Wild (5 page)

“What’s this Yonkers’ description?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Who was he meeting?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

I sighed and scratched my chin. “Okay, Hoagy.”

“Oh, there was one other thing. Not much, though.”

“What’s that?”

“The bulletin said this guy Yonkers was a sick man.”

I stopped scratching my chin, told him again that I’d buy him a bottle of rum if he’d keep quiet about talking with me, hung up, and returned to the Crafford receiving room.

“Hi!”

She was on the hassock, very bright-eyed. I sat in the chair and looked at her.

I said, “Your sister told me Carl had a visitor recently. Said they didn’t get along. Name of Bill Black.”

“Oh?”

“Meet him?”

She frowned faintly, moved her head slowly from side to side. “Nope. Never heard of him, never saw him.” She paused, still frowning. “Strange Carl never mentioned him.” She smiled. “Probably Ivor had a dream.”

“Maybe. Then again, there’s the possibility Carl’s not even dead.”

Red lips parted across very white teeth. “I’m beginning to think you just wormed your way in here with a tall story.”

“Yeah. Ever hear of anybody named Yonkers?”

“Yonkers. No, I don’t know anyone by that name. Why?”

“Nothing. Why don’t you and your sister get along?”

“Simple. Did we ever? I’m sure you remember. She always had everything. I never had anything. She had you, didn’t she?”

“Come off it.”

“Well, I still resent her. She always got the boy friends. So I took them away from her.” She paused. “I took them under the porch, where she wouldn’t go. It was fun, but it didn’t do any good.”

“Can you think of any enemies Carl might have?”

“I think we really should go up to my room.”

“Maybe I agree. But not right now.”

She said, “What man worth his salt hasn’t enemies?”

“Have you seen your sister lately?”

She smiled broadly. She crossed her legs and opened the dress over her knees again, letting it hang down the sides of her legs. The slit of the dress went up beyond the taut rims of her stockings. Plump white flesh was dented by the stockings and tight black garters.

Her eyes got sly. “Say. Was it you I spoke to earlier on the phone about Ivor?”

I pressed my fingers into the arms of the chair. “No.”

She scowled. “Somebody phoned earlier tonight. A man. He asked for Ivor—he was trying to locate her. I told him I didn’t know where she was and cared less. He said his name was Caramba, something like that. Sure that wasn’t you?”

“Was the name Gamba?”

“That’s it. It was you.”

“No. He say anything else?”

“Said to tell Ivor to meet him at the Royal Palms Apartments. Said to tell her if I saw her. I asked him where that was. He said she’d know, that he’d be waiting. He said it was very important, or he wouldn’t have bothered me.” She paused, fussing with the top of her stocking.

I stood up, looking at her legs. “Aside from your affair with Carl, did Elk have any reason to hate him?”

“They didn’t get along, I’m afraid. Elk’s hardly dependable. Carl should have known that.” She told me briefly what Ivor had said about the two men going together in a contracting business, and how Elk had goofed. “You aren’t leaving?”

“Yeah. The cops will probably be here any minute. I don’t want to be around.”

“Cops?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh.”

She got up and moved over to me.

“I wish to hell you wouldn’t go, Baron.” I remembered that she sometimes used to call me by my last name. She looked at me steadily. “I mean it.”

“I wish to hell I didn’t have to go. I mean that, too.”

“Will you come back?”

I looked into the shining, frantic eyes. “You’re lonely.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “Kiss me, at least.”

I took her in my arms and kissed her. She pressed tightly in against me, moving her lips, a lot of things. Time quivered. I released her forcibly, holding her by the slim waist, feeling the way she stirred. We looked at each other through the smoke. They were quite a pair of sisters.

“Lonely,” I said.

“It’s what you are of the moment,” she said. “The moment’s all that counts.”

“You need a spanking.”

“That’s not all.”

I turned fast.

“Lee?”

I looked at her.

“There’s more to it, Lee. It’s Elk—he keeps me cooped up here—I can’t—”

“Can’t what?”

“Nothing. Go away. But come back.”

I looked at her for another moment. Her face had changed subtly. I turned and walked out along the marble hall. I could hear her breathing back there.

In a short time I’d got to know Asa Crafford pretty well. Or was it not at all? Why is it, the minute you get rolling you find everybody hates everybody else enough to kill?

I let myself out quickly. He was sitting on the outside steps, his feet in the drive. He was smoking his pipe, holding the bottle on his knee. He was middle-aged, and his hair was thinning. I wanted to talk with him badly. He glanced up at me, then down at his pipe.

“Nice night,” he said gruffly. He had a growling voice.

