Kill as Directed

Twenty-Three

Kurt Gresham locked and latched the door and when he turned around he was still smiling. “Alone at last,” he said.

Harry Brown said nothing.

Gresham heaved off the bed, refilled their glasses looking down at him and Harry did not even look up. Dimly he heard the prissy voice say, “Would you care to wash, Doctor, as we well-bred people like to put it? I don’t have to tell my personal physician what an experience like this does to a man’s bladder. No? Well, mine isn’t as young and vigorous as yours. Excuse me.”

The fat old man went into the bathroom and shut the door.

Harry Brown heard the toilet flush after a while. Then he heard the sound of tap water running. Then the sounds of sloshing and of hearty gargling. This went on for some time.

He heard the sounds and they filled his head to the brim, leaving no space for anything else. Thoughts simply were not there. Vaguely, through the sounds, he knew that a great deal, of great significance, had happened in the past few minutes, but just what it was, what it signified, what position it left him in, he was unable to grasp and retain. It was as if he had been stricken with paralysis — mental and physical. He could not have pulled himself up from the overstuffed chair and gone over to the bed to reclaim the revolver under the pillow and unlock the door and walk out of the room if his life had depended on this simple series of actions. And for all he knew, his life did depend on it.

And he did not care.

The bathroom door opened and Gresham came out pink, dry, combed. He had removed his jacket and tie, his shirt was open at the neck, showing the mattress of gray hair on his chest, and he was carrying a clean towel.

The towel landed on Harry’s lap.

“Use it,” he heard Gresham say. “You’re sweating like a boy on his first date.” He repeated, sharply, “Wipe yourself.”

Harry picked up the towel and wiped his face, his neck, his hands. He folded the towel and laid it neatly on his lap. Gresham, observing him closely, took the towel from his lap and threw it into the bathroom. Then he went to the bed and lifted the pillow and brought out Benny’s lethal ashes and examined it. He shook his head over the silencer, glanced over at Harry, shrugged, opened the brief case on the bed, put Harry’s gun into the brief case, locked the brief case.

Then he came over to Harry and said, “Harry.”

Harry stared up at him.

“Would you care for a drink?”

Harry heard a hoarse voice say, “Yes.” To his surprise, he realized it was his own.

Gresham went into the bathroom again. He came out with a bottle of cognac and two water glasses.

“Twenty years old,” he said. “Private stock.” He half-filled each glass, put one glass into Harry’s hand, went over to the bed, put one pillow on top of the other and lay down. He raised the glass and took a long drink and then he lowered the glass and immediately raised it again. But this time he sipped.

“Harry,” he said. “Drink that brandy.”

Harry came to with a start. He raised the glass and he did not set it down until he had emptied it. Gresham watched him from the bed. A warmth came into Harry’s body, beginning at the toes. It rose through his legs into his torso and then it was in his head; and his head came alive again.

“Ah,” said the old fat man. “I see you’re back in the land of the living, Doctor. I’d like your opinion, Doctor. What do you think of yourself?”

Harry was beginning to think, but not of himself. He was beginning to think of Karen.

“You were the sucker,” piped Kurt Gresham, smiling again. “You were the patsy in the middle. The expendable man. And they couldn’t wait.”

“What?” Harry asked, blinking. “What did you say, Kurt?”

“They couldn’t wait.”

“Who couldn’t wait, Kurt?”

“Don’t you know? You mean you still don’t see it?”

“See what?”

“Harry.”

“See what, Kurt?”

“That you’ve been framed by my wife and her lover?”

Harry stammered, “Lover? But—”

“I mean our friend Anthony Mitchell.”

Why was everything so wrong? “Tony?” Harry muttered.

“Ah, she didn’t tell you about Tony. Or she lied and put on an act about Tony. It’s a damned shame. I mean, so much wasted talent. She’s never realized that she didn’t have to earn her living taking her clothes off. She could have made a fine career for herself as an actress. Oh, yes, Karen and Tony. Would you like me to sketch in the groundwork for you, Doctor? I mean about Tony?”

“About Tony,” Harry repeated.

“Tony’s been with me, intimately with me, for the past ten years. He’s one of my top executives — member of my board of directors. Who do you think suggested you as a replacement for Dr. Welliver here in New York when Welliver had to retire? Your friend Tony Mitchell. It was Tony who placed your name in nomination, and that was when we started our check of your background.”

“Tony,” Harry said again. He groped for his glass, saw it was empty, stared stupidly at it.

