The Way Some People Die (27 page)

“I see. Self-defense. Neat. Only, can you get away with it?”

“I’m telling you the truth,” she said.

“It’s the first time if you are.”

“Yes, the first time.” She spoke rapidly and low. “When I drove Joe to the Point Tuesday morning, I saw Keith’s car at the docks. He knew Joe would turn up there: I told him myself. I didn’t realize what Keith was planning. I went back to Los Angeles, to Keith’s apartment, and waited for him there. When he came home I asked him what he had done, and he confessed to me. He’d fought with Joe on the boat and pushed him into the ocean. He thought the way was clear now for us to marry. I couldn’t conceal what I thought of him, I didn’t try. He was a murderer, and I told him so. Then he pulled a gun on me, the gun he’d taken from Joe, your gun, as you guessed he did. I pretended to be convinced—I had to save my life—and I made up to him and got the gun away from him. I shot him. I had to. Then I panicked and ran out and threw the gun in the drain, and when the police questioned me I lied about everything. I was afraid. I knew that Joe was dead, and it made no difference to him if I blamed Keith’s death on him. I know now I made a mistake. I should have called the police when it happened, and told them the truth.”

Her breast rose and fell irregularly. Like any pretty woman with mussed hair, blood on her face, she had a waiflike appeal, which the steady gun destroyed. I thought of Speed, and saw how easy it was to wilt in a gun’s shadow. Though I had faced them before, single and multiple, each time was a fresh new experience. And a single gun in the hands of a woman like Galley was the most dangerous weapon. Only the female sex was human in her eyes, and she was its only really important member.

“What truth?” I said. “You’ve changed your story so often I doubt if you know what really happened.”

“Don’t you believe me?” Her face seemed to narrow and lengthen. I had never seen her look ugly before. An ugly woman with a gun is a terrible thing.

“I believe you partly. No doubt you shot Dalling. The circumstances sound a bit artificial.”

The blood from her cut cheek wriggled like a black worm at the corner of her mouth. “The police will believe me, if you’re not there to deny it. I can turn Gary round my little finger.” It was a forlorn boast.

“You’re losing your looks,” I said. “Murders take it out of a woman. You pay so much for them that they’re never the bargain they seem to be.” I had heard a noise from the back of the house, and was talking to cover it. It sounded like a drunk man floundering in the dark.

She glanced at the gun in her hands and back to my face, imagining the flight of the bullet. I saw her knuckles tense around the butt.

And I leaned forward a little without rising, shifting my weight to the balls of my feet, still talking: “If you shoot me, I’ll get to you before I die, I promise. You’ll have no looks left, even if you survive. Even if you survive, the police will finish the job. You’re vulnerable as hell.” The back door creaked. “Vulnerable as hell,” I repeated loudly. “Two murders, or three, already, and more coming up. You can’t kill everybody. We’re too many for one crazy girl with a gun.”

The floundering footsteps moved on the kitchen floor. She heard them. Her eyes shifted from me to the door on her right, came back to me before I could stir. She stepped sideways out of the chair, retreating with her back to the window, so that her gun commanded my side of the room and the kitchen doorway.

Mario came into the doorway and leaned there for an instant with one raised hand gripping the frame. His chin
had been smashed by something heavier than a fist. Blood coursed down his neck into the black hair that curled over his open shirt-collar. There was death in his face. I wasn’t sure he could see until he advanced on Galley. His smashed mouth blew a bubble in which the room hung upside down, tiny and blood-colored.

She yelped once like a dog and fired point-blank. The slug spun Mario on his heels and flung him bodily against the wall. He pushed himself away from the wall with his hands and turned to face her. She fired again, the black gun jumping like a toad. Still her white hands held it firm, and her white devoted face was watching us both.

Mario doubled forward and sank to his knees. The indestructible man crawled toward the woman, leaking blood like black oil on the rug. Her third shot drilled the bandaged top of his head, and finished Mario. Still she was not content. Standing over him, she pumped three bullets into his back as fast as she could fire.

I counted them, and when the gun was empty I took it away from her. She didn’t resist.

