Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  “It has been done,” Louis said. “For instance, Acme has been supplying the Faircraft corporation with a rust preventive compound that hasn’t been entirely satisfactory …”

  Weston said mechanically, “The jackasses were applying it wrong, getting too thick a coating, that’s why it didn’t give protection.”

  “Yes.” Louis smiled. “There was considerable correspondence on the subject, wasn’t there? You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a day or so ago a few sheets of data found their way from Faircraft to Acme that didn’t concern rust preventives at all.”

  “I see,” Weston murmured.

  Louis said, “Faircraft has been running performance tests on a new jet powerplant for its army interceptor fighter. Nothing revolutionary, you understand, but very interesting. Unfortunately, the F.B.I. clamped down almost immediately the information had gone out. Our man at Faircraft was jailed. The data were traced to Acme so quickly that our agent there had no opportunity to pass them along; he had to hide them.” The tall man looked up from his cup, setting it aside. “The F.B.I. were already in the place, as a matter of fact; and if you hadn’t created such a fine diversion in the locker room, it’s doubtful if he could have saved the situation. However, you gave him the chance he needed.”

  Weston had a sudden clear picture of the crowd at the locker room door, the Bentley boy holding the mail as he watched, fascinated. One of them, he thought, and realized that he was afraid to take it further. He did not want to find out. Two people in that group meant something special to him. He did not want to have to consider the possibility that either of them could have…

  “… had to give up the idea of searching the place,” Louis said. “Too many pipes and kettles. So now they are, presumably, waiting for us to lead them to what they want.”

  “It’s still there?”

  “Yes. Our man has been instructed not to expose himself by making any further moves. He is a key man in this area and his position is more important to us than the papers. Even though we’re interested in the Faircraft data, we’d rather lose them than jeopardize the whole organization.”

  “Then why doesn’t he just flush the damn things down the drain?” Weston asked.

  Louis smiled. “He’s done better. He’s taped them beneath the top right-hand drawer of your desk.”

  After a moment Marilyn, silent at the end of the sofa, tapped the ashes from her cigarette with the sharp nervousness with which she did almost everything these days—a little explosion of movement—then was still again. The color she had had earlier had faded from her face and the brightness from her eyes and she looked sleepy and bored. Weston looked away from her. He did not say anything. There was very little to say. The trap was self-explanatory. Louis began to explain it, anyway.

  “When the papers are found, as they will be, it will look as if you’d had some motive besides bad temper for so drastically interrupting the search of your belongings. And after your past and present association with Elaine, and your having dinner with me here tonight, I don’t think that one phone call to the F.B.I., or even two or three, will clear you of complicity in our operations here… if the papers are found.” The tall man gestured to the instrument in the hall. “You’re free to try it, if you want to. Call them up and tell them what you’ve learned. See if they thank you and get your job back for you. Personally, I think they’ll guess you’re double-crossing us because you’ve lost your nerve; or that we’re throwing you overboard and you’re trying to make a deal to save yourself.”

  “And if they settle for me, that’ll leave your man free to—”

  “To continue operations. That’s right.”

  Weston said shortly, “Well, you didn’t ask me up here just to crow about it. What’s the proposition?”

  Marilyn rose, smoothed her dress, and walked, not quite steadily, to the sideboard. Momentarily distracted, the two men watched her make herself a drink. When she did not turn around to face them, they turned back to each other.

  Louis said, “Even though they’re not of primary importance, we’d prefer not to lose those papers. We can’t afford to risk our man to get them out, but if you wanted to try, there might be a little money in it for you. And of course you’d also be working in your own interests.”

  The tall man continued to talk, but Weston let the words go by him. The outlines of the trap were already clear in his mind: a deadfall, baited with paper and rigged to bring destruction, in the shape of the F.B.I., down on the man who reached for it. The F.B.I. would be happy to catch Paul Weston red-handed with the evidence that, incriminating enough by itself in the place where it was hidden, would be utterly damning after he had sneaked guiltily back to remove it. There was a strong probability that Louis hoped he would be caught if he tried it; Louis might even be planning to insure, by an anonymous telephone call, that this would happen.

  He could leave it alone, and when the stuff was found—as he had no doubt it would be—he could try to make people believe that someone else had put it there. He grimaced at the thought. On me, a frame looks fine, he reflected bitterly. Or he could, as Louis had suggested, call the F.B.I. and make like a patriot; and Louis had pointed out exactly what that would get him. It might incline them very slightly in his favor. In ten years perhaps, if he behaved himself properly, they might check back over the records and decide that Weston, Paul F., hadn’t been such a bad guy after all, and it was a pity the poor sap had died of starvation, but some mistakes were inevitable and the country’s safety had been preserved.

  He heard his own voice. “Tonight?”

  Louis said, “I’ll meet you in the park with the money, afterward. Do you know the parking lot down by the lakefront—?” He described the place carefully. It sounded, Weston thought, like a particularly good place for a murder.

