Thinner (32 page)

'Enkelt, Mamma,'
Heilig said, but more gently now.

'I've got to talk to two more people, if you can direct me,' he said, and looked at a blank page in his notebook. 'Mr Taduz Lemke and a Mrs Angelina Lemke.'

'Taduz is asleep in there,' Heilig said, and pointed at the unicorn camper. Ginelli found this to be excellent news indeed, if it was true. 'He's very old and all of this has tired him out real bad. I think Gina's in her camper over there - she ain't a missus, though.'

He pointed a dirty finger at a small green Toyota with a neat wooden cap on the back.

'Thank you very much.' He closed the notebook and tucked it into his back pocket. Heilig retreated to his camper (and his bottle, presumably), looking relieved. Ginelli walked across the inner circle again in the growing gloom, this time to the girl's camper. His heart, he told Billy, was beating high and hard and fast. He drew a deep breath and knocked on the door.

There was no immediate answer. He was raising his hand to knock again when it was opened. William had said she was lovely, but he was not prepared for the
depth
of her loveliness -the dark, direct eyes with corneas so white they were faintly bluish, the clean olive skin that glowed faintly pink deep down. He looked for a moment at her hands and saw that they were strong and corded. There was no polish in the nails, which were clean but clipped as bluntly close as the fingernails of a farmer. In one of those hands she held a book called
Statistical Sociology.

'Yes?'

'Special Agent Ellis Stoner, Miss Lemke,' he said, and immediately that clear, lucent quality left her eyes - it was as if a shutter had fallen over them. 'FBI.'

'Yes?' she repeated, but. with no more life than a telephone-answering machine.

'We're investigating the shooting incident that took place here last night.'

'You and half the world,' she said. 'Well, investigate away, but if I don't get my correspondence-course lessons in the mail by tomorrow morning I'm going to get grades taken off for lateness. So if you'll excuse me -'

'We've reason to believe that a man named William Halleck may have been behind it,' Ginelli said. 'Does that name mean anything to you?' Of course it did; for a moment her eyes opened wide and simply
blazed.
Ginelli had thought her lovely almost beyond believing. He still did, but he now also believed this girl really could have been the one who killed Frank Spurton.

'That pig!' she spat.
'Han satte
sig
pa en av stolarna! Han sneglade pa nytt mot hyllorna i vild! Vild!'

'I have a number of pictures of a man we believe to be Halleck,' Ginelli said mildly. 'They were taken in Bar Harbor by an agent using a telephoto lens -'

'Of
course
it's Halleck!' she said. 'That pig killed my
tantenyjad - my
grandmother! But he won't bother us long. He . . .'

She bit her full lower lip, bit it hard, and stopped the words. If Ginelli had been the man he was claiming to be she would already have assured herself of an extremely deep and detailed interrogation. Ginelli, however, affected not to notice.

'In one of the photographs, money appears to be passing between the two men. If one of the men is Halleck, then the other one is probably the shooter who visited your camp last night. I'd like you and your grandfather to identify Halleck positively if you can.'

'He's my great-grandfather,' she said absently. 'I think he's asleep. My brother is with him. I hate to wake him.' She paused. 'I hate to upset him with this. The last few days have been dreadfully hard on him.'

'Well, suppose we do this,' Ginelli said. 'You look through the photos, and if you can positively identify the man as Halleck, we won't need to bother the elder Mr Lemke.'

'That would be fine. If you catch this Halleck pig, you will arrest him?'

'Oh, yes. I have a federal John Doe warrant with me.'

That convinced her. As she swung out of the camper with a swirl of skirt and a heartbreaking flash of tanned leg, she said something that chilled Ginelli's heart: 'There won't be much of him to arrest, I don't think.'

They walked past the cops still sifting dirt in the deepening gloom. They passed several Gypsies, including the two brothers, now dressed for bed in identical pairs of camouflage pajamas. Gina nodded at several of them and they nodded back but steered clear - the tall Italian-looking man with Gina was FBI, and it was best not to meddle in such business. They passed out of the circle and walked up the hill toward Ginelli's car, and the evening shadows swallowed them.

