She sat motionless. I could hear her quick, uneven breathing.
T did it because I love you, Gilda,” I said. “With any luck, they won’t find out I’m hoping in a few months we can go away and start a new life together.”
She hunched her shoulders as if she were feeling cold.
“How did you do it?”
I told her.
I didn’t hold anything back. I told her the whole sordid tale.
She sat in the corner of the car, her hands in her lap, motionless, staring out into the moonlit night, her big forget-me-not blue eyes wide and expressionless.
“If only that insurance claim hadn’t been put in,” I said, “I would have had nothing to worry about. But now . . . I don’t know. I think Harmas suspects something. That’s why we mustn’t see each other until the claim is settled.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Her voice was flat and cold.
“I want you to stick to the story you told Jefferson,” I said. “That’s all I want you to do. Harmas may question you. If he gets the slightest suspicion that we have been lovers, we shall be in trouble. We must keep away from each other until they have settled the claim.”
“You mean you will be in trouble, don’t you? If I tell them the truth, there is no trouble for me.”
She was right, of course, but I just looked at her, not saying anything.
“All right: I’ll lie for you. I’ll stick to the story.” She sat for several seconds staring through the windshield. Then she said quietly, “Would you mind walking back? You’ll be able to get a lift on the highway. I would rather go back alone.”
My heart gave a little lurch.
“This is not going to make any difference to your feelings for me, Gilda? I love you. I need you now more than ever before.”
“This has been a shock. Will you leave me now please?”
I tried to take her hand, but she moved it quickly out of my reach.
I could see how white she was and how tense. I realized she had to be given time to get over what I had told her. Already I was bitterly regretting having told her.
I got out of the car.
“I wouldn’t have done it, Gilda, only I love you so much.”
“Yes, I understand.”
The car began to move away from me. She was staring through the windshield. She didn’t look at me’.
I watched the red rear lights of the car go down the steep hill. I had a sudden horrible feeling she was moving away out of my life: moving out of it for good and all.
CHAPTER VII
I
Two days crawled by, and they were bad days for me.
I kept thinking of Gilda, seeing again the wooden stunned expression on her face as she had driven away and wondering why she hadn’t wanted me with her.
I tried to assure myself it was a natural reaction. I had confessed that I had murdered her husband. The shock must have been a horrible one. What really bothered me now was that this stupid confession might have killed her love for me. That was something I couldn’t bear to think of, for her love was more precious to me than my own life.
On the second night I could stand my thoughts no longer. I got into the truck and drove down to Los Angeles. I called her number from a pay booth.
I was startled when a man answered.
“Is Mrs Delaney there?” I asked, wondering, with a feeling of dread, if this man was a police officer.
“Mrs Delaney left a couple of days ago,” the man said. “I’m sorry but she didn’t give us a forwarding address.”
I thanked him and hung up.
I didn’t need a blueprint to tell me what had happened. My stupid confession had killed her love for me as I had feared it might. She had gone away because she didn’t want to see me again — ever.
I scarcely slept that night, and for the first time, I regretted killing Delaney. I was paying for what I had done, and from the look of my future, I would go on paying for it.
The following morning, as I was shaving, the telephone bell rang.
It was Harmas calling.
“Can you meet me at Blue Jay cabin at eleven?” he asked.
“We’re having a meeting, and I want you in on the technical end.”
I said I would be there.
“Swell, and thanks,” and he hung up.
The next three hours were bad ones. My nerves got so shaky I had a drink around half-past nine, and that led to three more drinks before I drove over to Blue Jay cabin.
Harmas’s Packard was parked near the verandah steps, and as I walked up them, I could hear him whistling in the lounge.
He looked around as I paused in the doorway.
“Come on in. The others will be along any time now.”
I walked stiff-legged into the lounge.
“What’s it all about?” I asked.
