Burden of Guilt

by Carter Brown

  Her frosted blue eyes had a polished glitter to them, and the down thrust of her hell-raising mouth had hit a new low.

  “How nice of you to invite us back to our house, Lieutenant, when we were in the middle of dinner.” Her top lip lifted slightly, briefly exposing the predatory-looking teeth. “Or are you getting your own back for my rejection of your sordid little advances yesterday?”

  “Why don’t you get Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley a drink?” I suggested to Tyler, who had retreated back behind the bar after he had made the phone call.

  “Nothing for me,” Kingsley said, and lowered himself into an armchair.

  “Bourbon on the rocks, Walter,” Adele snapped. “And I do wish you wouldn’t dispense our liquor to the lower orders of government employees when they make an uninvited visit!”

  “Was that how it was before Daddy lost all the stockholders’ money and blew his brains out?” I asked softly. “Was it really ever like that?”

  She sat down on the couch and crossed her legs, one thigh sweeping boldly over the other, her breasts heaving loosely beneath the dress. Tyler delivered her drink, then scuttled back to the safety of the bar.

  “I presume you have a good reason for this, Lieutenant,” Kingsley said quietly. “I would be glad to hear it.”

  “Mr. Tyler,” I said politely. “If you would be kind enough to repeat the essence of our conversation up to the point where you called Mr. and Mrs. Kingsley?”

  He cleared his throat a couple of times, settled his glasses firmly on the bridge of his nose again, then was off. It gave me time to light a cigarette and drink a little Scotch before he was through.

  “You brought us back from an excellent dinner just to hear that garbled collection of hearsay and speculation?” Adele said in an incredulous voice. “You must be losing what there is left of your tiny mind, Lieutenant!”

  “All of this can be proved,” I said patiently. “Cordain bought you for the specific purpose of making sure Stensen was convicted at his trial. I guess he bought you with money and promises, and after you had served his purpose he could have dumped you straight onto the street. But he didn’t; he went to extraordinary lengths to also make sure you were disbarred. Then he generously engaged you as his personal adviser. Why?”

  Kingsley shrugged. “It’s your story, Lieutenant.”

  “At the same time he introduces you to a call girl friend of his, Shirley Lucas, and you become friendly with her. Then, the secret meeting to clinch the union contract with Strachan is set up for Pine City. Cordain knows you’re renting a house here for the time involved, and bringing both your wife and your personal assistant with you. So he brings the two call girls down with him to stay in his rented apartment. Wanda Blair is his girl, and Shirley Lucas is supposed to be a kind of special surprise package, gift-wrapped and all, for you!”

  “Meanwhile”—Adele’s mocking laugh rippled through the room—“back at the ranch?”

  “Your husband is at last beginning to realize what Cordain really wants from him, why he is so relentlessly hounding him down and down, until very soon now, he’ll have no place to go except the gutter.”

  “And what is it, exactly, that Cordain wants from Gerard?” she sneered.

  “You,” I said.

  “You’re mad!”

  “It’s Cordain’s special obsession,” I said coldly. “The aristocratic lady with the Nob Hill background, the upper-crust natural snobbery, and social distinction. The aristocratic lady who also looks—and sometimes acts—as if she’s just about the sexiest woman this side of New Orleans. Never underestimate what a man with a fixation like that can do. Bringing Shirley Lucas with him to Pine City was to be the last shot needed to bring his campaign to a successful conclusion.” I looked at Kingsley. “He invited you over to talk business, sprang his big surprise on you, then held your attention for an hour so you couldn’t get back too soon to your own house.”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.” Kingsley sighed gently. “I just don’t see all this is leading us anywhere. Say, for the moment, we grant you this fantasy about Hal being obsessed with my wife. Bringing Shirley here didn’t help him at all!”

