Murder in Black Letter by Poul William Anderson (classic novels to read txt) 📕

had altogether failed him. He answered questions without evasions, but like a robot.

Silenio had contacted him and Larkin the Tuesday of last week. It was to be a well paid job, ten thousand dollars on completion of the first assignment and a hundred dollars a day while they waited for the next. ("No, I didn't know nothing, I don't know who else we'd go after!") The trio caught a plane to San Francisco that night. At intervals on Wednesday and Thursday Silenio had conferred with whoever engaged them, while Larkin and O'Hearn looked for a suitable house. Their find was rented on Friday, an old house in a run-down district at the southern end of town; and each of them bought a good used car elsewhere. Meanwhile, on Thursday night, Larkin and O'Hearn had lined up Guido. That had been at Silenio's orders, presumably derived from the boss's. The boss himself had arranged for Bruce to come to the house on Saturday, calling him on the phone with some plausible story. They captured Bruce very simply, with a gun, and tied him up. Silenio questioned him. Bruce had gotten stubborn with outrage—Kintyre knew how stubborn that could be—and the interrogation took a few hours; even after he broke they continued the pain a while, to make sure. Finally they cut his throat over the bathtub, dressed him in old clothes, and got rid of the body across the Bay on Sunday night.

"The questions, you bastard," snarled Kintyre. "Didn't the questions Silenio was asking tell you something?"

"It was all in wop," groaned O'Hearn. "I don't know wop."

Italy again. Though I suppose that our X would have made a special effort to get an Italian-speaking lieutenant, as another safeguard for himself.

"One thing so far," murmured Yamamura. "Guido is in the clear."

"Is he?" said Kintyre bitterly. "Wouldn't it be a beautiful turnabout, to make himself look like the fall guy for his own scheme?"

He turned back to the crooked blind face on the table. "What did you do afterward?"

"Waited in the house. Played cards. Silenio got the money for this job in the afternoon. Cash. He went out for it. Larkin went to pay off the Lombardi sucker Tuesday evening. That was because he didn't show Monday, account of his brother. Larkin got into a fight. We didn't know what it meant. Silenio called the boss and they talked on the phone in wop. Silenio told me to go pick up Guido Lombardi tonight. I figured we was going to find out how much he knew and then maybe dump him too, but I don't know for sure."

"Did anything else go on, this night?"

"Silenio and Larkin had another job."

"Where?"

"I don't know." The voice had become a worn rattling.

"Were you supposed to meet them at the house?"

"I was supposed to wait there with Lombardi till they got back. Silenio wasn't telling either of us more'n he had to."

"Will they be back there now?"

"I dunno."

"Suppose they came back and didn't find you? What would they do?"

"Try and find out what happened, I guess. Wouldn't stay in the house if it looked like something had gone wrong."

"Where would they go?"

"I don't know. Some hotel, I guess."

"And what would you do, if you couldn't find them?"

"Go back to Chi, I guess."

"No spare rendezvous," said Yamamura. "Lousy doctrine."

"Not if you're using expendables," said Kintyre. "And this bum is expendable. I imagine Larkin is too, though enough more valuable to go with Silenio—where?"

"Over here," said Yamamura.

"Very likely to kill someone else." Kintyre looked dully at the stub of his cigarette on the floor. He didn't remember dropping it. "We'll read in the papers who it was."

"If we aren't the target ourselves," said Yamamura. "Right now anything seems possible." He sighed. "Well, I'd better call the police."

"Wait a bit," said Kintyre.

"But that house—God knows what's going on there, right now!"

"Nothing, I'm sure. If only because Silenio and Larkin will be worried by O'Hearn's absence. Let's have breakfast, at least, before calling. You devise a story that won't make us quite such lawbreakers. I'm going to try and sort out my thoughts. I have an idea. It's driving me crackers, Trig. I feel I know what this is all about and still there's some kind of wall between me and the knowledge. A wall I've built myself!"

"Hm," said Yamamura. He gave the other man a meditative stare. "Yes, it might be worth while waiting till after we eat."

Kintyre went out, beating a fist softly into his palm. Yamamura paused to release O'Hearn's eyes. O'Hearn lay and wept.

While the detective made breakfast in the cottage, Kintyre took a shower. Then a shave, clean clothes, tee shirt, khaki pants, tennis shoes, brought him physically closer to humanness.

Inside, he was afraid, and he did not know why.

Guido appeared in the kitchen as Kintyre re-entered. He looked at the others with deer shyness. "Good morning," he ventured.

"Hello," said Yamamura. "Pull up an egg and sit down."

Guido perched on a chair's edge. No one spoke until coffee and food were within them. Somehow, the blue and green planet beyond the windows had become alien; they sat in a private darkness.

"I—" began Guido. He stopped.

"Go ahead," said Yamamura. Kintyre listened with a fractional ear. Mostly he was inside his own skull, shouting for something which did not answer.

"I'd like to say thanks, is all," offered Guido.

"It's okay," said Yamamura.

"Look, are you sitting and worrying about me?"

"In a way. The trouble is, you see, if we take your story at face value, we have no plausible suspects left. But two more killers and their chief are loose, probably arranging another murder. If it hasn't already been done."

