Quarry's cut q-4

by Max Allan Collins

  So I went over and lifted the tarp off the floor to see where the red puddle had come from and found the answer.

  Richie.

  28

  Castile met us at the door.

  “Where’s your wife?” I said, stepping inside.

  “She was tired, “ he said. “Had a headache, wanted to be by herself a while.”

  “I told you to stay together.”

  “You didn’t say that.”

  “I said it.”

  “We just searched the lodge, remember? There’s nobody in here but us.”

  Janet was huddling behind me. Shivering.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Castile said.

  “She didn’t like what I just told her,” I said.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That I saw Richie in the shed.”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “Not much. He’s under a tarp with his throat cut. Ear to ear. Like a great big smile.”

  “Jesus,” Castile said.

  “Take me up to your wife.”

  “She’s resting, I said.”

  “Take me up there. Now.”

  “Okay,” he said, and turned to lead the way. I hit him in the back with the crow bar.

  29

  A few minutes shy of two hours later, Castile woke up. He was sitting, tied to a straight-back chair, in the sunken living room in front of the fireplace, on the fake fur rug where, not so long ago, his wife and Frankie Waddsworth had humped for the cameras. Even now the massive black camera, a boom mike, the lights on tripods, looked silently on.

  “What… Jesus… what’s going…”

  He tried to move and couldn’t and looked down at himself and saw the thick rubberized cable I’d used to tie him to the chair and when he saw it, going around his chest perhaps twenty times, and then down around his legs and through the rungs of the chairs, he knew there was no reason to try to budge.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “What the fuck are you doing to me?”

  “It’s almost dawn.”

  “Where’s my wife?”

  “You know where you wife is. She’s upstairs with her throat slashed. Where you left her.”

  “This is a mistake…”

  “Right. Anyway, we’re alone in the place, Castile. I sent Janet away. Of course we’re not exactly alone… there’s Waddsworth over there, and Harry’s upstairs, and Richie’s outside… and then there’s your wife…”

  His face became slack. His body too. It was like he was a figure molded in clay that was starting to lose shape. His red hair, once so carefully groomed by his ex-hairdresser wife to disguise that it was thinning, looked wilted now.

  “I… I guess there isn’t much point in… pretending I don’t understand what you’re saying…”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  He could see the nine-millimeter in my gloved hand. I’d found the gun upstairs, in one of the built-in bureaus in one of the unused bedrooms on the fourth floor.

  He got a weary smile going. “And now what… you kill me?”

  “No.”

  “Then, what? Oh. You… you figure to… leave me here, and this Turner will come along and finish his job.”

  “Turner’s not going to kill you. He’s going to come in here in a while and take one look at any one of the dead bodies you’ve accumulated and he’s going to get his ass out. First rule of the profession is if anything’s out of whack, if things aren’t going exactly according to plan, then fuck it. Get out. And he will. So you aren’t in any danger from him, if I should decide to just leave you here.”

  “You… you’d do that? Just leave me here, and go?”

  “I might.”

  “What do you want for it… money? I told you before… I can get you money. Eight thousand, we were talking… I could get you that, I could get you more…”

  “That’s not what I want from you.”

  “Then what… what do you want?”

  “I want what happened… and I want it here.” And I tapped the big tape recorder I’d brought over from the table by the wail, where Janet had sat and done the sound on the film.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re going to tell the whole story. Beginning with the phone call you got from that guy whose daughter starred in the snuff flick. I want it all… everything… with one exception. You’re going to leave me out of it. And Janet too. I was never here. And Janet left here, before the storm set in… well before the shit started hitting the fan.”

  “And you want this… on tape?” He was looking at me like he thought I was crazy. It didn’t bother me. His opinion didn’t mean a whole lot to me.

  “I want it on tape,” I said “I know your intention was to throw the blame for what you did my way… you figured, and rightly, that if I was around for an investigation to focus on, you’d be in the clear. Once they had hold of me and dug into who I am and what I’ve done, I’d be a natural for the leading role in this little horror movie you’ve been stage-managing. So my way around that is simple: I was never here. When they find you here, you can tell any story you like… anything you can come up with that’ll save your ass… but just make sure I’m not a part of that story, and that Janet has a bit part. Because I’m going to have your story on tape… the story of what really happened here… to use against you if you ever try to implicate me. So I won’t have to worry. Janet, either.”

  He considered that for a moment, and then he tried out a small smile. “If I don’t make your tape… if I tell you to go fuck yourself… what then?”

  “I’ll think of something,” I said, and I got the straight razor out of my pocket. I’d found it on him, when I patted him down after knocking him out with the crow bar. I flipped it open, the razor swinging out of its white plastic handle. The edge caught some light and winked. The surface of it wasn’t entirely clean, however: there were still flecks of something on it, brown flecks that had been red.

  “All right,” he said. “And if I do make the tape…?”

  I tucked the razor back in its plastic handle and put it in my pocket. “I’ll leave you here.”

  “Tied up like this?”

  “Yes. That’s to your benefit. If you’re tied up and everybody else in the house is dead, when you’re found, then obviously somebody else was here. So you can pin the blame on that imaginary somebody.”

