The Glass Highway (21 page)

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. She puffed on the cigarette and took it out of her mouth, clicking her long red nails like castanets and staring directly into my collarbone. I might not have been right on track, but I hadn’t lost sight of the rails yet. I chugged on.

“My guess is they threatened you with your first husband. It can be done. He scares me, and I’ve met my share of killers. Faced with that threat, you agreed to keep tabs on her during Horn’s final weeks of imprisonment and make sure she stayed put until he was available. What went wrong was you made the mistake of taking Stepbrother Bud along on one of these partygoing reconnaissance missions, where he fell hard for the mark. Sticky, but still not disastrous. Until he decided to move in with her.”

I stopped talking. Fern was looking at me now. The skin of her face was so tight I could trace the outlines of her skull.

“I loved him,” she said.

T
HE AIR WAS
as brittle as old bone. We kept position like three dowagers posing for an antique camera. Even the smoke from Fern’s cigarette hung motionless.

“You were trying to get Bud out of there that night,” I prompted.

“Yes.” She breathed some of the dry air. “He never loved Paula. He knew she was in some kind of danger and protecting her made him feel grown up. Like with you. That’s the secret of her appeal, that phony helpless act she puts on.

“Horn was getting out Christmas Day. Bud was no match for him. I haven’t met anyone yet who is. He would’ve squashed Bud like an ant just to avoid having to step around him. Bud wouldn’t believe me when I told him. He’d only met Horn at my wedding, and he had no idea what he was like. Bud was only seventeen years old then. So I told him the whole story, how I was fingering Paula for the Colombians because my first husband would kill me otherwise. He called me a murderous bitch and told me to get out. When I wouldn’t, he got Paula’s gun and said he’d shoot me if I didn’t leave. I was half-crazy. I couldn’t talk to him with that gun in his hand, so I tried to take it away from him.” Her mouth worked some more, but no words came out. She took a drag, but the smoke went down the wrong way and she started hacking bitterly. The hacking turned to sobbing. If it was an act it was a good one.

“Paula told me you were really a nice girl,” I said. “That used to mean a woman who could love a man in spite of what he didn’t have. I guess you fit that definition. You worked overtime hiding it. Maybe you have to in your set.”

“Amos, I can’t stay here,” said Paula. Her face was pale under the South American coloring. “If Horn knows where I am he’s on his way here now.”

“He’d be here already if he knew. Grissom probably told him you were at Fern Esterhazy’s place.”

Fern stood. Her eyes were swollen now. “Horn would think that meant Father’s house. I moved here to stay away from that killer.”

“He’ll find out. If not from your father and stepmother, from someone else. With any luck we’ll have some law here by that time.” I took the automatic out of my pocket and laid it on the telephone table to dial.

“No! Call this number.” Paula drew a dog-eared card with a telephone number scribbled on the back from her brassiere and held it out.

“Not the Justice Department,” I said. “They have to have your bust measurement down in triplicate before they send out an agent. Give me a cop who can’t spell cat anytime.”

I told Fern to sit down and kept my eyes on her while I spoke to two officers to get where I was going. Finally the familiar busted-windpipe voice came on the wire.

“If you’re looking for a job, Walker, we’re fresh out of openings on the custodial staff. We’ll always be fresh out when you call.”

“Nothing of the sort, Proust,” I said. “I just called to ask if you thought we might have snow for New Year’s Day and if you might be interested in withdrawing the charges against my license if I hand you Bud Broderick’s murderer.”

“Haven’t they buried her yet?” He sounded pleased with his wit.

“If you mean Paula Royce, there’s a law against burying women alive in this state. I’m standing across from her right now.”

A swivel chair squealed miles away. “Shoot it to me.” He wasn’t pleased now.

“She’s not the one you want anyway. She never was, but you wouldn’t have cared about that, which is why she didn’t have to look too far to find someone to get her to Canada. The killer is also in the room. Now, if you and Cecil Fish want me to go to the press with the girl whose death you both confirmed, we will have some cameras. I just thought you might like to be able to throw the real culprit at the folks who ask what about Paula Royce. But I’m often wrong. So long, Proust.” I started to hang up.

“Walker? Walker!”

I put the receiver back to my ear. “Yeah.”

