Time to Murder and Create

Suppose it was Prager. Things seemed to form a pattern, and although they didn't really lock in place, they had the right sort of feel to them. He was on the hook in the first place because of a hit-and-run case, and so far a car had been used twice. Spinner's letter mentioned a car jumping a curb at him, and one had certainly taken a shot at me last night. And he was the one who seemed to be feeling the bite financially. Beverly Ethridge was stalling for time, Theodore Huysendahl had agreed to my price, and Prager said he didn't know how he could raise the money.

So suppose it was him. If so, he had just tried to commit murder, and he hadn't made it work, and he was probably a little shaky about it. If it was him, now was a good time to rattle the bars of his cage. And if it wasn't him, I'd be in a better position to know it if I dropped in on him.

I paid for my coffee and went out and flagged a cab.

The black girl looked up at me when I entered his office. It took her a second or two to place me, and then her dark eyes took on a wary expression.

"Matthew Scudder," I said.

"For Mr. Prager?"

"That's right."

"Is he expecting you, Mr. Scudder?"

"I think he'll want to see me, Shari."

She seemed startled that I remembered her name. She got hesitantly to her feet and stepped out from behind the U-shaped desk.

"I'll tell him you're here," she said.

"You do that."

She slipped through Prager's door, drawing it swiftly shut behind her. I sat on the vinyl couch and looked at Mrs. Prager's seascape. I decided that the men were vomiting over the sides of the boat. There was no question about it.

The door opened and she returned to the reception room, again closing the door after her. "He'll see you in about five minutes," she said.

"All right."

"I guess you got important business with him."

"Fairly important."

"I just hope things go right. That man has not been himself lately. It just seems the harder a man works and the more successful he grows, that's all the more pressure he has bearing down upon him."

"I guess he's been under a lot of pressure lately."

"He has been under a strain," she said. Her eyes challenged me, holding me responsible for Prager's difficulty. It was a charge I could not deny.

"Maybe things will clear up soon," I suggested.

"I truly hope so."

"I suppose he's a good man to work for?"

"A very good man. He has always been—"

But she didn't get to finish the sentence, because just then there was the sound of a truck backfiring, except trucks do that at ground level, not on the twenty-second floor. She had been standing beside her desk, and she stayed frozen there for a moment, eyes wide, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth.

She held the pose long enough for me to get out of my chair and beat her to his door.

I yanked it open, and Henry Prager was seated at his desk, and of course it had not been a truck backfiring. It had been a gun. A small gun, .22 or .25 caliber from the look of it, but when you put the barrel in your mouth and tilt it up toward the brain, a small gun is all you really need.

I stood in the doorway, trying to block it, and she was at my shoulder, small hands hammering at my back. For a moment I didn't yield, and then it seemed to me that she had at least as much right as I to look at him. I took a step into the room and she followed me and saw what she'd known she was going to see.

Then she started to scream.

Chapter 12

If Shari hadn't known my name, I might have left. Perhaps not; cop instincts die hard if they die at all, and I had spent too many years despising those reluctant witnesses who slipped off into the shadows to feel comfortable playing the role myself. Nor would it have sat well to duck out on a girl in her condition.

But the impulse was surely present. I looked at Henry Prager, his body slumped over his desk, his features contorted in death, and I knew that I was looking at a man I had killed. His finger had pulled the trigger, but I'd put the gun in his hand by playing my game a little too well.

I had not asked to have his life intertwined with mine, nor had I sought to be a factor in his death. Now his corpse confronted me; one hand was stretched across the desk, as if pointing at me.

He had bribed his daughter's way out of an unintentional homicide. The bribery had laid him open to blackmail, which had provoked another homicide, this one intentional. And that first murder had only sunk the barb deeper—he was still being blackmailed, and he could always be tagged for Spinner's murder.

And so he had tried to murder again, and had failed. And I turned up in his office the next day, and so he told his secretary he wanted five minutes, but he'd taken only two or three of them.

He'd had the gun at hand. Perhaps he'd checked it earlier in the day to make sure it was loaded. And perhaps, while I waited in the outer office, he entertained thoughts of greeting me with a bullet.