Dead Letter (19 page)

"How would a guy like Frisco come at you?"
I said.

"Quick. Probably at night. And he’ll be armed
to the teeth. There’s a chance he’ll flip out before he gets to
you, ’cause dudes like that were wired like Claymores. Sooner or
later they always blew themselves up. That’s what happened to
Frisco. One day he just walked off into the jungle with a knife in
his belt and that was the end of it. Don’t try talking to this guy.
Dudes like Frisco just don’t have anything to say. If you see him
before he sees you, my advice is kill him. And make sure the
bastard’s dead, too, ’cause he’ll have lots of juice working
for him and he’ll have a dozen different ways of wasting you."

I leaned back against the glass counter and rubbed
the bridge of my nose. "So all I can hope to do is beat him to
the draw."

"I’m sorry, Harry," Soldi said. "But
that’s the way it is. Guys like that just won’t walk into a trap.
Man, they used to sit around for hours without moving a muscle, just
waiting for the right moment to do their work."

"Well thanks, Larry," I said to him.

Soldi walked back to the rear of the shop and I could
almost see the energy draining out of him with each step. Bullet
looked at me a long moment and said what I’d been thinking, "Harry,
you’re in real trouble."

It took me a quarter of an hour to convince Bullet
that there was no way he could help me. And at that I wasn’t sure
he’d really bought what I told him. I didn’t like the way he was
looking at me as I left the store—like I was a piece of equipment
with his own personal five-year warranty on my chest. To be honest,
after talking to Larry Soldi, I didn’t like the look of anyone or
anything on the mall—the blue-haired woman with a shopping bag on
her arm who was gazing into Walgreen’s window, the black kids
hanging around the liquor store, the Samoyed nosing at some garbage
in a wire trash can, and, least of all, Ted Lurman, who was leaning
up against his Chevy pretending he was a station chief in Paris. Wake
up, man! I
almost shouted at him.

It wasn’t that Soldi had told me anything I didn’t
already know. It was just having it confirmed so thoroughly that
shook me up. Because if Larry were right, there’d be no percentage
in sitting around waiting for Lester to show his hand. He’d have to
be tracked down. And then he’d have to be killed. And if I didn’t
want Sarah and me to end up as casualties in an FBI set-up that
backfired, I’d have to make sure the killing was done as coolly and
efficiently as possible. That meant I’d have to have some help. I’d
have to have access to an informant who could tell me precisely where
Grimes was going to be at precisely the right moment.

As I drove back to the Delores I began to form a
little plan. If Sarah could get Sean O’Hara and some of the other
Friends of Nature to cooperate with us, we might be able to track
Grimes down that very night. The trick would be getting O’Hara to
play ball. If he wouldn’t the FBI could always tail him and his
friend Chico Robinson until they led us to Grimes’s lair. And once
that was over, I could get back to the document and Daryl Lovingwell.

Sarah answered the door when I returned to the
apartment. She had wrapped her auburn hair in a plaid scarf. Standing
barefoot in her peg-leg jeans and checked shirt, she looked domestic
and adorable.

"Hello, lady," I said, kissing her on the
lips.

"Hello, man."

"Why so housewifely?" I said as I hung up
my coat.

"We have guests."

"And did you have a nice morning?"

Sarah shrugged. "It could have been worse. They
could have been Republicans? The two telephone repairmen were sitting
on the living room couch. One of them was about twenty-five, short,
with a flushed, pretty, Italian face. He eyed Sarah hungrily as we
walked up to them. The other guy was looking straight at me. He was
about fifty, stocky, balding, and morose—a big-boned man with the
grave, sad-eyed face of a Methodist elder.

"Harry Stoner," I said.

The young one said, "Ed Lionelli. This is my
partner, Carl Sturdevant."

"Where’s Lurman?" Sturdevant said in a
deep, unfriendly voice.

"He was right behind me. I guess he’ll be up
in a minute."
 
Sturdevant
looked at his watch. "We’ve got to get cracking," he
said. "We’ve got to make some plans."

I looked at Sturdevant and knew immediately that he
was dangerous. A red-baiter. A holdover from the Hoover regime. He
was the type who could get Sarah and me killed and feel righteous
about it. I started to tell him what he could do with his plans when
Lurman knocked at the door. Sarah ushered him into the room, and as
he walked past me, he flipped off the dark green glasses and held out
his hand.

"Ted Lurman," he said.

"Harry Stoner."

Lurman nodded to Lionelli and Sturdevant and surveyed
the room. "You into stereo?"

"No. I just stopped at the store to talk to a
friend."

"I used to be," he said. "In the
service. Hell, I could pick up a Revox A-700 for six bills in
Germany."

"I think they’re well over a thousand bucks
here," I said.

Lurman smiled. "I know. I sold two of them in
New York when I got stateside."

Now, this is more like it, I said to myself. "I
thought you guys were all honesty and light."

"We are," he said. "Actually things
have kind of loosened up since Hoover broke his promise to himself
and died. Isn’t that right, Ed?"

Lionelli stared at Sarah and practically licked his
lips.

"Yeah, we’re real loose now."

"Did you get any action on the street?"
Sturdevant said.

Lurman shook his head.

"Then we’ll have to smoke him."

"Hold on," I said.

Sturdevant burped in surprise.

"You were saying?" Lurman said.

I sat down on the Easy-Boy and Sarah drifted in
behind me. "How much do you know about the way Lester
Grimes operates?"

"We know he’s a smart, dangerous, and slightly
crazy man," Lurman said. "He’s good with weapons and he’s
clever. The job he did on that school superintendent was a work of
art."

"How so?"

