Killer in the Street (15 page)

“I had a feeling,” she said. “I had a great big hunch that it might be you. Jack doesn’t get in until tomorrow.”

“Jack who?” Kyle asked.

“A man in my life—which isn’t exactly in your territory any more. But don’t just stand there wearing out the doormat. Come inside.”

That certain rapport between two people who worked closely together was going for them. Kyle accepted the invitation, and Charley closed the door behind him without taking her eyes from his face.

“What’s your trouble?” she asked.

“It isn’t exactly trouble,” Kyle said.

“And it isn’t exactly coming up roses, either,” Charley answered. “Sit down on something and I’ll get you a drink. You look as if you could use one.”

Charley was right. Kyle sat down on a tangerine-colored sofa and ordered a double bourbon over two cubes of ice. While Charley mixed the drink he had time to notice things: her new hairdo, the fact that she wasn’t expecting callers because she wasn’t dressed in anything more impressive than a softly tailored white robe and a pair of gold house slippers studded with colored glass jewels. An old Bill Snyder disc was spinning on the record player and Kyle remembered, in one of those peculiar ways an exhausted mind recalls unrelated things, that it was called “Lonely Wine.” It seemed important at the moment.

Charley returned with the drink.

“God bless you,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” Charley answered. “I like a man who knows what he wants and asks for it. But why aren’t you up at Sam’s cabin with Dee?”

The recorder stopped playing and shut itself off. There was no sound but the noise of the ice in Kyle’s drink. He must have looked surprised.

“Sam called me about eight,” she explained. “He said Dee rang his house earlier in the evening and asked where you were. The housekeeper relayed the message. You’re supposed to be off duty—at Sam’s orders—for the next three days.”

“Three days,” Kyle reflected. “What do I do then—rise from the grave?”

“Is the trouble that serious?”

Kyle wanted so much to tell her how serious it was—just to reach out and take one other human being into his confidence would have done more good than all the bourbon in Charley’s private stock. But he had made his decision to do a single and that was how it had to be.

“I’m feeling sorry for myself,” Kyle said. “I’ve got a headache that feels like one of those animated TV commercials.”

“When did you have dinner?” Charley asked.

“I didn’t.”

“Lunch then?”

Kyle reflected, remembered his early departure from the Booster Club affair and admitted that he hadn’t eaten since breakfast.

“And you wonder why your head aches!” Charley exclaimed. “Nurse that booze slowly and I’ll get you a plate of the best warmed-over meat loaf you’ve ever tasted…. And take off your shoes before you put your feet on the sofa!”

Charley was slightly psychic. He slipped off his shoes, loosened his tie and stretched out on the tangerine cushions. He drank very slowly until there was nothing left in the glass but the ice cubes, and then he tilted the glass until he could suck on the ice the way he had when he was a kid. He was beginning to relax for the first time since he had spotted Bernie Chapman’s killer. Back in that room in the motel he had been too intent on watching Donaldson’s window through the binoculars even to realize there was a bed in the room. The binoculars. He remembered now that he had left them in the room. No matter. He still had the gun tucked in under his belt and concealed by the jacket he wasn’t going to remove under any circumstances. He hadn’t thought much about the gun since the war. He wasn’t a hunting man. He liked to climb mountains and ride and absorb nature but leave it as undisturbed as possible. The gun was in the house for defensive purposes only. But now he wasn’t so sure. As he relaxed, his mind sharpened and grew more daring. There was a way out. In spite of Jameson, in spite of the syndicate and the syndicate’s expensive lawyers, there was a way out. It was unorthodox and against all the rules of the game, but the name of the game now was survival for himself and Dee and Mike. It was a game everybody had to play sooner or later and the ground rules kept changing with every move.

When Charley returned with a plate of food and a cup of coffee, Kyle was just a little drunk and too relaxed. He sat up abruptly and planted his stocking feet on the floor. Calculating loosely, he was going into his fortieth hour without sleep. He ate steadily and didn’t look up until Charley brought in the coffeepot to refill his cup. She was still waiting for an explanation and he couldn’t put it off any longer.

Kyle shoved away his empty plate. “I always said you would make some man a good wife,” he said.

“I always said so too,” Charley agreed, “but all of the interesting men are already married.”

