Read Ebook: Twelve Times Zero by Browne Howard

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 514 lines and 23380 words, and 11 pages

"These things take time, Miss North. If I were you I'd--"

Naia North failed to respond to the light touch. "I'm through filling wastebaskets," she said flatly. "Either you do something about this or the newspapers get the entire story. Not that I'll enjoy being a public spectacle, but at least they'll give me some action."

"What do you want done?"

"Who did?"

She looked straight into his eyes. "I did."

"Why?"

Slowly she straightened and leaned back in the chair, her gaze shifting to a point beyond his left shoulder. "Nothing you haven't heard before," she said tonelessly.

"We met several months ago and fell in love. I let him make the rules ... and after a while he got tired of playing. I didn't--and I wanted him back. For weeks he avoided me."

"So you decided to kill him."

She seemed genuinely astonished at the remark. "Certainly not! But when I saw him take this woman--this assistant of his, or whatever she was--into his arms ... I suppose I went a little crazy."

"Now," Kirk said, "we're getting down to cases. You know the evidence given at the trial--particularly that given by Gilmore's secretary?"

"Of course."

"Then you know this Dakin woman was in the laboratory until a few minutes before Cordell showed up. You know that nobody could have gone into that laboratory without her seeing them. You know that Alma Dakin testified that there were only two people in there: Gilmore and Juanita Cordell. So, Miss North, how did you get in there after Alma Dakin left and before Paul Cordell arrived?"

"But I didn't."

The Lieutenant's air of triumph sagged under a sudden frown. "What do you mean you didn't?"

"I was there all the time," the girl repeated. "Since noon, to be exact. I planned it that way. I knew everybody would be out to lunch between twelve and one, so I went to the laboratory with the intention of facing Greg there on his return. When I heard him and Mrs. Cordell coming along the corridor, I sort of lost my nerve and hid in a coat closet."

Martin Kirk had completely dropped his air of good-humored patience by this time, "You telling me you were hiding in there for almost five hours without them knowing it?"

Naia North shrugged her shoulders. "They had no reason to look in the closet. I'll admit I hadn't intended to--to spy on Greg. But I kept waiting for him to say or do something that would prove or disprove he was in love with Juanita Cordell, and not until his secretary left and he was alone with her did I discover what was between them. I must have come out of that dark hole like a tiger, Lieutenant. They jumped apart and two people never looked guiltier. He said something particularly nasty to me and I grabbed up a short length of shiny metal from the workbench and hit him across the side of the head before he knew what was happening. He fell down and the Cordell woman opened her mouth to scream and--and I hit her too."

She paused as though to permit Kirk to comment. "Go on," he said hoarsely.

"There's not much left," the girl said. "I was standing there still holding that piece of metal when the door crashed open and the dead woman's husband ran in. He started to lunge across the room at me and I threw the thing I was holding at him. It struck him and he fell down. My only thought was to hide, for I realized I couldn't go out through the outer office, and the only window was barred. So I hid in that closet again.

"It was only a few minutes before Paul Cordell regained consciousness. He staggered out of the room and down the hall and I could hear a lot of excited talk and Greg's secretary calling the police. Then I didn't hear anything at all for a moment, so I came out of the closet and looked down the hall. The office door was closed, but it seemed so quiet in there that I tiptoed quickly to the inner door, opened it a crack and peered through. The office was deserted; evidently Cordell and Miss Dakin had gone out to direct the police when they showed up.

"When I saw there was no one in the main hall of the building itself, I simply walked out and left by another exit. No one I passed even noticed me."

For a long time after Naia North had finished speaking, Martin Kirk sat as though carved from stone, staring blindly into space. She knew he was thinking furiously, weighing the plausibility of what he had heard, trying to arrive at some method of corroborating it in a way that would stand up in a court of law.

"Miss North."

She came out of a reverie with a start, to find the Lieutenant's eyes boring into hers. "This shiny hunk of metal you used: where is it now?"

"I'm sure I wouldn't know. Probably some place in the laboratory, unless somebody took it away. I do seem to remember picking it up and tossing it back with several others like it on the bench."

