Les Tilman was just getting out of his car as we arrived. I introduced him to Shirley; they were pleased to meet each other face to face.
“Well, here I am,” he told me. “I don’t know what I said, I was talking so fast, but Mr. Whitten bought it. Now you tell me why I’m being taken away from my wife and my TV set.”
“You’ll hear it when everybody else does.”
Les shrugged, then worked the door knocker. A servant admitted us. Shirley sort of crouched down behind me—she didn’t want to get noticed and evicted. She figured she belonged there by virtue of her great curiosity.
The butler or whatever he was addressed himself exclusively to Les. Apparently, my status here was no secret below stairs. He also ignored Spot completely, which was rather tough, considering the dog had been born there. We were led into the parlor. The chief nodded a greeting. Brenda said hi. She was sitting in a chair, looking sick, holding on to her crutches for dear life. Grant was at the sideboard pouring something amber into a couple of glasses. He handed one to the old man.
I watched that with a certain amount of interest. The chief was playing it cagey, apparently, saving Grant’s face with Mr. Whitten, if only for the time being.
The chief kept giving me significant looks, as though he expected something from me, God knew what.
A. Lawrence Whitten took a long pull at his drink. “I would offer you some, but you are not a guest. Cooper has arranged this, and it’s easier to get it over with than to fight. I hope you’ll be brief.”
Not brief enough to suit me. “Yes, sir,” I said.
I tasted bile, swallowed to get rid of it. Then I cleared my throat. Come on, Cobb, I told myself savagely, spit it out.
That’s pretty much what I did. “I’m going back to New York tomorrow,” I said.
“Good riddance,” Grant said.
I looked at him. Grant was playing it deadpan. I wondered how much he knew about my part in his impending downfall. Or did he still think he could charm his way out of the downfall altogether? I dismissed it. Grant had nothing to do with my business tonight. Or so I thought.
“From your point of view, I deserve that,” I said. “And maybe from my point of view, too.” In a very real way, I knew this mess was my fault. “If I had this past week to live over, I’d do it far away from my old alma mater.”
“Get to the point Cobb,” Mr. Whitten said. I had a sudden flash of déjà vu to another meeting like this; another old man, another sad daughter.
But I shook that off, too. “Yes,” I said, “the point I have been running around this town, making a nuisance of myself, in an attempt to find new evidence to clear Dan Morris of murdering Debra Whitten. I thought I’d found some on Sunday afternoon, when an attempt was made on my life. But that turned out to be the result of another matter entirely.”
“I’m not surprised,” the old man muttered. I ignored him and took another peek at Grant. He was still playing it cool. To hell with him.
On with the show. I was getting to the hard part. I was supposed to be in control of things here, but the futility and the goddam stupid waste of it all was clogging my throat and making it hard to talk. I had to force the words past it. I’ll bet it made my voice sound very compelling. I was getting sick of it.
“I have come to the conclusion that there was no new evidence—”
Behind me, I heard Shirley gasp. It was the first uncool, unprofessional thing she’d ever done.
“—that the story was all there to read that night. That I’ve just been too stubborn and blind to see it.”
“Do you mean to say,” Chief Cooper said, “that you now think your friend killed Miss Whitten?”
I turned to meet his eyes. ‘Yes,” I said. “My friend killed Miss Whitten. It was a crime of passion, committed in anger on the spur of the moment. But the deception and lying since then have been deliberate. And let me tell you something. When someone who’s supposed to be your friend lets you run around making a goddam fool of yourself, it does something to you.”
“Excuse me,” a voice cut in. It was Les Tilman, who until now had been effacing himself in a corner of the room. “I’m no lawyer or anything,” the reporter went on, “but I know this town. If you go back to New York tomorrow, and leave Dan Morris in the lurch, you might as well be turning the key on him yourself.”
“So?” I said “Doesn’t he deserve to have the key turned on him?”
