Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  “Almost too easy,” Traynor said. “Too simple.”

  Grey nodded.

  “At six forty-five last night the Haber kid went home. Jordan and Hofert were both here. Jordan stayed until eight. From six at night until eight in the morning nobody can get in or out of the building without signing the register, and the stairs are locked off at the second-floor landing. You have to sign and you have to use the elevator. Jordan signed out at eight. Hofert never signed out; he was dead.”

  “What was the time of death?”

  “That fits, too. A rough estimate is twelve to fourteen hours. One bullet was in the chest a little below the heart. It took him a little while to die. Say five minutes, not much more than that. Enough time to lose a lot of blood.”

  “So if he got shot between seven and eight—”

  “That’s about it. No robbery motive. He has a full wallet on him. No suicide. He was standing up when he got shot, standing and facing the desk, Jordan’s desk. The Haber girl couldn’t have killed him. She left better than an hour before Jordan did and the sheet bears her out on that.”

  “Motive?”

  Traynor put his coffee on the desk. “Maybe they hated each other,” he said. “A little two-man operation jobbing office supplies. The lawyer says they didn’t make much and they didn’t lose much either. Partners for six years. Jordan’s forty-four, Hofert was two years older. The secretary said they argued a lot.”

  “Everybody argues.”

  “They argued more. Especially yesterday, according to the secretary. There’s a money motive, too. Partnership insurance.”

  Grey looked puzzled.

  “Twin policies paid for out of partnership funds. Each partner is insured, with the face amount payable to the survivor if one of them dies.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what I asked the lawyer. Look, suppose you and I are in business together. Then suppose you die—”

  “Thanks.”

  “—and your wife inherits your share. She can’t take a hand in the running of the business. After I pay myself a salary there’s not much left in the way of profits for her. What she wants is the cash and what I want is full control of the business. Lots of friction.”

  “Maybe I’d better live,” Grey said.

  Traynor ignored him. “The insurance smooths things out. If you die, the insurance company pays me whatever the policy is. Then I have to use the money to buy your share of the business from your widow. She has the cash she needs, and I get the whole business without any cost to me. That way everybody’s happy.”

  “Except me.”

  “Hofert and Jordan had partnership insurance,” Traynor said. “Two policies, each with a face amount of a hundred grand. That’s motive and means and opportunity, so pat it’s hard to believe. I don’t know what we’re waiting around here for.”

  They didn’t wait long. Half an hour later they picked up James Jordan at his home on Pattison. They asked him how come he hadn’t gone to his office. He said he’d worked late the night before and wasn’t feeling too well. They asked him why he had killed his partner. He stared at them and told them he didn’t understand what they were talking about. They took him downtown and booked him for murder.

  Hofert’s widow lived in a ranch house just across the city line. The two kids were in school when Traynor and Grey got there. Mrs. Hofert was worried when she saw them. They told her as gently as you can tell a wife that someone has murdered her husband. A doctor came from down the block to give her a hypo, and an hour later she said she was ready to talk to them. She wasn’t, really, but they didn’t want to wait. It was a neat case, the kind you wrap up fast.

  “That poor, poor man,” she said. “He worked so hard. He worked and he worried and he wanted so very much to get ahead. He put his blood into that business. And now he’s gone and nothing’s left.”

  Grey started to light a cigarette, then changed his mind. Mrs. Hofert was crying quietly. Nobody said anything for a few minutes.

  “I hardly ever saw him,” she said. “Isn’t that something? I hardly ever got to see him and now he’s gone. So much work. And it wasn’t for himself, nothing was ever for himself. He wanted money for us. For me, for the boys. As if we needed it. All we ever needed was him and now he’s gone—”

  Later, calmer, she said, “And he didn’t leave us a thing. He was a gambler, Dave was. Oh, not cards or dice—not that kind of a gambler—stocks, the stock market. He made a decent living but that wasn’t enough because he wanted more, he wanted a lot of money, and he tried to make it fast. He wanted to take risks in the business, to borrow money and expand. He had dreams. He always complained that Jim wouldn’t let him build the business, that Jim was too conservative. So he took chances in the market, and at first he did all right, I think. He told me he did, and then everything fell in for him and . . . Oh, I don’t understand anything!”

