RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (16 page)

The shot jarred the two of them alike, her dead body and his still living one.

Their kiss only repeated itself as his lips fell athwart hers once more, stayed there. It became permanent.

Chance remark during the course of a shop-talk conversation between Detective A and Detective B:

. . . reminds me of a case we had out our way not so long ago. Found a note saying, 'Now you know what it feels like.' We couldn't make it out, because they were both dead. Who wrote it to who. . . . ?

Chance remark during the course of a conversation between Detective B and Detective C (three weeks later):

. . . like in that case A. was telling me about awhile back. They found a note saying, 'Now you know what it feels like.' Something like that, I don't remember exactly. . . .

Chance remark during the course of a conversation between Detective C and Lieutenant D (Cameron's Chief), six weeks later:

. . . B told me he heard of a case hike that. The note was worded the same way, that's what made me think of it just now. They didn't set too much store by it, just figured it was the work of a crank . . .

Letter from Lieutenant D to his opposite number at headquarters A (two and a half hours later):

. . . that MacLain Cameron, at his own request, be attached to your office on a temporary basis, to work along with your men on the deaths of Pfc. Buck Paige and his wife Sharon. . . ."

Answering Telegram from Lieutenant A to Lieutenant D (twenty minutes later):

ONLY TOO HAPPY ACCEDE YOUR REQUEST. SEND HIM ON

They turned back to the witness again, Cameron and his chief. "Just one more question, Celeste. . . ."

The girl on the chair swung her trousered leg off its opposite knee, dropped her foot to the floor with a short-tempered stamp. She took a hitch in her belt. She snapped the ash off her cigarette with a proficient fingernail.

"There you go again! How do you expect me to know who you're talking to? I keep thinking it's somebody else, behind me! Rusty's the name. \Vhat do you think I am, a big sissy?"

Cameron and his chief exchanged a look. "Sorry, didn't mean to hurt your feelings," the chief apologized dryly. "It takes us old-timers a little while to get used to the idea you're never, never supposed to call a girl by a girl's name nowadays. Okay, Rusty."

"That's more like it," she relented generously. "Now what can I do for you this time?"

"Sharon Paige had a locket, a thingamabob on a chain around her neck. We want to ask you about that locket."

"Okay, go ahead and ask me."

"She wore it pretty much, that right?"

"All the time. It only came off when she washed her neck. Then it went right back on again."

"Now here's the part we want to ask you about. How did she wear it? Can you tell us? Can you show us?"

"Well, this is the neck of her dress." She yanked out the neck of her own sweatshirt to show them. She pointed, her finger disappeared down the aperture. "Like this see? Down underneath it. All the way down in there."

"Never on the outside?"

"Never once. See, it wasn't for show. It was a personal memento, like. I only knew it was there because I saw her before her dress went on over it."

"But nobody passing her on the street, or even standing talking to her after her dress went on, could tell it was there?"

"Only an x-ray machine."

"Thanks. That'll be all, Ce-- er, Rusty."

She got up to go. She traced her hand along the wall and a match head flared out.

"Listen-- Please-" the thief stammered somewhat helplessly. "Not on our walls."

"What's the matter with your walls?" she said charitably. "They strike matches good."

The door closed after her.

Cameron's thief turned to him. "Proving?"

"Don't you see the point I wanted to bring out? That the poison letters to the husband were written by nobody else but the very guy himself, the one who killed her! Right while he was in the act of seducing her away from Paige, he kept tipping him off as to the progress of the seduction. Giving him a play-by-play account, right as he went along. He used that locket, in one of the letters, as a means of identifying the girl he was seducing as Paige's wife, so there could be no mistake in Paige's mind. Nobody on the street could see it, nobody could see it when she was fully dressed. He's the only one could have sent those letters."

"Why should he snitch on himself? That's crazy."

"It's crazy cruel, which isn't the same thing. It's ferocious sadism. He wanted to make him suffer, and he did make him suffer. You heard Rubin on that point."

"All right, but what do we have now? Proving what?"

"That he wasn't interested in the wife; either in loving her, or in killing her. He didn't kill her because he had anything against her , he killed her because he had something against Paige. The husband was the target, the wife was just the weapon used to strike him down."

The chief tried to shake his head, fighting off belief.

"Just answer me two questions," Cameron said. "How long did she suffer?"

"Ten seconds. Maybe twenty. Just at the end."

"How long did he suffer?"

"Weeks, I guess. Rubin said so. Weeks of slow torture."

Cameron spread his hands. "Which one of them was he really punishing?"

"This," said the chief dismally, "is something new."

Cameron had to go all the way out to Tulsa. In Tulsa he had to go all the way out to Dixon Avenue. Along Dixon Avenue he had to go all the way out to its extreme end. Even so, weeks of patient inquiry and research had had to precede this, before he could even find out just where it was he had to go.

He used a variety of methods to get there; train, and then bus, and finally a Tulsa taxi.

Then he walked up a flagstone path and rang the predetermined doorbell. An attractive little housewife of sunny aspect and friendly demeanor came bustling out after a moment or two.

"Graham Garrison lives here, doesn't he?"

"Yes," she said readily. "He's my husband."

"Ask him if he remembers Cameron," he said tactfully. He didn't want to frighten her, he didn't want to tell her he was a detective. There was something so cloudless, so trusting about her.

She repeated it to herself first, the way a little girl does a message entrusted to her, to make sure of getting it right. "Ask him if he remembers Cameron." Then nodding to show. she had it, went to deliver it.

Then came back to report, with a candor that was altogether fetching, "He said he doesn't. But he said to come in anyway."

