A Kiss Before Dying (15 page)

He was sweating. Not cold sweat though; hot healthy sweat from standing in the sweat-box of an airless closet in the sweat-suit of an imporous trenchcoat. His hands too; the gloves were brown leather with a fuzzy lining and elastic cuffs that held in the heat even more; his hands were sweating so much that the fuzzy lining was sodden and caked.

But the automatic (weightless now like part of him after dragging heavily in his pocket all evening) was motionless; the inevitable trajectory of the bullet as palpable in the air as a dotted line in a diagram. Point
A
the rock-steady muzzle; Point
B
: the heart under the lapel of the cheesy-looking probably-bought-in-Iowa suit. He looked down at the Colt .45 as though to verify its blue steel existence, so light it was, and then he took a step forward from the mouth of the closet, reducing by a foot the length of dotted line
AB.

Well say something, he thought, enjoying the slow stupid melting of Mister Dwight Powell’s face. Start talking. Start pleading. Probably can’t. Probably he’s all talked out after the – what’s that word? – logorrhoea of a cocktail lounge. Good word.

‘I bet you don’t know what logorrhoea means,’ he said, standing there powerfully with the gun in his hand.

Powell stared at the gun. ‘You’re the one – with Dorothy,’ he said.

‘It means what
you’ve
got. Diarrhoea of the mouth. Words keep running. I thought my ear would fall off in that cocktail lounge.’ He smiled at Powell’s widening eyes. ‘I was responsible for poor Dorothy’s death,’ he mimicked. ‘A pity. A real pity.’ He stepped closer. ‘The notebook,
por favor
,’ he said, extending his left hand. ‘And don’t try anything.’

From downstairs, singing of a dance tune came softly.

He took the notebook that Powell held out, dropped back a step and pressed it against his side, bending it in half lengthwise, cracking the cover, never taking his eyes or the gun off Powell. ‘I’m awfully sorry you found this. I was standing in there hoping you wouldn’t.’ He stuck the folded notebook into his coat pocket.

‘You really killed her,’ Powell said.

‘Let’s keep the voice low.’ He moved the gun admonishingly. ‘We don’t want to disturb the girl detective, do we?’ It annoyed him the way Mister Dwight Powell was standing there so blankly. Maybe he was too stupid to realize … ‘Maybe you don’t realize it, but this is a real gun, and it’s loaded.’

Powell didn’t say anything. He just went on looking at this gun, not even staring now – just looking at it with mildly distasteful interest, as though it were the first ladybug of the year.

‘Look, I’m going to kill you.’

Powell didn’t say anything.

‘You’re such a great one for analysing yourself – tell me, how do you feel now? I bet your knees are shaking, aren’t they? Cold sweat all over you?’

Powell said, ‘She thought she was going there to get married.’

‘Forget about her! You’ve got yourself to worry about.’ Why wasn’t he trembling? Didn’t he have brains enough … ?

‘Why did you kill her?’ Powell’s eyes finally lifted from the gun. ‘If you didn’t want to marry her, you could have left her. That would have been better than killing her.’

‘Shut up about her! What’s the matter with you? You think I’m bluffing? Is that it? You think—’

Powell leaped forward.

Before he had gone six inches a loud explosion roared; dotted line abwas solidified and fulfilled by tearing lead.

Ellen had been standing in the kitchen looking out through the closed window and listening to the fading theme of Gordon Gant’s programme, when she suddenly realized that with the window closed, where was that pleasant breeze coming from?

There was a shadowed alcove in a rear corner of the room. She went to it and saw the back door, with the pane of glass nearest the knob smashed in and lying in fragments on the floor. She wondered if Dwight knew about it. You’d think he would have swept up the—

That was when she heard the shot. It smacked loudly through the house, and as the sound died the ceiling light shivered as if something upstairs had fallen. Then there was silence.

The radio said, ‘At the sound of the chime, ten p.m., Central Standard Time,’ and a chime toned.

‘Dwight?’ Ellen said.

There was no answer.

She went into the dining room. She called the name louder: ‘Dwight?’

In the living room she moved hesitantly to the staircase. There was no sound from overhead. This time she spoke the name with dry-throated apprehension: ‘Dwight?’

The silence held for another moment. Then a voice said, ‘It’s all right, Ellen. Come on up.’

She hurried up the stairs with her heart drumming. ‘In here,’ the voice said from the right. She pivoted around the newel post and swept to the lighted doorway.

The first thing she saw was Powell lying on his back in the middle of the room, limbs sprawled loosely. His jacket had fallen away from his chest. On his white shirt blood was flowering from a black core over his heart.

