Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (30 page)

"I know, I don't want to, I—I don't think I
do, any more. It's all over, all of a sudden, and I don't know what
to do—but I shouldn't be here, I'm sorry. I've g-got money, and in
the bank too, I mean I'm all right. I expect I'd better go to a
hotel. It just hit me all of a sudden, the reason. And I don't
know—now—how I do feel about her. Doing that. Not him—but
trying to—wanting to—"

"Yes. I think the only way to feel is sorry for
her, don't you? Not resentful. It's just a thing you have to face up
to."

"I—I guess I'm not very good at that."

"Then now's the time to start," said Alison
firmly. Angel had calmed down a little; perhaps the kitten had
helped, curled up beside her purring. "I always wanted a c-cat.
She never— But I could be different, couldn't I? I could learn
better. To cope, sort of, you know. You know what I always wanted to
do? It's silly, I guess, she said . . . But I liked it better than
anything else at school, even than poetry. I—1ike to cook .... She
kept on at it, until I suddenly saw, that was all. And they think it
was me, that's what she wanted them to— Not Sergeant Hackett, he's
nice, but the other one. That I was in love with Brooke. But does she
think I'm c-crazy, not to know how I felt—and didn't feel? Oh, I
don't understand—and—"

"You'd better tell Lieutenant Mendoza about
this." And then Alison spent ten minutes persuading her.

"I couldn't! Don't you see—even if—even if I
don't feel anything—like that—for her, she is—! I couldn't—like
t-telling tales—"

"Don't be childish," said Alison. "This
is serious, you know it is. And I doubt very much if it'll come as a
surprise to Luis, when—" even you know about it, she finished
in her mind, but Angel was rushing on.

"And besides he's the one thinks I—! He looked
at me when he left—I knew what he was thinking—"

“
That I doubt too," said Alison. "If he
looked at you one way, it probably meant the opposite. I'm told
that's the secret of his success—experience at the poker table. Now
you go and wash your face—you've been crying and it'll make you
feel better—and you'd better take an aspirin too, and lie down on
the bed and rest quiet until he gets here. You can trust Luis not to
jump to any wrong conclusions, and it's much better in his hands."

Angel went meekly to do as she was bidden, and five
minutes later Alison, looking in, found her sound asleep, curled up
on the bed like the kitten.

She left her thoughtfully, shutting the door, and was
sorry Mendoza arrived so soon. He listened to her rather incoherent
account and said, "Awkward. I'm not quite ready to break this
yet, I want a bit more information, and I hope her—mmh—precipitate
flight doesn't scare Mona. No odds if it does, though, she'd only do
something else damn silly. No finesse at all."

"But what an awful thing, Luis—her own
mother—"

"Physical sense only. She's never had a thought
in her head besides herself. In this case, anything expedient to get
out from under. Now I wonder if that was why she took that laundry
bag away? Just in case."

"Will Angel have to testify against her? She's
just about at the end of her tether now—"

"
Es poco probable
,
I don't think so. Not if we get a nice tight legal confession, which
I'd like. She'll have a rough time for a little while, the publicity,
but these things die down—something else'll come along to make
gossip."

"There's good stuff in her, I think—she'll
take it, and maybe be the better for it. My Lord, how I long to get
at her and fix her up—she could be a good-looking girl, you know.
And what a time to think of that .... "

"Any time's the time to think of a good—looking
woman,
chica
. You do
just that, and earn Art Hackett's gratitude. I'd heard the one about
beauty being in the eye of the beholder, but I never believed it
before. Another good man gone wrong .... Yes, I'm afraid so,
lo
siento en al alma
, to my deep regret. Many a
man ruined for life by marriage, I only hope he'll have better luck."

Alison said, "Yes?" She watched him relax
on the couch, stroking the kitten.

"Well, where is this girl? I've got other irons
in the fire—”

"Count five and start pretending to be a human
being," said Alison dryly. "I'll get her."

And he gave her his one-sided smile, caught her hand
as she passed and kissed it. "Sorry,
querida
,
it's routine to me, sometimes I forget it isn't to everybody. I'll be
nice to her."

