Michael Gray Novels

by Henry Kuttner

  “He—he thought he had something on me.” Quigley’s voice was thick and low. “But I didn’t do it. You’re wrong. Dennis was the one!”

  He began to drum with his fist on the table. She could see the veins in his neck and forehead stand out now, and his forehead was wet.

  “Dennis hasn’t got the guts,” she said. “The police don’t really think he did it, Roger. Not for a minute. They haven’t stopped looking. They’re digging every minute, looking for mistakes you’ve made. Just one’s all they need. You’ve got to have help, Roger, before it’s—”

  “Shut up!” he said. “I’m telling you, Joyce!”

  “—before it’s too late,” she went on relentlessly. “You have to tell me! I have to know!”

  “All right, God damn it!” He smashed both fists on the table and glared up at her in hate and rage, his face crimson. “I did it! I killed them! I killed them both! Now are you satisfied? Now will you shut up!”

  Joyce breathed out softly, a long, gentle sigh.

  “Yes,” she said in a low voice. “Now I’ll stop. I just need to know one more thing. I have to find out. When you killed Oliver—why did you do it?” She hesitated. “Were you jealous, Roger?”

  He seemed to think about it for a moment. As if his outburst had drained him of emotion, he sat with his head sunk between his shoulders, his jaw slack. Slowly he shook his head.

  “No. It wasn’t jealousy.”

  Joyce drew her breath in again through open lips, a sound that hissed just a little. That had been the wrong answer. The other one could still have saved him.

  She looked for one last moment at his bent head. Then she turned with a smooth, efficient motion and took down the heavy meat-pounding mallet from the rack above the sink. Her motion was so matter-of-fact that it hardly caught his attention. He wasn’t even looking directly at her when the blow fell.

  Too late, he tried to turn. Albano, he remembered oddly enough, had made exactly the same motion, trying too late to dodge the crashing of the iron pipe.

  The mallet struck the side of his head and a white blaze that stunned and blinded him sprang out around the point of impact.

  He heard china crash and shatter. He felt the searing splash of coffee across his neck. He was falling….

  A strange and distant voice was crying hysterically in his ear, “I loved him. Did you know I loved him?” But Quigley was on his knees on the floor, his head ringing so loudly he could hardly hear her voice rising to a harsh scream.

  “God damn you to hell!”

  He wasn’t anywhere at all. He swung in dizzy swoops through alternate cycles of light and dark.

  The swooping slowed. He was coming back to awareness. He clawed for support and found the table edge. It wouldn’t take his weight. He felt it tip toward him, crash over. Food and dishes clattered across the floor. The way it was with Albano.

  But not the same way. He was still alive. And his head was clearing a little bit. His groping hand found the upset table and he pulled himself to his feet, supported by its edges. He stood there swaying and blinking.

  “Joyce?” he said thickly.

  There was no answer. She had gone—somewhere. He thought, “The little fool. The damned little fool. Once you start you have to finish them off….” And now he had to finish her.

  He lurched to the sink and turned on the cold water full force. He put his head under the stream and let the shock of it pull him back to full consciousness.

  He had only one thought now. I’ve got to catch her. I can’t let her get away.

  When he turned off the water he heard the sound of a car’s motor wheezing and dying from outside. He grinned a cold, lopsided grin. Joyce always killed the motor when she tried to start in a hurry.

  So he’d only been out a moment, after all.

  “Thank God it’s dark,” he thought, and ran through the house with long, light strides, hardly feeling the pain in his head.

  She was so intent on getting the car started that she actually didn’t see him come at all. She was sobbing, open-mouthed, the tears running streaky with mascara down her cheeks, as she switched the ignition on and off and stamped the accelerator angrily.

  Quigley tore open the car door and threw himself sidewise across the seat of the big convertible, reaching for her. When she felt the seat sag under his weight she looked up at last, blurrily through tears, too intent on the single job of starting the car to be aware of her danger.

