Killer's Payoff

by Ed McBain

  “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.

  “We 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 rig
ht 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 didn’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.”

  It was then that the door burst inward.

  Steve Carella lowered his leg from the flat-footed kick that had sprung the lock. His service revolver was in his right hand. He looked around the room quickly. Then he shrugged.

  “All over?” he asked.

  “Including the shooting,” Hawes said.

  “These our birds?”

  “Um-huh,” Hawes said.

  “The Kramer kill?”

  “Um-huh.”

  “Um,” Carella said.

  “You sure must have broken a lot of traffic regulations getting here,” Hawes said. “Boy, what speed!”

  “I thought you were nuts when I first spoke to you on the phone,” Carella said. “It took me about five minutes to realize you were in trouble. I thought my call had broken in on you and a girl.”

  “You’ve got an evil mind.”

  “Turns out you didn’t need me, anyway,” Carella said. Again he shrugged.

  “If you’d got to the squad at eight, when you were supposed to,” Hawes said, “you could have been here in time for the party.”

  “I had a stop to make first,” Carella said. “I went there from my house, and then I went to the squad.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Lucy Mencken’s place.”

  “What for?” Hawes asked suspiciously.

  “I gave her half a dozen pictures and negatives. I didn’t like the idea of somebody living in fear for the rest of her life.”

  “Was she appreciative?” Hawes asked.

  “We cooked hot rum toddies over the fire the stuff made. It was very cozy.”

  Hawes raised one eyebrow.

  “Now who has the evil mind?” Carella asked.

  Hawes made a rule of never replying to accusations that were true. He walked to the phone, lifted the receiver, and waited for an operator. When the operator came on, he said, “Frederick 7-8024, please.”

  Carella was busily handcuffing Miller to Murphy.

  All at once, Hawes felt very sleepy. He yawned.

  “Don’t go to sleep on us, Cotton,” Carella said. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

  Hawes yawned again and then watched Carella as he walked to the window and lifted the shade. Sunlight spilled into the hotel room.

  “Eighty-seventh Precinct, Sergeant Murchison,” a voice said.

  “Dave, this is Cotton. I’m at the Parker Hotel in Isola. I’ll need a meat wagon and some…”

  Murchison listened patiently, taking notes. Across the street from the station house, he could hear the kids playing in Grover Park. He wished he were a park attendant on a day like this. When Hawes finished talking, Murchison cut the connection. He was about to order the ambulance and the uniformed cops Hawes had requested when the lights on the switchboard began blinking again.

  Murchison sighed and plugged in his socket.

  “Eighty-seventh Precinct,” he said, “Sergeant Murchison.”

  Another day had started.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  PROUDLY PRESENTS

  FAT OLLIE’S BOOK

  ED McBAIN

  Coming soon in hardcover

  from

  Simon & Schuster

  Turn the page for a preview of

  Fat Ollie’s Book….

  1

  RESPONSE TIME —from the moment someone at the Martin Luther King Memorial Hall dialed 911 to the moment Car 81, in the Eight-Eight’s Boy sector rolled up—was exactly four minutes and twenty-six seconds. Whoever had fired the shots was long gone by then, but a witness outside the Hall had seen someone running from the alleyway on its eastern end and he was eager to tell the police and especially the arriving TV crew all about it.

  The witness was very drunk.

  In this neighborhood, when you heard shots, you ran. In this neighborhood, if you saw someone running, you knew he wasn’t running to catch a bus. This guy wasn’t running. Instead, he was struggling to keep his balance, wobbling from one foot to the other. Nine, ten in the morning, whatever the hell it was already, and he could hardly stand up and he stunk like a distillery. He finally sat on one of the garbage cans in the alley. Behind him, rain water from a gutter dripped into a leader and flowed into an open sewer grate.

  Slurring his words, the drunk immediately told the responding officers from Car 81 that he was a Vietnam vet, mistakenly believing this would guarantee him a measure of respect. The blues saw only a scabby old black drunk wearing tattered fatigue trousers, an olive-drab tank top, and scuffed black penny loafers without socks. He was having trouble not falling off the garbage can, too. Grabbing for the wall, he told them he’d been about to go into the alley here, yessir, when he saw this guy come bustin out of it…

  “Turned left on St. Sab’s,” he said, “went runnin off uptown.”

