by M. K. Wren
But that hope was too faint to lighten his foot on the accelerator.
The triangular yellow warning of an approaching curve he ignored, leaning close to the windshield, straining to see through the torrents arrowing out of the darkness to smash into the glass between the frantic sweeps of the wipers. He was looking for a certain cross street, one that was paved and would take him without risk of getting mired in mud to Front Street, which was also paved.
A street sign swam into the headlights. He braked too hard and skewed into a flamboyant skid, his breath stopping until he had the car under control and reeled into a right turn. The pounding of his heart set his head aching in blinding pulsations. He floor-boarded the accelerator as if he could leave the pain behind, hurtling past houses with their windows full of warm yellow light like a howling apparition from a nether world. Only three blocks. The sign announcing Front Street sprang into the lights.
He slowed, but not enough, and this turn produced a skid almost as hair-raising as the last. He came out of it muttering an expression of gratitude that was probably a prayer and careened north into the stilettos of rain. When the headlights flashed on curved, metallic surfaces, he surrendered the hope that Brian had been waylaid by mud.
The XK-E was parked in front of Beryl Randall’s outwardly and deceptively humble home.
He slid to a stop fifty yards short of the house. The alarm whined to remind him he’d left the keys in the ignition, but he only slammed the door to silence it and struck out for the house, as much blinded by rain as darkness. The front door was open, and he didn’t stop to wonder if that was a stroke of luck or simply an almost inevitable oversight in the confusion of Brian’s unexpected arrival.
He approached the door from the right, and when he reached it paused, listening, before he leaned far enough past the jamb to look down the shadowy tunnel of the hall. There were voices; no, only one voice now, unintelligible against the wind and rain.
Brian was in profile to him, standing with his back to the fireplace, intent on something—rather, it would be someone—across the room from him. His chin was thrust forward, his hands open at his sides as if he were ready to attack, but the incredulous chagrin drawing his features tight made it evident that his stance was defensive.
He was facing a gun. And more: an incredible truth. Conan slipped into the hall, pressing close to the right-hand wall, and moved like a shadow in the shadows toward the light, toward Brian, toward that voice. He recognized it, and now could understand the words.
“…what could I do, Brian? Theo left me penniless. And I never took enough to really hurt you. You didn’t even miss it. No one did until the IRS came in, until that Nye person started poking around. It was all his fault.”
Conan was watching Brian; he didn’t want to attract his attention. Not yet. But there seemed to be no danger of that. Brian was too morbidly fascinated, like a doomed animal hypnotized by a predator.
He asked huskily, “But…why—why did you kill him?”
“Oh, but I didn’t,” the voice responded with earnest candor. “It was an accident. You see, I had to talk to him after what he said to you in the bar, and when he told me he knew—I mean, he’d figured it out from the records—and I couldn’t just…well, we went to the kitchen. We could talk in private there. And he…he slipped and hit his head on the cutting table. Oh, it made a terrible sound. I thought he was dead. Really, I did, Brian.…”
Conan came to the end of the wall and reached the metal screen that served as a room divider. There he stopped and looked through the pattern of gold-colored arabesques.
An old woman was standing in the middle of the room. An old woman caught in the shimmering light of a chandelier that flashed on glittering gilt, on blood-red ruby glass, on cleaved crystal planes, on simpering miniature goddesses and prudish nymphs, on ebony animal appendages clawing crystal spheres, on quivering fringes and tangled laces, on china writhing with bloated flowers; knickknacks; bric-a-brac; a grotesque assemblage of inanimate things that seemed to smirk and giggle among themselves.
An old woman who was considered only an innocent dupe at the Tillamook bus depot; an old woman with a thin, sad crown of white hair, her face ungraced with cosmetics to give warmth to the tired skin, her creased mouth sunken in the absence of false teeth, her naked, browless eyes vague and unfocused without the glasses. She wore a full-length bathrobe now, a bulky, quilted garment designed to ward off the chills to which old joints are so sensitive, but no doubt in Tillamook she had worn a heavy coat to add apparent weight, and then, as now, there would have been no elastic undergarments to restrain the lax sag of aging flesh.
