Tricks and Treats, page 12
“What if I told you Thursby killed Monica?”
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t believe you, but then I wouldn’t particularly care. If you were smart, you’d have killed her fifteen years ago when she walked out on you. That’s what I’d have done.”
Leopold drove slowly back downtown, with Fletcher grumbling beside him. “Where are we, Captain? It seems we’re just going in circles.”
“Perhaps we are, Fletcher, but right now there are still too many questions to be answered. If we can’t find Thursby, I’ll have to tackle it from another direction. The bullet, for instance.”
“What about the bullet?”
“We’re agreed it could not have been fired by my gun, either while it was in my holster or later, while Thursby was in the ambulance with Monica. Therefore, it must have been fired earlier. The last time I fired it was at target practice. Is there any possibility—any chance at all—that Thursby or Monica could have gotten one of the slugs I fired into that target?”
Fletcher put a damper on it. “Captain, we were both firing at the same target. No one could sort out those bullets and say which came from your pistol and which from mine. Besides, how would either of them gain access to the basement target range at police headquarters?”
“I could have an enemy in the department,” Leopold said.
“Nuts! We’ve all got enemies, but the thing is still impossible. If you believe people in the department are plotting against you, you might as well believe that the entire ballistics evidence was faked.”
“It was, somehow. Do you have the comparison photos?”
“They’re back at the office. But with the narrow depth of field you can probably tell more from looking through the microscope yourself.”
Fletcher drove him to the lab, where they persuaded the Sunday duty officer to let them have a look at the bullets. While Fletcher and the officer stood by in the interests of propriety, Leopold squinted through the microscope at the twin chunks of lead.
“The death bullet is pretty battered,” he observed, but he had to admit that the rifling marks were the same. He glanced at the identification tag attached to the test bullet: Test slug fired from Smith & Wesson .38 Revolver, serial number 2420547.
Leopold turned away with a sigh, then turned back.
2420547.
He fished into his wallet and found his pistol permit. Smith & Wesson 2421622.
“I remembered those twos on the end,” he told Fletcher. “That’s not my gun.”
“It’s the one I took from you, Captain. I’ll swear to it!”
“And I believe you, Fletcher. But it’s the one fact I needed. It tells me how Dr. Thursby managed to kill Monica in a locked room before my very eyes, with a gun that was in my holster at the time. And it just might tell us where to find the elusive Dr. Thursby.”
By Monday morning, Leopold had made six long-distance calls to California, working from his desk telephone while Fletcher used the squad room phone. Then, a little before noon, Leopold, Fletcher, the Commissioner, and a man from the District Attorney’s office took a car and drove up to Boston.
“You’re sure you’ve got it figured?” the Commissioner asked Leopold for the third time. “You know we shouldn’t allow you to cross the state line while awaiting grand jury action.”
“Look, either you trust me or you don’t,” Leopold snapped. Behind the wheel, Fletcher allowed himself a slight smile, but the man from the D.A.’s office was deadly serious.
“The whole thing is so damned complicated,” the Commissioner grumbled.
‘‘My ex-wife was a complicated woman. And remember, she had fifteen years to plan it.”
“Run over it for us again,” the D.A.’s man said.
Leopold sighed and started talking. “The murder gun wasn’t mine. The gun I pulled after the shot was fired, the one Fletcher took from me, had been planted on me some time before.”
“How?”
“I’ll get to that. Monica was the key to it all, of course. She hated me so much that her twisted brain planned her own murder in order to get revenge on me. She planned it in such a way that it would have been impossible for anyone but me to have killed her. She set up the entire plan for the afternoon of the wedding reception, but I’m sure they had an alternate in case I hadn’t gone to it. She wanted some place where there’d be lots of witnesses.”
“Tell them how she worked the bullet hitting her,” Fletcher urged.
“Well, that was the toughest part for me. I actually saw her shot before my eyes. I saw the bullet hit her, and I saw the blood. Yet I was alone in a locked room with her. There was no hiding place, no opening from which a person or even a mechanical device could have fired the bullet at her. To you people it seemed I must be guilty, especially when the bullet came from the gun I was carrying.
“But I looked at it from a different angle—once Fletcher forced me to look at it at all! I knew I hadn’t shot her, and since no one else physically could have, I knew no one did! If Monica was killed by a .38 slug, it must have been fired after she was taken from that locked room. Since she was dead on arrival at the hospital, the most likely time for her murder—to me, at least—became the time of the ambulance ride, when Dr. Thursby must have hunched over her with careful solicitousness.”
“But you saw her get shot!”
“That’s one of the two reasons Fletcher and I were on the phones to Hollywood this morning. My ex-wife worked in pictures, at times in the technical end of movie-making. On the screen there are a number of ways to simulate a person being shot. An early method was a sort of compressed-air gun fired at the actor from just off-camera. These days, especially in the bloodiest of the Western and war films, they use a tiny explosive charge fitted under the actor’s clothes. Of course the body is protected from burns, and the force of it is directed outward. A pouch of fake blood is released by the explosion, adding to the realism of it.’’
“And this is what Monica did?”
