by Jon Wilson
He got up and moved slowly over to the left client chair, which I’d picked up and put back into position while he’d gone down with Cobb. He took the tumbler I slid across to him. “What are we waiting for exactly?”
“A murderer.”
“And you know who that is?”
“I think so. I expect so. I’d be surprised if I was wrong.”
We said those things back and forth, lapping up our booze, looking at the floor or our tumblers, the desk, telephone, window, or coat rack. Anything but each other. It was easier that way. Another quarter of an hour passed, and by then we were exchanging barbs and discussing Fagan and O’Doul’s thus far unsuccessful attempts to turn the Seals into an honest-to-God baseball team. It was all very masculine and reserved, but we had to pass the time somehow. And even though I got the feeling Lovejoy didn’t know much about sports, he made an effort to keep up.
When we heard the ping of the elevator, I had a sudden brainstorm and whispered at Joe to take my seat again. I put my back to the front wall, placing me opposite the window that overlooked the alley. To anyone coming into the main office from the reception area, I’d be invisible until they were through the door.
Our visitor didn’t wait that long, however. I estimated he was still at the door to the hall when he called, “Hello?”
I saw Lovejoy’s face light up, just as mine fell into a hundred befuddled pieces. I came off the wall, stepping toward the door. Morgan O’Malley and I nearly collided at the doorway to the office.
“I knew it!” Lovejoy said. “I goddamned knew it!”
I ignored him, placing a hand to Morgan O’Malley’s chest and pushing him back a step. His eyes widened
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Lana telephoned me with some wild jazz about Joe Lovejoy tossing you out a window.” He made it sound as ridiculous as he no doubt knew it to be. Certainly Joe hadn’t mentioned anything about a window, and I doubted Lana would have invented such an embellishment on her own. None of which distressed me nearly as much as the dopey look of pleasure and relief that I saw in O’Malley’s eyes. He must have felt how uncomfortable I was, because he turned his head a few degrees to the left to glance over my shoulder toward the desk. “Hello, Joe.”
“Were you followed?” I asked.
“Followed?”
“The police.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think so. George said the police had stopped all that.”
I enjoyed a very deep breath, realized my hand was still on O’Malley’s chest and used it instead to grab his arm. I pulled him into the office and along the wall I’d been hiding against. He followed me without resistance, his legs jerking like those of a drunken marionette. “You shouldn’t have come,” I told him. “Damn it. But you can’t leave now. We’re expecting someone.”
“Wait,” Lovejoy said, “you mean he’s not it?”
“It?” O’Malley was looking even more confused. “What’s it?”
But the brainstorms continued. I jerked my head up suddenly, and I pinned O’Malley with my gaze. “Did you talk to anyone else besides Lana? Your stepmother or Mr. Kelly or Jasper Reed?”
Something in my expression must have alerted him to the fact that this was important, because he didn’t even bother to remind me not to refer to Miranda O’Malley that way. He simply shook his head.
“Wait here!”
I made the hall in what felt like three bounding steps. I paused there holding my breath, listening, as I glanced up and down the empty corridor. The elevators were to my left, but a murderer intent upon stealing a piece of damning evidence in the middle of the night wouldn’t take the elevator.
I turned right and crept down to the stairwell door. I carefully placed my ear softly against the smooth wood. I’m not sure what I expected to hear. Maniacal laughter? A whispered confession? But, for the love of Mike, I swear I sensed someone standing just on the other side. I reached down with excruciating caution for the door handle, then grabbed the handle, twisted and threw my shoulder against the wood.
The collision was not monumental, but succeeded in throwing the other person back even as the door rebounded into my shoulder. I flung it wide, hearing an exclamation of pain and surprise as the other figure teetered at the top of the stairs. He grabbed hold of the rail to keep from falling.
I straightened up, pushing my tie flat. “Mr. Kelly. Don’t you want to join the party?”