  On the way downtown, Grey said, “Try it this way. Hofert went into Jordan’s office last night. They’d been arguing off and on all day. He wanted to draw more money out of the company, or to borrow and expand, or anything. He was in terrible shape financially. The house was mortgaged to the roof. He’d already cashed in his personal insurance policies. He was in trouble, desperate. They argued again. Maybe he even threw a punch. The office was a mess, they could have been fighting a little. Then Jordan took out a gun and shot him. Right?”

  “That’s the only way it plays.”

  “Let’s talk to Jordan again,” Grey said.

  They double-teamed Jordan and kept questions looping in at him until he had admitted almost everything. He admitted ownership of the gun, said he had bought it two years ago and had kept it in his desk ever since. He admitted quarreling with Hofert that afternoon and said that Hofert kept provoking arguments. He confirmed the secretary’s statement about the time of her departure and the fact that he and Hofert had stayed alone in the office.

  He denied killing Hofert.

  “Why? Why would I do it?”

  “You were fighting with him. Maybe he swung at you—”

  “Dave? You’re crazy. Why should he hit me?”

  “Maybe he hated you. Maybe you hated each other. You shot him, panicked, and left. You couldn’t face his corpse in the morning and you stayed home in bed until we came here for you.”

  “But I—”

  “You stood to gain complete control of the business with him dead. All the profits instead of half, and no partner to get in your hair.”

  “Profits!” Jordan was shouting now. “I have enough! I have plenty!” He caught his breath, slowed down. “I’m a bachelor, I live alone, I save my money. Check my bank account. What do I want with blood money?”

  “Hofert was dead weight. He was in hock up to his ears and he was giving you a bad time. You didn’t plan on killing him, Jordan. You did it on the spur of the moment. He provoked it. And—”

  “I did not kill David Hofert!”

  “You admit it’s your gun.”

  “Yes, damn it, it is my gun. I never fired it in my life. I never pointed it at anything. It was in my desk, in case I ever needed it—”

  “And last night you needed it.”

  “No.”

  “Last night—”

  “Last night I finished my work and went home,” Jordan said. “I went home, I was tired, I had a headache. Dave stayed in the office. I told him I might not be in the next morning. ‘Take it easy,’ he said. That was the last thing he said to me. ‘Take it easy.’ “

  Traynor and Grey looked at each other.

  “He was alive when I left him.”

  “Then who killed him, Jordan? Who lured him into your office and took your gun and shot him in the chest and—”

  They kept up the questions, kept hammering away like a properly efficient team. They got nowhere. Jordan never contradicted himself and never made very much sense. They kicked his story apart and he stayed with it anyway. After fifteen more minutes of getting nowhere they took hi
m back to his cell and locked him away. Traynor stopped to stare at him, at the small round face peering out through the bars of the cage. Jordan looked trapped.

  Two hours later, Traynor pushed a pile of papers to one side of his desk, eased his chair back, and stood up. Grey asked him where he was going. “Out,” Traynor told him.

  “He said that Jim Jordan was trying to ruin him,” Mrs. Hofert said. “I always felt . . . well, Dave felt persecuted sometimes. He had so many big plans that came to nothing. He thought the world was ganging up on him. I never believed that Jim would actually—”

  “We think it happened during an argument,” Traynor told her. “Jordan got excited, didn’t know exactly what he was doing. If he had planned to murder your husband he would have picked a brighter way to do it. But in the heat of an argument things happen in a hurry.”

  “The heat of an argument.” She sat for a long time looking at nothing at all. Then she said, “I believe everything has a pattern, Mr. Traynor. Do you believe that?”

  Traynor didn’t answer.

