Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (29 page)

"
Yo seguir
,
right behind. Twelvetrees figured to take the cash and let the credit
go, clear out the bank account and vanish into the wild blue yonder,
probably under the name of Eustace J. Humperdink. O.K. He took a
little chance clearing out the safe in the Temple—being too greedy.
That he should have left alone."

"I think it was more economy than pure greed.
He'd gone to a little trouble to get hold of the combination, silly
not to use it now. And it wasn't a long chance at all. Not when it
was a matter of hours. He knew Kingman probably wouldn't open that
safe until Saturday night. And he fully expected to be at the bank
when its doors opened Saturday morning, primed with a glib story for
the manager of sudden unexpected expenses that had to be paid in
cash—I wonder what he'd have said. I wouldn't put it past him to
have intended forging some notes of instructions from the other
officers. Yes. Clear out of 267th, he'd think, and get settled for
the night in some quiet hotel, and maybe he meant to sit up over
those forged notes, to have them ready. He wouldn't have closed out
the bank accounts, that'd call for more red tape—just stripped them
down to a hundred or so. No, it wasn't too much of a chance ....
Well, he went to the Temple and took the month's receipts. He went
and got his prescriptions refilled, and he bought those suitcases
somewhere—probably a big cheap department store where the clerks
are always in a rush, don't notice individual customers usually. And
he had an early dinner, and he drove back to 267th Street—he'd get
there about six-thirty, a quarter of seven, if he left that
restaurant at five-thirty. It had started to rain, you remember, it
was coming down steadily, that would slow him on the drive. And he
started to finish his packing."

"Yes. And?"

Mendoza's long nose twitched. "I'm doing all the
work. Can't you fill in a bit? Come on, think hard."

"Well—I think he wrote that note to Mrs.
Bragg, to have it ready. He didn't want any backchat, or delay in
getting away either. And it's nice to know he had the gun—it was
his .... Can we say he had a visitor, then? Before he got away, when
he was nearly finished packing .... " Hackett fingered his jaw,
looking troubled. "I don't know—"

"There are a lot of little things I don't know,
but I know who the visitor was. Thanks to you."

"Now look—she—"

"
Eso basta
,
you stop right there. I'm tired of listening. I think, though there
are jobs you could do, you'd better take the rest of the day off. I'm
worried about you—you're going to pieces. I could take time and
explain, but I think it'll be salutary for you not to be told—force
you to do a little thinking of your own."

"Are you ordering me?—" began Hackett
stiffly.

"
Es mas listo de lo que
parece
," said Mendoza to himself with a
sigh. "Smarter than he 1ooks—I hope. You go and have a nice
quiet drink somewhere, Arturo, and maybe take in a movie. And don't
worry, trust your uncle Luis, everything will be O.K. with a little
luck."

"Oh," said Hackett, staring at him. "You
don't think— And what are you going to be doing, if I'm allowed to
ask?"

"I have dispatched minions—that's a nice word,
no question but English has certain advantages—to discover, if
possible, where the coat was purchased, by whom, and when. I think
we'll get it, because it was only yesterday, you see, it'll be fresh
in the salesclerk's mind. And for other reasons too.
De
veras
, this love of melodrama .... I am
presently going to call on a new witness, or at least one we haven't
thought very important, and meanwhile I am going to sit here and do
some serious thinking, along the same line the famous idiot boy took
with the lost horse. Goodbye, Arturo. Shut the door when you leave."

Hackett looked at him,
opened his mouth, thought better of that and shut it, and stalked
out.

* * *

Oddly enough, he did more or less what Mendoza had
told him to do, though without conscious plan. He went and had a
drink, and then he walked up Main Street for a little way,
thinking—not to much purpose—and dropped into a newsreel theater.

