Say It With Bullets

by Richard Powell

  “You changed the whole set of buttons on that coat.

  The new ones aren’t a perfect match. And I saw Carson Smith, the morning we left Cheyenne, with a button in his hand that matched the original ones on your coat. Where did he find it, Bill?”

  “The only thing I know about buttons is that you don’t seem to have all yours.”

  “You picked a fight with Carson Smith that night. Why? The paper said there were signs of a big fight in the garage. Were you fighting the man who was killed? Did you get marked up? Did you pick a fight with Carson to have an alibi for the way you looked?”

  He said earnestly, “I admit you could get me in trouble with all these wild ideas. But be honest, now. Couldn’t the whole thing be in your imagination? Is there a single real fact among any of the things that are bothering you?”

  “Bill, you be honest. How easy would it be to prove you knew the man who was killed?”

  “Suppose I say I never met him in my life. Will you accept that?”

  “Bill, I can’t! What would happen if somebody called your family and asked casually if you knew him?”

  She sat on the floor, hugging her knees and peering at him over the top of them. She looked as if she ought to be out playing hide-and-go-seek instead of grilling a guy about a murder. She looked soft and meek and scared, but she couldn’t have thrown nastier questions if she had been a district attorney.

  “All right,” he muttered. “I knew him.”

  “I’m only trying to help. I’ve been sure for quite a while that you’re in some awful trouble. But don’t you see, I can’t go around wondering if…if…”

  “Here’s the whole story. Or anyway as much of it as I know. Russ was with me in the war. Afterward I started a little commercial airline in China with Russ and a few other guys from my outfit. We started to clear out in ‘49 when the Reds moved in, but I got shot by some crazy soldier and couldn’t make the plane and was left behind. I didn’t get home until last spring.”

  “It was a soldier who shot you, and not one of the men working with you?”

  “I said so, didn’t I? When I got back home, one of the papers did an interview with me. The day after it was published I got a queer phone call. From a guy whose voice I couldn’t recognize. He wanted to know the addresses of the men who’d been with me in China. When I started asking questions, he first offered me a thousand bucks for the addresses, then started making threats. I laughed at him. He said I must be in on the deal with them, and that I’d be sorry. He hung up. That night somebody took a shot at me.”

  “Did that make the mark on your side? The one you claimed you got in an auto accident?”

  “Yeah. So I decided I’d better take a trip and find my pals and see what the trouble was, and warn them somebody was gunning for us. I was on my way to visit Russ that night, and somebody slugged me outside his garage. When I came to, Russ had been killed by a bullet from my gun. Now you see what a mess it is.”

  He had been reciting the story fast in the hope that its weak points would zip past too quickly for her. The look on her face said that hadn’t worked. Probably one of her first-grade pupils could get the same reaction from her by reciting two times two is five, two times three is nine, two times four is six.

  “Why,” she asked, “didn’t you telephone your friends to warn them, instead of making a long trip?”

  “For one thing I didn’t know their exact addresses.”

  “Long-distance telephone operators are awfully clever at locating people.”

  “I was a little worried about what the boys had been up to. I figured if I dropped in on them without warning—”

  “Why did you sign up for this tour, instead of going directly by car or train?”

  “In case the boys had pulled something really bad, I didn’t want to leave a big trail tying myself to them. This tour sort of covered up what I was doing.”

  “You hadn’t been with them since 1949. How could you be blamed for any trouble they got into since then?”

  He couldn’t take much more of this. She was cutting him up into little wriggling pieces. “I didn’t know the score. I didn’t want to take any chances.”

  “One of them lives here in Salt Lake City, doesn’t he? You’ve been trying to slip away ever since we got here.”

  “Well, yes. I’ve got to find out what’s happening. I—”

  “You came back here tonight to get your gun before visiting him, didn’t you?”

  “This is a nasty business. I’m not going to get caught short again.”

  “Bill, after you found that man had been killed, why didn’t you call the police?”

  “When a guy’s been shot with my gun? I’d probably have to take the rap for it.”

  “They’d need more proof than that to convict you of murder. They’d have to prove a motive. Were you afraid they could find one?”

