The Dreadful Lemon Sky (10 page)

"Huh?"

"He was coming out of her motel unit when I drove in."

"Oh, that's just great. Anyway, he's top priority. All we can find out. Right?"

"Yessir, sir."

And despite my protestations that it wasn't all that urgent, he headed on out again after reborrowing the car keys.

"You can trespass on the porch here if you want."

"I'm terrified of the savage dog. Thanks anyway."

She smiled and went back into the house.

When the rain stopped, mist rose from the pavement. The air was washed clean and was much cooler. I stepped along faster than before.

Fifteen Hundred was a jumble of villas and town houses, of joined and separate structures interconnected by arcades and roofed walkways. The layout established small courtyards of various sizes. It did allow for a maximum privacy of approach and departure, but at the expense of security. In a world where violence is ever less comprehensible and avoidable, peopleespecially the middle-aged and the old-settle more comfortably behind barred gates, locked lobbies, roving guard dogs. They seek to die in bed, of something gentle and merciful.

I roamed, looking for Walter J. Demos. His was number 60, the ground floor of a town house near the back of the property, looking out at the pool area. A pretty lady in jeans and work shirt and tousled hairdo opened the door and said, liltingly, "No vacancies, none at all; so sorry." She started to close the door.

"I want to talk to Mr. Demos."

"He isn't even adding any names to the list, it's so long now." She had sweat beads of exertion on her forehead and upper lip. Behind her I could see a mop pail with a wringer fastened to it.

"I don't want to live here."

"Then you must be out of your tree. If it's about something else, well, let me think. Mary Ferris was after him to do something about her disposer. I think he'll be there by now. That's Twenty-one. Go past the pool and through that arch at the right and it will be… the second? No, the third doorway to your right. Go up the stairs and come back toward the front of the building."

Walter J. Demos wore gray coveralls and an engineer cap. The coveralls were wet-dark around his middle in a wide irregular band. He did indeed look something like a shorter broader Kojak, his face and jaw massive, almost acromegalic.

He showed me what he had in his hand. It looked like a tangled ball of dirty string.

"Do you know what this is? Can you guess?" he asked.

The woman giggled. She was plump and coy and underdressed.

"I wouldn't know."

"Miss Mary here had a lovely artichoke yesterday, and she put all the inedible parts of it into her disposer. Artichoke leaves, my friend, are made of string. And in a little while the string wound itself into a tangled mess and stopped the machinery."

Mary giggled again and switched back and forth, chewing a knuckle, scuffing her sandaled foot.

She thanked him and he gave her the string to dispose of in a less damaging manner. He picked up his tin toolbox, and we left to walk slowly back toward his apartment.

"I could tell them all to call the repair people. I could spend all my time in the pool. But it would drive me quite mad, I think. I have to keep busy. That's the way I am, Mr. McGee. And it saves my people money, which is increasingly important these days. Everyone chips in and helps whenever and wherever they can. We're a family here, helping and protecting each other."

"Meyer told me he got that impression."

"Oh, then you must be the friend he mentioned. I chatted with him for just a few minutes, but he struck me as charming and highly intelligent. I like intelligent people. That's the way I am."

"Have you found out who trashed Carrie's apartment?"

"What? Oh, no, we haven't. And I doubt we ever will. No one resident here would ever do a thing like that."

"Even though she was resented by the other… members of the family?"

He stopped and peered at me. "What would give you that idea?"

I was tempted to remind him of Meyer's intelligence, but I thought I could make a little more mileage by using the dead lady, so I said, "Mrs. Milligan was quite aware of it."

He grunted and we walked on, right to his door. The lady had stopped sweating. He took her hand in both of his. "Thank you so very much, Lillian. You know how much I appreciate it."

She went smiling off, purse in hand. He closed the door and looked around. "Nice job," he said to himself. "Very nice." He turned to me and made a wry grimace. "I have to be so very careful. If one of them cleans up for me too often, the others get jealous. Please sit down. You were telling me that Carrie had some fantasy about resentment."

"Purely a paranoid fantasy. She thought that because you put her at the head of the list and gave her the first empty apartment, the others resented her. She thought that because she was getting a rent-free ride, they resented her. She thought that because she didn't care to mingle, they resented her. She would rather have stayed with her friends in the cottage at Mangrove Lane. Maybe you should have told the whole family that Carrie. wasn't a very special and dear friend, but just part of the pot distribution system. Jack Omaha, Cal Birdsong, Carrie Milligan, and you."

He was good. He stared at me. At first he chuckled and then he laughed and then he roared. He slapped his thighs and rocked back and forth and lost his breath. Finally he held his wrists out and, still choking, said, "Okay, officer. I'll go quietly. You've got me."

"Why the special treatment she got from you? Tell me so we can all laugh."

He lost all traces of mirth. "You're beginning to annoy me. It's no business of yours, but I'll tell you anyway. A friend of mine asked me to make the apartment available to Mrs. Milligan. Jack Omaha asked me. My books show the rent paid every month. She may have a free ride, but it wasn't from me. Probably Jack felt that it would be more pleasant to have… more privacy and more access to the lady."

I lifted my eyebrows and looked at him politely. "I'm beginning to annoy you, Mr. Demos?"

"Frankly, yes."

There are a lot of choices in every instance. And it is easy to make a bad choice. A man will react badly to the promise of some unthinkable punishment. The musician will buckle at the thought of smashed hands. The choice cannot be made with the thought of taking any pleasure in the choice. It has to be businesslike, or it will not be convincing. This man was the benign daddy, the solid meaty big-skulled patriarch, full of such amiable wisdom and helpfulness that he would appeal to the little girl in any woman who might be still searching for poppa. A gregarious man. A sensualist. A skilled, successful, and unlikely womanizer who had built himself a profitable world teeming with prey. He was pleased with himself, and evidently still greedy.

