Killing Town Read online

  She pulled up in front of the door and cut the motor. We sat for a minute, then I said, “Love nest?”

  Her glance had irritation in it.

  She got out. I pulled my suitcase over the back of the seat and did the same. We walked up and she plucked a key from her handbag and unlocked the door. We went in.

  I was all wet in thinking nobody had been there lately. From the outside it didn’t look like it, but inside it bore a woman’s touch. The place was done in mountain style with knotty pine walls and a fieldstone fireplace, and there wasn’t a speck of dust anyplace as far as I could see. The novels in the built-in bookcase were recent and the ashtrays were clean. The furnishings dated back ten or twenty years, but they’d cost real money—this was the kind of casual that rich people enjoyed.

  When I’d dropped the overnight case to the floor, I pulled out another Lucky, lit it up, and sat down. It was all so nice and homey, with her going around lighting the lamps. That is, until you remembered that this was strictly tinsel, a too-real stage setting that had little lead bullets mixed up with it somehow.

  She turned the lamp on by the window and stood there fiddling with the shade. The light came up from the top, making a halo of her hair and doing things in shadow that I hadn’t noticed before. There was a lot of her I hadn’t noticed before, either. Like how almost mouth-to-mouth tall she was to me, and how her legs filled out the nylons and rose into firm, rounded thighs. She must have sensed the tear in her dress, and closed it without thinking, the movement of her arm a graceful gesture that accentuated the breadth of her shoulders and lengthened the hollow that dipped below the neckline of her dress.

  It was too bad, I thought, that she had to be such a damned phony. Any other time and she would have been a beautiful woman with all the promise that implied. But she was a phony, all right. I was getting the build-up with sex on display but not on the menu, and was supposed to be sucker enough to stick around for what might come my way. Whatever kind of curve she was getting ready to toss was going to be a doozy.

  Hell, it had to be. She was putting a lot of lovely hide on parade all for me, but she didn’t seem to know that when you over-bait the hook, a fish can yank you right into the drink.

  I squashed my Lucky out in the ashtray. “Now we talk.”

  She still held her dress together, too casually. “All I want from you is your name for a while. You behave yourself, there will be a financial settlement, when the time comes. Say, ten thousand dollars?”

  That was some dowry.

  “Okay,” I said. “But what’s it about? Don’t I have a right to know the score?”

  “There isn’t anything you need to know.” She glanced at me to see how settled I was, then sat down at the end of the sofa. “It should be enough that you’re out of the hands of the law.”

  I shook my head. “Oh, but that’s not enough, Blondie. I would have gotten out anyway.”

  A “V” formed between her eyebrows for a second, then disappeared. “You sound confident for a vagrant who just crawled out of a jail cell.”

  “I may not be the bum you take me for. I may be somebody who would have arranged a Manhattan lawyer to prove I never bumped that dame. And I never raped a woman in my life.”

  The pretty mouth made an ugly sneer. “Is this where you say, ‘I never had to’?”

  I frowned at her. “I never wanted to. File that away, sister. That piece of information could come in handy to you.”

  She shifted on the sofa, looked down her well-carved nose at me. “I’m to believe you didn’t kill that woman? That you’re innocent? But isn’t that what they all say?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And now you’re telling me you’re the exception? No, I did better than just read the papers. I had someone find out every detail of the circumstances and I don’t think there’s any doubt about what happened. You killed that woman.”

  “You don’t seem too worried about keeping company with a killer then.”

  “Why should I be? Aren’t I your only excuse for being free?”

  She had a point.

  “And as long as I’m alive,” she said, “ you stay alive.”

  “If I really killed that woman. But suppose I didn’t.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Then there’s no reason for you to do me harm,” she said. “Either way, you’re no threat to me.”

  I gave her the nastiest grin in my repertoire. “Are you sure? How about a fate worse than death?”

  At first, she was going to come at me. I saw it in her face and the clawed set of her fingers. Then she said, “You said it yourself. You’re no rapist.”

