Buried Caesars (13 page)

“He’s got two men working for him, Wylie and Conrad,” the woman said. She opened the refrigerator, came up with a Pepsi, opened it and put it on the counter next to me. “You want a glass?”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” she said, taking off her baseball cap and wiping her brow with the sleeve of her rolled-up shirt. “Shouldn’t leave animals in the car out here, even with the windows open. You want me to get your cat?”

“Sure,” I said, washing down a dry bit of sandwich with Pepsi.

“I’ll feed him,” she said, opening the can of soup and pouring it into a metal bowl. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “Conrad and Wylie drive a DeSoto. You happen to see them drive by this morning?”

“Coming or going?”

“Either one,” I said.

“Both,” she said. “Stopped for gas on the way to town. Shot by about two hours back without slowing down.”

“See anyone in the car with them?”

“Didn’t notice,” she said.

I swiveled on the squeaky stool and watched her move out of the station and over to the Crosley. She opened the door and scooped the cat out. She ran her rough hand over his back and placed the bowl on the ground next to the pump. I Finished the sandwich, Fritos, and the rest of the Pepsi. The cat finished eating. The woman put him under one arm, picked up the bowl in her free hand and came back inside.

“Good animal,” she said, dropping him on the counter in front of me.

“Thanks,” I said. “How’d you like to adopt him?”

“Can’t,” she said, dropping the empty bowl in the sink behind the counter. “Got a dog, Harold. He’s running out somewhere but he’d eat your cat in two minutes. Harold’s a good dog, but he figures the station and the twenty miles around it is his territory.”

“Pintacki,” I reminded her.

“He and Harold got similar ideas, only Pintacki’s are a bit grander and less realistic,” she said.

“You mean …” I said.

“I don’t mean anything,” she said, making a second cheese sandwich for the road. “You want to ask him? You go about ten miles farther east down the road. You’ll see a wire fence on the right. Keep going till you hit a gate. No name on it. That’s where you want. No more information. Harold and I got to live out here and I want no trouble till my men get back.”

“And then?” I asked as she handed me a bottle of Pepsi and the wrapped sandwich. The cat played with a leftover Frito.

“Maybe they’ll have a talk with Pintacki,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said. “What’s the damage?”

“Buck five,” she said. “That covers the two cents on the bottle and the bottle opener in the bag. Information’s free. So’s the advice. Turn around and go back to town.”

She flipped on the radio and a transcription of “Treasury Star Parade” came on. Fredric March shouted “millions for defense” and a chorus sang “Any Bonds Today.” I fished a dollar and a quarter out of my pocket, laid it on the counter and picked up the cat. “Thanks,” I said.

“You got what you paid for,” she said, pocketing the money instead of putting it in the cash register.

I took the cat to the car, got in, started the car and turned on the radio as I pulled out of the station and headed down the road. Someone on the radio said, “MacArthur can’t win this war alone,” and a chorus of voices agreed to pitch in and help him. Then they talked about making room to house families who might have to be evacuated from the East Coast in case of a German attack. The cat and I were depressed. I turned off the radio and he purred.

The desert moved by, brush cactus, patches of wild plants and no sign of any houses or human life. A lizard skittered across the road. I managed to miss him. About three minutes later a Plymouth coupe headed toward me, going in the direction of Angel Springs. I caught a flash of a fat man in a white tee shirt as the car zipped past, and watched him disappear in my rearview mirror.

“Cat,” I said, looking at the flat, dry, seemingly endless desert. “This might not be a good idea.”

The cat had curled up in the passenger seat for an after-lunch nap. He didn’t answer. I found the barbed-wire fence and followed it for about two miles. No Trespassing signs stood erect every half mile or so. I drove till I hit the gate, the gate the woman at the truck stop had told me about. I didn’t stop. I kept going for another mile or so past more No Trespassing signs till I came to the corner of the wire fence and hit open desert. I pulled off the road and drove behind a clump of yucca trees.

I got out of the car and walked to the road. The Crosley was small and reasonably well hidden behind the yuccas. Not perfect, but it would have to do. I went back to the car, opened the windows a little more, petted the cat and, with a thin trickle of sweat finding its way between the gray hairs on my chest, I leaned back and fell asleep.

