Murder Twice Told

by Donald Hamilton

  “I wouldn’t,” Mr. Carlson said.

  Phillips straightened up slowly and stood facing the tall man, holding his hands carefully away from his sides. It seemed to be a position you fell into naturally when a gun was pointed at you. He watched Mr. Carlson come forward, and remembered shaking hands with him earlier in the day. I want you to meet my father, Shirley Carlson had said. The whole scene, that he had thought nothing of at the time, took on a grim significance. The man, of course, was no more her father than he had been Janice’s.

  “You’re…”

  “That’s right, kid. Lewis,” the tall man said. “Karl Lewis. I used to know your wife.”

  “You killed her.”

  Karl Lewis nodded. “You saw me, didn’t you, kid? Tough.”

  Without letting the gun waver, he reached down and dragged the girl up by one arm. “Pull yourself together, Kitten,” he said, shaking her a little. “Get yourself a drink and a safety pin.”

  He released her and put two fingers between his lips and whistled shrilly. The footsteps of two men crossed the porch. The tall man spoke to the men before they entered the cottage.

  “Everything is fine. Bring the Buick around and wait in it.”

  The footsteps went away. The girl drew a ragged breath and rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. The man glanced at her, but she pulled at her torn blouse and did not look at him.

  “Karl, did you really…?”

  “Sure. It had to be done, didn’t it?”

  “Then why did you lie to me about it?”

  “Lie?” He smiled. “I didn’t lie, Kitten. I told you she was dead. You didn’t ask for—”

  “I said, it was lucky the one you wanted was killed and the one you didn’t, wasn’t. And you said yes, it was very lucky.”

  The man said nothing and the girl, after a moment, turned slowly away from him and walked to the cabinet by the fireplace. Still holding her blouse about her shoulders with her left hand, she took a bottle and a shot-glass from the cabinet, extracted the cork, filled the glass, drained it abruptly with a single motion, put it down, and wiped her fingers on her skirt.

  She turned. “I just meant,” she said carefully, “that if you’d told me I wouldn’t have been so shocked when he said it. If you want me to act these parts for you, Karl, you’ve got to let me know what’s going on. That’s all I meant.”

  “I know, Kitten,” the tall man said gently. “I know you wouldn’t mean anything else.”

  The girl looked at him and her eyes held a sick uneasiness. Phillips could see her facing the brutal fact of murder for the first time and, perhaps, wondering when it would happen to her. A car forced off the road was just another accident, even if it had been made to happen. It was a nice remote kind of homicide for which no one person was directly responsible. You could not clearly visualize it happening to you. But a girl beat to death with a socket wrench…

  She poured the shot-glass full again and carried it across the room into the bedroom, and the door closed behind her. Karl Lewis studied the closed door for a moment. Then he bent down and picked up the long-barreled revolver lying at his feet.

  “Well, so you did recognize me,” he said to Hugh Phillips.

  A big car pulled into the driveway outside. Its motor stopped and one man in it asked another for a light.

  XI

  Suddenly he was no longer a spectator. He had been standing by the davenport, careful not to move, of course, because of the gun, but feeling remote and only vaguely concerned, as if watching a play on a distant stage. Then the tall man checked the loads in the long-barreled revolver, dropped his own pistol into his pocket, and turned his full attention on Hugh Phillips; and suddenly he was in it, he was a part of it, and he was in danger.

  “No,” he said slowly. “No, I didn’t recognize you.”

  “You said you would at the inquest. You were going to identify me.” Karl Lewis smiled.

  Phillips remembered the idea he had had when Mr. Holt asked him if he could identify the truck-driver; and he felt a dim sense of triumph to know that it had, after all, worked. Karl Lewis had been worried enough by the statement that he had come over that afternoon to make sure, one way or another, whether Phillips was a danger to him. It occurred to Phillips that if he had acted only a little differently, if he had shown any interest in Shirley Carlson’s ‘father,’ if he had thought up some excuse to go with them as he had later regretted not having done, he would very probably be dead now. Under the circumstances the escape seemed hardly worth getting worked up about.

