Judge Me Not (5 page)

“Show the man.”

“Gosh, Lonnie, I …”

“Show the man!”

The tall, tanned girl walked out into the yard. Raval watched her without expression. She bent over and pulled up a clump of grass. She raised it slowly and put it in her mouth, started to chew.

“O.K., honey-lamb. Spit out the nasty grass. Come back and sit down. Morrow, you see what I mean? Now this girl here, she was pretty snotty to me last year. So I had to find out which button to push. You find the button, and you own the person. I own her. Anything I tell her to do, she does, don’t you, baby?”

She looked down at her hands. “Yes, Mr. Raval.”

“You don’t ever want to make me mad, do you?”

“No, Mr. Raval.”

“Because when I get sore enough at you, you know what I’m going to do to you, don’t you?”

Her voice was a barely audible whisper. “Yes, Mr. Raval.”

Lonnie smiled at Teed. “I get a big yak out of how those newspaper guys make a big mystery out of how the Commies get those confessions. They ought to come talk to Raval.”

Teed felt ill at having witnessed this humiliation of a human being.

“Want to make a bet, Morrow?”

“What do you mean?”

“You stay in town long enough, and I’ll own you too. I tell you to eat grass and you’ll eat grass. I know. You’re telling yourself you’re a big strong guy and you’d die before you’d take orders like that. That’s fairy-story stuff, Morrow. Hero stuff, like in the books. People aren’t like that. You can break people. You can break anybody in the world, if you know how to go about it. If you want to be smart, just join my team. Dennison doesn’t have to know. Keep the five grand. You like this little girl? Take her home with you. She’ll do anything you tell her to do.”

“No, thanks.”

“She’s a better piece than the Mayor’s wife, Morrow.”

Teed stood up, unable to conceal his surprise.

“Man, how do you think that old fud got to be mayor? Raval keeps up on things. Raval keeps track. See, already I got a little handle on you. Already I found one button.
And I’ll find the button on Dennison, too. And you two gentlemen can hold hands and jump through a big hoop whenever I hold it up. Felice gave me a full report. She isn’t bright. Just sort of shrewd.”

Raval looked lazily at Teed’s clenched fist and said, “It wouldn’t be at all smart to take a punch at me, Morrow.”

“You won’t stop us,” Teed said. He turned on his heel and left. As he rounded the corner of the house, he glanced back. The man and the girl sat placidly on the terrace. A master-slave relationship. A little medieval nightmare in a sunlit world.

He stepped on the starter. Under the hood a low whistle started. It increased in volume and pitch. It climbed up into a whistling scream that terminated in a sharp explosion. Clouds of white smoke rolled out of the vents.

The stringy little man called Sam was standing by Lonnie Raval. They were both laughing so hard they were doubled over. The girl in the white dress was standing behind the two of them, her laughter shrill above theirs. Teed yanked the bomb loose from the spark plug and threw it on the grass. He slammed the hood down. At the end of the driveway, as he slowed to make the turn, he could still hear them laughing.

Teed drove a mile before he permitted himself a small rueful grin. Raval had been all too convincing. The very casualness of his confidence had, in itself, been a weapon planned to undermine Teed’s confidence. Whatever else Raval was, Teed realized he was also an expert amateur psychologist. He had thrown in the knowledge of Felice Carboy at the proper moment to obtain maximum shock value. The little demonstration of his power over the girl had been adequately sickening.

By the time he parked in the City Hall lot, most of his confidence had returned. The City Hall was of yellow brick and sandstone, with four two-story pillars across the front. A patch of paper-littered parched grass stretched across the front, bisected by the wide walk leading to the foot-cupped concrete steps. Behind the building a roofed walk led to police headquarters.

Teed went into the Hall and up the stairs, heels clacking on the shiny metal treads, nostrils full of the stink of green floor-cleaning compound, ancient dust and the pink reek of the deodorant blocks in the urinals. Lonnie’s Mint. That was what the wise ones called the Hall. Its symbol was the
shine on the pants seat of a third-rate lawyer. Justice was blindfolded, but she carried no scales. In Deron she lay flat on her back in the City Hall with her knees high and the soiled toga entangled around her waist, with tireless relays of public servants making certain that she stayed that way.

Three City Hall girls came down the stairs toward him, high heels clacking, voices chattering about the week end.

