Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (21 page)

“What about Harry Small? How did Diane feel when you bladed him? Or was it her idea?” Just keep talking, Mallory. Just keep jamming that thumbnail brain so he can’t get down to work.

“Diane said we had to,” he admitted. “She said you were going to find him and he’d talk about her. She didn’t want to do it.”

“But I was hard to kill, so she didn’t have a choice. You tried twice. I suppose you were with Winkie when he
pulled the shotgun ambush. It would be your idea. Did you doctor the Buick over on Monessen, too?”

“Yeah.” He looked faintly puzzled. “How did you get out of that? Nobody saw me.”

“Only a little boy who didn’t look old enough to talk. He should grow up and get J. Edgar’s job. He deserves it.”

Something happened inside Taggart then. I could feel it happening. I could sense the ponderous slow thoughts swinging around to the problem at hand: my death.

“How did Diane talk you into this?” I said. “Those passionate midnight meetings on the beach. Did she tell you she loved you?”

He took a full step toward me, as if I had bitten a nerve. His mouth opened. “She does love me. I love her.” He made a sad calf noise in his throat. “Did you ever see her back? She’s beautiful. But her back — it’s ugly. Macy Barr did that to her.” The gun nosed up a little. “I love her. I’d do anything for her. Anything she asked me. We’re going to go away together. Nobody ever loved me before. I never got anything but kicked around, because I was a bastard. Everybody hated me. They looked at me with hateful eyes and wished I’d run away. Diane doesn’t hate me.”

From outside the house, above the sound of the wind, there were two shots, sharp cracks spaced a second apart. And a child began to scream in terror, as if the shots had unlocked a hidden place inside her and old nightmares tumbled out, writhing in her mind.

Taggart thumbed back the hammer. I was going for the gun anyway. It was no good — my fingers would never touch it — but it was no good just to stand there and die, either. A second before I shoved my hand toward the
butt of the .38 there was another shot, different from the first two. Heavier. The faraway roar of a .45. I knew Macy had somehow got to the automatic in his back pocket. Taggart knew it, too. He was thrown off stride by the sound of it. The slow-focusing mental processes were off me for a full second.

I had the gun out and shot him twice in the chest before he could do anything. The blows from the heavy .38 slugs would have knocked an ordinary man flat on his back, but he was not ordinary. Two more shots came together, blending in a hot stunning roar. One of them was his. I felt it hit like a pole thrust sharply, end first, into my stomach. I had tipped the barrel of the .38 up half an inch before the third shot. The first two set him up so that his head was turned slightly to one side. The third slug tore his throat out and went on into his head at an angle, along the jawline. He turned a little more, his eyes glazing, and then his legs failed and he pitched downward, spouting blood.

I backed away from the wreckage, feeling sick. I had to lean against the dresser. The automatic was almost too heavy for my hand but I continued to hold it. I knew the wound was bad without looking. I felt blood trickling down the inside of one leg.

I reached down and found the hole and put the heel of my hand against it. I walked with clown steps out of the room. I put my shoulder against the wall and slid along it, pushing grimly toward the living room. There wasn’t so much pain. It was more the idea that I was hurt that frightened me. I felt a swooping dizziness. It would be better to sit down, but I had to get outside. If she was still alive I had to stop her. I remembered Aimee’s shrill scream.
There was no more sound now, except the treacherous howl of the wind.

The front door was open. I put the fingers of my hand around the knob of the screen, but it was hard to turn because I was holding the gun, too. Finally I got it open, but I had leaned forward too much and fell outside with the swing of the door, rolling down the steps, feeling the blunt edges against my back and arms and shoulders. There was a pain in me, as though someone’s hands were tearing at my gut.

I lifted my head, looked down the curved drive to the gatehouse. Thunder grumbled above. Swirling clouds pressed low upon the island.

Aimee was lying motionless on her back near the drive, arms spread, one knee up. Diane walked past the child slowly, not looking at her. She had a gun. She was watching Macy, who lay on his belly a dozen steps from the gatehouse. Macy didn’t move. There was an object near him that might have been the .45.

