by DC Brod
“Thank you, Irna,” she said, “I’ll call if I need you.”
Irna left reluctantly.
Using Grace’s letter opener, I slit the envelope and reached inside for its contents. It occurred to me briefly that Willie Loman wasn’t the only one here riding on a smile and a shoeshine as I placed the single ticket to Death of a Salesman on the desk. Showtime eight o’clock tonight.
We both stared at it. “Interesting,” I said. “Grace, would you mail a death threat to a man you planned to kill?”
She studied me before answering. “If I were clever I would.”
I shook my head. “You’ve used a lot of adjectives to describe Diana Hauser. Clever wasn’t one of them.”
I set the envelope down next to the ticket. “The letter is postmarked Thursday, the same day Preston died. The ticket is simple but effective. Diana liked to see the unsettled reaction Preston had to these little notes of hers. She might have wanted to kill him, but she would have waited to see how distracted this”—I held up the ticket—“made him.”
Grace didn’t say anything, and her expression didn’t change. I continued. “If Diana didn’t do it, then whoever planted the pills and the hypo probably did. There aren’t too many people who had that opportunity, are there? Not a lot of people who spent a lot of time with Diana in Wayne. It would almost have to be a member of family, wouldn’t it?”
Grace pressed the intercom button. “Irna. Have security
escort Mr. McCauley out of the store.” She released the button and continued to stare at me. Finally she said, “You have a habit of stepping into dangerous waters.”
“Why, Grace? I want to know why.”
“I can destroy you.”
I laughed, and not entirely at Grace’s expense. I wasn’t exactly proud of the fact that she’d have a lot of trouble figuring out how to destroy me. I didn’t have much in the way of assets. “Grace, you’ve got to have something before you can worry about losing it.”
Grace looked from me to her blotter, then back again. She still didn’t speak.
“It was the store, wasn’t it? That was the last straw.”
She elevated her chin and said, “This store has been in my family for three generations. My grandfather established it. My father made it flourish. My brother was ruining it. Not only was he ruining the store, he was ruining the Hauser name with his flagrant womanizing.” She paused and let that sink in. “I could not allow that to happen.”
She sat straight up in her chair, looking more like a monarch than a murderer. There was something about the way she held my gaze—firm and proud—that gave me a glimpse of what it must have been like for her.
“It wasn’t easy, was it, Grace? Seeing Preston ruin the store when you knew you could make it work. You must have felt cheated. You’re older than he is. If you’d been born male, all this would have been yours. It wasn’t fair.” She didn’t say anything and I continued. “You lived with it the same way people learn to live with arthritis. Then the stakes changed. Hauser was going to sell to Griffin and that was too much.”
Grace looked at her folded hands briefly, then back to me. “Frank Griffin would have turned this fine old store into another one of the underworld’s holdings. That was unthinkable.”
“So you poisoned Hauser and nullified the deal.”
She smiled politely and instead of responding to my statement, said, “Quint, there are some things that justify drastic measures. Don’t you agree?” I didn’t answer. “Quint. You’re a bright, sensitive and, I think, sympathetic man. Anything that I might have done, I did for my family name, not out of greed or for personal gain. I’m not a Frank Griffin.”
No, she wasn’t a Frank Griffin, but the fact that she was an intelligent, attractive senior citizen and I happened to like her, didn’t make her Joan of Arc either. Anyway, who was I to draw the line?
“Maybe not,” I said. “But both of you are murderers.” I began to pace in front of her desk. “I must have been a real frustration for you. There you were, dropping hints left and right about Diana and probably thinking, ‘Damn, I keep beating this guy over the head but nothing sinks in.’ So you called in the heavy artillery—Paula Wainwright, but I still wasn’t convinced.” I stopped pacing. “What can I say? I guess I’m a slow learner.”
Grace clenched her jaw and took a deep breath. “You’re going to have a difficult time proving my guilt. I will deny everything I’ve said to you.”
“What about the letter?”
We stared at each other. I had nothing to lose so it was easy for me to keep my mouth shut. Finally Grace held up the ticket and the envelope it came in. “I think we should both forget we ever saw this.” She opened the center drawer of the desk and removed a book of matches. “I think you’d better leave, Quint. We have no business with each other anymore.”
