Buried Caesars (10 page)

“We’re all dying, Pudge,” said Hammett.

“I’m just doing it a little faster than my friends,” said Pudge. “Not complaining, but I kind of like the idea of picking my own time and place. If I could just catch on to a memory I’d feel okay.”

“Best we can do is go out with dignity—or having fan,” said Hammett. “I haven’t made up my mind which one I want. I don’t think you can have both.”

“More’s the pity,” said Pudge. “More’s the pity.”

Enough. I felt like the best friend’s friend in a third-rate play. I had nothing to say and the director wasn’t coming up with anything for me to do. It didn’t matter. I had my own plans. In the distance, a police siren wailed.

“I think I’ll go out and greet the pair in the DeSoto before the law gets here,” I said.

“Let’s,” said Hammett.

We left the room with Pudge and closed the cat inside. Pudge wandered off into the house, pistol in one hand, bottle in the other. Hammett and I went out the front door.

“How do you want to do this?” Hammett asked as we stepped into the sun and crossed the lawn, heading straight for the lone car parked on the street right behind my Crosley. The sun was hitting the windshield but I could see two shapes inside.

“Fast,” I said, moving quickly before Wylie and Conrad could take off. As it was, they didn’t want to take off. They got out of the car to meet us. They were still wearing their overalls and now had an overnight growth of stubble on their faces which didn’t improve their bulldog looks. Their identical gray eyes looked puffy and their faces tired. If I had thought they would be thrown by the element of surprise, I was wrong.

“What do you want?” I asked, brilliantly.

Wylie, the shorter of the two, who still stood at least six-three, plunged both hands into the deep pockets of his blue denim overalls and rocked on his heels. I half expected him to say, “Oh shucks,” and blush, but he didn’t. Instead he came out with a pocketknife which opened with a flick to show a blade that glinted in the bright sun. Behind him Conrad magically produced a short length of pipe.

“It’s coming right to us,” Wylie said. “And this time no fat gut with a gun is going to save your asses.”

“I think they should have had a better plan,” I said to Hammett, at my side.

“I don’t know. It has its good points,” he said in a near whisper. “It’s direct, honest and dangerous.”

“Those are good points?” I asked, as Wylie and Conrad advanced toward us.

“Usually,” he said.

“Yeah.”

We stood ready on the lawn. I didn’t think much of our odds, but that siren was much closer now. We were giving up too many years and too many pounds, but I had the feeling that Hammett and I knew how to take it better than Wylie and Conrad. If we could give out about as much as we took, we might be able to slow them down till help arrived. It was the best hope I could muster, but I didn’t need it. About three blocks down, a car screeched around the corner. Wylie, who was no more than six feet from me, looked over his shoulder, snarled “Shee-it,” and jammed his knife back into his pocket. He turned, grabbed Conrad’s arm and hurried back to the DeSoto.

“You all write now, you hear?” I said.

“I’ll fry your hair,” Wylie said, turning over the engine and putting the DeSoto in gear.

“Fry my hair?” I repeated to Hammett, who shuddered.

“He needs a new dialogue writer.”

Wylie and Conrad took off after clipping the right rear fender of my Crosley. They hit the nearby corner, turned right and were gone. I ambled over to examine the damage to my car with Hammett right behind.

The fender would need more than work. It would need a suitable burial in an auto graveyard.

The cop car slowed and pulled up behind us in the space just vacated by the grease monkeys from hell.

“Got a problem?” one cop asked, coming out of the driver’s seat with a gun in his hand. He wore a neatly cleaned and pressed blue uniform with a blue cap pulled over his forehead in military style.

“The bad guys got away, went around the block,” I said. “Blue DeSoto. You might be able to catch up with them.”

The first cop, who looked young and solid and wore sunglasses, was joined by an older, heavier version who had. come out of the passenger door. He was carrying a shotgun.

“You two mind telling us what you’re doing out here?” Cop One asked, with an edge.

“We’re guests of Mr. Block,” Hammett said. “Two men …”

“We can see you’re two men,” the first cop said with a smirk.

