by Basil Copper
I decided not to try that again. I checked my revolver. I had four shots left. Just then I heard the clattering of high heels from outside the hall. I risked a look round the edge of the case. Krug’s pale death’s head showed at the other end of the balcony; he had the Browning held towards the aisle through which I’d come into the library.
He had his cap on and his eyes were black caves behind the spectacles. He’d taken off the raincoat and he looked as smart a vulture as ever walked behind an S.S. band. Himmler would have been proud of him. I sighted up and squeezed the trigger. The Smith-Wesson jerked and Krug screamed. The bullet tore through the dark cloth of his sleeve and the Browning fell to the floor of the gallery.
I heard Kathy Gowan’s heels stop suddenly. Krug groaned and slumped back behind the end of the bookstack. I started to go forward when his hand, bright and sticky with blood, came out from behind the shelving. Quick as a snake it scooped up the Browning. The gun flamed and the detonation seemed to break my ear drums. Fire fanned past me and a pain like a razor-cut sliced up my arm. I fell back to the other end of the aisle as the doctor’s gun blared again; this time he missed and another explosion of paperbacks rained off the balcony.
The Smith-Wesson fell from my paralysed hand and went skittering across the gallery; it clanged against the metal railing and fell down on the main floor of the library. I heard the drumming of heels again then. A scarlet stream jetted from the ends of my fingers. I got down on my heels and with my uninjured hand got a handkerchief out of my trousers pocket and tied it round my wrist. The bullet had ploughed a deep furrow through but I thought it had missed the bone. The sleeve of my jacket was smouldering and I beat it out.
I heard Krug get up while I was doing this. I slipped to the next stack and found I was in the last aisle. The books here were more solid and the shelving of bare, unplaned wood. The shelves tottered as I fell against them. This part of the library seemed to be of a temporary nature; the shelving was bracketed to the floor and secured with screws, but the top was free. The shelves, which were two feet thick, went up about twelve feet, which left a deep space between the top and the ceiling.
I had some crazy idea about climbing on top of the stack, but the thing swayed alarmingly as I got my foot on the second shelf. I put my whole weight on the shelves and started to pull myself up when I heard a loud crack; one of the brackets securing the shelf end to the floor had cracked. At that second I heard a girl’s voice shouting at the end of the gallery and from the corner of my eye I saw Krug’s shadow round the next aisle. I jumped off the shelf and got past the corner when the doctor’s gun roared again; wood splinters rained in the air.
I was now standing at the end of the temporary shelving, completely hidden; I was quite safe in this position as Krug could hardly drill several hundred volumes of thick bound books endwise but at the same time I couldn’t afford to settle down here. It would all depend on which side of the shelves he passed. I felt sweat trickle down my shirt-band. I heard a barely-suppressed cough and then a soft footfall.
These shelves were at right-angles to the gallery and faced the iron railing; my scheme was to jam Krug up against them and force him to drop the Browning. I was pretty well placed to carry it out as it happened, but if Kathy Gowan came any closer he might take fright. I waited with the blood pumping in my chest; a nerve fretted in my cheek as I heard a board creak. Then I saw a faint shadow towards the rail of the gallery. Krug was passing in front of the stack. Putting one foot before the other, inch by inch, I crept round the angle. I got down near the end where the bracket had snapped and waited.
Somewhere in the gallery a fly buzzed. I found myself listening for it instead of the creaking of boards. I was half-kneeling on the far side of the stack when something solid passed between me and the light. I looked through and saw the buttons of a uniform. At this point the shelves hadn’t got any dividing partition and I could see right between the volumes. Krug hadn’t seen me. He was looking round the gallery, holding the Browning ready.
I pushed upwards, my hands underneath the shelves, feeling the muscles in the back of my legs straining and getting all the strength of my shoulders into the effort. The bookcase tottered, one or two books clattered to the ground and then the remaining bracket seemed to explode with a bang that echoed round the gallery; a cloud of dust spread out and with a screech of metal the whole thing started to fall towards the front of the balcony. Krug screamed like an animal and the hollow boom of the Browning was muffled by the descending books.
