“Are you ready to give me a full confession?”
“Never,” he said. “They can’t convict me.”
“They have three tries, remember.”
“Three?”
“If it was only Singleton, there’d be some room for doubt, even for sympathy. He took Bess away from you. You had some justification for letting the scalpel slip in his bowels.”
He said in a deeper voice: “My enemy was delivered into my hands.” Then he opened his eyes in bewilderment, as if he had talked in his sleep and waked himself from nightmare.
“That doesn’t apply to Lucy. She tried to help you.”
Benning laughed. With a great effort, he throttled the laugh and imposed silence on himself.
“Before Bess was killed tonight, she told me Lucy assisted at the operation. Lucy was in a position to know who and what killed Singleton. When things closed in on her – landlady trouble, no job, detectives tailing her – she thought of selling her knowledge to Singleton’s family. But she made the mistake of coming to you yesterday and giving you a chance before she did anything final.
“If she could get money from you, she wouldn’t have to sell you out or involve herself in a murder case. You gave her the money you had on hand, enough to buy a train ticket and get out of town. You also hedged against the chance that she wouldn’t take that train, by filching her motel-key out of her purse. Lucy missed the train, in every sense. When she went back to the motel, you were waiting in her room. She tried to defend herself with a knife. You were too strong for her.”
“You can’t prove it,” Benning said. Bowed far forward, he was staring down at the wet concrete floor.
“A witness will turn up. Somebody must have seen you go out, even if Florie didn’t. You must have passed somebody who knows you between here and the Mount view Motel, going or coming. If I have to, I’m going to canvass the whole population of the town.”
His head came up as if I had tightened a knot under his jaw. He knew he had been seen. “Why do you want to do this? Why do you hate me?” He wasn’t asking me alone. He was asking all the people who had known him and not loved him in his life.
“Lucy was young,” I said. “She had a boy friend who wanted to marry her. They honeymooned in the morgue, and Alex is still in jail, sweating out your rap for you. Do you think you’re worth the trouble you’ve caused?”
He didn’t answer me.
“It’s not just the people you’ve killed. It’s the human idea you’ve been butchering and boiling down and trying to burn away. You can’t stand the human idea. You and Una Durano don’t stack up against it, and you know it. You know it makes you look lousy. Even a dollar-chaser like Max Heiss makes you look lousy. So you have to burn his face off with a blowtorch. Isn’t that what you did?”
“It’s not true. He demanded money. I had no money to give him.”
“You could have taken your medicine,” I said. “That never occurred to you. It hasn’t yet. When Max found the Buick in your barn, that made him your enemy. Naturally he had to die. And when he came back for his money, you were ready for him, with Singleton’s clothes and a blowtorch and a can of gasoline. It must have seemed like a wonderful plan, to get rid of Heiss and in the same motion establish Singleton’s death by accident. But all it accomplished was to tip Bess off on what you’d done. As soon as I told her about the car he was found in, she realized you killed Max. And she left you.”
“She left me, yes. After all I’d done for her.”
“Not for her. For you. You’ve killed two men and a woman because they threatened your security. You’d have killed Bess if she hadn’t got out fast. She didn’t tell me that, but I think she knew it. She was the one you wanted to kill from the start, if you hadn’t been afraid.”
He shuddered, covering his eyes with his spread fingers. “Why are you torturing me?”
“I want a confession.”
It took him several minutes to bring himself under control. When he lowered his hands, his face had smoothed and thinned. His eyes seemed smaller and darker. No animal was using them.
He got up awkwardly from the pile of wood and took a halting step towards me: “I’ll give you a confession, Mr. Archer. If you’ll let me have access to my drug cabinet, for just a moment?”
“No.”
“It will save time and trouble, for all of us.”
“It’s too easy. I’ve promised myself one satisfaction out of this case. To see you go in and Alex Norris come out.”
“You’re a hard man.”
“I hope so. It’s the soft ones, the self-pity boys like you, that give me bad dreams.” I had had enough of that basement, cluttered with broken objects, wet and hot and squalid with broken desires. “Let’s go, Benning.”
Outside, the flawed white moon was higher among the stars. Benning looked up at them as if the night had really become a cave of shadows, the moon a clouded port and the stars peepholes into a terrible brightness: “I do feel grief for her. I loved her. There was nothing I wouldn’t do.”
He started down the veranda steps, his short black shadow dragging and jerking at his heels.