Justinian was talking. He was a tall man, gray at the temples, distinguished-looking, dressed by the best tailors. He had immense charm. Women fell over fainting when he smiled at them, and then were always astonished to discover that the underlying ruthlessness in his steel-trap mouth and bird-of-prey eyes was the real Justinian.
He was not bothering now to be charming. He was entirely the business man, cerebral, efficient.
“It’s a pity I didn’t get here a little sooner,” he said. “I might have stopped Carver. As it is—” He shrugged.
Brian looked up at him from the chair where he was sitting, with Eddie Sego behind him. “Then you admit you killed Marjorie.”
Justinian shook his head. “I haven’t admitted anything, and I don’t intend to. The thing is, you believe I killed her, or that I might have killed her. The doubt has been planted. I could go to a lot of trouble to convince you you’re wrong, but I couldn’t make you stop wondering. I could never trust you again, Brian, any more than you would trust me. So your usefulness to me is ended.”
He turned to glare at me. “That’s all you’ve accomplished, Carver.”
“Oh, I understand,” said Brian. “I’ve understood all along. Why else was all the business done in your office, and all records kept in your safe? You wanted to be able to eliminate me at any time, with no danger of incriminating papers lying around where you couldn’t get at them. So that angle is covered. But I’m a pretty important man, Joe. Won’t there be some curiosity?”
“If the bereaved husband takes his own life? I don’t think so.”
“I see,” said Brian. “Just like Marjorie.”
“And what about me?” I asked.
Justinian shrugged. “We planned that on the way. It will appear that Brian shot you first, before killing himself. You see? The old lover, accusing the husband of having driven his wife to...”
Brian whimpered and rose up, and Eddie Sego knocked him down again.
“All right,” Justinian said. “He keeps his gun in the desk in the next room. Go get it.”
Eddie nodded. “Cover him,” he said to Faceless. He went out.
I said, “There’s a couple of things wrong with your plan, Joe.”
“I’m listening.”
“Other people know the whole story. You can’t kill off everybody in town.”
“If you mean Miss Harding, she doesn’t know anything, not at firsthand. Suspicions are a dime a dozen. If you mean Prioletti, he’ll forget. He has a family to consider.”
“You’re overlooking the most important person of all,” I said.
“Who’s that?”
“The guy who brought me Marjorie’s body. He knows.”
Justinian’s face tightened ominously. “A crank, that’s all. Doesn’t mean a thing.”
Eddie Sego had come back from the next room. He was holding Brian’s gun. Brian was hunched over in his chair, but he was staring at me intently. The two large men stood still and listened.
“You don’t believe that, Joe,” I said. “You’re saying it because you haven’t been able to find out who the man is, and you don’t want your underlings to get panicky about it.”
“If he’d had anything to tell he’d have told it by now,” said Justinian. “Anyway, I’ll find him. One thing at a time.”
“You’d better find him fast, Joe,” I said, “because he belongs to you. You’ve got a traitor in your own camp.”
Justinian said, “Hold it a minute, Eddie.” He moved a step or two closer to me. “That’s an interesting thought. Go on with it.”
“Well,” I said, “a casual crank would have had to just accidentally stumble on the car with Marjorie’s body in it. He would also have had to know who she was, and that she had once been engaged to me. He would have had to know I was on vacation, and where. Now, does all that seem likely?”
He shook his head impatiently. “Go on.”
“I’m just laying it out for you. Okay, we forget the crank. We say instead it was somebody who was fond of Marjorie and wanted her avenged, but was afraid to come out and tell the truth. So he figured that handing me the body would sic me on to what really happened to her.”
“This sounds better.”
“But still not good enough. If he was just a friend of Marjorie’s, how did he know about the murder? Guess at it, stumble on it, happen to follow the cars into the logging cut and then wait around unseen while the thing was being done, when he could have been calling for help? Not likely. If it was one of the killers suddenly getting conscience-stricken, that fills all the requirements except one. Would he deliberately sic someone onto himself, to get himself hanged?”
Very briefly, Justinian’s eyes flicked from Nameless to Faceless and back again to me. “No. This I can tell you.”
“So what does that leave? It leaves a man who knew about Marjorie’s murder, but was personally clear of it. A man who was clear on the Harding murder, too — so clear he could afford to talk about it. A man who wanted the murderer brought to justice, but who didn’t want to appear in the business himself. Too dangerous, if something went wrong. So he handed the job on to me. Not to Brian, because he was too close to it, but to me. See? If I got killed, he hadn’t lost anything but this chance, and there’d be another some day. But if I succeeded in pulling you down, he—”
Nameless fired, past Justinian.
The noise was earsplitting. Justinian, with the instinct of an old campaigner, dropped flat on the floor. Eddie Sego, behind him and across the room, was already down and rolling for the shelter of a sofa. He wasn’t hit. He did not intend to be hit, either.
“He was gonna shoot you in the back, Boss,” said Nameless, on a note of stunned surprise. “He was gonna—”
I tipped my chair over onto him, and we went staggering down together, with my hands on his wrist. I wanted his gun. I wanted it bad.
He wasn’t going to give it up without a struggle. We got tangled in the furniture and when I got a look around again I saw Justinian, kneeling behind a big armchair. He was paying no attention to us. He had bigger things on his mind, like the gun he was too proud to carry. Faceless was crouched over in an attitude of indecision, his gun wavering between me and Eddie Sego. He couldn’t see Eddie, and he couldn’t shoot me without very likely killing his friend. Eddie solved his problem for him. He fired from the opposite end of the sofa and Faceless fell over with a sort of heavy finality.
Brian Ingraham sat where he was, in the middle of it, watching with the blank gaze of a stupid child.
I saw a heavy glass ashtray on the floor where we had knocked it off an end table. I let go with one hand and grabbed it and hit Nameless with it. He relaxed, and then the gun was quite easy to take out of his fingers. I took it and whirled around.
Justinian was moving his armchair shield, inch by inch, toward the gun that Faceless had dropped.
I said, “Hold it, Joe.”
He gave me a hot, blind look of feral rage, but he held it, and I picked up the gun. Justinian looked from me to where Eddie Sego was, and he cursed him in a short, violent burst, and then grew calm again.
“That was a crummy way to do it, Eddie. You didn’t have guts enough to face up to me yourself.”
Eddie stood up now. He shrugged. “Why should I commit suicide? I figured Carver ought to be mad enough to do something.” He glanced at me. “I just about gave you up this morning. I was really going to turn you in.”