Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  “There’s no sense in your feeling like that. We’re just doing our jobs. Sometimes we have to make trouble for people who perhaps don’t quite deserve it, but we don’t like it any more than they—”

  “Then what are you doing here, mister?” Weston demanded. “If you don’t like making trouble for people, why couldn’t you give me a ring and have me meet you downtown somewhere? Or catch me when I came home from work? No, you have to march into the place with horns, bells and whistles, letting everybody from the president on down know—” He choked on his anger. “Just too lazy or thoughtless to think what it would do to me! The same damn questions you asked me two years ago, and they can’t wait until five o’clock tonight; no, you’ve got to have me called into the front office to answer them! Like little tin gods, just because you’ve got badges—”

  He turned abruptly to the still open locker, put his hat on his head, and went out carrying his topcoat. Some of the pressure had been relieved, but there was enough left to make him hope that somebody would try to stop him. Nobody did. It was dark on the stairs and there was weak fall sunshine outside. He took a month’s wear from the recapped tires, sending his battered secondhand car away from there. Nobody came out after him.

  II

  It was well after dark when he found himself in a little bar off the lobby of a big downtown hotel, the name of which seemed familiar although he had never been in the place before. It was one of those hotels. He knew that he was quite drunk, perhaps a little drunker than he had ever been in his life, but he was still navigating with reasonable accuracy, speaking with sufficient clearness to be understood by the bartenders who confronted him; and the liquor was not helping him to forget anything. He knew that he was getting drunk mainly by the fact that he kept feeling more and more sorry for himself. It seemed to him that he had behaved very creditably throughout the whole affair, not losing his temper once until today, not changing his name or lying to anybody or concealing anything; and if you did it that way, and they still wouldn’t leave you alone, what hope did you have of ever getting clear of the mess? He never knew how long the girl had been standing beside him when she finally spoke, asking him for a light.

  Something in her voice stirred a memory inside him. He turned his head to look at her and saw her smile at him politely. She was a moderately tall girl with short light hair brushed into a feathery halo about her head. An elaborate dress, almost long enough to be an evening gown, of a stiff, blue-black, iridescent material like taffeta, rustled when she moved; it was pulled back into a ridiculous bustle in the rear.

  “Please?” she said, holding her cigarette steady in front of him.

  “Certainly,” he said, and lit it for her, then turned back to the bar, a gentleman, not taking advantage of the favor he had done a lady to force his acquaintance on her. Her dress whispered beside him as she, also, turned to the bar. He felt his heart begin to pound as he waited.

  After all, you could cut short the long untidy mane of red-gold hair and let it revert to what was probably its natural color; you could exchange the clothes of a rather careless, underpaid young government clerk for those of a fastidious, well-to-do society girl a few years older; you could even, if you were doing the character well, train and diet the young body to a more fashionable slenderness and the face to a more striking gauntness, but the blue-gray eyes would remain the same, and the short fine nose; and the long mouth would never be changed, for anyone who had known it well, by any subtleties of makeup or expression. Meet her anywhere, with any clothes or name she might choose to wear, and she would still be Marilyn George.

  He was not so drunk that he did not know quite well how it would look to anyone seeing her beside him, after he had just finished swearing that he had not been in touch with her for years. He had no doubt that she was quite aware of this, and had come deliberately to incriminate him by her presence, as part of some game she was playing. It was clear now that the F.B.I.’s visit to the plant that morning had been part of something bigger than just a routine check-up. Whatever the situation, there was obviously nothing to be gained in trying to shoo her away from him now; and a man trying to avoid a good-looking girl was invariably a ridiculous object.

  “I wondered if you’d recognize me,” she said without looking at him.

  He could see their two faces in the mirror, neither looking directly at the other. There was no point, he reminded himself, in bitterness or recrimination. She knew what she had done to him; and she felt the way she felt about it, however that might be. Nothing he could say could get him any more than pity from her; he probably could not do better than a kind of contemptuous sympathy.

  He had a momentary thought of Jane Collis, who still had his ring; but the kindest thing he could do to Janie would be to get out. He stood there at the bar, getting a small, mean satisfaction out of letting the girl beside him do the work of picking him up, knowing that he was going to follow her lead at least until he could see what she wanted. He remembered that there had been a time when he had wanted to kill her…

  In the morning he could not remember at once where he had left the car and this worried him, because he would need what little he could get for it when his savings ran out. Then he remembered parking a block and a half up the street; they had walked the remaining distance with great dignity, trying to impress each other with their complete soberness. He focused his mind on the building they had entered and it came back to him hazily: one of those gold-plated apartments near the lake front that sported a doorman, like a hotel.

  “Paul,” she said, shaking him.

  Nobody had called him Paul for a long time. It was a name he had left behind, with some other things, when he left Washington two years before. Paul was one kind of person and Wes was another; but somebody apparently did not know the difference.

  “Paul, wake up.”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her. She did not look the way he felt; she was dressed in a tailored blue robe of some light woolen material faced with satin like a man’s dinner jacket, and she looked very slender and young and freshly awakened—until he sat up stiffly, and his vision cleared, and he saw that she did not look quite as good as all that. Not bad, he thought, still not bad at all. But no chicken, now. Well, he was two years older, himself.