  She had backed him into a blind alley. Every time he tried to find a way out, he ran into another of her roadblock questions. “Guys have little arguments. You never know what the cops might make out of them.”

  “They could make a lot out of what you’ve told me.”

  “The important thing right now is, what do you make out of it?”

  She said solemnly, “The only completely honest thing you’ve said is that you’re in a mess.”

  “Look, Holly, I need a break. I need one bad. Are you going to give it to me?”

  “But you haven’t given me one! You haven’t told me the truth!”

  He got up suddenly. This was a waste of time. His only chance was to grab Ken and get the story out of him, before Holly worked herself up to calling in the police. “If I told you the truth,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe it either.” He walked out.

  Behind him Holly called something but he didn’t stop to listen. Maybe it was a threat to call the police. He wouldn’t blame her. A smart girl would have yelled for cops long ago. He cut across Main Street and headed east. The ground began tilting up and up, climbing to one of the Benches where in some past age Great Salt Lake had paused in its steady shrinking. He walked fast, his steps keeping time to a chant that kept pounding in his head: he’s-got-to-talk-he’s-got-to-talk-he’s-got-to-talk…

  He realized that he had forgotten the .45. But that might be just as well. Ken wasn’t big and husky, like Russ had been. If necessary he could take the guy bare-handed, and now he wouldn’t have to worry about a gun going off accidentally in a scrap. Besides, he didn’t really think Ken had done any of the shooting. Ken had been a good Joe once. A little weak, maybe, but a good Joe. If Ken would talk sense about who did the shooting in China, and who might have done it in Philadelphia and Cheyenne, there needn’t be any real trouble. But trouble or no trouble, Ken had to talk, and talk fast. Back in the tourist court on Main Street, Holly might be calling the cops right now.

  He reached level ground where the Bench began and walked over to the street off U.S. 40 where Ken’s tourist court was located. Everything in the tourist court was dark except the office. Ken was in there; now and then he saw a shadow moving past the drawn shades. It was a good break that Ken had closed the place for redecoration, because it wouldn’t have been easy to jump the guy in a crowded tourist court. He crept to the front door and turned the knob gently. The door was locked. He slipped around the building and found a back door and tested it. The latch slid easily out of the keeper and the door opened.

  He stepped inside and put his hand on the inside knob to close the door. A string was tied to the inside knob. His fingers touched it and his nerves screamed a warning and the lights flashed on and there was Ken crouched against a wall with a gun aimed at his guts.

  Ken was slim and dark, and his eyes looked like blots of ink on his white face. “I been waiting for you,” he said tonelessly. “I—” His eyes seemed to focus for the first time. The gun wobbled and he said, as if talking to himself, “It can’t be Bill Wayne. It can’t be! He’s dead. Way back in China. I’m not going to start seeing
things.”

  It was a long jump to that gun. Ken might be seeing ghosts but his gun wasn’t. “Take it easy,” Bill said softly. “It’s Bill, and I’m alive.” The guy was wound up like a clock spring. You had to release the tension slowly.

  “You were dead,” Ken said, but now he sounded doubtful. “You were flat on your face and I tried to lift your shoulder and it was like heaving at the corner of a sack of flour, you know? So I let you flop down again.”

  “I got over it. A couple of Chinese carted me away. I didn’t get back to the States until last spring.”

  Ken said wearily, “I thought one of the others must be pulling a fast one on me. That’s a bad crowd, not like when you were with us. Grabbing for that lousy gold and seeing it squirt away like watermelon seeds every time you think you have a grip on it does something to guys. Now somebody’s always pulling a fast one, always coming up with things.”

  Bill edged closer, as if walking on broken glass with bare feet. He murmured, “What kind of things?”

  “We got a lake we’re trying to buy up. You don’t know about it. But we need it for a very important reason, see? And I got an idea somebody in the crowd has been buying some of the land under a fake name so he can make the rest of us pay through the nose. Then take this thing about Russ Nordhoff.”

  “What about Russ?”

  “I guess you wouldn’t know that either. He got knocked off, Bill. Last Saturday night in Cheyenne. That’s one less to cut in on the lake deal, see? One of the crowd has been getting impatient, see? Maybe I’m next on the list.”

