The Lime Pit (16 page)

Once he'd gotten that out of the way, Jellicoe got
down to business.

"Now, you listen to me, mister," he said.
"You want that girl back, you won't tell the police about us.
Hear? We'll lose her sure as hell if you do."

"Why didn't you deliver her to LaForge?" I
said to him. "Why did he kill himself?"

"I don't know about that," Lance said with
a surprising depth of feeling. "He was dead when we got over
there. Don't make much sense to me. A man like him. Don't make no
sense a'tall."

I didn't believe Lance Jellicoe. At least, I didn't
think I did. But I found that I had to remind myself that he was
certainly a pimp and possibly a killer--his tone was that far removed
from what I'd anticipated.

"Where's the girl?" I said.

"We'll get to that." And suddenly his tone
wasn't odd at all. "You meet Laurie tomorrow night. Bring one of
them pictures with you. She'll tell you about Cindy Ann."

I thought it over quickly. I didn't understand the
importance of the pictures, although it was clear enough why the
Jellicoes wanted the police kept out of their affairs. "I'll
come," I told him. "But on my terms. We meet where I say
and when I say. And if there's any trouble, Lance, the pictures and a
deposition get sent straight to the cops."

"Call it," he said.

"The Busy Bee. At six tomorrow night."

"She'll be there," he said and hung up.

I put the phone back in its cradle and stared at the
desk top. If I'd have been the head-scratching, chin-pulling type, I
would have been paring away at my sandy noggin and my chin would have
been stretched out like taffy. It just didn't make any sense.
Jellicoe calling me up, suddenly showing interest in those snapshots,
practically agreeing to be blackmailed. He must have found out about
me and my little photo album through Preston or Abel Jones. That was
clear cut. What I couldn't understand was why the hell he'd be so
interested in a scummy picture that no one could trace back to him or
to his organization. I thought about it until it became obvious. And
then I laughed out loud--a single bark of berserk amusement. It
wasn't at all funny. If I'd thought of it a few hours earlier in the
day, Preston LaForge might still be alive.

"What's wrong?" Jo said uncertainly.

"He thinks he's in those pictures!" I said,
half to myself.

"What pictures?"

I looked at her a second. She cocked her head and
looked back at me expectantly. She had every right to know, and I had
every reason not to tell her.

"Are you sure you want to hear this?" I
said.

She nodded. "I think I have the right to know."

"I guess you do, too." I opened the lower
right-hand drawer of the desk and took out the box of photographs.
"These are pictures of Cindy Ann Evans. Hugo's Cindy Ann. They
were taken by the Jellicoes." I patted the lid and handed the
box to Jo. "Now you'll understand why the old man wants her
back."

I talked to her as she sorted through the photos, not
looking at her because I knew what her reaction would be. Disgust,
horror, anger-the same responses I had had. Besides, I needed to talk
about the Jellicoes. I needed to air my own ideas, and I needed
someone to hear them, to make them seem real or, at least, plausible.

"I think the Jellicoes want those pictures
because they think they might be in some of them. They're not sure,
though. And that's what interests me. Having been photographed with
Cindy Ann Evans must be a powerful liability. Or else Lance Jellicoe
would never have risked calling me and blowing his alibi by telling
me he was at the LaForge apartment tonight."

I looked over at Jo. Her hands were folded on the
shoe box and she was staring at them as if they were pictures of her
hands taken in an untroubled year.

"You don't want to hear this, do you?" I
said gently.

"Why not?" she said in a dull, wounded
voice. "I don't think anything you could tell me could be worse
than what I just saw."

"I warned you."

She shuddered and said, "Not strongly enough."
Jo looked up from her hands. "What's happened to the little
girl, Harry? Do you know?"

"This afternoon, I wasn't sure. Now." I
took a breath and said, "I think she's dead, Jo."

