A Handy Death

“Look at the whole picture from the beginning,” Hank said slowly. “A drunken kid in his teens, who — incidentally — had just come into a couple of hundred thousand dollars; a so-called chance meeting in a bar, a sexy woman, a bedroom scene; enter outraged husband back unexpectedly from a business trip; add a gun forced on the drunken kid; a shot; lots of blood around...” He stared at Mike coolly. “What does it sound like?”

“I know. It sounds like the old chicken-bladder swindle,” Gunnerson said grumpily. “Except for a few things.”

He started to tick them off on his fingers as Ross listened.

“One. In the swindle, the gun the drunk receives from the woman only holds blanks. This one held real bullets. Two. In the swindle the gun used is the one the woman takes away from the mark. This one was left and the other gun was taken away. Three. In the swindle, the woman in the case hustles the mark out of the room and gets in touch with him later — to blackmail him. In this case the mark remained and it was the woman who disappeared. And never got in touch with anyone since. Four. In the swindle the pseudo-husband usually has a plastic bag full of chicken blood in his mouth to bite on when the blank hits him. Here the only blood was his own. Five. In the swindle they always know who the sucker is and work a long time to set him up. In this case, to believe our truthful Billy Dupaul, he happened to meet the lady in a bar by accident.”

“You know better than that,” Ross said. “He happened to meet the lady the way the victim of a card trick happens to pick any card in the deck. The card is forced on him, and I’d bet the idea of that particular bar at that particular time was forced on Billy Dupaul in the same way. Suggested subtly, maybe, but definitely suggested.”

“By whom?”

“I’d like to know! Possibly the man Dupaul was talking to in that bar after he left the hotel and before he went to the Mountain Top Bar.”

“You’re reaching, Hank! How would the steerer know he’d go there?”

“As I said before, I’d enjoy knowing.”

“And how about the other points I raised?”

“Well,” Ross said, considering, “as far as the chicken blood is concerned, the woman could have cleaned that up as well.”

Gunnerson eyed him sardonically.

“She doesn’t know when the cops will get there; she’s in the room of a man she thinks is dead, killed violently; she has to get dressed — and now, in addition to carrying off a useless gun and a suitcase — so she won’t float, I imagine — she now stops to do a bit of housecleaning? And you wouldn’t call that reaching, Hank?”

“We don’t even know the swindlers bothered with chicken blood,” Ross said stubbornly. “Dupaul was so drunk he could have been convinced he really shot the man even without the evidence of blood.”

“A rather long chance for swindlers to take, don’t you think?” Gunnerson said. “Supposing Dupaul stuck to orange juice when he got mad?”

“We don’t even know whether there was chicken blood around or not,” Ross said, still unwilling to give up his argument. “After all, nobody looked for it. The police come in on a guy covered with blood. Are they going to stop to take samples to be analyzed of the blood, or are they going to forget it and rush him to the hospital? And in the hospital are they going to wipe his chin and send the scrapings to the lab to see if a chicken bled on him while he was damned near bleeding to death himself?”

He raised a hand abruptly, preventing Gunnerson from answering.

“I doubt it. Let’s look at it like this. There’s only one condition that seems to fit the facts. Let’s assume it started out as a simple swindle, and then something went wrong. Unaccountably, the gun wasn’t loaded with blanks, but with shells—” He grinned and shook his head. “No, I don’t like that. That would really be reaching...”

“That wouldn’t be reaching,” Mike said. “That would be plain falling down!”

“Let’s start over. Let’s assume it was a swindle as far as Raymond Neeley was concerned, but that as far as the woman known as Grace was concerned, it was a simple assassination attempt. How about that?”

“You promised not to reach,” Mike said reproachfully.

“That’s not reaching,” Ross said, insulted. “You admit the picture has all the earmarks of an old tried-and-true swindle. The poor sucker thinks he shot the husband and is open for blackmail from then on, or to go to prison for knocking off the husband of a woman he made sexual advances to. Not a very good spot to be in.”

“Wait a second—”