Operation Whiplash (4 page)

I dialed the emergency number for the sheriff’s department after looking it up. “Nate Pepperman is dead in his office above the bank,” I said to the official-sounding growl at the other end of the line. I changed my speaking voice when I said it. We’re supposed to be living in a democracy, but some sheriff’s departments haven’t got the message. They tape-record incoming phone calls.

“Whaaaaat?” the receiver barked in my ear. “What’d you say? Who
is
this? What—”

I repeated what I’d said before, then hung up.

I opened the trunk of the Ford before getting under the wheel again. I changed wigs, back to the one in which Robin had seen me previously. I’d even slept in it that night at the motel. Vanity, thy name is Earl Drake.

Hindsight being flawless, I wished now I’d stayed with Robin when she returned to the Lazy Susan. A couple always attracts less attention than a single of either sex. Of course Robin had been a single before, so a husband this time around might have attracted a little attention, too. Except that no matter where she went or how she registered, Robin wasn’t going to remain a single long.

I parked a block from the motel. “Watch the car,” I told Kaiser. His brown eyes regarded me steadily. I knew I wasn’t overburdening the dog. Anyone trying to get into the Ford without my permission was due to get hung up in a wolfish set of incisors.

I walked on the grass at the edge of the sidewalk to muffle my footsteps. This far out of town there were no pedestrians abroad. The last time I’d been at the motel I’d driven into a waiting semicircle of lights-out police cruisers. That had been the start of the chase that ended disastrously for me fifteen miles east of town.

I didn’t know Robin’s room number, but I didn’t anticipate any difficulty in locating her. She didn’t have a car, and an empty slot in front of a motel room door would be a good indicator. The long, low building was dark as I approached it except for its neon-lit sign and a dim night-light in the office. Through slitted venetian blinds, I could see the night clerk asleep in his chair behind the front desk. A smaller sign beneath the elaborately neon-scrolled LAZY SUSAN MOTEL said NO VACANCY.

There were two units with no cars in front of them. I drifted down the line of motel room doors until I could put my ear against the first one without a car. When my hearing adjusted, I could hear a rasping masculine snore. I wouldn’t have made book that Robin hadn’t acquired masculine company, but, having sampled her sexual appetite, I felt it unlikely a male companion would be permitted that sound a sleep. I moved on, almost to the end of the building, to try the second carless door.

When I couldn’t hear anything. I picked the lock. The chain latch wasn’t on, and I stepped inside into darkness. I could hear Robin’s even breathing. I closed the door, then advanced to the bed and shook a bare shoulder. “Mario?” Robin’s voice mumbled sleepily after a second shaking.

“It’s Drake,” I said.

She slid from the bed and turned on a lamp practically in the same movement. The effect was spectacular. Bent over as she was, a shorty nightgown covered only the upper third of her sleekly handsome bare ass. “What do—how—how did you get in?” she demanded shakily when she turned around.

“Better keep the chain latch on if you’re fussy about what gets inside your drawers, Robin,” I advised. “Who’s Mario?”

“A man who took me to dinner when I was here before,” she answered.

“And for dinner he gets a key to your room?”

She shook the implication off with no difficulty. “What are you doing here?” she wanted to know. She still looked sleepy but she no longer sounded befuddled. “I thought the idea was we weren’t going to be seen together.”

“Unless there’s someone in the bathroom, nobody is seeing us now,” I returned. Then I got serious. “There’s been a change in the game plan, Robin.” I sat down in an armchair, and after a moment’s hesitation she seated herself on the edge of the bed. Her nightgown crept upward, and she saw my attention fixed upon the furry juncture of white, firm thighs. She made no effort to conceal the target of my gaze. I wrenched myself back to reality. “Nate Pepperman’s dead, Robin.”

She stared at me blankly. “Dead?”

“Very. His face is slashed and his throat is cut. You do remember who Nate Pepperman is?”

She tried to rally from the state of rigid shock into which my information had thrust her. She swallowed hard.

