The Long Night (22 page)

Another five minutes went by. I began to think she didn't quite know where she was going. Soon after that, she more or less admitted it. She asked me where my apartment was. I told her. Then she asked me how to get to it. I told her that, too. She didn't thank me.

Not much later, I turned my head very carefully and stared through the rear window. I saw her gun arm go tense but she didn't say anything. I said, “Do you know we're being followed?”

She didn't look up at the mirror straight off. When she did, she said, “Why should anyone follow us?”

“Ask the two guys in that Buick right behind us,” I said. “They've been fastened to our tail for the past quarter of an hour.”

“Friends of yours?” She was trying to watch the street ahead, the car in the rear, and me—all at the same time. It was making her edgy.

“King Gilmore,” I said, “like the devil, takes care of his own. When a little girl sits in on a man's game, she's liable to get hurt.”

“Some other little girl maybe. Not this one. If they start something——” she pulled the wheel over and we slid past a towering truck and cut in again “—you'll be the first to get hurt. I can promise you that.”

The truck swung right at the next intersection. We rode straight on. And now the Buick was sniffing our rear fenders again.

Deborah was getting the jitters and getting them badly. She wasn't finding it easy to split her attention three ways.

I said, “When you offered me ten grand to bump off Gilmore, I thought it was because you didn't have the guts to do it yourself; now I find I was wrong. Why did you go to the expense of hiring me when you could've done your own killing?”

She said, “Shut up! I don't believe that car behind us is the least bit interested . . . and I'll soon prove it. . . .”

We began to draw away from the Buick. At the corner of Nineteenth and Stanley, she jumped the lights and threw the car round the next corner in a lurching skid that nearly ripped the rear tyres off.

Before the springs had settled, her eyes were on the mirror. She said, “I knew——” And that was all she did say. Her face went numb and she took her foot off the throttle and the car coasted along on an idling motor while she tried to free her hand from mine.

With the muzzle of the automatic wedged in the slit between the back-rest and the seat, I said, “During one stage of my misspent life, I learned three different ways of breaking the wrist that holds a gun . . . which way would you prefer? Or will you be your age and let go so you don't force me to be rough with you?”

Her lips were pale and she was trying to do without breathing before she said faintly, “I—I can't let go . . . you're crushing my hand.” In the grey light of the overcast sky, I saw tears clinging to her dark lashes.

“I'm sorry about that,” I said. “But it'll be a lesson to you. Next time don't go in out of your depth. Amateur dramatics have no place in the homicide business.” I loosened my grasp just enough to release her fingers and then I slid back into my corner. I said, “The next turning on your right is the way we're heading. Take it. Nothing's changed. We're going to my apartment to have the little talk you wanted.”

She put her hand to her mouth and she sucked in an uneven breath through her teeth. She didn't argue. Without looking at me, she did as she'd been told.

In the premature dusk that shortened a squally day, we went up the dim stairs. I kept two steps behind her. She hadn't looked round once since we had got out of the car.

On the second floor, I said, “The door at the end . . . that one on the left.”

While I opened up, she stood staring at nothing. Her face was a pale blur and the light from the window in the hallway
didn't reach her eyes. She looked like she was still feeling the ache of the fingers I'd crushed.

We went into the twin hole-in-the-wall I call an apartment and I put on the light and shut the door. She didn't protest when I locked it. She merely looked at me emptily when I took the automatic from my pocket. Her eyelashes were still sticky with tears.

I said; ”Now we'll play the reverse side of the disc . . . those who dish it out have got to learn to take it, too. Are you going to talk or do I have to make you?”

She tilted her head back and set her teeth in her upper lip. In a thin voice, she said, “You wouldn't dare.” Either she wasn't afraid or fear meant nothing to her any more.

“Who wouldn't?” I asked her. With the gun in my hand I walked towards her until we were almost touching. She didn't move an inch. The way she stared right through me, she didn't care what the hell I did.