  “Dave’s life—and his death, trying, struggling, working so very hard, and getting every bad break there was. Getting bad breaks because he tried so hard, because he wasn’t prudent about money. And then having everything build to a climax with everything going wrong at once. And the tragic ending, dying at what he could only have thought of as the worst possible moment. You see, all he wanted to do was provide for me and for the boys. He was . . . he was the kind of man who would have thought it a triumph to die well insured.” More long silence. “And not even that. A year ago, six months ago, all his policies were paid up. Then, as things went wrong, he cashed the policies to get money to recoup his losses, and lost that, too. And then the final irony of dying without anything to leave us but a legacy of debts. Do you see the pattern, Mr. Traynor?”

  “I think so,” Traynor said.

  He got very busy then. He went to the lawyer he had spoken to earlier, went alone without Grey. He asked the lawyer some questions, went to an insurance man and asked more questions. He called the Haber girl, and with her he went over the few hours prior to Hofert’s death. He got the autopsy results, the lab photos, the lab report. He went to the Hofert & Jordan office and stood in the room where Hofert had died, visualizing everything, running it through in his mind.

  It was pushing six o’clock. He picked up a phone, called headquarters, and got through to Grey. “Don’t leave yet,” he said. “I’ll be right over. Stay put.”

  “You got something?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  They were in a small cubbyhole office off the main room. Grey sat at a desk. Traynor stood up and did a lot of pacing.

  “There were no fingerprints on the gun,” he said.

  “So? Jordan wiped it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? If you shot somebody, would you leave prints on the gun?”

  Traynor walked over to the door, turned, came halfway back. “If I was going to wipe prints off a gun I would also do something about setting up an alibi,” he said. “The way we’ve got it figured, Jordan killed strictly on impulse and reacted like a scared rabbit. He went for his gun, shot Hofert, ran out of the building, and went home and stayed there shaking. He didn’t sponge up blood, he didn’t try to lug Hofert out of his office, didn’t do a thing to disguise the killing. He left the gun right there, didn’t try any of the tricks a panicky killer might try. But he wiped the prints off the gun.”

  “He must have been half out of his mind.”

  “It still doesn’t add. There’s another way, though, that does.”

  “Go on.”

  “Suppose you’re Hofert. Now—”

  “Why do we always have to suppose I’m the dead one?”

  “Shut up,” Traynor said. “Suppose you’re David Hofert. You’re deep in debt and you can’t see your way clear. You look at yourself in the mirror and figure you’re a failure. You want money for your wife, security for your kids. But you haven’t got a penny, your insurance policies have lapsed, and your whole world is caving in on you. You’re frantic.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Wait. You’ve always been a little paranoid. Now you think the whole world is after you and your partner is purposely trying to make things rough for you. You’d like to go and jump off a bridge, but that wouldn’t get you anywhere. If you died in an accident, at least your wife and kids would get the hundred grand, the insurance dough which Jordan would turn over to them for your share of the business. Suicide voids that policy. If you kill yourself, they wind up with nothing.”

  Grey was nodding slowly now.

  “But if your partner kills you—”

  “What happens then?”

  “It’s a cute deal,” Traynor said. “I went over it twice, with the lawyer and with the agent who wrote the policies. Now, each man is insured for a hundred grand, with that amount payable to the other or the other’s heirs. If Jordan kills Hofert, he can’t collect. You can’t profit legally through the commission of a felony. But the insurance company still has to pay off. If the policy’s paid up, and if it’s been in force over two years, the company has to make it good. They can’t hand the dough to Jordan if he’s the killer, but they have to pay somebody.”

  “Who? I don’t understand you.”

  “The dead man’s estate. Hofert’s estate. It can’t go to Jordan because he’s the murderer, and it can’t go to Jordan’s heirs because he never has legal title to it to pass on. And the company can’t keep it, so it can only go to Hofert’s wife and kids.”

  Grey hesitated, then nodded.

  “That’s the only way Hofert’s family ever gets a dime. They get that hundred thousand as insurance on Hofert’s life, and they collect another hundred thousand when Jordan goes to the chair for murder, and they have at least half the business as well. All Hofert has to do is find a way to kill himself and make it look like murder, and he sends all that dough to them and has the satisfaction of sticking Jordan with a murder rap. We get the other kind all the time, the murders that are faked to look like suicides. This one went the opposite way.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “The easiest way in the world,” Traynor said. “He covered all bets, gave Jordan motive and means and opportunity. He argued with him all day in front of the secretary. He fixed it so that he and Jordan were alone in the office. When Jordan left, he went into Jordan’s office and got Jordan’s gun. He messed up the place to stage a struggle. He wrapped the gun in a tissue or something to keep his prints off it. He stood in front of the desk, off to the side, and he angled the shot so that it would look as though he’d been shot by somebody behind the desk. He shot himself in a spot that would be sure to kill him but that would leave him a minute or two of life to drop the gun in a convenient spot. That may have been accidental; maybe he aimed for the heart and missed. We’ll never know.”

  “What does the lab say?”

  Traynor shrugged. “Maybe and maybe no, as far as they’re concerned. It could have been that way—that’s as much as they can say, and that’s enough. The paraffin test didn’t show that Hofert had fired a gun, but it wouldn’t, not if he had a tissue or a handkerchief around his hand. There were tissues on the floor, and a lot of papers that he could have used. The bullet trajectory fits well enough. It’s something you don’t think of right off the bat. The way Hofert had it planned, we weren’t supposed to think of it at all. And it almost worked. It almost had Jordan nailed.”

  “Now what?”

  Traynor looked at him. “Now we tell Jordan to relax,” he said. “And after the inquest calls it suicide, we let him go—very simple.”

  “No,” Grey said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s crazy. You don’t kill yourself to stick somebody for murder. It’s too damned iffy, anyway. Why did Jordan stay home that morning?”

  “He was feeling sick.”

  “Sure. He didn’t come in, he
didn’t even call his office. You can make a suicide theory out of it. You can also read it as a very clear-cut murder, and that’s the way I’d read it. You want to let Jordan off and take a couple hundred thousand away from Hofert’s wife. Is that right?”

  “Yes.” Traynor looked at the floor. “And you want to see Jordan in the chair for this one.”

  “That’s the way it reads to me.”

  “Well, I won’t go along with that, Phil.”

  “And I won’t buy suicide. You fought this one because it was too simple, and now you’ve got us stuck with two answers, one easy and one tough, and I like the easy one and you like the tough one. I hope to hell Jordan confesses and makes it easy for us.”

  “He won’t,” Traynor said. “He’s innocent.”

  “How sure are you?”

  “Positive.”

  “That’s how sure I am he’s guilty. What do we do if he doesn’t confess, if he sticks to his story and the lab can’t cut it any finer for us? What do we do? Toss a coin?”

  No one said anything for a few minutes. Traynor looked at his watch. Grey lit a cigarette.

  Traynor said, “I don’t buy murder.”

  “I don’t buy suicide.”

  “He won’t confess, Phil. And we’ll never know. If Jordan goes on trial he’ll get off because I’ll hand my angle to his lawyer. He’ll beat it. But we’ll never know, not really. You’ll always think he’s guilty and I’ll always think he isn’t, and we’ll never know.”

  “Maybe we ought to toss that coin.”

  “If we did,” Traynor said, “it would stand on end. It’s been that kind of a day.”

  This Crazy Business of Ours

  The elevator, swift and silent as a garotte, whisked the young man eighteen stories skyward to Wilson Colliard’s penthouse. The doors opened to reveal Colliard himself. He wore a cashmere smoking jacket the color of vintage port. His flannel slacks and broadcloth shirt were a matching oyster white. They could have been chosen to match his hair, which had been expensively barbered in a leonine mane. His eyes, beneath sharply defined white brows, were as blue and as bottomless as the Caribbean, upon the shores of which he had acquired his radiant tan. He wore doeskin slippers upon his small feet and a smile upon his thinnish lips, and in his right hand he held an automatic pistol of German origin, the precise manufacturer and caliber of which need not concern us.