  Then she saw him. She caught a deep breath to scream, her mouth stretched wide for it. Quigley grinned a fierce grin and balled his fist. His blow smashed against the side of her head in the same spot where she had struck him with the mallet. He hoped savagely that he’d smashed in her skull.

  She fell forward with a whimper across the wheel. There was a sudden, incredible moment of silence and peace around them. Quigley sat breathing hard, every sense vividly alert.

  Who had seen them? Who had been watching? It was too much to hope that he had got away with it unseen, here at the curb almost directly under the streetlight. He grinned, remembering a maxim of his adolescence. If you want to park with a girl, park right under the streetlight. There’s a cone of shadow down there that hides a multitude of sins. It looks innocent, and nobody can see inside the car.

  How little he had ever thought he would want that cone of shadow to park with a dead woman beside him….

  Joyce stirred a little and whimpered again.

  Not dead, then. Not yet.

  And he wasn’t out of the woods. The streetlight trick doesn’t work in an open car like this one. There’s no roof to cast a shadow. Anybody coming by would see Joyce lying on the seat. Anybody looking from a window would see her.

  Somebody laughed a little distance off. Feet scraped on the cement. Quigley whirled. About half a block away a man and a girl were walking slowly toward him. Had they seen what happened? Were they laughing at what might have looked like a family scrap?

  Blood was running down Joyce’s cheek, darkening the pale curls above her temple. The couple couldn’t miss seeing her when they came even with the car. And he didn’t dare drive off with a sight like that beside him, through traffic.

  The trunk compartment. That was the answer.

  He slid out of the car with desperate haste, unlocked the back, lifted the lid high. It would screen what he was doing from the on-coming couple. But if anybody was watching from the windows, he was finished.

  He had to take the chance.

  He hauled Joyce’s slight body out from under the wheel. She felt nearly weightless in his arms. With the car between him and the people on the sidewalk he carried Joyce’s limp weight past the left fender, around the rear wheel. With a heave he tossed her deep into the cavernous trunk. There wasn’t time to do worse to her than that, now. He could only hope her head struck something solid.

  He slammed the lid down hard.

  Then he stood still a moment, trembling with reaction he couldn’t fully indulge, yet. He was safe, for now. Unless that couple had seen too much. Even if they had, maybe he could get out of here before they came even with him.

  He found himself in the driver’s seat without remembering how, reaching for the key Joyce had left in the ignition. The motor caught on the second try and the car heaved into softly purring life under him.

  In the same moment, headlights suddenly bathed him from behind. The purr of another powerful engine drew up behind him in the night. He tilted the rearview mirror to turn the blinding reflection away. Then a car door slammed. A bulky form moved toward him on the street side.

  He knew Captain Zucker’s outlines and the big, seamed face in the streetlight reflections. God damn the lousy luck….

  But they didn’t know anything. They couldn’t prove a thing. Evidence under hypnosis is something any good lawyer could laugh out of court. Surely, surely that had to be true.

  “Quigley?” Zucker’s deep voice asked.

  “What do you want?” Quigley’s foot trembled
on the accelerator.

  “Mind getting out? I’d like to talk to you.”

  The scrape of footsteps on the sidewalk was very near now. The couple was only a few steps away. If they’d seen anything—if they asked any questions—or if Joyce inside the trunk woke enough to start pounding—

  Quigley couldn’t wait for them. He couldn’t take the chance. He’d pushed his luck to its outside limit already.

  Zucker’s hand closed on the door handle. “Well?” Zucker said.

  Quigley jammed down his foot.

  With a heavy roar the big car leaped forward. Its rush spun Zucker around, wrenching his wrist violently. For a moment he stood there reeling in the street, dazed by the noise and the shock. Gray and the police driver were already halfway out of the parked police car. Gray saw Zucker reaching for his gun awkwardly, with his left hand.

  “Stop him, Harry!” Gray shouted. “Go on—stop him!”

  Zucker let the gun drop back in its holster.

  “I haven’t got any proof. I can’t shoot the guy.” He grimaced, looking down at his arm. “But I’ll kill him when I get my hands on him,” he added. “I think he broke my wrist.”

  30

  For a split second Gray stood on the curb, staring after the diminishing lights of the convertible. He had had one short glimpse into the inside of the big car while Quigley was in the very act of accelerating it into action. There had been something on the front seat that touched Gray’s mind briefly as an incongruity. A handbag, that was it. A woman’s handbag on the front seat. It meant nothing—did it? A woman can forget, leave her purse in the car. Gray pushed the thought out of his mind, irritated with himself for wasting time on trifles now.

  Zucker was already scrambling into the front seat of the police car, nursing his wrist and swearing as he went. The driver gunned the motor to life. Gray whirled and ducked inside. He made it just in time. The forward lurch of the car threw him back against the cushions. Then they were roaring off down the dark streets after the taillights of the convertible.

  The couple on the sidewalk, astonished, watched them go.

  Above the police car its siren growled into life, deep at first and then rising to full voice that wailed stunningly from wall to wall along the quiet street. Ahead of them, Quigley’s lights leaped forward, galvanized, as the convertible picked up speed. He swung sharply around a corner, wheels squealing on the pavement.

  Zucker pulled up the mike with his good hand and barked orders into it. The loudspeaker answered with calm, metallic precision. In the next few minutes, Gray knew, squad cars all over this area would be alerted, the same calm, metal voice giving them the description and probable course of the fleeing convertible. It couldn’t get far, even if they lost it.

  But why had Quigley taken off like that, anyhow?

  Gray, bracing himself as the car swung around the corner in pursuit, scowled in the dark, unable to guess the answer. Panic? Maybe. But it didn’t seem to fit the rest of Quigley’s behavior. Even if Karen had named him as the killer, that wasn’t the kind of proof that would send even a guilty man in headlong flight like this. Did Quigley think they’d found some hidden evidence they really knew nothing about? Possibly. It seemed the best answer yet.

  But something kept nagging at the back of Gray’s mind as they roared down the street. That purse on the front seat. A sound he might have heard just before they drove up behind Quigley—he couldn’t place it, but it seemed to link up somehow with the purse. And one more thing, a sense of uneasiness he’d had about Quigley some time ago, in some connection he hadn’t time now to ravel out. The siren kept wailing, the car lurched, the red taillights ahead of them kept their even distance.

  Gray leaned forward toward the front seat.

  “What do you think now, Harry?”

  Zucker didn’t glance back. “I think I want to ask him a lot of questions,” he said with restraint.

  “You still think Champion’s your man?”

  “Go to hell,” Zucker said.

  Gray grinned and leaned back. Quigley’s car was weaving a little now and then, as if its driver couldn’t make up his mind whether to take the next corner or not. Gray shut his eyes briefly, trying to remember whether he had seen blood in a dark smear across the side of Quigley’s head in the quick glimpse he had had of the man. He thought he had seen it. Was Quigley groggy? And for God’s sake, what had been happening to send him running like this before a word of threat was uttered?

  Something had happened. Quigley wasn’t running blind. He had a purpose of some kind. A desperate purpose, to be accomplished in a hurry, before—what? A sense of urgency had begun to swell in Gray’s mind, a formless urgency he couldn’t understand.

  This couldn’t go on very long. That seemed certain. The traffic was in a lull at this hour, but sooner or later Quigley was going to have to crash through a stream of stop-light traffic or run into some roadblock he couldn’t pass. And one of the alerted squad cars should be cutting in on him any minute now.

  Where was he heading? Why, why was he running?

  They thundered along a stretch of business section, seeing all the traffic freeze in its tracks as the siren halted everything within earshot except the one roaring fugitive. Far in front of them they could see Quigley’s hunched shoulders as he bent over the wheel and drove the convertible desperately, at headlong speed, east toward—what?

  Toward the Bay, Gray realized.

  But then what? Then he’d have to stop, or swing parallel to the water one way or the other. It didn’t make sense.

