The Hours of the Virgin (25 page)

She thought about getting angry. In the end she just got tired.

“You've been living with that night twenty years. That's a long time to you, but it's my whole life. I just want out from under. Whatever happens to that pistol once he has it is no concern of mine, as long as I get the manuscript and my ticket out. But it's where yours begins. That's why I brought you in.”

“I've been wondering about that. A man named Merlin Gilly tipped me to the job. What was he to you?”

“My uncle.”

I struck another match then and lit the cigarette. I didn't want it anymore. The action gave me time to think. I took a drag, poked the match into my glass, and parked the burning weed in an old scorch-groove on the edge of the table. “I heard Merlin had a sister who died.”

“He was just a boy when she left town, but they kept in touch through letters. She used her real name, of course. The only one the cops cared about was Star LaJoie, and they didn't care about her once they thought she was dead. Which she was. She never used the name again, and she never turned another trick after that night. She was a legitimate masseuse in Carrie's parlor.”

A Gilly on her mother's side, a North on her father's. She ought to be sterilized. But I had a headache and the atmosphere in the kitchen was thick. “What made me your Lancelot?”

“You were always the hero in the family story. Mother bought all the out-of-town papers and followed the story until it dropped off the back page. They did a little human-interest on you to keep it alive. She was afraid to come forward, afraid even if she sent you the gun anonymously that North would suspect she was still alive and come looking for her. She was always after Merlin to throw work your way.”

“He charged me every time.”

“You can't expect Merlin not to be Merlin. I had to pay him to tell you about Boyette. I was pretty sure he'd put the arm on you too, but I was too busy making way for my new life to try and change his.”

“Why Boyette?”

“I needed someone who could authenticate the manuscript. I made him a deal: He could publish his research about the Hours, but Gordon would maintain possession in secret until his death. Then he could go public with the ‘discovery.' Gordon isn't a well man. We're talking ten years here.” She rolled her glass between her palms, making wet rings on the table. “I liked Harold, despite his flaws. He realized his mistake and wanted to get back what he'd sold for money.”

“It must have broken your heart when North used the gun he got from him to put a bullet in Harold's brain.”

“I'm not through telling my story.”

I couldn't take it anymore. I got up, went over to the little window above the sink, and heaved up the sash. It only opened two inches, but it let in a knife of pure cold air. I turned off the burner and moved the pot to the cold one on the other side. I circled the room and finished where I'd started, a familiar route. “Who frisked my office?”

“Frisked?”

“Searched. Tossed. Turned it on its ear. Conducted a thorough and professional investigation involving both mitts. From the French
friskadoo
, meaning to cause the building cleaning service to give notice. You know, frisked.”

“It wasn't me. I'm not looking for anything.”

“What were you looking for in Boyette's house?”

“What I found.” She stood, brushed past me, and opened the second drawer below the drainboard. It contained a divided tray full of flatware, which she removed and set on top. She peeled back a section of newspaper lining the bottom of the drawer, and lifted something out. Something that required both hands, even though it was no heavier than the newspaper. I looked at the wrinkled, buff-colored sheet, the enormous inlaid
L
, the uneven Gothic pointed letters in ancient brown ink. It had a pungent odor all its own, a cloying brownish stench of decay, distinct from the cabbage permeating the room. I hadn't noticed it when Boyette showed it to me in the DIA, and I remembered what he'd said about the destructive properties of uncycled air and pollution. The Secular Age was killing the sacred text.

Just to put the realistic point on things I bent close and located my old friend the crab louse.

I straightened. “I've seen it before. Boyette said North sent it to him to prove he had the manuscript.”

“That part was true. He wanted money then. Earl told me about it, and that's when I went to Harold and made our deal. Earl was quick to accept the counteroffer. The existence of that gun has been haunting him all these years. That's why he wanted to get close to me, to find out if I knew anything about it.”

“Is that what he was looking for in my office?”

“Wrong twice. You're looking at what I was looking for. And I ain't North.”

