‘You’re talking about Walter,’ I said. ‘Not about me.’
‘You’re younger, that’s all.’ He grinned amiably at me. ‘That’s why I been watching you. I never seen one so early before.’
That was ridiculous. I’m not like Walter. I never saw myself as one of those smooth devious characters, scaling the mountain of success with pitons hammered into the backs of their associates. I’ve never been clever enough, for one thing. And I’ve never had that much ambition, for another. It isn’t success I want, it never has been. All I’ve ever wanted is peace and quiet, to be left alone to live my life, not bothering anyone else and with no one else bothering me.
If I get angered at being made a fool of, as Walter made a fool of me, as Alice made a fool of me, does that make me a Walter? Is it so unusual to be angry when you realize you’ve been played for a fool? George was clever about some things—he’d understood Walter’s stealing of my idea, which I hadn’t—but he fell victim to the easy generality.
‘Just one thing, little friend,’ he said. ‘I told you, I like you. You’re gonna want to get even with Killy now, and then he’s gonna want to get even with you again, and then you’ll have to get even with him again, and that’s the way it goes. But he’s been around longer than you. You want to be careful before you start anything.’
Phil came back then, and we did no more talking. I drank more steadily after that, and lost a few dart games—but didn’t feel as though I had to get even with the people who won, so the hell with George’s ideas—and when we left I was more than half drunk for the second night in a row. Well, I could sleep late tomorrow, so it didn’t matter so much.
Phil drove, and I stretched out on the back seat. Phil switched the car radio on, and we listened to music. Then the one o’clock news came on, and the newscaster told us that Edward Petersen had not murdered Charles Hamilton. Edward Petersen had a rock-solid alibi for the time of Charles Hamilton’s death. Petersen was still being held for the embezzlement, but the search for the killer of Charles Hamilton and Gar Jeffers had begun again. An arrest was expected shortly.
I was barely half awake on the back seat of the Ford. The news didn’t interest me very much.
Thirty
I woke up at 3:00 a.m., knowing who had killed Charles Hamilton and Gar Jeffers. I had a blinding headache, but I was wide awake and my mind was functioning with almost startling clarity, as though I’d been fed some sort of stimulating drug. I looked at my knowledge, and turned it over and over, and looked at it from every side, and knew it was the truth. And then I lit a cigarette, noticing that Walter’s bed was still empty—tomorrow wasn’t a workday, so he’d be spending the full night with her—and decided what to do with my knowledge. And when I had decided, I got out of bed and put on all clean clothes, and took the car keys from the dresser where Phil had left them, and went out to the car.
It was a clear night, and cool. The streets were empty. Harpur Boulevard stretched straight before me, flanked by solitary street lights and occasional distant bits of red neon, lit through the night in the windows of liquor stores and dry cleaners. I drove to police headquarters and parked illegally out front, and went inside to talk to the man on the desk.
‘I want to talk to Captain Willick,’ I said.
‘Not here,’ he said. He’d been reading a paperback, and considered me a minor interruption.
‘My name’s Paul Standish,’ I told him. ‘You call Captain Willick at home, and tell him I know who killed Hamilton and Jeffers.’
He frowned at me. ‘Are you kidding? It’s after three o’clock in the morning.’
‘The killer may not be here tomorrow,’ I said. That wasn’t true, but I wanted Willick now. It was some small satisfaction to be able to roust Willick out of bed in the middle of the night, when he could have no complaint. I really was handing him a killer.
The desk man and I argued about it some more; neither of us getting anywhere, and then he used the phone and in a minute Jerry came wandering out to see me. The mocking smile was on his face, as usual, and he said, ‘You just couldn’t stay away, huh, Paul?’
‘I want to see Willick.’
‘Aw, now, Paul, you don’t really want to wake the captain up in the middle of the night, do you?’
‘I hope you’re the one who booked Petersen,’ I told him.
The smile faded, and he looked puzzled. ‘Why?’
‘Then you’ll be the one he’ll sue for false arrest.’
In a distracted way, he said, ‘He can’t sue me. He’d have to sue the city.’
‘Then the city wouldn’t like you very much.’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘Come on now, Paul. You got some information or haven’t you?’
‘I’ll tell Willick.’
‘But you do know who killed Hamilton?’
‘And Jeffers.’
‘How come you didn’t come forward with this information before?’
‘I didn’t have it before. I didn’t have it till I knew Petersen had been framed.’
He considered, studying me, gnawing on his lower lip. Then he said, ‘Take a seat over there. I’ll be back in a little while.’
He went away, and I took a seat over there, and the desk man went back to his paperback book. I waited twenty minutes, and then Captain Willick came through the front door. He glowered at me, and said, ‘This better be good. Come on.’
I came on. We went up to his office. Jerry was already there, with another plainclothesman I hadn’t seen before. Willick sat down, and said, ‘All right, I’m here. Let’s have it.’
There was a chair, brown leather, facing the desk. I settled into it without being invited, and said, ‘Who could have doctored the books? Give me the names.’
‘Why?’
‘I want to see if your list is complete.’
He grimaced, and said, ‘Edward Petersen. Julius Koll. Mrs Alberta Fieldstone.’
