The Day of the Guns (23 page)

From behind me Gretchen Lark said, “You really aren’t very smart, Tiger. Throw your gun on the chair.”

I didn’t have to turn around to be sure. I knew she had me lined up. I eased the hammer down on the .45 and did what she told me to. The move made the bullet crease on my side blaze into life again and I clamped my teeth together. The belt on my raincoat was too tight and I began to feel sick.

Gretchen Lark walked around the side of me, pointed the gun at a chair near the wall and said, “Sit down.”

Sweat was running into my eyes and dripping from my nose. I nodded, undid the belt of the coat, took it off and threw it next to Edith Caine. Then I sat down. I knew what she was waiting for. She had to make this look right and she was going to set it up. It wouldn’t be too hard. I had enough kills behind me to make me look like a madman. The story would be easy. Selwick had come for a portrait sitting when Churis came in to drop him. I had charged in and during the resulting gunfight everybody but Gretchen got knocked off. She could even inflict a minor wound on herself to make it look good and the story would be believed.

The thought was there in her mind because she picked up Vidor Churis’s gun and weighed it in her hand. Smilingly, Gretchen said, “The house is empty at this moment. If you’re hoping someone heard the shots you’ll be wrong, Tiger.”

I looked at Edith Caine sitting there so quietly. “I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.”

“Yes, you have,” Gretchen told me. “But you did spoil a wonderful situation.”

“Great.”

“Don’t you know how I was able to move against you, Tiger?”

I did now, but I let her say it.

“Burton was a lonely man. He was sick and overworked as well. His only real pleasure and chance to relax was when he came here to sit for his portrait. There were many things he took for his illness, but being a nurse I was able to prescribe other things too. They relieved his pain, of course, but with the use of simple truth serums, sodium pentothal, I extracted every secret he had and he never realized it. That’s how I knew about you. He told me of meeting you the first day he saw you. He was sick then and came here to relax. When he mentioned the name Rondine which you called Edith here we realized what might happen. You see, Rondine isn’t exactly unknown to us either.

“Then, it was Edith who told Burton Selwick that she was to meet you at your hotel and later he told me under deep sleep and we tried to kill you there. You handled yourself well, Tiger.

“Unfortunately, your friend had to die for you. I visited Edith at her apartment and saw the matches you left behind. That was very clumsy of you... or was it deliberate?” She thought a moment and nodded. “Yes, that is it. You did it deliberately thinking what you did about her. Or was it unconsciously, Tiger?”

“It was I who arranged for those so-called ‘contract killers.’ They weren’t very good at all and after all the money we spent! I knew you’d go to her apartment that one night and had those men ready. I thought I had them ready again when you took me home from the
Hall of the Two Sisters.”

Gretchen smiled again, and dramatically paced the room, the gun never leaving my stomach where it was aimed. In her pacing she stopped by the window, perched on the sill and changed guns in her hands so she had Churis’s pointed at me with her right.

“Funny,” she said, “all those elaborate plans that never seemed to work out and at the last moment you walk in all by yourself with an idiotic idea and turn your back on me. How strange fate is.”

“Where is Rondine, Gretchen?” I said.

“Dead. A long time ago. She was shot by one of our agents when she tried to get some papers back to England that would possibly grant her some protection for her past crimes.”

No, she wasn’t dead. She was very much alive, sitting ten feet away facing me and I loved her with all my heart and knew she loved me. I said, “Who was Rondine, Edith?” because I had to know.

Her eyes were directly on mine, loving, forgiving, sorry that it had to come out this way. “Rondine was my oldest sister Diana. She didn’t die in an air raid. She defected to the Nazis and worked for them against her own people. She was considered dead by the family and her name is never mentioned. She was the one shame they ever had.”

She smiled, her eyes wet. “They tell me I look exactly like her, Tiger. I know what it must have meant to you to see me so suddenly. But I couldn’t tell you, do you understand?” Her voice was soft, compassionate.

I still couldn’t believe it.
That was Rondine sitting there!

“Tiger... I couldn’t expose what Rondine did to my family. I couldn’t hurt them that much. I just had to put up with it.”

“And I lost a good friend because you didn’t have the nerve to talk.” I couldn’t keep the coldness out of my tone.

She dropped her eyes momentarily. “I—I’m sorry.”

