The Suspense Is Killing Me

by Thomas Gifford

  “I rather resent this,” Heidi said softly, shifting the weight of her big leather bag.

  “Well, I’m mighty sorry about that, but it’s an interesting story. You’re all gonna enjoy it, I promise you. Just bear with me, Heidi … guess what I found out about Heidi …? Heidi had started out as a researcher and computer programmer at Magnamation, our data-processing and credit-information wing … that’s where we know everything about everybody.” He chuckled, indulging himself. “You gotta know how to retrieve the information. And our Heidi played with things, began finding out things. She worked in London for us, then at the San Diego computer center. Well, a while back, before all this began, Heidi did a workup on publishing companies ’cause Magna was interested in acquisitions. And she found Purvis and Ledbetter particularly fascinating, she suggested a closer interest be shown—am I right so far, darlin’? What was the focus of interest? What made P and L valuable? Allan Bechtol, or, as she already knew him to be, Sam Innis. He was the lure. She left Magna, she presented herself to Innis—and he’s only human, he couldn’t resist. She was his. She was indispensable, she did everything she was asked to do and more, lots more—she was … magic word—creative! She was worth her weight in gold—”

  Sam Innis, red-faced, began yelling again. “What is the point of this? Is this going somewhere?”

  “And then, God love her, I’ll bet the farm the idea for the JC Tripper book was Heidi’s, wasn’t it, Mr. Innis?”

  “Well … I probably thought of it, she saw it was a good idea. Sure. Yeah, she was behind it all the way.” Sam Innis’s voice trailed off as he turned to Heidi. “It was your idea, I guess, wasn’t it, kid? You came to me …”

  “She’d been thinking about it for a long time,” Fleury said. “It all hatched in her mind at Magnamation when she discovered that Allan Bechtol was Sam Innis and Sam Innis had been a schoolmate and pal of JC and Lee Tripper.” He shook his head, smiling faintly at Heidi Dillinger. “You’ve got to hand it to Heidi, everybody. She’s what we used to call one smart cookie. I figure it was her plan all along—but what was the point? Just money? Not our pretty Heidi. What she wanted was to leverage herself into some real power at Magna by using the JC Tripper story, the Bellerophon plot, all the narcotics dossiers she was building … Jesus, it was a thing of beauty! She was even able to turn all those fuckin’ computers at Magnamation against the great mother company itself.

  “Finding JC Tripper if he was still alive—somehow she’d got it into her head that Bellerophon had gone wrong, had come apart—would be the frosting on the cake. The perfect partner for her. But she had to find him … and she didn’t know if Lee here knew where JC was or not, and Lee kept telling her and everybody else that JC was dead … so she had to start killing people.” His eyes rolled wetly toward Heidi. I didn’t know if he was expecting a round of applause or a denial or what.

  Sam Innis shook his head. “I simply don’t believe it, Fleury. You’re trying to shift the blame away from yourself. Oldest trick in the world.”

  “You’d better believe it.” Fleury was frowning. Was he having doubts? “Oh, she didn’t kill them and torture them first, not Heidi herself. God’s love, no. She was there, mind you, she asked the questions—didn’t you, Heidi? But you had muscle on hand … for the heavy lifting, as they used to say in the old days. You know, Lee, the fella you killed in Zurich? One of Heidi’s little persuaders, probably the same guy who killed Clive Taillor … oh no, she didn’t want to kill you, Lee. She wanted to scare you, make you think that JC, if he was still alive and you knew it, was turning against you, killing people, even you, to protect his hiding place … turned out you killed the guy. Damn fine piece of work, by the way. You’re a tough customer, Lee—” He broke off and turned back to Heidi. “So, young lady, you’re the blackmailer … and you’re the killer. Whattaya say, pretty Heidi?”

  “Madness,” Ledbetter muttered.

  “You can say that again,” Innis said. “And you, Lee, are the world’s prize son of a bitch … goddamn killer, bastard, fratricide, fucker—” He stood up, knocking the chair over backward. He was, I think, coming after me, though I never found out.

  “I’m a lot of things, Sam,” I said, “but one thing I’m not. I’m not Lee Tripper.”

  Twenty-Five

  I’D BEEN WAITING A long time FOR the inevitable and there it was at last.

  I’m not Lee Tripper …

  Then everything happened very quickly, too fast to follow clearly, but looking back at it you can slow it down, slower and slower, until you can see the full shock of it, particle by particle.