CHAPTER
35
:     
When I set the telephone down
, she was sitting in the chair I had pushed her into, her closed eyelids tremorless as carved ivory, her passionate mouth closed and still. From where I stood on the other side of the room, she seemed tiny and strange like a figurine, or an actress sitting on a distant stage. Mario lay face down between us.

A shudder ran through her body and her eyes came open. “I’m glad I didn’t kill you, Archer. I didn’t want to
kill you, honestly.” Her voice had the inhuman quality of an echo.

“That was nice of you.” I stepped over the prone body and sat down facing her. “You didn’t want to kill Mario, either. Like Dalling, you killed him in self-defense.” I sounded strange to myself. The fear of death had made a cold lump in my throat which I was still trying to swallow.

“You’re a witness to that. He attacked me with a deadly weapon.” She glanced at the metal knuckles on the dead man’s fist, and touched her cheek. “He struck me with it.”

“When?”

“In the garage a few minutes ago.”

“How did you get there?”

“He came into George’s Café and forced me to leave with him. I had no gun. He’d got the idea that I knew where his brother had left the money. I knew there was a gun out here, in the garage where Joe had hidden it. I told Mario the money was here, and he made me drive him out.” Her voice was clear and steady, though the words came out with difficulty. “He was almost crazy, threatening to kill me, with that awful thing on his hand. I got hold of Joe’s gun and shot him with it, once. I thought he was dead. I managed to get into the house before I fainted.” She sighed. With the emotional versatility of a good actress, she was slipping back into the brave-little-woman role that had taken me in before, and wouldn’t again.

“You might get by with a self-defense plea if you’d only killed one man. Two in a week is too many. Three is mass murder.”

“Three?”

“Dalling and Mario and Joe.”

“I didn’t kill Joe. How could I? I can’t even swim.”

“You’re a good liar, Galley. You have the art of mixing fact with your fantasy, and it’s kept you going for a week. But you’ve run out of lies now.”

“I didn’t kill him,” she repeated. Her body was stiff in the chair, her hands clenched tight on the arms. “Why should I kill my own husband?”

“Spare me the little-wife routine. It worked for a while, I admit. You had me and the cops convinced that you were shielding Joe. Now it turns my stomach. You had plenty of reasons to kill him, including thirty thousand dollars. It must have looked like a lot of money after years of nurse’s work on nurse’s pay. You probably married Joe with the sole intention of killing him as soon as he was loaded.”

“What kind of a woman do you think I am?” Her face had lost its impassivity and was groping for an expression that might move me.

I touched the dead man with the toe of my shoe. “I just saw you pump six .45 slugs into a man who was dying on his feet. Does that answer your question?”

“I had to. I was terrified.”

“Yeah. You have the delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake, and you react like one. You killed Mario because he figured out that you murdered his brother. Joe probably warned him about you.”

“You’d have a hard time proving that.” Her eyes were like black charred holes in her white mask.

“I don’t have to. Wait until the police lab men have a look at the deep-freeze unit in your kitchen.”

“How—?” Her mouth closed tight, an instant too late. She had confirmed my guess.

“Go on. How did I know that you kept Joe in cold storage for three days?”

“I’m not talking.”

“I didn’t know it until now. Not for certain. It clears up a lot of things.”

“You’re talking nonsense again. Do I have to listen to you?”

“Until the sheriff’s car gets here from Palm Springs, yes. There’s a lot of truth to be told, after all the lies, and if you won’t tell it I will. It might give you a little insight into yourself.”

“What do you think you are, a psychoanalyst?”

“Thank God I’m not yours. I wouldn’t want to have to explain what made you do what you did. Unless you were in love with Herman Speed?”

She laughed. “That old stallion? Don’t be a silly boy. He was my patient.”

“You used him then. You got the lowdown on Joe’s dope-smuggling from him. I take it he was glad enough to spoil the game for the man who fingered him and stole his business. Perhaps Speed was using you, at that. After talking to both of you, I imagine it was his idea in the first place. He was the brains—”

“Speed?” I had touched a nerve. So it had been her idea.