“It is a nice night,” I agreed. I couldn’t say anything else.

“Never mind,” he said, thumbing the coal in his pipe. “Never mind.”

I walked on out across the drive and started along the flags toward my car. Turning, I looked back at those glass doors. Elk Crafford was walking inside. I saw her standing in the hall where I had left her.

Crafford slammed the outside door. The glass seemed to balloon. Asa Crafford turned, caught at her skirts, and ran toward a long low stairway at the end of the hall. She ran up the stairs. Elk Crafford walked deliberately down the hall, moving with long swift strides. His shoulders tensed. The faint sound of his shout reached me. He ran up the stairs.

There was no sound. Not even a small wind.

I walked back to the curb and stood beside the car. There was an easy way to read this thing. I couldn’t believe it was the right way. Too much dream stuff. You could say Yonkers did know Hendrix. Yonkers was Black. He came alone to the trailer after robbing a bank in Laketown, Florida. He needed a place to lie low. Hendrix found out about the money, or maybe he was even in on it. He might have been the unnamed guy the stoolie said Yonkers planned to meet after he crashed Raiford. So Hendrix killed Yonkers for the money. Then what? What would anybody do? They would take a fast plane for South America, or wherever, and that would be that It did not sound right.

Because why was somebody trying to get me off this thing? If there was four hundred grand, where was it?

I slid under the wheel of the car, and sat there a moment, with the door open. I lit a cigarette. The tobacco smoke was good. I ate it like a fiend. Finally, I reached out to close the door and a man spoke quietly.

“Let’s talk.”

H
E HAD BEEN STANDING
somewhere to the rear of the car, then stepped up as I got in. He was by the open door.

“Go away,” I said. “I don’t want to talk.”

He breathed patiently.

“Slide over, cowboy,” he said.

I turned my head and bumped my nose against cold steel, smelling of powder solvent; Hoppe’s No. 9 Nitro. “No Marksman Or Hunter Should Ever Be Without It.”

I took a better look at him. It wouldn’t have done any good to start the car, throw it into gear, and try a run for it. He could have detained a Mack truck with one pinky while balancing a cup of tea on his knee and never spilled a drop. He hulked down, staring at me, with the gun in his fist.

He wore a light, floppy coat, a soft hat, and he had a face the size of a watermelon. Large blunt features, the nose broad and shaped like a loaf of bread, the jaws jutting and wide.

I slid across the seat. He jammed himself in, twined one enormous tentacle around the steering wheel, rested the other on the seat back. The gun was on the end of the seat back. A .45. The polished muzzle gleamed. It was a toy in his hand.

I remembered the face.

“You drive a maroon Olds,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see his face now, but he was watching me. He breathed like a wounded bear.

“Goons are passé,” I said.

He made a sound like laughter.

He spoke in a mild, intelligent, well educated voice.

“I’m not supposed to be sitting here, like this,” he said. He sighed. It was like a horse blowing after a hard run. There’s something about really big guys. I mean really big. I’m six-three, and on the lean side but still no shrimp by normal standards. But the big guys, like this one. It’s as if they’re so clogged up with meat and muscle they can’t breathe. They’re always gasping and grunting and heaving around. He said, “I’m supposed to either wreck you or just beat you up.” He sighed again. “I wanted to see what I’m doing all this to.”

“You’re the dark ghost that tried to run me off the bridge.”

“Yes. The way you pulled out of that made me curious. I suppose that’s my one weakness on my jobs. Curiosity toward my marks.”

He was imported stock. An expensive heavy. There was no fear in him. Someplace he probably had a wife and children who thought he was maybe a rug salesman. A nice home, with large rooms.

If I got the door open and ran, he would shoot me in the back of the head.

“How much do they pay you?” I said. My throat was dry, my voice hoarse.

“They pay well,” he said. “That reminds me.” He unwound his left arm, reached inside his coat, and tossed an envelope on my lap.

I looked at the envelope. Three crisp C-notes. I tossed my cigarette out the window, tossed the envelope back in his lap. I didn’t have a gun with me.

“Better keep it,” he said. “It’s kind of a payoff, I suppose. I don’t exactly understand it myself. Maybe you’re supposed to use it for bills.”

“What bills?”

“The ones you’ll have to pay after I finish with you.”

“Cut it out. This is comic.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s the way I look at it. Then again, it’s a bit sad, too. I don’t enjoy it. I have a degree in medicine.” He sighed. “I’d give anything to be practicing. I worked hard for that. I don’t like this at all. It pays well, though, and it’s a last straw.”

“What the hell are you trying to give me?”

“Truth. Maybe the rain depressed me.”

“Why don’t you practice, then”

He made the sound of laughter. “I tried. For nearly five years. Almost starved to death. Hardly worthwhile.” He reached over and turned on the dash map light. “Take a look,” he said. “Look at this face.”

I took a close look. It was pretty bad. A bit like one of the gargoyles on Notre Dame cathedral. He was the ugliest guy I’d ever seen. I looked away. He turned off the map light.

“Patients were just like that,” he said. “They never said anything. Didn’t want to hurt my feelings. But they couldn’t stand it, either. That way with everything I ever tried—I tried everything. I’m right for this job. It’s my work.”

“Plastic surgery” I said.

He sighed again. “No good. It’s the size. It begins with a glandular condition in early childhood. Nothing you can do about it.”

I began to breathe with only the upper third of my lungs.

“I know you’re scared,” he said. “You should be. There’s nothing you can do.”

“Take the money back,” I said. “Give it to whoever sent you and tell them to buy breakfast with it.”

“I told them it wasn’t enough.”

“Did you cut his arms off?”

He didn’t speak.

“Where’s Carl Hendrix?” I said. “Did you bury him, or what?”

He said nothing.

“Bill Black,” I said hoarsely.

He cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t continue, if I were you,” he said. “I’m not supposed to kill you this round. But I might have to.”

I made my voice hard and tight. It was a damned difficult thing to do. “Who comes into the loot? Go ahead, you can tell me.”

“You’re a stranger in these parts, Baron. You don’t know what’s been going on. You don’t know how to play the game.”

I had my hand on the door handle, ready to shove, and make a break. There was nothing else to do.

“Yeah?” I said. I shoved the door handle slowly. “So what?” I gave a good shove.

He showed me so what. It was thunder. My head exploded with soft white soundless light. My face cracked against the dashboard. Sound and pain came in bright airless waves, then a roaring set in, and above the roaring, his voice—mild, apologetic.

“The idea is,” he said, “for you to work on something else. Just put your present job out of your mind. You understand?”

His hand hadn’t traveled more than a foot, with the .45 in it, against the back of my head. It struck again. I smashed against the floorboards. I was no longer sane.

I was paralyzed.

I tried to fight back. It was hopeless. I was dreaming. I couldn’t move. I was trying to chin myself on the dashboard.

He brought his arm down again. My head fell off.

I yelled at him. I heard myself scream.

I fought with the brake pedal. He was hurting the hell out of me. I knew it was the brake pedal, but felt sure it was the guy, too. I twisted it, then wormed along the floor of the car and ran. I fell on my face in the wet grass. Pain was like scalding water. I tried to get up, succeeded.

I was alone with the night.

By the car, I slid down, hanging to the open door. I sprawled under the car, half off the curb. Everything went away.

I breathed the damp air. There was an odor of damp bricks, damp earth, oil and rubber. I had asked for this. My ears rang and ached. Everything became crazy, with me flying through the middle of it.

Then no sound. I was deaf.

Then I was all right. It was just the night.

He was gone. The Crafford house was dark. The street was dark, except for one light on the far corner, shining like blinding snow under the car where I lay.

I moved slowly. I was a sick old man. The pain was straight down the middle of my back, its roots in my head. I knelt on the grass beside the car. Finally I got on my feet. I fell in across the car seat and lay with my face mashed against crinkling paper. The envelope with the money. I didn’t have the strength to pull it free and heave it from the car.

Pain broke away in small chips, like stale icing off a cake. Knives probed me all over while hammers banged on my head.

I waited.

Everything that had happened since I’d found that body a few hours before swamped my mind. Finally I pulled myself up, got hold of the wheel, sat there. I felt my head. It was tender. The skin was broken in places. In other places it felt pulpy, like a bruised apple. Bumps were forming. The guy had been a pro, or he would have killed me.

I started the engine, drove slowly up the street to a short white bridge that arched the canal. I stopped the car, got out, slid down the bank till I stood on sandy soil beside water. The water shone blackly. I knelt and bathed my head and face. The water was refreshing. There wasn’t much blood. There was blood on the sleeve of my jacket. I washed it off, and returned to the car.

I’d been right. This case was going to be a toughie. I felt fairly certain that the dead guy was Barton Yonkers. Proof would have to wait. I had to make my play across enough of a ditch from the hometown cops so they couldn’t take direct action to stop me. If they did, I was done.

In the glove compartment, I got out the aspirin bottle, swallowed five. The Dexedrine was gone. I remembered using it up days ago, driving across the country, in a hurry to get home.

To this.