The Day of the Guns (22 page)

I leaned on the bell and waited, hearing her feet come across the floor. She opened the door, took a sudden sharp breath and bit her lower lip between her teeth. Her face was drawn with fear and something else, shadows underlining her eyes, her body tense. But even then she was beautiful, so damn beautiful that when I killed her I was going to be killing myself.

She had on a skirt and blouse, part of the suit combinations she had always liked so well, a wide leather belt at her waist. She always used to keep her rod there in a professional-type holster, but this time it was someplace else.
Too bad, honey
.

“It’s here, Rondine. Time has run out,” I said.

Rondine-Edith Caine held the door open so I could step inside. I did, but I pushed her ahead of me where I could see her. I’d never let her get behind me again. She looked at the gun in my hand, shook her head slowly and said nothing, simply walked straight into the living room and sat in the middle of the couch with her legs together and a sad expression on her face.

I checked each of the rooms quickly, never letting her out of my sight, then went back and sat across from her. “Tell me about it, Rondine.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said simply.

“What happened to the real Edith Caine, honey? What did the dead Diana Caine do that you could hold it over the Caine family’s heads? That’s the interesting part of the story. What’s going to happen when it comes out?”

There were real tears in her eyes now and she was going to play the part right down to the end. I would have liked it better had she reverted to her true character, the one with the gun who could shoot a guy who loved her.

“Please stop it, Tiger.”

“Why? I like to see you suffer. It’s paying off for all those twenty years I had to.”

“Tiger... what are you going to do?”

“Kill you.”

She bit into her lip again. “Iust... like that.”

“No, I’ll wait for the other to come. You aren’t the only one.”

The act again. The expression like she didn’t understand and the quick lowering of her head so I wouldn’t see what she was thinking. When she straightened up she wiped her eyes and said, “May I go to the bathroom? I look... terrible, I know.”

Ah, vanity. Even in the face of death they had to look pretty. But if she was looking for razor blades she’d have to get them out of my pocket where I dropped them before. “Sure, go ahead,” I said.

She got up, went to the bathroom, closed the door and I heard the sound of water running in the basin. I sat there thinking of how I was going to do it when I knew what was happening and raced to the door. She opened it before I could put my shoulder to it and I said, “Damn you, Rondine,” because she had won again. I had forgotten that she had an extension telephone in there beside the tub.

“Nice. You got a call through. So now they won’t be here. Churis will take him someplace else.”

“Tiger ...” she said, a curious note in her voice.

“I could make you talk, Rondine, but there isn’t any time. Your pain level is too high. You could hold out too long. I saw you do it when the
maquis
had you and I got you out. I could kill you here, but I might not make it out in time to get Selwick off the hook and that means our whole country would take a fall. So we’ll go out of here together and when I shoot you I’ll shoot Vidor Churis too, and tie it all up in a nice, neat package.”

“Selwick?”

I gave her a shove toward the closet. “Don’t play coy with me, baby. Your boys have him and I know where he’ll be taken. We have the Embassy and all their other buildings covered including most residences now. So he goes in one place where he’ll be worked on ... Churis’s apartment.

“You almost had it made, Rondine. You called Selwick to come here, had Churis ready to move in behind him and between the two of you it would have been done. But you managed to intercept Churis and I can see him going up to Selwick on the street downstairs with the story that you had to leave and would meet him someplace else and your killer friend, Vidor Churis, was instructed to lead him there. Like a sheep to the slaughter. Okay, kid, we’ll meet him. I’ve already been at Vidor’s apartment and left a dead man behind to watch the place. Get your damn coat on.”

I called a cab and asked for one to stand by downstairs. Both the stake-outs had been walking and if it was timed right we could be in a cab and gone before they got to their car.

Once again I bypassed the guy on the floor below, took the elevator down the rest of the way and saw the cab pulling up outside. I pushed Rondine through the door, got us into the cab and told him to take off in a hurry and only gave him the address after we made the turn. Back down the block and too late, the stake-outs were trying to swing around in the street and were blocked by traffic.

There was no activity on Churis’s block at all. Nobody had heard the shot and nobody investigated yet, otherwise a prowl car would still be on the scene and half the neighborhood trying for a look at the premises. I gave the cabbie ten bucks and told him to wait. He was glad to.

Keeping Rondine ahead of me, I nudged her up the stairs. Each time she tried to speak I shut her up curtly. She was terrified now. She saw death written all over my face and knew I was a part of it. She knew what I was going to do and she was tasting it already.

At the door I stopped. I had forgotten about the mammoth feature of the thing. Inside, the TV was going loud enough to make any sound I made impossible to hear, but if they were there already they’d keep it up. Churis would guess what had happened and would be ready for a break in the attempt.

But not the way I was going to do it.

I got out one of the pellets Ernie Bentley had given me, the one with the ring around it. I used wads of paper from the junk on the stairs, wedged the pellet between the knob and the door jamb, wetting it down with a half full can of black paint, squeezing the mess until it had the consistency of mud and the capability of directing the charge where I wanted it to go.

Part of it I left exposed, took a cigarette from Rondine’s bag while she stood there with amazement and terror a rigid mask on her face. I tore off a stub, lit it, set it on the exposed part of the pellet and moved her flat against the wall with me.

It was over in a minute, but when the thing went off, the concussion slammed against my eardrums like a sledge. The door flew inward, splinters flying everywhere, gray, choking smoke filling the hall. I grabbed her arm, spun her into the room first, shoved her aside and stood there with the .45 aimed at emptiness.

The dead guy was still saying “Oh,” on the floor and downstairs doors were opening and voices yelling to ask what the hell was going on up there. I shouted back that it was all right... the oven blew but nobody was hurt and there was no damage. In a little while they’d be coming up to see for themselves.

And I was at the end of the road right then. The fox had been foxed. I lifted the gun and pointed it right at her head. She never moved. Too much had happened too fast and she seemed to be in a state of shock. Her eyes were on the body a long time and when they reached me they seemed lifeless.

You’re getting old, Rondine, I thought. Plastic surgery can help the body, but the mind stays the same, getting older each day until you can’t take it any more.

I couldn’t do it alone now. I’d have to call in the others. I’d get wrung for it but it would be worth it. I went to the phone, the gun still on Rondine. I dialed Colonel Corbinet’s number and held on until he answered. His voice said, “Hello ... hello?”

Very slowly I put the phone back without answering him. On a pad beside the phone was a sheet of doodle paper and on it was written an address, a familiar address.

Gretchen Lark’s.

I grinned at the scratching Vidor Churis had made and knew what they had planned. Cute. Real cute. She was watching me now and some of the shock had left her eyes. I walked over, pointed out the door and when she left, stayed right behind her with the gun in her back. To a couple of nosy kids on the floor below I said my friend was upstairs taking care of the mess and with the TV still on loud they nodded and went back to their party stinking of beer.

In the cab the driver said, “What was that racket back there?”

“Crazy Village party.”

“Always like that around here,” he said.

Yeah. On Sunday, too. What else can happen on a quiet Sunday?

She couldn’t contain herself any longer. Her clenched fist went to her mouth and the tears came, coursing down her cheeks. Huge, gulping sobs wracked her body and with an impulsive move she slammed her hand against me and if I hadn’t grabbed it in mid-air it would have been over there in a fat mushroom of flame.

I squeezed her wrist and said, “Don’t be anxious to die ahead of time. I still have two more of those nice little charges and impact sets them off. They’re right in my pocket, honey, and a small jar blows them.”

Instinctively, she pulled away, the fear back in her eyes. I told the cabbie to let us out on the next corner, paid him off while we were still two blocks away and held Rondine’s arm while we walked. I wanted her in top shape when we got there.

