One Night Stands; Lost weekends

by Lawrence Block

  “But you topped the gag. She popped out of the cake covered with a smile and you put a bullet in her and left Donahue looking like the killer. Then, when you thought he was getting off the hook, you killed him. Not to cover the first murder—you felt safe enough on that score…because you really didn’t have a reason to kill the girl herself. You killed Donahue because he was the one you wanted dead all along.”

  Powell was still grinning. Only not so self-assuredly now. In the beginning, he hadn’t been aware of how much I knew. Now he was learning and it wasn’t making him happy.

  “I’ll play your game,” he said. “I killed Karen, even though I didn’t have any reason. Now why did I kill Mark? Did I have a reason for that one?”

  “Sure.”

  “What?”

  “For the same reason you hired Karen to bother Donahue,” I said. “Maybe a psychiatrist could explain it better. He’d call it transference.”

  “Go on.”

  “You wanted Mark Donahue dead because he was going to marry Lynn Farwell. And you don’t want anybody to marry Lynn Farwell, Powell, you’d kill anybody who tried.”

  “Keep talking,” he said.

  “How am I doing so far?”

  “Oh, you’re brilliant, London. I suppose I’m in love with Lynn?”

  “In a way.”

  “That’s why I’ve never asked her to marry me. And why I bed down anything else that gets close enough to jump.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re out of your mind, London.”

  “No,” I said. “But you are.” I took a breath. “You’ve been in love with Lynn for a long time. Four years, anyway. It’s no normal love, Powell, because you’re not a normal person. Lynn’s part of a fixation of yours. She’s sweet and pure and unattainable in your mind. You don’t want to possess her completely because that would destroy the illusion. Instead you compensate by proving your virility with any available girl. But you can’t let Lynn marry someone else. That would take her away from you. You don’t want to have her—except for an occasional evening, maybe—but you won’t let anyone else have her.”

  He was tottering on the edge now…trying to take a step toward me and then backing off. I had to push him over that edge. If he cracked, then he would crack wide open. If he held himself together he might wriggle free. I knew damn well he was guilty, but there wasn’t enough evidence to present to a jury. I had to make him crack.

  “First I’m a double murderer,” Powell said. “Now I’m a mental case. I don’t deny that I like Lynn. She’s a sweet, clean, decent girl. But that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Donahue’s the second man who almost married her. The first one was four years ago. Remember John? You introduced the two of them. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

  “He wouldn’t have been good for her. But it didn’t matter. I suppose you know he died in a car accident.”

  “In a car, yes. Not an accident. You gimmicked the steering wheel. Then you let him kill himself. You got away clean with that one, Powell.”

  I hadn’t cracked him yet. I was close, but he was still able to compose himself.

  “It was an accident,” he exclaimed. “Besides, it happened a long time ago. I’m surprised you even bother mentioning it.”

  I ignored his words. “The death shook Lynn up a lot,” I said. “It must have been tough for you to preserve your image of her. The sweet and innocent thing turned into a round-heeled little nymph for a while.”

  “That’s a damned lie.”

  “It is like hell. And about that time you managed to have your cake and eat it, too. You kept on thinking of her as the unattainable ideal. But that didn’t stop you from taking her virginity, did it? You ruined her, Powell!”

  He was getting closer to the edge. His face was white and his hands were hard little fists. The muscles in his neck were drum-tight.

  “I never touched her!”

  “Liar!” I was shouting now. “You ruined that girl, Powell!”

  “Damn you, I never touched her! Nobody did, damn you! She’s still a virgin! She’s still a virgin!”

  I took a breath. “The hell she is,” I yelled. “I had her last night, Powell. She came to my room all hot to trot and I bedded her until she couldn’t see straight.”

  His eyes were wild.

  “Did you hear me, Powell? I had your girl last night. I had Lynn, Powell!”

  And that cracked him.

  He charged me like a wild man, his whole body coordinated in the spring. I stepped back, swung aside. He tried to turn and come toward me but his momentum kept him from pulling it off. By the time he got back on the right track, my hand had gone up and come down. The barrel of the gun caught him just behind the left ear. He took two more little steps, carried along by the sheer force of his rush. Then he folded up and went out like an ebbing tide.

  He wasn’t out long. By the time Jerry Gunther got there, flanked by a pair of uniformed cops, Powell was babbling away a mile a minute, spending half the time confessing to the three murders and the other half telling anyone who would listen that Lynn Farwell was a saint.

  They started to put handcuffs on him. Then they changed their minds and bundled him up in a straitjacket.

  ELEVEN

  “I guess I missed my calling,” Ceil said. “I should have been a detective. I probably would have flopped there, too, but the end might have been different. We all know what girls become when they don’t make it as actresses. What do lousy detectives turn to?”

  “Cognac,” I said. “Pass the bottle.”

  She passed and I poured. We were in her apartment on Sullivan Street. It was Tuesday night, Ray Powell had long since finished confessing, and Ceil Gorski had just proved to me that she could cook a good meal.

  “You figured it out beautifully,” she said. “But do I get an assist on the play?”

