“Yes,” Murdock said quietly. “Something exactly like that. He was drunk and a bit high and he seemed to have a sense of power. He gloated, almost. He said if they got him in the gas chamber, I would be sitting right beside him. But that wasn’t all he said.”
“No. He didn’t want to sit in the gas chamber and he didn’t at the time see any very good reason why he should, if you kept your mouth good and tight. So he played his trump card. His first hold on you, what made you take the doubloon and give it to him, even if he did promise you money as well, was something about Merle and your father. I know about it. Your mother told me what little I hadn’t put together already. That was his first hold and it was pretty strong. Because it would let you justify yourself. But last night he wanted something still stronger. So he told you the truth and said he had proof.”
He shivered, but the light clear proud look managed to stay on his face.
“I pulled a gun on him,” he said, almost in a happy voice. “After all she is my mother.”
“Nobody can take that away from you.”
He stood up, very straight, very tall. “I went over to the chair he sat in and reached down and put the gun against his face. He had a gun in the pocket of his robe. He tried to get it, but he didn’t get it in time. I took it away from him. I put my gun back in my pocket. I put the muzzle of the other gun against the side of his head and told him I would kill him, if he didn’t produce his proof and give it to me. He began to sweat and babble that he was just kidding me. I clicked back the hammer on the gun to scare him some more.”
He stopped and held a hand out in front of him. The hand shook but as he stared down at it it got steady. He dropped it to his side and looked me in the eye.
“The gun must have been filed or had a very light action. It went off. I jumped back against the wall and knocked a picture down. I jumped from surprise that the gun went off, but it kept the blood off me. I wiped the gun off and put his fingers around it and then put it down on the floor close to his hand. He was dead at once. He hardly bled except the first spurt. It was an accident.”
“Why spoil it?” I half sneered. “Why not make it a nice clean honest murder?”
“That’s what happened. I can’t prove it, of course. But I think I might have killed him anyway. What about the police?”
I stood up and shrugged my shoulders. I felt tired, spent, drawn out and sapped. My throat was sore from yapping and my brain ached from trying to keep my thoughts orderly.
“I don’t know about the police,” I said. “They and I are not very good friends, on account of they think I am holding out on them. And God knows they are right. They may get to you. If you weren’t seen, if you didn’t leave any fingerprints around, and even if you did, if they don’t have any other reason to suspect you and get your fingerprints to check, then they may never think of you. If they find out about the doubloon and that it was the Murdock Brasher, I don’t know where you stand. It all depends on how well you stand up to them.”
“Except for mother’s sake,” he said, “I don’t very much care. I’ve always been a flop.”
“And on the other hand,” I said, ignoring the feeble talk, “if the gun really has a very light action and you get a good lawyer and tell an honest story and so on, no jury will convict you. Juries don’t like blackmailers.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “Because I am not in a position to use that defense. I don’t know anything about blackmail. Vannier showed me where I could make some money, and I needed it badly.”
I said: “Uh-huh. If they get you where you need the blackmail dope, you’ll use it all right. Your old lady will make you. If it’s her neck or yours, she’ll spill.”
“It’s horrible,” he said. “Horrible to say that.”
“You were lucky about that gun. All the people we know have been playing with it, wiping prints off and putting them on. I even put a set on myself just to be fashionable. It’s tricky when the hand is stiff. But I had to do it. Morny was over there having his wife put hers on. He thinks she killed Vannier, so she probably thinks he did.”
He just stared at me. I chewed my lip. It felt as stiff as a piece of glass.
“Well, I guess I’ll just be running along now,” I said.
“You mean you are going to let me get away with it?” His voice was getting a little supercilious again.
“I’m not going to turn you in, if that’s what you mean. Beyond that I guarantee nothing. If I’m involved in it, I’ll have to face up to the situation. There’s no question of morality involved. I’m not a cop nor a common informer nor an officer of the court. You say it was an accident. Okay, it was an accident. I wasn’t a witness. I haven’t any proof either way. I’ve been working for your mother and whatever right to my silence that gives her, she can have. I don’t like her, I don’t like you, I don’t like this house. I didn’t particularly like your wife. But I like Merle. She’s kind of silly and morbid, but she’s kind of sweet too. And I know what has been done to her in this damn family for the past eight years. And I know she didn’t push anybody out of any window. Does that explain matters?”
He gobbled, but nothing came that was coherent.
“I’m taking Merle home,” I said. “I asked your mother to send her clothes to my apartment in the morning. In case she kind of forgets, being busy with her solitaire game, would you see that that is done?”
He nodded dumbly. Then he said in a queer small voice: “You are going—just like that? I haven’t—I haven’t even thanked you. A man I hardly know, taking risks for me—I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m going the way I always go,” I said. “With an airy smile and a quick flip of the wrist. And with a deep and heartfelt hope that I won’t be seeing you in the fish bowl. Good night.”
