HCC 115 - Borderline Read online

  “Good,” I said.

  “Living I like very much better than remembering. Goodbye, Mr. Nobody.”

  The door slammed, and Ray Powell and I were alone. He glared at me.

  “What in hell do you want, exactly?”

  “To talk to you.”

  “You need a gun for that?”

  “Probably.”

  He grinned disarmingly. “Guns make me nervous.”

  “They never did before. You’ve got a knack for getting hold of unregistered guns, Powell. Is there another one in the bedroom?”

  “I don’t get it,” he said. He scratched his head. “You must mean something, London. Spit it out.”

  “Don’t play games.”

  “I—”

  “Cut it,” I said. “You killed Karen Price. You knew she was going to do the cake bit because you were the one who put the idea in Phil Abeles’ head.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He’s forgotten. But he’ll remember with a little prompting. You set her up and then you killed her and tossed the gun on the floor. You figured the police would arrest Donahue, and you were right. But you didn’t think they would let him go. When they did, you went to his place with another gun. He let you in. You shot him, made it look like suicide, and let the one death cover the other.”

  He shook his head in wonder. “You really believe this?”

  “I know it.”

  “I suppose I had a motive,” he said musingly. “What, pray tell, did I have against the girl? She was good in bed, you know. I make it a rule never to kill a good bed partner if I can help it.” He grinned. “So why did I kill her?”

  “You didn’t have a thing against her,” I said.

  “My point exactly. I—”

  “You killed her to frame Donahue,” I added. “You got to Karen Price while the bachelor dinner was still in the planning stage. You hired her to make a series of calls to Donahue, jealous calls threatening to kill him or otherwise foul up his wedding. It was going to be a big joke—she would scare him silly; and then for a capper she would pop out of the cake as naked as the truth and tell him she was just pulling his leg.

  “But you topped the gag. She popped out of the cake covered with a smile and you put a bullet in her and left Donahue looking like the killer. Then, when you thought he was getting off the hook, you killed him. Not to cover the first murder—you felt safe enough on that score…because you really didn’t have a reason to kill the girl herself. You killed Donahue because he was the one you wanted dead all along.”

  Powell was still grinning. Only not so self-assuredly now. In the beginning, he hadn’t been aware of how much I knew. Now he was learning and it wasn’t making him happy.

  “I’ll play your game,” he said. “I killed Karen, even though I didn’t have any reason. Now why did I kill Mark? Did I have a reason for that one?”

  “Sure.”

  “What?”

  “For the same reason you hired Karen to bother Donahue,” I said. “Maybe a psychiatrist could explain it better. He’d call it transference.”

  “Go on.”

  “You wanted Mark Donahue dead because he was going to marry Lynn Farwell. And you don’t want anybody to marry Lynn Farwell. Powell, you’d kill anybody who tried.”

  “Keep talking,” he said.

  “How am I doing so far?”

  “Oh, you’re brilliant, London. I suppose I’m in love with Lynn?”

  “In a way.”

  “That’s why I’ve never asked her to marry me. And why I bed down anything else that gets close enough to jump.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re out of your mind, London.”

  “No,” I said. “But you are.” I took a breath. “You’ve been in love with Lynn for a long time. Four years, anyway. It’s no normal love, Powell, because you’re not a normal person. Lynn’s part of a fixation of yours. She’s sweet and pure and unattainable in your mind. You don’t want to possess her completely because that would destroy the illusion. Instead you compensate by proving your virility with any available girl. But you can’t let Lynn marry someone else. That would take her away from you. You don’t want to have her—except for an occasional evening, maybe—but you won’t let anyone else have her.”

  He was tottering on the edge now…trying to take a step toward me and then backing off. I had to push him over that edge. If he cracked, then he would crack wide open. If he held himself together he might wriggle free. I knew damn well he was guilty, but there wasn’t enough evidence to present to a jury. I had to make him crack.

  “First I’m a double murderer,” Powell said. “Now I’m a mental case. I don’t deny that I like Lynn. She’s a sweet, clean, decent girl. But that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Donahue’s the second man who almost married her. The first one was four years ago. Remember John? You introduced the two of them. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

  “He wouldn’t have been good for her. But it didn’t matter. I suppose you know he died in a car accident.”

  “In a car, yes. Not an accident. You gimmicked the steering wheel. Then you let him kill himself. You got away clean with that one, Powell.”

  I hadn’t cracked him yet. I was close, but he was still able to compose himself.

  “It was an accident,” he exclaimed. “Besides, it happened a long time ago. I’m surprised you even bother mentioning it.”

  I ignored his words. “The death shook Lynn up a lot,” I said. “It must have been tough for you to preserve your image of her. The sweet and innocent thing turned into a round-heeled little nymph for a while.”

  “That’s a damned lie.”

  “It is like hell. And about that time you managed to have your cake and eat it, too. You kept on thinking of her as the unattainable ideal. But that didn’t stop you from taking her virginity, did it? You ruined her, Powell!”

