The Drill Is Death

by FRANCES

  “This man,” he said, “the one who said he was Reginald Grant—he spoke as I do? With what you call an accent?”

  The last was involuntary, and he heard his own words with faint surprise. Of course, to an American girl, he had an accent. Why shouldn’t she call it that? Of course, she is the one who has—He checked himself. Give him words to think about and he wandered into a copse; into, in fact, a thicket.

  “I suppose,” he said, “you’ll swear, when the time comes, that the voice on the telephone was my voice? Because of the—intonation?”

  She stood and looked up at him. He felt that, now, it was she who sought something, something to go on, in his eyes.

  “He spoke as you do,” she said. “I don’t—the telephone changes voices. Now I don’t—” She broke off again. “You’re really Reginald Grant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would she lie to me?”

  He merely shook his head.

  “I said what I thought was true,” she said, and spoke slowly. “If she—could somebody have lied to her? Said he was you?”

  He shook his head again.

  “She was in a class,” he said. “I talked to the class. There was no doubt who talked to the class.”

  She nodded her head, and again the dark red hair swirled with the movement.

  “Why would she lie to me?” Peggy Larkin said, and seemed to ask the question of herself.

  The idea which was steadily permeating Reg Grant’s mind was exceedingly unwelcome. If this pretty young woman was also an honest young woman—

  If she was that, there was nothing she could tell him, or tell the police. Unless—

  “When you told this to the police,” he said, “did you tell them you hadn’t actually seen—” He paused, momentarily. “The man who was dating your sister? Who, she said, was Reginald Grant?”

  She nodded her head.

  “That you’d only talked, on the telephone, to a man who said he was Reginald Grant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Miss Larkin, now you’ve heard my voice, do you think I’m that man?”

  She hesitated. She hesitated so long that, he realized, it would make little difference how she answered.

  Finally, she said, “I don’t know.”

  Call her honest, then. And—apologize for having bothered her, and go? Because, if honest, she couldn’t help; at best could only say that he might not, but again might, be the man who had telephoned and asked for her sister. If honest, just a pretty girl who had been lied to, and by a girl now dead, for reasons inexplicable.

  “He talked the way you talk,” Peggy Larkin said. “His voice was—was a good deal like yours.”

  She spoke with a kind of anxiety and, he thought, also with reluctance—spoke unhappily, as if she wished she could speak differently. And, he thought, she’s no longer afraid of me. But, it isn’t what she feels. It’s what she’s got to say, if honest. That is, of course, better than nothing; a doubt is better than assurance.

  “I didn’t lie about you,” she said. “I told them what I was told and—about the telephone calls. I wasn’t hired.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “So I can’t help you, can I? If you didn’t—if you’re not the one—why don’t you go to the police? If—you say you didn’t try to get away? Didn’t run?”

  “No,” he said. “But it’s a long story. An unlikely story. I’d better, as you say—”

  The buzzer made an unexpectedly loud sound; a harsh, loud sound. The girl’s body jumped at the sound.

  “The detective?” he said. “The one who was coming back?”

  She shook her head. “That wasn’t true,” she said. “At least he-”

  “There was a detective?”

  “Just before you came. He didn’t say he was coming back. I said that because—”

  He made a gesture to stop her.

  “Probably just a man selling brushes,” he said. “But—” He shrugged his shoulders.

  She still hesitated. The buzzer sounded again, and seemed to sound even more loudly.

  Probably it was not, really, a man selling brushes. Probably it was the police. Probably they’d picked him up somehow at the station—No, of course. The man who had let him into the building, thinking him a tenant, had been the detective on his way out—a detective who had had second thoughts, delayed recognition.

  She seemed to be waiting for him to tell her what to do. All right—he had run long enough. Also, there was no reason to involve her further.

  “Better let him in,” he said, and she went, obediently, to a box telephone on the wall near the door and took the receiver off and said, “Who is it?” There was a scratching from the receiver. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and turned back to him. She nodded her head. He said, “Right,” and she pressed a button which would release the latch of the door below.