  “Eggs sunnyside up or over?” she asked him, smiling.

  “Up,” he said thickly, not quite awake yet.

  She said, “The john’s through the bedroom. There’s a razor in the medicine cabinet. And you don’t have to walk all over my mink coat.”

  He stood up clumsily, pushing his shirt back into his trousers, and faced down the expensive modern living room that was not the kind of room to encourage intoxicated men to fall asleep on its pale sofa with their shoes on. He looked at Marilyn George and remembered a way he had had of thinking of her: hunted, fleeing, walking the streets in run-over shoes and snagged stockings, like him looking for a job where nobody would question her past… Well, he thought, it was always surprising the number of ways you could be wrong. He picked up the glossy fur coat with which she had apparently covered him when he passed out, laid it gently on the sofa, and went out without looking at her again.

  When he came into the kitchen, shaved and fairly presentable, with an aspirin taking the edge off his hangover, she had breakfast ready in the gaily painted breakfast nook; she served them in silence and they sat facing each other across the table, eating, at first, without conversation. From where he sat he could see all of the small kitchen, with a back door opening on an iron fire escape. Everything in the place looked as if it had just been installed.

  Last night they had had a fine time playing a game of pretending that nothing bad had ever happened between them; but it was morning now.

  She looked up and said abruptly, “In Washington… I tried to keep you from being involved, Paul. You won’t believe that, but it’s true.”

  He studied her face and, after a moment, shrugged and went on eating. “Well, it’s not r
eally very important now, is it?”

  “It is to me,” she said. “I know you think I deliberately…”

  He buttered a corner of toast. “Look, Marilyn,” he said, “it was two years ago and to hell with it. I’m not worrying about what you did to me two years ago. I’d just like to know what you’re trying to do to me now.”

  She glanced at him sharply.

  He said, “Let’s assume that I’m reasonably bright, even if it’s a strain. You didn’t pick me up in that bar last night just by accident. You didn’t even do it all by yourself. You hadn’t trailed me through the places I’d been before I got there, not in the outfit you were wearing. Somebody spotted me for you, and when I was in position, suitably tight, you moved in. Am I right?”

  After a moment she nodded.

  He said, “All right. Make the proposition.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on,” he said impatiently. “You didn’t bring me here to make love to me, and you didn’t bring me here to feed me. You brought me here because just by being here I convict myself of being a liar and probably a traitor—”

  “And you came anyway?”

  “What have I got to lose?” he asked. “It’s a cinch I’m never going to get another job in chemistry with the F.B.I. turning up to haunt me every few months. I played it straight once, right out of the boy scout manual. They walked right in and loused it up for me. Now I’m making my own rules. What have you got to offer?”

  He watched her rise and bring the coffee from the stove to refill their cups. She was, he noticed, really quite a bit thinner. When she sat down again, her fingers went nervously about lighting a cigarette. Something about the gesture seemed to add a couple of years to her age.

  “Paul,” she said, “just how do you feel about… about the people I work for?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I never bothered with politics much, if that’s what you mean.” He was not in a position to indulge in high-flown phrases about right and wrong.

  “Then if somebody offered you some money to—?”

  “How much?”

  “A thousand dollars?”

  “You can’t live very long on a thousand, these days.”

  Something changed in her eyes. She crushed out her cigarette and rose, turning away from him. “You’d better talk it over with a friend of mine,” she said. “I’ll make the arrangements.” She went quickly out of the room.

  He finished his coffee. His brain felt thick and useless; he had been trying out an attitude, trying to come to a decision about it, but he could not see the answer clearly. It was easy enough to use the words spy, traitor, but what did they mean, after all? How many times did you have to get kicked in the teeth before you were entitled to switch your loyalties somewhere else?

  He rose and walked into the living room. She was standing by the alcove of windows at the far end. He came up beside her, and they stood looking out at the steady fall rain dripping into the park across the street. Somewhere facing the same park, Weston remembered, was Jane Collis’s tiny kitchenette apartment. He put the thought aside, and watched the cars pass along the glistening asphalt drives down there, drives that looked more like water than the flat gray surfaces of the ponds and winding lagoons, now roughened by the rain. Beyond the park you could see the lake, but there was no horizon.

  “I didn’t hear you telephone,” he said.

  She did not look at him, and her voice was barely audible. “Maybe I don’t want you to—”

  “What?”

  She shook her head mutely, then turned suddenly to look at him, and they faced each other for a moment. Then he put his hands on her narrow waist, and her hands dropped to his wrists as if in protest, but she made no effort to free herself beyond that, and when he drew her toward him she came forward obediently, and her lips were alive to his kiss.

  He stepped back and wiped the lipstick from his mouth, turned, and walked away from her to the telephone stand in the little front hall. Her voice followed him, puzzled.

  “Paul, what—?”

  He looked up a number in the book. When he reached for the phone she was beside him, her hand holding the instrument down. She looked at the U.S. Government listings on the open page, and her free hand came out of the drawer below the telephone, holding a .320 Colt automatic pistol.

  “Don’t,” she said quietly. “Get away from the phone.”

  The gun did not go with the apartment, nor with the slender hand that held it. There was nothing expensive or feminine about the weapon; it was Mr. Colt’s stock model in that caliber, without radio, defroster, or white sidewall tires. It would not give good FM reception, change the baby, or make you attractive to the opposite sex. It wasn’t, Weston thought, even much of a gun. You would starve to death before you filled the pot with what it killed, even in a country teeming with game. When you came to think of it, the object was practically useless. It wasn’t good for a damn thing except shooting a man at close range.

  “You didn’t have to kiss me,” she whispered.

  He started toward her. She should not have done it, he thought, she should not have given him this opening; it was unfair. He had tried to keep the whole thing on a reasonably civilized basis, in spite of what he owed her, and then she started making with guns. It was stupid. It was ridiculous. She began to back away from him, her shoulder brushing the wall. She came to the alcove in the corner and was brought to a halt by the sofa beyond. He walked up to the weapon until it bore against his chest, feeling very brave. Then he put his hand on it and turned it gently away from himself. He brought his other hand up and disengaged her fingers from the butt. Then, suddenly sick and trembling inside, he knocked her down with a full arm-sweep of the hand that did not hold the gun.

  “Next time you try that,” he breathed, “you two-bit Mata Hari, I’ll ram the damn thing down your throat butt-first!’

  He did not recognize his own voice. After a moment he turned away and went back to the telephone and dialed a number, dropping the gun into his coat pocket. Presently he was aware that she had left the room. A man’s voice spoke in his ear.

  He said, “Two of your agents were at the Acme Petroleum Corporation yesterday. One has a bum wrist. I’d like to talk to him if he’s around.”

  He was told to wait. After a considerable time, the voice of the big man he had struck in the locker room said, “Richardson here.”

  Weston said, “This is Paul Weston. I want to tell you where Marilyn George is.”

  “You’re a little late, Mr. Weston. We’ve had our eye on her ever since you made contact with her last night.”

  Weston said, “I don’t give a damn where you’ve had your eyes. I’m merely going on record as reporting that—take it down and mark it from me—Miss George is at the Shore Arms Apartments, apartment 608N.” The number was on the tag of the key that still lay on the little stand where she had dropped it as they came in the previous evening. “That’s the north wing of the building. You turn right as you come in the door.” The anger that came when he even thought of them was sour in his mouth. He could not keep it out of his voice. “You came around and asked me,” he said. “You made a big show of it. It was important enough to get me fired for. Well, now that I know, I’m telling you. I don’t want to hear, later, that I’m in trouble for keeping it a secret.”

  The man called Richardson sounded unimpressed. “All right, Mr. Weston, you’ve reported it. Anything else?”

  “Yes. She wants me to meet a guy. A sum of money has been mentioned. Shall I go?”

  There was a space of nothing. Then: “Where is Miss George now?”

  “In the bedroom with a sore ear,” Weston said. “She had some objection to my calling you.”

  “In other words, she knows you’re talking to me?”

  “Hell, she’s probably listening.”

  “I don’t understand, Mr. Weston. Are you asking my permission—”

  Weston said clearly, “You’re a representative of my
government, God help it. As a good citizen, I’m notifying you that somebody has made me a questionable proposition. I’m asking you whether to go ahead with it and see what these people want, or tell them to go to hell.”

  “And the girl is listening to you asking?”

  Weston said, “For all I know, the damn place is wired for sound. Just answer the question: do I say yes or no?”

  III

  When he came into the bedroom she was lying face down on the big bed, crying.

  He said, “All right, I’ve seen you, Marilyn. You can turn it off now.”

  She moved her face a little from side to side against the pale blue satin coverlet, rumpled now and stained with tears over the pillow. He sat down beside her, for some reason that was not quite clear to him. There were times when you had to make it up as you went along; he had hit her and now he was sitting down to comfort her. It did not make sense, but then, nothing else did, either.

  “I wouldn’t have shot,” she whispered, her voice muffled. “You knew perfectly well I wouldn’t shoot. Why did you have to hit me?”

  He lifted her by the shoulders and, after a moment’s hesitation, she turned to him and buried her face in his coat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what’s been getting into me lately. That’s the second time in two days I’ve gone up in blue smoke. I’m sorry as hell, Marilyn.”

  She shook her head minutely. “No,” she gasped, “no, you’re not; not really, and that’s the terrible thing, because you were such a nice boy…” He winced. “You were,” she breathed. “You were so sweet, and you wanted to make me so happy, and you were kind of cocky and proud of me when we went out together. And now you knock me down with your fist,” she said, “and don’t even bother to see if you’ve hurt me.”

  “It wasn’t my fist,” he said. “Anyway, I’ve said I was sorry.”

  She said, “It’s not that, it’s just… Sometimes you see things you’ve done to people and wonder… if there’s really any excuse for you. Particularly when you no longer believe…”