Lucky at Cards (11 page)

“Listen,” I told her. “It’s only natural, for God’s sake. You and I and Murray are the only ones in the world who know he’s being framed. You and I know because we did it. He knows because it was done to him. He’s going to be suspicious all over the place. He may have you tailed, but nobody can dig up anything that will make you look bad. Don’t worry about it.”

“I can’t help worrying, Wizard.”

I thought quickly. “He’s coming home Monday,” I said. “Tomorrow is Saturday. Can he have visitors?”

“Of course. I see him once a day.”

“Could I see him?”

“Certainly. I’m surprised you haven’t gone already. His other friends have been there. Most of them, anyway.”

“I think I’ll go, then. Tomorrow afternoon, say. I should be able to draw him out a little and find out what he’s planned. At least I can find out whether or not we’ve got anything to worry about.”

That seemed to reassure her a little. She asked me to make fresh drinks. I told her no, that if the house were being watched, it wouldn’t look good if I stuck around too long. A sympathy call was fine, but you couldn’t extend it for too long a period.

She came to me, wanting to be kissed. I didn’t want to kiss her. But she pressed herself against me and my arms circled her and our mouths met.

It was funny. I didn’t even like her anymore. She was my partner in a crime I was not proud of. I didn’t want to have anything to do with her. I wanted to finish things up, tie the ends neatly and never see her again.

But the electrical impulses still worked. The contact set us off again. Just as the contact had always done, and animal need came on like gangbusters. I fought with myself. And, for a change, I won. I pushed her away and left and strode quickly to the Ford. Once behind the wheel, I started the engine and pulled away. There were no cars with people in them parked on the block. If Murray were having her watched, it wasn’t on an around-the-clock basis.

Did Murray really suspect anything? I didn’t want to think about it. Joyce and I had one of those set-ups that was perfect until someone started to pick at it. As soon as anyone suspected us, we were through.

It was easier to agree that Murray was ready to run for Brazil, or that he was resigned to going to jail for the shortest time possible. I hoped Brazil was his answer. Jail would be bad for him. And despite all my previous attempts, I couldn’t make myself hate the guy, couldn’t even dislike him a little—even though he had irritated me with his smugness to begin with. But it’s no fun jobbing someone who has helped you. With luck you can make yourself despise your mark long enough to con him and get him out of the way.

But now the reverse was happening. The further the scene developed, the more I liked Murray Rogers.

And the less I liked myself.

13

They were holding Murray Rogers at the city jail along with the drunks and the sex criminals. I drove down there shortly after noon. The jail was a bulky old building, a massive structure as inviting as a Gothic novel. I walked up a flight of high stone steps and opened a heavy door. There was a big cop behind the desk. I told him who I was and what I wanted and he nodded. He called a guard and relayed the information to him, and the guard led me up creaking wooden stairs to the second floor.

We walked down a long hallway. Most of the cells were clean and modern, but most of the inmates were last night’s drunks and they had spent the night puking on their shoes. In one cell a man was singing
Molly Malone
in a whiskey tenor. In another cell an older man was hawking and spitting.

Murray Rogers was all the way down at the end of the corridor. The guard and I stopped in front of his cell and he looked at us, his face breaking into a smile when he saw me.

“Bill,” he said hoarsely, “I’ve been waiting for you to drop around. How’s it going?”

I said something pleasant. The guard opened the cell door with a key and locked me inside with Murray.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all I can give you, Mr. Maynard.”

The guard left. Murray rose to his feet, pumped my hand enthusiastically. He had made a rather dramatic recovery since the day of the indictment. His handshake was firm and his face had its color back again.

“Sit down,” he said. “This little hole isn’t much, but it’s comfortable enough. And I’ll be out of here Monday.”

“Joyce told me.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Last night.”

“Poor kid,” he said. “It’s been hell for her, Bill. And for the girls. But I think the worst of it is over. The suddenness shocked them all, but you’d be surprised how much a human being can stand once he or she learns to accept it.” He waved his hands at the cell. “This, for example. I was going stir-crazy, Bill. I was in a state of traumatic shock and all I could think about was that I wanted to be free again. I denied everything, of course. I couldn’t explain all their evidence, and I just denied it.”

He offered me a cigar. I shook my head and he unwrapped one for himself and bit off the tip. “They won’t let me have a cigar cutter,” he said. “Afraid I’ll open my veins with it. The damned fools.”

I gave him a light. He blew out a cloud of smoke and winked at me through it. “I gave Nester a hell of a time at first,” he said. “I kept denying everything like an idiot. Now I’ve always felt that any man who can’t play straight with his own lawyer isn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell. You know, when you’re established and respected and well-to-do, you can’t believe you could ever get in legal trouble. The mind refuses to accept it. But the indictment did something to me. You were at the grand jury session, weren’t you?”

I nodded.

“Well, that was the turning point. That day in court damn near killed me, Bill. Knocked me for a loop. So Thursday night and Friday morning I did a lot of careful thinking. And when Alex Nester came in to see me I leveled with him finally. I told him there was no sense playing games any more. I killed Milani. Now all he had to do was get me off.”

I was sitting on the edge of his army cot. Murray was next to me. When he finished his last three sentences I almost fell off the cot. My face must have changed expression. That much was all right—it was okay to be surprised, but I couldn’t let myself be incredulous.

I said, “Then you did kill him?”

“Of course I did. What did you think, Bill?”

“I believed you.”

“That it was all a frameup? I suppose you and Joyce were the only people in the world who did believe me, then. Maybe a few other close friends who couldn’t imagine me being capable of murder. That’s nonsense. There isn’t a man in creation who isn’t capable of murder once you give him the means and motive and opportunity. I’m hardly the murderous type, Bill, but I killed August Milani as sure as God made little green apples. I didn’t have much choice. My back was up against the wall.”

I managed to light a cigarette.

There were a few possibilities that occurred to me. Maybe Murray was crazy—maybe by now he managed to believe that he had killed Milani, that everyone else was right about it and Murray was wrong. Or else he was going for the safe play, hedging his bet by copping the plea and trying for a temporary insanity defense. I asked him if he wanted to tell me about it.

“Nothing much to tell,” he said. “I was a party to a very large case of tax evasion. It involved a couple of real estate deals, and the end result was that the government got screwed out of close to two million dollars in income taxes. Milani knew about it, God knows how. He had proof. He could reach the Internal Revenue boys and make things very rough for us. What I did was out-and-out criminal, Bill. It meant a heavy fine and a jail sentence no matter how you looked at it.”

“I see.”

“So Milani tried blackmailing me,” Murray continued. “I tried to dodge him but he had me over a barrel. Finally I paid him off, sent the money over to his hotel. He was greedy. He had a perfect fish on his hook and he wasn’t going to stop with one payment. On Monday I went to see him. I was just going to argue with him, try to make him see I couldn’t afford to contribute to a private fund for the enrichment of August Milani for the rest of my life. I had no intention of killing him. It happened by itself, or at least it seemed to. We started arguing. I grabbed him by the throat. He pulled a gun on me. I took it away from him and—I shot him.”

He said all this very sincerely, very convincingly. If I hadn’t known better I would have believed him without thinking twice about it.

“The body,” I said. “What did you do with it?”

“Dragged it through the alley, stuffed it into my car and drove to the lake shore. I stuffed his clothing with rocks and lead pipe and tossed him in. I barely remember that part. I was in a fog from the moment I shot him. Everything’s very fuzzy. I meant to throw the pillowcase in with him but I forgot. So I wound up stuffing it in my own garbage can.”

“And the gun?”

“In the lake.”

I dropped my cigarette on the floor, covered it with my shoe. “Jesus,” I said. “What happens to you now?”

“I don’t know, Bill. At the worst they’ll call it manslaughter of one degree or another. With luck it will go as temporary insanity—that’s what we’re trying for. Nester’s a good man. He says we have about a sixty percent chance of getting off scot-free.”

“And the tax evasion?”

“No problem there,” he said. “I could tell the Treasury Department agents about it, but I don’t intend to. And they can’t force me, because I can always take the fifth amendment to avoid incriminating myself. Milani had information, but Milani is dead now.”

“Can they trace him?”

“Evidently not. The police have been trying, naturally. Milani probably isn’t even his right name. They can’t find any record of a man by that name and they couldn’t lift any fingerprints from the room at the Glade. The police know I was mixed up in something very crooked but they don’t have a case until they know something about it. And they’ll never find out a thing. I won’t tell them, my associates won’t tell them, and Milani can’t tell them.”

“Then you’re in pretty good shape,” I said.

“It could be a lot worse, Bill.”

“How do you feel about it?”

He stood up, paced the floor with his hands clasped behind his back. “Not so good and not so bad,” he said slowly. “I was a wreck at first. The whole concept of murder—well, it gets to you. Were you in combat?”

“No.”

“Neither was I. I was just old enough to go into a defense plant during the Second World War. Later on I did government tax work. I suppose it would be different for someone who saw combat, someone who killed men in the line of duty. But I never killed anyone before Milani, never witnessed a violent death. The idea of homicide took a little getting used to. I’m used to it now.”

“Uh-huh.”

