A Glimpse of Death (David Mallin Detective series Book 7)

by Ormerod, Roger

  “Then sort it out for yourself. Besides…” He suddenly grinned. “Your reasoning’s warped.”

  “You think so?”

  “If — if I say — she rigged an alibi for me, why would she put out the light?” His face glowed with triumph. “Go on, get out of that one. I’d have been just as much there if she’d left it on.”

  “I’m aware of that.” I watched his reaction. “I rather thought I’d go and ask her.”

  “You do that.”

  “But you’d phone her and tell her…”

  “I hardly know her!”

  “Yes. You wouldn’t phone her, because I’d tell from what she said whether you had. And as you’ve just said you hardly know her, you’d be proving yourself a liar if you did.” I stood up, grinned at him, and left.

  CHAPTER VIII

  It seemed I had done all this before, going to Berenice following an interview with Larry. And as before, I was wondering whether he would phone her. But this time I was fairly confident he would not. Once again I guessed wrong, and as before, her first words clued me in.

  “It’s taken you long enough.”

  Well, what’d she expect, that I’d run? “He phoned?”

  She twisted her mouth at me and stood back for me to enter. “He told me to tell you that even casual friends can phone each other.”

  “Especially to warn you that trouble’s on the way?”

  “Is that what you are, trouble? You don’t look much to me. Old and tired, and barely able to get around on your feet.”

  So it was to be aggression. It meant that she was frightened, and I wondered which part of what Larry had told her had worried her.

  She was wearing a dark dress, formal in itself on someone who would normally wear slacks for relaxing. If you could call her relaxed. But she was mourning Henry Saturn, and he’d been evil enough to have returned from the grave for her. No doubt she flinched at every knock on the door. Perhaps he’d liked that dark dress.

  “I suppose,” I said, “that he’s told you I can break his alibi?”

  She gestured angrily. “It’s all talk.”

  “But it must have been annoying,” I sympathised.

  “What must?”

  “You are angry, though?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Well…you look it. You were annoyed at me for even coming here.” Her mouth tightened and she looked away impatiently. “All it means is that you annoy me. I can’t see why that should make you smile,” she added sharply.

  “You were angry before I arrived. You’re simply aiming it at me.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you!”

  “There, you see. You’ve admitted something. It wasn’t all that painful, now was it?”

  She plumped down into one of the chairs, and briefly touched her hair, seeking self-confidence. “It doesn’t hurt at all.” She was maintaining her calmness admirably.

  “And I don’t blame you for being annoyed.”

  “That’s big of you.”

  “Because I’d be. Suddenly finding that I’d been lumbered with somebody else’s alibi.”

  “It wasn’t anything of the sort, if you want to know.”

  I edged round and perched on a padded arm. “Not an alibi, you mean? But surely he explained that I can prove he wasn’t in that room when the light went out?”

  “Larry said you can’t prove anything.”

  “Then why were you annoyed?”

  “Because,” she said angrily, “you were on your way here to accuse me of it.”

  “That’s a strange way of putting it. Accuse.”

  “Well…” She looked at me, turned away again, her whole body turning away. “It’s a crime, isn’t it, to give somebody an alibi?”

  “Only if it’s false. And only if they committed a crime. I take it you mean he did? While you were giving him this alibi.”

  “I didn’t say I had.” She was agitated. “I said you were accusing me of it.”

  “But I couldn’t do that,” I said, “if you hadn’t intended to. If, for instance, you’d found yourself lumbered with it.” I laughed. All to myself, because she didn’t join in. “And of course, that really would get you angry, finding yourself lumbered, when all you’d intended was to keep me busy watching.”

  “You jump to conclusions,” she complained. “You put words in my mouth.”

  “I’m only trying to help you, because you don’t seem to be able to say them yourself. You don’t have to be afraid of him, you know.”

  She stared. “Afraid of who?”

  “Larry.”

  Then it was she who laughed. For a moment I sensed she had relaxed. Perhaps she had surmounted a hurdle and seen the way clear ahead. She got up abruptly and went on a tour of the room searching for cigarettes. “Anybody,” she said, tossing the words over a shoulder, “who has lived with Henry, is not likely to be frightened of somebody like Larry.”

  “As I’m sure you told him.”

  “I did.”

  “When he started throwing his weight around and said you were stupid?”

  She frowned. I’d hit something. “Larry’s never grown up.”

  “So he did — call you a fool?”

  She found them at last, a pack hiding behind a cushion. She lit one, and thrust smoke at the ceiling. “He got a flea in his ear.”

  I chuckled. “I bet he did. This was when he told you how stupid it was to have put out the light?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The mistake you made in putting out the light,” I said patiently.

  “I don’t make mistakes.”

  “That’s a brave statement to make. You mean you did it on purpose? Did you tell Larry it was deliberate? No wonder he called you a fool.”

  She flushed angrily. I was trying to push her gradually towards fury. With some people, anger sharpens the wits. But it can get out of control, and then they begin to throw out challenges. I was trying to gauge the exact point at which indiscretions would creep in.

  She raised her chin. “It was not a mistake.”

