Lady, Go Die! (20 page)

“If you don’t find the money,” he went on, with a casual shrug, “or if someone beats you to it, I will still pay your daily rate.”

“All right,” I said. “Fifty a day. I cover my own expenses.”

“Very generous of you, Mike. We’ll start that rate as of yesterday, as a gesture to make up for what happened at your office. Mea culpa.”

“Yeah. Your culpa, all right.”

That pretty boy mug of his dealt me a seductive, hood-eyed gaze. “Could you help with one other item, Mr. Hammer?”

“Uh, what’s that?”

He nodded toward his two boys, who had managed to get themselves into sitting positions against the side of the building, their legs sticking straight out.

“I’d like to get Joe and Tony to a hospital. Could you help me convey them to my car?”

What the hell—why not?

That took only five minutes, and then I was on my way back to Sidon.

The pieces were coming together now. I didn’t know if I could lay hands on Johnny C’s skim money. But I would soon have a killer in my grasp, or on the end of my rod.

Either way, I’d be squeezing.

By the time I rolled into Sidon, it was damn near midnight. The long day was getting to me again and I’d almost nodded off a couple of times behind the wheel, thanks to the endless gray ribbon of highway cutting down the Island.

Best thing now was to sit down with Velda, compare notes and make a game plan for tomorrow. With what I’d learned in the city, and whatever she picked up at that roadhouse, we’d be ready to head down the home stretch.

But at the Sidon Arms, when I called her room from the house phone, I got no answer. That didn’t raise a red flag, since I’d dispatched her to gather intelligence at the hotel’s cocktail lounge and that jive-jumping roadhouse. So it would be no surprise if she got back well after midnight.

I was heading up the stairs with the intent of hitting the rack good and hard when a hoarse male voice called out: “Mike! Hold up there!”

I turned and saw Doc Moody, looking desperate and disheveled, stumbling out of the bar, trying to work up some speed. He was flushed and his hands were clawing at the air, like
he was trying to climb an invisible ladder.

He met me at the bottom of the stairs, his white hair askew, his eyes wide and red behind the wire-rim glasses. Not surprisingly, he smelled like he’d fallen into a beer vat.

“Poochie’s
gone
, Mike!
Gone!
They
grabbed
him!”

Moody wasn’t slurring—in fact he was over-enunciating—and he was more upset than drunk. But he was drunk enough.

I could have slapped the old fool, but instead I kept my head and said, “Slow it down, Doc. Come on. Let’s sit over here and you tell me all about it.”

I walked him over to a threadbare couch and we sat. A droopy potted plant next to him seemed to eavesdrop.

His voice was breathy and rushed. “Mike, I just stepped out for a minute... just to... just to run an
errand
...”

His breath made evident just what kind of errand he had run.

“I’ve been keeping Poochie in my little spare room... nice little quiet room... and he’s hardly stuck his nose out. He’s been scared, Mike. So goddamn scared of Dekkert and his bunch. I told him he could listen to my radio, he could go fix himself food in the kitchen, any time he wanted, but no, he’d just stay in that little spare room. I’d take his meals in on trays and—”

“Doc, skip the crap. What happened?”

He was shaking his head, close to hysteria. “I’ve been waiting for you to get back. Waiting and watching.”

From the hotel bar.

“The point, Doc. Get to the point.”

“About...”

He looked at his wrist watch and did a comic routine, trying
to make his eyes focus, that would have been a riot if this were goddamn burlesque.

“...about an
hour
ago. Little more. I come back from that... that errand? I come back, gone an hour, maybe two, and that little spare room, it was topsy-turvy. Everything turned upside down. And he was gone! Poochie was gone.”

Damn.

I asked, “Did the room look like it had been searched? Drawers sticking out, closet in disarray? Were they
looking
for something?”

“No! They were looking for
Poochie
! The mess was from a struggle. From them
taking
him. Mike, there was blood on the floor.”

“How much blood?”

“Drops. Just drops. They didn’t beat him or kill him at my place, I don’t think... they just, just
took
him...”

“Who took him?”

He shook his head, ashamed. “I don’t know. It
has
to be the police, doesn’t it? Dekkert and his thugs?”

I nodded glumly.

