Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  Louis glanced at the little gun in his left hand: the gun Weston had taken from her that morning and had yielded to Louis just before dinner.

  “Did you really think,” Louis asked, “that you could palm this from the sideboard upstairs, and neither Max nor Joseph nor I would notice it? What kind of comic-strip agents do you take us for?”

  “It’s my gun,” she whispered. “It… was lying there. I just picked it up. It didn’t occur to me you’d think…” She had said too much. She sensed it and stopped.

  There was more between these two, Weston knew, than the question of a gun, even if she had meant, somehow, to use it; more than some expressed opinions that might be interpreted, from the tall man’s point of view, as disloyal to him and the organization he stood for: after all, she could always claim she had been talking for Paul Weston’s benefit, knowing quite well the microphones were there but never dreaming she would be taken seriously by those listening in upstairs. Weston tried to work it out; then Marilyn’s shoulders moved in a tiny shrug and she rose and went outside without saying any more. At a gesture from Louis, Weston followed her.

  It was dark on the iron stairs and darker down in the alley where a trickle of rain water ran like the stream at the bottom of a canyon. Louis indicated a door in the building opposite and suddenly they were indoors again, in a brightly lighted service corridor of some kind. They paused, at Louis’s word, for Marilyn to run a comb through her hair and smooth down her dress; and the tall man gave them some further instructions, and a warning.

  Walking through the lobby of the apartment house next door, with Marilyn beside him and Louis hovering protectively behind him, Weston could not make the place seem natural to him. He had got his shoes wet in the alley and it gave him a bedraggled feeling. He did not know where he was being taken or why; and he could not determine what his feelings ought to be about the girl at his side. He could not quite understand the attitude of the man behind him. It was as if he had suddenly come into a movie in the middle of the feature, and there was nobody to tell him what had gone before.

  There was quite a bit of traffic in this building for that time of night: a laughing couple, quite young, went out ahead of them, while a middle-aged couple came in; and a woman wearing furs over a tailored suit waited by the door, presumably for her escort to bring the car around or return from parking it. She looked up as Weston and his companions approached; and he was sure that she was about to betray some surprise at the sudden appearance of two warmly-dressed young men accompanying a girl in a thin chiffon gown and not much else. It seemed to him that everyone who saw them must know that they did not belong here, and that there was something terribly wrong with the relationship between them. But the woman’s glance, recognizing none of them, slid politely past them. It occurred to Weston that she might very well have saved her life, and his, by this reaction. For the first time he came to grips with the actual thought of the gun Louis would be holding ready in his pocket.

  It had not been raining when they came down the fire escape, but it was raining softly when they stepped outside again now. Immediately, a car hissed up the gleaming drive to pick them up. The man in the brown suit, who had stood behind the bedroom door in the upstairs apartment, earlier in the evening, was at the wheel. He took them away from there fast; and as they turned into the wide street, beyond which were the trees of the park, there was a rending crash of metal from the left where one car, pulling out of a parking space, had been heavily rammed by another coming fast up the street. Weston was startled to recognize the ramming car as his own ancient sedan. A boy jumped out of it and darted across the street, losing himself in the park in an instant. The driver of the other car seemed stunned or hurt. Weston found the shock of seeing his own car wrecked replaced by a small growing sense of panic as he realized that this man must have been waiting there to follow them; and that Louis must have had a strong reason for having him so drastically put off their trail. It made Weston feel deserted and alone to know that there would be no help; he found that he had been vaguely counting on a rescue by somebody. They swung into a wailing right turn away from the park. Louis, kneeling on the front seat to watch the two in the rear, looked behind him.

  “What about Max?” he asked, clearly referring to the boy who had run away.

  “He’ll be waiting down by the lakefront,” the driver said. “I’m giving him time to get there; he’s got almost a mile to go on foot.”

  “Where’d he get another car?”

  “It was Bright Boy’s.” The man in the brown suit jerked his head toward Weston. “We jimmied the wheel lock and shorted the ignition. The heap wasn’t good for much else.”

  Weston said automatically, “Hell, that was a good car.” He felt a vague stirring of anger; the car he had just seen smashed had been his one major possession.

  “Yeah,” the driver said. “Ten years ago, it was a good car.”

  Marilyn’s voice came out of the darkness beside Weston. “Who was in the other car?”

  “Guess.”

  “The F.B.I. man?”

  “Give the gold-plated garbage can to the little lady in the rear.”

  “I hate to interrupt this routine,” Louis said. “But would you comedians mind shutting up?”

  The nervousness implicit in this request for silence, from a man whom Weston would have guessed to be not often troubled with nerves, was more frightening than anything that had happened that evening.

  When they swung out along the shore drive at last, the lake was lost in the wet darkness to the left. There had not been enough wind for the waves to be audible over the sound of the tires and the steady clicking of the windshield wipers; but somehow, even not seeing it or hearing it, you knew that the water was there. Louis had his gun in his hand now—a heavy, short-barreled revolver of a caliber large enough to give Weston the impression that, if the light should strike it right, he would be able to see down the wide bore to the bullet resting in the chamber. Something had changed, he knew; getting into this car had been a final step toward something to which Louis now felt himself committed. Weston could not make himself face the thought fully: it seemed too melodramatic and unreasonable.

  The car turned into an opening in the screen of bushes to the right and coasted across a wide parking lot, well lighted and marked with neat painted lines. It was apparently too wet and too late at night for anyone to be using the beach which it served; and no couples seemed to have found it suitable for other purposes, perhaps because there was too much light, or because this was a weekday evening.

  The windshield wipers kept up their steady beating after the car had been stopped. They waited, but nobody came out of the surrounding bushes to join them.

  “Where the hell is the —?” Louis asked suddenly, using an epithet that seemed to shatter completely the illusion of gentility he had woven about himself earlier. The man in the brown suit said something reassuring. Louis said, “— him! We can’t wait here all night.” He waved the gun abruptly at the occupants of the rear seat. “Out, you!”

  Weston reached for the door handle on his side. Behind him, he heard Marilyn’s voice, surprised.

  “Me?”

  The drive seemed to have given her assurance; and her tone said that nothing that could happen to her would be more incredible than that, dressed as she was, she should be asked to get out into the rain in this deserted place.

  “You, too, Elaine.” There seemed to be a dry regret in the tall man’s voice. Then something went shockingly wrong with it. “All right! Move!”

  Weston’s throat was suddenly tight and choked, his chest constricted, as his body understood at last—before his mind would admit the fact—that he was going to be killed. But why? he asked himself desperately. It was clear now that Louis had come to the apartment to get him with this in mind, had brought him directly here for the purpose; but for what reason? The flawed note in the tall man’s voice—his behavior throughout—said that for all his adventurous air he was no
practiced killer. This was no movie where spies fired off guns at each other with reckless abandon: these were men trained in a certain line of work, one of the cardinal tenets of which was to avoid violence wherever possible, because violence attracted attention. Then why? Weston asked himself. Merely because he, and the girl still hesitating in the car behind him, had violated a sort of gangster code these people had? It did not seem likely they could afford such luxuries; but maybe they could.

  Then Marilyn was standing on the wet pavement beside him in the yellow diffused light, in the rain, her hair instantly wet down her cheeks, the filmy layers of her evening gown quickly melting together to adhere unromantically to each other and to her. She seemed quite unaware of this or of the sudden wetness of her bare shoulders as she looked at him wide-eyed, having reached the same swift understanding that they were going to die.

  The bushes crackled behind her and she started; and Weston instinctively braced himself to throw both of them to the ground, that being all he could think of doing if shooting started. But it was only the boy who had served dinner, who had smashed his car, soaking wet and breathless, stumbling out to them.

  “—, it took you long enough!” Louis snapped, in that strained, inhuman voice.

  “I got lost,” the boy gasped. “It’s like a —ing jungle in there.”

  “Well, get in the —ing car so you don’t get lost again.”

  Louis gave Marilyn a little push and gestured to Weston. He was no longer a hearty man of the world; he was just a wet and worried—and therefore foul-mouthed—individual who had to kill a couple of people. Probably he had to do the job himself because neither of the others would take it on: murder was not in their contract, and they wanted no part of it. From the way Louis glanced back at them, Weston guessed that the tall man was not quite sure that they would not pull out and leave him. Then he gestured toward the bushes.

  “Over here,” he said.

  “But—” Still not quite believing, Marilyn turned her head to protest.

  “— you, get moving!” Louis seized on the excuse to let himself get angry. “You damn little bourgeois renegade!”

  She went on, her bare shoulders a little hunched against the rain, carrying her now sodden dress in dripping handfuls about her knees while her silver sandals, still shining dully, splashed heedlessly through the pools of water on the pavement. The barrel of the gun poked Weston in the ribs. He thought of turning, swinging his arm back, as he had read it and seen it done in the movies; but before he could make up his mind to act, the touch was gone.

  “In there,” Louis said. “Tell her.”

  “Take the path,” Weston said.

  The disheveled girl ahead of him glanced around, startled at being addressed through him; then located the mouth of a path, blacker than the bushes that surrounded it, and turned in that direction. As the dark tunnel opened before him, so that he could see the light of the open field beyond, Weston knew that unless something happened they would never get through that darkness. Quit stalling, you spineless jerk, he told himself, you might as well take it coming as going!

  The bushes were around him, brushing at him wetly. He could see Marilyn cringe from their contact with her skin, the whiteness of her shoulders a pale blur in front of him. He felt Louis close behind him. For a moment they were all together; and he dropped, sweeping Marilyn’s feet out from beneath her with a kick that made her cry out with pain, as she fell and the gun crashed over their heads. Louis, unable to stop in time, fell on top of them. They were threshing around in a hopeless confusion of limbs and wet clothes and angry, broken sounds of struggle; of hard pavement and soft earth and the resilient but impenetrable stalks of the bushes that responded to their bodies by showering them with water from above.

  Suddenly Weston was free and up, and a gleam of bare arms told him Marilyn was clear and away up the path; between them, a formless shape struggled for a footing. He did not dare to close with it; simple fighting instinct told him that, killer or no, Louis outweighed him and outreached him and probably knew tricks he had never heard of. Stay clear or he’ll bend you like a pretzel! he warned himself breathlessly, and kicked out with all his strength and again, feeling his foot strike solidly each time.

  He felt no more compunction than if it had been a snake in the path. A hand caught his trousers leg; a pale oval the size of a face turned up to him; and he drove the hard leather heel of his other foot directly at the light target, striking with a terrible, unexpected accuracy, and feeling bone and cartilage smash beneath the blow. Free again, he hurdled the writhing body on the ground, and saw Marilyn, waiting, break into flight ahead of him. He found that he had not expected her to wait for him; seeing her still there was like receiving an undeserved present because somebody just happened to like you that well. It told him something about his feeling for her that he did not have time to stop and analyze. It almost let him forget the sickening crunch of his heel going home in Louis’s face.

  Somebody shouted and took a shot at them as they ran across the open field. Then there was brush all around them, and branches tearing them. The civilized city beyond the park, the handsome, well-dressed people they once had been, belonged to a dream world that had no relation to the desperate reality in which they now found themselves trapped. Later, Weston could not have said how long they ran, even after there was no longer anyone behind them.

  IX

  He stopped in the little tiled hallway to look at her in the light, while water drained from his own clothes to make pools on the floor. Outside, the rain splashed down unceasingly; and across the street he could see the dripping trees of the park out of which they had just come. She leaned against the mailboxes, breathless, covered to well below the knees by his drenched, muddy topcoat—a necessity, since there had been, in places, not enough left of her shockingly bedraggled chiffon gown to serve even the primary purposes of clothing. Below the coat, her bare legs were scratched, her feet bruised and muddy in the blackened, disintegrating evening sandals.

  He said, “Well, we’ve obviously got to get clothes somewhere. If you’ve got any better ideas—”

  “I just don’t like begging clothes from your fiancée,” she protested.

  “She isn’t any more,” Weston said. “If that makes you feel better.”

  Marilyn glanced at him with weary puzzlement. “Well, she was last night when I picked you up in that bar, unless you were so tight you didn’t know what you were talking about. You were afraid she’d get into trouble about it.”

  He said, “Well, she did in a way, and now she isn’t. Not that I can see what that’s got to do with—”

  “Wait a minute.” Marilyn frowned and straightened up, squeezing back her wet hair with both hands. There was an ugly scratch across her left cheek, and no makeup of any kind left on her face. He thought it was probably the first time he had ever seen her face completely bare of cosmetics; somehow it made her more of a person to him, and less of a romantic idea, than she had ever been. She looked younger, and it startled him to see that she looked intelligent; somehow he had never considered her intellectual capacity before, and her record certainly wasn’t that of a particularly bright girl. Yet, on the other hand, you might say it was the brightest ones who were most in danger of being lured into crackpot crusades of one kind or another. “Wait a minute,” she said, and there was a hard, questioning note to her voice that he had not heard before. “You’ve had just two chances to see her since last night and break the engagement. One, when you went home to change for dinner; and the other, while you were at that place—”

  He said, “Damn it, what difference—”

  “Louis said you’d murdered somebody there!”

  “He said I was going to be arrested for it,” Weston corrected her.

  The tall girl facing him, with the naked, unfamiliar face and the squeezed-back wet hair, seemed to relax and even smile a little.

  “I see. So she did it.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Weston
protested.

  “And you were going to take the blame for it?” After a moment, Marilyn said quietly, “You must be kind of in love with her, to want to shield her.”

  “Ah, shut up,” he said uncomfortably. “Let’s get some dry clothes before we start discussing romance.”

  “Can’t I even talk about her?” Marilyn murmured.

  He glanced at her irritably and poked a finger at the bell. A trickle of rainwater went down his spine as he moved, and it seemed to him that women picked the damnedest times for deciding who loved whom. A familiar voice came out of the tube, asking who was there. He thought it sounded frightened: Janie would be expecting the police. He gave his name and the buzzer let him open the glassed inner door for Marilyn, who went past him quickly and hurried up the stairs ahead of him, without looking back.

  Janie was waiting for them on the third-floor landing, fully dressed. Light shone from the apartment door open beside her. Tonight, Weston thought, all the people he met seemed to have been too long in their clothes, too long awake. The small, dark-haired girl above him, he guessed, had not been to bed at all; she would have been waiting by the radio to hear that Dr. Lowery’s body had been discovered. Even at a distance her print dress looked wilted and he thought that when he reached her he would find her eyes behind the shell-rimmed glasses pink, her face shiny with sleeplessness and fear.

  She watched them come up the stairs toward her, with a little frown for Marilyn’s costume that became a look of quick apprehension as Weston came into the light and she could see the state of his dinner jacket. But she did not speak, perhaps afraid to wake the occupants of the other apartments to this parade of scarecrows up the stairs. She stepped back to let Marilyn up to the landing, and the two girls faced each other awkwardly, waiting for Weston to reach them.

  Then, as Weston mounted the last few steps to the landing, Marilyn held out her hand pleasantly enough and Janie took it; and the rest happened too quickly to be understood. Weston saw the two figures above him come together with abrupt violence, struggling for some object he could not see since it was hidden behind the taller girl, whose back was to him. There was a sharp, wicked crash of sound.