“S-s-st!” one said.

“Good morning, Mr. Morrow,” they said, singsong, almost in chorus.

“Good morning, ladies,” he said.

They passed him, and when he looked back down at them they were looking up the stairs. They clutched each other and giggled shrilly.

Teed went into his office and through the connecting door into Powell’s outer office where sallow Miss Anderson, a trustworthy import, was filing letters.

“He in?”

“Expecting you, Teed. But Commissioner Koalwitz is in there right now.”

“Give me a buzz when he’s free, please.”

He went back out and sat at his own desk. The green rug was scuffed down to where brown showed through the pile. One of the slanting window ventilators was missing, the other one cracked. Green steel desk with brown-black cigarette scars in the paint. Calendar from Mooten Brothers, A Funeral to Fit Every Purse. Ash tray on the desk encircled by a miniature rubber tire. Chair that creaked. Another office in another public building—so like the ones that had gone before, the ones that would come afterward. Public buildings and pigeons. They seemed to go together. One landed on his windowsill, looked in with beady, wise glance.

“Pigeon, I don’t think I’ll mention Felice to the boss. Check on that?”

The pigeon shrugged and flew away.

A half hour after he had returned from lunch there was a phone call for him.

“Teed? Don’t use my name over the line. Do you know who it is?”

“Of course.”

“Teed, I’ve got to see you. Same place as yesterday.”

“I thought we both chalked that one up to experience.”

“Please. I’m begging you. How soon can you get away?”

“I’ll be busy all this week, honey.”

There was a long silence and he thought that she had hung up. “Listen to me, Teed. I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong for a long time. I found out something today. Just an hour ago. Something that you ought to know.”

“What do you want to do? Change sides?”

“Don’t sound so … so contemptuous. Teed. I’m taking a risk, you know. The least you can do is …”

“I saw a man this morning. He knew more than I thought he knew.”

Her tone was humble. “I’m … sorry about that, Teed. If I had it to do over again, I …”

“If you know something you feel the City Manager should know, I suggest you make an appointment with Mr. Dennison.”

“Damn you! Oh, damn you, Teed Morrow!”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones …”

“You think you know everything there is to know,” Felice said hotly. “I wanted to tell you something because, in spite of what you said to me yesterday, I still think there’s something decent about you. And I don’t like what’s planned for you.”

He held the phone a bit tighter, but made his voice casual. “Don’t get so fussed. If you really think it’s that important, I’ll get away as soon as I can. Another hour or so here, and then an hour’s drive. O.K.?”

She sighed. “That’s better, Teed. Much better. I’ll leave now, and I’ll be there waiting for you.”

The phone line clicked dead before he could break again. He hung up slowly. Maybe she had gotten hold of something. Something too strong for her stomach. He shrugged. He was a fool if he did, and a fool if he didn’t.

He turned back to the prints and specifications of the sewer job completed by the Lantana Brothers Construction Company in 1950. The construction company was a partnership and it was common rumor, though unproven, that Lonnie Raval was the silent senior partner. Powell wanted Teed’s opinion on whether it would be worth while to bring in an outside inspector to check the job and find out just how many corners had been cut. It had been an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar job, specifying the digging up of old pipe, replacing it with new pipe at a deeper level. City inspectors had been on the job as it was performed, but Teed knew that in Deron that meant less than nothing. If pipe of the cheapest quality in the proper diameter had been used, and the line hadn’t been deepened, the job might have cost Lantana Brothers four hundred thousand. But it was going to be awfully tough to bring in an outside expert and expect him to dig holes in the street without anyone noticing it.

He scribbled on the bottom of Powell’s memo. “Why don’t we save it until we’ve got them on the run and can do it openly?”

At a few minutes after three he checked out with Powell, left the office and headed for the lake. He pushed the car hard and made it in fifty minutes. Felice’s convertible was parked on the narrow lane. He parked beside it.

The first thing he saw when he went in was the neat arrangement of Felice’s clothes on the cane-bottom chair. She was nude on the bed, one corner of the Indian blanket flipped across her.

She raised her deeply tanned arms, her eyes smiling. “Hello, darlin’,” she said huskily. “You made me wait so terribly long.”

He stood six feet from her. He took a cigarette out, tapped it on the new lighter, hung it in the corner of his mouth and lit it. She lowered her arms when she got tired.