Brenda Whitten spoke for the first time. Her voice was barely a whisper. “Matt,” she said helplessly. “No—”
I turned on her. “Why not?” She shook her head, starting to cry. It occurred to me I’d spent a good part of the week making this kid cry. I knelt in front of her and cradled a limp hand in my freshly bandaged ones. Spot came over to lend moral support. “Come on, Junebug,” I said softly. “Tell me, please. Why not?”
It went on that way for some seconds. Once, Mr. Whitten was about to command me to stop. I didn’t dare look away from Brenda’s face, but I found out later the chief had shut the old man up.
“Brenda, please. You’re my friend, aren’t you? Dan’s friend?”
I heard Les Tilman say, “His friend. Holy Christ. His friend.”
“Brenda, tell me. You weren’t going to let Dan go to prison, were you?”
She just shook her head some more, and said, “I can’t!”
“All right, baby, all right. You didn’t mean to kill her, I know that. But what happened?”
“She laughed at me!” She practically screamed it. “She was always laughing at me. She was so beautiful and healthy—and she made such a big deal of her lousy skin condition!”
Inside, I was shouting derision at myself. The body hadn’t cooled off yet, and there was Spot, licking Debbie’s face. For a long time. Yet earlier in the week he’d taken one lick and started to choke, put off by the medicated makeup. I’d forgotten all about it until Spot licked lighter fluid off Eve’s face in the woods.
Probably because I’d wanted to forget it. Because I liked Brenda. But there was no getting around it. Dogs don’t lie. Spot was licking that face because there was no makeup on it, period. But Debbie was very fastidious about her makeup. No one saw her without it, except for the immediate family and her lover.
Not Dan. He’d complained to me that very afternoon about it. So if Dan walked Debbie back to the house, and argued with her and killed her, when had she taken off her makeup? The police theory had to be wrong.
So who’d been in the house with Debbie? Dan, then Brenda, then me. And she was dead when I got there. Grant had been on the grounds, but nobody’s evidence could put him in the house. And Brenda, who had no reason to protect him as far as I could see, definitely put him out.
Besides, Grant was excluded for another reason, a reason that almost made me want to laugh. Grant couldn’t have delivered that flesh-crushing blow, that awesome display of strength that killed Debbie. And it just so happened Brenda could.
“Why did she laugh at you?” I asked the killer in my gentlest voice.
“I—I was just trying to talk sense to her. To make her see how foolish she was to want Grant when Dan loved her so much. She treated Dan so badly. When I walked in the house, I saw the broken banister—I knew she must have done something awful to him. She told me to mind my own business, but this was my business. It was!”
“We believe you, Junebug,” I said.
That seemed to soothe her. She didn’t look at her father or at anyone but me. Her Friend. Spot made a sympathetic noise in his throat.
“It was my business because—because I knew something about Grant.”
Grant again. I risked breaking eye contact with Brenda to get a look at him. He wasn’t quite so cool.
But he was trying. “This child,” he said, “is obviously in a lot of distress.”
“Just like you were!” Brenda yelled. It was an explosion of pure loathing. “The night of the engagement party. When you were drunk and I felt sorry for you and you told me how p
retty I was and how nice I was, nicer—nicer than Debbie. And how the leg didn’t matter to you.”
The look of disgust left her face when she looked back at me.
“I told Debbie all of this, Matt. I tried to make her see. I told her how he took me in the back seat and made lo—no, how he stuck it in me! There was no love in it. There’s never love in it. I’ve found that out since. Not for me, anyway. I was crying, and he was making me swear not to tell anyone.”
I did a little subtraction. Brenda had been fourteen years old at the time. I carefully avoided looking at Grant Sewall because if I had laid eyes on him, nothing would have been able to keep me from killing him.
“And when I told Debbie she laughed. She—she called me a liar. Then she said, Grant would never get that drunk, and she laughed at me some more, and I got so mad I just hit her, I just swung my crutch like a baseball bat and hit her and she fell, and I started to scream—”
Somebody else started to scream. Her father, a rasping cry of anger from a communicator who’d run out of words. He was going for Grant, and it would have been interesting to see what he did when he got there, but of course Chief Cooper wrapped him up before he could.