Chapter Twenty-five
George Kelly straightened up as well, continuing to steady himself with the railing. The stairwell was dim; a single low wattage bulb positioned just to the side of the doorway offered the only illumination. But the bulb was behind me, and it cast a sickly yellow pall over his haggard face. His eyes were wide and wet and frightened, but also sagging around the edges, perhaps the most truly exhausted eyes I’d seen in several years. He had to swallow several times to clear his throat enough to speak.
“Is my cousin here?”
“Morgan? He just arrived. We’ve been waiting for you.”
“For me? But I—” He abandoned whatever course he’d been set on and switched to an expression of petulant concern. “I want to know the meaning of this. I just received a strange telephone call from Lana, claiming that Joe Lovejoy—”
I showed him my palm, along with a commiserating smile and shake of my head. “Don’t bother. I’ve read the letter, remember? Why don’t you come in and we can discuss it.”
His collision with the door had knocked his hat off, and it had fallen on a step one up from the landing below. Kelly watched me a second, then turned to retrieve it. He descended with slow, measured steps, then crouched. When he stood up again, the hat wasn’t the only thing in his hands.
“I brought my own this time.”
I nodded appreciatively. “And she’s a beaut.”
I wasn’t merely talking. The revolver looked to be an old-style Remington six-shooter, polished and clearly treasured. I learned later that before the war, Kelly had spent most of his adult summers on a dude ranch in Colorado. I was told he could ride too.
“I don’t suppose three more will make much of a difference at this point.”
The look of determination given to him by the gun in his hand faltered a bit. “Three more?”
“Me, Morgan, and Joe Lovejoy. That’s two shots each.” And then, when I could see the bewilderment in his eyes, I added, “She isn’t just for show?”
He wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand. Like everything else about him, his lips were puffy and sagging. Wiping them that way stretched his mouth sideways into a gruesome parody of a scream. His wide eyes seemed to spasm in his head, jittering from side to side, as if he was struggling to focus on some hazy mirage right in front of his face. “No,” he said. “I’m not going in. You go get the letter and bring it out here to me.”
I shook my head again. “That’s no good. I’d just get one of my own guns and we’d end up in a shoot out.” I was watching his gun hand, which, rather like his eyes, was none too steady. “You’re used up, Mr. Kelly. You were used up last night. If I was half the detective I think I am, I would have seen it. I mean, I met you, what? An hour after you shot Papalia through the head? And I didn’t even realize it. That must have disappointed you. I know you wanted me to figure that out.Well, I sussed it this morning, only I also managed to figure out why it was Miranda married O’Malley. See, I was at the beach and—”
“Shut up.” Unlike Joe Lovejoy an hour or so before, Kelly didn’t shout that at me. He said it quietly, pathetically. His hand drooped an inch or so, not enough to inspire me to heroics. He looked down.
“Yeah, that must have hurt. That she preferred even that old man.”
“She’s evil, Mr. Colette. Wicked.”
He sounded sick to me, which I guess he was. But he also sounded less deserving of my pity, and I felt my lips twisting up. I shook my head one last time. “She’s really not. She’s just never loved you.”
His hea
d came back up, his mouth and his eyes widening even more. “But why?”
And then he lurched toward me, or rather toward the wall to my left, and only after he was falling did I register the three shots. I still flinched, even as I watched the Remington sag and drop from his hand. I stood frozen a moment, wondering where the bullets had hit me. Even seeing the life drain from Kelly’s eyes, I couldn’t convince myself he hadn’t fired. Then I heard the commotion in the hall behind me, and Morgan O’Malley’s big frame filled the doorway.
“George!” He tried to push past me, but that spurred me into action. I wrapped my arms around his chest, holding him back. Lovejoy was behind him, looking startled but carrying a sweet little Suicide Special in his hand. I wondered where he’d had that stashed.
“Let me go!” Morgan commanded me, but I said, “Wait, goddamn it! Wait!” I pushed him back through the doorway and into the hall. I didn’t release him, however, I simply called back over my shoulder. “Are you through?”
From the darkness below the landing came a frail, ragged voice. “Is he—?”