But she hadn't taken another step before the phone
rang, and it was Hackett ....

Angel looked a little better for the rest, with her
face scrubbed, her hair combed. She sat erect on the edge of the
couch like a child in school, with Alison beside her, and only
gradually relaxed under their quiet voices, their reassuring phrases.

"It was," said Hackett, "a picture
made before you were born, so you wouldn't know anything about it.
But what startled me was that there's a scene of her
shooting—target-shooting—and the way it was taken, I don't see
how it could have been faked. She was doing it, not someone doubling
for her—and she wasn't missing a shot. Quite a little exhibition."

"I don't know anything about the picture. But I
can tell you a little about that, I guess—" She stopped,
looked stricken again, and again Mendoza was patient.

"Miss Carstairs, I'm not lying when I say we'd
get all this elsewhere if not from you. There's only a few little
things I want to ask you right now. I knew about your mother this
morning, when I looked at that coat and saw it was brand-new, and
heard her trying to convince us all that it was yours, and that you'd
had it for some time. You're not betraying her in any sense, believe
me—you're only filling in a little for us that we could learn from
others."

"I see that," she whispered. "I—I
don't like it, but you'd only—find out anyway, and I don't
suppose—this'll be as bad as—if there's a trial and so on."
She stiffened her shoulders, took a deep breath. "Mr. Horwitz
could probably tell you more about it. I know I was awfully surprised
when he mentioned it once—it was the first I'd ever heard of it—it
must have been that picture he meant. He said everybody had been
surprised to—to find she was a second Annie Oakley. You see, she
was brought up on a farm, or anyway a very small town, I'm not sure
which, in South Dakota, and she used to go out hunting with her
father. She got to be quite a good shot. Later on she—I think she
felt it was unwomanly, you know—she never mentioned it or did it
any more. My father—I've heard Mr. Horwitz say—was a sportsman,
he liked to hunt, and I don't know but maybe she used to go with him
then. But that'd be twenty-five years ago, and so far as I know since
then she's never— But Brooke wasn't shot, was he?"

"Not Brooke," said Mendoza. He took the old
Winchester revolver out of his pocket and laid it on the coffee
table. "Have you ever seen this before, Miss Carstairs?"

She looked at it for a long moment. "I—why,
yes, I think—I think that's the gun Brooke stole . . . She wasn't
really angry about it, just a little put out. She never could have
refused him anything, you know," and faint contempt was in her
tone. "She was terribly silly about him. I knew—even I knew—he
just fawned on her, flattered her, because she—gave him presents,
and I think she used to pay too, when they went to some awfully
expensive place. I—it was shameful. I wouldn't have liked him
anyway but when he did that—"

"Yes. He stole this gun?"

"He called it borrowed. He was going to be in
some play where they had to have a gun," she said dully. "I
said my f-father liked to hunt, he had some guns, and two or three of
them she never sold. This was one of them. It's not the kind you hunt
with, of course—the others are rifles—but she kept this on
account of burglars. She said. He saw it one day, it was in the den
with the others in a case, and he took it. She said he should have
asked, of course she'd have lent it to him. He never gave it back—I
don't know if she asked, or maybe gave it to him to keep. I do know
it was loaded when he took it, she always kept it loaded. In case she
needed it in a hurry, she said, if someone broke in."

"Twenty-five years," said Hackett to
Mendoza, meditatively.

"I don't know, it's a thing you don't lose
entirely. If you've had a lot of practice. You'd get rusty, sure,
but—in an emergency—you'd instinctively do what old experience
told you."

"Probably. A great help, anyway—the old
experience—in that particular target shot."

“
Claro estd
. Miss
Carstairs, I've got just two more questions to ask, and then we're
going to see that you're settled in a hotel. Miss Weir'll go along
and I expect lend you whatever you need, and we'll stop bothering you
for a while. Can you tell me anything about Miss Janet Kent?"

