Cop Out (10 page)

Furia batted her hand away and dropped into the rocker breathing like a fish. He kept hugging the revolver. Hinch and the automatic were holding up the arch looking at Furia with anxiety and a little something extra. A doubt?

Malone shut his eyes.

When he opened them Goldie was saying, “Why not, Fure? We can hole in here for a day or even two and like really take the place apart. That money's here, it's got to be. Right?”

She had taken her mask off, too. Her hair was just-polished brass. The mask had smeared her makeup, it gave her features a blurred look like the TV sometimes when it pulsed. Malone squinted, trying again to place her, but she kept just out of reach. She was younger and must have been fresher then, not runny around the edges, maybe that's why I can't put my finger on it.

He stopped trying because Ellen was leaning her head on his shoulder and her face was turned up, her eyes were far-away glass. Even if we get out of this she'll never be the same, she'll have nightmares the rest of her life, she'll make a nervous wreck out of Bibby, she won't let the kid out of her sight … and never, never forgive me. Not because all this is my fault but because I somehow didn't rise to it like one of her heroes, Sean Connery, Peter O'Toole, Michael Caine, or her special favorite Spencer Tracy on the Late Late Show the two or three nights a month when the cramps keep her from sleeping. I'm the dropout of her dreams, a smalltown hick who can't make it even medium-sized. And the cop tag a big gas.

Malone hauled himself back to what was going on. Furia had recovered, he was the boss man again. “Didn't you hear what I said, fuzz? You pay attention when I speak!”

“I'm sorry,” Malone said. “What did you say? My head aches.”

“I said we're moving in on you till we find that bread. You got nosy neighbors?”

“No,” Malone said.

“How about delivery men?”

“Just milk. He leaves it on the porch around eight
A
.
M
.”

“The rube who delivers the mail.”

“He drops it in our mailbox near the gate.”

“That's all?”

Malone nodded with caution. His head felt like a bongo drum.

“Well, just in case. Anybody comes to the door and asks, we're relatives from out of town. How'd you like me for a relative, missus?”

Ellen almost said something.

“Not good enough for you, ha?”

“I didn't say that,” Ellen said.

Furia laughed. “You got it, fuzz?”

“Yes,” Malone said.

“You, too, missus?”

Ellen gulped something and finally nodded.

“And don't let me catch you trying to use the phone, I'll break your dainty ladyfingers one at a time or, hell, why not? I'll sick Hinch onto you. You like that, Hinch?”

“Mama mia,” Hinch said. “What I could do with her.”

Malone was hit by ice water. I never thought of that. I never thought of that danger to Ellen.

“Now Hinch,” Furia said. “This is a nice lady. Don't go thinking none of your dirty thoughts about Mrs. Fuzz.” Goodhumored now, the thing was settled for him by Goldie and he can act the big brass with the reverse of responsibility—ordering the tactics after the chain-of-command below works out the strategy, a hell of a way to run a war. But it was a cockeyed war. Malone kept his eyes on Hinch.

Hinch took off his bear mask, too. No doubt to give Ellen the benefit of his manly beauty. He was looking pleased. Malone's glimpse of that Neanderthal face in the clearing had hardly prepared him for the reality of the closeup. He could imagine how Ellen was feeling at her first look, especially with thoughts of rape trembling in her head. He felt her shudder and he wanted to tell her that gorillas were peaceable animals, it was the sort of thing he would have said to Barbara to hush a fear. But Ellen shuddered again and burrowed closer, a big smart girl who knew the difference between a fairy tale and seeing it like it is, baby. Malone found himself fumbling around with a prayer.

“That goes for both of you,” Furia said. “If the phone rings you don't answer without me or Goldie listening in. And about the door, front or back. Anybody comes you don't open till I give you the nod. Got all that?”

Malone said they did. Ellen said nothing.

“Okay. Soon as we tear your bedroom apart I'll let the two of you go up there, I'm sick of looking at you. But you stay there and no tricks. Remember about that phone.”

“There's no phone in their bedroom,” Goldie said.

“Anywhere.”

