Killer with a Key

CHAPTER 15

“GLAD you got the gun away from her, Mike,” Johnny-said casually to the little tableau.

Mike Larsen's voice was harsh. “We've gone a little bit beyond that foolishness, Johnny. A little bit beyond.” He looked at Lorraine Barnes, and Johnny looked, too. For the first time since he had known her the iron facade was cracked; her eyes were enormous. She swallowed, hard, and her voice was breathless.

“He said… Mike said-”

She swallowed again, and Johnny anticipated her. “That he'd killed me? His intentions were fine.” He looked carefully at Mike Larsen, who moved back two paces, the negligently held gun equidistant between Johnny and Lorraine. Johnny wondered how long they could stand there a dozen feet from the street without interruption.

Mike must have wondered, too. He glanced out to the sidewalk; he's made up his mind, Johnny thought suddenly. He's over most of the shock; he's going to play the hand out. Mike's voice confirmed this in the next breath; he spoke almost normally. “Outside. My car's across the street. Be careful. Both of you.”

Like an automaton Lorraine Barnes pushed through the outer glass doors. With the unwinking eye of the gun upon him Johnny followed and, on the sidewalk, breathed in the summer night's dry heat.

“Over there,” Mike Larsen said quickly. He stood with his right hand thrust under his left armpit. “Second in line.”

Second in line was not the MG; Johnny half turned in inquiry before his eyes caught the dull silvered spot on the dark sedan second in line where once there had been a door handle. He followed the sleepwalking Lorraine to the sedan, now just one more of a number of things all pointing in the same direction.

Mike tossed the car keys to Lorraine; he looked up and down the thinly peopled street. He watched Lorraine, but never so closely that a good measure of his attention wandered from Johnny. “Open it up and get under the wheel.” He waited for her to comply; his voice was tight, and there was a sheen on his forehead as he addressed Johnny. “You now. Delicately.” He smiled, almost pleasantly. “In my mind you're already dead, you know.”

Johnny inched in the front seat beside Lorraine, doubling up his left leg and sitting on it. He could feel the car springs settle as the rear door slammed, and Mike's voice came again strongly, the relief in it evident. “Down to Ninth, Lorraine, and turn left.”

Johnny turned his head carefully until he could see the back seat and Mike sitting with the gun in his lap. Mike looked almost jovial; he was pleased with himself. “That was my first really poor move, Johnny, upstairs just now. I panicked when you called me, because I realized that you knew. I'm glad it misfired; this gives me a chance to do the thing right.”

“You're runnin' out of chances, boy,” Johnny said softly. “Fast.” He stared at the man in the back seat. “How could I have missed it?”

“Because I was able to throw just enough sand in your eyes as we went along,” Mike replied comfortably. “I told you just enough about Connor to keep you from going to someone else.” He paused as Lorraine Barnes made the left turn onto Ninth Avenue. “Left on Forty-fourth right here.” He returned his attention to Johnny. “And I told you that Lorraine was having an affair with Sanders to forestall the possibility of your wondering if she was having an affair with me.” He leaned forward slightly. “Down to Second Avenue, Lorraine, then right to the tunnel.”

“Tunnel?” Johnny caught himself. When Mike had directed them east on Forty-fourth Johnny had assumed their destination to be the warehouse alley where Ed Russo had died in the rain. The tunnel… He looked at Mike. “We goin' out to the boat?”

“We are indeed. I realized belatedly that I can't stand the discovery of two more bullet-riddled bodies on the perimeter of our tight little circle. No… a boating accident is indicated.”

Johnny's voice was husky. “There'll be an accident all right, Mike, but it's gonna happen to you. I'll leave you out there for good.” His voice rose; he half surged up in the seat in the violence of the emotion that gripped him. “I'll leave parts of you all over Long Island Sound-” He broke off as the gun in Mike's lap rose up and considered him carefully.

“I wouldn't,” Mike said quietly. “I have remarkably little to lose.” He smiled thinly. “We'll have to put up with each other, until the boat ride.”

Johnny seethed internally. He thought of the battered pier where the boat was moored, deserted even in the daytime. Somewhere out there on the dark water he was going to find a way to turn the tables, and when he did it was going to be the end of the line for Mike Larsen.

