“All right, yeah, I was down in L.A. on other business and I got hired by the piano player to get a line on you. But...”
Dunc was sitting on the straight-back chair across the room. He took off the navy watch cap.
“You played me like a fisherman plays a trout, played me up here, gave me a job so you could keep an eye on me for Pepe.” His face tightened. “Pepe got Penny killed, Drinker.”
“What are you talking about? She ran off the road—”
“I saw the cut line and sawed steering linkage myself.”
“Aw, Jesus Christ, Dunc! Tin so fucking sorry...” He took a gulp of coffee. “Listen, we can go after him! We—”
“I’ve already gone after him — through Mr. David.” Dunc was on his feet, striding up and down the room, ignoring Drinker’s reaction to what he had said. “When I told you we were getting married in Reno, you called Pepe to alert him. He told you to steer me his way, he’d decided I was dangerous because of Las Vegas, so—”
Drinker had to ask it. “You never suspected him at all?”
“Not until Penny was dead — and then it was too late.” He shook his head. “Just a fucking dumb naive punk kid, Drinker.”
Drinker sighed and slumped lower in his chair, knees apart, hands hanging down between them. Dunc kept on pacing.
“But Pepe didn’t fuck up the Grey Ghost’s brakes and steering. He hired the man on the scene to do that for him.”
“Hey, just a minute! You’re not saying that I—”
“Of course I am, Drinker. Who else could have done it? That was the call you got — there was no office break-in.”
Drinker slumped lower so his right hand was now touching the inside of his left calf. Dunc had stopped pacing.
“You’re dead wrong,” Drinker said in a weary voice.
Now he was touching the butt of the little .25-caliber backup piece he always carried strapped inside his left ankle.
Dunc went right on. “And then on Monday morning you called to send us flying down the mountain as fast as we could...”
Drinker said abruptly, “Did you come here to kill me, kid?”
“I don’t know, Drinker. I just—”
Drinker jerked the six-inch .25-caliber revolver from its ankle holster and shot Dunc from six feet away.
The little slug tugged the sleeve of Dunc’s overcoat, but by then he was spinning to his left, moving fast, his gloved left hand jerking out Drinker’s office gun, a Colt .38 revolver, firing it while on the move.
The slug entered Drinker’s right temple from nine inches away, bulging his eyes and slapping his head to one side as its force drove him over against the left arm of the leather chair.
Dunc stared wide-eyed, shocked, at the corpse he had made. If he hadn’t meant to kill Drinker, why had he brought Drinker’s office gun with him?
Larkie straightened up, holding his bloody prize above his head; then he threw it far out into the swamp.
Suddenly Dunc knew, with a blinding clarity, that this was what the Las Vegas priest had been talking about. Not what he thought he had been talking about, but what he had been. Because the weight of guilt over Penny’s death had shifted, just a little, inside Dunc. Not the feeling of loss, but the guilt. What had Penny said in the dream? Now you can go on.
What said the Old Testament? Eye for eye. Simple justice.
He said to the corpse, “I’m still a better fucking shot than you are, Drinker.”
No one was ringing the bell, no one was pounding on the door. The killing could have happened in a vacuum. So go on. Think it through. Blow-back particles on Drinker’s right hand. Powder-scorching around the bullet hole in his temple — a bullet from his own gun... Suicide.
Dunc picked up the ankle gun, pocketed it. Wrapped Drinker’s right hand around the Colt .38, then let hand and revolver fall naturally. What else? Bullet hole!
He found Drinker’s slug lodged in the wall six inches from a framed picture. Dig it out, or leave it there? But on the far wall was a larger picture, a Maxfield Parrish print, blue ladies in diaphanous gowns with blue mountains behind them. He switched the prints. Maxfield Parrish covered the bullet hole.
He was halfway out the door when he remembered the ankle holster. Empty ankle holster. He went back and got it.
At 7:58 Monday morning Dunc trudged up the inner stairs at EDWARD COPE — INVESTIGATIONS. The newspapers had carried the explosion at the Whams’ flat, two dead. April — identified from the teeth in the half of her lower jaw they’d found — and an unidentified male too lightly built to be her husband.
In an allied story a private investigator who had been a marine demolitions expert in the war had been found dead in his apartment, an apparent suicide, with a large amount of unexplained cash and the remnants of a bomb-making kit...
Sherry was at her desk, her eyes red with weeping.
“I don’t believe it,” she said to Dunc.
“That Drinker would set a—”
“He’d kill anybody for money. But kill himself? Never!”
“He kept bad company,” Dunc said in a soft voice.
Her gaze faltered. “Dunc, I’m so sorry about Penny...”
“Yeah. Me too.”
There were volumes in the exchange. She ducked her head, ran for the stairs, ran down them, went out. He stood as if listening for something, then walked over to Drinker’s private office. He stood in the open doorway, looking in, overwhelmed with rage, anguish, love, regret, nostalgia, hatred.
All gone. Everything. His beloved Penny. His child. Drinker. Even Sherry. His dreams of being a writer. His joy at being a private eye. He’d clean out his desk, get his stuff from Ma Booger’s, say goodbye to Mickey, and hit the road again.
To go where? To do what?
There were tentative female steps on the stairs. He felt an upsurging in his chest. Sherry, coming back. They would sit down, talk it through, hash it out, get everything out in the open.
But it was a middle-aged woman, well dressed, her face crumpled with loss and indecision. She paused at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Cope?”
“Mr. Cope... died suddenly over the weekend. The office is no longer—”
“Oh. I’m so sorry.” She made a vague gesture of regret, but she might not have heard him. “I had hoped to hire him... My daughter... she’s only sixteen, and I’m afraid she’s run away with a man... much older than herself...” She wrung her hands with the over theatricality of true emotion. “What am I to do?”
Dunc felt an inner stirring. He was surprised to realize he was standing aside as if to usher her into Drinker’s private office, and she obediently went past him. But Drinker was dead.
“Please sit down,” he heard himself saying. He sat down himself in the swivel chair, drew over a memo pad, and picked up a ballpoint pen from the blotter. He began, “Maybe you’d better give me the particulars...”