The Will to Kill

by Robert Bloch

  I told Henley about Joe Calgary and his knife.

  When I finished, Lieutenant Cohen stood up and gave Henley a push. “Get on it, now,” he said. “Send out a pickup right away. No charge. If you find him, and he hasn’t got the knife on him, Bronson’ll make out a search warrant for you. Go up to his place and get it. One other thing—I want you to go down to Swanee’s bar. Talk to the night bartenders, the customers. Get the story, and anything you can on this Trixie. Her habits, her friends, who she’s come in with. The works.”

  Henley nodded and went out with the other man from Homicide.

  “Guess that’s all,” Lieutenant Cohen told me. “Now let’s go downtown.”

  We went downtown. It was anticlimax. Everything had been anticlimactic since I’d called the police.

  They booked me on suspicion, and I met Bronson who turned out to be an assistant D.A. I told the whole story all over again in the presence of a stenographer. I was calm, quiet, cooperative.

  They brought me a cup of coffee while I talked, and when it was all over they took me out down the hall to a cell.

  That’s when the photographers from the paper tried to rush me. And that’s when I stopped being calm, quiet and cooperative.

  At first I only shielded my eyes when the flashes went off. Then a little guy stuck his camera right through the bars in the corridor and tried to pop a bulb in front of my face.

  “Cut it out!” I yelled. “Cut—it—out!” That’s what I’d been yelling when I woke up, when all the knives were flashing just like the light flashed now. “Cut it out. It’s just like the other time. Cut it out!”

  Then I calmed down, but somehow I felt everything was different. It wasn’t that anybody had pressured me. But I got this feeling that I’d been through all this before. And why did it have to happen all over again? How many times would it happen over again? And why, why, why . . .

  I lay on my bunk in the cell and closed my eyes. When I did that I could still see little yellow rings from the flash-bulbs. And I still kept asking myself: why, why, why . . .

  Then I slept, really slept. That was the only good part, the sleeping. When I woke up it was late afternoon and Lieutenant Cohen was tapping on the bars.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” he said. “But someone would like to see you. If you don’t mind. This is Mr. Howard, the District Attorney.”

  “Hello, Mr. Kendall.” Mr. Howard stepped out of the shadows and nodded at me. “Can I come in for a minute?”

  “Make yourself at home,” I told him.

  “Will you need me?” Cohen asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Cohen went away, and the District Attorney unlocked the cell door and came in. He sat down on the chair and I got a good look at him. He was black-browed, bald, and he wore rimless glasses. When he smiled I got a look at some expensive bridgework. At least I thought it was bridgework and I was right.

  “Sorry I wasn’t around this morning,” he began. “But I had an appointment with the dentist.”

  “Hurt you?” I asked.

  “It was mur—” He stopped suddenly, then chuckled. “Better watch my language around here,” he said.

  “I don’t mind.” And I didn’t. He seemed nice. But then, they all seemed nice. Cohen and Henley and Bronson and all the rest of them. I was willing to bet that the guy in charge of the electric chair was ever so charming, too—but I didn’t want to meet him.

  I snapped my attention back to what Howard was saying.

  “I read the statement you gave to Mr. Bronson,” he told me. “It seems quite complete.”

  “Told him everything I know,” I said.

  “Mr. Bronson didn’t try to ask a lot of questions, did he? I mean, he wasn’t—”

  “Nobody pushed me around. This Lieutenant Cohen seems to be a pretty good guy, too.”

  “Thanks. I’m glad to hear that, Mr. Kendall.”

  “The name’s Tom.” I stood up. “Seeing that you’re asking, there’s only one thing really bothering me. Everyone is a little too polite. It makes me nervous.”

  “Sorry. It’s just our policy.” Howard took off his glasses and polished them. “Anything else make you nervous, Tom?”

  “Why—no. I guess not.”

  “What about the photographers?”