She steadied herself against the jamb. Then she raised her eyes to the man who stood beyond Powell, the man with the gun in his hand.

Her eyes dilated, her face went rigid with questions that couldn’t work their way to her lips.

He shifted the gun from the firing position to a flat appraising weight on his gloved palm. ‘I was in the closet,’ he said, looking her straight in the eye, answering the unasked questions. ‘He opened the suitcase and took out this gun. He was going to kill you. I jumped him. The gun went off.’

‘No – oh God—’ She rubbed her forehead dizzily. ‘But how – how did you—?’

He put the gun in the pocket of his coat. ‘I was in the cocktail lounge,’ he said. ‘Right behind you. I heard him talking you into coming up here. I left while you were in the phone booth.’

‘He told me he—’

‘I heard what he told you. He was a good liar.’

‘Oh God, I believed him – I believed him—’

 ‘That’s just your trouble,’ he said with an indulgent smile. ‘You believe everybody.’

‘Oh God—’ she shivered.

He came to her, stepping between Powell’s spraddled legs.

She said, ‘But I still don’t understand – How were you there, in the lounge?’

‘I was waiting for you in the lobby. I missed you when you went out with him. Got there too late. I kicked myself for that. But I waited around. What else could I do?’

‘But how – how—?’

He stood before her with his arms wide, like a soldier returning home. ‘Look, a heroine isn’t supposed to question her nick-of-time rescuer. Just be glad you gave me his address. I may have thought you were being a fool, but I wasn’t going to take any chances on having you get your head blown off.’

She threw herself into his arms, sobbing with relief and retrospective fear. The leather-tight hands patted her back comfortingly. ‘It’s all right, Ellen,’ he said softly. ‘Everything’s all right now.’

She buried her cheek against his shoulder. ‘Oh, Bud,’ she sobbed, ‘thank God for you! Thank God for you, Bud!’

The telephone rang downstairs.

‘Don’t answer it,’ he said as she started to draw away.

There was a lifeless glaze to her voice: ‘I know who it is.’

‘No, don’t answer it. Listen’ – his hands were solid and convincing on her shoulders – ‘someone is sure to have heard that shot. The police will probably be here in a few minutes. Reporters, too.’ He let that sink in. ‘You don’t want the papers to make a big story out of this, do you? Dragging up everything about Dorothy, pictures of you—’

‘There’s no way to stop them.’

‘There is. I have a car downstairs. I’ll take you back to the hotel and then come right back here.’ He turned off the light. ‘If the police haven’t shown up yet, I’ll call them. Then you won’t be here for the reporters to jump on, and I’ll refuse to talk until I’m alone with the police. They’ll question you later, but the papers won’t know you’re involved.’ He led her out into the hallway. ‘By that time you’ll have called your father; he’s got enough influence to keep the police from letting out anything about you or Dorothy. They can say Powell was drunk and started a fight with me, or something like that.’

The telephone stopped ringing.

‘I wouldn’t feel right about leaving—’ she said as they started down the stairs.

‘Why not? I’m the one who did it, not you. It’s not as if I’m going to lie about your being here; I’ll need you to back up my story. All I want to do is prevent the papers from having a field day with this.’ He turned to her as they descended into the living room. ‘Trust me, Ellen,’ he said, touching her hand.

She sighed deeply, gratefully letting tension and responsibility drop from her shoulders. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But you don’t have to drive me. I can get a cab.’

‘Not at this hour, not without phoning. And I think the tramcars stop running at ten.’ He picked up her coat and held it for her.

‘Where did you get a car?’ she asked dully.

‘I borrowed it.’ He gave her her purse. ‘From a friend.’ Turning off the lights, he opened the door to the porch. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘we haven’t got too much time.’

He had parked the car across the street and some fifty feet down the block. It was a black Buick sedan, two or three years old. He opened the door for Ellen, then went around to the other side and slipped in behind the wheel. He fumbled with the ignition key. Ellen sat silently, hands folded in her lap. ‘You feel all right?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said, her voice thin and tired. ‘It’s just that – he was going to kill me.’ She sighed. ‘At least I was right about Dorothy. I
knew
she didn’t commit suicide.’ She managed a reproachful smile. ‘And you tried to talk me out of making this trip—’

He got the motor started. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You were right.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, there’s a sort of a silver lining to all this,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’ He shifted gears and the car glided forward.

‘Well, you saved my life,’ she said. ‘You really saved my life. That should cut short whatever objections my father might have, when you meet him and we speak to him about us.’

