Solomon's Vineyard (13 page)

“I don't know. At least their deaths weren't reported until much
later.”

That was swell! I would look fine if the Grayson girl died. I asked:
“When is this ceremony?”

“In three days.”

I thought, what a goddam case! I was about to ask some more questions
when three of the Brothers came up to us. They looked unpleasant.

One said: “We have asked you not to come to the Vineyard, Mr. McGee.”

“This is a public day,” McGee said.

“Yes, but we do not care to have you in the grounds.”

“Are you going to put me out?”

“If necessary, Mr. McGee.”

McGee got oil the bench.

“Let's go,” I said.

“No.” McGee glared at the three Brothers. “I believe you are
incorporated as a religious institution.”

They stared at him, not answering.

“You see,” McGee said triumphantly to me. “They don't know.” He
turned to them. “I'll inform you. You are so incorporated. And the law
reads that such incorporated property is open to those who wish to
worship.”

One of the Brothers had red hair. He said: “You are not here to
worship.”

More of the Brethren were collecting. A half a dozen were moving in
on us. “Let's go,” I said.

“You don't know whether in my heart I worship or not,” McGee said to
the red-headed man.

“You will please go.”

Several of the Brothers moved close to McGee. “So much as touch a
finger to me,” he said, “and I. will bring suit.”

“Will you leave?” the red-headed man asked grimly.

“In my good time,” said McGee.

More were coming. Suddenly I noticed one was the dark man I'd knocked
out in the women's building the time I'd first seen Penelope Grayson.
He recognized me at the same moment. He nudged the man next to him and
whispered something, and they both scowled at me.

“For God's sake,” I said to McGee, “let's go.”

He was having a fine time. He bowed to the red-headed man. “I leave
now, but only of my own free will.” He smiled at him. “Do you
understand?”

The man didn't reply. We went to the touring car, followed by my dark
friend, the red-headed man and twenty other Brothers. The line was
still waiting on the mausoleum steps, and cars were still coming up the
driveway. A lot of people were rubbering at us. We got in the car.
McGee started the engine and waved to the Brothers. “Giddap,” he said,
and we drove away.

I turned back. The Brothers were still watching us. “They don't seem
to care for you,” I said to McGee.

“I don't care for them either,” McGee said, swinging the car on to
the main highway. “Do you know what I once did?”

“No.”

“Well, the Vineyard doesn't own any of the places it operates. Never
has. I came into some money, so I bought half a dozen of the places,
thinking I could force the Vineyard out. I raised the rents a hundred
per cent.”

“Well?”

“The Vineyard met the raise without a holler.”

McGEE let me off at the Arkady and I went down to the Turkish bath. I
intended to steam out some brandy, but first I had to tend to my gut.
It seemed to me I was hungry all the time now. I had the Finn send for
a double tenderloin steak, french fries, two orders of sliced tomatoes,
bread, coffee and half an apple pie. I read the paper while I waited.

I got a laugh right away. A man hunt was going on in the county, and
the man was Peter Jensen, of Fond du lac, Wisconsin. Me! What had
happened was this: the cops discovered the car that crashed into
Papas's cabin had been rented from the Drive-It by a Peter Jensen. He
had reported it stolen, but this, the cops said, was a trick to throw
them off the track. The theory now was the shooting at Papas's had been
an attempted hold-up, with Jensen the brains behind it. The paper
called him a mystery man.

That was fine. I liked being a mystery man. It wasn't such a hell of
a distinction, though. I'd never heard of a big police case that didn't
have a mystery man or, better, a mystery woman. Usually she was a woman
in a black veil. The cops had to have their romance. I got up and went
to the toilet. I took the card identifying me as Peter Jensen out of my
wallet and tore it up and dropped it in the water. Then I pulled the
chain. “So long, Pete,” I said.

I went back and looked at the paper again. The hood I'd killed had
been identified as Piper Sommes. He had worked in one of the town's
pool halls. The cops said he was one of the stick-up mob under Jensen.
Nothing was said to link him with Pug Banta. Another body was
identified as Joe Manno, one of Papas's waiters. They still had one
corpse to go. A trace had been found of Gus Papas. A car with five
Greeks in it had gassed up at a filling station in Cairo, Illinois. One
of them was wounded. The attendant had reported the wounded man to the
local sheriff. It was thought they were heading for Chicago.

It
was
Papas, I decided. He was probably clearing out for
good. Greeks never liked fighting. I wondered what had happened to
Winnie and the two men. They'd probably decided to keep quiet. I had an
idea one of the men had been cheating with Winnie. I read some more. I
was reading Chief Piper's statement that Caryle Waterman had been
killed accidentally during the stick-up, when a waiter came with my
food. I put the paper down. Upstairs someone had figured there were two
of us, and the waiter set two places on the rubbing table. That was all
right with me. It meant I got twice as much bread and coffee.

When I finished the pie I told the Finn to send the dishes up to the
kitchen. I got undressed and took the paper and a towel into the steam
room. I would steam for half an hour, and then I would take a rub and a
cold shower. Then I'd go about my business. I wanted to do something
about Oke Johnson. I felt guilty about him.

I sat on the wooden bench and tried to find something in the paper
about Oke. I couldn't. The Papas job had made the shooting unimportant.
I read a statement by the DA saying he was going to clean up the
county. There was another statement by the mayor. And another by the
Governor. The lid was off. I hadn't done so badly. It was a break,
getting Caryle Waterman killed. On an inside page I saw a picture of
the burned cabin. There wasn't anything left but the foundation and the
stone fireplace.

It was hard to read because the steam blurred the print. I put the
paper down and sat without looking at anything much. The steam was so
thick I couldn't see the opposite wall, anyway. Waves of it kept rising
from the pipes, warm and smelling of menthol. Sweat ran off my face and
chest, tickling my skin. I wondered if I was losing weight. I thought
about Ginger, wondering how she would look in the steam room. I thought
about her long legs and high breasts. I didn't get much of a buzz from
it. The Princess had fixed that. I wouldn't have gotten a buzz from
George White's chorus.

I tried to think about business. I had two days to get the Grayson
girl. I wondered why McGee didn't come through. A lawyer usually knew
of a way to do anything. I wiped my face with the towel and then I got
a handful of salt out of the box and gave myself a rub down with it.
The salt stung, but it cleaned my skin. I was still sweating. I began
to relax. The mendiol made the steam feel good in my lungs. The worst
was the Ceremony of the Bride. It sounded theatrical, but everything
sounded that way at the Vineyard. Still, I didn't like the idea of
there being no surviving brides. What if the brides just disappeared
after the ceremony? Were sent away, or something? That didn't sound
possible. People don't disappear. They write to their families, or send
for clothes, or draw out money in banks. But if they died, like McGee
said, how could the Vineyard keep it a secret?

I asked that last question, but it was just a formality. I knew
almost anything could be kept a secret at the Vineyard. Religious cults
were the hardest nuts of all to crack.

Look at Father—, for instance. The Government's been trying for
years to find out where he gets the dough to ride in Rolls-Royces and
buy estates on the Hudson, but he doesn't even bother to file an income
tax. It wouldn't be too tough for the Vineyard to get rid of a girl a
year. They could say she had gone away and nobody would be wiser, just
so the body didn't turn up.

It was all probably phony; girls didn't get killed that way, but it
scared me. It would be the end if Penelope Grayson disappeared. I could
see myself explaining to Grayson that I thought she was dead, but I
didn't know where the body was. He would like that! I was in a tough
spot with a lot of very strange people, and I had three days to get out
of it. I began to think about how it would be to live in Mexico. I had
nearly four grand. That would last for a while. The trouble was, they
didn't have many redheads in Mexico.

Someone opened the door. I felt the steam move with the draught. I
couldn't see across the room. “Craven?” . “Yes.”

I didn't recognize the voice. It wasn't the Finn. The door closed and
the mist didn't drift any more. I couldn't see anything through the
steam.

“God damn you, Craven,” the voice said. “You killed my sister.”

I rolled off the bench to the floor. The pistol made kind of a
plop
and lead flattened against the tile wall over me. Brother,
that was one time I was plenty scared. I couldn't think who was
shooting at me, or what he was talking about. I didn't know anybody's
sister. I crawled towards the shower booth that people used to wash off
the salt. He fired again. Now I could barely see something dark through
the steam, but I knew he couldn't see as much of me. My skin was closer
to the colour of the steam, especially right now. I said: “Get back or
I'll shoot.”

“Don't kid me.”

He started forward. I picked up the wooden box of salt and threw it
at him. It caught him high up and he went back out of sight against the
door. I heard him hit the door. I got to my feet and started to rush
him and my feet slipped on the wet floor. I hit my jaw a hell of a
crack on the table. I hurt my knees and elbows. I crawled to the shower
booth. He fired twice. Neither shot came near me. I crawled into the
stall, expecting a shot in the backside.

I was glad to get in that stall. It was
a
funny feeling, being
naked and fighting a man with a gun. I didn't like it. I felt the
bullets would hurt more, naked. I ran my hands around the stall and
found a bar of soap and a back brush. They made a really fine pair of
weapons. I couldn't see the guy. He was quiet now, waiting for me to
move. He'd shot four times. That left two or three bullets. That was
nothing to be cheerful about. It would only take one to knock me off.

I peeped around a corner of the stall. The steam was so thick I
couldn't see him. I wondered if the Finn had heard the shots. I
wondered if the steam in the room had muffled them. Then I saw him I He
was coming slowly towards me. He didn't know where I was, but he was
going to get up close for his last shots. I watched him come, seeing
his clothes through the steam.

I waited a second, and then I shook the shower curtain. He fired
twice; I felt the curtain twitch as the bullets went through it. I
knelt and groaned a couple of times, made a gasping noise in my throat,
and then held my breath. He was a sucker. He came right up to the
curtain. I reached out and jerked his legs. The pistol went off as he
fell. He lit hard, and I crawled up and wrestled away the pistol. He
didn't have much fight, but I socked him twice with the pistol. He lay
still on the floor.

I still didn't know who he was. I didn't wait to find out. I ran out
of the steam room. The Finn was standing by the door looking wild.
“What's the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I got a fifty-dollar bill out of my wallet. “Get a hammer
and some nails.” He hesitated and I shoved the fifty at him. His eyes
bulged out. He got the hammer and the nails. “Be fixing something,” I
said. He looked around the room. “What'll I fix?” I picked up a chair
and jerked the back off it. “Here.” He began to work on it, pounding
hard. I hid the pistol under a towel, and then I sat on the rubbing
table and began to talk. “There they were with sixty seconds to play,”
I said, “and Duke leading three to nothing, and me with one hundred
smackers on California. So what do I do? I say to Fritz: 'I'll pay the
bet off fifty cents on the dollar.' And Fritz says 'Okay'.”

I looked up, very surprised, as the room clerk and a uniformed cop
came running into the room. They stopped when they saw the Finn
hammering at the chair. “What's this?” I said.

The clerk turned to me. “Oh, Mr. Craven.” He giggled. “The awfullest
thing. I thought I heard shots down here.”

“We didn't hear 'em,” I said, looking at the Finn. “I guess he's been
making too much noise.”

The Finn pounded in a nail. The clerk giggled. The policeman snorted
and said: “And me eating my lunch.” They went out. I slid off the table
and went into the steam room.

I had been scared to death he was going to come to while the cop was
around, but I needn't have worried. He was still out, lying on the
stone floor just where I left him. I went over and looked down at him.
At first I didn't recognize him, and then I did. It was the punk who
had brought me the message from Carmel. The one who'd sat at the
coffee-shop counter with me. His face was white and “pinched-looking. I
didn't know if the steam made him look that way, or the knock on the
head. I hauled him out of the steam room. The Finn took off his clothes
and I stuck him under a cold shower. That brought him around. He
spluttered and gasped, trying to get his breath. He was a little guy,
not over a hundred and thirty pounds, and very thin. I could see his
ribs. I tossed him a towel. “Now, what's the great idea?” I asked. The
punk looked scared, but he said: “There isn't any.”