Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (13 page)

“Like?”

“Where she came from.”

“Nah, I don’t — I never asked. Why would I?”

“She ever do anything crazy around you?”

“Crazy?” He had to think about it. “Nah, nothing crazy. She was — different. But she never did anything crazy.”

“One thing more. You know Winkie Gilmer?”

He was bored. He shook his head. “I never heard the
name.” I was watching the boys at the TV set, too. Nobody twitched.

Gerry sat down beside Stan on the sofa, nuzzled him. He stiffened, then let himself be petted. He took one of her hands, held it with beautiful tenderness. I tried to keep from sneering as I walked out of the house and shut the door behind me with a light click.

The Neptune Court occupied two blocks of beach land on a narrow peninsula known as Fontaine Beach. It was a mushrooming resort center. Ornate motels and hotels done in bold long lines sprawled along the strip of highway in a growing chain. Every day bulldozers scraped at the raw land while sun-reddened men with fat stacks of blueprints watched and planned. The street crumbled slowly under the impact of the ready-mix trucks.

The motor court was a two-story Y-shaped building a block long, the two prongs of the Y set at an angle against the shoreline, which had been filled in here and there and otherwise contrived so that from every room in the court a bit of blue water could be seen. There was a large swimming pool in the juncture of the Y, then a hedge of Australian pine and beyond that a string of cabanas on the beach. Down one side of the court was a deep wide gash that served as a harbor for visiting yachts and small craft.

Zavelli’s restaurant and night club was set apart from the main building, connected to it by an arcade with small shops. There was dancing on the secluded roof of the club and pale tuneless music glittered in the air.

They told me inside I could find Zavelli on the roof.
I went up the outside stairway. There was iron grill-work around the parapet and some kind of hedge. The dance floor and the ring of tables were on different levels. A man in a dinner jacket stopped me under the entrance arch.

“You don’t go in without a tie.”

“Zavelli in there?”

“Maybe.”

“You go and tell him Pete Mallory wants him.”

He looked me over with a calm practiced eye. “What was the name?”

I told him again.

“It don’t mean nothing to me.”

“It rhymes with Macy Barr.”

His monotonous stare broke up. “Wait here,” he said. He went inside. I watched a tired tango on the dance floor below. He came back and took me to a table in one corner of the shelf above the dance floor. Zavelli sat there in a built-up chair. He had a normal-sized head, but his body was stunted, the arms grotesquely short, shoulders narrow and sloping.

“Sit down,” he said in a yawning voice. There was an intermission below and a shuffle of feet past his isolated table, a crackle of female laughter. He watched the dancers go by with no change of expression. “How’s Macy these days?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ve heard things.” He looked at me with a hint of expectancy. “What can I do you for?”

“You got a boy named Winkie Gilmer?”

“Yes.”

“What’s he do?”

“I use him downstairs. Keeps things orderly.”

“Kind of a waste of his talents, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t know he had any.”

“You know as well as I do that he’s a hired gun and anything he does around here is a blind. Don’t stall me, Zavelli. I want him. Right now. He’s up to his ears with me. You get him or you close down.”

His thin chest quaked. “He ain’t been around in a couple of days.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“He hire out much?”

“I — don’t know. That’s his business.”

“Who sent him here?”

He tipped a glass to his lips, holding it with both miniature hands. “Groaner. From Cleveland.”

“To do whose work?”

“I don’t know. I don’t ask.”

“Any more in town like him?”

He turned the sorrowful eyes on me. “Couldn’t tell you, Mallory. I stick close to my place. I don’t hear everything that goes on.”

“All right. Forget it. I want to see Gilmer’s room.”

Zavelli raised one of his short arms high. Near the entrance, the man in the dinner jacket was leaning against one of the posts of the ivy-roofed arch. He came to the table.

“Take him to Gilmer’s room,” Zavelli said. The man glanced at me curiously. We went downstairs and walked through the arcade and entered the lobby of the motel. He took a key from the desk and we went to Gilmer’s
room. He stood by the door while I looked around.