Brenda was sobbing. She reached out to me, to me, for Jesus’s sweet sake, the way she had in Dan’s apartment. I put my arms around her as she buried her face against my shoulder as if to hide from the world and everything in it.
I was looking at Grant. Everyone was looking at Grant. Chief Cooper had a look of disgust on his face, as if he’d suddenly found himself in a room with a million maggots.
He was the one who spoke first “Christ, Sewall,” he said. “You’re no goddam good at all, are you?”
Grant said nothing. He just swallowed and fixed his tie and wiped some sweat from his handsome forehead.
Brenda held me tighter, and cried as if she would never stop.
CHAPTER 29
“Get back in the box!”
–Señor Wences, “The Ed Sullivan Show” (CBS)
A DOCTOR CAME AND gave Brenda a tranquilizer, and some cops came and hauled Grant in, ostensibly on charges associated with the ComCab thing, but really because the chief all of a sudden decided a bastard like that ought to be in jail.
I was making a break for it. I needed some air. Les Tilman was sneaking out, too. I spoke to him on the steps.
“There’s your story, Les,” I said.
“If Mr. Whitten lets you print it,” Shirley added. She used to work for a congressman, so she has a tendency to think of things like that.
“It’ll be printed,” Les said grimly, “I’ll get it out even if I have to buy a job shop and set the type myself. Nobody’s going to be able to hush this up, don’t worry. But Cobb, may I say something?”
“What?”
“I hope to hell I never piss you off. You are one scary son of a bitch.”
That about did it. That was just the sort of thing I needed to hear to make my life complete. “Go to hell, Les,” I told him.
“Can I quote you?”
“I’ll give you something to quote. Let me out of here.”
I got in the car and asked Shirley to drive to the county jail. Eve was going to meet us there and get me in to see Dan.
About halfway there, Shirley said, “Matt, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
I leaned back in my seat. “If you think I’m scary, save it.”
“No, it wasn’t that. Harris never put through your resignation.”
“What?”
“He figured you were being hasty. When you called in and said you were quitting your job, he put you down for sick time. He would have told you when we first got here, but you hurt his feelings.”
I had thought I would never laugh again, but all of a sudden there I was, roaring until tears came to my eyes. Not only had I wrecked a life or two this week, I’d even wind up getting paid for it.
Wonderful. Now I had something to live for.
Spot waited in the car with Shirley while I went in to talk to Dan. Eve was already there, talking to the chief. They were trying to get a judge on the phone to authorize Dan’s release.
The chief showed me to Dan’s cell. He looked like he’d just been sentenced, not cleared. He greeted me listlessly and told me to sit down.
It made me mad. “You’re welcome!” I snapped.
“Oh, Matt, of course. You’re the best friend I could imagine, let alone have. But Chief Cooper was just in here. He says it was Brenda who killed Debbie. Then he rushed away.”
“He’s trying to get you out of here.”
There was a puzzled look in Dan’s big sad eyes. “But how could it be Brenda? I just don’t see it.”
I showed it to him. He didn’t like it any better than I did.
“All right, it had to be her because of the makeup, but the blow, Matt. How could she do that?”
“You taught her how. I saw you doing it the first day I was here.”
“What? I never taught her shuto.”
“No, but you taught her baseball. That nice, compact, powerful left-handed swing. She used her crutch, her stainless steel crutch. It’s lighter than a baseball bat but longer. High school physics—longer moment arm, more force. Much more force than you can generate with just your body, if you aren’t a black belt.”
Dan was scratching his beard and saying of course.
“Yeah,” I said, “of course. Plenty of room to swing in that wide hallway, and one moment of anger and bam. And the wise old Medical Examiner immediately said it was a karate blow. What else could it have been? What else has a rounded striking surface with a solid core covered with padding? What else, but a human hand? Well, how about a tube of stainless steel, curved and padded to fit comfortably under your arm?”
Dan shook his head. “The poor kid,” he said.
