Killer's Payoff

by McBain, Ed

  “Where’s your gun?” he asked.

  Hawes gestured to the table with his head.

  “Get it, John,” Miller said to Murphy. The old man walked to the table and picked up the gun. He tucked it into his waistband.

  “We didn’t expect you, Mr. Hawes,” Ruther said. “We thought there really was a man named David Gorman. Does anyone know—?”

  The telephone rang. Hawes hesitated.

  “Answer it,” Ruther said.

  “What shall I say?”

  “Does anyone know you’re here?” Miller asked.

  “No,” Hawes lied.

  “Then it’s probably the desk. Just speak normally. Answer whatever they ask. No nonsense.”

  Hawes lifted the receiver. “Hello?” he said.

  “Cotton? This is Steve,” Carella said.

  “Yes, this is Room 1612,” Hawes answered.

  “What?”

  “This is Mr. Hawes speaking,” he said.

  Carella paused for a moment. Hawes could almost feel a mental shrug on the line. Then Carella said, “Okay, this is Room 1612, and this Mr. Hawes speaking. Now, what’s the gag?”

  “Yes, I did order breakfast,” Hawes said. “Not ten minutes ago.”

  “What?” Carella asked. “Listen, Cotton—”

  “I’ll repeat the order if you like,” Hawes said, “but I don’t see why…All right, all right. I ordered juice, coffee, and toast. Yes, that was all.”

  “Is this Cotton Hawes?” Carella asked, completely bewildered.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what—?”

  Hawes covered the mouthpiece. “They want to send up the breakfast I ordered,” he said. “Is it all right?”

  “No,” Ruther said.

  “Let them,” Murphy suggested. “We don’t want them to think anything strange is going on up here.”

  “He’s right, Frank,” Miller said.

  “All right, tell them to send it up. No tricks.”

  Hawes uncovered the mouthpiece. “Hello?” he said.

  “Cotton,” Carella said patiently, “I just got in to the office. I had a stop to make first, so I just got in. Meyer left a message on my desk. He said to call you at the Parker Hotel and—”

  “Come right up,” Hawes said.

  “Huh?”

  “Bring it right up. The room is 1612.”

  “Cotton, have you—?”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Hawes said, and he hung up.

  “What did he say?” Ruther asked.

  “He said they’d send it right up.”

  “How soon?”

  Quickly Hawes calculated how long it would take a car with its siren blasting to get to the hotel from the squad. “No more than fifteen minutes,” he said, and then immediately wished he had made it a half hour. Suppose Carella had not understood him?

  “I only expected one of you,” Hawes said. He had quickly reasoned that he was safe until after the alleged bellhop arrived with his alleged breakfast. But if the bellhop did not arrive, how long would these men wait? The thing to do was to keep them talking. When a man is talking, he is not conscious of the time.

  “We should have figured that,” Ruther said. “The ‘come alone’ in your wires was very puzzling. If you knew about Kettering, you should have known there were three of us. Why, then, the ‘come alone’ line? We assumed you meant the three of us alone, no cops. We assumed wrong, didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” Hawes said.

  “Do you know about Kettering?”

  “I know his car is at the bottom of the lake at Kukabonga, and I figure he’s buried in the woods someplace. What else is there to know?”

  “There’s a lot more to know,” Miller said.

  “Why’d you kill him?” Hawes asked.

  “It was an—” Miller started, and Ruther turned to him sharply.

  “Shut up, Joaquim!” he warned.

  “What difference does it make?” Miller asked. “Are you forgetting why we came here?”

  “He’s right, Frank,” Murphy said. “What difference does it make?” The old man looked ludicrous with one gun in his hand and another tucked into his waistband. He looked somewhat like the senile marshal of a cleaned-out once-tough Western town.

  “Why’d you kill Kettering?” Hawes repeated.

  Miller looked to Ruther for permission. Ruther nodded.

  “It was an accident,” Miller said. “He was shot accidentally.”

  “Who shot him?”

  “We don’t know,” Miller said. “The three of us were hunting together. We spotted what we thought was a fox, and we all fired simultaneously. The fox turned out to be Kettering. We heard him scream. He was dead when we got to him. We didn’t know whose bullet had hit him.”

  “It wasn’t mine,” Murphy said flatly.

  “You don’t know that, John,” Ruther said.

  “I do know it. I was shooting a .300 Savage, and you were both using twenty-twos. If my shot had hit him, it would have torn a—”

  “You don’t know, John,” Ruther repeated.

  “I do know, damnit. Kettering was killed by one of those twenty-twos.”

  “Why didn’t you say so at the time?”

  “I couldn’t think straight. You know that. None of us could.”

