The Dishonest Murderer (13 page)

Briggs and Smiley—or would it be Smiley and Briggs? She got the Manhattan telephone book and began to look. There were a great many people named Briggs; she looked first under Smiley. Not Smiley and Briggs, that was quickly determined. She went back to the “B's” and down long columns. Briggs—Briggs—“Briggs and Smiley, b.,” with an address on Seventh Avenue in the Forties.

She did not think, as, calmer, she would have thought, that no office would be open at one-thirty on the afternoon of New Year's Day. She lifted the receiver of the telephone on her desk, heard the dial tone, spun the dial quickly. She was not surprised, as she might have been surprised, to receive an answer.

“Briggs and Smiley,” a woman's voice said.

Freddie asked for Mr. Smiley.

“He is not in his office at the moment,” the impersonal voice told her. “I expect to be in touch with him. May I have him call you?”

“I—” Freddie said, hesitating. To have him telephone the apartment might make difficulties. But she could see no alternative. “Yes,” she said. “Please do.” She gave her name and the telephone number. She replaced the receiver and sat at her desk, looking at the telephone. She would need to answer it first, and quickly.

She waited for more than an hour; she thought of Bruce, probed the emptiness his death left in her life. It was that—an emptiness. It was not as it had been the other time, when she heard of Jack's death. Then, for a time, it was as if she had fallen over the edge of something, had fallen twisting down, pain twisting with her. But now it was an emptiness, a blank space where her emotions had been, her plans had been. Now it was a question of starting all over, of somehow filling that empty place. When Jack was killed, there had been no such thought, because there had seemed to be no such possibility. She had been younger then, known less then. But that was only a partial explanation. This was a different thing and, except for the circumstances, a lesser thing. And, she realized, for the moment other things—uneasiness which was a kind of fear, a feeling of responsibility which nagged at her—partly filled the emptiness, as the piled up details of an elaborate funeral might diminish the pain of loss, quite simply by lessening the time which might be devoted to feeling pain.

She thought about Bruce, as if he had been dead longer than he had, and about her father. She did not, at first, try to imagine who had killed Bruce. It was not her father, although he had involved himself in something, had behaved suspiciously and now needed her help. It was, then, someone unknown; someone who had met Bruce in a bar, thought he had money, drugged him to get money. She set this up and did not analyze it, did not try to find flaws in it.

At some time in the hour, Marta came in, after knocking. Freddie did not want food but, in part because Marta seemed disturbed, let the maid bring her coffee. Little sandwiches came with the coffee, and in the end she ate them, hardly knowing she did so.

The police had gone, Marta told her. But Sergeant Mullins—“the big one”—had said they probably would be back. He had told Marta that, when she showed him out.

Miss Celia had gone to one of the guest rooms and was lying down and Mrs. Burnley, Marta thought, was with her. The others, she thought, were still in the apartment, but she was not certain. They had been half an hour or so earlier when, at the admiral's instructions, she had taken coffee and sandwiches into the living room and left them available on a table.

It was about two-thirty that the telephone rang. Freddie lifted the receiver, said “yes?” into it, before the first ring had finished.

“Let me talk to Mrs. Haven,” a voice said. It was the expected voice, the buttery voice. “Tell her Mr. Smiley is calling.”

“This is Mrs. Haven,” Freddie said. “I—”

“What can I do for you, beautiful?” the voice asked her. There was amusement in Smiley's voice.

“I want to see you,” she said. “About—about the work you were doing for Father.”

“Yeah?” Smiley said. “Why you?”

“I'll explain,” she said, and realized that part of it had come off; that, tacitly, he had accepted her statement that he was working for her father. So she had been right to be afraid, anxious. “I'll explain when I see you.”

He did not answer at once. He seemed to be considering. She could hear his breathing.

“If you want I should come there,” he said, then, “it's no dice, beautiful. I'm not sticking my neck out.” He paused. “Not right now, anyway,” he said.

“Not here,” Freddie agreed. “Wherever you say.”

He paused again.

“O.K.,” he said, finally. “If this is the way the old man wants it. My office. About half an hour.” He paused again, evidently looking at his watch. “Make it three o'clock,” he said.

He disconnected, and at once she put the receiver back in its cradle. She felt relief that the waiting was over; relief that the telephone conversation had come off, that no one had, as she had feared someone would, answered the call before she could lift the telephone. If her father had picked up the call on the library extension, for example, he would have put his foot down, he would have given orders. And then, for a moment, she became afraid that he had heard the conversation and learned of the plan. Had there been that faint soundless sound, that echo in hollowness, one heard on a multiple extension telephone line when two of the telephones were in use? She tried to remember, realized that she could not; that if there had been she had not, consciously, noticed it.

But still, as she sat briefly in front of her dressing table mirror, she was conscious of hurrying, of racing to be ready, be out of the room, before a knock at the door announced that her father had come to stop her. When she was ready, save for her coat and galoshes, she opened the door fearfully. But the hall was empty, and the stairs were empty.

If her father had not overheard, did not intend to stop her, he would almost certainly not be in the living room, she thought as she went down the stairs toward the foyer. He would have gone into the library, and from the library he could not see the foyer. If the others were still there, if they saw, it did not matter. None of them would ask an explanation.

But she took her coat hurriedly from the hanger in the closet off the foyer, grabbed up her galoshes and carried them, feeling as if she were pursued. She did not put her galoshes on until she was going down in the elevator. She stood first on one foot and then on the other, pulling on the galoshes. Ben told her she would sure need them, but that it had stopped snowing.

A taxicab was waiting at the corner. It came when the doorman beckoned. It slithered through the snow, twisting as it stopped. She gave the number on Seventh Avenue after she was inside, so that the doorman would not hear. The sense of being pursued still was with her.

It was only ten minutes of three when the taxicab stopped in front of the building on Seventh Avenue. It was a narrow building, an old one, pinched between, dwarfed by, two larger, newer buildings. She looked at her watch. She did not want to be early.

“I'm early,” she said. “Can you wait here a few minutes? It's warm in here.”

The taxicab driver seemed about to refuse; then he shrugged and tipped his flag to put the meter on waiting time. “God knows why I'm out at all,” he said, morosely, and lighted a cigarette. She waited in the cab until her watch told her it was two minutes of three. Then she paid the driver, tipped him with money and a smile, and went along a path shoveled across the snowy sidewalk to the entrance of the building.

The building had a narrow entrance and a narrow hall running back from the street. At the end of the hall a man was sitting on a wooden chair, tilting it back against the wall. He did not get up as he watched her coming toward him. When she was quite near he said, “Yeah?”

“Mr. Smiley's office,” she said. “He's expecting me.”

“Yeah?” the man said. He did not seem convinced. But he tilted the chair down and the legs hit the floor sharply, with a gritty sharpness.

“O.K.,” he said. “You want to see Smiley.” He jerked his head toward the elevator.

It was a small elevator. She stood against the back wall of the car, looking at the back of the elevator operator. He was an elderly man with dirty, thin gray hair. He did not say anything as the car went up. At the fourth floor he stopped the car and opened the doors. They opened noisily.

“End of the hall,” he said, and jerked his head toward the rear of the building. He stood partly in front of the door of the elevator and did not move aside, so that she had to brush against him as she passed. She felt him watching her as she went down the narrow, dirty hall in the direction he had indicated.

There was a door at the end of the hall with the words “Briggs and Smiley, Investigations,” painted on it. There was a pane of obscure glass in the door, and light came through it dimly. She knocked and waited. The knock was unanswered, so she pushed at the door, and it opened in front of her.

It opened into a small room. There was a dusty desk on her right and a hooded typewriter. Beyond were two doors and one of them was open. It was from that room that the light came.

At a desk facing the door, facing her, the man named Smiley was sitting. He seemed to be grinning at her; he seemed to be resting his head on the back of the chair and grinning across the room at her. His teeth were white under parted lips. But he did not speak.