The red rheumy eyes were full of tears. “Mike, I’m sorry, Mike... I let you down. I didn’t
mean
to let you down...”

“It’s all right,” I said. “You just go on home. No more drinking, Doc, not tonight. Just go home, get some rest. I’ll let you know tomorrow how it came out. I’ll want you clear-eyed then, okay?”

“Yes, Mike... yes...”

He was sitting there when I left, just a dejected slumped shape in a rumpled suit, with his white hair ruffled, his glasses crooked on a blood-shot nose that was a sorry beacon in his grooved yet puffy face, while his red eyes stared into nothing.

If anybody was to blame here, though, it was me. Me for entrusting Poochie’s care to an old rummy like the Doc, and not keeping closer tabs on both jailer and his charge. Not that I’d had a lot of options in Sidon among people I could trust.

But another on that short list was Big Steve.

I flew out of the front door of the hotel into a night that had turned chilly with breeze enough to make me tug down my hat and turn up my collars. It was like winter was changing its mind about letting spring take over, and summer was out of the question.

What was good about the temperature drop was how it woke me up, slapped me to alertness, not that the Doc’s news about Poochie hadn’t already done that. I crossed a street devoid of traffic and headed for the diner on the way to the police station. I got out the .45, flicked off the safety and racked one into the chamber. The idea was to see if Big Steve wanted to back my play—I wasn’t sure how many cops would be on duty at the station, and I planned to go in there hard and heavy.

That Pollack hated the corruption in his town, and I would bet my back teeth he had a weapon handy to take to the party, whether a sawed-off or a baseball bat. And he had sons, sons as big as he was, who might wade in with me.

I would be checking every alleyway as I went, but my idea was that right now Poochie would be in a back room of the Sidon station, getting the classic Third Degree treatment, rubber hose and all. I would feed that rubber hose to Dekkert, and kick Chiefie’s ass to Kingdom Come...

But as I neared the diner, which blazed with lights indicating it was still open, despite the hour, I saw through the long wide
windows two figures in blue uniforms seated at the counter, the only customers. I saw Big Steve, too, down the counter, minding his own business, wiping away with a rag.

And even turned away from me, those two blue backsides could only belong to Sidon’s top-ranking excuses for police—Chief Beales and Deputy Dekkert.

That stopped me so cold in my tracks I damn near fell on my face. It was highly unlikely these two exemplars of the law would have grabbed Poochie from the doc’s, then gone to the diner for a bite while letting somebody else handle the back-room interrogation.

What the hell?

Wind whispering in my ears but not making its message plain, I eased the .45 back under my arm but left the coat unbuttoned as I went up the couple of steps into the box-car diner. I settled onto the stool next to the chief, with Dekkert next to him.

As if I didn’t notice who my counter mates were, I called out, “So this is a twenty-four-hour joint, huh, Steve?”

Big Steve gave me a grin that lifted his black handlebar mustache halfway to his eyes. As he turned to wring out his rag in the sink, he said, “Open till midnight, Mike. Not closing for another five minutes. Fix you up with a burger or a dog maybe?”

“I’ll have a slice of that apple pie and some coffee.”

“Comin’ right up, my friend.”

Both Chief Beales and Dekkert were giving me frozen sideways glances. Theirs were the kind of open-yapped expression the driver of a car wears when he sees the truck about to hit him head on.

“Gentlemen,” I said with a friendly nod. “Little late for the
town’s top cops to be finishing up a shift, isn’t it?”

Neither said a word. They still just looked at me, Beales with popping eyes in that fat thick-lipped face of his, bullet-headed Dekkert staring out of eyes like small black buttons sewn on his face. Funny—seeing me made Beales turn red and Dekkert white, almost as white as the half-dozen bandages that seemed haphazardly applied to that once handsome face his blobby nose had ruined.

Those bandages were smaller than when last I’d seen Dekkert, but still a nice reminder of what I’d done to him in that alley. And later at the police station.

As genial as Fibber McGee, I said, “I was just on my way over to the station to report a crime.”

The chief licked the fat lips, but it was Dekkert who snapped, “
What
crime?”

