You Could Call It Murder

by Lawrence Block

  “You can do it,” she said. “I told you he’s all alone. Or he has a girl there, but she won’t be any trouble. He’s probably alone. He’ll be asleep and you’ll be awake. Why should you have a hard time with him?”

  I asked her where she would be during all this fun and games. “I’ll wait here for you,” she said. “In the car. If anybody comes or anything I’ll hit the horn and warn you. And when you come out of the house I’ll scoot up in front with the car so you can just hop in. I know how to drive this buggy. Barb used to let me take it for a spin. I’m a good driver.”

  I told her that was reassuring. I got out of the car, leaving the keys with Jill. She slid easily behind the wheel and grinned at me. I went around to the trunk, opened it. There was a tool kit there, and in the tool kit I managed to locate a tire-iron. It seemed ideal for slamming Hank Sutton over the head, so I dropped it into a pocket and went around to Jill’s window.

  “Up the stairs and into the bedroom,” she said. “The bedroom door’s on the right of the landing. Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.”

  “My hero,” she said, only partially sarcastic. “My hero in baggy tweeds. Give me a kiss at parting.”

  I gave her a kiss at parting and she turned it into Penelope saying so-long to Ulysses. Her arms wound themselves around me neck and her tongue leaped halfway down my throat. When she let go of me there were stars in her eyes.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Be careful, Roy.”

  I was careful.

  Very carefully I walked up the path to the house. I made my way up a trio of wooden steps that only creaked slightly. There was a door bell at the side of the door frame, and there was a knocker on the door itself, and I repressed a psychotic urge to ring bell and bang knocker and shout Halloo! at the top of my lungs.

  I did not do this. Instead I fished in my pocket for my knife, a clever instrument made in Germany and equipped to perform every task from removing the hairs in one’s nose to dissecting laboratory animals. It wouldn’t cut a damned thing—the cutting blade wouldn’t hold an edge to save itself. But it was excellent for opening locked doors.

  The glass-paned storm door had a hook which dropped into an eye attachment screwed into the door-jamb. I slid the long cutting blade of the knife between the door and the jamb to lift the hook. This took care of the storm door.

  The real door was heavy oak. It had two locks—a pin-tumbler type of spring lock and a supplementary bolt turned manually. I used the screwdriver blade of the knife to ease back the bolt, then sprang the spring lock with the cutting blade. I turned a brass knob and eased the door open slowly and gently. It opened without making a sound.

  I looked into the darkness and listened carefully. The old house was silent as the grave and dark as a blackout in a Welsh coal mine. I stepped inside and drew the door shut behind me. A clock was ticking in one of the other rooms. I stood and listened to it, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness.

  They did this a bit at a time. Gradually I became aware of the fact that the darkened interior of the house was not entirely black, that there were shapes and shades and shadows. A staircase loomed in front of me. I approached it, counted fourteen steps, and wondered how much the stairs would creak when I walked up them. Jill hadn’t mentioned that point.

  But they barely creaked at all. I walked up them like a man who had been riding horseback for several days without a pause, keeping my feet on the outward edges of the steps and being careful never to step in the middle of a plank. I stood without moving at the top of the stairs and wished for a cigarette, a long drink of scotch, and a seat in the parlor car of a fast train bound for New York. I dipped a hand into my pocket and drew forth the tire-iron. I hefted it in my hand. It was heavy.

  I held onto the tire-iron with one hand, reached for the doorknob with the other. I turned it and heard the beginnings of metallic protest. It whined like a mosquito zeroing in for the kill. I took a deep breath and threw the door open. It made enough noise to wake the dead, and Hank Sutton was not even dead. He was very much alive.

  He came out of sleep in a hurry. I saw the shadowy outline of his big body moving in the equally big bed. He swung both legs over the side of the bed and started to his feet.

  “Who the hell—”

  The room was completely dark, the shades all drawn. I moved from the doorway to one wall and pressed my back against it. He didn’t know who I was or where I was and he couldn’t see a thing. He hadn’t moved.

