Suicide Season (18 page)

“She’s scheduled for more x-rays and the CAT scan in the morning.” Bunch looked out the window at the lights gliding past. “They’ll have a better idea how bad it is then.”

I swung the car toward the bustle and glare of Hampden and turned east toward the AeroLabs buildings. “Her mother’s staying with her?” A cot had been made up in a dark corner of the room.

“Yeah. For tonight, anyway. I guess they let relatives do that if it’s serious enough.” He shrugged. “I’m not a relative, so I can’t stay. They didn’t even want to let me in the room with her after Mrs. Faulk got there.”

I started to say something when the radiophone wheedled its electronic chirp. “Devlin Kirk.”

“This is Vinny Landrum. We got to meet.”

“What’s your problem?”

“Not over this thing. Man, I mean it—we got to meet!”

“It’s Vinny. He wants to talk about something.” Then back to the radiophone. “I’m tied up for a couple hours. How about eleven at my office?”

“Not there. Remember where I saw you last time? Don’t say it—just tell me if you remember.”

That wasn’t too hard; it was Landrum’s office. “Yes.”

“Outside there. Eleven.” The voice clicked off.

“What’s that lint ball want?”

“Whatever it is, he didn’t want to broadcast it.” That’s what a radiophone traded for convenience—a transmission frequency that anyone with a shortwave receiver could pick up. And whatever was bothering Vinny, he was trying to keep it from someone.

“Y
OU GOT ME
into this, Kirk. Now you got to help me out.”

Bunch and I stood in a shadowy recess near the stairway that led up to Landrum’s office. A faint nightlight shone through the window of the quick copy center on the first floor and splashed a pale rectangle across a patch of worn yard toward the alley. On a corner glowed a serve-yourself gas station and beyond that was the steady flicker of automobile lights on a busy street. Here, in one of those neighborhoods that was still half-residential, Landrum’s hoarse whisper seemed to echo against the rear of dark homes across the alley.

“Into what, Vinny? What did I get you into?”

“Keep it down, man!” His sweaty face glinted as he peeked along the side of the house toward the avenue in front. “That Haas thing—you know, that fucking broad Carrie Busey.”

“Me? I got you into that?”

“Shh! Hell yes, you did. You didn’t take the case did you? So she came to me, didn’t she? And when I said we should work together you crapped on me, Kirk. You and meatball, here, you both crapped on me. So it’s your fault! You and that goddamned broad who’s causing all the trouble.”

“What trouble, Vinny?”

“She’s dead, that’s what trouble!” From somewhere in the distance, an emergency vehicle made a tiny howl in the dark. Landrum listened to it and wiped his nape with his hand. “Dead. Shot.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know who did it!” He caught his voice rising and stifled it, looking again past the corner of the house. “I don’t know who did it. She’s upstairs. In my office.”

“Somebody got shot in your office and you don’t know who did it?” Bunch craned to stare up at the dark windows on the landing above. “You call the cops?”

“Not yet, man—I wanted to talk to you first. Once they get ahold of me, shit only knows when they’ll let me go again.”

“Well, Vinny, I’d say you got yourself a real problem. But I don’t know what you want Dev and me to do about it.”

“It’s got something to do with that Haas case—that ‘suicide.’”

“What do you mean?”

“Figure it out. What did Carrie Busey hire me for?”

“I told you to lay off Margaret Haas.”

“Yeah? Well Carrie didn’t want me to lay off her. And she was paying the freight, Kirk. Not you.”

“She’s not paying the freight now, Vinny. She’s dead.” I wrapped my hand tightly around Landrum’s arm and felt the muscle squirm under my fingers. “Now I’m going to pay you some freight.”

“Wait a minute—wait, goddamn it all! Somebody killed her! It wasn’t me so it was somebody who wanted her out of the way. Because we were on to something.”

“What something?”

Landrum sucked in a deep breath. “I don’t know.”

I lifted the man’s jaw with a knuckle. “What something?”

“I don’t know, damn it! It’s just what I figure. Why else would she get killed? And I figure somebody thinks I know, too. You got to help me—it’s your fault!”

“He’s got something there, Dev. She was killed for a reason. Let’s take a look before worm-breath calls the cops.”

We went up in the dark, the stairs creaking under our weight. Inside, Landrum lowered the blinds and then flicked on the lights. Carrie Busey sprawled back in one of the two wooden chairs facing Landrum’s desk. One leg had jerked forward and stiffened; the other was still bent at the knee. Both hands were clutched tightly beside her purse which was on her lap and gaping open; and her head, with its stiffly piled blond hair, dangled face up over the back of the chair. Between her open eyes a purple hole had been punched and a small thread of blood had dried along one of the faint wrinkles of her forehead. Not much blood had spurted from the wound because most of it had gone out the back of her skull, spraying the wall behind the chair and then dropping in a gummy beard of sagging brains through her hair and onto the rug behind.

“See? Fucking dead!”

“We see, Vinny.”

Bunch peered at the bullet hole with its corona of dark powder burn singeing the flesh. “Fired at close range. Less than a foot, I’d say.”

The murderer probably stood just about where Bunch bent forward to study the wound. From the posture, Busey probably sat frightened and stiff in front of the pistol, straight up in the chair with her legs tucked under it and both hands clutching the purse for something to hold on to. Or to keep it from the killer. Then the shot. That close. That square to the target of forehead and between the terrified woman’s open eyes. The killer did not want to miss, and he had wanted her to see it coming.

“How’d she get in here, Vinny?”

“I—ah—she had a key.”

“You gave her a key to your office?”

“It’s the key to my apartment, too. I set the locks the same. I don’t like running around with a whole bunch of keys wearing holes in my pocket.”

“That’s real efficiency,” Bunch said. “You’re a real genius. Tell us, genius, what was she doing with the key to your apartment?”

Landrum glanced at me and then back at Bunch. “We had this thing going.”

“You what?”

“It’s no big deal, Kirk. You and that Haas broad got your thing going. A little smoochy-smoochy on the front porch—I seen you. Well, me and Carrie had something going too.” He added, “She didn’t have all the money in the world, you know, and I was putting in a lot of time on this case. So I sort of did her a favor.”

“How do you pay your rent?”

“Come on, she wanted it as much as I did. I told you about the ice-maiden type. It was a business deal and she didn’t mind at all. Hell, she liked it—it’s not the size of the tool, you know.”

“You’re all tool, Vinny.” Bunch stepped back and was surveying the small office. “Are you missing anything?”

Landrum looked around too. “I don’t know. I just came in here and saw her and got the hell out again.”

“Where’d you call us from?”

“The White Spot, over on Speer. I drove around for a while trying to think what the hell was going on. And to make sure nobody was tailing me.”

“When did you find her?” I asked.

“Seven, seven thirty. I figure she was shot maybe an hour before. After working hours, anyway, or somebody around here would have heard it.”

That made sense. I kept my distance from the victim and walked slowly around the chair looking for anything that might be meaningful. Landrum began rifling through the drawers of his desk. Bunch, a handkerchief wrapped around his fingers, gingerly lifted the purse from Busey’s lap and brought it over to the light. Carefully, he used a pencil eraser to move the objects inside. “Her wallet’s here. It doesn’t look like it’s been opened.”

“I don’t think this was a robbery. Not for money, anyway.”

“Yeah.” But that didn’t tell either of us what else might have been taken from the open purse. “Dev, look here.”

I peered into the purse where Bunch used the pencil to unfold a slip of paper. In the glare of the desk lamp, I made out the word “Loomis” followed by a telephone number.

“What’d you guys find?” Landrum tried to look around Bunch’s arm, which kept moving in front of his eyes. “What’d you come up with?”

The rest of the purse’s contents were the things that should have been there: the wallet, a key case, some loose change and bills wadded up and dropped in, cosmetics, a small packet of Kleenex, a comb, a bottle of Midol, a Tampax.

“What do you know about Loomis?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Professor Michael Loomis.”

“I don’t know any professor.”

Bunch set the purse back in the corpse’s lap as it had been found. “Did Carrie Busey ever mention him?”

Landrum shook his head. “Not that I remember. What’s he got to do with this?”

That was a good question and neither Bunch nor I had an answer.

“What about your files for Busey?” I asked. “Did anyone go through those?”

“No. They were in the file drawer and it’s still locked. Hey—where’re you guys going?”

“Get a beer. Home for a good night’s sleep. The usual.”

“Hey—hey, wait a minute. I’m going with you.”

“You’re going to be busy talking to the cops, Vinny. We have things to do.”

“Don’t leave me here, Kirk!”

“Why not? It’s your office. Your client, too.”

“I told you, goddamn it—whoever did this might be after me!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why! Why was she offed?”

“You tell us, Vinny.”

“I don’t know!”

“Then we can’t help you, can we?”

“But I don’t! I honest to God don’t know!”

Bunch followed me down the steps, and behind him Landrum hurried to turn off the lights and fumble with the door’s lock. He caught up with us at the bottom of the stairs, his whisper sharp in the dark. “Will you bastards wait up?”

“Got something to tell us?”

“If I knew something, I’d tell you. I swear it! But I don’t and that’s what’s got me scared. I don’t even know what they’re after!”

“Who’s they?”

“Whoever did this!” His thumb jerked toward the floor above. “I don’t know who they is. But she sure as hell didn’t do it herself.”

Our shadows loomed over the shorter man and finally I said, “Come on, then. We’ll get a cup of coffee and you’ll go over it with us. Everything you’ve been doing.”

“Okay—it’s a deal.” He stepped between the two shadows. “Let’s take your car.”

Landrum had left his car parked on the avenue in front of his office because he still wasn’t sure whether or not he was being tailed. “I figure if somebody’s on me, they’re out there watching my car, you know?” His baggy eyes looked hopefully up at us through the haze of steam rising from his cup. Working back from his meeting with Bunch and me in the alley, he detailed what he had been doing for Carrie Busey. Most of his time had been spent on periodic surveillance of Margaret—”I already interviewed all the neighbors before you tried to strong-arm me, Kirk”—and he had followed her when she and the children went out with me, a fact that robbed those times of some of their pleasure. “You never even knew you had a tail, did you?”

“What did you expect to find out?”

“Something that said she killed her husband. That’s all Carrie could think about. Talk about your one-track minds.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Total blank. It was driving Carrie nuts. I told her to let it alone for awhile—that Mrs. Haas was still looking over her shoulder. But Carrie kept saying that she would have to make a move for the money sooner or later.”

“What money?”

“From the Aegis payoff her husband got. You thought I couldn’t figure that out, right? Carrie told me a little, the rest of it I put together. My guess is Margaret Haas popped hubby for the money, then she stashed it somewhere. Bank account, whatever. And she’s waiting for all the noise to die down before she goes after it. So far, she hasn’t spent a dime more than she can cover legitimately, so she’s still figuring how to account for the payoff money when she gets it.”

“You’re full of crap, Landrum.”

“Hey, I’m not playing kissy-face with her. I can look at the possibilities; you can’t.”

“Then why’d she hire me to find out whether or not her husband had worked for Aegis?”

“She hired you? I thought McAllister hired you.”

“Wrong, Landrum. She did.”

The man’s sandy eyebrows bunched together in puzzlement. “It don’t make sense.”

“It does if she didn’t kill her husband.”

“But Carrie was so sure the guy wouldn’t commit suicide …”

“You be sure of this, Landrum: if you ever have anything at all to do with Margaret Haas again, I’m going to unscrew your head from the waist up.”

“I got no reason to, Kirk. Not anymore.” He sipped his coffee. “I hope I got no reason to.”

“You don’t.”

“So you say. But tell me, why was Carrie blown away? And in my office? And what happened to the payoff?”

The money question was the same one that Margaret had asked so many weeks ago, and the only answer I had come up with was that Haas had opened a bank account in some other name or had hidden the cash somewhere. In either event the money was now lost. As for the death of Carrie Busey, nothing that Landrum told us offered any reason. Nor was there any reason why she should have Loomis’s name in her purse.

“Well,” Bunch picked up the check and glanced at the figures. “All this has been fun, Vinny. But the hour is late and my youth is fleeting. You going to call the cops?”

He shook his head. “I figure I’ll wait and find her in the morning. Natural like, when I go in to work, you know? Less hassle that way.” He stood to leave when we did.

“Where are you going?”

“With you. I don’t have any wheels.”

“We’re going home, Vinny. You’re not going there.”

“Just give me a lift, okay? There’s this place I can stay tonight. It’s not too far, for God’s sake. You can at least do that much after all this crap you brought down on me.”