Killy

by Donald E. Westlake

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I wish you would.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, reluctantly. I got to my feet and, to the sterile precision of ‘Sunrise Serenade’, proceeded to show her the basic steps.

  It didn’t take me long to find out she’d been lying more completely than I. She knew how to dance. She probably could dance better than I could, but she was deliberately hesitant, to maintain the fiction. Before ‘Sunrise Serenade’ had mathematically computed its coda, she had folded into my arms, and we were moving easily together, as though we’d been partners for years.

  There comes a time when examination must cease. Her grandfather was four hours dead, I myself was up to my neck in murder and intrigue, but she wanted me to kiss her, and I did.

  She held herself against me in a way to let me know she wanted my hands on her body, and I put my hands on her body. Why did she want me to pick her up, child-light, and carry her upstairs to her bed? I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care why. I was beyond questioning, beyond understanding that what we were doing, in these circumstances, was grotesque. I did pick her up, and she was child-light, and I did carry her upstairs to bed.

  She spoke only once. Her face was nuzzled against my throat as I carried her, and as I reached the top step she murmured, ‘To the right.’ Thus avoiding the possibility that I might blunder with her into the room where her grandfather had been slain.

  Far away downstairs, in another world that wasn’t real either, the bands still softly played. Freed of our clothes, Alice MacCann and I lay stretched out side by side on her bed. She had shaved herself, reinforcing again the child-image in her, and startling me very nearly into conscious reflection. But then she pressed my head to her hard little breasts, and contorted her belly beneath my palm, and when I rolled onto her, her luminous brown eyes were squeezed shut, her lips were parted slightly, and she moaned only once. After that, the beast with two backs was busy, but silent.

  Eighteen

  I dozed awhile, and I guess she did, too. When I opened my eyes again, in the cool dimness of her bedroom, the alarm clock facing me on the night table read twenty minutes past two, and Alice was standing at the window. The window was open a few inches at the bottom, and a slight breeze ruffled the lace curtains. She had donned a white terry-cloth robe and stood with her arms folded, three-quarters turned away from me, gazing out the window and down upon Wittburg. She was in silhouette, and I couldn’t see the expression on her face.

  I stirred in the bed, and she heard me, and turned. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Yes.’ I looked down at my naked self, and sat up.

  She came over and sat down on the bed in front of me, her lips curved in a sad and wistful smile. ‘Paul,’ she said, but not calling me or speaking to me at all, only tasting the sound of the name in her mouth. She reached out and rested her hand lightly on my knee. Watching the hand, and my knee, she said, softly, ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It was the truth—I was too bewildered now to know anything—and I blurted it out without thought.

  But she approved of the answer. She smiled more, and nodded. ‘And I don’t know if I love you,’ she said. ‘But I hope I do. Or will. And that you will, too.’

  I fumbled for an answer, but couldn’t find any. Clarity was returning to me, and I was becoming dismayed.

  She went on, without any word from me. ‘What a terror I was in high school,’ she said, still in the same soft wistful voice. ‘If a boy so much as touched my breast, I clawed him to ribbons.’ She looked at me, and smiled, and shook her head. ‘Still, I wasn’t a virgin,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m twenty-seven,’ she said. ‘The fire’s been banked in me for fifteen years. And how was I to know you’d come along? I was never promiscuous, Paul. I thought I would marry him.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. It seemed required of me to say that.

  ‘Would you rather I told you about him? Or would you rather I wouldn’t?’

  ‘I’d rather you wouldn’t,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t exist,’ she said. ‘You erased him. From this moment on, he never existed.’

  I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t even want to think about it. Who was this woman? I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, and in less than three hours she’d built a towering love affair over us, we were star-crossed lovers. She was crazy, that’s all, she was out of her mind.

  I caught myself up on that. Alice MacCann was a fragile and delicate girl who had suddenly seen murder, who had suddenly had her family torn from her—for her parents were dead, and her grandfather was her only real family, the only one who had lived with her here in this house—and if she was out of her mind right now, it was from grief. Alone in the house, suddenly alone. emotionally racked, and then all at once I had come along. I had been kind and sympathetic, I had held her while she wept out the first raw jolt of grief, and in desperation she had turned to me. She hadn’t wanted to be alone, to be without love or compassion or human company, and so she had turned to me. I’ve read where people just rescued from what had seemed certain death—miners saved after a cave-in, miraculous survivors of plain crashes, condemned men reprieved minutes before the schedule! execution—very often feel a sudden overwhelming sexual desire as though only in this act can they truly affirm the fact of then continued existence. It had probably been something like that with Alice, added to the sudden loss and the sudden solitude enforcing it with the desire to affirm that she was still alive, she. had not been stopped and turned to clay.

  Brutal? Unfeeling? No, inevitable. In the sight of death, our first thought must always be of our own continued existence only later can we afford sympathy or grief for him whose existence has ended. Besides which, such promptings and urges would hardly have formed part of her conscious thinking.

  No, Alice was not to be blamed. Her emotions had been ripped to pieces, and she had striven, without conscious plan or design, to somehow make them whole again. But what about me? What was my excuse?

