The Long Wait Page 17

  He had to say it sometime. I was waiting for it and he said it. “Of all the lame-brain stupes you take the cake. How much trouble can a guy get into anyway?”

  “A lot more than this.”

  “Feel like talking?”

  “Not especially, but if you’re curious, what would you like to know?”

  “A few things the cops don’t seem to know. First about a dead man outside of town. He was a very special kind of dead man. He and two friends were part of an out-of-town team who specialize in rough stuff. The other two were found very nicely killed.”

  “So?”

  “He made the third. It might have been accidental but the chances are it wasn’t.”

  “It was. At least he wasn’t murdered. I was chasing him and he ran off the road. He died without talking. Next question.”

  Logan took another drag on the butt and nodded. “Same guy was seen in Eddie Packman’s place only a short time before. Then you beat up on Packman while the cops are looking and get tossed in the can. Why?”

  “Because said dead man had a grand in new bills on him, that’s why. Eddie paid him off for the job he didn’t do. There must have been trouble about it because the guy came away mad.”

  “So that’s why you went after Packman this morning.” He made a nice neat statement out of it.

  I shook my head carefully. “That was only half why, friend. About a half hour before that somebody fired a hatful of bullets at me and they weren’t kidding. Whoever it was waited for me to come out of the Ship’n Shore, barreled up and let loose. Nobody got hurt, but I got pretty mad. I checked Eddie’s car and that could’ve been the one.”

  “It wasn’t,” Logan said.

  “What?”

  “Eddie had been at the road stand for a good two hours before you came along. I checked.”

  I remembered every curse word I had ever learned and strung them out in a row. When they were out of my system I dragged the butt down to my fingers and tossed it out to the sidewalk. “Logan,” I said, “this whole thing is a screwed-up mess if ever I saw one. Everybody wants me dead but the wrong people. A killer wants me dead. The cops want me dead. Not Servo or Packman, pal. Servo was behind me in the joint when I left and Packman was in the other place. Whoever shot at me this time was the same one who tried it from the roof top the last time, and if it wasn’t Servo or Packman this time it wasn’t Servo or Packman then. No, they don’t want me dead.”

  Logan’s face tightened up until it was white. “Who says they don’t?” He kept staring out the windshield.

  “Finish it.”

  “Packman’s threatening to kill you on sight and Servo’s going to be in a blue funk when he finds out you aren’t where you can be gotten to easily.”

  “Like in the clink?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Where he has men on his pay roll?”

  “You got better eyes than I thought you had.”

  “Then to whom do I owe the debt of putting up ten grand for my bail?”

  Logan dropped his butt on the floor and stepped on it. “This’ll kill you. Your old boss put it up. Havis Gardiner.”

  “Fine, but I don’t get it.”

  “You will. Your direct-approach system seems to have had its effect. The guy thinks you’re innocent. Or at least your buddy was. His insurance investigators have uncovered a lead on Vera West.”

  “Fine,” I said again. This time my voice shook.

  “Not fine, kid. They think she’s dead.”

  “Oh, hell, when’s it going to end!”

  He turned around and glanced at me absently. “When somebody finds out why Robert Minnow died, that’s when.” His foot went down on the starter and churned the engine into life.

  “I’ve been looking into that angle. I saw his wife.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was a pretty good story.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I told him. I gave it to him in detail right down to the last minute Robert Minnow had spent on this earth and all the while I was talking his face kept getting tighter and tighter. His eyes seemed to sink deeper into his head and he didn’t ask any questions. When I finished I let him mull over it for a while, hoping he’d make a break but nothing happened. After he thought about it ten minutes the scowl turned into a puzzled frown and stayed there. Hell, if that’s the way he wanted it, good enough. I wasn’t going to pump it out of him.

  I said, “Where to?”

  “You’re going to stay with me until I deliver you to Gardiner.”

  “Okay, pal, whatever you say. But how about letting me get my car back. I wouldn’t want the friend it belongs to worried about it.”

  It didn’t take more than an hour to collect the Ford and park it at a garage where they promised to have it ready before noon. All the slugs had gone through the glass and since I had knocked out what was left of it nobody could tell what happened. Logan let me get finished then hauled us back to the new office where he went in to see about some business.

  When he came back I asked “Where to?”

  “No place special for a while. I’m still on that murder case.”

  “The dame?”

  “Yeah. The cops are up a tree too. They’re trying to run down the truckers she was friendly with.”

  “What about her roommate?”

  “She took a powder when she heard about it. Got skunky drunk right after she identified the body and was last seen climbing into a truck for a necking party outside a joint on the highway.”

  “Didn’t show up yet?”

  “Naw, probably still on a binge. She’s just the type, according to those who knew her. Right now she’s probably sleeping if off if she isn’t already back at work. I’m going down there now and see what the score is. Look, if you don’t feel like running around I’ll drop you off at my place.”

  “Hell, I’m okay.”