I jumped backwards; an avalanche of volumes spread out in every direction as the twenty-feet section toppled towards the railing. Krug screamed again as the bookcase pinned him to the balcony and then the scream died in a glutinous choking sound. I pounded round the splintered stack as Kathy Gowan ran down the next aisle.
Krug was lying half-in, half-out of the gallery, his gun hand pointing to the ceiling. His cap had fallen on to the floor of the library; his eyes were wide open and a thin thread of almost black blood silently spilled from the corner of his mouth. His lips moved once or twice but I couldn’t make out what he was trying to say. I pushed Kathy Gowan back and rushed at the bookcase, tearing at the books to lighten the load. But I think I had already guessed that his back was broken.
I was just starting to lift the end of the shelving off him when the noises in his throat stopped. I looked up when the crack of the shot whipped out in the echoing dome of the library. Krug’s head fell back and a dark stain spread out across his chest; the Browning fell back from his twitching fingers and bounced down on to the ground floor of the library. His eyes closed.
A thin wisp of smoke curled from Merna Freeman’s small nickel-plated revolver. She held it very steadily and I was more conscious of the whiteness of her face than the gun. I guess I wasn’t surprised to see her there. I let go the end of the bookcase and the pain in my arm started then; what with that and the ache of my bruises, I felt very tired.
Merna Freeman stood at the end of the next aisle and licked her lips with a dry tongue. The barrel of the little revolver suddenly drooped towards the floor like its insignificant weight was too heavy for her.
‘Hope I did the right thing, Mike,’ she whispered. ‘I thought he was going to shoot.’
‘Don’t blame yourself,’ I said. I put my hand over and rested it on her shoulder. ‘He wouldn’t have lasted anyway.’
I lit myself a cigarette and looked at the two women through the smoke.
‘You get the ambulance?’ I asked Kathy Gowan.
She nodded, her eyes frozen with shock and surprise.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Funny, he didn’t cut the wire here.’
‘No need,’ I said. ‘He might have wanted to make a call himself.’
Kathy nodded again.
‘Coffee wouldn’t be a bad idea,’ I said, ‘if we could find the kitchen.’
We went downstairs to wait for the cops to arrive.
Chapter Seventeen - Long Goodbye
The local sheriff was a man called Andrews. He was a nice enough guy; tall, rangy and with bright blue eyes; addicted to leather jerkins and a prominent revolver butt. A nice guy but appropriately suspicious. What with one thing and another it was twenty-four hours before we all assembled in the library.
‘We always assemble in the library,’ I told the Sheriff. ‘For explanations and such-like. To tidy all the loose ends. Surely you remember the Charlie Chan series?’
Tucker chuckled in his throat but Andrews didn’t seem to think it at all funny.
‘He’s always like this, Joe,’ said Tucker gently.
‘Mebbe,’ said Andrews morosely, ‘but what am I going to put in my report?’
‘This is an L.A. case,’ Tucker told him. ‘The finale just happened to take place on your patch. This about wraps it up. Not to mention Janssen and Hauser.’
Andrews scratched his sandy hair reflectively. ‘Well, it had better add up,’ he said. ‘Else the boys in the State Capitol will nail my ea
rs to the wall for getting took over by the city slickers.’
It was nearing dusk again. Thin rain still spat sourly at the windows. The Sheriff wandered over to the table. My Smith-Wesson sat on it, neatly labelled for the lab boys. Merna Freeman sat near the window and fooled with the spoon in her coffee cup. Kathy Gowan had a small notebook and pencil. She looked like a schoolgirl as she gazed at me expectantly. She’d spent half the day on the phone to L.A. but the big story was to come. I figured she’d earned herself another third on top of her salary.
I fingered the bandage round my wrist. I looked at Tucker. There were about ten of us in the big lower library; a couple of detectives from Tucker’s department, a deputy sheriff called Blish and two brawny Knoxtown patrolmen in leather slickers.
‘You want to start or shall I?’ I asked Tucker.
He went and sat in an easy chair and waved his hand. ‘It’s all yours, Mike,’ he said expansively. ‘I only came in halfway through.’
I went over in the centre of the room by the table.
