Nightmare Town: Stories (30 page)

I chuckled – an artificial chuckle – because central could have been ringing the wrong number. However…

“Miss Kenbrook,” I lied, “your phone rang at two-thirty and at two-forty that morning. And your doorbell rang almost continually from about two-fifty until after three.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “but I wonder who’d be trying to get me at that hour.”

“You didn’t hear either?”

“No.”

“But you were here?”

“Yes – who was it?” carelessly.

“Get your hat,” I bluffed, “and I’ll show them to you down at headquarters.”

She glanced down at the green gown and walked toward an open bedroom door.

“I suppose I’d better get a cloak, too,” she said.

“Yes,” I advised her, “and bring your toothbrush.”

She turned around then and looked at me, and for a moment it seemed that some sort of expression – surprise, maybe – was about to come into her big brown eyes; but none actually came. The eyes stayed dull and empty.

“You mean you’re arresting me?”

“Not exactly. But if you stick to your story about being home in bed at three o’clock last Tuesday morning, I can promise you you will be arrested. If I were you I’d think up another story.”

She left the doorway slowly and came back into the room, as far as a chair that stood between us, put her hands on its back, and leaned over it to look at me. For perhaps a minute neither of us spoke – just stood there staring at each other, while I tried to keep my face as expressionless as hers.

“Do you really think,” she asked at last, “that I wasn’t here when Bernie was killed?”

“I’m a busy man, Miss Kenbrook.” I put all the certainty I could fake into my voice. “If you want to stick to your funny story, it’s all right with me. But please don’t expect me to stand here and argue about it. Get your hat and cloak.”

She shrugged, and came around the chair on which she had been leaning.

“I suppose you do know something,” she said, sitting down. “Well, it’s tough on Stan, but women and children first.”

My ears twitched at the name Stan, but I didn’t interrupt her.

“I was in the Coffee Cup until one o’clock,” she was saying, her voice still flat and emotionless. “And I did come home afterward. I’d been drinking vino all evening, and it always makes me blue. So after I came home I got to worrying over things. Since Bernie and I split, finances haven’t been so good. I took stock that night – or morning – and found only four dollars in my purse. The rent was due, and the world looked damned blue.

“Half-lit on dago wine as I was, I decided to run over and see Stan, tell him all my troubles, and make a touch. Stan is a good egg and he’s always willing to go the limit for me. Sober, I wouldn’t have gone to see him at three in the morning; but it seemed a perfectly sensible thing to do at the time.

“It’s only a few minutes’ walk from here to Stan’s. I went down Bush Street to Leavenworth, and up Leavenworth to Pine. I was in the middle of that last block when Bernie was shot – I heard it. And when I turned the corner into Pine Street I saw a copper bending over a man on the pavement right in front of Stan’s. I hesitated for a couple of minutes, standing in the shadow of a pole, until three or four men had gathered around the man on the sidewalk. Then I went over.

“It was Bernie. And just as I got there I heard the copper tell one of the men that he had been shot. It was an awful shock to me. You know how things like that will hit you!”

I nodded, though God knows there was nothing in this girl’s face, manner, or voice to suggest shock. She might have been talking about the weather.

“Dumbfounded, not knowing what to do,” she went on, “I didn’t even stop. I went on, passing as close to Bernie as I am to you now, and rang Stan’s bell. He let me in. He had been half-undressed when I rang. His rooms are in the rear of the building, and he hadn’t heard the shot, he said. He didn’t know Bernie had been killed until I told him. It sort of knocked the wind out of him. He said Bernie had been there – in Stan’s rooms – since midnight, and had just left.

“Stan asked me what I was doing there, and I told him my tale of woe. That was the first time Stan knew that Bernie and I were so thick. I met Bernie through Stan, but Stan didn’t know we had got so chummy.

“Stan was worried for fear it would come out that Bernie had been to see him that night, because it would make a lot of trouble for him – some sort of shady deal they had on, I guess. So he didn’t go out to see Bernie. That’s about all there is to it. I got some money from Stan, and stayed in his rooms until the police had cleared out of the neighbourhood; because neither of us wanted to get mixed up in anything. Then I came home. That’s straight – on the level.”

“Why didn’t you get this off your chest before?” I demanded, knowing the answer.

It came.

“I was afraid. Suppose I told about Bernie throwing me down, and said I was close to him – a block or so away – when he was killed, and was half-full of vino? The first thing everybody would have said was that I had shot him! I’d lie about it still if I thought you’d believe me.”

“So Bernie was the one who broke off, and not you?”

“Oh, yes,” she said lightly.

I lit a Fatima and breathed smoke in silence for a while, and the girl sat placidly watching me.

Here I had two women – neither normal. Mrs. Gilmore was hysterical, abnormally nervous. This girl was dull, subnormal. One was the dead man’s wife; the other his mistress; and each with reason for believing she had been thrown down for the other. Liars, both; and both finally confessing that they had been near the scene of the crime at the time of the crime, though neither admitted seeing the other. Both, by their own accounts, had been at that time even further from normal than usual – Mrs. Gilmore filled with jealousy; Cara Kenbrook, half-drunk.

What was the answer? Either could have killed Gilmore; but hardly both – unless they had formed some sort of crazy partnership, and in that event –

Suddenly all the facts I had gathered – true and false – clicked together in my head. I had the answer – the one simple, satisfying answer!

I grinned at the girl, and set about filling in the gaps in my solution.

“Who is Stan?” I asked.

“Stanley Tennant – he has something to do with the city.”

Stanley Tennant. I knew him by reputation, a –

A key rattled in the hall door.