  “I was bluffing,” he said. “I thought there was a chance that if the guy who had killed her thought I’d know him…” He stopped, seeing Karl Lewis’s expression change minutely, frowning; then the tall man was smiling again.

  “Smart. Or not so smart. If I hadn’t thought you might be trying to kid somebody you wouldn’t be standing here now…”

  The bedroom door opened and the girl stood in the doorway, fastening the buttons of the crisp cotton shirtwaist with which she had replaced her ruined blouse. She did not say anything.

  “You sent her to check up on me?” Phillips asked, moving his head minutely in her direction.

  “Yeah, and to give me an excuse to drop around. She said you went back there looking for something, so I figured you had seen something. But if you couldn’t recognize me, there still wasn’t any point in…” He smiled gently. “But you didn’t? This afternoon?”

  Phillips shook his head. It seemed to him that the man was leading him somewhere, that Karl Lewis had been surprised when he denied having recognized him and was now probing for some important information; but he could not see what harm the truth would do. It did not seem to him, as he stared at the steady muzzle of his own gun, that things could very well be much worse than they were.

  “You know I didn’t,” he said, wondering how it would come and where they were going to do it. Because there was no doubt that he could recognize the man now.

  “But you saw something that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw you kill her,” Phillips said. “But I never saw your face.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the cops?”

  “I did, but they thought I was crazy.”

  The tall man asked very softly, “If you didn’t recognize me, kid, how did you know enough to come here?”

  In the doorway, the girl had stopped moving as she waited for the answer.

  Phillips looked back to the tall man. “I didn’t know,” he said, puzzled. “I just had to get out of the house. I came by here in the boat and remembered that she had been nice to me… I had to talk to somebody…”

  Karl Lewis slapped him across the face so that he reeled back against the davenport and had to put a hand against the wall to steady himself. The blow started his head to aching again. He pushed himself blindly away from the wall and the tall man slapped him again, back-handed, and he sat down, feeling the belated pain explode behind his eyeballs and run through his head into the back of his neck. When he looked up, the tall man was watching him, his eyes very blue against the gray of his suit and hair. They were the color of a cheap blue china plate and had exactly as much expression.

  “So you came with a gun,” Karl Lewis said softly. “Try again, kid.”

  “I forgot…” he said. “I just happened to…” It sounded improbable and a little undignified. It sounded as if he were making it up because he was frightened. “Go to hell,” he said.

  He parried a blow, and Karl Lewis rammed the muzzle of the revolver viciously into his stomach; and he gagged and doubled over. He heard the distant sound of the other’s voice.

  “You found something, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he gasped. “A picture and a bank book…”

  “Yeah, I heard that story when you told Kitten here. And you still just dropped around to be sociable?”

  It had slipped away from him again, and he was standing outsi
de watching it, and it made him uncomfortable. The young man who was being beaten up should have been braver about it, because he was after all the hero of the piece. He tried to stand up and the tall man knocked him back to the davenport. He could taste blood in his mouth.

  He caught his breath and said, “I really didn’t suspect anything until she…”

  His voice sounded like the voice of a nice little boy who had got into the wrong company and did not quite understand the joke that everyone was laughing at. Then he remembered that the house at Sand Point had been searched.

  It was clear, at last, where the tall man was leading him; and why it would have been better to say that he had recognized the man that afternoon. It was clear that Karl Lewis, after killing Janice, had begun to wonder uneasily whether she might not have left some evidence. He had searched the house and found nothing. Having later assured himself that, in spite of the evidence at the inquest, there was no one who could identify him, he had been packing, ready to leave, feeling himself secure and unsuspected; and suddenly the dead girl’s husband, who had shown no signs of recognition earlier in the day, had turned up, carrying a gun.

