The Good Old Stuff (47 page)

He exhaled slowly. “You sure?”

“Positive.”

“Then we’d better get her out of there, Robby.”

“And then go down and heist some gold from Fort Knox.”

“Don’t be a defeatist. Anyway, you know the score now.”

“Sure. The badger game on a mass-production basis. The well-to-do strangers are screened first at the hotel, then out here. If they pass both inspections, they are funneled to Roger’s

Place. There the trained gals take over. With a good screening job they can make a killing on every sucker. The rooms and apartments may be wired for sound. James P. Garver was going to be a routine sucker. They had time to check on him after he registered in and found they had a widower of close to fifty with a half a million bucks. So they put their best talent on him—one Allana Montrose.”

“And,” he said softly, “it was a change of assignment for her. The blue dress I took comes off in four different ways. She was part of the show here. They had a way to put the pressure on her.”

“But what are they planning to do?”

“I have a faint, disturbing idea,” he said gently. “And so we go collect Mrs. Garver. If I can park under that window, do you think you could reach the sill?”

“I might. But how do we turn invisible? There’s floodlights around here.”

“Invisibility is a question of degree.”

With the motor barely turning over, he slid the big car ahead. The gravel popped under the tires. He put the car under the window and left the motor running. The lights of the car went out.

“Get out of the car,” he said, “and count ten after I go through the door. Then scramble up as fast as you can go. Bust the window if you have to. And get that girl. I have a hunch she’ll want to come along. Lower her onto the car top and drop down yourself. Get her in the back on the floor and get behind the wheel and open the other door. Have that motor already turning over and give it one blast on the horn as soon as you’ve moved it up opposite the door.”

He took a last drag on his cigarette, flipped it away, tugged on his belt, and walked to the door. He went inside.

I counted to ten. On the count of nine there was a sound from inside as if a tubful of steel washers and bolts had been thrown through a plate-glass window. The music faltered, lost the beat, and faded off. The window sill came even with my eyes. I broke the window with my elbow and yelled, “Allie Garver! The window! Let’s go!”

I found the catch and slid the window up. The shade was
in my way. I tore it off, wiggled through, my stomach across the sill. Her mouth was wide open, and she held the blanket up against the front of her.

“Move!” I said. “We’ve got about ten seconds!” There was a blue robe on the chair. I threw it at her.

She shrugged into it as I heard the steps pounding up the stairs.

“Unlock the door, Allie!” yelled the voice of Rogah’s brother. I unlocked it. It swung inward. He took one step into the room. I jumped full into his chest with both feet. He shot backwards across the narrow hall and down the mouth of the stairway. She was at the window. I swung her up, slid her out feet first, and lowered her by the wrists until her feet touched the car top. She was on the ground by the time I dropped. I felt the metal dent under my heel.

Voices were roaring in anger. She fell full length on the floor as I shoved her into the back. I gunned the motor, yanked the car forward twenty feet until it was opposite the door, reached over, and opened the far door at the same moment as I blew on the horn.

I could see inside. The crinkle-eared gentleman lay on his back on the floor. His mouth looked like a tomato that had fallen on the sidewalk. Shay, his face alight with a vast, animal glee, yanked a man toward him, lifted him by throat and crotch, and hurled him at the others. He staggered as a bottle hit him over the eye, plunged toward the door. They caught him from behind. He ducked forward and threw one of them over his head, turned sideways to avoid a vicious kick in the middle, spun, and punched twice with precision. The last man between him and the door lost heart and stepped aside at the last moment. I had the car thirty feet away before Shay could pull the door shut. He glanced down into the back.

“Nice work, Robby. Nice!”

“Have fun?”

He was breathing heavily. He gingerly touched his forehead. One arm was gone completely from his jacket and his shirt was buttonless. His knuckles were gashed.

“Nothing to clear the head like a good brawl. She was glad to come along, wasn’t she?”

“Hurry,” Allie said, plaintively. “Please hurry!”

He turned so he could smile at her.

“Why, kitten?”

“They’re killing him tonight!”

Shay made
the phone calls while I waited in the car with Allie. There was, as I had expected, an unidentified lipstick in the glove compartment. She used the dome light and the rear-vision mirror. She had fallen from the car roof. The right hip of her blue robe was gritty and torn, and her elbow was skinned. She winced as I used the antiseptic in the first-aid kit on it.