Diane aimed carefully at Macy. In that same moment, he seemed to stir, an arm moving slightly. He wasn’t dead yet. I raised my own gun, taking time only to see that I had the right direction. I had little hope of hitting her.

I squeezed off the remaining shots in the magazine, the big automatic jerking in my hand, the noise deafening me. Then a sudden spasm left me weak. My face was cold, my eyes full of perspiration. I let go the gun and wiped at them. It was odd that she hadn’t returned the shots. I looked up again, hauling myself to my knees. For a long moment I could see with perfect clarity.

Diane had fallen near the gate. She must have panicked when I began to shoot, and tried to run. The gate
seemed to be locked. She hooked her fingers over stiff strands of wire, pulled herself to her feet, leaned for a moment against the gate, as if she were trying to shove it open. There was a car parked on the other side, pointed toward the causeway.

Something was wrong with one of her ankles. She might have twisted it when she fell. She glanced up, then put her arms above her head and began to climb the woven wire gate laboriously. It was eight feet high. It would take her only a few seconds to wriggle over the top and reach the car on the other side.

I tried to get up, sat back groaning from the fury of sudden pain. All I could do was watch her. She seemed to be having some trouble. Then I became aware that someone else was watching her, too. Macy Barr.

His head was lifted no more than half an inch from the ground. He looked at her for a few seconds, then began to crawl forward. I saw where he was going. Not toward Diane but to the door of the gatehouse. Once he stopped, and I thought he was finished. But with an awkward lunge he reached his feet, staggered forward to the doorway, leaned inside.

Diane saw him. She had reached the top bar of the gate, was ready to lift one leg and then the other over the top, drop to the ground. But fear held her fast for the seconds she needed to jump to safety. She stared at Macy and there was terror in her eyes. Above the gathering shriek of the storm I could hear her own scream, lifting to meet the lashing wind that whipped at her hair.

“Don’t, Macy! No—”

She was still screaming when Macy threw the switch inside the gatehouse that electrocuted her mercilessly
while her tortured body jerked and wrenched in a useless effort to be free of the clinging current.

I put my head down and waited. I knew there would have to be a time when I would find enough strength to go down there. I waited patiently for that time and finally I got to my feet and shuffled through a dark tunnel of angry rain to the gatehouse, found Macy dead on the floor. I closed the switch. I walked past him and looked at a telephone. I picked up the receiver and with a finger as large and awkward as a banana I dialed a number that would bring help. Then I sat on the edge of the bed trying to hold on to slipping strength. The child would be wandering in the rain, lost and afraid — if she were still alive. I thought she might be. Diane wouldn’t shoot her.

It was all over. But I had to wait with a hole in my stomach and wonder. Sometimes they could fix it, and sometimes they couldn’t. I had bled only a little from the mouth, with all the walking around. That encouraged me. But still you never knew.

I hoped Elaine would be able to get to me fast. I wouldn’t feel so afraid then.

First there was the hospital. Memories of it were sporadic, vivid, unorganized. Bits and pieces of colored glass in a clear jar. Moments of knifing pain. The upended bottle and long tube attached to one arm. An oxygen tent. A whirring circle of crisp clean whiteness. Faces, of course. Expressions of masked uncertainty, professional optimism.

And fear. Elaine was the one who was afraid. She held tight to one hand during the great swinging loops in and out of darkness, the bird-wing beat of pain in my stomach. Then the hand wasn’t there and the faces were careful little masks until there wasn’t anything but eyes peering at me and the measured drip of chloroform on a pad across my nose. I wasn’t very interested in anything. I couldn’t quite remember why I was there. It didn’t seem to matter, except that I was probably sick. No, not sick. I remembered, then. Shot. Maybe it was bad. There was no time to worry about it. There was no time.

Afterwards I was bound tightly about the middle. They wouldn’t let me eat. Tubes in the veins nourished me. Elaine’s face was more cheerful. The faces that came with badges weren’t. They were weary and irritable from overwork and trying hard to be polite but not really caring. Some of them were government badges. I told them everything I thought was safe for me to tell. I told it about nineteen times on successive days with a doctor
standing by and after a while the badges went away with tired sighs. The papers printed very little, Elaine told me later.

