The Collection (113 page)

He said, “Interesting, Sergeant---if you can prove that I do
know ventrilo---”

“I can't, but I'm not interested. All I have to prove is
that you killed Randall. As long as I know you
could have
pulled that
stunt in the car, I can forget it. How's about another drink? And incidentally,
what
you said was clever as hell. You knew we'd find out about you and
Mrs. Randall, and if you accused yourself of having that motive, it would spike
our guns. You expect to marry her, don't you, and get Randall's money?”

He filled my glass, but not his own. He stood up, yawning.
“Hope you'll excuse me, Sergeant. I
am
tired.”

“Go right to bed,” I said. “Got an alarm clock, or shall I
wake you any special time?”

“Never mind.” He sauntered to the door of the bedroom and
then turned. “I'll appreciate your leaving one drink in the bottle.”

“I'll buy you a new bottle,” I assured him. “Barranya, you
know anything about relays?”

“Relays? I'm not sure I know what you mean.”

“I'm not, either. Probably that's the wrong name for it. But
it's the first thing I looked for when I came up here. I didn't find it.”

“And where would you have looked for one?”

“I thought of the bell box of your telephone. Look, while
you were playing Randall for a sucker on the celestial advice racket, didn't
you have his phone wire tapped?”

“No, Sergeant. But how would a tapped wire---”

“Here's the idea. Holding gave it to me, in a way. He said
you might have phoned from the booth at the station, right out in the hall.
Except that the call came from here, that would have made sense. So I got to
thinking.”

“So?”

“This could have happened. You came here, driving fast from
the roadhouse, killed Randall, and switched in the gimmick. You'd have
everything ready, so you could do it in a minute. There'd already be the tap on
Randall's wire. The gimmick is a little electromagnet in your phone's bell
box.

“You drive to the station and
call your own
phone.
The circuit is shorted through the electromagnet, so instead of ringing the
bell, the magnet throws the double switch---just as though the receiver had
been lifted from Randall's phone. You're on Randall's wire and when the light
goes on down at the phone company switchboard, it's over his number. That
switch also opens his circuit, of course. When Central says ‘Number, please?’
you give my number, and---well, that's all it would take. You knew, of course,
that snapping a rubber band across the diaphram of the transmitter makes a
sound like a shot.

“And when you hung up, both circuits would be broken, and
things just like they were. The call would trace back to Randall's phone, but
his receiver was never off the hook!”

Barranya's eyes had widened while I was talking. He said,
“Sergeant, I never thought it of you. That's positively brilliant. But you
didn't find such an electromagnet?”

“No,” I admitted. “But it was a good idea.”

He yawned again. “You underestimate yourself. It was excellent.
Pardon me.”

“I will,” I said, “but how about the governor?”

He chuckled and closed the bedroom door. I poured myself
another drink, but I didn't touch it. The last three drinks hadn't had any
further effect on the toothache, so I figured I might as well stay sober and
bear it.

I listened until I heard him get into bed. Then I gave it
another ten minutes by my watch.

I went out the door and closed it, being neither quiet nor
noisy about my movements, got into the elevator and---in case the sound of the
elevator would be audible---I rode it all the way down to the first floor and
walked back up to five. One of my set of keys worked easily on the door of the
absent Mr. Shultz.

I crossed over to the telephone and bent down to examine the
box. There wasn't any dust on top of it, and there
was
a thin layer of
dust on most other things in the room.

I didn't touch it. I was sure enough now that the
electromagnet would be there, and I didn't want to lessen its value as evidence
by taking off the cover until there were other witnesses. Anyway, there was an
easier way to check my hunch.

I picked up the receiver and when a feminine voice said,
“Number, please?” I asked, “What phone am I calling from?”

“Pardon?”

I said, “I'm alone at a friend's house. I want to tell
someone to call me back here, and I can't read the number without my glasses.”

She said, “Oh, I see. You're calling from Woodburn 3840.”

Randal's number. That cracked the case, of course. Barranya
had worked it just as I'd told him upstairs, except that, knowing his own flat
would be searched, he'd put the tab on Shultz' phone and called up there.

“Fine,” I said, “Now give me---”

That was when something jabbed into my back and Barranya
said, “Tell her never mind.” His tone of voice meant business. “Never mind,” I
told the operator. “I'll put in the call later.”

As I put down the phone, Barranya's hand reached over my
shoulder and slid my police positive out of its shoulder holster. He stepped
back, and I turned around.

He'd really undressed for bed; he wore a lounging robe over
pajamas and had slippers on his feet. That's why I hadn't heard him come
through the flat. I'd known he'd be down sometime today to remove the evidence,
but I'd expected him to wait longer, and I hadn't thought of the back door. Maybe
I'd drunk more Scotch than I thought I had, to overlook a bet like that.

His face was expressionless; there was just a touch of
mockery in his voice. “Remember that message I brought you from the spirit
world a few hours ago, Sergeant? Maybe it wasn't as wrong as you thought.”

“You can't get away with it,” I said. “Killing me, I mean.
If you do, you'll have to lam, and they'll catch you. The homicide boys know I
stayed with you. If they find me dead---”

“Shut up, Sergeant,” he said, “I'm trying to think how---”

I didn't dare give him time to think. The guy was too
clever. He might think of some way he could kill me without it being pinned on
him.

I said, “A good lawyer can get you a sentence for shooting a
rat like Randall. But you know what happens when you kill a cop in this state.”

I could see there was indecision in his face, in his voice
when he said, “Keep back, or---”

I took another step toward him and kept on talking. I said,
“There are still men in Randal's flat, right under us. They'll hear that gun.
You won't have time to muffle it, like when you shot Randall.”

I kept walking, slowly. I knew if I moved suddenly, he'd
shoot. My hands were going down slowly, too. I said, “Give me that gun,
Barranya. Figure out what a rope around your neck feels like before you pull
that trigger, and don't pull it.”

I was reaching out, palm upward for him to hand the gun to
me, but he backed away. He said, “Stop, damn you,” and the urbanity and mockery
were gone from his voice. He was scared.

I kept walking forward. I said, “I saw a cop-killer once
after they finished questioning him, Barranya. They did such a job that he
didn't mind hanging, much, after that. And don't forget the boys below us will
hear a shot. You won't have time to pull those wires up through the wall before
they get up here.”

And then he was back against the wall, and I must have
pressed him too hard, because I saw from his eyes that he was going to shoot.
But my hand was only inches from the gun now, and I took the last short step in
a lunge and slapped the gun just as it went off. I felt the burn of powder on
my palm and wrist, but I wasn't hit. The gun hit the wall and ricocheted under
the sofa.

The burn on my hand made me jerk back, involuntarily, off
balance, and he jumped in with a wallop that caught me on the jaw that knocked
me further off balance.

I took half a dozen punches, and they hurt, before I could
get set to throw one back effectively. I took half a dozen more before I got in
my Sunday punch and Barranya folded up on the carpet.

I staggered across the room to the phone. My nose felt lopsided
and one of my eyes was hard to see out of. There was blood in my mouth and I
spat it out. A tooth came with it.

I got Holding on the phone, and told him. I said, “I guess
there's no one downstairs at the moment or they'd sure as hell be up here by
now.”

He said, “Swell work, Sarge. We'll be right over; sit on the
guy till we get there. How's your toothache coming?”

“Huh?” I said, and then it dawned on me that my whole face
and head ached, except for my tooth. I felt to see which one had been knocked
out in the fight, and it was!

After I'd hung up, I found Shultz, too, was a good host; his
whiskey was poorly hidden. My knees felt wobbly and I figured I'd earned this
one. I had another, and then heard voices and footsteps out in the hall, and
knew the homicide boys were back.

I walked over to the sofa where Barranya lay, to see if he
was conscious again. He wasn't, but bending over made my head swim and suddenly
my knees just weren't there any more. I don't know whether it was the whiskey,
or the fight I'd been through, or the relief that I didn't have to go to the
dentist.

But I'll never live down the fact that they came in a second
later---and found me sleeping peacefully on top of the murderer.

