Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (2 page)

“But we really shouldn’t... that was just... you’re so damn persuasive.”

“And I love you.”

She sighed, surrendering. “I guess it wouldn’t make—”

I worked the top of her suit down from her breasts.

“Oh, Pete,” she said comfortably, and helped me with the suit.

Afterwards she slept and I sat beside her, my skin very white where the swim trunks had been, and watched the small swell of waves on the beach, and tried not to think. But I had to look at her and wonder if her love could be strong enough, if it really would make no difference to her should I have to tell her where I came from, and what I was. There was no way to know. Maybe she loved me enough and could take that kind of shock. She was a pretty solid girl, unspoiled by the effects of wealth and social prestige that were hers and her family’s. But they, the proud Arnells, wouldn’t get over it. And they would take her away from me. One way or another, they’d do it.

After an hour, she stirred behind me, and I saw one
foot lift as she stretched. Then she sat up and put her face against my back, her arms around me.

“You love me, Pete.” It wasn’t a question.

“You know that.”

She was silent. The arms tightened about me, then relaxed. I sat very still, feeling the tips of her small breasts against my back as she breathed. I pushed the heel of my hand against my stiff-cropped hedge of hair, brushed loose a few grains of sand.

“Is there something you want to tell me, Pete?” she asked.

“No. Why?”

She began to rock back and forth gently, rocking me with her.

“When we left the store this morning, there was a custard-colored Pontiac coming down the street. Do you remember? It came slow at first, and the driver was looking at us. Then it speeded up. You were holding my hand so tight it hurt. When I glanced at you, for a second or two, the look in your eyes frightened me. Did you recognize the driver, or something?”

I looked incredulously at her. “No. Of course not. You been having bad dreams?”

She touched her lips to my back once, then stood up and straightened out the swimsuit, put it on thoughtfully.

“No. No, I haven’t had any bad dreams. Have you?”

I picked up my own suit and squirmed into it. It was about three; time to leave soon.

Her eyebrows drew together as she fitted the elastic top over her breasts. There was a funny look in her eyes, as if she were remembering being hurt a long time ago and didn’t like thinking about it.

“Pete,” she said in a flat voice, “what did you do before you came to Orange Bay?”

“Oh, I was in the Army for a while. Then I worked down in Castile for an insurance company. When I got bored with it I came North and opened up the sports shop. I thought I’d rather fish when I felt like it than adjust claims. Life story. You know all that. Then I met you. My life really started then.”

“I don’t believe you ever told me the name of the insurance company you worked for.”

I frowned, not liking all the questions. “Bay State Mutual. Why? Is it important?”

“No. I guess not.”

“Look, Elaine. I’m fine today. A little moody, possibly. Those feelings come and go. Don’t start worrying about me.”

She brushed at her bangs with the back of one hand. Her smile was quick but uncertain. “I’m sorry, darling.”

“I guess it’s time for us to get out of here,” I said.

“Yes.” She turned her head to look at the angle of the sun. “It was a nice day,” she said. “I had fun today.” She held my hand tightly. “I wish... it wouldn’t end.”

“There’ll be other good days,” I said. “Lots of good days.” I wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking that maybe the good days were over for a while. And I was afraid she’d know, so I turned away from her and began to gather up the beach towels.

We walked to the water and I helped Elaine over the side into the boat, shoved off from the beach. Once at the wheel I headed into the sun. Elaine leaned against me, her head on my shoulder. Her eyes were closed. The
boat cut a rough path through the darkening water. She hummed to herself, and I could barely hear the sound of it above the noise of the big motor. It was a strange lonesome tune that no one had ever hummed before but everyone had heard it at some time, sounding clear above the low beat of fear in their hearts.

Elaine was in better spirits by the time we arrived at her home. I unloaded the car, carried the beach towels and picnic basket to the big front porch of the Arnell house, overlooking the bay.

“Don’t forget the concert tonight,” she reminded me. “You’ve got only an hour to get ready.”

I kissed her cheek lightly. “I’ll go over to the store now and change. Clean the fish in the morning.”

