Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  “Yes?” Gray said.

  “It was Pollard’s office I was leaving,” Herrick said, his voice flat.

  Gray whistled softly.

  “What did Melissa say?” he asked. “You remember?”

  “Not exactly. Something like—oh—‘Hello there, sorry I’m late.’ Gray, do you think—” He paused again. “Did she mistake me for somebody after all? Gray, do Pollard and I look that much alike, with the light behind us?”

  Gray let the question hang between them for a moment. He was whistling silently to himself, and thinking, “Either this is a very smart cooky or we’ve really got something here.”

  Finally, with restraint, he said, “It’s possible, isn’t it? There’s a likeness…”

  After Gray had laid down the phone, he sat there looking straight before him, thinking hard. Then he grinned, took up the phone and dialed another number. He heard the ringing go on for some while. Then Quine’s heavy voice said irritably, “Hello?”

  “This is Michael Gray. Did I wake you?”

  “Yes, God damn it, you did. What’s the trouble?”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but this won’t wait. I think I know who killed Beverly Bond. It’s just a hypothesis, but I need your help to test it. I want to set up a trap for our man tomorrow morning.”

  “Who?” Quine’s voice was suddenly wide awake.

  “Neil Pollard,” Gray said.

  Silence at the other end. Then Quine said cautiously, “Go on.”

  “I’ll give you a quick run-through now,” Gray told him. “We can go into details later. I think this is the way it could have happened. You remember Melissa Lowe, Beverly’s sister? I think Melissa somehow got some kind of photographic evidence against Pollard she could use for blackmail. She went up to Pollard’s office to make her contact. I’ve got evidence to place her there and to suggest she knew him by sight. I think he tried later to get the evidence away from her by burglarizing her apartment. An accomplice killed her and from then on Pollard was guilty of murder. He was on the spot when she died.

  “He didn’t get the evidence. I think Melissa’s sister, Beverly, did get it. And she began to play the same game, extorting money from him by holding the photograph over his head. He’s hypersensitive to bad publicity. He’d pay—up to a point. I think when he had his talk with Beverly in the Silver Slipper Saturday night, he made an appointment to meet her at her apartment. For some reason he’d decided not to go along any more with the blackmail. Maybe her demands got too high.

  “He went to her place. He killed her. He started to search for the pictures. Then Eileen began knocking at the door. He set fire to the apartment in a last attempt to destroy the pictures along with everything else there. He dropped Eileen’s earring by the body, maybe accidentally, maybe not. He went out by the fire escape.

  “He thought he was covered when Eileen confessed. But then Ferguson confessed, too, and that really threw him, because Ferguson was along on the night Melissa was killed. At any moment, Ferguson might start talking about what really happened. So he killed Ferguson, too. And because I’d had some long talks with Ferguson and he was afraid what I might have learned, he wanted to kill me, too. He didn’t make it that time. He may try again, if he’s pushed.”

  Gray paused. “Well,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Quine cleared his throat. “I don’t know yet. I’m Still thinking. What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Gray said. “Here it is…”

  20

  The bright sunlight of a fresh-washed morning flooded Quine’s desk, where a scatter of stiff cardboard sheets lay. On each sheet were two photographs of a man’s face, one profile, one full view. And on each sheet was a number. Quine riffled through them, scowling.

  “These boys aren’t local, are they?” he asked Gray. “I don’t know any of them.”

  Gray was looking at a sheet of paper with numbers typed on it to correspond with the numbers on the cards. Opposite the numbers had been typed a series of felonies. Number One was Kidnaping. Two was Robbery. Three was Extortion. And so on. There were seven numbers and seven faces.

  “No,” Gray said, smiling a little. “Not exactly local.” He looked up. “You’ve talked to Pollard?”

  Quine nodded dubiously. “I don’t like this much,” he said. “If you’re wrong—if this fool scheme backfires—I never even heard about it.”

  “It can’t do any harm,” Gray said. “You and Dan Abel and I are the only ones who know. What did you tell Pollard?”