The second cop didn’t hold back a grin. He thought his partner was a regular Jerry Colonna.

“Hold it,” I said. “Two guys tried to bust our heads last night and then showed up here this morning. Pudge called …”

“Pudge?” asked the comic cop. They had spread out, comic cop in the street, sidekick on the lawn. Across the street a door opened and a man in a robe stepped out to watch. He had a gray walrus mustache and a very serious expression.

“Mr. Block’s nickname is Pudge,” Hammett explained. “The two you’re looking for are …”

“Maybe right in front of us,” said the comic. “This your car?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Don’t see many of these in Angel Springs. Don’t see many of these that can even make it to Angel Springs.”

“God, Barry,” the other cop said, shaking his head and smiling, gun still aimed at us.

“Let’s make it simple,” Hammett said. “Simple enough for Laurel and Hardy here. I suggest we go in and ask Mr. Block.”

Barry and his buddy exchanged looks and nodded. I had the feeling that we would have been safer dealing with Wylie and Conrad. The walrus across the street shielded his eyes from the sun to watch us march to Pudge’s door.

“Careful,” the man across the street called. I couldn’t tell who he was warning, us or the cops.

Hammett was reaching for the door when we heard the shot. It came from inside the house, clear, sharp, and only once. Barry shouldered his way past us, his partner aiming his weapon at Hammett, then me, and back again. He wasn’t smiling anymore and Barry wasn’t making jokes.

Barry turned the door handle and went in, weapon up, hands less than steady.

We followed him. Barry went to his knee on one side of the door. His partner ducked into the living-room doorway on the other side. Hammett and I stood in the hall.

“Police,” Barry called into the house.

“Crap,” sighed Hammett and stalked down the hallway.

“Stop,” called Barry.

Hammett simply threw up his hand in disgust and moved forward with me right behind.

We found Pudge in the kitchen, seated at the table, an empty bottle near his left hand, his pistol in his right. The hole in his temple was deep and almost black. Pudge was smiling as if he had a secret he wasn’t going to share. He was right.

W
e spent the morning in the cleanest cell I’d ever been in. If you had to go to jail, Angel Springs was the place to do it. There were only two of us in the cell, Hammett and me. We played poker with an almost new deck of Bicycles at a clean table, and ate a hot meal brought to us on plates.

“I know jokers who’d come up with a dime a night to huddle in a place like this,” I said.

“Not bad,” Hammett agreed, cutting the cards.

I owed him about thirty bucks by the time an old man in uniform came for us. He opened the cell door and motioned for us to follow him. He stayed about three feet ahead of us, gun bouncing in his holster. We could have taken the weapon, blown his head off and headed back to Los Angeles, but all three of us knew that you didn’t do things like mat in Angel Springs. We strolled into the outer office of the station past a pair of desks, one empty, the other filled by a dark-haired woman in a blue uniform talking frantically on the phone. She looked up at us and pushed the hair away from her face the way Ann used to do. I smiled at her. She looked through us and went back to her call.

Chief Spainy’s office was clean and sunny. The windows were big and freshly washed. The desk was clear and unscratched. Spainy was a bulky little man, in his fifties, with a thick neck. He wore a blue uniform and a tie that choked him and furrowed his throat. He did not look comfortable. He sat behind the desk, hands flat on it, and watched us sit.

“What do you know about rabbits?” he said finally.

“Not much,” I said.

“Stupid animals,” said Spainy. “Less sense than a chicken, if you can believe that. Less than a fish or frog. I’ve seen rabbits run right out on Highway 99 and stop, dead in the headlights of my jeep, just waiting to get squashed.”

“Sounds stupid to me,” I said.

“Domestics are even dumber than the wild ones,” he went on. “And they aren’t so damned friendly. Ever eat rabbit?”

Hammett sat with his hands in his lap, saying nothing, letting me carry the fascinating conversation.

“No,” I said.

Spainy shook his head in sympathy for my loss.

