The Will to Kill Page 16

  “When was this?”

  He checked his watch. “Not… not ten minutes ago.”

  I showed him the Colt Cobra in the handkerchief in my palm. “Does this look familiar?”

  “Yes! Christ. It’s mine. I keep it in my glove compartment. But I, uh, don’t have a license for it. What are you doing with it?”

  I slipped it in my suitcoat pocket. “Well, it was in your hand when I found you asleep here on the floor. Let me help you up. There’s something… somebody… you should see.”

  I did that, and when he saw the dead attorney sprawled behind the desk next to the toppled chair, he whitened and his mouth dropped open like a trap door.

  “If you’re going to puke,” I said, “use one of the johns out there.”

  He held up a quavering palm. “No… no. I’ll be all right.”

  I walked him over to a black leather couch just inside the door. He sat hunched, hands on his thighs, eyes on the floor. “Hammer… you don’t… think… think—”

  “That you did this?” I sat next to him. “No. Not with that knot on the back of your skull. But try to get past the cops with that, and they’ll just say you slipped on that rug trying to get out, cracked your head and rolled over while you were not quite as dead to the world as Hines here.”

  He seemed on the verge of bawling. “I didn’t have any reason to… to kill him.”

  “Oh, they’ll dig one up. Like for starters, maybe you being unhappy that the executor of your father’s living trust didn’t want to advance you any money.”

  I’ve had eyes look at me sadder, but they belonged to a basset hound. “What am I going to do, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Oh, are you my client again?”

  His hands were clasped, begging, praying. “I’m sorry about last night… so sorry. And I know you got my debts voided. I owe you so much!”

  “Skip it,” I said. I didn’t think I could take it if he started thanking me for getting him banned at that clip joint. “Do you want to turn yourself in?”

  “No! Hell, no! But… what choice do I have?”

  I gestured vaguely. “Since nobody has rushed in here to see about the gunshot—these non-commercial businesses and the offices above them must be pretty much empty on Saturday—you have options.”

  “Options! What the hell kind of—”

  “Somebody tried to frame you, just like somebody tried to frame your sister-in-law Madeline. I wouldn’t say whoever it is has much finesse, but he or she is goddamn determined. I would suggest you let me salt you away somewhere while I sort this the hell out. My secretary is in town—you may remember her, she was working the bar last night at your favorite haunt—and I can call and have her pick you up. We have a room out at the Laurels. Live on room service and keep a low profile for a while.”

  “We just… just walk away from this?”

  “You walk away, in the protective custody of my secretary, who is also a partner in my agency, an armed and licensed private detective.”

  Something approaching hope was flickering in the frantic eyes. “What will you do?”

  “I’ll call the State Police and tell them I found the body. I can’t let you get rid of the gun—it’s the murder weapon, and you may have some explaining to do, depending on how I fare. It’ll just be on the floor, about where it was when you were holding it. Since it isn’t licensed, they’ll be a while connecting it to you.”

  His eyes found me and were tortured things. “Oh hell. Oh Jesus. Hammer… why are you helping me, after last night?”

  I grinned at him. “I intend to charge you a pile of dough when you turn forty… but that only happens if I clear you. Understand, the cops won’t be looking for you, not right away.”

  He didn’t quite follow that. “Then why am I hiding out?”

  “Because somebody is alternately killing and framing you Dunbars.” I shrugged. “You could go into police custody, is another option.”

  He shook his head vigorously and was immediately sorry he had.

  Out in the reception area, I used the handkerchief on the receiver when I called Velda. Within twenty minutes she was waiting in her little red Mustang at the bottom of the back stairs, admittedly not the most inconspicuous ride for spiriting away a murder suspect. But it would have to do.

  I walked Dex down, gave Velda a look that said this situation was damn tight, got an I-have-this-covered nod in return, and went back up to call the State Police.

  * * *

  I got patched through to Corporal Jim Sheridan, who was again in the area, making it to the Hines & Carroll offices within twenty minutes, during which time my efforts to find the Dunbar living trust in the files proved fruitless.