“It was Tony who suggested that Karen and I become your patients. It was Tony who thought up the bank loan-cosigner approach, to be followed shortly by my paying off the loan in a lump with the flourish that was to hook you, and did. And it was Tony who must be given the credit for the coup de grâce — getting you into bed with Karen.”

Harry Brown blinked. A soreness suddenly seized the pit of his stomach.

“You’re shocked,” said Karen’s husband, smiling. “You slob, you’re actually shocked!”

He blinked and blinked and blinked. The soreness was spreading, had spread, through his body. One great soreness.

“But if you’re a slob,” Kurt Gresham went on, “I’m an absolute idiot. After all, Harry, you have an excuse — you’ve never lived, you’re a complete innocent, you’re rather stupid. But I’m supposed to be a smart man, a smart experienced man. I thought Tony’s idea to get you involved in an affair with Karen was good sound strategy. I didn’t know that their long-range objective wasn’t you, but me.”

“Your own wife,” Harry shouted. “You told your wife to become my mistress?”

“Yes, and it wasn’t so easy to get her to do it, either. Here, we both need another brandy.” Gresham heaved off the bed, refilled their glasses and lay down again. “Harry, you have that damned adolescent, Sunday-school view of life. Do you think I deluded myself when I married Karen? I’m an ugly old man; she’s a young, beautiful and, as you know, passionate woman. I couldn’t have bought her except as part of a deal; I knew that and accepted it. Money and marriage for her; and for me, the use of her at my pleasure. But I also knew I wasn’t man enough for her — I’m too old and used-up, as she likes to put it. So I gave her the right to sleep around — I knew she’d do it, anyway, — on the sole condition that she be discreet about it. I’ve known of her affair with Tony Mitchell from the day it started, which was before I married her. What I didn’t know was that theirs was no ordinary liaison. I didn’t know they were planning my murder and were waiting for the right weapon to come along. And that was you.”

Harry remembered the brandy. He began to drink it, steadily.

“You were their weapon, Harry. You’d kill me for them, and you’d be caught doing it, and they’d be rid of us both and live happily ever after on my money. How do you like my diagnosis, Doctor?”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Harry said.

“You’re a bigger imbecile than I figured you. Or you do believe it but won’t admit it to yourself. Or maybe you’re admitting it to yourself but for some amusing reason don’t want to look lower in my eyes than you know you already do.”

Old Kurt Gresham, vast sagging lump-on-the-bed, smiled at young Dr. Harrison Brown. It was not an unkind smile; it was almost a smile of sympathy. The jowls shook pinkishly.

“So let me spell it out for you, Doctor... It was Karen’s idea that you kill me.”

“No.”

“No, no, reflect, my boy. Was it your idea?”

“Yes.”

“No. She planted it in your head. Believe me. I know her. I know how she works... I’ll grant you that the inspiration might not have been hers originally. It smacks of Tony. Well, it doesn’t matter; whichever of them thought of it first, they were in this together. That’s as dead certain as that I’m still breathing. Now then. Karen told you that between five minutes to seven and seven o’clock on Friday nights I’m in this room at the Starhurst, alone. Correct?”

“Yes, but—”

“And she even got the gun and silencer for you?”

He was silent.

“Oh, gallant. And so typical. And this was all worked out to the last iota, Harry, wasn’t it? undoubtedly on a split-second time schedule? My death to occur during the five minutes before my club manager was due to show up? Couldn’t go wrong, could it, Harry? Only it did. And why? Because just after you stepped into this room — just after you raised the gun and theoretically shot me (and how my dear wife miscalculated in her choice of weapon, Harry, or my dear attorney, or both!) — just as I was theoretically falling dead at your feet... what happened? O’Brien of the hotel security staff barges in and — still theoretically — catches you with your antiseptic pants down, Doctor. So, if you’d had the guts to carry the plan out, you’d have been caught, wouldn’t you? My dear innocent, that must be clear even to you.”

Harry Brown closed his eyes to shut out the sight of the monster, the bloated embodiment of his conscience and ineptitude; but he could not shut his ears to its voice.

“Now O’Brien got a phone call in his office just in time to make arrangements to convert the hotel into a trap and race up here to catch you in the act. Who do you think made that phone call, Doctor? At five minutes to seven?”

At five minutes to seven he had just pushed through the revolving door downstairs, less than a minute after Gresham...