A few seconds later the car was surrounded by Japanese soldiers. They came out of holes in the sand, from behind a stray cactus, from the branches of the nearby yuccas. They wore blue uniforms and were led by Chief Spainy. I tried to start the car. It wouldn’t start. Bayonets were shining in the sun.

“His ear, boys,” Spainy shouted. “Get his ear. J.V. wants his damn ear.”

I fumbled for my .38, found it. It drooped in my hand. I tried to pull it together, get the barrel to straighten up so I could shoot it, but it lay like melting licorice. When the first Japanese soldier was about to skewer me through the open window I woke up with a shudder.

It was almost dark. A car whined past on the road, heading into the desert. I shivered and looked down at the cat pushing its nose into the paper bag.

“I’ll give you a hand,” I said, after I closed the windows.

I tore the sandwich in two, put my half on my lap and tore the cat’s half into little pieces. I placed the pieces on the flattened bag and he dug into it, waving his tail. I downed my sandwich in two bites.

“I’m stalling, cat,” I said.

The cat cleaned his paws with his pink tongue and ignored me.

“Let’s go.”

I got out and let the cat follow me. He stuck his nose in the air, twitched and shuddered. I pulled my flashlight, my jack and an old sweater out of the small trunk. The sweater was dirty and I’d meant to have it cleaned weeks ago. I locked the car and hid the key under a rock near one of the yuccas. I put the Sweater on under the Windbreaker, looked around and moved to the fence. The cat jumped over the lowest strand of wire. I moved to the closest post and set up the jack where wire met post.

The cat sat watching me and waiting. The jack slipped in the sand a few times, then caught and with each clack lifted the lower stand. When it was high enough, I slithered under the wire and joined the cat.

“Well,” I told the cat, “this is the way out. Think you can remember it?”

The cat thought the question was beneath him. He turned away from me, looking at something I didn’t see, and started to move slowly away from the fence. What the hell? I followed him. I didn’t want to turn on the flashlight unless I had to. It bounced inside the pocket of my Windbreaker, balancing the weight of the .38 in the other pocket.

It was dark about twenty minutes after we started, but the moon was high and almost full and the stars were clear, millions of stars, stars you never see in the city. Once in a while when I was a kid my old man used to take my brother and me out to the desert on Sunday to look at the cactus and wait for the night. My father, a grocer by trade, a dreamer by inclination, would sit with us on the hood of our Ford with blankets wrapped around us. We’d look up at the sky, eat sandwiches he’d made in the grocery and say nothing. Even though he was older, Phil always got bored first. If he was in a good mood, he’d poke me in the ribs and climb back in the car. If he was in a bad mood, Phil would squeeze my arm hard enough to let me feel the grip of each finger for at least an hour. My father never said anything. I wondered if he had gone out to the desert with my mother before she died, but I never asked him.

“Cat, I think I see something.”

The cat’s eyes twinkled like stars as it turned to me.

“Cat, I don’t think I like feeling this small. Between you and me, I’m not ready for it.”

The cat meowed and padded across the sand and around something that scurried through the brush in front of us. The sand was solid in most places but we hit soft patches as we moved toward a glowing light ahead. My old man’s watch said we’d walked about nine hours. I figured an hour was more like it.

The night stayed star-and-moon bright and the light in front of us got closer. About ten minutes later I could make out some of the-shape of something in front of us against the sky. It looked big. Ten minutes farther and it looked even bigger.

“It’s a goddam castle,” I told the cat.

There were lights on. Not too many of them, but it looked like someone was awake. Smoke came from one of the turrets. When we were about five hundred yards away I could see the driveway and the road through the desert, probably to the main gate I had passed. In the driveway sat the DeSoto and a Willys station wagon.

The cat suddenly went wild. It meowed and turned away from the house.

“Shut up,” I whispered. “Where the hell are you going?”

I looked at the house to see if someone had heard the meowing. Maybe they’d think it was a wild animal. Or maybe they’d come out to shoot whatever it was.

The cat dashed about thirty yards to the left and wailed. I ran, tripped and got to him. I was on my knees looking at the house and considering what the penalty might be for strangling a cat.

