Hannibal stopped at the hotel room door to add to his tally of victims. While Foster Peters lived with his own actions, his wife Ruth felt such guilt about his actions that it had eaten her alive from the inside out for perhaps twelve years. Hannibal had called Ray inside to keep an eye on Ruth while he went upstairs to face the conspirators who, he was certain, were working at getting their stories straight in case of trouble. He had just raised his hand to knock when the door opened inward and Joan almost walked into him.
“Where you headed, girl?” Hannibal asked, planting a gloved palm in the center of her chest and shoving her back inside. “This is where it gets interesting.”
As Joan fell against the bed Hannibal took the room in at a glance. Donner had decorated his space to look like home. A five or six inch statuette of an infantryman stood guard on the low chest of drawers. What looked like a class photo of men in uniform stood in the center of the round table by the window. Between that table and Hannibal, Gil Donner stood at the writing desk holding the telephone to his ear. As Hannibal stepped past the bathroom door on his left Donner slowly lowered the phone back into its cradle.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Donner asked.
“Giving you a chance to confess and maybe lighten your sentence.”
“I have done nothing,” Donner said, taking one step forward.
Hannibal pulled his automatic from under his right arm and pointed it at Donner’s right knee. “Nothing except perhaps destroying evidence and certainly falsifying reports. Maybe you’re just guilty of being a bad cop. Or isn’t a provost marshal considered a cop?”
Donner and Joan exchanged a look that seemed more desperate than Hannibal would have expected. Joan sat up on the bed, looking more like a woman than an executive for the first time in Hannibal’s experience.
“You don’t understand,” she said in an unexpected, plaintive tone. “You can’t keep me here.”
“Then why don’t you make me understand,” Hannibal said. “While we’re waiting here for the police to show up, make me understand why you covered for your ex-husband when he killed Grant Edwards.”
Frozen in place, Donner stammered one word. “How?”
“And I’d really like to know why you covered for him when he murdered your wife.” Hannibal said, leaning against the wall. He was enjoying the stunned reactions of his two-person audience. “I do think I get why Oscar had to die, but it all goes back to your wife, doesn’t it Gil?”
“You can’t think Al Brooks killed Oscar Peters,” Donner said. “He died in a training accident years ago.”
“Please,” Hannibal said, waving Donner into a chair. “If the man was dead, Joanie here wouldn’t have had to sneak off to Las Vegas to get a divorce before she could marry Mark Norton.”
“Even if you were right,” Joan said, “why would a man I was married to kill Oscar?”
Hannibal pointed Joan to the other side of the bed where she sat very close to Donner. “I figure it this way. Stop me if I go wrong, now. You, Joan, were a witness to Carla Donner’s murder. Either that or your hubby came home and told you he did her in. He was sleeping with her in that little second flat the Donners kept for entertaining their extra curricular friends. In any case, you told your good friend Oscar, didn’t you?”
“She caught us up there,” Joan blurted out.
“Quiet,” Donner said. “Don’t tell this jerk anything.”
Hannibal sat on the low chest of drawers shaking his head. “You and him. Only you weren’t married yet. In fact, you were probably underage. Okay, Carla goes to her little hideaway and finds her boyfriend going at it with a high school kid. She flips out. Attacks him. He defends himself a little too robustly and kills her. How am I doing so far?”
“This is silly,” Donner said, hands held wide. “Remember this is my wife we’re talking about.”
“Yes, and I can’t figure yet why you would help cover up her murder,” Hannibal said. “Joan I understand. He married her, so her testimony would be inadmissible. But that didn’t last too long. They moved to the States, she dropped her married name and went back to living with her uncle. You have been a handful for him, haven’t you?”
Again Joan and Donner exchanged significant looks. Joan opened her mouth to speak, but Donner cut her off. “His theories only work if all the killings were done by one man, and your husband, Al Brooks, died in a training accident in Germany.”
“It just doesn’t wash, Donner,” Hannibal said. “If her ex really had nothing to do with Grant Edwards’ death, why were you asking Walt Young about it?” Donner was still cool, but Hannibal could smell Joan’s fear. He kept talking, hoping she would fill in whatever pieces were missing. “I figure Grant was murder number two. Brooks slipped into the house just before Francis got there and stabbed him with a bayonet, then slipped out to let Francis take the rap. You see, Joan had moved on to Grant, and our ghost was jealous.”
“But jealousy can’t be a motive for the final murder,” Joan protested. “I was never intimate with Oscar Peters.”
“Oh, no, but he had to die, didn’t he?” Hannibal asked. “After all, he was blackmailing you wasn’t he? I’m thinking when he and Dean put their heads together, he found out about your connection to Grant Edwards’ murder. That led him to suspect that your ex-husband was still alive. And that made you a blackmail target. And that made him a target for your murderous ex.”
Donner shook his head, but that didn’t hide the tiny beads of sweat beginning to appear on his forehead. “This really is a pretty fanciful group of conjectures, don’t you think?”
“What if everything you say is true?” Joan said, her eyes cutting toward the door. “There’s still no reason to hold me. I haven’t committed any crime. And I really must be going.”
For a moment Joan assumed the icy confidence Hannibal was accustomed to. She stood, smoothed down her skirt and moved as if she would walk past Hannibal and out the door. Hannibal pulled his gun in beside his waist and cocked his right fist.
“Him I’ll shoot if I have to,” Hannibal said. “You I’d just knock down. Remember my job is to save Dean Edwards, and nothing bad happened to him until you moved the knife.”
“What?” Donner stared at Joan, as if waiting for her to explain.
“Nobody else went into Dean’s apartment over your garage who was in any way connected to the murders. No one was there after Oscar’s death who didn’t belong there. Somebody would have noticed a strange man lurking around. So you’re the only one who could have hidden the murder weapon in Dean’s place. You implicated him.”
“No!” Joan said, still on her feet. “I like Dean. And you have got to let me go before another man close to me is hurt.”
“Another?” Hannibal’s mouth dropped open when it came to him. He had been so focused on reconstructing events of the past that he forgot about the present. The first killing might have been accidental, and the last may have been to protect old secrets, but the second, Grant Edwards’ murder, had surely been about jealousy. He looked up at Joan to find her again staring past him toward the door. She wanted out, and he suddenly realized why.
“Mark,” was all he had time to say before the impact to his lower back sent him sprawling across the room. His right arm hit the writing table and his left hit the bed, leaving no way to reduce the impact when his face thumped into the floor. Through the haze of semi-consciousness he could hear Joan’s heels clicking out of the room.
32
Hannibal felt the gun being pulled from his left hand and braced for the bullet that did not come. Instead he took one hard kick to his midsection. Hannibal felt he deserved it for unforgivable carelessness. Very slowly he turned onto his right side to scan his surroundings.
The cheap carpeting scraped his face when he landed. His breath rasped in his throat. Pain shot up his spine as he moved, but he faced his situation stoically. His sunglasses had flown from his face so he had a very clear view of Cook, Donner’s blonde haired escort from the German bar. The man looked even taller standing above Hannibal, pointing Hannibal’s own Sig Sauer down at him. He craned his head to find Donner, above and behind him, sitting calmly at the round table, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.
