Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly (34 page)

They drove out Memorial into a black, bleary waste of suburbs not yet become open country. Then Sol said to stop. When they were at a standstill, he told Ben to wink his lights. At once they got a wink in return from a side road, some distance ahead. Then Sol told Ben to keep the lights dark, and run to the other car. Cautiously Ben rolled ahead in the dark, but stopped at the sound of running footsteps. The footsteps drew nearer, while all three of them sat silent Then Lefty was beside the car, his
voice lifted in a quavering wail: “They’ve plugged him, Solly, they’ve plugged him—
they’ve plugged him!”

Sol got out, followed by Bugs, and with apparent concern inquired: “Where they at?” But Lefty, as he turned to point, hit the ground in a sprawl, and the breath left his body in a grunting sob. Sol jumped on him, jammed his knee in his stomach, and slapped him eight, ten, or a dozen times. Then he told Bugs to give him a gun, and when Bugs drew one from an armpit holster, jammed it at Lefty’s mouth. Lefty clenched his teeth, striking at Sol with his fists. Bugs seized his arms and held them against the ground. Sol pulled his cheek away from his teeth, and shoved the gun muzzle inside of it. Then he began to whisper, obscene, psychopathic threats as to what would happen if Lefty didn’t “snap out of it.” Presently he removed the gun and asked: “Wha ya say now, soldier?”

“O.K., Sol, O.K.”

“Get up.”

“O.K., now I’m O.K.”

Sol, Bugs, and Lefty walked to the other car, leaving Ben alone. He sat there at the wheel of the car, his lights out, his motor always running, for perhaps ten minutes. Then Sol came back and told him to drive over to Rich Street. At Rich Street they headed out into another drab suburb, and at Reservoir Street Sol said stop. They sat in the dark car a long time now, Sol on the back seat smoking cigars, Ben up front, constantly checking that his motor was running. Some distance away, there was occasionally audible a low mutter, as well as a recurrent scraping noise. The only sign of the strain they were under came when Ben lit a cigarette. Sol savagely ordered him to put it out, not bothering to explain why he could smoke, Ben not. Presently Lefty appeared and got in, and Sol said drive to Ike’s, and step on it.

At Ike’s Lefty sat alone, in the shadows, drinking beer, and gave no sign that Ben should join him. Ben played pinball, having a small run of luck. Sol sat with Ike and two girls. He was very noisy, very gay.

The sun was coming up as Ben got to his hotel room and dialed the outside phone. “O.K., June, get up. Sorry to rout you out this time of morning, but we got work to do.”

“What is it?”

“They’ve knocked off Arch Rossi and we got to find him.”

C H A P T E R

4

It was after seven, though, before she climbed into his car at Wilkins and Hillcrest; the guard that Ben had insisted on was proving more of a nuisance than a boon, and she had to telephone Jansen before she could shake clear without being followed. They drove first out Memorial, to the spot where Sol had disciplined Lefty, but the only thing in sight was a small toolshed, and it told them nothing. Next they cut over to Rich Street, and drove out to Reservoir, but by daylight, this was just as unpromising. However, across a car track a road construction gang was preparing for work, and she insisted that this must have something to do with their quest. “What makes you think so, June?”

“Why would they come way out here, Caspar and those gunmen of his? There’s nothing else to account for it. Whatever they did with him, it had something to do with that road work.”

“Such as?”

“Dumping him in that fill, maybe.”

“Dumping him—
where?”

“In that low place there, where they’ve been filling up to make the road level. They could have driven over there, dropped him off, and then pulled loose dirt over him, anyway enough to cover him up.”

“That’s no good.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just not hot, that’s all.”

“If we could only go over there and
look
, before that gasoline shovel starts piling
more
dirt on top of him.”

The shovel was already warming up, giving a quite passable imitation of a battle tank. Ben pulled in his gear, but she touched his arm. “You stay here.
I’m
going over there to see what I can see.”

“Look—be careful.”

“Don’t be so jumpy. Can’t I be a naughty little thing? That was parked here last night with my boy friend? And lost my nice wrist watch? Can’t I ask them to let me look before they— ”

“O.K., but be careful.”

She did look a bit like a naughty little thing as she went skipping across the track, in a black dress with a floppy straw hat, and one would have thought the foreman would bow her in with his hat off, wanting to know what he could do for her. He didn’t, though. He seemed to be out of humor, and let her stand around while he roared at various workmen. In a few minutes she was back. “What’s the matter with him, June?”

“Oh, somebody stole a barrel during the night, and half a sack of cement, and used one of his wheelbarrows for mixing, and— ”

At the way his eyes were opening she stopped, stared, and then started to laugh. “Ben! You don’t really mean they’d—put him
in
that barrel, and fill it up with concrete, and—”

“You think they got too much character?”

She got in, and they drove around, cudgeling their brains to think where the hypothetical barrel of concrete, with the just as hypothetical body in it, might have been hidden. She was inclined to minimize the necessity for finding it, but he quickly set her right. “Look, we got to find it, see?—that is, if we’re going to lick Caspar. Because he’s not licked yet, not the way things are now. You’ve done fine, you’ve stirred things up, but it’s not enough. Specially since you’ve made such a play over
this kid Rossi. And it won’t do any good to say he’s dead. They say they never heard of him, and how do you prove your end of it? That’s how it is in a court of law, and that’s how it is in a political campaign—no body, no murder. We got to find him, see? There’s no other dirt that’ll do it. Maybe there is, but I don’t know any. This is it, or we lose.”

They got nowhere that day, though. Around ten o’clock she dropped off, to report to campaign headquarters, and around two Ben reported at the Columbus, as usual. And as usual, these last few days anyway, he and Lefty sat around the big room, reading newspapers, while another procession of visitors went through to the office beyond.

At six Lefty had sandwiches sent up, and at eight Sol came out, while Lefty tuned in the big radio on the speech that Maddux was making in the Civic Auditorium. It was, said the Mayor, the only speech he was making during the campaign, and he would not even have thought it necessary to make that if charges had not been made recently, vicious charges, serious charges, leaving him with no choice but to defend himself. He then reviewed events since the first charges made by “a speaker campaigning for my opponent,” with regard to the bandits in the Globe Hotel. But what, he wanted to know, could he have done about that? His opponent did not notify him. Instead, he had called the Castleton police, and these officers had staged one of the most high-handed acts that he, a man many years in public life, had ever heard of. They had come to Lake City, and without one word to Lake City police, or one jot of warrant from a Lake City court, had seized three of the bandits and carried them off.

The fourth, according to the latest charges, had been secreted in the Columbus Hotel. But here again, his opponent, instead of acting in a manner to get lawful results, had preferred making political capital to serving the ends of justice. Instead of offering this information to the Lake City police, he had, through his campaign speaker, screamed it from the rooftops, so that while Lake City police had acted the instant this information came through their radios, they were already too
late, the quarry having fled. That is, if there
was
any quarry. Where, the Mayor demanded to know, was this Arch Rossi? On whose word did they have it that an Arch Rossi was mixed up in the Castleton robbery? So far as he was concerned, he was beginning to doubt whether there was such a boy …

Nodding exultantly, Sol went back to his office. Lefty listened to the whole speech, then screwed up his face reflectively at the cheers which marked the end of it. “That does it, maybe.”

“Does what, Lefty?”

“Settles Jansen’s hash.”

“Why?”

“When you come right down to it, Arch Rossi was all that really meant trouble. With him out of the way, they can’t do much to Sol, or Maddux, or any of them. Well, he’s out of the way, boy. A fat chance they’ll find him now. And Maddux knows what that means, and so does Sol. He wrote that part of the speech, as a matter of fact. He copied it out this morning and phoned Maddux this afternoon. Oh, yeah—those three in Castleton can talk all they please, but the crime was committed in Castleton, you can’t laugh that off. Rossi, of course, he would have been different.”

“Looks like we’re in.”

“Looks like it. Four more years.”

Again it was daybreak when Ben got home to his hotel, and he undressed slowly, with pauses while he scratched his head and frowned. Then, when the light was off, he lay there in the gray murk, staring at the ceiling, thinking, concentrating. Then his hand went up in the air, a thick middle finger met thick thumb and hesitated a fraction of a second. Then came the snap, like a pistol shot, and he reached for the phone.

“We’re early birds this time, Mr. Grace.”

“What time is it, by the way?”

“I have five-thirty.”

“O.K., we got the road to ourselves.”

“And what is the big idea?”

“Why
would they put him in a barrel?”

“Now
that
, I can’t even imagine.”

“I couldn’t either, till a half hour ago. I heard about this concrete overcoat, as they call it. But then, when I got to thinking about it, the more I thought the dumber it seemed. I mean, it looked like going out of your way to be crazy, putting yourself to a whole lot of trouble and not getting any advantage out of it. But that’s one thing about friend Sol; he never does anything without a reason—unless he gets sore at you or something, and flies off the handle, but even then there’s generally something in it for Solly. So I thought and I thought. And the only case I could remember, I don’t know if I saw it in movies or read about it in the papers, was a bunch in New York that knocked off a guy and put him in concrete and dropped him in the East River. Does that mean something to you?”

“Not a thing.”

“They put him in concrete
to sink him!”

In the early morning light every grain of powder stood out on her face, and what seemed passably girlish at other times was now woman, squinting at him, trying to guess his meaning. Talking as he drove, he went on: “If it would stay down, there’s no place for a body like deep water, is there? But it won’t. Pretty soon it’s coming up, and ain’t that nice? But—imbedded in concrete it’ll stay down. Then it’s
really
out of sight, and I guess that’s why Lefty was bragging to me, how fine this guy was put away.”