The Irrepressible Peccadillo

by Fletcher Flora

  “He had been drinking gimlets.”

  “It looked for a while, however, as if things might go wrong after all. It looked as if the consort might escape suspicion, and so I wrote the note to the police, and now everything is working out beautifully as I wanted it to and as the Voice said it would.”

  “Is it? Perhaps you are too optimistic.”

  “Because of you? Oh, no. It was a mistake for you to come here, or to meddle at all, for now I must kill you, as you must surely see.”

  “How? Is there a gun in one of your pockets? Is that why you keep your hands there?”

  “Not a gun. I know nothing about guns, and they’re noisy besides. A knife. I can use a knife quite well. There is no use for you to scream, because there is no one to hear you, nor to run, because I can run faster, nor to struggle, because I am far stronger.”

  “If you kill me, you will surely be caught.”

  “No, no. Never. The Voice has assured me that I will not. The Voice comes to me and tells me what to do, and it is always right. It is a great advantage, having the Voice. Maybe it’s the Voice of God. Some day it will tell me if it is or not, and in the meanwhile it has told me that you must be killed, and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, nothing at all.”

  “As to that,” Sid said, “it seems to me that I have already done more than my share, and in my opinion it is high time that Cotton McBride begins doing his.”

  Cotton came out from behind the mausoleum then, on the run, and began doing his share to the best of his ability. Sara shrieked and clawed and fiercely struggled, and it looked for a while as if Cotton would need the assistance of Sid and Millie, but then, all at once, Sara became perfectly quiet, orally and bodily, and stood looking with an air of abstraction across the clustered headstones as if she were listening again to the Voice, which may have been telling her to give up.

  “Damn it, Millie,” Sid said, “I told you that Cotton was not to be in on it, but you brought him in anyhow, in spite of all my instructions.”

  “Fortunately for both of us, I did,” Millie said. “The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that it would be helpful to have some muscles present, even of an idiot.”

  “I admit that you were right,” Sid said, “and I, for a change, was wrong.”

  CHAPTER 15

  A few evenings later, we had a little party on the back terrace to celebrate my getting out of jail.

  We had gimlets to drink because Sid said it was important that I not develop a thing about them.

  In addition to Sid and me, Millie was there with her engineer, who was still trying desperately with a kind of restrained frenzy.

  Hec Caldwell was there with his wife, just to show that there were no hard feelings, much.

  Even Cotton McBride was there, a limp and lonely stag because he had never had any luck with the girls and still wasn’t having any.

  The Jack Handys were not invited, but they drifted around the hedge and got into it.

  Everything is clear up to a point, and then nothing is, and what I remember most clearly is Sid saying that I had become much more interesting to her since she had discovered that I was once a whore’s consort.

  Another thing I remember pretty clearly is someone saying that he or she wondered what would become of Sara Pike, and Sid saying in response that she would probably plead crazy and be sent for a while to an institution and then be released in due time as all right again.

  Which she did and was and probably will be.

  BONUS SHORT STORY: THE INVISIBLE GAUNTLET

  It was exactly eight o’clock one Thursday evening when Detective-Lieutenant Joseph Marcus rang the front doorbell of Conrad Vail’s house on Dryden Road. It was after work hours, and Marcus made a point of being punctual; he had arranged his visit by telephone earlier in the day.

  The door was opened by Vail himself. This was a nice personal touch that Marcus vaguely appreciated, but his appreciation was not excessive. He took the gesture, quite correctly, as simple recognition of his worth. The business on which he had come was something that might have pulled higher rank than his, but there was no one at headquarters who could handle it better, or even as well.

  Vail, after an exchange of greetings, took him immediately down the hall and into the library. There was a small blaze in the fireplace at one end of the room, more for cheer than for comfort, and Marcus, relieved of his topcoat and hat, was put into a chair in front of the fire.

  “I assume from the time that this visit is unofficial, Lieutenant,” Vail said. “Will you have a drink?”

  “No, thanks,” Marcus said. “You have one, if you like.”

  “Not yet.” Vail sat down in the other chair before the fire. “One strong highball just before bed—that’s my limit.”

  Marcus, stretching his hands toward the flames, reflected that Vail’s self-discipline was characteristic. Conrad Vail was a hard man. He could be, when necessary, a ruthless one. Until five nights ago, Saturday-last, he had been a kind of major-domo in the political house of Big Jim Shannon. Now, after a series of lightning maneuvers, he was master of the house.

  Big Jim was dead and buried. He had been found shot to death behind the wheel of his limousine in a dark, narrow street near the river. Someone—apparently a passenger in the car beside him—had held a .38 caliber gun against Big Jim’s side and had fired one fatal shot into the great cage of ribs that held his heart. It was on this business that Lieutenant Marcus was now calling.

  “You’re a busy man,” Marcus said, “so I won’t waste your time. As you probably know, I’ve been working on the Shannon murder. The D.A. and the Chief have been giving out all the news releases, but I’ve been on the job.”

  “I know.” Vail smiled thinly. “They make the noise, you do the work. Well, they couldn’t have chosen a better man.”

