Shoot to Kill (7 page)

“You haven’t told me anything yet,” Sergeant Griggs pointed out coldly. “State your name and occupation for the record.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. I’m Ralph Larson. I work on the
News
with Tim Rourke. I shot and killed Wesley Ames upstairs in his study half an hour ago. Is that what you want?”

“There’s the question of motive and premeditation,” Griggs told him, still coldly. “I understand that you threatened to kill him last night.”

“What does that mailer now? I was having some drinks with Tim and I shot my mouth off. I’m sure Tim has told you all about it with embellishments.” His mouth twisted and he shot a baleful glance across the room at the other reporter. “What the hell does my motive have to do with it? Do we have to drag my wife’s name through the mud? I killed him because he was a louse and didn’t deserve to live. Isn’t that enough?”

“Where did you get the murder gun?”

“It’s mine. I’ve got a permit for it.”

“And you came here tonight and burst into the house with a loaded gun, and you planned to kill him?” Griggs said inexorably. “It wasn’t a crime of impulse… a spur-of-the-moment thing. You’ve been planning it all day. Is that what we’re to understand?”

“I don’t give a damn what you understand. I’ve told you…”

“Don’t be a complete goddamned idiot, Ralph,” Rourke swore at him. “It wasn’t quite as coldblooded as that. Something triggered you off. Was it something Dorothy said?”

“Dorothy? No. It was that bastard Ames. Sitting there in his chair and laughing in my face when I told him to stay away from Dorothy. I told him I’d kill him and he kept on laughing. So I got my gun and did it, goddamnit.”

“Wait a minute.” Griggs looked puzzled.
“When
did he laugh at you?”

“This evening. Sitting there at his desk wearing that silly red vest with a row of silver buttons down the front. He didn’t even stop opening his mail long enough to listen to me. Sitting there slitting open the envelopes meticulously as though I was dirt under his damned feet. If I’d had a gun then I would have shot him.”

“This
evening?
You mean you were here earlier and threatened him and then went home to get your gun and came
back
to kill him?”

“Of course. When do you think I’m talking about? Didn’t they tell you I was here earlier? I had an appointment with him, and I didn’t bring a gun with me, damn it, so you can’t prove I was planning it all day. I was determined to have it out with him, and all I asked him was to promise to leave Dorothy alone in the future. That’s when he laughed at me and I decided to kill him.”

Sergeant Griggs said, “I think we’d better go back and sort of start over, Mr. Larson. Now then: You had an appointment with Wesley Ames this evening? What time, and what was it about?”

“I was supposed to be here at seven-fifteen to discuss an assignment for tonight. I work… have been working… for him on the side. Checking out stories from him about celebrities and getting facts for him to use in his column. I left the office a little early, a few minutes before seven, and drove out here. Vic Conroy came to the front door as usual when I drove up, saw who it was and waved me around to the side of the house where an outside staircase leads up to Ames’ study. I rang the bell at the top and he came to the door and looked through the glass, and unbolted it to let me in. He always keeps that door bolted,” Ralph went on. He seemed eager to talk now, to make them understand exactly what had happened. “I know that, and that’s the reason I didn’t go around that way later when I came back. I knew he wouldn’t let me in after I’d threatened to kill him, so I came in the front way instead.

“Anyhow, it was about seven-fifteen and he was in his study alone opening his mail and reading it… or at least glancing at each letter as he took it out of the envelope. I had it all planned… what I was going to say… and I started right in as soon as he sat back down at his desk. I told him I knew he was seeing Dorothy at night when he sent me out on assignments, and I asked him… man-to-man… to leave her alone. I reminded him that she was young and impressionable, and that he had lots of other women to play around with, and told him he was wrecking our marriage.

“And he sat there in his chair slitting open his goddamned letters and he laughed at me. He said if Dorothy wanted to pass it around he didn’t see why he shouldn’t get in line for it.

“I would have killed him then and there if I’d had a gun. I told him so. And he laughed in my face. So I went back out and down to my car and drove straight home and got my gun and came back. I hardly remember driving either way or anything.” Ralph Larson looked distraught and rubbed a hand vaguely across his forehead.

