Kill as Directed

Twenty-Four

Gresham called the desk and ordered a pile of sandwiches and a pot of coffee. The fat man ate with a sort of abstracted relish. Harry could not eat. He drank, however. Not coffee. A great deal more brandy.

At half-past ten Gresham took his brief case and they left the Starhurst. In the taxi he said, “We’ll go in through the tradesmen’s entrance at the rear and walk up. I don’t want the doorman or the elevator men to see us.”

Harry nodded dreamily. He was floating on brandy.

“We’ll set up our listening post in the blue guest room.”

“Blue guest room,” Harry said. In all this madness it sounded perfectly logical.

The millionaire unlocked his apartment door and they went into the black foyer at eleven minutes to eleven, by Harry’s watch. It was an old watch, a gift from his father, with a black face and pale green luminous hands. He was still focusing on the watch in the dark when Kurt Gresham snapped on the foyer light.

“Hurry it up.” The old man trundled ahead of Harry to the blue guest room and led him to a chair near the door. “You sit here.”

Harry sat. He fumbled for a cigarette. Gresham seemed able to see in the dark. “Don’t smoke,” he said sharply. “And don’t make a sound when they come in. Breathe with your mouth open.”

He trotted out of the room. A moment later the foyer light went off. A moment after that Harry heard him come back into the bedroom.

“You all right, Harry?” the prissy voice said. Harry restrained an impulse to giggle. It was like a séance he had once attended, with voices coming out of the air.

“I’m all right.”

He heard the slight scrape of another chair and a wheezy grunt as Gresham took up his position just inside the doorway, within reach of the guest room light switch; heard the creak of the chair springs, the thump of Gresham’s brief case being set down on the floor.

Then they sat there, in the darkness, silent. Harry dozed, chin-to-chest, mouth open.

Twice he came to with a start and glanced at his watch.

They heard the key in the lock. Harry sat up quickly, peering. It was twenty minutes to midnight.

The apartment door opened and closed and then they saw the glow in the hallway from the lights in the living room. They could hear faintly, but clearly.

“Something’s wrong,” Tony Mitchell’s voice said.

There were sounds from the bar, ice cubes tinkling in glasses, gurgling from a bottle.

“I can use this right now,” Karen Gresham’s voice said.

There was a pause. Then: “Radically wrong,” Tony Mitchell said. “There should be cops, respectfully stuck away in the rear of the lobby. But nothing. I say to the doorman, ‘How are you tonight, John?’ and he says, ‘Fine, thank you, sir.’ No excitement, no message, no knowing looks — nothing. And the elevator operator grins and scrapes as if it were the day before Christmas.”

“What do you think, Tony?” It was interesting to hear her voice. It was really a different voice — unknown to him. He was sure that if he could see her she would look different, too — equally a stranger. And wasn’t she? Wasn’t she?

“Either our medical pigeon contracted a severe case of chilled tootsies and ran out on the whole deal—”

“Not little Lord Fauntleroy,” said Karen. “His not to reason why. He’s one of nature’s noblemen, didn’t you know that?”

“—or, what’s far likelier, he loused it up and the old wolf beat him to the punch. That would explain why, if Harry didn’t go through with it, Big Daddy’s not home to greet us. He’s probably talking to his meat department right now, arranging to have our boy cut up, packaged and disposed of. That takes time, baby. And we’d better face it — if that’s the way it went, you and I are in one hell of a spot.”

Karen began to curse. She cursed her beloved Harry in a low, steady, unemotional way that made him writhe with shame. He could not hear Kurt Gresham’s breathing at all.

“Shut up, will you?” snapped Tony Mitchell. “I have to think this out. And fast, because that old man is sudden death.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Karen said viciously.

“The point is that even while the surgical saws are separating Harry into his component parts, old Kurt must be asking himself: How did Harry know about the Starhurst?”

“And also who called that house detective up?” Karen actually sounded frightened. “Tony, do you suppose he’ll realize—?”

“One thing at a time, will you?”

Harry could hear Tony Mitchell’s agitated steps. Beside him Kurt Gresham stirred; there was the slightest creak of the chair springs. It stopped instantly.

“We’ve got to anticipate Kurt’s thinking,” Tony said. The steps had stopped. “All right: How could Harry have known? We don’t have time to give it the finesse it needs — we’re going to have to play it by ear — but I have an idea.”

“Pour me another drink.”

There was the sound of more gurgling; then Tony Mitchell said, “Like this. You blew it, but inadvertently. The kid had confided in you that he’d been recruited by the old man. You had asked him where Kurt made the deal with him, at Kurt’s office in the Empire State Building or at his suite at the Starhurst. Slip of the tongue. Natural? So like the kid knew about the Starhurst, and like he worked his own points from there. Dig?”

Karen said slowly, “It might work, at that.”

“You knew nothing about it, our Dr. Brown had never dropped one word to you; but now, after the event, putting little things together, you realize that Harry must have had second thoughts or an attack of cold feet; that he wanted out and knew Kurt wouldn’t let him out; that he must have realized he could escape by only one route — Kurt’s murder. You can say he must even have thought you’d marry him afterward. Anyway, Harry tried, and the gutless wonder fouled it up... From there we play it by ear.”

Karen was quiet. After a while she said, “Pretty good. You are a smart operator, lover.”

“Not so smart,” Tony Mitchell muttered. “You’ll have to put on a good act.”

“You’re the only man I know smarter than that lump of pork fat I’m married to. And you’re a lot prettier. Come here to me...”

There was a long, long pause. The only sounds were the sounds of love-making, fierce and abandoned. And here we are, Harry thought, listening in — the cuckold and the cuckold, the legal one and the illegal one. He was quite sober now.

“No,” said Tony suddenly. “No, Karen, not now.”

