HCC 115 - Borderline (27 page)

“If this is some kind of a joke—”

“It’s no joke.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“The end of the line,” I said. “You made a hell of a try. You almost got away with
it.”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at, London. But—”

“I think you do.”

She picked that moment to wander into the room. She was a redhead with her hair messed.
One of the buttons on her blouse was buttoned wrong. She walked into the room, wondering
aloud what the interruption was about, and then she saw the gun and her mouth made
a little O.

She said, “Maybe I should of stood in the other room.”

“Maybe you should go home,” I snapped.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes, that’s a very good idea.” She moved to her left and sort of
backed around me, as if she wanted to keep as much distance as possible between her
well-constructed body and the gun in my hand. “I think you’re right,” she said. “I
think I should go home… And you don’t have to worry about me.”

“Good.”

“I should tell you I have no memory at all,” she said. “I never came here, never met
you, never saw your face, and I cannot possibly remember what you look like. It is
terrible, my memory.”

“Good,” I said.

“Living I like very much better than remembering. Goodbye, Mr. Nobody.”

The door slammed, and Ray Powell and I were alone. He glared at me.

“What in hell do you want, exactly?”

“To talk to you.”

“You need a gun for that?”

“Probably.”

He grinned disarmingly. “Guns make me nervous.”

“They never did before. You’ve got a knack for getting hold of unregistered guns,
Powell. Is there another one in the bedroom?”

“I don’t get it,” he said. He scratched his head. “You must mean something, London.
Spit it out.”

“Don’t play games.”

“I—”

“Cut it,” I said. “You killed Karen Price. You knew she was going to do the cake bit
because you were the one who put the idea in Phil Abeles’ head.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“He’s forgotten. But he’ll remember with a little prompting. You set her up and then
you killed her and tossed the gun on the floor. You figured the police would arrest
Donahue, and you were right. But you didn’t think they would let him go. When they
did, you went to his place with another gun. He let you in. You shot him, made it
look like suicide, and let the one death cover the other.”

He shook his head in wonder. “You really believe this?”

“I know it.”

“I suppose I had a motive,” he said musingly. “What, pray tell, did I have against
the girl? She was good in bed, you know. I make it a rule never to kill a good bed
partner if I can help it.” He grinned. “So why did I kill her?”

“You didn’t have a thing against her,” I said.

“My point exactly. I—”

“You killed her to frame Donahue,” I added. “You got to Karen Price while the bachelor
dinner was still in the planning stage. You hired her to make a series of calls to
Donahue, jealous calls threatening to kill him or otherwise foul up his wedding. It
was going to be a big joke—she would scare him silly; and then for a capper she would
pop out of the cake as naked as the truth and tell him she was just pulling his leg.

“But you topped the gag. She popped out of the cake covered with a smile and you put
a bullet in her and left Donahue looking like the killer. Then, when you thought he
was getting off the hook, you killed him. Not to cover the first murder—you felt safe
enough on that score…because you really didn’t have a reason to kill the girl herself.
You killed Donahue because he was the one you wanted dead all along.”

Powell was still grinning. Only not so self-assuredly now. In the beginning, he hadn’t
been aware of how much I knew. Now he was learning and it wasn’t making him happy.

“I’ll play your game,” he said. “I killed Karen, even though I didn’t have any reason.
Now why did I kill Mark? Did I have a reason for that one?”

“Sure.”

“What?”

“For the same reason you hired Karen to bother Donahue,” I said. “Maybe a psychiatrist
could explain it better. He’d call it transference.”

“Go on.”

“You wanted Mark Donahue dead because he was going to marry Lynn Farwell. And you
don’t want anybody to marry Lynn Farwell. Powell, you’d kill anybody who tried.”

“Keep talking,” he said.

“How am I doing so far?”

“Oh, you’re brilliant, London. I suppose I’m in love with Lynn?”

“In a way.”

“That’s why I’ve never asked her to marry me. And why I bed down anything else that
gets close enough to jump.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re out of your mind, London.”

“No,” I said. “But you are.” I took a breath. “You’ve been in love with Lynn for a
long time. Four years, anyway. It’s no normal love, Powell, because you’re not a normal
person. Lynn’s part of a fixation of yours. She’s sweet and pure and unattainable
in your mind. You don’t want to possess her completely because that would destroy
the illusion. Instead you compensate by proving your virility with any available girl.
But you can’t let Lynn marry someone else. That would take her away from you. You
don’t want to have her—except for an occasional evening, maybe—but you won’t let anyone
else have her.”

He was tottering on the edge now…trying to take a step toward me and then backing
off. I had to push him over that edge. If he cracked, then he would crack wide open.
If he held himself together he might wriggle free. I knew damn well he was guilty,
but there wasn’t enough evidence to present to a jury. I had to make him crack.

“First I’m a double murderer,” Powell said. “Now I’m a mental case. I don’t deny that
I like Lynn. She’s a sweet, clean, decent girl. But that’s as far as it goes.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“Donahue’s the second man who almost married her. The first one was four years ago.
Remember John? You introduced the two of them. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

“He wouldn’t have been good for her. But it didn’t matter. I suppose you know he died
in a car accident.”

“In a car, yes. Not an accident. You gimmicked the steering wheel. Then you let him
kill himself. You got away clean with that one, Powell.”

I hadn’t cracked him yet. I was close, but he was still able to compose himself.

“It was an accident,” he exclaimed. “Besides, it happened a long time ago. I’m surprised
you even bother mentioning it.”

I ignored his words. “The death shook Lynn up a lot,” I said. “It must have been tough
for you to preserve your image of her. The sweet and innocent thing turned into a
round-heeled little nymph for a while.”

“That’s a damned lie.”

“It is like hell. And about that time you managed to have your cake and eat it, too.
You kept on thinking of her as the unattainable ideal. But that didn’t stop you from
taking her virginity, did it? You ruined her, Powell!”

He was getting closer to the borderline. His face was white and his hands were hard
little fists. The muscles in his neck were drum-tight.

“I never touched her!”

“Liar!” I was shouting now. “You ruined that girl, Powell!”

“Damn you, I never touched her! Nobody did, damn you! She’s still a virgin! She’s
still a virgin!”

I took a breath. “The hell she is,” I yelled. “I had her last night, Powell. She came
to my room all hot to trot and I bedded her until she couldn’t see straight.”

His eyes were wild.

“Did you hear me, Powell? I had
your girl
last night. I had Lynn, Powell!”

And that cracked him.

He charged me like a wild man, his whole body coordinated in the spring. I stepped
back, swung aside. He tried to turn and come toward me but his momentum kept him from
pulling it off. By the time he got back on the right track, my hand had gone up and
come down. The barrel of the gun caught him just behind the left ear. He took two
more little steps, carried along by the sheer force of his rush. Then he folded up
and went out like an ebbing tide.

He wasn’t out long. By the time Jerry Gunther got there, flanked by a pair of uniformed
cops, Powell was babbling away a mile a minute, spending half the time confessing
to the three murders and the other half telling anyone who would listen that Lynn
Farwell was a saint.

They started to put handcuffs on him. Then they changed their minds and bundled him
up in a straitjacket.

“I guess I missed my calling,” Ceil said. “I should have been a detective. I probably
would have flopped there, too, but the end might have been different. We all know
what girls become when they don’t make it as actresses. What do lousy detectives turn
to?”

“Cognac,” I said. “Pass the bottle.”

She passed and I poured. We were in her apartment on Sullivan Street. It was Tuesday
night, Ray Powell had long since finished confessing, and Ceil Gorski had just proved
to me that she could cook a good meal.

“You figured it out beautifully,” she said. “But do I get an assist on the play?”

“Easily.” I tucked tobacco into my pipe, lit up. “You managed to get my mind working.
Powell was a genius at murder. A certifiable psychotic, but also a genius. He set
things up beautifully. First of all, the frame couldn’t have been neater. He very
carefully set up Donahue with means, motive and opportunity. Then he shot the girl
and left Donahue on the hook.”

I worked on the cognac. “The neat thing was this—if Donahue managed to have an alibi,
if by some chance somebody was watching him when the shot was fired, Powell was still
in the clear. He himself was one of the few men in the room with no conceivable motive
for wanting Karen Price dead.”

Ceil moved a little closer on the couch. I put an arm around her. “Then the way he
got rid of Donahue was sheer perfection,” I continued. “He made it look enough like
suicide to close the case as far as the police were concerned. And Jerry Gunther isn’t
an easy man to bulldoze. He’s thorough. But Powell made it look good.”

“You didn’t swallow it.”

“That’s because I play hunches. Even so, I was up a tree by then. Because the murder
had a double edge to it. Even if he muffed it somehow, even if it didn’t go over as
suicide, Donahue would be dead and he would be in the clear. Because there was only
one way to interpret it—Donahue had been killed by the man who killed Karen Price,
obviously, and had been killed so that the original killing would go unsolved. That
made me suspect Joe Conn and never let me guess at Powell, not even on speculation.
Even with the second killing he hid the fact that Donahue and not Karen was the real
target.”

“And that’s where I came in,” she said happily.

“That’s exactly where you came in,” I agreed. “You and your active imagination. You
thought how grim it would be if Karen had only been playing a joke with those phone
calls. And that was the only explanation in the world for the calls. I had to believe
Donahue was getting the calls, and that Karen was making them. A disguised voice might
work once, but she’d called him a few times.

“That left two possibilities, really. She could be jealous—which seemed contrary to
everything I had learned about her. Or it could be a gag. But if she was jealous,
then why in hell would she take the job popping out of the cake? So it had to be a
gag, and once it was a gag, I had to guess why someone would put her up to it. And
from that point—”

“It was easy.”

“Uh-huh. It was easy.”

She snuggled closer. I liked her perfume. Liked the feel of her body beside me.

“It wasn’t that easy,” she said. “You know what? I think you’re a hell of a good detective.
And you know what else?”

“What?”

“I also think you’re a rotten businessman.”

I smiled. “Why?”

“Because you did all that work and didn’t make a dime out of it. You got a retainer
from Donahue, but that didn’t even cover all the time you spent
before
Karen was killed, let alone the time since then. And you probably will never collect.”

“I’m satisfied.”

“Because justice has been done?”

“Partly. Also because I’ll be rewarded.”

She upped her eyebrows. “How? You won’t make another nickel out of the case, will
you?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“I’ll make something more important than money.”

“What?”

She was soft and warm beside me. And it was our third evening together. Not even an
amateur tramp could mind a pass on a third date.

“What are you going to make?” she asked, innocently.

I took her face between my hands and kissed her. She closed her eyes and purred like
a happy cat.

“You,” I said.

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