The Killer Is Mine

by Talmage Powell

  “Must be quite a guy.”

  “Most fearsome to some people, but only because they’re narrow and lack understanding. He was born without a single hair on him. None on his head. No eyebrows. His skin is shiny, like pink silk. He stands nearly seven feet tall and fills up a doorway. He used to perform great feats of strength in Grandfather’s shows. He challenged all comers among the local rubes in wrestling matches, with a thousand dollars in prize money if the rube could pin him in thirty minutes. In his entire career, he never cost Grandfather the thousand.”

  “Quite a man.”

  “He is, indeed! If he had ears, people might accept him more readily.”

  “He’s got no ears?”

  “None at all. He was born that way. Grandfather found him on a barren New England farm. I’ve heard the story many times. Max the Giant was like a wild creature of the woods. It came from having the normal ones torment him. It took Grandfather quite a long time to win him over. Now Max doesn’t have anybody joke about his ears. He’s far too big for that. In fact, he joked himself about it once. To me. He said, ‘People always talking about needing this or that like they need a hole in the head. Lucky for old Max he was born with two holes in the head, eh, little Wherry?’ “

  “Then he isn’t deaf?”

  “Of course not. He hears better than most people, sounds aft as well as fore,” Bryan said. “I think his joke was quite clever.”

  I swung into the driveway and stopped the car under the port attached to the dark house.

  Bryan opened the door on his side. “I’ll go in and turn on some lights for you.”

  He got out, went around the car and marched sturdily into the house. A few seconds later, lights went on inside.

  I got out, opened the rear door of the car, grunted Milt Collins’ form over my shoulder. He struggled a little and cursed thickly as I carried him into the house.

  Bryan led me to a bedroom and held the door open. “You may put him there.”

  I dropped Milt Collins across the bed. He cursed some more. I went out, and Bryan closed the door on his father’s cursing, which gradually dribbled down to nothing.

  Bryan dusted his hands and we walked back to the living area of the house. The place was sprawling and spacious, richly furnished. The use of glass and indoor planters, lushly green, seemed to bring the whole of the outdoors into the house. It was a place made for bountiful living.

  Bryan seated himself in a big, square chair and rested his hands on its arms. “I suppose Father will be quite ill when he wakes.”

  “You’re by yourself here?”

  “For the moment. Our house servant quit this afternoon. We’ve had a succession of them since Ruthie was killed and my mother went to the insane asylum.”

  “I see. Maybe I better stick around.”

  “You’re welcome to stay or go, sir. You needn’t stay on my account. I have plenty of books and the television. And Granny will drop over, I suppose. I phoned to see if Father was there to tell him about the servant quitting.”

  “Sure you won’t be lonely?”

  “Lonely?” he echoed, as if the word was strange. “No, I think not.” He regarded me dispassionately. “I suppose you’re thinking about Ruthie and my mother?” “Well, I—”

  “It’s quite all right, sir. What is done is done, as Grandfather would say, and you can’t undo it, can you?” His wide, bland eyes rested on mine.

  “I guess you can’t,” I said.

  “Were the facts altered, things might be worse. Ruthie was the lonely one. Rather like Mother. Frantic, from loneliness. It made for mischief sometimes. Like the time when Ruthie took the fish bowl—”

  “Son, if you don’t want to confide in a stranger, you sure don’t have to.”

  “You’re a detective. You came to ask questions, didn’t you?”

  “Not to pick kids,” I said.

  “You tried to pump me about Mr. and Mrs. Tulman.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Well, really, I don’t mind answering questions. I realize what you’re trying to do. You’d like to know about Ruthie. And Mother and Father. And Mr. and Mrs. Tulman. There’s little to know, really, that didn’t come out at the trial. Ruthie’s mischief came from wishing she was like poor children, who could run as they pleased and have playmates. It hurt her to be bad and she was bad sometimes so she could feel loneliness was about all she deserved. The time she put household ammonia in the fish bowl, she wasn’t mad at the fish. They just didn’t matter—until they curled up and died. Then Ruthie wept.”

  “Any kid’s liable to pull a few stunts like that in growing up,” I said. “Hardly a kid living that didn’t sometime pull the wings off a fly or pour salt on a snail or pop a bird or two with his first BB gun.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, sir.”

  A car drove up and stopped outside.

  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s Granny,” Bryan said, getting out of his chair.

  The glass doors slapped open and an old lady came in with all the grace of a free-wheeling boxcar. She was dressed in black and it made her rough-featured, densely powdered face look chalky. She had her steel-gray hair piled in a bun on top of her head. The bun was held with rhinestone pins and she dripped more rhinestones from her creased neck, ears and fingers.

  She laid her hand on Bryan’s shoulder. “Find your father?”

  “Yes, Grandmère.”

  Mrs. Madeleine Wherry turned her attention to me. “Who’re you?”

  “The name is Ed Rivers,” I said.

  “He’s the detective Mrs. Tulman hired,” Bryan said.

  The hefty old lady took a few slow steps toward me. Her eyes reminded me of a snapping turtle’s when the turtle is about to break the back of a fish.

  “Mr. Rivers,” she said quietly, “the Tulman affair was settled quite legally and honestly in court.”