“The—the little man,” she said in a half-whisper. “But I don’t—I don’t believe you. You’re just—just trying to scare me.”

“Why the hell should I try to scare you?” I demanded impatiently. “Pull yourself together, Robin, because I’ve got a few questions to ask.”

She didn’t seem to hear me. Her face was chalky-looking, and the tip of her pink tongue flicked nervously at her pale lips. “?-he’s really dead?” she stammered.

“Positively. Now get with it, Robin. I want to know where to start to find Hazel. Was anything at all said last Wednesday morning in Pepperman’s office that would give you the least idea where she might have gone?”

She was staring across the motel room unseeingly. “Dead,” she said in a dull voice.

“Robin!” I said sharply.

Her eyes came into focus again. “Yes?” she answered, but it was obvious I didn’t have her full attention.

I went over to the bed and took her by the arm. “I’ve got to find Hazel, Robin,” I repeated, spacing my words. “Where did you expect her to be when you came back to Hudson?”

“Right here.” Her words came more strongly. She seemed to have shaken off part of her shock. “I thought she’d be right here at the Lazy Susan.”

I tried to recall if I’d said anything to Robin in the Stuttgart tavern about Hazel having checked out of the motel. I decided that I hadn’t. For one thing, it’s never my practice to volunteer information. “Nothing she said gave you any feeling she wouldn’t be here?” I tried it another way.

“No.” Robin’s tongue circled her lips again. “Wh-what do you think happened?”

“I’ll be happy to let you know when I find out.” I couldn’t keep the irritation from my voice. “What was said in Nate’s office?”

Her eyes roved the room. Then she shook her head. “I don’t really remember.” She drew a slow breath. “H-Hazel did the talking. Find you. I should find you.”

I was wasting time if she couldn’t remember anything.

“I’ll come back in the morning, Robin. You may remember something by then.” I released my hold on her arm and started to turn away from the bed.

Her hand flew up and seized my arm, halting me in my tracks. “Don’t go!” she begged. There was a note of panic in her voice. “S-stay till daylight, please! I’m—I’m afraid!”

“Just lock the door behind me, Robin,” I said patiently, trying to free my arm. “And put on the chain latch.” Her hand-strength as she gripped my arm would have astounded me if I hadn’t witnessed the judo exhibition in Stuttgart. “Let go, Robin. Robin!”

“Take me with you!” she said feverishly.

I wasn’t about to take her with me. “I have to leave now, Robin,” I said. I could no longer hide my annoyance at her clinging-vine tactics. “Let go my goddam arm!”

Instead, she pulled me down on top of her on the bed. Since her shorty nightgown was somewhere up around her ears, this created an acreage of bare flesh into which I plunged my hands in an effort to keep my balance. “Damn it, Robin!” I rasped, but the girl held on like a boa constrictor.

Ungallantly, I punched her in her bare belly. I was able to get away from her then, but only by unprying her fingers one at a time. The nightgown had sagged from one smooth, shining-ivory shoulder, disclosing a plump, grape-nippled breast. “Shape up, Velvet-Ass,” I told her, starting toward the door.

She bounced up on the bed. “W-wait!” she blurted in a half-strangled voice, a residue of the belly-punch which had created a bright pink dot in the center of her deeply curved, nude abdomen. “Where can I r-reach you in case—in case Hazel comes back to the Lazy S-Susan?”

I paused halfway through the door. “I’ll call you every day,” I said. I went outside and closed the door. Then I stood and listened. In ten seconds I heard the snick of the chain latch being rammed into place.

It had been a mistake to tell Robin about Nate Pepperman. Her reaction had been to imagine the killer showing up at her motel room door. Which was ridiculous. Any connection between Nate Pepperman and Robin Ford was so slim as to be almost nonexistent, yet the girl was half out of her mind with what appeared to be genuine fear.