After they had been driving down Washington Avenue for a few minutes, she moved closer to him and hesitantly took his arm, hoping it wouldn’t interfere with his driving. She felt something hard pressing against her hip and realized that it was the gun in his pocket, but she didn’t want to move away.

‘Listen, Ellen,’ he said. ‘This is going to be a lousy business you know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I’ll be held for manslaughter.’

‘But you didn’t mean to kill him! You were trying to get the gun away from him.’

‘I know, but they’ll still have to hold me – all kinds of red tape—’ He stole a quick glance at the downcast figure beside him and then returned his gaze to the traffic ahead. ‘Ellen – when we get to the hotel, you could just pick up your things and check out. We could be back in Caldwell in a couple of hours—’

‘Bud!’ Her voice was sharp with surprised reproach. ‘We couldn’t do a thing like that!’

‘Why not? He killed your sister, didn’t he? He got what was coming to him. Why should we have to get mixed up—’

‘We can’t do it,’ she protested. ‘Aside from its being such a –a
wrong
thing to do, suppose they found out anyway that you – killed him. Then they’d never believe the truth, not if you ran away.’

‘I don’t see how they could find out it was me,’ he said. ‘I’m wearing gloves, so there can’t be any fingerprints. And nobody saw me there, except you and him.’

‘But suppose they
did
find out! Or suppose they blamed someone else for it! How would you feel then?’ He was silent. ‘As soon as I get to the hotel, I’ll call my father. Once he’s heard the story, I know he’ll take care of lawyers and everything. I guess it
will
be a terrible business. But to run away—’

‘It was a foolish suggestion,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really expect you to agree.’

‘No, Bud, you wouldn’t want to do a thing like that, would you?’

‘I only tried it as a last resort,’ he said. Suddenly he swung the car in a wide left turn from the brightly lighted orbit of Washington Avenue to the darkness of a northbound road. ‘Shouldn’t you stay on Washington?’ Ellen asked.

‘Quicker this way. Avoid traffic.’

‘What I can’t understand,’ she said, tapping her cigarette on the edge of the dashboard tray, ‘is why he didn’t do anything to me there, on the roof.’ She was settled comfortably, turned towards Bud with her left leg drawn up under her, the cigarette suffusing her with sedative warmth.

‘You must have been pretty conspicuous, going there at night,’ he said. ‘He was probably afraid that an elevator man or someone would remember his face.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. But wouldn’t it have been less risky than taking me back to his house and – doing it there?’

‘Maybe he didn’t intend to do it there. Maybe he was going to force you into a car and drive you out into the country some place.’

‘He didn’t have a car.’

‘He could have stolen one. It’s not such a hard thing to steal a car.’ A street-light flashing brushed his face with white, then dropped it back into the darkness where the cleanly-hewn features were touched only by the dashboard’s nebulous green.

‘The lies he told me! “I loved her. I was in New York. I felt responsible.”’ She mashed the cigarette into the ashtray, shaking her head bitterly. ‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped.

He flicked a glance at her. ‘What is it?’

Her voice had taken on the sick glaze again. ‘He showed me his transcript – from nyu.He
was
in New York—’

‘That was probably a fake. He must have known someone in the registrar’s office there. They could fake something like that.’

‘But suppose it wasn’t. Suppose he was telling the truth!’

‘He was coming after you with a gun. Isn’t that proof enough he was lying?’

‘Are you sure, Bud? Are you sure he didn’t – maybe take the gun out to get at something else? The notebook he mentioned?’

‘He was going to the door with the gun.’

‘Oh God, if he really didn’t kill Dorothy—’ She was silent for a moment. ‘The police will investigate,’ she said positively. ‘They’ll prove he was right here in Blue River! They’ll prove he killed Dorothy!’

‘That’s right,’ he said.

‘But even if he didn’t, Bud, even if it was a – a terrible mistake – they wouldn’t blame you for anything. You couldn’t know; you saw him with the gun. They could never blame you for anything.’

‘That’s right,’ he said.

Shifting uncomfortably, she drew her folded leg out from under her. She squinted at her watch in the dashboard’s glow. ‘It’s twenty-five after ten. Shouldn’t we be there already?’

He didn’t answer her.

She looked out of the window. There were no more street-lights, no more buildings. There was only the pitch blackness of fields, under the star-heightened blackness of the sky. ‘Bud, this isn’t the way into town.’

He didn’t answer her.

Ahead of the car a white onrush of highway narrowed to implied infinity always beyond the headlights’ reach. ‘Bud, you’re going the wrong way!’