolis humored her. When she started for the door he said I was to come along and he’d give me a lift home. I accepted. I wanted a lift home, but there was more to it than that. I was excited, thrilled as a high-school kid at suddenly becoming a part of all that—glamor, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t realize until we got out to the car that offering me a lift home wasn’t exactly a noble ges­ture on Margolis’ part. He needed me to help him handle Mrs. Barkeley. She passed out in the back seat. Margolis shook her and swore at her, but she was limp as a rag.”

  He stopped to wipe the sweat from his face with his handkerchief.

  “. . . and swore at her,” Dunlop said in his quick un­interested monotone, “but she was limp as a rag.”

  Loftus appealed to Cordwink: “I’ve admitted every­thing. Why does he have to take all this down?”

  “It’s routine, for one thing. For another, the statement you’re making now will have to be checked with your written confession for discrepancies.”

  “But I’m guilty, I’ve . . .”

  “No matter if you write five hundred confessions, you still have to be tried in a court of law to determine the de­gree of your guilt.”

  “Yes. Yes, I see now. I didn’t realize.” I sound so meek, Loftus thought. I don’t sound like a murderer at all. Maybe I would be more convincing if I acted belligerent, but I hardly know how.

  “Are you ready to continue, Loftus?”

  “I—yes, of course. Margolis said he couldn’t take Mrs. Barkeley home in that condition, and he asked me if I’d mind helping him get her out to his cottage. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of his cottage. There were rumors around the hospital. . . . I was there so much that I got to know quite a few of the nurses, and that’s how I first heard of Margolis and his affairs.”

  “The cottage was just outside the city limits, on the river. It didn’t look like much on the outside, but it was fixed up nice inside—leather furniture and a stone fire­place and some good reproductions hanging on the walls, a Van Gogh, I remember, was one of them.”

  “Tell me more about the fireplace,” Cordwink said.

  “Well, there were a pair of fishing rods, crossed, on the wall above it, and on the mantel itself there were several of those big German steins and two hunting knives in leather sheaths.”

  “Dunlop . . .” Cordwink made a half-turn. “Was the in­side of Margolis’ cottage described in any of the papers?”

  Dunlop put down his pencil. “A couple of Detroit pa­pers carried a shot of the outside, and the Tribune, I think it was, had a shot of the floor where Margolis was found—bloodstains, et cetera.”

  “No fireplace in the picture?”

  “No fireplace.”

  Loftus smiled anxiously. “I don’t read the Tribune any­way, sir.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “I helped Margolis carry her inside the cottage and put her on the davenport. She was still out cold. Margolis was very angry by this time. I think the two of them must have been quarreling earlier in the evening, and that this was a final straw for Margolis. He began calling her names and shaking her again. It was an ugly scene. I thought of all the things I’d heard about Margolis around the hos­pital. I thought of—well, it doesn’t matter what I thought. I went over to the fireplace. The fire was lit and the room was beginning to get very warm. I picked up one of the hunting knives and took it out of its sheath. Margolis wasn’t paying any attention to me. He’d forgotten I was there. I was just a bum, a nobody, a—well, then I did it. I stabbed him in the neck. I’m not very strong and I thought his neck would be the easiest place. It wasn’t easy. I had to stab him four or five times. He fell after the first stab, but he didn’t die right away. He kept sort of flopping around on the floor. The blood was terrible. It got all over me, my gloves and my coat and pants. And the smell—I began to retch. I ran for the door, and I kept on running. I lost my head, forgot about the girl, forgot about everything. All I wanted to do was get away from that blood, that smell. I went home by side streets. I don’t know how far I walked, two miles, three miles. No one noticed me particularly. It was late, and it was snowing, big feathery flakes of snow that clung to my clothes and hid the stains. The house was dark when I got home. I let myself into my room and took off the clothes that had blood on them and put them in the back of the wardrobe. That’s where they are now.”

  “In the wardrobe,” Cordwink said.

  “Yes, 611 Division Street, the left front room. It has its own entrance, that’s why the landlady calls it an apartment.”

  “What did you do on Sunday?”

  “I was very weak, I had to stay in bed.”

  “Didn’t see any papers?”

  “Not until early Monday morning, that is, this morn­ing. As soon as I read that Mrs. Barkeley was being held, I went down to the jail to see you. You were busy, and I waited in the corridor. Mr. Meecham saw me there.”

  Meecham nodded. “Yes, I saw him.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” Cordwink said. “What happened, Lof­tus? Lose your nerve?”

  “No. I suddenly realized, as I was sitting there, that there were a lot of things I hadn’t attended to, and that I’d never get a chance, once I’d confessed. So I walked out again.”