  I needed one, I’ll say that much.

  Well, to begin with, I am weak. I had not seduced her, she had seduced me, and I am devilishly easy to seduce. If the girl is under emotional strain, and a man with any decency in him at till would forbear, I saw now that I would become aware of my duty only afterwards. Before and during, I hadn’t been thinking at all.

  Additionally, in my own defence, there’s the fact that I too had been involved in something of an emotional hurricane for the last couple of days. Not with the suddenness or force of the hurricane that had hit Alice, but still I had been driven to the ragged edge.

  Excuses, excuses. But, God help me, I’ve got to be able to forgive myself, haven’t I? It would be impossible to live if we couldn’t forgive ourselves. I don’t believe that I was any less than any other man in my frantic search, as I sat there on Alice MacCann’s bed, for extenuating circumstances.

  All right, I think of duty only afterwards. And I knew my duty now. It would be very easy at this point for Alice, emotionally jangled already, suddenly to make a complete aboutface and begin to loathe herself for what she had done, to the point where the wouldn’t be able to forgive herself. Sooner or later, she was going to look at this afternoon with clarity, and say to herself, ‘I went to bed with a stranger, four hours after my grandfather was murdered.’ I had to soften that moment for her, if I could.

  So I said nothing to destroy the fiction she’d built up around us. Instead, I answered her by saying, ‘You tell me nothing about your yesterdays, and I’ll tell you nothing about mine. All right?’

  She smiled, pleased. ‘We’re brand-new,’ she said, and clasped my hand in both of hers.

  ‘Hello, Alice,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Paul.’ She smiled again, getting more radiant by the second, the shy wistfulness fading slowly. She got to her feet, still holding my hand, and said, ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘I’m starved.’

  �
�I’ll make you lunch.’

  ‘All right, I’ll—Oh, my God, Walter!’

  ‘What?’ Her eyes widened in alarm.

  ‘I told them I’d be back a little after one.’ I pulled my hand free and jumped up from the bed and started scrabbling around on the floor for my clothes. ‘They’re probably going out of their minds.’

  ‘Call them again, Paul. Don’t go yet.’

  ‘I told them I’d be back. I told them.’

  ‘Paul, wait. I told you I could help you. Call and say you’ll be late, and we’ll talk while we’re having lunch.’

  That stopped me. ‘Help me? How?’

  ‘I know what Chuck Hamilton found out,’ she said.

  ‘You do? What—he told you?’

  She shook her head. ‘I told him,’ she said.

  Nineteen

  My second call to Walter was less pleasant than the first. A touch of steel came into his voice when he recognized me, and though he didn’t say it in so many words, I got the idea that Fletcher and the others considered me Walter’s responsibility, and were beginning to wonder why in the world Walter had ever hired me.

  I made excuses, I’m not sure what. I’m sure only that I told him no part of the truth. I didn’t tell him where I was, I didn’t tell him what I’d been up to recently, and I didn’t tell him I was currently following a trail to Charles Hamilton’s secret. He might like to hear the secret, once I had it and was safely back in the motel, but for now he wouldn’t have liked hearing that I was still intent on butting my nose in. I promised to be back soon, and hung up.

  Alice had made a salad, because by now it was once again a very hot day, the hottest since I’d come to Wittburg. There was white bread, too, and butter and cheese spread and bologna. And more iced tea.

  Alice talked to me, while we ate. ‘Chuck came to me about a week and a half ago, and showed me the letter he got from Mr Freedman, in Washington. He knew I worked in the bookkeeping department, and he said if there was anything illegal or, or anything like that going on, that would help the union, it might be in the bookkeeping department. So he asked me to help him, and I said I would.’

  She paused to eat salad. I waited, watching her.

  ‘I have a key to the office,’ she said, ‘and I know the combination to the safe. Chuck and I went in there in the evenings, after work, and we went through the books. There wasn’t anybody around but old Abner Christo, the night watchman, and we made him think we were’—she blushed faintly, and her eyes skidded away from mine—‘were using the office for something else. That way, he wouldn’t say anything to anybody, about us being there.’

  The recountal of this subterfuge seemed to upset her, and for a minute she devoted her attention to eating, her eyes fixed firmly on the plate. I drank iced tea, and finished my sandwich, and waited. She was calm now, and relatively self-possessed, but I didn’t know how secure her grip actually was. If she was made upset by admitting a fictional adultery, the grip couldn’t be very secure at all. So I didn’t push her to go on with the story, even though I was pretty anxious to hear the punch line.

  After a minute, she raised her eyes to mine again, and went on. ‘We spent a week at it,’ she said. ‘Chuck wasn’t really much help; he didn’t know that much about bookkeeping. But we kept at it, and finally we did find something wrong.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘Yes. To tell you the truth, Paul, I’m not a really accomplished accountant either, so I don’t fully understand just what was being done, but I do know that money was being sidetracked out of the business. It was complicated, but we could follow it at least pan of the way.’

