The Revengers Page 4

  It was a damfool notion, of course. Obviously a wild-goose chase, a blind stab in the dark. Nothing could possibly come of it. I was grasping at straws, chasing ghosts, tilting at windmills. Who the hell did I think I was; Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey? I didn’t even know for sure if the man I was after existed. I’d never seen him. I didn’t know his name. Still, there had been some odd discrepancies in the accounts I’d heard and read of Bob Devine’s death. The gun wasn’t right and the behavior of the man who’d used the gun wasn’t right, not if said murderer was the kind of professional everybody seemed to assume. It was a long-odds gamble that would cost me nothing but a little sleep to check out.

  It was a clear night without a moon. The stars were much brighter than they’d been in Washington, D.C. Well, we were seven thousand feet closer to them, up here in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, the Blood-of-Christ mountains. This was not a community of walls and fences, and I slipped over the low rise behind the Devine house and found myself at the back of somebody else’s couple of acres. I sneaked on down past the lighted house that was there, to the road. So far, so good. Once on the road, I started to jog. It used to be that a running man either created a panic or was picked up by the white-coated boys with the butterfly nets. Nowadays, the best way to turn invisible is to proceed at a steady lope, just another health nut flushing the stale air from his lungs.

  I had some trouble with the gun and considerable trouble with my breathing. I’d just come up from sea level and it takes a week or two to get used to the altitude. I took the first crossroad to the right. This brought me back to the road on which Martha lived, known as Navajo Drive. I crossed this and went on to the next, labeled Ute Road, turning right again. With the last of my failing breath, I made it to a spot opposite my starting point but a block over, if this elaborate countrified community dealt in such conventional urban divisions as blocks. I stole between two of the scattered houses here and followed a fold of ground back toward Navajo Drive, finding myself at last on a hillside from which I could see the house from where I’d come, across the street. The bedroom wing where Martha slept was dark; the living room and kitchen were lighted as I’d left them. Directly below me was the house with the Wagoneer in the driveway, although the vehicle was now hidden from my vantage point on the hillside behind the house, by the garage. I sat down to catch my breath by a dark desert juniper against which, I hoped, my own dark shape would be invisible if anyone should look.

  Nothing happened. A neighboring house went totally dark. An occasional car drove by. A distant yapping sound that I hoped was a coyote—we used to hear them regularly, back when I first lived in Santa Fe as a married man—turned out to be merely a yapping dog, soon answered by another. They’ll fix that soon. The noise is bad enough, but obviously no dogs must shit in our immaculate future cities, and no pigeons must crap in them, either. Clean, silent communities and empty skies. Well, deep philosophy is always a good way of making the time pass on watch; but it was getting on toward midnight now and I couldn’t see spending the whole night sitting under a bush. Apparently they weren’t about to turn out the lights below me and go to bed; and while a man or woman aroused from a sound sleep is at a useful disadvantage, I could do without that edge, I hoped.

  There were two doors to cover: the kitchen door at the rear of the house, and a small door in the side of the garage. There were, of course, the big garage doors facing front, away from me, but it seemed unlikely anybody’d go to the trouble of raising those just to look out. There was also the front door, but I remembered that the light was on there, making it impossible for anybody to slip out inconspicuously that way. I made my way to an ornamental pine tree at the comer of the garage, took up station beside it, picked up a handful of small stones and started pitching them into the ornamental bushes beneath the lighted windows at the rear of the house, making interesting rustling sounds. I made a couple of them clatter lightly against the house wall.

  Nothing happened to tell me whether I was playing to an empty theater or standing room only. I sighed and found a good-sized rock after groping around in the dark. I stepped away from the house and turned and pitched my missile through the nearby garage window. It made a fearful crash in the quiet night—the distant dogs had ceased their canine dialogue. I moved back into my ornamental evergreen shelter. After a while, he came.