  The lights of the business district streaked by them and faded. They were heading away from the brighter streets now, racing along darker and steeper ways toward the water. Now the unlighted bulk of warehouses began to loom up along them, lining the jetties from which the wharves jutted out into the dark Bay. Labyrinths of dark streets whipped by, punctuated with flashing glimpses of the steep slopes mounting the hills. The lights of apartment houses sparkled between buildings, looking ready to topple unsteadily downhill toward them.

  The car ahead screamed around a turn on two wheels. The patrol car wrenched itself around after it. Now the two were hurtling along a street lined with warehouses on one side, and on the other—

  Nothing.

  Their headlights swept the railing of the jetty and touched the sullen gleaming of the waves. The tide was on the turn, sweeping powerfully through the Golden Gate, and the deep surges caught the headlights in glancing ridges. Farther ahead were piers and wharves. But here only emptiness bordered the street.

  Suddenly something flashed in the light ahead of them as it flew from Quigley’s car and sailed in a long arc to splash in the water.

  “What the hell was that?” Zucker said.

  Gray had a quick vision of the woman’s handbag that had lain on the seat beside the driver. A patent-leather handbag that would catch the light with just that rich, black gleam. He glanced backward at the surging current. There wasn’t a chance of recovering it, whatever it had been. The purse? Why …?

  Zucker said suddenly to the driver, “Slow down a little. I’m going to try to stop him. This is the place for it, anyhow. No bystanders.”

  He leaned out of the window, carefully steadying his left hand with his injured right, leveling his gun. The sharp bark of the gun slammed through the screaming of the siren. Zucker swore and fired a second time before Gray could tell whether he had missed.

  From ahead the explosion of a bursting tire told them all the second shot had hit its target. The convertible rocked wildly, tilted up sidewise as Quigley fought the wheel. The right rear tire had blown out, and the car, brakes screaming, lurched to a staggering stop.

  At the same moment their siren’s screaming was answered by another high, approaching wail and the flash of oncoming headlights burst upon them from a cross-street. A spotlight came on. The second squad car had found them at last. Its red light flashing, it drew up and stopped thirty feet beyond Quigley, just as Zucker’s car brak
ed to a halt behind the convertible, hemming it in.

  Quigley had slewed wildly around toward the water, tottered on the very verge of overturning in the street, and righted his car with a tremendous effort.

  Then, for a moment, everyone sat still. It wasn’t clear what Quigley would do next.

  He sat motionless behind the wheel, possibly a little dazed. Zucker grunted, “Mike, stay here,” and snapped the door open on his side. The driver hit the street at the same moment, gun ready. The two of them advanced on the quiet Quigley. Gray saw the other squad car doors open and two more officers came out into the blocked street, closing in on the convertible.

  Gray got out too. He wasn’t sure why. There was something wrong here that he couldn’t identify. But he was on the verge of it. That purse thrown out into the ocean in a sailing arc. Why? Because its owner wouldn’t be needing it any more? Because Quigley didn’t want it found with him in the car, didn’t want any questions asked about the owner when he was captured? Why not? Where was the owner?

  Zucker shouted, “All right, Quigley! Out of that car! Come out with your hands up.”

  Quigley didn’t move. He seemed—oddly, Gray thought—to be listening. Not to Zucker. To something subtler, a smaller, nearer sound.

  Gray stepped forward, trying to understand.

  Did he hear a faint, faint thumping noise?

  Quigley bent forward suddenly, with a look of resolution in the set of his shoulders. The convertible roared again into noisy life. Zucker shouted and fired a shot into the air.

  Quigley ignored him. The headlights’ sweep illumined a broad wharf just in front of the car, a blind escape route leading two or three hundred feet out into the Bay. The convertible lurched forward, lumbering on its ruined tire, picking up speed heavily as it went.

  But the wharf was a dead end. It couldn’t mean escape.

  Then what did it mean, to Quigley?

  Was he going to drive off the end of the wharf? There was no sense at all in that. Even if he had suicide in mind, what good would it do? The car was a convertible, the top down. He would float free. The tide was strong here, but the chances of his escape by swimming—or even by drowning—seemed remote.