The Lime Pit (22 page)

He snorted with laughter and started back down the
stairs.

"Hold up!" I said to him. "I wanted to
ask you something."

"Yeah?" He cocked his arm on the door frame
and looked at me impatiently. "I got work to do, you know."

"Last night, after I'd gone off to the hospital,
did I have any more visitors? Maybe a tall guy with cowboy boots? Or
a pretty blonde who looks like Farrah Fawcett?"

"Oh I'd have remembered that," he said with
a roll of his belly. He glanced at Jo and blushed to the roots of his
tow-haired scalp. "The answer's no. No one last night a'tall.
Though there was somebody asking after you this morning. A sweet
young thing with blonde hair. He smelled like a lilac bush."

"Leach," I said to myself.

"He said he had to get in touch with you. I
think he left a note in your box. Now, if you don't mind, I got work
to do-cleaning up after your damn mess."

As Leo ambled off down the stairs, Jo put a hand to
her mouth and whispered, "Is he always like that?"

"Always."

I opened the mailbox and took out Tray's note. Leo
was right--it did smell like lilac water.

Jo peeked at the note. "'Got to see you, Tray.'
"

"He's my friend," I lisped.

She laughed and jabbed me in the side.

The wrong side. I groaned and dropped the bag and
box. "Oh, God, I'm sorry," she said and started to laugh. I
glared at her. "That you think is funny?"

She put on a straight face, but her lower lip kept
trembling with laughter.

I scooped the stuff off the floor with another groan.
"Being alive she thinks is serious business. A man in pain she
laughs at."

We got up to the third floor and, when I unlocked the
front door, Jo gasped, "My God!" I dumped all the junk on
the couch and went into the kitchenette and fixed myself a Scotch.

"Me, too," Jo called out.

I poured another and walked back in and surveyed the
damage.

"Abel Jones did not have a delicate touch."

The room was a shambles. Drawers open, their contents
scattered everywhere. Bookshelves ransacked. Cushions torn off
chairs. I flipped on the Globemaster and sat down on the couch and
stared glumly at the wreckage.

"It's just as bad in there," Jo said from
the hall. She unzipped her dress and let it fall forward down her
arms. "I guess I better start cleaning up."

I took a look at her, standing there half-dressed and
eyeing the room with housewifely calculation. Her bra was low-cut and
wispy, and the tops of her breasts and the pink rounds of her nipples
showed through it.

I leaned back on the couch and took a long pull of
the Scotch. "What condition is the bed in?" I said.

She laughed. "What condition are you in?"
she said dryly.

She stepped out of the frock and kicked it into the
bedroom and walked in after it, her firm pink ass half-naked above
the bikini panties.

I started after her and, by the time I got to the
bedroom, she was naked on the bed, her hands tented at her lips and a
look of spry expectation on her face.

I took a long look at her and she blushed.

"God, I need you," I said heavily.

She arched her back and
hips as I kneeled on the mattress. "Make love to me, Harry,"
she said as I moved on top of her. "I want you to make me-I
touched her lips with my fingers, then covered them with my mouth.

***

Forget.

I think that was the word she was about to say. To
wipe it all away in a flash of pleasure, an explosion of glands and
muscle and nerve endings.

We'd gone at it, too, in one great roiling,
passionate coupling. Pure heat-like a junk rush. Her sex wet with my
saliva and her own sticky wetness. And me plunging into her
rhythmically. And the only sound the slap of flesh and the small,
urgent cries we gave to each other.

And it worked for Jo.

As she climaxed, she put a twisted hand beside her
mouth, agape with pleasure, and her head rolled away from mine to the
mattress. Then she opened her eyes and they were clear of bitterness
and bad memory. "Don't go," she whispered to me.

I lay on top of her, feeling her heart beat slowly
and the brine of sweat along my belly and in the hollow of her loins.
In a minute or two, I rolled away. Jo curled affectionately beside me
and was soon asleep. I stroked her black hair, warm yet and damp from
love-making, and pretended that I, too, was emptied of all terror and
rage.

But, for me, it wouldn't work. Even as I lay there
beside her, I knew that in a minute the pleasure would vanish and,
instead of staring off blankly into space, I would be seeing Hugo's
juicy eyes or Laurie's erotic ones or be imagining the dead doll's
stare of Cindy Ann's eye.

I got to my feet and walked quietly into the living
room.

My back hurt-a dull ache, like an earache but shot
with occasional twinges of hot pain. It made me feel sick and old and
desperate.

The thing was, I didn't know where to begin. I wasn't
even sure if I wanted to begin again--to hold my breath and go under,
into that green world of cool, predatory sex and sudden violence.

For a second I toyed with the idea of calling Foster.
Only I knew what would happen if I turned it over to him. He'd call
Tray Leach, who, faced with public exposure and a court trial, would
suddenly forget that he'd ever heard of the Jellicoes or of Escorts
Unlimited. As for Lance and Laurie, she would bat her sensuous eyes
and he would paw at the turf and grumble about persecution. And their
lawyer would produce a writ of habeas and, with it, a tax record
indicating that Escorts Unlimited was nothing more than a legitimate
escort service run by two young people who were being victimized by a
brutish detective--who killed a man, by the way, on Monday last--and
by a dirty, depraved old man with a screw loose in his noggin. Foster
would puff a little cigarette smoke and know that the Jellicoes were
lying and that there was nothing he could do about it. Not with
Preston LaForge dead and Cindy Ann Evans murdered and not a shred of
hard evidence to connect them to the Jellicoes. The D.A. could never
get an indictment out of a grand jury on the basis of my testimony
alone. Because, as the Jellicoes' lawyer would be sure to point out,
my character was easily impeached. After all, I'd tried to blackmail
those two young people. Hell, it was down on tape, and the police had
the tape recorder, along with my gun and my license.

So, where do you go from here, Harry? I asked myself.

Do you call Tracy Leach and get it all started again?
Do you take the chance of getting him and you and Jo killed? Because
Foster had been right about that. If they were willing to try once on
the basis of a few photographs, they'd be more than willing to try
again if I kept pushing.

Or do you let it all slide now? Because now's the
time to decide, while you still have that anger going for you. Next
week, maybe even tomorrow, it'll be too late.

Damn it! I said and slapped myself stingingly on the
thigh. I wanted to know who that third man was. Just for my own peace
of mind. So I could tell myself that I'd seen it all, before I
stepped away. Or didn't step away.

Hell, who knows what he'll do until he does it?

I picked up the phone and made two calls.

The first was to Ralph Cratz--to tell him that I
wasn't going to be able to make it up to Dayton that day.

"It's fine with me," he said. "But I
don't think Dad's going to like it. I told him you were going to come
up, and he's been trying to get you all morning. He's got it in his
head that something's gone wrong--you know how he is. And I'm afraid
he might try to go back to Cincinnati."

"Keep him there!" I almost shouted. "For
God's sake, keep him in Dayton! If you don't want to see him hurt or
killed, you'll do what I say."

Ralph promised to try. "But you know Dad,"
he said miserably.

The second call was to Tracy Leach--to find out what
he'd been in such a rush to talk about.

"Preston," he said. From the sound of his
voice, Tracy Leach was either very angry or very frightened. I
couldn't tell which. "What about Preston?"

"Are you going to make me say it over the
phone?" he said with distaste.

I thought about the last time I'd been invited to a
private meeting to talk things out and said, "Yes. What about
Preston?"

"You're a bastard," Leach hissed. The rest
of it was delivered at a clipped, furious pace, like morse code.
"Some policemen came here. They asked me about Preston. They
said he'd ... that the Evans girl was dead because of him."

"I know that," I said.

"They said he'd left a note by some pictures."
Leach paused. "I didn't tell them but I'm telling you. Preston
didn't have any pictures like that. I practically lived in his
apartment, so I know. Those pictures weren't his. I don't know about
the note. It was in his hand. They showed it to me. But I'm telling
you"--his voice peaked shrilly--"Preston did not kill that
girl."

I shivered where I stood in the hot July sunlight.
"He didn't kill Cindy Ann," I said flatly. Not like a
question. Like a statement of fact. Trying it out, seeing how it
sounded, how it resonated.

"And I can prove it," Tray Leach said. "Now
will you come over here?"

"I'll be right over," I said and slammed
down the receiver.
 
 

22

IT WAS the same overripe, dowager's room, but with a
difference. He'd taken the rug up--the one I'd splashed with rose
water--and he'd hung black crepe along the walls and put black
antimacassars on all of the furnishings; so that, now, it was a
dowager's room in mourning.

"For Preston?" I said, fingering the black
cloth on one of the armrests of the settee.

Tracy Leach nodded.

He'd decked himself in black, too. Black shirt. Black
trousers. Black shoes and socks. Given that impassive, boy-like face,
he looked vaguely like Cesar, Caligari's somnambulist.

He looked ridiculous. And so did the room. The
combination was as vapid as a belated condolence card. And it made me
squirm to see it.

"I said a little prayer for him today,"
Tray said. "I'm Catholic. Lapsed, of course. The Church doesn't
approve of my sexual preferences. But I still go to mass on a few
feast days and, every so often, for confession." He looked at me
with ugly self-assurance. "Am I boring you? Sorry, if I am. But,
you see, according to the Church, his soul is in hell. I don't know
if I believe that or not. But I do know what people can do to you
while you are still alive. Or while your memory is. They're going to
crucify Preston in the papers. And I will not let that happen. He was
a weak man, but he was not a killer. The very idea is absurd. He'd no
more have harmed that girl than he would have harmed me. He liked
her. He told me so. She had been sweet to him. Sometimes children can
be sweet in a selfless way, before they learn who they're not
supposed to like or love."

"What did he talk about on Sunday afternoon,
when he came to see you?"

"You, of course. And what you had done to him.
He didn't know what to do. You see, with an operation like the
Jellicoes', if a customer should become, shall we say, dissatisfied,
he can never complain to the authorities for fear that Lance or
Laurie will retaliate with pictures, tape recordings, films. They
have a little something on file for each of their special clients."

"What did they have on Preston?"

Leach leaned forward on the settee. "I'm not
sure. He wasn't sure, either."

"I don't understand."

Tray got up and walked over to the big rosewood
chiffonier. He opened the top drawer and withdrew a piece of paper
and brought it back to the couch. "A week ago last Sunday,
Preston went to a party in Louisville. I was invited but declined.
You see, the Jellicoes were doing the catering and I haven't done any
business with them for some time. I don't care for either one of
them. They're vermin and they were ruining Preston's life."

Leach looked up suddenly. "She could be
incredibly vicious. Teasing, tormenting. I think she's capable of
anything--that one."

"Of killing?" I said.

"Even that. She loves pain and she loves to
inflict it. She's extraordinarily artful at what she does. And she
can make it go on for hours, until you're begging her for release.
Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. That girl frightens me.
And I'm not easily frightened."

"And Lance?"

"A clod. A piece of Texas farm land. Big and
dumb and brutal. But, perhaps, not as brutal as she is. Not in the
mind, where it really counts."

"Capable of killing?"

"I don't know. Probably. If he were cornered and
saw no other way out. But, then, most of us are capable of killing,
given the right circumstances."

He gave me a quick look, and I realized that he knew
about Abel Jones. Then, I realized that a lot of people probably did.
It would have made the eleven o'clock news on all four channels.