Poisons Unknown (5 page)

After the blonde left, Liddell walked over to his valise, fumbled in its depths, and brought out the three strips of celluloid on which he’d put Alfred’s fingerprints. He took an envelope out of the dresser drawer, scribbled a note, wrapped the celluloid strips in it, and sealed the envelope. He addressed it, affixed a stamp to the corner, walked out into the hall, and dropped it down the mail chute.

T
HE PEALING OF THE PHONE
at his ear was shrill, strident, insistent. Johnny Liddell groaned, cursed softly, and dug his head under the pillow. The noise refused to go away. He opened one eye experimentally, squinted at the window shade, and noted that it still wasn’t light.

He tried to wipe the sleep from his eyes, but it wouldn’t wipe away. The phone kept dancing on the stand. He reached out, snagged the receiver from its hook, jammed it against his ear.

“What’s the matter? The joint on fire?” he growled into the receiver.

“Sorry, Mr. Liddell.” The operator’s metallic voice sounded bored. “Lady said it was a matter of life and death.”

Liddell yawned, nodded. “Put her on.”

There was a faint click, then the husky voice of Sister Wanda came through. “I’m sorry to have to bother you at this hour, Mr. Liddell. I didn’t think the occasion would arise to have to speak to you again. But something has happened.” She paused. “I’ve heard from Brother Alfred.”

“Where is he?”

“Hiding.”

Liddell scowled. “Why?”

“He believes his life is in danger. He merely called to assure me that he was safe. When I told him about you, he insisted that he see you.”

Liddell swung his legs out of bed. “Good. When and where?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Now. Where do I find him?”

“He’ll find you. Here are your instructions.”

“Wait’ll I get a pencil.” Liddell snapped on the bed light, reached to the back of the chair where his jacket hung, and pulled a pencil and notebook from the inside pocket. “Shoot.”

“Do you know how to get to West End Park? It’s near the yacht basin.”

“Better give me the directions,” Liddell told her. “I’m a stranger in town.”

“It’s very simple. You know how to get to Canal from your hotel?”

Liddell nodded. “Yeah.”

“Good. Canal separates old New Orleans from the modern part. The park is in the new section. You will follow Canal Street to the boulevard leading to Pontchartrain. You will come to the Delgado Museum. Exactly three miles farther there is a small dirt road. It’s marked ‘dead end.’ You will drive to the end of it and park with your lights on. Brother Alfred will come to you.”

“Don’t I need a secret password?” Liddell growled. “Why all the hocus-pocus? Can’t he just—”

“The meeting will be on his terms,” the receiver told him tartly.

Liddell sighed, squinted at the luminescent face of the clock on his stand. “It’s two-thirty now. I can’t be there much before four.”

“He will be waiting.” There was a click as the connection was broken.

Liddell dropped the receiver back on its hook and scowled at it. He reached for a cigarette on his night stand, stuck it in the corner of his mouth, and touched a light to it.

On an impulse, he reached over, lifted the receiver from the hook, gave the operator the number Marty Kirk had given him. There was a brief pause, then the heavy, throaty voice of the racketeer came through.

“Yeah?”

“This is Liddell. I’ve got news for you.”

The man at the other end snorted. “It better be good.”

“I’m meeting your boy at four.”

The voice on the other end sounded impressed. “How’d you reach him?”

“That’s a professional secret. I just wanted to tell you to get that five gees ready for a pickup.”

“You deliver the merchandise, we’ll have your payoff.”

Liddell nodded. “Okay. Set your alarm, because I expect to have him back at that hocus-pocus joint of his in time for breakfast.” He dropped the receiver back on its cradle, grinned at it. Then he snubbed his cigarette out and called down to the desk for a hired car. He told them to have it waiting in a half hour.

A miserable, cold drizzle had started by the time Johnny Liddell was ready to leave. He picked up the rented sedan in front of the Delcort, drove down Bourbon Street, swung into Canal. Most of the store fronts and windows were blank, dark, as Liddell tooled the rented car along the broad street. He passed the stately Boston Club, where the Mardi Gras King greets his Queen on Mardi Gras day, and headed uptown away from the river toward the lake.

