Chapter TWENTY-NINE

Try to stay alive ... if you can ...

and if you can’t ...

Take the bastards down with you.

Lou Tanner, P.I. - 1935

I took a deep breath. This wouldn't be easy. “You threw me under the train. You set me up. Yeah, I know, you didn’t have a lot of choices, but you did it. One of your choices could have been telling the truth and standing by it.”

Hayes and Lockwood exchanged glances. Green-eyes heard me and decided he needed to listen in. Good.

“A stray fact keeps bothering me. I’ve never been able to figure out why Frannie was in the Bayview neighborhood when I met her. She didn’t belong there anymore than I did. But that spot is close to the Pointe.”

Elliott started to pale, or so I thought. Lights on didn’t help too much. Shadows were close, reaching out for us if we were foolish enough to turn our backs on them. The place looked older than it actually was, and the resulting sensation was cold, damp, and ugly.

Green-eyes positioned himself at the corridor leading away from the murder site.

Valentini was still waiting under a sheet to be moved off to the morgue on Drumm Street. Somerset had been pulled off of him and lined up beside him. Two men locked together in mutual hate and now all they had was each other in death.

I took another deep breath. My insides and outsides raged at the brutal treatment they took on behalf of my gullibility. But nothing like the hammering my heart was about to take. And to give.

“You and your company, Mr. Lockwood, worked a sweet deal with the Militia over at the Pointe. You’ve supplied them for a while with raw materials. Is it better refined metals and batteries nowadays? Or more, if what I saw on Gilbert Halliday’s desk is any indicator? Your cousin, Gilbert, you remember him?” I was being snide because I could. “All in all, not illegal though a little untidy morality-wise. Probably helped the War Department looked the other way.” Hayes stifled a cough. “Frannie found out and in her practiced medium of blackmail, ingratiated herself into what was becoming a lucrative business. She became your partner, didn’t she, in selling the Militia whatever they need and want?”

He kept staring, an unusual practice for Lockwood. I guess he didn’t need to look away while facing the truth. No point in hiding.

“I don’t know if you meant to or not, I'm choosing to believe you didn't but you set up Frannie by telling Irenie what was going on and where Frannie would be. You either told her outright or let it slip that Frannie was handling some business for you. Irenie of course told Somerset and sent him to kill Frannie. Somerset agreed to the opportunity to frame up Willkie Valentini. Irenie had simple needs — her daughter either home and under her control, or dead. As luck would have it, Frannie ran into me that night. Then she stole my cab.”

“While I choose to believe you didn't fully understand the danger you put your stepdaughter in, you’re still not off the hook yet, Mr. Lockwood. You've known all the players all along. You made friends with Somerset some time ago, meeting him through Irenie and helping her foot the bill to pay him off. All you wanted was to keep the cops at bay and to keep the Coventry girls from embarrassing you. Even if you didn’t know Frannie was set up for murder, once you were in the middle of it all, Somerset had you by the short hairs. He made you set me up to be kidnapped and killed by Skates.”

“No. Lou, I didn’t.” He reached out and touched my arm. A pitiful, pathetic electricity raced through me. This time I ignored it.

“Yeah, you did. Somerset came to arrest you at my office, but you expected the cop to let you go. Remember, you wouldn’t give me your lawyer’s name. Why? Because you were certain you wouldn’t be under arrest for very long.”

God he was pretty, but his eyes were betraying him. Those beautiful blue eyes. Sad. Frightened, as he glanced at Hayes every few seconds. Caught in the act. What a weakling, and I almost fell for him. Not "almost." I had. But I came to my senses.

He heaved a sigh. “Somerset said nothing would happen to you. He wanted you out of the way for a bit.” Lockwood looked away. Damn it. There it was, the one lie I’d hoped he wouldn’t tell.

My good will deflated — the only word I could think of. I had so hoped he would be more than a gentleman: he’d be honorable. “They drugged me and beat the hell out of me. They had every intention of killing me!” My voice ended on a shrill, higher note. “You aren’t stupid, Mr. Lockwood. You knew what was at stake. Men like Skates Berk kill people. Somerset was dealing a dirty hand. You put your needs and profit ahead of everything, including me.”