‘We’ve got to go quite a way back for the germ of the idea,’ I said. ‘Kathy Gowan’s been doing some digging in the Examiner files. What she and my secretary came up with has been amplified by the L.A. police. We got most of the facts, except for the last piece. I’ll get to that in a minute.’
I looked out of the window. The red of the sunset smeared the rain-flawed glass and touched the tops of the distant trees with carmine. I liked that violent window; it made a nice climax to all that had gone before.
‘Miss Freeman’s cousin, Rex Beale, is the key to the whole thing,’ I said. ‘At the end of the war he was a major in the U.S. Intelligence Corps. One of his duties was to go out to Germany in 1945 and as the Nazi death-camps were liberated, to screen and interrogate as war criminals the personnel who had operated them. It was at Dachau that he met Dr Krug. They were two of a kind. Dr Krug had a lot of loose change put aside. In return for his life and a switch in identity, Beale was paid heavily to get him away from the Allies. Not only that; with a little surgery he was fitted up with false papers and a new name and provided with a safe passage to the land of the free. Some while later he turned up in L.A. There, the two of them launched the Sunset Gardens caper.
‘When Merna became a sort of unofficial guardian to old man Whipfuddle and his millions, Beale saw his chance. He got the old man interested and the will deal was dreamed up. By this time the Gardens was beginning to cost real money; so the phoney freezer scheme was brought in and occasionally the illnesses of the older patients were accelerated and forged wills made out. Incidentally, you don’t need ordinary freezers with liquid nitrogen. This was roughly the position when I came in. Beale warned me off, saw this was useless, panicked and then started hanging people on meat hooks.’
The Sheriff cleared his throat, made like he was going to say something and then changed his mind. I walked over to the window and looked out at the night.
‘But Krug had to have some more expert help and that was where Dr Hauser came in.’
This time the Sheriff came to life. ‘Finest doctor Knoxtown ever had,’ he said. ‘Why he had to murder Dr Hauser … ’
‘I’m not saying a word against the doctor,’ I said. ‘And Hauser wasn’t murdered.’
Kathy Gowan’s pencil stopped racing over the paper and Dan Tucker’s mouth came open. Only Merna Freeman looked bored and uninterested.
‘Dr Krug’s real name was Hauser,’ I said. ‘The Examiner’s researchers came up with that one. One brother emigrated to the States long before the last war, the other remained behind. Krug had the decency to change his name. He was known as Wolff to the Third Reich. His brother knew nothing of his war record, and what more natural than that Krug should set up in practice only two hundred miles away when he came to America? That was something which fooled me. I thought Hauser was a number one suspect when I came up here, but he was only nervous in case I found out about his brother.’
The sheriff stared at me for a long moment; he seemed to have difficulty in getting his breath. Then he went over to a desk at the far end of the room. I heard the cork being pulled from a whisky bottle.
‘No-one knows just how Doc Hauser got dragged into this thing,’ I said, ‘and a lot of it’s mere guessing at this stage. But Krug probably used him to counter-sign death certificates at first and then got him in deeper. That was why he acted so suspicious when I came up to see him. He knew, of course, that the Whipfuddle will had been forged by Morey Wilson — Krug had put the pressure on him to be a party to that — and there was only one way out.’
‘He threatened to go to the police and Krug killed him,’ said Kathy Gowan.
I shook my head. ‘Even Krug might be supposed to shrink from that. I read the situation quite wrongly when I turned up. My first visit had set Dr Hauser thinking and he knew the Sunset Gardens set-up could have only one end. He thought things over quite calmly and deliberately and then he killed himself. Krug’s reactions were surprisingly brotherly, though that was the last reason I figured at the time.’
The spitting of the rain at the windows made a hard, tapping noise in the long silence.
Sheriff Andrews came over and silently put a half glass of bourbon in my hand. He moved over to fill glasses for the rest of us. I felt the raw sting of the liquor down my throat and waited for the glow to spread out.
‘To revert back to Whipfuddle and the will for a moment,’ I said. ‘Beale had a hold over Krug, of course, as he knew his Nazi background. But he also knew he’d never get anywhere without the doctor’s cunning. He played on old man Whipfuddle and got him interested in the idea of cryogenic immortality. One flaw was that the will would have to be made in favour of Eternity Inc. which meant Krug. But Beale had a directorship on the board and a cast-iron hold over Krug, so he thought his position was impregnable. I figure he made an informal deal with the doctor for a half-share. But he didn’t make sufficient allowance for Miss Freeman.’