“That little beachcomber you boys took such a shine to—he’s been recovering at Doc Moody’s from a gunshot wound. He caught a bullet through the open window of his shack last Saturday night.”

The chief’s frown consisted of ridges of furrowed fat. “What are you
saying
, Hammer? Is
that
the crime you’re reporting?”

I shook my head.

Big Steve delivered my coffee and pie.

Stirring some sugar into the java, I said absently, “No, I didn’t bother reporting that. You see, I’m pretty sure it was your deputy here that shot Poochie, so calling it in struck me as redundant.”

Dekkert flushed around the white bandages and blurted, “I did
not
do no such thing! Watch your mouth, Hammer! Accusations like that can get your ass hauled in.”

“I didn’t say I was
sure
you did it,” I said, shoveling in a bite of pie. It would have been better warm, but it was still good. “Anyway, I was the intended target, not Poochie.”

The chief swallowed. He tried to fill his chest with indignation but it looked like so much more flab to me. “Maybe my deputy is right, Mr. Hammer. Maybe we
should
go over to the station, and take down your statement.”

“Here’s my statement. Poochie’s been lying low at Doc Moody’s, recuperating from that bullet wound, not to mention the beating you devoted servants of the law gave him. I figure keeping the little guy with Moody was kosher since he is, after all, your local coroner.”

Dekkert spat, “He won’t be for long!”

I chewed, swallowed, washed it down. “That’s your business. I don’t mess in local politics. The thing is, somebody has grabbed Poochie out of the doc’s place. Looks to have been a struggle.”

The chief demanded, “When was this?”

“An hour ago at least. Not more than a few hours ago at most.”

“Was Doc Moody there when Poochie was taken?”

“Nah. He was out drinking somewhere. Anyway, what I need to know is...” I wiped off my mouth delicately with a paper napkin and then gave them my worst goddamn grin. “...was it
you
?”

I watched their reactions. The chief seemed honestly confused, and frankly so did Dekkert.

With a half-spin on the stool, I turned to face them with the suit coat hanging open, revealing that big nasty gun under my arm.

“Well, Chiefie?”

But he was already shaking his head. “No, Hammer, I don’t
know anything about this.” He looked back at his deputy. “If
you
know something about this, Deputy Dekkert—”

“I
don’t
,” Dekkert said insistently, but it was the movement in his eyes—the fast, even desperate thinking he was doing—that made me believe him.

The chief seemed genuinely astounded. “Why would anybody want to kidnap Poochie? Why him of all people?”

I grunted a laugh. “Well, you local cops were interested enough in him the other day.”

The chief slammed a fat fist on the counter and my pie jumped. “Hammer, that was before Sharron Wesley turned up dead! We wanted to know if he’d seen anything on that beach. We were looking for any lead we could find.”

I studied him some more. “The disappearance of Sharron Wesley was troubling to you, wasn’t it, Chiefie? A lot was at stake. Plenty of local income, particularly off-season, depended on that dizzy dame.”

The chief shrugged. “Why should I deny it?” He cleared his throat rather theatrically. “Hammer, I’m going over to the station and I’m calling everybody in. The entire department, back on duty.”

What, all six?

He hopped off the stool like a big toad off a medium toadstool. “We’ll put out an All Points Bulletin on Poochie, or I should say Stanley Cootz. That’s his name. Whatever you may think of us, Mr. Hammer, know this—we run a safe community, safe for the citizens and safe for the visitors who we depend upon during the season. The Sidon PD will
not
sit still for having a serious crime like kidnapping take place in our jurisdiction.”

And he tipped his cap to Big Steve, probably in lieu of payment, then waddled out.

Dekkert, on the other hand, did seem to “sit still” for a crime like kidnapping. At least he was still sitting there. He was apparently ignoring his chief’s clarion call.

I slid over next to him as Big Steve cleared away a pile of dishes—Chiefie had had an appetite.

“Can you think of any reason,” I said, not putting even an ounce of menace into it, “why anybody would kidnap that beachcomber?”

Dekkert shook his head. He seemed to be staring at the open window onto the kitchen, where one of Big Steve’s big sons was cleaning up. But I had a feeling Dekkert wasn’t seeing much of anything but his own private thoughts. Private thoughts I would like to shake out of him.