The Poisoners (6 page)

It was a rather neat twist in an otherwise rather predictable gambit. It was supposed to make me take her in my arms and tell her she wasn’t so terrible after all, after which—considering her costume or lack of it—nature would undoubtedly take its predictable course. The only trouble was, I wasn’t in a receptive mood and I don’t like playing games with it unnecessarily. There are times in this racket when you’ve got to fake a lot of emotions, including passion, but I couldn’t see that this was one of them. I just stood there without saying anything. At last Beverly flushed slightly, and shrugged her bare shoulders.

“Well, it’s all I have to offer now,” she said. “For saving my life. Unless you want fifty-seven dollars and some change.”

“Cut it out. When I want to get paid, I’ll send you a bill.” I regarded her coldly and went on. “That cleaning fluid evaporates pretty fast. I think you can safely get dressed again. I’ll call a cab.”

She turned away sharply. She didn’t exactly slam the bathroom door behind her, but it didn’t close as gently as it might have. I grinned and went over to use the phone.

Charlotte Devlin, complete with car, driver, and prisoner, was waiting outside the address she’d given me—an address I figured didn’t mean much to anybody or she wouldn’t have disclosed it to an unsavory character like me. It was a run-down business block with a filling station on the corner. The public phone at the station was probably the main reason the place had been picked as a rendezvous. After all, I had asked her to do a little research for me.

I paid off the taxi driver and helped Beverly out of the vehicle. She seemed a bit startled, looking towards the other car, to see a woman awaiting us. My female associate got out and came to meet us. She looked Beverly up and down coldly during the introduction ceremony. It could have been professional wariness, but more likely, I thought, it was just tall Miss Devlin’s normal way of regarding all smaller and prettier women.

“What now, Mr. Helm?” she asked.

Beverly had spotted the black man sitting in the car, guarded by the driver. She drew back against me fearfully, forgetting that she was mad at me. I pressed her arm in what I hoped was a reassuring way, holding her there.

“Have you got a place lined up for target practice?” I asked Charlotte Devlin.

She said, rather stiffly and disapprovingly, “Well, there’s the pistol range we use, but I didn’t think that was exactly what you had in mind, so I called around and learned that there are some deserted oil properties…”

“The pistol range will do fine, if the backstop will handle Magnum loads.”

Charlotte raised her eyebrows, looking relieved and at the same time annoyed—relieved that what I was going to do, with her assistance, was innocent enough to be done at a public firing range, and annoyed that I’d let her believe, or at least suspect, otherwise. I was aware that McConnell, listening in the car, had shifted position slightly. I couldn’t see him clearly enough to know whether or not he looked relieved, too.

I hoped he did. I’d wanted him more or less anticipating that I was either going to execute him or shoot his ears off to make him talk. As long as he was brooding about the tough time I might be giving him soon, he wouldn’t be trying to figure out what other kind of shooting I might have in mind, and why.

Helping Beverly into the front seat, I said to the taller girl: “Incidentally, you’d better tell your wheelman that some evasive action may be indicated. That taxi turned up just a little too conveniently. I have a hunch it was planted on me, and I’d prefer not to have certain people know where we’re going. They might start wondering about things I’d rather not have them wondering about, yet…”

It was a fairly long ride. The driver knew his stuff, however, and by the time we reached our destination there wasn’t anybody behind us, but there had been. The driver got out to unlock a wire-mesh gate in a forbidding wire-mesh fence topped with barbed wire. Then he drove us past a shadowy building and spoke for the first time.

“We’ve got up to a hundred yards available here, Mr. Helm,” he said. “What range do you want to shoot at?”

“Short,” I said. “With silhouette targets if you’ve got them. I suppose there are lights.”

“Sure, it’s rigged for night firing.” He drove a little farther and stopped the car. “Here you are. The beginners’ range. We like to make it easy for them to hit something. It’s good for the morale. Just a minute while I unlock the switchbox.”

We sat there until the floodlights came on, illuminating the backstop, a high ridge of dirt out there, much too neat and level to have been formed by nature. The lights also picked out the roughly man-like and man-sized silhouettes lined up in front of the bank like two-dimensional soldiers at attention. I figured the range at twenty-five yards from the rearmost firing line, closest to the car; but the ground was also marked for shorter ranges.