“Damn you,” Karen laughed. “What you do to me...” There was a slight, laughing scuffle. “Darling. What’s the matter?”

“What about the little lump?” Tony Mitchell growled.

“What little lump?”

“Harry.”

“Harry?” The total contempt in her voice made Harry Brown shiver. “Lump is right. He was a panting, ridiculous lump. Strong as a bull, which made it even worse — strong, sincere, panting like an animal. The only way I was able to take him was to shut my eyes and pretend he was you. Give me a refill, darling. I need a lot of fortification if I’m going to fool Big Daddy when he comes waddling through that door...”

Harry found himself on his feet, aware with detached surprise that growling sounds were grumbling in his throat. But a hand closed on his wrist, and a hiss like a snake’s tickled his ear: “You stay right where you are!”

And then the hand was snatched from his wrist, and the shapeless silhouette of Kurt Gresham blocked out the faint glow in the doorway, and then it moved away, and Harry heard nothing, nothing at all, until the next eternity. And then what he heard was the muffled cough of a gun. And another.

And two thumps.

And silence.

He ran down the hall to the living room and he skidded to a stop in the archway.

“Hold it, Harry,” said the old fat man. The revolver with the silencer was pointed in Harry’s direction. Then the old fat man said, but not to Harry, “Scum. Scum.”

Two glasses, unbroken, lay on the thick-piled rug in the middle of spreading stains. Near one of them sprawled Karen Gresham, her body a glittery twist in its silver-sequinned décolleté gown. Blood Was gushing from her neck. Near the other sprawled Tony Mitchell, dinner jacket rumpled. Blood was gushing from his mouth.

“Don’t move, Harry,” said the old fat man. He walked over to his wife and carefully put another bullet into her head. Then he walked over to his lawyer and carefully put another bullet into his head. Mitchell’s eyes remained open. Karen’s eyes were no longer there.

Gresham’s pendulous cheeks were the color of well-hung beef fat, and they quivered as he spoke.

“Don’t worry, Harry,” he said, “my security people will take care of this. There won’t be a trace on the rug. And I’m not even here, remember?”

Something was wrong with Gresham’s statement, but for the moment Harry could not pin point the mistake.

“As for disposal, tomorrow my lawyer is going to take my wife out on his boat; a good way out to sea they’ll get into the dinghy and do some fishing; they’re going to capsize and drown, and none of the three bodies will ever be recovered. You know those sharks off Montauk Point.”

Harry started to say something, his tongue stuck, and then he got the word out. “Three?” he said.

“Didn’t I tell you, Harry? You went fishing with them.”

“That’s why you asked me to come here with you.” And now Harry realized that he had known it all along.

“Of course, Harry. Shooting you in the hotel would have necessitated a complicated disposal operation. It’s simpler from here. I’ve saved two bullets for you.” The old man moved closer; the revolver was coming up, slowly.

“But why, Kurt? Because I tried to kill you?” He was surprised at the clarity in his head, the lack of fear in his body.

“Because you failed to kill me,” said the old man. “You chickened out, Harry. I can’t have a weak sister working for me. And you know too much to be allowed to live. Especially now that you’ve witnessed me commit two murders with my own hands.”

Harry measured the distance between them. He had played football in college and he knew how far he could spring for a tackle. He tensed his leg and thigh muscles.

And now, although Kurt Gresham was smiling with his little womanish mouth, his colorless eyes flashed the glare of impersonal ferocity that Harry had never seen except in the eyes of wild animals.

“That’s the way it has to be, Harry. It’s going to be a bitter blow to the old man. Out fishing, the dinghy overturned, the bodies never found, and poor old Kurt Gresham is bereft, in one foul blow of fate, of the three most important people in his life — his wife, his lawyer, his doctor. Goodbye Har—”

He leaped high and out and hard and even as he struck he knew he had no target; he struck nothing; there was no resistance; the bulk was beneath him but it had not collapsed’ as a result of his strike. As he recovered his balance and looked down on Kurt Gresham, he knew that the third death, which had been Kurt Gresham’s dream, would be as unrealized as the dreams of the other two in that silent room.

Gresham’s globe of a face was not pink but yellow-green. His left arm was rigid, clamped in cramp. There were bubbles, at the corners of his mouth. The lips were cyanosed and tight back against the teeth, the mouth a fixed gape. The animal eyes were rolled far up to the lids. Dr. Harrison Brown made the clinical diagnosis automatically: coronary occlusion.

Without conscious thought, in conditioned reflex, Dr. Brown pried open the mouth, depressed the tongue, placed his own mouth on the mouth of Kurt Gresham and breathed into it. He pulled back so that the lungs could express the air he had forced into them, put his mouth back on Gresham’s mouth, blew the air from his lungs into Gresham’s lungs — kept up the prescribed ritual, in, out, breathe, away...

The lips beneath his twitched, grew salty, pulled together, had wetness.

Dr. Brown drew back.

For a moment there was intelligence in the staring pucker of the eyes. The blue upper lip writhed back. Teeth showed in a mockery of a smile.

He slapped the cheeks sharply.

“Kurt,” he said. “Kurt!”

A whisper drowned in phlegm produced a word.

“Human...”

He rubbed the wrists. Rubbed and rubbed.

“Human... funny...” Very faint.

“What? What?”

Now, quite clearly, through the blue lips past the leathery tongue: “Forgive... love... no... fun...”

The eyes rolled up, became slits of white.

The body jerked.

The body was still.

Dr. Brown locked his lips on the lips again, blowing with all his power, but the mouth was stiff, the tongue a nuisance, the lungs empty bags.

Dr. Brown pushed up from his knees, staggered and straightened, went past the two bloody things on the floor to the telephone and dialed police headquarters.