  “Easily.” I tucked tobacco into my pipe, lit up. “You managed to get my mind working. Powell was a genius at murder. A certifiable psychotic, but also a genius. He set things up beautifully. First of all, the frame couldn’t have been neater. He very carefully set up Donahue with means, motive, and opportunity. Then he shot the girl and left Donahue on the hook.”

  I worked on the cognac. “The neat thing was this—if Donahue managed to have an alibi, if by some chance somebody was watching him when the shot was fired, Powell was still in the clear. He himself was one of the few men in the room with no conceivable motive for wanting Karen Price dead.”

  Ceil moved a little closer on the couch. I put an arm around her. “Then the way he got rid of Donahue was sheer perfection,” I continued. “He made it look enough like suicide to close the case as far as the police were concerned. And Jerry Gunther isn’t an easy man to bulldoze. He’s thorough. But Powell made it look good.”

  “You didn’t swallow it.”

  “That’s because I play hunches. Even so, I was up a tree by then. Because the murder had a double edge to it. Even if he muffed it somehow, even if it didn’t go over as suicide, Donahue would be dead and he would be in the clear. Because there was only one way to interpret it—Donahue had been killed by the man who killed Karen Price, obviously, and had been killed so that the original killing would go unsolved. That made me suspect Joe Conn and never let me guess at Powell, not even on speculation. Even with the second killing he hid the fact that Donahue and not Karen was the real target.”

  “And that’s where I came in,” she said happily.

  “That’s exactly where you came in,” I agreed. “You and your active imagination. You thought how grim it would be if Karen had only been playing a joke with those phone calls. And that was the only explanation in the world for the calls. I had to believe Donahue was getting the calls, and that Karen was making them. A disguised voice might work once, but she’d called him a few times.

  “That left two possibilities, really. She could be jealous—which seemed contrar
y to everything I had learned about her. Or it could be a gag. But if she was jealous, then why in hell would she take the job popping out of the cake? So it had to be a gag, and once it was a gag, I had to guess why someone would put her up to it. And from that point—”

  “It was easy.”

  “Uh-huh. It was easy.”

  She snuggled closer. I liked her perfume. I liked the feel of her body beside me.

  “It wasn’t that easy,” she said. “You know what? I think you’re a hell of a good detective. And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “I also think you’re a rotten businessman.”

  I smiled. “Why?”

  “Because you did all that work and didn’t make a dime out of it. You got a retainer from Donahue, but that didn’t even cover all the time you spent before Karen was killed, let alone the time since then. And you probably will never collect.”

  “I’m satisfied.”

  “Because justice has been done?”

  “Partly. Also because I’ll be rewarded.”

  She upped her eyebrows. “How? You won’t make another nickel out of the case, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “I’ll make something more important than money.”

  “What?”

  She was soft and warm beside me. And it was our third evening together. Not even an amateur tramp could mind a pass on a third date.

  “What are you going to make?” she asked, innocently.

  I took her face between my hands and kissed her. She closed her eyes and purred like a happy cat.

  “You,” I said.

  TWIN CALL GIRLS

  ONE

  Somewhere a phone was ringing. I reached out and touched something warm and soft. The something flowed into my arms like hot lava and purred Oh, Ed and drew itself against me from head to toe. Mouths kissed and hands fluttered urgently.

  Somewhere a phone was ringing. The girl in my arms sighed lustily and made preliminary movements. I kissed the side of her face and her throat. A bedspring complained with a metallic whine. It was the world’s best way to wake up except for that damned phone.

  Somewhere a phone was ringing. The girl in my arms sighed a sigh pregnant with thoughts of what might have been. Her mouth stopped kissing, her hands stopped fluttering, and, reluctantly, she drew herself away.

  “Ed, the phone is ringing,” she said.

  Lust coughed and died. I blinked cobwebs from disappointed eyes, swung my legs over the side of the bed, and picked up the damn phone. A female voice said, “No names. Please listen carefully—this is urgent. I need help. Are you listening to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t talk now, but I want you to call me this afternoon. At two. Have you got that?”

  “At two this afternoon.”

  “From a pay phone. Not from your apartment. Call me at TRafalgar 3–0520. Do you have the number?”

  “TRafalgar 3–0520,” I said. “Whom do I ask for?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll answer.”

  The phone clicked. The girl in my bed wanted to know who had called. I told her I didn’t know. She said well now, what the hell was this, anyway? That I didn’t know either. I got out of bed and found a magazine and a pencil. On the magazine cover was a painting of a general. He had a high forehead. Across it I printed “TRafalgar 3–0520” and under that “2 P.M.”

  The girl in my bed yawned, a wide, open-mouthed yawn. No prelude to love-making. The damned phone had ended that. She got out of bed and started putting on clothes.

  “It’s morning, all right,” she noted. “Make some coffee, Ed. I’ve got a head that’s two sizes too big for me.”

  I made a pot of coffee which we drank in the living room. She asked about the phone call.

  “Probably some crank,” I said. “All cloak and dagger. That’s one trouble with being a detective. You get a lot of idiot phone calls.”

  “And all at the wrong time, Ed. You’re supposed to call her back. You going to?”

  “Probably.”

  “And the number’ll turn out to be the YWCA, or something. You lead a rough life.”