  I gave Sheridan the story as I’d outlined it to Dex Dunbar, and the trooper’s words seemed to accept it but his eyes stayed skeptical.

  “How long between your phone call with the victim,” Sheridan asked, “and when you got here?”

  “A little under two hours. Plenty of time for him to get himself killed.”

  “Did you call immediately after you found him?”

  I shook my head. “No. That body was brand-new, the blood not even dry. I checked the whole office out first.”

  That should cover me if anybody saw me go in the place.

  I was there a while. As a courtesy if nothing else, the Monticello cops were called to the scene, though it quickly became clear that the State Police’s Bureau of Investigation would be handling the case.

  Toward that end, Sergeant Virgil Bullard showed up to question me. We’d met briefly the night before last, after I found Wake, but the sergeant really wanted to get to know me today.

  Bullard was stocky and round-faced and wore an ill-fitting brown suit his wife probably ordered from a Sears catalogue; the too-wide yellow-green-and-brown striped tie seemed a ghost of Christmas past. He spat a little when he talked.

  “We heard all about you up here, Hammer,” he said. His voice was an off-key baritone. “You have a reputation for playing fast and loose with the law.”

  I was in a chair in the Hines & Carroll outer office. Bullard was pacing, third-degree style. I was smoking a Lucky. Bullard was smoking a nickel cigar—giving him the benefit of the doubt, anyway.

  “When you say ‘law,’” I said, “do you mean cops, or statutes? Just wondering.”

  “We heard about your mouth, too. About how comical you can be, playing tough.”

  I let the Lucky ride my smirk. “I’m flattered.”

  “You find two corpses in three days? How do you explain that?”

  “Everybody has to take a day off now and then.”

  It went on like that, him letting fly with dumb questions and spittle while turning various shades of red, me not giving a shit.

  But Bullard insisted I be taken to the State Police station that Sheridan worked out of, and in an interview cubicle he questioned me again and again, wanting to know everything about my investigation into the Jamison Elder death, and making noises about jailing me as a material witness.

  I could have called an attorney, but I didn’t know any live ones in Monticello. So I just stuck to my story, which was basically true, except for skipping the part where Dex Dunbar was on the floor with a .38 in his fingers.

  By the time I got back to the Dunbar place, the moon was high and I was low, really dragging. I saw no sign of Dorena downstairs and went on up to bed. In my skivvies, I crawled under the covers, and it probably took me all of twenty seconds to fall asleep.

  The mattress giving and the bedsprings squeaking sent me reaching for my .45 under the pillow on the other side of the double bed.

  Then I heard Dorena’s voice, soft but strained in the near dark: “Mike, I’m sorry to disturb you, but… I just heard on the radio, Clarence Hines was murdered. They say you found the body! This is madness! What in God’s name is going on?”

  I sat up in bed, reached past her to switch on the nightstand lamp, then gave it to her straight, minus only the name of the motel
that I had stashed her half-brother in under Velda’s care. She listened like a wide-eyed child hearing a bedtime story, only she was no child—she was a beautiful grown woman in a silk sashed robe the color of a pink pearl. No coral lipstick, no makeup at all, and the blonde hair was tousled. But she was perfection.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Helping my brother. Dex is no killer.”

  “I agree.”

  Then she crawled up onto the bed and curled up in my arms, a petite package of warm femininity. She was crying, even sobbing, saying, “It’s a nightmare… such an awful nightmare…”

  I had no intention of doing anything but comfort her when suddenly her mouth was on mine, hot and hungry, salty from her tears, desperate and needing. That went on a while, then she drew away and crawled off the bed and I figured that was it.

  But she clicked off the nightstand lamp, and now the only illumination was moonlight filtering through the window, making the pink-pearl robe seem to glow. She unsashed the thing, let it slip down over the stark nakedness of her, the ivory-edged slender curves, the pert breasts, the narrow waist, the dancer’s legs. With the robe pooled at her feet, an arm across her breasts, leaning gently, she was September Morn come to life, her hand demurely concealing where her thighs met. Then she swallowed and straightened and eased the flesh fig leaf away to reveal the tufted blonde triangle. She was trembling.