Cameron, thanking her, decided he didn't blame Garrison one bit for remarrying. Or rather, for marrying this particular little person. The wonder would have been had he failed to, once he'd known her. Every man, he supposed, was entitled to his happiness. And the very first look at Garrison's face showed Cameron he had his now, all right, if he'd never had it before.

He'd been listening to a baseball game. It was Sunday afternoon. He politely turned the radio off, successfully concealing the regret that Cameron knew darned well it must give him to do so.

"Are you from the company's eastern office?" he said. "Is that where we met?" Then seeing that Cameron was not quite sure what he meant, amplified, "The Standard Oil Company."

"No," said Cameron. "You didn't meet me in business. I don't know if you recall or not, but--" He glanced around, but they were alone anyway; she'd gone back to some domestic enterprise that held more attraction for her than her husband's concerns.

Garrison's memory suddenly beat him to the punch. He straightened in his chair, snapped his fingers, then pointed one at Cameron. "Oh, now I do! Sure. You're the police fellow that came out several times and talked to me, around the time Jeanette died." And then with evidences of extreme satisfaction, though it was probably due far more to his own successful feat of recollection than to Cameron's presence, he urged, "Sit down," offered him a cigarette and wanted to know if he wanted to have a drink.

Cameron got up and closed the door with a precautionary, "I wonder if we could talk this over by ourselves?"

"Is it bad?" asked Garrison.

"We don't want your wife to hear it," said Cameron, already her staunch protector after exactly forty-five seconds' acquaintanceship. "The implications aren't too pleasant."

"Nothing'll get her out of the back for hours," confided Garrison with an affectionate pride that shone out all over him. "She's cooking her first Sunday meal all by herself. There's a chalk mark across the back of the hail beyond which I daren't step."

"You're a lucky man, Mr. Garrison," Cameron couldn't resist blurting out.

"I had my loneliness," Garrison let him know.

Cameron reseated himself. "Look, I had to come to you," he explained. "I don't enjoy doing it, any more than you probably will enjoy having me do it. I hate to have to rake up the past. You're out of it now; it's over far as you're concerned. But you can help me. You're the only one who can. You're the only remaining link." Then he added, " Living link."

"That sounds pretty grim."

"Well, it has been. It is." He took things out of his pocket, things he'd brought along to show him. "Did you know a man named Hugh Strickland?"

"That bum?" was Garrison's way of answering yes. "They gave him the chair, I understand. He ended up fine, didn't he? I knew he was heading that way."

"You knew him fairly well, in other words."

"Too well to suit me. I dropped him even before Jeanette died. She wouldn't have anything to do with him any more, toward the end. After all, Florence Strickland was one of her best friends. I'm not a Puritan or anything like that, but when a man's that open about such things. . . ."

Cameron deftly sidestepped the moral aspect of the thing as being no concern of his. "There are two things I'm afraid we disagree on," he said. "But even though we do disagree, you can still help me nevertheless. That doesn't alter things one bit. One is about the death of the first Mrs. Garrison--"

"Oh, you still think Jeanette's death was--not altogether in the course of nature."

"I still do and I always will."

"I don't," said Garrison.

"That needn't hinder us at all. And secondly, it may surprise you, but I don't think Strickland was guilty of the murder of Miss Holliday, for which he went to the chair."

Garrison looked not only surprised, but even rather rebukingly at him for this.

"I interviewed him, unofficially of course, in his death cell some weeks before the execution. He repeated what I'd already heard him say when we first took him into custody--that there was a note lying there beside her body, of a vindictive, gloating nature. He couldn't produce it, of course, so he had no way of saving himself." He leaned forward intently, and indicated his own chest with his thumb. "I happen to believe there was such a note. Why? Because it was such an odd, unlikely, you might say pitiful, little detail to cling to, to be the lie of a man trying to save his own life. He never claimed to have seen any shadowy figure of a man slipping out just as he got there, nothing like that. Only, and always, he insisted he'd found that note there by her body. He swore to me he had. He quoted from it and his quotation never varied from first to last. And 1 happened to know, which he never did from beginning to end, that you yourself had received pretty much the same type of note a whole year earlier when your wife died. And-- one solid year after he was in his grave --a third such note turned up, in a third instance, somewhere else. Now do you understand why I've come out here to you?"

Garrison nodded, impressed in spite of himself.

"Now, let's get on with it," Cameron said. "Did you ever know a fellow named Buck, or Bucky, Paige?"

Garrison shook his head, at first tentatively, then as he mulled over it, more and more definitely.

"According to his birth certificate, which I located and looked up," Cameron tried to help him, "his given name was actually Bucklyn. It's on file at Lansing, Michigan. He was born there, nineteen-nineteen."

"No," Garrison kept insisting. "No." And saying it over to himself as a further test. "Paige. Bucky Paige. No."

"You're sure?"

Garrison said logically, "Well, I don't know the name. That much I'm sure of. I might have known such a person by sight at one time or another."

"Well, let's try it that way, then. Here, look at this. Carefully now."

He passed him a snapshot of two soldiers posing together, arms slung about one another's shoulders.

"Forget this one on the left," he instructed him. "And forget the uniform."

To help him do so, he took two strips of paper and obliterated the headgear and the jacket by framing the face between them.

"Try it with this," he said, and handed him a small magnifying glass. "Now."

Garrison pored. His reaction was not slow in coming. "Yes," he said, "I have seen that fellow's face somewhere or other. Now, wait a minute--where? Just where?" He sat back in his chair. He leaned forward again, scanning it some more.