Guilt by Association

by Gilbert, Morris

  Karen whispered, “What a terrible thing! He played a game with us!”

  “How’d they get it all together?” Karl asked. “I mean, the clues to who would be murdered were so complex. How did Rachel know how to apply them?”

  “He had some way of getting word to her.” Dani shrugged. “Isn’t that right, Rachel?”

  “Sure it is!” Rachel said defiantly. She laughed harshly, adding, “You searched this place a dozen times and didn’t find it—and it was right under your noses! Right behind the medicine cabinet in the bathroom! That’s where I got the poison.”

  Karen stared at Rachel. “But—how did she get the poison in the omelet? She never even came near while I mixed it, and Karl took it to the table.”

  “There was never any poison in that omelet,” Dani said calmly.

  “What?” Karl demanded. “But there had to be! It was all Alex ate that night.”

  Dani reminded him, “There was one other place he could have gotten it. And we all knew about it, because he took it after every meal.”

  “The Maalox!” Ben caught on instantly.

  “Yes, the Maalox.” She nodded. “We all knew about it, didn’t we?”

  “But how did she poison the bottle?” Bix demanded.

  “She left the table, for just a few minutes, while we were all eating,” Dani said. “It was the one time when it would be safe for her to go through the bathroom, into the men’s side, and put the poison into Alex’s medicine. I also suspect she had some sort of drug to raise her temperature so she could pretend to be sick. She used it later on, I’d guess, pretending to be sick like Vince. That’s what you did, isn’t it, Rachel?”

  “You’re the great detective,” Rachel snarled. “Figure it out!”

  Karen said slowly, “There are a number of ways to raise a temperature. She must have used some drug.”

  Rachel gave her a sour look, but couldn’t resist. “Sure I did. I had a reaction once to Imferon. Ran my temperature up. So all I had to do was take a little every time I wanted to fool you dumb clucks. All those pills you stuck in my mouth that were supposed to knock me out? I never swallowed any of them! Just hid them under my tongue and spit them out later!”

  “Sure.” Ben nodded. “Maxwell made his fortune in medicines. He’d know all about that.”

  “I think she’s probably a quick thinker,” Dani said clinically. “She was there when the omelet was brought up, and she saw a chance to throw suspicion on Betty and Karl—and even Karen—and at the same time put herself in the clear by pretending to be poisoned with the same dish.”

  “What kind of person would plan such a terrible thing?”

  “Well, Maxwell’s clinically insane, Karen.” Dani shrugged. “We all know that. But I rather think that Rachel’s just a plain murderer—though she’ll probably claim temporary insanity in court.”

  “You’ll never get me in court!” Rachel said defiantly.

  Dani regarded her for only a moment. “And poor Rosie! Stone didn’t call him by his nickname, but he did mention Roosevelt—which was Rosie’s full name. He also mentioned Julius Caesar. And he did quote several lines, such as ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.’ And then a real giveaway, the last words Caesar ever spoke before he was stabbed to death: ‘Et tu, Brute!’”

  “You and your employer are very artistic, aren’t you, Rachel?” Holtz asked, looking to where she stood, her head up and her eyes defiant. “All that about the Jews and the Nazis—I suppose that was part of your act?”

  “You believed it, too!” Rachel’s eyes glowed with anger, not remorse, as she glared around the room. “You’ve got me, but you won’t kill me! We all know that!”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Sid said. He moved closer to Rachel, with a gleam in his black eyes. “All of us ain’t as gentle as Dani,” he murmured. “Just give me two minutes with her—”

  “Keep him away from me!” Rachel yelled, trying to back away.

  “Let’ s hear the rest, boss,” Ben said. “What about Candi? Same thing?”

  “I had a hard time with that one, Ben,” Dani admitted. “Especially naming the victim. He slipped that into a phrase so cleverly I missed it for a long time. He said, ‘Instead of handing out death sentences, our courts are handing out candy to murderers.’ Candi.” She shrugged. “And then he mentioned the ‘harlot of the Nile that debauched the rulers of her day.’”

