Carnival of Death (21 page)

Miss Lindler pursed her lips.
“I
won’t listen to such talk.”

Daly took a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Then perhaps you’ll be interested in this. It’s a summation of the preliminary police and pathologist’s report” He read aloud, “‘No classifiable female prints in the unit. All plane surfaces, including the handles in the shower stall, were wiped clean…. Ballistics reports the three bullets removed from Carver’s body were fired from the same weapon that was used to kill James Davis, alias Dr. Alveredo … Said weapon still to be located and identified, but believed to be a .32-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver …’”

The cashier protested, “What has this to do with me?”

Daly continued, “However, while no fingerprints were found in the unit, the police have established the fact that the woman who shot Carver is not a natural blonde.”

“How?”

“By getting a deposition from a motel clerk who not only saw her in the nude, but whom she allowed to be intimate with her. Also by determining that while the long blonde hairs found on the bed came from a wig or a transformation, the light brown pubic hairs found on the same bed and on the person of the deceased had living follicles.”

“So?”

Daly returned his notes to his pocket. “You hated Carver, didn’t you Grace? You hated all of them. But most of all you hated Tim Kelly, hated him for what he did to and what he has made of you.”

The girl on the bench was amused. “Aren’t you a trifle confused, Mr. Daly? A few moments ago you insisted I was still in love with Tim, and I agreed with you. Besides, while what you’ve just read me is very interesting, if slightly racy, I fail to see what it has to do with me. So the woman the police are looking for isn’t a natural blonde; I believe one of her most prominent anatomical features are large, well-formed breasts.”

Daly said quietly, “Like yours when you aren’t wearing that tight surgical bandeau. The bandeau you began to effect when you found out you were just another girl to Kelly. When you first conceived the identities of Thelma Banks and Mrs. Bennett and began to entertain other men in the cabin and at the La Hacienda — in an attempt to salve your hurt pride.”

Grace took her right hand from the pocket of her robe and pointed the .32-caliber revolver it was holding at Daly. “I didn’t want to have to do this, Mr. Daly,” she said, quietly. “I meant what I said in the restaurant the other day. I like you. I like Mr. DuBoise. I used to dream that someday I’d meet a man like you. But no, I had to draw Tim Kelly. Then, not until I was past thirty. Have you any idea what it means to be a woman and thirty years old and never even have one man make a pass at you?”

It was her story. Daly let her tell it.

She shrugged the too-large robe off her shoulders, then used her free hand to unhook the tight bandeau and sat nude to the waist “Pretty, aren’t they, Mr. Daly?”

“Very,” Daly said.

One corner of her mouth turned down. “The joke of it is they’ve been there, all of me has been here for years. But up until the night that Tim Kelly drove me home from an office party, no man ever bothered to look at anything but my face. But because he was drunk and wanted a woman, any woman, Tim did. I was terrified when he kissed me and pulled me to him and put his hand on me. Even more so when he carried me in here and begged me to let him undress me, so he could see my beautiful body.”

“But you let him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I liked the guy. Because he’d gotten me so excited I only half knew what
I
was doing. But mainly because I was desperate, because just once before I died
I
wanted to know what it was like to be a whole woman. And he did more than sleep with me that first night. He opened a new and a wonderful world. All of the dirty words I’d ever heard or seen chalked on fences suddenly became beautiful. And when he left me that first morning I was so in love with him, so in love with the new world I’d discovered, there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t have done or, eventually, didn’t do for him.”

Her twisted smile faded. “Things went on like that for some months. Of course we couldn’t let anyone at the garage know what was going on, not even his own brother. But two or three nights a week we’d meet at some out-of-the way nightclub, usually out on the beach where we could be reasonably certain we wouldn’t meet anyone we knew. And we’d have drinks and dance and laugh. Then we’d come back here and he’d stay all night and in the morning I’d cook breakfast for him and we’d make love one last time. No woman was ever happier than I was. I bought him that chair. I bought him a car.
I
bought him clothes.
I
loaned him money. And when my own money ran out, the money I’d saved, I began to dip into the till. It didn’t matter to me that I’d never stolen before. Nothing mattered but keeping Tim happy and wanting me.”