  “I’m a working man, Mrs. Wherry. I have to make a living.”

  “Is that all you’re doing? Taking a client’s fee for the mere sake of living, even knowing the man’s guilty and beyond help?”

  “I try to give an honest day’s work for an honest dollar,” I said.

  She stood sizing me up. Her eyes were cold and wise. She was trying to decide whether I was a shyster type or the kind to take a fee seriously.

  “Mr. Rivers,” she said at last, “you’re facing certain failure.”

  “You may be right, Mrs. Wherry.”

  “Damn you,” she said calmly, “don’t use that patronizing tone on me. There isn’t a chance of Wally Tulman being innocent.”

  “I don’t blame you for hating him.”

  “Hating him?” she said softly. “Raw hate is love compared to what I feel for that monster! Almost equally, I despise his wife. It was she who brought him into our world, our lives. Perhaps you haven’t fully thought about what Wallace Tulman did to me and mine, Mr. Rivers.”

  “I have.”

  “?o, you haven’t—or you’d want that man to die, as he deserves. He killed a child. He destroyed the child’s mother, my daughter. He made wreckage out of the life of my son-in-law.” She gave a little gasp. “They’re all I have in this world, Mr. Rivers.”

  “I’m quite sympathetic.”

  “Then seek your living someplace else. If it’s a matter of money, I’m not a stingy person.”

  “I don’t buy off very easy, Mrs. Wherry.”

  “I could meet your price.”

  “The price of hiding something?”

  Color grew in purple blotches on the loose, heavy skin of her cheeks. It showed like bruises beneath the face powder. “Mr. Rivers, I don’t believe I made myself clear. We have nothing to hide. Nothing whatever. The newspapers have made capital of us. None of us can take much more. I have never bent my neck to anything in this life, but my neck is growing tired. My son-in-law must be left alone if he is to find his way back to some semblance of sobriety. And my grandson”—she put her arm across Bryan’s shoulders and drew
him close to her—”must not be scarred beyond repair. Now can you understand that? All our dirty linen, our weaknesses, our privacy, have been bared to public view. The man responsible will die in the electric chair—after the damage is done. We simply can’t afford more damage. What would it accomplish? How could it help anyone?”

  She stopped speaking, a glistening of spittle on her rouged lips. “You stand ashamed, Mr. Rivers.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not ashamed. I’m sorry for you.”

  “We’re grateful for that,” she said shortly. “I hope you’re sorry enough to understand and not torment us. If you’d name a price—”

  “I don’t have a price, Mrs. Wherry. I wish sometimes I did. It would make life simpler.” “You beast!” she said simply.

  Bryan looked up at her face. “He brought Father home, Grandmère.”

  “For that I’ll pay you, Mr. Rivers.”

  “There’s no charge,” I said.

  “He questioned me, Granny,” Bryan said.

  She looked at me and said, “I see I flattered you. I apologize to the kingdom of beasts. You’re really a snake. Now get out of here!”

  I turned to go.

  I hadn’t seen or heard him come in, but Max the Giant was standing near the outside doors. He was as big as Bryan had said. The only excess weight he carried was the weight of his clothes. He had a hickory neck growing out of his shoulders that curved to form a pink silk seal’s head.

  He looked past me at Mrs. Wherry hungrily. She failed to give him a signal and the eyes in the pale seal’s head showed disappointment.

  I walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER

  6

  WHEN I got to my apartment and opened the door I smelled fresh cigarette smoke. I put my hand on the .38 and used my other hand to turn on a light.

  She sat up on the day bed. She was a good-looking young animal, tallish and sleek. Her print dress flowed against the vigor of her thighs, hips and bosom. She had bedroom blond hair framing a face that was almost pretty as a doll’s. The lips were a little lush for a doll’s.

  She pushed back her blond hair where it had fallen across the side of her forehead.

  “Hello,” she said. “What took you so long?”

  “This and that.”

  “Got a cigarette?”

  I walked across the room and handed her a cigarette. She put it between her ripe cherry lips and waited for me to light it. I struck a match from a paper book. As she leaned forward to accept the light, I said, “Who the hell are you?”

  “Evie Grove.”

  “Never heard of you.”

  “I know you haven’t. But I’ve heard of you, Ed. You’re looking for Giles Newell.”

  “Word does get around. How’d you get in here?”

  “Oh, it’s an old-fashioned lock. A lousy lock.”

  “Giles Newell a friend of yours?”

  “Could be,” she said, taking a deep puff from the cigarette.

  “What else could he be?”

  She shrugged. “Business acquaintance.”

  “Help you pay the rent?”

  “Ummmm.”

  “I see,” I said. “How has the hostess business been?”

  “I can’t complain. That is, I couldn’t—as long as Giles was working at the Yacht Club. I have a comfortable cottage nearby. There was always a yachting party making up that needed an extra girl, or some poor guy out on the town without companionship.”

  I’ve walked down the dirty side of life for a long time, but I still feel a little sad pang when I cross an Evie. All that beauty put into the shallow, dead-end service of whoredom. She’d get only a few years of luxury at best. There was too much competition, too much beauty of the flesh that hated the idea of slinging hash or working in a cigar factory.