Leopold nodded. “A call to her Hollywood studio confirmed the fact that she worked on a film using this device. I noticed when I met her that she’d gained weight around the bosom, but I never thought to attribute it to the padding and the explosive device. She triggered it when she raised her arm as she screamed at me.’’
“Any proof?”
“The hole in her dress was just too big to be an entrance hole from a .38, even fired at close range—too big and too ragged. I can thank Fletcher for spotting that. This morning the lab technicians ran a test on the bloodstains. Some of it was her blood, the rest was chicken blood.”
“She was a good actress to fool all those people.”
“She knew Dr. Thursby would be the first to examine her. All she had to do was fall over when the explosive charge ripped out the front of her dress.”
“What if there had been another doctor at the wedding?”
Leopold shrugged. “Then they would have postponed it. They couldn’t take that chance.”
“And the gun?”
“I remembered Thursby bumping against me when I first met him. He took my gun and substituted an identical weapon—identical, that is, except for the serial number. He’d fired it just a short time earlier, to complete the illusion. When I drew it, I simply played into their hands. There I was, the only person in the room with an apparently dying woman, and a gun that had just been fired.”
“But what about the bullet that killed her?”
“Rifling marks on slugs are made by the lands in the rifled barrel of a gun causing grooves in the lead of a bullet. A bullet fired through a smooth tube has no rifling marks.”
“What in hell kind of gun has a smooth tube for a barrel?” the Commissioner asked.
“A home-made one, like a zip gun. Highly inaccurate, but quite effective when the gun is almost touching the skin of the victim. Thursby fired a shot from the pistol he was to plant on me, probably into a pillow or some other place where he could retrieve the undamaged slug. Then he reused the rifled slug on another cartridge and fired it with his homemade zip gun, right into Monica’s heart. The original rifling marks were still visible, and no new ones were added.”
“The ambulance driver and attendant didn’t hear the shot?”
“They would have stayed up front, since he was a doctor riding with a patient. It gave him a chance to get the padded explosive mechanism off her chest, too. Once that was away, I imagine he leaned over her, muffling the zip gun as best he could, and fired the single shot that killed her. Remember, an ambulance on its way to a hospital is a pretty noisy place—it has a siren going all the time.”
They were entering downtown Boston now, and Leopold directed Fletcher to a hotel near the Common. “I still don’t believe the part about switching the guns,” the D.A.’s man objected. “You mean to tell me he undid the strap over your gun, got out the gun, and substituted another one—all without your knowing it?”
Leopold smiled. “I mean to tell you only one type of person could have managed it—an expert, professional pickpocket. The type you see occasionally doing an act in night clubs and on television. That’s how I knew where to find him. We called all over Southern California till we came up with someone who knew Monica and knew she’d dated a man named Thompson who had a pickpocket act. We called Thompson’s agent and discovered he’s playing a split week at a Boston lounge, and is staying at this hotel.”
“What if he couldn’t have managed it without your catching on? Or what if you hadn’t been wearing your gun?”
“Most detectives wear their guns off-duty. If I hadn’t been, or if he couldn’t get it, they’d simply have changed their plan. He must have signaled her when he’d safely made the switch.”
The Boston police had two men waiting to meet them, and they went up in the elevator to the room registered in the name of Max Thompson. Fletcher knocked on the door, and when it opened the familiar face of Felix Thursby appeared. He no longer wore the mustache, but he had the same slim surgeon-like fingers that Immy Fontaine had noticed. Not a doctor’s fingers, but a pickpocket’s.
“We’re taking you in for questioning,” Fletcher said, and the Boston detectives issued the standard warnings of his legal rights.
Thursby blinked his tired eyes at them, and grinned a bit when he recognized Leopold. “She said you were smart. She said you were a smart cop.”
“Did you have to kill her?” Leopold asked.
“I didn’t. I just held the gun there, and she pulled the trigger herself. She did it all herself, except for switching the guns. She hated you that much.”
“I know,” Leopold said quietly, staring at something far away. “But I guess she must have hated herself just as much.”
If I Quench Thee...
William E. Chambers
MOMENT OF TRUTH
“If I Quench Thee...” is a strong, disturbing story which deals with an important social issue of our times—and which offers, in the “moment of truth” faced by its protagonist, Arthur Stern, a significant lesson for us all. The title may seem to have little relation to the tale itself, but in fact is both appropriate and tragically ironic, as may be seen by an examination of its source: Shakespeare’s Othello, Act V, Scene II. (The reader should not look it up until after completion of the story, however, because the exact quote gives away the basic plot.) William E. Chambers is one of the new young writers in the field of crime fiction, a graduate of MWA’s Writing Course, and is currently and ambitiously working on his first two novels for 1976 publication by Popular Library. - B.P.
* * *
Arthur Stern looked past his denim-clad daughter at the apartment she had taken in one of Manhattan’s ghettos. It was the first time he had seen it and he frowned critically. A rickety wicker settee served as a couch. The top of an ancient and probably unworkable combination TV-radio cabinet was used as a bar, and held two bottles of cheap rye. The lifelike poster of Communist rebel Che Guevara that decorated the otherwise plain wall behind the bar deepened the hue of Stern’s pink complexion.
