Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 03 (16 page)

“You did,” Harry growled. “Gloria? Remember her? The one that’s got my Jaguar?” The phone rang. Murmuring curses, Harry leaned to answer it. “Yeah.…Yeah, he’s here.” He looked up at Hickey, motioned with his head.

Hickey got up and took the phone. “Who’s this?”

“Tom, it’s Vi. A person at your number gave me this one. If you’re visiting, you must’ve found Wendy?”

“Not yet. What gives with Leo?”

“Not a word. Tom, I’m scared.”

Chapter Twenty-four

The physical suffering, Leo could bear. Pain had limits. At its zenith, a piece of his brain seemed to explode, and when the smoke cleared there remained a dead zone between the pain and his feelings.

Anguish was harder because it flogged him with blame. It insisted that nothing happened without reason. Every joy was a reward, every torment a punishment for something he’d done or failed to do. So when the punks clobbered him or sliced a line across his eyelid, even though after the shock, when the body part numbed, he could curse Bass, the driver, Denny, Mickey Cohen, or Tom for diverting him from the chores Southland Insurance threw his way—such as littering a sidewalk with dimes and quarters, then lounging in his Packard, camera at the ready, until Lester Fortenoy came out for his newspaper, walking stiffly in the back brace, then gingerly bent to scoop up some change—he could blame lots of guys, but Leo Weiss got the darkest curses. It was Leo who’d risked the grief of Violet, Magda, and Una for the sake of revenge. He’d plunged into the water with the sharks, like Tom, only twice as stupid. Tom had leaned on some hammerheads. Leo had taken on the great white.

The blame was doubly tough to endure when you couldn’t make a vow to right things, because your time was up. And memories besieged you. Maybe if death gave some warning, the memories would treat you gently—if you could count on a month or so to savor them, rein them out a little farther every day, and finally release them from a distance. Leo would’ve preferred meeting death step by step, the same way he tiptoed into the cold ocean on his daily constitutional. But when, over lunch, the punks talked of carrying him out in a sack at first dark, so Denny could meet a skirt of his at Ciro’s by nine, the memories walloped him. Exquisite memories. Seldom of victories or occasions when anybody sang his praises. Instead they recalled when some person, or some glimpse of beauty, had touched him and his heart swelled. There was a runny-nosed Filipino kid in Manila who begged him for a coin, whose toothy grin still shone after fifty years. And one foggy morning when the gray whales were migrating past his beach, and the dolphin fins, a dozen or more, spiked out of the water just beyond the breakers. Pelicans, gulls, and cormorants hovered. Back in paradise.

The driver tugged and Denny kicked him to his feet and Bass placed the hat on Leo’s head and they dragged him upright, out of the cellar. When he saw dark had fallen and knew he was still alive, a small dose of hope invaded him. If he could get to Cohen, maybe he’d find a word that’d sting the bastard. One final satisfaction. Or convince him to lay off Tom. One last good deed.

Through the living room and off the porch he struggled to move his legs. He didn’t want the punks carrying him. He tried to shake their hands off. They gripped like crabs.

“Shove him into the junk heap,” Bass commanded.

The punks cut across the lawn and through the row of pansies. Denny opened the Packard’s passenger door. The driver pushed Leo in. Bass hustled around and got into the back from the driver’s side. As Denny stooped to climb in, Leo mustered the breath to stammer, “Where’s my satchel?”

“Aw, shit. Go get it, Denny. In the dining room, I guess.”

“What’s he gonna need the suitcase for?”

“Think a minute, genius.”

“What?”

“We leave the satchel, you wanta leave a note too, all about how we treated the old man?”

Nodding glumly, muttering, “Oh, yeah,” Denny skulked out and ran across the lawn.

“Where we going?” Leo’s tongue was like chopped meat, his lips swollen and bonded together with blood and the ooze that wouldn’t scab.

“Hey, I’m tired of your voice, Pancho. All I wanta hear’s the name of this fanatic.”

“I’m gonna tell Mickey his name.”

Bass groaned. “What’d I do made you think I’m a moron? We knock you around all day, you say there ain’t no such fanatic. Now, when time’s up, you wanta talk to Mickey, buy a couple hours more. You weren’t such a tough old guy, I didn’t like you, I’d of iced you a long time back.” He plucked a case out of his coat pocket, inserted a stubby French cigarette into his mouth, and flipped open his shiny lighter. “Tell you what. Feed me the name, maybe we can work something out. Could be I’ll save your old ass, just for the hell of it. You give me the name, we check into a hotel. Tomorrow, who knows? How about it?” He sparked the lighter, made a three-inch flame.

“Naw.”

Denny tossed the satchel into the back seat, climbed in, and started the motor. Without letting it warm up, he pulled out and lugged down the street, while Bass unzipped Leo’s satchel, searched it with his hand. “Nothing but underwear and this old Luger.” He laid the gun on the seat beside him and lifted the satchel over the backrest, dropped it onto Leo’s lap.

The old man leaned onto it, used it for his pillow. For a while he let his brain scan his body, separate the pains from each other. There was his big toe with the nail plucked out, the kneecap they’d cracked, the ribs that felt like a bundle of splinters, a couple of them jabbing his lungs. The eyelid they’d slashed. A sliver of light glared through.

Denny made a fast right turn, slinging Leo against the car door. As he bounced off, his mind spun away as if it’d gotten seized by a whirlwind. After a second, when he landed, he was a young cop. His third year: 1906. Vi was a sophomore at Pasadena College. A creep had been stalking the girls from her boardinghouse. On patrol, Leo spotted a character in some bushes down the street. Tall, pale, curly-haired. Leo snuck up, grabbed and cuffed him, and marched him straight to the boardinghouse, where the girls sat around their supper table.

The house mother jumped up and railed at Leo. Said she’d given the description a dozen times, and this guy was twice as tall as the culprit. While the old buffalo read him off, all the girls snickered except the small brunette, who followed him outside to say thanks for his zeal. On the sidewalk, hallowed by the moon, she told him her name was Violet, then raised onto her toes, pecked his chin, and ran off.

The suspect had hung around to watch the encounter. “Ain’t that sweet,” he said. “She’s gotta hurry and wring out her panties. That’s the way those Mex gals are.”

Leo busted him for trespassing, cuffed him so tight he yelped and squealed all the way.

Every small hump sent the Packard bounding, and the pains seemed to jolt him awake as though out of a snooze. The satchel helped absorb the jolts. Leo only heaved himself up to look a few times. Once as they made the turn off Fairfax onto Sunset Boulevard. Once when Denny tapped the horn and waved at somebody stepping out of a Rolls in front of the Dancers, a supper club where Leo could’ve bought a cup of soup for about the value of his Packard. Cold soup, garnished with one sprig of parsley. And he noticed the violet buds and lacy finger-sized leaves on a jacaranda, along the foresty drive beneath Bel Air.

For a while he got lost, dreamed he was catching a lift up to the mountains, to Tom’s place. He got a whiff of redwood scent on thin air. Then Denny jumped on the brakes and pounded the horn, pitching him back to real life.

His eyes dripped, his throat blistered while he thought how he could’ve been with Tom by now, easily. He should’ve started out last night, the second he got off the phone knowing Tom wanted him up there. If he’d been a decent pal.

He tried to remember a single incident when Tom had let him down. There must’ve been one or two, but the memories got displaced by dozens of times when Tom had risked his neck, his marriage, or his savings. Every chance to strike it rich, Tom had invited him in. In a scrape, all he’d needed was to hint and Tom had come on the double. To imagine his pal thinking bitterly of him, when the chance to redeem himself was gone, felt insufferably wretched. He’d think about Tom no more, ever.

On some mountain road that he placed around the junction of Beverly Glen and Mulholland, he reached for the dashboard and boosted himself up. To the left, what at first looked like city lights he recognized as moonlight glinting off the mica embedded in the face of a boulder. Either there were hitchhiking midgets, a few yards off the road, or barrel cactus. The road turned to washboard. The punks were gabbing about movies.

“Roy Rogers is queer,” Bass said. “Gene Autry…let me tell you what my cousin Andrew says. Andrew, he’s a rancher.”

“For real?”

“Hey, I say he’s a rancher, it’s a fact. He says you’re risking your neck if you as much as light a smoke while you’re riding, and no damn fool gets away with sitting on a horse’s ass strumming a guitar.”

“You watch
Stagecoach
?” Denny asked. “Wouldn’t catch John Wayne picking anybody’s guitar.”

Bass proclaimed, “The only Western worth the quarter’s
Ride ’Em Cowboy
. Abbott and Costello.”

When Leo peeled his lips apart and tried to use the fat, raw tongue that lay throbbing on the floor of his mouth. The first phrase sounded like one long word in Arabic. The second try, he took more care.

“Suppose I’m telling you straight…the informer’s for real. He snitches, Mickey loses…his head.…Yeah? Asks why didn’t you bring Weiss to him?”

“Turn on the radio, would you, Denny?” The radio clicked on to Perry Como. “Not that bum,” Bass said. “Find something loud, with horns.”

Denny spun the dial while Leo dug through the rubble of his brain for a scheme, a way he could talk the punk into carrying him to Mickey, though he’d forgotten why he wanted to see the man, except it felt like you ought to meet the guy who was killing you. Maybe give him something lousy to remember.

Denny had found a jazz station. To the blats and wails of Charlie Parker, they started up a grade on a skinny road lined and sometimes overhung with pepper trees. They passed a field around which boulders were scattered like ancient headstones. Beyond it lay the ocean. Leo could spot the Pacific even in the dark, from the shade lines of its horizon. He placed them a few miles east of Malibu or the Palisades.

A strange lightness possessed him until, after one long free-for-all solo, they drove into a soupy mist. Leo stared into the gray dark. After all the rest, he’d lost sight of the ocean. There must be a God, he thought. How could blind fate treat a guy so wickedly?

But if God was actual, he argued for the thousandth time in the past dozen years since the Anschluss, why the hell would he choose a race of people, call them his own, then pitch them the nastiest curve balls ever thrown? No matter what their iniquities, Leo couldn’t imagine a father shooing his favorites into the wilds and loosing the wolves and jackals. If they were rotten kids, who was it made them so?

“Turn in,” Bass said. To Leo, it sounded like the command to fire.

The brakes screeched and tires slid across the gravel. Leo’d raised his head an inch or so when the blackjack whopped him just above and behind his right ear. It felt like somebody jabbed a trowel deep into his head. For an instant, as though wires crossed and sent a freakish signal, he didn’t hurt—rather he
heard
the pain. It bellowed like a great sea creature.

Maybe he died for a moment and returned just as fast. Anyway, he sensed himself rolling and tumbling like a skinny kid walloped and shanghaied by the surf. Inside a cloud of light, the Packard materialized around him. Two car doors slammed.

Somebody grunted. “You call that pushing?” a different man yelped.

“Damn! Ouch!”

“What?”

“The junk heap ran over my foot. Piece of crap!”

Every time Leo blinked, he got blinded by the light. As the last voice faded, Leo heard the Packard’s springs giving a mighty shriek just before the old workhorse seemed to vault upward, then topple and flip. It dumped him off the seat and under the dashboard, where he curled around the satchel and squeezed hard as if it’d been Vi or one of his girls suddenly come to his rescue.

Chapter Twenty-five

Wendy saw the headlights first. They jittered and bounced through the forest across the lake. Sure it was Tom, she wanted to holler for joy. Instead, she covered her mouth with both hands and only glanced sideways at the window.

The men sat hunched over the little table beside the kitchen, playing poker. Tersh scooped in a pot, added it to the pile of bills and mound of coins on his side. He gave a malicious chuckle. Bud stacked the few coins he had left, caught a deep breath, let it out in a sigh, and gazed around the room with eyes that seemed accustomed to witnessing their proprietor lose.

While she’d watched the game, Wendy’d pulled for Bud, silently, or else Tersh would’ve socked her again like he did when she couldn’t stop crying. Before dark, when she feared going crazy.

His fist had been good medicine. A minute of anger had ousted her fear, and during the break she’d gotten busy praying.

The men were too busy winning and losing to notice the headlights or hear the faint motor noise. The car crept along the road behind the tallest stand of yellow pine across the lake, halfway up the grade. It wasn’t Tom’s Chevy. Though she could only make out the slightest drone over the trees’ rustle and creaking, she recognized the difference because so many times she’d sat listening for Tom to come home. This one sounded like a bigger car. Maybe Claire’s. Or the police.

As the car drew closer, Wendy got nervous that the men would hear. To cover the noise, she prayed out loud. Excited, anxiously following the headlights, she couldn’t think up words of her own, so she recited from psalms she’d memorized. “Oh, Lord my God,” she mumbled, “if there be iniquity in my hands; if I have rewarded evil unto him who was at peace with me, let the enemy persecute my soul. But…I trust in your mercy. My heart will rejoice in your salvation. Pretty soon, I’ll sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me.”

“She’s at it again,” Bud said. “If she’s a nitwit, how do you suppose she remembers all that rigmarole?”

“She’s making it up.” Tersh sat upright, raised a hand for silence. “That a damned motorboat?” He turned slowly and peered out the window, then jumped from his chair and strode across the room, pushed his face against the glass. “A car.”

“Probably the snowplow guy,” Bud offered.

“It was a snowplow, I’d call it a snowplow. It’s a car.”

“Maybe the snowplow guy’s got a car.”

“We’ll see.”

Bud joined his partner at the window. They, and Wendy, silently watched the lights jittering up the last stretch of road before the fork, where the car swung right. A few feet ahead, it stopped alongside the Olds that had glinted for a moment in its lights.

“Lash her up,” Tersh growled.

He dashed to the chair by the door where two weapons perched. A sawed-off shotgun, twelve-gauge pump, and a Thompson submachine gun. Grabbing the twelve-gauge in one hand, he reached with the other hand for the pistol he’d left atop the kitchen hutch. He stuck the pistol under his belt. “Get a move on, Bud.” He pushed the door open slowly to minimize its squeak, stepped out, and closed it the same way.

Bud ordered Wendy to put her hands in her lap; then he wrapped the heavy cord around her, waist to shoulders, and around the back of the chair. He gave her a wink, blew her a kiss, and hustled outside, grabbing the tommy gun on the way.

***

The footsteps stopped crunching. Tersh was leaning against a tall blackened stump on the hill side of the road. Bud knelt behind a clump of saplings on the lake side. They’d come a hundred yards or so, to halfway between the cabin and the car that had parked next to Tersh’s Olds, just beyond the gorge a stream had carved across the road.

The man had gotten out of his car. From here it looked like a Plymouth. He’d walked about fifty yards and stopped. He stood still for a minute before he said, “Hey, hey, somebody there? I’m Frankie Foster’s pal. The guy you’re working for.” He braved a few more steps and hollered a little louder. “You hear me?”

Bud lifted a hand to keep his partner quiet. They watched the man near them a few steps at a time, punctuated by his greetings. “You there? Cut the ghost routine, will you?”

The voice got more quavery every time. Bud had to cup a hand over his mouth to mute his sniggering. Even Tersh’s sour mug brightened. When the man crossed the invisible line between them, Tersh and Bud sprang out and froze him with a Thompson aimed at his nose, a shotgun at his middle.

“Don’t believe we’ve met,” Bud said.

The man’s knees and shoulders quaked. He nodded frantically. “Yeah, well…Meechum.”

Even in the woolen, padded lumberjack coat, he appeared lanky. Big ears jutted out, like handles, through his wild yellow hair. Beneath a growth of blond stubble, his face looked raw, as though he’d walked miles through a blizzard. The upper lip appeared caked with greenish frost.

Bud let the tommy gun fall to his side. “Must be the guy. He’s ugly as Frankie said.”

“I’m the guy, all right. How else do I know you’re here, chrissake?” The man’s left arm remained tense against his side, while the right hand began jumping incessantly, from his hair to his nose to his thigh.

“Maybe you’re one of these spacemen from Krypton.” Bud snorted and grinned.

Tersh finally loosened his grip on the twelve-gauge, stepped back, and looked the man over. He hacked a cough and spat copiously. “What kept you?”

“I got delayed.”

“Me and Bud figure you been chasing dames, shooting craps. It’s gonna cost you.”

Jumpy as his right hand, Jack Meechum’s eyes darted between the men, to both sides, and over his shoulder as though watching for pursuers. “The hell,” he said meekly. “Put down the artillery, would you?”

“Not a chance.”

He tried bluster. Cranked up the volume, lowered the tone, and growled, “I had a breakdown in the desert fifty miles out of Vegas. Had to drive all night long with a heater that thinks it’s an ice machine. The girl still alive?”

“What, you figure we’re going to waste her gratis?” Tersh said. “We only got paid for the snatch, chum.”

“Take a look.” Bud motioned up the road toward the cabin.

Meechum followed, stumbling every time he glanced back at Tersh and the shotgun. He tripped over the threshold. Once inside, he dodged around Bud and reached the girl in two long bounds, as if she were a trophy that’d evaded him for years.

***

All the time they’d been gone, Wendy’d fought against her imagination, which listened for gunshots, screams, and blood. She wanted to picture Tom running in to grab her up and squeeze her, tickle her neck with hot kisses. Anything else, she refused to imagine.

To distract from her wicked imagination, she’d been trying to recite an especially pretty psalm. But several lines of one verse wouldn’t come. She remembered, “In wisdom have you made them all.” She knew another was, “Yonder is the sea, great and wide, which teems with things innumerable.” The verse ended with, “There go the ships, and leviathan which you did form to sport in it.” Now she sat pensively chewing on her bottom lip.

The door slamming open had jolted her so fiercely, her eyes bugged at the new, clumsy man and she bit a small nick inside her lip. The man looked furious and hateful, crazy as the devil, with something reddish that flickered out of his slits of eyes. He had his hands clasped together in front of him, as though he were strangling the life out of something. He unclasped them, reached out, and pinched her chin cruelly. The tips of his thumb and finger were calloused hard as wood.

“Your old man’s a nosy bastard,” he whispered. “A lousy snoop,” he yelled. “He would’ve kept his ass at home with you, stupid little bitch, I wouldn’t be…goddam him. What’s the deal, honey, you couldn’t keep your man home?” By now he was wrenching her chin so it bent her head sideways and made her eyes bubble with tears.

On the window side of them, Tersh grinned and nodded slightly as though at a cockfight, waiting for blood.

Suddenly Meechum let go her chin, cuffed it, turned, and staggered across the floor to collapse into a chair beside the table. His arm knocked over Tersh’s money pile. He sat glaring at the floor, gasping long breaths through his flared nostrils. The exhales came so hard they were like snores. Finally he reached into his coat pocket for an envelope. He pressed the ends to open it, peered inside, shook the contents into one corner, and poured a few dashes into the wedge he made between his left thumb and forefinger. He snuffed most of it through one nostril and finished it through the other.

“Ain’t you going to share?” Tersh asked.

“Hell, no,” Meechum snapped. Then, as if remembering the Thompson and the shotgun, he said more diplomatically, “I got a habit and I’m damn near dry.”

“Yeah, yeah. What you think, Bud? The junkie shows up half a day late, and he shows up damn near dry.”

“He’s got problems,” Bud drawled. “Matter of fact, they’re breaking my heart. Mind if I step outside and blubber awhile?”

“Go ahead and blubber in here. I get a kick outta watching that stuff.”

“First we gotta settle up. I figure, we put in a fair day’s work. We turn the doll over to Jacky here, collect our dough, and get a jump start off his jalopy. Then let’s you and me cruise on down the mountain. Drink a few rounds, lose a buck or two, take our turn with the dames.”

“Not till he knocks off the girl. She gets loose, we’re in the big house waiting for our turn at the hot seat.”

“You’re telling me we can’t trust ol’ Jack?”

“Why should we? He don’t show up on time or remember to bring us a snort. It’s like he gets invited to dinner, walks in late, and don’t even bring any wine.”

“Somebody oughta send him to finishing school,” Bud said.

They both stood watching Meechum, while his hand kept flying around to rub his ear, his ribs, his eyes. Finally Tersh stepped to the woodbox beside the stove, picked up the ax. He carried it to Meechum and held it out, the blunt end up.

“Whop her with this side, won’t be so much blood.”

Meechum looked up dreamily, his eyes wandering toward the window and back. “How about I shoot her?”