"I'm thinking of alternate ways of annoying you, Mr. Demos."

"What do you mean?"

"We have a specialist we could import. His nickname is Sixteen Weeks. He's very bright about guessing just how much punishment a given person can endure and still recover. He can guarantee you sixteen weeks in the hospital, Walter. At your age you might not ever get about as well as you do now."

His attempt at a smile was abortive. "That's grotesque."

"Or, if we decide to head in another direction, I'd turn the problems of disposition over to Meyer. He works things out so there isn't any fuss. As you noted, he's highly intelligent. We gave him the problems of Mr. Omaha, Mr. Birdsong, and Mrs. Milligan. He'd find something plausible for you. They could find you on the bottom of the pool some morning."

I think he tried to smile again. It gave his mouth an odd look. "Are you quite mad? Why are you saying such terrible things? What do you want from me?"

Rhetoric, all by itself, is too abstract. It needs punctuation. Show and tell. I stood up, smiling. I moved slowly. He watched me with some agitation. I walked slowly around to the back of his chair. He leaned forward and craned his neck around to watch me. I knew he was wondering whether or not to get up out of the chair.

It takes a reasonable amount of precision. In the clavicle area, where the muscle webs of the trapezius and deltoid are thinned out, the descending brachial plexus, which includes a big ulnar and radial nerves to the arm, is close to the bone. I chopped down, a short swift smashing blow, and hit him just as he started to move, hit him on target, mashing the nerves against bone with the bone ridge of my knuckles.

Walter J. Demos screamed in a very aspirated hissy way and came floundering up out of the chair. His right arm hung dead. He clasped his right shoulder in his big left hand. He stared at me with bulging eyes and roared with pain. Tears ran down his face.

There was a flurried rapping at the door. "Walter?" a woman cried. "Are you all right? Walter?"

"Tell her to call the cops," I suggested. "We can all sit around and talk about how much pot you moved out of this place."

"Walter?" she yelled.

"Everything is fine, Edith," he called. "Go away!" He sat down again and said, "You broke my shoulder!"

"It isn't broken. It will be okay again in a week."

"But I can't move my arm. It's numb."

"The feeling will come back, Wally."

"Nobody ever calls me Wally."

"Except me. I can call you Wally, can't I?"

"What do you want of me? Were they really killed? Really?"

"What we want is an established outlet in Bayside. Your previous source has dried up, Wally. Now tell me how you got into it and how you've been operating."

He found a hanky with his left hand and patted his eyes and blew his nose. He rubbed his numb arm. He talked and talked and talked.

He had always purchased supplies for apartment repairs and redecorating from Superior. He became friendly with Jack Omaha and they would have coffee together at a diner near the industrial park, within walking distance. One day he told Omaha that a lot of his tenants had become ill from smoking grass adulterated with some unknown compound. Jack said that his personal supplier, his milkman, had recently been busted, and he was buying it at a gas station and paying too much. Omaha had taken a lot of his vacation time in Jamaica. Half joking, he had told Demos he was tempted to go get his own, but it wasn't worth the risk unless he arranged to have a lot of it brought in, and he couldn't see himself peddling it. Demos told Omaha that quite a bit could be absorbed at 1500 Seaway Boulevard, and some of his tenants could probably get rid of a lot more at the offices where they worked.

It wasn't long before they had talked themselves into it. Omaha came back from Jamaica with guarantees, having talked to local hustlers named Little Bamboo, Popeye, Hitler, John Wayne, and so on.

At that point it was decided that Walter would be better off if he did not know any of the details of the smuggling operation, and if Omaha did not know a thing about his wholesale operation. The first shipments were small. As they got bigger, Demos brought in his most trusted tenants and it became a cottage industry, taking the bulk and weighing, measuring, and bagging it for the smaller wholesalers and the retail trade.

"We thought we'd be able to avoid getting mixed up with any-excuse the expression-hoodlums. We didn't see that there was anything terribly sinister about it. We were filling a demand at a fair price. We tried to cut our risks. Bringing Carrie here to live was part of the riskcutting. She'd tip me in advance as to when a shipment would be coming in. I'd get my people ready. On those nights she'd be driving one of the little panel trucks from Superior instead of her own car. When it was unloaded, checked, and weighed, I'd give her the money. We'd work all night. I wanted it all out of here by the following morning. Except personal supplies, of course."

"When was the last shipment?"

He looked dispirited. He nursed his shoulder.

He sighed. I could feel a certain satisfaction in having diagnosed him so precisely. But with satisfaction there was also regret. Demos had been full of himself, full of a big-bellied confidence, sure of his place in his world. But in had come the pale-eyed stranger who had said terrifying things and who had sickened him with pain. His world had become fragile all of a sudden. His heart was heavy. He was not a bad man, everything considered. He had been a jolly sly man, a manipulator, a greedy chap, overconfident. He had changed.

"Do you want me to annoy you some more, Wally?"

"No! No, I was trying to remember exactly. A Tuesday night. That would make it May fourteenth. Yes. I can't remember the exact time, but it was before midnight."

"How much was there?"

"An average shipment. Ten sacks, I think. Forty kilos each. Over eight hundred and fifty pounds. I think I gave her about ninety thousand dollars."

He described, by request, the way the money was wrapped. It fit the way it had been packaged when Carrie gave it to me. The adding-machine tape was from his office machine. He handled the money, figuring the commissions to his peddlers.