Stranger At Home (23 page)

Vickers hit him, low, with the point of his shoulder. He gathered Bill into his arms and the two of them went down. The impact wedged them both into the doorway. One gun went flying out of Saul's hand, out of reach. The other one, his own, he hung onto, but Vickers was on top of him in the narrow space of the doorway, and Vickers' left hand took hold of his wrist and held it. They lay there like that. They did not seem to move. Sweat broke out on Saul's face and he breathed harshly through his teeth, and after a while his arm relaxed and the gun dropped out of his hand, and Vickers picked it up.

“You did that for me, Bill,” he said. “Four years at hard labor. You get strong, doing that.” He stood up. He threw the gun away, into a far corner of the room. He looked down at Bill Saul and smiled.

“Get up,” he said.

Saul got up. “Did you kill her, Vick? Did you kill her!”

“Make a guess, Bill. You've got an even chance to win.”

Saul moved toward him “By Christ,” he whispered, “if you've...” He stopped. “No,” he said. “You can't needle me that way.”

Vickers shrugged. “Go on and telephone. Find out.”

Saul stood looking at him. The towel had come off. He was quite naked now, his body balanced like a cat's, for action. The radio had left Chopin for Handel, a Tibbett recording, very quaint and restful. Peggy stirred by the front door, but did not waken. Vickers looked into Bill Saul's eyes and said softly:

“I haven't anything to lose, Bill. The way you've worked it out, I haven't a hope. I don't know whether I can make you talk, and I don't know whether any of it could be proven if you did. But I've got beyond the point where that is all-important. Way beyond it.” He paused, then went on, as though he might have been talking about the probability of rain. “No,” he said, “I didn't kill Angie. She's safe. But she thinks I killed Joan. She'll think now that I killed Harry. I can't expect her to think anything else. The most charitable view she can possibly take is that I'm mentally unsound, but it means the end of our marriage.”

He paused again, studying Bill Saul, weighing him, measuring.

“You've done all this, Bill. You've done it to get Angie. I'm going to try and clear myself. I'm going to do my damndest to keep what belongs to me. But no matter what happens, there's one thing I can do. I can stop you taking what you want after I'm out of the way.” He saw what came into Saul's mind, and he smiled and shook his head. His voice was almost caressing. “I don't mean to kill you, Bill. You're far too important to me for that.”

Bill Saul measured the distance between himself and escape. He gave that up. He listened for approaching sirens, and heard none. He looked Vickers up and down, weighing the bleeding wrist against the size and weight. A bitter light of humor flickered briefly across his face.

“Four years ago I could have taken you, Vick. I could have given you height and weight and still taken you, because your guts were just stuffed feathers. Now, I don't know.” His breathing was deep and steady, his belly pulled in, his shoulders loose. He said, “I hope I can take you.”

His eyes began to burn, deeply, with an ugly heat. All the indecision left his face, and the gambler's mask of blankness, and what was left was hate. His own personal, particular kind of hate, born of logic as much as emotion, and spiked with his own kind of laughter.

“You went down easy in Mexico, Vick.”

“I was drugged.”

“You're drugged now.”

“I know it. But I can still see.”

He was hampered by the bad arm. Saul got in quite a bit of damage at the start.

The radio moved from Handel to Strauss.

#Vickers knelt on Saul's chest. He looked down into Saul's face. It was not pretty. Neither was his own. Saul's eyes glittered. He cursed Vickers, very softly, not wasting breath.

Vickers said, “You killed Harry.”

“Yes.”

“You killed Joan.”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell the police?”

“Christ, no!”

Vickers hit him carefully under the right eye. The cut that was already there split wider.

Bill Saul laughed. He said two words.

The radio turned from Strauss to Harry James.

Not very many seconds had ticked by on the clock.

#Vickers dragged Bill Saul to a sitting position against the wall. He crawled over into the corner and picked up the gun he had thrown away and crawled back again. Saul was trying to stand up. Vickers half rose and knocked him down. He propped him against the wall again. Saul looked at him through the slit of one eye.

Vickers said, “You wanted my wife.”

“Yes.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“Yes.”