  “Said I was trying to get an identification. On somebody who was at the Silver Slipper the night Beverly Bond was killed. An outsider, I said, but a man with a record. I claimed I’d got some leads that pointed to this fellow as a possibility, but I’d need more evidence before I went to the police. I said I’d had one identification, and if he could pick the same man, I could turn the thing over to Zucker and get the guy pulled in.” Quine shrugged. “He wasn’t too eager.”

  “But he’ll play along?”

  Quine tipped ashes into a big tray on the desk beside him.

  “Due here any minute.” He flicked a rather disdainful finger at the stack of cardboard pages. “Just what do you expect to find out with this—this picturebook project, anyhow?”

  “Not much,” Gray said. “Not from the pictures “themselves. Pollard’s reactions to them may show us something. Unless I’m away off in what I’m thinking, Pollard’s a guy with a hell of a lot to hide. My guess is he was being blackmailed about something. I’d like to try to startle him into giving me a clue to what it was. I may not get anywhere. But even if I don’t”—Gray paused—“well, we’ll see. Maybe I can scare him.”

  “How?”

  “He won’t take any psychological tests knowingly. He’s too afraid of what he might give away. But if I can trick him into a test and then let him know he’s been tricked, maybe he’ll panic.”

  “If you’re right, you’re crazy,” Quine said. “I’d hate to panic a killer, myself.”

  “The trick’s to keep one jump ahead,” Gray told him. “This is how I figure it. The killer set fire to Beverly Bond’s apartment because he couldn’t find something he thought was there. So as a last resort, he wanted to destroy it But he couldn’t have known whether it burned or not. He must still be wondering. If I can make Pollard think we’ve found something, he’ll try to get at it. But he’s cagey. He’ll cover his tracks.

  “That’s where the panic comes in. I want to scare him out of his caginess. If he thinks he’s taken a psychological test and given himself away—well, I hope he’ll start making mistakes.” Gray shrugged. “It’s worth trying,” he said.

  Quine grunted and puffed at his cigar.

  “Interesting to watch, anyhow,” he conceded. “If he doesn’t bite—well, no harm done, I guess.” He looked down at the pictures spread out on his desk. “What is this, anyhow? How does it work?”

  “It’s based on the Szondi test,” Gray said. “There’s still a lot of argument about how valid the Szondi really is. But it’s the only one I could think of that we could use to trick Pollard this way, without his knowing it’s a test—until we want him to know.

  “Dan Abel helped me work this fake version of it out. In the real Szondi, we have pictures of people who suffer from various kinds of emotional illness. The theory is that you react significantly to disorders that match up with your own traits. You’re asked to pick out the faces that you like or dislike most. After that, it gets complex. And really, of course, it takes a lot of tests, over a period, plus other tests, to give a valid answer.”

  “Give me an example of how it works.” Quine picked up a picture. “This fellow looks like a sick bloodhound. What’s his diagnosis, involutional melancholia? I don’t like him—What does that mean?”

  Gray gave Quine a slightly ironic glance.

  “I don’t know. I said it takes a lot of testing. And besides these aren’t the kind of pictures a valid Szondi would use. I picked
them myself, with something else in mind. Offhand I’d say your reaction could mean you’re an expressive sort of guy, an acting-out type, a—”

  “A ham,” Quine filled in with a deep chuckle. “You don’t need any tests to see that.”

  “But it might also mean you’ve got a lot of inner tendencies to melancholy, passivity, isolationism. Tendencies you reject in yourself and condemn in others whenever you recognize them, consciously or not. There are other possibilities, too. But if it’s true, don’t look so worried—it wouldn’t make you abnormal. You’re in a profession that apparently fits your own needs.”

  Quine grunted. “Okay, so this helps you put the finger on Pollard. What if Pollard isn’t your man?”

  “Then I’ll dope out something to try on my next choice. I—”

  A small knock sounded at the door. A subdued-looking secretary put her head in.

  “Mr. Pollard to see you, Mr. Quine,” she said.

  Pollard looked at Gray with some surprise.

