Sam spoke in a normal tone. “I keep forgetting you just got here. He declined—disdained?—to let us help him tidy up. We can’t force the gentleman, now, can we? He said if we touched him he’d hit us. He knows his rights.”
I looked at the gentleman. Some gentleman.
I had no clear idea of what Moulder had looked like before doing his time in the state prison, but I did know he was now forty-eight years old. Maybe he’d looked forty-seven when he went in; I didn’t know that, either. But he’d come out looking fifty-seven. At least.
He was a tall, lean man with a thin and slightly lopsided face, very pale, prison-pallor pale, balding, with a fringe of brownish-red hair extending an inch or two up from his ears. The ears were just the right size for his head, if he wanted to hear faint whispers from forty paces; otherwise they were a bit large. His lips were very thick. His eyes were the color of roses, but not nearly as pretty. He did not smell like a rose, either.
One of his front teeth was missing—knocked out by a fellow con at Q, I learned later, too near his release date for expert repair unless Moulder wished to stay over for the friendly dentist, which he did not wish to do.
He was a fearsomely unpleasant specimen of humanity, and knowing he’d flicked a .45 caliber slug close enough to burn skin from my hand didn’t make him look better to me.
“Theyzz,” he said.
I glanced at Sam, who looked innocent, but not back at me.
A little later I started to decipher the code. Moulder’s missing tooth didn’t help—and apparently his lips appeared unusually fat because the con who’d knocked out a piece of his grin had done his smile no good, either—but the main thing was that Moulder was drunk. He was still as drunk and dopey as an alcoholic going down for the third time in gremlins.
He was staying awake, it seemed, partly because he’d wanted to see me, and partly because the cops kept joggling him—gently, of course—to rouse him from approaching stuporousness; but not because he himself thought it a marvelous idea.
“Theeyzz,” Moulder said. “Yazr, izzim.”
Well, I couldn’t understand it all until a minute or two later, but by thinking back to how it had begun I was able to decipher most of his mumbles. It would be futile to report the weird dialogue either verbatim or as it buzzed on the ear. But his last comment had been, “There he is. Yes, sir. That’s him.”
Even allowing for the tooth and lips and booze and possible dementia, the statement oddly assaulted intelligence, because he was looking straight at me when he said, as though to several other people, “There he is.”
After a moment he buzzed on, “You’re Scott, right? Couldn’t be anybody else. You’re Scott?”
“That’s right. What’d you want to see me about, Moulder?”
“You got shot at tonight. Right? That’s what the fuzz tell me. They act like I’m supposed to know about it.”
“Yeah, I got shot at.”
His words became a little more distinct when he next spoke. He leaned forward and fixed the rosy eyes on me and said, “You see who it was shot at you? See anything at all?”
It sent a little ripple over the vertebrae of my spine. It was the same question, in almost the same words, that his wife had asked me.
I hesitated, then said, “No.”
“Nothing?”
“Only the car. And not much of that.”
He said a foul four-letter word. Then, “OK. Screw.”
The word “screw,” to certain elements of the hoodlum-world, means, among other things, “Get lost,” or “Beat it.” Even while trying to figure out what he was up to now, it occurred to me that Moulder was unquestionably not the same man who’d gone behind prison walls a year and a little more ago. I doubted that he would so casually have used the four-letter word, for one thing; but I knew very well he wouldn’t have said “screw” for beat it or “fuzz” for police. Undoubtedly he’d picked up a lot of other colorful language, and attitudes, from the prison-wise cons and many-time losers he’d met in stir, been with, lived with, in a very real sense gone to school with. Significantly, the cons themselves call it a “college.”
Anyhow, Leslie Moulder had been there. And clearly he had graduated, if not cum laude, at least wiser in the ways of the con than when he’d been involuntarily enrolled.
He had withdrawn his attention from me. His eyes were closed now. His puffed lips flapped gently, as if he was beginning to work up a snore.
“Hey,” I said sharply.
His wrinkled lids slid up like puffy Venetian blinds.
“Yeah?”
