“Precisely! It came in the afternoon mail. With a circle around eleven o’clock.”
Shayne would have liked to see Slater’s face, but it would have been too risky to raise his head.
“I swear to God, Luis,” Slater said fervently. “I don’t know how it happened. Nobody knew that trick but me. You’re not the world’s most cautious man. One of your monkeys must have seen it on your desk one of the other times, and put two and two together. I can see how you figure, but you’re absolutely wrong. I didn’t do it, goddamn it!” And he added in a low voice, “But if you want to know something funny, I almost wish I had.”
“Is that funny?” the Camel said dryly. “Your sense of humor is a little deficient, I think. Let us be specific. I was twenty minutes late, through no fault of my own. Where were you between five minutes of eleven and twenty minutes past? Give me the names of two impartial witnesses who can assure me that you were not in a garage waiting for me to arrive so you could knock me on the head, and perhaps you will succeed in convincing me.”
Slater didn’t respond at once. Then he said heavily, “You don’t want much, do you? Between five of eleven and twenty after I was doing something dumb. I left the hotel at ten-thirty and I didn’t get to the airport till quarter of twelve. I suppose I picked up the taxi at about eleven-thirty, but before then I was taking pains not to be seen by anybody. And for a good reason. I sneaked out and put some of the money I made on my last trip in the mailbox of Mrs. Albert Watts.”
There was an expressive silence.
“I know it was dumb,” Slater said miserably. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“Dumb! It was insane! What if somebody saw you? Did you think about that? “
“Nobody saw me. It took time, but I was careful.”
“And why did you feel prompted to do this crazy thing? You are ill, my friend. It is as good as a signed confession.”
“Aah-I was feeling lousy, Luis. She’s pathetic. I snowed her once at a dance, and I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since. It wasn’t her fault that Watts wanted to make himself a dirty buck by turning me in. I could have mailed it to her, but they might have traced it to me. This way was better.”
“It isn’t good. If you go to the trouble of killing somebody, the least you can do is be quiet about it afterward.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Slater said wearily. “Don’t try to act innocent with me of all people, Luis. But he was killed because of something I’d done for money, and all of a sudden that dough wasn’t any good any more.”
“How much did you give her?” the Camel sneered. “Half?”
“I wanted to give her the whole goddamn thing, but when I came right down to it, I couldn’t. I didn’t count it. I just pushed it in the mailbox. Maybe it wasn’t even half.”
“But this is weak, Paul. Very, very weak. Oh, I am quite sure you did it. It is too absurd to be a lie. But I do not think it would take an hour to leave some money in a fat lady’s mailbox. No, I suggest that you felt generous to this creature because you knew you were about to rob me of a matter of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”
Powys stirred. The redhead looked at him quickly, and the Englishman made a face to show that the sum impressed him.
The Camel went on. “We are clearing the ground. Now this sudden midnight trip by chartered plane. Your mother is sick?”
His voice was thick with sarcasm, and Slater said defensively, “Maybe she’s not so sick I couldn’t have gone up tomorrow. But my wife’s been putting pressure on me to straighten up. You’ve been putting pressure on me to take one more trip and make enough to retire. At the same time I’ve been getting the pressure from another source you may not know about. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately, not that it matters. Martha is a good judge of character. She knew that if you people put on one ounce more of that pressure I’d break. And if that happened, if I took one more wrong dollar, she said she’d leave me. I’ve played around a little, sure, but I worship that kid, Luis.”
“True love,” Alvarez said. “I honor it. But please continue. You expected me to come to see you and urge you once again to be sensible and make some money. And you were afraid you would agree?”
“Well, hell,” Slater said uncomfortably. “I know my limitations. So I thought this cable about Mother was a god-given opportunity.”
“God-given,” the Camel sneered, “but perhaps arranged by someone on earth, eh? I will tell you, Paul. It is no news to me that you have begun to shake and shiver. A little of this pressure you speak about, applied by policemen, and I have feared you would fall apart. When you are nervous, you make me nervous. It is true, I want you to go once more. I have been working up to this one for a long time. And this knock on the head seems to me to fit, Paul. You have been thinking perhaps yes, perhaps no. When you decide at last, you do not choose the sensible, honest way, but the foolish, the dishonest. And why? You are angry at me for this so-called pressure. It will be the last time, you tell yourself, and never again, if you do it this way, will you have to make such an unpleasant decision.”
“That’s pretty cheap psychology. And it’s wrong.”
“This we will learn. Because of one thing I am certain. You will find out tonight what is meant by pressure, and I think you are right-you are not the type to stand up.”
“No. No. But don’t use any muscle on me, Luis. On me or my wife. At the same time I’m not a moron. When you pulled me off the plane and said you had Martha, you really jarred me. I would have done anything you said. But then I stopped to think. Consider a possibility, Luis. What if I didn’t steal this dough? Just consider it, that’s all I ask. How can I convince you, by swearing on the Bible? You probably don’t even have a Bible. To you it’s ABC. All I have to do is get up the dough. But I can’t get it up if I don’t have it, can I? So I knocked my few brains together. I know what you do with the people who double-cross you. Crrr!”
He made a choking sound, which he must have accompanied with a gesture, drawing his hand flat across his throat. “And if you killed me you’d have to kill Martha too, and I didn’t want either of those things to happen. So this is the way I worked it. I wrote a letter. It’ll be found in the morning unless I get it and tear it up in the meantime. And if I’m dead I can’t very well tear it up.”
“What is in this letter?”
“Why, the whole damn thing, Luis. Facts and figures. I know you think you can beat a smuggling rap, and maybe you can. So I put in the dope on what happened to Albert Watts.”
“That does not sound so menacing.”
“You think so, do you? I know you covered yourself. You’d be careful about a thing like that. So what I said was that we did it together.”
After a moment’s silence the Camel’s voice said softly, “My God, Paul.”
“I knew it would impress you. I said you told me not to worry about the alibi. You could get plenty of people to swear we were somewhere else that night. But it won’t stand up against a written confession, Luis. I described how we did it. I only drove the car, naturally. You used the knife.”
“And you-signed this amazing document?”
“What good would it be without a signature? And I don’t think it’s bad, for something I thought up on the spur of the moment. If you let us go, you’ll still be all right. But if the cops find me in a ditch with my throat cut, you know what they’ll think. They’ll think you killed me to keep me from confessing, not knowing I’d already written it out and signed it. If you didn’t hang for one murder, you’d hang for the other.”
Alvarez said in disbelief, “Dear God. What if somebody finds this letter before you get it?”
“They won’t,” Slater said with confidence. “And don’t think you can follow me and pick me up again after I have it. I intend to cut your telephone wires and see that your cars won’t start without some extensive repairs.”
There was another moment’s silence. Outside on the terrace, Shayne could feel the tension in the room. Then the Camel gave a muffled exclamation. There was the sound of a blow.
“You imbecile!” the Camel said. “I hope you don’t think you can make a fool of me twice in one evening. I don’t have to cut your throat. I will stop short of that. We will work slowly, so you will have time to appreciate everything fully. Then we will move on to your wife, to Jose’s delight. You said you worshipped her, I believe? There will be little left to worship when he is finished.”
“The letter-”
“But don’t you understand, Paul? Where you have put this letter is merely one more of the things we must find out.”
