“You should be glad Pamela’s dead,” Jeff continued. “She killed her own sister; she killed Stevens, the man who made the bullet with which she shot Corinne. You can’t beat murder. It would have been only a matter of time until the police had sufficient evidence to ask for an indictment.”
Wendell Bogart’s face flamed. He jumped to his feet. “That’s slander! There has never been any sort of scandal in the Bogart family. If you don’t burn for murdering her, Hunter, I’ll run you out of town. I’ll get every penny you have or ever will have!”
Jeff turned and walked to the big table where Chief Gaines was examining the hundreds of bits of trash gathered from the lawn. He looked up wearily as Jeff approached.
“Where’s Smitty?”
“Here he comes, now. I gave him permission to go into the servants’ quarters to make a few phone calls from their phone. We’ve been using this one.”
“Hello, Jeff.” Smitty looked sheepishly at his boss. “You were right as usual.”
“What are the answers?”
“Sodium and under hair.”
“Thanks.” Jeff grinned at the bewildered men around him. “That’s what I thought.”
“Listen,” Chief Gaines protested, “this is no time to—”
“Hold it, Chief. Is there anything in this mass of stuff you gathered from the lawn that could be used for a cork stopper?”
“There’s a cork.” Detective Hawkins pointed to a small ordinary cork. “It was found near the fountain.”
“Good. Get a chemical analysis of scrapings from its top. The analysis should show a trace of sodium. While you’re about it, have the medical examiner give Pamela’s hair a fine-tooth combing, close to the scalp. Where did these come from?” Jeff picked up several dried grayish-brown oak leaves, with bits of fine gray hair clinging to them.
“From the lawn at the end of the terrace. Those green oak leaves were gathered up there, too. They were beyond the trellis where Miss Bogart was sitting.”
“OK. I think I’ve got all the answers. Mike! Mike Collins!”
“Yes, Jeff?” Mike got up from a lounge chair in a far corner of the room.
“This case is solved now, Mike. Tell the truth. Pamela’s dead.”
Mike nodded. “Yes, she’s dead.”
“What was your real reason for marrying her? Tell the truth.”
“I intended to kill her. Legally, of course, by eventually trapping her into admitting she killed Corinne. But I didn’t kill her tonight.”
“What did you see or learn a year ago that convinced you she had killed Corinne?”
“Corinne turned in her chair and looked toward the living room a few seconds before she slumped forward. In confidence, I told the police about it, but apparently they could do nothing, so I decided to drag a confession from Pamela myself. Marrying her would give me the opportunity.”
Jeff nodded. “This is what happened that night last June,” he continued. “After Corinne was shot, Pamela dropped the air pistol somewhere in the living room. The present killer found it. I don’t know where he concealed it for a year, but the police will find out.”
“I hope,” Chief Gaines said fervently. “I also hope you know what your talking about, Hunter.”
Jeff went on, “Tonight, a new killer went into action. He decided to create a diversion to cover the killing. He did that by inserting a dry cork in the tip of the fountain, and placing a small piece of sodium on it. When Fred Marston turned on the water, the pressure blew the cork out of the pipe, and the piece of sodium dropped into the fountain. Sodium is very tricky. There is spontaneous combustion when it gets wet. If Fred Marston hadn’t turned the fountain on, someone else would have. I nearly did it myself.”
“How do you know all that?” Chief Gaines demanded. “Are you just guessing?”
“Tell them, Smitty,” Jeff said.
“Upon getting Jeff’s written instructions – I found them in his coat pocket – I called everyone I could think of, chemists, magicians, professors of chemistry, everyone. It didn’t take long. They immediately and unanimously said ‘sodium’ when I mentioned water and the yellow flash. Spontaneous combustion in water and yellow flames are characteristic properties of sodium.”
Jeff grinned at the chief. “Under cover of the flash, the killer pulled the trigger of the air pistol.”