  No one quite knew what it meant when I said I wasn’t Lee Tripper. Thumper gave one of his characteristic soft, high-pitched laughs, thumping the table before him with both hands like the old drummer he was. Ledbetter turned in his chair, rumbled, “Come again?” Cotter Whitney peered at me as if he might, if he really strained, see the truth. His mouth made a circle and he was in his mind hearing the other shoe drop.

  Fleury was licking his heavy, trembling lower lip, his eyes showing an animal mixture of fear and confusion. “You’re not? You’re not Lee Tripper?” Then his gray face paled and he said, “Oh my God, I never thought of—”

  Heidi Dillinger didn’t do any talking. I’ll never know what she was thinking, what she had figured out and what was still a mystery to her. She was fighting for her life and I’m sure she was disgusted by the irony in being brought to grief by a creep like Morris Fleury. It must have galled her. She was so bright and so determined and so able. Why did she ever decide she needed to kill people … was it just to hurry the process along, get there faster? Yuppiedom gone wildly awry? Or was it the love of the game? The delight in plotting a course and then sticking to it, whatever it took? Maybe that was it. I like to think she hadn’t started with the intention of hurting anyone, let alone killing them … but then the game had begun to run out of control, taking her with it. Destroying her …

  She quickly—I didn’t see it happen, it just happened—she quickly had a gun in her hand. No wonder she’d held on to that bag for dear life. Was it stupid for her to go for the gun? Christ, I don’t know—what did she think she was going to do after using it? She’d just had it, I guess. Fleury had figured it all out and she was a goner one way or another. It was a terrible mess. What was she supposed to do? Sit there and take it? Have all her dreams crash down on her and leave one trampled yuppie?

  She had the gun out, pointing it at Fleury, but guns weren’t really her thing, were they?

  When I saw her with the gun in her hand I thought about the time we’d spent together. I saw her whipping Mellow Yellow’s ass on Fifth Avenue, I saw her head on the pillow the first time we made love, I saw her happy and angry and—

  Fleury wasn’t thinking at all. He didn’t blink an eye. You had the feeling he was finally playing in his own ballpark.

  He gave her both barrels in a fraction of a second and I saw most of her beautiful face disappear in a cascade of blood, bone, tissue, and hair.

  It blew her back out of the chair, ass over appetite, left her body jerking spasmodically on the floor. The noise was deafening and the smell was everywhere.

  Cotter Whitney let out a scream. At least I think it was a scream and I think it was Whitney. There was a lot of noise. He half-stood, tripped, fell backward over his chair onto the floor. I thought he’d cracked and was trying to escape. It was all happening so fast.

  Innis and Ledbetter were shouting and I was trying not to look at the remains of Heidi Dillinger and Fleury was yelling at everybody to calm down.

  Cotter Whitney wasn’t trying to escape.

  He was trying to get to Heidi’s gun.

  Fleury wasn’t really paying attention. And anyway he’d have to reload.

  Whitney got to the gun, I saw him out of the corner of my eye, saw him bringing it up.

  Fleury saw him, too, turned, and pulled the triggers on the empty chambers. Then he smiled the thin smile of the pessimist
who has had his pessimism confirmed. He’s right but he wishes he weren’t. It was funny, how much class he had at the end.

  Cotter Whitney shot him three times. Once for being too zealous an employee, once for talking too goddamn much, and once for shooting a lady. All three rounds went into Fleury’s chest, making quite a mess of his cardiovascular system. One got him right in the pump. As they say. He went back against the wall next to the fireplace. The shotgun clattered to the floor. He sat down and by the time he came to rest he was dead. Eyes open, floating off into infinity. Maybe he’d just joined up with Heidi Dillinger, two of a kind, a couple of escape artists on the journey of a lifetime. As they say.

  Cotter Whitney was not your ordinary fool.

  Whatever Heidi Dillinger had plundered from the Magna computers and whatever other sources she’d developed—it was all gone now. Fleury had erased her, her sharp brittle mind, all the information she’d collected. Erased.

  And Cotter Whitney was no fool.

  Morris Fleury was the only other wound from which Magna’s lifeblood was draining. Cotter Whitney had just stopped the bleeding.

  Whitney stood stock-still, staring at Heidi’s body.

  Maybe I was wrong about the way his mind was working.

  Maybe he was just fed up. Maybe he was being gallant, making a gesture.