He sighed. “It means a change in my living pattern,” he went on. “I’ve got the mark of Cain now. I don’t imagine we can go on living in this town, not very comfortably.” He smiled softly. “Maybe we’ll travel, Bill. Joyce has always wanted to travel, though she’s never pressed the point. I think she feels cramped in a town like this one. She’s used to a more sophisticated environment. I can afford to retire. Maybe we’ll try traveling until everything cools off.”

Our ten minutes were up, and with interest. The guard came back, an apologetic look on his face, and told me I’d have to be going now. I shook hands with Murray and he pumped my arm.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I couldn’t tell this to anyone else, not so easily. I feel pretty close to you, kid. You’re easy to talk to.”

The guard opened the door. I stepped out of the cell and he closed the door and locked it. I took a last look at Murray, smiled at him, said something cheerful. Then I walked with the guard along the corridor and down the stairs.

The bastard tipped. Murray tipped, he caught on, he knew. And now, cute as a palmed jack, Murray Roger was playing games of his own.

Well, what else? He had a perfect explanation, a hell of a convincing confession. He was a killer, he couldn’t get away with it, he was admitting it and taking the consequences. He had an explanation for everything, even had a way doped out to beat the tax boys and keep them from hanging an evasion rap on him. He told me this, earnest and sincere, and there was only one hang-up.

Because I damn well knew he hadn’t killed anybody and he damn well knew it. There were three possibilities—he was crazy, or he was just trying to save his neck. Or finally, he knew. And if that were the case, God alone knew what he was up to. God and Murray Rogers. I spent the rest of Saturday listening to the radio and dying to tell myself everything was clear and clean and he didn’t know a thing. I tried reaching Joyce once. The phone rang and rang and rang and I put the receiver back on the hook and gave up.

My own phone rang that night. It was Barb Lambert. What was I doing? Did I feel like coming over? I didn’t, at first. But there was calmness and softness and warmth in her voice and it reached me. I told her I would pick up a bottle and come over right away.

The liquor store around the corner sold me a fifth of Cutty Sark and I drove to Barb’s house. We spent the first half hour making a dent in the bottle and becoming comfortable. The comfort didn’t last. When I draped an arm over her shoulder I could feel her whole body go slightly tense. I took the arm away and she turned to stare at me.

“Bill—”

“Go on.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Barb said. “I—what’s happening with us, Bill?”

“What do you mean?”

She looked away for a moment or two. Then she said, “You swept me off my feet, you know. I was going along in a quiet little rut and then you came along and changed things. I started caring again. I started to feel alive. I thought you liked me.”

“Of course I like you—”

“But things are changing,” she said. She was staring at me now, eyes wide, innocent. “You’re all wrapped up in something, Bill. You don’t really seem to give a damn about me. You slept with me once. Or don’t you remember?”

“Barb—”

“But you don’t seem to remember. Don’t you want to—to sleep with me again? Wasn’t I any good?”

I didn’t answer her. I stood up, took fresh ice cubes from the silver bucket on the walnut breakfront. I put the ice in our glasses and poured some fresh scotch over the cubes. I set her glass on the coffee table in front of her. She didn’t pay any attention to it. I took a long drink and waited.

“I’m shameless,” she said. “I like you, Bill.”

There were tears welling up in the corners of her eyes but she was determined not to let go of them. She wouldn’t cry.

“Bill,” she said, “I don’t want to be—used. I want to mean something. I want you to like me and to—to love me. I want us to get married, Bill. I’m not in any hurry. But I have to feel that we’re moving toward something, not just wandering around in circles. I’m not a kid in college any more. I’m not that young. Do you see?”

“I see.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I wish I knew you,” she said. “I only wish I knew you. But I don’t know you at all.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Who are you, Bill?”

“You know the answers.”

She shook her head very gravely. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t think so. There’s something about you that doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t fit. I wish I could put my finger on it. You just came to town and slipped into a slot and fitted in perfectly, but there’s a part of you that doesn’t fit. I—I wish I knew more about you.”

“You’re making a big thing out of nothing,” I said. “I’m just another ordinary Joe, that’s all. You can’t make me into a romantic figure any more than you can call yourself a call girl. We’re ordinary people, Barb.”

I tried to kiss her. She pulled away, shaking her head. “Not now,” she said.

I finished my drink. She changed the subject, somehow, and we talked for a few moments about trivia. The trivia didn’t grasp us all that firmly and the conversation ran out of gas. The silence that followed was uncomfortable, awkward.

Then Barb said, “You can always tell me. Whatever it is, you can tell me, Bill. You know that, don’t you?”

“Even if there’s nothing to tell?”

Deep eyes cast downward. “There is,” she said. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”