Killer Mine (8 page)

Her voice was a weak whisper I could hardly hear. I bent my head closer and heard her say, “Al… was going to… let me… work. He… he said so. He wanted a… favor.”

“What favor, Paula?”

“Meet… somebody here,” she finally got out.

“Who, Paula, who?”

Instead of answering she said, “Al… was supposed to… come first. But…
he
did.” Her breathing came in a series of short gasps and she had trouble speaking.
“He
was… terrible.
He
did…” Whatever she was remembering stopped the flow of words.

After a few seconds her mouth moved again. “Al… came in. He… sat down. I tried to scream… then… then
he
hit me with something.”

Quietly, I asked again, “Who, Paula?”

Her eyes came back from the limbo they had been looking into. The glassy look vanished momentarily and they moved to focus on mine. I reached out to touch her and she drew back, the blood suddenly spurting from the ugly gash in her temple and her mouth opened to scream. The sound never came out. She died with her face contorted, mouth twisted in terror and in her eyes a hopeless look of staring into death itself.

The first squad car pulled to the curb outside and I heard heavy feet on the stairs. They came in and photographed the scene, took my statement, carted out the bodies past the group on the sidewalk who braved the rain to satisfy their morbidity, then Oliver and Bryan took me aside and it was like the first night when I was called in to look at the remains of Doug Kitchen lying on the sidewalk.

Captain Oliver said, “We can’t let this one ride, Joe. It’s wide open now. We’re going to have our heads handed to us and yours comes in on a silver platter.”

“Screw it.”

“You were there,” Inspector Bryan told me bleakly.

“Sure, too late. I had no choice. I told you I saw somebody across the street. Let’s say it was Beamish and Loefert. Al Reese set up a date with our killer and had them along for insurance. Only trouble was, the killer was wise, popped Reese and waited for Beamish and Loefert and got them too.”

Bryan nodded. “We’ll have to wait for ballistics to run a test, but the bullets in Beamish and Loefert are the same calibre as the one that went into the wall over your head. We haven’t found the one that went through Reese yet. None of them came from those hoods’ guns.”

We stood there in the rain with nothing much to say until Captain Oliver coughed and without looking at me, said, “You’ll have to come off it, Joe. We can’t take the heat that’s going to come.”

“You gave me two days, remember?”

“We’ll have to take it back. If the Lees dame had talked maybe we could have had something, but we’re still up in the ah-.”

“Let me have tonight then.”

“No more,” Bryan said abruptly. “It won’t do any good, but you have that much. Now let’s get the hell out of this rain.”

CHAPTER NINE

I HAD to walk it out. I could never go back to where I left her waiting for me until it was finished. I circled the perimeter of the place that had given me birth and raised me with the smell of it in my nose and the feel of it in my fingers and thought about what had happened and tugged at the string that led to the end, and all I could do was unravel an unending ball of confusion.

At the corner I stopped and opened the call box, rousted Mack Brissom from the coffee he was having over his late reports and gave him the details of the night. He said, “Tough, Joe.”

“That’s the way it goes, Mack. We checked out your inquiry about Gus Wilder and…”

“Forget it” he said, “Wilder’s out.”

“What?”

“His body turned up three hours ago. He knocked himself off with a .22 target pistol the same day he was supposed to appear for trial. I got a Coroner’s report right here on my desk. He’s been dead all this time.”

“Damn,” I said. I hung up and shut the door on the call box and went back down the street

The knots were in the string now and it was pulled tight. It was a different string, and the knots were tied in an odd direction, but they made the shape of a noose and were a terrible thing to look at.

I knew where I was going now. It was the only place I could go. No, Paula Lees hadn’t talked, but had said something without a word that was more important than anyone else. She had told me the same thing Papa Jones had told me that I didn’t want to hear and deliberately let it pass.

A lot of things spoke the truth. The simple fact that I was here again was part of it. I couldn’t help coming back either. I reached the corner and walked down to where the police car was parked and had the officer drive me to the street I hated to see. Since that morning, the construction crews had begun to move in their equipment that would demolish the whole place to make way for a new project building financed by the taxpayers and turned into a handsome garbage pit by the same people the housing project dispossessed.

I got out of the car slowly, dismissed the driver and stood looking up at the darkened windows of the apartment. The cold rain pelted the glass, making it look like a black mirror, an evil, nasty pair of eyes in the face of an evil, nasty building. There was something disgusting about it all, something foul and dirty, even unthinkable.

Up there, behind that darkened window, I had to kill myself. Up there I’d know what it would be like to lie dead, knowing the feeling and sight of featureless expression, the laxity of death.

The gun in my pocket seemed too heavy, so I just took it out and crossed the street with it in my hand. The front door was open. So was the inside one. Behind it was the yawning, cavernous mouth of the pitch black stairway and corridor.

One flight up and to the front.

In my mind I was picturing my face on the floor, half turned into the light, eyes partially open and the jaw slack. All consciousness gone. All conscience gone too. Nothing left. Just dead.

Under my feet the carpet was worn, and each step brought a musty, aged smell closer. From habit born long ago I stepped over the step that had pulled away from the wall, and as a kid would, counted my way toward the landing.

Four more to go. Then three, two, one and I was there. The door was ten feet away. I didn’t hurry. I wasn’t in a hurry to see what I looked like dead.

So I went slowly and when I had the knob under my hand I thumbed back the .38 Positive and thought how stupid it all was. And how it started. In a way, it had two starting points, but the first was last and the last first. At the last second I was thinking back over the simplicity and stupidity of the whole thing.

I pushed the door open with the nose of the gun. I didn’t need a light. One of the kerosene lanterns from the construction site outside was enough to make a pale orange glow enough to see by. He was sprawled out in an old beat up chair, the smoke from his cigarette drifting up lazily from his mouth.

I said, “Hello, Larry.”

And the one they had called Chief Crazy Horse, my own twin I had thought was dead a long time ago, turned and looked at me with that wild grin he could always muster up and said, “I was wondering when you’d turn up, Joe.”

“I’m here.”

“Too bad.”

“Is it?”

He dragged on the butt and flipped the remains of it across the floor. “You’re on the spot now, aren’t you?”

“I am.” It was a statement, not a question.

He looked at me and shrugged. “You should have known better.”

“I wish I had.” I paused and stared at him, seeing my own face reflected there. As long as he didn’t move or speak, it was me. Physically, there was no difference. Oh, a little, maybe, but time had done different things to both of us. Only mentally were we different and the gap between us was vast

Chief Crazy Horse. He had been aptly named.

It wasn’t easy to face, but it was true. He was crazy. He always had been.

“Why, Larry?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Maybe.”

He grinned again and stretched. “Listen, brother of mine, you got your ways and I got mine. We’re still brothers, ain’t we? Like I said, you’re on a spot.”

“You didn’t answer me, Larry.”

“Joe… come off it. You mean why what?”

“Start at the beginning, Larry, or shall I do it for you?”

“Let’s hear your version, brother. You always were the smart one. You liked to play the cop part and now you’re doing it right. So tell me. I’d like to hear about it.”

The gun was warmer now, nearly too warm to hold. It was a living thing there in my hand, held low at my side.

“You always enjoyed the wild life, Larry.”

“True. So who wants to be a slob? You think I could take this place like them others out there? Man, I wanted more than that”

“There were other ways of getting it.”

“Not for me, brother boy. After I faked getting myself knocked off by a land mine during the war, I picked up a record fast. Black market crap and all that under a real hero’s name who got checked off as a deserter. I wasn’t the employable type. Besides, I didn’t go for that eight-to-five routine.” He grinned again as if I understood. “But you ain’t telling me your version, Joe.”

“Suppose I pick it up from before Montreal.”

“Go ahead.”

“You tried a small bank job and bungled it. You were on the inside with the wrong people and got wind of the Montreal deal and hijacked the money from the driver who carried it.”

“Right so far, kid, but it wasn’t me who bungled the job. It was the idiot I had with me who got scared.”

I ignored him and said, “You made your way down here, coming home to hide like a salmon going upstream to breed where he was born himself.”

For a second Larry scowled, trying to understand the analogy, then broke into a chuckle and looked at me. “You got a way with words, boy.”

“Why here, Larry?”

“Where else? It seemed good enough. It would have been great if I didn’t make that call from Papa Jones’ place. I never figured the old goat would know me, but I guess he did. Then René spotted me and there I was.” He looked at the ceiling absently. “That dirty pig tried to screw me out of the cash. What got me was he thought I didn’t know what he was up to. Man, I was on to him from the first. Like that wasn’t bad enough, old Noisy Stuccio had to make a go at it with Hymie backing him up.” Larry glanced over at me and added, “They died easy, boy. Real easy.”

“Doug Kitchen didn’t.”

“What the hell… if he sounded off I’d have had it. Nobody else knew I was around.”

“Al Reese did.”

Larry grunted, his mouth twisting into a sneer. “That louse! Sure, René put him wise to get some cover and Reese was going to hit me up for a bundle. He got hit, all right. A permanent hit.” He swung around in his chair and curled a leg under him, nothing showing in his face at all. It was still just a game to him, a rooftop game that could end when he wanted to call it quits. “Hell, Joe, he woulda got to me sooner, only he didn’t know where I was. I had to get out of René’s place and I came here. Maybe he figured it out the same way you did, but he ran me down. If he had the chance he would have bumped me, only then he never would have gotten the money at all. So he sits here and gases with me… tries to soften me up by paying my way with some hooker named Paula Lees.”

“And you made the date,” I stated.

“Sure, why not? I knew what he was setting me up for. You think I didn’t know the mob had men in this neighborhood? Hell, brother boy, I seen ’em. I knew the word was out. I just couldn’t figure how they got the answer.”

“You aren’t that hard to decipher, Larry.”

He frowned again, his mouth tight while he thought about it. “Balls,” he said.

“You knew I was here, didn’t you?”

The frown went into an immediate grin, a kid having a change of pace in the conversation. “Sure I did. I seen you outside looking up here once when you were with little Giggie. Big broad now, that one.”

“Know why I was here?”

His shrug was elaborate. “Sure,” he repeated. “Cops and kills go together. This is your turf too, brother boy. They’d call you in for it. Didn’t they?”

“That’s right.”

“So what’s the complaint? Who got bumped? You think anybody’s gonna miss them slobs?”

“That isn’t the point, Larry.”

“Nuts,” he grunted.

“Where’s the money, kid?”

His smile was slow and came on as if I had told a joke. “You want a hunk too?”

“I don’t want any part of it at all.”

“No? Well, it’s where nobody can ever find it, brother boy.”

“What do you bet?”

Whatever was in my tone reached him and he stiffened in the chair. “What’re you getting at, Joe?”

“You never change, Larry. In some things you never change. Just as you came back to where it all started, your habits are the same. Want me to tell you where it is? In the same place you always used to hide things when you were a kid, in that space under the stairs we found together when we were about ten years old. You think I don’t remember it, but I can take you right to it and pull those boards off and show you whatever it was you hid there. A couple of suitcases maybe?”

The knuckles of his fingers were tight around the arm of the chair, biting deep into the padding. His one secret that he guarded so well was no secret at all and he was coming apart right before my eyes.

“Damn you,” he said.

“So it’s over, Larry. Let’s go easy, okay?”

“You… my brother… you’re gonna try and…”

“Larry,” I said, “you tried to kill me earlier. You didn’t care if I was your brother or not.”

His voice was cold, toneless. It sounded to me the way it must have sounded to René, Stuccio and the others. I wondered if he yelled that wild Indian yell with them like he did with Doug Kitchen that Paula Lees heard and told me about. That was the little thing that had bugged me. That yell. He used to do it when he was playing his Indian games.
I should have known then.

He said, “You should have minded your own business.”

“I was, Larry,” I said softly.

He didn’t look like me then. It wasn’t my face for a second. It was somebody else, a person I had never known and would never know. It was the face the dead men had seen, the face that had tortured Paula Lees into submission and now it was looking at me.

“I’m going, Joe.”

“With me,” I said.

“Not with you. Alone. I’ve always been alone.”

Before the words were out I knew what would happen. It was the one thing I had forgotten about.
“Chief Crazy Horse,”
I said. “You really are crazy.”

His hand was a blur of motion as he dug for the gun, the professional killer going into the act he knew best. But he forgot the old axiom of not being able to outdraw a man who already has a gun in his hand.

My own training and instincts reacted with his own and I felt the .38 buck once in my fist and a small, bluish dot suddenly centered in the middle of his forehead, snapping his head back with a jerk. Very slowly my twin sighed and sat down in the chair again.

And very slowly the face of the man I didn’t know turned into the face of one I knew all too well as it relaxed in the deep black of death.

Outside the rain would be a cleansing thing. There was a woman waiting for me to come back. There were people to be told that the terror was over. But it was going to take a lot of rain to wash everything away and a lot of woman to make me forget the memory of the night

It would come, though.

I went back to where I started from, turned my back to it and walked to where the future was waiting for me.