“Obviously they left the apartment with the woman.”
“And why would she take them?”
“Equally obviously, to discount the story she knew Dupaul would tell — the true story of what happened.”
“But, continuing to play Devil’s Advocate—” It was clear Gunnerson was enjoying himself “—why would she want to discount Dupaul’s story? Remember,” Gunnerson said, raising a finger for emphasis, “Dupaul was telling the truth. Neeley was there with a gun and he was going to kill the two of them. Dupaul was honestly convinced of that. Dupaul, therefore, saved the woman’s life. Now, why would she be so ungrateful as to remove the only evidence that would — or could — get her benefactor off the hook?”
Ross shook his head stubbornly.
“Let’s make a small modification in our basic premise that we believe Dupaul was telling the truth. We now believe Dupaul was telling the truth as he saw it! It will probably make a difference.”
“Fair enough,” Gunnerson agreed equably. “Still, why would the woman walk out with anything except herself? I can certainly understand her taking a powder from a murder scene to save herself a bucketful of grief, but why bother to load herself down with a lot of useless garbage like a suitcase and a gun? For ballast—?”
“Mike—”
“Let me go on. All right, maybe she’d take the gun. They come in handy sometimes. But even then, as the prosecutor said, why not the gun she gave the kid? At least she knew that one was loaded. And why the suitcase? She could have been seen with it. After all, a dame traipsing around lugging a suitcase in the middle of the night makes for easy identification. Not to mention guys offering lifts in cars, among other offers. Why didn’t she leave the thing where it was? Plus giving Dupaul a chance to save his neck?”
Ross stared at him a moment. He wrinkled his forehead in thought.
“When you put it that way, Mike, there can only be one reason, can’t there? Think about it.”
Gunnerson stared back. “A reason to walk out with somebody else’s suitcase? I don’t get it.”
“Think it over carefully, Mike.”
Gunnerson’s frown deepened. “I’ve thought it over carefully, and I still don’t get it.”
“Look at the whole picture from the beginning,” Hank said slowly. “A drunken kid in his teens, who — incidentally — had just come into a couple of hundred thousand dollars; a so-called chance meeting in a bar, a sexy woman, a bedroom scene; enter outraged husband back unexpectedly from a business trip; add a gun forced on the drunken kid; a shot; lots of blood around...” He stared at Mike coolly. “What does it sound like?”
“I know. It sounds like the old chicken-bladder swindle,” Gunnerson said grumpily. “Except for a few things.”
He started to tick them off on his fingers as Ross listened.
“One. In the swindle, the gun the drunk receives from the woman only holds blanks. This one held real bullets. Two. In the swindle the gun used is the one the woman takes away from the mark. This one was left and the other gun was taken away. Three. In the swindle, the woman in the case hustles the mark out of the room and gets in touch with him later — to blackmail him. In this case the mark remained and it was the woman who disappeared. And never got in touch with anyone since. Four. In the swindle the pseudo-husband usually has a plastic bag full of chicken blood in his mouth to bite on when the blank hits him. Here the only blood was his own. Five. In the swindle they always know who the sucker is and work a long time to set him up. In this case, to believe our truthful Billy Dupaul, he happened to meet the lady in a bar by accident.”
“You know better than that,” Ross said. “He happened to meet the lady the way the victim of a card trick happens to pick any card in the deck. The card is forced on him, and I’d bet the idea of that particular bar at that particular time was forced on Billy Dupaul in the same way. Suggested subtly, maybe, but definitely suggested.”
“By whom?”
“I’d like to know! Possibly the man Dupaul was talking to in that bar after he left the hotel and before he went to the Mountain Top Bar.”
“You’re reaching, Hank! How would the steerer know he’d go there?”
“As I said before, I’d enjoy knowing.”
“And how about the other points I raised?”
“Well,” Ross said, considering, “as far as the chicken blood is concerned, the woman could have cleaned that up as well.”
Gunnerson eyed him sardonically.
“She doesn’t know when the cops will get there; she’s in the room of a man she thinks is dead, killed violently; she has to get dressed — and now, in addition to carrying off a useless gun and a suitcase — so she won’t float, I imagine — she now stops to do a bit of housecleaning? And you wouldn’t call that reaching, Hank?”
“We don’t even know the swindlers bothered with chicken blood,” Ross said stubbornly. “Dupaul was so drunk he could have been convinced he really shot the man even without the evidence of blood.”
“A rather long chance for swindlers to take, don’t you think?” Gunnerson said. “Supposing Dupaul stuck to orange juice when he got mad?”
“We don’t even know whether there was chicken blood around or not,” Ross said, still unwilling to give up his argument. “After all, nobody looked for it. The police come in on a guy covered with blood. Are they going to stop to take samples to be analyzed of the blood, or are they going to forget it and rush him to the hospital? And in the hospital are they going to wipe his chin and send the scrapings to the lab to see if a chicken bled on him while he was damned near bleeding to death himself?”
He raised a hand abruptly, preventing Gunnerson from answering.
“I doubt it. Let’s look at it like this. There’s only one condition that seems to fit the facts. Let’s assume it started out as a simple swindle, and then something went wrong. Unaccountably, the gun wasn’t loaded with blanks, but with shells—” He grinned and shook his head. “No, I don’t like that. That would really be reaching...”
“That wouldn’t be reaching,” Mike said. “That would be plain falling down!”
“Let’s start over. Let’s assume it was a swindle as far as Raymond Neeley was concerned, but that as far as the woman known as Grace was concerned, it was a simple assassination attempt. How about that?”
“You promised not to reach,” Mike said reproachfully.
“That’s not reaching,” Ross said, insulted. “You admit the picture has all the earmarks of an old tried-and-true swindle. The poor sucker thinks he shot the husband and is open for blackmail from then on, or to go to prison for knocking off the husband of a woman he made sexual advances to. Not a very good spot to be in.”
“Wait a second—”
“You wait,” Ross said, his arguments firming themselves in his mind. “You raised certain legitimate objections; well, I’m answering them. If it was a swindle scheme and the gun the woman handed Dupaul had live ammunition in it, we can scarcely believe the ammunition got there by accident. So, who put it there? Neeley, even assuming he provided the gun? I’m inclined to doubt he would arrange to be shot. Dupaul? He says he knows nothing about the gun, and our scenario has him cast as Honest Harry, whose word is good as gold. Or platinum. So it has to be the woman—”
“If there was a woman,” Mike said sourly.
“Are we back to that?” Ross looked at his companion reproachfully. “There was a woman. Our client, Honest Harry, said so, and arguing is counterproductive. Now, if this woman put the ammunition in the gun, or even knew the gun was loaded when she handed it over, then she was suckering Billy Dupaul into killing Neeley for her.”