Find a Victim (18 page)

She nodded, leaning against him like a dutiful doll.

“Go and get into the car, then. I’ll be along in a minute.”

“No more trouble? You promise?”

“No more trouble. I promise.”

He thrust the blue gun back into its holster. Their bodies came apart gradually like a giant cell dividing. She walked with stunned leisureliness along the path to the street. He watched her all the way until she was in the front seat with the door closed. Then he picked up his hat and turned to me, brushing it on his sleeve:

“I’m willing to forget about this, if you are.”

“I’m not, though.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“You make your mistakes and I’ll make mine.”

“Damn it, Archer, can’t we get together?”

“Not on any terms that would suit you. I’m staying in Las Cruces until this thing is finished. Try slapping charges on me and I’ll show you a couple of charges of my own.”

“Such as?”

“Failure to do your duty. Conspiring with hoods.”

“No.” He reached for my arm. “You don’t understand.”

I stepped back out of his reach. “I understand this. I’m trying to solve two homicides, and something is trying to
stop me. Something that looks like law and talks like law but doesn’t smell like law. Not in my nostrils. It smells like zombie meat. A zombie that takes the public’s money and sits behind a courthouse desk pretending to be an officer.”

“I’ve always done my duty.” But he said it without conviction. His anger had turned inward, and his corroded snarl was chewing on itself.

“Did you do it last night, when that truck broke out of the county?”

He didn’t answer. He stood and looked at the ground between us, then turned on his heel and walked toward his car, stumbling a little. The back of his coat was split. There was a streak of dirt on the crown of his Stetson. In the diffused light, his body cast a faint and wavering shadow.

CHAPTER
21
:
I found a doctor and had eight
stitches put in my face. The doctor seemed to take it as a matter of course and asked no questions. When the job was finished, though, he asked me for twenty-five dollars in cash. He was that kind of a doctor, or I was that kind of a patient.

When I left his office, I had a powerful impulse to climb into my car and drive away from Las Cruces and never come back. I couldn’t think of a single solid reason for staying. So I drove across town to the courthouse, accompanied by my Messianic complex.

Its towered white concrete ell was surrounded by lawns as green as the artificial grass that undertakers use to hide the meaning of their work. Over the front entrance a basrelief of blind justice faced the sun. Far above her dim
and bandaged head, the iron hands of the tower clock pointed at three thirty.

A tiled staircase led up to the District Attorney’s second-floor suite. In the anteroom a heavy blonde with commissar eyes surveyed me from behind the barricades of her bosom. After taking my name and consulting her intercom, she escorted me past several doors to the D.A.’s private office. It was a large sunlit room with a minimum of furniture. A few small human touches softened its bright impersonality: the photograph of a young and pretty woman on the desk, shelves of books that weren’t all law books, a pair of Don Freeman lithographs on the walls.

I’ve dealt with three main classes of district attorney. One is the slightly punchy, amiable type who has failed or almost failed in private practice and ended up in the courthouse, polishing apples for the people who put him there. One is the rising young lawyer who is using the office as a springboard to higher office or a richer practice. The third type, not so rare as it used to be, is the public servant who would rather live in a clean community than please a friend or get his picture in the paper.

Westmore seemed to belong in the second category. He offered me a cigarette and lit it for me, using the opportunity to study my face. His own was thin and jut-boned, ambitious-looking to the point of asceticism. It was masked with rimless spectacles and surmounted by a brush of prematurely gray hair like upright iron filings.

After placing a chair for me, he sat down behind his desk. “You’re an elusive character, Mr. Archer.”

“Sorry. I’ve had ground to cover.”

“You appear to have covered it on all fours.” His voice was sharp and intelligent, threaded with irony. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking seriously of having a warrant issued.”

“On what charge?”

“There are several possibilities. Resisting an officer, for instance. We take a fairly dim view of that sort of thing in Las Cruces.” His mouth was prim.

“You mean Church?”

“I mean Deputy Braga.”

“Braga got what was coming to him. I could have taken the girl if he hadn’t tackled me.”

