Filbert didn’t deny it. “What of it?”
“Why did you shoot her?”
“A successful blackmailer knows when to stop.” Filbert smiled. “Nancy was an amateur. She milked Max Braun for every penny he could lay his hands on. She milked him until he was absolutely dry, and look where it got her.”
“I’m figuring Max Braun was the real name of the man with the glass eye?” Wilson asked.
“Yes, it was,” Filbert replied. “He was a Nazi spy, did you know that, Mr. Reporter?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He came here in the last year of the war. He was an undercover agent, sent to infiltrate. The name in that passport, I think you’ll find, is Paul Johnson.”
“Correct.”
“When the war ended, Braun found himself out of a job, and stuck in a very dangerous place should he be found out.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Sophie asked.
“Go right ahead,” Filbert said. He stared at Wilson. “Nancy’s been getting into trouble lately — she could never stay out of it. I made a good deal of money out of her. I chose to quit while I was ahead.”
Something dawned on Wilson. “You have the photographs!”
Filbert grinned.
“Max Braun had photos of Nancy and Bruno,” Wilson said. “He was going to send them to the newspaper.”
Filbert nodded. “They arrived the week he got shot. They were addressed to the editor. Providence saw to my opening the mail that morning.”
“So, you knew what was going on.”
“Max Braun wrote a lovely letter. The photographs were very flattering.”
“So you shot Nancy, and then you shot Bruno,” Wilson said.
“Yes,” Filbert answered. “You see, one of the roles of a copy-editor is to tidy things up. To strip out all the unnecessary parts.”
“You’re hiding all of the evidence.”
Filbert nodded. “Indeed.” He then sighed. “Poor Bruno, I always felt sorry for him. He was always the last to know anything.”
At that precise moment, Sophie’s cigarette hit the spot between Filbert’s eyes where Wilson’s gun had been aiming. It was an expert flick.
Filbert immediately got a face full of cigarette ash. Hot ash went into his eyes and into his mouth.
Right after that, Wilson hurled his gun at Filbert’s head. It whacked him hard. So hard, Filbert stumbled backwards, tripped over the umbrella he was carrying, and upended himself over the guardrail and fell down into the bear pit. He fired every bullet he had on the way down.
Before Filbert even landed, a herd of police officers lead by Lieutenant Harden charged onto the scene from out of the bushes Wilson had been hiding in earlier.
“What in heaven’s name did you do that for?” Harden barked like an indignant walrus as he galloped in Wilson’s direction.
The three bears played with Filbert as if he were a new toy on Christmas morning — and he lasted about as long as one.
Wilson frowned. “I see bears actually do eat more than shoots and leaves.”
Wilson bought Sophie a milkshake. He carefully stored the receipt in his pocket, and together he and Sophie strolled back toward the zoo’s entrance.
“Have you had that gun all along?” Sophie asked.
“Yes,” Wilson replied, lighting a cigarette.
Sophie slurped on her milkshake and looked at him. “Why didn’t you use it last night when Bruno was holding us at gunpoint?”
“I don’t have any bullets.”
Sophie stopped walking and slurped the last drops of the shake. She watched Wilson walk away. The midmorning sun was shining above him.
“Hey, Wilson?” she shouted after him. “Want to buy a girl a real drink?”
Bad Blood
by Keith McCarthy
Copyright © 2006 Keith McCarthy
Here’s an author CSI fans will adore. Keith McCarthy is a pathologist who has chosen the same trade for his fictional hero, John Eisenmenger. In Mr. McCarthy’s novels — of which there are four in the series to date: A Feast of Carrion, The Silent Sleep of the Dying, The Final Analysis, and A World Full of Weeping (all Carroll & Graf in the U.S.) — Eisenmenger works alongside DI Beverly Wharton, who appears in this story.
It was raining and it was cold. The man with the tape measure, the camera, and the clipboard was grumpy because his pen wouldn’t work properly and there was water dripping off his hat down the back of his neck.
“Tell me why I’m here, Kocher.”
Beverley Wharton looked as if she had fallen amongst lepers.
Sergeant Kocher grunted and abandoned his attempts to write. Without a word he walked out into the centre of the road, knowing he was safe because police cars blocked both ends. Despite the rain, the incidents of the night had still managed to attract six of the more rubber-necked citizens of the city; the audience was considerably augmented by faces peering from the sitting-room windows of the houses that lined both sides of the street. Beverley followed him to a point in the middle of the road. It was surrounded by plastic police cones joined into an approximate square by yellow tape. The rain had not been heavy enough to obliterate all the blood from the tarmac.
“The hit-and-run happened at approximately eight fifty-five. The victim was a young female, identified by credit cards and organ donor card in her handbag as Elizabeth Sanderson.”
“Is she dead?”
“Not yet.”
“So what’s it to do with me?” This was a uniform matter. Not that anybody ever openly admitted that uniform matters were less important than those of plain clothes, at least not to the poor spacks in uniform.
Once more Sergeant Kocher didn’t get around to replying directly. He walked up the road, away from the bloodstain, his torch pointed directly down on the surface. As Beverley followed him, a train rumbled past in the distance. The rain seemed to get slightly heavier and far more uncomfortable. He stopped walking about twenty metres away from the coned-off area and looked at her.
She asked, “Well?”
It was his show and he knew it. That she should have failed to spot the evidence was a source of pleasure to him, irritation to her. He said, “I’ve been up and down this street. The only skid marks are inside the toilets.”
At last she understood. “Deliberate, you mean?”
“Without a doubt.”
Now she was interested. “Witnesses?”
He shook his head, a sour grin on his face. Indicating their audience both inside and outside, he said, “Believe it or not, none.”
“Where’s she been taken?”
“St. Benjamin’s.”
Having organised house-to-house enquiries in the street, she arranged to meet DC Rich at the hospital.
“It’s potentially attempted murder, okay?”
He nodded and said nothing. She liked that about him; when he spoke it was usually worth the effort of listening. If she said that it was attempted murder then, as far as he was concerned, that’s what it was. She asked, “Where is she?”
“Intensive care.”
She didn’t voice her feelings as he led her through the starkly lit corridors, past occasional abandoned beds and wheelchairs. They ignored the sign on the door that requested them to ring and wait and walked straight in. The warmth stifled them at once.
They were ignored at first, allowing Beverley to look around. She counted eight beds, six of which were occupied, all flanked by stacks of equipment. There was a background cacophony of electronic beeping, an amelodic composition that never repeated yet was depressingly familiar. Beverley murmured something under her breath. Rich asked, “Beg pardon, ma’am?”