“Hassenpfeffer, fried rabbit, rabbit pie, roast rabbit, rabbit cooked in casserole. You take care in raising rabbits, wire-bottom hutches, off the ground. Feed them carefully and nothing tastes better. Nothing—not even a good steak from Kansas or an abalone from up the coast.”

He looked at us both to see if we were going to challenge him. We didn’t.

“You might guess I raise rabbits,” he said, pushing away from his desk and clasping his hands. He grinned. “That would be a good guess, but you might wonder why I’m talking rabbits with you.”

“You don’t want any trouble,” Hammett supplied. “You want to hold your job, raise your rabbits and retire without embarrassment.”

“Something like that,” Spainy said, losing his grin and not too happy to be upstaged. Upstaging Spainy didn’t strike me as a good idea either.

“We don’t get people getting shot in our town,” he said. “Residents don’t like it. And what they don’t like I don’t like. You know what I like?”

“Rabbits,” I said.

“And no trouble,” he added. “Now I’ll be quiet and you tell me everything there is to tell. I still got the victim’s widow to find and some explaining to do for her.”

“I’m a private investigator,” I said.

“I know that,” sighed Spainy. “And you,” he said, nodding at Hammett, “are a big-time writer,
Maltese Falcon, Thin Man
, that kind of stuff. Never read it. Wife does, though. Tell your tale and don’t waste time trying to impress the country folk.”

“We were staying overnight with Pudge, Mr. Block,” said Hammeft. “He was depressed. As an autopsy will show, he was dying. He made up a story about two men waiting outside with guns to get us out of the house. Mr. Peters and I went out to look. Your men pulled up, thinking we were the two men, and we heard a shot inside the house.”

“Simple so far,” said Spainy.

Hammett brushed back his white hair and shrugged.

“But you told my man Barry that a car had just pulled away,” said Spainy, shaking his head.

“To protect Mr. Block,” I stuck in.

“Dumb-ass story,” said Spainy, opening his desk and fishing for something.

“Most true stories are dumb-ass,” said Hammett. “We were outside with your men when Pudge shot himself. They heard the shot.”

Spainy found what he was looking for, a small jar of Postum. “J.V.!” he screamed.

The door to his office opened instantly and the dark, pretty and slightly overweight woman in uniform who reminded me of Ann stepped in, biting her ample lower lip. Spainy threw the small jar to her. She juggled it, managed to keep it from falling and clutched it to her bosom like a back pulling in a pass from Sid Luckman.

“Make a pot of that stuff, will you, J.V.,” Spainy said. “You two want some?”

Hammett and I shook our heads.

“Suit yourself,” he said, sitting down. “Hate the crap but I’ve got to drink something since I went off coffee. Hate tea. Don’t like cold drinks.”

J.V. left with her small jar still clutched tight.

“Could have been an accomplice,” Spainy said, returning his gaze to us and raising his eyebrows knowingly. “You could have had someone inside the house firing a gun. Block already murdered. Or you could have had a record of a shot or set up a gun to go off with some kind of timer.”

“I thought you didn’t read detective novels,” I said.

“Ah, hell. Jenny leaves ’em laying around. I pick up a few just to get ideas,” he said.

“Maybe we hypnotized Carl,” said Hammett. “Made him shoot himself while we used the police for an alibi.”

“Can’t make hypnotized people kill themselves,” said Spainy, pointing a finger at Hammett.

“No? Maybe not, but what if they don’t know they’re killing themselves?” Hammett went on, warming to the game. “What if they’re told it’s a toy gun, or …”

“… a new kind of thing to cut your hair,” said Spainy, leaning forward.

I tried to catch Hammett’s eye. Spainy didn’t need help in turning a suicide into a murder and pinning it on us. He needed help in recognizing it was a suicide.

“That’s nuts,” I said. “The man shot himself.”

Spainy spun around once in his swivel chair, a complete, slow circle full of thought.

“Seems so, seems so,” he agreed. “But I got a feeling something’s stirring here I ain’t been told. The rabbits are restless. I can feel it, but suicide’s better than murder. People are supposed to come here, feel good about life, not shoot themselves—but hell, maybe I shouldn’t complain. It’s better than murder.”