“You’re going to see how we insurance dicks earn our money,” Harmas said. He had dropped his indolent pose. He looked alert, and his wide, satisfied smile scared me. “I want you to give me a hand.” He took two ten-dollar bills from his wallet and handed them to me. “You’d better freeze onto these in advance in case I forget. My boss — this guy Maddox I was telling you about — is coming, and when he’s around I’m likely to forget my own name.”
“Maddox?” That really jolted me. “What’s he coming for?”
“Here he is now,” Harmas said.
I heard a car coming and I stepped to the french doors and looked out.
The sight of the police car with its siren and red light on the roof gave me a shock.
From the car came Lieutenant John Boos of the LA Homicide Squad: a big, powerfully-built man, around forty-two or three, with a red, fleshy face and small steel-grey eyes.
He was followed by a short, thickset man who I guessed was Maddox. He wasn’t more than five-foot six. He had the shoulders and chest of a prize fighter and the legs of a midget. His face was rubbery and red. His eyes were restless and as bleak as a Russian winter. He wore his well-cut clothes carelessly, and he had a habit of running thick, stubby fingers through his thinning grey hair to add to his untidy appearance.
He came up the verandah steps, frowning, his small restless eyes missed nothing.
Harmas introduced me.
Maddox shook my hand. His grip was hard and warm, and he nodded to me.
“Glad to have your help, Mr Regan,” he said. “I understand you’re working for the company now.”
I muttered something as Boos loomed up.
“Hello, Regan,” he said. “So you’ve got tangled up in this thing too, huh?”
“That’s right,” I said, and my voice sounded small and husky.
“Let’s get at it,” Maddox said and walked into the lounge. He stood in front of the TV set. “This it?”
“That’s the baby,” Harmas said cheerfully. He turned the set around. “Those four screws held the back in place.”
Maddox stared for a long moment, then walked over to the empty fireplace.
“Sit down, Lieutenant. You, Mr Regan, sit over there. We won’t need you for a while so just take it easy.”
I sat away from the other three and I lit a cigarette. My heart was thumping and my hands were unsteady and I was pretty badly scared.
Boos picked the most comfortable chair and lowered his bulk into it. He took out a pipe and began to fill it.
Harmas sank into another lounging chair and stretched out his long legs.
“Well now, Lieutenant,” Maddox said, “I’ve asked you up here because I’m not satisfied with this claim. Briefly, one of our salesmen called on Delaney and sold him insurance coverage for this TV set. There’s a clause in the policy that gives coverage of five thousand dollars in the event of death through a fault in the set. It’s one of those dumb clauses our sales people put in to catch a sale. We have sold twenty-three thousand, four hundred and ten of these policies, and this is the first claim covering death by a fault we have had. That is: it is a twenty-
three thousand to one chance, and when that happens I get suspicious. The claim arrived five days after the policy was signed. Delaney was buried before the policy was even delivered.”
Boos lit his pipe and frowned at Maddox.
“It could be one of those things, M: Maddox. I’ve read the coroner’s report. I’ve talked to Sheriff Jefferson. Nothing I’ve seen in the report and nothing Jefferson has said has convinced me there’s anything wrong with the setup. It looks straightforward enough to me.”
“It looks straightforward to you, Lieutenant, because you don’t handle fifteen hundred claims a week as I do,” Maddox said. “If you had sat at my desk for the number of years that I have, you would get to know a bad claim by instinct. I know this claim is a bad one. I feel it here!” And he paused to thump his chest. “But I don’t expect you to act on my hunches. Let’s take a look at the setup. Delaney was paralysed from the waist down. I’ve got a report from the doctor who attended him when the accident happened. The doctor says he was not able to bend at the waist. That means he was sitting upright all the time in his chair, and he could not bend forward. Now I’ll give you a little demonstration that’ll interest you.”
He turned to me.
“Mr Regan, I want your help. Will you sit in Delaney’s chair?”
I knew what was coming. Keeping my face expressionless, I walked over to the chair and sat in it.