  They waited. They could, after a moment, hear feet coming up the stairs. One heavy-footed man. The steps came to the door and stopped. The man knocked on the door. And then the man said, “Police, miss.”

  She moved toward the door and Reg moved more quickly, taking her shoulders, turning her partly toward him. He shook his head, then, and patted his lips with fingers. Looking down into widening blue eyes, he made a word soundlessly with his lips. The word was “Stall.”

  She waited. He looked around the room. At the far end, near the windows, there was a door, partly open, in the right wall. He jerked a thumb toward it and released the girl, and thought, there’s no telling what she’ll do.

  “Just a minute,” Peggy Larkin said, to be heard through the door the man had knocked on.

  She did not open the door until Reg had made the end of the room, taking long strides, and was behind the partly open door. He left it partly open. He was in a narrow bedroom, with a bath beyond it. It was hot in the room; he shrugged the Burberry off and let it fall to the floor. He could see part of the room he had left—left when he heard a voice he wouldn’t soon forget, and a voice not that of a policeman.

  He could not see the flat’s front door, but he heard it open. Then Peggy Larkin came into view and the square man after her.

  “O.K.,” the square man said, “where is he?”

  What would she say now?

  “He?” she said. “Who do you mean?”

  “Come off it, sister,” the man said. “Want to cooperate with the law, don’t you?”

  He made the words sound like a ridiculed quotation. He was not taking the trouble to pretend, not really to pretend.

  “You’re not—” she said, and with that he grabbed hold of her, roughly, by the shoulders.

  “Where is he?” the square man said. “Or do I have to shake it out of you?”

  He looked over her, at the door behind which Reg Grant stood—stood, he suddenly suspected, only partially concealed.

  She said, “You’re hurting me.”

  He released one hand and slapped her, hard, on the face. He said, “Think of that, sister,” and when she tried to put a hand up to the hurt face, slapped the hand down. And then he held her with one hand-held her easily—and reached with the other into a pocket. The pocket hand came out with something in it. Reg Grant had never seen a switch-blade knife, but he knew that this was a switch-blade knife.

  “All right,” the man said, “what did you tell him? You and he cook something up?”

  “I don’t—” the girl said, and a blade shot out of the knife. He held it in front of her face, and the blade gleamed dully.

  The other girl had been killed with a knife, A knife like—?

  Reg did not finish that thought. He came out, fast, from behind the door. But the man had been expecting that; had been baiting him out.

  The square man pushed the girl violently from him—pushed her so violently that she careened halfway across the room, into a small table with a telephone on it. She went down with the table and for a moment lay motionless.

  The square man moved to meet Reg Grant,
and had the knife ready. It was held expertly, Reg thought—held for an upward, ripping cut. The man knew his way with a knife. Reg let the square man come to him—hesitated, as if uncertain. He watched the man’s eyes. He’d watched a good many eyes of men coming at him, but not with knives.

  The square man was confident. Unexpectedly, the blade disappeared and he was clutching the knife in a fist. He cocked the fist back.

  Reg Grant was almost sorry for him, but not quite sorry. Reg sidestepped and used his left. As the man was staggering, he used his right. The square man went back in a neat parabola which ended when his head hit the floor. Reg Grant shook a paining right hand as he went to the girl, who was trying to get up—who stopped on her knees and looked up at him through astonished eyes.

  “Did a bit of boxing years ago,” Reg said, thinking that that was what seemed most to astonish her, since she looked in quick surprise first at the man on the floor and then at Reg.

  She started to get up, and he bent to lift her. She was light in his hands.

  “You hurt?” he said.

  “Bumped. Nothing—he’s not the police?”

  “Not he,” Reg said, and stepped over and looked down at the square man, who seemed to be resting comfortably enough, although breathing rather stertorously. Really a sucker for a right, the square man was. Had a glass jaw too, probably. “I suppose,” Reg said, “you haven’t got a handy length of clothesline about?”