'It was just as easy as pie, William,' Ginelli said. 'Third night in a row, and it was still as easy as pie
...
why not? The place was crawling with cops. Was the guy who shot them up just going to come back and do something else while the cops were there? They didn't think
so ...
but they were stupid, William. I expected it of the rest of them, but not of the old man you don't spend your whole life learning how to hate and distrust the cops and then just suddenly decide they're gonna protect you from whoever has been biting on your ass. But the old man was sleeping. He's worn out. That's good. We may just take him, William. We may just.'

They walked back to the Buick. Ginelli opened the driver's-side door while the girl stood there. And as he leaned in, taking the .38 out of the shoulder holster with one hand and pushing the wire lid-holder off the Ball jar with the other, he felt the girl's mood abruptly change from bitter exultation to one of sudden wariness. Ginelli himself was pumped up, his emotions and intuitions turned outward and tuned to an almost exquisite degree. He seemed to sense her first awareness of the crickets, the surrounding darkness, the ease with which she had been split off from the others, by a man she had never seen before, at a time when she should have known better than to trust
any
man she'd never seen before. For the first time she was wondering why 'Ellis Stoner' hadn't brought the papers down to the camp with him if he was so hot to get an ID on Halleck. But it was all too late. He had mentioned the one name guaranteed to cause a knee-jerk spasm and hate and to blind her with eagerness.

'Here we are,' Ginelli said, and turned back to her with the gun in one hand and the glass Ball jar in the other. Her eyes widened again. Her breasts heaved as she opened her mouth and drew in breath.

'You can start to scream,' Ginelli said, 'but I guarantee it will be the last sound you ever hear yourself make, Gina.'

For a moment he thought she would do it anyway ... and then she let the breath out in a long sigh.

'You're
the one working for that pig,' she said.
'Hans satte sig pa -'

'Talk English, whore,' he said almost casually, and she recoiled as if slapped.

'You don't call me a whore,' she whispered. 'No one is going to call me a whore.' Her hands - those strong hands - arched and hooked into claws.

'You call my friend William a pig, I call you a whore, your mother a whore, your father an asshole-licking toilet hound,'

Ginelli said. He saw her lips draw back from her teeth in a snarl and he grinned. Something in that grin made her falter. She did not exactly look afraid - Ginelli told Billy later that he wasn't sure then if it was in her to look afraid but some reason seemed to surface through her hot fury, some sense of who and what she was dealing with.

'What do you think this is, a game?' he asked her. 'You throw a curse onto someone with a wife and a kid, you think it is a game? You think he hit that woman, your gramma, on purpose? You think he had a contract on her? You think the Mafia had a contract put out on your old grandmother? Shit!'

The girl was now crying with rage and hate. 'He was getting a jerk-off job from his woman and he ran her down in the street! And then they ... they
han tog in pojken
whitewash him off -but we got him fixed. And you will be next, you friend of pigs. It don't matter what -'

He pushed the glass cap off the top of the wide-mouthed jar with his thumb. Her eyes went to the jar for the first time. That was just where he wanted them.

'Acid, whore,' Ginelli said, and threw it in her face. 'See how many people you shoot with that slingshot of yours when you're blind.'

She made a high, windy screeching sound and clapped her hands over her eyes, too late. She fell to the ground. Ginelli put a foot on her neck.

'You scream and I'll kill you. You and the first three of your friends to make it up here.' He took the foot away. 'It was Pepsi-Cola.'

She got to her knees, staring at him through her spread fingers, and with those same exquisitely tuned, almost telepathic senses, Ginelli knew that she hadn't needed him to tell her it wasn't acid. She knew, had known almost at once in spite of the stinging. An instant later - barely in time - he knew she was going to go for his balls. As she sprang at him, smooth as a cat, he sidestepped and kicked her in the side. The back of her head struck the chrome edging of the open driver's-side door with a loud crunch and she fell in a heap, blood flowing down one flawless cheek. Ginelli bent toward her, sure she was unconscious, and she was at him, hissing. One hand tore across his forehead, opening a long cut there. The other ripped through the arm of his turtleneck and drew more blood. Ginelli snarled and pushed her back down. He jammed the pistol against her nose. 'Come on, you want to go for it? You want to? Go for it, whore! Go on! You spoiled my face! I'd love for you to go for it!'