  V

  There was a fine mist of rain in the air as he drove up the narrow street toward the familiar building. The street lights had haloes that looked cottony, like the stuff you blow off dandelion stems in the spring. From a distance he could see the small parking lot squeezed between the plant and the next factory—which bottled some kind of soft drink—empty except for the watchman’s rusty sedan parked close to the side door. He drew up his own car, not much younger, behind it, turned out the lights and got out.

  Presently he turned up the convertible collar of his gabardine topcoat and buttoned it to the throat. The dinner jacket beneath it made him feel uncomfortable and out of place. Somebody was undoubtedly watching him, he thought, and to hell with them. The side door was locked when he tried it. He shook it, and kicked it tentatively. The noise seemed to roll out across the empty parking lot, echoing and re-echoing among the silent factories around, before it died away.

  They could hear him, he thought, clear up to the Loop. Somewhere, distantly, a streetcar went by, but no cars came down the near-by street. He was apparently the only person in the neighborhood; yet somewhere, he was certain, there were men watching him. Even if the plant itself were not being watched—which seemed unlikely if there were any truth in Louis’s story—Weston was sure that at least one person had been following him. He was probably leading a parade around the streets of Chicago. Me and the Pied Piper, he thought.

  He had made no effort to give them the slip, for the simple reason that he had no idea of how to go about it, and his old car would not do much over forty, anyway. Similarly, he had given up any thought of getting into the building unobserved. If men were watching the place they were sure to be better at this cops-and-robbers routine than he was. One thing you learned in scientific work was never to challenge a specialist in his own field, if you could help it. Keep it simple, he thought, have a straight story to tell if they stop you. Whether they believe it or not doesn’t matter. They don’t believe anything you tell them, anyway. If anybody stopped him, he would merely have decided, a little intoxicated, that tonight was a good time to clean out his desk and locker.

  He shook the door again. The watchman
was probably asleep in the boiler room where it was warm and dry; or he was doing his rounds, grumbling, among the big storage tanks along the spur railroad track that serviced the plant. Weston swore loudly and walked around the corner of the building, made his way through the stacked oil drums waiting to be cleaned at the rear of the plant and along the track to the big sliding doors at which the cars were loaded and unloaded. He threw his weight against the small trap-door in one of them, pushing down, and after a moment the latch slipped free. This was no secret to anybody who worked in the place with the possible exception of Mr. French.

  Weston left the trap-door open behind him so that nobody could claim he was trying to hide his presence in the place. Ahead of him in the long, low room he could make out the shapes of the silent mixing vats and the rows on rows of drums—some empty, clean, and waiting to be filled; others full and waiting to be emptied. The only light was a naked sixty-watt bulb hanging in front of the foreman’s office by the fire doors at the far end, closed for the night. He started toward it and stopped abruptly, listening to a rat run across the floor upstairs. You could tell when it left the wooden floor and started scrabbling across the tops of the steel drums stored up there. Weston grimaced in the semi-darkness, annoyed with himself for the way his heart had pounded. They’ll never make a hero of you, bud, he told himself, and made his way to the light, where he paused to scrape caked grease off his shoes. Or even much of a villain, he thought, finding himself casting uneasy looks into the shadows among the surrounding oil drums. He had been on night-shift several times when they were putting out a big order, but somehow it was different, being alone in the place. Who says you’re alone? he asked himself, wincing as two rats took off in different directions over his head.

  A small steel door beside the closed fire doors let him into the shipping room beyond; and then he was climbing the stairs past the main office. The glass partitions let him see the unmanned switchboard and deserted desks. As was customary at night, the door to Mr. French’s office had been left open, with a fluorescent lamp casting a cold light over the desk in there, and no other light in the room.

  Upstairs, the door to Dr. Lowery’s office was closed and locked. This was not customary and made him uneasy. Well, if they were waiting in there for him, there was nothing he could do about it, he decided, and looked around the laboratory, seeing the reagent bottles in neat rows above the stone-topped tables, the apparatus and glassware gleaming faintly in the light of the single ceiling fixture left burning. Finally he let his glance go to the group of desks in the far corner, beyond the somewhat larger desk—equipped with a typewriter—that belonged to Jane Collis.

  The question he had put aside came back to cry for an answer: Who? The occupants of those desks were clearly the people best located for planting something in his desk… You’d better make sure the stuff’s there before you start theorizing about it, he reminded himself sharply. But it took a moment, and an effort, before he could make himself go forward. He felt that sirens would scream and bells start ringing when he touched the second desk from the right; the doors would fill with armed men and, caught with the evidence in his hands, he would be dragged away to be tried as a spy with the verdict a foregone conclusion. What the hell, he thought, in jail they’ve got to feed me…

  The drawer made a small rumbling sound as he pulled it out. There was nothing beneath it.

  Quickly, he checked all the other drawers, finding that for the first time he was really frightened. It was to have been expected that Louis had lied, but he found that he had not expected the lie to have no basis in fact at all… He pulled the top right-hand drawer out completely and turned it over to the light. Four small tabs of transparent tape made a rectangle on the plywood bottom; a corner of a sheet of paper adhered to one. It was too small to give a clue to what the paper had been, but there clearly had been something there. Somebody had merely got here ahead of him.