I turned to face Merna as I spoke. She gave me a smile and sipped at a gin-sling the Sheriff had poured for her. She fumbled in her crocodile-skin handbag for a microscopic handkerchief.
‘That’s one point I couldn’t figure, Mike,’ said Kathy Gowan, her voice cutting through the room.
‘With all that at stake, why would Rex Beale commit suicide?’
‘He didn’t commit suicide,’ I said. ‘He was murdered. Small calibre stuff. That lets you in, Miss Freeman.’
*
If the former silence had been oppressive this one was positively explosive. Tucker hadn’t moved; he’d known all along, of course, and had played in. But the Sheriff’s face was a treat and Kathy Gowan’s mouth was a round O of excitement. Only Merna Freeman hadn’t changed. Her face looked supremely relaxed and she rubbed absently at her lip with a corner of her handkerchief.
‘We haven’t heard much of Miss Freeman in this case,’ I went on. ‘Which is perhaps only natural as she’s the kingpin. My feeling is that once Beale introduced her to Krug she was the prime mover. She hated old man Whipfuddle. The only reason she took over his affairs was to be closer to his money. Must have been disappointing when the will squabble arose after all that trouble. Beale made the mistake of double-crossing Merna and settling for a fifty-fifty split with Krug. Merna didn’t know anything about this at first but she had her suspicions. And she hired me to find out what was going on. That was Beale’s biggest mistake. For of course Merna meant to grab all the old man’s money for herself. Perhaps Beale and Krug were wise at that for Merna wouldn’t have split it even two ways.’
‘Correct, darling,’ said Merna Freeman. Her voice was cool and controlled. She gave me a smile which was perfect but for that slight gap in her teeth — which made it twice as fascinating.
‘You’ve got one or two details wrong, but basically you’re a pretty good P.I. How did you find out about Beale?’
‘The whole thing sounded too pat when you called me,’ I said. ‘Like Kathy said, characters like Beale d
on’t commit suicide and leave a billion dollars lying around. Leastways, not in my book. And would a gorilla like Beale use a small-calibre revolver? But a lady would.’
Merna Freeman smiled again. She inclined her head towards me in a courteous gesture.
‘Yes, of course. That was silly of me, wasn’t it? But it was all I could think of at the moment.’
‘But why?’ I said. ‘Ballistics would have proved that Beale didn’t fire it. And the gun was surely registered to you?’
Merna shook her head. ‘I bought the gun originally, yes. But Rex borrowed it a number of times. Eventually I forgot about it. Later, he asked me if I wanted it. I didn’t, so he got it registered in his own name.’
I looked at Tucker.
‘Correct,’ he said.
‘What I don’t get is why you waited so long before killing Beale,’ I said to Merna.
‘Now it’s my turn,’ said Tucker. His eyes had the old frost back in them. ‘Krug knew Beale had made a hash of burning you in the ravine. Beale was a big liability, had been for some time. He had to get rid of him but he shrunk at doing the job himself. He got round it rather neatly. He rang up Miss Freeman here and spilled things about the will double-cross. He could rely on the girl’s nature for the rest.’
For the first time Merna Freeman lost her composure. Her cheeks flushed as she replied. ‘How could you possibly know that, Captain?’
‘Hector,’ said Tucker gently. His eyes never left her face. ‘Your houseboy. He was listening on the extension. He doesn’t like murder any more than most of us. Contrary to orders he was there when you let Rex Beale in. He hid in the apartment and saw you kill Beale. He was frightened at first and told no-one about it. After thinking it over for a day or two he paid us a visit.’
Tucker sat easily, enjoying his triumph. I stood thinking to myself; thinking of a lot of things. Of Merna Freeman’s first visit to my office; of Stan Alloway and Janssen; of dark roads with rain glistening on them; of a dozen missed opportunities. Particularly why Dr Hauser’s face had reminded me of somebody else and of the similarity between his writing and Krug’s. The room had gone quite dark by now.