“You set him up for Ostervelt. You knew he was here. You knew that Ostervelt was trigger-happy, and stuck on you besides. You brought him up here and sat and let it happen.”
“Carl was no great loss to anybody. None of them was.”
“They were human beings,” I said. “Somebody has to pay for them.”
Her face brightened. “I’ll pay. I don’t have a great deal, but Carl had several insurance policies. I’ll go halves with you. Nobody has to know all this. Do they?”
“You’ve got me wrong. Money won’t pay for lives.”
“Listen to me,” she said rapidly. “Twenty thousand dollars, that’s what I’ll give you. It’s more than half of the insurance money that’s coming to me.”
“You’ve got more than that coming to you, Mrs. Heller. A private room made of concrete, without any windows.”
She took in my meaning slowly. It hit her like a delayed-action bullet, disorganizing her face. She turned and ran across the living room. When I came out of the kitchenette, she had the black case open, the revolver in her hand like a silver forefinger pointed at my heart. It gleamed in the long shadow that fell across the room from the single window.
I glanced at the window. Ostervelt was there, his elbow propped on the sill. His forty-five roared and spat. Mildred took three steps backwards and slammed against the wall like a body dropped from a height. The blood gushed from her breast. She tried to hold it in with her fists. She said, “Ostie?” in a tone of girlish surprise. Then the rising blood gagged her.
She covered her mouth politely with her hand, and fell down dead. Ostervelt clambered awkwardly through the window. His face was solemn. His eyes were little and hard and dry.
“You didn’t have to kill her, Sheriff. You could have shot the revolver out of her hand.”
“I know I could.”
“I thought you were fond of the girl.”
“I was. I heard what you said about the gas chamber. I also heard what she said. It was cleaner this way.” He was thoughtful for a minute, listening to the clatter of footsteps on the fire escape. “Anyway, she shouldn’t have let me shoot Carl. I don’t like that. It wasn’t fair to him or to me. It wasn’t fair to the law.” He looked down at the heavy gun. “What did the crazy fella think he was doing, coming out like that with the knife in his hand?”
“He was cutting bread,” I said. “He was going to make himself a peanut butter sandwich.”
Ostervelt sighed deeply. Policemen started to come into the room.
Midnight Blue
Published in Ed McBain’s Mystery Magazine, October 1960.
It had rained in the canyon during the night. The world had the colored freshness of a butterfly just emerged from the chrysalis stage and trembling in the sun. Actual butterflies danced in flight across free spaces of air or played a game of tag without any rules among the tree branches. At this height there were giant pines among the eucalyptus trees.
I parked my car where I usually parked it, in the shadow of the stone building just inside the gates of the old estate. Just inside the posts, that is – the gates had long since fallen from their rusted hinges. The owner of the country house had died in Europe, and the place had stood empty since the war. It was one reason I came here on the occasional Sunday when I wanted to get away from the Hollywood rat race. Nobody lived within two miles.
Until now, anyway. The window of the gatehouse overlooking the drive had been broken the last time that I’d noticed it. Now it was patched up with a piece of cardboard. Through a hole punched in the middle of the cardboard, bright emptiness watched me – human eye’s bright emptiness.
“Hello,” I said.
A grudging voice answered: “Hello.”
The gatehouse door creaked open, and a white-haired man came out. A smile sat strangely on his ravaged face. He walked mechanically, shuffling in the leaves, as if his body was not at home in the world. He wore faded denims through which his clumsy muscles bulged like animals in a sack. His feet were bare.
I saw when he came up to me that he was a huge old man, a head taller than I was and a foot wider. His smile was not a greeting or any kind of a smile that I could respond to. It was the stretched, blind grimace of a man who lived in a world of his own, a world that didn’t include me.
“Get out of here. I don’t want trouble. I don’t want nobody messing around.”
“No trouble,” I said. “I came up to do a little target shooting. I probably have as much right here as you have.”
His eyes widened. They were as blue and empty as holes in his head through which I could see the sky.
“Nobody has the rights here that I have. I lifted up mine eyes unto the hills and the voice spoke and I found sanctuary. Nobody’s going to force me out of my sanctuary.”
I could feel the short hairs bristling on the back of my neck. Though my instincts didn’t say so, he was probably a harmless nut. I tried to keep my instincts out of my voice.
“I won’t bother you. You don’t bother me. That should be fair enough.”
“You bother me just being here. I can’t stand people. I can’t stand cars. And this is twice in two days you come up harrying me and harassing me.”
“I haven’t been here for a month.”
“You’re an Ananias liar.” His voice whined like a rising wind. He clenched his knobbed fists and shuddered on the verge of violence.
“Calm down, old man,” I said. “There’s room in the world for both of us.”
He looked around at the high green world as if my words had snapped him out of a dream.
“You’re right,” he said in a different voice. “I have been blessed, and I must remember to be joyful. Joyful. Creation belongs to all of us poor creatures.” His smiling teeth were as long and yellow as an old horse’s. His roving glance fell on my car. “And it wasn’t you who come up here last night. It was a different automobile. I remember.”
He turned away, muttering something about washing his socks, and dragged his horny feet back into the gatehouse. I got my targets, pistol, and ammunition out of the trunk, and locked the car up tight. The old man watched me through his peephole, but he didn’t come out again.
Below the road, in the wild canyon, there was an open meadow backed by a sheer bank which was topped by the crumbling wall of the estate. It was my shooting gallery. I slid down the wet grass of the bank and tacked a target to an oak tree, using the butt of my heavy-framed twenty-two as a hammer.
While I was loading it, something caught my eye – something that glinted red, like a ruby among the leaves. I stooped to pick it up and found that it was attached. It was a red-enameled fingernail at the tip of a white hand. The hand was cold and stiff.
I let out a sound that must have been loud in the stillness. A jaybird erupted from a manzanita, sailed up to a high limb of the oak, and yelled down curses at me. A dozen chickadees flew out of the oak and settled in another at the far end of the meadow.
Panting like a dog, I scraped away the dirt and wet leaves that had been loosely piled over the body. It was the body of a girl wearing a midnight-blue sweater and skirt. She was a blonde, about seventeen. The blood that congested her face made her look old and dark. The white rope with which she had been garrotted was sunk almost out of sight in the flesh of her neck. The rope was tied at the nape in what is called a granny’s knot, the kind of knot that any child can tie.
I left her where she lay and climbed back up to the road on trembling knees. The grass showed traces of the track her body had made where someone had dragged it down the bank. I looked for tire marks on the shoulder and in the rutted, impacted gravel of the road. If there had been any, the rain had washed them out.