As he drove past the famous light stanchions, each decorated with the four flags that have flown over the city in its turbulent history, the character of the neighborhood slowly changed. The business district, the colorful Vieux Carré, fell far behind.

He drove into a district of big estates, their gardens abloom with roses and fragrantes. The houses themselves were huge, white, porticoed ghosts set back from the road, half hidden by giant moss-bearing oaks, so old and freighted with memories of centuries that their branches trailed the ground. Soon the estates, too, fell behind. He swung into the City Park, with its famous dueling oaks and the ghosts of thousands of gallants who’d lost their lives under them.

About forty minutes from his hotel, he came into sight of the Greek temple known as the Delgado Museum. He cut his speed and checked his speedometer. Three miles beyond the museum, he came upon the little dirt road with a weather-beaten sign that proclaimed it to be a dead end.

He swung the rented car off the macadam and fitted his wheels into a rutted track that led back through a clump of trees. The car bumped its way along a road that was barely wide enough for one car’s passage. After a mile or more of jouncing, he came to what was apparently the end of the road, a little promontory set high above the scenic highway, completely surrounded by trees and dense underbrush. He braked the car to a stop and looked around.

There was no sign of life of any kind.

Liddell tugged his .45 from its holster and put it on the car seat beside him. He opened the car door and walked to the end of the road in the chilling drizzle. It consisted of a couple of logs piled into a barrier. Beyond, the land fell away for several hundred feet of boulder-spiked hillside. On either side of the road, the ground rose to wooded wilderness. Far out he could hear the occasional hoot of a lake boat feeling its way through the mist.

He walked back to the car, brought out the pint he had stuck in the glove compartment, held it to his lips, and tilted it. The brandy helped take some of the chill out of his bones.

One moment he was alone, straining eyes and ears against the wall of darkness. The next there was a figure standing beside the car. It was that of a fairly short man dressed eerily in a white robe that stirred restlessly in the breeze. The lower part of his face was covered by a bushy black beard, he wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and his head gleamed baldly in the half-light.

“You are Johnny Liddell?” His voice was deep, theatrically rumbling. It was the kind of voice that would have a carefully calculated effect on an emotional audience.

Liddell started. His hand sought the .45 on the seat beside him and closed about the reassuringly cold metal of its butt.

“I am Alfred,” the voice continued. From its tone, it was apparent that the listener was supposed to drop to his knees. Liddell had no difficulty resisting the impulse. “I have been told that you seek to help.”

Liddell relaxed, let the air out of his lungs with a slow whistle. “Don’t sneak up on a guy like that, mister,” he advised. “Not in these surroundings.” He pulled out his pint, helped himself to a deep slug, offered it through the window. “Take the chill off?”

The bearded man shook his head. “Alcohol is against my teaching. You wish to talk? Come, I will lead you to my retreat.”

“Can’t we drive there?”

The man turned on his heel and started away. Liddell reluctantly pushed open the car door and followed him. “Near here?”

“You will soon see,” the bearded man boomed. “Perhaps you think these precautions silly. But you must understand that there are those who would destroy me because I am dedicated to drive them from their citadels of sin. Nothing must happen to me until I have finished my work.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to you. Marty Kirk and his boys have more to lose by your death than by your living. I’m here to guarantee you safe conduct back to your temple.”

The bearded man shook his head sadly. “You would take the word of a creature of Mammon? Do you not see that—” There was a sudden convulsion of his features. He crooked up a protective arm in front of his face.

Liddell started to swing around, heard rather than saw the blow that dropped him. There was a hissing rush of sound from behind. He tried to spin, to fall away from what was coming. It hummed like a bumblebee and exploded on the side of his head with a brilliance of a flare. He tried to tug the .45 from his pocket, but suddenly it had become too heavy. It slipped from his limp fingers and clattered to the ground.

There was another swish, another display of fireworks in the back of his skull, and he went to his knees. He tried to pull himself to his feet, but his knees had turned to jelly. He pitched forward on his face and didn’t move.

It was the penetrating cold, the persistent call of some wood bird that convinced Johnny Liddell that he was still alive. His head swirled sickeningly, and the call of the bird echoed back and forth in diminishing volume with a monotony that grated on his nerves.

He struggled to get his eyes open, but a black pit from which he was trying to climb yawned again. When he moved his head, nausea enveloped him, and he slid back into the void. He tried to cry out as the sinking sensation assailed him, but it came out of his throat as no more than a hollow groan.

After a while, the dark void receded. A pain that started behind his ear exploded in a bright flash. His eyes felt as though they were leaded down and stubbornly resisted his efforts to open them. Finally, when he did get them open, he had difficulty keeping them from rolling back in his head.

There was sky and a tree branch over his head. He managed to sit up, look around. The car stood where he had left it. The sky had lightened with the coming of day, transforming the drizzle of the night before into a damp fog that lay in the hollows around him like an opaque cloud. He crawled back to his car on hands and knees, managed to get the door open. The bottle was still on the seat where he had left it.

He tilted the brandy over his lips, took a long swig. Another wave of giddiness assailed him, then passed. He still had the pain behind his eyes, but the mists in front of them were fast dissipating.

The man in the white robe was nowhere to be seen.

After a moment, Liddell was able to get out of the car, look around. There were signs of a struggle. Mashed into the ground near the front of the car were the remains of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, the rims smashed, the lenses shattered. He picked them up and dropped them into his jacket pocket. His .45 lay where he had dropped it. He checked it, found it untouched, and replaced it in its shoulder holster.

Liddell cursed under his breath and pulled up his jacket collar in an abortive effort to keep out the chill that was beginning to numb his fingers and his feet. He tried to burn it out with another slug from the bottle but decided his wet clothes had too much of an edge.

He got back into the car, kicked it into roaring life, managed to get it turned around in the narrow clearing. He showed less concern for the car’s springs on the way back over the rutted road, roaring along it like a drunken panzer tank.

He headed back past the golf course and found a phone in a small coffee-and-doughnut shop on the boulevard. He put through a call to Marty Kirk at his penthouse. The number failed to answer. Liddell slammed the receiver back on its hook, cursing bitterly.

He had two cups of coffee so hot they almost scalded him, and got back into the car. He headed for his hotel and some dry clothes.

He was under a shower when the knock came at his door. He ignored it, finished showering, and rubbed himself down with a heavy Turkish towel. He got into a dry pair of shorts and walked out into his bedroom.

Hook, the little man with the thick black hair, whom he’d first met in New York, looked up and grinned. “Hello, Liddell. Long time no see.”

Liddell scowled at him, walked over, examined the lock. “A helluva lot of privacy they give you in this rat trap. First they use my room for a shooting-gallery, now they’ve routed traffic through it. How’d you get in here?”

The little man looked hurt. “You wouldn’t figure that lock would give me any trouble, would you? I could get that one open by blowing on it.”

“What do you want?”

“Same as always. The boss wants to see you.”

Liddell grinned at him glumly. “I got news for you, little man. I want to see your boss, too.” He stuffed his legs into his pants. “I called him an hour or so ago. Where was he?”

“He didn’t say.”

Liddell nodded. “There are a lot of things he didn’t say. Maybe this time he’s going to be more talkative.” He yanked out a drawer, pulled a shirt out. “I don’t like playing with a stacked deck.”

Hook sighed. “If I was you, I wouldn’t go looking for any grief, shamus. I got the feeling the boss isn’t too happy with you right now.”

“That spoils my whole day. You know what? I’m not very happy with you or your boss or this stinking town.” He knotted a tie around his neck, shrugged into his jacket. “Where’s your boss now?”

“Waiting for you.”

“Well, we mustn’t keep Marty waiting.” He took a snub-nosed .38 from his top drawer, dropped it into his jacket pocket. “Let’s go have a talk with the little man.”

• • •

Marty Kirk lived in the swank Carter Arms, an expensive pile of stone and plate glass that towered over Lafayette Square. The lobby was furnished in aggressively modernistic style. Brightly colored couches and chrome tables tastefully complemented the soft, restful, ankle-deep pastel carpeting. Hook led the way across the lobby to an ornate registration desk where an impeccably dressed man was engaged in the absorbing task of adjusting the edge of a cuff that peeked from the end of the sleeve of his morning jacket.

“Ring the penthouse and tell Mr. Kirk that Liddell and me are on our way up, will you?”

The clerk raised his eyes, nodded. “Of course.” His fingers played with the ends of a linen handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket.