Pale Shadow
Pale Shadow
Pale Shadow
A Wesley Farrell Novel
Robert Skinner
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2001 by Robert Skinner
First Edition 2001
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001086373
ISBN-10: 1-89020-866-3 Hardcover
ISBN-10: 1-89020-887-6 Trade Paperback
ISBN-13: 978-1-61595-230-4 ePub
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
For Glenda Williams and Louise Smith, my right and left hands
(and sometimes my brains)
Contents
It was the third of September,
a day I'll always remember,
yes I willâ¦
The Temptations, 1972
He discovereth deep things out of darkness,
and bringeth out to light the shadow of death.
Job 12:22
Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows.
William Shakespeare
King Richard II
II, ii, 14
“I became Wesley Farrell's partner at the age that most boys are only thinkin' about cars and young gals. He trusted me from the beginning, and I did my best to live up to that trust. Yeah, we did some questionable things to make money, but I played by the rules and was as honest as I knew how. One thing about bein' the partner of a man like Wesley Farrell, thoughâyou never knew when you might have to killâ¦or be killedâ¦it was part of the cost you paid for makin' a living in the dark side of this city.⦠Some call New Orleans âthe city that care forgot.' (laughs) Those folks don't know what I know⦔
Marcel Aristide, President of Farrell and Aristide, Incorporated, age 73. From an oral history tape in the Archives at Xavier University of Louisiana dated 3/24/1992.
Tuesday, September 3, 1940
In a large brick house on Mirabeau Street in the northeastern sector of the city, a man stared at the naked dead woman tied to the chair in front of him. In a quiet, savage voice, the man cursed the corpse, the corpse's mother and father and grandparents, the sky, the earth, and the heavens above. He cursed until he'd used every foul combination of words he knew, then stood breathing heavily as he tried to calm himself. He set the electric iron he was holding on its end, then jerked the plug from the wall outlet, wrinkling his nose at the odor of burnt flesh.
With his mind restored to calm, the man tore the room to pieces, unshelving books, rolling up the rugs, dumping desk drawers, shoving his hands down inside the cushions of the chair and love seat. When he finished with that room, he went upstairs to the bedrooms where he continued his search.
He continued on into the bathroom, going through the linen closet, the dirty clothes hamper, and the medicine cabinet.
The man realized he shouldn't have resorted to the hot iron on the woman's feet so quickly. He should have begun with the knife. The sight of blood will frighten most people into saying anything, but he had been in too much of a hurry.
With his expectations at zero, he pulled the rope to a disappearing staircase in the hall. Climbing up into the dark, he found a light that revealed a lot of dusty junk that had not been touched in years. He backed down the stairs, shutting off the light as he descended.
After searching all the downstairs rooms, he returned to the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of bonded bourbon uncovered by his search. He found a glass, then took them into the library and sat down in an armchair. He poured the tumbler about half-full and drank it down, sighing as the hundred-proof liquor loosened the tight muscles in his neck and back.
A few minutes later, he left through the kitchen door, pausing at the back porch. The neighborhood was quiet but for a dog barking a few blocks away. Pulling his hat down over his face, he walked quietly through the darkness to the service alley. There, he continued through to the next street, where his car waited. Within seconds he drove away from the neighborhood, leaving his headlights off until he was at least three blocks away from the house on Mirabeau Street.
When he reached the edge of the campus of Dillard University, he pulled up in front of an all-night pharmacy on Gentilly Boulevard. Leaving the car running, he entered a telephone booth just outside the drugstore. Feeding a nickel into the slot, he gave the operator a number on the other side of town.
***
On Sherwood Forest Street at the edge of City Park, a black-haired woman with skin the color of old gold dug her nails into the back of the man on top of her as he finally hit the spot he'd been probing at for the past quarter hour. She shuddered as the orgasm contracted the muscles inside her. He shook and shuddered along with her, completely caught up in the completion of the sex until the telephone on the nightstand began to ring insistently.
“Ah!” she cried out, mostly in frustration. The man ignored the phone as he continued to plow the same furrow with single-minded devotion. Finally, he collapsed on top of her, at the same time reaching out a searching hand that eventually fumbled the phone from its cradle.
“This,” he said in a voice lightly accented with Spanish, “had better be good.” He was a long, slender blonde man with bold, sharp features and a widow's peak that grew to a precise point on his broad forehead. His slanted eyes contributed to the somewhat demonic cast of his face. The glittering eyes stared a bit madly as he bared his teeth at the telephone receiver.
“It's Dixie Ray,” the caller said. “Sorry if I interrupted anything, Spanish.” He didn't sound particularly sorry. There was, in fact, a hint of a smile in his voice. Spanish hadn't wanted to hire him, and he knew that.
“Did you find them?” the blonde man asked, a different kind of excitement now trilling along the edge of his voice.
“No.”
“Why not?” The excitement was suddenly gone. Now his voice had an edge of steel.
“She wouldn't play ball so I had to get rough with her. She kinda died in the middle of thingsâmust've been a heart attack or something.” The words came from Dixie Ray's mouth flatly, without emotion. Death was his stock in trade. He expected people to die when he went to see them.
The blonde man swung his long legs over the edge of the bed and uttered a profanity. Whatever pleasure he'd derived from the dark-haired woman had evaporated with the other man's news. “Did you search the house?”
“From top to bottom. I tore everything there to pieces. They're not in the house, and probably never were. I just went there to make sure of things.”
The other man was silent for a moment. “I should have known it wouldn't be that easy. Did she tell you where Martinez is?”
“It's too bad I'm not a priest, Spanish. Once I went to work on her, she confessed every fuckin' sin since the fifth grade, but she didn't seem to know where Martinez is. You can believe I was tough enough to make her talk.” He laughed in a softly indulgent way.
The other man snorted. “That's rich, my friend. So now we have nothing.” He bit the words off clean and hard, fighting to keep the rage in him from boiling over. “What are you going to do now?”
“I'm gonna keep lookin'. See, I went to the trouble to find out about him. He's got friends here, places to hide. I'm gonna use that against him.”
The blonde man snorted derisively. “If you know him so Goddamned well, why haven't you gotten my plates back yet? Those are more than just engravings, my friend. They're part of an important plan, more important than you know.”
“Yeah, things are tough all over,
hermanito
. Course, if it was any of my business, I'd be askin' why you decided to cross Martinez after he set everything up for you. Now you got a mess, and it takes a man like me to clean it up.”
“It
isn't
any of your business,” the blonde man said angrily. “I've got a stockpile to work with, but it won't last forever. I need to produce more bills, and I can't do that until you get those counterfeit plates back. I don't care if you have to tear this damned town apart brick by brick until you find Martinez. Just find him.”
The man in the booth seemed unabashed by the blonde man's angry impatience. There was still a hint of laughter in his voice as he responded. “Sure, Spanish. You're the boss. Just relax,
entiende
?”
“I'll relax when you bring me back the plates. Now get them.” He threw the receiver back into the cradle.
The woman stood at the bureau, nude, pouring gin into a couple of glasses she'd filled with ice while the blonde man spoke into the telephone. She wasn't very tall, but the curve of her hips and the elasticity of her round, dark-nippled breasts made up for it. She brushed a strand of long, black hair away from her eyes as she pretended to ignore the telephone conversation. The name Martinez had a particular meaning for her. She recognized a strange indefinable pleasure in knowing Martinez had stymied the blonde man in some way.
“You've been mad long enough, Spanish. Have a drink and let me take your mind off of itâwhatever it is.” She returned to the bed, unconscious of the provocative roll of her hips. She stopped just short of him and reached out with the drink in her left hand.
Still scowling, the blonde man took the glass and drank about a third of it. “Stay out of it. It's nothing to do with you.”
She walked to her side of the bed and climbed back into it, fluffing the pillows so she could lean against them comfortably. When she'd taken a taste of her gin, she looked at his back. “Don't be so sure, sugar. That was Luis Martinez you were talking about, right?” As she stared at his broad back, she saw the muscles tighten, as she'd expected them to. He treated all women as though they knew nothing. It pleased her to make him wrong in something. In anything.
“What if it is? He's got something of mine, and I've got to get it back. It's important.”
“Of course, honey. Everything you do is important.”
He turned to her, his eyes hot. “What do you know about it? This is man's business.”
Her full, soft lips smiled. “Baby, would it interest you to hear that I used to know Luis Martinez?”
He looked at her, his eyes like shards of glass. “How did you know him?”
She ignored the look in his eyes, even though she knew from experience he would only take so much ragging before he lost his temper. For some reason she didn't care. “We had some laughs a few years ago before I left him.”
“So you are not friends now?”
She gave him the full benefit of her large eyes, smiling sweetly into his face. “How could I be, sweetheart? I'm a one-man woman, and you're the man.”
He nodded, interested in what she had to say. She enjoyed that. “But how well did you know him?” he asked.
“I got to know him real well, like I've gotten to know you, Santiago. I know where he goes, what he does when he gets there, and what he thinks while he's doing it. I could find him, if you made it worth my while.” She sipped her gin to cover the look of calculation in her eyes.
Santiago blinked at her self-assurance, and for a moment he wondered if she was talking sense or just trying to rag him. “Do you think you could find him, even if he doesn't want to be found?” For once his words did not drip sarcasm. It was a message to her just how badly he wanted Martinez found. She liked to see desperation in him.
She nodded seriously. “If it's worth my while.”
He returned her seriousness with interest. “All right, Jelly. Is ten grand enough?”
Jelly. She hated that name. She had once entered a bar while the jukebox blared “It must be jelly 'cause jam don't shake like that.” After that, wherever she went she was Jelly. “Ten grand would be swell.” And then you won't treat me like a dumb twist anymore. She hadn't realized until now how just much she hated him and everybody like him. She wanted to hurt him, to get away from him.
He drank his gin, examining her as though she was a different species of woman, somebody he hadn't met before. He patted the covers beside him. “Come here. Let us finish what we started before the telephone interrupted.” He put his empty glass on the night-stand and took her by the arm, pulling her insistently to him.
She wasn't in the mood, but the game had changed for her. Everything she did from now on would be a blow she struck against him. The name Luis Martinez had reminded her of another life she'd had, a life she'd given up for reasons she could no longer remember.
Her face flattened and sparks began to jump in her eyes as she crawled into his lap. She grabbed his head savagely, raking the nails over his scalp. Santiago grunted in surprise and pain, tried to push her off. She twisted his head up and mashed her lips down on his, chewing on them with predatory abandon. He was startled by her strength, and his inability to shake her loose. As they struggled, the feel of her hot flesh in his hands distracted him from his worries. But it didn't dispel them. He was in trouble and he knew it.
***
The man called Dixie left the stifling booth and stood on the sidewalk, letting a cool breeze dry the sweat from his face and neck. He looked up into the darkness at the faint flickering of stars, and for a long moment he enjoyed his anonymity, and the feeling of complete freedom he knew at this moment.
He had freedom in the work he undertook, as well. Dixie Ray Chavez liked to think of himself as a bullet which stayed on course until the job was done. He had some mixed feelings about this job, however. He didn't like Santiago Compasso, not because the man was handsome, sophisticated, and powerful, but because Dixie Ray already knew he wasn't smart. The other manânow that was a different story. That was a man you could stick with, a man who knew which end was up. Compasso wouldn't last, but the other man would.
Dixie Ray took in a deep breath and let it out. He had tried to find Martinez in all the easy ways he knew, and nearly three weeks had gone by. Now it was time to put a more complicated plan in motion. He got into his car and drove away.
***
Uptown, a frail, white-haired man drummed his fingers on the desk in his study as he stared at the telephone. His watery blue eyes reflected both impatience and worry, but there was a grim determination on his lined face, as well.
The telephone bell broke the tense silence at last. He waited until it had rung twice before he slowly picked it up. “Yes?”
“Mr. Leake, I have your party. Go ahead, please.” The operator spoke with impersonal courtesy.
“This is McCandless, Marston. What's so damned important that it couldn't wait another couple of days?” McCandless's voice was an impatient rasp.
“This
is
important, A. J.,” Leake replied. “Treasury agents began crawling all over the bank yesterday. They're looking for counterfeit money. I thought I'd better tell you immediately.”
McCandless was silent for a long moment. “Christ on the cross. Who else knows?”
“Right now, just you, me and the vault manager,” Leake replied.
“Keep it that way. Make like it's something routine from the Federal Reserve.”
“All right. What about you?”
“I'll be home when I planned. If I raced back, it might create an impression we'd find difficult to change.”
Leake's eyes narrowed. “I see.”
“Keep the lid on, Marston. Keep it on good and tight. I'm depending on you.”
“All right, A. J. Whatever you say. Good night.”
“Good night, Marston.” McCandless hung up in the same decisive way he did everything else.
Leake replaced the telephone receiver in the cradle then sat there thoughtfully, fingering his chin.