Murder with a Past

20

The man with the shining bald head was silent. Suddenly he looked strange — older, thinner, less substantial. Mercedes Cabbott and her husband were regarding him as if they had never seen him before.

As perhaps they haven’t, Tully thought.

“It would have been a pretty simple case if Cox hadn’t been so greedy,” Tully said into the silence, and then he shrugged. “But then he wouldn’t have been Cox, would he? He came to town to blackmail you, Ollie, but while he was here he thought he’d do a little business with Sandra Jean, too... whom he knew as Ruth. He must have set up the appointment with Sandra Jean first — a little incidental he thought he’d get out of the way. I wondered why he didn’t try to get some money out of Sandra on the spot — why he was willing to let her off the hook until she married Andy and he’d have something worth his while to go after. Now it’s obvious. He didn’t need Sandra’s immediate pittance; he had a much bigger fish tugging on his line. So Sandra came and went, and then you came at your appointed time, Ollie.”

He saw Ollie Hurst swallow, as if to gather sufficient moisture in his mouth to lubricate his voice. Before the lawyer could speak, Tully went on.

“You came, Ollie, and the gun Cox had taken away from Sandra was right there, and whether you came prepared to kill Cox or the sight of the gun set you off, you managed to grab it and cover him and wrap a towel around it and shoot him dead.”

“And Ruth walked in on that?” Mercedes said in soft horror.

“She did, didn’t she, Ollie?” Tully said. She’d followed Sandra to the motel, seen her leave, saw you go into Cox’s room, and she must have sensed that Cox had some hold on you, too. And with some quixotic idea of helping you — she’s always liked and looked up to you, Ollie; you remember that, don’t you? — Ruth barged into that room after you. And found you standing over Cox’s dead body with the gun in your hand. It must have been your voice Maudie Blake heard calling Ruth by name, not Cox’s — listening through that thin wall to the whole thing, Maudie must have made a lightning decision to lie for you and cover for you, Ollie, so that you’d have to pay her off. As you did, when you slipped into her room at Flynn’s Inn subsequently and forced a lethal dose of booze down her drunken throat.”

He was no longer Ollie Hurst at all, but a standing corpse, a breathing dead man, so still and stiff he might have been a corpse in fact. I wonder, Tully thought, if he even hears me now.

George Cabbott drew a quavery sort of breath and exhaled it noisily. “How do you know all this, Dave?”

“It follows from one simple thing, so simple I hardly noticed it at the time.” Tully’s breath came out under tension, too. “Ollie made a tremendous mistake. The night I went to Flynn’s Inn at Maudie Blake’s request, she told me she’d ‘just’ moved over there from the Hobby Motel. The next morning — the morning Ollie and I found her dead — we went in Ollie’s car, Ollie driving. Never once the night before in Ollie’s house, never once that morning in my house, did I mention the fact that Maudie Blake was no longer at the Hobby Motel, but had moved. And on the drive to Flynn’s neither of us said a single word. Yet Ollie drove directly to Flynn’s Inn.

“I didn’t realize until much later how significant that was,” Tully ground on. “In fact, I didn’t remember it at all. Until, that is, I began to put the pieces together about Ollie’s relationship fifteen years ago with Kathleen. Then it popped out, and it hit me between the eyes. That business with Kathleen concealed a possible motive for Ollie to have killed Cox. The knowledge he shouldn’t have had — of where Maudie Blake had holed in — put him right smack in that room at Flynn’s Inn — pouring a lethal dose of liquor down Maudie’s gullet. It’s not evidence, but I’m not after evidence — let Julian Smith and the prosecutor’s office worry about that. In fact, what I’m after—”

“Dave,” the corpse said. “Dave, you’ve got to understand I didn’t know that gun belonged to you. All I saw was a gun — and that damn leering face... It was over — I was committed — before I really had time to think. And there he was, dead, and afterward that Blake horror — trying to squeeze me, too...” Ollie Hurst said dully, “Didn’t she realize that a man who’s killed once finds it easy to kill a second time? I had to kill her. She knew. She knew everything.”

“And Ruth?” Tully said. “And Ruth, Ollie?”

“Ruth... She walked in... I couldn’t kill Ruth. Not Ruth. My friend. Norma’s friend. Your wife...”

Tully crouched slightly. He heard his breath whistling up from his lungs, tasted the foul taste of undiluted hatred in his mouth. “You couldn’t kill Ruth, Ollie? Do you think you can still pull the old-pal act with me?” He dimly heard his own voice shouting. “You didn’t kill Ruth then for one reason only: You needed her as your fall guy! And when you thought you were in the clear and you had Ruth all set up to take the rap for you — did you kill Ruth, too? Did you, Ollie? Where did you put her? Where have you got her hidden? Alive or dead?”

“Dave, no! I’ll take him!”

It was George Cabbott who sprang between them, reaching for the lawyer with his bronze arms.

It was impossible, but Ollie Hurst moved faster. Tully saw the blur of his hand snatching the cocktail shaker from the table, the weirdly colored line of light it made as the shaker struck Cabbott squarely in the face. The big man went down with an expression of great surprise. Blood began to pump from his mouth.

And Ollie Hurst — portly, bald Ollie Hurst — twisted his clumsy body and grabbed the terrace railing and vaulted over it like a gazelle and disappeared in the darkness.

Mercedes Cabbott dropped to her knees beside her husband with a faint cry.

Then Tully found himself on the black lawn, running.

He could not see Ollie, and he had to stop and listen for the thud of Ollie’s feet on the turf. He ran, and stopped, and listened, and ran again. When the thudding sounds turned into snapping dry-stick sounds, Tully knew that the lawyer had reached the gravel driveway before the house and was sprinting across it.

How long he chased his quarry Tully had no notion. It seemed endless, and it seemed no time at all. He ran and stopped and ran like a man in a dream, where time did not exist.

At one point he made contact. He remembered seeing the flying figure suddenly, hearing the horrid labor of his lungs, launching himself into space from behind like a swimmer at the start of a race, watching Ollie beyond all reason twisting his chubby body sidewise in a slow-motion film, feeling his shoulder slam glancingly against Ollie’s rib cage, pitching forward on his face with his hands extended to break his fall, feeling the jarring impact of his shoulder on the lawn, feeling himself tumbling over and coming to rest on his back, one vast windless pain.

The next thing David Tully became conscious of was running down a long slope after the fleeing lawyer. At the bottom of the slope stretched the Cabbott stables. His first reasoned thought came to him: Ollie Hurst had no plan, no destination. He was simply running, running in a blind instinct to prolong the sweet oblivion between crime and punishment. And he was dangerous. Now he was really dangerous.

Tully took longer strides. He was running easily now. It was no effort at all. He was only a few yards behind Ollie Hurst when the lawyer ducked into the hay-barn.

Tully plowed to a dead stop just outside the barn door. He listened, trying to hear over his own breathing. And he heard. He heard the huge and heaving gasps of an animal run to earth, incapable of further flight, cornered.

“Ollie,” David Tully said. “Ollie, I’m coming in.”

Nothing but the gasps.

“Don’t try anything, Ollie. I’m not going to hurt you. But you’re going to tell me what I have to know.”

There was a slobbering break in the gasps, and then they resumed.

Tully stood still.

Suddenly there was moonlight. It shone through the open door into the barn. He could not see Ollie from where he was standing.

“Ollie, I’m coming in.”

Most of the barn was dark.

“Ollie?” Tully said. “Don’t try to hide from me. I see you.”

“No... you... don’t.”

Tully whirled. The gasping voice had come from behind him.

Ollie Hurst was crouched in the doorway. His torso was still heaving for oxygen, his mouth wide open, the moonlight bouncing off his teeth and wet skull and streaming cheeks. There was a pitchfork in his hands and its tines were a foot from Tully’s throat.

“I don’t want this, Dave,” Ollie gasped. “I didn’t ask for this. I’ve got to keep running as long as I can. The keys, Dave. Give me the keys to your car.”

The shining needles of steel moved back and forth slightly, came closer.

Tully did not move. “Is Ruth alive?”

“Of course she’s alive—”

“Where is she, Ollie? Where are you hiding her?” He wanted to believe. He so desperately wanted to believe.

“The keys,” Ollie Hurst said again. “I’ll get them one way or another, Dave. I’ll get them if I have to kill you. Toss me those keys.”

“Sure, Ollie. If you’ll tell me where Ruth is.”

“First the keys.”

“No deal,” Tully said. Was he lying? If Ruth were dead, wouldn’t Ollie tell the hiding place in return for the keys without bargaining? He must be telling the truth...

And suddenly it came to him, as the other revelations had come to him, in a flash, whole and perfect. The tines were very close to his throat now, and he had to fight to ignore them.

“Or would this be it, Ollie? Where would an amateur like you find a hideout for your kidnap victim on the spur of the moment? You couldn’t have made any preparations. It would have to exist — safe, isolated, ready for use.

“There’s a place like that available to you, Ollie,” Tully said, “the only place you could take her that fits the specifications. The place you and Norma call the old place, that Norma’s great-grandfather built up in the hills. That’s why you talked Norma out of going up there... The root-cellar would be a good spot. Ruth’s in the root-cellar of the old place, isn’t she, Ollie?”

The tines wavered. “Dave,” Ollie Hurst said faintly. “Please—”

“George has phoned the police by this time, Ollie,” Tully said. He felt as big and sure as a mountain. “Julian Smith... Ollie, listen! Hear it?”

It was the creeping hysteria of a police siren from far away.

“What’s the use?” Tully asked the rigid man softly. “You’ll only get yourself killed if you run. It isn’t over by a damn sight, Ollie. Not while you’ve still got friends. Like me. And even Ruth. Give it to me?”

He carefully extended his hand.

Oliver Hurst collapsed. Everything gave way at once, head, arms, legs.

Tully took the pitchfork away from him.

“Ruth?”

He heard a gagged, frantic moan.

Tully smashed in the root-cellar door.