Kill Fee (9 page)

"Why not?" Ansbacher persisted. "You've been on the case since the start. You must have formed your own opinion, independent of what other people think."

There it was. He was supposed to side with Ansbacher against Murtaugh, with the captain against the lieutenant. Common sense said go with the higher rank. But Murtaugh was a good cop; Eberhart wasn't sure what Ansbacher was. But one thing he did know: he wanted to go on working with Lieutenant Murtaugh.

"Well, sir," Eberhart started out cautiously, "Walsh
isn't
the only one to profit from Jerry Sussman's death. Sussman had other partners in other projects—"

''But Walsh was the only one in danger of losing his magazine," Ansbacher interrupted.

"That's what makes him
look
like a suspect. But his alibi checks out—he was in Connecticut at the time of the shooting. We got witnesses. His former wife was with him all the time. Also, there's the desk clerk at the inn where they stayed, a waitress in the coffee shop, one of the maids. They all say Walsh was there, right up to a couple of days after the killing. They stopped for gas on the way up—we got the dated credit card receipt with Walsh's signature on it. No question, Captain. Walsh was in Connecticut when Sussman was killed."

Ansbacher scowled. "So what? A pencil-pusher like Walsh wouldn't do the job himself. He hired somebody."

"We don't think so, Captain. He doesn't have that kind of connections. He doesn't even know somebody who knows somebody who has that kind of connections. He just doesn't move in that world."

"Bank accounts?"

"Two, checking and savings. No large checks or withdrawals in the past year—just enough for bills and walking-around money." Ansbacher knew all that; Lieutenant Murtaugh had kept him informed.

"Did you search his apartment?" Ansbacher asked.

"On what grounds? We got no probable cause for a warrant."

"Bankbooks for accounts you don't know about. Key to a safety deposit box."

"Excuse me, Captain, but we can't get a warrant because we think Walsh
might
have something incriminating in his apartment. You know we—"

Ansbacher barked a laugh. "You're telling me Mur
taugh
doesn't have a tame judge in his back pocket? Didn't you even try?"

Sergeant Eberhart was sweating; he was in over his head. "Maybe you ought to talk to the Lieutenant, sir. I personally don't see any probable cause, but maybe if you talked it over with—"

"Are you telling me how to do my job, Sergeant?"

"Nossir, I—"

"I've talked with Lieutenant Murtaugh, and now I'm talking to you. I don't think you've been pushing hard enough. What about Sussman's other business partners? Any prospects there?"

''We're still checking them out."

"Meaning you don't have anything. Well, Sergeant, I hope for your sake this one doesn't go down on the books as unsolved. That's not going to help your record any. But you and Murtaugh are on your own now. I can't help you any more—I'm overloaded. I already have six killings on my desk when some opera singer from Toronto gets shot down at Lincoln Center and now I've got the Canadian consul on my back. You'd better know what you're doing, Eberhart."

God, that sounded ominous.
"Doing my best," he said noncommittally. Ansbacher's warning had a double meaning: you'd better know what you're doing when you side with Murtaugh instead of me. "That all, Captain?"

Ansbacher looked him up and down as if inspecting him for leaks and then nodded. The sergeant had almost made it out the door when Ansbacher spoke again. "Eberhart—how old are you?"

How . . . ?? "Thirty-two," he said wonderingly.

"Thirty-two. Isn't it time you were getting married?"

In spite of himself, Sergeant Eberhart let his mouth drop open. He took a deep breath to control his annoy
ance;
and when he could, he said, "Maybe it is."
Not that it's any business of yours.

"I like to see my men settled," Ansbacher said.

"Yessir." Eberhart made his escape.

Lieutenant Murtaugh found him leaning against the wall in the hallway, looking as if he couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry. "What's the matter?"

"Captain Ansbacher," Eberhart said. "He just told me it was time I was getting married."

Murtaugh grinned sympathetically. "You're in for it, then. He'll keep after you until you at least tell him you're engaged."

"What the hell business is it of his whether—"

"None, but that won't stop him. It's his business if he makes it his business. And he seems to have noticed he has a swinging bachelor among his troops."