  But I don’t think so. I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

  Finally Thumper said, “Okay, mates. The show’s over, our revels now are ended.” He took the gun from Whitney. “None of this ever happened, see? I’m going to take the remains of these two people, whoever the hell they are, I’m going to take them out in my boat, all weighted down with stones, and I’m gonna feed the bleeding fishies with them. Lost when your little craft capsized getting across from Lewis. End of story. Lost at sea. Nobody’s gonna argue.” He turned to Whitney, then to Innis and Ledbetter. “Hearing no objections, the motion is carried.”

  Then Thumper came to me and we looked at each other a long time. Then he said, “Jesus, you’re a sight for sore eyes … twenty years, man. I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again, JC.” He put his arms around me. I felt as if I’d come home.

  Innis was trying to get it all straight. He kept falling farther and farther behind. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Ah, Sam, for God’s sake, use your head. It’s me. JC.”

  He just stared at me, eyes wide, mouth open.

  “Thumper knew me,” I said.

  “Well, not for sure,” Thumper said. “You’re twenty years older, you’re fifty pounds heavier—hell, seventy pounds heavier than you were there at the end. You musta been down to one-fifty. You got a whole lot less hair. And you’ve had a bit of work done, around the eyes, around the nose.” He grinned at me. “I’m not sure I’d have recognized you. On my own, I mean.”

  “What do you mean—on your own?”

  “I was told you were alive, that you’d be paying me a visit.”

  “What the hell are you talking—”

  “Annie, Trip. Annie told me—”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “She knew right away, said you came up to her in a pub in Sloane Square—she knew you before she saw your face. It was your voice.”

  “Yes. It would be.”

  “She’s here now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s out in the recording studio. One of the barns, I’ve fixed it up. Deluxe, actually. She comes to see Chris—he’s studying composition with me. Gifted kid. Real future. They’re out there.” He pointed out the window to a stone barn, whitewashed. “It’s soundproof. No windows.” He looked around the room. “Why don’t you go out and see Annie … these three catatonic specimens can help me clean up the mess.”

  “No, no, I’ll help—”

  “Trip, listen to me. You sound like you’re insisting on helping with the dishes. Now just listen. I was always the brains of the operation, right? You were the talent. I was the brains. Try to remember that. You’re entering a whole new world … you won’t know it for a while, but the first step is to go out to the studio. Listen to Thumper. Leave this to me.”

  “One thing, Thump,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “Bellerophon. They set up Lee to kill me—”

  “I figured that, just listening to all this—”

  “But you know how Lee was. He was a head case, he was drugged to pieces thanks to Magna, all their Dr. Feelgoods, he couldn’t handle any of it … The night he was supposed to kill me, he couldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it, he could not kill old JC … But he was in deep, he knew they’d kill us both if he didn’t kill me, he knew he wasn’t going to last much longer anyway … So he had a plan, he told me I should kill him and switch our roles … then JC would be dead, I would become Lee, I could go the hell away, he was almost out of his mind, he was shot up with shit … I told him no, we’d figure out something else, I didn’t want to believe he was in the shape he was in, that he was too far gone ever to get back … I wouldn’t go for it … So my brother Lee put a gun to his head and did it for me … and I carried out his plan. I photographed the body, lousy light, head shot to pieces, and I sent the gun with Lee’s prints on it to Marty Bjorklund. I followed all the instructions Marty had given Lee to prove he’d done it … and I became Lee Tripper. You see, I had to keep Annie out of it. Magna felt safe, they had all the proof that I, Lee, had killed JC, and even if I went public as JC they’d say I was mad, had killed my brother … or they’d just kill me. And if I’d dragged Annie into it—well, she’d have been at risk, too. So … I just had to disappear.”

  Thumper had opened the door to the outside. “Go on, Trip. Seems to me you owe Annie one hell of an explanation.” He smiled raggedly behind the beard. “Come on, you’ve come all this way. Take the last step.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You’ll find Annie has a story for you, too.”

  And Thump was right about that.

  Annie listened to my tale of woe and held my hand and kissed me when it was over.

  And then she introduced me to Chris.

  My son.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1990 by Thomas Maxwell

  cover design by Michel Vrana

  978-1-4532-6618-2

  This 2012 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  EBOOKS BY THOMAS GIFFORD

  FROM MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA

  Available wherever ebooks are sold

  FIND OUT MORE AT

  WWW.MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM & WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM

  follow us:

  @eMysteries and Facebook.com/MysteriousPressCom

  @openroadmedia and Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia

  Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases

  Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.

  FOLLOW US:

  @openroadmedia and

  Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia

  SIGN UP NOW at

  www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters

  />
  Thomas Gifford, The Suspense Is Killing Me