I drove away from the house and headed crosstown. On the way I passed through the neighborhood where our house had recently been completed. It was dark now, waiting for Mrs. Mallory to bring light and warmth to the rooms. Soon. My breath caught a little at the thought. It had been a damned long time. But she had been worth waiting for.

My store was south on the highway, convenient for both the fresh-water fisherman of the backcountry canals and the angler who favors the tide flats and open sea.

I parked in front of the small building and paused under the pulsing neon sign that identified the place as
The Angler’s Shop
to find the doorkey. Locating in this section had cost me practically all my savings, but in two years the investment had paid off in a new house.

Thinking about this, I looked self-consciously down the street, but there were no cars parked nearby. My only
company was two teen-age girls in Bermuda shorts standing in front of a theater half a block away. I grimaced at my momentary nervousness and unlocked the door. I put away a couple of lures I had been experimenting with that morning and hunted up an ice chest. While I was getting it from a shelf behind the display case, the door opened. It didn’t close right away, and I had the feeling that someone held it open and watched me. Sweat rolled down my cheek. It was hot in the store without the air conditioner on. There was a loaded .38 revolver in a holster beneath the cash register, but it was ten steps away. I could feel the muscles of my back tightening. I tried not to think about the gun.

“You went fishing today,” he said. “I couldn’t find you.”

I took the ice chest from the shelf, straightened up and turned around, setting the chest carefully on the glass top of the display case. A drop of perspiration fell from my chin, splashing on the glass. I was conscious of my heart beating too fast.

“You ever been shot, Rudy?” I said harshly.

He was a stocky man, with too much weight on his bones now. He wore a wrinkled light-blue cord suit, a tired gray hat pushed back on his head. His hair was graying, oiled, long around the ears, thinning on top. He watched me steadily, wearily, from behind a large pair of glasses, the clear plastic frames yellowed by the sun. There was a crack at the corner of one lens.

His lips stretched wide in a humorless smile. “Lots of times.”

“You know better than to come on me like that. You might have picked up another one.”

A brown insect with buzzing wings whirled in the door, hovered near his ear, soared away. He chewed steadily on the wood end of a match. “You wasn’t nowhere near a gun,” he said, then added defensively, as if he hadn’t considered the possibility before, “and I was as close as my hip pocket.”

“Finish coming in,” I told him, “and shut the door.” I walked around the display case and turned on the air conditioner at the back of the store.

Rudy Mask sat in a chair and looked curiously about the store, sighed as the cold air from the big Carrier unit reached him. “So this is what you bought with Macy’s money,” he said.

I stood watching him. “Money I earned, Rudy,” I said.

He nodded, taking in the stuffed sailfish, the racks of slender rods. He knew nothing about fishing, cared less. He was an old hoodlum, an aging tough guy, his body scarred from knives and an occasional healed bullet wound. Not many. You don’t take many and keep walking around. His face and ears were worn and lined from the back alley poundings, the careless brawls in dives in every kind of town. His eyes had seen too many women, in brothels, in stinking chicken coops when things were bad, in magnificent apartments that smelled of strange flowers and perfume and the sweet flesh of hundred-dollar girls when things were fabulously good. His fingers had held too much whisky, and they weren’t steady.

It had been six and a half years since I had seen him, and he didn’t belong here. I didn’t want to see him now. I had left his kind of life one day when the stink of it had clutched at my stomach and made sleep impossible.
In the last months I had gradually forgotten there was always a loaded gun pointed at my head wherever I went. Rudy was a reminder that the trigger could be pulled at any time.

“What are you doing in Orange Bay?” I asked him.

“Macy wants you.” He took the chewed match from his mouth, glanced at it, tossed it on the floor. He looked for another in his coat pocket. “Somebody’s going to kill him,” he said, and coughed. Then it was quiet in the store, except for the air conditioner.

“Is that supposed to make me unhappy?” I said.

“Well, Jesus!” Rudy said, surprised.

“Who’s trying to kill him and why would I be interested?” I said, impatient to know what he was getting at.

He shook his head. “Macy doesn’t know. It’s not a Syndicate order.”

“What
does
he know?”

