Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 4, April 1972

Within The Law by John Lutz

There is nothing quite so gratifying as having the last word.

I have an orderly mind. Loose ends bother me a lot, especially when I have a personal interest. Everybody should pay the piper — an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that sort of thing. Nobody believes in capital punishment more than I do. That’s why I follow Jack Hall.

A little over a year ago Hall killed my wife. Nobody can prove it, not the best lawyers alive, because there just isn’t any proof. Hall saw to that before he killed her. Adelaide was having an affair with him that was getting out of hand, that threatened to break up his marriage. Hall couldn’t have that happen for financial reasons, so he carefully arranged things and strangled Adelaide, and witnesses swore that he was a thousand miles away at the time.

I knew differently because I followed Adelaide that night and saw her meet Hall. He killed her, and I’ll see that he pays. Oh, she was having an affair with him, but she was my wife, and he did kill her. A man ought to love his wife.

I’m walking behind Hall now in Denver. He travels all over the country on his job, and I follow him on my savings account. He’ll go into that cocktail lounge, I know. He frequents places like that.

I go into the lounge too, and find a booth where I can watch him sitting at the bar. He knows I’m there. I’m always careful to let him see me. His handsome, beefy face is red as he catches sight of me for a moment in the bar mirror as he orders his drink. It’s beginning to bother him more and more lately, me following him.

Hall will probably come over and try to talk again, try to bring things out in the open where he can deal with them, but I see to it that our conversations never take the pressure off him. I know what’s bothering him, and he has real reason to fear.

He’s standing over me now, his drink in his hand, paunchy but athletic-looking in his dark slacks and tailored gray sport coat. Quite a lady’s man.

“When are you gonna give it up, Brewster?”

“I think you know by now, Jack, that I’ll never quit.” I always call him by his first name. It annoys him.

He sits down across from me, uninvited. “But I don’t get it! What do you think you’re gonna accomplish by followin’ me all over the country?”

I keep my voice calm. “You’re going to pay for killing my wife.”

“But I didn’t kill your wife!” Hall looks at me with angry puzzlement, trying to convince himself that I’m just a harmless nut. “Besides,” he says, “that’s a closed issue as far as the police are concerned. I was a suspect and I was cleared.”

“As far as the police are concerned, not I.”

He gives a hollow laugh. “It’s the police that count, buddy boy. I was cleared and there’s not much you can do about it.” He raises his glass and takes a big swallow. “Just between you and me, Adelaide was going to leave you anyway. Why waste your time eatin’ your heart out over a dead broad that hated your guts?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, what you don’t understand is that the whole thing is over. You can follow me till the cows come home and it won’t change a thing. If you so much as even threaten to harm me I’ll have you arrested, and if you did kill me you’d fry for it.”

“I know, the letter.” Hall had informed me earlier that he’d left a letter with his lawyer to be opened in the event of his death. The letter explained how I’d been following him and named me as his probable killer. Besides, I had a good motive; it was no secret that I thought he killed Adelaide.

“You can’t prove anything,” Hall says. “You know you can’t prove anything.”

“Do I?” I sip my drink slowly. “I think you should get the electric chair, Jack. I think for killing Adelaide you should spend the long months on death row while your appeals all come to their predictable deadends, while you count your days, your meals, your minutes, your steps to the execution room. I think you should count your seconds while they fasten the metal cap to your shaved head.”

“Knock it off!” Hall is sweating and his knuckles are white where he grips his glass.

I shrug. “As you observed, I can’t prove anything.”

His dark brows knit in anger as he stares hard at me. “Then why keep followin’ me?”

“I just happen to go where you go.”

He clenches his jaws, still staring at me, then stands and walks out. I wait a few seconds, then I get up and follow him.

Hall is right, of course. I can’t prove he murdered Adelaide, or I would have a long time ago. Still, I know a way to make him pay. Justice demands that a murderer pay for his crime.