“Anyway, you went to San Francisco with him when he got out of the hospital. You sent your mother a Christmas card from there, and that was your first mistake—mixing sentiment with business. After you’d worked out the plan, you let your mother sweat out the next two months without hearing from you, because you intended to use her. You came back to Pacific Point and married Joe: no doubt he’d asked you before and was waiting for your answer. Speed went to Reno to try and raise the necessary money. Unfortunately he succeeded. Which brings us down to last Friday night—”

“You,” she said, “not us. You lost me long ago. You’re all by yourself.”

“Maybe some of the details are wrong or missing: they’ll be straightened out in court. I don’t know, for example, what you put in Joe’s food or drink Friday night when he came home from his last boat-trip. Chloral hydrate, or something that leaves no trace? You know more about things like that than I do.”

“I thought you were omniscient.”

“Hardly. I don’t know whether Dalling pushed in on your project, or was invited. Or was it a combination of both? In any case, you needed the use of this house of his, and you needed help. Speed was busy holding up his end of a phony honeymoon. Dalling was the best you could get in the clutch. When Joe went to sleep, Dalling helped you carry him out through his apartment and down the back way to the car. At this end, you hoisted him into the freezer and let him smother. So far it had been simple. Joe was dead, and you had the heroin. Speed had the money and the contacts. But your biggest problem still faced you. You knew if Dowser caught on to you, you wouldn’t live to enjoy your money. Perhaps you heard what his gorillas did to Mario Friday night, just on the off chance that he knew something about it. You had to clear yourself with Dowser. That’s where I came in, and that’s where you made your big mistake.”

“Anything with you in it is a mistake. I only hope you repeat this fable in public, to the police. I’ll put you out of business.” But she couldn’t muster enough conviction to support the words. They sounded desperately thin.

“I’ll be in business when you’re in Tehachapi, or in the gas chamber. You thought you could call me in to take a fall, then turn me off like a tap, or kiss me off with a little casual sex. It was a tricky idea, a little too tricky to work. You and your radio actor persuaded your mother
to hire me to look for you: you probably wrote the script. Then you arranged for me to find you and be convinced that Joe was alive and kicking. Dalling sneaked up on the porch behind me and sandbagged me. You even faked a warning that came too late, to demonstrate good faith. You removed my gun and filed it for future reference. I don’t know whether you were already planning to kill your partner. You must have seen that he was going to pieces. But you kept him alive as long as possible, because you still needed his help.

“Joe went back into the trunk of your car. In his condition, he must have made an awkward piece of luggage. You and Keith drove separately to Pacific Point. He got the body aboard the
Aztec Queen
, took it to sea, dumped it into the water, and swam ashore to your headlights. You took him back to the dock, where his car was, and the two of you drove to Los Angeles. That took care of the body, and more important, it took care of Dowser. It would be obvious, if and when the body was found, that Joe had drowned in a getaway attempt.

“That left just one fly in your ointment, your partner. He was useful for physical work that you couldn’t do, like rowing dead bodies around harbors and starting boat-engines, but he was a moral weakling. You knew he couldn’t stand the pressure that was coming. Besides, he’d be wanting his share of the cash. So you went up to his apartment with him and paid him off with a bullet. A bullet from my gun. Hid my gun where the cops would be sure to find it. Went home to bed and, if I know your type, slept like a baby.”

“Did I?”

“Why not? You’d killed two men and kept yourself in the clear. I have an idea that you like killing men. The real payoff for you wasn’t the thirty thousand. It was smothering
Joe, and shooting Keith and Mario. The money was just a respectable excuse, like the fifty dollars to a call-girl who happens to be a nymphomaniac. You see, Galley, you’re a murderer. You’re different from ordinary people, you like different things. Ordinary people don’t throw slugs into a dead man’s back for the hell of it. They don’t arrange their lives so they have to spend a week-end with a corpse. Did it give you a thrill, cooking your meals in the same room with him?”

I had finally got to her. She leaned out of the chair towards me and spoke between bared teeth: “You’re a dirty liar! I couldn’t eat. I hated it. I had to get out of the house. By Sunday night I was going crazy with it—Joe crouched in there with frost on him—” A dry sob racked her. She covered her face with her hands.

Somewhere in the distance a siren whined.