I got it the minute I saw that distorted face peering around
the corner of the turn in the hallway. I wasn't looking toward the hallway, of
course, but toward MacCready. Back of Mac's desk was a mirror and it was in the
mirror that I saw it.

For just a minute I thought I had 'em, then I remembered
Mac's screwy ideas on mental therapeutics, and I grinned. I kept the grin to
myself, though. Here's where I have some fun with good old Mac, I thought to
myself. Let him pull his gag and pretend to play along.

So I kept on with what I was saying. “Mac, old horse,” I
told him, “can't you get it out of your head that this isn't a professional
call? Quit psychoanalyzing me, dammit, or I'll leave you flat and hike right
back to Provincetown over these bloody roller-coaster anthills you call dunes,
and get myself drunk.”

He snorted, a well-bred Scotch snort. “You'd fall flat on
your lace before you got halfway. Bryce, how you ever made it out here's got me
beat. And how you ever write plays that get on Broadway, when you keep yourself
so full of whiskey that---” He shook his head in bewilderment.

“Ever see any of my plays, Mac? Maybe you'd get the
connection. But---”

I caught sight of that face again in the mirror, and I
calculated the angle and decided that Mac couldn't see it from where he sat.
The guy in the hall had come around the corner now, and was pussy-footing up to
the door. He was smiling, if you could call it a smile; one corner of his mouth
went up and the other down so his mouth looked like an unhealed diagonal wound
across the bottom of his face. His eyes were so narrowed you couldn't see the
whites. I thought crazily that if the British had done that at Bunker Hill they
wouldn't have got fired on at all.

All in all it wasn't a nice expression. I shuddered a bit,
involuntarily. Whoever was stooging for Mac on this gag of his ought to be on
the stage. He could do Dracula without makeup, unless he already had the makeup
on, and if he did, it was a wow.

Mac was talking again, it dawned on me. “If this wasn't my
vacation---” he was saying. “Listen, Bryce, even if it is, I'll take you on.
It'd take me three months to get you wrung out so you'd stay that way, but I'll
do it if you say the word. You're darned far on the road to being an alcoholic.
At the rate you're going, pal. . . .”

I grinned at him. “You underestimate me, old horse. I'm a
lush of the first water, right now. I like it. But listen, Mac, there is
something that worries me. I'm three months overdue on starting my next play,
and I haven't a ghost of an idea. I thought a summer in Provincetown would fix
me up. Cape Cod and all that and the picturesque fishing smacks and all that
sort of tripe. But---well, I'm worried stiff.”

I was, too. There's nothing worse than not having an idea
when you need an idea. That's the trouble with being a playwright. If you need
a house or a horse or a multiple-head drill or a set of golf clubs, you go out
and buy it, but if you need an idea and need it bad, you sit and stew and maybe
it comes and maybe it doesn't. If it doesn't, you go slowly nuts.

You get to the stage where you remember that an old friend
of yours is a psychiatrist and has his summer home on the other side of the
cape, with the waves of the Atlantic rolling into his front yard, and you hike
across the dunes to see him to find out what's wrong that you haven't got an
idea.

He said, “How to help you there, Bryce, I'm not sure. But
this should be good country for you. Eugene O'Neill got his start here, and
Millay, and others. Harry Kemp has a place only a few miles from here, and
. . .”

That was when the guy in the hallway reached around the door
jamb and switched off the light. Mac's head---I could still see dimly because
it was only eight-thirty and not completely dark out yet what with daylight
savings time and a bright moon---jerked around toward the doorway and I saw his
eyes widen. He reached quick for a drawer of his desk and then slowly started
to raise his hands up over his head instead. He was going to take it big, I
could see that.

I turned my head slowly toward the doorway. The man had
stepped fully into the room now, and although his face was in the shadow now, I
could see how big and powerful he was. He wore an overcoat three sizes too
large for him, and he held something in his hand that looked like a cross
between a pistol and a shotgun. It must be, I decided, a scattergun---one of
those things cautious householders keep on hand for burglars. It's useless at
any range to speak of, but up to twenty feet it can't miss a man, and it can't
miss doing unpleasant things to him. It shoots a small gauge shotgun shell.