Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (16 page)

It was a quarter of five when I had showered and dressed. I was hungry and since I wouldn’t be around for dinner I went into the kitchen and one of the boys fixed a steak from the freezer for me. After I had eaten I went upstairs, hoping to find Macy in his room. He wasn’t there. I started down the hall, then stopped, hearing a peculiar sound from the Rinkes’s bedroom. I waited for it to be repeated, then walked closer to the opened door. It had sounded like a voiceless person trying to scream.

I heard Rinke talking softly as I approached. While he talked the sound went on, relentlessly. I looked through the space between the door and frame. The first thing I saw was Evelyn Rinke’s face. It was chalky. She sat as if her bones were glass. Her eyes were squinted almost shut. Her mouth was twisted open, frozen in the scream that was like a sawing of metal from her throat.

Charley Rinke was holding a cigarette lighter about four inches from her face. He moved it very slowly as he spoke to her in his low calm voice. Her eyes watched the flame, blank with fright.

“I know you’re afraid of it, Evelyn,” he said smoothly. “I’ll take it away in just a moment. I know how you feel about being burned. This time I won’t burn you. But I want you to understand this. Stay away from Pete Mallory. Hear me? I saw the two of you playing in the water today. You have a good time with him, don’t you? But stay away from him. I know what you’re building up to with Mallory. Just remember who you are. You’re Mrs. Rinke. You’re my wife. You belong in my bed, not anybody else’s you happen to take a shine to.”

In a moment of explosive anger I wanted to walk into that I room, feel his face smash and spread under my
fists. Evelyn Rinke put her hands up, holding them out in front of her in a gesture of supplication.

“Take... take... take...” she pleaded.

Rinke thumbed the top down on the lighter and the little torch of flame was gone. He started out so quickly I had time only to retreat and duck into the adjoining room. I heard him walk rapidly away and go down the hall.

Evelyn Rinke was seated in the same position, hands over her face, when I went into her bedroom. She must have heard me come in.

“Go away,” she said. “Go away.”

“It’s me — Pete.”

Without any apparent movement she began to fall sideways out of the chair. I caught her and lifted her to the bed.

“Why did he do that?” I said.

Her teeth were tightly clenched. “He... can’t stand to see me have fun. Not with somebody else.”

“Why are you so afraid of fire?”

Her eyes opened wide. “Fire?”

“You were almost paralyzed looking at that lighter.”

“I don’t know why. The flame just makes me freeze up. I’ve always been that way.”

I looked at her for a few moments longer. The terror was still in her eyes. She touched one of my hands. “Stay with me, Pete.”

“It would be better if I didn’t,” I said. “If he came back I might kill him.”

I turned and walked from the room. I went downstairs, my chest tight and squeezed with anger. I walked out of the house, toward the trees that capped the north
end of the island, not caring where I was going, just needing to walk until the dangerous edge of hatred for Charley Rinke had blunted.

The sun was fading behind long streaks of clouds in the west. In the grove of palms I found Diane sitting on a couple of thin pillows, her back against the thickened base of one of the trees. There was a book face down in her lap and she looked steadily across the milky bay.

I stopped near her, putting out a hand to the tree. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t look up.

“Where’s Aimee?” I said, to jar her loose from her attitude of concentration.

“Lying down before dinner,” Diane said without moving. “What’s wrong, Pete?”

“Why would anything be wrong?”

“I could tell by the way you were walking. The quick way you breathe.” She looked up then. “Are you going into town?”

“Soon.”

Diane sighed. She got up from the pillows stiffly. “Too dark to read,” she said. “I guess I’ll go now.” She looked toward the bay again. “It’s really beautiful here. I like to come here and just sit. Get away from things that aren’t so beautiful.” She looked a bit wistful. “I guess it won’t be long before we leave this house for good.”

“What makes you think so?” I said.

“It’s — just a feeling I have.”

“What will you do then?”

“I’ll go where Aimee goes, I suppose,” she said carelessly. “It doesn’t really matter.”

“You like the kind of life you’ve got here?” I asked her. “You like the people you live with?”

