Fletcher Flora - The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™ - 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

I pushed the door open farther and stood there looking at Wanda Henderson, and I could see that she would be cold to the touch. Her arms were spread, the fingers clawed. Her red hair splashed around her head, and there were bruises on her throat. She’d been killed by hands — direct, primitive, the most brutal of all forms. At least it was a change from shooting.

I pulled the door shut very quietly, I turned, and went back downstairs to the car and drove away.

It wasn’t that I didn’t even consider calling the police. I did. It was my first thought. My second thought, however, was of Wiley Shivers, and I felt that anyone, even in case of murder, was justified in not calling the police if calling them meant facing Shivers the second time in one day.

Now the whole affair was a monstrous bit of nonsense verse. Nothing whatever made any sense at all, and I was groping blindly in a maniac world that was filled with wandering women and a fine, indiscriminate slaughter of witnesses. Why? Why the impartial elimination of the key witness on both sides? The only guy who’d figured in the business all the way was Austin Stark. All the way to the murder of Wash Richert, that is. But how could you figure Stark in the elimination of his own man? Of course, he probably had Richert’s signed statement, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same as a live guy in court putting the clincher on a frame.

Several blocks from the walkup, I stopped at a corner drug store and went inside to the phone. I dropped a dime and dialed.

“Hello, Kitty. Anyone there?”

“No. Your date over already?”

“It never even got started. Wanda had another date, in Samara.”

“What the hell you talking about, lover?”

“You don’t get it? A novel reader like you? Never mind, though. It means she’s dead.”

The wire sang between us, and after a while, she said quietly, “One of the others called in, right after you left — the platinum one.”

“Richert’s wife? What does she want?”

“She wants to talk with you. She sounded scared. She sounded scared to death. Which reminds me that I’m scared to death myself. I’ll bring all the petty cash and meet you at the bus station. We can’t afford a train.”

“Some other time, hussy. What about the platinum? She coming to the office?”

“No. She’s waiting in a little bar called The Peanut. They serve them in bowls with beer. It’s on Fifteenth, just off Wamego Street.”

“I know the place. See you later.”

“I wonder,” she said sadly, and hung up.

On Fifteenth, just off Wamego, The Peanut was a dismal, little bar which, like all bars in the morning, somehow gave the impression of having a hangover. In the shadowy interior, behind the peanut bowls, a bartender looked at me as if he wished he didn’t have to. Opposite the bar lining the wall, there was a string of booths, each with its own peanut bowl, and private remote-control box for the juke box in the rear. In the last booth, where the shadows were deepest, I caught a glimmer of platinum, the white movement of a lifted hand.

I told the bartender to bring me a shot of rye and went back to the booth and sat down. While I was waiting for the rye, I saw that Kitty had been right. Mrs. Richert was scared to death. Her face was drawn, no more than a shade darker than her hair, and her eyes were still and wary. She held a glass in her fingers, twisting it slowly, with odd little jerks.

“You wanted to talk with Wash,” she said. “It’ll never happen now.”

“I know. A cop named Wiley Shivers came to see me this morning.”

“Yeah.” Her eyes stared into her slowly rotating glass. “Nasty little toad. I wasn’t thinking straight, or I wouldn’t have put him on you. You got an idea Wash didn’t really see Hal Decker leaving Danny Devore’s place the night of Danny’s murder?”

“Yes. Hal spent that night with his girl. She was willing to swear to it. You get the tense? Was, I said. That was yesterday. Today she’s dead. Murdered. I just left her on the floor of her apartment.”

Fear moved like a shadow across her face. “The devil,” she said softly. “The merciless, arrogant devil.”

“Stark?”

The flesh quivered on her bones, and I could see her fingers tighten convulsively on the glass. “So you’ve figured it out. He killed Danny Devore, and I guess he killed Hal Decker’s girl. For that, I don’t give a damn. But he killed Wash, too, and Wash was mine. I’ve played him for a sucker whenever the notion struck; but he was mine, and I never wanted him dead. And I want the guy who killed him.”

“And if Hal Decker, an innocent guy, goes clear in the process, that’s purely coincidental, I suppose.”

Her eyes flicked up and down, and the hardness was in there with the fear. “That’s right. Wash and I had this fixed up for a big bundle, but now hope for the bundle’s dead with Wash, and all I want is to get even. I want the guy who killed Wash. Anything that comes with it is frosting on the cake, as far as I’m concerned.”

I looked at her with the first, faint light of dawn breaking inside my skull. “A bundle? So Wash was more than a phony witness. He was also a blackmailer. That explains a lot. I saw Stark in all this from the beginning, but I couldn’t see why he’d bump his own witness. And there’s still something I can’t see. I can’t see why Stark killed Devore. I know he was after Danny’s public hide, but murder’s something else. It’s too fantastic for belief.”

Her lips curled. “Politics,” she said, and the word as she said it was incredibly profane. “There was a better reason than politics for Danny’s murder. It’s really sort of funny, the way it happened. Listen. Wash was Stark’s investigator, and Wash was a handy sort of guy. He had a way with gadgets. Things like tape recorders, for in stance. Stark wanted something on Devore that he could use, something concrete. Devore used to make a lot of his crooked deals in his study at home, and Stark figured that if he could set up a hidden mike in the study with a recorder hidden outside, sooner or later he’d get something hot.

“He put Wash on the job, and Wash set the thing up. How he did it doesn’t matter now. Just take it from me, Wash was a pretty clever guy. He took three spools of tape on three consecutive nights and turned them over to Stark. What Stark didn’t know was that Wash played it all back before he turned it over. He not only played it all back, he made copies. Some of it was pretty good. Enough to nail Devore down. But Stark was greedy. He wanted more, and he got more.”

She stopped talking and began to laugh. It was deep, soundless laughter that shook her body like a violent spasm. After a minute, she broke it off with a shrill gasp and said hoarsely, “He got something real hot. He got something so hot it blistered the tape and shriveled his own lousy soul. He got Mrs. Austin Stark and handsome Danny Devore in a scene that was strictly unofficial. I guess it was the one thing the arrogant devil never dreamed of.

She began to laugh again, and inside my skull the dawn broke like thunder. The irony of it all was enough to make anyone hysterical. I reached across the table in the booth. I put my thumb on one side of her face and my four lingers on the other. Then I make like a pair of pincers, cutting off her laughter and forcing it back into her throat.

“I get it,” I said. “That was something a guy like Stark couldn’t take. He went blind. He killed Danny Devore, not for any political reason, but for the old three-cornered reason that’s always been valid.”

“That’s it.” She lifted her glass suddenly, draining away the last of its amber contents. “He told Wash to knock off the recordings. But he didn’t know that Wash had copies. He didn’t realize that Wash knew about Mrs. Stark and Danny Devore. Most of all, he didn’t realize that Wash was spinning another spool the night of the murder. He found it out about an hour later. He found it out when Wash showed up at his place all ready to do business.”