‘And one more,’ I said. ‘Alice MacCann.’
He frowned, and looked up at Jerry. Jerry was already looking defensive. He said, ‘She works there, that’s all.’
‘She has keys to let her into the building and the bookkeeping offices at night, and she knows the combination to the safe. She helped me steal the books.’
They hadn’t heard about the stealing of the books. Fleisch had kept quiet about that. I told them about it, and Willick nodded, looking grim, and said, ‘All right. She could get at the books.’
‘Wait a second,’ said Jerry. ‘She’s the old guy’s granddaughter. She’s Jeffers’ granddaughter.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘She’d been embezzling for about a year and a half. She wants to get away from Wittburg, see the big cities, the big time. She was having an affair with Hamilton—’
‘He was married,’ said Willick.
‘He was an ass man from way back, Captain,’ said Jerry.
I nodded. ‘His wife as much as told us that. Walter and me, when we went to see her the first time.’
Willick’s fingertips rapped rhythmically against the desk top. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘She’s the granddaughter of one of the murdered men, and she was having an affair with the other. What else?’
‘She was getting ready to leave,’ I said. ‘And she figured Hamilton would go with her. She told him all about the money she’d stolen, and figured he’d run away with her to help her spend it. But he was sceptical, so she took him to the bookkeeping office and showed him the books, showed him just how she’d done it. You can check with the night watchman there, Abner. He saw them go in together, at night.’
‘If she planned to run away with him,’ said Willick, ‘why’d she kill him?’
‘Because Hamilton didn’t want to go. He played around, but he planned to stick with his wife. And he also planned to make an in for himself with the new local that was going to be started here by tipping Alice’s embezzlement to us. He figured we could use it as a bargaining weapon with Fleisch, which we did. But he wasn’t clever
enough, and Alice discovered somehow what he planned to do. So she shot him. If you check that gun you found, I bet you’ll find it belonged to Gar Jeffers. She wiped it, and killed Hamilton.’
‘Wait a second,’ said Willick. ‘That was Jeffers’ gun?’
‘Where else was she going to get one? Jeffers told me he once had a brother who was a policeman. Maybe it was the brother’s gun. Would you have any records like that, showing the serial number or something of Jeffers’ brother’s gun?’
Willick pointed at the other plainclothesman and said, ‘Find out. Quick.’ The plainclothesman left, and Willick turned back to me. ‘All right. Next.’
‘Next, her grandfather. He came and talked to me that night, after your boys beat me up.’ Willick winced at that, but said nothing. ‘He was a friend of Hamilton’s, and he knew that Hamilton had planned to turn some sort of scandal information over to the Machinists. I promised to help him try to find out what that information was. When he got home that night, he talked to Alice, asking her to help him find out if the information was in the bookkeeping department. He said something wrong, maybe, or maybe she slipped somewhere, or maybe he just noticed his own gun had been fired recently. I don’t know which it was, you’ll have to ask Alice. At any rate, she shot him, too. Then in the morning she went out to the store and came back and made believe she’d just found him dead.’
Willick thought it over. His fingers rapped and rapped against the desk top. He shook his head, and sighed, and said, ‘You got any proof of all this, Standish?’
‘Somebody framed Petersen. The day after Hamilton was killed, Alice made up three phoney overtime checks and sent them out to the three smallest accounts she had, so she wouldn’t be losing much of the money. Then she faked Petersen’s signature—that wouldn’t have been hard to do, not with all the examples of it she could find around his office—and started an account in Petersen’s name, switching money over from one of the overtime accounts. She did that the day after Hamilton was killed. With murder having been committed, would any embezzler in his right mind keep on with business as usual, and even leave a clear link with an account in his own name?’
‘I’m already convinced Petersen was framed,’ Willick told me.
‘That’s what convinced me to come down here so late. But Koll could have done it just as easy as this girl. Or Mrs Fieldstone could have done it.’
‘Alice has a thing about Los Angeles,’ I said. ‘That’s where she wants to go, more than any place else in the world. I imagine you’ll find most of the stolen money in accounts in Los Angeles banks.’
‘You still aren’t giving me proof,’ he said.
I tried to think of something that would convince him. The fact that Alice had never been frightened enough for her own safety after her grandfather had been killed. The ease with which she had gone on being the tramp she’d always been. Her unusual skill at ferreting out the embezzler’s methods in the books, even though it had taken a trained and inspired accountant, Mr Clement, all night to work his way through the tangle.
I explained these things to him, talking and talking, but I was beginning to realize I didn’t have the kind of absolute proof he wanted. If I could convince him to make the arrest, she’d break down and tell the truth quickly enough, but first I had to convince him to make the arrest.
In the end, I didn’t. It was the plainclothesman, coming back with the news that my guess had been right. Owen Jeffers’ gun and badge had been turned over to his next of kin, his brother Gar, at the time of his death. The serial numbers matched. It was the proof Willick had needed.
It was nearly four o’clock by now, and time was running out, but there was still one more thing to set up, if I was going to get Walter cold. As Willick was getting to his feet behind the desk, I said, ‘Captain, will you do me a favour?’
