Bill Pronzini: Schemers

Under the watchful eye of the patrolman, Pollexfen was stumping around the living room with the tip of his cane making hard, angry noises on the rug-covered tiles. He stopped when he saw the three of us come in, started to say something that didn’t get out of his throat. It was the eight books I was carrying, spines outward, that checked him. His brows and his mouth pulled down into a bunched grimace.

“What have you got there?” he demanded. “How dare you remove books from my library without my permission?”

I said, “You should be glad to see these. Familiar even from where you’re standing, aren’t they?”

He came stumping toward me. “Give me those!”

I said, “No, you don’t,” and Davis stepped between Pollexfen and me to stop his advance. “They’re evidence now.”

“Evidence-bah! Where are the dust wrappers?”

“Wherever you hid them.”

He waved that away. “The books-where did you find them?”

“Same answer. Where you hid them. Inside jackets by other authors, filed under those authors’ names on the shelves.”

Another dismissive wave. Brazen it out, that was his style. Contemptuously spin and deny and manipulate to the end. He’d’ve been right at home in the nation’s capital. “Is that what Jeremy did? Hid them right under my nose until he could find a way to remove them later on?”

“Your scheme, not his. One of several.”

“Nonsense.”

“Fact. Here’s another: the eight books on the couch Cullrane was supposed to’ve gathered before he was shot. There’s not a highly prized first edition among them.”

“No? I told you he didn’t know books, didn’t I?”

“Then how did he happen to pick eight of the most valuable the first time around? Blind luck? No, you chose the second batch because you didn’t want to risk damage to expensive books. The same reason you replaced expensive ones with inexpensive ones on the shelves alongside the fireplace.”

He glared at me; there was hate in his eyes now, black as midnight. “I did no such thing. If books were moved around in there, Jeremy did it. Or Angelina.”

“They’d have no reason to. Only you.”

“Blatantly false accusations. You can’t prove any of them.”

“Except for felony insurance fraud,” I said. “All the police need to prove that is the missing dust jackets. You wouldn’t risk damage to the valuable ones, so they have to be some place secure. Your safe deposit box-that’s a good bet.”

A muscle twitched under his right eye. I’d made the right guess.

Yin saw it, too. She said, “All it’ll take to find out is a search warrant.”

“Before you can get one,” Pollexfen said, “I’ll withdraw my claim with Great Western Insurance. Then you’ll have nothing criminal against me. A man can do what he wants with his own possessions if he’s not committing a crime.”

“Nothing against you?” I said. “Not committing a crime? Last time I checked, premeditated homicide was still a Class A felony.”

“Homicide! Now what are you claiming?”

“That you killed your brother-in-law.”

“That’s preposterous. Angelina shot him, on purpose or accidentally-”

“No, she didn’t. You. Just like all the rest of it-designed and carried out by you.”

“That’s insane. How could I have shot the man when I was with you and my secretary when it happened? The doors to the library were double-locked, you unlocked them yourself.”

“We know how you did it,” I said. “We also know why. Revenge, for one thing. You hated Cullrane because he was bleeding you over the illegalities in your Greenfield Aeronautics takeover. Hated your wife because of her infidelity. Kill him, frame her-double payback.”

“Double nonsense,” he said.

“But that wasn’t enough for you. You had to do it in a way that satisfied your ego and your passion for crime fiction. Clever mastermind devises ingenious murder plot, then sets out to match wits with real-life detectives. The one thing you forgot is that the too-smart criminal almost always makes mistakes in his calculations, so he hardly ever gets away with his crimes. Life imitating art.”

“You know what I think?” Pollexfen said. “I think you’re full of shit.”

I said to Yin, “Never fails. Back one of the moneyed class into a corner, the respectability peels off like dead skin.”

“You haven’t backed me anywhere.”

“Pretty close, I’d say.”

“Words-just a lot of meaningless words. You believe you know how I committed a mythical murder? Go ahead, explain it.”

“Murder by suicide,” I said.

The phrase jolted him. Until I said it he’d thought we were guessing, that we didn’t actually know how the murder had been arranged. His arrogance, his sense of invincibility, was based on his conviction that he’d created an unsolvable puzzle. I’d blown up that assumption with three little words.

His mouth bent into a sneer, but he forced it and it didn’t come off. “That makes no sense whatsoever.”

“It’s pretty simple, really. Like the rest of your plan. You gathered your wife and her brother into the library and fed them martinis laced with Klonopin-enough of the drug to knock them out for approximately three hours. You knew about the effects of clonazepam and alcohol because of the time your wife ended up in the hospital when she made the mistake of mixing the two. I don’t know how you figured the exact dosage, but I can make a couple of guesses. Casual questions to a trusted doctor or chemist. Or more likely, by trial and error. You’re not above feeding yourself the same cocktail and suffering through the aftereffects until you had the right mix and the right time frame.”

He said nothing this time. The muscle twitched again under his eye.

“The way you set it up,” I said, “Cullrane could have died before you got back from the auction, before Brenda Koehler and I were in the house. It was only important that he be found dead with your wife in a sealed room, and that you have an unshakable alibi for the time of death. You almost miscalculated; another two or three minutes and I might have gotten in there in time to save Cullrane’s life. As it was, the fact that he died when he did, while the three of us were together in the hallway, must have seemed like a huge bonus to you.

“All right. Once Cullrane and Angelina were out cold, you pulled her off the couch and laid her on the floor next to the desk. You took eight not too expensive books off the shelves, probably at random, and stacked them on the couch. You put the second key, the one you had made from your own, into Cullrane’s pocket and then dragged him over to the fireplace and stretched him out on his back with his head propped up against the hearth bricks. How am I doing so far?”

“Still full of shit.”

“You took the shotgun down, made sure it was ready to fire, and laid it vertically on top of Cullrane’s body with the butt wedged down between his knees and the barrels shoved inside his mouth. Then you wrapped his hands around the trigger guard, the fingers interlaced to hold them in place, both forefingers hooked together through the guard and tight on the trigger closest to his face. He was a tall man with long arms; the fit would have been just right. Then you walked out, double-locked the door with your own key, and left for the book auction.

“Death trap for an unconscious man. Clonazepam mixed with alcohol leaves a person groggy and disoriented when he starts to wake up. Cullrane did what anybody in that condition would when he felt his mouth clogged and tasted gunmetal: he struggled automatically to free his hands, pull the barrels out of his mouth. Instead, his laced fingers triggered the weapon and blew off the back of his head, and the recoil jerked it loose and threw it down over his legs. Murder by suicide.”