  “Then you do admit that it was you who put out the light?” She stubbed her cigarette and did not answer. “And if he’s been blaming you for doing it, then you’re also saying he wasn’t there, otherwise he’d have stopped you.”

  She looked at me with disdain. “Isn’t that what you hope to prove?”

  “It was,” I admitted. “But all I seem to be getting is further proof that there was something more than a casual arrangement between you and Larry. You’re almost as upset as you’d be if there’d been a lover’s quarrel.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” she said sharply.

  “I can’t help my impressions.”

  “He told me you were a smooth bastard.”

  “That was before he insulted your intelligence?”

  “Damn you!”

  “So why work so hard at protecting him?”

  “I’m not protecting him.”

  “You’re fighting to preserve his alibi. Or so it seems to me.”

  “He doesn’t need one. We were together…”

  “I thought we’d progressed beyond that.”

  “We haven’t progressed, as you call it,” she snapped. “I didn’t intend to give him an alibi.”

  “You mean the putting out of the light wasn’t a mistake? But you didn’t mean it to be an alibi for him?” I spoke casually. This was the time for being casual. I was supposed to accept that anger had trapped her into this admission, but this too had not been a mistake. She didn’t make them. Obviously, she was really annoyed with him. So she intended to toss me back at him, but this time armed with teeth. I trusted they wouldn’t be false. So I was casual, pretending I was still leading her into traps.

  “As though I’d do such a thing,” she protested.

  “Of course not.” I was soothing. “All it was supposed to be was you going round to his place and the two of you keeping my eyes goggling at that gap in
the curtain. But he had this idea of sneaking out while he had the chance…”

  “Nothing of the sort. I don’t know what his idea was.”

  “No?” I didn’t want to sound too convinced.

  “He wasn’t there when I arrived.”

  “Not there?” This I had to think about. I’d assumed he had at least waited until she had arrived before he left. “You mean you went to a man’s rooms…”

  Her laugh was brittle. “Rooms!”

  “Room then. Went to his room, and he was not even there?”

  “No.”

  “So you had a key?”

  A fractional pause. “Yes.”

  “And you waited?”

  “Yes.” She tossed her head with pride. “It was a business arrangement. We were there…for a purpose.”

  “I’m aware of that. And all of a sudden it wasn’t business any more. It became very personal.”

  “Our relationship was completely impersonal.”

  “Yet you had a key. And you should listen to the tone in your voice. No my dear, you went there to meet Larry. That was the foremost thought in your mind. To meet him, and to hell with all the side issues. But he wasn’t there! Lord, you must have been furious.” She turned away.

  “And yet you stayed,” I said.

  “He’d left a note.” Her voice was very low, the admission reluctant.

  “Which you’ve destroyed, no doubt?” She whirled back on me, her eyes snapping.

  “Don’t you believe anything?” I spread my hands and shrugged, smiling.

  “Very well — there was a note. Perhaps you can remember what it said.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I’m curious. Perhaps it was something like: ‘just popped out for a minute.’ At eleven-thirty?”

  She gestured angrily.

  “Or was it: ‘just gone down the road to help my mates with the robbery’?”

  “Oh, you go on with it!” she said in fierce sarcasm.

  “Or maybe even: ‘just toddling round to your place to get rid of Henry’” I grinned.

  “All right!” she shouted. “If it’ll make you happy, there wasn’t any note.”

  “But he was supposed to be there?”

  “I wouldn’t have gone…” She stopped.

  “If the intention was only to fix my eyes on that window,” I pointed out, “then it wouldn’t have mattered if he was there or not. But it did matter — to you. So you expected him to be waiting for you. It was very personal, I can see that. And where did you think he’d gone, if not to a robbery or a murder?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  I could see from her eyes that we were approaching the point when I might push her into indiscretion.

  “But you must have had some idea. For instance — let me give you an example — if you’d previously supplied him with a 7.65 Mauser pistol, then you could’ve guessed…”

  “What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “There’s a lot of ‘em around,” I said calmly.

  “Oh, you’re determined, aren’t you! You’re going to pin Henry’s murder on Larry some way or other.”

  “When a man’s got a busted alibi…”

  “You can’t prove it.”

  “It seems to me I have. Where did you think he’d gone?”

  She tossed her head. “I’d got my own ideas. Don’t look at me like that, you big slob. Your mind must be rotten. If you want to know, I thought he’d gone to see another woman.” This was the breakthrough I’d been angling for, but I still wasn’t certain that she’d conceded it from anger. Certainly her eyes were flashing, and she was sufficiently vocal. I leaned back, considering her.

  “But as I said, for the purpose of fixing my attention, it wasn’t absolutely necessary that Larry should be there. And you’d gone there with such wild, erotic fantasies in your head!”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “So I am. And of course, you’d be stuck there. That’d be the really infuriating thing about it. Any other woman — stood up like that — could’ve simply walked out again. But you had to be there at least until twelve-thirty. It must have been absolutely…” I searched for the word. “You’d be positively vicious.”

  I thought she was going to hit me. She was poised for an attack that would have sent me flying from that chair arm.

  “As you are now,” I said. “But you were a good girl. You did as you were supposed to — at any rate, you stuck it until half past twelve.”