This was a new card in the deck, one who walked lightly and knew his way around locks. Laurel and I turned and looked at Ben, the aging welterweight who guarded Strangeways' gate and mixed his drinks. He was hatless and wore a civilian mackinaw over mufti that didn't fit him nearly as well as his uniform. He had his big magnum trained on us, but I was more interested in the much smaller pistol stuck in his belt, a semiautomatic whose square brown butt cut a notch out of the hard fat of his stomach.

“That's the part of the story I didn't get to,” Laurel said. “I don't have the thirty-two. Ben took it after he shot at you in the Tomcat.”

28

The square battered face, scorched deep umber by outdoor duty and seamed all over like a duffel, was professionally dead; anesthetized into that nerveless mask common to poker players and prizefighters, as if to say that striking it would be like kicking a granite gargoyle. Only the eyes, splinters of light folded in scar tissue, appeared to be wired to anything as complicated as a central nervous system. The shining revolver looked as big as a T-square in his small hard fist, broken many times and healed over shiny across the knobby knuckles.

Laurel Strangeways, still holding the first page of the Hours, let out her breath in a shuddering sigh. In every dreaded confrontation there is an element of relief.

I said, “I must be getting old faster than usual. I thought I lost you at Ford and Schaefer.”

“You did. I done a load of driving up and down before I remembered what's here. Get them hands away from your sides.”

I'd managed to unfasten my overcoat with my left hand. I was turned halfway toward him, putting that side out of his line of sight. But fighters are used to watching hands. I spread my arms. “You went with Laurel to the Tomcat?”

“I followed her. I'm good. People forget I was a store cop a lot longer than I boxed. Nobody pays much attention to the help, not even Mr. Strangeways. I hear things. That house of his has got no doors.”

“Why'd you shoot at me?”

“That was your fault. When she sat down next to you and started talking, I figured you was there for backup. I was just going to lay the barrel alongside your head. Then you started moving fast and I pulled the trigger instead.”

“That's why I ran,” Laurel said. “I was blind with pain and I thought you were shot, you went down so fast. Then I saw Ben. I thought Gordon had sent him. Everybody was running for the exit. I panicked.”

“Ben didn't.” I was watching him. “The only way out of the theater was the way everyone came in. Boyette had to run all the way from the front row. Naturally he scooped up the package he'd carried into the place. Ben intercepted him in the aisle, took it away from him, and made Boyette drive him to O'Hair Park, where he took the thirty-two out of the mailer and shot him with it. That was a break,” I told Ben. “You couldn't be sure the thirty-two was loaded. Even if you brought cartridges, there was no way to predict if it would even fire after all those years.”

The corners of the pug's slit of a mouth tugged out in a smile as tight as a turnbuckle. “I didn't even know about the gun till I pulled it out. I had it all wrong; I heard her when she called Boyette from the house. They was talking about this twerp Earl North. I thought she was going to run away with him and Boyette was helping. I seen the way she and North looked at each other that time I went with her and Mr. Strangeways to Boyette's office. I knew it was trouble when North come to work for Mr. Strangeways.”

Keep him talking. “North is Mrs. Strangeways' father.”

“I said I had it all wrong. Boyette set me straight when he was begging for his life. I got the whole story. He said if I let him go he'd give me a page of a manuscript Mr. Strangeways would pay big money for. That it?” He jerked the magnum's barrel that direction.

“Ben,” she said.

“Shut up. I never killed nobody before but I'd do it again if they talked about soaking Mr. Strangeways. The gun was loaded, all right. Trigger pull was stiff. It needed oil. But it done the job.”

“You wanted to hang it on North,” I said.

“No need to thank me. I know about your part in it too. Boyette talked right up until he stopped.”

Laurel said, “I don't want to soak Gordon. I wanted to give him the Hours.”

“I said you shut up. You run out on him. I knew you would the day he brought you home. I followed your cab when you said you was going to Louisiana. For a visit, you said. The driver put three bags on a cart at the airport curb. You went in behind the skycap and come out ten minutes later with one bag and got into another cab. I followed you to your motel. I slipped the desk clerk a hundred bucks to call me when you checked out and to give you the stall till I got there.”

“He said my bill was misfiled.”

