It was a few minutes after five when I hit Hoover. Traffic was leaving downtown and not coming in. I found a parking space on the street without too much trouble, locked up, and made my way through the going-home crowd with the sack under one arm and the dog under the other.
A chunky woman in a gray coat was coming out of the Farraday and held the door open for me.
“Thanks,” I said, easing past.
“You’re Peters,” she said.
“Right.” I looked at her dark, heavily made-up face and didn’t place her for a second.
“You’re the new mind reader,” I said.
“Tante Kuble,” she said. “Moved in last week. On the third right below you.”
“Right,” I said, shifting my load. “Didn’t recognize you without the gypsy suit. How’s it going?”
“Could be better, could be worse,” she said. “Mostly I’m getting the kids-soldiers, sailors-wanting to know what’s going to happen to them.”
“What do you tell them?”
“I tell them they’re all going to be all right, that they’re going to live forever or close to it,” she said, looking hard into my eyes. “Some of them I can see things I don’t want to tell them.”
“See you around,” I said, feeling uncomfortable under her hard look.
“Peters,” she said as I turned my back. “Don’t eat with the dead and get the dog to the one who wants it as fast as you can. You know what I’m talking about?”
“I know,” I said, walking into the dark echo of the Farraday. “Good talking to you.”
“See you around,” she shouted. “Damn it looks like rain.”
Then she was gone.
Some days are definitely not the ones you want to remember when you take a hot bath and plan your future. This one had found me in Shelly’s dental chair for the first time and brought me face to face with an old man in the park who lost his dogs and a fortune teller who saw death. I let the dog down, and he trotted up the stairs behind me, his stubby claws scratching against the marble and metal.
My big fear was that Shelly might still be in the office, but the door was locked. No one had put my name back on it yet in the terms that Shelly and I had agreed on, but I’d given him a week to get it done. I opened the door and left it open as I went in. There was enough light coming through the windows so that I didn’t have to use any electricity.
I unlocked the door to my inner office, but I didn’t go in. Tante Koble might have hit on something. Instead, I tore open the sack, took out a couple of hot dogs for the dog, put them on a towel on the floor, and poured him a cup of Pepsi. He went to work on them in a manner unbecoming to the dog of a president. I should have cut the hot dogs up but it was too late now. If I tried anything I might lose a finger or two.
Climbing into Shelly’s dental chair, I took my time eating and reached over to flip on Shelly’s radio. Captain Midnight was on. I didn’t sound anything like him-or the guy who played Ichabod Mudd or the guy who played Ivan Shark, for that matter.
After our dinner I cleaned up and went into my office. Martin Lyle was sitting there as I had left him, eyes closed, a lot more pale than he had been before. I wanted to turn on the lights because the sun was dropping down fast and the sky was cloudy, but I resisted.
So in I went and got behind my desk, checked my.38 and waited, and that, my friends, brought me to the moment at which I started this story, just before the killer walked in and I promised to tell a tale.
12
I considered offering the killer a chair, but there was none available unless we threw Lyle’s body on the floor or out the window or I stood up. So the killer stood while I talked.
“You fooled me,” I admitted. “I was hot on the trail of Bass and Lyle, just where you put me. The way I figure it, you planned to put Lyle away from the start, and if Bass got me at Olson’s, you’d get rid of him too.”
“So far,” said the killer, “there’s nothing very interesting in this.”
“You wanted the fifty thousand and the dog to make another pitch for more money,” I said.
The dog watched the gun on my midsection and whimpered, head down in his paws. I reached over very slowly and patted his head.
“Accurate,” said the killer, “but …”
“I’m coming to it,” I said. “But it’s got to be a trade. I’ll tell you something you need to know if you tell me why you killed Olson and Lyle.”
The killer considered the request, decided there was nothing to lose, and said, “I only killed Lyle. He was on his way here to talk to you. We had tried to make a deal with him, but Lyle was a fanatic, all politics, the money didn’t mean a thing. The kidnapping of the dog had been his idea, not for money, but in the hope that it would be used to force Roosevelt into some kind of deal. He forced Olson to go along with it. We brought Bass in to keep an eye on things, watch, wait, see if there was some way to profit from it. Mrs. Olson found out. We didn’t want to kill her, but Bass got carried away with loyalty.”
“He’s just a big, loyal, dumb dog, is that it?” I asked.
“Something like that,” the killer agreed.
“Fifty thousand isn’t all that much for a possible murder rap,” I said.
“It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this,” the killer said. “There weren’t supposed to be any killings. Bass started it.”
“And Anne Lyle?” I asked, trying to think of something I could use to stall for the thirty minutes I needed before help arrived.
“We were waiting for Olson,” the killer explained, “when he came to the house with her. We didn’t want her to see us so we went upstairs and hid while he got ready for his bath. Then we heard you come and Anne Lyle go into her story. That didn’t give us much time. The idea was to scare Olson, but Bass panicked and Olson started to yell. You know the rest.”
Maybe my hearing was better than that of my visitor, but I knew someone was coming down the hall outside. I started to talk and talk fast.
“Stupid,” I said, hitting the desk with the palm of my hand. “All this for-”
“Enough, Peters,” said the killer, pulling back the hammer of the pistol. “What is the information you have that’s kept you alive an extra few minutes?”
“The information,” I said with satisfaction as I saw the doorknob turn slowly, “is that you are about to take a trip downtown to explain all this to the police.”
The room was nearly dark, but a band of moonlight through the clouds showed the determined jaw of the killer. The door opened and the pistol turned from me to the new arrival.
“Look out.” I shouted, standing, bad ribs or no, to take a leap at the killer with the gun. But the surprise was mine and I stopped.
“Sit down, Peters,” Academy Dolmitz said, stepping into the small office and closing the door. “After what you’ve been through, you think you can just go jumping over desks and grabbing guns like the Cisco Kid? You know, Warner Baxter in Old Arizona, best actor 1929? Over-rated performance, but what the hell, sound was just coming in and he yelled and whooped and had that farcockta accent.”
“Dad,” said the killer impatiently, “why did you come up here? I told you I’d take care of it.”
“That’s the kind of father you think I am?” he said, pointing to his chest. “I’d let my daughter come in here and shoot a man who might get violent back. You got kids, Peters?”
“No,” I said “Not married, not any more.”
“Too bad,” sighed Dolmitz. “It’s good to have kids, you know what I’m talking about here? Your brother the cop, he would know. But it’s not so good sometimes to let the kids in on your business. You want to, but it doesn’t always work out.”
“Dad,” Jane Poslik pleaded, her gun back on me. “Let’s just get this over and get out.”
“A minute more,” I said. “I just want to get this straight. Lyle came to you looking for someone to keep an eye on Olson, some muscle, so you gave him Bass and decided to see if you could make a few bucks on the deal.”