Daly asked, “How long did this go on?”

“About four months. Until
I
was into the firm for eighteen or twenty thousand dollars and Tim had lost most of it playing the horses at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, trying to make one of the killings he was always talking about.”

She cupped one of her exposed breasts with her free hand. “Then he began to make excuses why he couldn’t meet me and I found out I was only one of his girls and he figured he’d milked me for all he could get and he didn’t want to be connected with me when the auditors went over my books. And while losing Tim was bad, it was even worse to discover he’d lighted a flame that refused to burn out.”

She continued quietly, “Looking back now, I can see how naive I was.” She shrugged. “But, after all it was my first experience with sex and I thought you had to be in love with a man to feel that way when he possessed you. Then one night when I was sitting in a little bar the man on the next bar stool started to talk to me. And because I was feeling so sorry for myself, because somehow, someway, I wanted to get even with Tim, I let him buy me a lot of drinks, then take me to a motel.” Her voice turned bitter. “And drunk as we both were, I loved it. I discovered you didn’t have to be in love, it didn’t even have to be with any particular man. All he had to be was male and able.”

Keeping his eyes on the revolver in her hand, Daly shifted his position cautiously. “And that’s when Mrs. Milo Bennett and Thelma Banks were born and you started wearing the bandeau to accentuate the difference between them and Miss Lindler?”

The plain-faced cashier nodded. “That’s right.” She added primly, “After all, even if I was a thief, rather because I was in as deep as I was, I had to hold on to my job. And bonding companies don’t look with favor on cashiers of armored truck companies who are flagrantly promiscuous.”

She asked Daly if he had a cigarette. He lighted one and stepped away from the door to hand it to her and the girl on the bench raised the revolver she was holding and said sharply, “No. Just toss it to me. I don’t want to have to kill you yet. Not until we finish our little tête-à-tête. I want someone to know my side of this.”

Daly tossed the cigarette. “You’re sick, Grace. You need help.”

The girl picked the cigarette from the floor and put it in her mouth. “That may be.” The lighted cigarette bobbling in her mouth as she talked, she continued almost tonelessly, “Meanwhile I was getting in deeper and deeper at Ramsdale. There was the rent on the cabin in the mountains, the Volkswagen registered to Thelma Banks, the pink Cadillac, Mrs. Bennett’s mink coat and the expensive clothes she wore, and a new man almost every night and every weekend. Trying to find one who could put out the fire. That is, except for Jim Carver.” She explained, “He was the first one after Tim. The one who taught me you didn’t have to be in love.”

“How about Davis?” Daly asked.

“He came into the thing on a fluke. One of the men I stayed with, don’t ask me which one, I haven’t any idea, got me pregnant. And Davis had aborted a girl I know. So I looked him up and he aborted me for five hundred dollars — and me.”

“And Tommy Banks?”

“I didn’t know he existed until about a month ago. That’s when I knew I had to do something drastic to straighten out my accounts. I’d been taking for over a year and covering up like mad. No matter how tired I was from the weekend or the night before, I didn’t dare miss going to work one day. Then I got my big idea. All I had to do was figure out how to rob one of the trucks and pin the job on some likely patsy.”

“Why the Laredos?”

“They were handy. With his background he made a logical suspect.”

“Where did you hear of them?”

“From Carver. He handled the publicity for a number of shopping centers. And one night when we were at the La Hacienda he just happened to mention them and the more he told me about them, the better prospects they sounded like for what I had in mind. Then when a week or so later he told me that Laredo was looking for a punk to run his miniature train I let a likely-looking punk pick me up and took him up to the cabin and the next week, using the name Tommy Banks, he asked Laredo for the job and I had an inside wire, someone to keep me posted on all of their movements.”

“But why did you have him use the name Banks?”

“Because he needed a car to drive. And it was cheaper to have him change his name than buy him one.” She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Besides, it was about time for Thelma Banks to disappear and it was a part of my plan to have him ‘disappear’ at the same time.”

“And now he’s disappeared.”

“So I hear. What a pity. He was a very immature lover, but there was
so
much he could have told the police.”