Rudy shifted his weight in the chair. “You remember the old gang, Macy’s first gang, back in the thirties? I started with Macy then, after I drifted out of Kansas City. There were four others besides me, Pete. Clemente and Porter and Tin Ear and Lundquist. Did Macy ever tell you what racket we had then?”

“Shakedown. Protection.”

“It was sweet. We lined up whole neighborhoods. Once in a while a customer wouldn’t buy. We ran into a tailor like that. He had a scrubby little shop and lived upstairs with fat mamma and two-three kiddies. Little old guy with a bent back and thick glasses. I remember him kinda well. He didn’t need the protection. His place burned one night. It was tough. So quick he didn’t have time to get himself and fat mamma and the kiddies out. We lost
a client, but the other merchants on the block came through in a hurry.”

“I never heard about it,” I said grimly.

“Macy’s been hearing about it lately — in the last three years. Every time one of the old gang was knocked off, he got a clipping in the mail, an old yellow newspaper clipping about the fire that burned the tailor and his family. Along with another story about how each one of the boys got it. Porter was the first. In an alley in Hammond, Indiana, about three years ago. Ripped apart with a big knife. There was maybe a couple of paragraphs in the local paper. Nobody would have known about it, except Macy got the story a few days later, cut from the paper. And the first clipping about the fire.”

“Who else is dead?”

Rudy slicked back his dirty hair, pressed a hand against his abdomen. “Stomach’s kind of wacky lately,” he explained apologetically. He took a couple of hard breaths. “Clemente went back to Cuba after the war. I think it was about seven months after Porter was killed that Macy got the story about Clemente. In Spanish, yet. His woman found him hung upside down in some Havana crib, slit open from throat to groin.”

“Another clipping about the fire with this newspaper story?”

“Right... Let’s see. It was Tin Ear next. New Orleans, this time. Throat cut and belly opened. About a year after Clemente. Three weeks ago Lundquist was knifed in an old folks’ home outside of Tampa.”

“Any message with these clippings? Some kind of threat?”

“Hell, no. It’s clear enough, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. Macy’s getting shook about all this?”

“Not too much. But he wants to get this thing off his back. He’s got other problems. He wants you to find the guy with the knife who’s sending him these newspaper stories.”

“How about you, Rudy?” I said. “You getting worried?”

He rubbed the back of his hand across his lumpy chin. His eyes weren’t happy. He was beginning to look like an old man. “The guy sticks with it,” he said, his voice rasping. “It takes a lot of patience to hunt down men like he does.”

“And a lot of hate to use a knife like that.”

“Yeah,” Rudy said. He squirmed in the chair.

I packed the ice chest with ice from the refrigerator, put the fish inside. It was time for me to pick Elaine up. She would begin to wonder what was keeping me. I thought of the menace of Rudy Mask, and Macy Barr, who should have been untouchable, but was feeling the pressure from a slow and patient killer. I wondered if I was going to be able to say no to Macy again and get away with it.

Without looking at Rudy I said, “Tell Macy to get another boy. I made a clean break. I want it to stay clean.”

Rudy was silent.

“If he told you to bring me whether I wanted to come or not, forget that too,” I told him.

“He didn’t figure you’d come back because you love him so much,” Rudy said. “So he wanted me to remind you of something. About what a nice girl you’re engaged to.”

I turned, my jaw tight with rage. Rudy wasn’t gloating. He looked at me soberly. “He wouldn’t hurt your girl,” Rudy said. “He wouldn’t have somebody brought in to
hurt her and leave her in an alley without her clothes like he’s done to others. He just said he’d take a letter you wrote a long time ago and wrap it up and send it to her so she could read it.” He was watching me closely. He must have seen what happened to my eyes, because he grunted, satisfied, and walked away, poking his bad teeth with the end of a match.

No, Macy wouldn’t hurt Elaine. Not in the old manner, breaking bones and faces. Once in a while this was the best way, the only way to make sure a warning was obeyed, to maintain control of the uncertain human element in a sprawling illicit operation. But through the years Macy had learned better and safer ways of control: how to bring a man to his knees through the gentle pressure of his own mistakes; how to hit a man through others close to him so that it is more painful than any beating.