“I was sorry about Ellen, you know,” Mike said conversationally.

“Sorry!” Johnny said gutturally.

“Sanders was just an obstacle in my way,” Mike continued, unperturbed. “Bobby Perry was a vicious little blackmailer who possessed a little dangerous knowledge. Ed Russo was getting close to adding two and two together, since he had knowledge that you didn't. I regretted none of them.” His voice rose sharply. “Nonentities, sluts, bullet-bait!” With a visible effort he brought his voice back under control. He sounded properly regretful. “Ellen, though, was the factor which jiggered my little equation all out of shape.”

The sedan veered left; Johnny looked around to see the yawning, white-mouthed tunnel entrance, and the multiplicity of signs- Queens Midtown Tunnel. Behind him Mike's voice resumed as they rolled through the winding ivory tube. “I'll never know why Ellen left the car that night. I had driven her over there myself; she was to have been my alibi for Sanders. I had previously arranged for her to deliver a kitten to Russo, and I was her transportation. A day or two later the fact of our having been in the neighborhood at the time of Sanders' death might have drawn a comment from Ellen; hardly anything more. I left her in the car for no more than five minutes; I knew I could count on Sanders, who was a methodical man. But Ellen left the car. I've wondered-”

He stopped talking as the car emerged from the whiteness of the tunnel into the night again; ahead of them the lights of the toll station loomed up. “I'd advise a little caution on the part of both of you here,” Mike said in an altered voice as they eased to a stop. The wooden-faced Lorraine handed a quarter to the toll collector, and in seconds they were in motion again.

Johnny looked at the car lights ahead on the parkway, then back to the driver, who sat stiffly with eyes straight ahead on the road. What was on this woman's mind? “Watch out for the parkway turn-off,” he advised her. “It's a little tricky at night.”

Mike's laugh was pure amusement. “Johnny, our chauffeur is more familiar with the parkway turn-off than you are- and especially at night.”

“You fluffed her off,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “Lorraine was followin' you that night?”

“And just about every night since,” Mike said harshly. He waited for his voice to level; he tried to restore it to its former tone of amused condescension. “It put me to a bit of trouble shaking her. Deliver me from women who love not wisely but too well. Her original intention, of course, was to find out my other interest.”

“And your other interest was Helen Sanders,” Johnny said. “You found out you could make a little time with her?”

“I found out I could marry her.” The man in the back seat leaned forward suddenly. “Not a bad prospect for an odd-jobs man. I decided to let nothing stand in the way of the project.”

“But she said she'd already decided to get a divorce-”

The laugh from the back seat was not amused this time. “A divorce takes time; too much time. For Helen Sanders, my type is not uncommon; I felt I had to shorten the gap. I had been thinking rather casually along these lines when I was suddenly given cause to accelerate my thinking. Even from a business standpoint Robert Sanders had never approved of me. He had accused me in the past of pandering to his wife's money-making greed by aiding and abetting her little schemes with which you're now familiar. He had taken the trouble to discover a situation in which I was vulnerable, legally perhaps. He threatened me with it. At the least it. meant the end of my business usefulness to Helen Sanders, and, knowing that lady, I was afraid that it would be a case of out of sight, out of mind. I decided that I had a position to protect. I protected it and had the shock of a not uneventful life when I came out of that apartment areaway and found Ellen on the walk in close conversation with our little dove here. I didn't know in feet and inches how close they'd been, but obviously too close.”

The car slowed; Johnny looked around in the lights and saw the black-lettered white sign, Grand Central Parkway. Lorraine inched around the sharp right-hand turn and crept out on the three-lane one-way highway. Johnny noticed these things automatically; his mind was still on the man in the back seat. “So you followed Ellen?”

“Of course. The situation was critical. She might tell anyone at all what she'd seen. Or imagined or surmised-all equally dangerous, so far as I was concerned. Our chauffeur's personal fortunes were involved; she was, I felt, a different breed of cat. I followed Ellen, lost her on the sidewalk due to your dramatics, left the car, came back and went upstairs.”