He didn't take in much of the news; when he came out
he went back for his car and drove up to Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood.
He located the doctor's office and the pharmacy, and drove slowly on
from there, watching the right side of the street. He stopped and
parked twice, to go into large shops where luggage was sold, and drew
blank. It was at the third place he got somewhere, a big department
store branch; one of the clerks thought he remembered a man who
looked like Twelvetrees' picture coming in to buy some luggage: he
couldn't say exactly when, a couple of weeks back he thought, and he
couldn't remember exactly what the man had bought.

Still, it all helped a little. Though the suitcases
didn't matter, weren't important. But at least it gave him an
illusion of working at it.

It was nearly four o'clock, and he remembered he
hadn't had any lunch. He had a sandwich in a drugstore, and started
back downtown, aimlessly.

He was on North Broadway, stopped at a light and
looking around idly, when he saw the sign. It was an old movie house,
newly refurbished in the desperate hope of better business, and for
the same reason running a new gimmick to compete with TV. Like the
fad for foreign films, there was a little boom these days in silent
movies; maybe it made the middle-aged feel young again, and the kids
superior; a lot of people seemed to get a kick out of saying, Did we
ever think that was good? This house featured them once a week, so
the sign said, and the one running now was called The Girlhood of
Laura Kent—the name leaped at him from below the title—with Mona
Ferne.

He turned into the next parking lot and walked back.
On the way he suddenly found himself thinking about that gun. It had
been lying on top of the bureau, Kingman said; so Twelvetrees had
taken it out of the drawer, where Pickering had seen it, to pack. His
visitor presumably had not (was that a fair deduction?) come with the
idea of killing him, or he or she would have been prepared with a
weapon. It was surprising how tough the human body was: you couldn't
be sure of killing someone with a bang on the head—when it happened
like that it was usually the sudden violent impulse and the blow
landing just right at random. But if a suddenly enraged visitor
snatched up that gun, why in hell hadn't he or she used the other end
of it? A much surer way. The noise, yes: but that was the last thing
anyone in a sudden violent rage would remember .... So, the gun
hadn't been loaded.

Yes, it was, he thought the next second. Or the
cartridges for it were there. Because a while later it was used on
Bartlett.

He stopped under the theater marquee, and in absent
surprise he thought, Well, well: so he had come round to Mendoza's
viewpoint on that, Walsh's thing.

He went up to the ticket window, past the resurrected
poster where Mona Ferne's young, insipidly pretty face smiled. "This
Laura Kent thing, when does it go on?"

"You're lucky, just starting now."

Hackett gave up his ticket stub to the door attendant
and groped his way down the aisle. Even in the dark there was an
empty feel to the house, and when his eyes were adjusted and he
looked around, he saw that there were only about twenty people in the
place. Wouldn't think it'd pay them to stay open ....

As he watched the opening scenes of what could never
have been a good picture (even allowing for changes in style) he
thought of what Stanley Horwitz had said. Couldn't act—just took
direction. Too true. And the kind of thing she had done: this was
probably a fair sample. It must have been one of the earliest
pictures she'd starred in, by the date: it was thirty-four years old.
A year older than he was: but when his memory started, a few years
later—well, it was hard to say, you remembered childhood
backgrounds distorted, sometimes, but he'd have said that even then
audiences would have been a trifle too sophisticated to go for this.
But they must have: she'd done this kind of thing another nine or ten
years and it had gone over pretty well.

It was supposed to be funny and what the posters
still called heart-warming at the same time. The tired old plot of
the tomboy who hates being a girl and goes swaggering about in jeans
playing baseball (or riding broncs or driving racing cars or flying
airplanes) until Love Enters Her Life and overnight she becomes a
demure clinging vine .... Of course the photography wasn't so good,
but it was interesting to see what she had been: he had an idea, now,
of the goal she was aiming for with all the effort put out. This
vapidly pretty girl with blond curls and spontaneous adolescent
giggles.

The dramatic action was jerky, everything drearily
spelled out. She waded in a stream, casting a line with what even
Hackett could see was inept awkwardness. She rode in a horse show,
smart and boyish in jodphurs. She went skeet-shooting with her
distinguished sportsman father, in—

Suddenly he heard his own voice, loud and shocking in
that place,

"My God!"—and found he was standing up.
It couldn't be—but it was, he'd swear it was!

