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Authors: Jonathan Valin

Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Hard-Boiled

The Lime Pit

BOOK: The Lime Pit
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The Lime Pit
Jonathan
Valin
1980

To Katherine

Chapters:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28

1

IT WAS a warm noon in early July. From my desk I
watched a black-bodied wasp floating past the screen of the office
window. He and a dozen or so of his cronies had built a hive on the
sixth-floor cornice of the Riorley Building, directly below my
office; and now, in the early summer heat, they circled and droned
through the air in a lazy, rancorous cloud, like a little spot of bad
weather in an otherwise flawless sky.

I had just gotten back to Cincinnati Thursday
morning, after spending the better part of two days in Chicago,
running down a con man by the name of Aaron Mull. He was an
interesting character, Mull--a kind of corn-belt Prospero who had
tricked two realtors into parting with a large sum of cash. It was a
beautiful scam and it could only have been run on the very greedy or
the maladroit, which was why the two real estate men had looked so
goddamn angry when they'd popped into my office on the first of the
month. The taller and more imposing of the pair, a bug-eyed man named
Leo Meyer, explained the situation in a hoarse, aggrieved voice,
while his partner, Larry Cox, literally wrung his hands in rage.
These were not-so-newly-rich men, used to getting their own ways in a
world of cutthroat scheming. They had worked their way up (so Meyer
told me) the "hard way," had "fought" for every
penny that was theirs. And (so I told myself, though I didn't tell
Meyer) it had taken this schemer, Aaron Mull, to summon up a history
that had been, for a decade at least, buried under the loose earth of
acquisitions--fine houses, fine cars, and the fine clothes, the
tailored suits, the Brooks Brothers shirts and ties, the Bally
shoes--that now seemed to Meyer mere figments from some dream of
worldly happiness.

I took the case. Hell, why not? Meyer's
self-righteousness may have been as phoney as Mull's scam and his
usual business ethics just as questionable, but money is money,
whoever has handled it. And, once in your hands, it's an orphan, a
new limb waiting to be grafted green on the family tree.

I'd found Mull, all right. Working the same scam on a
Northside Chicago realtor. And I'd turned him over to the police. Not
without a tussle, however, because Aaron Mull was a crafty
son-of-a-bitch and, like most imaginative men, a selfish one. In
fact, when I finally caught up with him in the tar lot of a Northside
I.G.A., he denied he was Aaron Mull. And, for just a second, in the
dry shimmering heat of that grocery parking lot, I believed him.
Maybe it was the heat or maybe it was just another facet of that gift
that made him so good at what he did, but, by God, in his checked
short-sleeved shirt, his Levi's and Hush Puppies, with his shock of
pale brown hair, his tan beardless face and huckleberry grin, he
didn't look like an Aaron Mull. He backed away, smiling with just the
right air of affronted good nature. And then I collared him.

Mull jerked away, and there followed a merry chase
among the parked cars and abandoned grocery carts. I had to bash him
one at the end of it--a hard tap across the noggin with my pistol,
which really wasn't fair, as Mull pointed out when I cuffed him and
called the police.

It was about midnight when the Chicago cops finished
with me. The night was blessedly cool after the heat of the day and,
rather than waiting for it to warm up again and driving in a sweat
all the way back to Cincy, I walked over to the police lot, got in my
Pinto and headed out Lake Shore to Stoney Island and from there to
the Indiana toll road and the interstate that led to home. I stopped
once at a Stuckey's outside of Indianapolis for a cup of coffee and
an egg salad sandwich; and, while the waitress sauntered sleepy-eyed
behind the counter and a handful of truckers, dressed in jeans and
workshirts with openbacked CAT (for Caterpillar) caps on their
heads, chatted and joked in one of the booths, I nursed my cup of
coffee and watched the sunrise through the truck-stop window. I felt
good. I'd done a good job. And, with the money I'd made from it, I
could just keep driving on 65, all the way down through Kentucky,
Tennessee, and Mississippi to the Gulf. It was a wonderful feeling of
freedom that didn't last much longer than the moment it took me to
reflect on how hot it would be on the Gulf and how little I liked
driving through the swelter of July; but it was a feeling that very
few people can afford to indulge in. Maybe the truckers at the nearby
booth. And maybe the two real estate tycoons, whom I would call from
my office that morning. You have to be god-awful rich or one of the
chosen poor to entertain the illusion that your life is a matter of
free choices. It's mostly an illusion, as Mull had found out. But
it's a damn good feeling while it lasts. Almost worth a year to two
in the slammer, which was all Mull would get as a first offender. And
certainly worth the crap that I had to put up with daily.

I'd gotten into town at seven A.M. and, still
exhilarated, driven straight to the Riorley Building. It wasn't until
that noon, as I sat drowsing, feet up on the desk, staring at the
cloud of wasps as if they were an omen, that the fatigue caught up
with me and the excitement left me the way it leaves an active
kid--in a sudden swoop, a downward spin that makes you wonder if
there will ever be anything in the world worth getting that excited
about again.

I was sitting in the diner, watching the sun rise in
a great purple aura above the horizon line of treetops and skeletal
high-power stations, when the kitchen phone rang. The waitress was
too tired to pick it up; and the truckers didn't seem to hear it.
Baby-faced Aaron Mull, dressed in bib overalls and a collarless
shirt, walked out of the kitchen and said, "I'm not going to
answer it." Which left me. I reached across the lunch counter,
but the space between the mushroom-shaped stools and the far wall was
suddenly extended, and it was like reaching across the dead space
toward the wild animals at a zoo. The phone kept ringing. And I kept
reaching. And then I opened my eyes and I was back in the office,
with a telephone buzzing insistently on my desk.

I picked it up.

"I want to speak to . . . Mister . . . Harold .
. . Stoner," a high-pitched, whimsical voice said. The speaker
was male, probably elderly; from the lacunae in his speech, the
emphatic pauses between words, I imagined he was either a man who
took himself very seriously or that he simply wasn't used to talking
over the phone, wasn't sure the contraption would convey clearly the
nuances of speech--like my own grandmother who used to yell into the
receiver to be sure she would be heard over "all that distance".

I rubbed my eyes with my free hand and said: "This
is Stoner speaking."

"Harold Stoner?"

I held the receiver away from my ear and looked at
it. "Yes. This is Harold Stoner."

"My name is Cratz, Mr. Stoner. Hugo ... Harold
... Cratz. We got the same name."

"What can I do for you, Mr. Cratz?"

"It's not me," he said with a sorrowful
catch in his voice. "It's my little girl, Cindy Ann. They done
something to her."

And with that Hugo Cratz began to whimper--weak
feminine sobs that made me shift uncomfortably in my chair. I let him
have his cry over Cindy Ann--wife, daughter, granddaughter,
whoever she was he had loved and lost. And when he'd finished, I told
him to call the police, because I had the feeling that Hugo Cratz
didn't need a private detective yet, just a friendly ear. But he
surprised me. "Shoot, I already been to the police. Goddamn
fools try to tell me she's left town. I says to them, `If she left
town, how come she don't leave no word? How come that friend of hers,
Laurie, is acting like she is?'.

"Well?" Cratz said when I didn't speak up.
"How come?"

"I don't know."

"You think you could find out?"

"I can try," I told him. "Come
downtown to my office tomorrow. Say about nine-thirty. And fill me in
on the details."

"Can't come downtown," Cratz said. "Had
a stroke last year and I don't get around much any more, save for a
walk in the park. You can come out here if you like. 2014 Cornell.
First floor front."

I started to write down the address on a notepad. And
then I put the pencil down. With what I had made from the Meyer deal
I didn't need Hugo Cratz's money. Or the trouble he was bound to give
me. Because Hugo Cratz was trouble. I didn't need any omens to tell
me that. "Wouldn't you be better off waiting a couple of days,"
I said to him. "Maybe Cindy Ann did leave town. Maybe she'll be
back in a couple of days."

"She's all I got," Cratz said weakly. "My
little girl is all I got."

I picked up the pencil and scratched out the street
number. It was in northside Clifton--a respectable address. "All
right, Mr. Cratz. It'll cost you two hundred dollars a day plus
expenses."

"Uh-huh," he said too quickly. "All
right."

"You've got that kind of money?"

"Well, not just lying around, I don't," he
said. "I can get it for you, though. In a couple of days. And as
for those expenses ... it don't cost but twenty-five, cents to get
from here to downtown on the Metro, and twenty-five cents back. So I
don't figure that should amount to much."

"What if I have to spend a few days on the job,
Mr. Cratz?"

He snorted. "With Laurie living right across the
street! Hell, you can find out the right of this in half an hour. And
that don't come to but eight dollars and thirty-three cents. Figuring
twelve hours in a work day," he added.

I took a breath. "So you estimate between the
bus fare and the half hour I'll be working for you that you'll owe me
..."

"Eight dollars and eighty-three cents,"
Hugo Cratz said smartly. "And I'll have it for you in a couple
of days."

I laughed out loud.

"Don't you believe me?" Cratz said.
"Mister, I need your help. No matter what it costs, I need your
help."

He needs my help.

What the hell? It was only a couple of miles out of
my way, and I was going home anyway. And I'd made a big bundle for
doing practically nothing. And I could afford to be charitable. And a
little, quite unprofessional part of me-maybe the best part, all
things considered-very much wanted to take a quick look at the man
behind that stubborn whimsical voice.

"All right," I said. "I know I'm
making a mistake, but I'm going to take you up on your deal, Mr.
Cratz. One half hour's work. Pro-rated. I'll be out around three. And
we'll see what we can do about finding your little girl."
 
 

2

NORTH CLIFTON is one of the oldest suburbs of
Cincinnati--a neighborhood of storied frame houses and spindlerailed
verandas, of white-capped gaslights and maple-shaded lawns. It's
picturesque and, like many picturesque neighborhoods, it has a
chilling uniformity of character, as if the householders propped
sternly in their lawn chairs or gazing out from the black space of a
porch have been chosen and supplied to ornament their homes. It's not
that the houses don't look lived in; on the contrary, Clifton looks
thoroughly lived in, richly historical in the clutter and detail of
everyday life. But it is a sedate and melancholy clutter that smacks
of decay. Despite the contradictory evidence--the deserted bicycle
blazing on a sunlit lawn, the bright yellow plastic truck abandoned
on the sidewalk, and the occasional dart of a child's playful
voice--I felt as I drove up Cornell that, like a bar or a graveyard,
this was not a place for the young. Perhaps Cindy Ann Cratz had felt
that way too.

Hugo Cratz lived six doors in from Ludlow in a
three-story red frame house with a white slat veranda and a tall
maple tree set in a modest yard. A hedge of rosebushes flowed about
the veranda and continued back along the driveway to the rear of the
house. Two old men were walking up the driveway when I pulled in. One
of them had been burly once--big-shouldered and strong-armed. But he
had shriveled away in his old age and now carried himself with a kind
of sodden, humpbacked fatigue, as if it pained him slightly to move
at all. His chest was caved in and showed, sallow and hairless,
through the front of his checked shirt. The head above the chest was
sharp-featured and crowned with a tonsure of wispy white hair. His
chin, peppered with stubble, turned upward; his sharp nose turned
down; so that his mouth ran like a thin dark crease between them. The
other man was fat, nimble, and deeply tanned on the face and arms. He
wore a tight yellow T-shirt that accentuated the sway of his gut and
the fat paps that sagged above his belly. His face was square,
pleasant and considerably younger-looking than the other man's. I
guessed that the frail one was Hugo Cratz, and I was right.

BOOK: The Lime Pit
10.35Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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