Hell Has No Fury

Now the whole affair was a monstrous bit of nonsense verse. Nothing whatever made any sense at all, and I was groping blindly in a maniac world that was filled with wandering women and a fine, indiscriminate slaughter of witnesses. Why? Why the impartial elimination of- the key witness on both sides? The only guy who’d figured in the business all the way was Austin Stark. All the way to the murder of Wash Richert, that is. But how could you figure Stark in the elimination of his own man? Of course, he probably had Richert’s signed statement, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the same as a live guy in court putting the clincher on a frame.

Several blocks from the walkup, I stopped at a corner drug store and went inside to the phone. I dropped a dime and dialed.

“Hello, Kitty. Anyone there?”

“No. Your date over already?”

“It never even got started. Wanda had another date, in Samara.”

“What the hell you talking about, lover?”

“You don’t get it? A novel reader like you? Never mind, though. It means she’s dead.”

The wire sang between us, and after a while, she said quietly, “One of the others called in, right after you left — the platinum one.”

“Richert’s wife? What does she want?”

“She wants to talk with you. She sounded scared. She sounded scared to death. Which reminds me that I’m scared to death myself. I’ll bring all the petty cash and meet you at the bus station. We can’t afford a train.”

“Some other time, hussy. What about the platinum? She coming to the office?”

“No. She’s waiting in a little bar called The Peanut. They serve them in bowls with beer. It’s on Fifteenth, just off Wamego Street.”

“I know the place. See you later.”

“I wonder,” she said sadly, and I hung up.

On Fifteenth, just off Wamego, The Peanut was a dismal, little bar which, like all bars in the morning, somehow gave the impression of having a hangover. In the shadowy interior, behind the peanut bowls, a bartender looked at me as if he wished he didn’t have to. Opposite the bar, lining the wall, there was a string of booths, each with its own peanut bowl, and private remote-control box for the juke box in the rear. In the last booth, where the shadows were deepest, I caught a glimmer of platinum, the white movement of a lifted hand.

I told the bartender to bring me a shot of rye and went back to the booth and sat down. While I was waiting for the rye, I saw that Kitty had been right. Mrs. Richert was scared to death. Her face was drawn, no more than a shade darker than her hair, and her eyes were still and wary. She held a glass in her fingers, twisting it slowly, with odd little jerks.

“You wanted to talk with Wash,” she said. “It’ll never happen now.”

“I know. A cop named Wiley Shivers came to see me this morning.”

“Yeah.” Her eyes stared into her slowly rotating glass. “Nasty little toad. I wasn’t thinking straight, or I- wouldn’t have put him on you. You got an idea Wash didn’t really see Hal Decker leaving Danny Devore’s place the night of Danny’s murder?”

“Yes. Hal spent that night with his girl. She was willing to swear to it. You get the tense? Was, I said. That was yesterday. Today she’s dead. Murdered. I just left her on the floor of her apartment.”

Fear moved like a shadow across her face. “The devil,” she said softly. “The merciless, arrogant devil.”

“Stark?”

The flesh quivered on her bones, and I could see her fingers tighten convulsively on the glass. “So you’ve figured it out. He killed Danny Devore, and I guess he killed Hal Decker’s girl. For that, I don’t give a damn. But he killed Wash, too, and Wash was mine. I’ve played him for a sucker whenever the notion struck; but he was mine, and I never wanted him dead. And I want the guy who killed him.”

“And if Hal Decker, an innocent guy, goes clear in the process, that’s purely coincidental, I suppose.”

Her eyes flicked up and down, and the hardness was in there with the fear. “That’s right. Wash and I had this fixed up for a big bundle, but now hope for the bundle’s dead with Wash, and all I want is to get even. I want the guy who killed Wash. Anything that comes with it is frosting on the cake, as far as I’m concerned.”

I looked at her with the first, faint light of dawn breaking inside my skull. “A bundle? So Wash was more than a phony witness. He was also a blackmailer. That explains a lot. I saw Stark in all this from the beginning, but I couldn’t see why he’d bump his own witness. And there’s still something I can’t see. I can’t see why Stark killed Devore. I know he was after Danny’s public hide, but murder’s something else. It’s too fantastic for belief.”