“Braga realizes that now. However, I’d stay out of dark alleys if I were you. And I wouldn’t advise you to try it again, on Braga or anyone else in the sheriff’s department. The one thing that’s keeping you out of jail is the fact that you did report that car at the airport.”

“Church gave me credit for that?”

“Naturally. The sheriff gives credit where credit is due. And the Buick was what we needed to give us a lead on Bozey.”

“So Meyer told me. I take it Bozey hasn’t been caught.”

“Not yet. But I’ve had a teletype since I talked to Meyer. Bozey’s rap sheet stretches from here to there.” Westmore picked up a yellow flimsy from his out-basket and scanned it. “Petty theft and vandalism when he was still in grade school, repeated car theft in the next few years; carrying concealed weapons, mugging, holdup. The usual progression. Counting a year at Preston, he’s spent seven of the last eleven years behind walls.”

“Where does he come from?”

“The west side of Los Angeles, originally. But he’s been arrested in five Western states. His last conviction was for driving a truck for a gang of bootleggers in New Mexico. He got out in July and switched his operations to the Northwest.”

“Did he knock off the bank in Portland by himself?”

“So far as they know, it was a one-man job. At least he was the only one who entered the bank.”

“And he walked out with twenty thousand dollars?”

“Twenty-two thousand plus. Unfortunately for him, he couldn’t spend it. They had a fairly complete list of the stolen bills, and they circularized the coast and the whole Southwest. That car-purchase in Los Angeles seems to have been his only major attempt to pass any of it. He got the car all right, but the deal backfired. He had to clear out of Los Angeles with the police one jump behind him. They checked out of a Main Street hotel less than an hour before the police got there.”

“The girl was with him then?”

“They were registered as man and wife. Mr. and Mrs. John Brown.” A wry smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. “A highly appropriate alias, in view of what happened to the original John Brown.”

“When did they leave L.A.?”

“Six weeks ago, September the 3rd. He robbed the bank in Portland on August 15. From September the 3rd till yesterday he dropped out of sight completely.”

“Not quite,” I said.

He gave me a keen look. “Go on, if you know something more. I’ve taken you into
my
confidence.”

“Do you know where Lake Perdida is, Mr. Westmore?”

“I should, I have a cottage there. Why?”

“It’s one of the focal points of the case. Bozey and the Summer girl hid out there for several days in early September. And Anne Meyer was last seen at the lake—”

“How does she enter the picture?”

“She’s in the middle of it. I don’t know what efforts are being made to trace her. If it hasn’t been done, I suggest an APB.”

“The sheriff issued one on her last night. We’ve had no response so far.”

“I think you should center your search on Lake Perdida.”

“You must have reasons.”

“Yes.” I gave him the heel, and the keys to the cabin, and went through my story again.

He listened impatiently, tapping his desk with a restless hand, as if he could feel the seconds slipping away from under his fingers. “MacGowan may be lying. Doesn’t his story strike you as fantastic?”

“Its as wild as life. If he was making it up, he’d think of something more credible. Besides, I saw the hole.”

“He could have dug it himself. And he has reason to lie, if he’s the Summer girl’s grandfather.”

“MacGowan didn’t even know the girl was in trouble when he told me about the gravediggers.”

“He seems to have convinced you, at least.”

“Question him yourself.”

“I intend to. In the meantime, I want you to talk for the record.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

He flicked his intercom switch and asked for a court reporter. A genteel white-haired man lugged his stenotype into the room and set it up by the desk. While his racing fingers took my story down, Westmore roved the office.

The sheriff played a purely conventional role in my account. If Westmore had been a different man, I might have spoken out. But Westmore was very smooth, and I distrusted his smoothness. He had more power than the sheriff, but I couldn’t be sure how he would use his power.

Halfway through my recital, he was called out of the room. He came back bright-eyed and nervous with excitement. After the stenotypist left, he told me why:

“I’ve been talking to the intelligence unit from Internal Revenue. I turned over Kerrigan’s books to them this morning. There hasn’t been time for a complete analysis, but they’re certain now that he was cheating the government.”

“Income-tax evasion?”