“A woman made that call, O’Brien said,” the prissy voice went on. “A ‘hysterical’ woman who had heard a gun go off in Suite 101 that hadn’t gone off at all. So she knew a gun was scheduled to go off. She knew you were going to be standing in that room pumping lead into me. What woman knew that, Harry? Give me a name — any other name but my wife’s. Can you?”

But he could not, he could not.

“And why should Karen phone the house detective of the Starhurst — putting on another act, of course, hysteria — why should she get him to roar into this room at just the time you were supposedly shooting me? Wouldn’t you say that her timing — deliberately premature to give O’Brien the opportunity to get up here at the moment of the murder — wouldn’t you say it was contrived to catch you committing it, Harry?”

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

“Maybe they figured you’d panic and run, Harry, and O’Brien would put a bullet in you — that would wrap it up neatly... both of us dead, the victim and his killer. Or, that when you saw O’Brien, you’d stick the gun in your mouth and save O’Brien the trouble, with the same satisfying result. And if you weren’t shot running, or if you didn’t shoot yourself... tell me, Harry, would you have dragged Karen into it? Could you have dragged Karen into it? If I know my wife, you’ll find she’s managed to leave herself completely uninvolved—”

Yes... All she had to do was not go through the motions of placing that two-minutes-to-seven phone call, was not to ask Dr. Stone to phone at twenty minutes past seven... then she was in the clear, in the clear.

“—and she’d have got away with it. How do you feel, Doctor?”

Harry licked his lips. Was it possible... was it possible that somehow, in some way, by some miracle, Karen was not responsible for this? That it had been Tony Mitchell all along...? But this straw bent and broke even as he grasped it. The only way Tony Mitchell could have known what was scheduled for tonight would have been through Karen’s telling him.

“I see you feel properly rotten, as rotten as only a fine clean-living young man could feel when he sees himself as others see him... a fool, an object of contempt, about as important to his beloved as a soiled handkerchief. And you’d like to find a hole somewhere, wouldn’t you, and crawl into it and lick your wounded little ego? You’d like to be out of the whole thing — Karen, Tony, the organization, me? Even me? Especially me? Harry?”

“Yes.” It came out stiff and dry.

“Maybe that can be arranged,” Kurt Gresham said. “You know, Harry, I liked you from the start. Just made a mistake about your guts. Well, this isn’t the time or place to discuss you. Right now we have work to do.”

He was trying hard, very hard, to follow the sense of the old man’s words. Gresham got off the bed and went to the closet and came back with one of his impossibly long, green Havana cigars. Harry watched him strike a match, puff critically, nod approval.

“We’re in an interesting situation now, Harry my boy,” the millionaire murmured. “Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of my wife and my clever lawyer. By now I’m dead and you’re killed, or alive but in custody. Of course you’re not able to show up at Monique’s for dinner, or to go to the theater with them and the Stones afterward. How do they explain your nonappearance? Very simply: doctors are notoriously unreliable socially. An emergency, no doubt — Dr. Stone and his wife will certainly understand that. You didn’t even have time to phone. These conscientious young doctors, tch, ten, and so on.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and frowned at it. “All right, then. Karen and Tony and the Stones finish their dinner and go to the theater. My chauffeur then drives the Stones home to Taugus, as Dr. Stone had requested. Leaving Karen and Tony alone for the first time this evening. Where do they go, Harry?”

“To your apartment.”

“Home sweet home — correct, Harry. He takes her home at once. Because I’m dead and you’ve murdered me, and the police must have been trying to reach the widow, are likely waiting for her there. Yes, they go right to the apartment, bracing themselves for the act they’ve undoubtedly rehearsed and — but what’s this?” The fat old man cried delightedly, “No police! No sign of police! No message! No anything. What’s their reaction, Harry?”

Harry said, “They’re puzzled. Then they get nervous. Maybe scared.”

“You’re certainly coming back to life, Harry,” said Kurt Gresham with pleasure. “Yes, they’re puzzled, then nervous, then very nervous, then scared to death. And what will they do, Harry, when they get puzzled and nervous and scared to death?” His teeth clamped down viciously on the cigar. “They’ll talk, that’s what they’ll do! They’ll talk it over.”

He still doesn’t think I’m convinced, Harry thought. Or maybe he’s not as sure of his theory as he’s made out to be.

“They’ll talk it over, Harry,” said Kurt Gresham, “and we’ll be there, you and I — we’ll be there to listen.”