  “Cleopatra!” Holtz breathed.

  “Yes—and all that business about the snake was because Cleopatra died of the bite of a deadly viper.”

  “She had a good shot at the poor child,” Holtz said. “It must have been easy, since she was alone with her.”

  “What about me?” Betty demanded. “Did he have me in any of his old speeches?”

  “He said something about Betty Crocker. And he gave some pretty broad hints, such as when he told me, ‘You have a “voice . . . soft, Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman.”’” Dani grimaced, adding, “I ought to have caught that one! It is said of Lear’s daughter Cordelia—and I once acted that role in college! He even dared to use another phrase which Lear said to Cordelia—‘so young, and so untender?’” And of course, Cordelia is hanged at the end of the play. Why didn’t I see it?”

  “Don’t feel bad, Dani!” Lonnie cried out. “I don’t see how you ever remembered any of his stuff.”

  “It is a marvelous gift,” Karen said with admiration. “But what about the last clues—the ones that trapped Rachel?”

  “Oh, once you have the pattern, it’s simple. He said, ‘A Daniel come to judgement,’ and I knew I was next. Then he started using lines from Hamlet: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,’ and ‘Diseases desperate grown . . . ,’ and when he used the phrase, ‘Sweets to the sweet: farewell!’—the lines spoken about Ophelia, at her funeral—I knew I was going to be murdered.”

  “How’d she die—in the play, I mean?” Betty asked.

  “She was drowned. Where else could anyone be drowned, except in the bathtub?” Then Dani said wearily, “That’s the way I discovered how Stone chose his victims and how he planned to kill them.”

  “But how’d Rachel do it?” Sid asked in bewilderment. “We’ve thought all along that a woman wouldn’t be strong enough to handle some of the killings.”

  Dani studied Rachel curiously, then turned to ask, “Ben, how about that? She almost got the best of you in that free-for-all in the bathroom.”

  “She’s very good,” he observed. “Faster than anyone I’ve ever tackled. I’d say she’s a black belt. And very strong, too.”

  “Rosie was a little guy,” Lonnie reminded everyone. “And Betty here won’t weigh a hundred pounds, soaking wet.”

  “Sure,” Ben agreed. “Be no trouble for a tough cookie like Rachel to handle either of them.”

  “I could have taken you, too, Savage,” Rachel snapped. “If your lady friend hadn’t been there to give you a hand!”

  “Not only an expert in karate, but in murder,” Holtz said slowly. “I take it you slashed poor Rosie, then went up the rope and got rid of the knife to throw suspicion on Ben?”

  “A piece of cake!”

  “You also planted the hypodermic needles in my case.” He nodded. “And that was you I got a glimpse of just after you’d hanged Betty!”

  “Sure it was!”

  Betty looked at Karl. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, dear! You saved my life! And I was awful to you!”

  Holtz came up with a small smile, “Well, you can make me one of those fine apple pies, Betty, and we’ll call it square.”

  “Why has all this happened? Why are we all here?”

  They all looked at Rachel, but she merely shrugged. “I don’t know. Mr. Stone don’t confide in me. He just pays me.”

  Dani startled them all by breaking in, “Oh, I can tell you that.”

  “What?” “Dani, tell us!” half a dozen other cries met her astonishing statement.
<
br />   “Do you really know, boss?” Ben asked curiously.

  “Oh, yes. It was simple once I got all the facts and had time to think about them!”

  “You missed a great chance to say, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson!’” Ben said. “Well, let’s have it!”

  17

  The Only Hope

  * * *

  Dani looked around at the faces fixed on her in shock and shrugged. “It’s just like discovering the pattern using Shakespeare’s quotations and giving the name of the victim. If there’s a pattern to something, no matter how complex, once you have the key, it’s easy to open the door.”

  “Well, I’ve been going over those confounded lists for weeks,” Karl said. “And I haven’t been able to make a thing of it! What’s the key?”

  “It’s been buried there under my nose all the time, because Rachel lied about her background,” Dani said, looking directly toward Rachel.