  “Only because the plan misfired, and she was murdered.” I mashed my cigarette butt in the nearest ashtray. “You didn’t think Shirley Lucas was a real call girl, Mr. Kingsley, not even in the beginning, surely? Nobody ever heard of two carriage-trade call girls sharing the same apartment. It would be too embarrassing for their clients! They could never be sure when they would bump into someone they knew! Shirley Lucas had to be Cordain’s girlfriend, who went along with pretending to be a call girl for just the one special customer; and she did it for love, or money, or maybe both.”

  A faint pink glow was slowly suffusing Kingsley’s face, and I pretended not to notice. “I’ll bet she was the best listener you’ve ever met in your whole life, Mr. Kingsley, and fascinated by your law work! It must have helped to have someone to confide in, during the worrying weeks that led up to being disbarred.”

  “She was an expensive whore,” he said savagely. “Nothing else!”

  “Let’s come back to the night she was murdered,” I said. “The way Cordain and the Blair girl tell it, she received a phone call sometime between ten and eleven, and told them she had to go out. They both presumed it was you who had called her, to arrange a meeting.”

  “That’s a lie!” he snapped.

  “I agree,” I told him, and he didn’t look at all happy about that, either. “The moment after you’d left the apartment, the climax of Cordain’s scheme to possess your wife went into operation. He told Shirley to call Mrs. Kingsley and tell her everything about her relationship with her husband, from the time it started months back in San Francisco; and also mention she’d been brought to Pine City just to be available for Mrs. Kingsley’s husband, whenever he so desired. Cordain figured Mrs. Kingsley would be so humiliated that she would leave her husband the same night.”

  I looked across to where Adele was sitting upright, in a kind of barbaric splendor, and smiled. “But you pulled a switch!”

  She didn’t answer, and that figured; but this was the vital moment in the whole bit where I would have to fumble my way through. I could be wrong and the whole thing would still stick together, but if I was too wrong, it could all fall apart in front of my eyes.

  “Mr. Tyler?” I turned around toward the alcove bar. “I’d very much appreciate it if you’d make me another drink.”

  “Of course, Lieutenant!” His magnified eyes suddenly snapped back into focus, and he reached for the Scotch bottle.

  “I pulled a switch?” Adele repeated in a kind of humor-the-maniac voice, with all the stops out. She shook her head slowly, then looked up at the ceiling for guidance, or whatever. “How?”

  “You didn’t pack your bags and storm off into the arms of Cordain,” I said. “You didn’t even lose your temper with Shirley Lucas. Instead, you suggested she should visit with you here, right away, so the both of you could discuss it.”

  “He’s raving!” she told the back of the couch, and produced a kind of grandiose gesture to go with it that made her breasts threaten to break through the material of her dress.

  “It was Shirley’s turn to be knocked off her feet,” I went on. “She had a quick consultation with Cordain, who said she should go. He figured the confrontation between husband, mistress, and outraged wife would make the situation even more intolerable for a real aristocratic lady like Adele.”

  “How does your fantasy end, Lieutenant?” Her eyes sparkled with an amused contempt as she looked at me. “Did the meeting of the three corners of the triangle ever take place?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said in a mild voice.

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t here!” I took time out to lift the fresh drink from the bar top where Tyler had placed it for me. “All I do know is that, in the end, you took the girl out into the backyard, and you brutally beat her, and then one of you strangle
d her to death.”

  “I think it’s you who have the obsession, Lieutenant,” she said in a brittle voice. “You’re determined to convict us of the girl’s murder, regardless of our innocence!”

  “You remember,” I said to Kingsley, “when you took me out into the backyard and showed me the girl’s body?”

  “Of course!”

  “I made the obvious comment that she had been strangled to death, and you said something about her also having been badly beaten before she died—which was also obvious—but then you added, ‘and probably also raped.’ Why did you presume that, Mr. Kingsley?”

  “Well,” he tugged his lower lip hard, “surely, in a sex crime that would be an obvious assumption?”