“Dorothy was there,” he said in a perplexed voice. “I remember she tried to stop me from getting my gun. She tried to tell me that Wesley Ames meant nothing to her and that I had no reason to be jealous of him. But I was halfway out of my mind, I guess. It’s all sort of blank until I was here suddenly and running up the stairs and that Puerto Rican tried to stop me. Even then I might not have done it. I don’t know,” Larson said in a troubled voice. “If he’d just begged me not to. If he’d just paid attention to me and promised, even then, that he wouldn’t see Dorothy again. But he was so goddamned superior. He just sat there leaning back in his chair looking at me and not saying a word even when I waved the gun in his face. So I shot him. What else could you do with a man like that? He slid sideways half out of his chair when the bullet hit him, and he still didn’t say anything. So, now then!” Ralph Larson lifted his head defiantly and glared at Griggs. “Does that spell everything out for you? I wish I’d had the guts to use another bullet on myself, but I didn’t.” He dropped his face into his hands suddenly and began weeping.

Sergeant Griggs stood up, looking tired and not particularly happy. He shrugged as Rourke went across the room to stand beside Ralph’s chair and put his hand on his shoulder, and walked out of the room and Shayne followed him.

He hesitated outside the door and told the detective, “I guess that ties it up in a neat bundle. You think Tim will be willing to go out with us and break it to Larson’s wife? She must be in a hell of a shape, not knowing what’s happened to her husband.”

Shayne said, “I’ll drive Tim to the Larson apartment. It’s on Northeast Sixty-First. Are you coming too?”

“Hell, I may as well get her statement for the record, and close it out,” Griggs said. “You and Tim go ahead if you like. Get the hysterics over with before I get there.”

AS MICHAEL SHAYNE DROVE OUT OF THE FLOODLIGHTED area down to the open gate, Timothy Rourke settled back on the seat beside him and sighed feelingly. “Poor punk,” he muttered. “What’ll become of him, Mike?”

“Ralph Larson? Chances are good he’ll burn. You’ve got premeditation. Actually a killing in cold blood. It’s Murder One right on the nose.”

“What about the unwritten law?” demanded Rourke. “A man has a right to defend his home… his wife. This is Florida, after all. Temporary insanity, damn it.”

“If he’d done it on the spur of the moment, sure. If he’d just walked in there and shot Ames tonight as we first thought, having worked himself into a state of homicidal jealousy, a jury would probably take a lenient view. If he’d had a gun in his pocket and blasted Ames on his first trip at seven o’clock… okay. But he left that house determined to get a gun and kill Ames according to his own statement. Half an hour is a long time for temporary insanity to prevail. No, Tim. Any way you look at it your young friend is in a very bad spot. You and I are both to blame for not taking his threat more seriously and stepping in faster.”

“Yeh,” muttered Rourke. “I’d rather cut off my right arm than break the news to Dorothy. No matter how it looks, I tell you she was really in love with Ralph. Think what she must have gone through this last hour. Ralph dashing out with a gun. She not hearing a word… not knowing
what’s
happened.”

“There may have been a flash on TV,” Shayne suggested. “One of the boys at headquarters may have picked it up.” He slid past the traffic light at 79th and eased over into the outer lane to prepare for the turn onto 61st.

“In that case we’ll find her hysterical.”

“Or under sedation,” Shayne suggested hopefully. There were fewer cars parked along the quiet street at this hour than when the detective had stopped by earlier, and he had no difficulty finding a parking place directly in front of the apartment building. He got out with Rourke and they went up the walk together and through the empty entrance hall to the stairway. The doors of both apartments at the top of the stairs were closed and there was silence in the upper hall. Shayne turned to 3-B on the right and pressed the button as he had done on his first visit, but this time he didn’t bother to get a pleasant smile ready to greet the occupant when she opened the door.

As before, there was no response to his ring. Shayne hesitated and glanced aside at Rourke with ragged red eyebrows raised questioningly, and pressed the bell again. Involuntarily he caught himself glancing over his shoulder at 4-B, half-expecting that door to open and reveal May Graham, still bare-footed and still welcoming.

But both doors remained shut and only silence answered his second ring. He hunched down and studied the keyhole and jingled a ring of keys in his pocket, and absently tried the knob as he straightened up.

It turned and the door to the Larson apartment swung open. There were lights inside but only silence greeted the opening of the door. Shayne stepped over the threshold, calling, “Mrs. Larson?” and he hesitated only a moment at the entrance to the empty living room before striding in.

The interior arrangement of the apartment was a replica of the one across the hall, with a closed door directly in front of him which he knew, opened into a bedroom, and an open door on the right through which he could see a small, neat kitchen.

He heard Rourke enter behind him, and the reporter muttered uneasily, “What the hell do you suppose…?”

Shayne crossed the sitting room in four long, fast strides and jerked open the bedroom door. The overhead light was on in this room also and neatly made twin beds stood side by side, but there were articles of feminine clothing tossed in disarray on one of the beds, a half-packed suitcase stood open near the head of it, and bureau drawers were pulled open haphazardly with contents rumpled and dangling over the edges of the drawers.