She took a small caliber gun out of the drawer and pointed it at me. I was real tired of people pointing guns at me.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I think I’ve got enough on you
already. I probably won’t need the ticket and the envelope as evidence. But there’s one other thing you should think about” I could tell by the way she clenched her jaw that I had her attention and I thought from the way she was avoiding eye contact and fidgeting that she was almost there. Just one push more. “Denying this conversation won’t do you any good. The whole thing has been recorded.”
“You’re lying,” Grace said.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then show me,” she said.
I walked around the desk and held my hand out to Grace. “Give me the gun.” I really didn’t expect her to do that, and she didn’t disappoint me. “Think about it, Grace. You kill me and you’ve got a whole pack of new problems. The police know I’m here. You’d have a rather large body to dispose of. Is it worth it?”
Grace stood motionless, gun still pointed at me. I began to unzip the jacket, hoping I would have an opening before revealing the fact that I wasn’t even wired with suspenders let alone a recording device.
“I know why you killed him, Grace, and I know why you tried to pin it on Diana. I believe you thought you were doing the right thing. But where does it stop?”
It seemed like a long time before anything happened. Finally Grace lowered her gaze and the weapon at the same time. She laid the gun on the desk and sank into the big leather chair. I picked up the gun. Grace massaged her forehead with her fingertips. She continued to rub as she spoke.
“I never meant for it to get out of hand. It was so simple. Eliminate Preston and I could get the store back in shape before the Hausers lost their connection with it.” Her voice drifted off. “I guess that won’t happen now.”
I heard raised voices in the outer office a moment before
Fred Morison erupted into the room with his gun drawn. Christ! He was just what the scene needed. Irna was right behind him.
“What’s going on here?” Fred demanded. He saw the gun in my hand and took it from me. I didn’t put up a fight. Morison might very well be the kind to shoot first and ask questions later.
He looked at Grace. “Are you all right, Mrs. Hunnicutt?”
“I’m fine, Fred,” she said but didn’t tell him to take the gun off me. “Irna, would you get my purse?”
All of a sudden she seemed to age before my eyes. The proud, tall woman shrank in front of me, dwarfed by the leather chair. She took the purse from Irna, removed a small pill box, opened it and took out two capsules. Then Grace leaned across the desk and poured herself a glass of water. There was something about this that was disturbingly familiar. I moved toward her, shouting, “Wait a minute.”
Fred, convinced that I was going to throttle Grace, lunged between us, gun pointed at my chest. “You wait a minute.”
I didn’t have time for another move before Grace popped the pills into her mouth and knocked them back with two swallows of water, just as her brother had done. She set the glass down, dabbed her mouth with her
handkerchief, and smiled at me.
26
It was Wednesday. Two days after Grace Hunnicutt had finished off the last of the Hauser bloodline—herself. I hadn’t expected that. I don’t know what I expected when I walked into her office intent on having her confess to her brother’s murder, but it wasn’t that
I drank some more Guinness and watched Elaine befriend a small shaggy dog wearing a plaid doggy coat. The dog lay on the carpeted floor of the White Hart, several feet from its owner, who stood at the bar. Patrons were stepping over the little animal, acknowledging its presence with a smile and a backward glance. The dog, oblivious to the fact that he was in the way, accepted the greetings of patrons without any fuss and was now concentrating on Elaine’s attentions. Smart dog.
I contemplated the glass of stout as I recalled my brief visit with Diana Hauser earlier in the day. She had stopped by Elaine’s to thank me. Elaine had been out shopping. Diana appeared fully recovered from her stint in the slammer, and she was flirting, incredible behavior, I thought, from a woman who’d come damned close to spending so long in prison that flirting wouldn’t have done her a whole lot of good by the time she got out. But then, maybe I was expecting too much from Diana Hauser to think she’d seize the opportunity to reevaluate her life. And—maybe I’d have been disappointed if she hadn’t asked me to take her to lunch.
“Is this how I get thanked?” I said. “I buy lunch?”
She answered, smiling, “There are those who would think that enough.”
I shrugged and removed a can of beer from the refrigerator. We watched each other as I opened the can and took a drink. She nodded, still smiling, and walked to the door, brushing my cheek with a kiss as she passed me. “If you change your mind,” she said, “I’ll be at the store.”
