The Lime Pit (30 page)

"Rafe?" he called again.

I edged closer to the porch, until I was below it,
among the ailanthus and the sun-burst dandelions. Forcing myself to
move at a crouch, biting my lips against the pain and the insane
desire to shriek out to him, "Here, Red! Here I am!"

The planking above me creaked as he leaned toward the
door. It wouldn't take him long, once he'd seen it. He'd be out again
in a second, down the steps, and across the hard dirt yard to where
the Cadillac sat winking in the sun. I waited for the sound of the
door.

And, finally, it opened with a groan of splintering
wood.

I pulled myself up, so that I was standing before the
railing. I put the whiskey bottle down on the planks, braced myself
with one arm, and extended my gun hand through the spindles-aiming
at the open doorway.

There was a ghastly sound--as if the house itself
were expelling its fetid breath. And I knew he'd seen him. Perhaps
not believing what he'd seen at first. Not sure it was a human body.
Then, walking over to it, as I had walked over to Preston LaForge's
corpse--his own body electric with adrenalin. And when he'd seen it
from close by, he'd gasped in horror and in the certainty that I was
out there somewhere, waiting for him.

"Come on out, Red," I called from the
porch. "Come on out, old man."

There wasn't a sound from inside the house.

"Come on out!" I screamed at the gaping
door.

My own voice frightened me. I wasn't sure how much
longer I could hold onto that ledge sanity, without blacking out or
losing my grip entirely. Part of me already wanted to run screaming
into the cabin, firing wildly as I ran.

But I made myself think of him, instead of me. I made
myself picture him as he stood there beside Rafe. A light sweat on
his creased face and in the prickle of hair upon his skull. Thinking
as he would be thinking--that methodical cop's mind, sorting and
discarding alternatives. He must have known I was hurt. How badly he
couldn't tell. But he must have been wondering if he could wait me
out. Just stand there until I keeled over in the sun. He'd heard my
voice, heard the pain.

I had to do something to make him commit himself or
he could wait me out, just as he was planning to do. I rubbed my
hands across the rough porch planking and it came to me as if it were
the one and only element in the universe.

The whole damn lodge was like a box of kindling. One
spark and the wind would carry flames across the porch. Slowly, at
first, maybe five minutes to get the fire going in earnest. Then the
cabin would explode like ignited wood dust and take whatever was
inside it up in a hot breathless gust. I picked up the whiskey bottle
and spilled what was left of the liquor on the planks. Then I lit my
lighter and tossed it on the wood. A blue pool of fire swept the
porch beneath the east railing, driving me back from the heat.

"You're going to burn, Red." I watched the
flames creep along the boards, eating them away inch by inch. "You
hear me? You're going to burn just like Rafe!"

The fire crackled and black smoke began to fill the
overhang.

I stood back ten feet from the stoop and waited. He
must have seen it by now. He had to have. The smoke was drifting
through the doorway.

And then he called out. "Harry. I'm coming out.
Hold your fire, son."

He pitched a revolver through the door, and it
clattered down the steps.

"Don't shoot me, son. I ain't armed."

I raised the gun toward the door.

Out he came, swiping at the black smoke with his left
hand and squinting against the heat. When he spotted me in the yard,
his right arm jerked up. And I fired.

Red grabbed his chest with his left arm and fell back
against the door jamb, another gun clutched tightly in his right
fist.

"Sweet Jesus!" he cried out. "You done
killed me."

He slid slowly down the doorjamb until he was sitting
on the porch--his face was white, his chest overspread with blood,
his gun lying in his hand. He breathed heavily.

Then he saw the flames as the fire swept toward him.
"Harry!" he shrieked, holding out a bloody hand. "Help
me, son."

I just stood there and watched him watching the fire.
It was up the north wall now, its yellow tongue licking at the door
in which Bannion was lying.

"Harry!" he screamed again. "I'll burn
alive!"

He looked at me--his face terrible in the smoke and
the bright cast of the flames.

"Oh, my God!" he cried out.

He tried to move his legs, but they wouldn't work any
more. He looked at me again, desperately and, with terrific effort,
brought the gun in his right hand to his lips. Then pulled the
trigger.
 

28

DOWN THOSE stone steps in a little glen is where they
found all that was left of Cindy Ann Evans. A piece of cloth with a
blood stain on it, turned brown in the weather. And, in a lime pit,
the shape of a smile, beside a shed used to store gear for men in the
hunting lodge, her fleshless bones. Everything else burned away by
the corrosive magnesium; and, with it, all that had fastened her to
this world. All love and loyalty. All life.

The highway patrolmen found her. I wasn't there.
Although I was well enough by then to go back out to the gutted
cabin.

I had legitimate excuses--two broken ribs, my
blistered hand, the place on my left cheek that had taken ten
stitches to close, and the part of my skull that was concussed by
that whiskey bottle and lacerated with glass. For five days I was one
of the walking wounded. And for five days I had sat alone in a small
county hospital north of Louisville, thinking of Jo. She never came.
They called her when they brought me in to St. George's. I asked them
to. But the days passed and I roamed the halls, scaring nurses with
my bruised face--more than ever the face of a busted statue--and
sitting in on card games with the invalided patients. Rummy and
pinochle and cribbage. And she never came. They told me she called
once on the first day, to make sure I was going to live. And, when,
on the fifth day, with no pride left to swallow, I called the Busy
Bee, Hank Greenberg told me she was gone.

"Where?" I asked him.

"I don't know, Harry. She called in on Saturday
and said she was quitting. One of the girls drove by her place and
the landlady told her that she'd left town."

"No forwarding address?"

"None."

And, so, on the sixth day, when they asked me if I
wanted to go out to Corinth--which was the name of the little hamlet
outside which the hunting lodge had been set--I begged off.

But all afternoon, in the slow heat of the white
hospital corridors, I could see that lime pit in my mind's eye. And a
part of me felt as if it, too, had plunged in and burnt away and,
with it, a part of what held me to earth. I'd find her again, I told
myself. After all, that's what I did for a living. Find things for
people who'd lost them. I have a talent for it, like I'd said to her.
Only sometimes things don't want to be found. People hide them away
or destroy them. Then they're gone forever. And all that can be found
is the place they once occupied, like those spaces in the magma at
Pompeii where the hot lava settled around a tool or a dish and burned
it away and then cooled so quickly that it took on the shape of the
thing it destroyed. The thing itself . . . gone forever.

On the seventh day an officer with the highway patrol
came to visit and, with him, Alvin Foster. They made an amusing pair.
The one tall and military, shining with bright leather bandoliers and
gold braid and sewn-on arm patches, with those ubiquitous aviator's
glasses on his nose. And the other one, rumpled and shabby, reeking
of tobacco, his flat ugly face morose and unsmiling.

"We just want to settle a few things, Mr.
Stoner. For the record," the military one said. His name was
Lee, and he acted like it. "Those two men you killed--there
isn't any way on God's earth to prove that it didn't happen exactly
as you said it did. Hell, from what we're finding out, they would've
ended up dead one way or another." He straightened his glasses
and seemed to squint at me as if he were looking at the sun through
smoked glass. "Only it wasn't one way or another, was it?
Lieutenant Foster, here, says you killed a man in Cincinnati.
Self-defense, of Course. That's the ruling, isn't it?"

Foster nodded.

"Sometimes a man's luck runs like that." He
fidgeted with his glasses again and squinted hard. "But not in
Franklin County," he said softly. "Not ever again. You
understand?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Next time your business carries you across the
river ... well, just see that it doesn't. You understand?"

"I understand," I told him.

"Good." He seemed to relax a little,
resting one hand on his gun butt and tucking the other in his belt.
"We got Howie Bascomb under arrest. Of course, it's going to be
tough to prosecute him for murder, unless the Jellicoes cooperate.
But, I think they will. The husband is willing to plea-bargain if we
drop the accessory to murder charge down to manslaughter. I think
Calvin Young, our D.A., is willing to do that. Lord, I can't count
the number of indictments that may eventually come out of this. Judge
Stebbins over in Boone County. Alderman Russo in Newport."

I named the state senator whom Tray Leach had
mentioned to me.

"Him, too," Lee said nervously. "You'll
be called, of course, when trial dates are set." He glanced at
Foster and said, "I guess that's all from my end."

Foster didn't say anything for a moment. Just stared
at me speculatively, as if I was something new to his experience of
men. "You've got guts, Stoner," he said, after a time.
"I'll hand you that much. But, my God, man, you haven't got a
brain in your head."

I laughed.

"It's not funny," he said. "Three dead
men is nothing to laugh about. Will you please tell me one thing ...
why in hell didn't you cooperate with us? What the hell was worth so
much risk?"

I looked away from his face. "She was," I
said softly. "Who?"

"The girl. Cindy Ann."

"Oh," he said with mild surprise. "The
one in the lime pit."

"Yeah," I said.
"The one everyone else wanted to hide."

***

On Thursday I caught a ride with a patrolman back to
Newport and picked up my car in front of the theater.

"You know they found the owner of this place
dead last week?" the cop said. "He was sitting in a seat in
his theater, watching a film along with the other stiffs." He
laughed at his own joke.

"Do they know why?"

"He had a lot of enemies," the cop said.
"You know towns like this one are funny. I used to work in
Vegas, so I know. You'd think in Newport that anything goes. But it
ain't true. Open towns got their own code of morality."

"I guess that comes from looking out of one eye
for too long."

The cop looked at me quizzically.

"And keeping the other one closed," I said.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "That's it, all
right. No perspective." He dropped me off by the marquee and I
drove downtown to Charles Street and up to Porky Simlab's veranda. It
was past noon and the gallery was full.

I walked up the front lawn and a burly young man I'd
never seen before stopped me at the porch. He put a paw to my chest,
like a Great Dane begging to be petted, and said, "Hold up,
there, friend." He was a slick-looking kid, with just a touch of
malice in his shiny blue eyes. With Red gone, I wondered how long
Porky would last. This one had no loyalty in his face, at all.

"Tell Porky, Harry Stoner."

He looked at me a second and walked up to the
veranda. "You can come up," he called down after a minute.

Porky was in his easy chair. He had a black arm-band
around his leisure suit, but, aside from that, he looked the same as
ever. "Hello, son," he said grimly.

"Porky."

"What you want around heah, today?"

"About Red ..." I said. "I didn't have
a choice."

"I figured."

I studied his fat farmboy's face. The pig-like eyes
had gone dead when they saw me. Dead and old.

"How about you, Porky? Did you have a choice?"

"Whachu mean, son?"

"You know what I mean, old man. There isn't much
in this city that escapes your attention. You knew about Red. You
just closed one eye and pretended you didn't see. For old time's
sake, Porky? For an old friend?"

He didn't say anything for a second. Then he set his
jaw and planted both stubby legs on the porch.

"Don't come 'round heah, Harry. Don't come back
no more, son."

The young tough ambled up behind me and Porky waved
him back with his fat baby's hand and a wink of his mouth.

"Won't be necessary, Lucius. The gen'lman's jus'
departing."

"The joke is that he was afraid you'd find out.
In a way, that's what got him killed."