He kept talking. I suppose he did, he would. But I wasn’t listening, because I was listening to something else. Somebody was running down the hallway.
I yanked open the door, and went after him. He’d been in his room, he’d heard me shouting at Archer, he’d come out in the hall to listen, and as soon as he’d heard Archer come up with an alibi he’d known it was all over.
“Ling!” I shouted, but he kept going. I could hear his footsteps going down the stairs.
I ran after him, and got to the head of the stairs just as the front door slammed. I went down, three at a time, and as I got to the front door I heard the sudden growl of Ling’s own car starting, the red MG he kept parked around at the side of the house.
I went down off the stoop and around to the side, and he came roaring straight at me, hunched over the wheel. I threw the Raggedy Ann at him, and jumped out of the way of the car just in time, and rolled over and over and sat up just in time to see the collision.
Einstein was arriving, just turning his official car off the road when Ling came barreling out from beside the house in the little MG, and they met head-on.
So Einstein got his man after all.
They both lived through it, and I’m sorry to say I can’t feel happy about either of them. But at least the accident hospitalized Einstein, and the state had to send up another man, who turned out to have a brain in his head.
It was Ling. In the hospital, he told how and why.
How: He looked down from his office window, and saw Russ watching the rehearsal, so the coast was clear. He’d started to kill her twice before, but somebody had been in sight both times. He got the knife out of his desk drawer, where he’d been keeping it for a couple of weeks, and went downstairs and out the front way and around to the green room entrance. He went in, and on-stage, and heard Charlie Wilbe wrestling flats around deep in the scene dock. He went over and cut her throat, and blood spurted unexpectedly, so he went down into the prop room and wiped his hands off with an old piece of drapery. He was mad at the blood being on his hands, and I guess that’s why he jabbed the knife into the Raggedy Ann. He left it there, hidden deep in with all the junk, figuring there was too much sharp weaponry down there anyway for one more or less to be suspect, and he’d gone back to work. While he was gone, the phone was off the hook, just in case any calls came in.
And why: That was in the contract in his desk drawer. He’d told us all it was a sixty-forty profit split he had with Heather Sanderson, and that was partially true. It was a sixty-forty split of the profits over and above Heather’s salary. And her salary was a thousand dollars a week, eleven thousand for the full season.
He’d been convinced her name would pack them in. He’d been wrong. At the end of the season, there wouldn’t be any profit. And there wouldn’t be any eleven thousand for Heather. Also in the contract was what she would get in lieu of salary. The theater.
So he was getting revenge, because she hadn’t fulfilled her promise to load the theater with customers. And he was saving the theater. He killed her the way he did because he had a refinement for his revenge: Her murder would publicize the theater. In death, she would draw the patrons as she hadn’t drawn them in life.
If he hadn’t tried to kill Edna and me, I would almost sympathize with him. Heather was a has-been and a lush, and she’d taken Ling for a ride.
As to why he’d suggested I play detective in the first place, the reason wasn’t exactly ego-building. He figured I couldn’t possibly learn anything dangerous, and I might inadvertently help by goofing things up and confusing the cops. At the very least, he hoped my eager-beaver amateur detecting would convince Einstein we were on the up-and-up, so he’d let us open the theater again. But when I started doing so much better than Einstein, and when I started searching the theater, he got rattled.
But there was, from it all, one happy conclusion. Edna could never convince her mother she’d been out all night only because someone had tried to murder her. When she got home, she found her bags packed, and her mother gave her the bit about never darken my door again.
So what could she do? She had to marry me.
Paid in Full
“Old bills,” I said. “I insist on that, they must be old bills.”
“Of course,” he murmured, smiling at me in that secretive way he affected. His face always looked hooded to me, remaining me of those blackout shields on automobile headlights in the war. With that face, with that smile, with that insinuating honeyed voice, no word he said could possibly sound sincere or truthful. But surely no one can lie all the time.
Most of what I knew of him I doubted. His name for instance, which he’d murmured was Sylvan Kelso, and which sounded too unlikely to be either the truth or a falsehood. His claimed feelings of friendliness for me, which I understood at once was artificial; I’ve had such buddies before, among insurance salesmen and candidates for minor political office. And the nation for which he claimed to be operating: Bulgaria! That couldn’t possibly be true.
The only truth of which I was sure was that he wished to buy from me what I was perfectly willing to sell. Willing, that is, if all my conditions were satisfactorily met, which is why we were meeting for the third time here in this dim bar in Arlington, not far from Chain Bridge.
“And small denomination,” I said to him now, as we sat crouched toward one another in the rear booth. “Nothing bigger than a twenty.”
“Ahh,” he said, “that will make a bulky package.”
“Not very,” I said. “Two packages, anyway. Half before, half after.”
“Your distrust, Mr. Stilmont,” he assured me in oiled tones, “is quite unnecessary.
“I’ve got to protect myself,” I told him.
“Of course you must. Certainly.”
“I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re liable to pull.”
He spread doughy hands. “Not a thing, Mr. Stilmont,” he said, “I do assure you. After all, why should I do anything to offend you? This is merely our first transaction.”
“Our only transaction,” I said, somewhat bitterly. “You know as well as I do there’s only the one valuable file I have access to. Once the deal is done, I’m sold out.”
“Temporarily, Mr. Stilmont. But surely in the future, as you climb the ladder of success in government employment, additional occasions will arise when we can be of… profitable service to one another.”
I was about to tell him the answer to that one was also no, but at the last second refrained. If Kelso really did think I might be useful again in the future, so much the better; it would make him less likely to double-cross me or make trouble for me.
But whether he knew the truth about me or not, I surely knew the truth about myself. I had climbed the ladder of success in government employment as far as the Civil Service system could carry me. I hovered at the edge of the executive level now, and here I would hover until retirement. In order to attain the upper ranks in government service, it is necessary to have either one of two things: superlative ability or political influence. I had neither.
Why do you suppose I’d undertaken this transaction in the first place? Do you think I’m a traitor, a spy? Do you think I’m here by choice? Let me tell you something that the progression o your own life has perhaps not yet demonstrated to you. Expenditures increase. Year by year, decade by decade, house by house, job by job, expenditures gradually but unceasingly increase. So long as income also increases — so long, in fact, as one continues to advance in one’s occupation — all is well. But when income levels off, when one has ceased to advance in one’s occupation, then, my friends, all is Hell.