“Maybe that’s what makes them interesting.”

“I once knew a psychiatrist who had the same idea. But we’re getting off the subject, aren’t we? It’s your trouble we’re to talk about, not mine.”

Kyle drained the coffee cup before answering.

“Charley,” he said, “a couple of years ago Dee and I had a stormy period. If you hadn’t been such a diplomatic liar and covered for me all the times I wasn’t in conference when you said I was, one perfectly fine marriage would have landed in Las Vegas. Do you think you could manage one more lie?”

It wasn’t another woman. He didn’t have to explain anything that sticky to Charley. She had known that the minute he walked into her apartment.

“Do I get any background material?” she asked.

“Not tonight—maybe never. It depends on how lucky I am for the next few hours. Charley, I sent Dee and Mike to Sam’s cabin to get them out of the city—for their own good. But Dee didn’t stay up there. She’s in town now—I saw her about an hour ago. She’s looking for me and I’m not ready to be found. I want you to call the cabin and leave a message with the caretaker. Tell him that you’ve heard from me. I had to make an unscheduled trip to Casa Grande. We have a subcontractor there so it will sound right if it gets back to Sam. Make it clear that I’m coming to the cabin the minute I’m free and expect to find my family there waiting for me. I know Dee will be calling the cabin sooner or later and will get the message. Are you with it, Charley?”

She didn’t like the sound of it, but she would go along. There always had to be one person like that in anyone’s life. One person who was so blindly loyal there would be no argument and no delay. Charley made the call while Kyle stood by to prompt her if she forgot anything. Ramon didn’t understand and she had to repeat the story, and all of the time Kyle could hear Mike’s small voice demanding to be allowed to speak to his mother. Mike, at least, was safe. Charley looked up and caught the naked relief in Kyle’s eyes, which she couldn’t understand any more than she understood why the message was so important; but she was woman enough to remember something that was.

“And get that child to bed immediately!” she ordered. “It’s much too late for him to be up!” Charley put down the telephone and looked at Kyle. “Any further instructions?”

“No,” Kyle said, “and thanks.”

“Then maybe I can buy you another drink? Stir up another meat loaf? It’s all on the house.”

“Nothing,” Kyle said. “You’ve gone beyond the line of duty already. I might add that I appreciate your bright and smiling manner in the face of adversity.”

Charley knew he wasn’t going to confide another word and so she said, “I’m always cheerful in the face of adversity. We’re such bosom companions I feel like saying ‘Hi!’ every time another wall falls on me. Where are you sleeping tonight—or shouldn’t I ask?”

Kyle looked hungrily at the tangerine sofa.

“It’s yours,” Charley said. “I’ll dump the dirty dishes in the sink and hit the sack. If you need anything in the night come to the bedroom door and call me gently before entering. I scream when a man walks into my room in the middle of the night. Darn it, it always frightens him away.”

“I’ll call first, gently,” Kyle promised.

He stretched out on the divan and unbuttoned his coat. While Charley took the dishes to the kitchen he slipped the gun under one of the cushions and closed his eyes. He was gliding off into a borderline stupor when she returned, and it was like a dream fragment when she brought in a blanket from the bedroom and spread it over his long body. He had time for only a half-formed thought about a man named Jack who wasn’t coming until tomorrow, and then those forty bone-weary hours dissolved in blissful oblivion.

Charley waited until Kyle was asleep and then carried the telephone into her bedroom and closed the door. She sat on the bed with the instrument in her lap and smoked two cigarettes down to the mouthpiece before making a decision. It was trouble. She had recognized that the instant Rick Drasco walked into the office and presented the Baemer Air Conditioning card. Drasco had a vicious sense of humor. He would have played it straight if she had let him through to Kyle—just to see if there was any recognition and fear. Fear was important. Drasco liked his victims to be terrified before they died. It was the way he got his kicks.