  “So Giles took off,” I said, “and your phone hasn’t been ringing.”

  “My rent’s overdue,” she admitted.

  “And Ordway won’t have you working the club on your own.”

  “Something like that. I guess he does have to think of appearances. Still, the little priss could give me a break. I’ve steered a lot of drinking business his way.”

  I went into the kitchenette to make some ice water.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me where Giles is?” she called after me.

  “If you knew, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “That’s right,” she said with a laugh. She had a damned fine laugh, musical and carefree. Maybe she’d practiced a long time to work up that laugh. It was a tool of her trade.

  I came to her carrying two glasses of ice water. I handed her one. She sipped it and made a face.

  “It won’t poison you,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” she laughed again. “Since it’s you telling me, I’ll take a chance.” She drank the water, set the glass on the floor beside the day bed, and leaned back. She half-reclined against her elbows. The print dress sighed against her firm flesh as she moved.

  “You know,” she said, “I believe you’ll find Giles.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I believe you could do about anything you wanted to. You’re not at all like Giles.”

  “No?”

  She gave a vague wave with her hand. “He was good looking—and you don’t look so good. He was a sleek physical specimen and kept himself in the best of shape—and you look sleepy and tired and sloppy. He would get on his knees and crawl if it would give him an in with somebody of wealth—and I guess you’d spit on somebody, wealthy or not, if you thought he deserved spitting on.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just try to mind my own business. I find it’s better that way.”

  “Oh, Giles minded his own business, all right. He was on the make for a rich one. Young, old, hag or bag, he didn’t care. Just so long as she was wealthy. He would get so frustrated sometimes, seeing all that wealth and having none of it, that tears would come to his eyes.”

  “I guess he didn’t like Wallace Tulman very well.”

  “I saw him at the trial. Giles, I mean. It made him writhe inside that bumbling, namby-pamby Tulman had married money when Giles, handsome and smooth, couldn’t seem to make a right connection.”

  “You’re talking about Giles in the past tense.”

  “So?”

  “So does it mean anything?”

  “Such as?”

  “You sound as if he’s dead. The way you describe him and all.”

  She dropped her head back and began laughing in earnest. The curve of her throat was slim and vibrant. Then she sat up. “Maybe the dirty son is dead. I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen him since he took off. Do you always try to read so much into so little?”

  “I guess I do. Once in a while I’m right.”

  “And rough about it.”

  “Not intentionally.”

  She turned her head and looked at me out of the corners of her eyes. “Leave Giles in one piece when you locate him, will you?”

  “For you?”

  “My rent’s overdue, remember? Giles must have figured the scandal and messiness of the trial had fouled him up here. When you find him, he’ll be working in some swank spot, still looking for that hen with the golden eggs. I need a connection in a swank spot, Ed Rivers.”

  She rose slowly to her feet. “Of course, I might find Giles first.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So I wouldn’t try to help him hide. I’d want to feel free to call you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, silly, it would be the best way. You’ll keep on hunting him. If I find him first, why not arrange it so you can talk to him and get it over with.”

  “You’re not worried about what he might say to me?”

  She smiled, showing a little of her even white teeth. “What could he say? I think he told the truth at the trial. He despised Wallace Tulman—but not that much. Anyhow, if he’d wanted to lie, wouldn’t it have been better for him to lie Wally out of it?”

  “For money?
”

  She shrugged. “What else?”

  “How much do you want if you find Giles before I do?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  “Pretty high payment.”

  “Please, Ed. I never take payment for anything. Just a favor in return for a favor.”

  “It’s still too much,” I said.

  “Four thousand?”

  “Be reasonable.”

  “Don’t be a piker,” she said, almost gaily. “It wouldn’t be your money. Think of the time and effort I might save you.”

  “A thousand dollars,” I said. “Provided I can get Mrs. Tulman to agree.”

  “That the best I can do?”

  “Take it or leave it,” I said.

  “Okay. Every little bit helps.”

  “That’s right. You have a pretty good idea where Giles is, don’t you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Now you’re telling a little white one,” I said. “You figure I’ll get to him, and you figure further to get your lump in before it’s too late and pick up an easy thousand dollars.”

  She smiled and rubbed my cheek with the back of her hand. “What a suspicious barbarian you are!”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know, Ed. I swear I don’t at this moment know.”

  “All right, maybe you’re telling the truth.”

  “I couldn’t lie to you, Ed.” Her smile became a giggle. “You might find out and beat me.”

  “Giles might do worse than that if he learns you’re selling him out.”

  “How can he ever know? You won’t tell him.”

  “No.”

  “Then he can’t find out.” She picked up a handbag that had a shoulder strap. She put the strap over her shoulder.

  “My address is 4318 Royal Palm Boulevard, Ed—in case you want to talk to me about Giles.”

  “I’ll remember,” I said. “Wally Tulman ever get to that address?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Often?”

  “No—only once.”

  “Laura Tulman find out?”

  “There was nothing to find out. One night—not long before that little girl was killed—Wally was in the Yacht Club bar drinking alone. It was a dull evening. I had nothing better to do.”