“Is that all, Moulder? I thought you wanted to see me.”
“I’ve seen you.” I was dismissed.
Maybe that’s what he thought.
“Listen, saphead,” I said. “Keep those goddamn glimmers open and —”
He bounced a little on his chair, maybe an eighth of an inch, when he heard the entirely different tone of my voice. But Samson had a hand on my arm.
“Can it,” he said. “I know it’s not loads of fun, old tiger, but —”
“Can it yourself, Sam. I’m not a cop. No police brutality here, buddy, just one dumb private citizen talking to another, OK?”
“Just take it easy.”
“I won’t lay a hand on him. But he asked for me, didn’t he? OK, he’s got me.”
Sam raised one shoulder an inch, let it drop.
I stepped closer to the table, put my hands flat on its top, and bent over it toward Moulder. I stuck my face about two inches from his, and since I have been told it is a face which, when I am not amused, is not an exceptionally soothing collection of features to behold, and I was not amused, his glimmers were wide open now.
The reek of him oozed into my nostrils and burned. But I kept looking down at him and said, “Moulder, Leslie Moulder, you hear me?”
He could hear me, all right; they could hear me in the Homicide squadroom.
I roared on, “If you can’t, sweetheart, start shoveling the crud out of your ears, because you’re going to be listening a while, and my words may pound dingleberries clear into your biscuit.”
It wouldn’t happen again, most likely, but for those few seconds he was very nearly hypnotized, and he actually lifted a hand with a long finger extended and dug into one of those big whisper-catchers of his, bloodstained eyes fixed on the bridge of my nose.
“I’ve talked to a thousand like you, Moulder,” I went on. “And I’ve got a very good record of listeners. You got it? I’d hate it like hell if you put a blot on that record. You got it, sweetheart?”
He nodded, very slightly, drawing away from me a little. So I cut the two inches between our chops to one and gave him another half minute of words, then finished with, “So we’re friends now, right, Moulder? And we’re going to have a very friendly conversation.”
Well, in a way we did.
Moulder didn’t dummy up on me again, but his cooperation wasn’t a lot of help. As I’ve indicated, it took about twenty-five minutes to decipher and interpret a five-minute dialogue. At first I wondered how the guy could still be so plastered after all this time, but then I realized it hadn’t been a long time, it had only seemed long to me.
When I’d called Samson from Mrs. Moulder’s he told me they’d had Leslie for about ten minutes. Add half an hour for me with Georgina and in the Skylight Lounge, a shade over twenty minutes to reach the Police Building, plus another ten minutes till now. Moulder had been in custody for only a little more than an hour.
At any rate, the friendly conversation—deciphered, and with obscenities deleted—went about like this.
“Now we understand each other, Moulder, maybe you’d like to explain why you tossed those friendly pills at me.”
“I didn’t shoot at anybody.”
“Where were you about quarter of eight tonight?”
“With my wife.”
“Georgina?”
“Georgina.”
“At quarter to eight?”
&n
bsp; “All the time. All day. All night.”
“Sure. Even last night.”
“Tonight. This afternoon. All the time.”
“Chop it, Moulder. You’ve been claiming you can’t remember a damn thing for hours, not even driving the heap you stole. You remember driving the car now?”
“No, I—how could I remember? I was asleep.”
“You were passed out, yeah.”
“Passed out, asleep, what difference? I wasn’t even in a car.”
“The fuzz found you in the car.”
“That’s what you tell me. I don’t remember it. Just the police car.”
“Yeah. You were with your wife since St. Valentine’s Day. Where?”
“Motel.”
“A motel. With your wife. You can do better than that.”
“She met me at the airport. We went to a motel.”
“Why? Why not to your own home?”
“Georgina wanted it like a picnic. I mean, a vacation. Where nobody’d know we were there and bust in on us.”
“Sure. Tell me about it.”
“Well, that’s it. I was with her. We drank a lot. And banged a lot. Drank and banged. I’d been inside for a year, no drinks, no bangs, hit me harder than I thought it would.”
“Uh-huh. So?”