  “Sure I lied!” Rachel snarled. “Stone made up a story for me, but I lied about most things on those lists.”

  “That’s what made the difference.” Dani nodded. “You all know how hard we worked to find things we’d all done—and only came up with five?”

  “Sure.” Bix nodded. “Stuff like we’ve all seen Gone With the Wind and we’ve all had some kind of pet.”

  “Right! But when I found out that Rachel was lying, that meant that there were more constants.”

  “How’d you find out she was lying?” Sid asked.

  “One of our ‘all but one lists’—lists of things all of us but one had done—was a list of cities we had visited.” She looked around the room, and her face was careful as she said, “Rachel said she’d never been to Dallas.”

  “And she really had?” Karen asked.

  “Once she let it slip that she’d attended one of the home games of the Cowboys—and she’d be unlikely to do that without passing through Dallas, wouldn’t she?”

  Karl was staring at her, his face suddenly filled with dread. “Dallas! It’s Dallas that ties us all together, Dani?”

  Dani nodded slowly, then looked around. “And I could make a new list now, that all of us would be on.” She paused, then asked slowly, “How many of you have ever been to the Mayfair Hotel in Dallas?”

  “That girl!” Karl lifted his hands suddenly, and his voice cracked with emotion. “It’s that Williams girl!”

  “But we had nothing to do with her death!” Karen protested.

  “Stone thinks we did,” Dani said. “He blames us all for not getting help for her.”

  She looked at each face, and every one except Ben had the same expression—a mixture of fear, anger, and guilt. Betty suddenly sat down and buried her face in her hands, moaning, “I knew I’d have to answer for that someday!”

  “Don’t talk like that, Betty,” Karen said quickly. “What could you have done?”

  “The same as the rest of you—I could have gotten the police!”

  Her words sank into the group as a stone drops into a still pond. They hit each person as hard as the truth had hit Dani when it had burst through.

  Only moments after the terrific fight in the bathroom, it had leaped into Dani’s mind in the form of a logical proposition: Rachel is the murderer, therefore everything she has said may be a lie. She said she’d never been to Dallas, so she probably has been to Dallas: Therefore all of us have been to Dallas.

  Dani had thought of the time she had been attending a professional meeting—which was being held in Dallas’s Mayfair Hotel.

  It was the only time she had ever seen a person murdered!

  As soon as she made the connection, the whole terrible scene flashed through Dani’s mind, with the clarity as of the view from her third-story hotel window.

  She remembered word for word what she had said to the policeman who had questioned her the next day: “I saw a man and woman—and she was on the pavement, trying to get up. When she did, he hit her and knocked her down again. They weren’t right beneath my window, so I had to lean out to see it. He kept hitting her, knocking her down, and she would get up and try to run away. I—I could see the blood on her mouth, where he’d hurt her.”

  When the policeman had asked if she heard the woman call for help, she had said, “Y-yes, she called out, ‘Please help me! O my God—he’s killing me! Please—somebody help me!’”

  That cry had echoed in Dani’s mind for weeks, waking her up at night and keeping her in a state of despair over her failure to respond to the young woman.

  Now, looking around at the others, she said unsteadily, “I guess you all had interviews with the police. When they asked me why I hadn’t called them, I said it never occurred to me that somebody hadn’t already done it.” Bitterness touched her lips, and she gave her shoulders an angry shake. “But nobody else did call. We all just watched and let a man murder a woman.”

  Betty’s face was dull with shock, and her voice a faint whisper, “I thought it was all over! But a thing like that’s never over.” She looked around, fear scrawled across her face, and added, “For six months after it happened, I didn’t sleep. Finally I had a breakdown. That’s why I lied about where I come from. When I got out of the asylum, I moved and changed my name. I’d lived in Pennsylvania all my life, but I didn’t want to stay where anybody knew me, so I moved to Saint Louis.”