She looked away, bent to pick up the pillows. “I think we are in rats’ alley,” she said almost inaudibly, “where the dead men lost their bones.”

The odd line jostled memory, and I looked at her thoughtfully. “Where did you get that?”

She shrugged. “I’ve known it for years. I’ve always liked that poem, because he seemed to write it for me. I’m the girl who looks in the mirror and wonders what difference it made.”

I wanted to hear her say more, but she was suddenly silent, as if she had revealed too much of the self that she usually kept carefully wrapped and put away from the curiosity of strangers.

I took the pillows from her, stacked them under my arm. We walked back to the house together, saying nothing. Her jaw was set, and there was a melancholy look in her eyes, as if she were reaching back to another time that had held more promise than now. At the patio I left her and went to the garage, picked out a car for the drive into town.

At seven o’clock I placed the call. I listened to the drone as it rang for a long time at the other end. Then she answered. “Yes?”

“You told me to call,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Do you know where Railroad Avenue is?”

“I can find it.”

“Get in touch with a man called Harry Small at Nineteen Railroad Avenue.”

“Why?”

“He raised Carla Kennedy,” she said. “He knows where she is now.” The connection was broken with a hollow click.

I wrote the address down, left the Coral Gardens Hotel. In the car I unfolded my city map and found Railroad Avenue. It was a two-block street that ran diagonally into the Seaboard’s Moreland Yards, not far from the bay.

I found the street without much trouble. It was hardly wider than a driveway, lined with gray, tottering rooming houses, narrow brick buildings. I parked near the entrance to Railroad Avenue, beside a littered embankment next to the railroad property. A long diesel freight pounded by on the outside track as I got out of the Buick.

Number Nineteen was half a block from the glittering bands of tracks. I picked out the number lettered above the door in the light of a lamppost on the corner. It was a
deserted store of some kind. The windows had been painted over, and there was a large rusted padlock on the door. It probably hadn’t been opened in years. Somebody had scratched a ludicrous face in the scaly paint near the keyhole.

I wasn’t amused. I had bought myself twenty bucks worth of nothing. I looked up and down the dark street. Lights burned here and there in the high windows, but there were no faces, no people to share the ledge of sidewalk with me. I walked past the store slowly, stopped. There was a crevice between two buildings, barely four feet wide. A dozen steps down this brick canyon a small yellow light glowed feebly, making long groping shadows. There was a door beneath the light.

I listened to the sound of boxcars clanking together in the freight yard, the deep chuff of an old locomotive. I walked down the alley, my feet rattling the trash. A furry shadow raced from a small paper box ahead of me, darted into blackness beyond the reach of the light.

No one answered my knock. I looked down at the brass doorknob. It gleamed dully. No rust. I touched it. My fingertip came away clean.

I put my hand around the knob, turned it slowly. The latch clicked, the door was free of the jamb. I pushed it open.

Inside, it was stifling. The one window was shut, shade pulled over it. The only light came from a battered metal table lamp in the center of the room. A man sat upright in a wheelchair beside the table. He was a short man with a bald head, powerful arm and shoulder muscles. His hands dangled at the spokes of the big wheels. He wore a
T shirt, gray pants, suspenders. His face was yellow and dry, the eyes half open and slightly protruding. His parted lips twisted convulsively. He leered at me. It was nothing personal. He would leer at anybody who came through that door, even the cops who would have found him sooner or later, if I hadn’t come first.

I walked closer to him, trying to smell death in the hot room. But he hadn’t been dead that long. I found out what was holding him up so stiffly. A knife had been thrust through the canvas back of the wheelchair, getting him just to the side of the left shoulderblade. From the size of the handle I judged it was a pretty large knife. The blade was aimed slightly downward. It had probably got the heart or one of the important arteries nearby. He would be a big sack of blood. A little of it had run down his T shirt in back, dried darkly.

It would have required a husky man to stab him like that, through the thick muscles developed from years of self-locomotion in the wheelchair. The tread on the rubber-capped wheels was almost worn away.