I’m staying at the same hotel that Hall is. I always do it this way so I can keep a closer eye on him. Not that it’s necessary anymore. He doesn’t bother to try to get away from me. He knows that even if he does manage to lose me I’ll just pick him up at his next stop. I know his business itinerary and I know all his clients. If worse came to worst, I suppose I could just wait by his home until he showed up and then start following him again. But it’s never come to that.

As I follow Hall back to the hotel I think about the letter. I don’t doubt for a moment that he wrote one and that it is in the possession of his lawyer. He thinks it protects him from harm, and in a way I guess it does. I smile as I walk behind him into the lobby. I wouldn’t have the stomach to kill him anyway. That would be breaking the law.

We hit Saint Louis that month, and Indianapolis and Chicago — then on to Detroit. I know his route so well I could almost fly ahead and meet him there. But that would be defeating my purpose, so I stay close to him, almost always within sight, while I wait for him to crack — and he’s close to cracking. In Indianapolis he came over to me in the hotel bar and threatened to hit me, but I told the bartender to call the police. That calmed him down.

I stay very close to Hall now, and it doesn’t surprise me when I overhear him ask on a lobby telephone for a reservation on the afternoon flight to Miami. Still, I think my heart skips a beat, and I’m not an emotional man. Miami is not on Hall’s itinerary.

I call the airline he uses and book a seat on the same flight he’s on. Usually I do that. I like to sit in front of him on the plane so he can see the back of my head. We both know he can’t give me the slip on an airplane.

Hall rents a car at the Miami airport and drives to a big motel out on the edge of the city in a fairly secluded area; but this time I don’t stay where he’s staying. I check in at one of the biggest hotels I can find, with a private beach and recreation area. The place is thronging with people, and I take a room on the middle floor with a window overlooking a busy street. It’s a small, well-furnished room, quiet but surrounded by activity. Perfect. After placing a phone call to Hall to irritate him and let him know where I’m staying, I settle down to wait.

Hall shows up that very night, as I thought he would. He can’t afford to waste time. When I open the door he seems ready to force his way in, and it kind of surprises him when I smile and stand back to let him enter.

“To what do I owe the honor?” I ask.

Hall looks around him, as if checking the room. The blinds are closed. He draws a gun from a pocket of his uncharacteristic drab brown suit.

“I take it you’re going to kill me,” I say.

“That’s right,” Hall says, and he grins, but his small eyes are angry. “You asked for it. It’s the only way I can get you off my back.”

“But aren’t you afraid you’ll be caught?”

“That argument won’t save you,” Hall says, his grin widening. “I traveled here under a different name, and I’ll return the same way tonight. Nobody’ll even know I was in Miami. Even if they suspect, I bought me a nice alibi in Detroit. Right now I’m back there playin’ poker in a hotel room.”

“You were at the races when Adelaide was murdered, weren’t you?”

“Sure,” Hall says. “I even had the torn tickets to prove it — mailed to me special delivery from Louisville.”

“Clever,” I say with admiration.

“Too clever for you, buddy boy. This time you outsmarted yourself, flyin’ here like a regular pigeon, so fast you couldn’t even have had time to tell anyone where you were going or why. By the time they find your body I’ll be back in Detroit. And the best part is, as far as the police are concerned, I don’t even have a motive to kill you.”

“There’s one thing,” I say. “Suppose I lured you here to kill you?”

Despite himself, Hall’s florid face suddenly goes pale. Then he regains some of his composure. “You won’t harm a hair on my head, pal. Remember the letter?”

I swallow and nod.

“Into the bedroom!” His voice is higher now as he gets up his nerve for the actual business of killing me.

“You’ll get the electric chair,” I say to him as he jabs the gun barrel into the small of my back and pushes me into the bedroom. “You’ll be counting those last seconds.”

“You got it backwards, buddy boy.” He picks up a pillow and folds it around the gun.

I don’t even hear the shots as I feel the bullets rip into my chest and I fall backward onto the bed. I’ll bet he wonders why I’m smiling when I die. I bet that will bother him.

He doesn’t know yet about the recorder in my pocket. Or about the letter I left with my lawyer.