Killed in the Act

by William L. DeAndrea

  He thought.

  CHAPTER 31

  “...And you’re special, just the way you are!”

  —FRED ROGERS, “MISTER ROGERS NEIGHBORHOOD,” PBS

  I WENT TO MY office to try to gather my dwindling resources before going home.

  My secretary was lurking in ambush for me with a message. “The Brant has called three times, Matt. They want to know who’s going to pay for two plane tickets to Brazil they got for one of the Network’s guests.”

  “Jazz,” I said, “I don’t want to hear about those tickets, understand? Turn the whole thing over to Accounting, and forget you ever heard about it.”

  I had my feet up on my blotter, and my eyes closed, but sleep was miles away. I’d forgotten how. Instead, I let my mind wander, and as I knew it would, it took me through some rotten neighborhoods. After about ten minutes, I hit the intercom and asked Jazz to make a phone call for me. She asked me if I had the number; I said, “Look under ‘United States Government.’ ”

  She made the call, and a very polite female voice told me what I wanted to know. After that, there was nothing left to think about, so I set my jaw and headed home.

  In costume and in action, Llona said she was glad to see me. She was wearing one of my shirts over panties, and was magnificent, but just barely decent. We embraced and kissed. The kiss was like a dream—fabulous, but unreal.

  Spot was happy to see me, too. He ran around us, wagging his tail and yipping until the kiss was over and I stroked his head for him.

  Llona smiled prettily and said, “I see you got through it okay, Matt.”

  I said, “Mmm,” and went to sit in the green leather motorized recliner. I reclined, but left the motor off. “You seem fine, too, Llona.”

  “Thanks to you,” she said. The Samoyed came over and rubbed his body against her bare leg the way a cat does. Llona laughed, and scratched his ear. “And you too, Spot. I wouldn’t forget you. Something to drink, Matt?”

  “Vanilla milk shake.” I needed something sweet. “The stuff is in—”

  “I know where it is. I’ve been prowling the kitchen all afternoon, looking for something to make you when you got home.”

  “I’ll call for pizza,” I said. She said it sounded like fun, and padded into the kitchen. Thanks to ridiculously expensive but very efficient electric appliances Rick and Jane Sloan had bought for the kitchen, it only took Llona a few dozen seconds to return with the milk shake. She made a good one. I sat sipping it, not looking at anything, trying not to think of anything.

  Llona perched on the arm of my chair and started playing with my hair. “Penny for your thoughts?” she asked.

  “Horace Walpole,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Horace Walpole. Eighteenth-century British writer of gothic horror stories.”

  “What about him?”

  “He said something profound once. At least once. I haven’t read much of his stuff.”

  “And you have to be fair to the fellow, don’t you?” She was teasing me, but she was right. “What did he say, Matt?”

  “He said, ‘This world is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.’ ”

  She nodded and worked her mouth, as though she were tasting it. “That is profound, Matt. I guess the world doesn’t change a whole lot, does it?”

  “Hardly at all,” I agreed.

  “What is it to you? A comedy or a tragedy?”

  I showed her a crooked grin. “Right now? A comedy. I’m too numb to feel. And people are always funny, if you’re cynical enough. Take that crew I spoke to this afternoon. All kinds of questions about why Ken did this particular thing, or that particular thing, but not a word about why he became a thief and a murderer in the first place.”

  “Well, Matt, after all, they had a terrible shock—”

  “Oh, I know that. I was just pointing it out. What do you think was wrong with Ken? Why didn’t he just take off for Brazil right after he killed Bevic? His land frauds were going to be discovered sooner or later.”

  She kissed me on the forehead. “All a natural part of his character, Matt. You’ve been saying so yourself—Ken as the unseen power, making things happen in secret. He got a kick from it, didn’t you tell me Alice said that? How is she by the way?”

  “Stiff upper lip. Go on, Llona, I want to hear this.”

  “I’m a good student, huh?” She smiled and kissed my forehead again. “Well, he just gravitated into things that would help him feel that way.”

