Authors: Bill Pronzini
Why he had died?
God, God! Why
had
he died? Had his death really been an accident? Or—had it been something else?
Suicide? Had the guilt become too much for him to bear? Had he finally reached the breaking point Sunday night—and thrown himself off that high, fog-shrouded cliff at Goat Rock?
Or—
Murder ?
No, not that, not that! Who would want to murder Jim? Unless ... His partners? The other five men? But why would they want him dead? Why after eleven years? Who were they? Who—?
The two men at the funeral.
The two men sitting in the very last row at the mortuary!
Trina sat up very straight on the chair, and it was as if her body were encased in a block of glacier ice. The two men, one dark and Latin-appearing, the other tall and muscular. Tall and muscular. Greenish-brown eyes. Stopping to look toward her in the family alcove, soft-spoken—“Mrs. Conradin ... I’m sorry, Mrs. Conradin”—Bandit Number One.
Steven Kilduff, San Francisco
.
She stood up convulsively. The police. She had to go to the police. She had to tell them—
Tell them Jim Conradin had been a thief?
Tell them the man she loved had been a vicious criminal?
Hurt his family, hurt her family, destroy his name?
But she had to. If he had been murdered, his killers couldn’t be allowed to go unpunished. And even if his death had been accidental, or suicidal, she couldn’t live with the knowledge of his crime—she knew that—she couldn’t live with it for one single day as he lived with it for eleven long years. She had to go to the police, she had to.
Jim, I have to, she thought, and she picked up the newspaper section from the floor and put it into the safe deposit box and swung the hinged lid closed. Jim, I have to, and may God have mercy on your soul and on mine for what I have to do; there’s no other way.
She picked up the box—frightened, trembling, crying—and ran out of the cubicle.
Late Wednesday afternoon.
The phone rang at 4:55.
Kilduff came out of the kitchen where he had been making coffee and caught up the receiver on the second ring. There was the taste of chalk in his mouth. “Hello?”
“Steve? Larry.”
“Yes?” tensely.
“I’ve got something.”
Kilduff let breath spray almost inaudibly between his teeth. “Go ahead.”
“Not on the phone.”
“Christ, Larry—”
“Later,” Drexel said. “Tonight.”
“Where are you now?”
“Chicago. I’m booked onto the seven-thirty flight to San Francisco.”
“Are you coming here?”
“No. My place. San Amaron Road in Los Gatos, Number 547. Can you find it?”
“I’ll find it,” Kilduff said. “What time?”
“The plane gets in at ten, Coast time. Give me better than an hour to get home. Say eleven-thirty.”
“All fright.”
“Listen, Steve, is everything okay with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been sticking close to your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t talked to anyone?”
“Who would I talk to?”
“What about your wife?”
“I told you about her,” Kilduff said. “She’s gone.”
“Okay, just stay cool.”
“Sure.”
“I’ll see you tonight.”
“Larry, what is it you’ve got?”
“Tonight,” Drexel said. “Make sure you’re there, Steve.”
“Larry—” Kilduff began, but he was talking to a dead line.
He put the phone down and returned to the kitchen and looked at the coffee maker. The same painful constriction he had known on Saturday night was back in his chest, and his breathing had a nasal, labored quality. Well, what now? Had Drexel located Helgerman somehow? He’d sounded uptight on the phone, almost apprehensive, and that wasn’t like him—always steady, always in command. Something was bugging him, bugging him heavy . . . Christ, Kilduff thought, suppose he’s already found Helgerman? Suppose for some inexplicable reason Helgerman went home after he killed Conradin, and Drexel found him and . . .
Suppose he’s already killed him!
I’d be an accessory before and after the fact, and wouldn’t that make me equally as guilty as Drexel in the eyes of the law? Wouldn’t that mean the gas chamber for me, too? The gas chamber—no, there weren’t any more executions in California, were there? They only gave you life imprisonment now, life in a cage—what does it matter, anyway, because one is no more preferable than the other and there’s no Statute of Limitations on the crime of murder—The doorbell chimed.
Kilduff started, and a cold slimy thing attached itself parasitically between his shoulder blades. He sucked breath into his lungs like a gaffed fish. But then he rubbed a hand across his face and thought: Take it easy, now, just take it easy. No jumping at shadows, no reading malice into everyday sounds. Easy, son, easy. Hell, it was probably Mrs. Yarborough, the manager. He hadn’t paid the rent for the month yet. Sure, Mrs. Yarborough. He went out to the foyer and pulled the door open.
Two men stood in the hallway outside. One was tall and thin, in his early thirties, with sandy hair immaculately combed and expressionless brown eyes and a chin that came to a long V-point. He wore a neat gray suit and a gray and white striped tie and a pale yellow button down shirt with silver teardrop cuff links. The other man was shorter, older by ten years, but of the same leanness. He had a narrow, protracted nose that curved oddly, like a fishhook. He was dressed in a dark brown shiny-trousered suit, and in his left hand he carried an old brown hat with a torn sweatband.
The sandy-haired one said, “Mr. Steven Kilduff?” in a soft, almost mellifluous voice.
Kilduff looked at them and knew instantly who they were. He had an insane desire to fling the door closed, to turn and run, flee, run, run, but there was no place for him to go. The knot in his chest tightened until his lungs seemed to be rejecting the entrance of oxygen, and he tried to control the panic that was rising like a flood tide within him. It’s something else, he thought, a traffic violation, something else; but he was lying to himself and he knew it. He put out his hand involuntarily against the door jamb, and washed saliva around in his mouth, and forced words past the dryness of his throat. “Yes, what is it?”