She left before I could tell her that maybe she should try feeling just a little bit guilty about this whole affair, which had cost a lot of lives. If she hadn’t sent the letters to Preston, he wouldn’t have hired a detective to dig up dirt on Hauser employees. The detective wouldn’t have been killed. Griffin’s thugs, Art, Griffin—they’d all be alive. I had a hunch Grace saw the letters as a nice lead-in to a murder. Unfortunately, Diana was probably on the elevator by the time I put together what I wanted to say. Must have been the after-effects of that concussion still …
A familiar voice dragged me back from my reverie. “Doesn’t anyone pick up their dogs around here?”
I looked up and saw Elaine laughing at O’Henry, who had come very close to tripping over the little dog, who was watching the stocky man with mild interest. O’Henry sat across from me in the booth and Elaine slid in beside me. He ordered a Guinness and Elaine took a sip of mine.
“I was going to bring your ticket,” he said to Elaine, “but I looked at the date and figured it wouldn’t do you much good since it was for two nights ago.”
“That’s okay,” Elaine said, sounding a lot more cheerful than the situation called for. “Quint is taking me to see it this weekend.”
“We’re going to Death of a Salesman and follow it up with dinner at a rowdy Greek restaurant. That way we can see how many mood swings we can pull off in one night,” I said.
Elaine gave my leg a playful slap, and I grabbed and held onto her hand before she could pull it away. Then she smiled and winked at me and said to O’Henry, “By the way, I asked Quint why he wasn’t wired when he went to see Grace. He told me to ask you.” She stole another sip from my glass. “So, I’m asking.”
O’Henry cast his eyes heavenward and shook his head. “They never remember the times you call it right.” Then he nodded toward me and said to Elaine, “I thought he was full of it. Grace Hunnicutt? No way. Not a shred of hard evidence. Just a bunch of suppositions. I wasn’t put on this planet to respond to this guy’s whims.”
Elaine started to give him some grief and I interrupted. “Yeah, but you did get that envelope postmarked for me.”
“I was just humoring you.”
I tipped my glass to him. He shrugged off the gesture and changed the subject. “Guess who’s heir to the department store dynasty?”
“Don’t tell me,” I said.
“Diana Hauser,” O’Henry said.
“I asked you not to tell me.”
O’Henry ignored my remark. “I talked to the Hauser family attorney. It’s official now, and guess who she wants to hire back as head of security?”
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “And this time I mean it.”
“Her lawyer’s going to call and make you an offer.” He took a drink, reflecting on his statement. Then he added, “Bet she pays good.”
O’Henry looked serious. Elaine looked like she was trying not to laugh.
“Can you imagine,” I said, “trying to be head of security where the store’s most notorious shoplifter is also its owner?” I shook my head at the concept.
“Well,” O’Henry said, “I just thought I’d pass it along.” He paused and drank a couple of swallows of the stout.
“What are you going to do, anyway? Get another security job?”
I shrugged. “Who knows.”
We finished our drinks and left after Elaine said good-bye to the dog and we both said good-bye to O’Henry.
“You’re awfully quiet,” I said to Elaine as we walked to the car.
She didn’t answer for a while, then she said, “I guess I’m just wondering what happens now.” “We go home,” I said.
“You know what I mean.” She squeezed my hand. “We’re about to run into reality. We both have to earn a living.”
“That’s not always bad,” I said, but I knew what she meant.
This past week we’d been thrown together in alien territory, with the rules of day-to-day existence temporarily suspended. Something good had happened between us, but here we were, as Elaine said, running into reality. Neither of us knew if that good thing that had happened would work as well in the real world.
We drove to the condo, each preoccupied by our own thoughts. As I turned off Addison, she said, “Are you going to look for your own place?”
“Not tonight.” I sounded more flip than I had intended.
I pulled the car up to Elaine’s door, leaned over, and kissed her. There must have been something final about that gesture, because when we finished she said, “You are coming up, aren’t you?”
“Sure. Where else would I go?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
She got out of the car, and I watched her walk into the building. Then I began my nightly ritual, wondering as I drove up and down car-lined side streets what beast one had to slay to appease the parking-space god.
Published in Electronic Format by
TYRUS BOOKS
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
4700 East Galbraith Road
Cincinnati, Ohio 45236
www.tyrusbooks.com
Copyright © 1993 by D.C. Brod
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction.
Any similarities to people or places, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3318-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3318-1
This work has been previously published in print format by:
Walker Publishing Company, Inc.
Print ISBN: 1-55773-630-8
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