“That night at his house. After dinner, he kept talking about how good it felt to be starting over. I guess he really meant that, huh?”
“Alex, what are you talking abouti”
“Next question,” I said. “How did you get Raymond Julius to kill those two bookmakers? I mean, I knew you were very persuasive…”
“What in God’s name is wrong with you?”
“And how did you get him to believe that my gun wasn’t real, of ail things?”
Uttley just sat there looking at me, shaking his head like I was a lunatic.
“And when did this whole thing start, anyway?” I said. “Does this go all the way back to when you asked me to be your private investigator? Was that all a setup from the very beginning?”
“I think you need to see somebody,” he said. “I know you’ve been through a lot. It’s obviously gotten to you.”
“Here’s another question,” I said. “This one I really need you to answer. Would you have killed me if you had to?”
He stopped shaking his head. He just sat there. He looked at me without blinking.
“The night you sent Julius over,” I said, “he was just supposed to scare me, right? Is that what you told him? Leave the silencer at home, make a lot of noise? Don’t worry, his gun isn’t even real? You were right there behind him, weren’t you. You weren’t at the Fultons’ house. You didn’t call me. You were right behind him and you came along just as soon as you thought it was all over. And fortunately, I guess, everything worked out the way it was supposed to. But what if it hadn’t? What if I had just wounded him? What if I had disarmed him? If he had accidentally killed me, that one’s easy. You just shoot him. Tell the police you were trying to save me. But what if we had both been alive when you got there? Would you have killed both of us? I’m sure you had your Beretta with you.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out the very same gun. “You mean this one?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“Please put your gun on the table,” he said.
“I don’t have it, remember? The police have it.”
“I’m not stupid, Alex. You must have another gun.”
“No,” I said. “Why would I need one? You’re no threat to me. And I’m no threat to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can’t kill me now,” I said. “That would ruin everything. You’d have to dispose of my body, or try to make up some wild story about me threatening you or something. It would all fall apart eventually. And Mrs. Fulton would not be happy about that, would she.”
Just saying her name, I could tell that it registered. I could see it in his eyes.
“And why are you no threat to me?” he said.
“Because I can’t touch you,” I said. “You didn’t kill anybody. What am I going to say, arrest Lane Uttley because I think he made Julius do it? And by the way, Edwin isn’t even dead? It was all a plot and Mrs. Fulton is behind it, too? How far am I going to get with that?”
I watched him as he thought it over.
“I’m not here to stop you,” I said. “There’s no tape recorder, no police outside waiting to break the door down. I’m not going to stand in your way.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you to tell me why you did this,” I said. “That’s all. Why did you put me through all this?” I watched him shift the gun in his hand. I knew the man wanted to tell me how it happened. Above everything else, in his heart the man would always be a lawyer. And lawyers have to talk. Especially about how smart they are.
“Because you were the right man for the job,” he said. “But you have to understand. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Tell me how it worked,” I said. “Tell me from the beginning. You owe me that much.”
“It all starts with Edwin’s gambling problem,” he said. “That much you probably know. What you don’t know is how big his problem is. He was into those guys for a good half a million.”
“That’s not that much,” I said. “Not for a Fulton.”
“That was just the current total,” he said. “He had lots of other big debts in the past. He paid them all. He was draining money out of the Fulton Foundation. His mother found out. She threatened to cut him off if he didn’t stop gambling. He tried to stop, but he couldn’t. She put the squeeze on him, cut off a lot of the money. He fell behind on the debt, started betting even more, trying to win it back. The bookmakers, they started to lean on him a little bit. They wanted their juice every week, just maintenance on the debt. They’re all connected, of course. It’s all one big network.”
“Of course,” I said. “So why kill two bookmakers? They’re just the frontmen. The debt would just get picked up by someone else.”
“That’s what I tried to tell Mrs. Fulton. I told her it would be like that Hydra monster, you know, the one that Hercules had to kill? You cut off one head and two more grow back? But she was adamant. I think part of it was she didn’t want to pay those guys any more money. They were calling the house, making threats. They found out her private number and starting calling her. I think that’s what did it. She wanted them dead. And Mrs. Fulton gets what she wants.”
“So hire a hit man,” I said. “Like any other rich person would.”
“No. She didn’t want that. She said if we hired somebody, then that person would have an angle on her. He’d blackmail her. That’s the way she saw people. Everyone wanted a piece of her. All the things she’s been through, who can blame her? So she wanted a way to get rid of the bookmakers. Get Edwin away from gambling, if that was possible. And she wanted it to be clean. No loose ends.”
“Did Edwin know about all this?”
“Not at first,” he said. “She left it up to me. I had Prudell working for me, and he had this other guy, Raymond Julius. This guy was psychotic. He came to me a few times on the side, told me he wanted to be my private investigator. Said he’d do a lot better job than Prudell. Said he’d be willing to do anything that had to be done. That got me thinking. So I started asking him questions. What kind of things would you do? Would you do the tough things? The real dirty work? He said the dirtier the better. He told me about all these guns he had, all of them unlicensed. I asked him why he didn’t have permits, and he just started going off on the fed, the international plot to make a one-world government and to take everyone’s guns away, you know, all the psycho gun-nut conspiracy horseshit. So I tried leading him on a little bit, just to see how he would react. I told him I might be involved with an underground movement that was trying to fight the international conspiracy, and that we might need someone to do some important secret work for us.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“I know it all sounds crazy. But this guy ate it up. I told Mrs. Fulton about this. That it might be a possible avenue to explore. She jumped all over the idea. She wanted it done as soon as possible. Have Julius kill the two bookmakers, then have someone kill Julius. Problem was, she wanted me to kill Julius. But I just… I couldn’t do it. So she said, have Prudell do it. But do it carefully, with no loose ends. Don’t let Prudell know what’s happening. Make it look like Julius is coming after him or something, so he has to kill him. But that was no good, either. I wouldn’t trust Prudell to kill a gopher with a shovel.”
“So that’s where I come in?”
“Mrs. Fulton knew about you. Edwin was always talking about you. She wanted details, so I told her everything I knew. You being a policeman, getting shot. She was particularly interested in that part. She wanted to know how it happened. She wanted me to find the news clippings. So I did. She read them all, and she told me that you would be perfect because you knew what fear felt like. That was the one thing you can always count on, she said. She knew from her own experience. The fear never leaves you.”
“So you did have this planned out from the beginning,” I said. “Before you even hired me. Before you even asked me if I wanted to become a private investigator.”
“Yes,” he said. He must have sensed the anger in my voice. He jiggled the gun in his hand as if to remind me that it was still pointed at me. “But remember, none of this was my idea.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You were just the helpless pawn in this game. So what happens next? You get Julius to kill Tony Bing and I get to come see it? What was that for?”