  So was I.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

  She smiled a little and got onto the bed and crawled like a prowling cat over to me. She flipped the covers down and saw what she was after and her lovely face descended. After seconds that were an eternity of pleasure, she climbed on and straddled me, guiding me into her.

  “I… I haven’t done this for a while,” she said shyly, or anyway as shyly as the circumstances would allow.

  “Take it slow,” I advised.

  She did. Very slow, rhythmic, hypnotic, her head back, her eyes rolled back, her body swaying, her breathing building, and by the time she reached the finish we had surged to a crazy crescendo in a two-person bolero that no orchestra could rival.

  Then she collapsed into my arms and held me, hugged me, tenderly, and just when I thought she’d gone to sleep right there on top of me, she pulled back, smiled an impish sad smile, gave me a quick kiss and ran out of there, snatching up the silk robe along the way, a jiggling vision painted in moonlight, blurring out of the bedroom.

  I got up and went into the john and did some things, including splash water in my face, which looked back at me in the mirror, ashamed of itself.

  Here I put Velda on the firing line, send her undercover into a mob casino, dispatch her to hole up with a guy I was pretty sure wasn’t a murderer, and this was the thanks she got?

  “You’re a heel,” my face told me.

  I didn’t argue with it.

  And when I went back to bed my mind gave me a hard time, too. Guilty thoughts about Velda churned, even though she and I had a sort of understanding, but also the pieces of this thing were floating in my head, swimming there, tumbling, turning, a jigsaw puzzle that refused to assemble itself.

  Maybe an hour later, I sat up in bed, frustrated and tired but with no possibility of sleep. Switched on the nightstand lamp and got into my shirt and trousers, shoes and socks, too. The only way to cure sleeplessness like this was to go out in the night air and walk it off.

  The way I had not so long ago, when I came upon half a corpse floating in the Hudson.

  Maybe that memory was why I stuck the .45 in my waistband.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The moon wasn’t full any more, but there was enough of it left to wash the world white, with blue highlights lending impressionistic touches to the landscape that the late Wake Dunbar might well have appreciated.

  The few remaining clumps of snow here and there, the patches of brown grass trying to be green again, made for unearthly terrain for me to tread along. Earlier today, what with the spring thaw, the ground could get muddy in places; but at night, with the temperature down to fifty or maybe a little below, you could walk well enough. A little spongy, maybe, but your feet didn’t sink.

  Still, it was hard to believe that, just a few days before, an ice floe with half a passenger had deposited itself at my feet, as if winter had been making one last forlorn statement.

  It was just chilly enough that I wondered if I should have slung on my suit coat, but mostly I didn’t mind. For a man trying to walk off sleeplessness, weather this raw might not seem ideal. But I knew what I needed, and that was to trudge along, my hands in my pockets, letting the thoughts that were plaguing me tire themselves out, even as a breeze nipped at me like a dog at my heels. Just enough wind ruffled the pines surrounding the estate to whisper at me, not saying anything at all, yet taunting me still.

  How the hell can you treat Velda like that?

  Not the pines talking, just the tattered remnants of my conscience.

  Who is behind all these murders and frame-ups? A killer on the loose, and you’re just banging the cute client! Get with it, Hammer. You’re not that damn old.

  “Just old enough to know better,” I mumbled to myself. I strolled around the edge of the woods that hugged the grounds, the big gray-stone mansion sleeping, not a light on in the place, and yet some unknown thing in the darkness seemed imminent. Something that nagged and gnawed at me, threatening to happen.

  It almost seemed inevitable when sounds broke through my thoughts, distant but distinct sounds, odd sounds, a crunch, a pause, a rattle, a crunch, a pause, a rattle. What the hell was that? Familiar, but… what?

  As I came around the far side of the house, still hugging the tree line, I could tell that the sounds emanated from the back of the carriage house. The source of the crunch, pause, rattle was not yet visible to me, set back as the two-story gray-stone structure was from the main building.

