College-Cut Kill

Chapter Eight Booby-Trap

The sun sank golden toward the gulf and then turned a bank of clouds to a bloody fire that was five thousand miles long. Dusk was an odd stormy yellow, and then a pink-blue and then a deep dusty blue. A cool wind came from the north west, and we shivered and went in and changed. We were as subdued as children who have been promised punishment.

It was possible that he might listen. As night gathered its dark strength and the sea turned alien, we sat in the brightness in the corner and read silently together from the same book, but even that was not powerful enough to keep us from starting with each small night noise. The wind grew steadily. The Magnum was a hard lump by my leg. She had clowned possession of the .32, stuffing it under the bright woven belt she wore, but it did not look particularly humorous.

When the knock came, firm and steady, we looked at each other for a moment frozen forever in memory. Her face was sun-bronzed, but the healthy color ran out of it so that around her mouth there was a tiny greenish tint. I squeezed her hand hard and pointed to the closet. I waited until the door was closed so that a thin dark line showed.

“Come on in!” I called. I let my hand rest casually beside me so that in one quick movement I could slap my hand onto the grip inches away.

Arthur Marris came in. The wind caught the door and almost tore it out of his hand. He shut it. The wind had rumpled his hair so that strands fell across his forehead. It gave him a more secretive look.

He smiled. “The night’s getting wild.”

I made myself put the book aside very casually. “Sit down, Arthur. I wrenched my ankle in the surf. If you want a drink, you’ll have to go out into the kitchen and make it yourself. I want to stay off the foot.”

I admired his tailor-made concern. “Oh! Too bad. Can I fix you one too?”

“Sure thing. Bourbon and water. Plain water.”

I sat tensely while he worked in the kitchen. He brought me a drink and I was relieved to see that he had a drink in each hand. I took my drink with my left hand and as I did so I braced myself and moved my fingers closer to the weapon. He turned away and went back to the chair nine feet away. He sat down as though he were very weary.

I lifted the drink to my lips and pretended to sip at it. I set it on the floor by my feet, but I did not take my eyes off him as I set it down. It made me think that this must be the way a trainer acts when he enters the cage for the first time with a new animal. Every motion planned, every muscle ready to respond, so much adrenalin in the blood that the pulse thuds and it is hard to keep breathing slow and steady.

“I’m troubled, Rod,” he said.

“Yes?” Casual and polite.

“This is something I don’t know how to handle.”

“Then it must be pretty important.”

He took the folder copy out of his pocket. “Did you leave this in my room by accident?”

“So that’s what happened to it. No, don’t bother bringing it over. Toss it on the desk. I can see from here that it’s mine.”

“I read it, Rod.”

“Like it?”

“What do you intend to do with it?”

In the game of chess there is move and countermove, gambit and response. The most successful attacks are those, as in war, where power is brought to bear on one point to mask a more devastating attack in another quarter. But before actual attack, the opponents must study each other’s responses to feints and counter-feints.

“It’s an assignment for my Friday class. Due next week.”

“I suppose you realize, Rod, that you’ve patterned your story, as far as it’s gone, on the series of misfortunes we’ve had in the house. You’ve twisted it a bit, but not enough. The method of death and the chronology are the same.”

“I still can’t see how you’re troubled.”

He frowned. “Is that hard? I had two other people in the house read it this afternoon to see if their slant was the same as mine. You can’t hand that in the way it is. Your instructor would really have to be a fool not to tie it up with what has happened, particularly because Brad Carroll’s death is still fresh in everyone’s mind.”

“What if he does?”

“You’ve made an amazingly strong case, Arlin, whether you know it or not. Until I read your story, I thought it was absurd to think of what has happened as anything except a series of tragic accidents and coincidences. No one can read your story, Rod, without getting, as I have, a strong suspicion that there is some human agency behind this whole affair. Absurd as the motives may seem, I have been wondering if...” He frowned down at the floor.

“What have you been wondering?”

