Six Seconds to Kill

by Brett Halliday

  Brett Halliday

  Six Seconts to Kill

  CHAPTER 1

  More martinis arrived. Camilla Steele touched the chilled glass lightly with her fingertips. She could coast with this one, taking her time, and if everybody stayed relaxed and cheerful, and if she remembered to eat something, there was a good chance that she could kill the evening, get to sleep at a reasonable hour and kill the night.

  She raised her glass and smiled at the man she was with. “Pretty soon we ought to order dinner. But not right away.”

  Even without her glasses, despite the subdued light, she was almost positive that the man’s name was either Wally or Joe. Lately the people she went to dinner with had tended to overlap at the edges. They wore the same kind of suits, made their living in similar ways and all, for some reason, seemed to smoke cigars.

  He breathed out a plume of smoke. It was Wally, probably. He sold real estate, not that it mattered. He was the best kind—he never asked questions, and wasn’t interested in anything that had happened earlier than the previous week.

  “Camilla, you’re the best-looking lady in Miami Beach.”

  She murmured something. She didn’t mind compliments, but she was sorry to say this one was hardly true. She was wearing a white cocktail dress, slit deeply at the neck. With her tanned skin, her very blond hair, she probably looked all right at the moment, but that was the point of these dim bars. She was too thin. If she had been interested in that kind of arithmetic, she could have counted her ribs. Until recently she had played a fiercely competitive game of tennis, and her movements still had a kind of controlled quickness and grace. She was thirty years old. In ordinary light she looked forty.

  “I have a suggestion,” Wally said, “and I’ve learned from experience that the time to come out with something startling is between the second and third martini. The idea is this. I think we ought to get married.”

  His face sprang into focus. Dark eyes, dark hair and sideburns, a humorous set to his mouth. It wasn’t either Wally or Joe. It was Paul London, damn it, which could mean another rough night.

  “Do you really want to bother?” she said lightly, hoping that his words, like the cigar smoke, would vanish into the air-conditioning. “Let’s have dinner and then just go to bed together as usual.”

  “No reason we can’t do all three.”

  She started to raise her glass. Paul took her wrist, spilling some of the gin.

  “Put it down for a minute, Cam. I want sixty seconds of your time, and you can clock me. After that we can go on drinking martinis until the management throws us out. Seriously.”

  “I hate that word.”

  He said it again. “Seriously. We’ve been seeing each other once every ten days, and in my opinion it isn’t enough. But if that’s what you want I’ll settle for it. Nothing stays the same, Camilla. We were in high school together, for God’s sake. What is it—fifteen years ago, now. You sent me marijuana brownies in the Marines, you dear girl. We’ve been having sex, off and on, for fourteen years, which I hope gives me a certain amount of seniority. And lately I’ve been getting the feeling that as far as you were concerned I could be anybody. My name doesn’t happen to be Max. Or Charley.”

  “I know exactly what you’re going to say.”

  He laughed and released her wrist. “Sure. Stop drinking so much. Stop spending the night with other guys, or cut down a little. Stop taking so many pills, and find out the name of the damn pill before you take it. All that’s standard advice. The reason I want you to marry me is to give you something to think about besides the Honorable Eliot J. Crowther.”

  “I have to think about him now and then,” she said reasonably, “if I’m going to assassinate him.”

  “Damn it,” he burst out. “That stopped being funny years ago. I hope you haven’t been writing him any more of those nutty letters.”

  She smiled. “It’s against the law to write threatening letters to a public official, didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”

  “It’s also damned dumb. You aren’t going to kill anybody. It’s not your style. Not to mention the fact that killing the attorney-general of the United States wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the world. His security people probably don’t even let him see your letters. You’re only injuring one person. Not Eliot Crowther—yourself.”

  The horrible thing about this was that she knew it was true. She whispered, “It’s the only thing I have to hold on to, Paul.”

  “Cut it out,” he said roughly. “It’s ancient history. I’m going to risk a declaration. I think I love you. The reason I’m not sure is that you keep changing. I do know I want to wake up in the same room with you every morning. That part’s definite. When Max calls I’ll tell him you’ve just moved to Hawaii. I’m running over my sixty seconds, but I’m going to say a few more things whether you like it or not. You had a run of bad luck. Getting married to Felix Steele was the unluckiest thing that could happen to a nice young girl. I know it’s a mean thing to say, but the guy was a first-class bastard.”

  “You can’t think I didn’t know that.”

  Paul looked at her closely. “When did it dawn on you?”

  “Sometime in the middle of the second day. It was weird, Paul. He never looked it, but he was so damned insecure. He was always scared I was going to move out. And I finally did, you know. I think that was one of the reasons for what happened. But it isn’t considered ladylike to divorce your husband when he’s on trial for murder.”

  She sipped some of her martini. Paul London wasn’t the only idiot who thought that talking about things helped. Three separate doctors had given her the same advice—dredge it up from your subconscious and you’ll feel better. At first she had tried. She had talked endlessly, and of course the more she talked about it the worse she felt.

  She said quietly, “Being married to you might be pleasant in some ways. But be thankful I’m saying no—my kind of bad luck can be catching.”