“It was Tommy who told you that Mickey Laredo was going to be on my program?”

“That’s right And it was too good an opportunity to miss. That’s why I had him and Carver work you over.” She added, wryly amused, “Using a Spanish accent.
‘Un momento, senor
. We will not detain you for long. But please to give a message to Chico. Tell him not to try it Tell him that we are watching him and that one is our pigeon.’”

Daly paid the girl grudged tribute. “You even wrote the dialogue.”

“Si, senor.”

While they’d been talking morning had brightened the drawn shade on the window and the normal street noises below it were growing in volume as the city awakened. Restless, the girl stood up. Then, leaving the oversized robe where it fell, she crossed to the red leather chair and sat with her bare feet on the seat, hugging her drawn-up knees with one arm as she regarded Daly over the barrel of the revolver. She made a pretty, if lethal-looking, picture.

Wetting her lips with her tongue again she asked, “Now have you any last questions, Mr. Daly? Before I pull the trigger of this gun?”

“And then?”

“Then rush out in the hall in simulated hysteria and scream rape. At least attempted rape. You see my story will be that you forced your way in here and tried to attack me and I had to kill you in defense of my honor.”

“It won’t work, Grace.”

“That’s the gamble I’m going to have to take. With you out of the way, I still have a chance. Oh, I’ll probably have to stand trial. But no jury in the world would believe the things I’ve admitted to you. Who could possibly believe such things of a drab little spinster who in her long years of loyal service to the Ramsdale Armored Truck Company has never been late to work one morning or ever been a penny short in her accounts? And my books balance now. I wrote the last entry at the La Hacienda about two o’clock this morning.”

D
ALY TRIED
to keep her talking until he learned the one last thing he needed to know. He used the one name he thought might keep her talking.

“You loved Kelly very much, didn’t you, Grace?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “We’ve been over that phase of the business.”

“But you haven’t told me where Tim fit into the looting of the truck. What was his part in the picture?”

The girl stopped hugging her knees with her free arm and stroked one arm of the red leather chair as she considered the question. “I guess,” she said finally, “you could say he was my human sacrifice.”

“Would you mind explaining that?”

“Well, as I told you before, the only thing that Tim liked better than women was money. He was always looking for the big ‘killing.’ So I called him and told him I had to see him one last time. And he came over and when I told him what I had in mind, he was so grateful to me he stayed all night.” She continued to stroke the arm of the chair. “He was so gentle and kind it was almost like old times. You see, I told him I’d planned the whole thing to get him back and he believed me. He thought I was doing it for him and once it was safe for us to quit our jobs we’d fly to South America, or somewhere, and live in luxury for the rest of our lives.” She stopped stroking the arm of the chair. “Just Tim and me, and whatever pretty little slut happened to excite him at the moment.”

“You killed him, didn’t you, Grace? You killed him to create the main diversion.”

“That’s right.”

“The chloral hydrate wasn’t in the lemonade.”

The nude girl was amused. “Of course not. I only planned it to look that way. It was in the two gelatin capsules I gave Tim before the truck left the garage.” She seemed to relish the memory. “I told him that after he drank the lemonade all he had to do was slip them into his mouth and bite down on them and while he would get a little sick when he came to again, he would be worth a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Only he didn’t know how sick he was going to be.”

She stood up and faced Daly. “Now you tell me one last thing. What made you suspicious of me?”

“A number of things,” Daly said quietly. “Your frugality in returning the two clown costumes. A parking citation. A pretty young mother who after she’d nursed her baby wrapped a towel tightly around her breasts to keep from soiling her negligee. But, basically, because you killed one too few people. Because you missed one very important witness.”

“Make sense.”

“All right,” Daly said. “I will. There’s been something about this affair that’s puzzled me right from the start. That was the fact that outside of the silver and bills thrown to the crowd and the five thousand dollars conveniently found in one of the horses on Mickey Laredo’s kiddy carousel, none of the one hundred and seventy-eight thousand dollars alleged to have been on the truck was recovered. So after leaving the La Hacienda, Gene and I rode out to the other end of the valley and recorded this.”