Pardon My Body (12 page)

I
WENT DOWN ON TO THE STREET
and walked back to where I had left my car. I slid in against the wheel and sat still for a moment. I had a headache at the back of my skull which hurt when I moved. Yet my nerves were steady. They would need to be. I jerked a cigarette out of a pack, then put it back. I got both hands on the big wheel and started driving.

It was quite a drive to where I was going, but I knew the way because I had been there before. Just once before. I wouldn't be going there any more after this. I wouldn't ever want to see it again. Unless I had everything figured out all wrong. I felt my mouth twist itself into a grin and I had nothing to grin about.

The house was quiet when I got there. I needn't have killed the motor and let the car glide the last fifty yards, but I wasn't taking any chances. The door which led onto the driveway was shut. I slid a piece
of celluloid between the wards of the lock and used a little pressure. The door moved silently upwards.

I stepped in the hall and walked carefully up the heavy-carpeted stairway. The door I wanted was halfway down the corridor on the left. It was locked, like the other. I opened it the same way and marched in.

When I had got it shut behind me I moved across in the dark to swing the window drapes shut. Then I turned the lights on. Though I had been to the house before I hadn't been in this room. It was a nice room. Big, furnished the way a woman would have fixed it if she had style. The woman who lived in the house had style. I knew that. Maybe she would walk in through the door any minute now and I didn't want that. Did I?

I still didn't know about that.

I still didn't
know
…

The lounge had a thick Indian pile in cream and green laid on a wood block floor with a light oak grain. The big davenport was rust-colored. The furniture was modern but it didn't shout at you. There was a baby grand piano in the window bay and a pile of music on a stool. The top piece said Bach. Evidence of a precisely mathematical mind. Or a logical mind? A lot of logic in this case. Yeah, the kind of logic I didn't like.

I stood in the center of the room and looked slowly around. There was just enough untidiness to show it was a place somebody lived in. Not a model room out of a furniture store window. A crushed cigarette lay in a glass tray. There was lipstick on it. Several books lay carelessly on a side table next the cream telephone. I let my gaze travel round the floor in the corners. Two pairs of shoes stood against the wainscoting back of the piano—a pair of high heels, a pair of tan wedgies. There didn't seem much else. Except that there was a little recess by the fireplace and I couldn't see into that from where I stood. I walked across the carpet and took a long hard look. It was there and I didn't want to pick it up. That was why I kept on looking. But I had to pick it up. It was a neat thin metal case in dove gray, compact enough to slide into a dispatch case. I got hold of it and laid it on the side table. It was locked but the key was hanging from the grip by a slim length of green tape. I put the key into the little lock and turned.

Then I had the lid off and was looking down at the natty little keyboard. I pressed on the keys with the flat of my hand and looked at the typeface. Then I stuck an old envelope in under the platen, turned it up and hit the J key. I went on typing. Another eleven letters which spelled two words. They came up in that elegant elite face just the way I had known they would.

Just the way I had felt uneasy ever since I first saw those small white even teeth and the sudden hard look she gave me when she bared them. But I hadn't known anything then. I just didn't like the look which came and went. I had been a long time trying to believe that she had nothing to do with hoodlums and daggers—and poison. I had been a long time because I hadn't wanted to believe that. And what could I prove now? That a change proposed in the constitution of a Wall Street corporation had been typed by her in her private apartment? But
he
had stashed it away in his safe, hadn't he?

I grinned mirthlessly. I didn't really know anything. No, that wasn't right. I knew everything. I knew it because I felt it in my bones. But I couldn't prove a thing. Better go home, Bogard, and start drinking.

So I sat down on the edge of a chair and lit a cigarette. I slid my right hand under my jacket and jerked the butt of my Luger out a little and flicked off the safety catch. The cigarette burned low and I dropped it in the tray beside hers. I walked over to the window and parted the drapes a little. Enough to look down onto the street. It was quiet. It was very quiet tonight in the borough of Queens.

Then, suddenly, I knew she was in the room. I didn't turn. I didn't move. Nothing had happened to
me except that the back of my neck was wet and I no longer had a stomach.

She said in a calm little voice, “Turn around, Dale.”

I turned slowly, both my hands held down with the palms spread outwards because that would be the way she would want it, and she was the girl with the gun.

It wasn't a little handbag gun. It was a Colt .44 caliber with a silencer screwed on the end. I figured it must be a very special silencer if she could fire through it without a blowback. She would know a lot about guns…and Task Force daggers.

I said, “I've turned, Julia. Where do we go from here?”

For the second time I saw those little white teeth bared and the hard look. Only this time the look stayed.

“You know, don't you, Dale?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I've known for some time.”

She sat on the arm of the davenport, lowering her body gently and holding the huge gun hard down on her nyloned knee, the way I had seen Klinger doing it.

I took a little step towards her. The gun barrel jumped a fraction so that it was pointing straight at the place where I keep my damfool heart. I quit taking steps.

“That's right, Dale,” she said, “Don't move again. Don't do anything.”

My collar was sticking to the back of my neck now, but I called up a crooked grin.

“What do we do? Stand here all night?”

“Not all night, Dale. Just for a little while.” Her voice was low and a little sad. “You have to die—you know that, don't you?”

I didn't want to tell her I knew it.

“I ought to fire the whole clip into you,” she went on, “but one slug will do it. It looks better that way. Self-defence. A lady defending herself in her own home. Good slush for the Grand Jury. They'll eat it up.”

I didn't want to tell her I knew that, either. I said, “Why did you poison Banningham?”

She reached for a cigarette with her free hand, stuck it into her mouth and lit it. She let out a long thin stream of smoke and spoke at the same time.

