Burden of Guilt Read online

  “Drop it!” Stevens and I said simultaneously.

  “What the hell?” he said thickly. “I’m a cop-killer. What difference does it make?”

  “You’re right, Lou,” I whispered. “What the hell difference does it make? That was my partner you shot in the back of the head, up in the shack. Even if you drop the gun, I’ll probably kill you, anyway!”

  “The lieutenant is always the big kidder, Fisher!” Stevens said suddenly in a harsh voice. “So you drop the gun before I count three, and you stay alive. Three-and-a-half comes after you’re dead!”

  Fisher dropped his gun before the count of two, and I forced my stiffened index finger carefully away from the trigger of the thirty-eight. Then the reaction set in, and Fisher’s knees suddenly spilled from under him and he collapsed onto the floor. I looked around and saw Wanda had vanished. Then her head appeared cautiously above the bar top.

  “Is it all over?” she asked nervously.

  Stevens grinned at me, then his face sobered. “I’m sorry I butted in on you, Lieutenant.” His voice sounded embarrassed. “I just kind of figured that Sergeant Polnik wouldn’t have liked it that way.”

  “You were right,” I told him. “That’s one of the reasons why I brought you along with me tonight, in case I forgot for a moment. And I did!”

  I looked around at the enormous, and still petrified, hazel eyes, and said, “Don’t just stand there, Wanda, make us a drink!”

  “There’s something else, Lieutenant.” Stevens still sounded embarrassed. “I guess it’s none of my business, but I couldn’t help overhearing you blaming yourself for Sergeant Polnik’s death, early this morning. It was all your fault, you said, because you forgot to warn him there could be two of them inside the shack. But the way it actually happened, nobody could have foreseen. Fisher panicked and killed Dana, then ran into the front room to hide. The sound of the shots brought the sergeant into the shack to investigate, then Fisher came up in back of him, and killed him.” He looked at me determinedly. “You see, Lieutenant? It would have happened to anyone. If it had been you, or me, or the sheriff, instead of Sergeant Polnik, it wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference, the guy would still be dead!”

  “You’re a mine of information,” I grunted. “Since you’re so smart already, just what the hell did Doc Murphy hypo me with this morning?”

  He grinned uncontrollably. “Just a pretty strong dose of sedative, Lieutenant. Only the doc figured, the way you were feeling about the sergeant right then, the first thing you’d do when you woke up again was go after his killer. He said—and I’m strictly quoting the doc!—‘That Wheeler is an impossible bastard at the best of times. When he wakes up this time, it’ll be like he’s got a mess of fighting leopards inside his skull, so we’d better clear a way for him.’ So he told Sheriff Lavers a wild story about how he had accidentally given you a shot of the wrong serum, and the stuff he’d given you was strictly in the experimental stages, around ten times stronger than LSD. He even gave him the Jekyll-and-Hyde crap how it would bring out the worst character traits into complete dominance until the effect of the drug wears off. He warned the sheriff, at all costs, not to get the wrong side of you so you developed a grudge against him. The sheriff swallowed the whole thing, and told Miss Jackson about it, and she did the same. It’s been the standing gag of the office ever since this morning!”

  “Do you want a drink, or not?” Wanda asked plaintively from in back of us. “I’ve already drunk the first three I made.”

  It was around a month later when I drove up in front of Lavers’s office at five-thirty in the evening, which is something I don’t do very often, but he’d insisted it was a special occasion. I took a little time for the thick veil of cigar smoke to clear, after I had closed the door in back of me, but it finally thinned out enough for me to see the guy standing beside the sheriff’s desk.

  “Maybe I should introduce you both,” Lavers said, with a bluff geniality that made me regret he, ever found out the truth about that wrong serum. “Lieutenant Wheeler, I’d like you to meet Sergeant Stevens.”

  “Sergeant!” I said in a shocked voice. “Things are that bad, we’ve gotten down to this?”

  “Sergeant Stevens will be on permanent loan to this office,” Lavers said smugly. “I had to twist both of Captain Parker’s arms up behind his back, but he finally gave in!”

  “He’s starting out on the traffic detail?” I asked idly.

  Stevens’s face went a bright red. “As I understood from the sheriff, I’m starting out as your partner, Lieutenant. But if you’d prefer not to—”

  “Wheeler knows!” Lavers chuckled fatly. “He asked for you. Who do you figure twisted both my arms up behind my back until we got what he wanted?”

  I checked my watch. “I’ve just got time for a drink, if we hurry.”

  Stevens shook his head dubiously as he studied his own watch. “So, if I’m late?” He shrugged. “It is a kind of special occasion!”

  “You join us, Sheriff?” I asked.

  “No, thanks,” he grunted. “Got things to do—politics!”

  We walked into the outer office and Stevens took a long, thoughtful look at the empty desk with the typewriter on top.

  “That Annabelle Jackson,” he said casually. “Your private property, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” I said honestly. “We date once in a while. But there, my friend, is the kind of challenge you should leave alone until you’ve got a lot more experience!”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She might prefer a younger man.”

  By the time we hit the street, the red haze in front of my eyes was beginning to evaporate a little.

  “How about we have a drink in Charlie’s bar?” Stevens said. “If it’s all the same to you, that’s where I’m picking up my date.”

  I looked him steadily in the eye. “Small world!”

  “I never did see that Toni Del Guardo again!” He grinned. “You don’t have her chained under that monstrous couch of yours, by any chance, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” I grunted, “and that reminds me! That Barbie-Ellen of yours has never shown up again to do the chores, either. Sometimes, if I wake up in the middle of the night, I sneak out into the living room, just in case that itty-bitty ninety pounds of her is thrashing around on my couch, wearing nothing but her cute little leather boots!”

  We walked into the semidarkened atmosphere of Charlie’s bar and gravitated toward one end, where an elegant dark-haired lawyer was already perched on a barstool with her shapely legs crossed.

  “Hi, Moira,” I said. “You know Sergeant Stevens.”

  “Hi, Al,” she said brightly. “Of course I know Sergeant Stevens.”

  We were maybe halfway through our first drink when we were joined by a pocket Venus with chestnut-colored hair, wearing faded hip-hugging jeans and a loose-fitting shirt that was open almost all the way down to her navel to reveal the inner flanges of her jiggling breasts. Her dimples looked purely wanton when she smiled at the three of us, and I felt a small pang of envy.

  There was the usual chitchat until we had worked our way through a second drink. Then Stevens cleared his throat gently, in a more obvious kind of signal.

  “Well,” he said brightly. “I’ll guess we’ll have to be on our way. Coming, Wanda?”

  I looked meaningfully at Moira. The two girls looked at each other for a long, solemn moment, then nodded in unison.

  “Why do we need to break up the party?” Moira asked me innocently. “It’s okay with Wanda and me. We were discussing it the other day.”

  I looked at Stevens, and he looked at me. “Discussing what?” I demanded.

  “We thought it could be fun,” Wanda said.

  “What, for Chrissake?”

  “A little party. Just the four of us. Give more scope for the imagination, don’t you think? More variety.”

  “Well—” I hesitated, and looked again at Stevens, and from the look in his eye he didn’t think the i
dea was such a bad one. Nor did I, for that matter, conjuring up images of Moira and Wanda, and—I jumped quickly up off the stool and grabbed each girl’s arm. “Come on,” I urged. “Let’s go indulge ourselves in America’s favorite indoor game. Then we can have ourselves some dinner.”