‘What is it?’
‘I got into a fight with Sondra Fleisch,’ I said, ‘and now I’m sorry for some of the things I said to her. I’d like to make it up to her, by calling her and telling her you’re about to make the arrest.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘But that’s just the point. She’s still mad at me. She probably wouldn’t even believe me. Would you call her?’
He shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, and reached for his phone.
‘And tell her to bring a photographer along.’
Willick made the call, and when it was finished, I said, ‘By the way, the reason I didn’t want to wait till morning. Walter Killy has been seeing a lot of Alice lately, and tonight he didn’t come back to the motel. Alice has been looking for a man to run off with, and I wasn’t sure but—’
Willick was already out the door.
Thirty One
They were in bed when we got there, but not asleep. There was a second-floor light on—her bedroom, I remembered—and when no one answered the doorbell, Willick figured they were packing or something, maybe slipping out the back door this very minute, so they broke the door down and stormed upstairs, and broke in upon the two of them in sweet oblivion.
I’m glad I didn’t go up with Willick and Jerry and the other two. Sexual humiliation is always a very uncomfortable thing to be near. But I stayed outside on the sidewalk, while Willick and the others barged in, for reasons other than the humane. I was waiting for Sondra. She showed up just after the scream sounded from the second floor. The Thunderbird I’d seen in front of the Fleisch house now came whipping down the road and dug into a jolting stop in front of me. Sondra popped out on one side, and a pale-haired acne-troubled young man carrying a Speed Graphic climbed out on the other.
I ran over to Sondra, looking terrified and humble. ‘Please, Sondra,’ I pleaded, ‘don’t take pictures! Walter Killy’s in there, don’t take his picture!’ Knowing then she would.
She swept by me without a word. She and the photographer went down the concrete steps and through the doorway and past the hinge-sprung door, and out of sight.
I went over to one of the two police cars we’d all come in. The driver was sitting there like a hypnotic subject, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I got his attention, told him Willick could find me back at the motel if he needed me any more, and left.
It was a longish walk back to police headquarters, but I didn’t mind it. The night was cool and pleasant. Most of my headache had gone away, and for some reason I felt as though I’d had a full night’s sleep instead of just two hours.
Willick and the others got back to headquarters before I did. In fact, the three cars—Sondra’s Thunderbird grimly trailing the two official cars—passed me two blocks from headquarters. I kept walking, got to the Ford in my own time, and drove it back to the motel. I had to call Fletcher, but first I had to get rid of Phil.
Walter would no longer be running the operation up here, not after I called Fletcher. But who would be put in temporary charge? Not George, certainly. Not Mr Clement, just as certainly. It was between Phil and me, and Phil would be their first choice. But if I showed I was on the ball, and I put Phil to work so he wasn’t available for instructions, then that left me.
When I got to the motel, I woke George and Phil and told them what had happened, and that a Beacon photographer had probably taken Walter’s picture with Alice. I told Phil he ought to get right down to the Beacon office and see what he could do to soften the blow. George just sat up in bed and watched me. Phil, looking worried and irritated, dressed and hurried off to see what he could salvage. I told George I’d be right back, and drove down to the City Line Diner, where I had a cup of coffee, got a lot of change, and went to the phone booth.
It took me for ever to get Fletcher. First, I had to call the Machinists building, and got hung up a while with a night watchman or somebody. Eventually I convinced him to give me Fletcher’s home phone number. He lived in Bethesda, outside the city.
It was by now nearly four-thirty in the morning. I called Bethesda, Fletcher’s number, and listened to the sound of the ring
ing. On the ninth ring, Fletcher’s voice, irritable and sleep-drugged, said, ‘What is it?’
‘This is Paul Standish, Mr Fletcher. I’m sorry to wake you up like this, but something’s come up, pretty important.’
‘All right.’ The sleep was already leaving his voice. ‘Get to it.’
‘Alice MacCann has been arrested for the murders, Mr Fletcher.’ I automatically paused there, to allow for his excited reaction.
What he said was, ‘Uh huh. Did she do it?’ I’d never heard him say ‘Uh huh’ in person, but over the telephone it was practically his entire conversation.
‘It looks that way,’ I said. ‘But the thing is, Walter was with her when they arrested her.’
‘Killy?’
‘Yes, sir. They were in bed together. Now, the police are holding them both.’
‘Uh huh,’ he said. It was a sour sound.
‘There was a photographer there,’ I said. ‘I sent Phil down to the Beacon to try to put the lid on.’
‘Uh huh. What’s your number there?’
‘5-0404.’
‘I’ll call you back.!
‘All right.’
I went back to the counter, and told the man on duty I was expecting a long-distance call on his pay phone. He said sure, and I ordered another cup of coffee.
The call came at five after five. Fletcher was brisk. ‘For the time being,’ he said, ‘you take charge up there. If Killy is released, tell him he’s relieved of duty there and he’s to stay in the motel until I arrive. For everything else, carry on as though nothing had happened. If it’s absolutely necessary to make a statement to the press, say the Machinists is conducting its own investigation into any possible wrongdoing on the part of its representatives. I’ll get up there as quickly as I can.’
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