Blue City (25 page)

Hanson parked in the club’s driveway and walked quickly to the back door with me at his heels. The back door was unlocked and he went in, gun first. The door of the office was open and the lights were burning. Kerch sat behind the desk with his battered head sagging forward and his eyes closed. The dark little Cyclops eye in the center of his forehead gave him a queerly alert expression.

But the expression on Kerch’s face no longer mattered to
me. What mattered was the girl lying on the floor beside the leather couch, her clean cotton dress soiled by a red stain that spread downward across her left breast. I had been seeing a good deal of blood, but I had never fully realized what a waste it was to let blood run out of a body. The thought that she might be dead broke in my mind like a cold wave and brought me to my knees beside her. She was still breathing.

“Call an ambulance, Hanson. Tell them to come fast.”

“Yeah.” He picked up the phone on the desk, and used it.

I tore the dress down from her left shoulder. I didn’t like to bare her breast in front of him, but it was necessary.

He put down the phone and squatted beside her. “Don’t look too bad to me. Too high to get the lung, unless it was deflected. Looks as if it broke the collarbone, but that ain’t so bad.”

“Ambulance coming?”

“Right away.”

“See that they take good care of her, will you?”

“She’s a witness, isn’t she?” He had taken a large clean handkerchief out of his pocket, and was folding it lengthwise. He looked at me over his shoulder with narrowed eyes. “Say, this Kaufman girl a friend of yours?”

“More than that. If I hadn’t brought her out here, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“What the hell did happen? You think Kerch shot her and committed suicide? No, that don’t make sense. No burns on his face, no gun. What was
she
doing here?”

“She drove me out this morning. After Moffatt got me, I
guess she was afraid to come downstairs. Then she heard the shot that killed Kerch, and came down anyway. She must have recognized the man that did it.”

“Or woman.”

“That’s a heavy-caliber wound. Women don’t pack forty-fives.”

“They don’t, eh?” He had finished his temporary dressing of the wound and stood up. “But we’ll call it a man. It doesn’t follow that she knew him.”

“Maybe not, but she does.” And so did I.

“Who?”

“The man that did this. Lend me your gun.”

“I can’t do that, Weather. Strikes me you’re overeager. Who you want to gun for?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, and there’s no time to argue. I’ll take him with my bare hands. But a gun’s more certain.”

“A gun’s too certain. Five dead are enough.”

I started for the door.

“You better stay here with me, boy.”

“To hell with you!” I left him with the unconscious girl. I wanted to stay with her myself, but there was one person in the city who interested me more just then. Her car was still parked behind the Cathay Club, and the keys were in it. I got in and headed for the Harvey Apartments. I didn’t put in to the curb for the ambulance that passed me screaming west.

The voices I could hear through the thin door of Francie Sontag’s apartment told me that I was in time.

“I won’t keep quiet!” her bitter voice was saying. It was like a key speech in a play I had heard before. “You can’t make me.”

“But you must,” the man said. “You’re making too much noise now. Somebody might hear you.”

“I want everybody in town to hear me.”

“Be quiet.” His voice was small and tight. “You’re hysterical. You’re forgetting that you’re in this as deep as I am.”

“Oh no, I’m not. I never knew what went on. You didn’t even tell me they were killing my own brother last night.”

“I didn’t know—”

“You sat on your bony rear and let them kill him. You wanted him dead, didn’t you?”

“Listen to me, Francie.” The grim patience in his voice was wearing thin. “How could I know it was Joey?”

“You could’ve gone to the Wildwood when this boy called you. You were Joey’s last chance, and you didn’t lift a finger to help him.” Her voice had begun to rise and fall in a gasping rhythm.

“I had nothing to do with it. He meddled with things that were too big for him, and they killed him. Anyway, what’s a gorilla like him compared with you and me?”

“Mr. Fine-Gentleman Allister!” she cried viciously. “You got your gall talking about gorillas. His little finger was worth five of you. He was a man, and he didn’t drool at the mouth with words. I’d rather hear him say hello to me again than listen to you jabbering all night.”

“I thought you loved me.” Allister’s voice was softened by a dangerously unstable humility which could change suddenly to anything at all. “You always said you loved me.”

“I was crazy, wasn’t I? How could I love a murdering hypocrite like you? But I’m not crazy any more.”

“Maybe you’re crazy today for the first time.” His voice was dead and monotonous now. “You’re the only one left who knows about me.”

“Kerch knows. Garland knows.”

“Kerch and Garland are dead. You’re the only one left alive, Francie.”

“You killed them?” Her voice had lost its scornful stridency and had become little and tinny with fear. “I don’t believe it.”

“Believe what you like. I’ve given you your chance and you have failed me. Everyone has failed me.” His voice vibrated with an unnatural timbre, as if he was approaching the emotional level where murder would be possible again.

I tried the door. It was locked. The doorknob rattled slightly when I removed my hand from it.

“What was that?” he said.

I stepped back across the hallway and took the lock away
with my shoulder. They were facing each other in the middle of the room, in stiff attitudes, like children caught at forbidden play. He turned on me with his hand in his coat pocket, his face and his whole body fumbling for his gun. Before I reached him the woman stepped behind him and seized his arms. He struggled in her grip, but she was a big woman and her hold was strong. She got the gun and he stopped struggling.

He tried to organize his face in a smile, as if they were playing games together. “Hello, Weather,” he said without conviction.

I didn’t like to go near him. I had a notion that his tense body would be giving off a sour-sweat odor of depravity. But I moved close up to the wretched smile and took the envelope from his breast pocket. He winced and jerked as if I was trying to tickle him. I had an impulse to hit him then, but I held it back. Violence might destroy the remnants of human dignity that kept him erect and smiling, and turn him into something queer—so queer that I wouldn’t want to look at it. Another violence might do something to me, too—make me howl like a dog or cry like a baby or plait daisies in my hair.