  “Why were you going in the alley?” one of the blues asked.

  “To look inna garbage cans there.”

  “For what?”

  “Bottles,” he said. “Takes ’em back for deposit, yessir.”

  “And you say you saw somebody running out of the alley here?” the other blue asked. He was wondering why they were wasting time with this old drunk. They’d responded in swift order, but if they wasted any more time with him, their sergeant would think they’d been laggard. Then again, the TV cameras were rolling.

  “Came out the alley like a bat out of shit,” the drunk said, much to the dismay of the roving reporter from Channel Four, a pretty blonde wearing a short brown mini and a tan cotton turtleneck sweater. The camera was in tight on the man’s face at that moment, and the word “shit” meant they couldn’t use the shot unless they bleeped it out. Her program manager didn’t like to bleep out too many words because that smacked of censorship instead of fair and balanced reporting. On the other hand, the drunk was great comic relief. The Great Unwashed loved drunks. Put a drunk scene in a movie or a play, the audience still laughed themselves to death. If they only knew how many battered wives Honey had interviewed.

  “What’d he look like?” the first blue asked, mindful of the TV cameras and trying to sound like an experienced investigator instead of a rookie who’d just begun patrol duty eight months ago.

  “Young dude,” the witness said.

  “White, black, Hispanic?” the first blue asked, rapping the words out in a manner that he was sure would go over big with TV audiences, unmindful of the fact that the camera was on the witness and not himself.

  “White kid,” the witness said, “yessir. Wearin jeans and a whut chu call it, a ski parka, an’ white sneakers an’ a black cap with a big peak. Man, he was movin fast. Almost knocked me down.”

  “Did he have a gun?”

  “I dinn see no gun.”

  “Gun in his hand, anything like that?”

  “No gun, nosir.”

  “Okay, thanks,” the first blue said.

  “This is Hon
ey Blair,” the Channel Four reporter said, “coming to you from outside King Memorial in Diamond-back.” She slit her throat with the forefinger of her left hand, said, “That’s it, boys,” and turned to her crew chief. “Get him to sign a release, will you?” she said. “I’m heading inside.” She was walking toward the glass entrance doors when the Vietnam vet, if indeed that’s what he was, asked, “Is they a reward?”

  Why didn’t you say that on the air? Honey thought.

  THIS WAS, and is, and always will be the big bad city.

  That will never change, Ollie thought. Never.

  And never was it badder than during the springtime. Flowers were blooming everywhere, even in the 88th Precinct, which by the way was no rose garden.

  Detective/First Grade Oliver Wendell Weeks had good reason to be smiling on this bright April morning. He had just finished his book. Not finished reading it, mind you, but finished writing it. He was still rereading the last chapter, which was back at the apartment. He didn’t think it would need any more work, but the last chapter was often the most important one, he had learned, and he wanted to make sure it was just right. He was now transporting the positively perfect portion of the book to a copying shop not far from the Eight-Eight.

  He wondered if the sun was shining and the flowers were blooming next door in the 87th Precinct. He wondered if it was springtime in the Rockies, or in London, or in Paris or Rome, or in Istanbul, wherever that was. He wondered if flowers bloomed all over the world when a person finished his first work of fiction. Now that he was a bona fide writer in his own mind, Ollie could ponder such deep imponderables.

  His book, which was titled Report to the Commissioner, was securely nestled in a dispatch case that rested on the back seat of the car Ollie drove hither and yon around this fair city, one of the perks of being a minion of the law, ah yes. The windows of the Chevy sedan were open wide to the breezes that flowed from river to river. It was 10:30 on a lovely sunlit Monday morning. Ollie had signed in at 7:50 (five minutes late, but who was counting?), had taken care of some odds-and-ends bullshit on his desk, and was now on his way to the copying shop on Culver Avenue, not four blocks from the station house. So far, the day—