  The girl was very smart. She’d pegged it exactly, as far as I could see. A television director is an unseen power; a godlike, disembodied voice of command. And after Ken had been one of those, he’d become the hidden key to a magic act both on and off stage. From there, he’d found how nice it was to make money disappear with a few strokes of red or black ink. And from there, he’d tied it all together—protecting his frauds by using his experience and knowledge to commit a stage-magic murder.

  “And not only that,” Llona went on. “Ken was as big a ham as Lenny was, in his way. And he had a grudge against poor Lenny. And he was crazy. Just killing Jim and running away wouldn’t have been...have been artistic enough for him. He’d have wanted to do something, well, spectacular for his finish.”

  Yeah, I thought crudely, he was a real smash.

  I looked up at Llona. She was smiling; her eyes were bright. She looked as happy as I had ever seen her. I pulled her down to me and kissed her, hard, and for a long time, because I knew it was going to be the last time.

  When our lips parted, I said, “Now let’s talk about you, Llona.”

  She was shocked, or puzzled, I couldn’t say which. “Me? What about me?”

  I made a disgusted noise, and stood up. Llona was thrown off balance when the recliner straightened, and fell onto the seat of the chair.

  “I didn’t do this on purpose, you know,” I told her, just for the record. “I’m willing to swear that only 20 percent or less of my life happens on purpose. I didn’t fall for you on purpose.”

  She sat up in a more dignified position, brushed her bangs out of her eyes. “Matt...”

  “Tell me about the tickets, Llona.”

  “Tickets?”

  “The airline tickets. The ones the bellboy brought.”

  “What about them?”

  “Do you notice you’re starting to say that a lot?” She was good with her face. I could almost believe she was afraid I was cracking up. “Never mind,” I told her. “Two tickets, Llona. Two of them. That doesn’t jibe with what he told us about his plan, does it? He said he’d keep us with him until he boarded the plane, right? What did he need another ticket for? He wasn’t planning to travel with a bass fiddle or anything.”

  “I...he...Matt, you’re exhausted, you’re not yourself. You should go lie down...”

  She was right. Fatigue had brought with it a kind of counterfeit peace, a strange detachment, as though the real Matt Cobb were somewhere else watching, and Llona and I were just two more talking shadows on the tube.

  “Why two tickets, Llona?” I said. I sat on the couch, across from her, and looked into her eyes.

  The eyes said she was humoring me. “He was lying to us, Matt, that’s all. He wasn’t going to leave us at the airport, he was going to take one of us along as a hostage. That way the one of us he left behind couldn’t tell the authorities.”

  I nodded. “That’s a possibility,” I conceded. “It has some pretty big flaws, but it’s one possibility.”

  “What do you mean, Matt?” All the concern in her face was tender concern, concern for me.

  “You know how tight security is at Kennedy, at all the New York airports. There was no way he was going to get that gun on the plane. And it would have been pretty difficult for him to hold one of us hostage without a gun, wouldn’t it?

  “See if this doesn’t make more sense. Shelby kills me, and the gun and I both wind up in the trunk of a rented car in the airport parking lot, and he fl
ies off to Brazil arm in arm with you. Then he doesn’t have to worry a damn about the one left behind’s calling the authorities. A much smarter plan. Worthy of the Phantom of the Network, wouldn’t you say?”

  Llona was close to tears. “Matt, please, don’t hurt me like this, how can you even think—”

  “Because I notice things,” I told her. “It’s my curse. I don’t always have time to think, because I’m busy being afraid for my life, or maybe I’m even thinking about something important. But I always notice. I can’t help it.”

  “But to think I’d want to help someone kill you!”

  “Oh, I wasn’t the one that was supposed to be killed, necessarily. It was better for you if I neutralized Ken—caught him or killed him. You showed your preference when you dropped the gun off the balcony.

  “But Shelby wanted me dead, and he thought you agreed with him. I wondered why he acted so strangely. Like when he congratulated you when you threw in that touching piece of business about Jerry de Loon. Very clever, Llona. Brilliant, in fact. Ken thought you were stringing me along for him, while all the time, you were stringing him along for you. I thought you were a spunky damsel in distress, and he was sure you were his dedicated accomplice. Smooth work. You were even smarter than Ken. You manipulated the manipulator.”