Kaiser was sitting quietly in the front seat of the Ford. He
rrrrrrr’
d a welcome and butted his big head into my arm when I got in and took the wheel. I turned the car around and headed north with the dog riding a bright-eyed shotgun beside me.

I hadn’t told Robin I was leaving to look for Hazel. There was a place about which I felt hopeful. I’d thought of it when I was talking to Jed. At the time I first met her, when she was running the Dixie Pig for something to do, Hazel had a cabin in the woods about five miles out of town. She’d built it herself and furnished it comfortably. It was her private place. It was in the cabin that she and I had first made it together after an embarrassing initial fiasco. If Hazel was still in Hudson and under her own power, the cabin was by far the most likely place for her to be.

I passed the blinking yellow light in the square again and continued north on U.S. 19. I ignored the three empty cars drawn up in front of the bank and the light in Nate Pepperman’s second-floor office. I drove slowly. I could never forget where the cabin was, but the darkness, the out-of-the-way location, the development taking place in the area, and the fact that vegetation grows so rapidly in Florida made me cautious in my approach.

I recognized the side road when I came to it. The Ford bumped along a narrow, rutted, gravel road. I missed the spur that led to the cabin and backed up when I realized I’d gone too far. The headlights finally disclosed the brush-overgrown car-track that led to it, and I turned again.

Twenty yards along the track I knew Hazel wasn’t there. The Ford was crashing through a junglelike tangle that was proof no one had been there by car, at least, for a long time, possibly since the last time Hazel and I were there together.

But Hazel didn’t have a car in Hudson, and I allowed myself to become hopeful again. In daylight I might have been able to see where an individual had cut a path through the brush. At night I couldn’t see anything, but, Hazel or no Hazel, I needed a place to stay myself. Where better than this? I bulled the Ford along through the heavy undergrowth beneath the trees.

The cabin finally loomed up ahead of me in the pale light from a sliver of moon. I directed the car headlights at the cabin door and got out. Kaiser made a quick circle of the building while I picked a brass padlock plus a regular doorlock. A wave of dry, musty-smelling air rolled out at me when I opened the door. It reminded me of the time I’d opened another cabin door near Hudson and found the body of my partner, Bunny.

But this cabin was empty. I walked through it rapidly, opening windows. Hazel had built the place so tightly there wasn’t much dust. I went outside again and turned off the car lights. Kaiser followed on my heels. If there had been any recent trace of Hazel inside the cabin, I was sure the dog would have let me know.

I didn’t bother making up the stripped bed. I flopped on the couch in the cabin’s second room. Tomorrow I’d activate the fridge and lay in some supplies. Kaiser curled up on the floor near my feet, whined once, and then was silent.

I don’t know which of us fell asleep first.

Kaiser woke me in the morning by butting me with his head. I yawned, stretched, rolled off the couch, and went to the door to let the dog out. It was barely sunrise. Morning mist was rising from the creek that formed the east boundary of Hazel’s property. The air was pleasantly cool, and it smelled fresh.

Kaiser circled the car once, then rounded the cabin. He paused while he sampled the woodsy ambience with uptilted nose, then trotted off. For a moment I could follow his progress by the rippling strands of dew-wet, sparkling, knee-high grass before he disappeared into the tree-zone.

The dog went off with a purposeful attitude, as he did everything. Except with Hazel, and occasionally with Jed, he had never been a playful animal. He was far and away the biggest shepherd I’d ever seen. I had measured and weighed him once when I was in Hudson before. He stood 28 inches high at the shoulder, weighed 110 pounds, and the span of my hand couldn’t begin to cover the widest part of his wedge-shaped skull.

I stood in the doorway for a moment savoring the fragrance of the early-morning breeze and the sound of birdcalls from the woods. The light was still so insubstantial that grass and trees looked more like variegated shades of blue rather than green. The colors would change throughout the day until sunset.

Florida has a lot of woods. I’ve had a feeling for trees ever since I did a hitch in a Pacific Northwest logging camp while I was avoiding the attentions of several police departments. The logging camp was also where I learned to shoot. Daily practice left me with a facility that a number of people have underestimated, to their sorrow.

From where I stood I could see groves of Florida’s ubiquitous jackpine, plus individual shagbark hickory, palmetto, sassafras, and chinquapin. The creek was lined with cottonwood, aspen, sweet gum, and red birch. In the swamp east of town there was live oak, cypress, and mangrove. Hazel had planted magnolia and mimosa close to the cabin. Above the entrance, blossoming bougainvillea vines were clustered thickly. Florida is a paradise of growing things.

I went back inside and turned on the water in the kitchen and in the shower. When the water ran clear after the accumulated rust stopped flowing from the pipes, I cleaned the sink and shower and then employed the latter in a luxurious soap-and-rinse performance. Hazel and I had really got to know each other—in more ways than one—in that same shower.

I opened the bedroom’s closet door when I came out of the bathroom to see if by any chance I’d left clothes in the cabin. There was nothing of mine, but a pair of jeans, a bright-colored blouse, a dressing gown, and an old sweater of Hazel’s were hanging there. The sight of her limply hanging clothing touched me. It suddenly seemed like a long time since I’d seen her.

My own clothes felt grubby when I dressed. I’d been living in them too long. I’d have to find wash-and-wear replacements in town when I shopped for groceries—if I could locate a place open on Sunday that sold clothing.

Kaiser was stretched out in front of the cabin door when I opened it again. His muzzle was resting on his paws languidly, but he raised his head, wagged his tail, and rose lithely. The big dog was always ready to go. Riding in the car, anyplace, was his idea of dog heaven.

I turned the Ford around after some maneuvering made difficult by the profusion of undergrowth that had encroached on the area near the cabin. I added a machete to my mental list of shopping items. An hour’s work would clear out the brush and restore something of the former ecological balance.

I drove back along the rutted road to the highway, then turned toward town. Beside me on the front seat, Kaiser alertly surveyed everything that moved. In the rear-view mirror I could see two or three heads turn in passing cars for a second look at my dignified-appearing canine passenger.

It was still so early not even the little mom-and-pop roadside grocery stores were open. I headed for the Log Cabin, a stucco-front lunchroom near the traffic light downtown. It catered to Hudson’s early-morning breakfast crowd. I changed my mind and drove on past it until I came to the building which contained Jed Raymond’s office. Jed’s yellow Porsche was parked in front. I hadn’t noticed its color the previous night. I had to smile at the way the car’s insouciant appeal matched its owner’s.

“Come on, boy,” I said to Kaiser. “Let’s go see Jed.”

Kaiser wagged his tail briskly while I opened the car door for him. He slithered down onto the sidewalk, then waited for me while I closed the door. We started across the street side by side. I had just raised a foot to step up on the sidewalk when I heard a savage-sounding growl behind me.

I spun around, almost falling. A shaggy, mean-looking mongrel, of the color known in the South as shit-brindle, was charging us, belly low to the ground. It was a second before I realized the aggressor’s eyes were fixed upon Kaiser, not on me. I thought Kaiser didn’t see him, but before I could react, Kaiser turned and thrust the point of his rigid shoulder toward the mongrel.

The yellow dog ricocheted from the shoulder as Kaiser’s big head moved so fast it was just a dark blur. His jaws snapped once, and the startled mongrel hit the pavement and slid, ki-yi-yi-ing. He rolled over, staggered to his feet, and ran limping down the street. Kaiser’s sharp teeth had scored him heavily on one flank.

Kaiser never even turned his head to look after the fleeing opposition. He spat out a mouthful of brownish-yellow fur, then calmly started to climb the outside stairs to Jed’s office. Jed was standing at the top of the stairs, shaking his head and grinning.

“I reckon I knew that was comin’,” he confided when I joined him. “That mangy ol’ yaller dog has been inchin’ up on Kaiser for a couple weeks now, with Kaiser payin’ him no never-mind. I s’pose the mongrel purely thought he was gonna have things his own way.” Jed shook his head again. “ ‘Bout a year ago Kaiser run a doberman across two county lines because it wouldn’t stop pesterin’ him.”

