The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (56 page)

Slabbe shrugged apologetically. “Well, he was logical, wasn’t he? It looked good, too, and it took you and your gang away from the Nola joint so they could operate some more. That’s what they’re doing, only they have company. Abe Morse is working.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Carlin demanded.

“Just Hurst, so far,” Slabbe said. “Drink some beer. I don’t think he’ll be going far, but we gotta wait for Abe to put him in somewhere and get to a phone. How did Ione Nola take it when you let it out that Teel was Ruby’s hubby?”

Carlin folded his long form into a chair, grimaced. “It was touch and go. I didn’t know for a second whether she’d claw my eyes out or fold up and we’d have to send for a nut doctor.”

“Uh-huh?” Slabbe was interested.

“It hit her hard, all right. Her face started to bust up. Then the old lady, Miss Yates, did a Marines to the rescue and started telling her that she loved Teel, didn’t she, and the charges against him were preposter-something, and here was where her love was going to be tested, and like that.”

“And Ione pulled out of it?”

Carlin nodded. “Yep. She’s more nuts about the guy than ever. Dames are nuts.”

“You braced Teel with the Caddy being at Lilac Lake Monday night?”

“Sure. He wouldn’t talk. He has the oldest face on a guy of twenty-seven I ever saw.”

“He has good reason to, I’d say,” Slabbe mused. “Murders going on around him, on his account, and him not having much, if anything to do with them, but still needing to keep his lip buttoned.”

Carlin leveled a finger longer and bonier than his nose at Slabbe. “Just let’s hear you explain this.”

The phone rang.

Slabbe grinned. “You’ll get it on a platter.” He answered the phone. Abe Morse’s husky voice said: “Benjie? I put this chauffeur into a cabin up here at Lilac Lake. I’m down the road at a gas station. He’s alone and he put a pot of coffee on the stove, so I took a chance on phoning.”

“Slide back there, but don’t let him get his mitts on you, kid. He didn’t go there just to drink coffee. We’ll be up. How do we make the right cabin?”

“Turn left at the breast of the dam, left again a hundred yards on. It’s a big log place, all by itself. My jalopy’ll be off in a little grove of pine trees.”

Slabbe hung up. “OK Leftenant,” he told Carlin. They drove to Lilac Lake, left at the breast of the dam, left again a hundred yards on. There wasn’t much moon, no stars. The air off the black-looking water was chill. Slabbe’s breath made frosty clouds when he said, “There’s the pine grove,” and swung ponderously to peer.

Carlin eased the departmental sedan off the road. The tires made whispering sounds on pine needles, a winter old. They found Abe Morse’s car, but not Abe. They prowled ahead on foot, found the cabin, a solid two-story structure in the log cabin tradition, but with nothing phony about the logs. The place was a fort.

“The caddy’s gone,” Slabbe frowned. “Cripes, I hope Hurst didn’t clip Abe.”

“I hope you get your hope,” Carlin grunted. “No lights inside now. No coffee, I can smell. When these trees get full of leaves, I’ll bet it’s black as hell in here.”

Slabbe squeezed the lieutenant’s arm for silence – and got it, complete silence, with only the intangible, non-noise sound of a large body of water nearby.

“Take a chance on a light for a second, Pat,” Slabb suggested. “The road’s dirt. Ought to be tire marks.”

“Yeah,” Carlin said a second later. “Car came in, didn’t go out.”

“He made coffee and drove on past the cabin, huh?” Slabbe said. “Suppose I slip down on foot and you go back for the sedan?”

It wasn’t necessary. A shadow darker than the rest glided up to them. Abe Morse’s husky voice said: “He’s about a quarter of a mile down the road. He’s looking for something in a gully off to the right. I got the distributor cap off the Caddy. Was that right?”

“It wasn’t wrong.” Slabbe chuckled.

“Looking for something in a gully?” Carlin scowled. “What the hell for?”

“A body, is my guess,” Slabbe said. He went ahead, faster now. Carlin cursed and stumbled. “Give me a good concrete city street,” he complained. “What’s that?”

“Tree toads in the woods,” Abe Morse husked. “An owl over there in that chestnut tree. See it?”

“The tree or the owl?” Carlin said sarcastically. “I wouldn’t know one from the other.”

Alan Hurst’s flashlight was suddenly a giant white firefly below them to the right. He was in a gully fifty feet deep, fifty yards across, that ran beside the road. Slabbe squatted and pulled Carlin down beside him so that their silhouettes did not stand out.

“It’s not so steep going down from here, but look at the other side,” he said. “It’s a face of rock. He’ll have to come back up this way or cut left or right down there and plough a hundred yards before he can break clear. How about one of you guys at each end? I’ll go down right here.”