  “Is a husband who consummates his marriage a rapist? I don’t think that way, but I might make an exception for an heiress with a fortune I could get my grubby fingers on.”

  She went damn near as white as her hair. She was afraid. Not of the killer she claimed she thought I was. But of the man sitting on the couch with her who was fed up with being manipulated.

  “Don’t worry about it, kid,” I told her, grunting a laugh, pawing the air. “Right now I’m too tired to do anything except play word games with you. I can wait. Hell, it’s only three days.”

  A horrified kind of loathing pulled her cheeks tight until she looked like some kind of Oriental cat.

  “If you ever touch me,” she said so softly I could barely hear, “I’ll kill you.”

  The nasty grin again. “Honey, please—a cultured type like you knows it’s polite to wait till you’re asked.”

  “Bastard!”

  Now she did come at me with those clawed fingers and I knew I’d gone too far. I had her wrists and she was all big eyes and flared nostrils and clenched teeth, and my options were to kiss her or slap her, which was when I began to feel like a real jerk, and did neither, shoving her back into the cushions at her end of the couch. She curled up into herself, frightened, obviously realizing this whole thing had got out of hand. I just smoothed my shirt and looked around for my composure.

  So I thought about this damn crazy situation for a while. I tried to figure the angles but all I got was curves. She sat there with her legs tucked up under her to get as far away from me as she could. I plucked another cigarette from the pack and sat back, now looking at her.

  “Okay, Blondie, give it to me straight,” I said. “No fooling around. Too damned much has happened and I don’t feel like being messed with. What’s behind all this?”

  With a frustrated frown, she said, “Can’t you just be satisfied with your freedom?”

  “No.” I held a match up to the end of the Lucky. “Being married isn’t exactly freedom.”

  “It’s better than jail.”

  “I don’t know.” I caught her eyes and they never wavered. “Maybe it will be—later.”

  Her voice held contempt. “You’ll never know,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said, shrugging, “but that isn’t answering my question. Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start with Senator Charles, who owns the fish cannery stinking up this lousy town.”

  “He’s my father.”

  “Yeah. I picked up on that. So you have money and social standing. Plus, you’re a hot-looking number who can attract any kind of man you want, yet you snag one out of the clink with a screwball story and hold it over his head to make him marry you.”

  She seemed offended. “I don’t see why you should complain about it.”

  “Baby,” I said, “I’m complaining all right, and loud. I don’t like being tapped for a kill, I don’t like being mauled by a pack of smalltown cops, and I especially don’t like being suckered by some babe who’s got a deal cooking I fit into some way that she won’t say. No matter how I look at it, it’s me who’s left holding the bag. Now that’s what I know. What’s the rest of it?”

  She gestured with open hands. “Nothing. I told you everything in the first place.”

  “Damnit! You told me nothing!”

  She shook her head. “All you have to do is
marry me. Nothing else. I don’t expect, nor will I ask of you, anything else. After we’re married, you can do whatever you please. And then there’s that ten thousand dollars.”

  I took the butt away from my mouth and stared at her. “Let me take a wild stab at this. You’ve been with some bad boys in your time, and over the years, Papa’s been disapproving—chased them off, bought them off… that kind of thing?”

  She was smiling now. “You said you were clever, Mr. Hammer.”

  “And this is your revenge. Run off and marry an outright murderer. What a beautiful way to tell the old man to go screw himself.”

  Her shoulders lifted and came back down. “Clever and shrewd, you said.”

  This time I shook my head slowly. “Fine. Swell. But explain away the bullet in the rain, honey. It could have been you it was meant for.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “Convince me.”

  Her open-hand gesture was graceful, very Country Club, as was the expression she gave me, chin lifted.