And there would be time. They wouldn’t kill Gretchen Lark or Selwick until she was there to give the order. It would have to be planned somehow, a love-nest suicide pact, and it would look logical as hell and only we would know the difference. There would be a ring of truth to it ... a lovely woman painter doing a portrait of a famous man for whom she worked, the two of them falling in love, realizing the futility of it all, him with a wife in England and an illness that could kill him at any time. So they take the big out together. Just a quick dosage of strychnine forced down their throats would do the trick. It was available and the thing suicides would use.

But first they’d wait for the master planner to show. Selwick would have to be forced to talk first. I explained it to her, letting Rondine see how much of it I had down pat, watched her go white as each sentence came out of me and saw her nearly get sick when I described how I had killed Alexis Minner and the two others. She stumbled and almost fell and I laughed and kept on with the story.

I said, “If I had killed you at first I could have stopped it cold right then, but I wanted to louse up your organization, Rondine. So far I did pretty well. You’ve gone all week trying to dump me because the critical time in the U.N. comes this week and you couldn’t have anybody standing in the way of all those grand Soviet sneak plans. Nobody. You could guard against the agency boys but not against me.”

We were outside the building then. She looked at me and said one word, softly: “Fool.”

I prodded her. “Inside. You know where she lives.”

At the door I took the .45 out and whispered, “Knock.”

With some hesitancy she tapped on the door. Inside there was a sudden movement, the sound of feet on the floor and Gretchen said in a voice that was tinged with fear, “Yes... who is it?”

Behind her Churis would be standing with a gun, making her speak. She had a right to be scared. I tapped Rondine with the nose of the gun and stepped out of the way.

Rondine said, “Edith... Edith Caine.”

A chain rattled on the door and a lock clicked. The door opened and when Gretchen saw Edith her face changed, went from relief to fear again, then I shoved her into Gretchen so they both hit the floor in a jumble of arms and legs and there in a comer with a gun in his hand was Vidor Churis and the first shot he got off went across my side with a searing, white hot stab of pain.

He only got the first one. The .45 caught him right at the bridge of the nose and everything seemed to come apart from there on up. Skull, brains and blood sprayed the wall like a bright wet flower and he flung his hands out so violently with the death jerk the Tokarev flew halfway across the room.

I ran to the door, slammed it shut, jerked Rondine to her feet and threw her violently into a chair so she could look at the figure of Burton Selwick in the chair facing her, eyes closed in a peaceful sleep, one sleeve rolled up above the elbow and a tiny red dot in the vein showing where the needle had gone in. Behind me, still gasping from the fall, Gretchen was getting up, but I didn’t take my eyes off Rondine.

“Want to question him, baby? Want to see what they laid out for tomorrow’s session? Think it can do you any good now? Or aren’t you curious any more? I’d think you’d want to know what he’d have to say just to satisfy yourself.”

“Tiger...”

“Shut up, Rondine. It makes nice listening. You were the one putting the squeeze on the old boy. We’ll just back-check to be sure, but chances are you had him to your place many a time and needled him into a dream sleep supposedly to relax him and made him talk under the drug. Nice, baby, but not nice enough. You were the one who laid out the play to have me dumped. You were the one who knew where I’d be and how I’d move. You were trapped from the first second I saw you there in the restaurant and had to move from any angle at all to get rid of me without exposing yourself. The only thing I can’t understand is why you moved so badly. You used to be a great operator. You could nearly outthink anybody. You could work in ways a person wouldn’t dream of. You could scheme and plan and come up with a dilly in seconds... none of this crude stuff like contract killers. You would have known I could outthink you and be ready for something like sending a squad to nail me in bed. Why so stupid, Rondine?”

There was no fear at all in her eyes now. Instead, there was just the quiet acquiescence, resignation and deep, deep pity.

“I’m not Rondine,” she said.

There by the easel with the stems of her paintbrushes sticking out of the neck was a peculiarly colored pale blue bottle half filled with solvent and it was exactly the same as those filled with sodium pentothal that I had found in Alex Minner’s cabinet !