Burden of Guilt

by Carter Brown

  He shuffled his feet restlessly. “No offense, Lieutenant—”

  “Every time you say that,” I grated, “I know you’re about to insult me!”

  “It’s just that, the way you’re talking about it, you sound like some television director setting up his next scene.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “It just isn’t what I imagined it would be, I guess.”

  “What do you want? Ma Barker and her boys, and tommy-guns yammering away up and down the street all day long?”

  He grinned. “Okay, Lieutenant!”

  “You want to take it as it comes, it’s all right with me,” I said. “Maybe it’s my deep-seated subconscious desire to direct a television series that always makes me want to talk first, and do nothing after.”

  He finished his beer in one gigantic gulp. “Let’s go, Lieutenant!”

  “I’m glad I can’t drink Scotch like that,” I said, “because I’d be dead inside a week.” We went back to the car and retraced the three blocks, then parked outside the swank apartment building. On the way up to the penthouse in the elevator, Stevens checked his belt holster carefully, then looked at me with a serious expression on his face.

  “You figure there’s any chance of a shooting when we get inside, Lieutenant?”

  “How would I know?” I shrugged. “I’m going to take it as it comes. I figure if that’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me, too.”

  The elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out onto the private and completely enclosed front porch that belonged to the penthouse.

  “There’s a nice girl inside, by the name of Wanda Blair,” I said, the moment before I pressed the doorbell. “If there is any shooting, make sure you stand in front of her. I wouldn’t want her to get killed!”

  They took their time about opening the front door—maybe a little too long, I thought. Finally it opened up a little, and a sleepy-looking hazel-colored eye blinked at us.

  “Well!” a husky voice, completely devoid of enthusiasm, said, “If it isn’t Lieutenant Al Wheeler come to wake us in the middle of the night!”

  “I’ve got some news I thought you’d be interested to hear, Wanda,” I said. “You mind if we come in?”

  “Why, of course not! Come right on in!”

  The newfound brightness and gaiety in her voice made me feel a little better, until I saw she was looking directly over my shoulder at the cause of it.

  “Who’s your friend, Al?”

  “Detective Stevens.” I figured it was a strictly temporary promotion that would only last as long as we were inside the penthouse. “Stevens, Wanda Blair.”

  By that time we were inside and I saw his eyes widen at the first sight of Wanda in her transparent shift.

  “My!” She wriggled slightly, but with Wanda even a slight wriggle went all the way down to her ankles. Her breasts quivered in their usual high-flying style. “They’re building police officers better these days,”

  “Yeah, well—” Stevens looked embarrassed. He couldn’t keep his eyes still. Me—I had seen it all before. Wanda smiled brightly at him and fluttered her eyelashes. She took a deep breath and the hem of the shift rose just enough for me to glimpse the wisp of chestnut hair between her creamy thighs.

  “Is Cordain around?” I asked, because I was getting tired of just standing there with mud in my eye.

  “Hal?” She shrugged. “I think he’s gone to bed.” She lunged past me and grabbed hold of Stevens’s arm. “But why don’t we all go in and have a drink!”

  I trailed them into the bordello-styled living room, then across to the bar. Stevens gave me a pleading look as Wanda lined herself up as bartender.

  “Detective Stevens doesn’t drink while he’s on duty,” I said happily. “I’ll have Scotch on the rocks, with a little soda.”

  “He isn’t on duty right now,” the pocket Venus said tartly. “This is purely a pleasure!”

  To prove a point, she reached up on the tips of her toes for a bottle on the top shelf above the bar, and the shift rose all the way up over her bare bottom. Stevens’s eyes seemed to glaze as he stared at the pink, rounded cheeks which were slowly revealed to him, inch by tantalizing inch.

  She made my drink first, then her hazel eyes glowed at Stevens. “It’s my special drink,” she confided. “I only let my very special friends share it! I call it ‘Passion Unlimited’ because after a couple of glasses, nobody ever knows where to stop!”

