Carolyn Banks - The New Black Mask (№6)

“It would, Maxwell. Especially for the boys.”

He nodded, looked serious. “A court battle would be very hard on them at their age.”

“Then you will sign the papers?” Susan said, just a little too quickly. “Give Norman the boys? Let them take his name?”

His name! The rage welled up inside him again. He fought hard to keep it down, hide it. Pretended to consider the impossible idea while inside he boiled. First his contract. Then his wife and his boys. Now his name!

“I’ll consider it, Susan.” He would not consider it. His mind could not even begin to consider it. But he needed time. He needed to have her think he would, in the end, agree.

“Norman can give them much more than you ever will. You must know that by now.”

It was the breaking point. He began to shout in the elegant club, his ale forgotten. The other elite diners turned to look.

“My sons are mine, you hear? I’ll never consent, and no court will take them away from me!”

The maître hurried over. Could he help monsieur? The other diners, monsieur. Max Castro sat pale, his fine, honey-like ale forgotten. Susan drank her martini, looked past him.

“The court will back us, Maxwell,” she said, her voice soft, almost gentle. “Norman has the best lawyers, influence in the city. We’ll prove you’re an unfit father. A child-beater. Even a child molester. We have witnesses. You remember that maid you fired? Josie? Those baby-sitters you threw out of the apartment for smoking pot? There’s my mother, my sister. Then the boys themselves. The way you gave them baths, dressed them. Innocent, but when we coach the boys—”

Max Castro sat in the fine club with its white cloth and crystal glasses, shining silver and dark-green walls, the silent waiters. He had always loved to eat lunch here, the elegance of it, the privilege, the power. Now he barely knew where he was. Her voice soft as a snake gliding into his ears.

“I can do it, Maxwell. You know me. Think how horrible for the boys. For you.”

He would die and his business would go to his boys, and then Roth would have his business too. They would have it all. He had to fight. But would he win? If she told the court he... If witnesses said he... molested... battered...

Susan stood up. “You really have no choice, Maxwell. We’ll get the boys in the end, with or without you.”

Maxwell Castro sat in the lunch club long after his ex-wife had left, a taste of ashes in his mouth. His sons! She was so sure. His stomach was tight, painful. Sure of her lying scheme to steal the boys from him, and of what else? What had happened, or was going to happen, to make Susan so confident?

He went to work, checked all his information sources. It took three days, and then the reports came to him. Roth wasn’t ruined. His campaign had failed. Roth was not only unhurt, he was moving upward again. Bigger and better contracts. Roth would succeed, and Roth would get his sons.

No.

Norman Roth would not get Maxwell Castro’s sons. This time Susan was definitely wrong. He had a choice. A very clear and obvious choice. He would kill Norman Roth.

I heard Max Castro’s inner voice. He would kill Norman Roth as he had redly wanted to from the first moment Roth had stolen the Shea contract and Susan. A voice of hate, of fury, of panic at the loss of everything that belonged to him, that whispered over and over in his mind: Kill Norman Roth! Kill Norman Roth!

We still had half an hour before the woman would be brought into Pearce’s office.

“Castro named his company Castro & Sons as soon as his second boy was born,” I said. “The adoption threat did it. And the failure of his plan to ruin Roth. I located the confidential reports Castro got after Susan Roth’s visit. Roth had been awarded the big Haskins Urban Redevelopment Project contract. General architect, the works. It would save Roth and a lot more. Roth had floated a large loan, had already advanced money to a lot of suppliers. Roth was safe, moving ahead again. With Susan’s lies, witnesses, he would get Castro’s sons.”

Lieutenant Schatz wasn’t convinced, paced the office behind its drawn shades. “Okay, he had a motive. But he had to have known he’d be the first man we’d suspect. We’d be down on him before Roth got cold, Fortune. He’d have to have been crazy.”

“Most killers are crazy,” I said. “But Castro knew he’d be the first suspect. He planned it with that in mind.”

I tried to plan it exactly as Maxwell Castro had, our minds a single mind. The pattern was clear as I thought it out with Castro. Alone in his office, smoking cigarette after cigarette, he worked it all out as he would have worked out some delicate problem in architecture. Careful. Logical...

Max Castro knew that damn few premeditated murderers went uncaught. It was a fact, and it was why murderers were caught — because they knew that murderers were almost always caught!

The killer planned, complicated, made an intricate scheme to turn away any shadow of guilt. All possible dangers prevented, all possible suspicion diverted.

Attempted to hide his homicide by disguising it as something else. An accident. A senseless killing by some insane night prowler. The panic murder of a startled burglar. Sometimes he worked out a crazy plan to make the murder look like death from natural causes, relied on a shaky verdict of suicide.

He beat his brains out to hide his motive. He planned on an unsolved murder! The police would give up in the face of his cleverness, file the crime away to gather dust and be forgotten.

Or, the most certain of all to fail, the killer laid false trails that would be sure to lead the police to someone else, but that, in the end, always led to him.

The killer, aware of danger, planned a crime so intricate and complicated, it was all but inevitable he would be caught.

He, Castro, would not do that.

What a killer could devise, the police could detect. What one man could hide, another man could find. Max Castro would hide nothing.

The answer was simplicity. Exactly like the clean, simple lines of a modern building. A simple line for a building, a simple plan for a murder. An obvious murder. A murder that pointed straight to only one murderer. Himself.

Because it isn’t enough for the police to know that a man committed murder. They have to prove it. Not that he had wanted to commit murder, but that he had committed murder.

He, Castro, would be the logical suspect. He would have no alibi. Definitely no alibi.

The stupid, iron-clad alibi. Stupid, because no alibi could be iron-clad since it was, in fact, an alibi, and not the truth. It was a lie, something that had not happened. The smallest unexpected accident, and the alibi was broken. And once broken, the alibi itself, the carefully constructed lie, became the most damning evidence against the killer.

No, when Norman Roth was dead, the police would come straight to him, Castro. He would say, “Yes, officer, I often thought of killing him myself. I’m glad he’s dead. As a matter of fact, I was very near where he was killed at just the time it happened. It’s my normal routine to walk past there at that time. I certainly could have killed him, but I didn’t. Can you prove that I did?”

Finally, he would not confess. That last and most fatal flaw in any killer’s plan. The weakness of guilt that made a man break down under pressure.

Castro would feel no guilt at all. Not for killing one thieving son-of-bitch young stud.

He would not break under questioning.

He was a man of position and wealth.

He could protect himself.

And he would not be forced to confess to save an innocent person. He would be the only real suspect. Susan would have an alibi, a real alibi, and the scene would be completely deserted.