  I told her it had its moments.

  At 2 P.M. I called TRafalgar 3–0520. It wasn’t the YWCA. The same voice answered on the first ring, saying, “Ed London?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  A sigh of relief. “I’m in terrible trouble,” she said. “Somebody is trying to kill me. I need your help. I’m scared.”

  I started to tell her to come to my place, but she cut me off. “I can’t go there,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not safe. Listen, I’ll meet you in Central Park. Is that all right?”

  “It’s a pretty big place. Want to narrow it down a little?”

  “There’s an entrance to the park at 94th Street and Fifth Avenue. There are two paths. Take the one that bears uptown. A little ways up there’s a pond, and the path divides to go around the pond. I’ll be sitting on one of the benches on the uptown side of the pond.”

  “How do I recognize you?”

  “I’m blond. Not too tall. Don’t worry, just come. It never gets crowded there. I’ll be alone. I’ll…I’ll recognize you, Mr. London.”

  “What time?”

  “Four-thirty. Please be on time. I’m very scared.”

  She had picked a quiet part of the park. I walked in through the 94th Street entrance and passed a covey of maids pushing carriages. They milled around near the entrance and gossiped about their employers. I took the path that led uptown and walked toward the pond.

  The pond came into view, flat, calm, and stagnant. Three beer cans and two ducks floated on the water. I thought of sitting ducks. I started walking around the uptown side of the pond and then I saw her, sitting alone on a bench and not looking at me. I wanted to call her name but she had never gotten around to telling me what it was.

  “Hello there,” I called.

  No answer and no glance. I looked at my watch. It was 4:30, I was right on time, and she was the only person around. She was blond, young, and dressed nicely. I walked faster. She still did not look at me. I hurried along, worried now, and I reached her and looked at her and saw, finally, why she had not moved.

  I was on time. But someone had gotten to her first, had found her before me.

  Once she had been pretty, and once she had been frightened…and now she was dead.

  TWO

  I looked around. The park was as still as the girl. I went through the inane formality of holding her cool and limp wrist and feeling for a pulse. There was none. There is rarely a pulse in the wrist of a girl who has been shot through the middle of the forehead. She had been dead fifteen or twenty minutes.

  If she had a purse, someone had snatched it. No identification. I did not know her name, who had scared her, who had followed her, who had killed her, or why. She had wanted help, my help, but I did not get to her in time.

  I didn’t want to leave her on the bench. There is something ineffably discordant about a lone corpse left to cool and stiffen on a park bench. But I turned and walked back around the edge of the pond and down the path. I stopped once to look back at her. She did not look dead from a distance. She looked like a young girl sitting quietly, waiting to meet a suitor.

  I walked to Fifth Avenue, down to 86th Street, east toward home. There was a bar on Madison. I stopped there to use the phone booth. I dialed Centre Street Police Headquarters.

  “There’s a body in Central Park, a dead girl,” I said, and quickly gave him the location. He kept trying to interrupt, to get my name, to find out more. But I had said everything I wanted to say.

  The day had started off with an unreal quality to it. Private detectives do not get mysterious phone calls from anonymous people. They do not keep unexplained rendezvous with nameless voices in secluded parts of Central Park. It had all seemed a game staged by some more or less harmless lunatic, and I h
ad gone through the paces like a dutiful clown.

  The corpse changed all of that. The girl, so neatly shot, posed so unobtrusively on the park bench, was a jarring coda to the symphony of annoyance that began with a phone call’s interruption of romance. I had made my call to the police without giving my name and, consequently, was not involved. I had gone through the motions and had stumbled on the death of a prospective client who had not lived long enough to pay me a retainer. I had gone to her aid without believing she really existed, and when I had found her she was dead, and I never had the chance to become involved.

  But I still felt involved.

  At 5:30 I was still nursing my drink. Time dragged. Outside, the street was still bright. Then a buzzer sounded: someone was downstairs in my vestibule. I got up slowly, drink in hand, and pressed the answering buzzer that would open the downstairs door. I waited and listened to footsteps on the staircase. The footsteps halted in front of my door. There was a knock.

  I finished the cognac and went to the door. I turned the knob and flung open the door—to look into the face of the girl I had found dead in Central Park. I saw the blue eyes, the blond hair, the button nose. I saw everything but the little hole in the middle of the forehead.

  “You’re Ed London,” she said.

  “You’re not you!” I exclaimed stupidly as she stepped inside my apartment.

  “I don’t understand.”

  I took a deep breath and stammered, “B-but I just saw you, in Central Park, where I was supposed to meet you. Only somebody else met you first and you were dead. Shot between the eyes.”

  It sounded idiotic now—her standing beside me, a living, breathing doll. But she made her way through the maze of my meaningless words and something soaked in. Her mouth fell open and she gasped like a fish on a line. Her eyes bugged. She said, “Oh no! Good God,” and gave a shrill little scream and fell into my arms and cried her eyes out…

  THREE

  I held the girl until she got a half-nelson on herself, then eased her into one of the twin leather chairs that give my living room the air of a British men’s club. She stayed in the chair and finished her crying while I poured cognac into a glass for her.