Abe Morse slipped away without question. Carlin spat and burped, but finally loped off. Slabbe went down, crab-style, feet first on his heels, palms and beam. The chauffeur’s flash was swinging methodically, covering every square foot of the undergrowth as he worked through the gully. He found what he was looking for just as Slabbe came up behind him.

Hurst was breathing fast, but stopped and gave a little grunt of triumph as his flash centered on his find: a man’s body. The man was on his back. His clothing showed that he’d been out in the weather for days. Slabbe recognized his features: Jake George.

Hurst hesitated no longer. He caught the man’s arm, started to lift him as easily as a sack of feathers. He stopped, frowned, let the arm go again. He picked up a basketball-sized rock, poised it over the dead man’s pasty face.

Slabbe said: “Don’t do it, son.”

It was a mistake. Slabbe was shambling forward, but he shouldn’t have spoken. Or he should at least have clipped Hurst first.

The chauffeur swung easily, smoothly, catlike, and shot-putted his rock at the first thing he saw moving, which was Slabbe. Man, beast or devil smacking into Slabbe once he was under way would have come off second best, but not rock. It took him on the left shoulder and let him know about it. It stopped him, swung him with more, though less localized push, than a .45 Colt slug. He spun so that his back was toward Hurst when the chauffeur cut his flash and leaped away.

Slabbe closed his teeth against the pain, lurched around and shambled after Hurst. The chauffeur’s longer legs made it an uneven contest. He was twenty yards ahead of Slabbe and gaining.

Slabbe opened his mouth to shout to Carlin and Abe Morse, but decided against it. If Hurst knew there were reinforcements handy, he might go to earth in the undergrowth. As it was, he was certainly trying for the Caddy – which was now without a distributor cap.

Slabbe tried for the car, too. Since he had just come down, while Hurst had been here for a while, he was a bit better oriented. When he started clawing up the slope to the road, he was sure he was lined up with the Caddy, while Hurst, off to the right, would have to run back this way once he made the road.

Slabbe’s left hand and arm were numb. His right hand tore on the rocks he clutched at, felt warm and sticky. The slope was just a blur, he could have closed his eyes and made just as good time. He heard the scrambling sliding sound made by rocks and dislodged earth by both himself and his quarry. His lungs were bellows sucking air through his open mouth, drying his lips and tongue and throat till he wanted to gag. He rolled over the hump and was on the road again. Hurst’s footfalls were approaching, thumping on the dirt. Slabbe peered for the dark shape of the Caddy. He saw double – but it was no illusion. There
were
two cars there. Headlights slashing suddenly into the night proved it. A tinkling voice proved it. In Fudge Burke’s place the voice had sounded clearly as tiny bells in a fine Swiss watch. Out here, with sky and trees to background it, it was a carillon.

“Here, Alan!” it cried. “In here! Quickly!”

Hurst could have made it – but didn’t. It wasn’t his lungs or his legs that gave out. It was his heart. One second he was running freely in a long, loping stride. The next he lurched. The next after, he crumpled.

Slabbe was down on one knee. He shifted his gun from its line on where Hurst had been to the tires of the car with the blazing headlights. But that wasn’t necessary either. Miss Yates was not leaving, she was hurrying to Alan Hurst. Slabbe saw her kneel beside him. Her bonnet had fallen off and her white hair was silvery in the wash of the automobile headlights. There was no need for Slabbe to hurry.

When he had dusted himself off, righted his hat and swabbed blood from his right hand, he went over. Miss Yates was rising. She trembled a little.

“Dead?” Slabbe asked.

She nodded, turned. Slabbe took her arm. “I think there’s coffee in the cabin. Who owns the place?”

“It was John Nola’s. We thought we could intimidate that detective, Jake George, or buy him off if we held him a prisoner here for a while, but when Alan talked to the man Monday night, he saw there was only one way.”

Slabbe nodded. “So Hurst and Ike Veech killed Jake, put the body in Veech’s car and Veech drove down here to the gully and dumped it in. They didn’t think then that it would be found soon or that it would make much difference, anyhow. Let’s go into the cabin.”

She offered no resistance. The only sound was the rustling of her black taffeta skirt and Slabbe’s breathing coming back to normal.

There was a smell of coffee inside the cabin. Slabbe hesitated, then saw that she was through, and went to the kitchen. He brought coffee back to where she sat in front of a huge fieldstone fireplace. Her pale face was as unruffled as her fine white hair, but her hands twitched ever so slightly.

Slabbe said: “It was all for love of Ione. M’m, and hate of Nola probably.”