But there was one thing about this old woman that wouldn’t have been exposed in Tillamook.
The small automatic in her hand.
Conan found an ambiguous irony in that gun. She’d been so meticulous about leaving no incriminating evidence, yet she hadn’t disposed of the weapon with which she shot Johnny Hancock.
Perhaps she still considered herself above suspicion.
“…never, never intended for you to be blamed, Brian. If you’d only gone home when you should have, everything would’ve been fine. I waited in my car for you to leave. I waited and waited, but you would choose that night to get so drunk you passed out on the bar.”
Brian shook his head at that tone of annoyed rebuke and whispered, “Oh, God…oh, God help me.…”
“Well, what could I do? Finally, I decided I’d better get rid of the records. Nye found out about—well, about my little fudging from them. I was going to come back to take care of…of him. I thought surely you’d be gone by then. But—oh, that car! It wouldn’t start again. I had to walk all the way home, and without a car, I couldn’t very well do anything about Nye. I mean, it would be difficult enough to get him from the freezer to my car, but to dispose of his—of him without a car—”
“Bea, you…you just walked home and went to bed after leaving a man in—leaving him to freeze to death?”
“I told you, I thought he was dead when—”
“Oh, I can’t believe this!”
His hands knotted into fists, he took an unsteady step toward her, and the gun came up, her eyes lost their ingenuous vagueness, turning cold and obdurate.
“Brian, you mustn’t let your temper get out of hand.”
“My temper?” He stared at her hopelessly. “You—oh, God, you’re crazy! What’re you going to do now? Kill me, too?”
She prefaced her answer with a long, plaintive sigh.
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to. Oh, Brian, really, you give me no choice. Don’t you see that?”
His face was contorted not with anger, but with an inner torment that could find no verbal expression. She raised the gun, sighting on his heart, but he only stared at her. Perhaps he still didn’t believe he was face to face with his own death. Or perhaps he was too deep in shock to care.
Conan moved along the screen; the gun wavered, then abruptly swung around toward him.
“Who’s there? Who’s there?”
He dropped into a crouch. The gun cracked, the bullet ringing when it hit the screen.
“Who’s there?”
Another brittle crack, a screech of alarm. Conan was past the screen, springing to the attack, but Brian was ahead of him, his strangled cry raw with unleashed rage. Then both alarm and rage were stifled in grunts of impact. The gun cracked again, the sound muffled in a tangle of bodies as they hit the floor and tumbled against the far wall.
Beryl came up shrieking—short, gasping screams that didn’t stop even when Conan scrambled for her, rolled with her, straining for the gun, while she kicked, bit, and clawed with feline viciousness. The gun went off twice more, but he had her arm; the bullets smashed harmlessly into the wall. He banged her hand against the floor unmercifully while her shrieks turned to howls of pain, and finally the gun went skating under a chair.
He dived for it; the chair crashed over, knocking a painting off the wall, and as soon as the g
un was in his hand, he twisted around to face her.
But she didn’t launch a new attack.
She was incapable of that, lying hunched on her elbows, her strength spent, toothless mouth sagging open, every panting breath rasping in her throat.
Conan thrust the gun in his pocket, watching her numbly as she began crawling, crawling toward Brian.
He lay on his side, knees drawn up, both hands pressed to his chest to contain the red flow that welled between his fingers and spread across his shirt. A dark stain was forming on the rug beneath him.
“Oh, Brian…”
She stretched out a shaking hand to him, and his lips pulled back from his teeth, loathing vying with pain to make every word a wrenching effort.
“Get—get away from me, you dotty old bitch! Get away from me!”
She recoiled as if she’d been struck.
“Brian, how can you say—”
Conan cut off the incredible question as he dragged her to her feet and pushed her down onto a plush settee, stomach rebelling at her look of pained insult. He turned away, stumbling against a side table; it toppled, its burden of bric-a-brac cascading to the parquet floor. Beryl shrieked in dismay and sank to her knees among the shattered ruins.