“Yes. But we spent all that time thinking, or trying to think, of some sort of weapon someone might have used. And there was Brenda, right there, with two of them. Perfectly disguised. I was so used to seeing her with them—hell, in a very real way, they were part of her. It was all there for me to see the first second after I arrived. Spot licking Debbie’s un-madeup face, and Brenda standing there on her crutches, shocked and crying.”
“The poor kid,” he said again.
“Yes, Dan.” For no reason, I was getting irritated with him. “But she killed her sister, no matter how. It had to come out, and you know it.”
“But she must have been through hell this past week!”
“And what have you been through? Disneyland?”
“That’s not fair, Matt.”
“Murder isn’t fair.”
“Did you have to put her through the wringer like that? In front of everybody? Couldn’t you just—?”
“Couldn’t I just what? Frame Grant? I might have at that if I could have gotten away with it. But let’s be real. Clear you without involving her? Not bloody likely. Do you think I enjoyed doing this? Maybe I should have just forgotten all about it and let you take the rap for her. That’s what she was going to do.
“The really amusing part of it is that she never thought of getting away with it, Dan, or of framing you. She didn’t think of anything at all. She was just standing there, shocked at what she’d done when I rushed in, saw that bruise on Debbie’s throat, and decided you’d killed her. Brenda was ready to tell me then, but I was busy being worried about getting you a lawyer, so she shut up and let Nature take its course. So, in a way,” I concluded, “I’m responsible for your being here in the first place!”
“Then you did think I killed her!”
“Yes, goddammit, I did!” I exploded. “I’m sorry, Dan, but there it is. I saw what it looked like, and I was scared to death for you. It lasted until I spoke to you on the phone, but until then, yes, I thought you did it.”
Dan looked grim. “Don’t worry about it. When I heard some of the evidence, I began to think I might have done it myself. But dammit, Matt, you’ve practically cruci
fied Brenda! The kid lost her head for one second, and look what she’s in for now.”
“And in that second, she killed the woman you loved.” I waved that aside before Dan could get mad. “All right, forget about that. But look at the situation I was in back there in the woods, when Spot and Fred Stampe so kindly led me to the truth. Stampe had said, ‘Weapons are everywhere,’ and it clicked.
“Brenda had killed her sister, but I was the one who gave her the idea, in her moment of panic, to blame it on you. She would have come apart and confessed and faced the music, which at that time probably wouldn’t have been so bad.
“And Dan, if she hadn’t been so scared, she wouldn’t have let you stay in jail. Subconsciously, she was confessing all damn week. She called my attention to her crutches, constantly. At one point, when she was trying to pretend you had done it, she said, ‘Dan should have killed her.’ Not ‘He was right to have killed her,’ but ‘He should have.’
“Brenda’s a careful speaker; she doesn’t make that kind of diction mistake. Unconsciously, she was saying exactly what she meant. You should have killed her; then she wouldn’t have had to. You would be in prison justly, and she could feel sorry for you, and everything would be the way it was supposed to be.
“And she’d still be rid of Debbie. Who had two legs. Who had your love. Who had given her Grant, then taken him back. You should have killed her, Dan, because deep down, Brenda wanted her dead. What she didn’t want was the guilt.
“And yet, she wanted me to figure it out. She showed me she had some kind of hold over Grant. He sure as hell didn’t want to talk to me at the cemetery Saturday afternoon, but Brenda made him do it by getting stern with him. I wondered about it at the time, but I didn’t follow up. He was afraid of her about something. Now we know.
“Hell, Brenda even called my attention to Debbie’s skin condition!”
I sat down on the edge of Dan’s cot. “You know something? I bet that if this had been a Network case, with a bunch of strangers involved, I would have gotten it before Spot had taken his last lick at Debbie’s face. I just didn’t want to think of Brenda as the killer. I wouldn’t let myself do it, not seriously. I remember how happy I was when I thought I’d cleared her by proving she couldn’t have delivered that karate blow.”
Killed with a Passion Page 18