I was glad to see that the firing points weren’t covered. It wasn’t raining, we needed no protection, and the .44 makes quite enough noise without having it bounced back at you from any kind of a roof.

“All right,” I said. “Bring him along, Miss Devlin. Where’s the cannon?”

She handed it to me over the back of the seat. Checking the loads once more as I got out of the car, I regarded the weapon without fondness. I’ve never really understood the fascination of these outsized, overpowering weapons; yet it seems you can’t sell a gun these days if it hasn’t got Magnum in the title. This was the second job I’d had recently involving this kind of hopped-up hardware.

Charlotte had backed out of the car, covering McConnell as he got out clumsily. We walked to the nearest firing point.

“I’m going to untie him in a minute,” I said to the tall girl. “Keep him covered. He’s a confessed murderer, remember. He’s got nothing to lose. Don’t hesitate to shoot if he gives you the slightest excuse.”

She said stiffly, “I know my business, Mr. Helm. I hope you know yours.”

This was her way of saying, I suppose, that she wondered what the hell we were doing here. Well, it was a good question. I hoped the answer would become clear shortly.

Having no spotting scope handy with which to check the targets, I walked down there and made sure there were no bullet holes in the one directly opposite, at least none that hadn’t been covered with the patching tape they use—at better than a buck a crack for the target face alone, not to mention the backing, you can’t throw away a whole silhouette every time somebody puts a few bullets through it. But these silhouettes must have been about ready for the discard or they wouldn’t have been left out in the weather. Some of the patches were peeling off, but for my purpose it didn’t matter greatly, and I went back to Lionel McConnell and untied him.

“How’s the circulation?” I asked when his hands were free.

“All right,” he said.

“That’s fine,” I said, “because you’re going to show us just how you killed Annette O’Leary. She had two bullets in her. Say that’s her down there, third target from the left. Your job is to put two slugs from this gun through the vital zone—if you can.”

He studied me suspiciously, trying to guess what I had in mind. “Listen, man,” he said, “you can’t make me re-enact…”

“No,” I said, “I can’t
make
you. But I can call Mr. Warfel and tell him that I think he’s pulling a fast one because I never knew a pug who could shoot for sour apples. I can tell him that you refused to demonstrate your marksmanship, so I’ve got to figure you don’t really know a trigger from a cylinder crane. I can tell him that I’m mad at having such an obvious fall-guy wished off on me, and that I’m going to tear things apart until I find the gent who
really
shot our girl O’Leary…”

McConnell cut me off with a sharp gesture. He glanced towards the illuminated targets scornfully. “You just want me to hit that great big man-sized poster-thing down there with two shots, slow fire?” His voice was contemptuous. “At twenty-five yards, single action, no time limit, using sights and all? Hell, give me the gun!”

“I’ll give it to you when you’re ready to fire,” I said. “And if it swings more than ten degrees out of line, either way, two .38 Specials will make hamburger of you. Okay?”

“Relax, man. I’ve confessed, haven’t I? Why should I make trouble now?”

He rubbed his wrists, flexed his fingers, and stepped up to the line. Back of us, I could see the driver leaning against the car, watching. Beverly Blaine’s small face was a white blur behind the windshield. McConnell scuffed his feet in the dirt and settled himself in position with his right shoulder towards the floodlighted target. I glanced at Charlotte, who nodded.

“Ready?” I said to McConnell.

“Ready.”

Bringing out my own sawed-off little belly gun to cover him, I handed him the big revolver. He took it with his left hand and, in the manner of the experienced pistol shooter, fitted it carefully into his right hand—if you don’t get hold of it exactly the same way every time, it won’t shoot in the same place. Obviously, McConnell had used a one-hand gun before.

His thumb, I noticed, rested on the cylinder latch, high on the left side of the frame, braced against the recoil to come. That’s fairly common target-shooting practice. I started to speak, but checked myself. McConnell cocked the big revolver, thrust it out level, and began to press the trigger gently as the sights lined up. Presently the Magnum fired.