She lay still, staring at him with eyes now as dark as death.

'You'd do it,' he said. 'If it was just you, you'd come at me again. But it would just about kill him, wouldn't it? The old man?'

She said nothing, but a dim light seemed to flicker momentarily across the darkness of those eyes.

'Well, you think what it would do to him if that really
had
been acid I threw in your face. Think what it would do to him if instead of you I decided to throw it in the faces of those two kids in the GI Joe pajamas. I could do it, whore. I could do it and then go back home and eat a good dinner. You look into my face and you are gonna know I could.'

Now at last he saw confusion and a dawning of something that could have been fear - but not for herself.

'He cursed you,' he said. 'I was the curse.'

'Fuck his curse, that pig,' she whispered, and wiped blood from her face with a contemptuous flick of her fingers.

'He tells me not to hurt anyone,' Ginelli went on, as if she had not spoken. 'I haven't. But that ends tonight. I don't know how many times your old gramps has gotten away with this before, but he ain't going to get away with it this time. You tell him to take it off. You tell him it's the last time I ask. Here. Take this.'

He pressed a scrap of paper into her hand. On it he had Written the telephone number of the 'safe kiosk' in New York.

'You gonna call this number by midnight tonight and tell me what that old man says. If you need to hear back from me, you call that number again two hours later. You can pick up your message ... if there is one. And that's it. One way or another, the door is gonna be closed. No one at that number is gonna know what the fuck you are talking about after two o'clock tomorrow morning.-'

'He'll never take it off.'

'Well, maybe he won't,' he said, 'because that is the same thing your brother said last night. But that's not your business. You just play square with him and let him make up his own mind what he's gonna do - make sure you explain to him that if he says no, that's when the boogiewoogie
really
starts. You go first, then the two kids, then anybody else I can get my hands on. Tell him that. Now, get in the car.'

'No. I’

Ginelli rolled his eyes. 'Will you wise up? I just want to make sure I have time to get out of here without twelve cops on my tail. If I had wanted to kill you, I wouldn't have given you a message to deliver.'

The girl got up. She was a little wobbly, but she made it. She got in behind the wheel and then slid across the seat.

'Not far enough.' Ginelli wiped blood off his forehead and showed it to her on his fingers. 'After this, I want to see you crouched up against that door over there like a wallflower on her first date.'

She slid against the door. 'Good,' Ginelli said, getting in. 'Now, stay there.'

He backed out to Finson Road without turning on his lights - the Buick's wheels spun a little on the dry timothy grass. He shifted to drive with his gun hand, saw her twitch, and pointed the gun at her again.

'Wrong,' he said. 'Don't move. Don't move at
all. You
understand?'

'I understand.'

'Good.'

He drove back the way he had come, holding the gun on her.

'Always it's this way,' she said bitterly. 'For even a little justice we are asked to pay so much. He is your friend, this pig Halleck?'

'I told you, don't call him that. He's no pig.'

'He cursed us,' she said, and there was a kind of wondering contempt in her voice. 'Tell him for me, mister, that God cursed us long before him or any of his tribe ever were,'

'Save it for the social worker, babe.'

She fell silent.

A quarter of a mile before the gravel pit where Frank Spurton rested, Ginelli stopped the car.

'Okay, this is far enough. Get out.'

'Sure.' She looked at him steadily with those unfathomable eyes. 'But there is one thing you should know, mister - our paths will cross again. And when they do, I will kill you.'

'No,' he said. 'You won't. Because you owe me your life tonight. And if that ain't enough for you, you ungrateful bitch, you can add in your brother's life last night. You talk, but you still don't understand the way things are, or why you ain't home-free on this, or why you ain't
never
gonna be home-free on this until you quit. I got a friend you could fly like a kite if you hooked up some twine to his belt. What have you got? I'll tell you what you got. You got an old man with no nose who put a curse on my friend and then ran away in the night like a hyena.'

Now she was crying, and crying hard. The tears ran down her face in streams.