  “Why would a killer kill everybody else in the house, and leave me alive?”

  “I’ll toss you behind that couch over there. You can say the killer forgot about you. Lost count.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Not really. When Richard Speck killed those nurses in Chicago, he lost count. One of them hid under the bed and got out alive. They’ll buy it. Leave it to them to come up with the explanation.”

  “Maybe it would work…”

  “It will. Now. I’m going to turn on the tape recorder, and once it’s going, I won’t be talking any more. This is your show. Make it good.”

  And I hit the switch.

  30

  He began where I told him to, with the midnight phone call and snuff flicks and how he’d been living in fear for the past six months, getting little sleep that whole time, and when he did sleep he had cold-sweat variety nightmares, and when he was awake he thought about the nightmares he’d been having, and took to carrying a gun with him and just generally jumping every time he heard a noise and sometimes when he didn’t.

  He described briefly the filming of the porno flick here at the lodge, how the first fleet of actors had left the day before, and how Janet Stein had left in the afternoon, just before the rest of them got snowed in, and then he went into Waddsworth’s fall, and how he, Castile, had reacted to it.

  “I was sure he’d been murdered,” Castile said, “by whoever it was that’d been hired to murder me. I just… knew… that the paid killer that Meyers had hired was in this lodge… to kill me… maybe to kill everyone in the lodge, now t
hat we were snowbound… and my wife, when I went back to my room and told her, about Waddsworth’s death, and what I thought it could mean, she tried to convince me it could’ve been an accident, or the result of an argument between those three faggots upstairs… but I couldn’t buy it. I knew… after all those paranoid months… that this was it.. that the attempt would be made tonight.

  “Of the four of us left in the lodge…” And here he paused to give me a look, emphasizing that he had left Janet and me out, in his tally of the number of people present. “… my wife and I made two, and that left only Harry Belcher, a cameraman from Chicago, and his young ‘friend’ Richie Hudson. Harry was the older man, the more physically tough of the two, Richie being an ineffectual type… so obviously Harry seemed the more likely of the two, to make a living by violence. Another possibility was that the two men were in on it together… they lived together, lovers is what they were… perhaps they were in business, too, or at least knew each other’s business.

  “So I made an excuse to my wife, about hearing a noise in the hall, and I took my gun and went to Harry’s room. He was in bed… Richie wasn’t there… Richie had his own room, but that had been for appearance’s sake, and I’d expected them to be together… had been ready to confront the both of them, threaten them with the gun, make them tell me, make them admit who they really were… or anyway who Harry was… I wasn’t completely convinced that little fag Richie was a part of it, though I couldn’t risk taking a chance he wasn’t.

  “He… Harry… was sitting on the side of his bed… lights on… he was holding his head in, his hands. He looked up at me, and I showed him the gun, and didn’t have a word out before he’d jumped at me.

  “It wasn’t supposed to go like that… I was to supposed to hold the gun on him and he would tell what I needed to hear and then.. I don’t know what… then, maybe, I would have killed him. I hadn’t thought it through that far… I was just acting out of reflex, doing what I thought I needed to survive.

  “And now, Jesus! I was fighting. A man so much stronger than me it was ridiculous… if he’d thought to hit me, just use his fist on me, he’d have had me. But he didn’t. We just sort of wrestled. He was concentrating on the gun I had… trying to twist it out my hand… so we wrestled, rolled around on the floor like a couple of kids roughhousing.

  “That’s when Richie came in. He must’ve been next door, or maybe he was off alone someplace pouting about what happened to Waddsworth.. but anyway he came in, and made a sound, like he’d been hit in the stomach, air rushing out… I could see him out of the corner of my eye, standing there waving his arms in the air, like he’d spotted somebody drowning and he didn’t know how to swim and couldn’t do anything about it… and then he sort of ran off, toward the bathroom and he came back with the straight razor.

  “He stood over us, Harry and me, and in a shaky voice told me to drop the gun. Somehow that struck me funny, not that I took time to laugh about it, but here was this skinny little faggot spouting a cliched line out of an old western: ‘Drop the gun.’ It just seemed absurd to me. The whole thing seemed absurd.

  “But of course I did as he said. And Harry let up on me, stood away from me, and I got up from off the floor, but as I did, I kicked out, at Richie’s legs, and there was a sort of a struggle, just me and Richie this time, while Harry looked on helplessly, and I ended up with the razor.

  “Harry was almost to where I’d dropped the gun… he almost had time to pick it up… but he saw me… he saw the razor… and didn’t do it. He just backed up. They both backed up. And this weird thing happened… this kind of surge went through me. All the wrestling, scuffling… that sort of thing isn’t like anything I’d ever be involved with… but it had me confused… it also… I was, in a weird way, excited by it, and I did something that had no thinking to it at all: I lunged at Harry, like a fucking lion-tamer, and he backed up some more, toward the doorway… and he almost lost his footing, but not quite, not even when I lashed out with the razor and caught him across the throat… he just sort of reached up and touched where he’d been cut, with both his hands, and stumbled out of there, walking somehow, don’t ask me how…

  “And Richie, Richie was running… I don’t know why he didn’t scream. Maybe he was too scared to… but he ran, ran down the stairs, out of the house, and I caught him outside, and he was crying, just blubbering, and he made me mad, for some reason, he just made me mad, made my head throb for a second, and my face felt hot, cold as it was out there, and me not in a coat… and suddenly I was… it was happening, but I was watching it happen. I was detached, somehow, distant and close at the same time, doing and watching, and you know something funny? I didn’t get any blood on me… not when I lashed out and cut Harry, not when I took Richie in the shed and cut his throat. There was a lot of blood, but none of it got on me… not until my wife.”