You have to wonder about the type of man who can pump three slugs into another guy’s back, then balk at the word dead. Or maybe he’d meant to say still alive.
The sound of that other voice tempered Morgan’s struggling. We exchanged looks—his asking for an explanation, and mine requesting time to formulate one. I released him cautiously, letting him know with a timid nod of my head that I was trusting him not to make any rash moves. I turned my back to him, blocking the doorway as best I could as I tried to examine George Kelly.
Kelly lay sprawled halfway down the steps. He had hit the wall, then slid facedown. He wasn’t completely still. His left leg was bent, the knee lodged on about the middle step, but his right leg was stretched out, his foot nearly touching the landing below. It was twitching spasmodically, which told me one of the bullets had probably landed close to his spine. His chest was jerking too, expanding and contracting irregularly while he made faint choking sounds. He wasn’t dead, but I doubted there was much hope. The other two bullets had probably punctured his lungs, and he was drowning in his own blood.
Still, I called, “I’ll check,” my voice about what you’d expect from a man in the midst of getting his neck wrung. O’Malley took hold of my left arm from behind. I shrugged him off, croaking, “Don’t shoot me.”
I went down to Kelly and rolled him onto his back. His eyes were still wide, and his blood-coated lips were working, but I doubted he was seeing anything. I figured speech was out of the question. He tensed up a moment, looking even more startled, then faded out completely with a ragged sigh. His leg kept twitching a moment longer.
I watched him until everything grew still, then I touched the side of his neck. His skin was surprisingly hot and sticky, but I felt no throbbing pulse below it. I lifted my head, peering into the darkness. “Yeah. He’s dead. Why don’t you come up, Colonel?”
I heard O’Malley’s gasp and the old geezer’s footsteps simultaneously. Jasper Reed ascended the stairs with all the joie de vivre of Sisyphus attacking that mountain for the thousandth time. Only in the Colonel’s case, his boulder was a dull, silver Luger lodged tightly to his chest and aimed straight ahead. As he made the landing, he bent his form sideways, keeping the body and me—though mostly, I imagine, the body—directly in his line of sight. I’ve never seen the expression of an old duck in cardiac arrest, but I figure it looks something like Reed’s face did as he turned toward me.
O’Malley actually said, “Uncle Jay.” I wanted to tell him to keep it zipped, but I also didn’t want to turn my back on the man with the gun. Reed, for his part, didn’t seem to hear O’Malley at all. His tired eyes were wide and rheumy as he stared at George Kelly’s immobile form.
I cautiously lowered my right foot down another step. Reed had crossed the landing, standing poised at the bottom of the set of stairs leading up from the landing to the third floor. I stretched out my right hand, almost like I was offering to help him, even though the last time he’d tried to bash my brain with his walking stick. What I really wanted was for him to hand over the Luger. If he really was done, he wouldn’t need it any more.
I flexed my fingers. “How about you let me take that for you, sir?”
He didn’t appear to hear me, but he extended his right arm, raising it slightly and aiming the barrel of the Luger at my chest. Then his hand went limp, and the gun sagged. I tugged my handkerchef from my breast pocket and transferred it to my right hand, then moved down another step to where I could just, leaning forward and stretching, take the Luger by the barrel. It was hot even through the cloth, and I dropped it quickly into my hip pocket.
I climbed back up a step. “Can you help him, Mr. O’Malley?”
When that didn’t seem to elicit any sort of response, I looked back. O’Malley stood there ashen and nauseous, and not unlike I’d asked him to lick a toad. But when I stepped down to offer Reed an arm, O’Malley came back to life and hurried forward to join us.
When we got the old man around the body and to the top of the stairs, I told Lovejoy that I’d telephone and he should stay with the body. I threw a glance at O’Malley, who still looked in need of some air, and suggested he get some. I asked him to go down to the lobby and wait for the police. He frowned, studying the old man he called Uncle Jay with disgust, then said, “No. I’ll stay with George. Joe, you go down and wait for the police.”