“How in the hell did you find her?” Johnny demanded roughly.

“Simplicity itself. I felt sure you wouldn't register her, but in that case you'd have to tell Vic to prevent the possibility of his assigning a legitimate guest to the same room. When you were out of the way on your nightly round I went down to the desk and told Vic I was delivering something for you, and where had you put Ellen? Naturally, he told me. The one thing I didn't realize at the time was your previous personal connection with Ellen, and the rather primitive reaction you experienced surprised me. Alarmed me a little, to be truthful, to the extent of improvising a couple of smoke screens.”

The sedan purred through the darkness. Johnny watched the lights of the oncoming cars on the other side of the divided highway as they appeared far down the road, to gradually brighten, loom up menacingly and hurtle on by. When he spoke his voice was tired. “How I could have been so blind… you and your fake skin pigmentation deficiency out on the boat, so you wouldn't have to take your shirt off. You couldn't take it off. You had the devil's own luck; Vic knew about you, but thinking that Lorraine was involved he shut down completely rather than say anything that might get her in more trouble.”

“For different reasons,” Mike said complacently, “I felt I had little to fear from either Vic or Lorraine. Oh, the lady here accused me, but I of course denied it, and entangled as she was herself she wasn't quite sure enough about me to make a move herself. She did take to following me, which was inconvenient.”

Johnny sat with hands tightly clenched by his side as the sound of Mike Larsen's voice died away in the back seat; where had he gone wrong? He should have known, but how? Mike was right in one respect; the key pieces in the puzzle, the vital little bits of information had fallen into place too late.

He leaned forward and began to watch the turn-off signs as the realization came to him that they had been on the parkway for some time. He was in a hurry to get to the boat. “Glen Cove Road is the one we want.”

“I know.” Lorraine Barnes spoke for the first time since they had left the foyer of the hotel. Johnny looked curiously at her stiff features, and the white-knuckled hands on the wheel.

The sedan slowed under her guidance and eased gently down a curving exit road which bore off to the right; on the highway below she turned back left under the overpass. A roadside directional sign picked up in the headlights as they completed the turn Listed the towns in the area with little black arrows pointing-Sea Cliff, Glen Cove, Roslyn, Locust Valley, Lattenburg, Bayville. They rode along the Glen Cove Road, and Johnny could see Lorraine watching for the Sea Cliff turn-off. Mike was right; it was not the first time she had driven this route.

Salt tang was fresh in the warm air as the car swung sharply left and then right again in a hundred yards and set off on the long diagonal paralleling the water, which could almost be felt. It was not quite ten, but most of the lights in the quiet houses of Sea Cliff were already out. In Glen Cove the lights were on in one restaurant; the first stop light was on the blinking yellow, the second still on the red and green. They by-passed the right angle swing through the center in favor of the little yellow signs proclaiming Direct Route to Bayville.

Johnny stretched cautiously in his cramped position in the front seat; his voice was soft. “Used to know every inch of this country when I was a raggedy-tailed kid.” He looked directly at Lorraine behind the wheel. “You ever been down on the island below Bayville? Centre Island, they call it. Something to see. Estates, mansions, stone walls, high wooden fences. Palaces, they looked like to a kid. I've cut grass on half of 'em, there and over at Oyster Bay. There's at least one boat, cruiser size, goes with each house, and some of the Centre Islanders had channels cut in the rock so they could tie their boats up right under their front porches.”

She took her eyes from the road in one quick flash to look at him sharply, then returned to her driving. The car's pace again slowed; Johnny could see her looking for the unmarked gravel road. At the sudden gap in the trees she braked and turned hard left, and they bumped down off the macadam as the tires crunched in the loose gravel. She tapped the brights and steered down the light-colored ribbon of road between the scrub trees and the tangled undergrowth. They ran out of the tree line, and tall, waving grass loomed up on either side of the sedan, and then the grass grew shorter and less dense and the dark pilings of the dock appeared in the headlights. Lorraine turned the car off onto the weeds and shut off the motor, and for an instant the only sound was the night breeze in the saw grass.

Johnny turned back to Mike Larsen as something occurred to him. “You sent the note in to Vic?”