  It was hard to tell whether Ken had cracked completely or had merely been shaken up and might come out of it any minute. Ken wasn’t putting down that gun, though. The guy kept making quick nervous gestures with it. The bomber pilots used to have to sweat it out like this, coming back from a mission with a bomb that was armed but had failed to drop. Make a rough landing, and blooie! Trying to jump Ken right now might be the roughest kind of landing. He said, “You were all set for whoever came, weren’t you? Clever rig you dreamed up.”

  “Yeah,” Ken said eagerly. “Not bad, is it? I lock the front door so nobody can get in there, see? I leave the back door unlocked. But I tie a string to the knob and run it into the front room. Then I sit here with this other string tied to the main one, you know? Like fishing and waiting for a bite.” He jerked at the cross string he was holding in his left hand.

  “Didn’t give you much time to sleep, did it?”

  “Sleep? I don’t know what it is any more. I haven’t closed my eyes since I read about Russ in the paper. I kicked everybody out of my cottages and pretended to paint them so I could lay a trap. Look. You haven’t seen the best part yet.” He moved like a squirrel flicking around a tree trunk and closed the back door and scurried to the front room. He moved so fast there was no chance to grab him. He beckoned with the gun.

  Bill walked to the front room. Several cords crisscrossed it. One stretched to the back door. Another slanted across the room parallel to the windows, and on it hung a piece of stiff cardboard cut to resemble the silhouette of a man’s head and body.

  “Look,” Ken said. “I sit in the back room with my fishing line, see? I tighten it like this, see, and that cardboard slides down the string and crosses the windows in front of the light. Nice shadow effect, huh? Anybody is watching, I’m walking across in front of the windows. I loosen up on my string and the shadow slides back down the line. I’m quite a web spinner, huh? Walk into my tourist court said the spider to the fly. And who should walk in but old Bill Wayne.” He let out a thin laugh.

  “Quite a letdown,” Bill said. “Put that gun away and let’s have a good talk, shall we?”

  This was one of those dreams where you feel everything has happened before. Come to think of it, this had happened before. But the other time he had been the one with the gun and Russ had done the coaxing.

  “I don’t know about that,” Ken said. “If I put away this gun, one of the other guys might sneak in and I wouldn’t be ready for him. Let’s just sit down like this.” He lowered himself into a chair as if afraid he might break, and motioned Bill to sit in a chair on the other side of the table. He sat silently for a few moments, his eyes as dull as charcoal. “Little foggy,” he said. “Too much Benzedrine and not enough sleep. Maybe you’re wondering what this is all about, huh?” His eyes seemed brighter now.

  If Ken’s eyes got back to normal his brain might start clicking too. That would be a bad moment. “Yeah,” Bill said. “I’m wondering.”

  “We gave you a raw deal,” Ken muttered. “Then we started giving each other a raw deal. I guess that’s natural, huh? I’ll tell you about it. Only keep an eye on that string leading to the back door. I don’t want to get what Russ got. Guess you don’t either.”

  “I sure don’t. I already collected enough slugs from forty-fives. I—”

  “What did you say, Bill?”

  He stared at the guy. Ken’s eyes looked hot and bright enough to burn holes in his head. He had just made a bad mistake with Ken. Maybe the last one he’d have a chance to make. He tightened his leg muscles for a spring, said hoarsely, “You told me Russ was shot with a forty-five and so I—”

  “No I didn’t! I didn’t even say he was shot. So you know all about it, huh? Look who walked into my trap. Giood old Bill Wayne and his forty-five. Where is your forty-five, Bill? Gonna reach for it?”

  “I don’t have a gun,” he cried. “Take it easy, Ken. I—”

  Ken rose slowly. “You should have stayed dead over in China,” he said. “That would have saved me trouble.” The revolver lifted, steadied.

  Just then a freezing noise crept through the room. A whisper of sound, like a snake crawling through wet leaves. Ken began to shake. Across the room, dipping and swaying in a grotesque dance, came the cardboard silhouette on its string. Behind it the shadow oozed across the drawn shades. Somebody had opened the back door.

