Step to the Graveyard Easy (13 page)

Vanowen picked up the deck to deal the next round. And all at once, he froze and the glower metamorphosed into a stare of astonishment. He said explosively, “Jesus Christ!”

A couple of the others made startled noises, their eyes raised to something behind Cape. He swiveled his head, then froze himself.

Somebody had come into the room, breeze-silent, and was now moving quickly toward the table. Five or six inches under six feet,
compact, dressed all in black, head covered by a black ski mask, one hand waggling a large-caliber automatic.

“Everybody sit still, you don’t want to die.” Raspy, nervous male voice muffled by the mask. “Hands on the table. Do it!”

They did it. The sudden tension in the room was electric. Cape could feel it on the back of his neck, prickling, stiffening the short hairs.

The gunman took something white and folded from his pocket, moved close enough to toss it on the table. Pillowcase or flour sack. “You,” he said to Sturgess, who was the bank. “Fill it with the cash. Hurry up.”

Vanowen opened his mouth. “You won’t get away with this.”

“Shut up.”

“You think we don’t know who you are? Even with that mask?”

Cape glanced over at him. Veins bulged in his neck, throbbed in his temples. His liquor-shiny eyes showed anger, contempt, but no fear.

“I told you shut up, asshole.” The automatic made fidgety, weaving motions; to Cape it was like watching a coiled, one-eyed snake. “Rest of you put your wallets, watches, jewelry on the table. Everything valuable. Use one hand, keep the other where I can see it.”

Silently, they complied. Vanowen was the only one who took his time, and when he had his wallet out, he slapped it down hard on the felt. The platinum ring on his left hand, with its circle of fat diamonds, made gleams and glints in the spill from the low-hanging droplight. Instead of stripping it off, he covered it with his other hand.

“Everything in the sack,” the gunman said to Sturgess. And when it was full, “Pass it over to this guy here,” indicating Cape.

Cape took the sack.

“Hold it out with your right hand.”

He did that, and the gunman came forward and snatched it from him. Backed off again.

“You,” he said, and now he was looking at Vanowen. “That ring you’re covering up. Take it off, toss it over here.”

Vanowen sat motionless, glaring.

“Take it off. Now!”

“Go to hell, Judson. That’s what you call yourself, isn’t it?”

Mahannah said warningly, “Andy, for God’s sake.”

“Boone Judson. You—”

The masked man shot him. In the face, so that Vanowen’s head seemed to burst in streaks and spatters of bright red.

The automatic shifted and he fired again, this time straight at Cape.

Cape was already moving in a sideways dive out of the chair. The bullet missed close, burning through the left side of his shirt. He jarred into the floor, his legs tangled up with the chair. He heard the gun go off again, and in the same instant the poker table came crashing down on top of him. That round missed, too; the metal jacket thwacked into something solid near his head.

All around him was chaos. Moans, yells, running steps, scrambling on the hardwood floor, the air choked with the stink of burned powder. An edge of the table dug into his back; somebody’s flailing elbow cracked the side of his jaw as he heaved up. The weight shifted off him. He kicked loose of the chair, corkscrewed his body around. One hand slicked through something wet and sticky as he dragged his knees under him and shoved, lurching, to his feet.

For a second or two his vision was cockeyed. When it cleared, he saw that the shooter was no longer in the game room. The running steps… he could still hear them in another part of the house. Heading for the front entrance? He ran that way, not looking back even when somebody yelled his name, the commotion made by the others diminishing behind him.

The front door stood wide open. He plunged outside. Powdery moonlight brightened the gravel turnaround, gleamed off the dark shapes of cars; nobody moved anywhere among them. The access
drive and the road beyond were empty black stripes. Then his ears picked up rustlings, the snap and crackle of twigs being crushed: the gunman was somewhere in the woods that stretched along the lakeshore. Cape ran parallel to the house and the railed deck, across the far edge of the turnaround. Over there was a path angling away into the evergreens. Enough moonshine filtered down through the overhead branches to soften shadows, give him a sense of where he was going.

Sudden noise: engine starting up somewhere ahead.

He couldn’t move any faster in the darkness. Twice he almost blundered into the boles of trees. A narrow little inlet materialized on his right, then a wooded finger of land. Beyond the finger the engine noise rose, steadied, began to thread away. Boat of some kind leaving the shore.

He stumbled on until the hard yellow-and-black gleam of the lake appeared again. Another inlet, a circlet of mud-and-sand beach fringed with mashed-down ferns and scrub, a furrow in the damp earth to show where the boat had been drawn up out of the water. And out on the lake, a couple of hundred yards distant now, moving fast on a southwesterly course, an indistinct shape that was the boat itself. Seconds later, as Cape stood there panting, the shape vanished beyond another slender wooded peninsula.

In the new hush he heard thrashings in the woods behind him. Then a shout: “Cape! Where the hell are you?” Mahannah’s voice. He turned to see flashlight beams throwing crazy patterns of light and shadow among the trees. Not answering the hail, he stood there waiting.

Mahannah burst into sight first, torch in one hand, a shotgun from his gun cabinet clenched in the other. Sturgess and Wineberg were with him, neither man armed.

“Where’d he go?” Mahannah demanded.

“Out on the lake. He had a power boat waiting here.”

Sturgess said, “You took a chance, running after him like that. He might’ve shot you too.”