  Quine said, perhaps a little hastily, “I’m trying to get an identification from Mr. Gray, too.”

  “I thought the man was seen at the Silver Slipper,” Pollard said, gazing with some curiosity at the pictures spread out on the desk.

  “There’s just a chance he may have hung around in the crowd at the Bond apartment, too,” Quine said. Either he was thinking fast or he had thought his story through beforehand. “If he’s the killer, he had to be there that night. So was Gray. When there’s arson involved, especially, you can expect the firebug to hang around and watch the excitement. So Gray might have noticed him.”

  “Well—I might,” Gray said dubiously.

  “You can look over these mug shots anyhow,” Quine said. “If either of you sees a familiar face—fine. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll try to get in touch with the Donnellys. I want them to look at these pictures, too. I’ll try them later on Eileen.”

  He went quickly out of the room, not glancing back. Gray pushed the cardboard pages apart and studied them thoughtfully. Pollard came up and gazed down, too.

  “This sounds like a pretty long shot to me,” he said.

  “It is,” Gray said. “Still, you never know. I can’t say any of these look familiar.”

  Pollard, scanning the faces, shook his head.

  “I don’t place any of them either.”

  Gray said, “No. Mostly it was dark when I might have seen him. Still, on a thing like this, you probably can’t expect to make a certain identification. Consciously I may not remember seeing the guy, but unconsciously I may know him. There’s a fair chance that if you choose at random, it wouldn’t really be so random. That’s why hunches work sometimes. They’re based on unconscious knowledge.”

  Pollard was silent, scrutinizing the photographs.

  “As far as I know,” he said, “I’ve never seen any of these faces before, anywhere.”

  Gray said, “Well…” He pushed one photograph aside. His hand hesitated over another, then pushed it, too. “Not these two, anyhow. They don’t ring any bells at all. But this one, now—mm-m. And this one here—I can’t say I remember these faces. But there’s just a feeling. Okay, I choose these two. Now if the others pick the same two, or one of the same, it’ll narrow things down a little. Go on, it’s your turn.” He shuffled the pictures together and pushed them over to Pollard.

  Pollard’s hand hovered a moment. Then he spread them out and gazed down meditatively.

  “I picked four and five,” Gray said. “Let’s see what their records are.” He reached out and turned over the card with the typed numbers and charges. “Kidnaping and robbery,” he said. “I wonder.”

  “Let’s see that,” Pollard said, reaching for it.

  Gray said, “I’m just about to change my mind. Maybe second thoughts are better. I’m going to switch my vote.” His hand hovered over the pictures.

  Pollard was reading the list. He compared the photographs with the charges, his eyes darting from face to card to face. Gray watched him from the corner of his eye and poised his hand over picture Number Three. The crime on the card said Extortion.

  “Maybe this is the guy,” Gray said tentatively, his hand lowering.

  Pollard’s own hand shot out fast and with certainty. He picked up Number Six from the far corner and held it out before him.

  “That’s the man,” he said.

  Quine said, “Well, what does it prove?”

  Gray laughed. “Not a damned thing. I told you that. But it sure as hell suggests something, doesn’t it? I was trying to push Pollard into giving me a hint about what comes into his mind when the word ‘extortion’ is mentioned. I won’t say this proves anything. It doesn’t. But when I reached out to pick up the Extortion face, he grabbed a card at random. Well—almost at random.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want attention focused on extortion in any form. Hell, I doubt if he realized it himself. But he just felt like changing the subject fast when he saw me reaching for the Extortion card. He’d been studying the list. He knew which face was linked with which charge. And he reached for a special card. Not at random, really. It wasn’t nearest or easiest. He grabbed for Number Six.”

  “What did Number Six do?” Quine asked.

  Gray said slowly, looking puzzled, “Embezzlement. Embezzlement and fraud.”

  They looked at each other.

  “It’s almost like a word-association test,” Gray said. “When I said, ‘Extortion,’ he responded as fast as he could with, ’embezzlement and Fraud.’ But why?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean a damn thing,” Quine suggested unhelpfully.