Closing the door behind him, he handed her his coat and said, “For God’s sake, Monica, put on a bra. There’s not much to that blouse you’re wearing.”
Monica stood on her toes and kissed his cheek. “Don’t be so old-fashioned. If God wanted these things bound, I would have been born with a Playtex living—”
“Damn it! That isn’t funny!”
“Okay! Okay!” Raising her hands like a holdup victim, Monica retreated backward through beaded curtains to her bedroom. She shouted from inside, “Hey, I’m glad you came to visit, Dad.”
“Thought I’d surprise you, since you never visit me.”
“I was going to get in touch with you—”
“I’ll bet.”
“I was. I’ve got a surprise of my own.”
“Nothing you might say or do would surprise me any more.”
Monica returned, mixed two highballs, and sat on the settee next to Stern. They clinked glasses. He said, “Happy birthday.”
“Whoa. I’m not twenty-four until next week. Don’t rush it.”
“I didn’t know what to give you as a present, Monica, so I thought I’d find out what you needed and write a check.”
“Well, I don’t really need anything—”
“Seems to me you could use everything.”
“Like what? I have my home, my job—”
“Some home.”
“The location’s convenient for work.”
‘‘Toiling for peanuts among a bunch of savages—”
“Daddy—please! I do social work because I have a conscience.”
“What kind of conscience prods a daughter to leave her own flesh and blood for a band of slum dwellers?”
“You don’t need me. These people do.”
“Need you? Do you think your mother—God rest her soul—and I slaved to build that mink farm upstate just for ourselves?”
When Monica failed to answer, Stern continued, “We did it to get you away from the city—the slums—and the kind of people who dwell in them.”
“These kind of people are good people, Dad. All they need is some help—”
“Bull! All they need is to get off their butts and help themselves like I did.”
Monica gulped her drink, took a deep breath and said, “You’ve always been strong, Dad. That’s why you can’t understand people who are weak.”
The shrill buzz of the doorbell interrupted them, and Monica looked a little uncomfortable. Stem said, “Expecting company?”
‘‘No. Not really.” She fumbled with the buttons on her blouse. “It—well—it might be Tod Humbert.”
“Another social worker?”
“Much more than that.”
A second, more insistent buzz made Stem wince.
“Buzz him back, will you?”
The sound of a man coming up the stairs was followed by a vigorous tapping on the door. Monica opened it and said, “Oh—hi, Tod—”
A tall, thin black man wearing a short leather jacket and blue jeans wrapped his arms around her waist, kissed her on both cheeks and said, “You’re looking bad, baby. Superbad!”
Monica gently withdrew from his embrace and turned sheepishly toward her father.
“Tod—I—I want you to meet Arthur Stern, my father.”
A bright smile flashed across the black man’s face. He walked forward, hand extended and said, “Mr. Stern, this is a pleasure, sir.”
Ignoring Tod completely, Stern rose. “Monica, my coat please.”
The girl looked pleadingly at him, then went wordlessly into the bedroom. Tod sat down on the settee and stared silently at his outstretched legs and crossed ankles. Stern wrote out a check and handed it to Monica when she returned with his coat.
“Fill in whatever you need.”
“May I borrow your pen?”
“Of course. Here.”
Monica blinked steadily as she filled out the check and handed it back to him. The amount read: Nothing!
The odor of rancid food that pervaded the hall disappeared as Stem stepped into the cold night air. He crumpled the rejected check in his fist, threw it into the gutter and ordered himself to be calm. However, his stomach churned, and his temples throbbed as he envisioned the black man with his daughter, the black man’s arms around Monica…
Stem strode around the block, trying to decide what to do. He could disown Monica and wash his hands of all responsibility toward her. But the very thought made him shudder. He could go home, and hope time would heal the wounds. But what if that failed? Finally, he decided he could return to her apartment, make apologies and an effort to tolerate Humbert, and start rebuilding their damaged relationship.
Choice number three was most logical, of course, so Stern swallowed his pride and marched back to his daughter’s building. An elderly man who was leaving held the inner door open as Stem entered, making it unnecessary for him to ring the bell. A shaft of yellow light slanting from the recessed hall at the top of the stairs indicated a partially opened apartment door.
The sound of familiar voices made him hesitate at the foot of the landing. He heard Tod Humbert say, “Don’t feel bad, honey. It’s good to be snubbed occasionally. Humbles the ego.”
“Thanks for being so understanding, Tod.”
“You’re extra-special. Marrying you will be the greatest thrill of my life.”
A sudden upsurge of blood pressure made Stem grip the bannister rail for support. He had visions of friends and business associates sporting lewd grins and knowing leers. Damn it! He could stand her seeing Humbert, but not this—not marriage, a black son-in-law.
Fists clenched, teeth grating, he left the building again and ducked into the doorway of an abandoned house diagonally across the street. The burning hatred he was feeling now conjured up remembrances a quarter-century old. His mind filled with reflections of Korea, of another people different in skin color, an alien race that had threatened him and his fellow commandoes. A threat he had eliminated with bullets, piano wire, and bare hands.
