Killy

by Donald E. Westlake

  I was constantly guilty with her, first for tactless stupidity, now for sweaty imaginings. I wanted to make amends, to do something for her, I wasn’t sure what. I said, ‘Do you want some coffee?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she whispered. ‘Please.’ She turned her face away, pressed it to the back of the sofa.

  I looked around, distraught. ‘I’ll come back later,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow, or some other time.’

  ‘No.’ The whisper was so faint I could barely hear it. ‘Please stay.’

  So I stayed. I retreated to the armchair on the other side of the room, and sat there watching her. She lay unmoving, her hands folded together on her waist, her head turned so the face was away from me. Her hair was a deep black, and soft-looking, and now rumpled and disarranged.

  In the silence, I could think about what she’d told me. Gar was dead, murdered, shot. I remembered Captain Willick’s phrase shot to death. Now, a second time, it had happened. A living human being was now decaying vegetable. Shot to death.

  By the same man, surely, and with the same gun. But this time he’d left the gun, after first being careful to wipe it clean. Could he wipe his hands clean as readily? Whatever he touched from now on, this unknown man, wouldn’t he leave a smear, a slime, an invisible film of blood behind? Where he trod in the world from now on, wouldn’t the mark of his foot be bloody?

  I remembered The Picture of Dorian Gray; every man had a painting like that, down inside him. There would be no mark on the murderer, not on the outside. He would have to be found some other way.

  Why had he killed Gar? Because Gar, like Charles Hamilton, had become a danger to him. Both had contacted men from the union, the one with knowledge that could harm the murderer, the other with awareness of that knowledge. Gar had started along the same trail that had led Charles Hamilton to his discovery and his death. It had led Gar to death, too.

  Then another thought occurred to me. Twenty-five men had signed their names to the second letter Hamilton had sent to tin-union, and now two of those men were dead. Were more of them to die? Still, the murderer this time had left the gun, as though to announce that now he was finished, that he had done all he considered necessary.

  What were Ben and Jerry thinking now? What was their Captain Willick thinking? Walter had still been imprisoned by them when Gar was being murdered, and I had two witnesses to bolster my own alibi. Their play-acting at their jobs, their sham and their misuse of their authority, had resulted in more than the inconveniencing of two men from Washington, it had resulted in a second murder. Though I knew full well no legal responsibility could be held against them, I knew just as well that they were accessories to that second murder. In being more concerned about pleasing Mr Fleisch than looking for a murderer, they had left that murderer free to kill again. I wondered if self-defensive, hypocritical Captain Willick was thinking about that now, realizing his own guilt. I hoped so.

  The time stretched by, expanding slowly, but still the girl on the sofa didn’t move. After a while I looked around the room, noticing again the clean simplicity of the furnishings, and judging that the granddaughter had probably selected everything. Gar hadn’t been the kind of man to worry about his surroundings.

  There was a clock on one table, a glass face edged in gold and with gold hands. It read ten minutes to twelve, and when I saw it I remembered with a start that Phil and George didn’t have any idea where I was. They were probably convinced by now that I’d been kidnapped. Since I wasn’t doing any good here, I ought to get back to them.

  I got to my feet. ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Miss—‘ I didn’t yet know her name.

  ‘Alice MacCann,’ she said, lifeless voice muffled by the back of the sofa against which her face was still pressed.

  ‘Miss MacCann. I really ought to get back to the motel. My friends will be worried about me.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sat up, all at once, smoothly, and turned to face me. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘For what? All I did was make you cry.’

  ‘You sat with me. Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll come back later on. Whatever you say. We can talk.’

  ‘This evening. There are things I want to tell you.’

  ‘All right.’ I stifled a smile of elation at that—had Gar found out something, and had he told his granddaughter? But I had sense enough not to push it. ‘I’ll be going now,’ I said.

  Though I didn’t expect her to, she got to her feet and came with me to the door. She opened it and glanced out, then suddenly closed it again. ‘They’re coming back,’ she whispered, looking startled.