  Bill slammed the table into Ken and sent him crashing into a corner and made a lunge for the revolver. At almost the same second a scream knifed into his ears, a scream pitched so high it hurt. He wrenched the gun from Ken and whirled toward the back room. Standing in the entrance between the two rooms was a figure with hand clamped to mouth to block another scream. A girl. She had bright hair ending in a tuft at the back of her head. This was the maddest thing that had happened yet. It was Holly Clark.

  “Come on in,” he said harshly. “We’re all crazy here and you’ll feel right at home. This is Ken Hayes and he has a persecution complex. My trouble is I’m feebleminded.”

  Holly didn’t say anything. She stood motionless with her hand still pressed to her mouth. From over in the corner Ken gasped, “Go ahead, sister, scream! Yell for the cops. Yell for anybody. This guy’s a killer.”

  Bill said, “She walks in while you’re fixing to shoot me so that makes me a killer.”

  Ken said, “I don’t know you, sister. But if you can’t scream you better run.”

  The girl seemed to be wavering, and Bill said quickly, “Don’t, Holly. I was sunk when you walked in. Call the cops and I’m sunk again.”

  “He admits it,” Ken said. “You heard him, didn’t you? Do you know why he’d be sunk? Because a guy got killed last Saturday night.”

  Holly’s hand came down slowly from her mouth and she said, as if reciting a lesson, “It was in Cheyenne and his name was Russ Nordhoff.”

  “I won’t ask if you know who killed him,” Ken said. “Might not be healthy to say right out loud.”

  “I don’t know who killed him,” she whispered.

  Bill gave his head a hard shake, the way you might jiggle an alarm clock to start it working. Things had moved too fast for him. Maybe anything that moved at all was too fast for him. He thought that he had left the girl back on Main Street, getting ready to call the police. Instead, here she was, trying to defend him.

  Ken said, “If you don’t know, I’ll tell you. This guy right here killed Russ. If
he don’t have you hypnotized, get out while you can. He’s a murderer.”

  “It’s not murder if it’s in self-defense,” she cried. “How do I know what happened in Cheyenne? How do you?”

  Ken said, “I know because he sneaked in here to kill me too. Only I was waiting for him and got the drop first.”

  “Where’s my gun?” Bill said. “Where’s the gun I was going to shoot you with?”

  “Maybe you were gonna vary it a little this time,” Ken said. “Maybe you were gonna choke me, or bash in my head.” He leered at Holly and said, “You ever been strangled yet, sister? Stick around and maybe you’ll find out how it feels.”

  Bill saw a shudder wrench at the girl’s body. He broke open the revolver and knocked the bullets into his hand and put the gun in one pocket and the cartridges in another. “Holly,” he said, “I’ll give you two

  • choices. Sit down and listen to the whole story, or call the cops. You can do both if you want.”

  “Is it going to be the truth this time?” she asked.

  “Yeah. But I told you before, it won’t sound very good.”

  She came in and sat on the edge of a chair with her knees pressed tightly together and her fingers laced in a knot. You might think she was ten years old and had been sent to the principal’s office for whispering in class. “I’ll listen,” she said.

  Ken was still sprawled on the floor in a corner. He sat up now and stuck his legs straight out and parted his hands together mockingly and said, “Now we get a bedtime story. Once upon a time there was a great big nice pilot named Bill Wayne who—”

  “I’ll give you a choice, too,” Bill said. “Shut up or I’ll kick your teeth in.”

  “You’ll kick them in anyway. But go ahead.”

  He gave them the story. It was the first time he had tried to put it all together for anybody and he could see that the result was sort of ramshackle. If he had tried to put together a house that way it would never have rated a loan from a bank. More likely the local zoning board would have ordered him to tear down that eyesore. The trouble was, he was a little short of material. As he talked, Holly watched him with big puzzled eyes. Ken sat in his sprawled legs-out position, looking like the villain in a puppet show. Bill finished the story in a rush. “That’s it,” he said. He knew he was giving the impression of running away from the thing quickly before it could fall down around his ears.