  He was getting closer to the borderline. His face was white and his hands were hard little fists. The muscles in his neck were drum-tight.

  “I never touched her!”

  “Liar!” I was shouting now. “You ruined that girl, Powell!”

  “Damn you, I never touched her! Nobody did, damn you! She’s still a virgin! She’s still a virgin!”

  I took a breath. “The hell she is,” I yelled. “I had her last night, Powell. She came to my room all hot to trot and I bedded her until she couldn’t see straight.”

  His eyes were wild.

  “Did you hear me, Powell? I had your girl last night. I had Lynn, Powell!”

  And that cracked him.

  He charged me like a wild man, his whole body coordinated in the spring. I stepped back, swung aside. He tried to turn and come toward me but his momentum kept him from pulling it off. By the time he got back on the right track, my hand had gone up and come down. The barrel of the gun caught him just behind the left ear. He took two more little steps, carried along by the sheer force of his rush. Then he folded up and went out like an ebbing tide.

  He wasn’t out long. By the time Jerry Gunther got there, flanked by a pair of uniformed cops, Powell was babbling away a mile a minute, spending half the time confessing to the three murders and the other half telling anyone who would listen that Lynn Farwell was a saint.

  They started to put handcuffs on him. Then they changed their minds and bundled him up in a straitjacket.

  11

  “I guess I missed my calling,” Ceil said. “I should have been a detective. I probably would have flopped there, too, but the end might have been different. We all know what girls become when they don’t make it as actresses. What do lousy detectives turn to?”

  “Cognac,” I said. “Pass the bottle.”

  She passed and I poured. We were in her apartment on Sullivan Street. It was Tuesday night, Ray Powell had long since finished confessing, and Ceil Gorski had just proved to me that she could cook a good meal.

>   “You figured it out beautifully,” she said. “But do I get an assist on the play?”

  “Easily.” I tucked tobacco into my pipe, lit up. “You managed to get my mind working. Powell was a genius at murder. A certifiable psychotic, but also a genius. He set things up beautifully. First of all, the frame couldn’t have been neater. He very carefully set up Donahue with means, motive and opportunity. Then he shot the girl and left Donahue on the hook.”

  I worked on the cognac. “The neat thing was this—if Donahue managed to have an alibi, if by some chance somebody was watching him when the shot was fired, Powell was still in the clear. He himself was one of the few men in the room with no conceivable motive for wanting Karen Price dead.”

  Ceil moved a little closer on the couch. I put an arm around her. “Then the way he got rid of Donahue was sheer perfection,” I continued. “He made it look enough like suicide to close the case as far as the police were concerned. And Jerry Gunther isn’t an easy man to bulldoze. He’s thorough. But Powell made it look good.”

  “You didn’t swallow it.”

  “That’s because I play hunches. Even so, I was up a tree by then. Because the murder had a double edge to it. Even if he muffed it somehow, even if it didn’t go over as suicide, Donahue would be dead and he would be in the clear. Because there was only one way to interpret it—Donahue had been killed by the man who killed Karen Price, obviously, and had been killed so that the original killing would go unsolved. That made me suspect Joe Conn and never let me guess at Powell, not even on speculation. Even with the second killing he hid the fact that Donahue and not Karen was the real target.”

  “And that’s where I came in,” she said happily.

  “That’s exactly where you came in,” I agreed. “You and your active imagination. You thought how grim it would be if Karen had only been playing a joke with those phone calls. And that was the only explanation in the world for the calls. I had to believe Donahue was getting the calls, and that Karen was making them. A disguised voice might work once, but she’d called him a few times.

  “That left two possibilities, really. She could be jealous—which seemed contrary to everything I had learned about her. Or it could be a gag. But if she was jealous, then why in hell would she take the job popping out of the cake? So it had to be a gag, and once it was a gag, I had to guess why someone would put her up to it. And from that point—”

  “It was easy.”

  “Uh-huh. It was easy.”

  She snuggled closer. I liked her perfume. Liked the feel of her body beside me.

  “It wasn’t that easy,” she said. “You know what? I think you’re a hell of a good detective. And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “I also think you’re a rotten businessman.”

  I smiled. “Why?”

  “Because you did all that work and didn’t make a dime out of it. You got a retainer from Donahue, but that didn’t even cover all the time you spent before Karen was killed, let alone the time since then. And you probably will never collect.”

  “I’m satisfied.”

  “Because justice has been done?”

  “Partly. Also because I’ll be rewarded.”

  She upped her eyebrows. “How? You won’t make another nickel out of the case, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “I’ll make something more important than money.”

  “What?”

  She was soft and warm beside me. And it was our third evening together. Not even an amateur tramp could mind a pass on a third date.

  “What are you going to make?” she asked, innocently.

  I took her face between my hands and kissed her. She closed her eyes and purred like a happy cat.

  “You,” I said.

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