“Twice.”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell the police?”

Saul said two words.

Vickers laid his forefinger along the barrel of the gun. He drew the sights experimentally across Saul's cheek. He said,

“You aren't going to have much of a face.”

Harry James started on the “Two O'Clock Jump.”

Vickers pulled Bill Saul into the bath. He pulled him by the hair. The shower was still running. The water was cold. It splashed glistening on the tiles and swirled energetically down the drain. Vickers pulled Bill Saul up to the shower stall and lifted his head and shoulders up over the sill and shoved him in until his face was under the spray. The water swirling around the drain top turned red.

Presently Saul began to jerk convulsively. Vickers hauled him out, onto the floor. He bent and studied Saul, as an artist studies a finished work, critically, turning Saul's head from side to side. Saul breathed heavily through his mouth. Vickers rose and walked unsteadily to the shelf by the window and took the shaving mirror carefully in his hands. He went back to Saul.

“Bill,” he said. “Bill.”

He took his finger and pushed Saul's eyelids open. Saul looked up at him.

Vickers held the shaving mirror over his face.

“Do you think it needs a bit more off on the side, Bill?”

He held the mirror steady. Bill Saul made a strange sound. His body tightened, then relaxed.

Vickers put the mirror down with great care. “By Jesus,” he said. “He's fainted.”

Out in the living room, Peggy stirred. Somebody was making a lot of noise. It was the police, breaking in.

Harry James started on “Holiday For Strings.”

Twenty-one minutes had gone by on the clock.

Bill Saul lay on the bed. There was a blanket over him. Vickers held his left arm. A uniformed policeman held his right. Two other men held his feet. He struggled, but not very hard.

Trehearne stood at the foot of the bed. Beside him there was a young man in plain clothes, who had a notebook and pencil. The shower had been turned off. The radio had been turned off. Peggy had been taken outside.

Bill Saul whispered, “I want a doctor.”

“Not yet,” said Vickers. “Not yet.”

The blind red thing on the pillow moved. A hoarse sound came out of it.

“You ought to be dead, Vick. I hit you hard enough. I'd have hit you again, only those goddamn drunken fools came.”

Vickers said, “You wanted my wife.”

“Damn right. She needed a man, not a stuffed shirt. Yeah. I wanted her.” He began to struggle again. “I want a doctor.”

Not yet,” said Vickers. “You killed Harry.”

“Yeah. I saw you when you came in, Vick. I didn't believe it was you. I kept out of sight. Went around onto the terrace and looked in at you – I still didn't believe it, but there you were. I didn't want you back.”

“No,” said Vickers. “You wouldn't.”

“I went away and thought about it. How to get rid of you so that Angie'd hate you. How to get rid of your memory. I wanted to get rid of Harry, too. He was around her too much. She felt sorry for him. When a woman gets pitiful, she gets soft. I knew he was with her then. Alone. Didn't take long to figure out.”

He coughed over some blood that ran down his throat.

“I went down to the beach. I was lucky. Harry came out alone. He was drunk. Very drunk. I hit him, with a rough iron bar. No fingerprints, Vick. No way you could prove it wasn't you killed Harry, before you'd even gone to the house. Then a car came up on the drive. I had to run.”

“Joan Merrill's car,” said Trehearne. Vickers nodded. He held Saul's arm and said,

“Not yet. There's Joan.”

“She died easy,” whispered Saul. “Not even a twitch. Let me go.”

Trehearne said, “Let him go. I can fill that in myself.”

They let him go.

Trehearne looked at Vickers. He said, “Well, you didn't have to go to all this trouble, Vickers. But I guess you had it coming to you, at that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Saul is a very smart boy. He painted a beautiful picture. There was only one detail that was wrong. Joan did die easy. Much easier than he thought. He knocked her out in the kitchen. She must have had some warning of it. She was under great tension anyway, and the shock stopped her heart. With medical attention she'd have come round, but she didn't have any. She'd been dead over an hour when you were supposed to have killed her with the poker. Did you notice that she hadn't bled the way Bryce did, from the same type of wound?”

“My God,” said Vickers.