  “Oh, you mean this morning, in the hall. Well, you know how it is. The way they come at you, and the idea of getting your picture in the papers. That’s enough to make anybody nervous.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Howard put his glasses on again. “When the photographers tried to take your picture, you yelled something. Something about it being just like the other time. What other time, Tom?”

  The cell was cool, but I began to get wet under the arms.

  “Why—”

  “Look, Tom. You’re in here on a serious charge. If it’s upheld, I’m the man who’s going to have to prosecute that charge in court. How I do it will depend a lot on just what you’re willing to tell me now.” He smiled, and the new bridgework glistened in the single shaft of sunlight from the window. The teeth were false. And the smile? And the words?

  He sighed. “Don’t get the idea that this is some movie you’re seeing,” he said. “I’m not a fighting D.A., and I’m not up for re-election for three years yet. I can play it the hard way if I have to, but I don’t like it. So let’s not hold anything back.”

  My hands were sweating, too. I rubbed the palms against the side of the cot as I sat down again. He watched me all the time he talked.

  “You gave a pretty good statement, Tom,” he said. “I know, because I’ve read a lot of them. I think I can tell when a man is telling the truth. And you told the truth so far—but not the whole truth.”

  “What more do you want?”

  “Everything, Tom. Everything. What do you suppose we were doing while you slept? We had your name, address, previous background. Naturally, we checked. And the first thing we ran into was that—other time.”

  “Newspaper files?”

  “Teletype from the Coast. Photostats of all the documents will reach us by tomorrow afternoon. But meanwhile it would help if you told about it yourself. All of it.”

  He had me. He had me cold. I was sweating but I wanted to shiver. But I talked, then. I told him everything. About Marie, the blackouts, the inquest, and the hospital.

  “Good,” he said, when I finished. “It checks, so far. By the way, Tom, you’ll notice I didn’t write anything down. And there are no witnesses.”

  “It wouldn’t matter,” I told him. “Come to think of it, I don’t see why I was so panicked. After all, it was on the record, and I’ve been cleared. I’ll be cleared this time, too. Just as soon as you find Calgary and that knife of his.”

  Howard stood up. “Just got a report on that, too,” he said. “We haven’t picked up Calgary yet, but we did go through his room. Nothing there. So we checked on his movements. After he left Swanee’s we traced him to another place down the street. Dick’s. He sold his knife to a bartender there, for three dollars.”

  Now it was my turn to stand up. “You got it? You really got it?”

  “Here it is.”

  The District Attorney reached into his inner coat pocket and brought out a tissue-wrapped parcel. He undid it slowly, carefully.

  “We checked it for prints already,” he observed. “And they’re all the same. They may or may not be Calgary’s, but they’re certainly not yours—so that’s a matter of record.”

  I breathed a little easier, then. “What about blood?” I asked. “Did you find any bloodstains?”

  Howard nodded. “Yes. Some of them may be recent.”

  “And there’s some way, isn’t there, of telling whether it would be the same type of blood as Trixie’s?”

  “That’s difficult to say, but I believe there is a method.”

  “You have the coroner working on it, haven’t you, or the boys in your lab?”

  “No.”
/>   “Well for heaven’s sake, man—I don’t want to tell you your business, but it’s important to me. Get on it!”

  “It won’t be necessary.”

  I stared at him. He stared right back as he spoke.

  “You see, the first thing we did was to take the knife to the coroner and show it to him. He checked the wounds on Trixie’s body. Look at this blade, Tom. It’s big and broad. This isn’t the knife that cut Trixie Fisher’s throat.”

  “You’re—sure?”

  “Positive.” He stood close enough so that I could see the saliva form on his bridgework. “The weapon that killed Trixie, the weapon that ripped her up, was longer and thinner and pointed. Do you know what a poniard is, Tom?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s a French dagger, something like an Italian stiletto. Matter of fact, I’ve got a wall case down at the shop and I think there’s one up there. I sell them for curios from time to—”

  I stopped. I was saying too much, or not enough. “But wait a minute, I’ve had some of those pieces up ever since the place opened and all I’ve ever sold was a dirk and a Malay kris.”