  “I wondered about that afterward,” I said slowly. “Especially when the autopsy established the girl hadn’t been raped at all. A normal man, looking at the dead body of a young girl who had been badly beaten, wouldn’t even want to think about anything else having also happened to her. The thought would be an ultimate obscenity! So then I wondered what kind of man would not only think the obscene thought, but also voice it.” I took a slow sip of my drink, and the tinkling ice cubes sounded loud in the room. “Maybe a man who would have liked to perform the act on the girl, but wasn’t capable of it. The kind of man who had allowed his wife to dominate the sexual side of his marriage from the very beginning, so she had quickly established that sex was a reward bestowed by her, and allocated to her husband on a kind of brownie-points system. In reverse, it was withheld for any actions that didn’t meet with her approval. Being disbarred meant six months’ famine! The kind of man who’d go along with a psychotic marriage arrangement like that invariably would wind up a psychotic himself. Maybe this dread of sexual denial as punishment for his misdeeds inside his marriage would become an automatic reflex that made him impotent the moment he approached another woman.”

  “With the kind of mind you have, Lieutenant, I wonder you’re still allowed to roam the streets!” Adele said tightly.

  “Of course!” I stared at her for a long moment. “If your husband had admitted his impotence with any other woman, in front of Shirley Lucas and yourself, you would have forgiven him everything!”

  “Lieutenant,” Kingsley leaned forward in his chair, and the beaded sweat that covered the top of his head sparkled like the morning dew under the light of the chandeliers, “if, as you claim, we murdered the girl, why would we have left her body in our own backyard, then reported it to the police early the next morning?”

  “Because what the hell else could you do?” I snarled at him. “Your theory of somebody having dumped the girl’s body in your backyard, in an attempt to frame you for her murder, was perfectly plausible.”

  “I don’t intend to listen to your insane accusations any longer,” Adele said in a purely vicious voice. “If he hasn’t left within the next two minutes, Gerard, throw him out of the house!”

  She got to her feet and her body seemed to ripple expectantly beneath the yellow dress, which pressed flat against her pelvis and thighs. She was right, I figured, it had gone on long enough. I swung around quickly toward the alcove bar and slammed the flat of my hand hard down on the top of the bar. It sounded like a gunshot, and the little runt let out an agonized yelp as he fell back against the storage shelves.

  “All right, Walter!” I growled at him. “You knew the girl was here. So maybe they bundled you off to your own room, but you wouldn’t have gone to sleep, not when you knew the kind of thing that was still going on down here! It was a moonlit night. The girl must have screamed at least once, before they gagged her and dragged her out into the backyard. What did you see out your bedroom window?”

  His magnified eyes had a sudden out-of-focus stare, as the memory engulfed him. “It was horrible!” He whimpered deep in the pit of his stomach. “Horrible! They tied a silk scarf around her mouth so she couldn’t cry out anymore, after the first time. Then they used another silk scarf to tie her wrists in front of her, and they dragged her out into the backyard by her hair.

  “I wanted to do something to help her!” He banged his small fists helplessly on the bar top. “But I was too scared! I knew they would kill me, too, if I tried to interfere. They were like animals—worse than animals!—they tore off all her clothes, and then Adele went and got a dog leash from the kitchen closet. The owners left it here, I remembered seeing it when we inspected the house just before we agreed to the rental. Then they took it in turns to beat her, until they had exhausted themselves and—finally”—his voice broke and he started sobbing breathlessly like a small child—“finally, Adele took off all her clothes and flaunted herself in front of Mr. Kingsley. Then she said something to him, and he went down on his knees, and put his hands around the girl’s throat. I couldn’t stand to see the rest!”

  Adele Kingsley stood as if fixed to the floor. The glitter had already faded from her eyes, and now they only mirrored a hollow kind of emptiness. It was like looking at a particularly obscene kind of statue, I thought idly. Gerard Kingsley was slumped in his armchair, the dead cigar dangling from his limp fingers. It was the time to feel compassion for both of them, I guessed, because at some stage in their lives they must have been a couple of ordinary human beings, no better and no worse than anybody else. But then I remembered the way the girl’s body had looked as it lay under the flowering shrub, and I knew I wasn’t a big enough man to feel compassion for either of them.