  I winced, and moved myself and my drink away from the bar, back toward the center of the room. As far as the other two were concerned, it was like I had ceased to exist. A couple of minutes later I put down my empty glass, and decided if Cordain was a party-pooper it was up to me to find him and persuade him to join in the mad, hilarious frivolity. The only door off the living room led into the kitchen, I remembered from my last time around. So I drifted out into the front hall, and found a side hallway at one end that led to the bedrooms.

  It seemed logical to follow Stevens’s example, and take the doors as they came. I knocked loud enough on the first one to awaken the dying, and near-dead, and nothing happened. The second door along produced a better result. There was no time for a second knock, even, before the door was pulled open viciously from the inside.

  “What the hell is—” Cordain stopped suddenly as he saw me. “It’s you!”

  “Wanda said you were sleeping.” I gave him a benign smile. “I didn’t want you to miss out on the party.”

  “Party?” he snarled.

  “We’re celebrating. The killers of Shirley Lucas are in the county jail, booked on a first-degree homicide rap.”

  “Who?” For the first time his eyes looked a little alive, and not like dried-out olives.

  “You have to join the party first, Hal,” I told him.

  “Okay!” The hank of thick black hair fell down over one eye again, and it was a slight improvement. “Give me a couple of minutes, and I’ll be out there.”

  The door slammed shut.

  I walked back into the living room with the certain feeling that the other two didn’t know I had ever been away. There seemed no point in trying to disturb them at the end of the bar, so I made myself a fresh drink, lit a cigarette, and tried not to think about anything much at all. Five dull minutes rolled by before Cordain came into the room. The lines in his face seemed even deeper-etched, and the puffiness around his eyes was more noticeable. He was wearing a plaid sport coat, green slacks, an orange-colored cossack-type shirt, and the same old suede boots.

  He came to an abrupt stop when he saw Stevens, then yelled, “Who the hell is this?”

  His deep, resonant voice still had the metallic rasp to it that scratched at my nerve ends.

  “This is Detective Stevens, Hal,” Wanda said blissfully. “He’s got my vote for the man I’d most like to be poured into the same scuba diving suit with!”

  “That’s high praise, indeed,” I said to Stevens in very clear voice. “Coming from a professional call girl, it’s the voice of wide and varied experience!”

  Wanda’s face flushed a dusty-red color. “I’m not a professional call girl!”

  “Not while you’re on vacation in Pine City,” I agreed. “But when you get back to San Francisco, it’ll be back to work, too!”

  “You’re a filthy liar, Wheeler!” Her eyes blazed bloody murder at me. “It was only a joke. Sure, I shared the apartment with Shirley, but neither of us were ever call girls. It was only as a big special favor to Hal that Shirley used to entertain that creep, Kingsley, and you know something about him?” She started to laugh hysterically. “He couldn’t—”

  “Shut up!” Cordain bellowed.

  “I know,” I said to Wanda. “It always did sound a little wild. Two professional call girls sharing the same apartment. It would only be some kind of a weirdo like Kingsley who would have ever bought the idea in the first place.”

  “Look, Wheeler!” C
ordain pushed the hank of hair out of his eyes again. “You came up here to tell us about Shirley’s killers—you said. So tell us!”

  “Just tell me one thing first,” I asked out of genuine curiosity. “What was Shirley Lucas to you?”

  “My girl,” he said quickly. “The way I’ve missed her since—I guess I must have been in love with her, and never knew it!”

  “You could have fooled me,” I said gently. “The way you used her to try and get to the woman you really wanted.”

  “I don’t have to take that from you,” he rasped. “Cop or no goddamned cop!”

  “Detective Stevens!” I snapped.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “I want both Wanda and Mr. Cordain to hear this story out,” I said. “If he even tries to interrupt me again before I’m finished, I want you to punch him in the mouth. That’s an order, and I’ll take the responsibility.”

  “Yes, sir, Lieutenant.”

  By the way Cordain’s mouth twisted, I figured he’d caught the hopeful note in Stevens’s voice, too. I gave them a capsule version of how Shirley Lucas had died, and why. Wanda broke down and cried genuine tears, while Cordain’s face started to age fast in front of my eyes. I spelled out how his obsession for Adele Kingsley had led to her murdering the girl who had trusted him and whom he had only used. By the time I had finished even Stevens was looking a shade paler than usual.