A stock of up-to-date newspapers and magazines with the front covers missing suggested he probably made his living as a newsdealer. His room needed a good cleaning. He didn’t have enough shelf space for all his books. They were piled on the windowsill, on the floor, under a bunk bed. There was one on the table near the wheelchair, opened at about the middle. I glanced at the cover. It was a collection of poems by Robert Browning.

Next to the Browning reader was a telephone, and a small notepad was stuck halfway under the base of the phone. I pulled it out, looked through it. It wasn’t new,
but there was only one notation in the little book, a Bay-view phone number. I picked up the receiver of the phone, dialed. There were six rings, then a sound as if someone had cut in.

“Stan’s Restaurant,” a female voice said cheerfully.

I hung up, looked at the number again. I tore the page out of the notebook and shoved it back beneath the telephone. Apparently Harry Small had had Stan’s private phone number at the restaurant. They cut in from somewhere else when he didn’t answer.

Listening to the echo of my own thoughts in the silent room was making me nervous. Perspiration soaked my face. For a moment I almost envied him his dry skin.

I walked around the table and my foot kicked a piece of broken porcelain. I looked down and saw a little glazed figure, a Napoleonic soldier standing stiffly at attention. His feet and rifle were broken and there was a long crack down his face to the white cross-chest cartridge belt. I wrapped him in my handkerchief, not taking time to look for the missing feet, and put the broken doll in my coat pocket.

It was almost impossible to find anything in the cluttered room, but I gave it a try, looking in the most likely places for pictures. I found none. No faded snapshots of little Carla Kennedy. No trace of the girl at all. And Harry Small was supposed to have raised her.

I was ready to go. I had stayed too long already. But I went to the phone and dialed another number, the number the old woman had given me. It rang again and again. I waited for her to answer, but she never came. I hung
up and wiped the phone with a towel from the sink. I thought about turning off the light above the door and leaving through the alley that led to the rear of the building. But I was liable to blunder into more trouble if I didn’t go out the way I had come. I left Harry Small, smearing the doorknob with the palm of my hand as I went out. As far as I could tell, no curious eyes tracked my progress down Railroad Avenue to where the Buick was parked.

At a quarter after eight I parked the Buick in a metered rectangle on Kelvin Boulevard, walked half a block to Monessen. Down at the other end of the street, near the apartment house where Victor Clare had lived, children gathered under a streetlight. This end of Monessen was deserted.

There were no lights in the grim brick fortress of the used-furniture store. I cupped my hands against the glass plate in the door, looked inside. It took me a few seconds to notice the splinter of light between the curtains at the rear. I watched it, reached out with my fist and knocked loudly. Nothing happened. I knocked again. The light went out suddenly.

I thought about that. Then I turned and walked across the street, stood partially behind a leaning tree to see if anyone ventured out. I waited for what seemed a long time. I decided it wasn’t worth it, but I stayed there anyway. Then I saw the tip of a cigarette glow in an alley next to the store. Nothing else. Just the cigarette to tell me I wasn’t the only one who waited.

In another minute or two, the cigarette was flipped away, toward the sidewalk. I kept my eyes on that alley. I counted the steps he might be taking. Then there was a crack of misty pale light along the side of the furniture store as a door was opened. I thought I saw someone go
inside, but I wasn’t sure. It was quite a distance. The light vanished as the door was shut.

I yawned to lessen springlike tension, put a hand inside my coat to loosen the automatic that rode in the shoulder holster there. I crossed the street casually, my shoes popping the crisp little asphalt bubbles raised by the heat of the sun that day. Down at the other end of the street the children played in the circular glow from the streetlight. A voice chanted, “Ten... twenty... thirty...” and there was a quick scuffle as figures fled to favorite hiding places. Soon there would be the long moments of breathless search, a yelp of discovery, a frenzied dash to the circle of light. Home free.

I walked into the alley.

“Seventy... eighty...”

I pulled the heavy automatic from the holster, slid my fingertips along the smooth, faintly oily slide. I put my thumb on the rasp top of the hammer, eased it back. I walked very slowly. I lived a long time between each step. The noise of the children faded, belonging to another world beyond the mouth of the tar-black alley.