I sucked in on the cigarette, watched him through the smoke. The bottle was half empty. He never stopped staring out the window for a minute.
“Offhand, I’d say you sneaked that stuff out of his pocket while you were in his car, hoping that he’d think he lost it while he was drunk. You called the police, disguised your voice and tipped them off. That gave Lindsey a reason for nailing me whether I was Johnny McBride or George Wilson. You didn’t care what name I died under.
“Logan wasn’t so drunk after all. He must have heard the news broadcast and started thinking. I wonder if he remembered that fresh haircut you had and connected things up to Looth Tooth. He sure did something, because in checking back he found out. But like everything else, Logan made a mistake too. He wanted a story. A documented story. He must have phoned you and you met him and Looth Tooth.”
Then I knew why he was smiling when he should have been praying. I remembered that look on his face when I came in. He had been expecting somebody else and somebody else was out there in the night looking back at us through the window!
“Logan isn’t dead, Gardiner. He may die and he may not. Someday he’ll be able to tell if you conked him with something before you steered his car over a cliff, or not. If he lives he’ll tell because you won’t be alive to see that he conveniently dies in the hospital. Money can do a lot of things that way.”
I leaned into the light. Deliberately. I moved a step so the light bathed me from top to bottom. I propped my shoulder against the wall and didn’t move anything except my mouth while I counted the seconds it would take for a good shot with a service revolver to line up the sights on my chest, hold his breath and squeeze the trigger.
“And I’ll be able to tell how I called you up just as you came home after you did the job. Your housekeeper tried to tell me you were out and I thought it was a stall, but you were out... on a murder... and came back in time to take the call. I’m sure we’ll all be glad to tell a jury about it if we have to.”
I moved as the shot blasted the picture window into a million fragments. For a millionth of a second there was the yellow tongue of flame still licking toward me out of the blackness, a fiery yellow tongue with a red tip and the brighter white of the eye behind it. The gun in my hand bucked once. The room split open with the sound of it and died away to a brief, unholy silence.
There was no refraction now that the window was gone. The night outside was a warm, friendly thing trying to spew out the hideous face with the hole in it that seemed to stagger toward the gaping window. It staggered out and stopped and the mouth of Tucker bubbled red a moment then dropped out of sight.
Havis Gardiner hadn’t moved. Not an inch. But the smile was gone and the rigidity was back in his spine and his hand was a talon around the glass again.
I grinned at his back as if nothing much had happened at all. As if death was part of my life and always had been. As if I didn’t give a damn or a wonder why I was so good with a rod I could pot a guy by instinct who stood twenty feet away in the night.
Yeah, I went right on talking and this time Gardiner’s soul was crawling in the mud. I dropped the gun in my pocket and spoke to his back.
“Servo must have cursed you plenty, Gardiner. Servo must have cursed the day he met you because you had him by the short hair and made him do things he knew shouldn’t have happened. It would have been better if you hadn’t done anything at all. I doubt if anything would have come of my little venture at all.
“No, you got so damn scared it occurred to you that Harlan might want to team up with you for a squeeze play to get even for having to take a back seat, so you found out where she was staying and sent Eddie Packman out to get her. What Eddie didn’t know was that Harlan shared a room and he didn’t bother to look and see who was in the bed. He just killed the girl and that was all.
“Harlan knew what happened. She knew that murder was headed her way and couldn’t stop it. She knew it had to come someday and she must have lived with that fear from one hour to the next. She knew that even the photograph she had wouldn’t stop it because you were quite mad by then, so she got that photo to somebody who would take care of it for her and got under cover.
“Too much whisky and too big a fear killed Harlan. She stood it as long as she could and killed herself. She didn’t realize that she put Troy in a spot all the time. He figured on getting rid of Troy if and when he found it. Maybe even if he didn’t find it, because if he couldn’t nobody else could either. So Troy took off. One of the cops on your pay roll found her.
“Everybody made a mistake all at once. They didn’t look hard enough for a gun and thought I was a sucker to boot. I was picked for a sucker all along the line when the biggest suckers of all are right here. You especially. It’s done. You’re left. You’re the chief sucker.”
In a minute now he was going to prove it to himself. I was wondering how long it would take before he made his mind up.
He had the gun right there beside the bottle now. All the time I had been talking he was fooling around the ice well in the bar set until he had it almost under his hand.
I dropped the butt in my fingers and fished around for another one in my pocket. I took it out and wedged it between my lips and lit a match very elaborately, staring into the flame I had cupped between my hands.
Gardiner’s mouth peeled back, pulling his eyes wide open so the insanity that had been there right along and so neatly covered was a naked thing, a living thing that contorted his face into a mask of madness.
He grabbed, turned and fired faster than I thought he could move and faster than I could get my hand back to my pocket. The bullet slammed into the door beside my head. The shock of the explosion staggered him and he wondered why I didn’t fall.
The gun came up for a second try and I shot him in the belly a little above the belt and saw the dimple in his coat where the bullet went in. “For Bob Minnow and Mrs. Minnow,” I said.
I shot him again, a little lower. “For Logan and Looth Tooth.”
His mouth gaped. He couldn’t get his breath. The gun dropped out of his hand and his fingers ran up his body and covered the two little holes. Slowly, like a stalk bending m the breeze, he went to his knees.
I shot him in the head. “For Johnny McBride,” I said.
There was a scream from inside. I went out the door and the housekeeper was standing there, a grotesque figure in a loose cotton robe. She was right next to the telephone stand. “Don’t bother with a doctor,” I told her. “Call the police. Ask for Captain Lindsey and tell him he can forget about watching his buddy Tucker. He’s dead too. Tell them it was self-defense. It was, wasn’t it?”
Dawn was sprinkling the sky with gray. The streets were still wet, glistening under the mist that rose from the hot surface. There were no busses in the ports, no mail trucks on the platform and nobody in the station.
The ticket window was closed.
I had to slam the door twice to break the lock.
I went over to the drawer where Nick kept my picture and opened it. I was still there. Under the pictures there were more pictures of me and more legends and they all went back a few years. I closed the door and walked back to the Ford. Now I was even sure of the very last detail.
Pontiel Road. A white house on a hill half hidden by the fog. Seven steps to the porch and a key in the flowerpot. Dark downstairs, but a shaft of light coming down the stairs. Fourteen steps to the landing and three doors. A spare bedroom on the right. A bath in the middle. A bedroom that smelled of powder and perfume on the left.