“I guess not,” I said.
He could see the nine-millimeter in my gloved hand. I’d found the gun upstairs, in one of the built-in bureaus in one of the unused bedrooms on the fourth floor.
He got a weary smile going. “And now what… you kill me?”
“No.”
“Then, what? Oh. You… you figure to… leave me here, and this Turner will come along and finish his job.”
“Turner’s not going to kill you. He’s going to come in here in a while and take one look at any one of the dead bodies you’ve accumulated and he’s going to get his ass out. First rule of the profession is if anything’s out of whack, if things aren’t going exactly according to plan, then fuck it. Get out. And he will. So you aren’t in any danger from him, if I should decide to just leave you here.”
“You… you’d do that? Just leave me here, and go?”
“I might.”
“What do you want for it… money? I told you before… I can get you money. Eight thousand, we were talking… I could get you that, I could get you more…”
“That’s not what I want from you.”
“Then what… what do you want?”
“I want what happened… and I want it here.” And I tapped the big tape recorder I’d brought over from the table by the wail, where Janet had sat and done the sound on the film.
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re going to tell the whole story. Beginning with the phone call you got from that guy whose daughter starred in the snuff flick. I want it all… everything… with one exception. You’re going to leave me out of it. And Janet too. I was never here. And Janet left here, before the storm set in… well before the shit started hitting the fan.”
“And you want this… on tape?” He was looking at me like he thought I was crazy. It didn’t bother me. His opinion didn’t mean a whole lot to me.
“I want it on tape,” I said “I know your intention was to throw the blame for what you did my way… you figured, and rightly, that if I was around for an investigation to focus on, you’d be in the clear. Once they had hold of me and dug into who I am and what I’ve done, I’d be a natural for the leading role in this little horror movie you’ve been stage-managing. So my way around that is simple: I was never here. When they find you here, you can tell any story you like… anything you can come up with that’ll save your ass… but just make sure I’m not a part of that story, and that Janet has a bit part. Because I’m going to have your story on tape… the story of what really happened here… to use against you if you ever try to implicate me. So I won’t have to worry. Janet, either.”
He considered that for a moment, and then he tried out a small smile. “If I don’t make your tape… if I tell you to go fuck yourself… what then?”
“I’ll think of something,” I said, and I got the straight razor out of my pocket. I’d found it on him, when I patted him down after knocking him out with the crow bar. I flipped it open, the razor swinging out of its white plastic handle. The edge caught some light and winked. The surface of it wasn’t entirely clean, however: there were still flecks of something on it, brown flecks that had been red.
“All right,” he said. “And if I do make the tape…?”
I tucked the razor back in its plastic handle and put it in my pocket. “I’ll leave you here.”
“Tied up like this?”
“Yes. That’s to your benefit. If you’re tied up and everybody else in the house is dead, when you’re found, then obviously somebody else was here. So you can pin the blame on that imaginary somebody.”
“Why would a killer kill everybody else in the house, and leave me alive?”
“I’ll toss you behind that couch over there. You can say the killer forgot about you. Lost count.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Not really. When Richard Speck killed those nurses in Chicago, he lost count. One of them hid under the bed and got out alive. They’ll buy it. Leave it to them to come up with the explanation.”
“Maybe it would work…”
“It will. Now. I’m going to turn on the tape recorder, and once it’s going, I won’t be talking any more. This is your show. Make it good.”
And I hit the switch.
30
He began where I told him to, with the midnight phone call and snuff flicks and how he’d been living in fear for the past six months, getting little sleep that whole time, and when he did sleep he had cold-sweat variety nightmares, and when he was awake he thought about the nightmares he’d been having, and took to carrying a gun with him and just generally jumping every time he heard a noise and sometimes when he didn’t.
He described briefly the filming of the porno flick here at the lodge, how the first fleet of actors had left the day before, and how Janet Stein had left in the afternoon, just before the rest of them got snowed in, and then he went into Waddsworth’s fall, and how he, Castile, had reacted to it.
“I was sure he’d been murdered,” Castile said, “by whoever it was that’d been hired to murder me. I just… knew… that the paid killer that Meyers had hired was in this lodge… to kill me… maybe to kill everyone in the lodge, now that we were snowbound… and my wife, when I went back to my room and told her, about Waddsworth’s death, and what I thought it could mean, she tried to convince me it could’ve been an accident, or the result of an argument between those three faggots upstairs… but I couldn’t buy it. I knew… after all those paranoid months… that this was it.. that the attempt would be made tonight.
“Of the four of us left in the lodge…” And here he paused to give me a look, emphasizing that he had left Janet and me out, in his tally of the number of people present. “… my wife and I made two, and that left only Harry Belcher, a cameraman from Chicago, and his young ‘friend’ Richie Hudson. Harry was the older man, the more physically tough of the two, Richie being an ineffectual type… so obviously Harry seemed the more likely of the two, to make a living by violence. Another possibility was that the two men were in on it together… they lived together, lovers is what they were… perhaps they were in business, too, or at least knew each other’s business.
“So I made an excuse to my wife, about hearing a noise in the hall, and I took my gun and went to Harry’s room. He was in bed… Richie wasn’t there… Richie had his own room, but that had been for appearance’s sake, and I’d expected them to be together… had been ready to confront the both of them, threaten them with the gun, make them tell me, make them admit who they really were… or anyway who Harry was… I wasn’t completely convinced that little fag Richie was a part of it, though I couldn’t risk taking a chance he wasn’t.
“He… Harry… was sitting on the side of his bed… lights on… he was holding his head in, his hands. He looked up at me, and I showed him the gun, and didn’t have a word out before he’d jumped at me.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like that… I was to supposed to hold the gun on him and he would tell what I needed to hear and then.. I don’t know what… then, maybe, I would have killed him. I hadn’t thought it through that far… I was just acting out of reflex, doing what I thought I needed to survive.
“And now, Jesus! I was fighting. A man so much stronger than me it was ridiculous… if he’d thought to hit me, just use his fist on me, he’d have had me. But he didn’t. We just sort of wrestled. He was concentrating on the gun I had… trying to twist it out my hand… so we wrestled, rolled around on the floor like a couple of kids roughhousing.
“That’s when Richie came in. He must’ve been next door, or maybe he was off alone someplace pouting about what happened to Waddsworth.. but anyway he came in, and made a sound, like he’d been hit in the stomach, air rushing out… I could see him out of the corner of my eye, standing there waving his arms in the air, like he’d spotted somebody drowning and he didn’t know how to swim and couldn’t do anything about it… and then he sort of ran off, toward the bathroom and he came back with the straight razor.
“He stood over us, Harry and me, and in a shaky voice told me to drop the gun. Somehow that struck me funny, not that I took time to laugh about it, but here was this skinny little faggot spouting a cliched line out of an old western: ‘Drop the gun.’ It just seemed absurd to me. The whole thing seemed absurd.
