“Once the Senator was gone, there was only one hurdle left between you and the money. Zinnie wanted to take it the easy way in a divorce settlement, but her child got in the way of a divorce. I imagine you did, too. You had one death to go, for the whole five million less taxes and a wife who would have to take orders the rest of her life. That death occurred today, and you’ve practically admitted that you set it up.”
“I admitted nothing. I gave you practical proof that Carl Hallman killed his brother. The chances are he killed Zinnie, too. He could have made it across town in a stolen car.”
“How long ago was Zinnie killed?”
“I’d say about four hours.”
“You’re a liar. Her body was warm when I found it, less than an hour ago.”
“You must have been mistaken. You may not think much of me, but I am a qualified doctor. I left her before eight, and she must have died soon after. It’s midnight now.”
“What have you been doing since then?”
Grantland hesitated. “I couldn’t move for a long time after I found her. I simply lay on the bed beside her.”
“You say you found her in bed?”
“I did find her in bed.”
“How did the blood get in the hall?”
“When I was carrying her out.” He shuddered. “Can’t you see that I’m telling you the truth? Carl must have come in and found her asleep. Perhaps he was looking for me. After all, I’m the doctor who committed him. Perhaps he killed her to get back at me. I left the door unlocked, like an idiot.”
“You wouldn’t have been setting her up for him? Or would you?”
“What do you think I am?”
It was a hard question. Grantland was staring down at Zinnie’s clothes, his face distorted by magnetic lines of grief. I’d known murderers who killed their lovers and grieved for them. Most of them were half-hearted broken-minded men. They killed and cried and tore their prison blankets and twisted their blankets into nooses. I doubted that Grantland fitted the pattern, but it was possible.
“I think you’re basically a fool,” I said, “like any other man who tries to beat the ordinary human averages. I think you’re a dangerous fool, because you’re frightened. You proved that when you tried to silence Rica. Did you try to silence Zinnie, too, with a knife?”
“I refuse to answer such questions.”
He rose jerkily and moved to the window. I stayed close to him, with the gun between us. For a moment we stood looking down the long slope of the city. Its after-midnight lights were scattered on the hillsides, like the last sparks of a firefall.
“I really loved Zinnie. I wouldn’t harm her,” he said.
“I admit it doesn’t seem likely. You wouldn’t kill the golden goose just when she was going to lay for you. Six months from now, or a year, when she’d had time to marry you and write a will in your favor, you might have started thinking of new angles.”
He turned on me fiercely. “I don’t have to listen to any more of this.”
“That’s right. You don’t. I’m as sick of it as you are. Let’s go, Grantland.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Then we’ll tell them to come and get you. It will be rough while it lasts, but it won’t last long. You’ll be signing a statement by morning.”
Grantland hung back. I prodded him along the hallway to the telephone.
“You do the telephoning, Doctor.”
He balked again. “Listen. There doesn’t have to be any telephoning. Even if your hypothesis were correct, which it isn’t, there’s no real evidence against me. My hands are clean.”
His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his several shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland’s central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness.
“Your hands are dirty. You don’t keep your hands clean by betraying your patients and inciting them to murder. You’re a dirty doctor, dirtier than any of your victims. Your hands would be cleaner if you’d taken that gun and used it on Hallman yourself. But you haven’t the guts to live your own life. You want other people to do it for you, do your living, do your killing, do your dying.”
He twisted and turned. His face changed like smoke and set in a new smiling mask. “You’re a smart man. That hypothesis of yours, about Alicia’s death – it wasn’t the way it happened, but you hit fairly close in a couple of places.”
“Straighten me out.”
“If I do, will you let me go? All I need is a few hours to get to Mexico. I haven’t committed any extraditable offense, and I have a couple of thousand–”
“Save it. You’ll need it for lawyers. This is it, Grantland.” I gestured with the gun in my hand. “Pick up the telephone and call the police.”
His shoulders slumped. He lifted the receiver and started to dial. I ought to have distrusted his hangdog look.
He kicked sideways and upset the gasoline can. Its contents spouted across the carpet, across my feet.
“I wouldn’t use that gun,” he said. “You’d be setting off a bomb.”
I struck at his head with the automatic. He was a millisecond ahead of me. He swung the base of the telephone by its cord and brought it down like a sledge on top of my head.
I got the message. Over and out.
31
I CAME TO crawling across the floor of a room I’d never seen. It was a long, dim room which smelled like a gas station. I was crawling toward a window at the far end, as fast as my cold and sluggish legs would push me along.
Behind me, a clipped voice was saying that Carl Hallman was still at large, and was wanted for questioning in a second murder. I looked back over my shoulder. Time and space came together, threaded by the voice from Grantland’s radio. I could see the doorway into the lighted hall from which my instincts had dragged me.
There was a puff of noise beyond the doorway, a puff of color. Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring. I got my feet under me and my hands on a chair, carried it to the window and smashed the glass out of the frame.
Air poured in over me. The dancing flames behind me began to sing. They postured and beckoned when I looked at them, and reached for my cold wet legs, offering to warm them. My dull brain put several facts together, like a boy playing with blocks on the burning deck, and realized that my legs were gasoline-soaked.
I went over the jagged sill, fell further than I expected to, struck the earth full length and lay whooping for breath. The fire bit into my legs like a rabid fox.
I was still going on instinct. All instinct said was, Run. The fire ran with me, snapping. The providence that suffers fools and cushions drunks and tempers the wind to shorn lambs and softening hardheads rescued me from the final barbecue. I ran blind into the rim of a goldfish pond and fell down in the water. My legs Suzette sizzled and went out.
I reclined in the shallow, smelly blessed water and looked back at Grantland’s house. Flames blossomed in the window I had broken and grew up to the eaves like quick yellow hollyhocks. Orange and yellow lights appeared behind other windows. Tendrils of smoke thrust delicately through the shake roof.
In no time at all, the house was a box of brilliant jumping lights. Breaking windows tinkled distinctly. Trellised vines of flame climbed along the walls. Little flame salamanders ran up the roof, leaving bright zigzag trails.
Above the central furnace roar, I heard a car engine start. Skidding in the slime at the bottom of the pool, I got to my feet and ran toward the house. The sirens were whining in the city again. It was a night of sirens.