Mike nodded; he was looking out at the pier. “Yes. Not one of my more inspired moments. Can't even think now why it seemed important at the time, except that things were popping a little too rapidly for my liking.” He seemed to rouse himself as he looked back at Johnny. “I sent the trio who waylaid you outside of Lorraine's, too. Another little backfire that fizzled. I wanted you to blame Russo for it; he'd already become a headache to me. I thought you'd dismantle him on sight.”

“The first fifteen seconds that I saw him afterward he tried to bet me fifty he could take me even. After sendin' out a losin' goon squad, it just didn't figure.”

He had lost Mike's attention; from the back seat the automatic motioned at Lorraine. “You get out first.” She complied, and Mike eased out on Johnny's side of the car, gun leveled. “You, Johnny.”

Johnny got out a little stiffly; he stood erect and stretched leisurely. He looked up at the sky; the earlier haze had disappeared, and the night was clear. He fixed the stars in his mind; he knew now what he had to do, but he didn't know how much time he had in which to do it. Mike Larsen did not intend that three of them should return from this boat ride. Or even two of them, whether Lorraine Barnes realized it or not.

The beam of a flashlight came on in Mike's hand; he moved in a semicircle around Johnny and handed it to Lorraine. “You lead.”

The loose fill grated under their feet, and the weeds whispered damply. Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the pier's timbers until they stood dockside to Ye Olde Beaste. Beneath their feet there was the faint hiss of water and the occasional slap of a slightly larger wave against a piling.

Against the night light of sky and stars the stubby masts of the moored boats danced in shadowy disorder.

“You first, Johnny, into the boat,” Mike decided. “Drop down and take off the tarp. You keep the light on him, Lorraine, and if I see you going for a spanner, Johnny, that's it, right there.” The white of his teeth showed in the blur of his features. “You could probably dive under the pier and get away; I know you're a fish in the water, but I think you'd rather get your hands on me.”

How right you are, Mike Larsen, Johnny thought to himself as he swung down the piling ladder and reached for the deck with his feet. And I know how I'm going to do it. In the beam of light directed down at him from the pier above he knelt and loosened the ties on the tarp, bundled it and tossed it amidships.

“Take off the engine cowling.” Mike's voice sounded right at his elbow; sound carried in the night. Johnny slid off the metal casing and stood it up in the stern. “Lorraine's coming down now. I'm watching you.”

Johnny watched her cautious descent of the ladder; was it more typically feminine to be afraid of falling from the ladder between the creaking, barnacled pilings and the dark water line than of the gun in Mike Larsen's hand? He stepped up from the cockpit to the deck, scooping up an air-filled seat cushion as he did so. He reached up and lifted her down from the ladder, and with her body as a shield pushed the cushion under her arm, his whisper a breath in her ear. “Hang onto this.” He released her; she made no sound, but her arm gripped the seat cushion.

Mike's carefully contrived face-forward descent, flashlight under an armpit and the gun in his free hand, was a strain on him. Explosive relief was again evident in his tone as he dropped the final three feet to the deck planking. “Now!”

Johnny smiled tightly to himself. He thinks he's crossed his last river. He doesn't know his white water is still ahead of him.

Mike pointed with the gun to the opposite side of the cockpit from his own station at wheel and throttle. “You, Johnny. Over there. Carefully.” He groped in a locker cupboard behind him and tossed a fish knife to Lorraine. “When I say so cut the lines.”

The cockpit sprang to trembling life as the engine roared, and Mike gunned it a time or two to make sure it had fully caught. A flip of a switch and the port and starboard red and green lights came on, and the masthead running light.

“Cut the lines!” Mike had to raise his voice over the engine sound; he waited as Lorraine cautiously picked her way from stern to bow. Mike eased back delicately on the bar throttle as they inched away from the pier. In a boat as over-engined as Ye Olde Beaste slow speed was nearly as ticklish as high; long ago Mike had wound a strip of tape, now dirty and discolored, around the throttle bar at the point beyond which it was not safe to advance the lever arm.