  The tall man’s first thought had been that Phillips, upon thinking it over, had realized his identity; but Phillips had denied this, and there was no reason why he should lie. It would be hard for Karl Lewis, knowing his own guilt, to believe that Phillips had been drawn to the cottage by nothing more than the desire to talk to a pretty girl. The only remaining possibility, Phillips realized, was for him, Hugh Phillips, to have discovered something left behind by Janice… It was as if a door at the back of his mind had opened, letting in a cold draft of fear. The tall man was after something that did not exist. Janice had not left anything. But there would be no way of convincing Karl Lewis…

  The tall man was staring down at him, blue-eyed and expressionless. Slowly his left hand found a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of the gray suit, shook one up, put it between his lips, and lit it with a silver lighter after putting the pack away.

  “That’s better,” he said, reading something in the younger man’s face of which Phillips himself was not aware. He blew out the flame, closed the cover, and dropped the lighter into his pocket. “Listen, kid,” he said in a friendly voice. “Listen, Janey wrote me a letter. She wanted five thousand. She always was a greedy little tramp…”

  Phillips moved a little. Even if you had not got along too well with your wife, it was not pleasant to hear another man refer to her as a tramp. It reminded you that the other man had known her too well. He looked at Karl Lewis’s face, trying to understand why the girl who had married him should have wanted to live with this man with the long hard face and the blue eyes that looked dead, like blue marbles. Or why the other girl should be willing to help him commit murder.

  “… I knew she’d be around for more later,” Karl Lewis was saying. “She knew I’d killed a man in Hollywood on a little deal about whiskey for the club… But you know all about that. She lost her nerve after giving me an alibi. I looked for her and couldn’t find her. After a while I figured she was going to keep quiet, anyway, and I stopped looking. Then this letter, see?”

  Phillips licked his lips. “Did she say she was leaving a…?”

  “… I sent one of the boys ahead before I mailed the money,” the tall man went on, unheeding. “He picked her up in the Baltimore post office when she came for it and tailed her down here… No, she hadn’t said anything about leaving a note, or I wouldn’t have… I thought she figured that being three thousand miles away she was safe. If she was leaving something around, to be delivered if anything happened to her, she’d have told me, wouldn’t she? It wasn’t any protection if I didn’t know about it.”

  His voice was suddenly indignant, as if he were accusing Janice of playing him a trick. Phillips watched him uncomprehendingly; it seemed as if the tall man, after proving that Janice had left a note, was now busy proving the reverse.

  “But in that case what makes you think…?”

  Karl Lewis looked up sharply. “You’re here, aren’t you? With this.” He tapped the gun scornfully. “How would you know so much if she hadn’t…?”

  Phillips opened his mouth and closed it again. The tall man was not talking to him, but to the girl, defending himself against the charge of having bungled the murder. He was not proving that no note existed, but merely that he could not have foreseen its existence.

  “So I went ahead,” Karl Lewis said. “Then I decided I’d better look through the house to make sure…”

  “Why didn’t you take the picture and the bank book?” He could feel the rough flesh inside his lip where it had been cut against his teeth, and he knew that he hated the man who had struck him, the man who had lived with Janice before he knew her. But there was no time for hatred.

  Karl Lewis shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t know if you’d seen them, kid,” he said. “I didn’t want you to miss anything.” He looked at the younger man for a moment. “And it wasn’t there, was it? I was looking in the wrong place, wasn’t I, kid?”

  “It wasn’t anywhere,” Phillips said. “She didn’t leave anything.”

  Karl Lewis smiled slowly. He spoke as if he had not heard. “So now…” he murmured, “… so now you’ll get on the phone and call her, huh? Tell her to bring it with her.”

  Phillips looked up abruptly, for a startled moment thinking the other had gone mad and had forgotten that Janice was dead and who had killed her. Then he understood and felt panic grip his throat and stomach like the first pangs of seasickness. He was on his feet, and the tall man had taken a step backward, leveling the gun.