"I don't swing," Eberhart said grumpily. "I just sort of two-step a little once in a while. My sister used to complain because the family kept at her all the time to get married. Now I know how she felt."

Murtaugh doubted that, but didn't say so. "Well."

"Damnedest thing," Eberhart went on, "what if I
had
been thinking of getting married? How could . . . " He trailed off.

"Getting married would make it look as if you'd given in to Captain Ansbacher?"

"Yeah, that's it."

"Sergeant, if you don't get married because of the Captain, then he's controlling your actions just as much as if you did get married on command. You can't decide on that basis."

"Yeah, I know. It's just that—
shit.
You know."

Murtaugh knew. He knew something else too: Eberhart was stalling, avoiding talking about something.

And
Eberhart knew he knew. The Sergeant made up his mind. He'd already chosen sides, while he was still in Ansbacher's office. He'd done so at some risk to himself; therefore he'd better make sure Murtaugh understood he'd gone out on a small limb for him.

Eberhart jerked one shoulder toward Ansbacher's office. "He called me in there for a reason. He tried to get me to say you'd handled the Sussman case wrong. Specifically, that you should have booked Leon Walsh."

Murtaugh just looked at him, wordless.

"I said I thought you were right about Walsh."

"Thank you, Sergeant," Murtaugh said quietly. "I'll remember."

Leon Walsh was unaware of the police's reluctantly continuing interest in him; that part of his life, he thought, was over and done with. He was not a suspect; he was in the clear. They didn't think he'd killed Jerry Sussman; Lieutenant Murtaugh had made no move to arrest him, had (in fact) treated him with courtesy and respect. Walsh was no longer worried about being charged with murder.

Now he had brand new things to worry about. New, and worse, in a way.

He had guilty knowledge of the murder; consequently he was an accomplice after the fact, he was sure that was the way the law must read. He didn't know the murderer's real name, or where he lived, or even what he looked like. He knew a voice over the phone, that was all. A voice saying:
You may call me Pluto.
When Walsh had finally gotten the last twenty-five thousand, from Leila, he'd gone into the men's room at the Mark Hellinger Theater at exactly two-thirty on Wednesday afternoon. The matinee performance was well into the first act
when
Walsh removed the paper hand towels from the wall dispenser and placed the money inside. Evidently the pickup had been successful, for he hadn't heard from Pluto since.

Just like that, he'd paid off a murderer. He, Leon Walsh, respectable and contributing member of society—had paid off a murderer! After the fact, of course. But there wasn't much real difference between that and going out and hiring someone to kill Jerry Sussman. Clumsy irony: now that the police no longer suspected him, he looked upon himself as guilty.

How easily he'd yielded to Pluto! The voice on the phone had known all about the enmity between editor and publisher, it had known of UltraMedia's involvement, of Walsh's impending loss of
Summit.
Pluto had known financial details not published in the
Wall Street Journal
story, he'd even known details of Walsh's own personal finances. When Pluto had said he had ''disposed of" Sussman, Walsh believed him.

Walsh had put himself into a financial hole, a deep one. Buying up Sussman's
Summit
shares hadn't wiped him out, but it had come close. And then this Pluto had hinted that if he didn't get his money, Walsh himself would never live to enjoy it. Again Walsh believed him. He hadn't slept at all the night after that first phone call; he'd shivered in bed on a warm night and he couldn't sleep.

He felt sick to his stomach every time he thought of the rotten trick he'd played on Leila. What kind of man would do a thing like that to a woman? A terrified one, that's what kind. Walsh tried to console himself by thinking that Leila hadn't been too eager to give him the money when she believed only
his
life was at stake. But oh boy did she come across when she thought she was in
danger
too. Served her right. If she'd said yes when he first asked her, he wouldn't have had to stoop to such underhanded strategy; it was her own fault.

No use. It was still a rotten trick.

Walsh sighed, and knew he'd do it again if he had to. For a man who'd been thinking about suicide only a few weeks ago, he certainly was doing all he could to stay alive now. His money problems bore down on him; he didn't know how he was going to pay back all he'd borrowed. But the idea of giving up now was inconceivable; because now he had
Summit.
That's what made the difference. All to himself he had the magazine, to do with as he pleased.