"He just timed it to perfection. We went back
over the scene later and we figure he must have sat in front of the
building opposite superintendent Bolter’s apartment for two or
three hours. In broad daylight, mind you. With a machine pistol under
his coat. About five Bolter draws the living room curtains and Grimes
pulls out the piece, loads it, and shoots him six times before the
poor bastard can let go of the drawstring."

"He’s that good a shot?" I said.

"Deadly and proficient. We’re not sure, but we
think he may have killed a narcotics agent in San Francisco, too,"
Lurman said. "This time, he used a shotgun. At close range."

"A sawed-off?" I said with a shudder.

"Yeah. It’s paradoxical. One crime in the
style of a Mafia button-man and the other like a barroom brawler."

"What about the 'Cowboy' business?"

"Apparently he’s been fascinated with guns and
gunmen most of his life. Some of the people we interviewed in
California said he liked to switch hats. Some days he was the good
guy and some days the bad. Some days he was the town sheriff and
others the hot-blooded outlaw. It’s not that he’s completely
looney. He knows that there’s more than a little wrong with him;
and he’s been known to warn friends away when he thinks he’s
losing control. What he is is a paranoid with a wry sense of humor;
and the Cowboy act is a way of dramatizing his own craziness."

"How the hell did someone like him get involved
in radical politics?"

"A lot of vets did," Lurman said. "You
know men just can’t come back home after seeing a lot of death and
sit down at the old spot at the table and swallow the same pap. Look
who was doing all the sniping in the Miami riots. Lester was involved
in the Vets Against the War movement back in the early seventies and
drifted from that into more violent protests."

I took a deep breath and glanced up at Sarah. She was
staring somberly at Ted Lurman. I touched her hand and she looked
down at me. "Do you think you can get in touch with Sean again?"

"Why?"

"We need his help," I said. "Grimes is
a trained killer and I don’t think he’s going to walk into any
trap that we set up. He’s going to kill us in his own sweet time
and maybe these gentlemen will get him after we’re dead and maybe
they won’t. Our only real chance to stay alive is to find Grimes
before he finds us. And Sean can help us find him."

Sarah knit her brow. "If you expect Sean to
betray Les, he won’t do it."

"Not even for you?"

"Christ, Harry, that’s lousy."

"Yes. It’s a choice between lousy and dead."

"Once he finds out that we’ve thrown in with
the FBI, Sean may not even talk to me, much less help me."

"I’ve got an answer for that one, too. But
you’re going to hate it."

Sarah stared at me coldly. "You mean lie to him,
don’t you?"

I nodded. "You don’t tell him about the FBI.
You don’t tell him the real reason we want to find Grimes. You just
tell him that you want to make amends with Cowboy. Tell him that
you’ve broken off with me. Set up a time and place for the
reconciliation, and we’ll go in your place."

"God," Sarah hissed.

"Do you think I would say it if I could think of
anything else? Christ, Sarah, it’s him or us now."

"I’ll think it over," she said tartly and
stalked off into the bedroom. I sat back in the chair and lit a
cigarette.

"That’s your idea?" Lurman asked after a
moment.

"That’s the idea, buddy," I snapped.
"There isn’t going to be any set-up on this one. No decoys.
And that girl isn’t going to be involved in the pay-off. When we
hunt down Grimes, it’s just going to be you, me, and your two
friends."

"It’s a good idea," Lurman said.

I took a deep drag and blew it out. "It’s a
shitty idea. But if O’Hara plays along, it’ll work."

I filled the three agents in on what I knew about
Grimes, O’Hara, and Robinson; and we decided that if Sean wouldn’t
cooperate, we’d split up and follow him and Chico in the hope that
one of them would lead us to the Cowboy. While Sturdevant and
Lionelli were discussing how the tail should be run, I pulled Lurman
into the kitchen and asked him for a favor.

"Do you know a security man named Louis
Bidwell?" I said.

"Chief at Sloane?"

I nodded. "I want you to get a copy of Daryl
Lovingwell’s security file from him."

"Does it have anything to do with Grimes°?"
Lurman said.

I didn’t even have to think about the lie. I just
looked him in the eye and said, "Yes."

"All right," Lurman said. "I’ll see
what I can do."

After setting that wheel in motion, I walked into the
bedroom to talk with Sarah. She was stretched out on the blanket,
face-down, her head buried in the pillows. When I touched her on the
shoulder, she turned over and looked unhappily into my face.

"You think I’m being a shit, don’t you?"
I said. "That I’m enjoying this?"

"I don’t think you enjoy it, but they’re my
friends. At least, Sean is."

"You still love him?" I asked.

Sarah wiped her eyes with her fingertips and said, "I
like him. What does that have to do with it?"

"Nothing," I said. "I guess I was
being 'jealous' again." She laughed half-heartedly. "I know
it’s lousy, but if you don’t want to be involved in the violence,
it has to be done this way."

"There’s violence and there’s violence."
Sarah sat up on the bed and drew her knees to her chin. "This is
a bad thing, Harry. You must feel it, too. I told you before—I
don’t think I would have survived adolescence without Sean."

"Sarah, the cold truth is that you’re not
going to survive adulthood without him."

"I know," she said. "I’d just like
to have the illusion of a choice." She brushed her hair back and
got up off the bed. "I’ll call him. But I can’t lie to him."

"Sarah, you might as well cut your own throat.
If O’Hara tells Grimes what we’re up to, he’ll have the edge."

"Sean won't tell him."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because he loves me, Harry," she said
flatly.

I thought it over. "You’ll be trading on his
feeling for you."

"How nice of you to put it that way."

"You’re the one that wants the illusion of a
choice."

"Yes," she said bitterly. "I’ll be
trading on his feelings. But, at least, I won’t be lying about why
I’m doing it. And now I better go make that call. If I think about
it too much, I’ll chicken out."

I left the room, and, a minute later, I could hear
her dialing the phone.