  ‘Who?’ I thought immediately of Jerry and Ben.

  But she said, ‘The neighbours. They’re coming back from the funeral.’ Her mouth twisted a little on that last word. ‘They shouldn’t see you here, someone will tell the police.’

  That was true, and she was right. I didn’t want the police to know I was ‘interfering’ again. ‘I’d better wait,’ I said.

  ‘Till one o’clock,’ she said. ‘They only got half a day off.’ She looked past me, at the stairs. ‘They’ll be getting another half-day off,’ she said. ‘Won’t that make them happy?’

  I touched her arm, because I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and the large brown eyes refocused on me. ‘I shouldn’t blame them, it wasn’t them. I have some iced tea made, would you like some?’

  I was going to refuse, but then I thought it would be better if she were allowed to do something, so I said, ‘Thank you, I would. Oh, and can I use your phone? I want to call my friends at the motel.’

  ‘Of course. It’s in the kitchen.’

  I followed her down the hall to the kitchen, where the window overlooked a view of the city, squatting below us at the foot of the hill, nursing its sores. There was a cream-coloured telephone on the wall beside the window, and as I made the call Alice opened the refrigerator and got out the pitcher of tea and a tray of ice cubes.

  I asked the woman who answered in the motel office if I could please speak to anyone in Unit 5. She agreed reluctantly, and told me to hold on. While I waited, I watched Alice. She worked at the sink, breaking loose the reluctant ice cubes and dropping them into two glasses. Then she took time out to rinse her face with double handfuls of cold water, and dry it by rubbing briskly with a hand towel. When she was done with that, her face still had more colour than the delicacy of its structure called for, but now the colour was healthy-looking and not the angry puffy red that follows weeping. Then she went back to preparing the tea.

  About that time, a voice came on the line, saying hello. I turned quickly to the phone, saying, ‘Hello. This is Paul Standish.’

  ‘Well, Paul! Where the devil are you boy?’

  I recognized the voice instantly. ‘Walter! You’re free!’

  ‘Good old Fletcher,’ he said. ‘Read lawbooks at them till they all went to sleep, and then we just tiptoed out.’

  I was practically laughing aloud, I was so pleased to hear his voice and know he was released at last. I was grinning so hard my cheeks hurt and I could just barely pronounce words. ‘By golly, I’m glad!’ I said. ‘I’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off.’

  ‘To coin a phrase,’ he said, and laughed. ‘I know, Fletcher’s been telling me all about it. He wants me to send you back to Washington, air express.’

  ‘Listen, Walter—’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘I told him I’d rather you stay, since you were here from the beginning. You’d probably like to see how the mighty look when they’re fallen.’

  ‘You said it.’

  ‘So Fletcher said all right, if I’d guarantee you’d keep yourself out of trouble.’ He paused, and then said, ‘Now, I don’t know what to say. Here you are, you’ve gone running off again. George is all embarrassed.’

  ‘I’m not in any trouble,’ I told him, ‘and I’ll be back a little after one o’clock. Oh, and there’s one thing more. Some news. There’s been�
�‘ Then I stopped, remembering Alice’s presence behind me. I turned and looked at her helplessly.

  She gave me a smile, wan but reassuring. ‘It’s all right,’ she said.

  Still, I stumbled along as I told Walter what had happened.

  ‘There’s been a second murder,’ I said. ‘One of the men who signed that letter of Hamilton’s.’

  Walter interrupted me before I got any further, asking question after question. I answered them all as best I could—and as briefly as I could, because it wasn’t a good subject for discussion, with the dead man’s granddaughter standing behind me—and finally, when Walter’s questions had run out and he was totally filled in on what I’d been doing of late, I reiterated my promise to be back at the motel a little after one, and hung up.

  Alice said, ‘Here’s your tea.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t put anything in it. Do you want sugar, or lemon?’

  ‘No, this is fine.’

  ‘Shall we talk in the living room?’ She was composed now, having drained the emotion out all at once.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That would be fine.’