  “I could’ve killed him.” she hissed. “If he’d been there.” Her eyes darted at me. “I could’ve torn him limb from limb.”

  “But instead — and this was all you could think to do — you put out the light.” She said nothing. “At twenty-five to twelve. You’d been there for a quarter of an hour by that time, and you were prepared to sit another fifty-five minutes in the dark…You must have been seething.”

  “I put out the light,” she agreed tensely, watching me absorb it, waiting for me to understand why. I obliged.

  “Because it was on the programme that you should go there. Henry himself had fixed it up. A business arrangement. You knew I was watching, or at least that some dumb idiot was, and all that was necessary was for the light to stay on. But if the idiot was dumb enough, he’d actually take it all seriously. He would report back to Henry. In due course. So you played it out. Henry would get his report, but now there’d be a bit in it that hadn’t been on the programme. A matter of nearly an hour with the light off before you left.”

  “You’re bright. Did you know that?”

  “Warm blood courses through my veins. I thrill to the evidence of romance. Henry might have been a cold fish…”

  “He wasn’t cold!”

  “But he was a piranha. He’d gobble up poor Larry.”

  She shrugged. “Larry could take care of himself.”

  “Like the others? Like the one who died?”

  “No!” she cried. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then how was it?” She looked through me. “What could you expect from Henry? Didn’t he ever get tired of being thrown into that position? You were tossing into his face his own inadequacies…”

  “As though I’d dare.”

  “He frightened you?”

  “No — never. But…” She stopped, and bit her lip to restrain it. “He could be abusive.”

  “I can imagine. But there were gentlemen friends, and he chased them off. You had it both ways, didn’t you, flaunting them at Henry, then trusting him to use his viciousness to remove them for you when they annoyed you. So what did you expect from putting out the light?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Nor care? He’s a presentable lad, is Larry.”

  “He’d look after himself. You don’t understand Henry. He was a professional, and proud of it. He’d never use his abilities for personal reasons.”

  “Like,” I suggested, “a butcher who’d expect his wife to do the carving at home? His gun would stay in the drawer until money lured it out into the top of his trousers.” She was staring at me, fascinated. “Except once. Once he used his gun on one of your lovers. Was he paid for that, I wonder? Did you pay him?”

  “You bloody, fat — ”

  “Slob? I know. But you were perhaps not planning that for Larry. Just a little annoyance. Teach him a lesson. How to treat,” I said, “a lady.”

  “You get out of here,” she screamed at me. “You come here with your snide remarks…You wouldn’t have done it if Henry had been alive.”

  Really amusing, that was. I laughed out loud, though she flinched at it. “If he hadn’t died, my dear young lady, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “If you hadn’t been here,” she snapped, “perhaps he wouldn’t be dead.”

  “Oh?” I’d underestimated her. This was attack.

  “I’ve been hearing about you. You’re right in the middle of this, and you’ve been around…they picked you up for carrying. You’re getting a nasty reput
ation, old man. So don’t you come preaching to me. The word’s around.”

  “The word? What word?”

  “That Sarturo isn’t the only one in the field, if you want it spelt out for you. That there’s a load of the stuff waiting for handover, and you might be in the market. You talk about alibis — who was where while you were watching the room? But what about you? Who’s going to say you were watching all the time?” She gave a nasty little laugh. “Try that on for size, friend. You could’ve come along here and killed Henry, just to get in first, because Henry was Sarturo’s hit man and you were scared of him. How does that sound to you? Doesn’t it fit nicely?”

  “And this is the word that’s going around?” I asked, interested.

  “You’re an ex-copper. You’ve found yourself another line.”

  “Which includes being a professional killer?”

  “If it suits you.”

  “He’d have to have recognised me as such.”

  “Maybe he did,” she challenged.

  “Otherwise he wouldn’t have held open his jacket to show me he wasn’t wearing a shoulder holster.”

  It seemed to hit her between the eyes. Perhaps I’d introduced a mental image that distressed her. Her fingers went to her mouth and she made a choking sound. At last:

  “He was wearing his new waistcoat,” she whispered.

  “New waistcoat?” I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “I’d…bought it him only a few days ago. He’d never worn a…waistcoat. How could he have been armed? The gun…”

  I realised what she meant. “He couldn’t have stuck the gun in his waistband while he was wearing a waistcoat?”

  She was bitterly angry. “He was shot down like…a dog.”

  “And you feel I did the shooting?” Then she completely lost control.

  “Get out of here! Go on. Now! You hear? D’you think I want Emilio hearing I’m associating with you? No thank you. If he thinks you’re after the drugs, and that you killed Henry…and you’re coming here and talking to me…” She waved her arm violently. “So get out. Keep away from me.”

  I watched her with interest. My reputation as a drug pedlar — for what it was worth — rested entirely on what Sarturo himself had planted on me. So he’d hardly be considering me as a one-man rival gang. If she was sincere, and her attitude certainly indicated some fear, then it followed that she was not in Sarturo’s confidence. There was no reason why she should be, because after all Henry himself had chosen to rent a furnished flat during his stay, rather than live in the same hotel with Sarturo and his depressing entourage.