  She lowered her eyes and looked at her lap. “I thought you...felt something for me, Matt.”

  “Don’t, Llona,” I warned. “You know what I feel for you, goddammit. You left that note. You knew what was on the kines, so you calmly walked across the street and bet my life on a showdown with Shelby. You couldn’t lose however it turned out.

  “You know, even while the fight was going on, I wondered why Shelby always acted as though he expected you to give him the gun; why he didn’t shoot you when you were wide open at point blank range. Why he ignored me and went for you when you dropped the gun over the railing. Why did you do that, Llona? Did you figure I’d be easier for you to handle than he would?”

  “It’s not true, Matt, none of it is true, I swear.” She was out of the chair, hands spread, pleading.

  “Enough lies, Llona, all right? Hell, even the suitcases call you a liar. Did you see the suitcases? Back to back on the bed, both open, lids forming a pointed arch? Did you ever pack two suitcases at once? The only reason to do it is to sort things as you take them out of the drawer, maybe heavy fabrics in one bag, light in the other, or whatever.

  “But if that’s what you’re doing, putting the bags on the bed back to back is just stupid—you’d have to walk around the whole bed every time you wanted to put something in the far bag. It makes a whole lot more sense to put both bags side by side.

  “But there’s one way back-to-back bags make sense—when two people are packing. Both those suitcases had clothes in them, Llona. You lied to Lieutenant Martin when you said you came in and found Shelby packing. He started packing when you got there, and you helped him!”

  “No!” Llona blurted. There was real fear in her face now.

  “No?” I said it as coldly as I could.

  “Yes!” she said. “I did help him, but not at first! I mean, I found him packing, and after he pulled his gun, he—he had to hold it on me, so he made me take over!” Her voice carried an undertone of “How can people be so dense?”

  It didn’t work; she was slipping. “Right. He made you take over the job, so you started in on a new suitcase. Sorry. Besides, why wasn’t any of this in your story to the lieutenant?”

  No answer. Instead, she caught my eyes, and put an infinity of pain in hers. “Matt, Matt, what made you like this?”

  I found it amusing, in a sick sort of way, that I had legitimate answers to all her rhetorical questions.

  “Rivetz couldn’t find a Social Security card,” I told her. “And it bothered me. He thought it might have been jarred out of Ken’s wallet when he splattered, but that seemed pretty unlikely. I had time to kill, so I thought about it.

  “The card was in the wallet when I put it in my office. It wasn’t in the wallet when they took it from Ken’s body in the morgue. Who had the wallet in the meantime? You. Only you.

  “That struck me as odd. I didn’t believe it for a second, but I still had time to kill, so I speculated on why you might want that Social Security card. I thought of what I knew about the card. It was in the name of ‘Kenton F. Schnellenbacher.’ Ken told us he kept the replica in memory of his tough life before he changed his name. The number was”—I closed my eyes to think—“446-59-0200; that’s close, if it isn’t it.

  “And then that struck me as odd. Because if what I knew about Social Security was right, the payments you get when you retire are based on the total amount you paid in during your working life. In that case, they wouldn’t give you a new number when you change your name, they’d just adjust your current records to reflect the new name.

  “I called Social Security a little while ago, and they told me I was right. And they told me something else I’d wondered about.

  “Social Security numbers are assigned geographically. For instance, everyone in my family has a number that starts with zero. Everyone, in fact, who has ever gotten a number on a card issued by the New York office has had a number that begins with a zero, or with a one. Period.

  “Now, a big part of the Legend of Shelby and Green is the fact that Ken had never traveled from the metropolitan area until he teamed up with Lenny Green. Yet the card he said he carried as a keepsake, the card he said he was issued when he was very young, begins four-four-six.

  “Four-four-six, Llona. That comes under the range of numbers issued by the Kansas City Social Security office. And that means either Ken got lost on his way to the Federal Building downtown years ago, or that card is a fake.”