I didn’t argue. I just told him for God’s sake, don’t touch anything. And then, as I was escorting Reed into the hall toward my office, I glanced back once and saw him standing resolutely at the top of the stairs, his arms folded tightly across his chest.
I got Reed all the way into the small reception area, where I piloted him into one of the chairs in the corner near the old magazines. The Luger was tugging heavily on my pants, so I placed it on the corner of the desk. I wedged myself onto the edge of the desk in front of the gun, blocking it from sight. Then I watched the old man a moment, wondering what the chances were his face would ever really regain its color.
“Can I get you anything, sir? Water? A whiskey?”
He shook his head ever so slightly, keeping his glassy eyes fixed on a point in the air between us. I let him study that a while, then told him, “So, you didn’t burn the letters after all.”
That appeared to penetrate the fog. He focused his eyes, and his Adam’s apple slid all the way down and back up. He blinked. “The letters are gone.”
I took a slow deep breath. “Sure. You don’t have to talk. Especially not to me. You’re a lawyer. You know that.”
As I watched, a long series of expressions played across his face. It was like the muscles were rebelling. His lips twitched. “Besides, there was really nothing to them. A brief mention of having met George for a weekend at Malta. Another of George having arranged for Adam to get a new driver.” He swallowed again, so thoroughly I could practically hear it. “It was the journal, of course, that brought me here. The arrogant, silly child writes of having managed to convince Papalia to teach her to drive by insinuating something about the letters.” He looked at me. “She didn’t even know what she had done.”
I nodded. “It was all a big misunderstanding.” I said that not because it was the truth, but because it was what he wanted to hear. He knew as well as I did that Ramona Wyman died because she knew Jasper Reed had written the letter to Lana. She had called my office and arranged to meet me because she didn’t want the old man exposed and embarrassed. By then, she had probably elicited a promise from him that he wouldn’t do anything of the sort again. Only she had asked George for my name—probably because one of the kids, Morgan or Lana, had discussed their consultation with him—and George, having already been alerted by Papalia that Ramona was on to something, had listened in to our telephone conversation and jumped to the wrong conclusion.
So, maybe in some ways, it was a big misunderstanding. But she was still just as dead.
The elevator pinge
d again, and I slid off the desk and stuck my head out the door. It wasn’t the cops. Wayne Holmsby stood in the hall before the open elevator doors, looking both ways with his mouth hanging open.
“In here,” I called.
I resumed my perch on the someday-receptionist’s desk and offered the chauffeur a commiserating smile when he stopped in the doorway. He looked from me to the colonel and then back to me before spying the Luger lying on the desk behind me. He moved toward it with a purpose, and I jumped up and pivoted around the desk, opening the top drawer and pulling the gun across the desktop with my knuckle. It dropped over the edge and into the waiting drawer, which I snapped closed with my hip.
I stood pressing my weight against the drawer and offered him another commiserating look, this time without the smile. He stopped, staring me straight in the eyes, but let it stand at that.
Epilogue
Monday morning, I was back in my office behind my desk, with my ankles crossed and my heels resting on the open bottom drawer. I hadn’t quite recovered enough from the long weekend to get my feet up onto the edge of the desk itself.
Across from me in the right client chair sat, not a client, but Gig Barton, my reporter friend from the Bay Clipper. He had, by then, been over the story a dozen times with a dozen different sources and even published two articles, one of which had been picked up by the AP. But newspapermen always seem to want more. And, in this case, I felt obliged to humor him.
“So somehow the girl figured out that George Kelly had arranged for Adam’s death?”
I frowned at him. He knew that wasn’t right and posed the question merely to show he’d been paying attention. “No. She managed to make Papalia think she’d figured that out. I don’t honestly think she suspected him at all.”
“But when she showed an interest in you, Kelly thought she was moving to expose him.”
“That’s probably right. One of the many things we’ll never know is what exactly George Kelly thought.” My telephone began to ring, and as I lowered my feet and picked up the receiver, I explained to Gig, “We don’t really even know if he or Papalia murdered the girl.” I put the telephone receiver to my ear. “Hello?”