  “You’ve finished now, Lieutenant?” Cordain asked thickly.

  “Finished?” I snarled at him. “We haven’t even started!” I went through the story of Joe Dana’s efforts to topple Cordain out of the leadership of the labor union, and how the head of the goon squad, Lou Fisher, was with him. How Dana had called Strachan to arrange a meeting out at Bald Mountain, and Polnik had taken Strachan’s place and been murdered.

  “There’s a theory that Fisher was working for both sides,” I said directly to Cordain. “Supposedly loyal to Joe Dana, but acting as your spy on the spot, so you knew exactly what Dana was doing the whole time.”

  “You’re crazy!” he said.

  But his heart wasn’t in it anymore, because I figured he was still slowly bleeding to death inside at the thought of Adele Kingsley growing old inside a penitentiary or a sanitarium. That was fine by me; the whole point of recounting the story had been to get him into a receptive frame of mind.

  “In the last few days Kingsley—prodded by Tyler—finally came to realize you’d set out from the beginning to ruin him completely, because the only thing you wanted from him was his wife,” I told Cordain. “So he was about ready to go over to Dana. You figured that could be real dangerous for you, right?”

  “You keep running off at the mouth like a busted faucet!” He shrugged listlessly. “It makes no sense at all to me.”

  “Everything you’ve touched, you’ve made a mess out of,” I sneered. “Where’s Dana?”

  “I have no idea!” He moved his head from side to side, restlessly. “You’re so goddamn smart, you find him!”

  “There were two of them in that shack, the night Sergeant Polnik took Strachan’s place,” I said gently. “One of them acted as a decoy to lure him inside the shack, while the other sneaked up behind him and put three bullets into the back of his head. I want both of them, but the one who put those slugs into the back of Sergeant Polnik’s head—him, I want real bad!”

  “So why don’t you go look for them?” he sneered.

  “I am,” I said, still grinning at him. “You were the smart operator, the guy who figured everything out. Then suddenly their whole world flew into small pieces, when they found out they’d killed a cop by mistake: Nobody will harbor a cop-killer, because they know what will happen if the cops find out about it. He’s the loneliest guy in the whole world. These two—” I stopped suddenly.

  “What’s the matter, Wheeler? You finally run out of breath?” Cordain grunted.

  I looked across at Stevens. “It doesn’t make any sense! There had to be two of them inside the shack. Dana had to be one of them, and he’s expecting Strachan. He sees a stranger get out of the car, he’s not about to decide to murder him! The other one—Fisher—working for Cordain here, undercover, he could, maybe?”

  “Why don’t you get lost?” Cordain said bleakly. “Go take your problems and figure them out someplace else!”

  “Dana is my problem right now,” I said slowly. “Whatever happened to him? But Fisher, the other one, the moment he found out he’d killed a cop, he’d be looking for sanctuary. Where else but with the big mastermind who got him into all this trouble in the first place?”

  “Here!” Cordain stared at me in outrage. “In this penthouse? Now I know you’ve got to be crazy!”

  “I don’t think I’m crazy,” I objected politely. “You figure I’m crazy, Wanda?”

  “He’s here,” she said in a small tight voice. “They haven’t let me outside the front door since he arrived. It was a million-to-one chance I managed to get there first tonight and open the door to you.”

  I was watching the open doorway leading into the front hall, because I was sure he had been in one of the bedrooms, and it’s a bad mistake to forget most people like to eat sometimes. He came out of the kitchen door, smooth and fast, and caught both Stevens and me flatfooted. A guy who wasn’t that tall, but powerfully built, out of all proportion to his height. Thirty-five, I guessed. The pockmarked face wasn’t exactly ornamental, but in his original line of business with the racketeer union it had probably been an asset. He had a .32 in his right hand, and there was nothing nervous about the way he held it.

  “Nobody wants to die, not even a cop!” His voice was harsh, as if the lining of his throat had cracked suddenly and just fallen away.

  “Hal’s friend,” Wanda said fiercely. “Mr. Lou Fisher.”

  “Don’t just sit there, Hal,” Fisher said. “We’re in this together, right?”

  “I never saw you in my whole life before,” Cordain said in an uninterested voice.

  “Don’t give me that!” Fisher’s liquid brown eyes seemed to darken a shade. “You got me into all this, Hal! And without you now, I’ve got no place to go!”

  “Where’s Dana, Lou?” I asked.

  “Lying at the bottom of a ravine, the other side of that mountain,” he said flatly. “Whenever I think about it, I could laugh, if I didn’t feel like screaming! Me and Dana! The biggest buddies you ever saw, and there’s me squealing on everything he does to my other buddy here, Hal Cordain! Dana set up that secret meeting with Strachan at the shack, and I called Hal and told him ten minutes later. ‘He’s getting too dangerous,’ Hal said, ‘get rid of him’. Then afterward you meet Strachan at the shack, pretend to be Dana and rough him up a little so he’ll come running back to me, pleading to sign up on the dotted line.’

  “Only it wasn’t that easy to get rid of Dana. Somebody had tipped him off about me, and he watched me as close as I watched him. So it’s still a Mexican standoff when we get to the shack, and wait for this Strachan to show.” He licked his lips quickly. “I can still feel how it was, even now. The both of us standing there in the dark, and even though it was a cool night up there on the mountain, I could feel the sweat running off me the whole time. Five, maybe six, times, I was ready to pull the trigger. But it was so goddamned dark, you couldn’t be sure of putting the slug where it mattered. Then the headlights showed up on the road. The car turned off and stopped in front of the shack, with the lights shining directly on to the front of it. The driver cut his motor, then called out, ‘Dana? It’s me, Strachan!’

  “We waited, and the guy called out the same thing a couple more times, then we heard the car door slam. Dana said to back off down the hallway into the back room, because those goddamn headlights were pushing too much light into the front of the shack. He went first, with me right in back of him. When he was almost to the other room, he looked back down the hallway and—it must have been one of them freak things!—he just caught a glimpse of the guy coming toward the shack. ‘That
’s not Strachan!’ Dana yelled, and I lost my head. Don’t ask me why, but right then I was convinced the guy outside was a pal of Dana’s, and they’d set the whole deal up just so they could kill me! So I pumped a couple of slugs into Dana, and didn’t wait to see what happened. I hightailed it back to the front room and crouched down against the wall.

  “The guy outside heard the shots and came running into the shack. I could see his flashlight beam bouncing off the walls as he went past. He stopped when he caught up with Dana’s body lying half in and half out of the back room. Then he leaned forward—I guess to see if Dana was dead. That was when I came up behind him and—” He shrugged expressively. “Makes no difference now, huh, Lieutenant? But if I’d known he was a cop!” He shook his head expressively.

  “I never saw you before in my whole life,” Cordain repeated, and almost sounded pleased with himself.

  “Lieutenant?” Fisher’s eyes were a shade darker again, when he looked directly at me. “What I said about Hal—it was him who told me to kill Dana. This is good enough for a court? I mean, in front of a couple of cops, and a nice girl-type kid?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “We can all testify on oath as to what you just said.”

  “You hear that, Hal?” he said jubilantly. “Now you got no choice but to side with me!”

  “You goddamn stupid moron!” Cordain said, with a hissing sound in his voice that became more and more pronounced as he went on. “I’ve lost every single thing in my whole life I ever wanted! You figure it’s worth the effort for me to run now? Where to? What for?” He shook his head decisively. “I’m going to sit right here, because whatever happens it doesn’t make any difference. I’m dead already!”

  “You double-crossing son of a bitch!” Fisher exploded. “You got me into this mess in the first place. Now you’ve got to get me out!”

  “You’ve got a gun, so use it,” Cordain sneered. “Do yourself a favor, Lou, and put a slug through that thick brainless skull of yours!”

  Fisher’s eyes seemed to burn for a moment like live coals, then his face distorted with fury. The gun in his hand exploded, and he kept on firing. The first slug went into the side of Cordain’s head, and knocked him sideways out of the chair. Three more slugs buried themselves in his still-twitching body, and then Fisher stopped firing.