There was a muffled noise on the other end, as of someone talking to someone else with a hand over the mouthpiece.

“Proust?”

“Okay, Walker, deal. If what you got is good enough.”

“I think you’ll agree it is.” I gave him the address in Grosse Pointe.

“That’s out of our jurisdiction.”

“I know. I’m calling the G.P.P.D. next. You might call them too and let them know you’re coming. Send Bloodworth. If Zorn wants to come along he can, but if he messes the rug, out he goes.”

“They’re on their way, fucker. Ten minutes. And Walker?”

“Yeah.”

“If this turns out to be nothing I’ll nail your balls over my office door.”

“Colorful, Proust. But not original.”

He made a rude noise and rang off.

Next I called the Grosse Pointe cops and talked to Captain Quincannon.

“I don’t want those crooked bastards in my yard,” he said coldly, after I’d filled him in.

I said, “They’re not all crooked, Captain. And this did start out to be their case.”

“Working a deal, are you?”

“I have to eat.”

“I heard it before. Be there in five.”

Paula was glaring at me when I put down the instrument. “Pretty slick.”

“If I were that I would have stayed in the army and been a lieutenant colonel by now.”

“Is that true what you said about helping me because you thought I was innocent?”

“Me lie to a cop?”

“That doesn’t explain why you didn’t let me go to jail while you investigated the murder.”

“You said yourself I’d promised to help.”

“And you said that wasn’t meant to be a blank check.”

“You I lied to.”

She was watching me with a look I’ve seen a couple of times, too far apart. “I don’t think I ever knew anyone like you,” she said.

“There used to be a lot of us.”

I was still watching Fern. She was slumped on the sofa, one arm dangling over the edge, knees sprawled apart. She looked like something wrung out and flung into a corner. A fresh cigarette smoked untended in an ashtray on the end table. I walked over and put it out. I’m a compulsive or I wouldn’t have done that and left her gun lying next to the telephone. I might as well have chucked it out the window and thrown myself after it. When I turned around at Paula’s gasp, Horn was smiling at me from the apartment doorway.

“G
O AHEAD,”
he said.

He stood just inside the threshold, just a large mild-looking fattish man in the same blue suit and gray coat he’d been wearing when I met him. His hands were at his sides and one of the coat sleeves that were too long for his short arms hung down over the bandage on his wrist, concealing it. With his enormous chest and broad face he looked like a professional wrestler who had retired and gone to work in the front office.

He’d followed my eyes to the gun on the table. I was ten feet closer to it than he was, just a step and a scoop away, but I didn’t try for it. “I’ll pass,” I told him. “I’ve seen you move.” I didn’t mention the revolver behind my hip. He was too fast even for that.

Something like disappointment fluttered over his fair features, but he covered up well. His friendly eyes moved to the woman on the sofa. “Hello, Fern.”

Fern didn’t respond. She was sitting up straight now, her hands braced on the cushions. Her breathing was audible.

Paula stood in the middle of the room with her back to the casement window. She’d guessed the newcomer’s identity, but you’d have to have seen her in various situations to realize that. A slight whitening around the nostrils, flesh pulled taut and shiny across cheeks and forehead. But for that she might have been waiting for a bus.

Fear crept into the room like cold through an open window.

Horn closed the door behind him without turning around. His slightest movements were hypnotic. They had the velvet-wrapped power of a bear pacing its cage.

He was still looking at Fern. “I spoke to your stepmother over the phone. She wouldn’t tell me where you’d moved, so I went out there and talked to the neighbors. I told them I was your second husband’s lawyer and that I had to have your signature on some papers. Somebody remembered the name printed on the moving van. I called the company and they gave me this address. You’re a lot short of smart, Fern. Miles short.”

“I had to do it.” She spoke rapidly. “She said if I didn’t take her in she’d tell what happened Christmas Eve. I was going to call you, Fletcher.”

“No, you weren’t. Her body in your apartment would have been harder to explain. Besides, you’re afraid of me.”

She forced her mouth into a pleasant expression, got up, started snaking toward him in a jerky parody of her usual style. She put her arms around his neck. He was an inch taller. She kissed him lingeringly. I worked a hand inside my coat and around behind.

“Still think I’m afraid?” she asked him, coming up.

Horn hadn’t moved. He was wearing the same tight-lipped smile he’d had on when he came in. He reached up and grasped her wrists in both hands. She took in her breath. I knew that hold. He brought his hands down and out to the sides, twisting her elbows in. She sank to her knees, whimpering.

“You should’ve just done your part and backed out.” His tone betrayed all the effort of a fat dog snoozing in the shade. “Now I’ll have to mop up, and you know how I hate working for free.”

“Let her go, Horn.”

He looked at me, then at the .38 in my hand. His smile may have flickered a little. He relaxed his grip. Fern folded the rest of the way to the floor and lay in a heap of red hair and long legs at his feet. She was sobbing for real now.

Horn said, “I still got rust in my joints or that wouldn’t have happened. I was counting on that present I left you in your car to keep you from getting tangled up in my feet. You want my hands up or what? I’m unarmed.”

“You’re never that. Fold them across your chest.”

He obliged. It seemed to amuse him.

“Let’s talk,” I said. “Why’d you kill Moses True?”

“I never said I did.”

“We’ll pretend.”

“He was trying to chew both ends of the string. He found out where Paula Royce lived and offered to sell the address to my employers. They laughed at him and said they could find that out without his help. Then he threatened to go to the cops if they didn’t pay him off. They paid him off.”

“Why’d you strangle him?”

“The day I need anything more than my hands to cool a dud like True is the day I retire. The same goes for his fucking dogs.”

“Today’s the day. What about Rhett Grissom? He gave you the information you were after or you wouldn’t be here. He wasn’t the kind to hold out so long you had to beat him to death.”

“We’re just pretending, remember. I said I was rusty. I forgot to pull my punches.”

“I think it’s more than that. I think you slipped your cog. Get out of here,” I told Paula.

She stayed put. I said it again, and then she started hesitantly toward the door. I glanced at her and away from Horn, which was my second big mistake that day. When I looked back he was moving.

He caught my gun hand with the side of his foot just as my finger pulsed on the trigger. The report gulped up all the sound in the room. Something shattered, the noise falling tinnily on my battered eardrums. Horn pivoted clear around on the other foot and kicked me in the ribs. My coat saved them from breakage, but my lungs turned inside out and I staggered. Before I could catch my balance, the edge of a stiffened hand came down on my forearm and I wasn’t holding the gun any longer. I had True’s mongrel to thank for his not having broken my arm; it obviously hurt him to use that hand. Lucky me.

I hadn’t fought straight karate style since my M.P. training, and no one had been out to kill anyone that time. But instinct is a powerful weapon. Instead of resisting I went with the blow, spinning on the ball of my left foot and slicing the stiffened fingers of my right hand into where his solar plexus would have been had he cooperated. He twisted just in time for me to graze his rib cage instead. I was rewarded with a loud grunt and a whoosh of spent breath. I jabbed at his eyes with my other hand. He ducked and shouldered me low in the abdomen, tearing me off my feet. My elbow struck the floor and my arm went numb. I tried to roll, but he was on top of me too quickly. Fingers closed around my throat.

Over his beefy shoulder I glimpsed a flash of red hair, and then Fern was gone out the door. I decided I didn’t blame her. Then I forgot about her. Horn’s breath hissed through his teeth, flecking my face with spittle. He was the only one of us who was breathing. I rabbit-punched him behind the ear as hard as I had ever hit anyone or anything. All I did was hurt my hand. My vision turned black around the edges.

A fresh explosion rocked the room. An astonished “Huh!” broke from Horn, and his weight sagged. His grip on my throat went slack. Sweet air poured down into my lungs. Paula’s face hovered somewhere overhead, behind the smoking blue mouth of the .32 automatic thrust out in front of her in both hands. Her eyes were very large.

I was starting to push out from under the limp sack of meat when it went rigid, and then Horn was up on one knee and pivoting. I shouted a warning. It came out a strangled croak. Before Paula could move, he swept a hand around and grasped the gun by its barrel and twisted. The muzzle spat red and blue fire. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the casement window collapse in a slow-motion shower of glittering iridescence, all in eerie silence because I was still deafened by the earlier blast. The gun came free as Horn rose and backhanded Paula with his empty hand. She spun and collided with the telephone table, overturning it and sending Ma Bell’s instrument flying. I got a hand under me to push myself up.