I'd said it for myself, as well as for her, to take
the sting out of it by making it conscious. But all it did for me was
remind me of Hugo and of the dreadful look on LaForge's face. And, as
for Jo, she looked back down at her hands and started to cry. "My
God, what an awful thing. Why would they do it? She's just a child."

I sat back heavily in the chair. I was sorry I had
told her. I was sorry I'd admitted it to myelf. "I don't know
why. All I know is that the Jellicoes don't want my photographs lying
around that could connect them with Cindy Ann Evans. And, to me, that
means that Cindy Ann Evans is in serious trouble. I could be wrong.
But she did drop out of sight. And LaForge is dead, maybe by his own
hand, as a result of something that I started this afternoon by
showing him those same pictures."

"It's not your fault," Jo said hoarsely.
She wiped her eyes with her fingertips and asked, "What did he
have to do with the girl anyway?"

I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. Not
with Jo feeling so vulnerable. And not with LaForge newly dead. I
owed him something for trying to be a good boy, and the bitterest
part of the truth didn't seem like too much to pay.

"Nothing," I told her. "He was just an
acquaintance of the Jellicoes. He was just a means of getting in
touch with them. Preston was an unhappy man who couldn't live up to
his all-American image. And I just happened to catch up with him on
the last day of his life."

"Bad luck," Jo said, closing off the topic.

She got up from her chair and walked slowly toward
the bedroom. "Bad luck for you both."
 
 

15

MONDAY STARTED off as badly as Sunday had ended. Hugo
called at half-past eight, and I spent half an hour trying to
convince him that everything was fine and that he should stay with
his son in Dayton. It's hard to lie convincingly very early or very
late in the day--salesmen and bill collectors know it and so, I
think, did Hugo Cratz. Try as I might to make my sleepy voice sound
cheerful and confident, some of the previous night-some of that
horror that Jo had written off as bad luck--seeped in. And Hugo
caught it, the way a dog catches a trace of dogginess in an old rug.

"Hold up, now, Harry," he said crankily.
"Just what's going on down there? I got the right to know."

They were Jo's very words and, like Jo, he'd spoken
the truth. He did have the right to know. But, after what had
happened the night before, I just wasn't prepared to tell him. So I
tried to edge around the ugly part and, at the same time, to suggest
what had occurred to me as soon as I saw Preston LaForge's shattered
face. "Right now, I'm not having much luck finding her, Hugo.
I'm beginning to think that it wouldn't be a bad idea to let the
police in on it."

"Police!" he exploded. "Damn it, I
told you I didn't want no cops sniffing around my little girl. If
you're getting tired of helping me, just let me know. I got other
places I can go."

Like where? I almost said.

And I almost said, "What if she's dead."
But it would be a hellish mistake if I were wrong. So there was
nothing to do but tell him, "I'll keep at it," and to
mumble a silent prayer that the Jellicoes could be bluffed into
telling me what had become of Cindy Ann.

Only that seemed more and more unlikely as the day
started in earnest over coffee and the newspaper and the sounds of Jo
showering and getting dressed. The Jellicoes had no intention of
trading information to me. Moreover, I had nothing to trade. Once
Laurie saw one of the pictures and realized that neither she nor
Lance was in it, I'd be cooked. That is, unless I could convince her
that the photos were more damaging than they seemed, unless I could
keep her guessing about what they really pictured. It would be a
risky bluff. Perhaps a fatal one, if Jellicoe had been lying to me
about LaForge's death, if, in fact, he were setting me up the way I
had set up Preston. What it came down to was the tricky question of
how far the Jellicoes could be pushed. And, at ten in the morning,
the only person I could think of who might know was Tracy Leach--the
woman I'd sworn to leave alone the night before.

It's always depressing to recognize just how fragile
good intentions are. Preston's, my own, and Jo's. That "bad
luck" business wasn't going to carry her through the day, and
she was seething as she walked into the living room. She sat down on
the couch and I passed her a cup of coffee and the morning Enquirer.
As soon as she saw the front page, the big picture of Preston and the
smarmy headline, it all came out in one confused burst.