Around them Long Island Sound glimmered black and slick as Lorraine came back and sat down to Johnny's left. They moved out beyond the point, and as the shoreline disappeared behind them a faint swell manifested itself even in the flat calm. An occasional wave slapped lightly under the bow and hissed along the water line; Mike touched the throttle bar and the engine took on a deeper note. The stern-heavy Ye Olde Beaste settled even more deeply in the water as the powerful propeller took hold, and the bow rose correspondingly steeper in pitch.

Johnny looked at the silvery wisps of spray filtering in over the stern, then up at the stars. With the toe of his right shoe he forced his left shoe off and in an unhurried movement picked it up in his toes and lifted it to where he could reach it with his hand without bending down. He placed it gently on the thwart beside him; he had a feeling it would not be long now. The gun should be no problem; Mike wanted no bullet holes. When Mike went for a spanner, or next attempted to position Johnny differently, possibly…

Mike Larsen moved out a step from his helmsman post, his left hand negligently on the wheel behind him. The gun which had dangled at his side in his boat-handling preoccupation swung up and around in deliberate presentation. Mike's voice was crisp; his face was calm. “Sit still, Lorraine. Johnny-” His left hand left the wheel and groped in the locker beside him, and in the second his eyes veered fractionally Johnny stood up, picked up his shoe and threw it at the throttle bar.

At the short range of the crowded cockpit he scored a direct hit on the lever arm, and Mike Larsen yelled hoarsely as the arm jumped the restraining tape and jammed at the full-speed end of the bar. Johnny crouched as the engine boomed in a long unused explosion of power, and Ye Olde Beaste jumped forward beneath them. The engine sound was fantastic; the stern flattened, and the bow canted higher. The boat began to shudder uncontrollably, and Mike Larsen by main strength clawed himself off the cockpit rim against which he had been flung and stared wild-eyed at the water shipping in over the stern. Beneath their feet a deep grinding noise punctuated splintering sounds as the hull began to disintegrate under the pounding of the water, and a high-pitched whine filled the air.

The white-faced man dived for the throttle as black water spurted through the sprung seams; his frantic grab jerked the lever arm from full speed to zero, and Johnny leaned forward, picked up Lorraine Barnes and threw her over the side. Behind him the stern rose like a cork; the high-canted bow dipped deeply and plunged its blunt nose into an oncoming swell like a fat man stabbing his toe into the ground in the middle of a hundred-yard dash. There was a shivering crash; Mike Larsen screamed shrilly as the heavy stern rose inexorably in a monstrously grotesque cartwheel while disintegrated planking flew like popcorn.

Johnny went over the side in the deepest dive he could manage as the boat stood on its nose; he hit the Sound's unyielding bottom with an impact that nearly stunned him. His ears rang both with the concussion of his own dive and the nearby cataclysmic dull thunderclap of sound as Ye Olde Beaste pounded back into the water, upside down. He struggled back up in a frenzy of arms and legs, surfaced and roughly sleeved the water from his eyes. The night was filled with a hissing, bubbling noise, and seventy yards ahead a black blot that bore no resemblance to a boat disappeared altogether in a leisurely curving arc.

Johnny swam to the spot in a thrashing scramble. He criss-crossed back and forth through the gaseous bubbles and the little pieces of flotsam that popped to the surface all around him. No man could possibly survive such an impact, but still he swam. The bubbles weakened and died, and the flotsam drifted away; the only sound in Johnny's ears was the water awash on his shoulders as he plowed stubbornly on his course, until he was sure.

No man had survived.

He turned and swam in the opposite direction. He bored into the chop, breasted it and trod water while he scanned the surface of the Sound. A faint sound to his right sent him strongly in that direction, riding high in the water. He saw her, finally; Lorraine Barnes rose and fell in the inky swell, her upper body across the air-filled cushion to which she clung like grim death. She sobbed when she saw him; her hair was like wet seaweed all over her face, and her nose was bleeding from the force with which she had struck the water.

“M-Mike!” she choked, and Johnny reared up alongside her, unbelieving.

“I ought to leave you out here, you fool!”

She didn't even hear him. “Mike, Mike, oh, Mike!”