“Wait a minute,” Chief Gaines protested. “That little pellet couldn’t have more than stunned her. It—”
The shrill ringing of the telephone interrupted him. Hawkins answered it, and handed it to his superior. Chief Gaines’ side of the conversation was “yes” and “no”. He hung up and nodded to Jeff to continue.
“Now, the puzzling part was that there were apparently no marks on the body. I made a note of that and asked Smitty to get me the answer. Tell us, Smitty.”
The little man cleared his throat. “I telephoned several famous pathologists. Their unanimous opinion was that such a thing was impossible. The nearest solution they had for the problem was the possibility that a long, thin sliver had entered a vital organ. They discounted the heart, for they felt that the point of entrance would easily have been noticed.”
“What about the brain?” Chief Gaines asked.
“They said it could have entered through the ears, mouth, nose or eyes, points of entry harder to find. They also suggested making a thorough search of the scalp.”
“That’s where it was,” the chief grinned. “Doc Marshall missed it on his preliminary examination. He found the hole hidden by hair at the base of Pamela’s skull, not much bigger than a pinhole. Lodged in—”
Wendell Bogart jumped to his feet. “Did you have the gall to perform an autopsy on my niece without a reasonable suspicion of foul play?”
“We didn’t,” the chief said. “An X-ray of her head showed a long piece of metal like a thick needle.”
“I think you’ll find, Bill,” Jeff explained, “that it is probably the end from the dart Bogart dropped into the wastebasket. You see, the blunt end could be forced into the head of the lead pellet. When it drove into her skull, the pellet only followed until it struck bone. The point of the dart would continue into the head.”
“This is ridiculous!” Wendell Bogart sat down, puffing furiously on his cigar.
“Give us the answer, Jeff,” the chief said. “Also, tell us where the gun is.”
“Those leaves should tell you, chief.” Jeff pointed to the dried leaves with the bits of the gray hairs clinging to them. “What would dead leaves be doing on a lawn at this time of year?”
“I’ll be damned.” Chief Gaines whistled. “And I was raised in the country, too. Those leaves are from an old squirrel’s nest. Something must have disturbed it. Could it have been a gun?”
“That’s right. You’ll probably find some sort of contraption like those spring clothesline reels, or maybe something bigger, like the spring that pulls back an air hose.”
“But how?”
“I think you’ll find, if you examine the trellis, a spot where the air gun was wedged in the framework, screened by leaves. Under cover of the flash, the killer fired the gun, pushed it through the trellis, and let it go. A spring coil, or counterweight, jerked it up into that big oak tree. On its way up, it knocked off growing leaves and also struck an abandoned squirrel’s nest.”
“What’s the motive, Jeff?”
“The same old one – money. You ready to confess, Bogart? You know, your fingerprints will be on the gun. You were the only person who could have shot her in that spot. That’s why your arm was resting on the top of the settee, behind Pamela.”
“This is ridiculous!” Bogart snorted, his face turning gray. “Whatever gave you the idea that I need money?”
“Just little things, like cutting down on cigars, and not carrying matches. That’s the sort of foolish thing that normally wealthy people usually do when they try to economize. I suspected you weren’t on the level when I came here early this morning. Everyone around town seems
to know you’re having financial troubles.”
Hawkins burst into the library. “The gun’s there, chief. There are beautiful prints on it, too. I’m not going to attempt to move it yet. I want to photograph that little blue steel squirrel in its nest. It was jerked up into the old squirrel’s nest by a fine steel wire, and a small coil drum. It looked like a specially made contraption to do that one job. OK for me to get a hook and ladder company out here? We can get photographs from the raised ladders.”
“Go to it, Hawkins,” the chief said. “You ready to talk, Mr Bogart? You’ve got to talk if I spend the rest of the week in an outlying police station taking you apart. You have a workshop and laboratory here in the house, and you probably manufactured your own props. I’m going to have an airtight case against you before I book you. Going to talk willingly?”
A look of fear crossed the older man’s face. “I should have my lawyer.”