The woman stepped back from us both, with the heavy automatic in her hand. The long minutes with Allister had given her skin a greenish patina of fear, and her eyes had a belladonna stare.

“You better go out in the kitchen and get a drink of water,” I said.

She looked questioningly at the gun in her hand.

“Don’t worry. I can handle him.”

I never saw a convict walk off the scaffold when the trap failed to work, but she showed me how they walk. With slow, incredulous steps, and a backward glance at death.

I opened the envelope with Allister’s name on its face. He moved suddenly to snatch it from me, but with only half his heart. I thrust him back with the flat of my hand. He lay down on the chesterfield with one knee dragging on the floor and his face hidden.

Nearly all the letters in the bulky envelope were addressed to Francie Sontag at a Chicago hotel. March 24, 1944—“Francie My Dear One: Your letter was very sweet.…” March 25, 1944—“My Sweet Love: I lay awake for hours thinking …” March 26—“Darling Francie: Today is the birthday of our love. One year ago today …” March 27—“Flesh of My Flesh …” March 29—“My Only Love …”

The last letter, typed in duplicate on heavy bond paper, was addressed to Judge Ernest Simeon. Both copies were signed “Freeman Allister,” but neither was dated. “Dear Judge Simeon,” it began:

Before I finished the letter, Mrs. Sontag came out of the kitchen. She moved hesitantly like a visitor in a sickroom and seemed surprised by the tranquillity of the atmosphere.

“What are you going to do with him? Aren’t you going to call the cops?”

I put the letters on the table behind me. “Are you in a hurry?”

“He was going to kill me, wasn’t he? I spend three years massaging his personality, trying to build him up into some kind of a man, and he ends up trying to kill me.” She seemed to be spitting the words at the inert man on the chesterfield.

“I’ll get around to calling the police. It says in the letter that he wants to be tried and punished for his crime.”

“All right. I was just wondering. I can wait.” She screwed a cigarette into a long red holder, lit it with a table lighter, and sat down in a dim corner of the room. Her color had improved, but she was still looking a little faded. She gulped hard on the cigarette.

Allister sat up and faced me. “I wrote that letter under duress. It will never be admitted in evidence. I wrote it from dictation on my typewriter and signed it at the point of a gun.”

“It sounds quite a bit like you. Maybe you and Kerch have similar styles, at that. You both use words without any real feeling for what they mean.”

“That letter is worthless to you. As a lawyer, I know what I’m talking about.” He spoke with authority and I was surprised at his comeback. I wondered what he had done to himself while he lay with his face turned away.

“You killed to get this letter,” I said. “Backed by Mrs. Sontag’s testimony, it will do you a lot of harm. And the bullet in Kerch’s head is going to correspond with the rifling on the gun you used.”

His answer was glib. “I performed a public service in shooting Kerch. He resisted arrest, and, as chief magistrate of this city, it is my duty to enforce the law.”

“Was Garland resisting arrest when you strangled him—unconsciously resisting arrest?”

“You have no evidence that I killed Garland. You have no usable evidence against me at all. Francie will never testify against me. If she tried to, her evidence could be invalidated on moral grounds.”

“Moral grounds!” she yelled from her corner. “There’s
only one thing in my life I’m ashamed of, and that’s you. I’ll sing you into the chair, Mr. Morality.”

The superficial calm of his face cracked wide open and let his teeth show. “If I go, you’ll go with me. You can’t talk about me without convicting yourself as an accessory.”

“Because I knew you got that revolver from Joey? Don’t kid me!”

“Maybe you should study the tabloids, Allister. Any jury will recognize her right to protect her brother, at least to refrain from handing him over to the police. Especially now that he’s dead.”

He adopted another mood, with the speed of a quick-change artist and the same effect of artificiality. “Look, Weather, the woman doesn’t matter. She won’t do anything by herself. Now I understand you intend to stay here, and take over your father’s interests—”

“No sale. I’m going to run them clean.”

“Of course.” He shifted again. “That’s what I mean. If my name is dragged in the dirt, municipal reform will suffer an irreparable setback. Last night we agreed to work together, John.”

“Don’t call me John.”

“Sorry. I’ve done wrong, I admit that. But it was my means that were at fault, not my ends. I killed your father—it’s a terrible thing to have to say, isn’t it?—but I did it because I sincerely believed that it was for the general good. I have sincerely regretted my crime, as that letter proves—”

“You wrote it at the point of a gun.”

“Please let me finish. I have learned my lesson, Weather.
I have learned that ends must never be subordinated to means, because the ends come to be determined by the means. Can’t we still work together for a good purpose?”

He spoke clearly and rapidly, enunciating his phrases with athletic movements of his mouth and nostrils. They meant no more to me than words read in alphabetical order out of a dictionary.

“Save your eloquence for the jury,” I said. “In a few minutes you’ll be believing that story. That’s why your type is so dangerous, Allister. You can make yourself believe anything.”

“I told you I’ve seen my mistakes—”

“Listen to me for a change. You identify yourself with a cause, and all that means is that your ambition acquires a flavor of sanctity. You can convince yourself that you’re working for a higher purpose, a purpose so high that it places you above the law. You kill a man, but you’re not a murderer. You’re a political assassin killing in the interests of good government with you at the head of it.”

“You’ve got him pat,” the woman said. “When he does it, he thinks it doesn’t stink.”

“Do I have to sit here and listen to her recriminations?”