Shay came out of the all-night drugstore at a half trot. “Make time, Robby,” he said.

As I held the speedometer at ninety and the big car swayed and roared through the night, Allie spoke over the sound of the rush of the wind.

“I’ve always been a sucker for a pair of dice or a wheel,” she said. “I wouldn’t have sold my act to Jeff Maydo at Club Three if I’d known it was a bust-out house on the side. I don’t know how it happened. They let me keep playing and they took my notes, and all at once I was eleven thousand in hock. That’s when things got rough. Jeff’s brother, Roger, runs Roger’s Place in town, but they work close together. The two of them had what they called a heart-to-heart talk with me. They wanted to put me on the list down at Roger’s Place and let me work my way out of the hole with the extra income. I think they knew I’d blow up at that. I’m no prude, but I’m no hooker either. I said no and then Roger, the creepier one, he said that he’d have to have a friend of his operate on my face, just as a lesson to the other deadbeats. I knew he meant it. He said I’d have a hard time getting my new face into any kind of an act except the circus.”

“Lovely people,” Shay said.

“Oh, the best. We compromised. They said that they’d save me until a prize sucker came along and then, if I did my part, they’d cancel out the debt and give me a five-thousand-dollar bonus. I—I said okay.”

“And the sucker turned out to be Jim Garver.”

“That’s right. Believe me, when I saw him, it wasn’t an act when I did my crying at the bar at Roger’s Place. Then I took on so many drinks that I don’t remember much. Anyway, the next day I got my instructions, and the idea was that I had to marry him. They put the pressure on until I had to say I would. I didn’t understand what they wanted to do. They had me in the bag. I married him. You’d never know he had any dough at all. They must have really checked on him, because a month after we were married, I found out about the half million. I used to call Jeff. He’d keep telling me to sit tight, sit tight. So I did. It wasn’t bad. I got to like old Jim. He’s kind of a sweet guy, and he’s a wonderful cook. And I liked it nice and quiet in the country. Then the letter came for me to come in here. I had to leave without anything, and keep anybody from seeing me leave. I guess I managed it all right. I went to the Club Three. It was … like a nightmare. I didn’t know they were going to kill him until then.”

“When did you find out?”

“Yesterday. I guess I haven’t got much … courage. They made me sign the papers.”

“A confession?”

“Sort of. It gives all the details. I can buy it back from them for four hundred thousand dollars, and if I don’t they can give it to the cops. They won’t be implicated in any way. I haven’t any proof against them. I came downstairs tonight hoping I could sneak out and stop it. But they made me go back up again.”

“Faster, Robby,” Shay said.

We left her with Krimbow and went over to Garver’s house. I cut the lights before we came over the last rise. The night was bright enough so that I could see the turnoff to Garver’s place. The willows made the shadows heavy. I cut the motor.

A voice at the window said, “Nice and easy, now. Press the palms of your hands against the car roof.”

The pencil beam shot through the window. The faint rebound of it picked up the trooper’s brass and the gun-muzzle glint.

“Oh, Mr. Pritchard!” the trooper said, recognizing Shay.

“Where’s Burns?”

“Right here, Shay,” the big trooper captain said softly. “Nothing yet. We’ve got a net all around the place. The old man’s been in bed for hours.”

Shay got out on his side. He latched the car door softly. “The tip is good, Ed. The only danger is that when it went wrong on the Endor City end, they might have had a chance to call their man off.”

“Jim Garver pays his taxes. He gets protection.”

“Have you planted a man in the house?”

“Haven’t wanted to take that chance.”

Shay was silent. He said, “I’ve been in there. I know the floor plan. Mind if I work my way close?”

“Better leave it to us, Shay.”

An awakened bird made small throaty sounds and subsided. Off in the swamps the peepers shrilled endlessly. Over on the main highway truck motors thrummed. The gray in the east began to be touched with rose. The car, invisible moments before, emerged from the blackness.

I glanced at Shay. He had an odd expression on his face. He had a listening look.

“I’m going to the house,” Shay said.

