The Code (14 page)

I worked my tie loose. The madam kept talking, saying the same things over and over again. Finally Eve's customer emerged from her trailer and walked to his car. I left the madam still jawing about freaky sex.

Eve was a red-haired girl going to fat and bogged down in disappointment. She said there was too much competition in Reno and anywhere else I'd care to mention. Too many divorcees giving it away. Too many amateurs all over the nation, too much of this new sexual freedom. "Hippies will do it for any reason or no reason at all. I hate hippies," she said.

The talk and the atmosphere depressed me. I had already paid the madam, but I pulled out another twenty and placed it on the bed. Eve swept it up like a vacuum cleaner. She said certainly she remembered Moose. They had met when she was in Denver, in better days.

"I often think about going back," she said. "Everything was better then, including me." She smiled apologetically. She realized she wasn't taking care of herself. She liked to eat too well and the only exercise she got was on her back.

The conversation was like a river running in the wrong direction. I reminded her that I was interested in Moose. "I'm sorry," she apologized again. She got up and opened two cans of beer and passed me one. "Moose hasn't been around lately."

There had been a time when she was hung up on him and when he thought her something special. But the relationship didn't last and he had kept in touch mostly for old tunes' sake. The last time he'd dropped in had been earlier in the year.

"I left Denver right after he hooked up with that other girl and stopped coming around. She was a waitress. From a small town near Denver. She was Moose's type, stacked. I remember seeing her once. She fell for Moose's line about making big money." Eve laughed cynically. "I guess he didn't tell her how he was going to make it. I heard later that he got hard up for a stake and put her in a house."

Her monolog had stopped boring me. I said, "Was she a blonde, that girl? Do you remember her name?"

"The name, no. She was what I call aristocratic looking. High cheekbones, big dark eyes. You'd have thought she was a model."

She was talking about Sheila Brant.

"What's the matter?" Eve asked, catching some expression on my face that I hadn't known was there.

I stood up and leaned in the door of the trailer, my back to her. "I don't guess you know what happened to her."

"I never heard. Maybe Moose left her and moved on, the same as he did with me."

"Moose made a big connection later on," I said. "He got to be close to a man with power. In the Organization."

"That's news to me," said Eve. "There isn't much of a grapevine out here."

A cowboy was walking among the trailers, his hat drawn down to shadow his eyes. He carried a green shopping bag. I watched him as he came toward me.

"You didn't say why you're looking for Moose," Eve said. She was standing near me, opening another can of beer.

The cowboy stopped. His hat was new and crimped awkwardly. He reached into the shopping bag and pulled out a sawed-off shotgun.

I lunged sideways as he brought the weapon up and pointed it at me. I hit Eve with my shoulder and drove her out of the line of fire as the shotgun went off. Lead streamed through the trailer doorway and struck the wall like hail.

Moving to the window, I pulled back the curtain. The cowboy was reloading. I knocked the glass out with the barrel of the Luger and shot at him. He lost his hat as he ran for cover.

"My God! What's going on?" Eve said.

I ran for the door while the cowboy was ducking behind the madam's trailer. I went for the ground like a swimmer making a shallow dive. At the last minute I turned and hit on my shoulder and rolled over. I snapped off a shot as I sat up and the bullet screamed off the trailer an inch in front of the cowboy's face as he peered around the corner. He ducked back out of sight.

I bobbed to my feet and zigzagged toward his hiding place. I fired a shot as I ran, trying to discourage him from letting loose with the sawed-off shotgun. Swerving, I put my back to the wall of the trailer.

No noise came from him for a minute. Then I heard the madam yelping. Girls were peering out of the trailers. One screamed at the top of her voice. The madam came around the corner of the trailer, her wig slipping sideways on her head.

The cowboy was walking behind her, using her as a shield.

He reached around her with the shotgun in one hand, ready to fire a blast at me. I pointed the Luger down and shot between the madam's legs and blew away part of the cowboy's boot. Some toes left with it.

His scream eclipsed the woman's.

The madam bolted from his grasp as he fell. She scurried under the trailer, which was jacked up off the ground.

Sprawled on his back, the cowboy turned, trying to bring the shotgun to bear on me. My next bullet hit him in the head.

The girls bounded from the trailers, surrounding me as I knelt beside the dead gunman. I couldn't tell anything from what was left of his face. I searched his pockets and came up with a wallet containing a California driver's license issued to Sidney L. Crandall. His slender build was about right, I thought. He could be Moose's other partner, the one who had put a bullet in me in Idaho.

I returned the wallet to his pocket. His trousers, shirt, and boots were also new. He'd bought the clothing for this job, to divert suspicion.

"I've seen this guy before. He's been hanging around here for the last day or so," said a girl wearing a black slip. "He drove that pickup truck over there."

He and Moose had split up, I thought. Moose had gone to Portland and Sid had come here. They had been out to finish me off fast.

I hurried to the pickup truck and gave it a quick search, hoping to find some clue that would lead me to Moose. No luck. The papers in the glove compartment showed the truck had been rented two days before in Reno.

The madam came over to me as I got into my car. I heard a police siren in the distance. The madam said, "You'd better stick around to explain this to the police."

"You take care of that for me," I told her.

I arrived in Denver at 8:30 p.m. and ate a thick steak washed down with two cups of black coffee. I'd had only one full night's sleep since I left the hospital in Idaho, and the physician who'd warned me to take it easy would have been appalled to learn the kind of activities I had been engaged in.

For all I knew, Moose was also in town. I had reduced the ranks of his gang by two, but he had picked up another confederate since Bonham, the man who had been driving the Lincoln when Moose tried to gun me down outside of Portland.

I had been thinking about that man in my spare moments. AXE's investigators, after checking the murder scene at Key West, had put forward the supposition that four killers had attacked the house where David Kirby was meeting with Frank Abruze. Only two men had shown up with Moose in Bonham, but maybe there had been another gang member all the time.

There were other factors for me to contemplate while I was trying to judge the possible odds against me. There was the mysterious joker in the deck, the man I had yet to identify. I had convinced myself that he was a Mafia bigwig who had put the finger on Frank Abruze and that he was the man the luscious twosome Janice and Delia had described to me, the important Organization figure Moose had wanted to impress. The girls had said he was tall, wore glasses, and looked like an accountant.

Finally, there was Marco Valante, the old friend of Frank Abruze's. On one occasion Valante had given me a helping hand, but I had roughed up two of his boys and jarred them off my trail. Valante might not be so kindly disposed toward me if and when we met again.

Well, no one had told me this would be an easy job, I thought.

I paid my dinner check and stopped at a telephone booth in the restaurant lobby to call Barbara, the girl I'd come to Denver to find.

Barbara was the only one of the seven girls listed in the little black book who had not been described by Moose in some detail. Her name had been underlined and Moose had linked a string of exclamation points after it as though she defied verbal description. If she was so super-special in the bedroom that Moose was incapable of assessing her performance, I thought, she must rate high among the natural wonders of North America.

I had to admit that curiosity was gnawing on me as I dialed the number in the book. After one ring, a recording broke in on the call to tell me the number I had dialed was no longer in use. It was a big letdown, although I had half-expected that I would have difficulty contacting some of the girls in the book. They were all call girls or prostitutes and theirs was a mobile profession.

I stood outside the telephone booth and asked myself what I should do next. I had no way of knowing when Moose had taken down Barbara's number. Maybe the girl had left town. Even if she had only changed addresses, I was at an apparent dead end. I didn't know her last name or what she looked like. I had the option of going on to Las Vegas and trying to contact Cora, the last girl on the list, but I hated to give up so soon.

I decided to consult an expert. I hailed a taxi "I'm looking for a man who knows the local bordellos," I told the lanky driver.

