We walked down a long hallway. Most of the cells were clean and modern, but most of the inmates were last night’s drunks and they had spent the night puking on their shoes. In one cell a man was singing Molly Malone in a whiskey tenor. In another cell an older man was hawking and spitting.
Murray Rogers was all the way down at the end of the corridor. The guard and I stopped in front of his cell and he looked at us, his face breaking into a smile when he saw me.
“Bill,” he said hoarsely, “I’ve been waiting for you to drop around. How’s it going?”
I said something pleasant. The guard opened the cell door with a key and locked me inside with Murray.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “That’s all I can give you, Mr. Maynard.”
The guard left. Murray rose to his feet, pumped my hand enthusiastically. He had made a rather dramatic recovery since the day of the indictment. His handshake was firm and his face had its color back again.
“Sit down,” he said. “This little hole isn’t much, but it’s comfortable enough. And I’ll be out of here Monday.”
“Joyce told me.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Last night.”
“Poor kid,” he said. “It’s been hell for her, Bill. And for the girls. But I think the worst of it is over. The suddenness shocked them all, but you’d be surprised how much a human being can stand once he or she learns to accept it.” He waved his hands at the cell. “This, for example. I was going stir-crazy, Bill. I was in a state of traumatic shock and all I could think about was that I wanted to be free again. I denied everything, of course. I couldn’t explain all their evidence, and I just denied it.”
He offered me a cigar. I shook my head and he unwrapped one for himself and bit off the tip. “They won’t let me have a cigar cutter,” he said. “Afraid I’ll open my veins with it. The damned fools.”
I gave him a light. He blew out a cloud of smoke and winked at me through it. “I gave Nester a hell of a time at first,” he said. “I kept denying everything like an idiot. Now I’ve always felt that any man who can’t play straight with his own lawyer isn’t worth the powder to blow him to hell. You know, when you’re established and respected and well-to-do, you can’t believe you could ever get in legal trouble. The mind refuses to accept it. But the indictment did something to me. You were at the grand jury session, weren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Well, that was the turning point. That day in court damn near killed me, Bill. Knocked me for a loop. So Thursday night and Friday morning I did a lot of careful thinking. And when Alex Nester came in to see me I leveled with him finally. I told him there was no sense playing games any more. I killed Milani. Now all he had to do was get me off.”
I was sitting on the edge of his army cot. Murray was next to me. When he finished his last three sentences I almost fell off the cot. My face must have changed expression. That much was all right—it was okay to be surprised, but I couldn’t let myself be incredulous.
I said, “Then you did kill him?”
“Of course I did. What did you think, Bill?”
“I believed you.”
“That it was all a frameup? I suppose you and Joyce were the only people in the world who did believe me, then. Maybe a few other close friends who couldn’t imagine me being capable of murder. That’s nonsense. There isn’t a man in creation who isn’t capable of murder once you give him the means and motive and opportunity. I’m hardly the murderous type, Bill, but I killed August Milani as sure as God made little green apples. I didn’t have much choice. My back was up against the wall.”
I managed to light a cigarette.
There were a few possibilities that occurred to me. Maybe Murray was crazy—maybe by now he managed to believe that he had killed Milani, that everyone else was right about it and Murray was wrong. Or else he was going for the safe play, hedging his bet by copping the plea and trying for a temporary insanity defense. I asked him if he wanted to tell me about it.
“Nothing much to tell,” he said. “I was a party to a very large case of tax evasion. It involved a couple of real estate deals, and the end result was that the government got screwed out of close to two million dollars in income taxes. Milani knew about it, God knows how. He had proof. He could reach the Internal Revenue boys and make things very rough for us. What I did was out-and-out criminal, Bill. It meant a heavy fine and a jail sentence no matter how you looked at it.”
“I see.”
“So Milani tried blackmailing me,” Murray continued. “I tried to dodge him but he had me over a barrel. Finally I paid him off, sent the money over to his hotel. He was greedy. He had a perfect fish on his hook and he wasn’t going to stop with one payment. On Monday I went to see him. I was just going to argue with him, try to make him see I couldn’t afford to contribute to a private fund for the enrichment of August Milani for the rest of my life. I had no intention of killing him. It happened by itself, or at least it seemed to. We started arguing. I grabbed him by the throat. He pulled a gun on me. I took it away from him and—I shot him.”
He said all this very sincerely, very convincingly. If I hadn’t known better I would have believed him without thinking twice about it.
“The body,” I said. “What did you do with it?”
“Dragged it through the alley, stuffed it into my car and drove to the lake shore. I stuffed his clothing with rocks and lead pipe and tossed him in. I barely remember that part. I was in a fog from the moment I shot him. Everything’s very fuzzy. I meant to throw the pillowcase in with him but I forgot. So I wound up stuffing it in my own garbage can.”
“And the gun?”
“In the lake.”
I dropped my cigarette on the floor, covered it with my shoe. “Jesus,” I said. “What happens to you now?”
“I don’t know, Bill. At the worst they’ll call it manslaughter of one degree or another. With luck it will go as temporary insanity—that’s what we’re trying for. Nester’s a good man. He says we have about a sixty percent chance of getting off scot-free.”
“And the tax evasion?”
“No problem there,” he said. “I could tell the Treasury Department agents about it, but I don’t intend to. And they can’t force me, because I can always take the fifth amendment to avoid incriminating myself. Milani had information, but Milani is dead now.”
“Can they trace him?”
“Evidently not. The police have been trying, naturally. Milani probably isn’t even his right name. They can’t find any record of a man by that name and they couldn’t lift any fingerprints from the room at the Glade. The police know I was mixed up in something very crooked but they don’t have a case until they know something about it. And they’ll never find out a thing. I won’t tell them, my associates won’t tell them, and Milani can’t tell them.”
“Then you’re in pretty good shape,” I said.
“It could be a lot worse, Bill.”
“How do you feel about it?”
He stood up, paced the floor with his hands clasped behind his back. “Not so good and not so bad,” he said slowly. “I was a wreck at first. The whole concept of murder—well, it gets to you. Were you in combat?”
“No.”
“Neither was I. I was just old enough to go into a defense plant during the Second World War. Later on I did government tax work. I suppose it would be different for someone who saw combat, someone who killed men in the line of duty. But I never killed anyone before Milani, never witnessed a violent death. The idea of homicide took a little getting used to. I’m used to it now.”