  She put her hands flat on the table, palms down, one on either side of the plate. ‘There are basically two kinds of expenses in the factory,’ she said. She waggled the fingers of her left hand. ‘Employees’ salaries, and contributions to the Unemployment Insurant fund, and health and accident insurance premiums, and things like that. Things connected with the employees.’ She waggled the finger of her right hand. ‘And there are the costs for raw materials, anil shipping costs, and heat and electricity for the plant buildings, am I things like that.’ She lifted her hands from the table and pressed tin palms together over her plate. ‘But at the top of the accounting system,’ she said, ‘all the expenses come together. They’re all linked As you work down through the system, they separate out into expenses for this and expenses for that. Do you see the way it works’

  ‘More or less,’ I said. As an Eco major, I’d taken more than my share of math courses, but accountancy was far from my strong suit. My main concern, in the field of economics, had always been at a more ethereal level.

  ‘The way the money’s been taken out,’ she said, ‘involves both kinds of expenses, and that’s why it’s so hard to follow it through the books. To begin with, on the raw-materials side, false vouchers are made out, for companies we actually do business with, and false check numbers are created—there’s a whole false-check series in the books now—for make-believe checks to pay for these vouchers. But these checks would have to be made out to the companies, and so they’d be too hard to cash, so there aren’t any checks made out at all. This part is just to explain where the money went.’

  I nodded. ‘But the money really went over to the other side, is that it?’

  ‘That’s right. Various employees, on the other side, are credited with mythical overtime, and checks are actually made out to them, with all the proper deductions and everything. But when you get about halfway through the books, those checks just disappear, like a river going underground. I’m not sure myself how it happens; the books keep balancing all along the way. But the checks disappear; the amounts are justified some way or other, and from there on, the books are accurate except for the embezzlement. But you see, on one side there’s too much money, because of bills that were supposed to have been paid and weren’t, and on the other side there’s too little money, because of checks that have been written with incomplete recording. But when it all gets to the top’—she clasped her palms together again—‘it all cancels out. Everything works out even.’

  ‘My God, that sounds complicated,’ I said. ‘Why not just stick with the phoney overtime checks? Why play around with vouchers and all that?’

  ‘Because the overtime checks have to disappear from the books before they reach the point where they’re joined to the worker’s actual wages. Otherwise, his annual income figures and tax deductions wouldn’t square with his own accounts.’

  ‘Uh. And he can’t just stick with the vouchers, because those checks are made out to company names. All right, I see it. But how does he cash the overtime checks?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose he has bank accounts in other cities, and just endorses and deposits them by mail.’

  ‘I suppose so. Something like that, anyway. How much has he taken?’

  ‘I don’t know how long it’s been going on. It averages two or three thousand dollars a month.’

  ‘Nice work if you can get it. All right, who is he?’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s what I don’t know. There an three people who could do it, and I don’t know which one it is.’

  ‘Oh.’ That brought me down to earth again. I’d thought it was all finished, and it wasn’t.

  ‘There’s Mr Petersen,’ she said, ‘the head of the department And Mr Koll, the chief accountant. And Mrs Fieldstone, Mr Petersen’s secretary.’

  ‘His secretary?’

  ‘Mr Petersen believes in delegating responsibility,’ she said. ‘Mrs Fieldstone does more of his work than he does. So those are the three people who’d be able to get at the books and the files and the check-writing equipment.’

  ‘All right, it’s one of them. Any guesses?’

  She thought it over. When she frowned in concentration that way, she looked very young and very appealing and very defenceless.

  Defenceless. Mr Petersen or Mr Koll or Mrs Fieldstone. One of those three had been stealing money from the Mclnty
re Company. Charles Hamilton had found out about it and had been murdered. Gar Jeffers had found out about it, and had been murdered. And Alice MacCann found out about it.

  I didn’t tell her then, but all at once it occurred to me just how lucky she’d been to run out of butter this morning. The murderer had come here to silence them both. It had to be that way. They both had the dangerous knowledge. And the murderer couldn’t have known that Gar would be alone in the house. He had come here to kill, and must have expected to find both Gar and Alice at home. But Alice had gone out to the store, and that was the only reason she was still alive.

  Not the only reason. The killer had surely waited around for Alice to come home. Not in the house, that would have been too dangerous, but somewhere nearby. And then Alice had come home, but had immediately called for the police. And after the police had left, I had arrived.

  Was he still out there, waiting, cursing me, watching my car still parked across the way. If I had waited, fifteen minutes more, before coming up here, I would never have met Alice MacCann in life. If I had left at one o’clock, as I’d planned, I would never have seen her again.

  The knowledge of just how close we had come to never meeting, to never knowing one another, shook me and made me regard this slender girl with sad tenderness. How nearly we had missed one another!

  She looked at me oddly. ‘What is it?’ she asked me.

  ‘What’s what?’

  ‘Why were you looking at me like that? So sad.’

  ‘Nothing. I was thinking.’ She could hear about how close it had been some other time. ‘Well?’ I asked her, wrenching the subject away again. ‘Any guesses about which one it is?’

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t see any of them doing anything like that,’ she said. ‘I know it has to be one of them, but I just can’t—Mr Petersen is very lazy, and he complains all the time, but still, he’s been working here for nearly twenty-five years. I just can’t see any of them doing it.’