“You gave us the tip, Shay,” Burns said with a hint of anger, “but this is my show. When I call it off, which will be soon, you can go take a look.”

“Garver has lived alone,” Shay said. “He has farmer’s habits. The way the house sets, we can see the kitchen windows from here. There’s no light on yet. Why?”

“Maybe he was tired.”

“And maybe,” Shay said, “he’s dead tired.”

“A mouse couldn’t have crept in there since we started covering the place,” Burns said impatiently.

“And suppose the mouse was already holed up in there before you circled the place? Or had killed him and gone?”

“I had a trooper phone him and hang up when he answered. The light went on, so he was okay then.”

“He should be up by now,” Shay insisted.

“Okay, okay,” Burns said wearily. “We’ll both go take a look.”

Nobody stopped me, so I followed along.

The house was as tight as a drum. We circled it. When Burns shined his light into the bedroom window through the screen and began to curse softly and slowly, I looked in.

His bare, gnarled feet hung motionless, six inches from the floor. He wore faded blue-and-white flannel pajamas. The over-turned chair was off to his left. The cord was tied to the metal handle of the trap door set into the bedroom ceiling. His thick-knuckled hands hung at his sides, curled as though to grasp a tool. The cheap teeth were clamped into the swollen blue tongue and, all around the dead irises, the muddy whites showed.

Burns kicked a hole in the screen and yanked it out. He started to climb over the sill when Shay yanked him back.

“What the hell are you—”

“If a mouse couldn’t sneak in, a mouse couldn’t sneak out, either.”

Burns stood very still for a moment. “Worth a try,” he said.

Twenty minutes later it was broad daylight. When the man broke from cover near the garage, running like a rabbit, Burns drew the .38 special without haste. He held the muzzle high and slowly lowered it, intersecting the line of flight. The sound of the shot was flat in the still morning air. The running man did a complete somersault and rolled to a stop.

“Knee?” Shay asked.

“Hip. It’s a safer shot.”

He had a sullen, stolid face. He bore the pain without any change of expression.

The doctor worked on him back in the trooper station. Shay, Burns, a few others, and myself stared at him.

“He hasn’t got a name,” Burns said gently, “and he doesn’t know what he was doing on Garver’s land.”

“The Maydo twins are going to be very unhappy,” Shay said. The man’s eyes betrayed a sudden surprise, then went blank again. The doctor applied the final strip of tape and stepped back quickly as if he had been touching something dirty.

“We can convince him he ought to talk,” Burns said.

“Oh, he’ll talk right now,” Shay said. “He’ll tell us who told him to kill Garver.”

“Are you nuts?” the man said hoarsely.

Shay was smoking a cigarette. He nibbled a half moon of thumbnail from his left hand and laid it across the horizontal cigarette, just above the glowing tip. He held it close to the man’s face. When the flame touched the nail, it curled and stank.

“Smell that? That’s the way a man smells after they kick the switch, friend. He jumps up against the straps three, sometimes four times. A husky kid like you might go for five. It sure makes a terrible stink.”

The man on the table swallowed hard.

“Sure,” Shay said, almost fondly, “you can keep your mouth shut. You can be a hero. You make your little jumps against the straps and then, before the worms even have a chance to go to work, they’ll forget who the hell you were. At least, even when you get life, which you might not get, you get to see sunshine once in a while, a chance to walk around the yard.”

The man licked his lips. “You got somebody to write this down?”

Shay and I came out of the restaurant. He climbed into the car as though he had suddenly grown old. The lump on his forehead was an angry purple. He sat woodenly beside me.

“Big callous character,” I said.

“Shut up, Robby.”

“No, you don’t feel these things a bit, do you? A dead old guy and five thousand salted. The five is what counts.”

“I told you to shut up!”

“I can’t shut up. It’s such a shock to me to find out that you become emotionally involved in these shoddy little affairs.”

“Why the hell do I keep you around?”

“You mean why do I stay, don’t you? Maybe I stay because once every six months I get a look at the vulnerable part of you, Shay, the part that can grieve for strangers. It’s the only thing that makes you human. You’ve got the dough. If you don’t want to be hurt, why don’t you just sit on your fanny at Sharan Point and add to your collection of statues of the female form. Maybe underneath you’re some sort of white knight looking for grails.”