“I fell asleep, that’s all. There in the motel. I didn’t kill anybody.”
“Of course not. You didn’t threaten to kill Blaik when you fell from here, either.”
“So I threatened. What’s threatened? That was just—he got my goat. He got me bugged up.”
“Looks like you got a lot more bugged up in stir, Moulder.”
“No, I let it go out of my mind. But the bastard sold me down the river. He didn’t have to lose the case. Bastard wouldn’t even put me on the stand. ‘Stead of buggin’ me you ought to work him over, give him a lie test or something and it’ll prove —”
“You conveniently forget a lot of things—like he’s dead.”
He blinked slowly and moistened his fat dry lips. “That’s right. I did forget. Well, it’s a mess.”
“Yeah, a mess you made when you plugged him in his dinner.”
“It didn’t happen.”
“Nothing happened. Nothing at all. You drank with your wife, had a couple too many, and now conveniently can’t remember a thing. Everything went black. And while everything was black you of course did not drive around and kill Blaik and maybe let a few fly at me…”
I stopped. Nobody had been shooting at me. I’d gone over that part in my thoughts with some care.
So I continued, “Skip the shots at me. Make it shooting at Blaik—and Lynn.”
“Who?”
“Lynn Duncan.”
“Who’s she?”
“You never heard of her?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Don’t tell me the police haven’t mentioned her name to you, Moulder.”
“I … yes. Think they did. Don’t really remember. But I don’t know who she is.”
“Where’s this dandy motel you stayed in?”
“I, hell, I don’t remember. Somewhere near Hollywood. I was a little drunk when we got there.”
“Forgot that, too, huh? You’ve got a damned good forgetter. Even forgot your wife was home all afternoon, waiting for you to show. Slinky and frilly, rouged and perfumed, in a brand-new negligee, waiting for hubby.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“She was with me. In the motel. Drank and banged, drank and banged.”
And that’s the way it went.
Back in Samson’s office he sat behind his desk and I straddled a wooden chair and leaned on its back. Sam said, “You did very well. Shell. You got almost as much out of the man as we did.”
He got out his stinking black cigar. And a match.
Well, I couldn’t have that.
“Sam,” I said, making my voice as smugly patronizing as I could, “I hate to mention it, but I am beginning to fear you’re just not cut out for this kind of work.”
“Izzatso?” he said, like a straight man.
“Yes, sad to say. Oh, you were probably all right in your time, years and years ago. But now you’ve become a slave to the book, to rules, to the nibbling of legal termites. You listened to what was said, rather than what was between the lines.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. By listening between the lines myself, I learned a great deal from my brilliant interrogation of Leslie Moulder.”
“How nice,” he said. “Like what?”
“Like he didn’t do it.”
“Of course, you can prove it.”
“Well, ah, not this instant.” I paused. “But I’ll tell you how we can prove it.”
* * *
Four of us walked down the hospital corridor, headed for room 411 in which lay abed Lynn Duncan, under sedation and with her head somewhat ravaged, but alive, recuperating, and even conscious. Conscious enough to talk if she wanted to—and we had the doctors’ OK for a brief talk with her, if Lynn didn’t object too strenuously. I didn’t think she would.
The four of us were: Samson, Sergeant Kidd, Leslie Moulder, and me. Half an hour had passed since I’d told Sam what I wanted to try, whereupon he’d thought a while, put away his wooden match, clamped the cigar in his teeth, and started making arrangements.
Arrangements, including the timing, had now been completed.
I glanced at my watch. Eleven thirty p.m., on the tick. We could hear the girl’s voice coming faint from inside 411 as we approached the door.
When we stopped outside it the words were clear: “I did it for Leslie! I’ve told you and told you, I did it for Leslie!”
Sam opened the door and we went in. Me first, so I could turn and keep an eye on Moulder. Then Moulder with Kidd, followed by Samson.
Lynn Duncan sat propped up against pillows behind her on the bed, looking toward us as we entered. A uniformed officer, and a doctor, stood near her before a white folding hospital screen.