“I was going to marry Grierson. He agreed to try to get the company's constitution changed so that I would inherit his cut in the event of his death. That would have been not too long after he got me to the nuptial bed.”

“But you had to get Banningham's consent to the change, and he wouldn't play ball,” I said.

“He was a stubborn old soldier,” she said. “I had to overcome that obstacle. The night he asked me to go out to his place was the chance I wanted. It wasn't
true that Lee Wesley, the driver, was ill. I made that up. I didn't want any chaperone around on the night Banningham was to be alone in the house. I did the work he wanted and mixed him a stiff nightcap of barbiturates and Scotch. He always took a drink straight down, so it was easy.”

She paused a moment and went on without a change of tone. “He knew what had happened all right as soon as he drank. I threw a gun on him and stood there watching him go to sleep. The Big Sleep. The one you don't come out of. I undressed him. Got him into his silk pajamas and tucked him up. He still wasn't dead. But he was going to be pretty damn quick.

“I had everything fixed the way I wanted it. Then things started to happen. I guess that's the way it always is. I was on my way
back
from Banningham's place when I saw Grierson's car parked on the roadside ahead. I could begin to imagine what it was there for. I nearly went into a panic—but not quite. If I kept driving the chances were he would spot me and get to wondering about it after they found Banningham dead. So I pulled into the side myself.

“I found out how wrong that was when I saw those two hoodlums with him. I couldn't see their faces and they didn't let me see them. Everything else happened like I told you. They slashed my tires and
one of them drove me down the road a couple of miles and ditched me. Then he swung round and headed back.

“The funny thing was I never spotted Grierson when we went into the inn. Maybe he saw me, maybe not. If he did he wouldn't be allowed to say anything by the killer who was with him—Canting's hired hoodlum.” She mouthed the three last words with ice-cold hate.

“That was the end of it for you,” I said.

“Yes,” she said in a low toneless voice. “Everything I had planned—money, power, position. All gone. And I had just killed a man to get all of it. A cheap killer had made an end of it for me. A tiny smile crossed her face. “I gave him his,” she said. Now there was tone to her voice. A horrible dry little tone.

“It was luck. Just as you dropped me off here that night an old Packard went by. I caught a glimpse of a fair-haired guy with a scar. It was uncanny. I never saw him at the inn, but he looked a ringer for the man you described. The car rumbled to a stop down the street. He seemed to be having engine trouble. I walked along the street and talked to him. I told him I was flat and was looking for a guy to go to bed with. He liked that. He was the kind who would always like that.

“I went with him to that cheap little saloon Mike Hannigan runs. He got the room keys and sent me up when Hannigan went in the back for something. He had a suitcase and when he opened it the first thing I saw were a set of three daggers like the one he knifed Grierson with. I knew then that he was the man. It was a million-to-one chance. He bragged about those daggers—but not enough to say he had used one on anybody.” She paused again and her little teeth glistened. They were very wet now. “I let my dress fall down round my ankles. I bent down and came up with one of the daggers. He was lying propped up on the bed with a drink in his hand. I got onto the bed with him. Then I put the dagger straight into his heart…the dirty little cheapskate.”

“And then?” I just managed to get the words out.

“It wasn't luck after that. I had to find out who had paid him to kill Grierson. You found that out for me, Dale. I didn't have any trouble getting close to Canting. He liked women, too. I was there a half-hour before you found me in my negligee at Cornel Banningham's apartment. I didn't know it was you…”

“Somehow,” I said, “that was the give-away. I knew you didn't love Banningham. I realized then that you wanted nothing but his money.”

“That's right,” she said. “He was the next biggest thing.”

“He wouldn't have lived too long, would he?”

She didn't answer that. Instead, she asked in an odd little voice, “Why should you know I didn't love him?”

“I won't answer that,” I told her.

Suddenly, her calm went. “You great big goddamned fool—why did you have to push your way into this? Why couldn't you leave things alone? Why, why, why? when it's you I want. I've wanted you ever since you picked me up off the roadway that night—wanted you every waking minute. Oh! Dale, Dale—why did you have to do it? Now it's all gone. Oh Christ, why did you have to do it?”

I said, “Save it, pretty baby—save it for the Grand Jury.” I hadn't meant to say that, I hadn't meant to say anything. I didn't know anymore what I was saying.

She sat motionless for a minute. Except that she was chewing her bottom lip. A trickle of blood spilled on to her softly rounded chin. A long shudder ran through her. Then she was calm again.

“Now I don't get anything. I don't even have you in bed. Nobody has you now….”

My shirt was wet and my mouth was hard and dry and there was a noise in my ears. Like the noise
of guns heard a long way off. They might be .44 Colts fired without a silencer. This one would only make a thudding sound if the silencer was as special as it looked.

All the beauty had gone from her face. It was a face suddenly grown old and bitter and not quite sane. She raised the gun barrel another fraction of an inch.

“Shut your eyes, Dale, please,” she whispered.

I went on keeping them open. Only now they were looking past her. They were looking at a slowly opening door. Then they were looking at Detective-lieutenant Desmond O'Cassidy. He stood there framed in the doorway, his hat pushed back on his pale forehead, his gun held towards her back.

“Don't shoot, sister,” he said.

In the silence of that room his voice was more violent than a bursting gun shell.

She cried out indescribably and spun round. There was a rapid explosion, a spurt of flame. Her fantastic Colt fell to the carpet. She stood still for a moment. Then she put both hands to her breasts and coughed. Just the once. A funny little cough. Her body bent, straightened up and collapsed sideways into my arms. I held her for a second. Her lovely eyes were wide open but they weren't seeing me. She was never going to see anything again.