  “Okay,” he snapped. “You’re here, whoever you are. Why not turn on a light if we’re gonna play games?”

  I didn’t answer. I heard the sound of a drawer opening, saw his hand move around by the tiny night table at the side of the bed. The hand came out of the drawer holding something that could only be a gun.

  “To hell with you,” he said. “You start talking fast or I blow a hole in your damned head.”

  But he was pointing the gun away from me, at the doorway. I took a deep breath and hoped he didn’t hear me sucking air into my lungs. He had the gun and I had a tire-iron, and a gun can be a far more effective weapon than a tire-iron.

  But I knew where he was. Which was even more of an advantage. I didn’t have all the time in the world. At any moment his eyes would become aware of the fact that he was awake again, at which time he would be able to see. And once he could see, the fact that he couldn’t hear me wouldn’t make a world of difference. He would shoot a hole in my head just as he had promised.

  “Come on, damn itl Who in—”

  I rushed him.

  I ran straight at him at top speed, with the tire-iron going up and coming down. The gun went off, rocking the room and filling it with the subtle stench of burning gunpowder. But the gun went off in the direction he had been aiming it, and that was not the direction I was coming from.

  Then the tire-iron was curving down in a lovely arc, smashing all hell out of his wrist. The gun clattered from his hand and bounced around on the floor. I caromed into him while he roared like a gelded camel and held onto his wrist with his other hand. I bounced away from him—every action having an equal and opposite reaction—and wound up on the floor. Somewhere in the course of it all the tire-iron managed to lose itself.

  “Son of a bitch,” he howled. “What are you trying to do—kill me? You son of a bitch—”

  I wasn’t trying to kill him. I was trying to knock him colder than his pair of thugs had done for me in New York. I got to my feet and went for him. This time he saw me coming and threw a right at me.

  It was a mistake. The punch landed but it hurt him more than it hurt me. He swung at me before he remembered what had happened to his wrist, and when his hand ran into my chest he howled again and fell backwards.

  It was my turn. I hit him in the stomach with all my weight in back of the punch and he doubled up neatly. I crossed a right to his jaw and he straightened out again. He went back against a wall, then lowered his head and charged me as a wounded bull charges a matador.

  He ran into a knee and fell flat on his face.

  He wasn’t moving. I picked up his head once or twice and banged it against the floor purely for sport. Then I went back to the doorway and rubbed one hand around the wall until my fingers found the lightswitch. I turned on lights and blinked—my eyes had grown completely accustomed to the darkness by then. I found a now-crumpled pack of cigarettes in my pocket, extracted a now-crumpled cigarette, and lighted it.

  Hank Sutton was a big man. He had more hair on his chest than he had on his head. His nose must have been broken once and set poorly, and his wrist had been broken just recently by my tire-iron. He was stretched out on the floor and sleeping like a baby. I didn’t even have to be careful not to wake him.

  I looked under the bed and spotted the strong box. It was an ordinary gray steel affair about a foot long, six inches deep and four inches high. I reached under the bed and dragged it out. It had three circular tumblers with numbers on them from one to ten whic
h constituted a sort of combination lock that wouldn’t really keep a determined individual out of the box. I could have opened it in a moment or two but I didn’t want to waste the time.

  So I left him there. I picked up my tire-iron, tucked his .38 into the waistband of my trousers and his strongbox under one arm, and went down the flight of stairs in a hurry. This time I didn’t bother stepping carefully, and this time each board that I hit squealed like a frightened mouse.

  It was lovely—I had gone in there, smashed his wrist with a tire-iron, stolen a box of dirty pictures and taken his gun in the bargain. And the bloody fool didn’t even know who I was! He hadn’t so much as seen my face or heard my voice.

  He was going to be unhappy. He was going to wake up with a quietly magnificent headache, wath his blackmail material out the window and his gun along with it. I knew about the headache—his friends had given me one of my own in New York, and he had it coming. But the finest part of all was he wouldn’t know who on earth had done it all to him.