Shayne took in the scene with one swift glance, then strode to the open door of a bathroom on the right and switched on the light. Rourke saw him straighten and his shoulders stiffen as he looked inside the bathroom.

Fearful of what he might see inside the bathroom, the reporter edged up behind the rangy detective and peered past his shoulder.

There was no body in the bathroom, as he had instinctively feared. But there was blood on the washbasin and on the floor. And a damp handtowel was wadded up on the floor, liberally smeared with blood.

Shayne turned slowly, shaking his head and looking at Rourke with a deep frown of puzzlement. “I don’t get it, Tim. What the hell do you suppose happened here? When she phoned me… it was after Ralph had run out with his gun… so she said.” He paused, thinking deeply. “And Ralph verified that, didn’t he? He said Dorothy was here when he came home, and she tried to stop him. Isn’t that the way it was?”

“That’s what he said. That she tried to tell him there was nothing between Wesley Ames and her. But he also claimed he had pulled sort of a blank and doesn’t remember much until he was suddenly at the Ames’ house. Do you suppose they actually had a fight and he slugged Dorothy, and…?”

“And did away with her somehow?” Shayne shrugged and turned back into the bedroom, tugging at his ear lobe in deep perplexity.

“From the look of things here she had started to pack a bag. Was that before or after Ralph came to get his gun?”

“Pretty messy packing,” suggested Rourke. “Like she was in one hell of a hurry to get out of here.”

“And that suggests it was
after
Ralph had come and gone. Or, maybe not. After I talked with her maybe she thought it over and decided to pack up and get out before he came home from the office. Then, if he came back from his interview with Ames and caught her packing a bag, he might have suspected the worst and gone berserk. But that won’t work either,” he interjected. “There’s that telephone call to me
after
Ralph had got his gun and gone back. She must have started packing after she called me. If Ralph then turned around and came back unexpectedly…”

“I don’t think there was time for all that,” objected Rourke. “It must be a fair fifteen-minute drive from here to Ames’ house. Ralph says he first got there about seven-fifteen, had the argument with Ames, drove back to get his gun… and then got back there to kill him about eight o’clock. That doesn’t leave much leeway for him to have spent here.”

“Not if that timetable checks out,” agreed Shayne. “Right at this moment we have only Ralph’s word for any of it. We don’t
know
he had only half an hour to get here and back to Ames’.”

“But we do know,” argued Rourke, “that not very damned much time elapsed between her phone call and Ralph’s arrival there. You didn’t waste any time getting there, and he made it just about a minute ahead of us. Even if he drove as fast as you did… which I doubt… there wouldn’t have been more than a few minutes for him to come back and do anything here.”

“That’s true. Let’s get out of here and wait for Griggs without touching anything.” Shayne led the way out of the bedroom. “Unless it was some other woman who phoned me pretending to be Dorothy Larson,” he went on with a scowl. “I can’t say I actually recognized her voice after having heard it only once before.”

“What other woman?” demanded Rourke.

“How the hell do I know what other women were involved with the Larsons? There’s blood in the bathroom and she’s missing, damn it. Just at the time when her husband was committing murder on her behalf. It all adds up to a whole lot of question marks. That’ll be Griggs now,” he added moodily at the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairway. “He’s going to love this… just when he had his murder tied up in a neat bundle and was ready to go home and get some sleep.”

Sergeant Griggs definitely did not care for what he found in the Larson apartment. He looked at what there was to see, and he listened to what the two men told him, and he wearily went down to his car to have his driver radio in to headquarters for the technical crew to be sent back out to go over the place, and he roughly brought Ralph Larson back upstairs with him without telling him why his trip to jail was being interrupted by a visit to his home, and he shoved the young man inside the living room and he stood in the doorway and watched him and demanded, “Look all around and tell us if this is the way this place was when you ran out with your gun to kill Ames?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ralph stood in the center of the neat room looking about dazedly. “Where’s Dottie? What… where
is
she?” His voice rose shrilly in sudden panic.

“Suppose you tell us.”

“But I don’t know. I…” He turned and went to the bedroom door and peered inside at the disarray there, shaking his head in dismay. “Dottie was always so neat,” he faltered. “She wouldn’t have…” He turned to Griggs with his face working. “Where
is
she? What’s happened to Dottie?”

“Take a look in the bathroom,” said Griggs grimly, stalking up to him with out-thrust jaw. “Then you might try telling us the truth about what happened here tonight. Go on and look.” He turned the hesitant young man about and shoved him angrily toward the open bathroom door.

Ralph Larson shambled past the bed and the bureau with its gaping drawers, and looked inside the bathroom. He turned back, his young face white and drawn, his fists clenched tightly by his side.

“Blood all over. Is it Dot’s blood?
What’s going on here?”

“Did you kill her first?” demanded Griggs savagely. “And then go back to kill her lover? Where’s her body? What did you do with her?”

“I didn’t do it. I loved her. That’s why I killed Ames. She was here when I went out. She tried to stop me and I remember pushing her. But I didn’t
hurt
her. I wouldn’t hurt her. I loved her. Don’t you understand that?”

“Yeh,” said Griggs disgustedly. “You loved her so much you couldn’t stand the thought of her getting into bed with another man. Come on! Tell us the truth. What have you got to lose? You’ve already got one murder rap around your neck. They can only put you in the chair once. Get it out of your system. It’ll do you good. You made a clean job of it and killed them both because she was two-timing you.”

“I didn’t,” Ralph cried thinly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why don’t you
do
something, damn you? Don’t just stand there. Get busy and find Dottie.”

Sergeant Griggs shrugged and turned back from the bedroom door to Shayne and Rourke who were silent onlookers. “This is the kind
I
have to get,” he complained morosely. “You, Mike. Can you swear it was the Larson woman who called to send you out to Ames’ house?”

“There’s no way I can swear to it. She was hysterical and practically screaming at me over the phone. She seemed to know me and about the talk I had with Mrs. Larson this evening. She called him ‘Ralph’ and she wailed that she didn’t want him arrested when I told her she should call the cops. She certainly sounded like a distraught wife trying to head her husband off from committing a murder.”

Sergeant Griggs nodded absently. “She probably just got scared and took a run-out powder,” he muttered unconvincingly.

Timothy Rourke grinned at him. “After cutting her wrists and bleeding all over the bathroom?”

“How do you know she cut her wrists? How do we even know that’s her blood? Maybe she had a nosebleed. Let’s don’t jump to conclusions around here. After my boys give the place the onceover we’ll know more about what went on here. I guess I don’t need you two any more,” he went on flatly. “Why don’t you beat it? I’ve got work to do.”

“Sure,” said Rourke easily. “You get on with your knitting, Sergeant. Mike and I’ll go get some shut-eye like you suggested awhile ago. How about it, Mike?”

Shayne nodded and edged toward the open door into the hallway. He saw, now, that the opposite door was open about a foot, and he sensed that May was standing behind the partly opened door listening. He stepped out and waited for Rourke to follow him, with his hand on the knob to close the door behind the reporter and with the thought that it might be worthwhile talking to May without interference from the sergeant.

But evidently May had been watching as well as listening, and waiting for him to appear, because her door swung open before Rourke reached the hall, and she swayed forward drunkenly almost into Shayne’s arms so he had to catch her to keep her from falling headlong.

She was still barefooted, but she had changed from her former costume into a tightly-belted, pink, quilted robe with a frayed hem that struck her sturdy legs just below the knees. She was quite drunk and her well-fleshed body was heavily lax in his arms as he held her upright. Her eyes were round and unfocussed and she was smiling vaguely and she clung to him and said, “Hiya, Red, honey?” and hiccoughed loudly, and then she drew herself back with dignity and pushed him away from her, and demanded in a huskily fuzzy voice, “Whatcha doin’ in there, huh? I thought you was comin’ back to see me, Red. Wha’ she got that I haven’t got, huh?” She stood with arms akimbo and ducked her head coyly and rolled her unfocussed eyes at him.

Rourke stood aside watching with a grin on his lean face, and Sergeant Griggs thrust his square jaw out the door and demanded of Shayne, “Friend of yours, Mike? You didn’t tell me…”

Shayne said grimly, “May and I are old friends and I didn’t know I was under any obligation to reveal such intimate details to you, Sergeant.”

He put his arm gently about May and patted her shoulder beneath the quilted robe. “Where is Dottie?” he asked her quietly. “Have you seen her since I was here?”

She blinked her eyes a couple of times and then closed them tightly and leaned against him. “Haven’ seen her,” she said in a faraway voice. “Been waitin’ for you, Red. Beltin’ down a few an’ waitin’ for you.” She snuggled up against him and slowly clasped her arms about his neck, keeping her eyes closed and turning her face up to his with full lips avidly parted. “Send ’em away, huh?” she murmured drowsily. “You take me in an’ put me to bed, huh, Red? Tuck me in good?” She pulled his head down with surprising strength, and pushed her mouth up against his, and Sergeant Griggs snorted obscenely behind them and closed the door firmly to shut out the maudlin scene.