There was a single bed, night stand, three chairs, desk, dresser, all made of bleached wood. There was no suitcase in the closet. A beach robe and a wrinkled sport shirt were on hangers, and a pair of canvas shoes was stacked in a corner like nervous feet. A Polaroid camera with flash attachment in a leather carrying case hung from a hook on the closet door.

In one of the desk drawers I found a folder of pictures. All of them had been taken with the Polaroid. There were all kinds of women in the pictures, most of them young, some trying hard to seem young, women in beds, bathtubs, automobiles. Some wore an occasional article of clothing, some were happily getting rid of it. Most wore nothing. Winkie was a souvenir hunter.

I turned the wastebasket upside down but it was empty. So were the dresser drawers. A big Zenith portable radio and his little camera seemed to be Winkie’s chief amusements. I checked the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and found only suntan oil, dull razor blades.

“You know Gilmer?” I said to the man in the dinner jacket. He nodded mechanically, his jaw grinding chewing gum.

“What kind of car’s he drive?”

“Buick Century. New.”

“He got any girlfriends around this place?”

The man laughed drily. “Mister, Winkie’s had ’em all.”

I grinned a little. I took out the .38 automatic and let him get a good look at it. He couldn’t take his eyes away. He wasn’t that kind of tough guy—yet.

I jacked a shell out of the chamber and the slide
slammed forward. I bounced the cartridge in my hand, tossed it at him. He caught it and held it with two fingers.

“You see Winkie around here any time soon,” I said, “give him that.” I put the .38 away and walked past him into the hall.

“And tell him I’ve got six more just like it I’m going to stick square in his gut the first time I see him.”

It was eleven o’clock when I drove down the causeway to the island and was let through the gate by a hobbling Rudy. The house was quiet.

Macy Barr wasn’t in his study. The door was open slightly and a lamp on the desk was lighted. I pushed the door out of the way and went inside, intending to wait for him there.

In one corner, near the desk, there was a small safe. The door hadn’t been shut tightly. Macy probably kept money for household expenses in the safe. A tightening excitement concentrated my attention on that safe. It would be a good place for keeping certain papers close at hand. Not his own papers, but a file of reports and notes about, and signed by, other men over whom it was necessary to exercise control.

I walked closer to the flimsy little safe, feeling almost giddy with anticipation. If I could find it, I thought. If I could find the letter—

The safe door opened readily, squeaking slightly. I ignored the packages of small bills, leafed through the contents of a clasp envelope, glancing at the first paragraphs of letters that were meaningless to me, looking for the address of a New York sanitarium on the fronts of the old envelopes stuck here and there in the collection of papers. I was too intent on my search to hear Macy when he came in.

“Pete.
Pete!
”

I shoved the bulky envelope back into the safe and jerked around. Macy watched me with a furious expression that slowly changed to one of mere tiredness.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve got a gun in this pocket. In the old days, or just a couple of years ago, I’d have shot you dead without even asking you what you thought you were doing.”

I stood up, unable to say anything, my mouth tight with apprehension. He never took his eyes off me. He pulled the .45 out of the pocket of his robe an inch at a time. He glanced down at it in exasperation, let it drop back.

“So you want the letter,” Macy said. “What were you going to do with it, Pete? Rip it up and burn it and go your way?”

I didn’t speak. “You answer me!” he shouted, losing control for a moment.

“I don’t know,” I said thickly.

Macy walked to his desk, his face rigid with a sort of pain. “Sit down, Pete, and listen to me. If you walk away now so help me I’ll kill you.”

He took a key from a holder he carried and unlocked a drawer of the desk. He took out a cardboard box and untied a string around it with clumsy shaking fingers. He sorted through the stuff inside as if he couldn’t quite remember what was there. Then he stopped, shook a soiled folded envelope free, looked it over, put it on the edge of his desk.

“Look at it,” he said gruffly.

I did. It was the one. I opened the envelope to make sure.

Macy grunted harshly, leaned out of the chair and
grasped the wastebasket beside the desk. It banged against the desk as he upended it. The contents of the wastebasket were scattered on the floor. He heaved it to the desk, stood up, picked up a cigarette lighter. He held the letter with one hand and set fire to it. When it was burning good he dropped it into the wastebasket and sat down again. The burning left a sour brown smell in the room.