"Then it's still there," he said slowly. "Judge Reed ordered the room sealed up until after the trial. And then there's the closet.... Were you wearing gloves that afternoon, Miss North?"

She said, "No. You're thinking of fingerprints?"

"If you're telling the truth," he said, "there's almost certain to be some of your prints on the inside of that closet door--maybe even on that length of metal, if we can find it."

She said almost carelessly: "That's all you'd need to clear Paul Cordell, isn't it?"

"It would certainly help." He swung around in the chair, scooped up the telephone and gave a series of rapid-fire orders, then dropped the instrument on its cradle and turned back to where she sat watching him curiously.

She had opened her bag and taken out a cigarette. Kirk ignited one of his kitchen matches and she bent her head for a light. He could see the flawless curve of one cheek and the smooth cap of blonde hair, and he resisted the urge to pass a hand lightly across both. Something was stirring inside the Lieutenant--something that had long been absent. And, he reflected wryly, all because of a girl who had just finished confessing to two particularly unpleasant murders.

Naia North raised her head and their eyes met--met and held. Her lips parted slightly as she caught the unmistakable message in those gray-blue depths....

The moment passed, the spell was broken and she leaned back in the chair and laughed a little shakily. "I read about those statements of his in the papers, Lieutenant. I think perhaps I can at least partially explain them. As I remember it, there were several Bunsen burners lighted on the laboratory bench near that window. They give off a blue flame, you know, and I must have been standing near them when Paul Cordell came charging in. In his confused frame of mind, he may have pictured me as being in a ball of flame."

"Sounds possible," the man admitted, frowning. "What about those flashes of light?"

"You've got me there. Unless they were reflections of sunlight through the window--from the windshield of a passing car, perhaps."

"And the things he heard you and Gilmore saying?"

She shook her head regretfully.

"There I'm simply in the dark, I don't see how he could have twisted what little we said into the utterly fantastic nonsense he claims to have heard."

The girl smiled faintly. "'Lovely head', Lieutenant?"

Kirk flushed to the eyebrows. "That slipped out.... Why the confession?"

He watched as she drew smoke from the cigarette deeply into her lungs and let it flow out in twin streamers from her nostrils. Only rich men, he thought, could afford a woman like this, and somehow it made him resentful. What right did she have to walk in here and flaunt a body like that in his face? She went with mink stoles and cabin cruisers and cocktails at the Sherry-Netherland, and her shoe bill would exceed his yearly salary. She would be competent and more than a little cynical and not too concerned with morals or the lack of them. That kind of woman could kill--and would kill, on the spur of the moment and if the provocation was strong enough.

"Well, Lieutenant?" She said it lightly, almost with disinterest.

Then Kirk was all right again, and he was looking at a woman who had just confessed to murder.

"And if those men don't find anything?"

They found the fingerprints: several perfect ones on the inner door of the laboratory coat closet. But even more conclusive was their discovery of a short length of polished metal pipe among the dismantled parts of a Clayton centrifuge. At one end of the pipe were the imprints of four fingertips--at the other a microscopic trace of human blood.

"We had no business missing it the first time, Lieutenant," the Crime Laboratory technician told Kirk ruefully. "I'd a sworn we pulled that place apart last month. But this time we got the murder weapon and we got the prints--and those prints match the ones we took off that blonde. Hey, how about that, Lieutenant? I thought this Cordell guy did that job?"

Slowly Kirk replaced the receiver and eyed Naia North across the desk from him. "Looks like you're elected," he said somberly. "I'm telling you straight: the D. A. isn't going to like this at all--not even any part of it."

Her brow wrinkled. "I'm afraid I don't understand. Doesn't he want murder cases solved?"

He glanced up at the office clock. It was nearly nine o'clock in the evening, and both of them were showing signs of wear. Kirk left his chair and went over to the water cooler, drank two cupfuls and brought one back to the girl. She thanked him with a wan smile and gulped down the contents.

He took the empty paper container and crumpled it slowly. "Might as well get hold of him," he muttered. "It's going to be mighty damned rough, sister. You sure you want to go through with it?"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet