Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Why?”

“Why? If you shot somebody, would you leave prints on the gun?”

Traynor walked over to the door, turned, came halfway back. “If I was going to wipe prints off a gun I would also do something about setting up an alibi,” he said. “The way we’ve got it figured, Jordan killed strictly on impulse and reacted like a scared rabbit. He went for his gun, shot Hofert, ran out of the building, and went home and stayed there shaking. He didn’t sponge up blood, he didn’t try to lug Hofert out of his office, didn’t do a thing to disguise the killing. He left the gun right there, didn’t try any of the tricks a panicky killer might try. But he wiped the prints off the gun.”

“He must have been half out of his mind.”

“It still doesn’t add. There’s another way, though, that does.”

“Go on.”

“Suppose you’re Hofert. Now—”

“Why do we always have to suppose I’m the dead one?”

“Shut up,” Traynor said. “Suppose you’re David Hofert. You’re deep in debt and you can’t see your way clear. You look at yourself in the mirror and figure you’re a failure. You want money for your wife, security for your kids. But you haven’t got a penny, your insurance policies have lapsed, and your whole world is caving in on you. You’re frantic.”

“I don’t—”

“Wait. You’ve always been a little paranoid. Now you think the whole world is after you and your partner is purposely trying to make things rough for you. You’d like to go and jump off a bridge, but that wouldn’t get you anywhere. If you died in an accident, at least your wife and kids would get the hundred grand, the insurance dough which Jordan would turn over to them for your share of the business. Suicide voids that policy. If you kill yourself, they wind up with nothing.”

Grey was nodding slowly now.

“But if your partner kills you—”

“What happens then?”

“It’s a cute deal,” Traynor said. “I went over it twice, with the lawyer and with the agent who wrote the policies. Now, each man is insured for a hundred grand, with that amount payable to the other or the other’s heirs. If Jordan kills Hofert, he can’t collect. You can’t profit legally through the commission of a felony. But the insurance company still has to pay off. If the policy’s paid up, and if it’s been in force over two years, the company has to make it good. They can’t hand the dough to Jordan if he’s the killer, but they have to pay somebody.”

“Who? I don’t understand you.”

“The dead man’s estate. Hofert’s estate. It can’t go to Jordan because he’s the murderer, and it can’t go to Jordan’s heirs because he never has legal title to it to pass on. And the company can’t keep it, so it can only go to Hofert’s wife and kids.”

Grey hesitated, then nodded.

“That’s the only way Hofert’s family ever gets a dime. They get that hundred thousand as insurance on Hofert’s life, and they collect another hundred thousand when Jordan goes to the chair for murder, and they have at least half the business as well. All Hofert has to do is find a way to kill himself and make it look like murder, and he sends all that dough to them and has the satisfaction of sticking Jordan with a murder rap. We get the other kind all the time, the murders that are faked to look like suicides. This one went the opposite way.”

“How did he do it?”

“The easiest way in the world,” Traynor said. “He covered all bets, gave Jordan motive and means and opportunity. He argued with him all day in front of the secretary. He fixed it so that he and Jordan were alone in the office. When Jordan left, he went into Jordan’s office and got Jordan’s gun. He messed up the place to stage a struggle. He wrapped the gun in a tissue or something to keep his prints off it. He stood in front of the desk, off to the side, and he angled the shot so that it would look as though he’d been shot by somebody behind the desk. He shot himself in a spot that would be sure to kill him but that would leave him a minute or two of life to drop the gun in a convenient spot. That may have been accidental; maybe he aimed for the heart and missed. We’ll never know.”

“What does the lab say?”

Traynor shrugged. “Maybe and maybe no, as far as they’re concerned. It could have been that way — that’s as much as they can say, and that’s enough. The paraffin test didn’t show that Hofert had fired a gun, but it wouldn’t, not if he had a tissue or a handkerchief around his hand. There were tissues on the floor, and a lot of papers that he could have used. The bullet trajectory fits well enough. It’s something you don’t think of right off the bat. The way Hofert had it planned, we weren’t supposed to think of it at all. And it almost worked. It almost had Jordan nailed.”

“Now what?”

Traynor looked at him. “Now we tell Jordan to relax,” he said. “And after the inquest calls it suicide, we let him go — very simple.”

“No,” Grey said. “I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s crazy. You don’t kill yourself to stick somebody for murder. It’s too damned iffy, anyway. Why did Jordan stay home that morning?”

“He was feeling sick.”

“Sure. He didn’t come in, he didn’t even call his office. You can make a suicide theory out of it. You can also read it as a very clear-cut murder, and that’s the way I’d read it. You want to let Jordan off and take a couple hundred thousand away from Hofert’s wife. Is that right?”

“Yes.” Traynor looked at the floor. “And you want to see Jordan in the chair for this one.”

“That’s the way it reads to me.”

“Well, I won’t go along with that, Phil.”

“And I won’t buy suicide. You fought this one because it was too simple, and now you’ve got us stuck with two answers, one easy and one tough, and I like the easy one and you like the tough one. I hope to hell Jordan confesses and makes it easy for us.”

“He won’t,” Traynor said. “He’s innocent.”

“How sure are you?”

“Positive.”

“That’s how sure I am he’s guilty. What do we do if he doesn’t confess, if he sticks to his story and the lab can’t cut it any finer for us? What do we do? Toss a coin?”

No one said anything for a few minutes. Traynor looked at his watch. Grey lit a cigarette.

Traynor said, “I don’t buy murder.”

“I don’t buy suicide.”

“He won’t confess, Phil. And we’ll never know. If Jordan goes on trial he’ll get off because I’ll hand my angle to his lawyer. He’ll beat it. But we’ll never know, not really. You’ll always think he’s guilty and I’ll always think he isn’t, and we’ll never know.”

“Maybe we ought to toss that coin.”

“If we did,” Traynor said, “it would stand on end. It’s been that kind of a day.”

The elevator, swiftand silent as a garotte, whisked the young man eighteen stories skyward to Wilson Colliard’s penthouse. The doors opened to reveal Colliard himself. He wore a cashmere smoking jacket the color of vintage port. His flannel slacks and broadcloth shirt were a matching oyster white. They could have been chosen to match his hair, which had been expensively barbered in a leonine mane. His eyes, beneath sharply defined white brows, were as blue and as bottomless as the Caribbean, upon the shores of which he had acquired his radiant tan. He wore doeskin slippers upon his small feet and a smile upon his thinnish lips, and in his right hand he held an automatic pistol of German origin, the precise manufacturer and caliber of which need not concern us.

“My abject apologies,” Colliard said. “Of course you’re Michael Haig. I regret the gun, Mr. Haig, even as I regret the necessity for it. It’s inconsistent greeting a guest with gun in hand and bidding him welcome, but I assure you that you are welcome indeed. Come in, come in. Ah, yes.” The doors swept silently shut behind Haig. “This thing,” Colliard said distastefully, looking down at the gun in his hand. “But of course you understand.”