  “Maybe not. But I’ve got to try it. This is all I have to go on. Fraud. Fraud. Wait a minute.” Gray shut his eyes, trying to remember. Scotch and soda—why did he connect fraud with the taste of scotch and soda?

  “Chris Bond!” he said suddenly, staring at Quine. “He was the one. He mentioned fraud—somebody who went to the penitentiary for fraud and died in the first year of his term.” Gray looked blank for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I’ll be damned. A McCreery! A relative of the McCreery brothers. What connection could there be there?”

  “You tell me,” Quine said. “What kind of fraud? When? Where?”

  Gray frowned at the desk. “I could find out,” he said. “At least, the library or one of the newspapers ought to have the story. May I use your phone?”

  Twenty minutes later Gray had it. He pushed the phone away and turned to Quine.

  “David McCreery was the name,” he said. “It happened right after World War Two. McCreery headed a fraudulent corporation that cheated the government on war contracts. He was convicted and died in jail. And the money—” Gray paused.

  “The money was never found,” he said.

  Again they looked at each other in speculation.

  “You mean he hid it?” Quine asked. “In cash? Was there a lot?”

  “Plenty. Just how much I don’t know. And what he did with it nobody knows, either. During his trial he wouldn’t talk, and they never found the bank accounts or safe-deposit boxes or wherever it was he stored the loot”

  They were silent briefly.

  “Well, what’s it got to do with Pollard?” Quine asked at last. “I don’t see—”

  “Maybe nothing,” Gray admitted. “That’s what I have to find out next.”

  “Money,” Quine said meditatively. “A lot of money. Do you think Beverly Bond had it? Was that what everybody’s been searching her place for?”

  Gray had a sudden vision of great bundles of bank notes and securities stacked in Beverly’s closets, going up in smoke as the apartment burned. He shook his head impatiently.

  “Pollard isn’t crazy. Nobody’s going to burn money deliberately. There’s got to be some other explanation.” He began to gather together the cardboard sheets with the photographs on them.

  “Maybe Pollard’s fraud and the McCreery fraud have no connection at all,” he said. “I’ve got t
o find out. I think it’s time I had a talk with the McCreery brothers…”

  “Wait a minute,” Quine said uneasily. “What about Pollard and your little trap? When does he find out he’s been tricked?”

  “Not till I’m ready to let him know,” Gray said. “Don’t worry. I won’t say a word until the trap’s set.” He stacked the cards together neatly. “I’ve got to return these,” he said.

  Quine looked curiously at the photographs.

  “Who is Number Six, anyhow?” he asked.

  Gray laughed. “The same guy as all the rest. They’re all pictures of the same man. An actor I know let me have them. He plays a lot of character roles.”

  When Pollard went back into his office that morning, walking slowly and looking preoccupied, the receptionist said, “Mr. Herrick’s been trying to reach you, Mr. Pollard.”

  Pollard nodded. “Call him back,” he said. “I’ll take it in my office.”

  He closed the door behind him and stood looking out over the city and chewing his lip uneasily.

  When the phone rang, he picked it up with a quick, nervous pounce.

  “Hello, Neil,” Philip Herrick’s voice said. “I’ve been trying to get you. We ought to have a talk before I see Senator Brewster today. Where have you been, anyhow?”

  “Over at Quine’s,” Pollard told him.

  “Something new?” Herrick’s voice was suddenly eager. “Is Eileen all right?”

  “Oh, yes. It wasn’t about her. Not directly, anyhow. Gray was there with Quine. We were—”

  “Were you taking some tests from Gray?” Herrick asked with great interest. “I’m waiting for a call from him myself about that. He said he wanted all of us to—”

  “No!” Pollard said sharply. “No, it wasn’t that. It was just—” Here his voice began to die slowly. “It was just…” he said again, and fell silent, staring at the desk unseeingly. Suddenly he slammed his hand down on the blotter hard. His face congested. “It was phony!” he said. “I know it was a set-up!”