Call Me Killer (Prologue Crime)

by Harry Whittington

  She shook her head, standing tall, her pale face expressionless.

  “I won’t go yet,” she replied. “I — if you are really ill — I cannot desert you — no matter what you have done to me.”

  He got up and went to her. He put out his arms, but she avoided him. He made no effort to follow her, but bit down on his underlip. He turned back to his chair.

  “Thank you, Elsa,” he said humbly.

  • • •

  At eight o’clock the next morning, after a sleepless night, Sam Gowan dressed and left the house. Elsa was not there. She’d slept last night in the guest bedroom, although nothing was said about it. When he came out of his bedroom, she’d made his breakfast and put a note against the electric percolator. She had gone to the store to do her shopping.

  He ate his solitary breakfast and departed before she returned. There was nothing to say to her. He had spent the night staring at the darkened ceiling as he twisted and squirmed on his uncomfortable bed.

  This morning he assured himself there was no sense in waiting any longer. Life itself was untenable. He had no idea what had happened to him, where he’d been, or what he’d done in the lost six months of his life. But none of that seemed to matter. It was possible he had killed Ross Lambart. He must go to the police.

  As he walked past the grocery store near the Kinsey Arms apartment building, he glanced in casually seeking one last look at Elsa. No matter what she thought of him, no matter how deeply she hated him, they had once been very much in love, and Sam had the memory of that. Inside him, that memory was very real.

  He stopped before the wide, bargain littered window. He searched the inside of the store. Elsa was not there. Probably she had stopped in for a visit and morning coffee with some neighbor.

  He felt a pang of loneliness as he went now. When would he come again along Wilkins Road? The kids playing in the shady places, the small dogs romping, the gossip of the women, the cluster of community shops at the corner of the Boulevard. There was a lean, red-faced newsboy hawking morning papers before the Kinsey Arms.

  Gowan stopped to buy a morning paper. The bus roared into the safety zone at the curb, and Sam had to run to board it.

  The headlines screamed that a man had confessed to the murder of Ross Lambart. He was shown in a four column cut. It was only in the body of the story that the falseness of the scarehead lead was revealed. The unenthusiastic story showed that the man had confessed to four other murders in the City during the past twenty years. More, it was impossible for this particular man to have been in the Citizens Trust Building the early morning of the 26th, as he had been confined in the alcoholics ward of’ the Catholic Hospital.

  Gowan shivered.

  He thought again of the detective with the contemptuous gray eyes. The cruel eyes of the hunter, the preying stalker. He shook his head.

  • • •

  As Sam went up the steps to the office of the Personnel Executive in the manufacturing company’s downtown office, he cursed himself for every kind of spineless coward. But he knew he could not bring himself to go to the police with his confession.

  He was shown into the Personnel Executive’s private office. This worthy magnate was a relative of the family who owned the corporation. He’d failed in a business of his own. He was reading about the Lambart murder — Poss had been one of his own social set, a member of two of his clubs, one of his friends — and now he put away his paper with obvious reluctance. His secretary who actually ran his office for him, now brought in a folder on Sam Gowan, employee.

  In a few moments, as if by magic, an assistant personnel manager, the supervisor of male employees, and an auditor appeared from somewhere in the building. And five minutes later, panting with exertion, the head bookkeeper in charge of the clerks during Gowan’s tour of duty, hustled into the room and tried to sink against the wall to further conserve his anonymity.

  “I’ve come for my job back,” Sam told them.

  “You’ve been absent some months without pay,” the assistant personnel manager reminded him.

  “We’ve made every effort to contact you at your home and failed,” the supervisor told him.

  “Your actions were highly irresponsible and unusual,” said the secretary.

  The Personnel Executive cleared his throat noisily.

  “I worked as hard as I knew for some eight years,” Sam said. “I passed the monthly lie detector tests, I’d accumulated seventy days of sick leave. I gave you no trouble in all that time.”

  “That’s true,” the assistant personnel manager admitted at last.

  “I believe I can furnish the word of a reputable doctor that I was too ill to work,” Sam said. The job wasn’t much, but you fought for it when it was all you knew — and they’d taught him bookkeeping during his months in the reformatory!

  “That would make a difference,” the supervisor said with an uncertain glance at his superiors.

  “That would be very good,” said the Personnel Executive.

  Everybody sighed.

  “I’d be glad to have him back at work,” said the head bookkeeper hesitantly.

  “A doctor’s affidavit would be acceptable to the auditing department,” said the auditor. “That’s all they’d require. Naturally no back pay would be restored.”

  “Naturally,” said the assistant personnel manager. “He couldn’t expect that.”

  “Gentlemen,” said the secretary who had been going through the folder on Sam Gowan, employee. “This is employee 568, on whom charges have been filed.”

  “568!” said the assistant personnel manager.

  The auditor got up and took the files from the secretary without a word and returned to his chair. He said evenly to Gowan, over the top of the papers, “You got your job in the first place under false pretenses. This is a very serious matter, punishable by legal action and immediate dismissal.”