  “A lot of things you hadn’t attended to, such as what?”

  “Personal things. I closed my bank account, and sold my car, things like that.”

  “Listen to this, Loftus.” Cordwink turned over the pages until he found what he was looking for. “ ‘I stabbed Mar­golis deliberately and with intent to kill, and not to pro­tect Mrs. Barkley or myself.’ You still claim that?”

  “Better think before you answer,” Meecham said. “That deliberation and intent business will . . .”

  “Keep out of this, Meecham,” Cordwink said, scowling. “You’re not his lawyer.”

  “He needs one.”

  “He’ll get one.” Cordwink faced Loftus again. “Have you any money?”

  “A little, yes. The past few months I’ve been able to work. I’m an accountant. That’s what my treatments have been for, not so I could live longer, but so I could carry on w
ith my job, live more efficiently.”

  “How much money? Two thousand? One?”

  “Oh, not that much.”

  “Lawyers come high. The more crooked they are, the bigger their price. That’s how they stay out of the booby hatch, by rubbing the lesions on their conscience with greenbacks.”

  Loftus looked a little puzzled. “Well, if I have to have a lawyer, Mr. Meecham will suit me fine. He’s been very kind.”

  “Kind?” Cordwink raised his eyebrows, exaggeratedly. “This I must hear.”

  “When he thought I was just a bum, he offered me two dollars.”

  “Well, well. Where’d you get the two dollars, Meecham, selling phony oil shares to war widows?”

  Meecham’s smile was a little strained. “I object to the question on the grounds that it is intimidating and forms a conclusion.”

  Dunlop put down his pencil, and said, with a faint whine, “When everybody keeps talking like this, I don’t know what to write down. Everybody shouldn’t keep talk­ing like this.”

  “Don’t write anything,” Cordwink said. “Call a patrol car and take Loftus down and book him.”

  I’m going to jail, Loftus thought. But he still couldn’t quite believe it. Jail was for criminals, for thieves and thugs, for brutal angry lawless men. He said, with the sur­prise and disbelief evident in his voice: “I’m going to—to jail?”

  “For the present, yes.”

  “Why do you say, for the present?”

  “We have no facilities at the jail for looking after a dy——a sick man. There’s a prison ward at the County

  Hospital. You’ll be transferred there eventually.”

  “The County Hospital.” Loftus laughed, holding his hands over his belly. It hurt him to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. “That’s funny, isn’t it? The final irony. After all that’s happened, I’ll end up where I started—in a ward at the County Hospital.”

  The sound of his laughter faded, though his mouth kept grinning. He saw Cordwink and Meecham exchange un­easy glances. “You’re uncomfortable, aren’t you?—dis­turbed?—you wish you’d never seen me? Yes, it’s the same everywhere I go, I make people uncomfortable. I don’t have any friends. No one wants to be near me, people are afraid to be near a man who’s walking a step ahead of death. I make them too conscious of their own fate, and they hate me for it. I’m not blaming them, no, I understand how they feel. I loathe myself more than anyone could loathe me. I loathe this decaying body that I’m trapped inside, hope­lessly trapped inside. This isn’t me, this grotesque body, it is my prison. What prison have you to offer that could be half so terrible?”

  He didn’t realize that he was crying until he felt the sting of salt on his lips. He sometimes cried when he was alone at night and the hours seemed so ironically endless; but never in front of anyone, not even his wife on the day she left him. He wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve, ashamed that he had broken down in front of these three men.

  Cordwink stared out of the window, motionless, his face like granite. Inside, he felt something begin to move, like a steel claw, reaching out and clutching his stomach, squeezing. It could be me. Or Alma and the kids. Don’t let it happen. Me or Alma and the kids.

  A pair of headlights swerved up the driveway. He glanced across the room at Loftus. Loftus had slumped for­ward in his chair, his hands covering his eyes. The back of his neck looked very young, a boy’s neck, thin and vulner­able and white as wax.

  “Loftus.”

  There was no reply, no stirring in response to his name.

  “Loftus,” Cordwink said again. “The car is here.”

  Loftus raised his head slowly. He seemed dazed, as if he’d flown his prison, had gone miles and years away, and was now returning, like a soul to hell.

  “I’m ready,” Loftus said.

  6

  611 Division Street was a three-story red-brick house on the outskirts of the college district. Light and noise poured from nearly every window. On the second floor two young men were bending over a microscope. In the adjoining room a boy sat at a table by the window, absorbed in the blare of the radio beside him, his head resting on an open book. Meecham couldn’t see into any of the rooms on the top floor, but it sounded as if a party was going on up there. There was a continuous babble of voices punctuated by sudden peals of laughter.