  She shook her head. She said, “Who is he?”

  “Probably,” Reg Grant said, “the man who killed your sister. Anyway, he carries a knife. He—”

  The man on the floor began to twitch. Then he got his hands on the floor and tried to sit up.

  “Just lie easy,” Reg told him. “We’ll have a constable here in no time, Mr.—you have a name, I expect?”

  Reg Grant was feeling somewhat exuberant. A needle despaired of had popped most conveniently out of a haystack. A telephone call now, the arrival of policemen—life was about to resume its proper orderliness.

  “Give the boys in blue a buzz, what?” he said, to the girl. The man propped up on his hands stared at him. “Did a bit of boxing years ago,” Reg said, for his benefit, on the assumption that he had not heard that the first time and might be a bit slow on the uptake.

  Peggy Larkin picked the telephone up off the floor and dialed it and then, quite meaninglessly, shook it. Then she said, “It’s dead.”

  The man on the floor began to move his head slowly from side to side. Still groggy, Reg thought. But—beginning to come out of it. To the girl he said, “Dead?”

  She reached the telephone toward him, and then he saw why the telephone was dead. The cord had been, evidently, tangled somehow with the table. As she fell against the table, carried it down with her, the telephone had been pulled loose from its wall connection.

  “Out by the roots,” Peggy Larkin said, and shook the telephone again, apparently in anger.

  VII

  Shapiro had not been able to find anybody among either faculty or student body at Dyckman University, Downtown Branch, who had seen Reginald Grant, visiting lecturer, and Jeanette Larkin, junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, together. Which meant nothing; Grant, although not formally a faculty member, would have been conscious that liaisons between teachers and students are frowned upon. But still—

  “She doesn’t say she actually saw him?” Nathan Shapiro asked Detective Tim O’Hara.

  They were at a lunch counter near Washington Square, and were having coffee. O’Hara was also having a sweet roll. He shook his head, swallowed, and said, “No, she doesn’t. But she talked to him on the telephone and—what the hell?—her sister ought to have known who she was dating.”

  O’Hara had been sent to see if anything new could be got from Peggy Larkin; anything which would tie Grant more tightly into it. It had been O’Hara’s private opinion that Grant was already tied in knots, but his opinion had not been asked, an omission to which he was used. He concluded his preliminary report to Nathan Shapiro by saying, “Shouldn’t she?” and swallowing another bite of sweet roll.

  Shapiro sighed, which was his way of accepting the obvious, which usually depressed him. He had, this time, special reason to feel depressed. He had had his hands on a knife-killer and had opened his hands and said, “Fly away home.” And the killer had not, of course, stopped with that, but had flown farther. I am, Shapiro thought, looking for a loophole to crawl through. Of course he was dating the girl. Of course, in some fashion, he got in too deep—emotionally? in some manner which jeopardized his career?—and killed to get out. And the fact of his association with the girl is established to anybody’s satisfaction. What more do I want?

  “Sure,” Shapiro said. “She knew who she was dating. And told her sister and one or two girls she knew. And Grant called up the sister’s apartment and asked to talk to her and said who he was.” Shapiro nodded his head and finished his coffee and O’Hara looked at him. The damnedest things depressed Nate. What more did they want? Except, obviously, to catch their man.

  “May as well check in,” Shapiro said, and went to a telephone booth. He was gone for some little time; he came back looking, if possible, sadder than before. He was sadder and, further, annoyed with himself for feeling so. For a detective, even one as inadequate as himself, to entertain wistful hopes that he had not, after all, pulled the boner of all time—

  “Almost got him in Stamford,” Shapiro said and then, gloomily, “He’s on the run, all right.”

  “Hell,” O’Hara said, “we knew that.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I suppose we did.” And passed along to Tim O’Hara what he had just been told.

