Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  “No.”

  “Did you have… any trouble?” The small break betrayed her utterly.

  “Should I have had?” he asked, and watched her turn and go to the windows, the short chiffon gown she still wore swirling and eddying about her like mist. After a while, he said, “You’re kind of a bitch, aren’t you, Lynn?”

  “I suppose so.” She did not move or look at him.

  “Whose idea was it, yours or his?”

  “His.”

  “You’d say so, of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you called the F.B.I.”

  “Yes.”

  “The man said you had a nice sexy voice.”

  “Did he?”

  “I was to be caught with the goods on me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be disappointed to hear it didn’t work,” he said. “Because I burned the stuff.”

  She turned then. The motion continued in her dress for a little after she was still again. He finished his drink, set the glass aside carefully, and walked across the room to her. She waited for him to reach her, unmoving. She did not seem to be afraid.

  “You lousy little tramp,” he said, standing over her. “I ought to beat your ears down.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He pulled her to him roughly, to maul her, rumple her, to muss her fragile gown and her careful dignity, to hurt and humble her. But somehow the kiss did not turn out like that at all; and after a while he released her abruptly, bewildered and a little frightened by what had happened to his angry intentions. He found himself irrelevantly remembering that she had stepped behind him at a certain moment earlier this evening, probably to help disarm him, yet just possibly to shield him.

  “What the hell are you, anyway?” he asked.

  She turned away from him to look down at the headlights passing along the drives of the park across the street. The pavements were shiny with wetness. He stood behind her for a while, waiting for her to speak, until he realized from her breathing that she was trying very hard to keep from crying. Then he started to turn away, but she heard him move and stopped him with her hand.

  “Don’t—”

  “What?”

  “I thought you were leaving.”

  He shook his head. “Just shedding my hat and coat. Okay with you?”

  She smiled at his challenging tone. Her voice was suddenly quite prosaic. “Bring me my evening bag from the telephone stand, will you? I need a hanky, for some reason.”

  In the hallway, he glanced at his watch; twenty minutes had passed now since the F.B.I. had let him drive away. They would be in the Acme building now, they would be up in the laboratory; if they had managed to locate the watchman with the key, they might already have the office open. Once Dr. Lowery was found, they would be after Paul Weston again. He had no doubt that somebody was keeping track of him; it should not take them long to get here. Anticipation of the questions they would ask this time made him cringe inwardly, and he wondered if he would be able to stick to the story that the door had been locked and he had not known what lay behind it. Even so, he thought there was a very good chance that he would wind up being tried for murder. Well, you could not say he had not asked for it.

  When you came right down to it, he reflected, you would have to go a long way to find another man who went to more trouble to play sucker for every woman who crossed his path. And the wenches aren’t even grateful! he thought, remembering Janie’s small, hostile, shamed face as she gave him back his ring and fled. Well, what did he want, he asked himself, a tin medal on a pink ribbon? She had gone, hadn’t she? The trouble was, nobody seemed to appreciate what an innately fine and heroic person Paul Weston really was. Pass the crying towel this way.

  He wondered if Janie would speak up if he were arrested. Once he would have had no doubts, but now he was not so sure. Thinking him to be a spy, a man who had used her and perhaps even laughed at her, Janie might very well let him be punished for what she had done, feeling that it was really his fault anyway, and that it would serve him right. And if she did not come forward of her own accord, he would only make himself look like a coward and a vicious fool if he tried to save himself by bringing her into it. Even if she were to volunteer a confession, there was a strong probability it would be thought that, still in love with him, she was lying to protect him. No, the story was his and he was stuck with it; in this game, apparently, you played for keeps.

  When he came back into the living room, Marilyn was sitting at the end of the long sofa nursing an unlighted cigarette, which she held up to him for a match. Somehow it was a relief to be with someone to whom he owed nothing, someone who could not be harmed by knowing him, because she was already infected with the contagion it seemed he carried. In fact, when you came right down to it, it was she who had given it to him.

  “Thanks,” she said, leaning back from the flame he had held for her. “What happened to my purse?”

  He laughed. “Sorry. I was thinking about something else. Shall I—?”

  She shook her head. “Do you want another drink?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Do you?”

  “No,” she murmured. “Even if I am a lush who’s been tanking up all day, Paul, I don’t want a drink, thank you.”

  He winced to hear the words he had spoken upstairs quoted back at him: they sounded crude and unpleasant.

  She said, “You don’t have to make me out worse than I am.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Remembering the microphones in this apartment, he did not try to explain. He was not very eager, anyway, to confess that he had still retained enough illusions about her to think she might have been trying to help him, that he had, by reviling her, been trying to shield her from the suspicion of her associates.

  After a while he seated himself on the sofa beside her. Presently she put her hand on his arm lightly, as if to call his attention to what she was about to tell him.

  “I did try to keep you from being involved in Washington, Paul,” she said. “Even if you don’t believe it. And I warned you this morning to get out. If you keep playing Secret Agent X-9 around the place, is it my fault if you get into trouble? Certainly I called the F.B.I.; I’d have done it even if Louis hadn’t told me to, just to get you put out of circulation for a while.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  She watched the ascending spiral of smoke from her cigarette. “If you saw a little kid loose in your laboratory, reaching for stuff that could burn him or kill him—” She looked at him with sudden directness. “And do you think I like having you around with that hangdog look, blaming me for everything that’s happened to you since the day you were born, Paul? Do you think I like being needled and insulted and sneered at, yes, even struck—” she touched her cheek where a small bruise was still visible, “—just so you can keep on telling yourself you’re not still in love with me? I’m not much to be in love with, I admit, but have I ever done anything to take advantage of the fact that you go all rubber-legged when I kiss you? Have I? In Washington, did I ever ask you for anything, anything at all? As I remember, I was even very careful to go easy on your pocketbook when we went out together. Here, have I used my… my sex on you to make you do anything but get the hell out of something you don’t know anything about and haven’t the experience to handle? Or, if you’re going to be stubborn and get your fool head shot off, to treat me with ordinary human decency until it happens? I haven’t, have I?”

  “No,” he said stiffly.

  “All right,” she said. “And another thing, I don’t like to be looked at and handled as if I were some kind of a tart, Paul. I’m not. Maybe it’s nothing to my credit that I don’t operate in the bedroom like the girl who had this place before me, but it just happens that I don’t. That’s just another conclusion you’ve jumped to—”

  “I never said—”

  She said, rather breathlessly, “You’ve been waiting for me to start seducing you ever since I picked yo
u up last night! Well, if you stay here tonight, you’ll still sleep on this couch, Paul. In Washington, I was a messenger, nothing more. I had dates with those men and afterward then would be something in my purse and then I’d go some where else and there wouldn’t be anything in my purse any longer. I’m not claiming that’s anything to be proud of; and I’m not saying that at twenty-five I’m as innocent as I was at fifteen; but that’s my private life and my own business, and you can just keep wondering about it from now until you grow a long gray beard. But the next time you start to push me around, darling, I’m not going to be sweet and girlish and yielding: I’m going to crown you with a lamp. It isn’t as if you were used to acting that way. It isn’t as if you’d dream of acting that way with any other girl you know. Well, you’re not going to act that way with me, either, Paul.”

  He did not speak. She got up and stabbed her cigarette into an ashtray, which was already half full of stubs she must have put there, waiting, while he was at Acme. The trays had all been empty, earlier that evening. She turned to look at him.

  “You’ve got no right—” she began quickly.

  “No right to what?”

  “—to condemn… Oh, I guess you have,” she whispered. “I suppose you can’t divide a person up into different parts and judge them all separately, can you? The funny thing is that quite often I still feel like quite a nice person, Paul, and when somebody like you treats me as if I were… rubbish… it hurts. Of course you know that. That’s why you do it, isn’t it?”

  He asked, “How did you get into this racket, anyway?”

  “It wasn’t a racket when I got into it,” she said after a little pause. “It was more like a religion. You can do a lot of strange things for something you believe in; things that seem quite incomprehensible after you’ve stopped. You just can’t see how you could have been so blind… But of course, it was very breathless and thrilling, too; and that had something to do with it. I used to like excitement,” she said, rather dryly.

  He did not speak. Presently she came back to the sofa and sat down on the edge of it, facing him. “I don’t suppose you’d ever understand,” she said quietly. “I’ve never tried to make anybody… It really was like a religion. I was a nice girl from a wealthy family—they don’t know where I am now or what name I’m using—and they used to have fits about the political views I came home with. They couldn’t see where I got them. But… it just seemed like the answer, when I was in college. The world we lived in had come all apart during the depression, but nobody at home would admit there was anything wrong with it, or that anything should be done about it. The self-righteous way they talked because we could afford… The way they closed their eyes to everything… And then a boy gave me a book to read, and I went with him to a meeting—I don’t even remember his name, now—and it was like coming into a different place, where nobody was afraid to believe, really believe, that the world could be made into a wonderful place to live in, if you were just willing to work and suffer for it.”

  Her face had seemed to soften and become young and almost eager as she talked. “And what they believed in,” she said, “had a sort of beautiful, simple logic, and if it was harsh and cruel in a way, what’s a revolution when you’re seventeen years old? What are a few hundred thousand people to be murdered in cold blood, when you’re a sophomore in college and haven’t ever seen anybody dead? And if you really couldn’t stomach the revolution, there were always people who’d help you argue it wouldn’t be necessary. Why, it was the official line: nothing violent, nothing illegal. We believed it, why shouldn’t we? We believed everything they told us!” Her features were sharp now with self-contempt; and she looked at least thirty years old. “What nobody, nobody seems to realize is that we weren’t betraying our country. We thought we were helping to save it. Along with the rest of the world.”

  “And now?” he asked gently.

  “Now we’re all running to the nearest platform to wash our dirty little disillusionments in public.” She shivered. “But for some of us it’s too late. We’ve already done too much… Did you know that a man in Washington killed himself two years ago because of something he’d passed along to me? He was about to be discovered, so he killed himself.”

  Weston shook his head; he had not heard it.

  She said, “They hushed it up. He was in the State Department. He left a note. That’s why I had to disappear like that. Now do you see why I can’t… why I have to keep on…?” She rose again, standing with her back to him. “I suppose if I were really brave… but I’m not. And they know it. They always know just what kind of person you are, and what you can be made to do, and how to make you do it. They know that as long as I can keep on living in nice places and wearing nice clothes and having people admire me, I’m not going to help put myself in jail if I can avoid it. They don’t worry because I no longer think I’m saving the world… you won’t believe it, Paul, but I really thought that in Washington—as late as that, two years ago!—I was working for world peace. Until I learned what some of the documents were I’d helped pass along, and where they’d gone to; and until the foreign situation made it so obvious what was going on over there that even I began to understand…” She turned to look down at him. “I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me, darling. Why, a lot of the time I still kind of enjoy myself, in a ham-actressy sort of way. It’s, well, exciting—” She shivered again, and after a pause walked away across the room, saying, “I think I will have a drink after all. Join me?”

  “All right,” he said. “Just a little one.”

  As he went forward to take it from her, he did not know what he was thinking, except that it was tinged with regret. Because it was too late to be explaining anything. It was too late. Even if he were in love with her, it was too late for love. He would wind up in court for murder, and she for something many people would consider worse than murder; and how they had got that way no longer really mattered.

  Yet it was nice to have company. He smiled at her, taking the glass from her hand, and her smile answered him; then suddenly died. He also had heard the elevator come to a stop at this floor; but he stared at her for a moment longer, and understood that she, too, had been waiting. She, too, was expecting someone or something. She had been a little surprised to see him, he remembered suddenly, she had thought herself to be opening the door for somebody else; someone for whom she had, he reminded himself, retained the fragile, becoming evening gown instead of changing into something more comfortable and less vulnerable.

  Her glance at him was suddenly the glance of a stranger, as she put her glass aside and went hastily toward the door, but not so quickly that the bell did not have time to ring before she got there.

  Then Louis was in the hallway. Weston heard the tall man’s voice.

  “Where?”

  Marilyn answered with a jerk of her head. Louis brushed past her to stand in the archway, facing Weston. Behind him, the slender fair-haired girl Weston could no longer feel he knew had turned aside to pick up her silver-mesh evening bag from the telephone stand. She did not look around.

  “What took you so long?” she asked sullenly of the tall man. “God, I’ve had to tell him the whole story of my life, waiting for you to get here!”

  “I know,” Louis said. “I heard you.”

  The girl behind him glanced up quickly at the tone of his voice.

  VIII

  Louis was wearing an army officer’s bulky trenchcoat; his hand was in the pocket of the coat. The garment became him, giving him an air of reckless arrogance that was not belied by his handsome bared head. Yet somehow with a gun in his hand he was not quite as impressive a figure as without one, talking about it: he had a little of the appearance of a man running a bluff and not quite sure it was going over.

  “Where’s his hat and coat?”

  Marilyn, after a moment, straightened up and slipped her wrist into the loop of the silver purse with which she had been toying.

  “I’ll get them.”r />
  She crossed to the closet, then carried the clothes through the living room to Weston, taking a route that did not at any time place her between the two men. She gave Weston the coat to put on, waited until he had buttoned it, and then presented him with the hat.

  Louis said, “Take a look down the fire escape, will you, Elaine?”

  “What’s the matter with the elevator?”

  “Nothing. Just an agent of the F.B.I. making sure your friend doesn’t get away before the police can arrest him for murder… The fire escape!” he prompted sharply, as Marilyn made as if to speak. “We haven’t got all night.”

  She glanced at Weston a little strangely before turning away. Weston obeyed the tall man’s signal and followed her. As he entered the kitchen, she was coming back in through the open fire escape door.

  “It seems all clear,” she said to Louis.

  “All right,” he said deliberately. “You go first, Elaine.”

  Her head came up. “But I’m not—” She checked herself, watching him. “But why, Louis?”

  The tall man said nothing. She shrugged her bare shoulders resignedly.

  “Well, I suppose it’s all right if I get myself a wrap,” she said.

  As she turned to slip past them sideways—the two men leaving only a small space for her in the tiny kitchen—Louis moved without warning and pinned her with hip and shoulder against the refrigerator while still facing Weston, who heard her quick gasp of shock and surprise at the unexpected roughness. It took the tall man an instant to jerk the silver-mesh bag from her wrist. He stepped back again, in releasing her throwing her away from him toward the open door, where the raised step tripped her.

  Louis dropped the captured purse on the drainboard, pried the throat of it open left-handed, caught hold of something inside, and shook it free. The discarded purse flew along the kitchen to strike glancingly one wall, another, and finally stop almost at the feet of the girl who had fallen awkwardly across the doorstep, her long dress collecting in pools of chiffon about her. After a moment, not looking up, she reached for the shining bag and slipped the loop of it back about her wrist, as she sat there.