“Yes, going back several years. He made quite a lot of
money out of his bar in the late forties, money that he didn’t report as income.”

“Where did the money go?”

He shrugged his narrow pin-striped shoulders. “Las Vegas, Tanforan, Caliente—much more exciting than paying income tax. The year after he bought the Golden Slipper, he started keeping two sets of books. Apparently he did it with Anne Meyer’s connivance. She was his secretary and bookkeeper at that time. The government has been trying for several months to get some concrete evidence against them. They tell me they were planning to call both Kerrigan and the Meyer woman before the grand jury.”

“No wonder he tried to get out.”

Westmore nodded solemnly. “Donald Kerrigan was at the end of his rope, financially and morally and every other way. Even his marriage was breaking up. I spoke just now to Kate Kerrigan on the telephone. He’s luckier than she is, in a sense. He’s out of it.”

“Isn’t she?”

“Not if the government presses its case. She signed his joint tax returns, of course without knowing that he had falsified them. But they could probably take everything she has left.”

I thought of Kate Kerrigan, still tangled in the consequences of a wrong choice made seven years ago. “Isn’t that pretty rough on her?”

“It won’t happen if I can help it. Kate’s a much sinned-against woman, and she’s been a saint about it, an absolute saint.”

I didn’t argue, though saint wasn’t quite the word. “I like her, too.”

“I’m glad to hear you say so. She asked after you, by the way. She wants to see you when you’re finished here.”

“Is she at home?”

“At home, yes. One thing I didn’t tell her, and I wouldn’t want it passed on to her, or anyone else.” He looked at me a little dubiously.

“It’ll stop with me.”

“Well, it ties in with your idea that the Meyer woman is central to this case. According to Kerrigan’s canceled checks, he’s been paying her a thousand dollars a month for the past year.”

“That’s a big salary for a motel manager.”

“More than he ever drew from the business himself.”

“Blackmail?”

“It seems to be the logical hypothesis. Hush-money of some sort, probably connected with his income-tax shenanigans. Whatever it was, it gave him a powerful motive for murdering her. Does that fit in with your ideas?”

“I’ll go along with it, at least for the present.”

Westmore moved to the window and stood there for a while with his back to me. When he turned, his spectacles glared in the slanting light.

“Let’s assume that Kerrigan killed Anne Meyer on Monday, and disposed of her body somehow. He knew that it would be found sooner or later, and he’d be the obvious suspect. No doubt he also knew that the Revenue Bureau was getting ready to descend on his fat neck. So he decided to get out, with as much money as he could scrape together.”

“And the Summer girl.”

“The girl, of course. She’s the catalytic agent in the reaction. She brought her two men together, Bozey and Kerrigan, and they worked out a plan to highjack a load of liquor. Bozey had twenty thousand dollars that he couldn’t spend. Kerrigan had the connections that made it possible for him to order the load and set it up for Bozey. He even arranged a temporary drop at the airbase. For these various services Bozey paid him in stolen money.”

“Which Kerrigan wouldn’t have been able to spend either.”

“Obviously Kerrigan didn’t know that. They conned him. Bozey was using the girl as sucker-bait.” The underworld jargon sounded queer in Westmore’s Ivy League accent.

“Maybe,” I said, “but she made it real for herself. She was in love with Kerrigan.”

His eyebrows rose. “How do you know that?”

“From the way she talked. Also, I saw them together.”

“Isn’t that rather subjective evidence?”

“You can’t ignore it, though. People are human. That includes the girls in Corona, and the girls who are on their way there.”

“We won’t argue.” His face had stiffened into an official mask. He was a bureaucrat, no matter how reluctant. “She’s accessory to murder in any case. We know that Bozey shot Aquista.”

“Do we know it for certain?”

“I’m convinced he shot both Aquista and Kerrigan. The bullets that killed them came from the same gun. Look at Bozey’s record. It’s pure chance that he hadn’t killed before. He was ready to kill for that load of whisky. It was better than money to him, better than the kind of money he had. There are still states in this Union where good bootleg liquor is a valuable commodity.”