Trehearne said, “Catch him, there. Isn't that goddamn ambulance here yet?”

They sat, or rather, lay comfortably at full length in the long padded chairs by the pool. The butler brought a tray of tall cool glasses and went away again. Trehearne sipped drowsily and then glanced with a certain sardonic annoyance at Vickers.

‘I'm disappointed,” he said.

“And also,” said Vickers, “your pride is touched.”

“To the quick.” Trehearne sighed. “And I had such a beautiful case against you.”

“Circumstantial evidence,” said Angie.

“Not with that last performance. I had everything. Fingerprints on the poker. Fingerprints on the bottle of chloral hydrate we found behind the flower bowl. Your visual testimony, Mrs. Vickers, which you volunteered.”

Angie flushed painfully, and Vickers said, “My God, do you blame her? She wakes out of a drugged sleep and sees me...”

“I don't blame her at all. I merely said it was helpful. Very. Then your wild escape down the hill.” Trehearne shivered. “Christ, you terrified me! I was in that police car, you know. We thought we were dead ducks. We didn't have the license number of your car, our radio was busted in the crash, and Mrs. Vickers had passed out cold, so we were a trifle delayed in finding you. You got quite a lot done in that time.”

“I had four years to make up for,” Vickers said.

Angie said, “Just what did you do to Bill?”

“Darling,'! said Vickers gently, “we're interrupting Mr. Trehearne. This is his moment. Let him enjoy it.”

Trehearne said, “Thank you. Well, this was supposed to be the set up. Bill Saul had to get Vickers out of the way. He fumbled the job in Mexico, through no fault of his own, and it was very embarrassing to have him turn up again, alive, and probably able to guess pretty shrewdly at what had happened. Saul figured it this way – Vickers hadn't told anyone he was alive, or coming back, therefore he suspected an attempt at murder. However, Vickers had not set the police onto Bill Saul, therefore he did not know who was responsible. Saul thought he had a little time, enough to try something smart.

“Saul knew that the only way to get rid of Vickers once and for all, as far as Angie was concerned, was to make it seem that Vickers was a killer, a louse, a murdering, half-cracked sonofabitch. In short, to destroy Angie's faith in him. So he killed Harry Bryce, knowing that Vickers would be blamed for it. But the thing got a bit confused, what with Angie and Joan, and a distressing lack of proof. Nothing for Bill to do but wait and try again. I'm using the third person here because it goes easier. Ungrammatical, but you don't mind, do you?”

They did not.

“So he waited, and suddenly the break came. The psychological moment. Joan gave him his chance. She, too, wanted to get rid of Vickers. So she arranged a very clever frame-up. She knew that she and Harry Bryce had the same type of blood. They found that out during the Blood Bank era. And she knew what nearly everybody has read in the newspapers – that blood tests can only be proved negatively. That is, you can prove that a certain sample of blood did
not
come from a particular individual, if it's the wrong blood type, but never that it
did
, if it happens to be the right type. There are only four blood groups, and that makes a lot of people that match.

“So Joan doctored a pair of Vickers' shoes with her own blood, which was the same as Harry Bryce's, polished them carefully, and sent them to me, via Bill Saul. She sent a note with them, explaining that Vickers had switched shoes on me when his clothes were picked up for examination, and that these were in reality the ones that Vickers had worn at the beach the night Harry was killed. The only trouble with that hopeful effort was that laboratory tests showed that the shoes had not been worn for a long time, there was no beach sand or tar on them, and there were none of Vickers' fingerprints, which there would have had to be if he had worn and polished them himself, as she claimed.

“Well, Bill didn't know any of that, and he didn't care. He knew the evidence was a phoney, of course, because he himself had killed Bryce; but that didn't matter. What did matter was that Joan had put into his hands a perfect motive for murder. The lack of love between Joan and Vickers was pretty well known all round. So what would be more convincing than that Vickers should discover that Joan had sent incriminating evidence, phoney or not, to the police – she was even the type who might have bragged about it to Vickers – and that Vickers flew into a rage and killed her? So Bill knocked her out, he thought, and went back into the living room to play some more gin rummy.”