“I took a long walk this afternoon. I tried to think clearly and without any prejudice. I want to ask you to hold up sending in that assignment for a time. Is the original copy here?”

“In that desk.”

“Are there any other carbons?”

“No. You’ve seen the only one.”

“I’d like to have you come back to the house with me, Rod. Right now. We might be able to clear this up.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Not with this ankle.”

He stood up and came two steps toward me. “I’ll help you, Rod. You see I want you to come back there with me, because even though your reasoning might be right in that story, the conclusion is...”

Marris stopped short and stared at the leveled weapon. He licked his lips. “What’s that for?”

“What do you think it’s for? How do you like the end of the road.”

He smiled crookedly. “Look, Arlin. You can’t possibly believe that I...”

The room was gone as abruptly as though the house had exploded. Too late, I remembered the fuse box on the outside of the house, in typical Florida fashion. We were alone in the sighing darkness, in a night that was utterly black. The outside door banged open and the sea mist blew in, curling through the room, tasting of salt.

I moved to one side, toward the closet, as fast and as quietly as I could go. I took three steps when somebody ran into me hard. A heavy shoulder caught my chest and I slammed back against the closet door, banging it shut. The impact tore the gun out of my hand and I heard it skitter across onto the bare floor beyond the rug. I touched an arm, slid my hand down to the wrist and punched hard where the head should be.

I hit the empty air and the wrist twisted out of my grip. Something hard hit me above the ear and I stumbled, dazed and off balance. I fell and had sense enough to keep rolling until I ran up against a piece of furniture. I had gotten twisted in the darkness. I felt of it and found it was the desk. Tilly screamed at that moment and the scream was far away because of the closed closet door.

Crawling on my hands and knees, I patted the floor ahead of me, looking for the gun. Somebody rolled into me and there was a thick coughing sound. I slid away. There was a thumping noise. The shots came, fast and brittle against the sound of the sea. There was an angry tug at my wrist and then a liquid warmth across my hand.

The terrace doors we had locked splintered open and the white glare of flashlights caught me full in the face as I sat back on my heels.

Two figures tramped toward me and around me. I turned and saw that they had gone toward a moving mass in the center of the room. One of the figures who had come in towered over the other. I got to my feet and reached the closet door and opened the closet. At that moment the electricity came back on.

Tilly stared up at me and said, “I thought you were... I thought you were...” She leaned against the wall of the closet, closed her eyes and sank slowly toward the floor.

I turned and saw Lieutenant Cord pulling a man off Arthur Marris. Arthur lay on his back. His face was dark and the breath was whistling in his throat. His eyes were closed.

“Back up against that wall,” Cord said quietly to the other man who had risen to his feet.

Step Krindall blinked his baby-blue eyes. Droplets of sweat stood on his pink bald head. He stared incredulously at Arthur. He said, “I thought I had my hands on Arlin! My heaven, I thought it was Arlin! I was strangling Arthur.” He worked the fingers of his fat pink hands convulsively.

“You were trying to kill Arlin like you killed Carroll?” Cord asked, very casually.

“Sure,” Krindall said. “And the other ones. My heaven, I have to take care of Arthur. He’s not smart you know. He’d let them push him around, Arthur would. I’ve been watching out for Arthur now for a long time.” He looked appealingly at Lieutenant Cord.

“He knew what you’ve been doing?”

“Oh, no! He wouldn’t like it even though it helped him a lot. I never told him. He won’t die, will he?”

Arthur stirred. He opened his eyes. He gagged and rubbed his throat as he sat up.

Krindall took a step forward, ignoring Cord. “Arthur, you’re not sore at me, are you? I knew you wouldn’t be sore. I was helping you. And then when you showed me that story today, I just thought Arlin would make trouble for both of us and it would be better if he was dead.”

He reached down as though to touch Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur pulled himself away, violently, hunching along the floor.

Step looked at Arthur for one incredulous moment and then began to blubber, his eyes streaming, his hands making helpless appealing flapping motions.

“Who was shooting?” Cord demanded.

That reminded me forcibly of Tilly. I turned back to her.

She was sitting on the closet floor staring at me. She wore a curious expression. “I felt myself fainting. I sort of expected to wake up on the couch. Only — I didn’t.”

Cord saw the punctured door, thin plywood splinters protruding. “You were shooting from inside the closet?” he asked incredulously.

“I was locked in,” Tilly said with dignity as I helped her to her feet. “I thought Mr. Arlin was being killed. I wanted to create a diversion.”

“Great diversion,” Cord said dryly, staring at my hand. The blood was dripping from the tips of my index and middle fingers. Tilly looked down. This time I was ready. I caught her and put her on the couch.

Arthur stood up shakily. He said, “Rod, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You built such a strong case you got me thinking about Krindall. Little things that I had half forgotten. I still couldn’t believe it.”

Krindall stood, weeping silently. But there was a gleam in his tear-damp blue eyes. I said, “Look at him! Great emotion. Great acting. He’s standing there trying to figure an angle. All this doesn’t actually mean anything to him. This great devotion to Arthur is just a sham.”

The tears stopped as abruptly as though they had been turned off with a pipe wrench. He looked like an evil, besotted child. “I could have got you, Arlin,” he said. “I could have got you good. I rode Rex under the water and towed him out to where it was deep. I got Tod into an argument about guns and slipped a round into the chamber. The argument was whether you could see any glint of light down the barrel.

“I fixed the noose for Ted and got him on the chair to tell me if it was water pipes in the top of the closet. He didn’t see the noose until I slipped it over his head and yanked the chair away. Then I had to keep pulling his hands off the pipe for a little while. I knew about Brad and his wife. When she left, I went in. It didn’t take long. All of them were stupid. All of them. I’ve been smarter than any of you.”

“Yeah, you’re real bright,” Cord said speculatively. “Real bright. We got some mind-doctors who can check on you.”

“Doctors! You think I’m crazy!”

He made a dive to one side. Even as he moved, I saw the butt of the Magnum peeping out around the edge of the chair leg. I needn’t have worried. Cord took one step and swung a fist that was like a bag of rocks on the end of a rope. The fist contacted Step Krindall in mid-flight. It made a sound like somebody dropping an over-ripe cantaloupe. Cord sucked his big knuckles and stared down at Krindall.

“Real bright,” he murmured. He looked over at me. “You worried me, Arlin. I thought it wouldn’t do any harm keeping an eye on this place.”

Tilly revived and Krindall came to enough to be walked out. As I held my punctured epidermis under the cold water faucet, I apologized to a glum Marris.

We were alone again and the night wind still blew, but it was not alien. The sea sighed, but it was a domesticated beast.

Then we had a solemn nightcap together. Tilly said that she thought I ought to drive her back to the campus and I said why of course. We put the top up and I took her back as though we were returning from a very average date.

Ten days later I hit rain as I crossed into Georgia. I took the coast road and the rain stayed with me. The wipers clicked back and forth and the blacktop was the color of oiled sin.

I thought of facing one Mr. Flynn and telling him what had happened, what I had found out. He would have some of the details from the papers. There were others he should know, and others I would spare him. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it was something that had to be done. Krindall would be institutionalized.

Tilly stirred and yawned and stretched like a sleepy cat and smiled at me. Depression went away as though the sun had come out.

“Hungry?” I asked.

“Mmm. Famished. Let’s find a place to eat and then go find a nice court to stay in. We’ll stay there until a sunny day comes along, huh?”

“What’ll thinkle peep, honey? It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”

“Who cares what they think, huh? Show ’em the license.”

“Hunting, driving or marriage?”

“Hunting, of course. No, I’ll tell ’em we had to get married.”

“Then they’ll ask why.”

“Then I’ll say because you got me expelled from junior high.”

“You don’t look old enough to have been in junior high.”

She curled against me. “Just old enough to know better, hey?”

It was raining like crazy in Georgia and the sun was shining bright.