“Give me just a minute,” she whispered.
“Okay, take your time,” Carmody said, releasing her wrist. He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deeply into his lungs. Then he sat down and stared at a picture on the wall. Finally, he glanced at her. “Okay?”
“Yes. Eddie was here when you called. But he told me he didn’t want to speak to you. He listened to the conversation and broke the connection when you began to yell at me. I begged him to be careful but he said you were more frightened of Ackerman than he was.” She stopped, breathing slowly, and put the palm of her hand against her forehead.
“We watched television until eleven-thirty. When he left I tidied up the room and found his wallet in the chair he’d been sitting in. His badge was clipped inside it and I knew he’d need that on duty. So I went downstairs to see if I could catch him. The street was dark but I saw him walking toward the corner, about fifty yards away. I ran after him. I didn’t call because it was late. Eddie didn’t hear me until I was eight or ten feet from him. I’d changed into slippers and I didn’t make any noise, I suppose. Then he turned around quickly and reached for his gun. When he saw me he laughed and started to say something. But he didn’t get the words out.” She shuddered and rubbed her arms with her hands. “That’s when it happened. A man stepped from behind a tree and into the light of the street lamp. He had a gun and he shot Eddie twice in the back. Then he ran to the corner. I began to scream and he looked around and stopped. He started toward me but a woman came out on the balcony across the street and began to shout for the police. The man stopped again, under the light at the corner, and then he turned and ran into the next block.”
“Okay. You’ve been looking at pictures at Headquarters. Did you find this man in any of them?”
She shook her head slowly.
“Tell me what he looked like. Everything you can remember.”
“He was big. Not fat, but tall and wide. His hair was blond and long. I couldn’t see his eyes, they just looked black, but his face was heavy and brutal.”
“How old?”
“Young, not more than thirty.”
“How about his clothes?”
“He was wearing a sports jacket and a sports shirt. The shirt was open at his neck and the jacket was a light color. Gray tweed or camel’s hair, something like that.”
Carmody frowned. He knew the local hoodlums who might have done this night’s work: Sheen in West, Morgan or Schmidt in Northeast, Youngdahl who ran a bowling alley in Meadowstrip. But Karen’s description fitted none of them. That meant an imported killer. And you couldn’t get a man like that in ten minutes. It required arrangements, discussions, planning. So the double-cross hadn’t been a spur-of-the-moment decision. It had been in the works all the time.
He began to smile slowly. “I’ll get that man, Karen. Don’t worry about it.”
“What good will that do? Eddie’s dead. You can’t bring him back.”
“I’m not doing this for Eddie,” he said, still smiling coldly. “This is for me. They promised me time to work on him, and I believed them. They lied to get me out of the way. And it worked. Then they shot him down like a dog. Do you think I’ll let them get away with that?”
“I might have guessed this,” she said, staring at him with something like wonder in her eyes. “It’s not for Eddie. It’s not because the men who killed him are savage and cruel and evil. It’s because your pride is hurt. Their great crime was to make a fool of Mike Carmody. Even your own brother’s death can’t penetrate your thick-headed arrogance.”
“I told you to skip the sermons,” he said, getting to his feet.
“I know you don’t want to hear sermons,” she said bitterly. “You don’t want to hear a word about right and wrong or good and evil. Those things hurt you. You can’t stand them, Mike.”
“Shut up!” he said thickly. “Damn it, will you shut up?”
“No, you don’t want anyone to tell you what kind of a man you are. You sneer and laugh at the whole world but you’re too damn sensitive to listen to its judgment on you. Well, some day you’ll have to listen, Mike. You helped fire the bullet that killed Eddie, and you’ll never be able to run away from that fact.”
“I did what I could,” Carmody said, catching her thin shoulders in his big powerful hands and lifting her to her feet. “Don’t ever say I killed him. Don’t ever say that to me again.”
“You did nothing but advise him to become a thief like you,” she said, staring into the pain and fury in his eyes. “When that didn’t work you walked away from him. That’s what you did, Mike.”
The words framed the dark thoughts which he had been fighting to drive into the safe hidden depths of his mind. I didn’t kill him, I didn’t kill him, he thought, hurling the words like weapons at his growing sense of guilt. Then he released her arms so abruptly that she staggered to keep her balance. “You don’t know anything about it,” he said hoarsely.
“You’re feeling it now,” she said, watching his face. “It’s something you’ll never get away from. If I’ve done that, I’m glad.”
“I’m tougher than you think,” he said, forcing a smile onto his lips. “Listen to me; Eddie didn’t die because of me. Eddie died because he was a fool.”
She sat down slowly, watching him with a frown, and then shook her head sadly. “If you can say that, you’re tough all right. You’re not a man, you’re just a slab of concrete. But some day you’ll crack up anyway. And the crash will be that much louder.”
“Don’t bet on it,” he said.
It was four in the morning when Carmody entered his own living room. The lights were on and Nancy Drake lay on the sofa, an empty whiskey bottle within inches of her trailing hand. Strands of her fine blonde hair fell across her damp cheek and there was a little smile on her lips. But it was a stiff, unnatural smile, the kind Carmody had seen on the lips of women who needed to scream. The line of her body was rigid and the smooth muscles in the backs of her calves were drawn up into small knots.
He shook her gently. “How do you feel, Nancy?”
“Feel?” The grin grew wider. “Hotsy-totsy.” A spasm shook her body and she pounded her feet up and down on the cushions of the sofa. “Say something nice to me, Mike. Don’t let me start crying.”
“Let’s have a drink. That’s something nice, isn’t it?”
“Real peachy,” she said. “Let’s just do that, Mike.”
The phone rang suddenly, shrill and ominous in the silence. Nancy cried out softly and Carmody patted her shoulder. “Keep quiet while I’m talking,” he said. “Okay?”
“Sure, Mike.”
Carmody crossed the room and picked up the phone. “Hello.”
“Mike, this is Bill Ackerman.”
Carmody stared at the receiver. Then he said softly, “You made a mistake tonight, Bill. I’m going to prove it to you.”
“Now get this!” Ackerman’s voice was sharp and controlled. “We didn’t kill your brother. I promised you forty-eight hours and I meant it. Whoever shot him was working on his own. We’ll find the killer and when we do he’s all yours. Do you understand me, Mike?”
Carmody smiled coldly. Was this the opening lead in another double-cross? Was he next on the list? “I thought you’d killed him, Bill. I thought you’d crossed me,” he said.
“I don’t work that way. I don’t need to. I gave you forty-eight hours and I stuck to my word. My guess is that some hophead learned that your brother was causing us trouble, and decided to get in good with us by doing the job on him. He’ll be in for a handout one of these days and you can take over from here. Is that clear?”