“You’ve been teaching him bad habits while I was away,” I said. Jed grinned again and opened his office door. “Wait. Have you had breakfast yet?”

“Just coffee. Why?”

“Let’s go up to the Log Cabin and eat,” I proposed. “My meals have been on the sketchy side lately.”

“Fine with me,” Jed replied. He closed the door again and locked it before following me across the street to the Ford. Kaiser sat between us on the front seat, running his pink tongue over his muzzle occasionally as though reassuring himself that he had gotten rid of the mongrel’s fur. “Find out anything last night?” Jed inquired, ducking as Kaiser turned his head to give Jed’s face a fast tongue-wash.

“Nothing that helped,” I admitted.

“I still cain’t get over what happened to Nate Pepperman,” Jed brooded. He restrained Kaiser by main strength from repeating the tongue bath. “Sho’, now, you cut that out, dog.”

We left Kaiser in the car outside the Log Cabin despite his reproachful stare. The lunchroom was sparsely occupied compared to the way I remembered it weekdays. Jed ordered blueberry pancakes while I had a double order of ham and eggs. When I got outside the food and finished my third cup of black coffee, I was almost ready to forgive my enemies.

The restaurant had nearly filled up by the time we lighted cigarettes. Hudson evidently came to life later on Sunday mornings. Jed tapped his spoon idly against his empty coffee cup, his thoughts almost translatable from the frown on his freckled face. “You don’t have the least notion where Hazel could have gone?” he brought me back to the present.

“None. Nor why she went.”

“Somethin’ she wasn’t expectin’ must have shook her loose,” he continued, “’cause when she had dinner with me on Tuesday night she didn’t say anything about leavin’. Just the opposite, as a matter of fact. She was talkin’ about—”

Jed stopped when he saw he had lost my attention.

Robin Ford had just entered the Log Cabin.

She walked with lithe grace to the opposite corner of the lunchroom from where Jed and I were seated, then settled herself in a booth with her miniskirt furnishing a betraying, lengthy flash of her exceptional legs. She was alone, and I didn’t think she had noticed me.

Jed’s glance had followed mine in time to be a fellow witness to the leg-display. “The ungodly type sure does attract you, friend,” he remarked.

I raised an eyebrow. “Ungodly?”

“Remember the Widow Grimes?” he countered my question with another.

I did indeed remember Lucille Grimes. She had been the girlfriend of Blaze Franklin when that bastard starved my partner to death. Moreover, she had known all about it, despite her attempt to deny it to me. I had settled with the blond Lucille before I finally caught up with Franklin.

“I don’t see any resemblance,” I told Jed.

“I’m not talkin’ about the color of their hair or the shape of their snatches,” he answered. “I’m sayin’ that female in the booth over there is the same type of copperhead. She was around town three-four years ago, an’ then I didn’t see her for a while. Now here she is again. It’s got to be bad news for somebody.”

Robin Ford had been in Hudson three or four years ago? She had said nothing about it. She had an aunt, of course, and visits weren’t unlikely. But Jed’s sour look and his remark about bad news—

I hadn’t said anything to Jed previously about the mechanics of my return to Hudson. Perhaps it was time I did. “She’s the reason I’m in town again,” I said casually.

Jed’s blank stare indicated I had created the desired impact.
“She’s
the reason?” he echoed on a rising note. “What the hell, I thought—”

“Hazel sent her to get me,” I cut him off.

“Hazel
did?” His look of bewilderment was almost laughable. “Man, quit tryin’ to put me on. You’re stackin’ the deck on ol’ Jed. You’re—”

I interrupted him again to relate the circumstances of Robin’s appearance in Stuttgart. I didn’t go into any details of our trip together. Long before I finished, Jed’s sandy head was shaking itself in a prolonged negative. He could hardly contain himself until I finished.