"Let's see. A bordello is a fancy whorehouse, right?"

"Technically, it doesn't have to be fancy," I said.

"You've got your man. Emmett Ripley, like it says on the license there. You can call me Red."

"All right, Red. Do you know a hooker named Barbara?"

He thought about it. "Not offhand. But I know a couple who'd love to have you call them Barbara if that's your thing."

"I'm looking for a particular girl." I got into the cab. "Take me to someone who knows the subject better than you do."

He thought about that. "Well, there's one possibility." He drove me to a bar called Millie's. "Go in there and talk to the bartender who looks like an elephant stepped on his face. I'll wait for you."

There was no mistaking the bartender Red meant. He looked like a former prizefighter. I told him he had been recommended by Ripley.

He gave me a bourbon and water. "Which do you prefer, blondes, brunettes, or redheads?"

"I prefer Barbara."

"If you mean Barbara the Bazoom Girl, she left town. She was a stripper, you know. Hustling was just part-time with her."

I confessed that I didn't know what Barbara looked like.

"Well, besides the Bazom, there's one more Barbara that I can think of who might be your girl." He went to a telephone and talked, returned and wrote an address inside a matchbook. "She says to come around."

"What's she like?" I asked as I got off the bar stool.

"Venus de Milo in heat," he said.

Red Ripley drove me to the address, which turned out to be an aged building in a neighborhood laced with coffeehouses and hole-in-the-wall bars and cafes. I got out and paid the fare. "Take off, Red. I may be staying awhile."

I walked along a hallway in need of paint and knocked on the door at the end of it. Barbara was in her early twenties. She was wearing a buckskin jacket, khaki trousers, and sandals. Posters of rock groups decorated the walls of the small apartment.

"What a relief," she said. "The last guy Charlie sent over here was older than Henry Kissinger."

"How much do you get for a trick?" I asked her.

"A hundred bucks. Some people think it's too much, but I'm working my way through the university." She smiled. "Make it two and you can stay all night."

"What's your major?"

"Foreign relations," she said with a straight face.

"I'll give you the hundred for information, no game-playing required. I'm looking for Moose."

"And I thought this was going to be a fun date. Oh, well. A hundred is a hundred. You give me the money and I'll give you Moose's address."

It was much too easy. I said, "He's in town?"

"He got in yesterday. Let's see the cash," she insisted.

I pulled out the money, glad I didn't have to file a formal expense account. There were some people in AXE's clerical department who simply wouldn't understand.

Barbara folded the bill carefully and stuck it in her trousers pocket. Then she tossed me a telephone book. "Moose called and asked me to come over. I haven't been yet, but I wrote the address down on the cover."

I tore the address off the book. "I'm surprised you didn't ask why I'm looking for him."

"I don't really care. I don't imagine you're a member of his Cub Scout troop, but that's no business of mine. Just don't tell him that I sent you."

She might look like the Venus de Milo, I thought, but she had a heart like the Chase Manhattan Bank.

When I turned to leave, she picked up a heavy glass ashtray from an end table and struck me on the head with it. The blow was a good one. I found myself on my knees, shaking my head in a effort to clear it.

She also knew karate. She leaped on my back and slashed at the back of my neck with the edge of her hand. I blacked out.

I awoke lying on my back on the floor. My coat had been removed and Wilhelmina extracted from the holster under my arm. When I got through telling myself how stupid I had been to let her catch me by surprise, I rolled on my side.

Barbara was talking to someone on the telephone. "He's here," she was saying. "Everything's under control."

I realized that my sleeves were rolled up. Both of them. She had also taken the stiletto out of its scabbard. Maybe I wasn't stupid, she was just smart. A lot of professional spies had searched me and missed that little knife. Barbara hadn't.

She glanced at me as I sat up. She lifted the Luger, which she was holding in her hand, and pointed it at my head. Her eyes gave me a warning I didn't ignore. I sat very still.