Angel's eyes hardened a little. "Yes, I can,"
she said steadily. "She was a—a sort of nurse—supervisor for
me for about ten years, from the time I was five. I don't think she
meant to be—unkind, but she was awfully—oh, strict and
old-fashioned, and crotchety. She was old then, and looking back now,
I can see she used to—to fawn on her and pretend to admire her so
much, because she was afraid of losing her job, not being able to get
another. But—she—swallowed it all whole, you never can give her
too much flattery, she never sees through it. And when I got too old
for Miss Kent, she gave her a sort of pension, just because it makes
her feel magnanimous to have someone dependent on her that way. I—I
feel sorry for Miss Kent now—once in a while she'd get me to go
with her there, you know, and it's just sickening—to me anyway—the
way Miss Kent kowtows to her, you almost expect her to say ‘my
lady' and curtsey—oh, you know what I mean—like a whipped
dog—because she's old, nearly eighty, and she hasn't got anyone or
any money, and if she ever stopped giving her this little bit to live
on, Miss Kent'd have to go on the county. She just revels in it, of
course, the funny thing is she thinks Miss Kent really means it—"

"Yes. Now I want you to take your time and think
about this one," said Mendoza. "You know, of course, that
your mother has made a very inept effort to cast suspicion on you.
She didn't choose you deliberately, but when we found the body, you
see—which hadn't been intended—and began finding out a few things
close to home, she got nervous. She had a few things she hadn't got
rid of, to link her with it, and now she was afraid to try to dispose
of them, that we might see her doing that. So it had to be someone in
the same house, in case of a search warrant. And that meant you. You
know about the coat. There's something else. Something about two feet
long or a bit more. Fairly heavy, but partly flexible. Is there
anywhere in that house where she could put such a thing, where it
would be definitely connected with you and still you wouldn't come
across it right away‘?"

She didn't think twenty seconds; she said simply,
instantly, "Why, of course. My old trunk. That is, it's—it was
my father's, there were some old family pictures in it and odds and
ends. She was going to throw it away once when I was about seven, and
I begged to have it. I—I never knew anybody in either of their
families, you see, my grandparents or aunts and uncles—and it made
it seem I had more of a family somehow, those old pictures. I used to
t-tell myself stories about them .... I keep it way at the back of my
closet, it's locked, and there are things in it I expect it's silly
to keep, but the kind of things you don't throw away. My high school
graduation dress, and the school yearbooks—and a c-couple of
letters—things like that. I don't open it once in six months, now."

"Locked," said Mendoza. "Where do you
keep the key?"

"In the top drawer of my dresser."

"And where were you from six o'clock on last
evening? At home?"

"Why, no—for once I wasn't," she said
without bitterness. "I felt I had to get out—away—I went to
a movie by myself .... No, of course I haven't looked in the trunk
since."

"Thank you very
much," said Mendoza smiling. "That's all for now."

* * *

And as they waited for Alison to pack an overnight
bag for the girl, over Angel's protests, Mendoza suddenly asked, "You
didn't pick up a traffic ticket on your perambulations today, by any
chance?"

"A— No, why?"

"Neither did I. Oh, I don't know—round out the
case," said Mendoza vaguely. "Traffic tickets, they've had
quite a lot to do with this i case, one way and another. If Frank
Walsh hadn't given me that ticket and subsequently found I'm a
tolerably reasonable individual to talk to, he'd probably have done
nothing about his doubts on Bartlett. Let Slaney convince him he was
just being overconscientious. And if Madame Cara hadn't got a ticket
that night at—as we now know—the corner of Avalon and DuPont at
seven minutes past eleven, I might easily have decided to use that
warrant and charge them with the murder. And in the first instance,
if Walsh and Bartlett hadn't stopped to hand out a traffic ticket
right there, she wouldn't have had such a good chance to spot the
squad-car number she was looking for, and take those shots at the
driver—the wrong man. Funny how things work out sometimes. If she
hadn't done that extra kill, nobody might ever have known a thing
about it. Twelvetrees—Trask quietly moldering away there with his
suitcases. Woods would have gone on looking, and finally filed it
under Pending, and that would have been that .... It was the extra
kill—and the traffic tickets—that tripped her up in the end."