Easy Death (21 page)

His eyes broke away from mine and dropped to the floor, just in time for Officer Drapp to hang up the phone and turn to me with, “Yeah? You need me for something?”

I flipped open my wallet with the badge pinned in it, and I held it open so Drapp could get a good look. Only I didn’t give him the chance; I jerked my head just a fraction toward that armored-car guard and pitched my voice low, like I was sharing a secret.

“Agent George Arliss, FBI.” I put the wallet back in my coat, then nodded down the hall. “Can we step over here a minute?”

“Wondered when you guys were going to get here.” Drapp followed me about a dozen steps away, and I made a show of positioning myself so I could talk to him and still keep an eye on the guard. “That guy back there,” I said, “dressed as a guard. What did he give his name as?”

“Him?” Drapp started to look back over his shoulder, then checked himself. “Says his name’s Logan Pierce.”

“Not Larry Price?”

“No, Logan Pierce. Why?”

“Not Lawrence Piersall?”

“Not as far as I know. Just Logan Pierce, unless you know him by some other name.”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He looks like a guy I saw a while back in Dayton. Only he had a moustache then. Called himself Lonny Pressman.”

“How’d you come to know him?”

“Armored-car job.”

I said it slow and looked at him all important-like. Pulled out my cigarettes and offered him one. As we both lit up, he took time for a casual glance behind him, and the guy from the armored car looked back at us both and shifted his feet like he was standing on something hot.

“And you think this is the same guy?” Drapp took a deep drag on his cigarette, breathed the smoke out through his nose, and turned back to me, talking low-voiced.

“Can’t be sure,” I said, “I need to get back to the office and check a few reports. Maybe I’m wrong but…”

“But he could be in on this?”

“Could be.” I leaned on the wall, real casual, and Drapp did likewise. We were badge-brothers now, sharing trade secrets. “Kind of looks that way, but I can’t say for sure. Not yet.”

“The other one got wounded out there,” Drapp said, “but it wasn’t serious. Maybe they just did it to—”

“Wounded, you say?”

“Yeah, that means something to you?”

“Last two jobs this Larry Price pulled, one of the guards got a minor wound. In the head.” I looked at Drapp like he’d handed me a cup of diamonds and Drapp looked back at me like I’d just turned on the lights.

“Yeah,” he said, “they shot his ear off!”

“Like I said,” I went on, “this may not be the same guy. I could be way off here, so we don’t arrest him now. At least I wouldn’t, was I—if I were you. Not yet. I just wonder… I don’t suppose you could get us some fingerprints, could you?”

“Pierce’s prints, you mean?”

“It’d be a big help,” I said. “Like I say, we might not need them at all, I could be way off on this. But I won’t know till I get back to the office, and even then, sometimes if the mug shots are close but not quite… You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “That could get kind of complicated, might have to book him on suspicion…”

“I don’t want you getting yourself in trouble over it.” I’d waved the bait at him long enough; time to start pulling in the string. “I mean, if it turns out this Pierce guy is actually Pressman, no one would blame you if he got away. I mean, not when we got the money back and all….”

That’s all it took. Drapp got this look on his face like a fish snapping his jaw shut.

“I think we can do it.” He waved over the cop who’d been standing outside the door and said he should ask that guy from the armored car there real nice to step back in the room he’d been in and just relax for a few minutes. And that’s how I got rid of that guard and the extra cop.

So it was just me and Drapp there in the hallway.

“We appreciate your help.” I tried to say it like there was the whole FBI, Harry Truman and the United States Government standing behind me. “Of course,” I added quick-like, “we’re actually just trying to help out here. You folks are running the show; the Office just sent me down to process the money.”

Local cops don’t hear much from the feds, and when they do, it’s usually talking down to them like a bunch of hillbillies. And now here was me, a real Federal Man, telling Drapp he was running things and asking could I help. And he ate it up with a spoon. A big spoon, too,

“Process the money?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” I said, “we need to get everything to the nearest local police station for inventory and crime analysis. I don’t suppose you could arrange transport, could you?”

December 20, 1951

7:00 PM

Brother Sweetie

Bud Sweeney hung up the phone, swearing softly at the deepening snow, at Eddie, Walter, everyone he’d ever trusted with a job in his life, and the human race in general. He looked out in the lot. Just a young couple, the ones who’d been in here twice before, circling around a ten-year-old Nash, opening the doors and checking the tires, then testing the bumper, then opening the doors again….

Sweeney hustled his bulky mass outside. “Closing up folks.” He took the door handle right out of the young man’s hand, locked it and then slammed it shut. “Come back again, though.”

“We were just wondering—” the man started.

“Not tonight,” Sweeney said. “That was my mother just called, dying in the hospital and she wants a hot-water bottle. Understand it?” He started walking away even as he said it. The young man started to argue, saw the purposeful stride in the big man’s body and decided to take their dreams elsewhere.

Sweeney never noticed. He was back inside the office, switching off the lights in the parking lot and flipping a switch behind him to kill the music, thinking about how he had to get the truck out to Dell’s and wondering about Slimmy and if he was still waiting out there on Highway 12.

Right on cue, the phone rang again.

“Mister Sweeney?”

It was Sarge on the other end.

“Whaddaya got, Sarge, I’m kind of busy.”

“I got Slimmy here, is what I got. He’s kind of drunk. Even for Slimmy he’s kind of drunk. And he’s talking.”

“Talking?” Sweeney’s hand tightened around the phone receiver. “Talking about what?”

“I’m being real careful not to listen,” Sarge said. Then, “I’m being real careful not to hear anything.”

“How long’s he been there?”

“That’s funny too; some cop dropped him off here about one.”

“A cop dropped him off?”

“Yeah, just let him out outside and then took off. I mean he took off fast as he could in this mess, the cop did. And then Slimmy comes in and he was already kind of drunk so I give him a sandwich, and he has a few beers, then a few more and now—well he’s getting kind of loud.”

Sweeney calculated. If Slimmy had blabbed anything to the cop, he wouldn’t have just dropped him off there drunk. And Sarge said the cop took off in a hurry, right around one, which would be when they’d started looking for the Ajax truck. “Anybody else there?”

“A night like this? The only one else here is Joe and I told him to stay in the kitchen.”

“Good work.”

“Well, I owe you.”

“Come June we’ll see about fixing you up with that air conditioning thing you been talking about,” Sweeney said. “Right now, I want you to slip him one—Slimmy, I mean—I want you to slip him one, and when he passes out you set him outside for me.”

“Outside?” Sarge’s voice got a little high and thin.

“Do I mumble?”

“This weather?”

“We got a bad line or something?”

“No, I hear ya. Just….” Sarge didn’t want to go on and Sweeney didn’t pick up the thought. They both just let it hang there between them on the telephone line.

“I’ll be there when I can. May be a while. Probably better if you and Joe just close up and go on home.”

“We were thinking on just sleeping here tonight, it’s so bad out and all….”

“Sleep in the outhouse if you want to,” Sweeney said patiently, “or at the Ritz. I don’t really care where you are, just don’t be there outside when I pick up Slimmy. Understand it?”

“Got it.”

“I was hoping you had.”

“Well….” Sarge wanted to end the conversation, but he felt that was Sweeney’s call. “If I don’t see you, Merry Christ—”

Sweeney hung up. He picked up a ring of keys from his desk drawer, right next to the snub-nose Colt .38 he kept there for social occasions, considered packing the .38 but decided against it.
The day I need a rod to settle anything like Slimmy…

He walked out into the garage. Yeah, the ice truck was there, and ready to run. He looked up at the big black-and-white clock on the wall. After seven, way after. Nearer seven-thirty. And he had to get out to Dell’s. And then clear the other side of the county over to Sarge’s. Damn. Damn the weather.

There just wasn’t enough time.

He heard something from back out in the office, and from a lifetime of experience knew it was something someone didn’t want him to hear. Softly, surprisingly quiet for a man his size, he eased back to the doorway looking into his office.

Mort was standing there, bent over Sweeney’s desk drawer, and holding the snub-nose Colt.

December 20, 1951

7:30 PM

Eddie

I couldn’t give Drapp too much time. Did he get a chance to think it out, a smart guy like him, he’d start asking more questions, and they’d be hard ones, too. So while he was lining up how to move out that money, I was heading back to where I stowed Walter.

And running up to more trouble.

As I come down the hall to that room where I left Walter, I heard voices. Or one voice, really, high-pitched and sharp, and it didn’t sound real happy. Inside I saw Walter, still sitting there looking three-fourths gone to Canaan, and Doc Robbins standing to one side, acting real sorry about all this. And leaning over Walter there’s a tall guy in a clean, starched white coat, asking how comes he to be there anyway.

“Why didn’t they send you to the clinic?” The doctor—the clean doctor, I mean, he was asking it, not Doc Robbins—he stepped around those water tubs where Walter was soaking his bare feet, leaned down to put a thumb under his left eyebrow—none too gentle, either—and pried his eye open. “Come on, boy, I can tell you’re not passed out. You can’t fool a white man with that—”

That’s when Robbins saw me come in. He took in my new outfit and blinked, and for a minute I thought maybe he wouldn’t recognize me, but then up he pipes, “Uh—perhaps, uh, Officer Drapp here can explain it better than I could?” He gave me what they call a meaningful glance and said a little louder, “This is Doctor Woodrum, Officer Drapp.”

The other doctor turned to me. Then back to Robbins. “Robbins you idiot, this isn’t Officer Drapp.” He turned back to me. “You’re not Officer Drapp,”

“If you say so,” I smiled at him, “I won’t argue it with you. But this man’s getting treated. Here. In your hospital.”

“We don’t treat them here.” Woodrum sounded like another one of these guys that just loves the sound of himself giving orders. “That’s our policy.”

“Looks to me like you’re treating him now.” I looked at Walter. He was slowly, quietly pulling his hands out of the buckets of warm water. “Hell, you’ve treated him already.”

Woodrum never took his eyes off me. Never saw Walter lift his feet from the water buckets in front of the wheelchair he was sitting in and put them gently down on a towel on the floor in front of him. Woodrum just looked at me closer. “Officer, I want your correct name and badge number. I won’t have this attitude!”

“I won’t charge much for it,” I said.

Because while Woodrum was talking, Walter sitting there behind him, he reached down on the floor and slipped his hand into one of his empty shoes and then he stood up. I could see him wince with the pain of moving, but he did it, and then he tapped Woodrum on the shoulder, real gentle.

Woodrum got a look on his face like he wasn’t used to getting interrupted when he was laying down the law at somebody, and then he turned around and saw Walter standing behind him. I didn’t see the look on his face then, but his shoulders twitched in surprise as he faced Walter for about a second and a half.

“I hate to hit a man from behind,” Walter said.

Then he swung the fist inside that heavy shoe of his and caught Woodrum right upside the head.

Woodrum, he fell sideways toward the cabinets, and he went to crumpling up while he got there. I watched him land, and he hit like in a movie I saw once where a plane crashed across the deck of an aircraft carrier—just all over the place like that. I looked over at Doc Robbins, and he was looking across the room to where his boss-doctor was lying there now like a pile of clean white laundry over in the corner.

Walter can swing a good one, does he want to.

Right now though, he just collapsed back to sit-down, near crying with the pain in his hands and feet. I turned to Robbins.

“You saw it,” I said, “your Doctor Woodrum there slipped in the water and came down on his head. Didn’t he?”

Robbins, from what I’d seen of him, I figured he was a man liked to talk. But he just kind of stood there looking at me, at Walter and then over at the pile of doctor in the corner.

Well, I didn’t have time to use up a lot of words on him. I stepped up close to him and shot him the same look I gave that armored-car guard. “Give me your wallet,” I said.

He blinked. I thought to slap him upside his fat face, but then I figured to hold off on that if I could.

“Give me your wallet,” I said again, and I said it different this time. A lot different. Still nothing from Robbins but an empty stare, like he figured he’d wake up just any time now and things would make sense again. I just put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed some—real friendly, but I put a little hurt in it.

“Give me your wallet.” It was the last time I was going to say it. And it was the last time I had to, because he finally woke up and dug in his back pocket and come up with an old brown leather thing with most all the skin wore off it.