  So at nine-thirty we pulled into the ABC Diner and I waited in the car while Logan went inside to ask his questions. He didn’t take long. Five minutes later he was back shaking his head. He got back in the car and started to pull out just as a prowl car drove up. Logan grimaced at the driver through the windshield. “You won’t get anyplace either, copper.”

  “No soap?” I asked.

  “Hell, she’s still missing. At least it isn’t anything new. Her boss said she took off like that a couple times before. Didn’t show for a week.” He reached in his pocket and flipped a snapshot out at me. “There’s what she looks like.”

  I said, “Umm,” because she wasn’t bad at all. It was taken at a beach and she was oozing out of a Bikini suit like toothpaste out of a tube. She was some hunk of stuff if you didn’t mind a face that was too much lipstick, too arched eyebrows, too wide eyes and too little sense than to try to wear an up-sweep in a stiff wind. I gave him back the snap and settled down against the cushions. It was his working day, not mine. My head was putting up an argument against staying awake and I didn’t have anything to say about it. I closed my eyes and fell asleep.

  I kept dreaming about a blonde, a real honey blonde with a soft curving body and a beautiful face that had a wonderful radiance about it. She came close to me, smiling, her eyes telling me she loved me, then when she was only an arm’s length away the hands that had been reaching for my face grew sharp, curved talons and she raked at my eyes viciously. I batted them away and tried to grab her, but she stayed out of reach and laughed at me. I said, “Vera, I’ll kill you when I get you, so help me!”

  The elbow that rammed my ribs wasn’t trying to be gentle. Logan gritted, “Wake up, damn it.”

  “Where are we?” I came out of it fast, trying to see everything at once. The day had drifted into dusk and the cars coming toward us had their dimmers on. We were nestled against the curb beside a six-foot field-stone fence in a section of town I hadn’t seen before.

  Logan let me get the sleep out of my eyes first. “Gardiner’s place. He wants to talk to you.”

  “I bee
n asleep all day?”

  “You’re not kidding. Come on, snap out of it.”

  So I snapped out of it. Logan locked the car then took me for a short walk around the field-stone fence to a wrought-iron gate that might have been swiped from Buckingham Palace. He rang a bell, we waited, then a tall gent in riding breeches did the honors of opening the gate. The guy was the type who could turn politeness on or off and since he had it on right then I gathered that we were expected.

  There was a long walk up a flagstone path that curved through a series of gardens, ending abruptly at the foot of a gently sloping lawn that encircled a fine old house. A three or four car garage was set back in the shadows under the trees and behind that the faint outlines of a tennis court probing the sky with metal fingers of its fence corners.

  “Some dump.”

  Logan nodded curtly. “Some have and some don’t. I’ll let Gardiner have it. Taxes on this place must cost a fortune.”

  “Yeah, it’s rough having to be a bank president and live in style. I feel for him.”

  “Quit being class-conscious,” he said.

  Evidently there was some communication between the gate and the house. The door opened as we were going up the steps and an elderly woman in a severe black dress smiled and ushered us in. She took Logan’s hat, escorted us into a walnut-paneled room lined with books and said, “Mr. Gardiner will be right with you, gentlemen. Make yourselves comfortable.”

  We didn’t have time to do that. Havis Gardiner came in before we had gotten seated, nodded hello and pulled a chair up for himself. He was as distinct as the men of distinction come. Strictly sharp in a hundred-buck pin-stripe suit and looking like he just stepped out of the pages of a magazine. His graying hair was freshly trimmed around the edges and for a minute I was wishing it was me sitting over there instead of here with a bandage for a hat and a headache to keep it company. He waved for us to sit down and crossed his legs carefully enough to show he was teed off about something. Logan and I shared the couch and lit up a pair of cigarettes.

  “You have something on your mind, Mr. Gardiner?” I asked.

  “That’s a mild way of putting it. The way you seem to move events around to suit yourself is quite disturbing.”

  “Like last night?”

  “Like last night. Do you realize what you did?”

  “Sort of. Maybe you better explain in case I missed a point.”

  Gardiner looked at Logan. “Tell him, Alan. You’re more familiar with conditions than I am.”

  “Hell, he won’t listen to me.”

  “Tell him anyway.”

  Logan tapped his butt into an ash tray. “We’re after two things. Robert Minnow’s murderer and a couple hundred thousand bucks. Your coming back here has spread this case wide open again as fars as we’re concerned. Until now you were tagged for both jobs, now there’s reason to believe that you never pulled anything.

  “Let’s look at it this way. Minnow, as District Attorney, wasn’t concerned with the law-abiding element ... it was the gang making Lyncastle a criminal paradise that he was after. He was doing fine until he happened to get called in on a routine case of suspected embezzlement, then all his good work was washed out when the embezzler killed him out of pure revenge. That embezzler was supposed to have been you.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Shut up. However, after you ducked out of sight it made the case certain, and in one respect, even if it wasn’t you, the heat was directed away from the guilty party. Now we know this much. Vera West could have done the actual embezzling, though the details of it aren’t clear yet. The money involved was worth killing for, especially if the murder could be directed away from herself. We know too that after it happened Vera and Lenny Servo, who we’ll unofficially class as part of the criminal element of town, were pretty chummy until Vera disappeared.