“My name is Commac,” the sandy-haired one said. He brought his left hand up, and nestled against the palm was a leather case with a shield pinned inside. “Inspector Neal Commac, San Francisco police. This is my partner, Inspector Flagg.”
His knees were suddenly jellied, and he knew the color had drained out of his face. He just stood there, holding onto the door jamb.
Commac watched him with his expressionless eyes. “Is something the matter, Mr. Kilduff?”
“No, I... no,” Kilduff answered.
“We’d like to talk to you, please.”
“About—what?”
“Inside, if you wouldn’t mind.”
He worked some of the saliva onto his lips. “No, of course not.”
The two men came in past him and entered the living room. They stood with their eyes moving slowly over the interior, photographing it. Kilduff shut the door and went in there. “Well,” he said, facing them, trying to get a smile on, trying to brazen it out, knowing that he wasn’t even close to pulling it off, “sit down, won’t you?”
“Thank you,” Commac said, and they sat down on the sofa. Flagg put his hat on his knees, balancing it there.
“Can I... offer you anything? Some coffee?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
Kilduff sat on one of the chairs opposite, leaning forward, and got a cigarette out of his pocket. He managed to keep his hand steady as he lit it. “What is it I can do for you?”
“You attended the funeral of James Conradin in Sebastopol on Tuesday, yesterday,” Commac said. That right, Mr. Kilduff?”
The urge to take flight came back on him, and he had to make a concentrated effort of will to throw it off. They know, he thought, somehow, in some way, they’ve found out and they know. All right, what do I do now? Do I tell them, admit it, get it done with? They have ways of dragging information out of you, they’re professionals, cops, they know how to trap you into making admissions. I can’t get away with lying to them, not for very long, not when they already know. All right, then, all right. All I have to do is confirm it, tell it straight, make it easy on myself, sure, no agonizing decisions to reach, no more sweat and no more fear, it’s over and the choice has been made for me and all I have to do is confirm it ...
“Mr. Kilduff?”
He came out of it. “What?”
“I asked you if you attended the funeral of James Conradin yesterday.”
“I... yes, yes I did.”
“Conradin was a friend of yours?”
“I knew him in the service.”
“When was this?”
“From 1956 to 1959.”
“You were stationed together?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
The Bellevue Air Force Station.”
“That’s in Illinois, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
Commac studied him for a long moment. Kilduff just sat there with his lips pressed tightly together and the cigarette curling smoke upward into the still air of the room. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it, he couldn’t say the words, he couldn’t even meet Commac’s eyes. He couldn’t do it, not now and not later, and now was the time because Commac had already begun to probe, still playing along the surface, yes, but it wouldn’t be long before he would penetrate deeper and deeper; now was the time and he simply couldn’t do it.
“When was the last time you saw Conradin, Mr. Kilduff?” Commac asked. “Alive, I mean.”
“It must have been ... oh, eleven years ago,” he answered, and that was the first lie. It came flowing out of his mouth like warm butter, without effort, without conscious consideration. And he knew the ones which would follow would be just as smooth and just as accomplished. “It was right after we were discharged.”
“When was that?”
“February of 1959.”
“And you hadn’t seen him since that time?”
“No”
“Did you know he lived in Bodega Bay?”
“Before I heard of his death, you mean?”
“Before then.”
“No,” Kilduff said. “No, I didn’t.”
“I see,” Commac said. “Were you close friends in the service?”
“I... guess we were, yes.”
“How is it you never kept in touch after you got out?”
“I don’t know. People drift apart. You know how that is, Inspector.”
“Uh-huh,” Commac said.
Flagg took a stick of spearmint gum from the pocket of his brown suit, unwrapped it carefully and wadded the foil into a little ball and put the ball in the ashtray on the coffee table. He chewed with his mouth closed, quietly.
Kilduff thought with self-loathing and with self-pity: You goddamned coward, you goddamned frigging coward, you yellow gutless wonder—it’s never going to be this easy again, if you can’t do it now you’ll never do it.
And he still couldn’t do it.
Commac said, “Who was the other man, Mr. Kilduff?”
“What other man?”
“At the funeral with you on Tuesday.”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“You were sitting with a dark-complected man, Latin features, expensively dressed. Together, in the last row of chairs during the service.”
“Oh, yes, that man,” Kilduff said. “Well, I don’t know his name.”
“You just happened to sit by one another, is that it?”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“And you neglected to introduce yourselves.”
“You don’t usually observe the amenities at a funeral.”
“Come on now, Mr. Kilduff,” Commac said mildly. “You came in together and you sat down together.”
“I told you, I don’t know the man. I never saw him before yesterday. Listen, what’s this all about? Why are you asking all these questions?”
Flagg continued to chew his gum quietly. He had begun to rotate his hat between his thumb and forefinger. Commac’s expressionless eyes never left Kilduff’s face. He took a small clothbound notebook from the inside pocket of his gray suit and opened it and studied a page. He frowned. “Bellevue, Illinois,” he said. “That’s near Granite City, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s near Granite City.”
“That was where they had that big Smithfield armored car robbery,” Flagg said, speaking for the first time. His voice was as soft as Commac’s. “April of fifty-nine, wasn’t it, Neal?”
“March,” Commac said. “March 15th.”
“Sure,” Flagg said. “Six men got away with over seven hundred and fifty thousand in cash. They were never caught.”
“No,” Commac said, “they never were.”
“Consensus seemed to be that it was an amateur job, the way it was pulled off,” Flagg said. “Lacked the professional touch.”