Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  Once, he remembered, he had given this girl a ring which she still had around somewhere, and had planned to marry her. It seemed remote and distant now; and he knew that he had been reaching for matrimony only as a rung in the ladder back up to the security and respectability that had been taken from him by what had happened in Washington. The knowledge made him feel uncomfortable in front of her, so that when he spoke his voice was rougher than he had intended.

  “Give,” he said.

  She seemed about to protest; then she pulled a crumpled envelope from her pocket and held it out to him. It was addressed to the Chemical Laboratory, Acme Petroleum Corporation, and it had been opened. He drew out the contents, two sheets that at first glance seemed to be laboratory report forms of a type sometimes used at Acme, each filled out for some oil. A hasty check of the physical characteristics showed him that they were inconsistent and meaningless. No such petroleum compounds had ever, to his knowledge, been discovered; nor did he think any were ever likely to be. Code, Louis had said. Weston returned the papers to the envelope.

  “You came back for this, Janie?”

  She did not look at him. “Yes.”

  “Why? What were you going to do with it?”

  “Give it to you,” she whispered.

  He did not want to believe her, because it would put him so deeply in her debt. Hold on, he told himself, look this over carefully, bud, before you buy it. You were a sucker for a girl once before, remember.

  “Go on.”

  “When I felt it under the drawer…” She looked rigidly at the floor. “It obviously didn’t belong there… I thought somebody else must have… I was afraid those men would find it and think you… I thought if you saw it you might be able to…”

  Her glance slid up to touch his face, and down again. He could see her bitterly remembering seeing him walk straight across the laboratory to examine the drawer in question. There was no reason why she should believe an explanation, so he did not make one.

  He asked, “How’d you get back in, Janie?”

  “I never left,” she whispered. “I just went outside at five to make it look as if… and then I slipped back in and hid in the washroom.”

  “You’ve been here since five o’clock!” He glanced at his watch, which read well after ten. Janie nodded. He asked, “What made you think somebody was watching?”

  “Well, I thought—” she flushed “—I thought that if it was a movie, they would be. And then, while I was looking out the window, I saw him. He was in the doorway across the street for a while, then he moved into the alley beside that window-shade factory. So I knew I’d have to wait until dark to get out without being seen. I got myself something to eat and drink from the vending machines in the plant, and went back into the washroom to wait. The watchman looked in once, but he didn’t come inside. After a while I went up and… and got it.” She glanced at the letter in his hand. “It was getting dark, it was about eight, and I thought I could make it out through the back if I went through the drum-cleaning shed and got in among the storage tanks. Only, when I started to leave, he was there.” She did not quite look at the closed door beside her. “He said he’d seen me sneak back. He said he’d been waiting to see what I… was up to.”

  “And then?”

  “He—” She closed her hands into fists; it was not a gesture of anger, but of remembered panic. “He wasn’t the same person at all, Wes! He had a gun and he made me go into his office and he closed the door and called up somebody he called Louis…” She looked up and spoke with careful clarity: “He wanted to know when Louis was going to send you…”

  “Me?” Weston asked, surprised although it was logical enough when he thought about it. When you had two people to get rid of—and doubtless something drastic had been planned for him earlier, for which Janie’s interference had made her also a candidate—it was easier to take care of them both at once.

  Janie looked away and said stiffly, “Louis was to see that somebody named Weston came here as soon as possible.” She waited, as if hoping he would have something to say.

  “I—” He checked himself; there was no time for explanations. “Go on, Janie.”

  “Then we waited for you. The watchman came up the stairs once, but he took me into the private washroom back of the office, and the man didn’t look there.” She drew a long breath. “Then we waited some more. Then he suddenly remembered the envelope and had me bring it to him. He was sitting at the desk. I guess it was so… so usual, my bringing him a letter to read, that he forgot… He started to read and the gun was just lying there beside him. When I leaned over and picked it up his face got so surprised, and he reached for it and… and it shot him.” She licked her lips. “I mean, I shot him. I suppose I did.”

  He wanted to help her but he did not dare to touch her. After a while he asked, “How long ago was this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “How could I know? It seemed like ages before I heard you… I was so afraid the watchman would come by and wonder why the door was locked.”

  Weston frowned, trying to follow her reasoning. “You waited for me, even after what you’d heard him—”

  “I guess I just wanted to be sure,” she said, and looked up at him with sudden, disconcerting steadiness. Presently she said quietly, “I guess I’ve been kind of a little fool, haven’t I, Wes?”

  He found himself unable to meet her eyes. He wanted to explain himself, but was stopped by the cold fact that would not be explained: that he had nothing to give her in return for the feeling she must have had for him, to try to do this for him. There was only one thing he could do, and he thought: make it good now; get her out of here. Her question showed him the way.

  He said carefully, clearing his throat, “Well, I wouldn’t say that, Janie.”

  Slowly the color came flooding into her face; she had obviously been waiting for him to reassure her, to assert his innocence and his love for her. Whether or not she had intended to let him convince her, she had been waiting for him to try.

