She wasn’t alone.
I sat there and laughed until I heard the car stop outside. Then I picked up the two guns and went to the other room and stood in the dark waiting. Eddie, Pimples and the guy he had called Lobin came in, shut the door and went past me into the room where death had had such a wonderful sweet time.
Lobin went for his gun and I shot him in the head. Pimples wasn’t so lucky. He would have lived if he hadn’t tried to live up to his job. He got it in the chest and died crying.
That left Eddie Packman.
I was right when I said he looked like a rat. A rat can be nasty when it thinks it has a chance, but when a rat is cornered all its ingrown instincts come out and it’s a cowardly rodent with sharp yellowed teeth and eyes that dart from side to side to find a hole to crawl in.
Eddie Packman was a rat. He didn’t look like himself any more. He looked smaller, the cast on his arm a huge fungus growth that weighed him down whenever he tried to move.
I said, “Eddie... when I came to town I promised to do a few things before I left. I was going to kill somebody. I was going to break somebody’s arms. That last one was you.”
There were two more guns on the floor. I picked them up and tossed them on the table, then laid the two I had down beside them.
Then I started walking toward Eddie.
He took his chance with the knife and had it out as he jumped me.
A chance. That was all it was. I grabbed his wrist, picked it out of his fingers and tossed it in the corner. He kicked and screamed and punched at me as I carried him to the table, screamed again when I laid his good arm across the top and fainted when I leaned on it and snapped the bone clean in two. I waited until he came out of it, broke the cast on his arm with the butt of a gun, propped it up against the table and snapped it all over again.
Eddie’s eyes were staring up at the ceiling, but he wasn’t seeing anything.
Lobin’s gun was the best. A police positive. There were extra shells in his gun belt that I took along too. He still had his badge pinned to his jacket under the raincoat. They might think he died in the line of duty and even give him a nice military burial.
I went outside in the rain and got in the car. Eddie’s sedan was parked in back of it. I turned the key, kicked the starter and pulled out on the pavement. Not far away the lights above Lyncastle threw a spectrum of color against the low-hanging clouds.
Soon now, the lights would return to a normal shade. Someday, even, it might become a normal city.
But first somebody had to die.
Chapter Thirteen
The time was five minutes after three. I stopped in a bar where everybody was arguing at one end, covered my face with a handkerchief before going to the phone booth, and put in a call to police headquarters. Captain Lindsay wasn’t there. The voice on the other end told me if it was important he could be reached at home and gave me the number.
It was that important and I reached him at home. He sounded old and tired when he said hello.
I said, “Johnny McBride, Lindsay. You don’t have to wait that week out after all.”
He sucked his breath in sharply and let it out into the receiver. “What happened?”
“Servo’s dead. One of his bunch is dead. His girl friend is dead. One of your cops is dead. Eddie Packman is minding them. He has two broken arms and he’ll be minding them for a long time yet.” I sounded tired too. I didn’t feel like explaining another thing. “Stay on the main road right out to the river. There’s an old house on the bank and Packman’s car is in front of it. You can’t miss the place.”
“Damn you, what happened?” he exploded.
“You’re a cop,” I told him. “Figure it out. Tomorrow somebody else’ll be dead too and if you haven’t got it figured out by then I’ll tell you about it.”
He ripped out a curse.
“Lindsey...”
“Yeah?”
“If I were you I wouldn’t let your buddy Tucker out of your sight. He helped kill Bob Minnow. He left the window open for the killer to get in and arranged things so Bob would be there ready to die on schedule.”
“Johnny,” his voice quavered, “if you don’t...”
I cut him short again. “You know that body of a man who was with Logan.”
“He’s identified, damn it. They called me twenty minutes ago.”
“Was it a barber named Looth? Looth Tooth?”
He sounded slightly incredulous. “That’s... right. His wife was away and nobody notified the missing persons bureau. We got it from a laundry mark. How did you know?”
“I didn’t. It just occurred to me. A couple of things just occurred to me. One is another reason for seeing that a murderer dies before morning.”
There wasn’t any sound from the phone so I hung up.
I had all the answers in my pocket except one. The biggest one. But I got that one too. You know how? There was a blonde over in the comer dead drunk. Her hair was bleached almost pure white, just like Carol’s. It made me think of something, then a lot of things all at once and I had all the answers, every single damned one of them. I even knew how to be absolutely sure.
But first there was something I had to do first.
I reached the house just before four o’clock. I walked up to the gate and pushed the bell. This time he had on a bathrobe instead of riding breeches and he looked mad as hell. When he saw it was me he opened the gate, studied me a moment, then reached for the phone in the receptacle.
I tapped him behind the ear with the gun butt and dragged him into the gatehouse. I was very easy with him when I stretched him out on his bunk and pulled the covers up under his chin. After all, he only worked here.
Then I walked up the flagstone to the house where there was a light in the study that looked out on the drive and pushed the bell there too.
He wasn’t expecting me at all. He was expecting someone else and for a fraction of a second it showed on his face. I said, “Hello, Mr. Gardiner,” stepped over the sill and kicked the door shut.
“Isn’t it a bit late...”
Havis Gardiner licked his lips and nodded curtly. He was still a man of distinction.
When we got inside I kicked that door too. No, I didn’t sit down. I let him sit down and I stood there leaning against the door. I never wanted to sit down again. Not in a chair.
“They’re all dead, Gardiner. All but you.”
His head pivoted around as if I had pulled a string. The fingers of his hands were sunken into the upholstery of the chair. “You?” His voice sounded strained.
I nodded. “Me.”
He looked ghastly. The color left his face and he slumped back in the chair. He seemed to collapse under his clothes and stay that way while he stared out the window into the night.
“You can’t prove it, McBride.”
It was too bad he wasn’t able to see me grin. “No, not right now, Gardiner. I’ll take a lot of work by Lindsey and whatever cops he has who still work for the city, but when they’re done everybody will know what happened.
“I thought I had it a little while ago. I was ready to lay it all to Servo until I watched him go kill-crazy and beat the hell out of a woman who was half finished already. A big shot can’t do that. He can’t afford to mix in anything like that.
“Once Lenny was a big shot. Soon after he came to town he and Harlan got you in a fix and made you lift five hundred thousand bucks from your bank. He thought he had a nice deal and was smart enough to pay the money back to you so the temporary loan would never be noticed.
“Too bad Lenny forgot that you were a clever guy too. You saw the way he was feeding that money back and liked the way he did it. You were so damned smart you got some kind of a hold on Lenny that made you the top dog instead of him and cut yourself in for a share of the profits.