Mrs. Shatzkin sat down on a sofa after flipping on some lights and folded her hands in her lap, ready for anything. She looked at me briefly, trying to read some answers in my face, but my face doesn’t hold any answers. My face is a weary question mark. I was willing to stare her down. The advantage was mine. She was easier to look at than I was, and I could read her with no trouble.
“Jerry Vernoff has confessed before two reliable witnesses that he killed your husband, Thayer Newcomb, and Haliburton,” said Seidman. “He also said that you conspired with him to commit those murders.”
I sat down without taking my eyes from Camile Shatzkin, and Phil looked around the room feigning boredom, acting as if this was the routine part of a case already wrapped up. There was nothing to read in Seidman’s voice or face. He was simply giving information and withholding some. He didn’t tell her that Vernoff was dead and probably in the morgue by now. He didn’t tell her that all she had to do was say nothing to stay out of this, to walk away clean with her estate. There was no case on her, just the accusation of a dead man, a murderer three times over.
“How could he say such a thing?” she said, trembling. “I don’t believe he… I think you’re lying. And I think I’ll have to ask you to leave and talk to my lawyer.”
“I guess we’ll have to book her and take her downtown,” Phil said, examining a painting of a French landscape on the wall.
Camile Shatzkin said nothing.
“He’s dead,” I shot in.
Phil’s head turned in my direction and Seidman shook his head. Mrs. Shatzkin looked at me, but nothing dawned. Almost all the “he’s” in her life were dead. I had to be more specific.
“Jerry Vernoff,” I said. “He’s dead. His neck is broken and he’s lying in the morgue by now. One more on the slab and you’ll have killed a whole basketball team worth of men.”
“Jerry is…?” She smiled with a touch of madness and a shake of her head. “No. This is another trick.”
“No trick,” said Seidman, going along because there was nothing else to do. Phil was at my side. I hoped he wouldn’t hit me in my sore back if he decided to strike. But he sensed a crack in Camile Shatzkin and stood waiting.
“Look,” said Phil, “what’re we bothering with this for? We have a man’s dying confession and testimony. That’s enough to hang her. If she wants to shut up, let her shut up.”
Phil clearly had a way with words. We all looked down at Camile the Widow and waited to see which way she would go. If she told Phil to go chew on an electric eel, that was the end of it. If there was a clock ticking you could have heard it, but there wasn’t. Luckily no one’s stomach growled. “I loved him,” she said very quietly.
“What?” growled Phil.
Camile Shatzkin looked up with tears starting in her eyes. “I loved him.”
“Jerry Vernoff?” Seidman said.
“Darryl,” she said.
“Darryl?” said Phil, looking at me and Seidman. “Who the hell is Darryl?”
“Darryl Haliburton,” she said, her eyes red. “I didn’t know he was going to kill Darryl. I didn’t really realize how much I loved him, needed him.”
“Vernoff said it was your idea to get rid of your husband,” said Seidman.
“It was his,” she said, pulling a handkerchief from her robe. Her chest rose with a sob.
“How did you help?” I asked.
This was it, but she didn’t know it.
“I didn’t have to do anything, just let Newcomb in, watch him shoot Jacques, and make no effort to follow him. All I had to do was identify William Faulkner as the murderer.”
“That lets my man off the hook?” I asked.
Phil nodded.
Seidman went upstairs with Mrs. Shatzkin to check her room and be sure there were no weapons of self- or other destructiveness. While she dressed, Phil and I sat in the living room ignoring each other.
“My knee’s getting better,” I said, sitting down.
Phil grunted. That was our conversation for the night.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In which a famed writer returns home and this obscure private detective finds that financial security is hard to come by even in the best of times.
It was well after two in the morning when Faulkner was released. I was surprised that I wasn’t particularly sleepy, though I was tired. I had been working a lot of nights since the two cases began. Faulkner looked composed, though I detected below that wry, thin exterior a tight sheet of controlled anger. He accepted his belongings and, to give him credit, didn’t give the usual line about suing the Los Angeles Police Department for false arrest.
“Can I give you a ride back to your hotel?” I asked him, trying to reach the spot on my back where Vernoff had clobbered me with his gun.
Faulkner accepted and on the way sat looking out the window listening silently and pulling at his pipe while I told him the tale.
“That Vernoff should bear such rancor toward me suggests the frightening prospect of others who might harbor such thoughts about each of us without our knowing,” he whispered.
Most of my enemies weren’t so subtle, but I just nodded in agreement. We paused at a red light and watched a drunk in a doorway trying to stand up and having a hell of a time at it. Faulkner and I both urged him up silently, and I forgot to move when the light went green. A kid in the car behind hit his horn and pulled me up to what passed for reality.
“I have informed Mr. Leib that I will repay him for the advance he gave you,” Faulkner said, still not looking at me. “I would appreciate it if you would submit to me in Oxford the remainder of your bill. I do not wish to have any obligation to Warner Brothers or Mr. Leib.”
“Fine,” I said.
“It may be several weeks or longer till I can forward the amount,” Faulkner continued in what was obviously a difficult statement, “but it will be forthcoming.” He laughed without humor. “I have been writing for years about honor, truth, pity, consideration, and the capacity to endure grief and misfortune and injustice and then endure again, in terms of individuals who observed and adhered to such principles not for reward but for virtue’s own sake in order to live with oneself and die peacefully with oneself, but there’s no denying the needs of the body. Romantic virtue is constantly preyed upon by our animalism.”
“Makes sense to me,” I lied. “You’re not sticking around Los Angeles, then?” I hurriedly changed the subject.
“No,” he sighed. “I will leave my agent to try to negotiate something here. I’m needed in Oxford. I’m the area chief for the local aircraft warning system, though I can see little chance or reason for an air attack on the hinterlands of Mississippi. I’ve actually got an office over a drug store where I can recruit observers. My daughter Jill likes it. She’s always complaining that she doesn’t know what to indicate on school forms that ask what her daddy does. She thinks I don’t work, but now she can list me as an air-raid warden.” “It’s something,” I said, turning down the block in front of the Hollywood Hotel.
Faulkner reached over to shake my hand when we stopped in front of the hotel. I hadn’t been to the Hollywood for years and didn’t realize how fast it had fallen to just this side of Gothic decay.
“If something ever brings you to Mississippi, Mr. Peters, I would be pleased if you would visit my family and me in Oxford. You could join a few friends in a hunt for raccoon or squirrels, and we could spend a night in the woods by a lake eating Brunswick stew and washing it down with lots of bourbon while we play nickel poker.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” I grinned.
Faulkner got out quickly and hurried into the hotel without looking back. His gray jacket was badly wrinkled, and he looked a little frail as he moved, but his back was straight with a dignity I knew I could never pull off.