  I went past them into the front hall to the phone, dialed the same old number and, it seemed lately, the same old voice answered.

  “Wheeler,” I said, and gave him the address of the house. “I want a patrol car out here like fast to pick up Gerard and Adele Kingsley on a first-degree homicide—the Shirley Lucas killing—and also Walter Tyler, on an accessory before—no, forget that!—accessory after the fact. Tell them to treat him nicely because he’s going to be the state’s prime witness.”

  “Sure thing, Lieutenant!” The voice wasn’t quite so bland now.

  “What do you look like out of uniform?” I asked him.

  “Why, Lieutenant! Only my girlfriends can do justice to an answer to that question!”

  “I mean, in a suit!” I growled. “Or do you just paste a couple of flowers on to the vital parts, and the hell with the weather?”

  “I have a suit,” he said eagerly.

  “How long will it take you to go home, put on your suit, then get out to Hillside and meet me there?”

  “Maybe a half-hour.”

  “So you do that, Patrolman Stevens,” I grunted. “And don’t forget to change your gun at the same time you change your suit!”

  “Lieutenant?” There was a mournful note in his voice. “We’re a man short on the shift tonight, and the sheriff’s working late. I don’t think he’ll let me cut out from the desk.”

  “Put me through to him,” I said. “And you cut out the moment we’re connected.”

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant!”

  There were a couple of painful clicks in my ear, then Lavers grunted. That was all, he just goddamn well grunted!

  “Would the stupid jerk who connected me with the local swinery kindly connect me with the county sheriff?” I snarled.

  “It’s Lavers here,” he snarled right back.

  “Wheeler,” I said. “I need Patrolman Stevens for special duty urgently, and right now.”

  “Impossible! We’re a man short already on the night shift!”

  “So why don’t you help out?” I asked coldly.

  I held the phone away from my ear until the dinosaur-like trumpetings finally quieted down. “Sheriff ?” I said softly.

  “Are you still there, Wheeler?” he bellowed. “I already told you, no!”

  “What are you trying to do to me, Sheriff?” I asked in my best silkiest voice. “Try and get me to harbor a personal grudge against you, or something?”

  There was a strained silence that lasted all of five seconds, then his voice came through again, full
of the rich warm friendship that existed between man and man. “Sorry, Lieutenant. We must have had a crossed line the first time, because I didn’t hear you too well. You want Patrolamn Stevens for special duty—he’s yours!”

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” I told him courteously, and maybe I hung up too fast, because I think he was about to offer me another four patrol cars, and the National Guard thrown in as a kind of bonus.

  I watched the two stony-faced Kingsleys bundled into the patrol car about ten minutes later, followed by the still-weeping Walter Tyler. After they had gone, I went back to the alcove bar and finished my drink. Then I switched off all the lights on my way out, like a good cop should, locked the front door and put the house keys into my pocket. Whoever owned the house, I just hoped they had collected the rent in advance.

  Chapter Nine

  It was just eleven-thirty when I picked up Stevens in Hillside, then drove three blocks to the nearest bar. I ordered my usual drink and he said he would have a beer if it was okay to drink on duty. He looked like he had just stepped out of a four-color advertisement in one of the classier men’s magazines, in case his suit got soiled by the rest of the company he had to keep on the page, and I hated him.

  “You’re right,” I said, when I could trust my voice again. “A patrolman getting a beer while he’s on duty is a special kind of privilege.”

  “And a lieutenant drinking Scotch while on duty?” he asked innocently.

  “When you make lieutenant, you can get to ask that question again,” I told him.

  “I figured this was a real urgent, life-and-death, get-there-fast-or-they’ll-dynamite-the-powerhouse kind of assignment, the way you spoke when you called in, Lieutenant.” He was trying hard not to sound disappointed, but it showed up all over his face.

  “I just wanted to fill you in on the background first,” I said truthfully. “We come bearing good news. The killers of Shirley Lucas have been caught. You can expect varied reactions to that, and when we mention the names, a couple of them should be worth watching.”