The voice did not tinkle now, it was too low. “I did hate John Nola. I loved him at first and even after he married my sister and Prentice was born. Then he said that he still loved me. Ione is my child, mine and his. Knowing it practically killed John’s wife, my sister, but even after she was dead he wouldn’t marry me – perhaps it was
because
she died over our affair. So then I hated him.”

“Love and hate,” Slabbe said. “They complicate things. You wanted Ione to marry Bill Teel?”

“Yes.”

“Even though you must have learned or guessed that he was phony?”

Serena Yates lifted her chin. “When Bill Teel brought life to my daughter’s eyes again after the months she spent in a crazy dream world of grief and escape, I knew he was good for her. I wouldn’t have cared if he were a freak – but he isn’t. He became infatuated with a girl once, a Ruby Reed, and married her and she enticed him into a criminal enterprise. He learned from his mistake. I’ve watched him these past months, and he’s building solidly and honestly for a good life.”

“Only John Nola couldn’t see him?” Slabbe said.

The old woman’s black smooth eyes were venomous. “John Nola thought people are black or white, with no in-between. Teel was all bad or all good. John said all bad, and he had a strange, perverse love of Ione. He didn’t want her to marry a criminal. The fool was so insensitive that in spite of knowing what he’d done to me he scoffed at the notion that betrayal by a loved one can make a woman warped and bitter, if not actually mad. I know it can,” she said bitingly. “Ione had transferred everything she’d felt for her first boy to Bill. If he had let her down—”

“But just pulling a trick a couple years ago wouldn’t have thrown her if she was so nuts about him,” Slabbe interrupted.

The black eyes studied him. “You’re quite right. A woman in his past would have done it, though – I thought. Bill told me openly and frankly that he had already been married and not divorced when I encouraged him to love Ione.
I
told him not to tell her. I was wrong there, but my child was coming to life again and I wouldn’t risk anything that might change her. And then as she loved Bill more and more and believed that she was the only one he had ever loved, it became even more dangerous, to my way of thinking, to tell her that another woman had been first in his life.”

“To your way of thinking,” Slabbe said. “You put that in yourself. You see you were wrong there, too. She knows now that Teel was married to Ruby. She took it, didn’t she? She didn’t crack.”

The old lady bowed her head.

Slabbe said: “You can’t keep your kid from getting bumped, lady. Everybody gets bumped. Most everybody takes it, too. They stand on their feet. They gotta. It’s not
your
way of thinking that counts for them, it’s their own way. Believe different and look what happens. Rather than let John Nola give your kid a bump, you killed him.”

“In cold blood,” Serena Yates said.

“Drink your coffee,” Slabbe murmured. “You’ll have to make a statement when Lieutenant Carlin gets here. Let me go over it with you.”

He sandpapered his jawline, sighed. He said: “John Nola meant to expose Teel. He hired Jake George. Jake got a line on Teel, an old black market rap hanging over him. Nola may have been pig-headed, like you say, but he knew a mere criminal charge that maybe wouldn’t even stick wouldn’t be enough to make Ione throw Teel down. He told Jake to dig some more, look for a woman in Teel’s past. Jake heard of a wife, but couldn’t trace her. He went to Max Lorenz to see if Lorenz knew where she was. Lorenz did and would tell for a price. That was John Nola’s scheme: put Teel’s wife up against him in front of Ione.”

“And break her heart,” Serena Yates said harshly.

“It didn’t break,” Slabbe said simply.

“Thank God. That’s why telling you the truth is good, at last. You’ll see that Ione and Bill had no part of it and let them alone.”

Slabbe said: “Your chauffeur was nuts about you. He killed for you.”

“I caught him burgling our house when he was only sixteen years old and gave him a job. I killed John Nola, though, and Ruby Reed, too. I wouldn’t have let Alan touch Jake George if I’d guessed what would happen.”

Slabbe shrugged. “Hurst knew a little about how cops operate. He knew you can’t just wet your toes in a murder deal, you gotta jump in feet first. He took a Brody on telling us as much of the truth as possible, hoping we’d check just so far and be satisfied, not tie Ruby Reed in with Teel. But I knew she had to fit somewhere the second she showed that she knew Max Lorenz, at Fudge Burke’s. The telegram Lorenz sent her from the airport showed they were definitely connected. He told her to meet him here to make money, but didn’t tell her the score because she, as the wife, would have been in the driver’s seat. It was just coincidence that she picked up Prentice at Fudge Burke’s. Maybe not. She was the type to go for the rich pups and Prentice hangs out at Fudge’s. So long as they both were in the place at the same time, they were bound to get together. It was one between the eyes for Bill Teel when he walked in there today and spotted her.”