Маргарет Миллар - Do Evil In Return

She repeated stubbornly, “He would never do such a thing.”

“I admit it’s a pretty stupid idea to drive a convertible containing two bodies into your girlfriend’s garage. But I figure that he didn’t expect you back for a few days, and he intended to use the time to think himself out of the jam. When you look at it like that, Ballard was playing it smart. Your garage was practically the one safe place in town where he could hide the bodies until he planned a way to dispose of them.”

Lewis and Violet. Lewis and Voss. Lewis and Eddie. Three deaths already, and Easter with death in his eyes.

Easters mouth moved with a question, but she hadn’t heard it.

“I repeat,” Easter said. “Ballard had a key to your garage?”

“I don’t see what difference it...”

“But he had a key?”

“I left the door open.”

“Did he have a key?”

“Yes!”

Both their voices were raised, but Easter’s had lowered in pitch, and Charlotte’s was high and shrill.

“Do I have to squeeze everything out of you?” Easter said. “Don’t you know I’m trying to help you?”

“I don’t want your kind of help.”

“You can’t be choosey at this stage of the game. You’d better take all the help you can get while you can get it. You’ve got a car with two very dead men out in your garage, and I have to report it. I have to report it to the chief, to the D.A., to the sheriff. I should have reported it half an hour ago, but I gave you a chance. Where’s Ballard?”

“I don’t know.”

“And even if you knew...?”

“I wouldn’t tell you.”

“The loyal-little-woman role, eh?” An ugly smile crossed his face. “Well, come on, loyal little woman, I have something to show you.”

“I don’t have to...”

“Come on. I want to see that loyalty explode right in your two blind eyes.”

She felt a surge of violence. She wanted to reach out and hit him. It was the first time since childhood that she had wanted to strike someone, to hurt “You’re — you’re a contemptible...”

“Bully,” he said. “Gad. Yeah, I know all that.”

“My — my loyalty isn’t as absurd as you seem to think it is. There’s no proof that Lewis is guilty of anything.”

“Not enough for a court of law. It might take a month, two months, to line up the witnesses and the ballistics and medical experts and to organize the evidence. But right now I’m convinced, as the judge puts it in his instructions to the jury, I’m convinced beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty, that Ballard killed all three of them, Violet, O’Gorman and Voss.”

Beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. Heavy, somber words, like a funeral sermon.

Easter glanced at his watch before he opened the front door. “You haven’t much time. Coming?”

“Where are you going?”

“Just to the garage.”

“I don’t want to.

“Afraid you’ll be convinced?”

“No.”

“Come on, Charlotte.”

“No.”

Easter made an impatient gesture. “If I have to convince you that Ballard is a murderer before you’ll do anything to help yourself out of this mess, you must come out to the garage and see for yourself.”

“See what?”

“The gun.”

“Gun?”

“You’re in a worse spot than you think you are, Charlotte. The evidence indicates that the shooting was done in the convertible, perhaps right in your garage.” He paused. “Coming?”

“Yes.” She wanted to see the gun. She even had a sudden hope that she would be able to say definitely that it didn’t belong to Lewis. Lewis had a target pistol, a pair of them, in fact. She remembered the day she’d first seen them. She thought back to the time when she and Lewis were having a picnic on a remote stretch of beach near Pismo, and Lewis was trying to explain to her the difference between a revolver and an automatic pistol.

“These are revolvers. Now an automatic works differently. The cartridges are loaded into a clip that fits into the handle and the recoil mechanism discharges the empty shell and throws a new cartridge into the chamber. But a revolver like this has a revolving cylinder which — you haven’t even been listening, Charley.”

“I have so.”

“All right, what is this in my hand?”

“It’s a .38 caliber Colt target pistol. Darling, the sun’s making me sleepy. Anyway, what is a caliber?”

“You actually don’t know what a caliber is?”

“I actually don’t.”

“You are an amazingly ignorant but lovable woman,” Lewis said solemnly. He had leaned over to kiss her, one of the pistols still in his hand.

It had been a happy day. She thought of it now as she followed Easter silently out to the garage. The beach, the sun, the happiness, were as remote as a dream.

Easter beamed his flashlight into the back seat. It pointed like an accusing finger at the gun on the floor beside Voss’s knee. “See it?”

“Yes.”

“Recognize it?”

“No — I don’t know — I’m very ignorant about revolvers.”

“You can’t be very ignorant or you wouldn’t have called it a revolver.”

“I... I thought guns and revolvers were the same.”

“Did you?” The light hadn’t moved off the gun; it was mercilessly steady. “Well, it is a revolver and a very interesting one. Note the ramp built up along the barrel. That’s for more accurate sighting. Know anyone who goes in for target shooting?”

“No.”

He made a sound of disbelief. “The gun’s a common make, a Colt .38. What makes it uncommon is the fancy hand-made grip, and the fact that it’s one of a pair. And the other one of the pair is in Ballard’s study. I saw it there this afternoon.”

She turned away. The ceiling light of the garage was on, and she could see, in sharp contrast to the convertible and its contents, the ordinary items of her everyday existence: her gardening tools, the canvas gloves she wore to protect her hands, the trunkful of woolen clothes she had stored away for the summer, the old bicycle she used sometimes for exercise. They all seemed remote, like the day at the beach with Lewis. It was as if she would never again be able to take up her life where she had left off. The stitch had been dropped, and even if she could return to pick it up, the pattern had already, and inexorably, been changed.

She spoke wearily, “I have a legal right to say nothing.”

“That’s true.”

“I think I’ll — go in now.”

He followed her back into the house. His face was unnaturally red, the face of a man trying to control himself and restrain his anger. He walked the length of the room and back again, slowly, heavily, his full weight on every step.

“Charlotte...”

“You’d better make you report.”

“Not yet. I can hold off for a few more hours. You’ve been away, understand? You’ve been away and you haven’t come back yet.”

“I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d never gone. I wish I’d never met any of you, Violet or Eddie or you or...”

“Take it easy.” He went out into the kitchen and found a bottle of Bourbon and poured her some in a water glass. “Drink it.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Afraid you’ll talk too much? Look, Charlotte, this is no longer a matter of loyalty. It’s a matter of trying to protect yourself from being ruined.”

“I can’t protect myself. They’re there, Voss and Eddie. I can’t get rid of them.”

“I know you can’t.” He put the glass of Bourbon on the coffee table. “But you can minimize the importance of their being found in your garage. As the case stands now, that’s the point the newspapers are going to concentrate on. Double Slaying in Garage of Prominent Physician — they’ll give it the business, and whether you’re guilty or innocent, you’re going to be smeared. You’ll be accused and tried, not by a jury of your peers, but by a couple of newspaper reporters who want a juicy story, a deputy D.A. who likes to have his picture in the paper, several hundred housewives who resent your position as a doctor, a few disgruntled patients, some or your friends who ‘knew it all the time,’ a couple of W.C.T.U. members who saw you drink a beer once in 1943, and the usual assortment of religious cranks, neurotics, sadists... There’s your jury. Like it?”