  “What happened?” Hawes asked.

  “We were in the middle of the woods with a dead man,” Miller said. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration now. Caught in the grip of total recall, his words came haltingly, with difficulty. “The woods were still; there wasn’t a sound. We were hardly breathing. Do you remember, Frank? Do you remember how quiet the woods went after Kettering’s scream?”

  “Yes,” Ruther said. “Yes.”

  “We stood around the body, the three of us, in those silent woods.”

  And all at once, Hawes was there with them, standing over a man one of them had shot, standing over a dead man, with the woods gone suddenly still, as still as the man at their feet. And he realized, too, that the men were back there in the Adirondacks, playing out a scene they had lived, playing it with fresh emotion, as if it were happening to them for the first time.

  “We didn’t know what to do,” Miller said.

  “I wanted to report it to the authorities,” Murphy said.

  “But how could we do that?” Ruther asked. “He was dead! Goddamnit, you knew he was dead.”

  “But it was an accident.”

  “What difference does that make? How many men get hanged because of accidents?”

  “We should have reported it.”

  “We couldn’t!” Miller said. “Suppose they didn’t believe us? Suppose they thought we shot him purposely?”

  “They’d have believed us.”

  “And even if they did,” Ruther said, “what would a scandal have done to my business?”

  “And my job,” Miller said.

  “Our pictures would have been in every tabloid. And there’d always be the doubt, and the knowledge that one of us had killed a man. How could we have lived with that?”

  “We should have reported it,” Murphy insisted.

  “We did the right thing,” Miller said. “No one had seen us. There was no one to know.”

  “It wasn’t murder. We should have—”

  “He was dead, damnit, dead! Did you want policemen and reporters barging in on your life? Did you want a living hell? Did you want everything you’d worked for ruined because of a goddamn senseless accident? If the man was dead, how were we harming him further? We knew he was single, we knew his only family was a sister he didn’t get along with. What else was there to do? Ruin our own lives because of a dead man? Take a chance that the law would be lenient? We did the right thing. We did the only thing. It was the only way.”

  “I suppose,” Murphy said, and perhaps the argument in the woods had ended the same way, ended with the same false logic, the logic of three panic-stricken men faced with a problem that seemed to have but one solution.

  “W
e buried him,” Miller said. “And then we released the brake on his car, locked the doors, and rolled it into the lake. We didn’t think anyone had seen us. We were sure we were alone in the woods.”

  “You should have reported it,” Hawes said. “At worst, it was second-degree manslaughter, punishable by not more than fifteen years or a fine of one thousand dollars, or both. At best, it was excusable homicide. An accidental shooting. You might have got off scot-free.”

  “There wasn’t time to consult a lawyer, Mr. Hawes,” Rather said. “There was only time for action, and we acted the way we thought best. I don’t know what you would have done.”

  “I’d have reported it,” Hawes said.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s easy for you to coldly say you would have reported it. You were not standing there with the rifle in your hand, and the dead man at your feet—the way we were. Decisions are always easy to make from armchairs. We had a decision to make, and we had to make it fast. Have you ever killed a man, Mr. Hawes?”

  “No,” Hawes said.

  “Then don’t make statements about what you’d have done or not done. We did what seemed like the only thing to do at the time.”

  “We thought it was murder, don’t you understand?” Miller said.

  “I told you we should report it,” Murphy said. “I told you. No! You both insisted. Cowards! I shouldn’t have listened to cowards! I shouldn’t have listened to frightened men!”

  “You’re in this, so shut up!” Miller snapped. “How could we have known we were being watched?”

  “Kramer,” Hawes said.

  “Yes,” Ruther answered. “Kramer, the bastard.”

  “When did you get his ‘I SAW YOU!’ note?”

  “The day we got back home.”

  “What then?”

  “He followed it with a phone call. We met him in Isola one day last September. He said he considered us equally guilty of murder. He had seen the shooting, seen the burial, and seen the disposal of Kettering’s car. And since he held us equally guilty and since, he said, we were equally guilty in the eyes of the law, he expected equal payments from each of us. He demanded thirty-six thousand dollars—twelve thousand from each of us.”

  “That explains the buying spree in September. What then?”

  “In October he came to us with another demand,” Ruther said. “He wanted an additional ten thousand from each of us, thirty thousand in all. He said that would be the last demand he would make. We couldn’t raise the money all at once, so he agreed to take it in two payments, one in October and the next in January. We raised twenty-one thousand in October, and we paid the remaining nine thousand in January.”

  “We should have known,” Hawes said. “Every damn deposit in that bankbook was an odd number divisible by three. We should have realized. What about that April deposit? The fifteen-thousand-dollar one?”