  We went back to the living room and sat down.

  Seventeen

  ‘I don’t think I want to talk about anything—serious yet,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not.’ I was in the armchair again, she once more on the sofa, though this time she was in a more relaxed and comfortable-looking position. ‘Whatever you want.’

  ‘That cry did me good,’ she said, half apologetically. ‘I think I’ll be all right now. But I think I’d just like to talk about—things, inconsequential things, for a while. Until I’m sure the crying won’t start again.’

  ‘At your service,’ I said.

  ‘I can help you. But we’ll talk about that later. The newspaper said you were from Washington?’

  It was a rather leaden-footed change of subject, but I went along with it. ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I’d been there all of two days before coming here. I’d just been hired by the union.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Washington,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been anywhere. Do you know the city I’d really like to see?’

  ‘New York,’ I guessed.

  She laughed, lightly. ‘No, I have seen New York. It was—‘ Then she stopped, in mid-sentence, and started to cloud up again, distracted, eyes sliding away from me, face working.

  I could guess she’d visited New York with her grandfather, and the memory at this moment was a little too acute. Quickly, I said, ‘What then? London?’

  ‘No.’ She forced herself back to the present with an obvious effort of will. ‘No, Los Angeles. I think that must be fascinating, everything so different. Even the weather. And restaurants shaped like hats and birds. And the people are different, too. Did you go to college?’

  ‘I still do.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Six months in college, six months working. It’s the system they have there.’

  ‘I never heard of that. I wanted to go to college, but I couldn’t We couldn’t afford it. I could have gone to Potsdam State Teacher’s College or something like that, and lived at home, and driven to school every morning, but that wouldn’t have been the same thing, would it?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’

  ‘I wanted to go to UCLA. I still have the catalogue they sent me. They have a huge campus, and it’s summer all year round I’d like to go to Bermuda sometime. And Havana. Do you think we’ll ever be friendly with Cuba again?’

  I grinned. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, the way things shift around. Twenty years from now, Cuba and Russia will be our allies again, and England will be our enemy again. International friendships keep shifting round. If you wait long enough, you can go anywhere, or be barred anywhere.’

  ‘I’ve never been anywhere,’ she said. ‘My parents went to Montreal on their honeymoon. Have you ever been there?’

  ‘Yes. Have you ever been to Buffalo?’

  ‘A few times, why?’

  ‘Montreal is like Buffalo, except the bars stay open all night. And on the Rue St Denis, there’s a restaurant called Corso’s that serves the best pizza in the world.’

  Her eyes shone, and she leaned forward, fascinated. ‘Really What else? It can’t be like Buffalo, not really.’

  ‘Not really,’ I admitted. I felt a little foolish, impersonating a world traveller this way, but it was clearly doing her good to chat about faraway places. ‘Along the Rue St Denis, late at night,’ I said, ‘the taxis zigzag back and forth from one side of the street to the other, looking for fares. Right from one kerb to the other They pass each other that way, going in opposite directions, and sometimes it looks as though they’re all going to pile up in the middle.’

  ‘You’re making that up!’ She was delighted.

  ‘No, I’m not. In Montreal, they have a different idea about automobiles from us down here. I think they look on them a being kind of sewing machines that move. I knew a guy once in college—who swears he was driving on the Jacques Cartier bridge, on the far right-hand lane—and the bridge is eight lanes wide—and he got involved in a head-on collision.’

  ‘Now I know you’re making it up’

  ‘Cross my heart and—‘ I stopped that one in time, and hurried on. ‘The other driver only spoke French,’ I said hurriedly, ‘so my friend never did find out what he was doing way over on the wrong side of the bridge.’

  ‘Where else have you been?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’ve been to the Azores,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. It was terrible. It’s Portuguese, you know.’

  ‘How did you get there?’

  ‘The Army sent me. I was only there three months. Some guys have to spend a whole year there. It’s just a fuelling stop for planes coming back from Europe, that’s all. The nearest land is twenty-one hundred miles away, and that’s Spain.’