Moulder looked at Lynn. She looked at him. Moulder looked at me, Kidd, Samson, back at Lynn again.
The first one to speak was Lynn. She said quietly to me, “Hello, Shell.”
Big deal. Big nothing. That was fine.
“Hi, Lynn,” I said.
Sam threw a few fast questions at Moulder, a couple at Lynn. Only halfheartedly. I think he was just about convinced. Then he nodded at Kidd and the sergeant took Moulder away. Back to the cell block this time.
The policewoman—who’d been behind the screen crying “I did it for Leslie”—came out, spoke to Samson, and left.
The rest was my baby, so I sat down on a wooden chair by the bed, close to Lynn. “This won’t take long,” I said to her. “Mostly you’ll just have to listen, maybe answer a couple of questions. OK?”
“All right.” She looked scared. But she had plenty to be scared about.
I said, “Let’s go back to when we met tonight, Lynn. At the Hideout. After Jazz and I joined you and Blaik, I was looking out the window and saw a car come up the road. But it didn’t continue on to the entrance. The driver pulled into the lot. That was a little before seven forty-five. Just a little before the shooting. He just came up, parked, and waited there. Got it?”
“Yes.” Very soft.
“When we all went out, it was about quarter of eight—you didn’t want to leave right then, remember? You made it very clear that you wanted to stay a little longer.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Then, the shooting,” I went on. “Blaik was farthest from the club’s steps and I was moving toward him. Jazz was behind me on my right. More important, you were to my left, about the same distance from the steps as Jazz was. So you were a long way from Blaik. A long way. Clear?”
She moistened her lips and swallowed. She moved one hand from her side and let it rest on her left breast. “I remember now.”
“Uh-huh. One final thing. The killer had plenty of
time to aim his first shot. He was ready and waiting; he’d started the car’s engine. So, first one shot, then a short pause—call it the time required for a man in a hurry to aim again in a hurry—and the second shot. Another brief pause, and then three or four shots all at once, the guy yanking, not squeezing the trigger for those last ones. But we know he aimed at least two, maybe three of those shots with some care.”
I paused. “I realize you haven’t had much time to think about these things since it happened, Lynn. Maybe just during the last half hour or so. But if you hadn’t already figured it out for yourself, are you starting to get the picture now?”
She didn’t speak, but I saw her throat move as she swallowed again.
“Remember where you were? Put it this way: draw a line on the ground from that dark sedan to you, and I was standing just about on that line. A man shooting at me might miss and hit you by accident. Only that’s not what happened. Instead, a man shooting at you—taking time to aim, wanting to be sure he killed you—came close to hitting me. The killer wasn’t after Blaik and me. He was after Blaik and you. Want to tell us about it now, Lynn?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I sighed. “OK, here’s a little more of it. Some of us, for a while, thought those slugs were sprayed all over the landscape because the gunman was drunk. But the gunman wasn’t drunk. He was cold sober. He shot and killed Blaik. And he intended to kill Blaik—not me—he was ready and waiting for him. So he had to know Blaik would be at the Hideout, and at least approximately what time he would be there.”
I got out cigarettes, looked at the doctor, who nodded. Then I lit a smoke and had a long drag before continuing.
“Blaik wasn’t tailed to the Hideout. The killer didn’t arrive until shortly before we all left, and you and Vince had finished dinner, must have been there for at least an hour then. If we wanted to grab at straws we could say maybe a waiter or guest at the restaurant called the gunman and said Blaik was there—but I think we can ignore that little beauty. So what’s left?”
She stared at me silently, those moist, wide-set eyes, eyes the shade of bruised mint leaves, unwavering on my own. But now the hand resting on her breast rose and fell more rapidly, testimony to her accelerated breathing. Usually people under stress fail to realize it’s happening and is visible to others—emotions spurring glands and organs into increased activity that eats up more and more of the blood’s oxygen, and the lungs automatically labor faster to make up for the loss. So her hand rose and fell, rose and fell, on her sweet young breast.
The Shell Scott Sampler Page 15