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

But he wasn’t in the house. The place was pretty well messed up, with drawers pulled out and stuff strewn over the floors. I decided he’d grabbed a few valuables and skipped. Then I looked out the window, saw his convertible still parked on the edge of the street. I tried to make sense out of it, but didn’t feel up to it.

As the anger burned out of me, I didn’t feel up to anything. I went in his kitchen, started some coffee making. I looked in his refrigerator. Two bottles of beer were in it. I drank both of them.

I followed the beer a few minutes later with two cups of scalding black coffee. I ate a piece of bread and butter, a slice of cheese, and followed that with another cup of coffee.

I went to the living room, opened the front door. My head was still aching and spinning like crazy. I wondered if I had a concussion. The sun was just over the lip of the earth in the east, rising in that burst of orange and crimson you see nowhere but in Florida.

Low in the air, over the edge of the beach, a cluster of gulls were wheeling and screaming.

I did a double take at that group of gulls, stared at them a few seconds, then went stumbling toward the strip of beach as fast as I could go.

Baxter Osgood was lying on his face, the water almost lapping the tips of his upflung hands. He’d been shot in the right temple, and near his hand lay a .38 caliber revolver.

I squatted on my heels beside Osgood’s body and tried to figure the way it had happened. He’d left me in the back yard, entered the house to get something. Somebody had arrived.

He and the somebody had walked down here, and the somebody utterly without warning had shot him, then with panic gnawing, the somebody had wiped the gun, pressed Osgood’s prints on it, and left it where it might have fallen from his hand. I was pretty sure the gun was the same that had killed Buddy Tomlinson.

It was just a hunch, but granting the hunch, and granting that Ben Aiken fell for the suicide picture, Aiken would conclude that Osgood had killed Tomlinson because one of their shady deals went sour, then in panic had killed himself.

There was one other point. The murderer evidently hadn’t known I was in the back yard. My coupe wasn’t at Osgood’s house, but up at his beer joint. There was no other evidence that I was lying in the back yard unconscious when the murderer had called on Osgood.

I turned Osgood over, remembering the way his bungalow had been searched. I patted his torso, his waist.

The moneybelt was one of those jobs that blends right in with the body lines. If you weren’t careful, you could search him and miss it. I tore his shirt open, took the belt off him.

Osgood’s belt contained five thousand dollars in money and a few sheets of paper that upon reading I knew were the letters that Phyllis Darnell had written to Buddy Tomlinson.

I went back in the house and phoned Ben Aiken.

An hour after that, a small crowd of people was gathered in a room in St. Pete’s old, sun-baked city hall.

They all looked at me when I entered. I had my head bandaged, three aspirins under my belt, pile-drivers still in my skull, and a feeling like a wad of cotton in my throat.

I looked over the silent room. Ben and a city dick were there, along with a stenographer, who was a big, brawny man. Henry Fayette was standing beside the chair that held Emagine Buford, who’d been taken from her cell. Allene Buford stood near the windows, and Phyllis Darnell stood with her back to the wall near Emagine’s chair.

I tossed Phyllis Darnell’s letters on the scarred table. Her gaze rabbited around the room, her hands fluttering to her throat. “Go ahead,” I said, “and pick them up. My boss will render you a bill later. For my money, you’re a dirty little tramp, Mrs. Darnell, but Ben has agreed to keep the letters confidential. Not because of you — because of that poor devil up in Augusta, Maine.”

“Then you know that I didn’t kill Buddy Tomlinson? You really do know!” Phyllis held her hands pressed tight against her throat.

I looked at Allene, She took a step or two toward me. That wad of cotton fluffed out in my throat. “We know who killed Tomlinson and Osgood both, don’t we, Allene?”

She stopped, then began moving again, circling around the room. “Are you joking with me, Lloyd?”

“I wish I was. I wish it more than you know, though maybe not for the reason you think. You knew Tomlinson had a good chance of getting his hands on the Buford money through Emagine, unless something was done about him. You went to his bungalow, maybe planning to kill him, maybe not. But you did kill him. Osgood saw you leaving. You were wearing Emagine’s hat and coat, and he thought it was Emagine at first. But when he heard her story, he was inclined to believe it and guessed it had been you.

“You had killed Tomlinson to hold on to your money, Osgood reasoned. If Emagine went to the chair, it would not only leave you clear, Allene, but would remove her as the last obstacle between you and the Buford fortune. It looked sweet from where Osgood sat. He dug you for five grand, but when you’d had time to think, you knew it was no good. It would never be any good as long as Osgood was alive. So you killed him too.

“When I found Osgood dead on the beach, I started trying to think of the whole thing as he would have thought. You were the only answer, Allene. You were the one who could have easily gotten Emagine’s hat and coat. You had motive. And I’m afraid they’ll pin it on you. There must be some of your fingerprints on the five grand I took off of Osgood. There’ll be so many more things when they start looking and digging, Allene.”

She looked from face to face, her hands knotted at her sides. Then she wheeled and lunged for the door. But the knife was quicker. The knife flashed in my hand, thudded in the door, close to her face. It paralyzed her. It paralyzed everyone in the room. She came to life first. She grasped the knife and pulled it from the wood. “You’d do this to me, Lloyd?”

That wad of cotton in my throat choked me.

“What else could I do?” she whispered. “I’d never had but one thing in a lousy life — that money. That damned filthy Buford money — and now I was going to get cheated out of that. I didn’t mean to kill Buddy Tomlinson. I only wanted to scare him. But he grabbed at the gun — and it went off. I thought that if I hired a detective to warn Buddy away from Emagine, Buddy’s body would be found and no one would ever think I had known he was dead. I thought that would take suspicion from me, and once Buddy’s body was found, the detective would have no more to do with the case.

“After that, it seemed easier. It was much easier to kill Osgood. Yes, killing gets easier all the time—”

She sliced the word off with the knife. A spasm crossed her face, telegraphing a wave of horror over the room. A little cough bubbled in her throat.

I had never thought she’d use the knife for that. I’d only wanted to scare her, to bring her up at the door before Ben and his men began pulling guns. I’d wanted her to stop, to think. To talk. To cop a plea. To live.

She had saved my life. It was the only possible way I could have saved hers.

But she’d used the knife on herself.

I caught her in my arms as she crumpled, laid her gently on the floor. The scene in the room was breaking apart, people moving, converging on her. Her eyes flicked open. “Why couldn’t it have been different, Lloyd? Why couldn’t you have showed me Florida — the — part — the tourist never sees?”

Tears wells in her eyes. A spasm shuddered over her.

I stood up, fighting the moisture in my eyes. Distantly, I heard Emagine Buford say, “In a way, I’m not surprised. She was always sort of—”