He left her to the debris and knelt beside Brian, his fingers seeking the pulse in his throat. He was still conscious, but too bound in pain to speak, his pulse faint and erratic, his breathing almost undetectable. His forehead was wet with perspiration, his cheeks wet with something else; with tears. That was for another kind of pain.
Conan rose and found a telephone—a brass-and-porcelain monstrosity—and dialed the police station. Steve Travers was on the line in a matter of seconds.
“Conan! Is that—Where are you?”
He felt the weight of the gun in his pocket as he watched Beryl gathering the pieces of a cobalt vase into a little pile. She’d cut her hand, but didn’t seem to notice the bloody prints it made on the floor.
“I’m at Beryl Randall’s house, Steve. I have a killer and a murder weapon for you. And another victim. Get an ambulance here fast.”
Beryl droned monotonously, “Oh, look what you’ve done.… Look what you’ve done.…”
Chapter 26
The jangle of the phone jarred Conan from a deep sleep plagued with amorphous dreams, but he let it ring twice more before he made a move toward it in order to orient himself and be sure this was in fact his own bed, that it actually was the morning sun flashing on the breakers outside.
The fourth ring sounded while he propped himself on one elbow and fumbled for the phone; the fifth ring was cut off when he finally lifted the receiver.
“Hello.”
“It’s Steve, Conan. How’re you feeling?”
That, he decided, was something better left undiscussed on this aching morning after.
“I’m all right, Steve. Where are you?”
“The police station. Where else? Look, I think you better get down here. Luther Dix arrived a few minutes ago.”
“Damn. What does he want?”
“It’ll be easier to explain if you’ll just come on down to the station.”
After a moment, he agreed reluctantly. “All right. Give me fifteen minutes.” Then as he began levering himself out of bed, “No, make that twenty.”
It was actually twenty-five. He kept lapsing into musings that made slow work of the automatic processes of showering, shaving, and dressing. The odors of hospital and jail melded in memory, calling up vagrant fragmentary images.
Brian at the hospital. Conan had called Nicky Heideger; he couldn’t remember when, but she was there, and it took her an hour in surgery to excise the bullet in Brian’s lung and repair the damage it had done. When she emerged from the operating room, her succinct assessment was that Brian had the constitution of an ox; otherwise, he probably wouldn’t be alive.
Conan, she credited with the pigheadedness of a mule. That was while she repaired the damage he had sustained, including putting a new cast on his hand.
And Beryl Randall at the police station. Beryl in hastily donned street clothes and wig, protesting through every stage of her incarceration the inconsiderateness of it. “But you can’t expect me to stay in one of those filthy jail cells.…”
The cells weren’t filthy, whatever else they were, and by now she would have been transferred to the county courthouse, which had segregated facilities for women prisoners. No doubt she would find them equally offensive.
She admitted nothing. She refused to answer a single question and considered the booking officer’s inquiry about her age particularly impertinent. But Steve had her gun for ballistics comparison with the bullet recovered from Johnny Hancock’s body, and he had Conan’s detailed statement recounting the confession he overheard while Beryl made her ritualistic rationalizations to Brian.
And Kleber had an explanation for the initials in the freezer. He accepted it with laudable grace.
Conan was still so preoccupied when he drove to the police station, he nearly forgot why he was going there, but two blocks before he reached it, as if that was the range of some unknown frequency that Luther Dix broadcast, Conan remembered, and by the time he arrived at the station, the muscles of his jaws were pulsing with tension.
Dix was in Kleber’s office with the chief and Steve. Conan didn’t pause to knock, and would have dispensed with amenities altogether if Kleber hadn’t offered such a warmly courteous, “Good morning, Mr. Flagg.”
Mister Flagg. It was remarkable.
“Good morning, Chief.” Then with a glance at Steve, who was standing at one side of the desk, “Hello, Steve,” then finally to Luther Dix, who sat sternly upright in one of the chairs in front of the desk, “Mr. Dix.”
