My car was parked at the curb. I drove away from the neighborhood as fast as you can drive without risking a ticket. When I reached Murray’s house, I parked a few doors down the street. I hurried up his driveway to the rear of the house, opened a gun-metal garbage can, stuffed the bloody pillowcase into it. I put the lid on, clambered into the car and headed for my apartment.
I didn’t start to shake until I was inside my apartment with the door shut. Then my hands trembled and my heart pretended it was a triphammer. I poured a shot of scotch and spilled half of it on the way to my mouth. The second shot steadied me.
The cut on my arm had opened up again. The blood had soaked through the band-aid to the shirt and through the shirt to the jacket. That didn’t matter. I wouldn’t have much use for shirt or jacket again. I tried to make sure of the cut now. I washed it out with scotch since it had a higher alcohol content than anything else in the house, and then I fixed up the wound with a gauze pad and a few strips of adhesive.
The Broadway suit and the shirt and the loud tie all were dumped into the incinerator. There would be traces there—buttons that didn’t burn, things like that. That wouldn’t much matter. The police wouldn’t be looking in my incinerator for Milani’s clothing. The police would be looking for Milani himself, for one thing, and they wouldn’t have any interest in one William Maynard to begin with. The shoes I put into the closet along with the little cap pistol. In a day or two I would flip them into a trash barrel somewhere.
I poured another drink and tossed it off. The gash in my arm felt better now, either because the cut was healing or because the liquor was anesthetizing it. I sat down on the couch and turned on the radio, dialing in a station that gave you music and spot news twenty-four hours a day. There was a news flash at nine but it had nothing about Milani.
The hell—the plan couldn’t really miss now. The stage was set perfectly. The desk clerk at the Glade would tell the cops about a seedy criminal type from Brooklyn named August Milani who had acted as though he were going to come into a fortune, who did come into the fortune, and who told the clerk that he, Milani, made the fortune by keeping a secret for a lawyer named Murray Rogers. The cops would toothcomb Milani’s room and find the aftermath of a murder. Room knocked around, bloodstains, a broken ashtray, shattered eyeglass lenses, the faint smell of gunpowder. The desk clerk would admit he had been away for half an hour or so, obviously the logical time for Rogers to move in on the scene.
And there would be plenty more. Rogers’ receptionist would tell the police about a nasty-voiced man who had kept trying to talk to Rogers, and Murray would try to explain that the man had been some nutty insurance salesman. The authorities would find the letters in the Rogers file. Murray would deny writing them. The authorities would find the bloody pillowcase in the Rogers garbage can, and the blood would match the stains in Milani’s hotel room. Murray would say he didn’t know how the pillowcase had found its way into the garbage can. The police would ask Murray who Whitlock was and what hold Milani had over him. Murray Rogers couldn’t tell the police because he wouldn’t know anything about Whitlock or a “hold.” The authorities would keep on asking and Murray would never be able to come up with the answers.
The desk clerk would remember the messenger. The messenger would tell the cops he picked up a bundle at Murray’s office and gave it to Milani in person. Murray would say he didn’t know anything about it. The police would ask him what he did with Milani’s body and he would try to make them believe he never met any Milani, that Milani was just a persistent voice on the telephone.
Murray Rogers, the poor bastard, didn’t have a chance.
I caught a news flash at nine-thirty. A man had been assaulted or possibly murdered at a downtown hotel. Police were working on the case and had several good leads. They expected to wrap it up quickly. No names were mentioned, but the confidence was obvious. The cops had this one in the bag already and they didn’t care who knew it.
I sat there and listened to more music and wondered what was going to go wrong. Something had to go wrong. This wasn’t a deal off a stacked deck in a bust-out joint. This was a big one. One little snag somewhere along the way would blow the works to hell and back.
The telephone rang at ten minutes of ten like a small bomb and the noise shattered the comparative silence of the apartment. I reached over, switched off the radio. I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. Her voice was music.
“It worked,” she said.
“What happened?”
“It worked like a charm. The cops just left and they took Murray along with them. I didn’t hear much of it. They asked him if he knew anybody named Milani. He said he didn’t. They asked again and he said that Milani was some insurance salesman but he had never met the man.”
“And?”
“And they zipped him up and took him to jail,” she said. “I have to hang up now. He wanted me to call his lawyer, but I decided to call you first.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt numb now. The scheme had worked so far, it was going nicely, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
“Darling?” A soft chuckle. “You’re a wizard, darling. You really are.”
12
From there on, it was everybody’s ball game. The whole town was busy for the next ten days. Murray found himself the best criminal lawyer in town, a man named Nester who handled most of the important cases in the area. He had two sets of clients—rich men in trouble, and hoods. Murray was a rich man, and he was sure as hell in trouble.
He hired Nester. Murray also hired the local agency of a national detective outfit. He drove the lawyer and the detectives out of their minds. According to what I learned through Joyce, both Nester and the detectives took it for granted that Murray was guilty. All Nester did was try to persuade Murray to level so a way could be found to break the case. Murray kept on shouting that it was all crazy, that some bastard was framing him. And the more the detectives dug around, the guiltier Murray appeared.
The district attorney was digging around, too. It was a colorful case—wealthy killer, shocked and pretty young wife, and enough elements of mystery to give the theory-builders a kick or two. The newspapers gave it a big play, one daily screaming for Murray’s head, and the other staying more on the solemn side.
It was the sort of case that a politically ambitious district attorney would be well advised to win. This public prosecutor was ambitious as hell.
Every joker had a different notion. Somebody suggested that Milani hadn’t been killed, that he was wounded and was biding his time in a gangland hideout, ready to wreak revenge on Murray as soon as he was released. Other geniuses insisted that Rogers hadn’t done the job himself at all, that he had hired professionals and that Milani was in the river wearing a cement overcoat. The music went round and round, and I sat back and tried not to listen.
The grand jury was to meet on Thursday, ten days after the arrest had been made. I was out with Barb Lambert Wednesday night. We had dinner and then went over to her place for records and conversation, and I was in a mood. She misread it as concern for a close friend. She asked me what would happen to Murray Rogers.