I turned my back on him and went to the door and out. I shut the door with a quiet firm click of the lock. A nice smooth exit, in spite of all the nastiness. For the last time I went over and patted the little painted Negro on the head and then walked across the long lawn by the moon-drenched shrubs and the deodar tree to the street and my car.
I drove back to Hollywood, bought a pint of good liquor, checked in at the Plaza, and sat on the side of the bed staring at my feet and lapping the whiskey out of the bottle.
Just like any common bedroom drunk.
When I had enough of it to make my brain fuzzy enough to stop thinking, I undressed and got into bed and after a while, but not soon enough, I went to sleep.
THIRTY-FIVE
It was three o’clock in the afternoon and there were five pieces of luggage inside the apartment door, side by side on the carpet. There was my yellow cowhide, well scraped on both sides from being pushed around in the boots of cars. There were two nice pieces of airplane luggage both marked L.M. There was an old black imitation walrus thing marked M.D. and there was one of these little leatherette overnight cases which you can buy in drugstores for a dollar forty-nine.
Dr. Carl Moss had just gone out of the door cursing me because he had kept his afternoon class of hypochondriacs waiting. The sweetish smell of his Fatima poisoned the air for me. I was turning over in what was left of my mind what he had said when I asked him how long it would take Merle to get well.
“It depends what you mean by well. She’ll always be high on nerves and low on animal emotion. She’ll always breathe thin air and smell snow. She’d have made a perfect nun. The religious dream, with its narrowness, its stylized emotions and its grim purity, would have been a perfect release for her. As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.”
“She’s not that bad,” I had said, but he had just grinned at me with his wise Jew face and gone out of the door. “And besides how do you know they are virgins?” I added to the closed door, but that didn’t get me any farther.
I lit a cigarette and wandered over to the window and after a while she came through the
doorway from the bedroom part of the apartment and stood there looking at me with her eyes dark-ringed and a pale composed little face without any makeup except on the lips.
“Put some rouge on your cheeks,” I told her. “You look like the snow maiden after a hard night with the fishing fleet.”
So she went back and put some rouge on her cheeks. When she came back again she looked at the luggage and said softly: “Leslie lent me two of his suitcases.”
I said: “Yeah,” and looked her over. She looked very nice. She had a pair of long-waisted rust-colored slacks on, and Bata shoes and a brown and white print shirt and an orange scarf. She didn’t have her glasses on. Her large clear cobalt eyes had a slightly dopey look, but not more than you would expect. Her hair was dragged down tight, but I couldn’t do anything much about that.
“I’ve been a terrible nuisance,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry.”
“Nonsense. I talked to your father and mother both. They’re tickled to death. They’ve only seen you twice in over eight years and they feel as if they had almost lost you.”
“I’ll love seeing them for a while,” she said, looking down at the carpet. “It’s very kind of Mrs. Murdock to let me go. She’s never been able to spare me for long.” She moved her legs as if she wondered what to do with them in slacks, although they were her slacks and she must have had to face the problem before. She finally put her knees close together and clasped her hands on top of them.
“Any little talking we might have to do,” I said, “or anything you might want to say to me, let’s get it over with now. Because I’m not driving halfway across the United States with a nervous breakdown in the seat beside me. ”
She bit a knuckle and sneaked a couple of quick looks at me around the side of the knuckle. “Last night—” she said, and stopped and colored.
“Let’s use a little of the old acid,” I said. “Last night you told me you killed Vannier and then you told me you didn’t. I know you didn’t. That’s settled.”
She dropped the knuckle, looked at me levelly, quiet, composed and the hands on her knees now not straining at all.
“Vannier was dead a long time before you got there. You went there to give him some money for Mrs. Murdock.”
“No—for me,” she said. “Although of course it was Mrs. Murdock’s money. I owe her more than I’ll ever be able to repay. Of course she doesn’t give me much salary, but that would hardly—”
I said roughly: “Her not giving you much salary is a characteristic touch and your owing her more than you can ever repay is more truth than poetry. It would take the Yankee outfield with two bats each to give her what she has coming from you. However, that’s unimportant now. Vannier committed suicide because he had got caught out in a crooked job. That’s flat and final. The way you behaved was more or less an act. You got a severe nervous shock seeing his leering dead face in a mirror and that shock merged into another one a long time ago and you just dramatized it in your screwy little way.”
She looked at me shyly and nodded her copper-blond head, as if in agreement.
“And you didn’t push Horace Bright out of any window,” I said.
Her face jumped then and turned startlingly pale. “I—I—” her hand went to her mouth and stayed there and her shocked eyes looked at me over it.
“I wouldn’t be doing this,” I said, “if Dr. Moss hadn’t said it would be all right and we might as well hand it to you now. I think maybe you think you killed Horace Bright. You had a motive and an opportunity and just for a second I think you might have had the impulse to take advantage of the opportunity. But it wouldn’t be in your nature. At the last minute you would hold back. But at that last minute probably something snapped and you pulled a faint. He did actually fall, of course, but you were not the one that pushed him.”