  “You know a lot about knives, don’t you, Tom? Quite an expert.”

  “Just because I told you a poniard is like a stiletto? Look, Mr. Howard—go down to my store, take my key, go in and see for yourself. That poniard and the other pieces, I never bothered to dust them off. You can see for yourself that nothing has been disturbed for a year and a half—”

  The District Attorney sighed. “The boys have already been there, Tom. They found your wall case. It holds a German hunting knife, a Bowie, two Filipino stabbing knives and an Arab dagger. But no poniard.”

  “Maybe I was mistaken,” I said. “Maybe I sold it. I might have forgotten. A man can’t keep track of knives and everything he—”

  “You’ll find it’s very important to keep track of knives,” Mr. Howard answered. “Very important. The boys do. They checked your wall case thoroughly, because they thought it was so important. Some of the weapons were dusty, as you say, but the case itself was clean. The lock, for example, was quite immaculate even though it had been recently broken. Whoever took that poniard out wanted it in an awful hurry, I might say.”

  “Somebody stole it?” I asked.

  Mr. Howard unlocked the cell door and stepped outside. He closed the door again and smiled as it clanged.

  “That’s one theory,” he said. “Personally, I have another. Would you like to help me out, Tom? Would you like to tell me what you did with the knife after you ripped her?”

  SIX

  It must have been about an hour later when the guard came by. I was lying on my bunk watching the shaft of sunlight as it turned from white to gold, from gold to red, from red to dusty rose. I watched it fade, wondering why everything had faded for me today.

  “Visitor,” said the guard. He unlocked the door, and the sun started to shine again.

  “Kit!”

  “Darling—the minute I read the papers—”

  Her arms were around me tight. She was ready to kiss me, but I broke away.

  “The papers. Are they pretty bad?”

  “I could get you one. If you want to read it.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to read it.”

  “But you’ll tell me about it. About what happened.”

  “Sit down,” I said. I sat down in the shadows, so she couldn’t see my face. “Yes, I’ll tell you about it.”

  And once again I told my story. I’d told it so many times I thought it would be easy by now. But it wasn’t easy. Not the part about Trixie, about sitting in the booth and going home with her. That wasn’t easy at all. By the time I got to the end, I was barely whispering. Anyhow, I told her.

  She stood up and put her arms around me. That’s a natural gesture when you want to comfort somebody, or when you love somebody. Which was it this time?

  She kissed me, and I found out in a hurry. Not too much of a hurry, really. She took her time.

  “Then you’re not angry? I mean, you understand about—what I did? I thought you’d walk out on me forever, and I had a lot to drink, and—Kit, I’m sorry. She was a nice girl, really she was.”

  “Don’t talk any more,” Kit said. “Don’t talk any more.”

  We didn’t talk for quite a while then.

  “Lady, your time’s up.” The guard tapped the bars with his key chain.

  “All right.” She dabbed at her mouth. “Tom, I’ll see you tomorrow. And your lawyer will be here after supper.”

  “My lawyer?”

  “Of course. The papers said you didn’t name an attorney. So I went right around to Anthony Mingo, and he promised to come up after office hours.”

  “Anthony Mingo? He’s pretty big, isn’t he? How come you thought of—”

  “Don’t worry. He’s a friend of mine. As a matter of fact, we were almost engaged, once. But that was a long, long time ago.” Kit smiled at me and I smiled back.

  “Lady,” said the guard.

  “Coming.” She turned to me. “One thing more, Tom. I’ll need the combination.”

  “What combination?”

  “To your wall safe, silly. I never gave you back my key. But if I’m going to run the place while you’re here, I have to get at the stamps.”

  I could have kissed her. In fact, I did, until the guard came right into the cell and took Kit away.

  Then they turned on the lights and brought me my supper and I found out I could eat. I was still eating when Lieutenant Cohen showed up.

  “Hello, Kendall,” he said.

  It wasn’t anything in his face, it wasn’t anything in his tone of voice. But the way he switched from “Mr. Kendall” to just “Kendall” told me where I stood.