Guilt over rewarding Sussman's killer, guilt over Leila. There wasn't much he could do about that now; maybe in time it would take care of itself. Concentrate on the money problems.

It was time to trot out J. J. Kellerman again.

J. J. had been lying in a file drawer for a long time now—in Walsh's personal file, at home. It wouldn't do for carbons of a J. J. Kellerman
parvum opus
to go floating around the
Summit
offices—wouldn't do at all. J. J. Kellerman was the best-kept secret in Leon Walsh's life; even Leila hadn't known about him. If someone like Fran Caffrey should ever find out that Walsh was writing fiction under a different name—well, he didn't even want to imagine that scenario.

Was writing,
hah.
Had written
was more like it. Walsh hadn't composed any fiction of his own for over four years now. The
Summit
readers' response to the last J. J. Kellerman story he'd published had been so negative that he had dropped out of the short-story rat race altogether. He'd actually felt his genitals shrivel when he read the letters some of the magazine's readers had taken it on
themselves
to write.
Amateur
was the word that appeared most often; there were other disparaging terms, but
amateur
was the one that hurt the most.

Walsh had come up with a fair rationalization of the antipathy his fiction had aroused. He told himself those letters must have been written by readers who liked the kind of story Jerry Sussman had manipulated him into printing. Nonliterary readers. There had been no letters of endorsement from readers with what Walsh imagined were more esthetic tastes, but that wasn't surprising. People tended to write letters about things they disliked; when they liked something, they didn't bother. So Walsh had been able to tell himself he just might have a readership out there someplace after all. But he'd written no more stories; the hurt had been too deep.

J. J. Kellerman had been born out of a combination of modesty, professional ethics, and an unwillingness to take risks. In the pre-Sussman days when
Summit
was just another struggling quarterly, Walsh had been inundated with manuscripts from beginning writers. They all subscribed to
Writer's Digest
and they all felt that if they were ever paid thirty-five dollars for something they'd written, they were a success. But Walsh had never meant
Summit
to be a testing ground for learners; he'd wanted the best, right from the start. But to find the good ones he'd had to wade through floods of quasi-realism, pseudosymbolism, countersurrealism, neo–New Wave, god knows what else. There was even a short-lived university-nurtured movement that called itself "holistic fiction"—Walsh got a lot of good laughs out of that one.

Most of what he read was so bad that Walsh felt that old itch to write coming back once again. It was the same trap so many readers fell into:
I can do better than that.
Walsh had tried writing when he was younger but had
given
it up when he decided he didn't really have anything to say. He was an editor—an
improver,
to his way of thinking. But still, there was that itch.

So he had turned to his typewriter and had laboriously produced an earnest little story called "Talking of Michelangelo"—he was still in his T. S. Eliot period then. But what to do with it? Editors of fiction anthologies included one of their own stories as a matter of course, but it was considered shabby for periodical editors to print their own work—except for editorials, of course. Obviously the thing to do was send "Talking of Michelangelo" to another editor; but Walsh hesitated, worried about what a bad story might do to his growing reputation as an editor. He couldn't judge his own work as objectively as that of others.

He thought of trying to work out a back-scratching arrangement with the editor of some other literary quarterly; there must be dozens of editors with writing aspirations who'd be willing to swap stories with him. But Walsh could never bring himself to propose such an exchange.
Modesty,
he thought—hoping it wasn't really cowardice that kept him from acting.

So because he didn't have the nerve to publish under his own name, Walsh invented a pseudonym for himself—J. J. Kellerman. "Kellerman" because at the time he'd recently seen the movie
Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things about Me? Keller
was German for cellar, basement; Keller-man was the man in the cellar, the leading character's subconscious that was acting against his own best interests. Walsh wanted to draw on his own subconscious; and one way of bringing the man out of the cellar was through the creation of art, wasn't it? Walsh liked the neat way that worked out. So he'd paid himself a token fee of ten dol
lars
and published "Talking of Michelangelo" (by J. J. Kellerman) in the next issue of
Summit.