  “Call who?” Phillips whispered.

  “The girl,” Karl Lewis said gently. “The girl you’ve been covering up for all evening, kid. The girl you’ve been trying to make us believe thinks you killed Janey.”

  Phillips whispered, “You’re crazy. She doesn’t…”

  “You kind of overplayed that hand,” the tall man said. “The minute you said that, about her accusing you of murder, I started wondering why you’d want to make so damn sure we didn’t connect her with you.”

  “She hasn’t anything to do with this,” Phillips said breathlessly. “She thinks I…”

  “… killed Janey.” Karl Lewis laughed. “Yeah, I know. I heard you the first time; remember, I was in the bedroom there? But it stinks, kid. It stinks. Janey left it with her, didn’t she? You were Janey’s husband, and she didn’t want you to get curious about where she’d come from or why she’d want to leave a note like that. She couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t peek, eh, kid? But this girl, Christine, she’d recognized Janey, you said, and Janey made her promise to keep her trap shut. So maybe one of the boys wasn’t as careful as he might have been, and Janey recognized him and knew I was getting close to her, so she wrote something and left it with this girl who already knew all about her and wasn’t going to tell. And tonight the girl, Christine, brought it to you and you got your gun and came over here—”

  “No!”

  “I say yes, kid. And don’t try to tell me she’s taken it to the cops, because if she had why should you think up a fancy story to keep her out of it? She’d be safe with the cops.”

  “She doesn’t know anything about it,” Phillips whispered. He could hear his own voice far away. It sounded ragged.

  The tall man paid no attention to the interruption. “You figured you could come here and see what you could find out and if anything went wrong I wouldn’t dare touch you because your girl had the evidence. Well, listen, little boy, I’ve had that gag pulled on me before. So now you’ll call her and tell her everything’s okay and the sheriff man, Holt, wants her to bring it right away…”

  A long time ago, before the war, they had gone down to the pier after two hot sets of tennis. They had stood on the pier, cooling off, and he had looked at her, seeing her flushed and warm and smiling and happy. He had known that he was in love with her. There were times when you knew a thing like t
hat so sharply that you had to do something about it; and if the girl were like Chris, so that you could not grab her and kiss her in full daylight in front of God and everybody, you pushed her in the drink.

  She made a beautiful splash and he watched her come up, her hair streaming down her face; then, to make a joke of it, suddenly embarrassed, he dove over her head into the water. She was pulling herself up the ladder, pushing back her hair, when he rose. That was silly, she gasped. What if I’d had my watch on? But she was laughing, and he could not, and did not want to, help seeing the way the wet tennis suit betrayed her fine body; and the way her arms and legs were golden in the sunlight. Perhaps she knew what he was thinking, because as he swam up she put a rubber-soled sneaker against his head and pushed him under…

  “No,” he said.

  The tall man struck him with the gun and he fell to the rug. He waited for the man to hit him again, and he knew that he was afraid, no longer of what the man might do to him, but that he might not be able to stand it; that he would call and Chris would come and he would have done this to her, too, as well as what he had done to her a year ago when he married Janice. He felt Karl Lewis approach. The man’s foot caught him in the ribs and drove the breath out of him.

  He closed his eyes tightly and watched the red spots dance through the blackness and waited for the blackness to become complete. Far away he heard a telephone dial clicking rhythmically. He wondered if he were really feeling the rug under his fingers, or if he were actually at the end of the room, doing what Karl Lewis wanted him to do. The thought drove him back to consciousness. He sat up.

  XII

  The girl he had known as Shirley Carlson leaned against the wall by the telephone table, running the fingers of her right hand through her already disheveled hair, while she listened to the instrument ringing in her ear. She looked up as Karl Lewis took a threatening step toward her and gestured him into silence. She shook her hair back from her face and stepped free of the wall, and suddenly she was a different person.