  And here he paused again and his eyes were watery and his voice was wavery, like poor TV reception.

  “She put up with a lot from me, Millie did. She did a lot for me. She even stayed by me, when she found out about those snuff things I handled… the idea of them, it sickened her. She was really… very sensitive. She wasn’t tough enough for this business… she.. you have to be willing to do whatever you have to.”

  He stopped. He began to cry. He didn’t make any noise as he did; that part he held in. But the tears flowed, and after a while I kicked him a little and he went on.

  “She gave me money… financed me, my career… it was all her doing. She fucked people on the screen, for me, because I asked her to. She’d do anything for me. She believed in me. She wasn’t any angel… I mean, she was in it for herself, too… wanted a career in aboveground movies, wanted to be a real star… and that was going to be a problem for me. I needed to leave all my ties to the porno industry behind, and she was going to be something of an embarrassment, expecting parts in the post-porno films I’d make. She knew things about me… about things I’d done, to get ahead in the business… the snuff films, for instance… that meant I couldn’t get her out of my life, a divorce was out of the question. Very soon our marriage would’ve turned into a sort of blackmail situation… she was capable of that Still… I liked her. I did. She was important to me… do anything for me… but this.. this was too much… she couldn’t couldn’t… I couldn’t.. ”

  He stopped again. Took in a couple breaths. He wasn’t crying any more.

  “She knew I’d killed Harry. It wasn’t hard for her to figure out. She told me she knew. I didn’t deny it. I told what I’d done and I told her about Richie. I said I was sorry but that it had just… happened… that things had just… got out of hand. She just looked at me. I told her no one would ever have to know I’d done it.. we could cover it up somehow, I said, I knew we could…

  “And she started beating on me with her fists. She’d been very quiet till now, that surface calm that hysteria hides behind sometimes, and she just… attacked me, but she was saying things, not screaming, almost whispering… not this, she said, not murder, not that… and she said this is exactly what she said, hitting me

  … she said, I can’t live with that.

  “The razor was in my hand and I grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head back and her eyes were… they were sad… not full of pain or anger or hatred or anything… they were sad… and I cut her throat.

  “This time there was blood. On my hands. On my arms. I went into the bathroom and I washed my hands.”

  He smiled. The practiced smile I’d seen so much of lately.

  “It’s like I told Millie,” he said. “It just got out of hand… things just started happening… quickly… it was like somebody else was doing those things… it was unreal… like the movies.”

  And then he laughed at what he’d just said, and the laughter turned into a racking sound and when he stopped making the racking sound, his head hung loose above the DIRECTOR shirt, his body slack again, the cables holding him in like a man in an electric chair that’s do
ne its work already.

  I switched off the recorder.

  “That’s all I need,” I said.

  “Tell me…” he said, coming back to life a little. “Tell me something, Murphy, or whoever the fuck you are… how did you put this together so fast? How did you know it wasn’t your Turner who killed Harry and Richie and Waddsworth?”

  “Harry probably killed Waddsworth,” I said. “But there’s no way to know for sure. Not with all three of them dead.”

  “You mean… it was an argument… love triangle thing.. ”

  “I’m sure of it. But whether Harry freaked and murdered Waddsworth or whether it was accidental, just a fight that got out of control.. no one will ever know. Janet heard them arguing, remember, and that’s as close to the truth as we’ll come. “

  “What about the rest of it? How did you pick up on me?”

  I shrugged. “It was obvious enough what had happened outside, out in the snow. You told me you’d seen Turner in the hall, that it was Turner you’d chased out there… but the footprints outside told a different story than yours of going out and looking around for Turner and seeing nothing and getting scared and coming back in. There were two sets of prints ending in a smoothed-out area, where you pulled Richie down and struggled a little, then a long smooth trail where you dragged him unconscious to the shed, and then one set of footprints going back to the house.”

  “And based on that, you came in and hit me with whatever it was you hit me with?”

  “It was a crow bar. No. When I looked in the tool chest for my gun and it wasn’t there, I knew it was you had taken it. You were the only person who knew I even had a gun. I told you I hid it outside… you were smart enough to know that that meant in the shed. You took a quick look and turned it up, after you finished with Richie… or maybe you went out and found it earlier. Doesn’t matter. Either way, could only have been you.”

  “It could’ve been Turner who found the gun.”

  “Why would he be looking for it? Besides, there was a silencer for the gun, in the tool chest, too… I’d hidden it in there, loose. You left it behind. You probably didn’t know what the hell it was. Turner, obviously, would’ve.”