“My child,” Ellen said. “Is it all right if we take my child in with us?” She added quickly, “In case she wakes up, Mr. Furia. I don't want her to be any trouble to you.”

“After we search your room, okay.” Her humility seemed to gentle him. Or maybe he's turned on. Can he be high on junk or LSD? No, not him. He's got to have control.

“She can remind you the spot you're in, missus.”

Malone saw suddenly that Furia's bag was fear.

“Thank you,” Ellen said humbly.

Furia had done a job on their room all right. While Hinch held the Walther on them downstairs. Every once in a while making a face at Ellen. He seemed to enjoy watching her shrivel and blanch. Malone could see Hindi's lips, red and wet as fresh blood, and occasionally the gray tip of his tongue. Those lips on Ellen's. The picture made him pull his legs up as if he had been kicked in the groin.

Everything in their bureau drawers had been tossed every which way. The clothes in their closet had been ripped apart garment by garment. The bedroom rug, a handhooked American Colonial that Ellen had wheedled out of her mother, had been slashed in three places—how could it have hidden anything?—and kicked aside. A loose board of the old chestnut floor Ellen kept in a perpetual gleam had been hacked with Malone's handax from the cellar and pried up; they could see in the cavity before Malone replaced it a fossilized rat's nest that had probably been there for generations. Their imitation maple double bed had been taken apart and two of the slats broken, sleep-on-that-damn-you they seemed to say in Furia's alto, Malone had had to put the bed together again before they could transfer Bibby from her room. The child's head was lying on his hunting jacket. Furia's switchblade had disemboweled their two pillows, goose feathers lay all over the room.

They sat on the floor at the foot of the bed in the wreckage listening to Barbara's heavy breathing. She had waked from her alcoholic sleep when Malone picked her up and begun to cry, complaining that her head hurt, and Ellen had had to get the boss man's permission to go for an aspirin in the upstairs bathroom. She finally got Bibby back to sleep. Malone was holding an icebag to his swollen jaw, and with the bandage on his bloody head that Ellen had applied he looked like a refugee from a defeated army.

Ellen said with a shiver, “Hold me, Loney.”

He held her.

“I'm scared.”

“We're still alive,” Malone said.

The Irish in her stirred, and she showed the faintest dimple. “You call this living?”

He lowered the icebag to kiss her. “That's my girl.”

“Loney, are we going to get out of this?”

“I think we're all right for the time being.”

“And how long is that?”

He was silent.

“Couldn't you make a rope out of the bedclothes and climb out the window while they're tearing up the house?” She's back at the movies again. “You could make a call to Chief Secco from the Cunninghams' or the Rochelles' …”

“How long do you think you and Bibby would last if they found me gone? You've got to face it, Ellen. We're in this alone.”

She was silent.

I'm in this alone.

A glass crashed downstairs and they heard Hinch laughing. He's found the bottle of Scotch Don James gave me for finally catching that white kid who kept heaving trashcans through their front windows. He tried not to think of Hinch drunk and tightened his grip on Ellen.

After a while Malone said, “Our best chance is if we can get the money back or at least figure out who took it. I could maybe make a deal with Furia, the money for him letting us go.”

“I thought you thought Furia stole it.”

“I thought he did. Now I'm not sure. A punk like him could put on an act, I suppose, but I think I'd see through it, I can usually tell when they're lying. He sounded pretty convincing to me.”

“But if it wasn't Furia who could it have been? Maybe it was Hinch after all, Loney. He could have been like in a crouch—”

“Can't you remember anything else about the man who hit you?”

She set her head back against the patchwork quilt. “I told you all I saw.”

“Sometimes things can come back. We've got to try, baby. Ellen?”

“Yes?”

“I know you're fagged out, but don't go to sleep on me now. Think! His suit. What color was it?”

Ellen's head rolled a negative.

“Was it a suit? Or could it have been a sports outfit? Did the pants and jacket match?”

“I don't know. I didn't notice.”

“Or maybe a leather jacket?”

She shook her head again.

“Could he have been wearing a topcoat?”

