He shook his head slowly. “After you told me about the call I checked the switchboard operators. No longdistance calls had gone to your room. It was a fake. Tags or Al impersonated the lawyer. To get you out of the hotel. Sorry, beautiful.”
Her head drew back, her face was dazed. Her eyes stared at him unbelievingly.
Hammond cleared his throat. “Let’s shove off. No telling who heard the shooting.” He picked up Paula’s bags.
The gray eyes had misted. Novak drew her arms apart and kissed the side of one cheek. Shakily she turned and began pulling on her coat.
Hammond said, “Need my gun for a prop?”
“Registered?”
Hammond nodded.
“No good then. I’ll set enough of a scene to satisfy cops who don’t get feverish over hood killings.”
“Any time you get to St. Louis, look me up,” Hammond said as he moved past Novak. “The Stallion Club. Ask any cabbie.”
“Sure. You’ll stand me a drink. We’ll have a cigarette and chat for half an hour trying to remember what the hell it was all about.” He lifted his hat, ran one hand through his hair and saw Paula turn and breathe a kiss. Her cheeks were moist. The amber light plated them with burnished gold.
He heard their footsteps going along the passageway to the kitchen. The screen door opened, closed softly, and then there was silence.
Novak got out a cigarette with unsteady fingers, lighted it and heard a cracked voice saying, “Take good care of her, Pike.” He felt terribly alone. He drew one hand across the side of his face, shook himself and went over beside the writing table. He gathered his pen from the floor, crumpled the sheet of paper he had written on and shoved it in his pocket. His eyes searched the wall until he found the hole drilled by Barada’s derringer. A small hole, .22 maybe. And a close miss. The derringer was for under-the-table work, not a gunfight. Barada had learned the lesson too late.
Novak took the two empty shells from his pocket, wiped them and dropped them near Barada’s body. There was a big red hole staining the back of Barada’s yellow shirt. Colt .45. Nice shooting, Pike.
He wiped the chrome-plated pistol and laid it in Barada’s upturned palm. He pressed the slack fingers around it, remembering to touch the index to the trigger, and then he placed the pistol a foot from Barada’s hand and picked up the derringer. Carrying it over to Al’s body he wiped it and repeated the process, leaving the little gun a yard from Al’s arm. One of his shots had torn through Al’s jaw. The other had entered the throat. There was no exit hole.
His lips were as dry as brick. Moistening them he flicked ash from the cigarette and stared around the room. Nothing else to do. The setting wouldn’t fool a moron.
In the distance he heard a car engine start. The car backed, turned and ground away. As he listened his throat tightened again. He swallowed hard, turned and went through the passageway into the kitchen. Covering the doorknob with his handkerchief he pulled it open, closed it and walked down the steps.
He almost stumbled over Tags’ body beside the car. There was a steady heartbeat and muffled sounds came from the gauze-stuffed snout. Novak opened the car door, slid across the seat and found the ignition keys.
Without turning on the lights he started the engine and backed the car out of the driveway.
17
The moon was a tuft of dirty cotton, clouds rafted the starless sky, the air had the heavy taste of rain.
As he drove he tried not to think about the last half hour on Melrose Street but his nostrils still held the bitter scent of gunsmoke. The cigarette tasted like smoldering straw but it was better than the reek of cordite. In his mind he saw two dead bodies lying on the floor of a dusty room; but for a little luck they would have been his and Paula’s. He thought of Morely and wondered if Bikel had returned to the Tilden. He thought of a wasted little woman on a chipped iron bed. He thought of a fat woman in an expensive suite, staring at the ragged moon and waiting.
His body was spent, his mind numb. He found his head nodding, attention drifting from the road. For a while he fought fatigue, and then he stopped at a diner and gulped two cups of black coffee. When he crawled behind the wheel again he knew he could last another couple of hours.
Movie houses were disgorging people from the early show. Taverns were doing a normal Thursday night business. Shopping center lots were jammed with cars. He wondered whose car he was driving. Not a rental car, probably stolen. Time to start it on the way back to its owner.
At Q Street he turned and drove down Kingman Place to a dark curb under a low tree. He cut the motor, dropped the keys on the floor and got out. Wiping his prints from the door handle he jogged back to Vermont and waited until a cruising cab pulled over.
In front of the Tilden, the doorman opened the cab door and beckoned to a waiting couple. When he saw Novak paying the driver he said, “They’re looking for you inside, Pete. Andy says its important.”
Novak nodded, hurried into the lobby. The bell captain was standing near the reception counter, fingers drumming against his leg. When he saw Novak he hurried over. “Jeez, Pete, where you been?” he complained. “Lieutenant Morely wants you to call him right away.”
“Bikel ever get back?”
Andy shook his head. “If he did no one saw him— and I ain’t hardly took my eyes off the elevators.”
“Thanks, Andy.” Novak strode to the desk phone, asked the operator for Police Headquarters and got Morely on the phone in less than a minute. Morely said, “Well, pal, we bagged the medicine man.”
“Where?”
“Mortuary.”
“Dead?”
Morely chuckled dryly. “Naw, he’s feeling pretty sick but he’s still among the living. We picked him up trying to claim his wife’s body for burial.”
“The sentimental type. What are you holding him on?”
“Violating drug control laws, for one thing. Material witness in the death of his wife for another. And if that ain’t enough we can toss in Boyd’s death. I figure Dr. Edward Bikel will be with us quite a little while.”
“Mrs. Boyd know?”
“Not from me.”
“He gets to make a phone call, you know.”
“He ain’t asked yet. When he does, maybe he won’t have the necessary dime.”
“Mind if I tell Mrs. Boyd?”
Morely grunted. “Help yourself. She can’t run a shyster down here before morning and by then we’ll have wrung considerable sweat out of our doctor.” There was a thoughtful pause. “Bikel had quite a bit to gain from Boyd’s death. How do you like it he gunned Boyd so’s he could marry the widow?”
“And left the body in the widow’s room? Sounds sort of scatterbrained.”
“The doc’s on the feeble side. Maybe he used up all his strength pulling the trigger and couldn’t budge the corpse. Anyway, we’re asking him. By morning we may have something for the papers.”
“You may at that,” Novak said, “but I seem to remember your liking Barada as Boyd’s murderer. What happened to that?”
“Motive,” Morely said irritably. “A guy like Barada don’t kill just because some john’s shacked up with his wife. Blackmail, yes, because it’s profitable. How could he get a nickel out of murdering Boyd?”
“Maybe he got the jewels.”
“You fixed that one, pal,” Morely said bitterly. “I might believe it like I believe in the True Cross, but Mrs. Boyd has the jewels now.”
“He got a grand out of them,” Novak said evenly.
“Canary feed. Hell, he coulda realized half their insured value from the insurance company. If he killed Boyd for the jewels why didn’t he make them pay off?”
“There’s an answer to that,” Novak murmured. “You figure it out.” Then he cut the connection, massaged his closed eyes and crossed the lobby to an open elevator.