“Clerks are smart. I was a house dick two years.” He backed off on the turnbuckle. The tight smile went away. “I got there just in time to tail you to the theater.”

“You didn't park in the lot,” I said. “It was empty after you left with Boyette in his car.”

“I parked around the corner and walked back from the park. North knew the Ranger. I didn't want to scare him off.”

“You did anyway. How much does Strangeways know?” I measured the distance between me and the big revolver. It was easier to get to than the Smith & Wesson on my hip. Two long strides against a half-centimeter pull on the trigger.

“I ain't told him a thing and I ain't going to. Mr. Strangeways is a great man. He don't treat me like I'm a punchy, the way they done where I worked before; good enough to take a bullet for a paying customer but not nothing important, like carry money or use my head. He talks to me like a man. It was his magazine got me my first and only shot at a title. He stays clean of this.”

“What do you want?” Laurel asked.

“I want you to
shut up!
” He yelled it. Then he looked at me. “Where's the rest of that manuscript? I seen you and North talking on Mr. Strangeways' porch like old buddies. I figure you made some kind of deal. I'll give you the same terms she and Boyette gave him: the thirty-two for the pages.”

The gun was just something in his hand now. He wanted an answer. I came up very slightly on the balls of my feet. “What happens once you have them?”

“I give 'em to Mr. Strangeways. That one too. From what I hear he can buy a thousand hillbilly whores worth more than her for what it's worth.”

“I mean, what happens to us?”

“That's your lookout. If I never lay eyes on either of you again it'll be too goddamn soon.”

“Too thin. You've been talking too much to just let us walk. What if we walk straight to the cops?” I tensed the muscles in my calves, shifting my weight forward from the waist. Glaciers never moved more slowly.

“And tell 'em what? Even if they believe I said what I said, they won't buy a word of it when they question me. I'm just a busted-down old canvasback that took one too many shots to the coconut. I'll pour it on thick.” He shook his square head. “You won't go to the cops. They'll just laugh you out of there like the last time.”

“What if I don't know where the manuscript is?”

“Then everything changes.” He tightened his fist on the magnum. “Back on your heels, bub. You ain't nobody's Fred Astaire.”

I relaxed my muscles. He was as punchy as a cat in an aquarium.

“One kill doesn't make a character,” I said. “You can be out in three on Boyette. That was passion. The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice has a drawer full of happy precedents there. Loyalty, that's a novelty even a tired judge might buy. Strangeways will probably pop for your defense. Lawyer Raider took on the United States Supreme Court and won. She'll grease you through the system on her lunch hour. Two more murders is a complication you don't need.”

“I don't butter that easy. You saying you ain't got the thing?” The slits he saw through went stormy.

“Not with me. I can't tell you where it is. But I can show you.”

“Well, that was the idea,” he said. “You think I was going to let you tell me where to look and then say thanks and go off and leave you here?” He motioned with the gun. “Let's see some footwork.”

I said, “There are other people in the building. If you march us down the hall waving that cannon, we won't need to go to the cops. That part's okay. It's the shooting that comes after I'd like to avoid. My mother told me to stay out of crossfire.”

“Mine told me to go for the eyes.” But he considered. Then he holstered the big revolver under his mackinaw and took the .32 out of his belt and stuck it in his coat pocket. That's when I scooped the pot off the stove by its handle and threw it at him.

The lid came off and the cabbage flew out like chain-shot, plastering him from head to knee. It scalded him and he roared in pain, but managed to deflect the pot with his free hand. By then I was coming in low and hard.

My shoulder went into his belly. He said woof and I smelled what he'd had for lunch, but he didn't bend. He retreated two steps, then pushed back. I was sliding on cabbage. The padding around his middle was just for show; two inches in he was coiled steel, like the forearm I grasped in both hands to keep him from twisting the gun around inside his pocket. It was like trying to hang on to a tree limb in a tornado. He lashed around, breathing hard, but not as hard as I was. A bench vise clamped my forehead on both sides and squeezed. It was his free left hand, trying to get juice out of my skull. My eyes were swelling out of their lids when I let go of his arm with one hand to grope for his face.