“I just didn't see, Loney.”

“A hat?”

“No,” Ellen said this time. “No hat, or I'd remember. The stocking was drawn over his whole head.”

“You can see
something
of the face through one of those sheer stockings. Do you remember anything about his face?”

“Just a mashed nose.”

“Mashed? Like Hindi's?”

“A stocking would mash … anybody's … nose …”

“Ellen, you're falling asleep again.” He shook her, and she opened her eyes.

“I'm sorry.”

“Hair? Ears? Tie? Hands? Feet?”

She kept shaking her head. But then her eyes got big and she pushed away from the bed. “His feet, Loney! He was wearing galoshes. Or overshoes.”

“Overshoes.” Malone stared at her. “Today? It's been dry all day, not a cloud in the sky. You sure, Ellen?”

She nodded.

“That's a hot one. Overshoes … What's the matter?”

“I just remembered something else.”

“What?”

“His hands. He was wearing gloves. I saw the hand coming down after I was hit. I didn't see flesh. It was a man's glove. Black leather.”

“Gloves,” Malone muttered. “That could figure. If he kept his face covered he might also be careful not to leave his fingerprints around … if he was, say, a housebreaker.”

“In New Bradford?” Ellen actually smiled. “You're making like a detective again, Officer. Why would a sneakthief in this town worry about fingerprints?”

“I admit it's a lot likelier one of them, the way we've been figuring. But why gloves? All three of them came here tonight barehanded …”

Malone looked surprised at the destination of his train of thought. He set the icebag on the floor carefully and slipped off his shoes and put his fingers to his lips and got up, not like an exhausted man now. He went to the door and listened. When he came back he got down on one knee and said in a whisper, “Ellen, you've kept telling me it was a man hit you. Why a man?”

“Huh?”

“Why've you been saying the one who hit you was a man?”

Ellen frowned. “I don't know. His jacket, the pants—”

“That doesn't make a man. Not these days. These days you can hardly tell some women and men apart. A woman can put on a pair of slacks and a man-style jacket and with her hair squashed down by that tight stocking you wouldn't be able to tell, not from the front and while you were falling from a hit on the head. But there's two things about a woman would be a dead giveaway if they weren't disguised some way and that's her hands and feet!

“That's why she wore the men's overshoes on a dry day and men's gloves. She was taking out insurance in case she was spotted. Remember Hinch saying downstairs he and this Goldie went into town today? Ellen, it's Goldie who's doublecrossing the other two. She must have given Hinch the slip in town and come here on her own.

“She's the one knocked you out. She lifted that bag, and it's a cinch she hid it somewhere before she went back to the cabin. It adds up, because she's been trying like mad to sell Furia that we stole it. Yes, sir. That's it!”

Malone was feeling the small triumph. He craved Ellen's adoration. He wanted her to say, You've redeemed yourself in my eyes, my darling, you're my very own hero, you sure can overcome, I feel safe again.

But all Ellen said was, “All right, Loney, she's got it. How does that help us?”

And of course she's right.

Malone got back up and began to pad about. “That's the problem. What else have we got to work on? Nothing. So we've got to make use of it some way. How?”

“That is the question,” Ellen said. She did not sound anything but beat. Her head sank back against the end of the bed.

But Malone's second wind continued to blow. It was something. It was a light where everything before had been black as the inside of the old gravity well out back that hadn't been used in fifty years and was full of green slime, like Furia must be.

“Maybe if we accuse her of it in front of the other two,” Ellen murmured.

“No, that wouldn't work. She's smart, she's got Furia around her little finger, he'll believe anything she says. She mustn't even suspect we suspect her, Ellen, or she might get Furia to knock us off. I wouldn't put it past her. Deep down she's worse than he is.”

“Could we make a deal with her …?”

“What have we got to offer? That we'll tell Furia? Even if it put a doubt in his mind we can't prove it to him, and she'd talk him out of it. Up to now, Ellen, she's held him back. She wouldn't hold him back any more.” Malone looked down at her. “The way it shapes up, we'll have to somehow find out or figure out where she's hiding it.”