  “We didn’t hear from him all through the winter. We really began to believe his thirty-thousand-dollar demand was the last one,” Murphy said. “Then, in April, he called again. He wanted another fifteen thousand. He swore this would be the last payment. We raised the fifteen thousand.”

  “Was it the last payment?”

  “No,” Miller said. “If it had been, Kramer would still be alive. He called again in June, the beginning of June. He wanted another fifteen thousand. That was when we decided to kill him.”

  “He was bleeding us!” Ruther shouted. “I’ve just begun to get my agency on its feet. I was pouring every damn cent I’d earned into Kramer’s bank account!”

  “If homicide is ever considered justifiable,” Miller said, “the murder of Sy Kramer was justifiable.”

  Hawes did not comment. “How’d you do it?” he asked.

  “Where’s that breakfast?” Ruther wanted to know.

  “It’ll be here. Tell me how you got Kramer.”

  “We followed him for a month,” Murphy said. “We took shifts. We worked out a timetable. We knew exactly where he went at what hours. We knew his life better than he did.”

  “We had to,” Ruther explained. “We were planning to take it from him.”

  “Then?” Hawes said.

  “On the night of June twenty-sixth we bought a .300 Savage.”

  “Why that gun?”

  “First, because we had some silly notion of disfiguring Kramer beyond recognition. Second, because I own a Savage,” Murphy said. “We thought if you ever got around to checking guns we owned, you’d eliminate mine and eliminate me as a suspect at the same time.”

  “Who fired the gun?” Hawes asked.

  The men remained silent.

  “You were acting in concert,” Hawes said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “The best shot among us fired the gun,” Ruther said. “Let’s leave it that way.”

  “Did Murphy drive the car?”

  “Yes, of course,” Murphy said. “I’m an excellent driver.”

  “What did the third man do?”

  “He was at the back window with an auxiliary rifle. We didn’t want to fire from two different guns unless the first shot missed. We wanted it to appear as if one person had done the killing.”

  “You damn near succeeded,” Hawes said.

  “We have succeeded,” Ruther answered.

  “Maybe, and maybe not. A lot of people are on this case. Adding another homicide to it isn’t going to help your chances any.”

  “Will it hurt them any? First-degree murder is first-degree murder. You can only burn in the electric chair once.”

  “Where’s the breakfast?” Miller asked.

  “What did you do with the rifle you used?” Hawes asked back. A good twenty minutes had passed since Carella’s call. Facing the possibility that Carella would never arrive, Hawes began sizing up the men in the room.

  “We did just what you thought we did,” Ruther said.

  “We disassembled it and buried the parts in separate locations.”

  “I see,” Hawes said. Murphy was obviously the weakest link. He was an old man who couldn’t shoot straight, and he was carrying two guns. Hawes noticed for the first time that the only gun in the room that was not carrying a silencer was his own gun, the gun tucked into Murphy’s waistband.

  “Did you just buy these guns?” Hawes asked.

  “They’re part of my collection,” Murphy said. “We’ll bury them, too, after we use them.”

  “For a guy who’s innocent all the way down the line,” Hawes lied, “you’re sure joining a sucker’s game, Murphy.”

  “You just finished saying we had acted in concert when we killed Kramer,” Murphy said. “I’m an old man, mister. Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes.”

  “You must be old,” Hawes said.

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “You’re covering me with an automatic that has the safety on!”

  “What?” Murphy said. His eyes flicked downward only momentarily, but that was all the time Hawes needed. He flung himself across the room at Murphy, his left hand crashing down onto Murphy’s right wrist.

  He heard the puffing whisper of a silenced gun being triggered as he hit the old man full in the face, knocking him to the floor. He saw the chunk of wood erupt from the floor not six inches from his head. And then Murphy’s gun was in his hand, and Hawes threw himself flat on the floor and fired. The gun made hardly any sound at all. The scene was being played with deadly cold ruthlessness, but it was being played in paradoxical whispers. His first shot dropped Ruther. There were two down now, and one to go.

  Miller backed off against the door, leveling his pistol.

  “Drop it, Miller!” Hawes shouted. “I’m shooting to kill!”

  Miller hesitated a moment, and then dropped the gun. Hawes kicked the gun to one side and then whirled on Murphy. The old man was unconscious, incapable of drawing the fourth gun from his waistband.

  Frank Ruther, sitting on the floor clutching his bleeding shoulder, shouted, “Why didn’t you shoot him, you fool? Why di
dn’t you shoot him?”

  And Miller, standing wearily and dejectedly, answered, “I’m a lousy shot. You know that, Frank. I’m a lousy shot.”