The hall door opened and closed, and a man’s footsteps came toward the open doorway of the room in which we were. A tall, broad-shouldered man in tweeds filled the doorway – a ruddy-faced man of thirty-five or so, whose appearance of athletic blond wholesomeness was marred by close-set eyes of an indistinct blue.

Seeing me, he stopped – a step inside the room.

“Hello, Stan!” the girl said lightly. “This gentleman is from the Continental Detective Agency. I’ve just emptied myself to him about Bernie. Tried to stall him at first, but it was no good.”

The man’s vague eyes switched back and forth between the girl and me. Around the pale irises his eyeballs were pink.

He straightened his shoulders and smiled too jovially.

“And what conclusion have you come to?” he inquired.

The girl answered for me.

“I’ve already had my invitation to take a ride.”

Tennant bent forward. With an unbroken swing of his arms, he swept a chair up from the floor into my face. Not much force behind it, but quick.

I went back against the wall, fending off the chair with both arms – threw it aside – and looked into the muzzle of a nickeled revolver.

A table drawer stood open – the drawer from which he had grabbed the gun while I was busy with the chair. The revolver, I noticed, was of.38 calibre.

“Now” – his voice was thick, like a drunk’s – “turn around.”

I turned my back to him, felt a hand moving over my body, and my gun was taken away.

“All right,” he said, and I faced him again.

He stepped back to the girl’s side, still holding the nickel-plated revolver on me. My own gun wasn’t in sight – in his pocket perhaps. He was breathing noisily, and his eyeballs had gone from pink to red. His face, too, was red, with veins bulging in the forehead.

“You know me?” he snapped.

“Yes, I know you. You’re Stanley Tennant, assistant city engineer, and your record is none too lovely.” I chattered away on the theory that conversation is always somehow to the advantage of the man who is looking into the gun. “You’re supposed to be the lad who supplied the regiment of well-trained witnesses who turned last year’s investigation of graft charges against the engineer’s office into a comedy. Yes, Mr. Tennant, I know you. You’re the answer to why Gilmore was so lucky in landing city contracts with bids only a few dollars beneath his competitors. Yes, Mr. Tennant, I know you. You’re the bright boy who -“

I had a lot more to tell him, but he cut me off.

“That will do out of you!” he yelled. “Unless you want me to knock a corner off your head with this gun.”

Then he addressed the girl, not taking his eyes from me.

“Get up, Cara.”

She got out of her chair and stood beside him. His gun was in his right hand, and that side was toward her. He moved around to the other side.

The fingers of his left hand hooked themselves inside the girl’s green gown where it was cut low over the swell of her breasts. His gun never wavered from me. He jerked his left hand, ripping her gown down to the waistline.

“He did that, Cara,” Tennant said.

She nodded.

His fingers slid inside the flesh-coloured undergarment that was now exposed, and he tore that as he had torn the gown.

“He did that.”

She nodded again.

His bloodshot eyes darted little measuring glances at her face – swift glances that never kept his eyes from me for the flash of time I would have needed to tie into him.

Then – eyes and gun on me – he smashed his left fist into the girl’s blank white face.

One whimper – low and not drawn out – came from her as she went down in a huddle against the wall. Her face -w ell, there wasn’t much change in it. She looked dumbly up at Tennant from where she had fallen.

“He did that,” Tennant was saying.

She nodded, got up from the floor, and returned to her chair.

“Here’s our story.” The man talked rapidly, his eyes alert on me. “Gilmore was never in my rooms in his life, Cara, and neither were you. The night he was killed you were home shortly after one o’clock, and stayed here. You were sick – probably from the wine you had been drinking – and called a doctor. His name is Howard. I’ll see that he’s fixed. He got here at two-thirty and stayed until three-thirty.

“Today, this gumshoe, learning that you had been intimate with Gilmore, came here to question you. He knew you hadn’t killed Gilmore, but he made certain suggestions to you – you can play them up as strong as you like; maybe say that he’s been annoying you for months – and when you turned him down he threatened to frame you.

“You refused to have anything to do with him, and he grabbed you, tearing your clothes, and bruising your face when you resisted. I happened to come along then, having an engagement with you, and heard you scream. Your front door was unlocked, so I rushed in, pulled this fellow away, and disarmed him. Then we held him until the police – whom we will phone for – came. Got that?”

“Yes, Stan.”

“Good! Now listen: When the police get here this fellow will spill all he knows of course, and the chances are that all three of us will be taken in. That’s why I want you to know what’s what right now. I ought to have enough pull to get you and me out on bail tonight, or, if worse comes to worst, to see that my lawyer gets to me tonight – so I can arrange for the witnesses we’ll need. Also I ought to be able to fix it so our little fat friend will be held for a day or two, and not allowed to see anybody until late tomorrow – which will give us a good start on him. I don’t know how much he knows, but between your story and the stories of a couple of other smart little ladies I have in mind, I’ll fix him up with a rep that will keep any jury in the world from ever believing him about anything.”

“How do you like that?” he asked me, triumphantly.

“You big clown,” I laughed at him, “I think it’s funny!”

But I didn’t really think so. In spite of what I thought I knew about Gilmore’s murder – in spite of my simple, satisfactory solution – something was crawling up my back, my knees felt jerky, and my hands were wet with sweat. I had had people try to frame me before – no detective stays in the business long without having it happen – but I had never got used to it. There’s a peculiar deadliness about the thing – especially if you know how erratic juries can be – that makes your flesh crawl, no matter how safe your judgment tells you you are.

“Phone the police,” Tennant told the girl, “and for God’s sake keep your story straight!”

As he tried to impress that necessity on the girl his eyes left me.

I was perhaps five feet from him and his level gun.

A jump – not straight at him – off to one side – put me close.