I shot to kill. Una died on her feet, of a smudged hole in the temple, and thumped the floor. I held Sylvia’s hand until the police arrived. Her hand was ice cold at first. After a while it was a little warmer, and I could feel her blood beating.
Chapter 30
The starred sky arched like a crystal roof over the town. The valley floor was like the floor of a cave, the mountains blunt stalagmites against its glimmering walls. Once I got off the highway, the streets of Bella City were deserted. Its midnight buildings, leached of color by the alkali moonlight, stood like gray shadows on their own black shadows.
Parking at Benning’s curb, I rang the bell and heard its complaint inside the house. A door creaked open at the rear of the hallway. Benning passed through its widening shaft of light and shut the door behind him. His face appeared above the cardboard patch in the corner of the window. It was crumpled and streaked like a discarded charcoal-sketch of itself.
He opened the front door. “What is it? Why have you come here?”
“Let me see your hands, doctor.” I showed him the gun in mine.
He stepped out onto the porch, bulky in a zippered blue coverall, and held out his empty hands.
“They’re dirty,” he said. “I’ve been doing some cleaning in the house.”
“Your wife is dead.”
“Yes. I know. They phoned me from Los Angeles. I’m getting ready to go.” He glanced down at my gun as if it were an obscenity that shouldn’t be mentioned. “Perhaps they sent you to fetch me?”
“I came on my own.”
“To spy on my grief, Mr. Archer?” he asked with broken irony. “You’ll be disappointed. I can’t feel grief, not for her. I’ve suffered too much for her.” He turned up his dirty palms and looked down into them. “I have nothing.” His fists closed slowly on moonlight. “Who is this woman who murdered her?”
“Una Durano. She’s dead, too. I shot her.”
“I’m grateful to you for that.” His words were as insubstantial as his double fistful of moonlight. “Why did she do it to Bess?”
“She had various reasons. Your wife was a witness to the Singleton shooting, for one.”
“Bess? A witness?”
“She was there when Singleton was shot.”
“Who on earth was Singleton?”
“You know as well as I do, doctor. He was your wife’s lover almost as long as you were married to her.”
Benning looked up and down the empty street. “Come inside,” he said nervously. “I only have a few minutes, but we can talk there.”
He stood aside to let me enter first, maintaining a formal politeness like a wire-walker afraid to look down. I waved him in with my gun and followed him through the waiting-room into the consultation room. The inside of the house was suffocating after the chilly night air.
I pulled his swivel chair into the middle of the room. “Sit down, away from the desk.”
“You’re very hospitable,” he said with his down-dragging smile. “Bess was, too, in her way. I won’t deny that I knew of her affair with Singleton. Or that I was glad she shot him. It seemed fitting that she should be the one to destroy that arrogant young man.”
“Bess didn’t destroy him.”
“I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Now that Bess is dead, I’m free to tell you the truth. She confessed to me that she shot him.”
“She was lying to you.”
He stood wide-legged and stubborn under the light, shaking his long head from side to side. “She couldn’t have been lying. No one would lie about such a thing.”
“Bess did. It was the only way she could persuade you to take care of him. The crime was actually committed by Una Durano. Bess was a witness, as I said.”
He slumped into the chair. “Do you know that, for a fact?”
“I couldn’t prove it in court. I don’t have to. Una is dead, along with the competent witnesses, Singleton and Lucy and Bess.”
“Did this woman murder them all? What kind of a woman was she?”
“As hard and nasty as they come. But she didn’t kill them all. Bess was the only one she killed. She thought Bess had turned informer against her.”
“You said she murdered Singleton.”
“Not exactly.”
“You said she committed the crime,” he insisted.
“The crime was attempted murder, done by proxy, but you finished Singleton off. I think he’d still be alive if you hadn’t got your knife into him.”
Benning’s body jerked backwards. His large grimy hands moved towards each other across his denim-covered abdomen. The thumb and forefinger of one hand plucked at the coverall zipper as if it were a sutured incision in his flesh.
He found his voice: “This is utter nonsense. You can’t prove either the fact or the intent. Singleton’s death was pure accident. I couldn’t stop the internal hemorrhage.”
“You destroyed the body. That carries a lot of weight.”
“If you could prove it. But there is no body. You have nothing.” It was an echo of what he had said about himself.
“Singleton’s bones will do.”
“Bones?”
“The skeleton you rigged to hold Bess in line. It’s turned into a booby trap.”
“You’ve left me far behind.”
I moved the gun in my hand, drawing his attention to it. “Open the closet in the examination room.”
He rose, still holding his middle where my accusation had hit him. I thought he was too willing. The closet was empty. He shut the door and leaned against it. His long-toothed melancholy grin mimicked the grin of the absent skull.
“Where is it, doctor?”
“I suppose Bess took it with her. That would be fitting, too.”
There was an iron grate set in the baseboard beside the closet door. Benning’s glance rested on it involuntarily, a second too long. The grate was the closed outlet of an old-fashioned hot-air system. Holding my gun on Benning, I stooped to touch it. It was warm, and under it I could sense the minute vibrations of fire.
“Show me the furnace.”
Benning stood flat against the door, his eyes gleaming palely, as though they belonged to a tormented animal crouched inside of him. He drooped suddenly, but I distrusted his docility. It was taut and dangerous. I held my gun close to his back as we went through the house and down the basement stairs.
The light was still on in the basement. A naked bulb suspended on a wire cast a dingy yellow glare on shelves of empty jars, broken furniture, newspapers and magazines, generations of cobwebs. A rusty three-burner gas plate squatted on a bench beside the stairs, and a copper boiler, dented and green with age, hung on the wall above it. Benning avoided that corner of the basement.
In the far corner, behind a rough board partition, an old cast-iron furnace was breathing like a bull. I used my toe to open the fire door, and saw what lay in the heart of the fire: a skull licked by flames in a phoenix nest of bones.
Beside me, Benning was lost in contemplation. The orange light of the fire played feebly on the lower part of his face. He seemed for an instant to be young and smiling.
“Put it out.”
He came to himself with a start. “I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“Find a way, and be quick about it. Those bones are worth money to me.”
He attached a garden hose to a tap in the hot water tank, and turned its stream on the fire. Steam sizzled and gushed from the furnace door. He emerged from it coughing, and sat down on a pile of kindling against the board partition. I looked into the blackened firebox at five thousand dollars’ worth of charred bones, all that remained of the golden boy. It was a hell of a way to make money, selling dead men’s bones. I kicked the iron door shut.
With his eyes closed, his head lolling back against the boards, Benning looked like another dead man.