  I was kind of sorry about it. It meant I had him figured right as the kind of man who trees his own coons and stomps his own snakes; and that’s practically an endangered species these helpless days. Of course, if I had him figured right there was no chance of his calling the police. He wouldn’t want the cops around, under the circumstances. But even under other circumstances he’d feel quite capable of protecting his premises himself, thanks. It’s an attitude I admire, so I regretted what had to be done now; but unfortunately the guy had gone too far and we do have the policy of teaching outsiders, as a matter of principle, not to monkey with the buzz saw. It was too bad about blond Mrs. Roundheels, as Martha had called her, that suburban Lorelei, and Bob Devine should certainly have remained faithful to his own wife and let other people’s wives alone, but a shotgun was carrying things just a little too far.

  The broken window was a help. When he stumbled over something, sneaking through the garage—probably the rock I’d thrown—and swore softly, I heard him clearly and knew where to expect him next. I was ready for him when he opened the side door and stepped outside, the long-barreled weapon he held gleaming faintly in the starlight. When, scrutinizing his property warily, he swung away from me, I stepped around the comer of the building.

  “Easy, friend,” I said. “There’s a thirty-eight looking right up your backside.” He stood quite still, frozen, and I went on, “If you’re thinking of trying to swing that cannon around, don’t. You’ll never make it. Lay it down gently, now.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Lay it on the ground, please,” I said. It always disconcerts them when you’re polite. “We can talk afterward. No hasty movements. . . . That’s fine, now you can straighten up, but don’t turn around. There’s nothing for you to see but a man you don’t know and don’t want to know.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  I said, “Just a guy with a gun. What’s the matter, friend, are you stupid or something? You read the article, didn’t you? Hell, everybody in Casa Glorieta has read that article, I’m sure. ‘Hey, did you see the story about that new family over on Navajo Drive, the big guy with the nice young wife, did you read about him, hey?’ ” I paused and went on, full of menace now to see what I could shake loose. “Why’d you do it, amigo? Do you make a habit of feeling under rocks for rattlesnakes or skiing past avalanche-warning signs just for kicks? If you’ve got to shoot somebody, why pick on a man with friends and associates like that? Did it never occur to you that we might take care of our own even after they’re retired? I know, he probably had it coming in a way, but the unwritten law doesn’t work any longer, friend. Sorry. Up against the wall now, please.” I stepped forward and picked up the weapon he’d laid down. “So this is the gun.”

  It was exactly what I’d expected, exactly what it had to be from what it had done: a long-barreled autoloading shotgun eminently suitable for ducks and geese, not so hot for quail, and clumsy and unwieldy for homicide. I couldn’t read the barrel markings in the dark, but I would have bet a considerable sum that it was bored full-choke to throw tight patterns for long-range shooting—the spread of the shot can be controlled, like the stream of water from a hose, by the amount of constriction in the end of the gun barrel. It had to be fully choked if I had it figured right; besides they don’t usually make thirty-inch barrels in any other configuration.

  The man in front of me, call him Mister Lorelei for purposes of reference, stirred and said, “You’ll never prove. . . .” Then he stopped.

  “Sure,” I said. “A load of buckshot out of one shotgun —or birdshot for that matter—looks just like th
at out of another. Who can tell anything from a bunch of little round pellets? But you didn’t stop to pick up the fired case. That’s the trouble with these autoloaders from the criminal standpoint—they toss their empties from hell to breakfast. Yours is in the hands of the police; and a fired shotgun shell can be traced to the gun that fired it. The firing-pin indentation is unique, and there’ll be other markings for the ballistic geniuses to drool over. Of course, twelve-gauge shotguns are a dime a dozen out here in the Southwest. The police could hardly stage a house-to-house search of Casa Glorieta to locate the murder weapon, particularly since the crime occurred in town and it was thought to be a professional hit anyway, because of Bob Devine’s past history. But if somebody gives them the idea of checking up on local motives and they come looking. . . .” I hesitated. “Why didn’t you get rid of it?”

