Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

She was moving toward him, trying to smile over her awareness of the gun.

“Stop, Marcillene!” he said harshly. “I mean it.”

“But, Bob...”

“I said, stand back! I just realized something, Marcillene. There has to be a woman in this. A woman, first, to get the goods to blackmail the old geezer, Berrywinkle. But why not a woman all the way? A woman to kill him, to track down Darran, and kill Darran too to silence him? It would be easy for her, with a hired hood, maybe, to lug the unconscious patsy to Darran’s so the killing wouldn’t come home to roost.”

“Darran,” she breathed. “Darran dead? I didn’t know!”

“Let’s can the act. In Darran’s hand was a tiny white feather. Did he snatch at the feathery flower in your hair? Did you take the flower from his dying hand, fluff it out, put it back in your hair?”

His voice snapped off. Heintz had moved over to the writing desk. His hand was near the desk drawer. “Hold it, Harry!” Bob said.

They stood that way during a frozen moment. Then Bob said:

“Your lapel, Harry. No imitation gardenia in your buttonhole right now. I’ve never seen you without it before. It’s always been as much a part of you as a toupee is to some men. So the bit of down in Darran’s palm didn’t come from the flower in a girl’s hair — but from the imitation gardenia you were wearing when you killed him! Darran snatched the flower, struggling with you, but you got the flower back. But not all of it, Harry. You left just enough.”

He jerked the gun up, but Heintz was moving fast, reading Bob’s face. Bob fired, missed. Heintz threw himself down and sideways with blinding speed. He scooped the gun from the desk drawer. He squeezed the trigger.

Banklin flung himself on the floor, rolling for the shelter of a chair. Marcillene screamed, dropped beside Banklin.

Bob fired again. Sweat was needling down into his eyes. He heard the crash of Heintz’s gun, felt the bite of the bullet in his shoulder. The impact knocked a cough from Bob. He was spun back, and the gun he’d taken from Steve Ivey slipped from his fingers.

In a haze, he saw Heintz’s gloating face. Heintz was bringing his gun up, taking his time... it was all so obvious now. Heintz behind the Berrywinkle mess, having to kill; Heintz, with his connections, inevitably locating Darran; Heintz finding a prime fall guy when Bob walked into the Gilded Lily, and making Bob drink a drugged drink and sleep for awhile with Darran’s corpse. And now Heintz was ready to kill again.

But there’d had to be a woman from the beginning. Marcillene. She’d got the blackmail goods on old Berrywinkle. She’d played her string with Heintz right on through the murder.

For a moment, the thought of her, the memory of her lips, drove unbearable pain through Bob. Then the pain began to die; for the gun before him was very real and she was pulling herself from the carpet, crawling toward Heintz.

The gun crashed. But the sound came from behind Bob, not from Heintz’ gun. Heintz jerked up on his toes, blood splashing down the side of his neck. His gun slipped from his grip, and he began a crazy, twisting fall to the carpet.

Bob turned. Steve Ivey was standing in the doorway, a gun in his hand. Big, competent, a hunter of men.

He pushed in the room. “You okay, Bob?”

“I’m all right,” Bob said. “He barked my shoulder just enough to knock the gun out of my hand. But how did you—?”

“I figured you’d come here,” Steve said, leaning over Heintz to watch him draw ragged breaths. “I was working on the Berrywinkle killing. Everything I’d dug up so far pointed to Heintz — old Berrywinkle’s keeping company with Marcillene before his death, Berrywinkle’s movements the day of his death... and of course Darran. We had a good idea that Darran was holing up because he’d been on the scene of the killing and knew who did it. So tonight, when I discovered Darran’s murder and let you get away, I’d already mentally tagged Heintz for it.”

“You let me get away?”

“I had the gun,” Steve said simply. “I could have blown your brain out.”

“But why? Why let me get away?”

“I knew you hadn’t killed Darran, Bob. No killer is going to hang around a murder long enough for the blood to dry on his hands. But if I’d hauled you in, I’d never have been able to tell that to the Inspector or the D. A. with the kind of case they’d have had against you. If I’d pulled you in, you’d have been their man. Another assignment for me, and I... Oh, hell, Bob, I know you think I’m nothing more than a guy out hunting with a gun and a badge. Maybe I am — but I always like to hunt the right man.”

Bob swallowed. Coldness in Steve’s eyes? Sure, for the guys who deserve it. But that didn’t mean it was part of the man. Pam had been right about Steve all the time...

A hand touched him. Bob turned. Marcillene was standing close beside him, looking up into his face, smiling.

“Bob,” she said. “There’s so much I’ve got to explain...”

It was there. A golden image of beauty. His for the taking. Heintz was down and he was top dog now. But Bob thought: I was right in the middle of it when Berrywinkle’s killer was brought down. I’ll be a stellar witness at the trial. Maybe she’s thinking that I can lie enough to save her lovely neck.

Her beauty shook him. He couldn’t deny that. But time would lessen the pain until it became only a vague memory. Time can change a man. Three years behind walls had shown him that, Bob thought.

Bob turned away from her and bent over Heintz. Heintz was groaning. The wound in the fleshy side of his neck was not too serious.

“Heintz,” Bob said, “can you hear me? She was your girl. You said it, remember? She’s been with you all the way, an accessory before and after the fact. But maybe, just maybe, you can tell it to them so she’ll get off a little lighter than you. You’d hate to sit in the hot seat and know that all this beauty is going to be the next customer, wouldn’t you, Heintz?”

Bob turned then and walked from the apartment. Steve didn’t try to stop him. As he pushed through the aroused, excited crowd outside the apartment, toward the clean outside air of the early morning, Bob knew that Steve understood.

It had been a tough road. But Bob had reached its ending. He was home at last.

Originally published in Detective Tales , October 1952.

I closed the car door behind me and bored my way across the village street through the lashing snow, moving toward the lighted warmth of Len Abbott’s general store. It was a bitterly cold day, an angry north wind hurling the snow down through the mountain passes. Though it was only four-thirty in the afternoon, the village lay cloaked in a thick, gray near-darkness.

I stomped my feet and shook my coat when I was inside the store. Len was dozing behind the counter. Three mountain men were grouped on nail kegs around the potbelly stove in the center of the store. Len said, “Howdy, doc.”

“Any mail for me?”

Len handed over a couple of envelopes and a small, brown package, mail from relatives and sample drugs from a pharmaceutical house. I stuffed the mail in my pockets, and bellied up to the stove, feeling its warmth on the full, red flesh of my cold face.

Though a mountain doctor has little time for such things, I always enjoyed a stop-off in Len’s. Like the mountains, the store hadn’t changed in its reflection of a way of life. The store meant grub when crops went bad or a man’s livestock sickened. It was a meeting place where Saturday poke buyers swapped news of Dogwood Mountain for news of Jackson’s Cove. Girls in their teens flirted behind their mamas’ backs and in summer young bucks pitched horseshoes or staged weight lifting contests with sacks of grain in the store yard. The main thing I liked about the store was its smell. It smelled just as it had when I was a boy coming to town with pa in the buggy when Len’s pa ran the store, fifty years ago. Time had blended the odors of new harness, salt meat, chewing tobacco, fresh denim, fertilizer, snuff, candy, crackers, until there wasn’t another smell quite like it on earth.