Even in the open, it made a fearful racket. A long tongue of flame licked out down range. McConnell was shoved backwards by the recoil. His hand and arm kicked high, the big gun twisting violently in his grasp, almost escaping him. I grabbed the weapon from him. He took his right hand in his left and hugged it to him, making no sound but rocking back and forth a bit with pain.

“Let’s see it,” I said.

He gave me a hating look, and showed me the hand. The side of his thumb was bleeding, cut by the cylinder latch. The thumb joint, sprained by the kick of the .44, was already beginning to swell.

“You bastard,” he said. “You honkie bastard!”

“Take it easy,” I said. “What are you squawking about? I asked you if it was your gun and you said it was. Why should I tell you how to shoot it?” He glared at me and didn’t speak. I said, “But you really ought to know better than to rest your thumb up there on the latch,
amigo
. That’s all right with a .22, or maybe even a gentle little target .38, but with the heavy artillery you get your thumb the hell down out of the way of the recoil unless you want to lose it.”

“I’ll remember that,” he said grimly. “I’ll sure enough remember that now, man!”

“It’s too late now,” I said. “What’s Warfel got on you, McConnell? What’s he got that’s strong enough to make you confess to committing murder—with a gun you obviously never fired before in your life?”

It was an anonymous kind of office in an anonymous kind of building, don’t ask me where. I can find my way around Washington and New York, not to mention London, Paris, Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, and East and West Berlin, but Los Angeles is an unexplored and unmapped wilderness as far as I’m concerned. Anybody who can figure out those freeways is wasting his time behind a steering wheel. With that kind of genius, he ought to be doing advanced research on space travel.

Anyway, it was the place to which Charlie Devlin—so help me, Charlie was what they called her around home base—had brought me after the firearms demonstration, when I asked to make a long-distance phone call. I thought it was damn nice of her. She could have taken me back to that filling station pay phone and made me call collect and supply my own dime. I had a hunch that her new, accommodating attitude was due, at least partly, to the fact that she felt she’d misjudged me: I hadn’t shot up anybody after all.

“Yes, sir, it was a phony,” I said into the telephone. “That’s right, sir. Strictly a snow job for our benefit.”

I looked across the desk at the black man and the red-haired girl watching me from the doorway. Charlie stood behind them, guarding them. I didn’t feel the nickname really fit her—or maybe there was more to her than I’d been allowed to see. An arrogant, inhibited, self-righteous young lady who nevertheless allowed her colleagues to address her as Charlie just couldn’t take herself as seriously as she seemed to. But Miss Devlin’s character was strictly beside the point, at least for the moment.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Warfel must have got a scriptwriter over from Hollywood to do the screenplay. It was good typecasting, but the sinister pug-type didn’t shoot Annette O’Leary and the heartless starlet-type didn’t set her up for it, even though they were both eager to claim the glory. No, sir, I have no idea how Warfel got them to cooperate. They aren’t saying. But guys like that have ways of applying pressure.”

I watched the two faces as I said it. McConnell’s features remained impassive, but Beverly’s eyes widened and darkened a bit as if at a frightening memory.

“What was the tipoff? Well, no one thing exactly, sir, except that Warfel looked like a man putting on an act and overdoing it, casually inviting me to spill blood all over his bedroom carpet, for God’s sake! And McConnell was willing enough to confess to murder—maybe a little too willing—but when he heard that the girl had been roughed up before she was shot, he was jolted just like any black man accused of manhandling a white girl would be. He hadn’t expected that, and he wasn’t braced for it… Just a minute, sir.”

McConnell had taken an angry step forward. “You’re just playing Sherlock Holmes, man!” he snapped. “What do you know about black men and white girls?”

I regarded him without affection. The name he had called me, back at the pistol range, didn’t bother me greatly, but the attitude it illustrated did. I don’t like people who think tolerance is a one-way street. If Mr. McConnell wanted his origins treated with respect by me, he could damn well treat mine the same way, and keep his loaded racial terms to himself.

“I don’t know too much,” I said, “but you did react,
amigo
, and you didn’t know how to handle that big pistol that was supposed to be your pride and joy. You may have shot lots of people with other guns, but not with that one or anything like it, and that’s what killed Annette O’Leary. Maybe I got the right answer for the wrong reasons, but I got it, didn’t I?”