He sidestepped out to the aisle and ran up it. And as
he ran, a few pieces fitted themselves together in his mind, and he
thought, So that was it. The coat, the damned coat—but—

"Telephone?" he gasped to the doorman, who
gaped at him and pointed out the public booth in the lobby. Hackett
fumbled for a dime, slammed it into the slot .... "Jimmy,"
he said when he got Sergeant Lake, "let me talk to him—I don't
care if he's in conference with the Chief, I've got—"

"He isn't here, Art, you just missed him."

Hackett said a few things about that. "Know
where he's gone?"

"If you'll let me get a word in edgewise. He was
just back from somewhere, looking like the dealer'd handed him a
royal flush first time round, when that Miss Weir called and out he
goes again in a hurry."

"Oh, O.K., thanks." Hackett hung up. It was
twenty past five. He seemed to remember that that school of hers
closed at three-thirty, four, around there: she was probably at home.
Try, anyway. He found another dime, looked up the number.

"Miss Weir? Art Hackett. Is Luis there? . . .
Luis, listen, I've got something, something so—"

"Well, wel1,"
said Mendoza, "have you limped up to the finish post,
chico
?
Congratulations. You'd better come round, we've got something here
too."

* * *

At about the same time that Hackett was brooding over
his drugstore sandwich, Alison was saying helplessly, "Now drink
your tea while it's hot," and wondering why it was that in the
American mind, apparently, tea was connected with trouble. Could it
be still reverberations from the Stamp Tax? When someone was in
trouble, a little under the weather, or having a crying spell,
automatically you made them a nice hot cup of tea.

She had found the girl outside her apartment door
when she came home, a forlorn stranger who told her numbly, like a
child repeating a lesson, "Sergeant Hackett said to come and see
you. I'm sorry, I didn't know where else to come. I didn't know what
to do. But I had to get out of that house. I had to. I'm Angel
C-Carstairs."
 
She was shaking
and cold, and she'd had some kind of bad shock, Alison saw. Having
heard a little about this case from Mendoza, she recognized the
girl's name; she made her come in and sit down, she made the tea and
gave her soothing talk, and then all this began to come out.
Incoherent at first.

"I didn't know—I thought I'd never seen it
before, but it must be hers, because—because she kept saying—
Like, you know, if you keep on telling a person he's stupid, he will
be. She did that with me, I know it, I know it in my mind but I
c-can't seem to do anything about it—telling me I'm too big and
clumsy. You know. It was like that, about this—as if she thought,
if she said it to me enough I'd begin to believe it—the way
everybody else would. And it's not true, it's silly. That I could
ever—be in love—with somebody like that! Like Brooke! I didn't
even think he was handsome, I mean he was too good-looking—you
know—"

"Yes."

"Oh, I don't know what I'm doing here—perfect
stranger to you. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I didn't know—I just had
to get out of her house— You see, it was so funny, the way she kept
insisting it was my coat, as if after a while I wouldn't be sure
about that either, and say it was— and then after they'd g-gone,
she got onto this, kept saying she understood how I'd loved him, felt
jealous—and then I thought why it could be. I didn't believe it—I
don't know if I believe it—but if she did—Oh, I've hated her,
I've hated her so—you can't understand that, how anybody could—my
own mother, but you don't know, you probably have a n-nice mother—"

"Drink your tea," said Alison. She was
beginning to understand what this was all about, and automatically
made quiet responses while she thought, I'd better call Luis.
Persuade her to talk to him, if she will. "Actually I don't
remember my mother at all, she died when I was two, and my father
brought me up. Not much of a bringing-up, I expect, either, because
he was an engineer and we lived in Mexico mostly, traveling around
from one godforsaken spot to another—construction camps, you know.
But people are just people, no better or worse for being mothers or
fathers. And hating doesn't do any harm except to you—"