“You're mistaking me for somebody else,” I said. “Don't you remember me? I'm the moron who works for King Gilmore. I'm also the killer you hired for ten thousand dollars. There's nothing a hoodlum like me won't dare.” I took another half-step forward and now I was nearly treading on the toes of her dainty shoes. “Someone should've told you I'm the kind of guy that should never happen to a nice girl . . . if the sister of a tramp like Susan Warner can be called a nice girl. What do you think?”

“I think——” Inside her pretty head she was grilling me over a slow fire. It she hadn't been reared to act like a young lady she'd have spat in my eye. Then she started again. After she'd improved her attractive chest development with a long, deep breath, she said, “I ought to have killed you when I had the chance.” She made it sound like she almost meant it.

“Don't regret your lost opportunities,” I told her. “You might give yourself wrinkles. I like you much better the way you are. Think you could learn to like me?”

“There's only one thing I'd like,” she said. “And that's to have the gun in my hand again.”

“Is that all?” I withdrew the magazine from the butt of the automatic and held it up to the light. It was full. When I'd put it back, I worked a shell into the breech. Then I
laid the gun on my palm, butt foremost, and held it out to her. “We don't all get a second chance,” I said. “Better take yours before I change my mind . . . go on.”

Her eyes left mine and travelled down to the gun and climbed slowly up again. She wet her lips twice and swallowed. Almost in a whisper, she said, “You. must be crazy. . . .” The colour had come back to her cheeks and there was something in her face I couldn't read.

“Sure I'm crazy,” I said. “I've got a swell-looking dame and in my apartment and the door's locked. What do I do with a set-up like that? I hand her a loaded automatic and I ask her to shoot me so she'll know I'm on the level. If she doesn't she'll go on distrusting me; if she does, I suppose she'll send flowers to the funeral to show she's full of remorse . . . what else could I be but crazy?”

She squeezed her hands together and moved back a couple of inches as if she wanted to see what I'd do. Then very, very slowly, she reached out and took hold of the gun and stepped one long pace away from me. The overhead light put bronze fire in the sheen of her hair. Deep in her eyes lay an enigma that only the gun could answer.

Beyond the rain-spattered window an occasional light smeared the growing darkness. Somewhere on the ground floor a door banged in a gust of wind. I could hear a child crying fretfully in the room below.

One shot would arouse no alarm . . . the Paplinski's would think the Schwartz kids were playing with a toy pistol . . . the Schwartz family would think it was the Paplinski kids . . . or people would put it down to the backfire of a car. . . . And Deborah could leave without hindrance . . . walk out and lose herself among the evening crowds . . . if I had been wrong . . . if it had been Deborah and not Susan who had killed Judith Walker . . . killing comes easy after the first time . . . there had been Pauline's removal because she had known the answer to the Walker death. . . .

I thought about Pauline while I watched Deborah's finger tighten and her knuckle grow white around the trigger. The hit-run car must've been the pay-off on a blackmail squeeze. And that type of technique belonged to the King Gilmore school. Pauline had known about the frame-up staged in Judith Walker's apartment and she had tried to cash-in on
her knowledge. Therefore, Pauline had had to be eliminated. A guy called Glenn Bowman had had to be eliminated also . . . but none of my conclusions accounted for Judith's murder.

The automatic was branding a hot ring on my chest. I suddenly realised what I had done. I had tried a bluff that'd been a piece of bonehead play. When you bluff, you've got to have a hand to bluff with.

One half of me was scared to hell—the intelligent half. The other half buried its head in the sand and refused to believe this could happen to me. And all because a two-timing dame with a honeyed, velvet voice had called me at two o'clock in the morning. The whole business deserved to be called: Twilight of a Shmoe.

I said, “It won't fire unless the safety's off.”

Deborah looked at me and went on looking. Her left hand came up and felt its way over the gun until it found the safety catch. With a light of far-off wonder in her eyes, she said, “You are crazy . . . this is quite fantastic.”

“You've put the safety on,” I told her. “It's the up position that's off.”

She said, “I know.” The frozen numbness had gone from her face as though something inside her were melting in a growing warmth. All her features were becoming soft—like her trembling mouth and the moistness of her wide, grey eyes. After a moment, she repeated, “I know. . . .”