“You’ll get him after you make a statement. To begin with, how did you get the gun when Corinne was murdered? Where did you hide it?”
“I found it in the chair where Pamela dropped it. Temporarily, I hid it behind the seat of the family doctor’s car when he came to examine Corinne. He drove away with it. I recovered it a few days later. My first idea was to protect Pamela. The scandal—”
“Later,” Jeff prompted, “you decided to cash in.”
“Pamela was a murderess; she didn’t deserve to live.”
“Besides, you needed the money. You were afraid to dip into her trust fund because of the courts and the bonding company. You wouldn’t denounce her to the police because of the publicity and also because you thought you’d be indicted, too, as an accessory after the fact.”
“Something like that.”
“Come on, Smitty, let’s go.”
“But, Jeff, why the silver bullet?”
“It didn’t have to be silver. It could have been copper, or maybe eight or ten-carat gold. The bullet had to be made of a metal soft enough to form a temporary seal to back up the compressed air in the pistol, and hard enough to penetrate a body. Pamela never thought of a dart. Silver happened to be handy. Besides, it was bizarre, showy, and all the Bogarts go for that. Pamela’s tricks, Wendell Bogart’s showing off with darts, the sodium flash.”
“Jeff, don’t let’s take any more criminal cases unless they are—”
“No more at all! Let’s go.”
A REAL NICE GUY
William F. Nolan
Warm sun.
A summer afternoon.
The sniper emerged from the roof door, walking easily, carrying a custom-leather guncase.
Opened the case.
Assembled the weapon.
Loaded it.
Sighted the street below.
Adjusted the focus.
Waited.
There was no hurry.
No hurry at all.
He was famous, yet no one knew his name. There were portraits of him printed in dozens of newspapers and magazines; he’d even made the cover of Time. But no one had really seen his face. The portraits were composites, drawn by frustrated police artists, based on the few misleading descriptions given by witnesses who claimed to have seen him leaving a building or jumping from a roof, or driving from the target area in a stolen automobile. But no two descriptions matched.
One witness described a chunky man of average height with a dark beard and cap. Another described a thin, extremely tall man with a bushy head of hair and a thick moustache. A third description pegged him as balding, paunchy and wearing heavy hornrims. On Time’s cover, a large bloodsoaked question mark replaced his features – above the words WHO IS HE?
Reporters had given him many names: “The Phantom Sniper” . . . “The Deadly Ghost” . . . “The Silent Slayer” . . . and his personal favorite, “The Master of Whispering Death”. This was often shortened to “Deathmaster”, but he liked the full title; it was fresh and poetic – and accurate.
He was a master. He never missed a target, never wasted a shot. He was cool and nerveless and smooth, and totally without conscience. And death indeed whispered from his silenced weapon: a dry snap of the trigger, a muffled pop, and the target dropped as though struck down by the fist of God.
They were always targets, never people. Men, women, children. Young, middle-aged, old. Strong ones. Weak ones. Healthy or crippled. Black or white. Rich or poor. Targets – all of them.
He considered himself a successful sharpshooter, demonstrating his unique skill in a world teeming with three billion moving targets placed there for his amusement. Day and night, city by city, state by state, they were always there, ready for his gun, for the sudden whispering death from its barrel. An endless supply just for him.
Each city street was his personal shooting gallery.
But he was careful. Very, very careful. He never killed twice in the same city. He switched weapons. He never used a car more than once. He never wore the same clothes twice on a shoot. Even the shoes would be discarded; he wore a fresh pair for each target run. And, usually, he was never seen at all.
He thought of it as a sport.
A game.
A run.
A vocation.
A skill.
But never murder.
His name was Jimmie Prescott and he was thirty-one years of age. Five foot ten. Slight build. Platform shoes could add three inches and body-pillows up to fifty pounds. He had thinning brown hair framing a bland, unmemorable face and shaved twice daily – but the case of wigs, beards and moustaches he always carried easily disguised the shape of his mouth, chin and skull. Sometimes he would wear a skin-colored fleshcap for baldness, or use heavy glasses – though his sight was perfect. Once, for a lark, he had worn a black eye-patch. He would walk in a crouch, or stride with a sailor’s swagger, or assume a limp. Each disguise amused him, helped make life more challenging. Each was a small work of art, flawlessly executed.