  ‘Were you in Spain?’

  I laughed, shaking my head. ‘No, I told you, it was over two thousand miles away.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’ She suddenly seemed timid, and very young. Only fifteen now, or even younger.

  I suddenly remembered my first meeting with Walter, when I too had had years stripped away from me, and felt ashamed of myself. ‘I’ve been to St Louis,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if that counts as a glamour spot or not, but I’ve been there.’

  That restored her good humour, and she said, ‘Were you ever in Los Angeles?’

  ‘No. St Louis is the farthest west I’ve ever been.’

  ‘Oh, I’d love to go there,’ she said. ‘I so wanted to go to UCLA. And see the Pacific Queen, and maybe fly to Hawaii some day. Where are you going to live?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When you get out of college. Where are you going to live then?’

  ‘I don’t know. In New York for a while, I guess. I want to get my master’s at NYU. After that, wherever I get a job.’

  ‘But some big city,’ she said, forcefully. ‘Not a place like Wittburg.’

  I smiled. ‘No, not a place like Wittburg. There aren’t many openings in a town like this for an economist.’

  She cocked her head to one side and studied me. ‘You don’t look like an economist,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not one yet,’ I reminded her. ‘What do I look like?’

  She thought it over carefully, and said, ‘A teacher. A very idealistic young teacher who wants all his students to love learning.’

  ‘Like in books, huh?’ I said, grinning at her.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be a teacher?’

  ‘I don’t know, maybe. I’ll try for a job in private industry first, though.’

  ‘What if you became a troubleshooter for an oil company or something?’ she said. Her eyes were shining again, and her hands were clasped in front of her. ‘You’d travel all over, to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and the South Seas—’

  ‘Do they have oil in the South Seas?
’

  ‘Well, North Africa, then. And I’ll be your secretary, and travel everywhere with you.’

  ‘It’s a deal,’ I said.

  She sipped some iced tea, and then sat gazing into the glass. ‘I wonder how you become an airline stewardess,’ she said. ‘Do you know how?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘I’ve seen ads in magazines for stewardess schools,’ she said. ‘Correspondence schools. But I suppose they’re all just confidence games, aren’t they?’

  ‘I think they probably are, yes.’

  ‘If I was a stewardess,’ she said, ‘I’d have my apartment in Los Angeles. And maybe I could even go to UCLA part time. I’m only twenty-seven, that’s not too old for college.’

  ‘Of course not. Look at me.’

  She got to her feet suddenly and, not looking at me, said. ‘Would you like to hear some music?’

  ‘Sure, fine.’

  There was a radio-phonograph console against the wall to tin left. She started it cooking, and then brought out a stack of records from the storage shelf underneath. It was all dance music, and all fifteen or twenty years old, but re-releases on LP. There was a lot of Miller, and some early Miller-influenced Ken-ton of the Balboa Beach days, and some Ralph Flanagan, and even a Ray McKinley. The most recent album she had was a re-release of Sauter-Finegan’s first album, from 1952.

  Miller started, smooth as margarine, and she turned the volume down to where we could talk over it if we wanted to. But she didn’t talk, or go back and sit down on the sofa. She stood awhile, listening to the music, standing in front of the console with her back to me. Her head was bowed, and she was either listening intently or very deep in thought.

  She stayed that way through ‘Pavane’, and then turned my way at last, but still not looking at me. ‘I never learned to dance,’ she said. ‘I wish I could dance.’ She spoke so very low, and not looking at me at all, that I wasn’t sure whether or not I was supposed to have heard it.

  But I was. When I made no response, she looked at me directly, and said, ‘Will you teach me?’

  ‘I’m not very good,’ I said. It was half a lie. I’m a perfectly competent, if uninspired, social dancer. But the situation was suddenly making me feel uncomfortable. It finally occurred to me to wonder just how far off the rails this girl had been knocked by her grandfather’s death.