Smoked Out (Digger) (23 page)

"Do you have a defense attorney already?"

"You never stop, do you, Burroughs?"

"Not until I’m done. It’s worth your while to talk to me. Perhaps we can do each other some good."

"About what, Burroughs?"

"About accidents that aren’t accidents, Doctor."

"Eight o’clock," Welles said after a short pause. Then he hung up.

Digger turned to Breslin. "Eight o’clock."

"Good luck," Breslin said.

Chapter Twenty-five

"Dr. Welles, I presume."

"You showed up. For some reason, I didn’t think you would. Come in."

"Thank you. In the last week, I feel I’ve gotten to know you. So I thought I should really get to know you."

"We can go into my study. That’s here, in the back. But of course you know that."

"How would I know that?"

"Yes. How indeed?"

"Nice dogs."

"I believe you’ve met them before. Both of them. Scylla. Charybdis. Sit. Have a seat, Mr. Burroughs."

"Do they always growl like that?"

"That’s their way of saying hello."

"What’s their way of saying goodbye?"

"They do tricks. Charybdis there has a rather unique way of closing doors behind himself and locking himself in my office."

"Smart dog."

"He needs help to do it. He’s not that smart. Now, what’s on your mind, Mr. Burroughs?"

"Mind if I smoke, Doctor?"

"No. Go ahead. They’re awful, aren’t they?"

"Yeah, but I smoke four packs a day. If I smoked anything stronger, I wouldn’t be able to talk in the morning. Only problem is not many places carry this brand. I had to go all the way to San Francisco to buy these."

"Nice city."

"Everyone’s favorite city," Digger said.

"You were saying what brought you here?"

"Yes. I’ve been given to understand that you are considering suing my company."

"That’s right. For harassment and character assassination and whatever else. I haven’t decided yet whether to bring criminal charges against you. I guess that’ll depend on what your company does."

"My company’s not paying."

"No?"

"No."

"Why?"

"We don’t pay off in murder."

"You mean somebody killed my wife?"

"I mean you killed your wife."

"Interesting theory."

"Isn’t it?"

"I killed her while I was four hundred miles away?"

"Yes."

"I killed her even though the police didn’t think so and made Jessie’s death an accident?"

"Yes."

"I killed her even though the lie-detector test says otherwise?"

"Yes."

"Burroughs, I don’t think we have anything more to talk about. Maybe we should let our lawyers chat."

"That’s a bluff. You don’t mean that."

"Why not?"

"Because you want to know what I know. And you want to know where you slipped up."

"All right. If this gives you pleasure, go ahead."

"I take no pleasure in it. Considering the uses of iniquity is never pleasurable."

"That’s very good. You mind if I write it down?"

"No, go ahead. You can use it when you throw yourself on the mercy of the court."

"You know, Burroughs, I almost feel like I know you."

"Not much to know."

"I wouldn’t say that. I mean, how many people can go hit on boatyard groupies under one name and dime-store clerks under another and go audition for Camelot under another? Is there a reason for all that or is it just a puckish sense of humor?"

"No, actually, it just buys time. By the time everybody’s finished comparing names and notes, I’m usually done."

"That fast?"

"Yeah, generally. This job took a whole week."

"I’m sorry to have inconvenienced you."

"No problem, Doctor. Sometimes if the puzzle is good enough, I don’t begrudge my company the time."

"This puzzle was good?"

"Very good, until you got a little antsy."

"Antsy? What’s that?"

"Ants in your pants. You got nervous. So you had your bookie’s two goons work me over at my motel."

"Of course, I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Right, Doctor. Why don’t we just enter that as your automatic response to everything, so we can move this right along?"

"Suit yourself."

"It was a mistake to have them lean on me. You see, up until then I was just going on a hunch. I thought you might have killed your wife, but I didn’t have anything to prove it. I might have lost faith in that theory if you had left me alone. When I got mugged, it told me that I was right, that I was getting too close and was starting to annoy you."

"You can be annoying."

"Just a matter of style. So then I knew I was going in the right direction. Once that was confirmed, it was just a matter of time before I figured it out."