Jimmie was a perfectionist.
And he was clean: no police record. Never arrested. No set of his prints on file, no dossier.
He had a great deal of money (inherited) with no need or inclination to earn more. He had spent his lifetime honing his considerable skills: he was an expert on weaponry, car theft, body-combat, police procedures; he made it a strict rule to memorize the street system of each city he entered before embarking on a shoot. And once his target was down he knew exactly how to leave the area. The proper escape route was essential.
Jimmie was a knowledgeable historian in his field: he had made a thorough study of snipers, and held them all in cold contempt. Not a worthwhile one in the lot. They deserved to be caught; they were fools and idiots and blunderers, often acting out of neurotic impulse or psychotic emotion. Even the hired professionals drew Jimmie’s ire – since these were men who espoused political causes or who worked for government money. Jimmie had no cause, nor would he ever allow himself to be bought like a pig on the market.
He considered himself quite sane. Lacking moral conscience, he did not suffer from a guilt complex. Nor did he operate from a basic hatred of humankind, as did so many of the warped criminals he had studied.
Basically, Jimmie liked people, got alone fine with them on a casual basis. He hated no one. (Except his parents, but they were long dead and something he did not think about any more.) He was incapable of love or friendship, but felt no need for either. Jimmie depended only on himself; he had learned to do that from childhood. He was, therefore, a loner by choice, and made it a rule (Jimmie had many rules) never to date the same female twice, no matter how sexually appealing she might be. Man-woman relationships were a weakness, a form of dangerous self-indulgence he carefully avoided.
In sum, Jimmie Prescott didn’t need anyone. He had himself, his skills, his weapons and his targets. More than enough for a full, rich life. He did not drink or smoke. (Oh, a bit of vintage wine in a good restaurant was always welcome, but he had never been drunk in his life. You savor good wine; you don’t wallow in it
.) He jogged each day, morning and evening, and worked out twice a week in the local gym in whatever city he was visiting. A trim, healthy body was an absolute necessity in his specialized career. Jimmie left nothing to chance. He was not a gambler and took no joy in risk.
A few times things had been close: a roof door which had jammed shut in Detroit after a kill, forcing him to make a perilous between-buildings leap . . . an engine that died during a police chase in Portland, causing him to abandon his car and win the pursuit on foot . . . an intense struggle with an off-duty patrolman in Kansas City who’d witnessed a shot. The fellow had been tough and dispatching him was physically difficult; Jimmie finally snapped his neck – but it had been close.
He kept a neat, handwritten record of each shoot in his tooled-leather notebook: state, city, name of street, weather, time of day, sex, age and skin color of target. Under “Comments”, he would add pertinent facts, including the make and year of the stolen car he had driven, and the type of disguise he had utilized. Each item of clothing worn was listed. And if he experienced any problem in exiting the target area this would also be noted. Thus, each shoot was critically analyzed upon completion – as a football coach might dissect a game after it had been played.
The only random factor was the target. Pre-selection spoiled the freshness, the purity of the act. Jimmie liked to surprise himself. Which shall it be: that young girl in red, laughing up at her boyfriend? The old newsman on the corner? The school kid skipping homeward with books under his arm? Or, perhaps, the beefy, bored truckdriver, sitting idly in his cab, waiting for the light to change?
Selection was always a big part of the challenge.
And this time . . .
A male. Strong-looking. Well dressed. Businessman with a briefcase, in his late forties. Hair beginning to silver at the temples. He’d just left the drugstore; probably stopped there to pick up something for his wife. Maybe she’d called to remind him at lunch.
Moving toward the corner. Walking briskly.
Yes, this one. By all means, this one.
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 72