Very slowly, the gun drooped lower and lower until it hung by her side. As if she were recalling lines from a long-forgotten script, she murmured, “You were right . . . I can't. I don't know who you are but I trust you. Or I want to trust you. It's only Richard Gilmore I hate.”

“Because of what he's done to you?”

“No . . . to Susan. She was living with him all the time she was supposed to be in Europe . . . someone she knew re-directed her letters . . . and now she's come home again.” Deborah glanced down at the automatic and then up into my face. In a bitter voice, she said, “Gilmore isn't the constant type. For the past few weeks, he's been neglecting her more and more and she found out there was somebody else—the girl called Judith Walker.”

“Does Susan admit she killed her?”

“No. . . . No, she says she's never been anywhere near the apartment. And she blames only herself for the whole affair, anyway. She says she knew what he was and she went into it with her eyes open.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I—I don't know,” Deborah said. She said it like she really didn't know.

“Has she told anyone else where she's been living while people thought she was in Europe?”

A little shutter flicked shut at the back of Deborah's eyes. I guessed she was either going to lie or to tell a half-truth. And she had to think too long before she said, “No . . . I'm the only one who knows.”

“Look.” I said. “Let's not play 'em close to the chest. You say you want to trust me . . . O.K. Here are my cards: my name isn't Wylie—it's Bowman. I'm a private investigator. How I got mixed up in this business will keep until another time, but you can take it from me I'm in it right over the head. The police wouldn't be the least bit surprised to learn I killed Judith Walker; and King Gilmore had a poor guy called Cartwright bumped off in mistake for me. In fact, officially I'm nicely laid out in a morgue in Washington right now.”

The wind spattered rain against the window and the door down below banged again while Deborah stared at me with mingled emotions chasing each other across her face. At last, she said, “I don't understand. All along I've been under the impression you worked for Gilmore. When I offered you ten thousand dollars to kill him, I didn't expect you to do it; I just hoped the attempt by me would bring him out into the open. And——” she looked at the gun and then at me as she added “—I also had a faint hope it was Gilmore who killed the girl Walker and that somehow I'd manage to prove it.”

“For what reason? Revenge for your sister's chastity?”

She didn't like that. But there wasn't much she could do about it. So she said, “Why not?”

“It's as old-fashioned as grandma's drawers,” I said. “That's why not. You had a better reason. You wanted to cover up for your father . . . didn't you?” I moved closer to
her and shook my head. “You think he discovered what Susan's been up to and——”

“What conceivable motive could he have for killing that woman of Gilmore's? She couldn't be blamed for what had happened to Susan.”

“Don't ask me,” I said. “I'm not the one who suspected your father.”

“Then why did you call on him this afternoon? Miss Armitage described you to me and that was why I waited for you. . . .”

“To have him admit that he was in Judith Walker's apartment the night she was murdered,” I said.

A stricken look came into Deborah's face. She said, “It—it isn't true . . . I don't believe it.”

“Sure you believe it! All you're worried about is that someone outside the family knows what you've only been suspecting. Isn't that it?”

She took a long time to answer. Then she said shakily, “Yes . . . but you won't convince me my father had anything to do with that girl's death. The whole thing was planned by Gilmore so as to stop father testifying before the Grand Jury.”

“Not the whole thing. The plan misfired or Judith wouldn't have died. And I'm not trying to convince you that your father killed her. He was merely a possible on my list of those likely to have done it.”

“How many are left on your list?”

“Just two now.”

Her hand opened and the gun dropped to the floor. Almost in a whisper, she asked, “Who—who are they?”

“Either you or your sister,” I said. “I can't see it being anyone else. Maybe you cooked it up together. Maybe Richard made you and Susan his Tootsie I and Tootsie 2 . . . and you needn't think you could pick that thing up quick enough. You can try, but you'll never make it. What's more, tears won't do any good. Apart from which, I've no mission in life to put the finger on Judith's killer. I've merely been academically curious. King Gilmore is the sonovabitch I'm interested in.”