"Just a matter of time. Are you always that cocksure?"

"Yes. I’m very good, Doctor."

"Why don’t you tell me about this rich fantasy life of yours."

"Sure. In all these cases, it’s money or women. I know that’s true because a woman told me. But murder over a woman sounds a little ridiculous in this town, so it had to be money. You, for example. Boats. Expensive habits. Girlfriends stashed all over town. Running up big bills with your bookie. Stiffing Vegas casinos. Then you went belly-up on that housing deal. You expected your wife’s inheritance to bail you out, but there wasn’t any. What money the old man left went to the mother. Nice doggie."

"You raised your voice. That’s why he growled. He’s worried that you’re going to attack. Just talk softly and he won’t do anything. Sit there, Charybdis. Behave."

"Thank you, Doctor. The old man had been dying a long time and you figured that would bail you out. But it didn’t, and suddenly you had a lot of due bills. Plus your wife’s store was a drain on the family finances. How to pay them. Your partner, Dr. Walker, was dead. Without him, nobody would come to you for treatment. You were stuck taking that hospital job."

"I really don’t have to listen to this."

"No, but it’s probably worth your while to hear it. It’ll help your lawyer prepare your defense. Of course, you liquidated what you could. The boat went. You started bitching at your wife about the money she was spending in the store. Poor woman, she probably didn’t know how bad things were."

"Do women ever?"

"I think they do most times. I think they just don’t want to get into it. It messes up their heads. Then you had your brainstorm. Your wife’s epilepsy."

"My wife’s what?"

"Yes, Doctor. Mrs. Welles’s epilepsy. I’ve checked it out. Her mother admitted it to me over the telephone last night. Don’t look disbelieving. If you want, call your mother-in-law. I’ve got the number in my jacket. Ask her what she and the Contesa Julienne DeBoroes talked about last night. I do a very good French accent. Don’t bother, save yourself the time and take my word for it. Actually, your marriage had been rocky for a long time. You were catting around. Your wife, well, she had at least one friend…."

"That’s obscene, Burroughs."

"So’s murder. So there you were with nightmares about a divorce and losing half of what little you had left. So you beefed up the insurance on your wife to half a million dollars. A million, if she died accidentally. You were lucky. Like a lot of rich people, your wife had never carried an insurance policy, so there were no medical records in the central information register on her. You had your friend, Dr. Etienne, do a physical on her and give her a clean bill of health. He knew about the epilepsy, of course, but he conveniently, at your request, forgot to put it on the application."

"You’re marvelously imaginative."

"I get better as the evening wears on. Try this. You started hypnotizing your wife. Mrs. Beckwith used to hear your voice in here, talking to her. Soft and dreamy-like, she called it. Your hypnotism voice. I don’t know exactly why you were hypnotizing her. I guess it was primarily to establish control—total control—over her for when you needed it."

"You really do get better than this, Burroughs?"

"Hold on. The good part’s coming up. Your wife had been an epileptic since childhood. She controlled it with medication. I’m sure when my company gets working on it, they’ll find some school records or some college records or some private physicians someplace who prescribed for your wife years ago. But once you had her where you could hypnotize her just by some kind of trigger, you started working on setting off the epileptic storms. That was the point of the strobe lights in the bedroom. Mrs. Beckwith thought they were some kind of sex thing, but they weren’t. The idea was to start epileptic seizures. The television set, too."

"Oh, even the television set?"

"That’s right. It’s just another trigger, and you were Sixteen-Gun Welles. You were going to pull every trigger you could just to make sure you hit."

"Burroughs, you’re marvelous."

"I’d appreciate it, Doctor, if you wouldn’t interrupt. If I lose my place I’ll have to start all over again."

"Please. Proceed. I’m terribly sorry."

"Then there was the 5:00 A.M. call. You called Mrs. Welles every morning at 5 o’clock. You were in San Francisco and it was supposed to be the act of a loving husband, but I never knew anybody who loved me who would call me routinely at five in the morning."

"Did you ever know anyone who loved you at all?"

"My mother always said she did, but I don’t believe her. That morning phone call puzzled me for a while. I couldn’t figure it out. I knew what happened next, though. You called, Mrs. Welles got up and turned on the television and the disco lights and then she dressed and left the house to go to work. Mrs. Beckwith turned the lights off later. Where is Mary, by the way?"

"I let her go to the movies. We’re quite alone."

"Oh. Anyway, she turned the lights off. Mrs. Welles probably never even knew she had turned them on. That’s when I figured it was hypnosis. You called her in the morning, did whatever you California swamis do, and you had her in a trance in which she did what you wanted. But I couldn’t understand why it had to be 5:00 A.M. Why not 7:00 A.M.? What difference did it make to you? That one really puzzled me for a while."

"But, of course, with your usual tenacity and intelligence, you solved that problem."

"Yeah. It was that stupid little fence you built with your own two little soft hands. I wondered about that. Wondered why you built it so close to the edge of the drop. Wondered why you made it so flimsy, when a good cinder-block retaining wall might have made some sense. It was interesting."

"You make it sound really exciting. Why did I build that stupid little fence?"

"I asked myself about that five o’clock call? What happens, say, between five and seven, that doesn’t happen just as well between seven and nine? You got it, Doc. Sunrise. You know about it because you’re out there running every morning around sunrise. For someone driving up that hill by your house, that rising sun is flush in their eyes. And the way that fence was curved, that sun flicks through those pickets, flash, flash, flash. Just like disco lights. It’s another trigger for an epileptic seizure. And, of course, anybody suffering a big attack there wouldn’t have a chance. They would freeze up at the wheel and just go straight off the edge. Just the way Mrs. Welles did. It was all just a matter of what morning it would happen. I don’t think you could be sure that it would happen while you were away in San Fran. But you could hope."

"There’s always hope. Life would be a pretty dismal thing without hope, wouldn’t it?"

"Sure would, Doctor. So you hoped it would happen while you were away. There you’d be, four hundred miles away. A perfect alibi. So you called your wife every morning and pressed her button. And she’d turn on the television so its flicker could get her going. And she’d turn on her disco lights so the flashing could prime her pump. And then just like a zombie, just like you wanted her to, she’d leave the house just as the sun started to rise, just in time to drive up to that fence, just in time to get killed. Tell me, were you surprised when it worked?"

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"Don’t be modest. I think it was really a good plan."

"This is all very fanciful, but I don’t think it is going to save your insurance company from paying me the million dollars it owes me."

"We owe you tapioca. Your wife’s epilepsy, not mentioned on the application, makes the whole application fraudulent. Forget the money, that’s gone. You better worry about your life now."

"You’re still talking nonsense."

"One of your problems, Doctor, is your neatness. I said Mrs. Welles was on medication for her epilepsy. Generally, that prevents attacks. You had to do something about that, so you substituted aspirin for her trimethadione. First you had to get trimethadione packaged up as aspirin. I don’t think it’ll be hard to find the chemist who did that for you. Then you had to replace it with aspirin. But you made the mistake of keeping her trimethadione in the center desk drawer instead of just throwing it out. Don’t bother looking. This is the trimethadione here in this envelope. I took them out of your desk when I was here that day. With Fang Two."

"You bastard."

"Please don’t raise your voice, Doctor. It upsets Maude and Harold there. That was another thing that got me. When Mrs. Welles died, she had a small plastic vial of aspirins in her purse. Not too unusual, although most people would carry one of those little tin containers of aspirin. In her medicine cabinet, she had another one of those plastic containers. That had aspirin, too. I couldn’t understand why she’d have that in her medicine cabinet when there was a bottle of aspirin in there already. It finally got through that she didn’t know they were aspirin. She thought they were the medicine for her epilepsy."

"You should write murder mysteries. You’re really clever."

"It all checks. I had the vial from the medicine cabinet analyzed. There are traces of trimethadione in it. The same thing with the aspirin vial in her purse. Trimethadione traces there, too. The poor woman thought she had medicine to help prevent her seizures, but she was just taking aspirin. She was an accident waiting to happen. I think when the police check the aspirin vial from her purse, they’ll find traces of trimethadione in that one, too. The medicine she thought she was taking."