Carolyn Banks - The New Black Mask (№6)

“Lose what?”

She kissed him, smiled down into his eyes. “The boys, Norman. We start proceedings to legally adopt the boys. His boys. We threaten to take his sons from him.”

Roth stared, then began to laugh. “Castro & Sons!”

“It’s the one thing that would make Max commit murder — the loss of Castro & Sons.” Susan Roth smiled. “His sons with your name. His business with your name.”

Roth laughed aloud. He grabbed her, rolled her over on the bed, kissed her breasts, kissed her mound, kissed... Stopped.

“The business! It won’t work if he thinks he’s ruining me, and he is ruining me.”

Susan Roth stretched and looked up at their naked bodies in the mirrored ceiling. “You’ve been invited to bid on the Haskins Project. Make your bid so low they must give it to you. They don’t reveal details of the bids.”

Roth shook his head. “A bid low enough to be sure would lose me a fortune. We’d really be ruined, and for keeps.”

“Not with Max dead,” Susan said. “A calculated risk, Norman. With Max gone we would get his insurance, his money, and his business. Or the boys would, and that means me. We’d have it all, and you could absorb the Haskins loss.”

“I’d need money up front to start the work, make it look good, and no one would give me a loan the way things are now.”

“I have my jewels, some securities. We’ll get a loan with them as collateral. Maxwell won’t know how we got the loan. He’ll find you have the contract and the money, are going ahead bigger and better. He’ll have to kill you. He’s wanted to from the start. You took his contract, his wife, and his male ego. I’ve known that all along. Now we can use it to save ourselves.”

“Will the courts let us adopt the boys without his consent?”

“They will if we can prove Max is an unfit father, a child molester, and we can. Or we’ll make Max think we can, and that’s all it will take. He wants to kill you, Norman. We’ll give him a good excuse, make him tell himself there’s no other way.”

Roth stared at her, perhaps suddenly a little bit afraid of her. Afraid and excited too. They stared at each other in the giant bed high above the city, Maxwell Castro’s ex-wife and his most hated enemy. They looked at each other with the excitement of victory and even of death, and that brought another kind of excitement. An excitement that isn’t all that different.

Afterward they began to plan.

They set the business wheels in motion, Susan had her lunch with Max Castro. Then they made Castro wait and wait until he was on the verge of exploding with his hate. When they were ready, they decided on a Thursday, the night of Susan Roth’s Junior League meeting.

“I’ve timed it, Norman,” Susan said. “If I drive from the apartment to the Junior League faster than usual, or slower than usual, there is only a difference of five minutes in total time.”

Roth nodded. “No jury would convict anyone on a matter of five minutes in city traffic. Not without a lot of evidence.”

“And there won’t be any. As long as no one sees you with Maxwell at the site, we’re safe, and Maxwell himself will make sure no one sees you, eh?”

They both laughed.

“Even if someone notices the car,” Susan went on, “it will be just an unidentified car on a dark street for a few moments. It will be far too dark to read the license plate. They’ll know we killed him, but they won’t be able to prove it.”

That Thursday, Roth volunteered to work at the Junior League himself. He told his men that he would not visit the site that night. He told them to knock off at the regular time.

Roth and Susan went to the empty site. She dropped him off. Castro waited. Roth killed him. Susan came back two minutes after Castro had arrived. A minute later Roth walked from the deserted building. Susan held the door open for him, he slipped into the car. Susan ran back around the car to the driver’s seat, drove off. Roth looked at his watch.

“Four minutes flat.”

They arrived at the Junior League exactly at Susan’s usual time. Traffic had been a little lighter than normal. From the numbers, they couldn’t have stopped anywhere.

As they worked at the Junior League, they smiled.

I sensed them still smiling when the police came the next morning. They were shocked, horrified, but admitted quite readily that they had hated Castro and were glad he was dead. They admitted they wanted him dead, but they certainly hadn’t killed him. They defied the police to come up with a shred of evidence. They knew they had made no mistakes, not one.

In his office above the city, Captain Pearce sighed. “Not one mistake, Fortune. They’re right. We’ve got no real evidence.”

“No one else could have done it,” I said.

“Or anyone else,” Schatz said.

Pearce nodded. “A tramp, a drunk, a psycho, a scared kid caught trespassing by Castro. Some enemy of Castro’s we don’t even know exists. Roth’s lawyer will make hash of a jury.”

“Except for Castro’s mistake,” I said, “and the flaw in the Roths’ plan.”

Pearce was doubtful. “It’s pretty thin, Dan.”

“Thin and theory,” Schatz said. “No DA is going to even go to a grand jury with what you’ve got, Fortune.”

“He won’t have to,” I said.

They said nothing. They weren’t exactly convinced. Neither was I, really, but what I had was all I was going to get as far as evidence was concerned. I hoped it would be enough. I was pretty certain it would be, but it had been a long, hard case and you never know for sure.

“It’s funny,” I said. “Castro had a perfect plan without a flaw, but he made a mistake. Roth and Susan Roth didn’t make a single mistake, but their plan had one flaw — the alibi. They had to have an alibi.” I shook my head. “Because their plan had a flaw, and Castro made a small mistake, they’re going over.”

How do you explain one small mistake? Castro’s plan was literally foolproof — if he made no mistakes. What made that one careless moment? I was inside his mind and I didn’t know. The waiting? The anxiety to get it done after all those weeks, months? Maybe it was, in the end, only fate, the roll of the dice, working on three lives that last Thursday...

The boy stood behind the soda fountain counter.

“Dead? Mr. Castro’s dead?”

“Murdered,” I said. “It was in all the newspapers.”

“I don’t read the papers. I’m studying to be an architect. I liked Mr. Castro.”

“Two weeks ago Thursday,” I said.

The boy blinked at me, frowned. “Two weeks? Thursday? Gee, maybe that’s why I couldn’t find him, you know? I mean, it was two weeks ago, sure. Thursday.”

“Find him?” I said. “Two weeks ago?”

“He forgot the razor he bought,” the boy explained. “We had some loud kids, you know, and he had to wait to pay for his cherry soda and the razor. He walked out fast, forgot to take the package. He was gone maybe three, four minutes when I saw it. The package, I mean. I told the boss, and he let me go after Mr. Castro with the razor. I mean — the boss, he liked Mr. Castro too. So the boss took over on the fountain and I went out and tried to catch up with Mr. Castro.”

“You went after him two weeks ago Thursday?”

“I knew which way he always walked ’cause he talked to me a lot about going to visit this building of some guy named Roth about three blocks up. I figured he’d probably stop there and I could catch him. Only, when I got there, no one was around.”

“You went to Roth’s building five minutes after Castro left your store, but you didn’t see anyone?”

“Not when I got there, and I never did see Mr. Castro. But when I was leaving I saw this big guy come out of the building and get into a car. It wasn’t Mr. Castro, and there was only a woman in the car, so I walked back to the store.”