Лоуренс Блок - Death Pulls a Doublecross [= Cowards Kiss]

“Then how did you know I had the briefcase? If you didn’t know where she lived, you didn’t see me coming out of her apartment. So how did you spot me?”

“I didn’t.”

“You had a tail on me last night,” I said. “I sent him home with his head in a sling. How did he pick me up?”

“You’re in the wrong world, London. I didn’t have you tailed.”

I remembered a little mousy man with glasses. “A little guy. He picked me up at the Ruskin, where Armin is staying. And then—”

His smile spread around some more. “Is that where he’s staying?”

“You already knew that, Bannister.”

“I guess I know it now. Thanks.”

I shifted gears again. It was cuter than hell — the more I knew, the more things got jumbled up all over again. “You didn’t spot me with Alicia’s body,” I said. “But you figured I had the briefcase. Right?”

“Right.”

“Then—”

My ignorance had him so happy I thought he was going to start giggling any minute. “So goddamn dumb,” he said. “I got a phone call. You learn a lot of things over a phone. I learned you had the briefcase. And you did. So?”

“Who called you?”

“A little bird. You ask a lot of questions, you know that? What do you care about answers? I shoot you and you’re dead. You believe there’s a thing like heaven?”

“No.”

He nodded swiftly. “Good. Neither do I. So you’re dead, and when you’re dead it’s all over. In an hour or so you get stiff. Your hands and feet turn white. Powder white, fishbelly white. A couple days after that you start to rot. And whatever you got going for you in your head, whatever your brains are loaded with, it rots too. The questions and the answers — they rot. Why ask?”

“Curiosity.”

“It killed a lot of cats, London.”

I took very careful aim with the Beretta. He was right but his reasons were all wrong. I didn’t need any more questions and answers. I had all the answers that mattered. There were a few questions left here and there but Bannister wasn’t going to be able to answer them.

Everything was coming into focus now. Everything was taking shape and working itself out.

I didn’t need Clay Bannister any more.

“Dead,” he was saying now. “Didn’t have to kill you before. No point. Hell, you did me a favor. I take the briefcase and toss you out. What can you do to me? Nothing. You don’t have a story to take to the cops and you’re too small to give me a hard time on your own. I brush you away like a horse brushes flies.”

“You can still do that.”

He shook his big head. “Uh-uh,” he grunted. “You killed one of my boys.”

“Ralph killed him.”

“Uh-uh. You killed him. So now it’s your turn for some of the same. You still sure you don’t believe in heaven? You want to squeeze in a round of last-minute praying?”

He could have gone on that way for another half hour. His voice was ugly but he liked the sound of it, liked the way his neo-Nietzschean crap rolled off his tongue. He might still be talking now. But I was sick of listening to him, sick of staring into the muzzle of his gun.

I steadied the Beretta and squeezed the trigger.

For a little gun it made one hell of a noise. Bannister’s face started to change expression from satisfaction to horror. He got halfway there and wound up wearing a silly half-smile. I wondered how long it would take the undertaker to wipe it off his face.

I was aiming for his face but the bullet came in low. It took him in the neck, right in the center of the throat, and he fell in slow motion, the gun in his hand all the way to the floor. When he was on his knees he squeezed the trigger in a death grip and a bullet plowed a furrow in the thick carpet.

He fell the rest of the way, then stopped moving. A river of blood flowed from the hole in his throat. The thick carpet sopped up most but not all of it.

I felt a little like Lady Macbeth. “Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” But the little lady was swimming in guilt, and I couldn’t feel anything but numb satisfaction no matter how hard I tried. Nobody ever deserved death more thoroughly. Nobody’s death ever came in a more appropriate manner.

Just for the record I took his pulse. He turned out to be just as dead as he looked. Then I walked over to Billy, grabbed hold of his wrist, and found out he was as dead as his boss. I glanced at Ralph — he didn’t seem to be breathing, and when I looked for a pulse I couldn’t find one. Maybe he had a heart attack. Maybe I scared him to death.

Then I saw beads of blood in both his ears and figured out what happened. The fall with Billy on top of him had been a healthy one. He fractured his skull and he was dead.

Which meant there were three of them. Three dead men on a thick carpet in an ugly living room. Three bodies cooling off under a beamed ceiling in a Long Island manor house. Three gunshots in ten minutes.

And one worn-out detective who needed a drink. Badly.

And all at once I remembered another picture. A picture of an apartment where a dead and nearly nude blonde lay still and silent in the center of an immaculate room. The scene I was in now was just as surrealistic. Maybe it was Death itself that was surrealistic. Maybe the rest was just the frame for the picture.

I got out of there in a hurry. I wiped off everything I could have touched in one way or another — a doorknob here, a chair there. I wiped off three hands and wrists while I tried to remember whether it was possible to get a print from a dead man’s skin. I took a final look at the three of them and remembered they had been alive just a few minutes ago, all three of them, and that I was responsible for their deaths.

I wasn’t sorry.

I remembered the beating they had handed me and the search they had given my apartment. I thought about all the people they had managed to mess up in one way or another in the course of their lives. So I wasn’t sorry at all. They had it coming.

I picked up the briefcase. It was beginning to feel like an old friend. I carried it out of the house, wiped the brass doorknob and closed the carved oak door. The bullet in Bannister’s throat was my only souvenir. And ballistics wouldn’t be able to do a thing with it. Peter Armin wouldn’t own a traceable gun.

From the front seat of the Chevy I looked out at the house again. Bannister’s house, his estate. The sun was still shining and I blinked at it. I’d been expecting dark clouds and gloomy weather. But the real world doesn’t have the artistic balance of a Gothic novel. Bannister’s lawn was still neat, still blindingly green. Birds went on singing in his trees.

They didn’t seem to miss him at all.

I pushed the accelerator to the floor and let the Chevy have her head. The top was still down and the rush of very fresh air shook me out of my mood. A few miles down the road I pulled over to the curb to fill a pipe and get it going. There was a small hole in my right-hand jacket pocket, the one the bullet went through. It was black around the edges. The gun in that pocket felt heavier now than before. Actually it was lighter by a bullet. It still felt heavier.

I goosed the Chevy and we got going again.

There was one little headache — I’d beaten the brains out of a little guy with glasses, and unless Bannister was lying for the sheer hell of it the guy hadn’t been tailing me at all. But that was something to worry about later. For the time being I had plenty to do. I had answers to all the questions now, values for all the unknowns in my human equation. X and Y and Z had names and shapes and faces. I knew all I had to know.

I left Suffolk County behind, hurried through Nassau, got done with Queens as quickly as I could. I rode under the East River, felt trapped in the tunnel, then came out in Manhattan again. It felt good. I’m a city boy — I was born here and I like it here, and it’s the only spot that feels like home. Boroughs like Brooklyn and Queens are a waste of time and space, and the rest of Long Island is the country.