“You have to know the technique. Shall I try?”
“Why not?”
The technique was simple. She turned and gestured, and a squat bartender came down on the other side of the bar. His round, oily face was bland. His tiny, pinched mouth, tucked under a swollen nose, twitched back over shrunken gums. Peter specified bourbon and water, and the woman said, assuming his acceptance of the weary routine, that she’d have hers in ginger ale. When the drinks were in their hands, she said, “There’s a booth empty,” and he said, “That’s convenient,” and they went over and sat down on the same side of the table.
She sipped her pale, professional drink. “My name’s Roxy,” she said.
“It’s a nice name. Mine’s Peter.” A waiter materialized periodically with full glasses. Peter drank what he had to and spilled what he could. Roxy, pressing against him, played her weary part with automatic fidelity. The whole place was hot and panting, and after so much time and bad whisky, there was a churning rebellion in his stomach, a growing turbulent sickness.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said suddenly.
“Why?”
“It’s too crowded.”
“Don’t let it bother you. No one pays any attention.”
“It’s my Puritan background, baby. I like privacy, and I’m willing to pay for it.”
She arched her thin eyebrows and formed a red circle with her lips. “I work here. You know that. I’m not supposed to run out with the customers.”
“Who’d notice?”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “All right. You go out alone. I’ll meet you at the alley entrance in a few minutes.”
He got out of the booth and went out through the hall past the fat man in the chair to the street. The air was astringent in his throat and lungs. His head cleared a little, and the revolution in his stomach subsided to a turgid unrest. Walking swiftly, he went down to the corner and back on the side street to the alley entrance. Three or four steps down the alley, he stopped and stood quietly, pressed against the damp brick of an old building.
Down the alley, a door opened and closed, projecting and extinguishing a weak swath of light. For a second, his ears caught faintly a wave of crazy reefer rhythms. High heels rapped briskly on brick, coming abreast, and pushing away from the wall, he hooked an arm. She spun around with a startled curse, the curse cutting off abruptly when she recognized him.
“You scared hell out of me, honey,” she said.
“Sorry. The car’s right down the street.”
They went down to the Olds and got in. Lowering the window beside her, she sat strangely upright in the seat, lifting her face with a kind of pathetic greediness into the rush of cold air, and as he drove, he thought he could see from the corners of his eyes a faint flush of color in her sallow cheeks. The Olds moved cautiously through narrow streets of predominate darkness, emerging finally into a brighter section where incandescents and neons repelled the shadows, passing after a short while into the avenues and broad boulevards tilted upward toward the high ground above the river.
On the suburban road at the crest of the rise, where the earth descended again to the lip of the bluff, he stopped the Olds. Twin shafts from the headlights sliced down through the darkness past the rail fence into emptiness. Then he leaned forward and extinguished the lights suddenly, and in the instant after extinction, before his eyes could adjust, the night was complete and impenetrable, a soft and tangible pressure that filled him with a momentary terror, as if it were he who was about to die.
She twisted toward him on the seat. “Why are we stopping here? I’m getting cold.”
There was no fear in her voice, no rising awareness of danger, but only a slight nasality, the hint of a petulant whine.
“Have you ever been up here before?” he said.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“I thought maybe you’d like the view. Look behind you.”
She twisted away in the opposite direction, looking back through the rear window. Behind and below them, the lights of the city were spread in wide display. She sat that way a long time, twisted in the seat to look back at the lights, and then she said, “It’s pretty. It’s been a long time since anyone bothered to show me anything pretty.”
“I thought you might like it,” he said.
And then, because it had to be then, because he could never bring himself to the point again, he reached out and took her by the throat from behind. She tried to twist around to face him, clawing at his hands and threshing her legs in a desperate diffusion of energy, but she was not strong, even in a struggle for life, and it was only a little while until she was dead.
Afterward, he proceeded quickly, according to plan. He removed a can of gasoline from the rear and soaked the interior of the car. He started the engine and pressed the accelerator down, wedging it with a piece of wood. With the high singing of many horses in his ears, he pulled the body over under the wheel, switched on the headlights, and dropped a lighted match on the upholstery. Finally, he pulled the automatic transmission lever into drive position and simultaneously released the hand brake, and the big car leaped away, careening. He stood and watched it crash through the fence at the edge of the bluff and catapult blazing into space. After a moment that seemed forever, he heard from below the crashing of steel and a detonation that was like a giant expulsion of air.
Slipping off the side of the road, he ran. Carrying the empty gasoline can, he ran at a tangent and downward through the dark toward the street below where his own car waited.
CHAPTER 7.
The colored flags of the terrace were littered with dead leaves that had blown in on the wind. A pile of them had gathered in a corner against the adjacent walls of the house. There was no wrought-iron table there now, no gaily striped glass. The chaise longue was gone, and Etta was gone, because Etta was dead and buried in Kaw City, and there were more things gone and going than it paid to think about.
Someone knocked softly, and Peter turned away from the window and went over and opened the door. A man stood in the hall with his hat in his hands. He was short and fat, his belly lapping the waist band of his trousers. He had a round face splattered with freckles and a tiny, sucked-in mouth that looked like a deep dent in a batch of bread dough. He turned his hat around and around by the brim in stubby fingers. His name was Smalley, and he was a detective.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Roche,” he said. “May I see you for a minute?”
“Certainly.” Peter stepped back into the room. “Come in.”
Smalley came into the room and stood waiting, turning and turning his hat, while Peter closed the door and came back past him.
“Won’t you sit down?” Peter said.
Smalley shook his head. “Thanks. I’ll only be a minute.” He looked past Peter and out the window to the opposite wing of the house. His eyes were small and pale, red-rimmed and watery, and every once in a while he knuckled them as if they pained him. “I’ve been talking with your father,” he said.
“Has he finally accepted the fact that it was really Etta?”
“I think so.” Smalley knuckled his eyes, and let them drop to the floor. “I think I convinced him,” he said.
“You’re certain, then?”
“Yes. No possibility of a mistake now. The identification is complete.”
“How’s that?”
“We had her dentist check the teeth. Dr. Norton Foresman. You know him?”
Peter was aware suddenly that he’d drawn his breath and held it. He released it slowly on a long, fading whisper, and the room blurred and faded and slowly returned in a diminishing spiral of dizziness. “Yes,” he said. “I know him. Professionally, that is. I’ve been to him myself once or twice.”
“I see. Well, as I said, he made the identification positive. The insurance will be paid promptly now. I’ve just told your father, the senator, as much.”
“Then there’s no hope at all? That it might not have been Etta?”
“None whatever. I’m sorry.”
“Well, it’s not too great a shock to me. I’ve felt from the beginning that it couldn’t have been anyone else. I’m afraid the old man was holding out pretty grimly, though. How did he take it?”
Smalley turned and turned his hat and scuffed a toe against the rug. “That’s really what I stopped to speak to you about. On the surface, he took it calmly enough. And that’s the trouble. He took it too calmly. Not a normal kind of control, if you know what I mean. He’s withdrawn, drifting out of contact, and that’s a danger sign.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t like to mention this, to frighten you needlessly, perhaps, but I think under the circumstances that I’d better. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, Mr. Roche. I’ve watched it happen.” Smalley lifted his eyes to the light. Behind a thin film, they had a bright, blind look. “I’m thinking of suicide, Mr. Roche.”
“Suicide!”
“Yes. I know it must seem incredible to you. It always does, and maybe in this case it really is, but if you’re wise you’ll watch him for a while. Just keep him under observation.”
“I think you must be mistaken. The old man never struck me as the type who would go off the deep end. Not even over something like this.”
“There’s a breaking point, Mr. Roche. A time when a man feels he’s simply had enough. It comes to all of us, and most of us get past it all right, but a few of us don’t. Well, it’s your affair, of course. I just thought I’d mention it for what it’s worth.”
“I know you mean well. Thanks very much. Will you have a drink before you go?”
“No, thanks.” Smalley put his hat on his head, took it off again, blinked into the light, and turned back to the door. He looked over his shoulder and nodded several times and let himself out into the hall.
Peter stood quietly in the room and listened to an exultant, interior singing of joy and triumph.
How cooperative of the old man, he thought.
How very cooperative of him to make his death and the means of his death predictable.
And time, at last, moved swiftly.
The time was now.
CHAPTER 8.
He waited for her to come. He sat alone in the library where he had first met her, and it seemed a long time ago. For a moment he could see her in the chair by the fire, a soft and sinuous cat with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, smiling at him lazily through a transparent veil of smoke. The vision was so vivid that he had the feeling that it would survive all tests, that if he arose and approached her she would set the glass aside and lift her arms to accept whatever he had to give. He took a swallow of his own drink and looked away toward the draped windows, but she had moved from the chair in the instant of his shifted view and was there ahead of it, poised and provocative against dark green.
Behind him in the hall, rasping across his raw nerves, the front door bell rang. He was on his feet at once, as if he had been propelled physically by the sound, his pulses pounding in his temples. Carefully and slowly, exercising deliberate control he lifted his glass and drained it. Then he set the glass on a table by the bottle that had supplied it and walked with measured, unhurried steps into the hall and down to the door. His sensation was one of gaseous lightness, as if he were moving under a soft, external force that was in no way his own toward an end that was inevitable, and the door floated open in his hand without weight or resistance.
She stood in the spill of light in a posture of breathless waiting that seemed cataleptic in its strange rigidity, and the intensity of her excitement was something tangible that reached him and touched him and stirred within him an identical emotion. For a long moment they stared at each other across the narrow space that was all that was presently left of the separation, and then her breasts rose and descended, and he could hear the extended whisper of her breath.
“I got your message,” she said softly.
“I see. Come in.”
She came swiftly into the hall and turned as he closed the door.
“Is it all right?”
“Yes.”
“The servants?”
“Gone for the night. I saw to that.”
“Where’s the old man?”
“Upstairs in his room. In bed. Your death knocked him out, darling. I didn’t really anticipate his taking it quite so hard. Even the detective on the case noticed it. And was disturbed by it. He warned me to be on the watch for suicide.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.”
“I know. That’s why I sent you word to come. Right now everything’s favorable. It’s the psychological time. If we do it now, we’ve got everyone thinking the way we want them to think. You’ll just have to make it look like suicide, that’s all. You’ll have to be sure.”
“I’ll be sure, darling. I’ll be very sure.”
Then, as if they had been pressing all this time against invisible barriers that collapsed suddenly, they moved together and locked with an almost brutal impact of bodies, and it was a long time before she let her head fall back away from him, her bright dyed hair hanging.
She said dreamily, “And now it’s almost over, darling. After so long.”
“Almost. The big risk, one more time of waiting, and then nothing left.”
“No, darling. You and me left. You and me and what all the money will buy. How am I for a dead woman?”
“As good as you ever were alive. Lucky for us, since you have to stay dead. Have you seen anyone you know?”
“No. No one.”
“How did you come?”
“By bus. I took a taxi from the depot to an address about a mile away. I walked from there.”
“No one saw you approach the house?”
“No one at all. I’m sure of that.”
“All right.” He stepped back, her hands trailing off his shoulders and down his arms to hang quietly at her sides. “I’d better go now. I’m meeting a party at a club in half an hour. That’s my alibi in case I need one. I don’t think I will. You’d better allow me at least an hour.”
“Yes, darling. I’ll wait.”
“I’ve arranged everything so you won’t be disturbed. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“I won’t worry.”
He turned and walked to a hall closet, from which he took hat and coat. He put them on and returned most of the distance to Etta, stopping a couple of feet away, the interval that would widen into the final separation that must still be endured.
“Good-by, darling. Last good-by.”
“Yes. The very last.”
He wanted to touch her, to feel again the assurance he gained from the touch of her flesh, but he didn’t. Turning away, he opened the door and paused, looking back for an instant before shutting himself out. She returned his look with dreamy eyes. On her bright lips was the small smile of a child who anticipates a pleasure assured and at hand.
CHAPTER 9.
It was strange, very strange, and he couldn’t understand it. It was all done, all over, the risks taken and survived, and now the tensions should have been relaxed, a sense of triumph and power dominant in his mood. But it wasn’t that way at all. He was depressed, afflicted with a deep anxiety that was much like fear.
In his room in the empty house, the night held back by stone and wood and glass, he turned in his mind to the beginning, which was Etta, and worked back in detail through the events that followed, and he could see again, for the thousandth time, that nothing had gone wrong, that everything had worked almost miraculously to plan, and that it was now, in the time of triumph, wholly irrational to submit to despondency.
Even the last most precarious detail of all had gone with incredible ease, the intended interpretation accepted without a shadow of suspicion that could be detected. He could see again the commonplace figure of the detective named Smalley, could hear as if they were actually repeated at the moment of his recollection the detective’s exact words and the monoton
ous inflections, or lack of them, with which they were spoken.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Roche. You’ll recall that I suggested this possibility.”
“Yes. I’m afraid I discounted the possibility too much. I never really felt that the old man would do it. I suppose there’s no chance of its having been anything else?”
“What else could it be?”
“I see what you mean. The only alternative is even more shocking. Even more incredible.”
“Well, I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with alternatives. It was suicide, all right. Open and shut, as I see it. The position of the wound, the presence of the gun, the motivation—all these make a convincing case.”
“All right. I guess I must simply accept it. Thank you for your consideration.”
“Not at all, Mr. Roche. I only wish I could have convinced you in time that this might happen.”
That easy. That fantastically simple. All things in order and moving smoothly toward the projected end—the funeral, the payment of the insurance, the business of the will. And now Etta. Due and past due, Etta and the far places.
In the hall, the upstairs extension began to ring, and he listened to it without moving, wondering if he should let it ring or go out to answer it, and when it continued to ring imperiously in long bursts, he submitted and went out into the hall.
“Peter Roche speaking,” he said, and a masculine voice responded that he didn’t immediately recognize.
“Good-evening, Mr. Roche. Dr. Norton Foresman here.”
He waited, aware that his breath was caught painfully in his suddenly constricted throat, but after a while he spoke quite calmly, somewhat surprised that he could manage it.
“Yes?”
“I dislike bringing this to your attention,” Dr. Foresman said, “but I’m quite sure you’ll understand. It’s your dental bill, Mr. Roche. For professional services. It’s now delinquent, and I’m afraid I must insist upon immediate payment.”
“You mean Etta’s bill? The one she made before her accident?”
“Yes. Surely you’ll want to assume her obligations.”
“Certainly. Legitimate ones. That particular bill, however, has been paid in full.”
The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery Megapack Page 15