  “The Warburton girl,” she said, “has two very violent brothers. One of them already shot a man for making advances at her. Went to prison for it, though he’s out now—the spurned suitor was only wounded, you see. The brothers have been threatening that if the state doesn’t kill you, they will.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  My bride-to-be fixed us a little supper. Whether cooking skills could be added to good looks, among her wifely attributes, remained to be seen—for now she just opened a can of Dinty Moore stew and heated it up in the little kitchenette off the living room.

  While she did that, I had a look around the place. At the rear was a bedroom with more lodge-type trappings—framed hunting and fishing prints, rustic pine furnishings, log double bed with a comforter with a cloth grizzly bear sewn on. Not that grizzly bears are all that comforting.

  Across a small hall was the john with shower plus a storeroom with water heater, washing machine, and electric furnace. At the end of the hall was a rear door onto a little patio with a grill, and a small garage was back there, too, a gravel drive leading around to it. Beyond, land rose steeply, trees and brush holding on for dear life, the forest so all-encompassing you had to crane your head back to see any sky.

  I joined her in the kitchen area, where the beauty in the green Paris original was playing what’s-wrong-with-this-picture as she put down plates of stew and two bottles: beer for me, 7 Up for her.

  We both sat at the little round maple table. A kind of wary truce had settled in.

  “We’ll have to rough it till I can get some fresh supplies tomorrow,” she said apologetically, passing me a little basket of saltines in lieu of bread.

  For a guy who’d eaten K-rations in Pacific foxholes, this kind of roughing it was not a challenge.

  “I don’t live here,” she said.

  “I didn’t suppose you did.”

  “I have an apartment in town, but sometimes I like a weekend with the out-of-doors all around. That’s not anything I advertise, though. So for us, I think staying out here makes a lot of sense— reporters won’t likely find us.”

  She hadn’t seemed to mind reporters when she brought them along to embarrass the D.A. into quickly releasing me.

  “Or that dead woman’s brothers, either,” she added.

  That much was a benefit.

  I said, “You sound like you want us to spend the whole three-day waiting period out here.”

  A forkful of stew froze, midair. “I think that might be wise, yes.”

  “Why, so we can get to know each other better? Honey, I didn’t come to Killington for my health.”

  “What did you come for?” She really just seemed to want to know.

  That rated a shrug. “Personal business. Nothing to do with you. But I need to be mobile. How about you be a nice kid and fix it so I can rent a car?”

  She frowned, returning the forkful of stew to the plate. “I hope you don’t have any plans to go looking into this thing.”

  I figured she meant the Warburton girl’s murder, but I didn’t ask. I just said, “No. I said it was personal business and it is.”

  Like being framed for murder and rape wasn’t personal.

  Her expression was so intense, her eyes focused on me so tight, she might have been about to scream or maybe burst out crying.

  So I gave her just a little bit more. “I need to look up the wife of a guy who was in my outfit overseas. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a promise I need to keep.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “It already has waited—I didn’t figure on getting arrested for a sex kill, not to mention having a socialite propose marriage.”

  She blushed. Actually blushed.

  “Is that what you think I am?” she asked, very quietly. “Some rich-girl refugee from the society page? Me, the daughter of a fish cannery magnate?”

  I shrugged again. “Daughter of a senator.”

  She smiled a little and poked at her food, seeming too embarrassed to meet my eyes right now. “Daddy was a state senator for a single term, a long time ago, back when his daddy… my late grandfather… was still running the family business. Ever since then, he’s been ‘Senator’ Charles. But Senator Charles is just a small-town big wheel who runs a cannery, going back generations in the family, and that’s whose daughter I am.”

  “How about the fish glue works? Your daddy owns that, too, doesn’t he?”

  She pushed her plate of stew away, little of it eaten. “He does. But my brother Lawrence is in charge.”

  “Any other potential in-laws I need to know about?”

  She shook her head. “My mother died when I was fairly young. There’s just Lawrence, Daddy and me… well, Lawrence is married with two children. Very respectable, my brother.”

  Any time somebody is described as “very respectable,” I start to wonder.