  Which was cute.

  I got downstairs, tossed the front door open and went out through it. I saw the MG still parked in front of the field, and as I headed down the walk I heard her start the motor and head toward me. She slowed down long enough for me to get into my seat, then put the accelerator on the floor.

  “Hey! Take it easy, girl.”

  She looked at me. “He’ll be after us, Roy. He’ll want to get that box back. He’ll—”

  “He’s sleeping like a corpse.”

  “You didn’t wake him?”

  “I awakened him. Then I put him to sleep again.”

  “You ... you killed him? Roy—”

  The conversation was rapidly getting inane. So I told her to shut up for a moment, and then I told her what had happened, and then all at once the car was parked at the curb and the motor was off and she was in my arms, hugging me fiercely and telling me how wonderful I was.

  It got involved.

  Finally I said: “Hurry up and drive, Jill. It’s late and we both have to get to bed”

  ‘To bed? Why?”

  “Because there’s not enough room in an MG.” I kissed her nose, her eyelids. “And you and I need a great deal of room.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I remember.”

  “Then start driving.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “You’re wrong,” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About there’s no room in an MG. There’s plenty of room. You never knew Barb Taft very well, did you?”

  “Not very well.”

  She grinned. “Barb would never have owned a car if there wasn’t enough room. See?”

  I saw.

  “Besides,” she went on, “if I started driving now it would break the mood, and this is much too nice a mood to break. Don’t you think so?”

  “It’s a fine mood.”

  “Uh-huh. And besides, I don’t want to wait. All the way back to Cliff’s End, for God’s sake. And then trying to sneak into your moldy old room. I don’t want to wait.”

  Her mouth nuzzled against my throat. Her body pressed hard against mine and her voice was a whisper of warmth.

  “We can stay right here,” she said. “And we can have a very enjoyable evening. I think.”

  And, as it turned out, she was correct.

  Ten

  I DROPPED her off at her dormitory despite her protests. She wanted to come with me, wanted to be on hand when I opened Sutton’s strongbox, but I wouldn’t listen to her. I explained that it was too damned late as it was, that I wanted to open the box in the privacy of my own room, and that sneaking her up Mrs. Lipton’s stairs once in an evening was quite enough. She argued a bit and pouted a bit and finally accepted the state of affairs. She kissed me goodbye almost passionately enough to change my mind, then scampered off to her dormitory.

  I drove back to Mrs. Lipton’s, parked the car outside and carried the strongbox up to my room. It was the middle of the night, almost the middle of the morning, and soon false dawn would be painting boredom upon the face of the sky. I was exhausted and the bed beckoned.

  So did the strongbox. I sat down on the edge of the bed with it and looked it over thoughtfully. The combination lock was a simple affair—three dials of numbers running from zero to nine, with a consequent nine hundred ninety-nine possibilities, the same as the odds in the policy slip racket I started spinning the dials aimlessly, trying to hit the right combination, then gave that up as fundamentally insane. Instead I took Hank Sutton’s gun, hefted it by the barrel, and slammed the butt against the box.

  It made a hellish noise. I sat still for a moment and felt guilty. I wondered how many boarders I had managed to awaken. Then I decided that one might as well wake them all and slammed the strongbox again with the gun.

  This time it opened. I put the gun away in a drawer and opened the box. Its contents were no phenomenal surprise. First of all there were twelve negatives—two each of the six poses. I guessed that he was getting ready to pull the old gambit of selling the negatives for a high price, then resume the blackmail dodge. There were prints, too. Eighteen of them, three sets in all. All of them equally glossy, equally detailed, and equally pornographic.

  I didn’t waste time looking at them. I put them back in the box, adding the set I’d found in Gwen Davison’s closet. Tomorrow I would have something to burn in a convenient field; for the time being only sleep interested me.