  The left part of the lower floor was dark and the shades were drawn.

  Following Cordwink up the sidewalk Meecham thought, it’s a funny place for Loftus to live—a dying man in the midst of all this noise and youth.

  The sidewalk forked to the left. A little path no more than a foot wide had been shoveled through the snow and sprinkled with cinders. This was Loftus’ private entrance.

  Cordwink took out the ring of keys that Loftus had given him. “Still want to tag along, Meecham?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What do you expect me to find?”

  “The bloodstained clothes he was wearing Saturday night.”

  “You seem to have a lot of confidence in that confession. Wishful thinking, Meecham?”

  “Could be.”

  “You and Loftus are kind of palsy for a couple of guys who never met before.”

  “I’m palsy with everyone.”

  “Yeah. You got a heart of gold, haven’t you? Cold and yellow.”

  “You’re getting to be a sour old character if I ever saw one.”

  Cordwink inserted one of the keys into the lock. It didn’t fit, but the second one did. The flimsy door, curtained at the top, swung inward. “By the way, it wouldn’t be quite ethical to take on a second client while your first client is still in jail.”

  “She won’t be in jail long. Your forty-eight hours are nearly up, Cordwink. By tomorrow morning you have to charge her or release her.”

  “And if she’s released, you’d take on a lost cause like Loftus?”

  “One minute you’re implying that his confession is a phony and the next minute he’s a lost cause. Make up your mind.”

  “He’s a lost cause to you, anyway. He hasn’t much money.”

  “Well?”

  “Or at least that’s what he claims.” Cordwink turned on the light switch inside the door, but he didn’t look at the room. He was watching Meecham. “Suppose you were in Loftus’ shoes and wanted some money.”

  “Money isn’t much good, where’s he’s going.”

  “Suppose he didn’t want it for himself. For a relative, maybe, or a close friend. It seems to me that Loftus had something very valuable to sell—his absolutely certain knowledge that he’s going to die anyway. No matter what he does, he has nothing to lose.”

  “So?”

  “So he committed a murder. For money.”

  “Whose money?”

  “Virginia Barkeley’s.”

  “That sounds reasonable enough,” Meecham said calmly, “except for a few little things. First, Mrs. Barkeley only met Loftus once, in a bar, for about five minutes. That’s not quite long enough to arrange a big deal like murder.”

  “She could have known him before. They’d both deny that, naturally, if there’s a deal on.”

  “In the second place, if she paid him to kill Margolis, she wouldn’t have arranged the matter so that she’d be caught as she was.”

  “Maybe she’s very, very subtle.”

  “In the third place she hasn’t any money and neither has her husband. I’ve checked. They live up to their income, the house is mortgaged and the furniture isn’t paid for.”

  “There are ways of raising money.”

  “And in the fourth place you don’t even know that Loftus has any money.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “Your trouble is stubbornness, Cordwink. You were sure Mrs. Barkeley was guilty an
d you can’t admit you were wrong even with Loftus’ confession staring you in the face.”

  “What’s staring me in the face is a lot of funny coinci­dences and right in the middle of them is a lawyer called Meecham.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “That’s one. Another one has just occurred to me. Sup­pose Loftus was paid for services rendered, what did he do with the money?”

  Meecham said wearily, “He dug a hole in the back yard and buried it.”

  “I figure he gave it to someone, either the party he wanted it for in the first place, or a go-between.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “Whom am I going between, or between whom am I going? Oh, hell. You know I never saw Loftus until to­day.”

  “That’s your story.”

  “His, too.”

  “It would be, of course, if the two of you are working in collusion.”

  Meecham lit a cigarette. There was no ash tray in the room that he could see, so he put the burnt match in his pocket. “So now you’ve dreamed up a place for the money you’ve dreamed up. Want to see my wallet? Check books? Or maybe I’m wearing a money belt. Why don’t you check?”

  “Don’t worry, I will. When the time comes.”

  “You can waste a lot of time chasing little bright butterflies, Cordwink.”

  “I like the exercise.”

  Meecham raised his head. He saw that the Sheriff was looking rather pleased with himself, and he wondered whether Cordwink really believed in his own theory or whether he was merely needling him. Cordwink hated all lawyers, but his hatred wasn’t a personal one. It was a matter of principle: he hated lawyers because he believed their sole objective was to circumvent the law.

  Cordwink began to circle the room, his eyes moving from object to object with alert precision.

  The room was fairly large, and fitted out for light house­keeping. In one corner, half-hidden by a painted card­board screen, was a small sink and a two-burner gas plate and a table. The bed was a studio couch neatly covered with a blue and yellow chenille spread, and above it, high on the wall, a trio of college pennants was nailed: