Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  After a moment, Jane Collis backed away until the wall stopped her, staring at the small pistol in her hand. Her glasses had been knocked off in the struggle. Without them, her face had a startled, half-blind look. She glanced up abruptly and watched, fascinated, as the taller girl first steadied herself by the stairwell railing and then, quite slowly, crumpled to the floor. Then Janie looked at Weston.

  “She… tried to kill me…!”

  There was a brief instant in which he believed her. But the girl on the floor changed position slightly and was still again, her slow, pained breathing suddenly quite audible. He discovered a fierce relief at the knowledge that Marilyn was alive, mingled with a panic desire to know how badly she was hurt. He knew also that she had not tried to kill anybody; she had, instead, as once before that night, stepped in the way to keep him from getting killed. It had been her way, he knew now, of repaying the debt she owed him. He did not need any evidence for this.

  Janie was watching him. She could see him, all right, even without the glasses; she knew where to find him without trouble, but it was obvious that she could not read his expression. She peered at him through the mists of nearsightedness.

  “Wes, she tried to kill me! She had a gun in her p—”

  There was a dreadful little pause while she tried to decide whether to say purse or pocket. She looked down to see if the unconventionally dressed girl on the floor had even brought a purse. Momentarily diverted, her defective vision did not catch the start of Weston’s movement in time; and before she could shoot he had struck the gun away from her. She cowered back against the wall, holding her hurt fingers to her mouth like a child. He wanted to strike her for what she had done, but the necessary rage would not come. Perhaps he was too tired.

  “Not twice, Janie,” he said. “I won’t swallow that act twice in one night. You could kid me into thinking you’d killed Doc in self-defense, but now you’re running the routine into the ground.”

  Then he was kneeling at Marilyn’s side. She was still breathing very carefully, as if it hurt her. She made no sign that she knew he was there, and he did not speak to her. She had a silent battle of her own to fight, and he knew that she would not thank him for distracting her from the grim business of staying alive.

  People, aroused by the shot, were moving uneasily behind the closed door facing Jane Collis’s apartment. Rising, Weston knocked on the door. A man opened it. There was a woman behind him. Weston asked the woman to bring a blanket; and to cover and watch over the hurt girl while he called a doctor and the police.

  He had the feeling of being on a stage speaking his lines too quickly just to get them out before he should forget them. The small girl backed against the wall gave him no help toward reality by beginning to curse him childishly; clumsily using epithets that were nasty and quite familiar. She did not sound like Jane Collis at all; but he had heard the same words in a man’s mouth only an hour or so ago. The gun he had picked up was familiar also; it was Marilyn’s little Colt automatic that had been passed from hand to hand all day, finally winding up in Louis’s possession. Going in to telephone, herding Janie ahead of him, Weston found the tall man lying on the sofa in her tiny apartment, oblivious to everything but the agony of his smashed face.

  Janie ran to him and went on her knees beside him and looked at Weston. “You lousy coward,” she gasped. “To kick a man in the face like that! I wish I had killed you. I would have, if she hadn’t interfered!”

  Weston studied her for a moment, wanting to ask whether kicking a man in the face, as he had done to Louis, was worse than shooting him in the back, as Louis would have done to him; but it did not seem important. Holding the gun, he picked up the telephone left-handed, still watching them. Something in the way Janie looked at, and touched, the man on the sofa made the relationship between the two embarrassingly clear, and also the reason why Louis would run the risk of committing murder: to remove the one man beside himself who knew where Janie had been that night. For some reason, it seemed more shocking to think of little Jane Collis having a lover than to think of her being a spy or killing somebody.

  X

  They had to wait on a bench in the bare hospital corridor. Presently Richardson said, “I understand Acme is a little short of chemists right now. It’s possible your Mr. French is going to have trouble finding men willing to work in a place that’s been in the papers as a nest of spies. I was talking to him this morning. You might try dropping around there when you’re through here, if you’re not too proud.”

  Weston nodded. It did not seem to him that he owed the big F.B.I. man any thanks, and the big man did not seem to expect any. A nurse in a starched white uniform went down the corridor to the door that had the right number, and inside. Presently she came back out and beckoned to them.

  “Don’t make her talk,” the nurse said. “If you have any questions let her just answer yes or no.”

  “That’s all right,” Richardson said. “We’ve got it all pretty straight by now, anyway. How is she?”

  “Oh, she’s coming along very nicely,” the nurse said. Marilyn was lying in the white hospital bed, the only color in her face the fading ugly scratch she had got running through the park. She did not turn her head to greet them, but waited to smile at them until they had come to the foot of the bed where she could look at them without effort. Her lips formed a question.

  Richardson said, “You’re not supposed to talk. Louis is in the hospital. The little girl’s in jail. We’re waiting to see where the others run to before we pull them in.” He watched the eyes of the girl in the bed. “Oh, him?” he said, glancing at Weston. “He’s all right, I guess. I’ve just finished telling him his boss says he can have his job back. He doesn’t seem very grateful.”

  Weston grinned. “Should I be? Maybe I should also thank you for using me as a stalking-horse in the first place.”

  “Well, we had to have some excuse to get into Acme without pointing a finger at the people we really suspected,” the big man defended himself. “We wanted to see what would happen to that envelope. If you’d kept your temper you’d have been all right. But when you picked that moment, just when the mail was coming up the stairs, to start swinging iron bars around the place, it seemed like a little too much of a coincidence, if you get what I mean. When we realized the letter had vanished we knew you hadn’t hidden it yourself—you hadn’t had a chance—but it certainly looked as if you’d been trying to help whoever did get away with it. After that we couldn’t gamble on explaining to you what we were trying to do. You didn’t look like a good risk.”

  Weston said, “If you’d really wanted my cooperation, it might have helped to ask for it before you started playing games around the laboratory.”

  “Uhuh,” Richardson said, “and also it might not, the way you were feeling about us. And besides, you’re not a hell of a good actor, Mac.”

  “Well, you’re not much of a detective,” Weston said, “if you can’t find an envelope taped under a desk drawer.”

  “We didn’t want the envelope,” Richardson said. “We wanted whoever had hidden it. The letter wasn’t anything: hell, I wrote up those sheets of data myself, up at Faircraft. Why should I kill myself trying to find them?” He grinned at Weston’s expression. “I was getting tired waiting for somebody to give me a break on this case, Weston. And too much information was going out through Acme. I don’t know what they’ve told you about the Faircraft engine; actually, it’s pretty hot stuff. I guessed that if I could get something in the works that was supposed to be the dope on it—and I had a line on their man at Faircraft and the code they were using—and then make them work like hell to get the information out, I’d learn something about who was passing the mail through Acme.”

  “They told me it wasn’t very important,” Weston said. He was aware of the girl in the bed watching them steadily, listening to their conversation; both men were a little uncomfortable, not knowing quite how to act in front of her. Weston found a strong tendency
to drop his voice to a whisper, as if she were asleep. There was also a temptation to make her waste her strength answering stupid questions about how she was feeling and what she would like brought to her or done for her. And there was, finally, the urgent desire to get rid of the other man and speak to her alone. He found himself panic-stricken at the thought that the nurse might come back to send them away before he had had a chance to say what he had come here to say, that could not very well be said in front of anybody else.

  Her lips formed a word. Richardson said, “Oh, the murder? Well, the plan was apparently that our mutual friend here—” he indicated Weston, “—would be sent into the plant to distract our attention, while the little girl escaped through the rear with the papers. Only, in the meantime, the chief chemist had caught her at the desk—he must have stayed behind to watch her, suspecting something—and she’d lost her head and killed him. Her sense of duty wasn’t strong enough to let her face a murder rap just to get the papers out, so she persuaded Young Galahad on my right to take charge of both the papers and the murder, washing her hands of the whole thing. After she got home, I guess she began to worry about how far she could trust him to keep his mouth shut. So she called her boy friend to get rid of him, and you too, in case he’d whispered something to you.”

  Marilyn whispered, “She had the gun in her hand. When I came up the stairs. She tried to hide it in her dress…”

  Richardson said, “When Louis came staggering in with a bent profile—his pals dropped him at the door and lit out—and then the two of you turned up right on his heels, she must have figured Weston had caught on to the trick. She’d hoped, of course, that he’d be picked up leaving Acme with the papers on him and the body in the office. That would have fixed his clock so that nobody would have believed anything he said. But he wasn’t quite that dumb.”

  Marilyn’s eyes found Weston’s face. She smiled a little. “He burned the papers,” she whispered.

  “Uhuh. Whether out of a sense of patriotism or self-preservation we’ll never know,” Richardson said, unimpressed.

  “I know,” she breathed.

  “Yes,” the big man said crossly. “You’ve known about him all along. Sure. But the rest of us don’t happen to be in love with the guy.” He turned abruptly away from the bed to face Weston; and when he spoke again, it was as if the girl was no longer in the room. “She’s been working with us, you know,” he said.

  Weston did not say anything. He knew that what he was being told was extremely important; but it did not seem to matter. It was always too late for explanations. If you really needed an explanation you would not believe it; and when you were ready to believe it you no longer needed it.

  Richardson said, “She came to us after a man in the State Department had killed himself. Later, we passed around the story that he’d left a note, to protect her in case anybody wondered where we’d got certain information. Actually, there hadn’t been anything to connect her with the death except that she’d been one of several hundred people who’d known the man. But she walked in and told us exactly what she had been doing, and wanted us to tell her what it meant, and if there were anything she could do about it, or did we just want to put her in jail. We suspected her motives for a while because she held out your name and it wasn’t hard to discover that she’d been seeing a lot of you. I’m afraid the boys in Washington made more trouble for you than they ordinarily would have, but you can see how it looked at the time, as if she were trying to shield you because you were guilty…”

  The girl in the bed moved slightly. Richardson did not look at her. There was a certain antagonism in his voice and attitude as he faced Weston; and Weston realized suddenly that the big man was, if not actually jealous, at least envious of him. It seemed to make the other man more human; and it seemed to bring the girl closer to him.

  Richardson said, “Anyway, she’s been working with us for two years. That’s a long time for that kind of work. We knew they were getting suspicious of her when they sent her up here to make contact with you under circumstances where we almost had to pick her up; after all, we weren’t even supposed to know where she was, and suddenly they were waving her in our faces. We seriously considered arresting her for her own protection, but she persuaded us not to.” After a moment he turned toward the door, then paused. “Under the circumstances, I am authorized to say that the department sees no further reason for taking Miss George into custody, protective or otherwise.” Then he was gone, gently closing the door behind him.

  Marilyn turned her head slowly, watching Weston come along the side of the bed toward her. He stopped and stood looking down at her where she could still see him comfortably. There was an awkward pause; and what he said at last was not at all what he had planned.

  “Look,” he said, “what the hell is your name, anyway?”

  “Marilyn,” she whispered. “Elaine was just a code name they used.” After a while she said, “Don’t be grateful, Paul. Even if I did in a way save your life, you still haven’t exactly gained by knowing me.”

  “That,” he said, “is what you think.”

  THE BLACK CROSS

  I

  When he got her out to the car at last she said she was quite able to walk and he did not have to drag her. So he let go her arm and she stood for a moment, smoothing the white silk jersey of her dress over her hips; no man was going to rush her and especially not a husband. Then she got into the car. It seemed as if all of them were standing on the porch watching, except Chris, who had run inside.

  He started around the car to get behind the wheel and the lights came on and the motor started. She was sitting waiting for him with her foot on the gas and the cold, stubborn look on her face that he knew very well; and there was really no point in making any further exhibition of the Phillips family that evening, so he went back and got in beside her. She took them out of there so fast that they were doing fifty when they hit the road at the rustic sign that said The Larches, J. and V. Cunningham. Hugh Phillips had always suspected that Jack and Vivian thought they were referring to a species of bird when they put it up, since there was not a tree on the place that was even close.

  “I’m not drunk,” Janice said.

  Hugh Phillips did not say anything. There really wasn’t any point in arguing about it.

  “I’m not a bit drunk,” she said. “I’m not even high. I just got tired of watching her trailing you around. Ever since we came down here she’s been trailing you around, and if nobody else will put her wise to the fact that you’re married, then I will.”

  He sat beside her remembering the way Christine Wells’s face had become more and more pale until he was afraid that she would faint or begin to cry, either of which would have been completely dreadful. She had looked at him, begging him silently to stop it; but you did not stop Janice except by force once she had started to blow her top about something; and in the final analysis he had already, a year ago, made his choice between Janice and Christine Wells. He could not make Janice look ridiculous by carting her off the porch on his shoulder: she was his wife. She was making a damn fool of herself and she was hurting Christine quite unjustly and the whole thing was a mess, but he was still married to her.

  They bounced over the country road at a fantastic speed, and at the main highway where the direction markers said Washington was sixteen miles to the left, they shot away to the right toward Annapolis. The speedometer climbed to seventy and Janice’s mouth looked dark and reckless in the glow of the dashboard. Her face was almost classical in profile, the dark hair braided up tightly to show the fine shape of her head. There was a flat pearl disc in the lobe of her ear.

  She had got herself a deep smooth tan that spring, and the rich color of her neck and arms was barbaric against the draped silk jersey of the white dress. It was never any use for him to ask himself how he had come to marry her, because these days the answer was always right there when he looked at her. Even the way she had dressed when he first met her at the Unive
rsity, the men would turn around when she walked through the office where she worked; and nowadays she left hardly anything to the imagination. He had not yet figured out why being married to him should give her a sudden desire for extreme clothes, when most faculty wives became dowdy in short order. He consoled himself with the thought that it would have been too bad to have a wife who acted like a bitch and looked like hell, too.

  “Well, say it,” Janice said abruptly.

  “Say what?”

  “Tell me I acted like a bitch. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  Sometimes her guesses were disconcertingly accurate. “Let’s just skip it,” he said. “Let’s skip the whole thing.”

  “I love you when you’re magnanimous,” Janice said.

  At seventy the Ford went into nasty little crabwise hops on the curves, and on the straightaways it seemed to rise up and float an inch or two off the ground, occasionally dropping back to earth with a jar. The headlights picked out a sign saying Washington was twenty-two miles behind them; it was gone in an instant. Janice reached out and turned on the radio. Presently she began to croon softly to the music, to tell him how little his opinion of her disturbed her.

  “And I don’t mean to be critical of your friends,” she said, “but don’t you know anybody who drinks scotch or bourbon? For heaven’s sake sit still. Don’t wiggle.”

  “Watch the road,” he said. “If you’re going to drive like a fool, don’t look at me, watch the road.”

  “Don’t tell me how to drive.”

  “Somebody should tell you.”