  Llona was back in the chair, curled up. Her lovely legs dangled over the side, and her hands covered her face.

  “It’s not going to change because you’re not looking at me,” I informed her. She shook her head, but still wouldn’t give me her eyes.

  I couldn’t think of anything to do but go on. Sometimes telling the truth is like draining a sore. “The next thing I had to do was figure out a reason for Ken to have a faked Social Security card. Lieutenant Martin gave me the answer as a gift when he passed on the information about the phone call from the Coast. Ken’s embezzlement, and how the IRS thought the money was probably in a Swiss or Panamanian bank.

  “The banks in Switzerland and Panama have one thing in common with Social Security cards—numbers. If—and it was still ‘if’ at the time—you had taken the card, or if Shelby had given it to you, you just might have had the key to his box of stolen goodies.

  “I told myself I was an idiot, and tried to forget it. But all afternoon, all these other things came infiltrating my brain like the V.C. used to infiltrate Saigon. And they were about just as welcome. But they were there. Maybe Ken didn’t trust his memory. Maybe he needed someone to travel for him while he stayed in a safe country.

  “Where’s that card, Llona?”

  She took her hands away from her face. Her expression was very cold. She looked as disgusted with me as I was with her, which seemed a little hard to believe.

  “No one will ever find it,” she said defiantly. “I kept bending it until it broke, and I did it over and over until it was just pieces, and I threw each piece down a different sewer.”

  “You trust your memory, huh?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said.

  “Yeah, you have a lot of confidence in yourself. You proved that this morning.” I walked over to my own window, to my own view of the park. With my back to Llona I said, “When did you do these things, Llona? When did you find out about Shelby? When did you come to an understanding with him?”

  No answer.

  “Want me to guess? All right, I’ll guess. You found out Saturday morning, when we made that sentimental journey to your home town. Jim Bevic did write a letter to his brother, didn’t he? You found it and read it when you went to Alex’s ho
use, and found out all about Ollie McHarg’s story and the missing money. Maybe there was more than that. Maybe Jim had dug up some evidence about Ken’s shady land deals. Maybe Jim told Alex he had an appointment to meet secretly with Shelby at Shelby’s place.

  “I like that last one. That would have dumped it right in your lap. Not only would it have saved you the trouble of figuring anything out, it would have been evidence you could control Shelby with. Was that it, Llona?”

  I tried to read Llona’s face as she played with her lovely dark hair. She may have been thinking of killing me, but it didn’t show.

  “I like to think you worried about it,” I told Llona. “Saturday night, with all your crying, and whimpering in your sleep, and the way you clung to me after we made love; I like to think your conscience didn’t die without a struggle. I like to think that it at least occurred to you that that letter was evidence that would lead to more evidence that would have let us put Shelby away.

  “And by God, I hope you have some appreciation of the fact that if you had given me that letter, instead of what?—hiding it? destroying it?—Lenny Green would still be alive.”

  “I wanted to tell you. Lots of times.” Llona was still looking off into space. “Saturday. Sunday evening in your office.” “But your better judgment won out.” I picked up what was left of my milk shake and finished it with a loud slurp.

  “I didn’t know he was going to kill Lenny!” Llona was intense, earnest. “You have to believe that, Matt. I didn’t speak to Ken about—about the letter until late Sunday morning, when you were busy with Wilma Bascombe.”

  “So there was a letter.”

  She closed her eyes. “I knew you would be like this.” She sounded impatient. “Yes, there was a letter, just like you said. But Ken told me it was over—that the bowling ball trick was the end of it. I didn’t even know how he worked that.”

  “To hell with the bowling ball trick!” I snapped. “What fascinates me is the fact that Ken went ahead and killed Lenny, and you still didn’t say anything. He must have had a lot of faith in you. Or did he just know that if you talked, he’d turn you up for your little blackmailing escapade? He was a remarkable judge of character. But it’s funny how it was really Lenny who caught him. Lenny stole the wallet. Ken should have seen something like that coming.”