“He tried hard enough inside. Those last two rounds were aimed at me.”

Cape stepped past the others, started back along the path. After a few seconds they trooped after him. Mahanilah came up alongside, lighting the way with his flashlight, but he had nothing more to say just yet. Neither did Cape.

Inside, Bellah and Jones were perched on one of the couches, big snifters of cognac in their hands, both white-faced and wearing stunned expressions. A sheet had been found and used to shroud the body of Andrew Vanowen. Blood stained it over what was left of the dead face. The poker table still lay on its side, chips and cards, shattered glass and streaks of blood, littering the floor around it and the sheeted mound.

Jones stirred and said to Mahannah, “We had to cover him. His head… the blood…”

“One of you notify the county sheriff?”

“I did,” Bellah said. “They’re on the way.”

Cape made a detour to the wet bar. Reaction had set in; his head ached, his legs felt jellied. When he leaned for support on the bar, he noticed a coagulating red smear on his palm. Vanowen’s blood. He went around behind the bar, washed his hands in the sink there.

Jones was saying, “Window in your bedroom’s open, Vince. Must be how the bastard got inside.”

“How’d he know about the game?” Wineberg asked rhetorically. “We don’t advertise when we’re playing.”

“Never mind that. Why in God’s name did he kill poor Andy?”

Cape helped himself to a slug of cognac.

Sturgess said, “Andy recognized him, that’s why. Said his name just before he was shot. What was it…. Johnson?”

“Judson,” Mahannah said. “Boone Judson.”

“Right. But who the hell is Judson? How’d Andy know him?”

Mahannah turned to look at Cape. His slick, handsome face was set in grim lines, his gaze no longer friendly.

“No,” Cape said.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“He didn’t kill Vanowen because he was recognized. That’s not why he fired those last two rounds at me, either.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“When he stepped forward and took the sack out of my hand, I got a good look at his eyes through the mask holes. They were brown.”

“So?”

“Judson’s eyes are blue,” Cape said. “Whoever the gunman is, he’s not Boone Judson.”

Inside of an hour, the house and property were swarming with Douglas County sheriff’s personnel. The man in charge was a plainclothes captain named D’Anzello. Mid-forties, big without being fat, deceptively soft-spoken and slow-moving; mop of black hair, bushy salt-and-pepper mustache. Efficient, professional. The kind of man who doesn’t have to say or do much to command respect or attention, whose presence in a room is enough to make him its focal point.

D’Anzello asked preliminary questions to get an overview of what had happened. Then he took them one by one into Mahannah’s study, while the rest waited their turn in the main living room. Mahannah was the first. So Cape knew he’d be second even before he was called.

The study had the same determinedly masculine look as the rest of the house, dominated by a desk of some polished wood whose color matched the redwood paneling. D’Anzello hadn’t appropriated the desk. Both he and a second, younger plainclothes-man were on their feet, waiting in the middle of the room.

D’Anzello said, “Sit down, Mr. Cape.”

“I’d rather stand, if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself. Matthew Cape, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Current residence?”

“Lakeside Grand in Stateline.”

“Current permanent residence?”

“I don’t have one. Mahannah must’ve told you that.”

“Last place you lived for more than a week or two?”

“Rockford, Illinois. Born there, lived there all my life until a few weeks ago.”

“What happened a few weeks ago?”

Cape told him, keeping it terse.

“So now you just travel around the country, living out of a suitcase. The vagabond life.”

“That’s one term for it.”

“Finance this lifestyle how?”

“Savings, mostly.”

“Supplemented by gambling winnings?”

“Not really. I like to gamble, but it’s only a hobby.”

“High-stakes poker?”

“When I can afford it. The game tonight was about my limit.”

The other sheriff’s investigator had a tape recorder going and was making written notes besides. That was all he was there for, to make sure they got everything they might need. D’Anzello did all the talking.

“Ever been in trouble before?” he asked.

“Gambling trouble? No.”

“Any kind of trouble.”

“Kid stuff in Rockford.”

“What kind of kid stuff?”

“Possession of marijuana when I was fifteen. Charge was dropped.”

“Still smoke dope, do you, Mr. Cape?”

“No.”

“Use any other kind of drugs?”

“No.”

“What about adult trouble? With the law, I mean.”

“None.”

“Not even a speeding ticket?”

“Not even a parking ticket,” Cape said.

“We’ll check on that, you know.”

“Go right ahead. The closest to adult trouble I’ve had was a
month or so ago in New Orleans. I happened to witness a purse-snatching, chased the thief, caught him, and held him until the law got there. You can check on that, too.”

“We will,” D’Anzello said. “Let’s move on to your reasons for being in this area.”

“Mahannah must’ve filled you in on that.”

“I’d like to hear it from you.”

Cape’s smile was faint, wry. “You know how tired I am of telling this story?”

“A man was murdered here tonight, Mr. Cape,” D’Anzello said in sharper tones. “Tell the story one more time, and don’t leave anything out.”

“Sure. One more time.”

When he was done, D’Anzello said, “Let’s see if I have this straight. You took the satchelful of money from the Judsons and just let them walk away scot-free.”

“That’s right.”

“Why? They’d run this scam on you and the conventioneers—professional cardsharps certain to keep on fleecing other innocent people. If you’re such a good Samaritan, why didn’t you report them to the San Francisco police, take them out of commission?”