Night My Friend (17 page)

“Well,” Jane breathed. “What was all that?”

“The break I’d been hoping for. If she tells me what I think…”

“Come on,” Jane Boone said. “I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

“Thanks. Guess I’ll be around for a bit longer tonight.”

They sat in the merry-go-round pavilion and drank black coffee, and after a while Jane Boone threw the switch that started it turning. “There’s no music,” she explained a bit sadly. “The loudspeaker’s disconnected. But I left the rest of the power on for when I was working in here.”

Clinton watched it turning, slowly at first, but with the inevitable quickening of pace. “That’s too bad. It doesn’t seem quite real without the music.”

“In the winter nothing’s quite real around here,” she said.

“To me it never seemed real in the summertime, either. I remember going to these places as a boy and, after a few hours of the unreality, crying to go home. I guess I was afraid of staying too long, of losing touch with the real world outside.”

She nodded vaguely, her eyes on the prancing, revolving animals. “Some times I think I’ve been here too long. I think of the whole world as a merry-go-round without music, or a fun house boarded up for the winter.”

“Maybe it is, these days. Maybe that’s the reality of it.”

She hopped aboard the slowing carousel and threw a leg over one of the gaily colored horses. “Zelda will be back soon, if she’s coming.”

“And Dick?”

“You’re a strange guy, Clinton.”

The merry-go-round was picking up speed again, and he was about to join her on it when the door slid open to admit Zelda Spindler. “I couldn’t find you at first,” she said quietly.

Clinton walked over to her. She was shorter, close up, than she appeared. The leggy look was somehow a trick of distance, and the black boots. “I’m here,” he said. “What have you got to tell me?”

Zelda shot a glance at Jane Boone, still riding the silent carousel horse. “Can I talk in front of her?”

“Of course.”

“All right. What you suspected is true. Felix Waterton met my father during the war. He has been giving my father money for years. I have the financial records of the Noahites in the car. They show assets of more than a half-million dollars.”

Clinton’s heart pounded a bit faster. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because once my father was a good man, a highly respected army officer. I’ve seen him change since he retired, or maybe not change enough. I’ve seen him form the Noahites into an army to follow his crazy dreams. These old ladies, and lonely middle-aged men, and insecure kids—they follow him without knowing where they’re going. And all the time he’s using the Noahites as a front for his schemes with Felix Waterton. I took a lot, but I’m not taking murder. I’m telling all about it, to you and anyone else who wants to listen.”

And at that moment the angry, unmistakable voice of General Spindler boomed out from the door. “A very nice speech, Zelda. I’m pleased I arrived in time for it.”

Clinton saw the two men moving in behind the General, saw them circling to flank him, and knew that the battle was joined.

In the instant of frozen fear that followed, it was Jane Boone who was the first to act. She swung suddenly off the revolving merry-go-round and yanked Zelda away from her father’s menacing approach. Clinton used the distraction to stiff-arm one of the men out of the way, and when the other reached for his pocket, the lawyer hit him hard in the stomach. Then he was outside, running, and he saw that Jane was close behind him. “They’ve got guns!” she gasped out. “We’ve got to get the police!”

As if in confirmation of her statement, a dull, flat crack sounded behind them. Clinton dived for cover, pulling the girl with him. They were behind the sheltering entrance to the Fun House, with only a few inches of plywood for protection. “Keep down,” he warned. “They mean serious business.”

“What about Zelda?”

“She’ll have to take care of herself. Right now I’m more interested in getting those records from her car.”

In a brief burst of moonlight through the patchwork clouds, they saw the two cars parked near the bingo hall. “The foreign one is Zelda’s,” Jane confirmed.

“Can you get into this place?” he asked, indicating the padlocked door of the Fun House.

“I’ve got a key.”

“Stay there, out of sight. I’ll be back for you.” Then he was gone, running bent over across the slushy midway.

He reached the shelter of the bingo hall, and was about to make a dash for the car when he saw Spindler suddenly loom up before him, holding Zelda by the arm in a steely grip. “Stay right there,” Spindler commanded. “I have a gun.”

Sam Clinton froze. “All right,” he answered, trying to keep his voice calm. “Can’t we talk this over?”