Charley knew a great deal about Rick Drasco, even if he didn’t know her. The syndicate was thorough. It knew how to play on people’s weaknesses; it knew how to time its strikes. It had known six years ago how to get a stage-struck girl with a high school business-course background on Sam Stevens’ payroll and into his confidence. The recently widowed and childless Sam, needing to be needed, and luxury-loving Charlene needing a way out of the gambling debt she had been encouraged to accumulate when her dreams of stardom dissolved like a desert mirage. The syndicate was wise. Charlene Evans pined for luxury and limelight. As Sam’s personal secretary she could get certain papers signed, certain documents filed; yes, she could even get a certain young engineer placed on Sam’s staff. As Sam phased off into retirement, turning more and more of the responsibility over to Kyle, she would become Kyle’s secretary and continue her dual role in exchange for enough of life’s goodies to make the game worthwhile, but never enough to buy her freedom.

And so it was trouble when Rick Drasco walked into the office, and it was trouble compounded now that Kyle was asleep on the tangerine couch. Charlene Evans did have a heart, and a part of it belonged to Kyle. The rest of it belonged to survival.

She snuffed out the second cigarette and picked up the receiver. She dialed Phoenix and placed a call to the Adams Answering Service, extension 112. There was never a delay at that number.

“A salesman for Baemer Air Conditioning missed an appointment with Kyle Walker today,” she said. “When you make contact, tell him the client is leaving for Mexico City on the morning flight. He will be ticketed under the name of ‘C. Evanson.’ ”

Charley made a second call to the airport and then put the telephone down on the floor, turned off the light and wondered, sitting alone in the darkness, if Jack would have been Mr. Right.

Kyle stirred restlessly on the tangerine couch. In a dream he was climbing a sheer rock precipice that rose abruptly from a violently surging sea. He was halfway up the rock—climbing in terror because each new thrust of the waves brought the tide higher. He was tired to the point of exhaustion, but there was nothing above but the black, wet rock and a stormy sky. At last his hands reached upward and touched nothing. His palms slapped down and grabbed the rock. It was flat. He had reached the top of the precipice.

With his last strength, he pulled himself up until he stood on solid rock and then looked about to see what kind of island he had come to out of the boiling void. But he had reached no island and no shore. Instead, he stood on a small dais of rock that was no more than ten feet across and completely surrounded by the still rising sea.

And then he began to shout—not in fear or in the expectancy that anyone would answer—but because he wanted to shout and there was little time left for anything he wanted to do. It was a rebel yell that he hurled at the sea, and he kept yelling until he became aware of a strange happening. The sea had receded several feet from the top of the rock. He continued to shout until the sea was completely absorbed and he was left standing on a high rock that rose up from a desert where an occasional pool of water glistened in reminder of the ocean it had once been.

He climbed down from the rock and began to walk. He was tired. Sometimes he stumbled and fell to his knees and the sea would come seeping up through the sand until he shouted again and made it drain away. In this manner he made his way across the desert toward a green plateau in the distance that smelled softly of mint and uncut flowers …

The dream ended and Kyle awakened with his heart pounding. He found the gun under the cushion and brought it out where he could make careful examination. Charley had turned off the lights, but there was a bright glow from the street. He broke the gun and rechecked the cartridge clip. It was loaded. He snapped the cartridge back into place and held the gun at arm’s length, and wondered how it would feel to kill a man who wasn’t wearing the uniform of an enemy power.

He slipped the gun back in under his belt and studied the illuminated dial of his wristwatch. It was a few minutes past twelve. He had slept barely an hour, but that was enough to remind him that he could stay with Charley no longer. There was no island in this sea of trouble. By this time Dee would have called the cabin. She would accept Charley’s story but Jameson might not. Jimmy Jameson was a hard-nosed cop who wasn’t above sending over a man to question Charlene Evans. Kyle didn’t want to be on the premises when that happened, and he didn’t want his station wagon to be parked in Charley’s carport.

He got up in the semidarkness and groped about on the floor until he found his shoes. He put them on and walked over to the bar for one last bourbon—this time without the noisy accompaniment of ice. He found a memo pad near the telephone at the bar and left a one word message: “Thanks.” No signature. Charley would understand. He left the apartment at twelve-thirty and went downstairs to the carport. He got into the station wagon and drove to Speedway, and then he turned left and continued driving until he came to a used-car lot with an exposure of heavy stock and an easy access in the rear. The front floodlights were set to burn all night, but the sales office was closed and it was comfortably dark where he parked. If Charley’s call to the cabin hadn’t halted the search Dee’s fears must have started, nobody, not even Jimmy Jameson, would look for the blue station wagon among all these “buyers beware” specials.