  The strongbox—and the gun as well—went into a dresser drawer. While putting them away I came across what little remained of my bottle of scotch, and this could not have worked out more neatly if I had planned it. I finished the bottle and put myself, at very long last, to bed.

  I was awake suddenly. It was noon and I was still tired but I’d had the magnificent luck to wake up tired or not. I sat on the edge of the bed and looked around for cigarettes. There didn’t seem to be any.

  It was that sort of day. There are days when one bounces out of bed filled with life and easy of spirit. There are other days when one wakes up coated with a fine layer of foul sweat, and on those days that sweat seems to have seeped into one’s brain. And it was that sort of day. My brain felt sweaty.

  I shook my head to clear it, then shuffled down the hall to the community bathroom. Someone was in it. I went back to my room and shifted uncomfortably until someone got out, then took his or her place. The shower was either too hot or too cold all the while I was under it, the spray either too hard or too soft. I struggled with the controls only for a small while. On days like that, you cannot fight with fate. You do not stand a solitary chance of success.

  The towel provided might have blotted a small puddle of ink. It wouldn’t do for a full-sized human being. I did as much as I could with it, then trundled back to my room and waited for the water to evaporate. I had a strong urge to roll around in the rug but managed to control myself.

  One of those days.

  I got dressed and dragged myself out of the house. The cold spell had broken, which should have been a pleasant turn, but it was the wrong day to expect pleasant turns. Rain had come with the warm air, rain that mingled with the fallen snow and made slush out of it. In New York you learn to accept slush as part of the winter wonderland environment. In New Hampshire you expect a little better in the way of weather.

  I squished through the slush to the MG and wondered if it would refuse to start. But the gods smiled and the engine turned over. I drove over to the main street of town and parked the car.

  The drugstore didn’t have any of my brand of cigarettes left. I should have expected as much. I settled for a pack of something else, then went next door and smoked a cigarette while a waitress brought me orange juice and toast and coffee. There was nothing wrong with the orange juice, but the toast was burnt and the girl put cream in the coffee.

  Which was par for the course.

  I ate the toast without complaining, had her trade the cup of dishwater for a cup of black coffee, and sm
oked my way through the day’s second cigarette. Then I sat there for a few moments wondering what was going to happen next. Something, no doubt. Something abominable.

  So I left the lunch counter and went to the police station, And it happened.

  I asked the old policeman if I could talk to Alan Marsten, He stared at me. “You mean you ain’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  “About the kid,” he said. “About what he did, the Marsten kid.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said mildly.

  “No?”

  “I was sleeping,” I said patiently. “I just awoke.”

  “Ayeh,” he said. “Sleeping till noon, eh? You private police have the right deal, by God. Sleeping till noon!”

  We had the right deal, by God. I wondered if they would throw me in jail for hitting the old fool in his fat stomach. I decided they probably would.

  “The Marsten boy,” I reminded him.

  “Escaped.”

  “What!”

  He smiled with relish. “Escaped, I said. Run off, took to the woods, disappeared.”

  “When? How? What—”

  “Hang on,” he said. “One at a time. First the when part. Happened about three hours ago, just after I come on duty. Then the how—that lawyer of his came in to see him. I opened the door and the kid gave me a hit over the head that was enough to put me out on the floor. When I came to he was gone. They say he ran out, jumped in a car that some damn fool left the keys in. And off he went like a bat out of hell.”

  I must have had a magnificently foolish expression on my face because he was smiling patronizingly at me. “The lawyer,” I managed to say. “What about the lawyer?”

  “Kid hit him. Hit him same as he hit me, with one of the legs he busted off that little chair in his cell. The lawyer was still out cold by the time I got up.”

  There was probably little enough that was even mildly humorous about it, but it came at the right time, on top of no cigarettes and burnt toast and coffee with cream in it, on top of an occupied shower and a feeling of ill-being and everything else that went along with it. The mental picture of that fine Philadelphia lawyer tapped on the head with a chair leg was too much for me.