I grew stronger. Lying in bed, I tried not to think. One of the badges — gold-filled — came back to see me, a well-dressed guy with a pink face. He talked to me for a long time, alone. Afterwards I was completely clear. He got mad at me three separate times because I wouldn’t tell him everything he wanted to know. He tried to convince me I had enough information to wreck organized crime in the area. I told him it wouldn’t stay wrecked six months, and meanwhile I’d have bought myself a hole in the head. He saw my point. He signed some kind of release and the hospital said I could go home. My doctor from Orange Bay came down, checked me over suspiciously and took me back in a red and black ambulance.

Two days later Elaine came into my room at the clinic with the morning newspaper.

“Good morning,” she said. “How did we sleep last night?”

“Better,” I yawned. “Still have that middle-of-the-night period. Wake up reaching for a gun that isn’t there. Then lie awake as if I never have slept and never will again.”

She took away the breakfast tray with the food I hadn’t eaten and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap.

“You promised you’d finish telling me about it when you could,” she said.

I sighed, put aside Steve Canyon and the other denizens of the comic strip page, and began the long story of hate and vengeance. I told her of the old fire and its lone survivor,
the little orphan named Carla Kennedy who grew into a lovely woman carrying the terrible scars of the fire on her back and the even more terrible scars of hatred in her festering mind. I told it all, how she had used the dull-wilted giant, Taggart, as a messenger of death, how she had ruthlessly removed all obstacles to her crazy plan: the ineffectual drunk, Owen Barr; the crippled newsdealer who had been like a father to her; me, when I began to dig too close to the truth. Except that she had failed to get me, three times.

Elaine’s face tightened when I told about Taggart’s last, nearly successful try at me. Her fists clenched as I described the gunfight and my long, tortured trip to the outside, too late to do the job Macy had called me back to do.

I began to tell of Macy’s last, long struggle to the gatehouse and the death switch, but Elaine shut her eyes and put her hand on my lips. “That’s enough,” she said. “It’s... terrible. I don’t... ever want to hear you mention it again, Pete. Never. It’s just a miracle you’re alive. I want to forget all that ever happened.”

I took her hand, kissed it. She looked at the door, then leaned back on the pillows with me. I put an arm around her shoulders. “As soon as I’m well enough to get away from here, we’ll be married. Then we’ll take a long trip. Havana or Nassau, maybe. It was nice of the cops to turn over that envelope they found in Macy’s pocket to me, just because he had put my name on it. Five thousand dollars. We’ll spend some of it because I think I earned it. The rest belongs to Aimee.”

I felt Elaine stiffen slightly, but her eyes remained closed.

“How is she?” I said.

Elaine smiled bleakly. “She eats. She sleeps, a little. But she won’t respond to me, or to anybody. She... just sits, and stares with those dark terrible eyes. Dr. Richman says she’ll probably snap out of it.”

“We’ll do what we can,” I said.

“Yes, Pete,” she said obediently.

“You didn’t like it when I had her brought here, did you?” I said after a short pause.

“Pete, we don’t need to talk about it now.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s clear it up.”

She twisted a little, indecisively. “Pete — she doesn’t belong with us, really. She... she’ll never fit in. We know nothing about her, except that she’s probably not legitimate. We know about the filth and squalor she came from. She was wild once. She could go back to being wild. She might grow up to be nothing but grief. A... busty, sullen little tramp, easy pickings for every boy in town. She’s — trouble for us, Pete. Trouble we don’t need to take on ourselves. We’ll have children of our own to think about.”

I tried to tell her the way I felt, but I knew I couldn’t explain. Not now. It was something she would have to learn, and maybe she was right, and I was wrong. But I had to do it this way and because Elaine believed in me she would go along with it. Reluctantly. But she’d try.

“Maybe she’ll turn out to be nothing but trouble for us,” I said frankly. “But I think she deserves some sort of chance. Macy gave me more than a chance once. I — I don’t quite know what to say.”

She got up then. A smile warmed her eyes. She bent over and kissed my forehead. “It’s all right, Pete. Really. We’ll do the best we can. And it’ll work out for us.
Just... be patient with me, darling. Understand me. I guess I was born a snob, that’s all.”