“You want to get us killed? You really think you have eight more lives?”

The cat went on howling and started clawing at the mound of sand it was perched on.

“All right,” I said. “All right.”

I clawed at the mound, not only to shut the cat up but because I didn’t like the shape of the moonlit pile of sand. The cat was helping. I felt a piece of cloth first, then a finger and a hand. I scooped sand. The body wasn’t buried very deep.

Even before I uncovered the face, I could tell it wasn’t Hammett. The body was too young and the suit wasn’t the one Hammett had on that morning. When I cleared the sand from the corpse’s face I knew it was Andrew Lansing. He looked like a white clay version of the photograph I had, but there was no doubt it was him. I couldn’t find a wound on the body so I turned it over. I was reasonably sure he didn’t wander into the desert, cover himself like an Indian whose time had come, and simply die. The hole in the back of his skull said I was right. I turned him on his back again, dead eyes to the sky.

I checked his pockets. No money. No MacArthur report.

“Think you can find him again?” I asked the cat, softly picking him up.

He purred and I considered getting back to the car and going for help, not Spainy but the California State Police, but that would take hours and Hammett might also be under a mound by then if he wasn’t already. I moved slowly toward the house, circling behind it where there was less light and less likelihood that someone might see me.

The house didn’t just look like a small castle. It
was
a castle; stone, a pointed turret in each of the four corners, even oval barred windows and an oversized metal-reinforced wooden door.

“Don’t get me killed, cat,” I whispered, crouching as I moved slowly forward.

The cat licked the back of my hand. I pulled out my .38 and made my way to the rear of the castle in the desert. There was no cover. All I could do was move low and slowly, keeping an eye on the windows to see if anyone might be keeping an eye on the desert. My plan was to fall flat and lie quietly if I saw someone in the castle. Of course, there could have been someone in one of the darkened windows, someone I couldn’t see. I did a Groucho walk for a dozen yards, dropped to my stomach and crept for another dozen yards, before I came nose-to-nose with a scorpion. The cat hissed. I got up, grabbed him and ran the last few yards to the castle.

Enough. The desert came right up to the house. I dropped the cat and reached for the wall. The rough stone was cool against my palm. I moved to the left, gun in hand, to a lighted window, and looked inside carefully. My shirt was sweat-drenched and sticky. I dried my palms on my pants.

There was no one in the room, a big library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a roaring fireplace.

“Cozy,” I whispered to the cat and ducked under the window and moved around the corner to another lighted window. The cat followed, looking up at me curiously.

There was no one in this room, either; it was a big kitchen with a wooden worktable in the middle. Beyond the kitchen, at the side of the house, I found a door, heavy, solid. I pushed down on the iron handle expecting nothing and was surprised when it clicked open. The cat ran in ahead of me. I followed him, .38 in front of me. We were in a small alcove with a door in front of us. The alcove was lighted by a small overhead bulb that couldn’t have been more than twenty-five watts. Through the wall to my left I could hear a machine, probably a generator, humming and grinding.

I pushed down on the handle of the second door and it opened into a dark room. The light from the alcove didn’t help. I closed the door behind me slowly, and quietly, pulled out my flashlight, and turned the beam into the room. It fell on a face I recognized, the smiling craggy face of the trucker in Sheila’s restaurant, the trucker who had saved Hammett and me from Conrad and Wylie. The cat was sitting in the trucker’s lap.

Something clicked and the room was flooded with light. I blinked, and found myself facing not only the trucker in a chair but Wylie and Conrad standing next to him. Wylie held a shotgun. Conrad held a hunting rifle. The room seemed to be a servant’s room, with a small table, chairs.

The trucker was wearing a blue shirt, a tie, and a white cardigan sweater.

“Took you almost forever to make your way here,” the trucker said. “Conrad was for going out after you, but Conrad has not yet learned the virtue of patience. He may never learn.”

I aimed my .38 at the trucker’s chest.

“Pintacki,” I said. “I want Hammett, now.”

Pintacki smiled and stroked the traitor cat.

“Well, then, I’d better do what you say. You might shoot me. What do you say, men?”