  Still facing the wall, he shrugged his shoulders. “I do a bit of hunting; everybody knows I have a shotgun. If it turned up missing it would be as good as a confession, wouldn’t it? At least she’d have known. . . But she found out anyway from the way I was acting; I couldn’t help it.”

  I said, “I’m not up on local mores, but I didn’t think who slept with whom was a killing matter these days.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “We were doing all right at last. We had it made at last. Goddamn it, my wife is not a tramp, she just gets . . . a little bored and restless sometimes. And drinks a little too much sometimes, or used to. But we had it licked, she had it licked, and everything was fine; and then he came along and that damned magazine story: the big dangerous fascinating man with the intriguing disability, tragic really, a great handsome virile guy like that with a time bomb ticking away in his chest. And what with all the tension and guilt and . . . and excitement of carrying on an affair like that, she started doing it to herself again, poisoning herself again. Destroying herself again. I had to. . . .” He stopped and moved his shoulders once more. “All right. I don’t mean to sound too altruistic. I was jealous, sure; and I hated the good-looking bastard for what he was doing to us after we’d worked so hard to build something together; but goddamn it, it wasn’t even as if he loved her and wanted what was best for her. . . .”

  He stopped. A car went along Navajo Drive but the headlights did not reach us where we stood. I said, “You hesitated, there behind the restaurant. He had time to start one way, and change his mind, and come back the other. You had a clear shot—”

  “Hell, I didn’t want to hurt his wife, I had nothing against her,” he said. “That’s a tight-shooting gun, but I had to wait until they were separated enough so I could be sure she wouldn’t get sprinkled; even one buckshot can do a lot of damage. Is that how you knew?”

  “It had to be a full-choke gun or Mrs. Devine would have been hit, regardless,” I said. “But a pro wouldn’t have lugged around a long piece of field artillery like that. He’d have used a short, wide-open, sawed-off weapon that he could hide under his coat; and it would have sprayed lead all over that parking lot. No matter how hard and fast her husband pushed her, she’d have picked up a few stray pellets, regardless. And the shot concentration in the body wouldn’t have been nearly as great if a sawed-off had been used.” I drew a long breath. “And then, a pro wouldn’t have given a damn about the wife. He wouldn’t have taken any chances with a trained man like Bob Devine who might have been carrying a gun. He’d have shot instantly and to hell with who else got hit. If that made it a double killing, too bad.” After a moment I said, “Okay. I had to know for sure, but okay. This is as far as I go, friend. I’ll report it as a private matter, of no concern to us. The fact that you took time to see that Mrs. Devine wasn’t hurt earns you a break from me. For whatever it’s worth now.”

  “Yeah,” he said, softly and bitterly. “For what it’s worth now. I—”

  Abruptly, the garage lights went on and a woman’s voice called out, “Hey, where the hell are you? What are you doing out there? What’s taking you so long? Whatsh . . . what’s going on out there, anyway?”

  I’d worked the shells out of the shotgun as we talked; now I set the empty weapon against the wall and stepped over into the shrubbery as she appeared in the lighted doorway, an unsteady silhouette with a glass in its hand.

  “Whawash . . .” Her voice was slurred. She realized that she wasn’t transmitting clearly and tried again, “What was that awful noish . . . noise, anyway?”

  “A kid with a rock, I guess,” the man said. “He got one of the garage windows.”

  “And you couldn’t get a shot at him? How too, too bad!” There was a cold savage hatred in the voice that, for a moment, sounded almost sober. “You couldn’t drop him as he ran, like a rabbit? What the hell kind of a loushy . . . lousy hunter are you, anyway?”

  She stepped away from the door, turning to see her husband more clearly. The light caught her as she turned; revealing that her appearance had undergone a shocking transformation since I’d seen her watching us from across the street. I’d gotten a clear impression then, even at a distance, that Bob Devine’s partner in adultery was a handsome woman who dressed nicely and took good care of herself—but that had been this afternoon.

