to death of the sight of her, her despair might have moved me a little—not much, but maybe a little. ‘I couldn’t help it. He—he’s been blackmailing me for months.’
I drank a little of the Scotch. It tasted fine: strong enough and cold enough and with just the right bite in it.
‘You mean Oscar has been blackmailing you for months?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you thought it would be a bright idea if he blackmailed me as well?’
‘I couldn’t help it.’ Again she wrung her hands. As a repeat performance it wasn’t quite so convincing. ‘He found out you had all this money…’
‘You mean you told him?’
‘No, I didn’t. I swear I didn’t!’ She stared at me, tears still on her pale face, her eyes wide and miserable. ‘He found out.’
‘Look, don’t give me that stuff,’ I said angrily. ‘For heaven’s sake, try to make your story convincing. He couldn’t have found out. Only you and Aitken knew how much I was going to put into the business. Aitken wouldn’t have told him, so you must have.’
She squirmed in her chair as she tried desperately to keep ahead with her lies.
‘I—I didn’t mean to tell him, Ches. You’ve got to believe me. We were talking together, and I said I knew someone who had a lot of money and I wish I had it. I never thought he would… It just happened… it slipped out. I didn’t intend to tell him.’
‘But you told him?’
She went back to the trick of squeezing her hands between her knees.
‘Yes, but I didn’t meant to.’
‘Why has he been blackmailing you for months?’
She hesitated, looking away, moving uneasily. ‘I can’t tell you that, Ches. It—it’s private. It was something I did…’
‘Like taking some interesting man down on a lonely beach?’
‘Of course not. I—I’ve never done that before.’
‘Well, all right, let it ride. So he was blackmailing you, and in spite of that you used to have little chats with him like telling him about your husband’s employees and how much money they have.’
‘It wasn’t like that at all…’
‘I bet it wasn’t. Okay, don’t look so indignant. Anyway, I bet it was his idea for you to persuade me to teach you to drive and to take you down on the beach.’
‘Yes.’
She lifted her hair off her shoulders. That was a trick she hadn’t tried for some time.
‘And you have no idea why you were persuading me to go down to the beach?’
‘No. He—he didn’t tell me.’
‘And because he blackmails you, you do what he tells you?’
She fidgeted with her hands, blood rising into her face.
‘I have to do what he tells me.’
‘Do you pay him money?’
She flinched.
‘No—I haven’t any.’
‘He extracts his blackmail by making you do what he tells you?’
‘Yes.’
‘After you had acted out your little scene with me,’ I went on, watching her, ‘you drove off and somehow managed to kill a policeman. You promptly drove to the nearest telephone and called Oscar and told him what you had done. He saw this was a much more powerful weapon to use against me and instructed you to go to my place and stage another little scene, persuading me to take the responsibility, then he assured you he would move in and collect the money. You, because you have to do what he tells you, followed his instructions to the letter, even trying to persuade me by threats of telling your husband if I didn’t pay up.’
She began to beat her fists together again.
‘It didn’t happen like that at all, Ches! I didn’t telephone him. I came straight here.’
‘I don’t believe you, Lucille. I don’t believe Ross is blackmailing you. I think you and he are working on this thing together.’
‘You’re wrong, Ches! I swear we’re not,’ she said. ‘It is exactly as I told you.’
I studied her, convinced she was lying.
‘Okay. I’ll tell you what we’ll do. We’ll go together and talk to Ross. I’d like to hear what he has to say if we come on him unprepared. You wait here. I’m going to change, and then you and I will go and talk to him.’
I went out of the lounge, shutting the door before she could protest, walked down to my bedroom, opened the door but didn’t go into the room. I slammed the door shut, then stepped quickly into the spare bedroom, pushing the door ajar and listened.
I heard the lounge door open gently. Looking out, I saw Lucille step into the hall and stare down the passage at my closed bedroom door, then she stepped back into the lounge again and shut the door. A moment later I heard the faint tinkle of the telephone bell as she began to dial.
I had set the trap for her and she had walked into it.
I crept down the passage and listened against the door panel.
I heard her say: ‘What shall I do? I don’t think he’s going to pay. No… I can’t handle him any more. You’ll have to do something…’
I turned the door handle and walked into the room.
Lucille hurriedly replaced the receiver and moved quickly away from the telephone.
‘All right, all right,’ I said, ‘don’t look so guilty and embarrassed. I heard you. Now will you admit you’re working with him?’
She turned slowly and stared at me. Her face was white and her eyes showed her hatred of me. She was no longer young nor fresh nor beautiful. She looked older, defeated and trapped.
‘You think you’re smart, don’t you?’ she said, her voice stifled with hatred. ‘Well, all right, I admit it. But you’re going to give us the money! You can’t prove I was with you! You can’t prove I was driving! We’ve got a picture of you and the car. That’s something you can’t do anything about! If you don’t pay up, we’ll send the picture to the police. If you try to bring me into it, it’ll be your word against mine and you have no proof. I’ve got an alibi. I’ve got people who will say I was with them when he was killed. There’s nothing you can do but pay up and that’s what you’re going to do!’
I stood looking at her hard, vicious little face, and my mind jumped to the bloodstains on the off-side rear wheel of the car and I felt a cold chill snake up my spine.
Those stains had baffled me, but I realized now what they meant. This hadn’t been an accident. O’Brien had been murdered as Dolores and Nutley had been murdered.
‘You and Ross murdered him, didn’t you?’ I said. ‘The crash was faked. You knocked him on the head and you ran him over with the rear wheel of the Cadillac. You were jittery enough to make a mistake. You killed him with the wrong wheel. You should have run him over with your on-side wheel and not your offside wheel, Lucille. It’s a mistake like that that lands a killer in the gas chamber.’
She backed away from me, her face suddenly grey.
‘I didn’t kill him!’
‘You and Ross did,’ I said. ‘You planned to kill two birds with one stone, didn’t you? You planned to get rid of O’Brien and get thirty thousand dollars out of me.’
‘It’s not true!’ she said hoarsely. ‘You can’t prove anything! I didn’t kill him! If you don’t give me that money…’
‘You’re not going to get it,’ I said and I moved over to the french windows, undid the two curtain cords and pulled them free. ‘I have a busy afternoon ahead of me,’ I went on, looking at her. ‘I want to find out why you had to kill O’Brien. I don’t want you in the way. I’m going to tie you up, Lucille, and keep you here, until I find out what I want to find out.’
Her eyes opened very wide and she began to back away.