  “Who — brought such a charge?” Sam whispered. Who could have done such a thing? Who would have dug back into the past like this? At fifty-five dollars a week, did he matter that much? Who would care at this late date if he had lied to get a steady job that he had terribly needed all those years ago? Who would want him fired, fined or jailed?

  Nobody offered to answer his question. They simply sat there in a semi-circle staring at him. He was a person apart from them now. A man with a prison record. A man not worthy of holding a job among respectable men who never Stooped to anything lower than gossip, blackballing, backbiting, spying, oppression and cruelty — all of them in jobs that paid nowhere near three hundred a week. A low price for such inhumanity to your neighbor, Sam felt.

  “These are very serious charges indeed,” the auditor was saying. “We could bring you to court and convict you of attempting to defraud this company, since we are on government contract, in a way you are defrauding your government. However, we have already agreed that Employee 568 should be given the opportunity of signing resignation papers. The whole matter would then be dropped.”

  Sam looked at them. Not one of the men, or the woman, in the room met his eye squarely. In their faces was self-righteousness, but there was no trace of compassion.

  “Where is the paper?” Sam said. His voice was very low. “I’ll sign it now.”

  • • •

  Where now? he asked himself when he was once more in the comparatively pure air of the foul smelling street. Elsa was through with him. If the police were not yet looking for him, it was only a matter of hours now until they would be. He didn’t have a job any more. It was possible he had killed a man, but he didn’t even know why. He had been somewhere, leading some sort of existence culminating in the murder of Ross Lambart night before last.

  Standing in the middle of the sidewalk, he remembered the girl. She called him “David.” She ran after his taxi when he drove away. She was in this City, and perhaps she knew the secret of where he had been, what he had been doing all these months.

  There was only one way to find out the trut
h. He must find that girl. But would he even know her if he saw her again? So far as he knew, he had seen her only for a few minutes in the drizzling rain before daybreak on the sidewalk outside the Citizens Trust.

  The last thing he remembered was the meeting with Ross Lambart in November, six months ago. There was a barroom. It was large and dark, with gray walls, and it had been crowded. The name of the place escaped him, but it must have been near the post office; because he remembered that Lambart had called him at the office and told him to meet him at four o’clock in this bar. “It’s out of the way,” he remembered Lambart’s saying. “On Fifth. No one will know us.”

  He was already hurrying toward Fifth Street. The light was red at the corner, but Sam was too anxious to get started; he couldn’t wait for the walk signal. He hastened out into traffic. Horns screamed indignantly. A police whistle blared. Sam weaved in between the speeding cars and leaped to safety on the far curb.

  There were a lot of bars on Fifth Street. But he was determined to look in each one until he recognized the place where he’d gone on that November afternoon with Ross Lambart. Perhaps the scene itself would bring back some of his memory. Anyhow, it was the last place he could remember visiting before he came awake in Lambart’s office, gun in hand.

  He couldn’t stand the thought of losing himself like that. He had to know the truth. His excitement mounted as he hurried along the street in the crisply cold wind. He went five blocks down Fifth, past the rear of the Chronicle Building, where news delivery trucks smoked and roared, past the wholesale flower district, and then he slowed. The traffic was thinning out. His heart pounded. He was sure he was getting near to the answer now.

  It was in the sixth block on the right hand side of the street that Sam found it. He knew by accelerated heartbeat, quickened breath, and feeling of anxiety that swept over him. The place was called Slow Joe’s Bar, and just inside the door was a three-by-five enlargement of the soused old woman who says in bars all over the country, “Restroom, hell! I ain’t tired, where’s the can?”

  Inside the door, he stopped and looked around. He was aware of heads turning at the tables. He was certain that some of these people knew him. He waited, but no one spoke. At last, breathing heavily in his excitement, he went to the bar and ordered a whiskey and ginger ale.

  “Whiskey and ginger ale?” said the bartender. “That spoils good whiskey, don’t it?”

  Sam looked at him. The man was smiling, as though this was some private joke between them.

  Sam dampened his lips with his tongue, holding the shot glass in his trembling fingers. “Do you know me?” he said in a half whisper. For as a matter of fact, he was afraid to hear the answer.

  The bartender looked at him for some moments in silence. At last he stopped smiling. “No,” he said at last. “No. I guess I don’t.”

  He started away, obviously offended. Sam tried to reach across the bar to clutch at his shirt. “Wait,” he pleaded.

  The bartender stopped. “All right, mister. What is it?”

  “Do I look like someone you know?”

  Sam was aware that two more men had come to the bar. The bartender started away again. “Do I?” Sam repeated.

  The bartender wasn’t smiling now. “Not if you say you don’t, mister.” He looked beyond Sam at the two men. “All right, Charlie, what will you and your friend have?”

  Sam stared at the bartender another moment. Then he turned around, leaned against the bar, and searched the room.

  He saw her then. She was in a white waitress smock, and she was standing, half turned away from him, taking the order from a bulky man at a table against the wall.

  Sam started toward her. She finished taking the order and turned around. She stopped, the pencil and the order pad in her hands at her sides.

  She did not smile this time as Sam came near her. There was recognition in her eyes, but no pleasure.