  When the door opened behind him he found that he was ready for it, waiting for it. He did not turn at once, giving the person behind him plenty of time for whatever he wanted to do. If he was to be shot, it was no break to see it coming; and if the F.B.I. were there he did not want to startle them into doing anything hasty. After seeing him blow his top once they would be understandably careful not to take chances with him a second time. A voice spoke his name softly, calling him Wes.

  “Hello, Janie,” he said. His mouth was dry and he did not like to think what her presence meant.

  She was standing in the doorway to Dr. Lowery’s office, now open. There was a gun in her hand. She had on one of those long, loose, hooded coats that the girls had been wearing the past year or so; this one was brown and he knew it as well as the clothes in his own wardrobe, having carried it for her and helped her into it innumerable times. He knew the low shoes she was wearing, and the shell-rimmed glasses—one of two pairs she owned—and the way she had her dark hair drawn back into a bun at the nape of her neck. But he did not know the pinched white face, or the wide, intent eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses.

  He said, “Are you going to shoot me, Janie?” His mind started to add it all up. He did not like the answer he reached, or really believe it. Yet who had been better situated to intercept incoming mail, who had had more constant access to his desk than the small girl in front of him?

  “You,” she said. “I… thought…”

  “What?”

  “I thought you didn’t… didn’t…”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Know,” she said.

  He looked at her, never letting himself look away from her, not for a moment. “It isn’t there,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve got it.” The fingers of her left hand crushed the pocket of her coat from the outside, crumpling paper beneath the cloth.

  “You weren’t supposed to,” he said.

  She stared at him blankly.

  He asked quietly, “Why did you come here?”

  “I thought you—” Her face seemed to go through a spasm of pain. “I thought you—”

  “What?” He was getting closer, slowly. The palms of his hands were wet, and he could feel the perspiration inside the starched collar of his shirt. “What did you think, Janie?”

  “I thought you didn’t know…” She looked up at him. The gun sagged, forgotten, in her hand. “This morning… Doc asked me for your notebook. Something—paper—caught when I tried to close the drawer. I thought… I told myself you didn’t know… Somebody else… I came back to…” The gun steadied and her knuckles whitened. “But you did know. You went right to it. I watched you.” She stared at him blindly. He saw that she was crying.

  She turned and leaned her forehead against the doorjamb, and did not seem to know when he took the gun away. He stood for a moment beside her, sickeningly relieved to have his hands on the weapon, so that for a moment nothing else mattered. The small girl in the brown coat pressed her face hard against the unyielding wood of the door and continued to cry silently.

  “No,” she gasped, when he tried to take her by the shoulders, “no, don’t touch me. At least don’t touch me!”

  He looked at the gun in his hand. “Janie, the gun,” he said. “Where’d you get the gun?”

  “He had it,” she said, and made a little motion with her head toward the office. Weston looked at the familiar desk where, as on Mr. French’s desk downstairs, a small lamp was burning to give all the light there was in the room except for what spilled in through the open door. At the base of the desk he saw the head and one shoulder of the man who was lying on the rug behind it, unmistakably dead.

  VI

  He was thinking that this did not happen, even as he walked deliberately forward and checked that he had made no error either about the identity or the condition of the man on the floor: it was Dr. Lowery and he was dead. Weston looked down at the silent figure, seeing the drying blood on the vest and on the fingers of the hand that must have gone there in an instinctive movement to contain
the sudden unbearable pain, even as death wiped this out with everything else the older man had ever known. Doc, he thought, who had hired him even knowing how he had come to lose his previous job; Doc, with his air of a somewhat uneasy champion of the oppressed and misunderstood, who would gladly have tackled Mr. French in his behalf. Or would he really? Doc, to whom the laboratory mail came quite naturally, without any effort on his part. Doc, who had an unquestioned right to be anywhere in the building he wanted to be, who could openly look through anybody’s desk on the excuse—if anybody asked, which they wouldn’t, except to help—of hunting for a scrap of data or some mislaid correspondence…

  Weston turned to look at the small girl in the doorway. The light was brighter in the laboratory behind her than in the dim office in which he stood, so that it was hard for him to see her face. After a while, she nodded dumbly in answer to his unspoken question. Yes, the gesture said, I killed him.

  This did not happen, Weston thought: people you knew did not shoot other people you knew. They could have peculiar politics, be engaged in questionable activities, but they did not kill each other.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I… he…”

  It was too much for her, and she turned away. Weston looked at the dead man on the floor and tried to work it out by himself; but a small urgent voice was speaking in his mind: Wake up, bud, you haven’t got all night.

  He came out of the office, closing the door behind him after setting the latch so that it would not lock. For a moment he was under the impression that she must have run away, and found himself curiously relieved not to have to decide what to do or believe about her. But she was leaning against the wall at his shoulder, her back to the wall, her hands flat against it, as if she needed all the contact she could get with something solid. He stood looking down at her.