Olivia said, with a meaningful glance at me, “That’s right, Paul. It was a prowler. I haven’t had time to see if anything is missing, and I haven’t anything worth stealing anyway. I can’t imagine what he was doing here, maybe just working from room to room.”
Her voice was cool and matter of fact. She was pretty damn good, I had to admit. She might have been clumsy yesterday evening but she was catching on fast.
I said in my innocent role, “Sure, but what about the cops? They like to be notified in cases like this. It’s a notion they have.”
She looked at the man on the bed. Her voice was tart. “I don’t really think Harold wants the folks back in Pensacola to read in the papers that he was shot in my hotel room in New Orleans, no matter how innocently he happened to be there.”
Mooney shook his head quickly. “No. Please. If we can avoid publicity—”
“I’m quite capable of fixing up a little bullet-hole,” Olivia said. “Now please open my bag, Paul, and get the bottle of peroxide, hydrogen peroxide, and the applicators... Oh, and twist up a towel or something for Harold to bite on when he feels like screaming, will you? We’re going to have to do this without anesthesia, and Harold is rather sensitive about pain, aren’t you, Harold? I mean, his own pain, of course.”
Her face was expressionless, but the peroxide bubbled viciously as it hit the raw flesh of the wound. Actually it doesn’t really sting, not like iodine or Merthiolate, but watching it you’d think you were being consumed alive. Mooney started by watching the proceedings bravely enough, but he quickly turned his face away, looking sick.
“So much for the preliminaries,” Olivia said calmly. “Now we’re going to have to go in and clean it thoroughly. Fortunately the bullet went clear through, but it may have carried along dirt or scraps of cloth... All right, Paul.”
She made a sharp little gesture. I was in position; I had the twisted towel in both hands, like a garrote. I got it between his teeth as he opened his mouth to yell, and I held it there. It wasn’t the first time I’d helped patch up a guy when silence was necessary. Presently he fainted, which was nice for everybody.
“There,” Olivia said at last, completing a neat white dressing that covered both entry and exit holes. She grimaced. “I look as if I’d been sticking pigs, don’t I?” Her voice was light.
I said, “Cut it out. You don’t have to impress me, and he’s out cold. I don’t like working with screwballs, Doc. Don’t let this vengeance kick get out of hand.”
She looked at me across the bed. “What do you mean?” she asked innocently.
“What’s this about not having any anesthetic? I bet you could have squirted something into him to make it easier if you’d wanted to.”
She turned away and went to the bathroom door and looked back. “Why should I want to make it easy for him, my dear?” she asked quietly. “Bring him to and get him out of here. He’s doctor enough to know how to treat it while it heals, I hope. Tell him I hope he has the decency not to try to see me or speak to me again. Not that decency is a word I’d normally associate with him!”
She went into the bathroom and pulled the door closed behind her.
I cleaned up around the place, wiping the phone and doorknob where she’d left traces, and making a bundle of the stained towels. They presented no problem. Everybody swipes hotel towels. Finally I took a careful look around and saw where the bullet had ended up in the plaster wall after passing through Mooney’s arm. I dug it out with my knife, fingered it—a .22—and dropped it into my pocket. By the time I was through, the patient was beginning to stir uneasily. I went over to him. He opened his eyes to look at me.
“She says you’ll live, much to her regret,” I said. “Let’s get your jacket on and I’ll see you to your room. But first I’d like a run-down on what happened. You say there was a man in the bathroom?”
Mooney licked his lips. “Yes. Olivia went in there for her toothbrush or something. I heard her gasp; then she was backing out stiffly as if she’d just missed stepping on a snake. This man followed her in. He had a little tiny pistol. It looked like a toy. He had tremendous hands.”
“Go on,” I said.
“He was a big man,” Mooney said. “He made us stand against the wall over there. He looked at me and asked who the hell I was. He seemed very annoyed with me for being there. I told him my name and I told him... well, I protested against his manner. He was really very rude and overbearing. I told him...” He stopped.
I looked at the man on the bed wearily. He still smelled of that virile, masculine shaving lotion. Nowadays we men are supposed to smell pretty, too. I remembered a number of good men I’d known who’d generally smelled of sweat or horses or fast-car lubricants, sometimes of smokeless powder or that acrid variation the British call cordite. I felt old and tired.
“I know,” I said gently. “Oh, I know. You told him he couldn’t get away with it.”
Mooney looked startled. “Why, yes! How did you know?”
“Because that’s how damn fools always get themselves shot, trying to sound brave at the point of a gun,” I said. “If you’d kept your trap shut, you probably wouldn’t have got hurt. They ought to have a high-school course in not talking back to a man with a gun. It might save more lives than driving lessons.”
“I couldn’t believe he’d be crazy enough to really shoot!” Mooney protested. “I mean, it was so pointless. What did it gain him?”
I said, “Well, for one thing, it shut you up, didn’t it?” Kroch had obviously been on edge. Listening to the pompous grandstanding of an amateur hero had been too much. Well, it showed that the opposition was subject to nerves and irritability like anybody else; it also showed he didn’t kid around much. But it didn’t explain his motive for being there. Obviously Mooney’s presence had surprised and annoyed him. The question was, had he been waiting for Olivia, hoping to catch her alone, or had he hoped to catch me, too?
I picked up Mooney’s jacket. The holes were almost invisible in the thick tweed, and what blood there was, was on the inside.
“On your feet,” I said. “Let’s get this on you so you look respectable. Our prowler friend didn’t happen to indicate what he was looking for in here, did he?”
“No. No, he didn’t give any intimation... Ahh, that hurts!”
I had to steady him and work the jacket on gently; then, when we reached his room, I had to help him off with it again. I looked at him sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, pale and sick in his stained, half-sleeveless shirt, and I knew I’d been wrong about him. He wasn’t our man.
I don’t mean we’re all heroes; I don’t mean we’re all iron men. But he wasn’t acting and he hadn’t been acting—he wasn’t that good; and they use a little harder material for agents than Dr. Harold Mooney had displayed this morning. This wasn’t a man you’d send out to run the terrible risks involved in committing murder on signal. Olivia had been right. He was just a handsome phony.
I said, “Olivia says she doesn’t want to see or hear from you again. We’re getting married, you know.”
“Yes.” He licked his lips. “Yes, she told me. Just before that man—”
“In case you’re wondering,” I said, “in case you have the remotest little idea resembling, shall we say, blackmail or anything like that, I’d better tell you that I know all about it, you and her. There’s nothing you can threaten her with, because she’s already told me everything. I know I’m getting something pretty good, and I know I’m getting it on the rebound, and I don’t give a damn...”
Well, you can complete the parting speech for yourself. I was the sterling character willing to forgive the poor girl one mistake; I was also the dissipated rounder reformed by a woman’s love. Maybe it was inconsistent but it sounded swell. We parted on a very high plane indeed. When I got back to Olivia’s room, she was scrubbed and dressed and her bags were packed.
“How is he?” she asked.
I said, “I’m sorry I kept you waiting, but it took a
little time to find the pliers.”
She frowned quickly. “Pliers?”
“Sure,” I said. “To pull out his fingernails and toenails by the roots. Wasn’t that what you wanted? I had the iron heating while I did it so I wouldn’t waste any time burning out his eyes afterwards—”
“Damn you,” she said. “What are you talking about? I didn’t hurt him deliberately. Well, not much.” I didn’t say anything. She looked down. “Paul,” she whispered.
“Yes, Doc?”
“I still love him. You know that, don’t you?”
“Sure,” I said, “but the way you show it, I hope to hell I can keep you hating me. Come on, we’ve got a date to get married, remember?”
13
We got the job done in a small town in Alabama, the name doesn’t matter. It wasn’t the fanciest wedding I’d ever had. I went the cutaway-and-white-satin route once. To be strictly accurate, it was right after the war and I was in uniform—the first time I’d worn my soldier suit in almost four years. What I’d really been doing overseas in various other costumes was an official secret, not to be revealed to anybody, not even my bride.
I was making like an Army officer on terminal leave, therefore, but some of the other male participants wore those streamlined tailcoats, and the bridesmaids were in tulle, if I’ve got the name right. It was very formal and pretty, and everybody said the bride looked perfectly lovely, but it didn’t take. She learned a little too much about me eventually, and didn’t like what she learned; and now she’s married to a rancher in Nevada and the kids are growing up on horseback and calling him daddy. I guess he’s better daddy material than I am, at that.
Olivia and I had lunch in the town afterward so anybody who wanted to check on the ceremony would have time to do so. The meal was a silent one. I suppose we both felt awkward about our new legal relationship. Finished, we got back into the car.
It was hers, a little foreign job with the engine behind. I guess she’d felt Volkswagens were getting too commonplace with the intellectual crowd; she’d got herself a French Renault, plain black with gray vinyl upholstery and all of thirty-two horsepower working through a three-speed shift, which isn’t enough gears to get real efficiency out of so small a mill. I got behind the wheel, started the machinery stirring in back and drove away, watching the mirror.
It was a waste of time. Nothing showed but the ordinary southern small-town traffic. Nothing followed us away from there except a Ford pickup with Alabama plates, which turned off onto a dirt road after a couple of miles.
“It still looks like a water haul,” I reported at last.
“What?”
“A country colloquialism, Mrs. Corcoran,” I said. “That’s what you say when you’ve come a long way for very little. Not that I’m running down the holy state of matrimony, you understand.”
She smiled, and stopped smiling, and looked thoughtful. “Could Kroch just be giving us rope, so to speak, counting on picking us up in Pensacola?”
“Why should he think I’d take you home to Pensacola where your friends and colleagues are? As of this morning, he had no reason to believe my intentions were honorable. Having softened up the lady, wouldn’t I be much more likely to take her to a lonely love nest by the seashore?” I shook my head ruefully. “If he’s our man, he ought to be sticking with you. If he doesn’t show, we’ve figured wrong somewhere.”
“But if he isn’t our man, why was he hiding in my room?” Olivia protested. “It doesn’t make sense.
“If he is our man, why was he hiding in your room?” I countered. “Mr. Kroch seems to have a habit of not making much sense. I have a hunch, the kind you get in this business, that he was waiting there to kill me.”
She looked startled. “That’s kind of farfetched, isn’t it? Why would he want to kill you? And why would he think you’d come here?”
I said, “After the cozy way you’d spent the night in my room, it wasn’t too unlikely that I’d visit yours. If you came alone, you could be made to call me. I should have anticipated something of the sort, but I’d seen no indications that the guy was around and I’m having kind of a hard time following his mental processes. But he was annoyed with Mooney for being there, wasn’t he? Presumably he’d expected somebody else, me. As for his motive, he’s already served notice that he doesn’t like interference.”
She said, “It was my room, after all. The most likely possibility is that he was just waiting for me.”
I said, “The answer to that is that you’re sitting beside me very much alive, thank God. If he’d wanted you, if the word had come through that it was time for him to act, he’d have got you. What was there to stop him, with your efficient bodyguard slurping coffee three stories below?” I made a wry face at the windshield. “He had you, but he didn’t kill you. He just shot Mooney in the arm and took off... Wait a minute! We’re overlooking something. Suppose he was waiting for just the man he got. Suppose he was waiting for Dr. Harold Mooney.”
She was staring at me. “You can’t think there’s anything between Harold and Kroch!”
“I’m trying out the idea. It has possibilities.”
“It’s absolutely insane!” she protested. “I should think you’d be satisfied about Harold after this morning. We agreed he’s not the stuff one makes secret agents out of.” I said, “Sure. He couldn’t be trusted to do the work alone. I’ll grant that. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t the stuff one makes secret agents’ accomplices out of. Suppose Kroch is our man after all, but suppose he’s playing it real cagey. He hasn’t shown previously, has he? You’d never seen his face before, to remember it?”