"Whose?" whispered Guido.

"If we knew that," said Yamamura gloomily, "we could get a police guard for him. But until we've identified the chief, there's no way of figuring who the next victim might be."

"No," said Kintyre.

He sat up straight, feeling how cold his hands were. It came to him, through a great hollowness—each instant he seemed more remote from himself—that he could have found his enemy before now. He had enough facts to reason on. He was still feeling his way a step at a time, but he felt there would be an end to his journey.

And he felt, without yet knowing why, that the horror waited for him there.

He said, sensing a resonance within his head, as if his voice formed echoes:

"It has to be someone who knew Bruce at least fairly well. He went to that house because of a telephone call. He didn't own a car and wouldn't borrow Margery's. That's a long awkward trip, by street train and bus. He wouldn't make it casually. He'd want to know why he was being asked to come to this address he'd never heard of before, without telling anyone. The person who called (and could have been right in Berkeley, of course) had to be somebody who could give Bruce a strong, convincing reason. What it was, I don't know. It doesn't matter now, it was surely a lie. But a lie he would accept! From a person he trusted."

He stopped. Guido said with a certain boy-eagerness: "Who knew him best? His girl friend!"

Kintyre shook his head, violently, uncertain why the idea should smite him so.

"Nope," said Yamamura. "Too much lets her out; hell, the simple fact that she doesn't speak Italian. That she hasn't the money, or the connections, or anything."

"I haven't the money either," said Guido defensively.

"For all I know, you could have ten million dollars hoarded," said Yamamura.

The anger in Guido's face reminded Kintyre of Corinna. He snatched for the memory, it warmed him a minute and was torn away again. He shivered.

"Guido's story has to be accepted, I think," he said. There was no color in his words, but they came fast. "All the psychological quirks he's shown. He bopped me with a stool to let Larkin get away, because he was deathly afraid. But he cried at having hurt me, even so trivially. Also: could that parcel of marijuana have been in the drawer by sheer coincidence? And even if he planned some complicated misdirection that made him his own fall guy, it would not have involved something as serious as dope. He could have gone to jail for that, or been deported. And why? What reason? Insane jealousy won't fit such an elaborate procedure. It would have to be money. And where would he, drifting between minor night club engagements, sponging off his parents when he isn't shacked up with some tart, where would he find time for a million-dollar enterprise?"

Guido reddened. "Hey!" he protested.

"You had that coming," said Yamamura. He turned his back on Guido, who slumped, pouting. "It doesn't look as if X really believed an accessory-to-murder rap could be hung on the boy," he remarked. "Not when you demolish it so fast."

"Perhaps not." Kintyre struggled for clarity within himself. "But Guido would have wriggled and evaded much more if the police had questioned him, dug in his heels at every step, for fear of the dope charge. When he finally realized the situation and confessed, if he did at all, it would have been too late. He would have served X's purpose of holding up the police for days.

"And the fact that he fell so neatly into the slot clinches the proof that X knows the Lombardi family well."

"You've ruled out Michaelis & Son," said Yamamura. "That's confirmed by the gangsters still operating with them in clink. Who's left, the writer?"

Kintyre said: "He blew into town less than two weeks ago, having never met Bruce in his life before. Their time together was a few meetings devoted to professional arguments. How could he know Guido? And his only motive would have been to eliminate Bruce. Simple murder would have sufficed, not calling in three expensive sadists to do a job of kidnaping and interrogation. Also, I proved to myself, without meaning to, that he's a physical coward. I doubt if he could have asked someone like Larkin the time of day. Or run the risk of detection. No, there was just one way Owens helped the killers, and that was unintentional."

"How?" asked Yamamura.

Kintyre looked at his hands. They were clasped together, as if to hold the safe nonmurderer, Jabez Owens, tightly to him. But the wind streamed and the sea ramped beneath it, Owens was whirled from his fingers and drowned with all the rest, all the rest. He said from the noise of great waters:

"Owens was after the Book of Witches, yes. First he tried bribery. Then, the minute he heard Bruce was dead, he went over to the history building, I suppose trying to get up nerve to go in and see if the volume was there. He saw me instead, and urged me to take Margery out that night; he did know, like everyone else, that she'd been living with Bruce. He burgled the apartment. An amateur job. If he'd used his brains, he would at least have taken some valuables. But he didn't even bother to open places where the book couldn't possibly be. That alone pretty well shows who did it. He tried again yesterday, in my office, actually pulled it off, but Clayton—well, all it accomplished was to divert our attention."

He wondered remotely how they could fail to see what was happening to him; and how long before it broke his shell and they could not escape seeing.

"Bruce's immediate family?" said Yamamura. "No motive, no money, no connections, no opportunity. Write 'em off. Can you think of any of his friends at the University who aren't eliminated by the same reasoning?"

"No."

"But who's left? Clayton? What motive? And in all the months he's been here, I'd have an inkling if he weren't honest. No hint of underworld tie-ins. Who's left?"

Kintyre stood before the last wall. It had the form of a ship's tilted deck.

"If I knew why," he said, holding his voice utterly planar, "I think the how would follow. Why was Bruce killed? Because of something