“The time for talking is past,” General Spindler said.

“You can’t kill me and get away with it.”

“No? You could die the way Felix did. These buildings would make a wonderful funeral pyre.”

Clinton was trying to determine where the other two men were, but he wasn’t sure of their location. Perhaps they were searching for the girl. But then, out on the highway, he saw a car begin to turn into the parking lot. Dick Mallow was arriving for his belated visit with Jane.

As in slow motion, he saw the General turn toward the approaching car, saw the gun waver only for an instant. But that was the instant he needed. His own gun was out before Spindler’s weapon could quite get back, and the road of the two pistols blended simultaneously with Zelda’s scream.

Clinton found Jane in the darkened passage of the Fun House, huddled in a corner against some unknown terror. “I heard a shot,” she said.

“Two shots. We both fired at once.”

“Spindler?”

“I think he’s dead. I didn’t wait to see. I guess your boy friend’s calling the police.”

“What’s the matter with your voice?”

“His bullet caught me in the side. I’m bleeding a bit.” He sat down on the floor next to her.

“We have to get a doctor!” Her hands touched him, but quickly withdrew on contact with the bleeding.

“Stay here! At least till the police come. Those two goons are still prowling around. I’m not hurt badly.”

“What about Zelda?”

“She seemed all right. She was screaming when I shot her father.”

Somewhere far off, a world away, a siren began its mournful wail. “Where is it all going to end?” Jane Boone asked, her voice almost a sob.

“It’s ended.”

“Is it?”

In the distance, the sound of the siren was building steadily. She shuddered at the sound. “They’re coming,” he said simply.

“You wanted the money, didn’t you? That’s why you came here.”

Suddenly he seemed too tired to answer. “What?”

“I have a new theory about Waterton’s murder, Sam. Do you want to hear it?”

“No.”

But she hurried on anyway, as if the time was growing short. “His body was doused with gasoline and burned almost beyond recognition, and yet you told us about the piece of paper found in his pocket. If there were a paper, Sam, the only one who could have found it was the murderer, before he set the body on fire. I guess you killed him, Sam. I guess you killed him yourself, and then came here after the money.” When he didn’t answer, she added, “You must really have hated him.”

Clinton rolled over, trying to see in the dark, trying to hear beyond the all-powerful siren that filled the night around them. “I hated him,” he said, but he didn’t really know if she heard.

“They’re here now,” Jane said as the siren suddenly died to nothing.

“What are you going to do about it?” he asked. “Are you going to tell them?”

For a long time she didn’t answer, and it was as if they truly were alone in the world, the only two left in a dark tunnel that led to nowhere. But then there was Mallow’s voice outside, calling her name, searching for her.

And she answered. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Does anybody ever know, really?”

J
OHNNY KENDELL WAS FIRST
out of the squad car, first into the alley with his gun already drawn. The snow had drifted here, and it was easy to follow the prints of the running feet. He knew the neighborhood, knew that the alley dead-ended at a ten-foot board fence. The man he sought would be trapped there.

“This is the police,” he shouted. “Come out with your hands up!”

There was no answer except the whistle of wind through the alley, and something which might have been the desperate breathing of a trapped man. Behind him, Kendell could hear Sergeant Racin following, and knew that he too would have his gun drawn. The man they sought had broken the window of a liquor store down the street and had made off with an armload of gin bottles. Now he’d escaped to nowhere and had left a trail in the snow that couldn’t be missed, long running steps.

Overhead, as suddenly as the flick of a light switch, the full moon passed from behind a cloud and bathed the alley in a blue-white glow. Twenty feet ahead of him, Johnny Kendell saw the man he tracked, saw the quick glisten of something in his upraised hand. Johnny squeezed the trigger of his police revolver.

Even after the targeted quarry had staggered backward, dying, into the fence that blocked the alley’s end, Kendell kept firing. He didn’t stop until Sergeant Racin, aghast, knocked the gun from his hand, kicked it out of reach.

Kendell didn’t wait for the departmental investigation. Within forty-eight hours he had resigned from the force and was headed west with a girl named Sandy Brown whom he’d been planning to marry in a month. And it was not until the little car had burned up close to three hundred miles that he felt like talking about it, even to someone as close as Sandy.

“He was a bum, an old guy who just couldn’t wait for the next drink. After he broke the window and stole that gin, he just went down the alley to drink it in peace. He was lifting a bottle to his lips when I saw him, and I don’t know what I thought it was—a gun, maybe, or a knife. As soon as I fired the first shot I knew it was just a bottle, and I guess maybe in my rage at myself, or at the world, I kept pulling the trigger.” He lit a cigarette with shaking hands. “If he hadn’t been just a bum I’d probably be up before the grand jury!”

Sandy was a quiet girl who asked little from the man she loved. She was tall and angular, with a boyish cut to her dark brown hair, and a way of laughing that made men want to sell their souls. That laugh, and the subdued twinkle deep within her pale blue eyes, told anyone who cared that Sandy Brown was not always quiet, not really boyish.

Now, sitting beside Johnny Kendell, she said, “He was as good as dead anyway, Johnny. If he’d passed out in that alley they wouldn’t have found him until he was frozen stiff.”

He swerved the car a bit to avoid a stretch of highway where the snow had drifted over. “But I put three bullets in him, just to make sure. He stole some gin, and I killed him for it.”

“You thought he had a weapon.”

“I didn’t think. I just didn’t think about anything. Sergeant Racin had been talking about a cop he knew who was crippled by a holdup man’s bullet, and I suppose if I was thinking about anything it was about that.”

“I still wish you had stayed until after the hearing.”

“So they could fire me nice and official? No thanks!”

Johnny drove and smoked in silence for a time, opening the side window a bit to let the cold air whisper through his blond hair. He was handsome, not yet thirty, and until now there’d always been a ring of certainty about his every action. “I guess I just wasn’t cut out to be a cop,” he said finally.

“What
are
you cut out for, Johnny? Just running across the country like this? Running when nobody’s chasing you?”

“We’ll find a place to stop and I’ll get a job and then we’ll get married. You’ll see.”

“What can you do besides run?”

He stared out through the windshield at the passing banks of soot-stained snow. “I can kill a man,” he answered. But deep in his heart he wondered if even this was true any longer.

The town was called Wagon Lake, a name which fitted its past better than its present. The obvious signs of that past were everywhere to be seen, the old cottages that lined the frozen lake front, and the deeply rutted dirt roads which here and there ran parallel to the modern highways. But Wagon Lake, once so far removed from everywhere, had reckoned without the coming of the automobile and the postwar boom which would convert it into a fashionable suburb less than an hour’s drive from the largest city in the state.

The place was midwestern to its very roots, and perhaps there was something about the air that convinced Johnny Kendell. That, or perhaps he was only tired of running. “This is the place,” he told Sandy while they were stopped at a gas station. “Let’s stay awhile.”

“The lake’s all frozen over,” she retorted, looking dubious.

“We’re not going swimming.”

“No, but summer places like this always seem so cold in the winter, colder than regular cities.”

But they could both see that the subdivisions had come to Wagon Lake along with the superhighways, and it was no longer just a summer place. They would stay.

For the time being they settled in adjoining rooms at a nearby motel, because Sandy refused to share an apartment with him until they were married. In the morning, Kendell left her the task of starting the apartment hunt while he went off in search of work. At the third place he tried, the man shook his head sadly. “Nobody around here hires in the winter,” he told Kendell, “except maybe the sheriff. You’re a husky fellow. Why don’t you try him?”

“Thanks. Maybe I will,” Johnny Kendell said, but he tried two more local businesses before he found himself at the courthouse and the sheriff’s office.

The sheriff’s name was Quintin Dade, and he spoke from around a cheap cigar that never left the corner of his mouth. He was a politician but a smart one. Despite the cigar, it was obvious that the newly arrived wealth of Wagon Lake had elected him.

“Sure,” he said, settling down behind a desk scattered casually with letters, reports and wanted circulars. “I’m looking for a man. We always hire somebody in the winter, to patrol the lake road and keep an eye on the cottages. People leave some expensive stuff in those old places during the winter months. They expect it to be protected.”