  “Now for the reasons for her disappearance. She might have stuck close to Lenny as long as he could afford her some protection, and there’s no doubt at all that he’s influential enough to give plenty of protection. She had enough dough to pay for that protection and enough to make the proposition interesting to him, too. But remember this, it was still big dough and if you could get away without splitting it, a couple hundred grand could make for some pretty fancy living. Vera might very well have taken that cash without cutting Lenny in and taken off for somewhere.”

  Gardiner nodded approvingly. “Or,” he added, “Servo could have kept the money and killed Vera.”

  “I like it better the first way,” I said.

  Logan’s butt poised over the ash tray. “Why?”

  “Because Servo was in love with her, that’s why. She left him flat somewhere along the line.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I get around,” I grinned. “You mentioned something about Vera being dead. What about it?”

  Gardiner looked at me squarely. “The investigators for the insurance company have managed to trace Vera West out of the state. There’s no need going into detail of how they did it, but they found that she had spent some time in the state capital then moved on to New York. Her last known address was a small uptown hotel off Times Square, but after she left no further trace of her was found. The investigators went on the premise that she might have died, and checked with the New York police. Their morgue records showed two cases of drowning, both suicides, either of which could have been Miss West. Since both bodies had been buried in a pauper’s grave an exhumation for purposes of facial identification wasn’t practical. After so long a time decomposition would have made identification impossible.”

  “So?” I said.

  “So there’s still the money to be accounted for,” Logan said. “There was no indication on Vera’s having lived high.”

  Gardiner saw the frown on my face. “The point is this, Johnny, the case is not exactly a local one any longer. Since it has been reopened, the insurance company for the bank has its own men assigned to the case working in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I am quite aware of the situation that exists as far as our local police force is concerned, which is to say that in their minds the case is already settled except for a positive means to identify you. Now, you have been a sort of a center of the controversy. You can upset things if you aren’t careful.”

  I stood up and flicked my butt into the fireplace. “In other words, I’m to pull in my horns?”

  “Until the proper authorities have reached a conclusion.”

  I could feel.Logan’s eyes on me, waiting to see what I’d do. I said, “The insurance company and the F. B. I., what are they looking for?”

  After a moment’s pause Gardiner said, “Primarily a murderer, then the stolen funds.”

  “That’s very good,” I told him, “very good. Me, I want a killer too. But that doesn’t come first. I want a whole town of people to know that Johnny McBride didn’t have anything to do with anything. I want to prove that there’s still something to be proud of in a name and you know how I’m going to do it?”

  They were both waiting for me to tell them and I didn’t. Instead, I said, “Nope, the horns don’t get pulled in. Not even a little bit. Maybe the cops’ll trip over me some, but there’s more of a chance that somebody else will trip over me first.”

  I expected an argument and didn’t get any. Gardiner shook his head in a slightly puzzled fashion. “I ... understand quite well how you feel, Johnny. Please understand this. I’m not trying to interfere with your ... crusade. I know the kind of people you’re dealing with and I don’t want you to be in further trouble before we come to the truth of the matter.”

  “Like getting myself killed?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked down at Logan. “You feel the same way too?”

  “More or less. You’re screwing the works up pretty nicely.”

  “Then if Vera’s still alive and she pulled this stunt you’re willing to see her pay for it?”

  He got mad first, then
dropped his eyes. “If she’s behind it.” I said, “Nuts,” and was going to say more. The words were there in my mouth but they didn’t come out. My mind was going around in cute little circles making ends meet here and there and a picture started to form that was vague in a way but with definite outlines that could paint a picture of murder.

  So instead of all the words I had stored up I said, “Any chance of seeing the report of the investigation?”

  Gardiner reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope of official documents with COPY printed across the face of them. Everything he had told me was there in black and white all signed and stamped with an official seal. When I looked them over I handed them back with a nod. “Okay,” I told them. “I’ll pull in my horns.”

  Gardiner saw us to the door personally. The housekeeper handed Logan his hat and we went back down the path to the car. The poor guy looked pretty upset and it didn’t help his face any. He climbed behind the wheel, made a U-turn and picked his way back to town. When he got on the edge of the lights he said, “Where do you want to go?”

  “Get my car back first. Take me over to the garage.”

  “Then where?”

  “Someplace you can’t go, chum.”

  “A dame?”

  “Natch.”

  “That’ll probably keep you out of trouble more than anything else I can think of.”

  “It will?”

  “As long as you don’t marry one.” Logan sounded too damned sour.

  He wheeled the car over to the garage, waited until I had paid the bill, then waved me over. “If you want me for anything I’ll probably be at the Circus Bar. I hope you don’t want me for anything. I’m going to get stinking drunk and I want to do it alone and without having you in my hair, understand?”

  “You’re the one who’s got woman trouble.”

  “Shut up.”