  He said angrily, “Don’t look at me like that, Janie. When you spend four years of your life in uniform and all it gets you is a ten-point veteran’s preference toward a lousy civil service job, which they then grab away from you because they don’t like your female companions, what are you supposed to do, get up and sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’?”

  She licked her dry lips. “I wasn’t thinking about that,” she whispered. He realized that she was afraid of him. He was somebody, now, that she did not know; and she would not have been surprised to see him take out the gun and try to kill her.

  He said, “I’m not going to shoot you, Janie, you can let go of that wall!” He waited until she had straightened up. Then he jerked his head toward the closed door. “He killed himself. You weren’t here. You went to see the show at the Park Theater—we saw the feature downtown last week, but you didn’t realize that until you’d got inside, and you didn’t care about the picture, anyway; you were just worrying about me.” He saw her wince, and went on: “Then you went home to bed. You can’t help it if they lost track of you; nobody’d told you to keep yourself available. If they ask how you got home from here, you took a streetcar. If nobody saw you, that isn’t your fault.”

  She shook her head in weak protest. “But I can’t just—”

  He said irritably, “Don’t let your conscience get the better of you. If they get the wrong person you can always stand up and say you did it, can’t you?”

  “Why are you—”

  “Look,” he said, “don’t ask so many questions. I’m giving you a break, Janie. Because you’re a nice girl. You don’t want to get mixed up in this.”

  “You might… have thought of that sooner,” she breathed.

  He said, “Damn it, I didn’t ask you to go around killing people for me.”

  “No,” she whispered, “no, you just gave me a ring and said you loved me.” She never stopped watching him. “Wes, why are you helping me now? What do y
ou want now?”

  After a moment he made himself grin. “All right,” he said. “All right, Janie.” He slapped the letter against the palm of his hand. “This,” he said, “this never existed. As long as this never existed, you never shot anybody. Do you understand, Janie? Letter, murder. No letter, no murder…”

  “It wasn’t mur—”

  “Do you think anybody’s going to believe that, Janie? When you tell them why you came back here, they’ll think you were my accomplice right along; you just got caught slipping this letter out of here for me, and killed him. Why, that’s just about what happened, isn’t it? How are you going to prove what your motives were; and who’s going to care?”

  Her glance touched the rectangle of paper, and returned to his face. Her own face looked drained and exhausted, as if she had been through a long illness. “I shouldn’t let you…” she whispered. “Oh, I don’t know what’s right any more!”

  Her voice said that she knew only too well what was right; and then her shoulders sagged a little, in surrender. She pulled at the buttons of her coat and reached inside. Her hand came out with a small object threaded on a string about her neck. She pulled hard, the string broke, and she dropped the thing into his hand and, whirling, ran for the stairs.

  Presently Weston looked down at the engagement ring gleaming, with all the gleam you could buy for sixty-nine fifty these days, in the palm of his hand. He dropped it into his trousers pocket. He found that he was a little disappointed in Jane Collis. She should have marched bravely out to tell the F.B.I. all about the letter, even if it meant the electric chair. Perhaps she was going to do it after all, but remembering her small, weary face, he doubted it. Not tonight. And the longer she let it ride, the harder it would come. So long, Janie.

  After a long time, hearing nothing to indicate that she had not got clear all right, he opened the office door and went in to the dead man, with the feeling of disturbing somebody’s privacy. He took the gun from his pocket and studied it from all angles against the light. It was a small revolver and he was not surprised that the sound of it had not been heard outside this third-floor office insulated for air conditioning. Only a couple of fingerprints seemed clear enough to be of any use to anybody. He smeared these lightly and put the gun on the rug, not too far from the body.

  Straightening up, he looked around the place and thought of a dozen things he could do to make the scene more convincing. Don’t get fancy now, he warned himself, come along, Mastermind, before you louse it up. All that was necessary was to leave the possibility of suicide open. He went out of the office, releasing the catch so that the door locked irretrievably behind him: he intended to claim that it had been locked when he came and that he had therefore never looked inside. Then he took the papers from his pocket and studied them grimly.

  It seemed to him a little anticlimactic to discover that they were really no problem at all. He walked to one of the fume-hoods and pulled the switch beside it; an exhaust fan set up a muted roaring in the metal duct that led outdoors. He burned the papers in the largest crucible the lab provided, and used a Bunsen burner to complete the job of incineration. Faircraft presumably had the data on tap, and nobody else had any real business with them, anyway. Finished, he felt rather noble and patriotic—he could, after all, have got a considerable amount of money for them, assuming he could have got them away from here—but the temptation had really not been very strong. Apparently, you either had to be born a traitor or get extremely hungry; and he was not yet that hungry.

  VII

  They let him get three blocks before they stopped him. Weston had never been searched before, and the experience left him angry and humiliated. Only the memory of what was behind him in the locked third-floor office enabled him to keep his temper under control. He watched them go through the carton of personal belongings which he had, when leaving the place, put into the rear seat without any attempt at concealment, and through the car itself. Finally the big man, whose bandaged wrist gave him a reason for liking Weston no better than Weston liked him, came back along the sidewalk.

  “You picked a funny time to drop by for your stuff.”

  Weston said, “Maybe we just don’t agree on what’s funny.”

  Richardson studied him thoughtfully. “You called me this morning. You offered to help us.” After a moment he went on: “It may interest you to know that we got an anonymous telephone call telling us you’d try to break in here tonight. We were giving you a chance to bring it out to us…”

  “What?” Weston asked.

  “What you were sent here to get.”

  Weston said, “What I came after is in the back seat.”

  The big man looked him over coldly. “You’re getting by with a lot of stuff, Mac,” he murmured, and shifted the position of his injured arm as a reminder. “We’re leaning over backward to go easy on you, because we think you may have got a raw deal. But don’t push your credit too far.”

  Weston waited, unimpressed. When the other remained silent, he asked, “May I go now?”

  The big man hesitated, clearly quite aware that there was trickery involved here, and debating the best way to handle it: whether to let Weston go for now, or take him back to Acme and hold him while an attempt was made to discover what he had been doing in the place. It seemed to Weston that midnight passed and dawn approached while he waited for the answer. He knew that he was not a good enough actor to behave naturally while waiting for them to discover Dr. Lowery’s body. They would know he had known it was there.

  “I guess you can run along, for now,” the big man said reluctantly.

  Weston turned toward his car without, he hoped, any appearance of haste.

  “Oh, Weston…”

  This was part of the technique, he knew: to make you think you were safe, and then slug you unexpectedly from behind. He straightened up. Don’t talk too much, now! he warned himself.

  “Yes?”

  “Where’s your girl friend?”

  “Marilyn?” he asked, making his voice surprised. “She was at the apartment when I left.”

  The big man chuckled. “You and your women! No, the little girl. She seems to’ve given our man the slip; we really haven’t got enough people to keep an eye on everybody.”

  Weston said, “Well, good for Janie. I didn’t think she had it in her.” He hoped his voice indicated that Janie’s whereabouts did not interest him enough to speculate about them.

  “I noticed,” Richardson murmured, “that she seems to’ve given you back your ring. Or do you always carry a spare engagement ring in your pocket?”

  It was like seeing an open manhole in the road ahead when you were doing seventy; for a moment he could not seem to catch his breath, until he realized that the other could not readily know that the ring had been returned tonight.

  He heard his own voice saying smoothly, “No, she gave it back, all right. What did you expect after the reputation you’ve given me?” When the big man did not speak at once he went on to ask with innocent curiosity, “How did you know we were engaged?”

  “Everybody in the place seemed to know about it. Was it supposed to be a secret?”

  “Kind of,” Weston said and, knowing that he had said enough on the subject, waited, feeling the ring heavy and betraying in his pocket. He had not even thought about it; and Richardson had not given a sign that he had noticed it, until now. It occurred to Weston that he had underestimated the man he was trying to outwit. The thought was not reassuring.

  The F.B.I. man said deliberately, “Well, I guess you can go… Oh, just one thing more.”

  Weston waited by the car without speaking.

  “It was a woman who called us,” the big man said. “Nice sexy voice.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You haven’t been a sucker for that one again, have you?”

  “What do I do, say yes?”

  Richardson laughed. As Weston bent to get into the car, he asked quietly, “Oh… you haven’t seen your friend Dr
. Lowery tonight, have you?”

  Weston felt his breathing stop, his heart stop. It seemed to him that the picture in his mind, of the dead man lying on the rug in the blue-white light of the fluorescent desk lamp, must be visible to everyone around him.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “You seem to have a hell of a time keeping track of people,” he said. “What do you want Doc for?”

  The big man regarded him without liking. “Never mind,” he said. “Beat it…”

  It was raining a little when Weston left the car near the tall apartment buildings that faced the park, and went inside the closest one. He did not really know why he had come back here, except that there was no other place to go except his room, and he needed to talk to someone. The buzzer responded to his finger on the proper button without any questions from the voice-box. Marilyn was waiting for him at the apartment door when he got out of the elevator. He did not think she had been expecting him. She stepped back to let him in, however, and he stopped to look at her for a brief moment as he passed her, a little shocked to see how slender and lovely and serene she looked, facing him. Somehow it would have been nicer to find her disheveled and reeling drunk. It was not pleasant to know that people could look as she looked and still be what she was.

  He walked directly across the living room to the sideboard and poured himself a powerful drink. Then, on consideration, he returned half the slug to the bottle; his trained chemist’s hand performing the task without spilling a drop. That was all the training was good for now, mixing drinks, he reflected bitterly. But it was clearly no time to be getting tight.

  With the glass in his hand he turned again to look at her. She had not followed him across the room, but was standing by the little hallway, watching him. Something in her regard reminded him that he still had his hat on and was therefore no gentleman.

  “I thought you were going to meet Louis in the park,” she said.

  “Uhuh.”

  “Have you seen him?”