“Mr. Flagg.” He seemed surprised to see him and not too happy about it.
Steve took an envelope from Kleber’s desk and handed it to Conan.
“Mr. Dix brought this. It was written by Eliot Nye last Monday, probably less than twelve hours before he died.”
Conan took the letter, but before he could even assimilate its existence, Dix protested, “Mr. Travers! That letter is IRS business—or perhaps police business at this point—and I certainly don’t think—”
Kleber said, “Well, now, I figure Mr. Flagg’s got a right to know about it. He’s been in on this thing from the beginning, and he was the one who broke the case.”
That was more than remarkable; it was astounding. Conan murmured gratefully, “Thank you, Chief.”
Dix was equally astounded, especially when he saw that Steve was in agreement with Kleber. Dix sagged back into his chair in blinking silence while Conan unfolded the letter.
It had a fastidiously formal look about it, typed with no errors on heavy bond under the IRS letterhead. Conan scanned it hurriedly first, then gave it a second, closer reading.
Holliday Beach
February 9
Re: Brian Tally audit (Social Security Number 475-32-5087, Document Locator Number 83434-115-50733-7.)
Dear Mr. Dix:
I will discuss this matter with you later today by telephone, but I feel it imperative that I offer my recommendation in writing as quickly as possible so that it may be acted upon promptly.
On the basis of the second audit and my investigation of accounting and inventory procedures at the Surf House Restaurant, I am convinced that the deficiency in reported profits which I noted in my previous audit was not due to purposeful misrepresentation on Mr. Tally’s part, but to fraud of which he was himself the unknowing victim.
I shall present the evidence upon which this assumption is based in detail in a future report, but I am convinced at this time that Mr. Tally is—and has been for several years—the victim of embezzlement, and the money thus stolen from him accounts for the low profit ratio which led me to recommend levying a tax deficiency against him. I am also convinced that only one person could possibly be responsible for this embezzlement scheme, and that is his bookkeeper, Mrs. Beryl Randa
ll.
In view of this development, I am recommending that the tax deficiency claim against Mr. Tally be dropped, and that the seizure order due to be executed next Friday be rescinded, or at least deferred pending further investigation.
Sincerely,
Eliot Nye
Conan studied the tidy signature and wondered what there was about the letter that awakened grief he’d never felt for the man who had written it. Finally, he put it back in its envelope and looked at the postmark.
“Mr. Dix, this was mailed last Monday. When did you receive it?”
“It arrived in the afternoon mail on Wednesday.”
Conan felt the anger congesting his throat like something alien his body was trying to expel.
“Wednesday? And you didn’t bother to tell Steve or Chief Kleber about it until today?”
Dix said stiffly, “It was necessary to consult our legal department before I could take any action on it. That, of course, took some time; they’re understaffed and always very busy.”
“Busy! While your legal department was so damn busy, a man was murdered! A human life, Mr. Dix, lost while you went through channels, and maybe Johnny Hancock’s wasn’t much of a life, but it was his, and he wouldn’t have lost it if you’d called Steve as soon as you received this letter. Nor would Brian Tally be lying in a hospital recovering from a bullet wound that nearly killed him; nearly made him a second victim of your official caution.”
Dix turned lividly pink under that attack.
“Mr. Flagg, I object to your taking that tone with me! I had no way of seeing into the future, and you have no way of proving that my retaining that letter for a few days had any effect whatsoever on the subsequent course of events.”
Conan didn’t argue that. All at once it seemed darkly, futilely humorous. But he couldn’t laugh at it.
“What about the IRS claim against Brian?”
Dix took a deep breath, his mouth pursed.
“In light of Eliot’s recommendation and the fact that the pertinent records have been lost—if it can be shown that Tally had nothing to do with their loss—the case will be dropped.” Then he added piously, “You’ll note that the seizure order was not carried out yesterday. I put an indefinite hold on it when I received Eliot’s letter.”