  All she said was, “Why didn’t you stay away?”

  “I came looking for you,” Sam said.

  The man spoke from the table behind her. “How about my order, Miss. I ain’t got all day.”

  She started by Sam. He caught her arm.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said to her. “Please. Now.”

  Her chin went up a little. She shook her head. “I can’t talk to you now. There’s no time. No place. Besides, it won’t help. Please go. You shouldn’t even have come back.”

  She brushed by him then. He watched her hurrying expertly through the tables toward the bar. He knew now that he was more lost and alone than ever. For he knew suddenly how terribly important it had become to him to find her again. But he knew that since he had found her, he couldn’t let her go. She was the only person in the world who could help him find out the truth about those lost six months.

  7

  BARNEY MANTON finished his third day since the murder of Ross Lambart as unspectacularly as he’d finished his first two days: Waiting for assignments. Doing leg work that didn’t even call for written reports.

  No one had told Barney “hands off” the Lambart affair. It was a simple matter of his being quietly bypassed. The first day Barney Manton was bitter as the bright young career men carefully filled their notebooks with data that he, felt nobody would ever read, made tests and measurements that would lie forgotten in the files.

  But Manton had been a long time on the police force, a long time on the homicide detail. He knew how these things worked, and by the third day, although he was still slightly bitter, he was no longer sarcastic when he addressed Milligan, his immediate superior. And he was resigned now to working his eight hours and then putting the whole thing out of mind with a fifth of blend whiskey at three-seventy-five.

  Today was no different. Milligan often accused Manton of never doing one thing more than he was paid to do, and Barney bitterly admitted this accusation. All you had to do to get somebody’s big foot square in your teeth was to attempt to be an ambitious boy. Well, Manton had eaten toe leather long enough, he knew better by now.

  As he left the outer office he could hear the buzz of the voices of the bright young men clustered about Milligan’s desk.

  The newspapers and the citizens were giving Milligan hell by now. No man, said one newspaper, was safe in his own bed if the police force was no more efficient than this. How could a man as well known as Ross Lambart be attacked and foully murdered in his own office, and the police, called within three hours, be unable to turn up the murderer?

  There was an edge to old man Milligan’s voice, Manton recognized as he left the office. The career sergeants were more careful in their suggestions. They checked everything they said twice before they uttered it, and God help ‘em if Milligan found them wrong.

  They were landing on the old man’s neck from upstairs. The D.A.'s office, the police commissioner, the newspapers, the citizens’ committees led by rabbis, priests and preachers.

  Manton shrugged. The old man was going without sleep. And Barney supposed that even if he got to sleep, he was wakened at all hours by the jangling telephone win irate tax payers and the merely curious demanding to know if the “killer” were yet in jail?

  I’m getting my sleep anyway, Manton told himself. However, this was not strictly true. He slept miserably. Short cat-naps were the best he could muster during any night. The honest fact was that Manton, living alone in a rented room with a radio he seldom snapped on, magazines he almost never read, hated nights: the lonely, small, dark hours.

  He threw himself in behind the wheel of his car wondering what he would do with himself now that he was off his job. He pushed his snap brim felt back on his high fore-head, and regarded his cold eyes in the rear-view mirror. He had no friends, and now that he was off the job, he admitted it to himself: nobody liked him and he had nowhere to go.

  He drove slowly out across the Bay Bridge and in Inland City stopped at the first bar he saw. The place was almost deserted in the afternoon. There was a blonde woman sitting alone half way d
own the bar. Manton looked her over.

  He found himself remembering that woman, Elsa Gowan whom he’d seen coming out of Milligan’s office yesterday. She was a dish all right. And he could do with some of that.

  He ordered whiskey and water and pulled the black book out of his pocket. He thumbed through to the letter “L,” and there under LAMBART, Ross Karsley, he found what he sought:

  “Night of December 24th, Lambart went in to Mrs. Gowan’s place on Wilkins Road. I parked across the street and waited two hours. He had not come out of the front door when I left.”

  There was more, all kept in detail. It would never do him any good now, he supposed. Lambart, dead. But there were a lot of other spicy details about a lot of other highly placed individuals.

  He shrugged his heavy shoulders. He had started all this about ten years ago, keeping book on people who were getting into all sorts of things, and seemingly getting away with it. Men of wealth and position, men of influence and importance. Women whose social careers would be blasted if he spoke just a few of the secrets he’d learned about them in the past ten years. In the beginning it hadn’t meant anything particularly. He had been unable to sleep. He was unmarried, and he could neither make new friends nor keep old ones. He was a cruel, sadistic lover, mistrustful and suspicious, so that not even the most neurotic female, ridden with masochism, could long endure him.

  It was only after a year of this peeping-tom existence that an idea shaped up in Barney Manton’s mind. The things he had found out were explosive. They would some day be worth a great deal to him. He knew by that time ways to make every name in that book pay off. It was better than sleeping, and anyway, sleeping was almost impossible for him, even then.

  Then too, Manton realized that he was getting the kind of kick out of keeping this book that he missed and wordlessly longed for in his affairs with women. And so he delayed, from year to year, his break with the police force.