Harmas picked up a length of cord that was lying on the table. He went around behind me and looped the cord around my chest and behind the chair and tied it tightly, preventing me from moving forward.
“That was the way Delaney was fixed: bolt upright and unable to bend forward,” Maddox said.
“Okay, okay,” Boos said, frowning. “So what?”
“Go ahead, Regan,” Maddox said, “and take the back off the set.”
“It can’t be done,” I said.
“Well, try anyway, and try hard.”
I wheeled the chair up to the set and took out the two top fixing screws: that was easy, but I couldn’t get within two feet of the bottom screws, fixed as I was in the chair.
“You’ve read the coroner’s report,” Maddox said to Boos. “When Regan found Delaney’s body, the back of the set was off. And another thing there was a screwdriver by Delaney’s side. He apparently got it from the storeroom. He hooked the toolbox down from the shelf with a walking stick. The tools fell on the floor. Ask yourself: how did he manage to pick the screwdriver up?”
Harmas put the screwdriver on the floor beside me.
“Can you reach it?”
My fingers were a good twelve inches from the tool.
Maddox said to Harmas, “Take the back off the set.”
When Harmas had removed the back, Maddox said to Boos, “See those two terminals in the set? Delaney was supposed to have touched them with the screwdriver: that’s how he was supposed to have been killed. You can see Regan can’t get near them from where he is sitting.”
Boos got abruptly to his feet. He came to stare at the inside of the set.
“Do you see what I’m driving at?” Maddox went on. “Delaney is supposed to have taken the back off the set. He couldn’t have done it. He is supposed to have got the screwdriver from the storeroom. He couldn’t have done it. He is supposed to have touched those two terminals. He couldn’t have done it.”
Boos stared at him.
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
Harmas undid the cord that bound me to the chair and I got out of the chair.
Then Boos turned to me.
“Let’s have your story again, Regan,” he said. “Let’s go over the whole thing. You called on Delaney to see how the set was working. Right?”
“Yes. I found Delaney lying in front of the TV set. There was a steel screwdriver by his hand and the back of the set was off. I thought he had electrocuted himself. I pulled the plug out of the mains and then I touched him.”
“He was dead?” Boos asked.
“Yes.”
“How did you know he was dead?”
“He was cold and he was stiff.”
“When a man is killed by a big dose of electricity,” Maddox said, “he burns. He’s not going to cool the way a body would cool, dying from gun-shot wounds or a stab in the back. The jolt he gets from an electric shock would increase the temperature of his blood. If Delaney had died of an electric shock, his body wouldn’t have been noticeably cold in three hours.”
Boos began to look bewildered.
“Are you trying to tell me he didn’t die of an electric shock?” he demanded, staring at Maddox.
“I’m not trying to tell you anything,” Maddox said curdy. “I want his body exhumed.”
Boos scratched the side of his neck, frowning at Maddox.
“You’ll have to talk to Jefferson first,” he said. “Maybe there is something wrong, but I’m Homicide. You’re not suggesting Delaney was murdered, are you?”
There was a constriction in my chest now that made breathing difficult. I leaned forward in my chair, staring at Maddox, my hands squeezed between my knees, waiting to hear what he would say.
“Am I suggesting Delaney was murdered?” Maddox asked. “No, I’m not suggesting it: I’m telling you he was murdered! He was murdered because he took out an insurance policy that covered his crippled life for five thousand dollars. He was murdered because his killer took into account that the inquiry would be handled by two old dead-beats who would accept what they saw and wouldn’t dig deeper.” A hard, grim smile lit up his face. “Murder? Of course it’s murder! Why do you think I brought you out here? This is the plainest case of murder I’ve ever had to deal with!”
II
Boos scratched a match alight. The sound of the red head against the sanded side of the box made a sharp explosion in the silence of the room.