“No, but—”
“It’s a face you wouldn’t forget if you saw it twice, even just passing it on the street,” I said. “And don’t think Kroch doesn’t know it. It’s his handicap in this business, as my height is mine. He’ll be forever figuring ways to get around it. Well, suppose he’s using Mooney as his eyes, and keeping his ugly, conspicuous self under cover. Mooney isn’t scheduled for any heavy work. Anybody can see he isn’t up to it. He just keeps track of you, acting the romantic lover. That’s why he followed you here in a panic, not because he was scared of a scandal, but because he couldn’t afford to lose contact with you or Kroch would have his hide. His job is to keep you located in a general sort of way. When the time comes, Kroch moves in and makes the kill.”
Olivia winced. I guess it wasn’t a pleasant idea to have tossed at you casually.
Then she said impatiently, “That’s ridiculous! Harold has no interest whatever in politics. Why would he—”
“Does Harold lead such a blameless life that you can’t imagine anybody blackmailing him, Doc? Is he such a strong character he’d tell a blackmailer to publish and be damned?”
She was silent for a moment, then she said quickly: “But Kroch shot him! Doesn’t that prove—”
“In the arm?” I said. “A neat, small-caliber flesh wound with a doctor available—two doctors if you count Mooney himself—if anything went wrong, like a severed artery? It’s been done before by people with complicated motives and mentalities. Why did Mooney come around this morning to apologize? He’s hardly the apologetic type. If you hadn’t invited him to your room, maybe he’d have invited himself on some pretext.”
“To get shot? Harold would never agree to that. You saw the way he reacted.”
“He didn’t have to know what was going to happen. He could just have had orders to make an appearance there with you at a certain time. Kroch’s acting surprised and annoyed by his presence could have been just a cover-up. And after the shooting, Mooney didn’t dare squawk.” I drew a long breath. “Look, Kroch knows I have him spotted. He can guess I’m also suspicious of Harold, the way he’s been hanging around you. This could be Kroch’s way of whitewashing Harold and taking all the suspicion on himself. That would leave the handsome doctor, pale and romantic-looking, with his arm in a sling, free to keep up the surveillance unsuspected. Meanwhile Kroch crawls ba
ck into his hole, wherever it is, gets regular reports on you from Mooney, cleans his little popgun, and waits for Der Tag.”
Olivia shook her head. “I don’t believe it!” There was a little pause. She gave a short laugh. “I guess I just don’t want to believe it, Paul. It was bad enough thinking Harold at least found me... well, attractive enough at the start. If he did the whole thing under orders, that doesn’t leave me any pride at all.”
I said, “It could be that Kroch found the situation between you and Mooney already established when he came on the job, and simply looked around for a way to take advantage of it.”
“It’s a nice thought,” she said wryly. “It makes everything much better. Now all I have to face is the fact that Harold is willing to help another man murder me to save his own skin...”
The little car buzzed on down the black highway between the trees of one of those dry-looking southern pine forests. When you come from the West, as I do, you’re apt to think everything east of the Mississippi is built up solidly like suburban New York, but it isn’t true. There are still some good big forests there, and some bleak lonely island beaches that haven’t yet been turned into replicas of Coney Island.
I had one of those offshore strips of white sand near Pensacola in mind as I drove. I’d seen it from the air, returning from the carrier with Lt. (jg) Braithwaite, and I’d talked it over with Olivia, who’d been out there in the summer. She’d agreed that at this time of year, too cold for swimming or picnicking, you could commit murder at leisure there, or any other crime you happened to have in mind. The difficulty would come in getting our subject out there, particularly if he was using another man as a front.
I noticed that Olivia was twisting her new wedding ring on her finger. “It’s a funny feeling,” she said.
“What is?”
“Being married. Like this. In cold blood, so to speak. Paul?”
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