I held it a moment and watched the hand drop down again to join the other one and the two of them twine together and pull hard on each other.
“You were made to think you had pushed him,” I said. “It was done with care, deliberation and the sort of quiet ruthlessness you only find in a certain kind of woman dealing with another woman. You wouldn’t think of jealousy to look at Mrs. Murdock now—but if that was a motive, she had it. She had a better one—fifty thousand dollars’ life insurance—all that was left from a ruined fortune. She had the strange wild possessive love for her son such women have. She’s cold, bitter, unscrupulous and she used you without mercy or pity, as insurance, in case Vannier ever blew his top. You were just a scapegoat to her. If you want to come out of this pallid sub-emotional life you have been living, you have got to realize and believe what I am telling you. I know it’s tough.”
“It’s utterly impossible,” she said quietly, looking at the bridge of my nose, “Mrs. Murdock has been wonderful to me always. It’s true I never remembered very well—but you shouldn’t say such awful things about people.”
I got out the white envelope that had been in the back of Vannier’s picture. Two prints in it and a negative. I stood in front of her and put a print on her lap.
“Okay, look at it. Vannier took it from across the street.”
She looked at it. “Why that’s Mr. Bright,” she said. “It’s not a very good picture, is it? And that’s Mrs. Murdock—Mrs. Bright she was then—right behind him. Mr. Bright looks mad.” She looked up at me with a sort of mild curiosity.
“If he looks mad there,” I said, “you ought to have seen him a few seconds later, when he bounced.”
“When he what?”
“Look,” I said, and there was a kind of desperation in my voice now, “that is a snapshot of Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock giving her first husband the heave out of his office window. He’s falling. Look at the position of his hands. He’s screaming with fear. She is behind him and her face is hard with rage—or something. Don’t you get it at all? This is what Vannier has had for proof all these years. The Murdocks never saw it, never really believed it existed. But it did. I found it last night, by a fluke of the same sort that was involved in the taking of the picture. Which is a fair sort of justice. Do you begin to understand?”
She looked at the photo again and laid it aside. “Mrs. Murdock has always been lovely to me,” she said.
“She made you the goat,” I said, in the quietly strained voice of a stage manager at a bad rehearsal. “She’s a smart tough patient woman. She knows her complexes. She’ll even spend a dollar to keep a dollar, which is what few of her type will do. I hand it to her. I’d like to hand it to her with an elephant gun, but my polite breeding restrains me.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s that.” And I could see she had heard one word in three and hadn’t believed what she had heard. “You must never show this to Mrs. Murdock. It would upset her terribly.”
I got up and took the photo out of her hand and tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the wastebasket.
“Maybe you’ll be sorry I did that,” I told her, not telling her I had another and the negative. “Maybe some night—three months—three years from now—you will wake up in the night and realize I have been telling you the truth. And maybe then you will wish you could look at that photograph again. And maybe I am wrong about this too. Maybe you would be very disappointed to find out you hadn’t really killed anybody. That’s fine. Either way it’s fine. Now we are going downstairs and get in my car and we are going to drive to Wichita to visit your parents. And I don’t think you are going back to Mrs. Murdock, but it may well be that I am wrong about that too. But we are not going to talk about this any more. Not any more.”
“I haven’t any money,” she said.
“You have five hundred dollars that Mrs. Murdock sent you. I have it in my pocket.”
“That’s really awfully kind of her,” she said.
“Oh hell and fireflies,” I said and went out to the kitchen and gobbled a quick drink, before we started. It didn’t do me any good. It just made me want to climb up the wall and gnaw my way acros
s the ceiling.
THIRTY-SIX
I was gone ten days. Merle’s parents were vague kind patient people living in an old frame house in a quiet shady street. They cried when I told them as much of the story as I thought they should know. They said they were glad to have her back and they would take good care of her and they blamed themselves a lot, and I let them do it.
When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homey smile on her face to watch me drive away.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
I called Lieutenant Breeze when I got back and went down to ask him how the Phillips case was coming. They had cracked it very neatly, with the right mixture of brains and luck you always have to have. The Mornys never went to the police after all, but somebody called and told about a shot in Vannier’s house and hung up quickly. The fingerprint man didn’t like the prints on the gun too well, so they checked Vannier’s hand for powder nitrates. When they found them they decided it was suicide after all. Then a dick named Lackey working out of Central Homicide thought to work on the gun a little and he found that a description of it had been distributed, and a gun like it was wanted in connection with the Phillips killing. Hench identified it, but better than that they found a half print of his thumb on the side of the trigger, which, not ordinarily being pulled back, had not been wiped off completely.
With that much in hand and a better set of Vannier’s prints than I could make they went over Phillips’ apartment again and also over Hench’s. They found Vannier’s left hand on Hench’s bed and one of his fingers on the underside of the toilet flush lever in Phillips’ place. Then they got to work in the neighborhood with photographs of Vannier and proved he had been along the alley twice and on a side street at least three times. Curiously, nobody in the apartment house had seen him, or would admit it.