“Nobody else could have known about him,” I said, my voice cracking just a little on “known.” I don’t think anyone noticed.
Constable shook his head. He looked disappointed, as if he had been expecting brilliance, but had been met with numskullery. “That isn’t sufficient reason,” he said.
“Not by itself. But everyone else was accounted for. Janet was with me. Wiedstein was with his wife. Two cops who might have killed him couldn’t have. That left either you or Procane. Procane said he didn’t kill him so it has to be you.”
“Why me?” Constable said. “Why not Procane here despite his denial? Don’t you think he’s capable of it?”
“That doesn’t really enter into it. I guess anyone’s capable of murder if sufficiently provoked. Or sufficiently greedy. You were having dinner with Procane that night. He must have already told you about Frann and what he was up to earlier that day. Probably over the phone.”
“I told him,” Procane said, his voice dulled and flat.
“All right. He told you about Frann. When I came out of my hotel at eight last night, Frann was dead, stabbed to death, sitting in his car in a no-parking zone. He couldn’t have been there much more than thirty minutes or the beat cop would have noticed him.” I turned my head slowly to look at Procane. “What time did your pal here show up for dinner?”
“Around eight.”
“And when did you tell him about Fran?”
“Just after you called me yesterday. Around two, I think.”
I looked at Constable. “That gave you nearly six hours to set it up. First you had to locate Frann, arrange a meeting with him, kill him, and then drive him around and park him in front of my hotel. That was a nice touch.”
“I thought it would confuse things,” Constable said, smiling a little. His teeth were almost the same shade of gray as his hair. I remember wondering whether he had grown up in some section of the country where there was a lot of fluoride in the water supply.
Procane stared at Constable and asked his one-word question again, “Why?” and once more the word was filled with the melancholy echoes from a shattered faith.
There was a lot of contempt in the look that Constable gave Procane. “Because he could have ruined everything,” he said. “You’d have abandoned the entire scheme if Frann had even breathed on you hard. I know you, Abner. Oh, God, how I know you! I had to make sure that Frann was dead and that you knew he was.”
“He doesn’t mean that,” I said.
“Mean what?”
“He doesn’t much care about why you killed Frann.”
“Oh,” Constable said. “I see.”
“Well?” I said. “Aren’t you going to tell him?”
“We’ve talked too much already.”
“You mind if I tell him?”
“I don’t know that you’ll have the time.”
“It won’t take long.”
Constable seemed to think about it for a moment before he said, “All right. Tell him.”
“A million dollars,” I said to Procane and then turned back to Constable. “See. It didn’t take long.”
My analysis of why he had double-crossed his patient seemed to disappoint Constable. He frowned and gave his head a small, stern shake. “That wasn’t it. The money is only the icing.”
“All right. You tell him. You owe him that much.”
“I don’t owe him anything.”
“I think you do,” Procane said in a low voice. “You owe me that much.”
The contempt in Constable’s voice matched that in his eyes. “How long have we known each other, Abner, five — six years?”
“About that.”
“And all this time you’ve been talking almost endlessly about how perfectly content you are to be a thief. How perfectly marvelous you think that your chosen career is. You spent hours with me poking at it and probing it and picking away at all the reasons that you think make being a thief the most wonderful thing in the world. And then once a year, or possibly twice, you’d go out and steal more money than I made in a year and then come back and tell me about how easy it was and ask me why more people of intelligence didn’t turn to it. Believe it or not, Abner, I’m human. And so when you told me about this million dollars you planned to steal, I became extremely human. I asked myself the old, old question, ‘Why him and not me?’ And I really didn’t come up with any satisfactory answer because, to be quite frank now that I can afford it, I’ve never really liked you, Abner. I don’t like you at all.”
To prove it, he shot Procane twice. Procane said something that sounded like “Uff” before he staggered back a step. I didn’t watch him fall because I was in the air, throwing myself at Constable’s spindly, birdlike legs. My left shoulder caught Constable at the knees and he started to say something like, “No, you don’t,”, but all he could get out was “No, you—” before he went over backward. I heard his gun skitter across part of the oak floor that wasn’t covered by the worn oriental rug.
I looked up and saw Constable crawling rapidly after the gun which had skidded almost into the dining room. He would reach it in a few seconds. I turned on my hands and knees and scrambled toward Procane. He looked dead. His mouth was open and so were his eyes. I thought they looked a little crossed.
I reached inside his jacket pocket and felt around until I found the Walther. I jerked it out and when I did I saw that my hand was covered with blood. I turned, still on my knees, and pointed the Walther at Constable. He was turning fast, nearly all the way around now, the .38 revolver in his right hand.
“Hold it right there,” I yelled, even then a little self-conscious about the phrase that I had heard a hundred times on television and only once or twice in real life.
He saw my gun and paused, just long enough for me to say, “I can make three holes in your shirt before you can get off your first shot.” It was a bluff, of course, and a terribly corny one at that. But I didn’t have time to polish it up. All I could do was lock my eyes on his and force a confident smile on my face, the kind that I use when I’m betting a pair of queens into three sixes
I think he almost folded. I’m sure he started to. The muzzle of the gun dipped a little, but then it came back up. He gave his head a small shake, the kind that I’ve seen poker players give me when they’ve decided that they’d rather lose their money than suffer the embarrassment of being bluffed.
There wasn’t anything else for me to do except pull the trigger. And I did that only because it was better than doing nothing. All I expected to hear was that dry admonishing click of misfire, like the one Procane got when he had tried to” shoot the thing at the drive-in. I wasn’t really aiming the Walther, just pointing it, so the sound of the blast that it made surprised me.
The large red hole that blossomed where Constable’s upper lip had been surprised me even more.
24
Constable was still on his knees and he stayed on them for nearly a second before he slumped forward into a sprawl. The Walther should have knocked him backward, but it hadn’t. His damp brown eyes were open and they seemed to be staring at Procane. The lower half of his face was covered with blood and some of it had dripped off and was soaking into the worn oriental rug.
I looked at him for several seconds and then I looked at Procane. After that I looked down at the Walther in my hand. It was smeared with blood, Procane’s blood. He would have repaired it, of course. He was like that. Malfunctions probably offended him. On our way back to Washington he would have fixed whatever had gone wrong with the gun. He might have been working on it while Wiedstein was playing chicken with the Oldsmobile.