The thick surge of anger swelled in his throat and then died. This was Vic's wife. Mike had tried to frame her twice and would certainly have killed her tonight, and still she could call for him. This was Vic's wife, about as wrong as a woman could be, but he had to get her back to shore. “Shut up and listen to what I tell you.”

A stinging little wavelet slapped her in the face, and she spat a mouthful of chop. “We'll d-drown!” She strangled. “Drown!”

“Not in this pond.” Johnny reached down and pulled off his other shoe. “I could swim it both ways, if I had to.” He pulled the belt out of his slacks and peeled them off. He ripped and tore at shirt and T-shirt until he felt a blessed freedom. He looked up at the stars, orienting himself, and then turned back to the sobbing woman. He pulled her clothes off in great, bunched handfuls.

He bounced erect in the water for another look at the stars, then settled back. “Put your left hand on my right shoulder,” he told her curtly. “Hold the cushion in your right armpit. Don't fight it; let it balance you. And hang onto me.”

He set out at a steady beat and in three hundred yards had made the adjustment for the drag on his right side. He bored persistently through the rising swells, with head turned to one side to breathe deeply between onslaughts. Twice he paused to check the stars again and altered course slightly; the only noise he heard beside the roar of water in his ears was an occasional animal-like sound from his companion.

He swam strongly, thinking not at all of time or distance, and was surprised when the dark mass of the shoreline blotted out his waterlogged horizon. He had thought they were farther out; he shook his head to clear his ears of the benumbing water pressure and tried to listen. If the noise he heard was surf, and not just the roaring of his own ears, then he had missed the target. Surf meant rocks, and rocks meant trouble. He turned and swam parallel to the thickening blur of the shoreline, and between two waves he lifted his head and saw the little forest of masts. Again he laboriously shifted course and doggedly carved out his watery path until a blacker shadow in the variegated darkness transformed itself into the lee side of a cabin cruiser. He worked his way around to the stern and transferred the nearly limp Lorraine back to her cushion. He pulled himself up to cockpit level on the boat, then set his teeth and brutally muscled his heavy body over and in. The dead-weight lift after all the time in the water was nearly more than he could manage; from the chest down he felt as though he weighed a ton.

He waited for his chest to stop heaving and looked down for the woman bobbing below him. “Watch yourself coming aboard; I'm too pooped to lift you clean.” He didn't know if she had heard him; he braced himself, reached far over, grabbed her under the armpits and lifted until the blood hammered in his ears. She scraped her thighs coming over the side and moaned as she tumbled in a white lump in the bottom of the boat.

Johnny stood up when he could breathe again; he didn't know why he still felt driven, but he couldn't take the rest that common sense urged upon him. He twisted the hasp from a locker and rummaged inside. He threw handfuls of clothing at the white body and found a pair of paint-stained trousers for himself. He could hear her crying as he straightened up wearily, the deep sobs of exhaustion. For an instant he didn't realize she was trying to say something. “-make it up to V–Vic… I w-will-I will!”

He spat salt spume and another taste and walked up to the bow. He jumped heavily to the deck of the next moored boat and again to the one beyond. When he reached a piling ladder he slogged his way up it, the rough timbers reminding his stockinged feet that he should have scouted the ransacked locker for shoes. He was too tired to go back.

He hauled himself erect on the splintered pier topside and automatically turned to look once more out over the Sound. Unconsciously his hands hooked into claws. How could you do it, Mike? We were friends, you and I. And Vic. I hope Vic never knows that you've left him with very nearly as little as you left me.

He started the long trek out to the road; the car keys were at the bottom of Long Island Sound, and they needed transportation. And the police had to be notified. The police he grimaced wryly. He stumbled off the dock timbers onto the gravel, and his heels bit stingingly as his weaving walk jarred him from side to side. His ears still sang from the water-wash, and his bare arms and shoulders were encrusted with a film of sticky salt. He tried to concentrate on steering a straight course on the lighter colored gravel road which led up to the highway and renounced it in favor of putting one foot before the other. The swash in his ears died out gradually, and he could hear the high-pitched whisper of the night breeze in the scrub pines, mournfully persistent.

He put down his head and walked on.