  “You and your brother get along?”

  She rose, plucking up her plate and taking it to the sink, her back to me as she said, “Of course. Why wouldn’t we?”

  Something about that made me wonder, too.

  I asked, “You have a role in the family business?”

  “No.”

  “What do you do?”

  She was getting a bottle out of a cupboard—Smirnoff vodka. “I don’t do anything. Serve on a few charitable committees. Go down to New York to see plays and shop. Travel. Nothing, really.”

  But she was no rich-girl socialite, right?

  With the bottle in one hand and a water glass in the other, she returned to casually pour herself a good four fingers into the glass. Then she added some 7 Up as she settled back down.

  “Sometimes I go club-hopping,” she continued. Then the gray eyes flashed. “If anybody asks, that’s how we met. At the Copa, maybe. Or the Latin Quarter.”

  I shook my head. “Nobody will buy that. Guys who hitch rides on freights don’t hang out at nightclubs, unless they’re a dishwasher or push a broom. I have a better one.”

  She was all ears. “Oh?”

  “We met a couple years ago at a USO dance.” I swallowed some beer. “Felt the ol’ mutual attraction and wound up spending the whole rest of my leave together—translation, we shacked up. After that we wrote letters back and forth.”

  She was nodding now. “Yes! And you came to town hoping to re-connect, but got swept up in that murder thing first.”

  “And you saw my picture in the papers and came forward to get me out of a jam. But, no… scratch that.” I’d been cookin’ but then the cake fell. “It doesn’t jibe with you seeing me in a hash house. That story makes me out a stranger. And it’s on the record.”

  Half the glass of vodka and 7 Up was gone. “You don’t understand yet, do you, Mr. Hammer?”

  “Mike.”

  “Mike. I’m the Senator’s daughter. Once I came forward, you were off the spot. People may question my motives, they may think I’m lying and gossip about it all over town, while the police and the District Attorne
y and his staff whine about miscarriage of justice…” She sipped and smiled. “… but nobody’ll do anything about it.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. Anyway, leave out any indication we… shacked up. Or even that we kept in touch. We met at the USO, the Stage Door Canteen… I’ll say I was helping out. We spent some time when you had a pass or a leave or whatever it is.”

  I nodded slowly. “And after I got mustered out, I came to town to look you up.”

  She smiled big, seeming pleased with herself, and toasted me with her now almost empty glass.

  Seemed like a good time to try again. “So, how about helping out a guy you met at the USO? With some wheels?”

  “You can use my old Packard,” she said, off-handedly. “It’s in the garage out back. You need any money?”

  Here was my opportunity to become a kept man, but I said, “No. I’m fixed. I’ll try to take care of that personal matter tomorrow, okay?”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  After all that chatter, we wound up spending the rest of the evening like any married couple—not talking. Melba drank her vodka and 7 Up while I ran through the beer in her fridge, as we sat on the couch listening to the radio—Baby Snooks, Ginny Simms, Jimmy Durante. Also, It Pays to Be Ignorant, which hit a little close to home. Back in the city about now, the drinking was being done in gayer circumstances. But that was for people still looking for a mate, or escaping theirs.

  Around ten she fixed the couch up with a pillow and a light blanket, then headed off to her log bed and its grizzly bear spread. We said good night, politely, even pleasantly, first names and all. The truce was holding.

  Yet somehow I knew that if I headed back to that bedroom, she’d have something waiting to shoot me with.

  * * *

  The day dawned sunny.

  The world out here past the city didn’t seem to have low-hanging clouds, no gray rags overhead sopping with rain, ready for wringing. We were so far away from civilization, the fish stench was only the faintest memory. And the sounds of late summer in the forest were at it like a symphony—chirping birds, buzzing insects, croaking frogs, and somewhere a brook was babbling. In town the chirps came from chippies, the buzzing came in entryways, and plenty of croaking and babbling was going on, too, none of it at all symphonic.