  Holtz had been staring at the floor, but now he looked up. “Death was a familiar figure to me during the war. I saw the young woman being attacked, but I was not a citizen then. I didn’t want to get involved in a criminal matter, so I said nothing. I thought—as all of you thought, I suppose—that the police would get a dozen phone calls. The whole thing happened in front of dozens of witnesses.”

  “You’re right, Karl.” Karen nodded. “I was in Dallas for a vacation.” Irony sharpened her voice, and she shook her head. “I’d just gotten back from Six Flags when I looked out the window and saw the thing. I started to call the police, but I thought the same as you and Dani did.”

  “Sure, we all thought that,” Bix said woodenly. “I was playing a gig with a group at the Mayfair. The cops found out I’d seen it and kept me talking about it for two hours: Why hadn’t I done something, they wanted to know. I was down on the world then, and I told them I wasn’t getting paid to protect the broad—it was their job.” He made a futile gesture with his hands. “I could have done something, too. That’s what got to me after it was over. Maybe I couldn’t have gone out and taken the guy—but I could have called.”

  “It was that story in the paper that got me!” Sid said. “Way it was wrote up, we didn’t care about the girl!”

  “Yeah, I almost looked up that reporter and busted his nose!” Lonnie agreed sourly. “I never even seen the thing, not really. I was delivering some booze to the hotel and just passed by. I saw this guy was hasslin’ this girl, sure, but how was I to know he was going to knock her off? I said to my boss, as soon as I got back to the warehouse, ‘Seen some guy pushing a dame around outside the Mayfair,’ and next thing I know, the cops is there, pumping me!” He gave his head an angry shake. “I finally hadda get out of Dallas and go back home over that mess!”

  “But what does Maxwell Stone have to do with that woman?” Karen asked.

  “Williams was her married name,” Dani spoke up. “She was getting a divorce, I remember. I’m wondering if her maiden name might have been Stone.” She stopped, bit her lip, then said slowly, “I’ve never forgiven myself for not doing something!”

  Silence fell across the group, until Sid broke it by saying, “Stone must have gotten our names from the papers.”

  “No,” Ben said. “The papers never listed your names. But Stone had connections and money. He could have gotten it from the police records. Lots of people have access to those reports, and some of them have been known to be on the take.”

  “Did they ever catch the guy who killed her?” Sid asked.

  “He got life without parole, I read.” Lonnie spoke thoughtfully. “But there was
a little piece in the Little Rock paper about him. He’d only been in prison for four months when he got killed in some kind of rumble.”

  “Wouldn’t be hard for a rich guy like Stone to arrange that.” Sid shrugged. “With enough coin, you could get anybody burned.”

  Dani looked around, then said quietly, “Well, we’ve come a long way today. We’ve got our killer, and we know why we’re in this place, but I’m afraid it doesn’t mean a lot.”

  “I think you’re right,” Karl said. “With the kind of mind Stone’s got, even if we all confessed and said we were sorry, he still wouldn’t let us go.”

  “Can’t afford to.” Ben nodded. “Multiple kidnappings and three murders? He’ll never let us go.”

  His words expressed everyone’s thoughts, and Sid gave Rachel a hard look. “Maybe if we give him this doll’s fingers, one at a time, he’ll reconsider.”

  Rachel paled, but shook her head. “Wrong there. He’d let me run through a meat grinder before he’d change his mind.”

  “The thing that bothers me,” Dani said slowly, “is that he might panic, now that we got his assassin put away. He may just decide to let us starve—get rid of us any way he can, so he can bury all the evidence.”

  “The ‘evidence,’” Karen said sharply, then gave a humorless laugh. “That’s us, I take it. But you’re right, Dani. Haven’t you sensed that he’s getting tired of his game with us? Things are happening faster, and he can’t risk having us around. I think he’ll kill us soon, especially now that he doesn’t have Rachel to pick us off.”

  “But—he doesn’t know we have her,” Ben mused.

  Dani stared at him, noting the intense look on the lean face. “Well, he’ll know soon enough, Ben.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You have an idea, Ben?” Bix asked hopefully.