  “Hi,” I called. “Just eating. Want to join me?”

  “No, thanks. You got company coming. I thought I’d just stop by beforehand and see if you’d thought of anything more you could tell us. The District Attorney said he had a talk with you.”

  “That’s right. And I told him everything I know. I was hoping you might have news for me. Did you find Joe Calgary yet?”

  Cohen shook his head. “Don’t worry, he’ll turn up. Right now we’re more interested in a certain poniard.”

  “That’s probably turn up, too,” I answered.

  “Feel pretty good, eh, Kendall?”

  “Lots better, thank you.”

  “Nice-looking girl you’ve got there. Saw her in the office down the hall.”

  “Well, don’t go getting any ideas.”

  “A wife and four kids, and I need ideas?” He chuckled, then stepped closer to the bars. “Look, Kendall. This is off the record and I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m going to anyway. Howard’s out to nail you. He was pretty sore about the way that interview went this afternoon. Don’t let him fool you. He talks soft but he carries quite a big stick. If this case ever goes to court with him feeling that way, he’ll get them to throw the book at you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll remember that.”

  “It would help you a lot more right now if you could remember a few other things,” Lieutenant Cohen told me. He took an after-dinner nibble at his mustache. “The more cooperation you show, the better it’ll look in the records. You did fine this morning, you did fine right up until you talked to Howard. So why spoil it? If you could just tell me where that poniard is—”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You will be,” he answered, and walked away.

  Then the guard brought in Anthony Mingo.

  We shook hands. We sat down. He opened his briefcase and took out some note paper and asked me to tell him my story.

  This time I found it quite easy, easy enough so that I could study and observe Anthony Mingo during all the time that I told it.

  Anthony Mingo was dainty. Not delicate, not effeminate, but dainty. He was slight of stature rather than short; he was well-proportioned but small-boned. He had curly graying hair and a complex
ion like old china. His porcelain-blue eyes and thin pink lips seemed painted on, and his skin itself had this patina of daintily-preserved elegance. He looked like a doll; he looked like an elderly little boy in a fawn-colored, form-fitting summer suit.

  His gestures, when he made them, were quick but controlled. Every so often, during the course of my story, his head moved forward to catch, or punctuate, or emphasize a point. Always it moved quickly; always it halted quite suddenly, without a jerk. The control was perfect every time. And I noticed that, although he sat with his right leg crossed over the left, it didn’t swing back and forth, or move enough to disturb the sharp crease in the trousers. No waste motion here. And no waste emotion, either, in those painted eyes.

  I kept watching them, after a time, waiting for some reaction. None came, until I finished what I had to say.

  “That’s all,” I concluded. “You know my background. You know what happened with Trixie, and what I told the police and the D.A. this afternoon. What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” And the emotion came into the eyes now, the emotion I hadn’t suspected. “Why, my dear boy, I think it’s perfectly fascinating! Have you seen the papers?”

  I shook my head.

  “They’re having a field day, I assure you, a positive field day! Forgive me. I know it’s not something to be treated lightly. But it’s absolutely delicious the way the press has handled this affair. The knife and sex angle, of course—it’s only to be expected. But I wish the reporters would get together and agree which form to use. One of them compares you to Giles de Retz and the other insists on using Gilles de Rais. Not that it matters.”

  I stood up. “Look, Mr. Mingo. I’ve had a long, hard day. Tomorrow won’t be easier. So if you don’t mind, please go away and be fascinated somewhere else.”

  He raised a delicate hand. Not too far, just far enough. “A thousand apologies, Mr. Kendall! I’ve been singularly lacking in good taste, as well as in tact. And I apologize, abjectly.”

  He registered abjectness. Precise, correct abjectness. “Do not misunderstand. If I forbear to show sympathy, it is because sympathy is not my province in this matter. I find it best for my clients that I remain objective. And at times my somewhat inane evidence of humor helps me to maintain that objectivity.”