  She must have been drinking hard ever since. Now, at midnight, the sleek shining hairdo I’d admired from afar was falling apart into wisps and loops of lank blond hair. The crisp, pale green blouse hung limp and untidy and halfunbuttoned, one crumpled shirttail dangling. The expensive, smoothly tailored, pale green slacks had succumbed to careless wear and the soft warm pressures of her mature body, becoming almost embarrassingly creased and shapeless. It was hard to understand how, in just a few hours, she’d managed to get them looking as if she’d slept in them for a week. She swayed dangerously on her high heels, standing there; and liquor spilled down her clothes as she tried to drink from her unsteady glass. She did not seem a bit concerned about the state she was already in or the further mess she was making of herself; she actually seemed pleased by the effect she was creating, peering down to admire the dark, wet splotches as if she thought they added a final artistic touch to her ruined costume, as of course they did.

  I realized belatedly that, instead of fighting it as in the past—if her husband’s account was correct—tonight this woman had deliberately given herself over to the booze she knew she could not handle. She was quite aware of, even perversely proud of, what it was doing to her. She was taking malicious pleasure in showing her husband how little he’d gained by murdering her lover. All he’d gotten for his crime, she was saying, was this stumbling, slovenly and drink-stained creature, really quite worthless. After the ghastly unforgivable thing he had done, she would never again, could never again, be any more than this to him. It was her revenge on him, and on herself.

  “You see,” the man murmured without turning his head. “You see what he’s done to her? She was doing fine before he came!”

  It didn’t seem fair to blame it all on Bob Devine, the basic problem had obviously existed long before he arrived on the scene, but he certainly hadn’t been altogether blameless. There were too many confused and violent emotions here; and there was really nothing for me to do here, anyway. I’d learned what I’d come to learn. If punishment was needed, these two people seemed to be dispensing it quite adequately themselves, without my help.

  “Go on,” I whispered. “You’d better get her to bed if you can. Good luck.”

  The man’s voice was soft and bitter. “Good luck? What’s that?”

  Then he moved forward hastily as the glass dropped from his wife’s hand and shattered on the concrete walk. A startled look had come to the woman’s blurred but still-handsome face as she realized abruptly that in her anger she’d gulped down just a little too much too fast of the stuff that was poison to her. She had not intended to carry her self-destroying vengeance quite so far tonight; and now she was making a shaky effort to regain the shelter of the house and, no doubt, the bathroom. He reached her in time to catch her as she faltered; he steadied her and led
her out of sight inside; but they didn’t make it all the way through the garage. I heard her become violently ill in there. The sound of her retching spasms followed me as I sneaked away.

  Martha was in the lighted kitchen as I slipped into the Devine house by the back door after some cautious detours that were probably unnecessary; but you get into certain habits in this business, if you survive.

  “I made you some fresh coffee,” she said, turning from the stove.

  “You’re supposed to be asleep,” I said.

  “Well, so are you,” she said with a grin.

  After what I’d just seen, she looked very good, very reassuring, in her long loose kaftan or dashiki or whatever the hell it was called. There was still some hope for the human race. I even liked the bare feet peeking innocently out from under the hem of the garment, although I’m not really a freak for barefoot girls; I find heels and nylons a lot more stimulating. But stimulation was not the game tonight. We were just two people who’d come to know each other pretty well and were now surprisingly comfortable with each other, which had not always been the case in the past. There was a question in Martha’s gray eyes, but she did not ask it aloud. I answered it anyway.

  “The guy across the street shot Bob,” I said. “The husband. You can probably figure out a motive if you try hard. That article by Eleanor Brand had nothing to do with it, so except for a personal grievance for the way she abused your trust, you have no reason to look her up with intent to do grievous bodily harm, as the saying goes. She’s not responsible for Bob’s death in any way.”