  In the cavern of the night, however, those sounds were small but well-defined, even echoing, crunch, pause, rattle. I moved along the trees, and then I could see across the vast yard a figure, small, almost skeletal, digging in the middle of the night, a mobile scarecrow in the unfenced ten-by-ten garden, its brown tilled soil ready for spring to assert itself.

  Who the nocturnal gardener was, I couldn’t make out at this distance. Why he was at work so late at night, I couldn’t say. Something was on the ground, at the edge of the waiting garden—a canvas duffel bag, the size a sailor might haul over his shoulder off and on a ship.

  Obviously I needed to check this out, but if somebody was up to some malicious thing, I couldn’t just come jogging across the expanse of the lawn and announce myself.

  Instead, I cut back along the tree line and came around the front of the house to make my way to the carriage house, keeping close to the structure, hugging it as shadows hugged me. Edging along with my back to the outer stone wall, I did my best to stay quiet, though the sound of the shovel digging into hard ground, with shovelfuls dumped and scattered to one side, pretty well covered my approach. Then I was to the corner of the building with the garden just beyond…

  …and there he was, a foot or so down in a long narrow hole he was digging, his back to me but a familiar scrawny figure in an ear-flap cap and a black-and-white-and-red plaid hunter’s jacket.

  Then, like a farmer out in his field, Willie Walters leaned against his shovel, taking a few moments’ break, breathing hard, some raspiness in it. The thaw had made his work possible, but it was still hard going for a skinny guy in his fifties.

  Soon he started digging again, a groan accompanying each crunch of the shovel blade driven by his right foot, gouging into the unforgiving earth, a heaving sigh accompanying every dumped scoop of soil. He was just getting started, but the outline of the three-foot wide, six-foot long cavity quickly became apparent.

  A grave.

  Who was the grave for? I wondered, but my eyes were already swinging toward that big duffel bag. A shape
, possibly human, could be discerned under the canvas, knees up but recognizably a person, or something that had been a person. If Willie was behind these murders—Chester Dunbar and Jamison Elder and Wake Dunbar—was he getting so prolific that he had to start burying his corpses now?

  Could that be Chickie in that canvas shroud?

  If this was a grave, that meant Willie would have to dig the hole deep, a good six feet anyway, because in a wooded area like this, every kind of critter would go digging here for meat. So I considered biding my time. Let him get way down deep in his hole, tired as hell, wasted from the effort, before I dealt with him.

  Then the duffel bag squirmed.

  Jesus God—somebody was in there! Not somebody big, but somebody alive, and I could only wonder if Walters intended to kill his victim or just plant the poor soul in this garden, buried alive, human compost.

  I considered shooting him right now. He deserved it. No argument on that front. And the .45 was out of my waistband and in my hand now.

  But I had so many questions, and it would be a pleasure getting the answers out of him. And they might be interesting, if the screaming didn’t get in the way. His motive for killing and tormenting the Dunbars might not have a damn thing to do with money—he could be a homicidal lunatic with a will to kill, who’d hidden behind his harmless caretaker facade and had his fun.

  As much as I wanted to put a bullet through that ear-flap cap, I wanted answers more. Because even with Willie right in front of me, and one of his victims in a canvas bag waiting for a grave, I couldn’t make the puzzle pieces fit. I needed him alive, goddamnit.

  I stepped out from the side of the building and walked to the edge of the garden. Huffing and puffing and digging and dumping, he hadn’t heard me approach. He was maybe five feet from me. When he was between crunches, I said, “Evening, Willie.”

  He turned in alarm, his pale blue eyes big in the wrinkled Punch-and-Judy puss, and filled with a craziness he hadn’t showed me before.

  I stepped closer. “What are you getting ready to plant there, Willie?”

  He was just looking at me, submerged enough in the still-shallow hole to gaze up, his face a ghastly mask of fear and rage, only the mask didn’t hide the real Willie Walters: this was the real him, a monster who’d pretended to be a man.