“I thought you had something to tell me.”

“That can wait, can’t it, darlin’?” She raised her leg and kicked the flap of blanket aside, lay watching him with her eyes almost closed.

In spite of himself he felt desire twist within him, a slow
oily shifting. His hand trembled a bit as he lifted the cigarette to his mouth. To gain the necessary control, he turned his back on her, walked over to the bureau, flicked the ashes into the tray.

“What’s wrong, Teed?”

“When things are finished, I like them to stay finished. If you’ve got anything to say, say it. If not, get your clothes on and go home.”

“Teed, I …”

He tensed and raised a hand. “Shut up. Listen!”

The car had slowed on the highway. The camp and the two parked cars were not visible from the highway. He heard the faint whimper of rubber on the hard surface, the change of motor noise, and knew that the car was turning in.

There was no need to warn Felice. She scrambled out of the bed, snatched up her clothes. She darted, ludicrous in frightened nudity, toward the bathroom. A shoe fell and she dodged back, snatched it up, biting hard on her under lip, her eyes wide and scared. He took her purse and gloves and glasses off the bureau, stopped the door as she started to slam it, shoved the articles into her arms and pulled the door shut.

He took a deep breath and walked slowly toward the door. The car had stopped in the blocked lane. Two men got out, came quickly toward him. He stared hard at them and wanted to laugh, yet something choked off the laughter. In the shaped rubber masks that covered their heads, they looked like twins. Familiar twins. And then he realized that the masks represented Mortimer Snerd, he of the buck teeth, receding chin, owlish, harmless, stupid stare. And the automatic that one held, glinting oily blue in the afternoon sunlight, seemed to beam toward him a ray of cold invisible light. The light was focused on his belly and the spot it touched was cold.

The twin Snerds came close. A whisper cannot be identified or remembered. “Turn around and walk in slow.”

“So she set this up for you? Where’s your camera, boys?”

He walked in, heard the quick rustle of movement behind him and tried to move quickly forward, away from the expected blow. It hit the back of his head and it was oddly like one of the tumbles of childhood, where the skull raps smartly against the unforgiving sidewalk. He rocked toward the wall on drunken joints and they grabbed him
expertly. Every touch hurt and he cried out as they twisted him, flung him onto the bed. As he started to recover, to bring into play that massive strength that he knew how to use, he was rapped again, driven down right to the edge of blackness like a kite that dives toward the earth only to recover at the last moment, struggle painfully back up. When he tried to use his arms again, he found that his wrists had been lashed to the two bedposts. He tried to kick, but it was like kicking under water, and they tied his ankles quickly.

The twin masks hovered over him, swaying like comic balloons. His head was steadied and glass grated against his lips. Warm whisky filled his mouth and his nose was clamped, a hand fastened tightly across his lips. He had to swallow in order to breathe. Twice he managed to blow the liquor out of his mouth, but time after time he was forced to swallow. Alcoholic skyrockets exploded in the back of his mind. There was a faraway commotion, a woman’s shout of anger or pain, but it was of no importance.

There was a whisper that said, “Slower, or he’ll heave it.”

Liquor roared behind his eyes, like a train in a tunnel. The tunnel began to slant downward toward the bowels of the earth. The train rushed on, faster and faster, out of control, rocking on the tracks, whistle shrilling, heading for the final and inevitable.…

He woke up in shuddering, cold-sweat darkness. He sat up, spinning, liquor-sick. His mouth was a loose numb area. The bed swung twice, slowly, the way a pitcher winds up, and then did a gut-wrenching outside loop, spilling him out onto the harsh grass rug that scraped his face and his naked hip. Grass rug. That meant the camp. Damn fool to get so stinking. How did it happen? He went slowly across the rug on his hands and knees. It was cold. He shivered violently, but could not stop sweating. His head butted the doorframe. He turned a bit to the left and crawled out onto the porch, spreading out with his naked chest on the cold boards, his head over the edge of the porch. He fingered the back of his tongue and was sick, wrenchingly, agonizingly, meagerly. He lay for a time, panting with exhaustion, then crawled back to the door.
With his fingers on the doorframe he pulled himself erect. When the camp swung dizzily, he hung onto the doorframe with all his strength, his eyes tightly shut. When it steadied a bit, he reached around the frame, opening the door with his arm, finding the light switch.