“You got a piece?”

“I could borrow yours.”

“Like hell you could. Anyhow, it’s no sense making noise. You knock her with this, tie some rocks on her—there’s plenty along the shore. I’ll help you dump her in the lake for a C-note. You want me to knock her
and
dump her, it’ll cost you a grand.”

“You know,” Bud mused, “I mean, look at her. Now, that’s a pretty thing to waste. Suppose we blind her. How’d that be? She couldn’t pick us out of the scrapbook.”

Tersh squinted at his partner, then at Wendy. After a sullen minute, he took the chair beside Meechum and sat, his face wrinkled pensively. “How do you blind somebody? I never done it.”

“Throw some stuff in her eyes, if you got the right stuff. Fire’ll do the job. Coals’d do it, huh? We got plenty coals.”

“That’d wipe the smile off her.”

Meechum’s wild stare kept shifting between the two men, following their talk, while his hand bolted from one destination to the next as though searching for the right button. At last, he said, “You guys are nuts.”

Tersh formed his eyes and mouth into near-perfect O’s. “Nuts, are we?”

“How about her tongue, you gonna cut it out too? And her hands so she can’t write?”

His malicious grin warping into a frown, Tersh gazed at his partner. “You wanta blind her, how come the whole time we been gabbing like there’s nobody here? How come yesterday you talk like she’s good as dead, tonight you say give her a break? Like she won’t remember our names, or what? I mean, sure there’s a million Bud’s around. How many other guys you know named Tersh?”

“I was just saying she’s some doll. It’s a damn shame to waste her.”

“Maybe you’d like to stuff her, take her home,” Meechum snarled.

“You implying I’m a pervert?” Bud asked coolly.

“What if I am?”

“Look,” Bud mused. “If her old man gets her back, maybe he’s too busy taking care of her to try and hunt us down. See, the way I figure, we snuff the girl, we gotta knock him off too. This is one tough guy, the way I hear it. Busts heads for Harry Poverman.” He glanced at Meechum and nodded slowly, ominously.

“Yeah,” Tersh said. “Barney claims he ain’t exactly mean like some of your bulls that just like to beat on guys. I mean, he catches a cheat, somebody pilfering, he won’t rough ’em up or nothing. It’s just he goes wacko about dames. There was a creep played this game. He’d buy drinks for some tourist doll, drop a little powder in it. She gets woozy, he hikes her to the room, next thing she’s out and he’s all over her. She wakes up in this room that’s registered to some corny name—Johnny Appleseed was one. Anyway, this Hickey corners the guy—they damn near had to use a cable and winch to pull him off. The creep was seeing nothing but stars for three days.”

“Yeah, I heard,” Bud said. “Another time, there was a slot mechanic dropping sexy notes to a cocktail gal, scaring the pants off her. Looked like the cops couldn’t pin the notes on the punk, but everybody knew it was him. Hickey chased that boy off the mountain so good, I hear he’s in Brazil, still running, and he ain’t gonna stop till the Arctic.”

“We gotta take him out,” Tersh muttered. “Only question, how much do you pay us to hit the big fella, Jack?”

“Shit. If that’s gotta be done, it’s part of the deal. You guys knew about the doll’s old man before you grabbed her, didn’t you?”

Bud plucked off his hat, scratched his crown. “Me and Tersh aren’t known for our foresight.”

Meechum heaved himself out of the chair, made a pass by the window, and stared out. Then he turned back and glowered at Wendy.

Though she’d tried to keep attentive, she’d only heard clips of the men’s talk. Just enough. Fright or something had confused her body, made it go fiery hot on the surface but icy inside, so cold she imagined Clifford freezing solid. Meantime, an idea was possessing her. Maybe, she thought, if she pleaded, they’d save the baby. As soon as the man lifts his ax, when it’s sure Tom hasn’t rescued her in time, she could beg and argue. Explain how, if they killed her but spared the baby, and if she wrote a note asking for Tom’s promise to leave the men alone on account of he might get killed or tossed into prison where he couldn’t take care of Clifford, he’d be sure to abide by her wish. She could even write how she was thankful to the men for saving Clifford when they didn’t have to.