  The Stamford police had received a tip that Reginald Grant, or a man who looked very like him, was in a parked car near the railroad station. The tip had come from a man and been somewhat inconclusive. The tipster had said that the man who looked like Grant had appeared to be asleep. The tipster had either hung up, or been cut off, before he gave his name, but after he had said that the car Grant, if Grant, was in was a 1959 Chevy, two-tone gray.

  There had been a good many cars, and a good many of them Chevies, by the time the police began to look. It had taken them some time to find one of them with a small suitcase in the rear seat, which interested them because sensible people do not leave suitcases in unlocked cars. It had taken them longer to get, from a filling-station attendant, a description of a man—taller than average, bareheaded, wearing a loose topcoat—who had appeared from behind the filling station and crossed the street toward the railroad station. It had taken only a little longer to establish that the car had been reported stolen by a man who lived in the River-dale section of the Bronx. It was only a few minutes before Shapiro telephoned in that a laundry mark on a shirt in the abandoned suitcase had been found to match marks on other clothing in Grant’s apartment.

  So Grant was on the run, in what seemed to Shapiro a rather peculiar fashion—why steal a car and go off and fall asleep in it?—but, admittedly, still with success. So there was no use entertaining even the faintest of wistful hopes that Grant, not knowing that he was wanted, thinking the acceptance of his first story by Shapiro still held, had innocently gone off somewhere for a long weekend.

  Shapiro ordered another cup of coffee. It would upset his stomach, but then almost everything did.

  Grant was their man. There could be no doubt of that. Admit it; quit shying from it. A murderer on the run; a murderer who had used a knife on a girl and—

  Shapiro put his cup down suddenly on the counter.

  And a man who might think that his greatest danger lay in the story another girl had told—that in that story was the only sure, and potentially fatal, linkage between him and Jeanette Larkin and that without that linkage the police would have no way to prove their case.

  He might think that the other Larkin girl, Peggy Larkin, could testify to more than, it now appeared, she could. He might, on the other hand, know that only a voice on a t
elephone linked him, but know also that, hearing the voice again, Peggy Larkin would be positive in her identification. When he was brought to trial. If she was alive when he was brought to trial.

  They might have enough without that. Shapiro rather supposed they would, when flight was taken into account. But it was not what he thought, or a district attorney might think. It was what Grant thought, or might think. And, might act on.

  Of course, Grant was miles away by now—he was on a train bound for Boston or bound for Springfield; he had dropped off a train at New Haven or at Bridgeport. He wouldn’t—

  Shapiro got off the counter stool. “Want to clear up a point,” he told Tim O’Hara, and went back to the telephone.

  The filling-station man had merely seen the tall man cross toward the railroad station at Stamford. That had been at a few minutes before eight. The next train to New York was the 8:01. It had, oddly enough, been on time. The next eastbound train was the 8:48 for New Haven. But the 7:47, also eastbound, was behind time (which was not odd at all) and did not leave Stamford until some few minutes after eight.

  Probably it was the late-running 7:47 Grant had taken, assuming he had taken a train at all. No proof of that, or against that, at the moment. But, as far as time went, he might have returned to New York to—to tidy up?

  Shapiro looked at his watch and found it was a little after ten. Grant would have got to Grand Central before nine; he could have got down to West Twelfth Street, if his inclination, or his need, took him to West Twelfth Street, at a little after nine.

  “Let’s go back and have another talk with Miss Larkin,” Shapiro said.

  “You won’t get—” O’Hara began, and Shapiro said, “Sure we won’t, Tim. But all the same—”

  Tim O’Hara shook his head. Nate Shapiro was sometimes hard to figure out. Men who’d worked with him more often than O’Hara had agreed on that. However, it was for Shapiro to call the play, as first grade to third grade. If he thought O’Hara had missed something.

  “Guess we might take a cab,” Shapiro said, which was a further surprise. The cab would be on them, probably. Which meant that it would be on Shapiro.