"You got a lousy job, Harry!" she muttered.
"And I hate it. I hate what I saw last night. And I hate the
people you deal with. And right now, I hate you for being part of the
whole thing!"

She shot up from the couch and I grabbed her hand.
"It's not that I'm a coward," she said. "You know I'm
not. I've seen terrible things in my life. And I've survived them.
I'll survive this, too. The thing is I just don't know whether I want
to commit myself to a relationship with a man whose professional life
is like the buried half of a log. I don't need any more grief. I want
something ..." Her gray eyes darted about the room as if the
word she were looking for were hidden in a corner. "Quieter."

She pulled away and said, "I'm going to go home
now and think about this."

She started for the door and whirled around and
pointed an accusatory finger at me. "I think I could love you,
damn it! I think I already do. And what I want to know is what you're
going to do about it."

"I love you, too," I said helplessly,
which, I suppose, is the only way it's ever said.

"Well, goddamn it!" Jo said and stalked out
of the room. "I'll be at the Bee tonight," she called over
her shoulder.

"I'm off at ten."

***

I'd dressed in a pair of light gray slacks and a pale
blue broadcloth shirt, and I'd dug through the closet until I found a
navy blazer that didn't look as if it had been torn from the rack
during a twelve-hour sale. I wanted to look natty and reputable for
Miss Tracy Leach and, standing in the bright morning sunlight in
front of her jewel-like house and watching the sparse traffic saunter
down Ida Street, I felt relatively respectable.

I'd tried to picture what she'd look like as I'd
driven over to Mt. Adams. But what does a rich, young woman with a
jaded sexual palate and Preston LaForge for a boyfriend look like?
She could be anything from a robust and rambunctious Dallas Cowgirl
to one of those ethereal young things with blue-veined, china-white
skin and large nervous eyes. All I knew for certain was that she
liked her callers well-dressed.

Looking up at that exquisite house with its Chinese
red doors, I decided that she was probably closer to the ethereal
type--one of those shy, serious, half-pretty young women who prefer
the company of weak and troubled men. The kind who has hundreds of
"friends" in different places and who lives nervously from
friend to friend in an endless round of homing and small talk and
idle, uneventful romance. She was probably thin and blonde and
gauzy-looking. And she would dress elegantly and speak in a soft, shy
shimmer, like the slip of a small blue wave. I liked the woman I had
conjured up on the doorstep and decided to handle her with care.

I knocked once at the red door.

A pale, straw-haired man-shirtless beneath a white
waiter's jacket and navy-blue pin-striped pants answered it. In the
face, he had the fragile look of the young Truman Capote; but, as
with those photographs of the young Capote, there was a distant
malice in his pale green eyes and something absolutely vicious about
the cut of his mouth, which was much redder than the rest of his face
and seemed to stand out from the surrounding flesh as if it were
carved in bas-relief. Beneath that face, he was wiry and slender. But
not at all weak-looking. Twin cords of muscle pillared his neck, and
his pale naked chest had the oiled, overdeveloped musculature of the
weight-lifter. He was about forty years old and wore that boyish face
as if he were thoroughly tired of being told how young it looked.

"Yes?" he said. "What is it?"

"I want to speak with Tracy," I said. "Is
she home?"

The man grinned nastily. It made him look his forty
years and then some. "Is this a joke?" he said and I could
see the muscles beneath that waiter's jacket tightening up. "Because
if it is, I don't think it's funny." His face fell suddenly and
for a second I thought he was going to cry. "I've had an awful
night and if Tony or Mark or one of that crowd sent you over here to
rag me, I'm warning you now I'm in no mood for games. Maybe they
didn't tell you, but I'm expert at sabot. And I can assure you that
if you don't get off this porch in two seconds, I'm going to give you
a lesson that you'll never forget.