Free The Wrecking Crew by Donald Hamilton

mouth.
    We, stared at each other in silence, our faces less than a foot apart. He was quite a handsome and distinguished-looking man, with thick, black, well-combed hair, grayed at the temples. He had a little black moustache. He hadn’t been wearing a moustache when I’d seen him last, there’d been no gray in his hair, and his arm had been in a cast up to the shoulder.
    “You are careless, Eric,” he murmured, taking his hand away. “You sleep too heavy. And you still have bad dreams.”
    “I don’t know why they bother with a key for this room, the way people wander in and out at will,” I said. “Roll up your left sleeve.”
    He laughed. “Ah, we play tricks. It was the right one, don’t you recall?” He started to take off his coat.
    “Hi, Vance,” I said. “Never mind stripping. I remember you.”
    I got up, shook my head to clear it, went into the bathroom and started the hot water running. I got a jar of instant coffee and a plastic cup out of my suitcase. I loaded the cup with the powder and went back to the bathroom to fill it. The water was almost hot enough. I sat down on the bed to drink, without offering any to Vance. I hadn’t invited him. If he was thirsty, he could supply is own coffee, or at least his own cup.
    “Don’t smoke,” I said to him as he produced cigarettes. “I don’t, and somebody might wonder who stunk up the curtains.”
    He chuckled and lit the cigarette. “They will think it was just your lady friend. The one with the strange hair.”
    I rose and knocked the cigarette from his fingers and stepped on it. “I said don’t do it!”
    He looked up at me. “Careful, Eric!”
    I said, “I could take you, Vance. I could always take you.”
    He said calmly, “It was never proved. Some time we must try. But not here and now.”
    I sat down on the bed again, and polished off my almost-warm-enough coffee. “Sorry, amigo ,” I said. “I’ve had a rough night, and nembutal makes me irritable. Furthermore, I’m not in a mood for jocular references to the lady in question. She happens to be dead.”
    “Dead?” He frowned quickly. “The commotion in the park?” I nodded, and he said: “At whose hands? Yours?”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “One of my reasons for coming was to warn you against trusting her too far. It wasn’t a message we could send through her apparatus, naturally. It appears that her department is secretly investigating some derogatory reports, which they only recently got around to mentioning to us.”
    “I’d say the reports were probably correct,” I said. “But it was our man who got her. At least he announced himself by name, and now I’m inclined to think it actually was Caselius. Unfortunately, he gave me no opportunity to look at him in the light, and I think he was disguising his voice… It was a cat-and-mouse act, Vance. Kind of lousy. They let her assist at her own funeral; they let her cooperate with them in making a holy spectacle of herself; they let her think until the last moment that she was just helping them to kid me along. Then they killed her. He killed her.
    “It was a great joke, and whoever set it up would have wanted to be there to laugh. That’s why I think it was Caselius himself. He wouldn’t have bothered to arrange all that specialized fun for another guy. He’d have wanted to be there to finish her off himself, and see the horror in her eyes as she realized how cruelly she’d been tricked.” After a moment, I said, “I figure he killed her because she’d served her purpose and he couldn’t leave her alive to talk. That means she had something to talk about. I’ve got to go on to Kiruna in the morning with the Taylor woman. Can you check on two men for me?”
    “I can try.”
    I said, “One man I don’t know. But she said she was going to be married as soon as she finished her tour of duty here; and I think the bereaved fiancé deserves a little of our attention. Somebody filled her full of fine ideals