He pulled me in by the waist. “I tried to keep you out of the whole business.” He wanted to be forgiven. “I told you to stop. I paid you off ...”

I wanted none of this. I pushed him away, with every bruise, cut, and bullet hole screaming at me. “Five people are dead. And I killed one of them. Self-defense be damned, I killed a man.” My heart shriveled up with every word. Even Uncle Joe hadn’t killed anyone outside of a war zone.

Hayes stopped leaning against the wall. His hand dropped down on Lockwood’s shoulder and gripped him hard. “We’re going to want to ask you several questions, Mr. Lockwood. You’ll need to come with me.”

“No, Mr. Lockwood." I could never call him Elliott again. "You need to go with him. I don’t know if you broke any laws directly, but you have answers to give. And all the negative publicity you’ve been trying to avoid? I think the rabbit is out of the hat now and everyone knows how the trick was done. I’m sorry, but this is bigger than a murder or two. This is, oh hell, I don’t know what to say to you anymore. Do yourself a favor and be honest for the first time this year. Maybe the first time in your whole life.”

His face contorted in confusion, making me wonder what it was I ever saw in it, and maybe I was a bit relieved as Hayes handed him off to another agent, who took him down a corridor out past the carousel.

Me? I stood there, torn between calling myself a complete idiot and feeling pride in solving my first case. Yet, I couldn’t get past the image of Somerset dying. His smoldering coat, his listless body draped over Valentini in some Shakespearean lover's embrace of death — because of me. He’d saved my life. Why? Why had he turned on me after saving me? I wasn’t getting an answer. He was dead. It didn’t matter to me that Hayes shot him in the head, Somerset was dying before that.

I heard you never forget your first kill. Do you ever get over it? Uncle Joe didn't offer any words of wisdom for this in his journal. The empty spot where my heart once pumped waited silent and frozen.

Hayes chewed on the inside of his lip, then announced to me, “Let me take the heat for Somerset.”

Grabbing me by the shoulders, Hayes stared straight into my eyes — hell, into my soul. “I took down Somerset. My Lightning Gun, my take down. Do you hear me?”

“Don’t lie for me,” I whispered. “I didn’t get into this business without knowing this could happen.”

I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. I clung to “naïve” and felt my skin start to flame. “I won’t take the fall for someone else, but I sure as hell won’t let someone take it for me. I’m a grown woman. I’m a good P.I. You can’t have my glory and you can’t have my failures. Those are mine to have. All of them. Do you understand me?”

I watched as he shifted his weight away from me. My voice had been low, solid, and unwelcoming to critique. Uncle Joe once told me he only worried about me when I got quiet.

“Okay, Lou. They may ask a lot of uncomfortable questions. You may be giving depositions for days. But, you know that already, don’t you?”

“It shouldn’t. But it does. I better get used to it and quick. No one honest wants ...” I stopped, letting the words fall away with the thought. I was explaining it to myself with Hayes as my audience. He already knew what I wanted to say. “Look, Agent Hayes.” I took in a deep breath. “Thank you. I appreciate the gesture.”

He opened his mouth, heaven only knew what he was planning to argue, what he was trying to convince me of. Damn glad he didn’t. I didn’t need him talking me out of my responsibilities.

I killed a man. I stared into his eyes and seen his life disappear into the ether. Pemberton’s manual didn’t talk about such topics in any conclusive detail. No one did. It was a dark secret left to carve a void in one’s soul. All those doughboys coming back from the Great War? Yeah, I understood them now. How the killing of another human being left you not right with the world.

Would I get over it — recover my senses? Sure. Happens every day for a professional in this business, right, but the first kill was hard, while the next one gets easier and it keeps on getting easier. God help me, I never want it to be easy.

Behind me, the fog horns howled with laughter and I still wasn’t sure if I got the joke.

Stan’s place. I needed a drink, a pack of cigarettes, and some Billie Holliday on the radio.

T.E. MacArthur is a New York Times best-selling author – okay, that’s not true, she’s still working on it. There are, however, more than seven novels and novellas with her name on them, including the multiple award-winning paranormal thriller, The Skin Thief, that should be NYT best sellers. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her cat, Onyx Calypso, in the Lower Catswold District of her apartment.