No one was looking at me. That was my good luck. “Now look, Mr Maddox,” Boos said after he had lit his pipe and had got it to draw to his satisfaction, “I know your hunches. I know you have yet to be proved wrong. Okay, if you say this is murder, I’ll listen, but before I start something I can’t finish, I want to be convinced.”
Maddox went back to the fireplace and stood before it. “This is a murder case. When I smell murder, I know it’s murder. I’ve never been wrong, and what’s more, I’ll stake my life I’m not wrong this time. Anyway, I can give you enough ammunition to blast this old has-been right out of office.”
Boos had let his pipe go out. As he groped for his matches, he said sharply, “What ammunition?”
“I’ve given you enough to get an order to exhume the body, but I can give you more. I can even give you a guess who killed him.”
My heart missed a beat, then began to race so violently I could scarcely breathe.
“You can?” Boos was sitting forward, the match burning between his fingers, forgotten. “Who killed him then?”
“His wife,” Maddox said. “She’s tried to kill him once before but only succeeded in crippling him.”
I started to protest but checked myself in time. I wanted to tell him he was crazy, but I hadn’t the nerve. I knew if I spoke and they looked at me, they would know who had killed him all right. At that moment my guilt was written across my face.
“I don’t get it,” Boos said.
“Delaney married this woman four years ago,” Maddox said. “They hadn’t been married three months before she got into touch with one of my agents. She suggested he should talk to Delaney about an accident insurance policy. She said her husband was interested in a hundred thousand coverage.” Maddox pointed a stubby finger at Boos. “I don’t have to tell you when a wife tries to arrange an accident policy for her husband the red light goes up. My agent told me. I told him to go ahead, but I opened a file on Mrs Delaney. The agent talked Delaney into signing a policy, but a day later, Delaney wrote in and cancelled it. We didn’t press him because I smelt trouble. It was a hunch that paid off. Three days after he had cancelled the policy, my agent reported to
me that Delaney had met with an accident. If he had been insured, I would have con-tested the claim and started an investigation, but as he wasn’t insured I let Jarrett, who you took over from, handle it. It was cleverly done, and he didn’t get anywhere. You’ll find it on file though. Delaney was drunk and asleep and she was driving. She stopped the car on the mountain road. A friend of hers had had a breakdown and was blocking the road. Delaney was asleep. She got out of the car and her story was she hadn’t set the parking brake properly. It’s a wonder Delaney survived.”
Boos said, Well, I’ll be damned!”
“The woman must be cock-eyed,” Maddox went on. “The moment Delaney takes out this TV policy and she discovers he is covered for five thousand bucks, she moves in again: only this time she kills him, and this time I’m right here to fix her!”
This was the moment when I should have got to my feet and told him he was wrong. This was the moment when I should have told him I had killed Delaney. But I didn’t. I just sat there, my heart pounding, too frightened for my rotten skin to tell them the truth.
Boos tapped out his pipe.
“You can’t prove she killed him, Mr Maddox.”
Maddox made an impatient gesture with his hands.
“That’s your job. I’m telling you this is murder, and I’m willing to bet my last buck, she did it. It’s your job to pin it on her. Find out where she was when Delaney died. I’ll bet you she’ll have an alibi. When you know what it is, take a good look at it before you accept it. Get Delaney’s body exhumed. I’m willing to bet she staged the scene by taking off the back of the TV set and she also planted the screwdriver by Delaney, and she did it to collect the five thousand coverage.”
Boos stroked his fleshy nose.
“Well, okay, I’ll talk to Jefferson. We’ll have the body exhumed right away.” He got to his feet. “Do you happen to know where Mrs Delaney is?”
Harmas said, “She’s in Los Angeles looking for work. Her attorney, Macklin, will know where you can contact her.”
“Okay, Mr Maddox,” Boos said. “I’ll take it from here. I’ll let you know how it develops.” He turned to me. “I’m going to lock up this place and seal it. I want the set left just where it is. Did she ask you to sell the set?”
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