She went across the small outer room and started to enter the office with the open door, and still Smiley did not move and did not speak. He merely sat there, with his lips drawn back from his teeth, so that he seemed to be grinning. She was quite close to him before she realized that he was dead.

There was a bloody red hole in his forehead, and the blood was oozing out of it.

Freddie Haven put her gloved right hand against her mouth, the knuckles bruising her lips. She did not scream. For what seemed a long time she did not move. She merely stood in the doorway, looking at the grinning dead man. She put out her left hand and steadied herself by holding to the door jamb. Nausea began, and she fought it down. Steadying her body by the hand held against the door frame, she tried to steady her mind.

She stood there for what seemed a long time, her eyes wide, her gloved right hand pressing against her lips.
If only the mouth would close,
she thought.
If only it wouldn't grin!

But, she thought, Dad wouldn't shoot a man sitting at a desk, unarmed, unready, without a chance. (He would give an order which, if an infinite series of calculations was correct, would snuff out the lives of a thousand men, invisible to him, unwarned, but that would be different. That would be, that had been, war; that had been his trade. But never one man, sitting at a desk.)

She clung to that knowledge, that certainty. Then, taking a deep breath as if she were about to dive, she released the door jamb and forced herself to move toward the desk. She had to know.

She stood, without touching anything, almost against the desk, and looked down at the grinning face. Now, with the head tilted against the headrest on the chair, the face grinned up at her. Again she felt, again fought to quell, the rising nausea.

The left hand of the body was resting on the desk, the fist clenched. The right hand she could not see. It was below the level of the desk top. She moved to one side of the desk and then she could see the right hand. It was in the partly open center drawer of the desk. It seemed to be reaching for something, clutching for something.

She moved again, forced herself to bend down so that she could see over the right shoulder, follow along the arm, see what the hand had clutched for. Not much light fell into the drawer, onto the hand, but there was enough. The hand—a big hand, soft looking, fat—clutched the butt of a black automatic.

Not unarmed, then. Not unready. Merely—slow. Too slow. He had had time before he died, died grinning, to pull open the drawer, get his hand on his gun. To anyone standing in front of the desk, standing near, the motion would have been evident, the purpose clear. A finger must have been ready on a trigger; pressure, as the movement of the man at the desk was seen, would have been—must have been—instinctive and inevitable. Anyone, trained to emergencies, would have acted when Smiley reached for his gun. There was an instant of time; there had been ready decision in utilizing that instant.

That would have been like the admiral. That decision his training had given him, that readiness to grasp the instant. If there was shooting, you shot first. That was the rule. “Seek out and destroy.” Seek out and destroy, seek out and destroy. The words beat a senseless, horribly sensible, rhythm in her mind. Seek out and destroy. Seek out the enemy and destroy him. The man with the grin, with the bared white teeth, had been an enemy. He had been destroyed.

It was hideously clear in her mind. This man, this fat man dead with a grin fixed on his lips, had visited her father a few hours after Bruce Kirkhill had been killed. He had been confident, then; there had been assured insolence in his manner, in the inflections of his voice. He had had no doubt that her father would see him; his attitude had implied that her father had no choice but to see him.
That her father would be afraid not to see him.
And—he had been right. Her father had not been surprised at this attitude, had not protested it.

Her mind stopped there, shrinking away from a clear presentation of what this meant; what, if the premises were true, it must inevitably mean. Her mind, caught in its own logic, fled in a circle, as if within a wall, seeking escape from this inevitability. Dad
must
not have done this; it
must
not be this way. He could not have come here—

That was it!
He had
not
come here. He was at home, in the library; probably he had not even been alone. Probably Howard Phipps—somebody, anybody—had been with him from—when was it? At about two-thirty Smiley had been alive. He had telephoned her, made the appointment she had kept, was now, horribly, keeping. Was it only half an hour ago, forty minutes ago, that she had heard that buttery voice? During that forty minutes her father had been in the library, talking to somebody, perhaps eating a lunch which Watkins had brought him. That would be the way it had been.