“There it is, Pete,” he said. “You can go now, if that’s all that was keeping you here. I never would have used it. I never would have sent it to your girlfriend. It was a bluff. Just bluff. That’s all I am now, bluff.”

He stood up and turned around and kicked the chair he had been sitting in. It flipped over and banged into the wall nearby. “Go on, get out of here. Go back to your girl, Pete. Hang on to her. Hang on to her as if you never had anything in your life before. Because you never did, till you had her.”

“If I leave,” I said, “somebody’s going to kill you. He may do it anyway.”

His head hung for a moment. “I know it,” he said as though he had just at that moment begun to realize it.

“You’re a sad sight, Macy,” I said. I didn’t know why I was going to say the things that had been collecting in my mind. I knew it wouldn’t help now, but this man had been a second father to me once, in his own way. “Every two-bit racketeer in this area has his hand in your back pocket. The wolves are circling, and Maxine’s leading the pack. What the hell you been doing?” He just looked sullen and a little bit pitiful.

“Who’s supposed to be taking care of things in town for you?” I said, trying to punch the right key to make him react.

“Reavis,” he said. “Reavis handles most of the work you used to do. Taggart does most of the traveling.”

“What kind of job is Reavis doing?”

“Lousy.”

“Not that I care, but can him and get a new bunch. The pilings are rotten, Macy, and the whole works is coming down around your ears. I was in town one day, and I can see it.”

“Let up on me! I know it. I know.”

“But you don’t give a damn.”

He tried to fling an answer at me. Nothing came. He jammed his hands into his pockets.

“What’s got into you?” I said. “The kid? Aimee? Did that start it? Or were you already coming unstuck when she came along? Now a crackbrain killer has thrown a scare into you. You used to have steel walls around you, but when you weren’t looking somebody stole them, and all that’s left is cardboard. A handful of men and a bookkeeper are all you got left. No wonder you’re shaking.”

“Pete! Will you leave it alone, Pete? I did you a favor, what do you want? Will you leave it alone, Pete!” I didn’t know whether or not he meant it, but he had pulled the automatic from his pocket and was pointing it at me.

“Put it down,” I said, wondering how touchy the trigger might be. A coldness spread from the roof of my mouth to my chest.

He looked down at the gun, puzzled. He put his other hand over his chin, and the barrel of the .45 dipped slowly, as if his wrist muscles were stretching.

“I think we need a drink,” he said then.

“Let’s have a drink,” I agreed breathlessly.

There was a bar in the living room, with a small refrigerator.
We went there. He mixed the drinks and made them strong. We sat in two stylish chairs, facing each other uncertainly. Macy lifted his glass to me.

“You’re right, Pete,” he said. “I don’t know when it started. Maybe as far back as six years ago. It hasn’t been anything sudden. A little ground lost here and there, not recovered. Some cheating overlooked because it wasn’t quite so important at the time. Things got loose. I didn’t stay around town enough. It was better down here. Last year I moved. I stay here all the time now. With Aimee.

“I wasn’t completely unaware of what was happening, Pete. I thought I could step back in any time I wanted. Give the orders. Clean things up. Then one day it was too late. It didn’t even seem to matter much. I knew then how old I was getting. I tried just to hold things as they were. Tell myself it really wasn’t as bad as it looked, that nobody realized. But everybody knew. My own boys knew first. A few of them left. They went over to Maxine. The others got sloppy. Now Maxine’s getting ready to make his bid. It’s not worth fighting back.”

“What are you going to do when the showdown finally comes?”

“There won’t be any showdown,” he said, but his eyes were evasive. He had something in mind but wasn’t ready to talk about it. “Tell me what happened today, Pete. Everything.”

I told him. “Both Gilmer and Carla Kennedy are important,” I finished. “When I find either of them I may know who’s been sending you fan mail.”

“Rudy doesn’t sleep any more,” Macy said reflectively. “I look at Rudy and say that it doesn’t bother me like that, but it does.” He swirled ice in his glass, drained the last of
the whisky. “I ought to tell you to go home, Pete,” he said without shame, “but I’m afraid to. I want you around.”