  “I’m willing to take a chance.”

  “Let’s drop it, Paul. It’s distracting. I have other things on my mind.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Do you really think Eliot Crowther doesn’t read my letters? He reads them and they terrify him.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How do you think I got this freaky job with the foundation? Nobody worries whether I come to work or not. Plenty of money so I can pay my bills at the drugstore and the liquor store. Strings were pulled. They were pulled by Crowther, and I know that for a fact.”

  “Then it was nice of him. It must mean he feels a little responsible for what happened.”

  She finished her martini in one long pull. It wouldn’t hit her for a moment, but if she wanted to explain anything—she didn’t know why she bothered—she had better do it in a hurry.

  “How can I marry you? You’re right—a minute ago I didn’t even know who you were! And I honestly didn’t care! I only have room for one name in my mind, and how clever of you to guess it’s Crowther. I do want to assassinate that man, Paul. I know it won’t be easy, and I’m not sure I’m up to it.”

  “I hope you don’t say things like this to other people. I know you don’t mean it.”

  “I mean it,” she insisted. “I’m being very practical about the difficulties.”

  She put her hand on his and said matter-of-factly, “I know I’m a little deranged. That’s no longer news. I don’t even hate him. It just seems to me that he sums everything up! Everything that’s ugly and horrible about the way we live. He knew Felix didn’t kill that woman. He must have known. But what a chance for a district attorney.”

  “Camilla, that’s what district attorneys are for. He was playing the role.”

  “An
d it carried him all the way to the cabinet. What’s the next step, the Senate?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said seriously. “This could be the last stop. He hasn’t been in the papers for six months. The thing you forget—he looks like an important man, with that hair and that voice, but basically he’s a jerk. Sooner or later people find it out.”

  “He’s a symbol. He’s not a person. When I shoot him he’ll bleed press releases.”

  The gin in her last drink ended its journey and exploded behind her eyes. And that was enough of an explanation for one day. If Paul wanted to buy her another drink or two and feed her dinner, she would repay him by taking him back to her apartment for a fast bout of love-making which she might not even remember in the morning. She needed someone at night. The nights she slept alone were the bad ones. There would be new lines around her eyes the next time she looked. She knew she was deteriorating fast—it was her way of commenting on the mess around her.

  Paul’s eyes seemed to be moving from one place to another in his face, which was otherwise, as always, solid and dependable. He had marvelous arms and shoulders, the legs of a quarter-miler. If she had married him instead of Felix Steele—

  But she hadn’t, she very definitely hadn’t, she had married a handsome boy with a black Maserati, incredible clothes, a monthly check from a trust fund set up by a grandfather. And the trap had snapped shut. She was still in the trap, and she no longer expected to get out. Accepting that truth might be progress of a sort.

  Two days after she left her husband—that fact was never brought out at the trial—he was arrested for the rape and murder of a beautiful Negro singer in her suite in a Miami Beach hotel. He had been taking the drug commonly referred to as “speed.” He had been seen in the hotel corridor with blood on his shirt. For some unexplained reason—Camilla, who knew him better than most, concluded that it was a queer kind of put-on, to show that he was brighter than the detectives—he had answered their questions playfully, admitting to lustful thoughts about the singer when he watched her perform. Camilla suspected that the particular crime of rape was beyond his capabilities. But it was the right moment in history for a white man to be convicted and executed for the rape-murder of a black woman, something that for two hundred years had happened only when the colors were reversed.

  It was a spectacular trial, with a victim who was not only black but famous, a defendant who was rich and wild, a drug-taker. Felix’s family had just the right amount of political clout. They sounded more important than they actually were. Crowther defied their attempts to bring political influence to bear, and got his conviction and his reputation.

  Camilla was twenty-two that year. She was twenty-seven when her husband was finally executed.

  Now, three years later, she pressed Paul’s hand, feeling a sudden need for human contact. She had thought she was beyond all that, but perhaps not. She wished she could make him understand. She, too, had been playing a role—the loyal wife, insisting on her husband’s innocence, helping organize a defense committee, raising money for new appeals. The white-supremacy groups made sure that the defense fund was never short of cash. Felix himself ran the campaign from his condemned cell, using his wife as liaison. Month by month he became more hateful to her. He might be innocent of the murder, but of nothing else. She despised the cause, the bigots who were attracted to it, the embittered man in his cell.

  After losing the battle for a new trial, she fought to have his sentence commuted. And if she succeeded, he told her, he had promised himself that he would kill one Negro convict for every year he was kept in jail. He spent most of his time devising ways of doing it without being caught.

  He horrified her, but in the end he bored her. During the last weeks she was completely fed up with the legal maneuverings and her husband’s obsession. She longed for an end to the ordeal, for a definite date after which there would be no more appeals, no more writs and stays, no more talk.

  And when it happened, she felt that she had helped bring it about. A few days later, she swallowed too many sleeping pills, an easy way to stop thinking.

  She was out for forty-eight hours, and her recovery was slow and painful. She wrote her first letter to Eliot Crowther from the hospital, warning him not to expect to live forever.

  After that, one of her main interests, at times her only interest, was following Crowther’s rise in state and national politics. Two years later, a Miami private detective named Michael Shayne brought in a talkative hotel thief who had rashly boasted of having committed the murder for which Felix Steele had been killed. Steele had been unlucky that day, this man had been lucky. His good luck continued. He repudiated the confession, and in the absence of other evidence the grand jury failed to indict. Camilla’s doctors were afraid this would be bad for her, but she had decided by that time that nothing mattered very much, except to see if she could harass Eliot Crowther and make him uneasy.

  Her letters became more and more ingenious. Someone like Paul London, of course, would consider them a symptom of mental illness. And they were. She was willing to concede the point. They were!

  She squeezed his hand and picked up her glass, which she found to be empty.

  “Now that that’s taken care of,” she said, as though she had actually explained something, “it’s time for more drinks.”

  “It’s time for dinner. I see you don’t like the idea about getting married. I’ve got another idea, and this is nearly as good. Come to Mexico with me. I’ve still got two weeks of vacation.”

  “I’m sorry, Paul, it’s out of the question.”

  Ordinarily she would have accepted promptly, because why not? But she couldn’t leave Miami right now. She was looking forward to something. For a moment she couldn’t remember what, and then it came to her—her number-one enemy, Mr. Eliot Crowther, was showing himself in Miami Beach the next Saturday, to accept some kind of award—for hypocrisy and opportunism, probably. She was planning to be in his hotel lobby when he walked through. She didn’t intend to spit at him, or shout. She was simply going to post herself where he couldn’t avoid seeing her. She had been practicing a smile. If she did it right, she was sure she could unsettle him. When he accepted his damn award, she hoped he would still be stammering and mopping sweat from his forehead.

  Paul continued to badger her. He had friends in Acapulco. There was a hotel which would give him a fifty percent discount. He refused to let go of the subject, and finally she lost patience and told him to disappear.

  He looked at her. “What was that word?”

  “I don’t mean forever. But as far as tonight goes—” She gripped the edge of the table in both hands. “I mean it. I can’t talk about it any more. You thought up this Mexican deal so Crowther and I wouldn’t be in the same town at the same time. I suppose it’s sweet of you. But you remind me of too many things. It’s honestly much easier with someone absolutely new.”

  “I saw a movie yesterday. We could talk about that.”

  She shook her head without looking at him. “Good night, dear. I can’t get properly plastered with you around. I’ll sit here and brood for five minutes, and then I’ll call somebody.”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything about marriage. That’s what scared you.”

  “Leave some money for the drinks.”

  He took out a bill, folded it carefully and put it under her empty glass. “As long as you realize this isn’t such a wonderful way to live.”

  “I’m not advocating it for everybody. For me it works.”

  “Does it?” he said gently. “I think I’ll go to Mexico anyway. When I get back I won’t call you for a while. But if you need anything get in touch with me.” He kissed her lightly. “Good luck.”

  She watched him walk away, and almost changed her mind. He had a sexy way of moving. The one thing that was wrong with him was that he had terrible taste in women. Anybody with any native intelligence at all could see that Camilla Steele carried a very high risk, and you had to be a little
sick yourself to take a chance on getting involved.

  She felt the first probing touch of depression, an old acquaintance. She had to do something about that right away, or she would sit here the rest of the evening, ordering drinks and not bothering to phone anybody because it was too much of a problem to put a coin in the phone and dial without making a mistake. And she would arrive home alone, the one thing she was desperate to avoid.

  She took a pill-holder out of her purse and ripped the plastic sheet to get at one of the pretty striped pills inside. If she remembered correctly, these babies were slightly unpredictable when combined with gin. There was only one way to find out.

  She washed it down with what was left of Paul’s martini, and looked for a waiter to order another.

  When he brought it he said, “A phone call for you, Mrs. Steele.”

  “Will you tell them I just left?” She corrected herself instantly. “No, I’ll take it.”

  This might save her the trouble of dialing. The public phones were hung on the wall beyond the end of the bar. One of the drinkers, a man in a brilliant sports shirt, spoke to her as she passed, and she stopped to see if she knew him. He was holding a lighted cigar. Only the cigar was familiar; everything else she was seeing for the first time. Perhaps it didn’t matter. It would set a precedent, but that would be one way of guaranteeing that he wouldn’t be thinking of her in terms of the losing side in a celebrated murder case.

  She smiled at him and picked up the phone. “Hello. Camilla Steele.”

  “At last,” a voice said. “I am overjoyed to locate you. But I must make sure. Is it indeed the famous Camilla Steele?”

  “Who is this?” she said sharply.

  “Speak louder. There is much noise there.” She didn’t recognize the voice; the accent was vaguely Spanish. “Hold the phone tightly to one ear and stop up the other with your finger. I think we will do OK. This is in connection with a pig named Eliot Crowther.”

  She clattered the phone back on the hook. She looked at the dial, frowning. The pill had dissolved and was beginning to run through her veins. The air darkened and filled with swirling black dots, but each number and letter on the dial was brilliantly distinct, as though lighted from within. When the phone rang again she snatched it up and said, “I have to know who’s talking.”