There was an amused smile on Gretchen’s face as she listened to us, the gun never wavering in her hand. She had the back of Edith’s head and my stomach in perfect target and she could afford the amusement.
But I couldn’t look at Edith Caine in that chair and believe what she was telling me!

There was one thing I saw. Edith was looking at Gretchen’s reflection in the glass of a framed picture on the wall and one hand was already in the pocket of my coat. When it came out she had one of the pellets in her fingers and was getting it set on her knuckle and I felt a chill go over me that took all the fire out of my side and made me want to turn inside out.

I tried to yell for her not to do it but by then it was already done. She flipped the pellet back over her head toward Gretchen Lark’s feet and she never noticed it coming. The moment I let myself go to the floor, Edith did too and if Gretchen got off a shot it was drowned out in the wild blast from across the room. The violence of the explosion threw furniture all over and tumbled the chair over Edith into me and knocked the unconscious figure of Burton Selwick into a stack of paintings, completely oblivious to whatever happened.

I shoved the chair away, got up and reached for Edith. There were smudges on her face and a trickle of blood coming down her cheek, but no more. She touched my face once, ran to Selwick to make sure he was all right, then we both turned to look at the hole where the window had been.

Someplace down below Gretchen Lark would be lying in fragments.

She turned, looked at me, knowing I hadn’t taken my eyes off her for a long while, frowned at what she saw there and tried to speak. I beat her to it. “It could have been a beautiful plant, kid. Gretchen wasn’t going to knock you off because you two pulled it together. She sat there with a gun on us and could have killed us any time, the sooner the better. She was just letting you have your fun until you gave the signal. But you protected your own hide again, just like that last time. To come out clean with me you saw an angle and played it. You knew I had those damn things in my coat and took the big chance, just the way Rondine always did. If it went right you knew you could get me to fall for that phony story because I love you and would be sucker enough to let it lie.”

I had the .45 back in my hand again and the hammer was back.

She saw it.

But she wasn’t afraid.

She said, “Do you really love me, Tiger?”

“Yes, I really do, Rondine, and now you get it.”

“I love you, Tiger. As I told you before, I loved you from the first time I saw you. Did Rondine love you that way too?”

“Yes, Rondine, that’s the way you always did.” I lifted the snout of the gun.

“You made love to her many times, didn’t you?”

Her hands went to her jacket, took it off and threw it on the floor. Slowly, she undid her blouse, pulled it out of her skirt and let it follow. In that strange way women have, she reached behind her back and unfastened the snaps on her bra and took it away deliberately, her breasts full and lovely, bursting with pride at having been relieved of their restraint.

I felt the gun in my hand shake and held it steady.

“No good, Rondine, the act won’t work. You tried the same one before.”

My words didn’t stop her. Her fingers felt for the zipper on the side of the skirt, found it and pulled it down. She moved her hips, swayed and the skirt fell in a heap at her feet and with her thumbs she pushed down the slip on top of it.

Damn, my hand was no good, no good at all! The palm was slippery with sweat and muscles jerked and pulled up my back. My eyes seemed to burn and something was churning inside my mind. I felt an involuntary message of habit from my brain trying to tell my fingers to move, to pull the trigger, to kill her, kill her, kill her before it was too late, but my finger wouldn’t move.

The last act of the tableau was complete because she had the wisp of pink nylon in her hand and she was naked before me, beautiful, lovely, desirable, legs as graceful and firm as a statue, belly flat and moving with the swell of her breathing, breasts hard and flamingly pink-tipped now, chestnut hair still soft and gleaming, skin satin-sweet and waiting.

The gun began to get too heavy to hold and I let it down. She was going to win after all. Two dead and one unconscious at our feet and she could still do this.

She said, “If you had Rondine then you’ll know now for sure, Tiger.”

I couldn’t stop her when she walked to the couch. As languidly as a cat she lay down on it, her body and her eyes inviting me, wanting me. No, it was more than that. She was demanding me.

I had to. I was beyond choice. I loved her too much and too long. This was a Rondine I loved and had to have and to hell with the consequences.

She reached her arms up to me and smiled, the love in her eyes bright and shining. “Now you will find out, Tiger, my love. Now you will know,” she said to me. “You see... I’m still a virgin.”

And she was.