  “Thanks. Anyhow, it’s a tough case. Big Jim had a thousand enemies. It would take a year to round up everyone who had reason to wish him dead. Moreover, there’s very little to go on. It’s the hardest kind of case in the world to solve. Someone simply shot him and walked away—no witnesses, no clues, no anything.”

  “I can see that. Still, we can assume that it was someone Big Jim knew well enough to have with him in his car. Probably someone he trusted. That should narrow it down for you.”

  “Not if Big Jim had the gun on him all the while. Not if he was forced to drive down to that street near the river.”

  “That sounds logical in theory, but I can’t buy it, Lieutenant. I knew Big Jim Shannon for years, ever since I came to him for a job when I was fresh out of law school. And nothing I know makes me believe he would have submitted to that kind of intimidation. He was a strong, contemptuous man, one of the last of a vanishing breed in city politics. Believe me, he would never have driven anywhere under the threat of a gun. He would have forced the issue wherever it began, whatever the consequences.”

  Marcus was glad to hear this, for it accorded perfectly with his own opinion. He had brought up the point only to have it refuted and cleared from his mind. Big Jim just didn’t fit the picture of the murder. Contemptuous, Vail had called him, and it was an apt word. One of the last of a vanishing breed—an apt phrase.

  Vail, on the other hand, was one of the new breed—just as hard, just as arrogant, just as ruthless in the exploitation of power, but operating under a surface of learning and polish. Anyone who doubted it had only to remember the swift and efficient way Vail had gathered into his own hands the complex of reins that Big Jim had dropped in the front seat of the limousine near the dark river.

  “I welcome your judgment in the matter,” Marcus said. “It clears the way for another idea I have.”

  “Oh? What idea?”

  “I’ll be interested to hear what you think of it. It’s my notion that Big Jim Shannon did not drive to that street where his body was found. He
was driven there.”

  “An interesting notion, but I don’t see how you support it. He was found sitting under the wheel, although his body had toppled sidewise onto the seat. The wound was in his right side, with all the evidence indicating that it had been made by a gun fired from the seat beside him.”

  “True. But the wound could have been deliberately made that way to create that impression. In other words, Shannon could have been killed elsewhere and then taken to where he was found.”

  “Killed where?”

  “I don’t know. That’s something we still have to determine.”

  “Is this just your imagination working, Lieutenant, or do you have any evidence?”

  “Some. But nothing conclusive.”

  “Whatever it is, I’d like to hear it.”

  “Well, for one thing, the steering wheel. It had plenty of Big Jim’s fingerprints on it, and many of them were quite clear. Yet he wasn’t wearing gloves.”

  “He rarely did.”

  “So I understand. Anyhow, there were also some prints on the center braces of the wheel. You know how a man will often hold the wheel that way when he’s driving. However, those prints were badly smeared. It was almost as if someone, wearing gloves, had grasped the braces in order to leave the prints on the wheel itself undisturbed.”

  “Clever, Lieutenant, but you’ll have to admit, rather tenuous. Big Jim wasn’t the only person who drove that limousine. His son used it, and occasionally his wife.”

  “Oh, I know. I admitted it was not conclusive.”

  “If you’ll pardon my saying so, it’s not even convincing. You’ll have to come up with more than that.”

  “There is more. Not much, but a little. At any rate, I think you may find it more convincing.”

  “I’m perfectly willing to be convinced, Lieutenant. Try me.”

  “It’s incredible, really. Assume for a minute that my idea is sound. Big Jim Shannon was killed somewhere else and driven by the murderer in Shannon’s car to the place where it was found. His body was pulled into position behind the wheel to support the fiction that he was shot there by a passenger sitting next to him. Then the murderer walks away into the darkness, and no one can prove that it didn’t happen exactly the way he had made it appear. Except for one thing. As his nickname implies, Shannon was a big man. He was six-feet-three. But the driver’s seat in the murder car was in the farthest forward-position. Big Jim could never have driven with the seat like that. He would have been intolerably cramped.”

  Conrad Vail was silent, evaluating this, and then he slapped his knees suddenly and stood up.

  “You’re right, Lieutenant! Leaving the seat in that position was a flagrant, blunder. As you said, it’s really incredible.”

  “But fortunate for me. At least, I know that I am looking for a small man.”

  “Physically small, you mean.”

  “Do I? Perhaps I do.”

  “Yes. And you will no doubt want to get on with your looking. I won’t keep you, Lieutenant. I’ll be interested in seeing how successful you are.”

  “So will I.”

  “Can you let yourself out?”

  “Of course. I know the way.”

  Conrad Vail retrieved Marcus’ hat and coat, and held the coat while Marcus slipped into it.

  “By the way, Lieutenant,” he said, “I wonder if you would do me a service before you leave?”

  “If I can.”

  “Just hand me that Life of Napoleon from the upper shelf there. I’m too short to reach it.”

  Having done the service, Lieutenant Marcus let himself out, figuratively carrying in his pocket the gauntlet that Vail had flung down.