“Man, you are about to get yourself good an’ snakebit,” he said emphatically then. “I don’t know what the hell the mumbo-jumbo that dame gave you was all about, but I’ll give you a written guarantee it wasn’t what she
said
it was about. I’m not funnin’ you, friend, she’s poison.” His eyes blinked at me earnestly. “Or her friends are. She must’ve somehow conned Hazel into—”

“Her friends?” I said.

Jed waved a hand vaguely. “I only know one personally, but he’s enough. A syndicate-type named Mario Rubelli.”

I thought instantly of Robin’s sleepy inquiry when I knocked at her door at the Lazy Susan the night before. “Mario?” she had asked. Well, sure. A boyfriend. A man for her bed. What more likely? But a syndicate-type?

“Do you know her aunt?” I asked Jed.

Once again his stare was blank. “Aunt? What aunt?”

“Here in Hudson.”

His snort blew our cigarette ashes from the ash tray all over the table. “How often do I got to tell you that you been sold a bill of goods?” he demanded. “That woman’s got no aunt in Hudson. Hell, I can draw you up a genealogical chart of every damn family in town.” His regard of me had turned speculative. “I wonder what you could have that she wants? That they want? You’re hardly—”

“Take it easy, Jed. What do you really know about her? For sure?”

He looked hurt. “Okay, you don’t have to believe me. I’ll send you to a guy who’ll give it to you like a shovelful of shit in the face.” He paused. “If he’ll talk.”

“Why wouldn’t he talk?”

“I already told you.” Jed’s tone was as patient as a teacher’s explanation to a slow-learning child. “Didn’t you hear me say syndicate?”

“I heard you. You mean Mafia? In Hudson?”

“That’s what I mean,” Jed assured me, ignoring the skepticism in my voice. “Based in Tampa. You needn’t look so goddam incredulous. Ever hear of ‘Bolts’ Colisimo?”

“No.”

“He’s Rubelli’s boss. A syndicate
caporegime.
Short, fat, ugly, an’ always with a fresh white carnation in his lapel. The man is bad paper. He just finished a hitch for aggravated assault. The charge was reduced from second-degree murder.”

“Syndicate
caporegimes
don’t do hitches for aggravated assault, Jed.”

He shrugged. “This one likes it.”

“Doing hitches?”

“Aggravated assault. He got his nickname from a quaint little custom of destroyin’ the faces of people who disagree with him, by the forcible application, a few dozen times, of a canvas sack of bolts.”

I thought about it for a moment while I looked at Robin. She was facing away from me. I could see one arm and the point of her shoulder. “And this Colisimo outfit was active in Hudson three or four years ago?”

“Not on the surface,” Jed admitted. “I never saw Colisimo in town. When I got onto who Rubelli was, I did a little nosin’ around.” This time his grin was rueful. “At a respectful distance, may I say? So respectful I never learned much I could swear to. Then they kind of dried up an’ blew away. Until a year ago. They showed then an’ put the wood to a guy here in town. The guy I want you to see. No complaint was ever filed, although they just about half-killed him. There was a few other people had a notion what was goin’ on, then or later, but nobody took any ads in the paper.”

“Colisimo worked this man’s face over with a sack of bolts?”

Jed shook his head. “Colisimo must’ve been out to lunch that day. It was just a standard, goon-type shellack-in’.”

“Who’s the man?”

“Name’s Casey Deakin. He used to have a truckin’ business. Colisimo’s got it now.”

“What do you feel I can learn from Deakin, Jed?”

He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray while his eyes remained fixed upon mine. “That I’m not kiddin’ you when I tell you this dame in the booth here is bad news. I wouldn’t touch her with a forty-foot pole.”

I wondered what Jed would say if he knew I’d touched her with a pole of considerably less length. But I didn’t feel like smiling about it. If Jed was correct, something didn’t add up about Robin Ford’s appearance in Stuttgart, Arkansas. The more I thought about it, maybe a whole lot of things didn’t add up.