The Shakedown Shuffle: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 3)

by Richard Levesque

  Having studied a map beforehand, I made it to my next destination pretty quickly, less than ten minutes. If Carson Mulvaney had also done his homework—and I had every reason to think he would have—then he could have made the same trip in the same amount of time, probably less if he’d done it late at night after having spotted me outside Leonora’s.

  A parking place on Jeanie’s street was easier to find. The prime spot right in front of the little house was taken, though, and I had a pretty good feeling I knew who had taken it. I parked across the street and got out. Not for the first time, I thought about how shabby my old Winslow looked in comparison to the vehicles that crept down from the hills to prowl among the commoners. The car in front of Jeanie’s was a bright red convertible Newport. Its white top was down, and I saw there was a divider between front and back with a separate little windshield for whoever rode in the rear. It was a car meant to be driven by a chauffeur, but I was sure Leonora Rigsby had been behind the wheel when the Newport had come to a stop here in front of Jeanie’s house. I was also sure the car was a pretty regular fixture on the street just a short hop away from the Paragon lot.

  I walked past the car and up the concrete walkway to Jeanie’s front door. Pausing first to listen for voices inside, I knocked on the door, waited a few seconds, and then rang the bell. All was silence inside the house, and it stayed that way after my attempts at getting someone to come to the door.

  There was a wooden gate on the right side of the house, and after a full minute of standing at the front door, I opted to go try the gate. The ground in front of the house was still a little damp from the deluge of the night before, and I felt my heels sink in a little as I tramped across the grass to get to the gate. It was just under six feet high and needed paint; I had to stand on my toes to see over it. I figured it was a good idea to take a look first before walking into Jeanie’s backyard uninvited.

  On the other side of the gate was a narrow strip of grass running between the house and the wooden fence that ran around the perimeter of the yard. Next to the fence were a shovel, a rake and a hoe. I also saw a little wheelbarrow with a pair of work gloves inside it. Past the corner of the house, I could see that the yard expanded, but I could see only one corner of it and picked up no signs of life back there.

  Jeanie must be a gardener, I thought, but I expected she was more rosebushes and periwinkles than peas and carrots. Taking another look at the shovel, I saw dirt crusted on it, dry at the edges but still wet in the middle. There was also moist dirt caked in the bed of the wheelbarrow. She’d either been digging in the damp earth this morning or had left the dirty tools out the evening before, letting things get wet in the late-night storm.

  Reaching over the gate, I felt for the latch, and when my fingers found a padlock, I cursed under my breath.

  Turning to survey the yard and street again, I stared at the Newport. It might as well have been a big red sign saying “Leonora Rigsby Is Here.” The fact that neither she nor Jeanie had responded to my knocking didn’t necessarily mean anything was wrong inside the modest little house. The reunited lovers were probably still asleep after what I guessed had been a late night. A sensible man would have left and come back to knock again later.

  I’m not a sensible man, however. Or, rather, the nagging memory of Leonora’s manufactured tears had washed away whatever sensibleness I had—that, and the disappearance of Carson Mulvaney after I’d last seen him racing away from Leonora’s and toward…where? I didn’t think it was the pier.

  Unlike Jackson Kinkaid’s neighborhood, I could see no one watching me as I stood impotently in Jeanie Palmer’s front yard. No pleasant housewives tended their flower beds, and all the kiddies were in school. Sure, some neighbor, perhaps already on high alert because of the lack of masculine traffic in and out of Jeanie Palmer’s, might have been keeping an eye on me through a slatted window shade. I wondered if anyone had seen Carl Culpepper scoping out the house the same way I was and hated the thought that I might be confused with him. There was no fixing that today, though.

  Turning back to the wooden gate, I wondered if Culpepper had done the same thing whenever it was that he’d infiltrated Jeanie’s backyard. My purposes in scaling the gate were far less nefarious than his, however. I grabbed the top with both hands, planted one foot on the cinder block wall it was mounted to, and pushed off with the other foot. It had been a while since I’d done any backyard fence jumping, but there’d been plenty of obstacles to climb over in the fields and villages of Europe, so I wasn’t entirely out of practice. I was up and over in a few seconds, jumping down to the ground in Jeanie’s backyard without breaking the gate or an ankle, relieved at not having to worry about taking a sniper’s bullet in the process.

  Once on the ground, I took a few seconds to listen for signs of life in the yard or any indication that I’d been seen going over the fence. All was quiet, so I moved away from the gate. Pausing for a moment at the corner of the house, I listened again before advancing, amazed at how easily I had slipped into the routines that had gotten me through endless searches of bombed out villages and farmhouses during the war.

  Still detecting nothing, I made the corner and found myself in Jeanie’s backyard proper, a large rectangle of lawn with—as I had guessed—several varieties of rosebushes planted around the perimeter. Not interested in horticulture at the moment, I ducked low to pass what I guessed was a bedroom window even though its curtains were closed today. It was impossible not to picture Carl Culpepper standing in the same place, probably in the dark, watching that open window as Jeanie undressed, probably assuming she was safe from prying eyes with nothing but rosebushes in the backyard.

  I wasn’t interested in the bedroom but rather the back door. When I got there, I tried the knob and found it was locked. This one I wasn’t going to knock on, however.

  I sighed, not sure of the best next move. Were it night time, I would have been tempted to peek into a few windows—not to scope out Jeanie in dishabille but rather to look for signs of life inside the house. In the light of the early afternoon, that would be a mistake. Turning away from the door and keeping my back pressed to the house’s wood siding, I surveyed the yard again. The variety of roses was impressive, and all the plants looked perfectly groomed. It was easy to imagine Jeanie spending hours out here tending to her flowers.

  But then I thought about the shovel and the wheelbarrow I’d seen by the gate.

  None of the flowers looked freshly planted. From where I stood, none of the earth in the flowerbeds looked to have been recently turned or otherwise disturbed.

  I let my eyes pass over the neatly manicured lawn between the roses and the house. And that was when I saw what I’d been hoping not to find even though I’d come looking for it.

  “Damn it,” I whispered as my eyes ran over a spot in the far corner of the lawn that didn’t look as neat or as manicured as the rest. I didn’t want to walk over to that corner and take a few careful paces to measure off a plot of earth that was a little over by six feet long and a bit wider than two feet across, but I knew I was going to have to. And then I was going to have to call O’Neal.

  Glancing at the windows at the back of the house to make sure I could detect no observers, I slowly crossed the lawn to the far corner and then dropped to one knee and leaned forward, my fingers poking into the grass and the damp soil beneath. I suppose my posture might have made it look like I was praying or mourning, but I was doing neither. Instead, I was looking carefully at the sod, noting the cuts of the shovel blade and the ways the grass had been laid carefully back in place after being disturbed.

  I wasn’t terribly surprised when I heard the back door open. Turning my head only a little, I caught sight of Leonora walking across the lawn. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of turning to face her, so I shifted my gaze back to the grass in front of me, but not before seeing enough of her to notice the blue dress she was wearing. It was unremarkable, or at least it would have been to anyone who hadn
’t already seen her wearing it in another world—face down on a bed with pills and liquor all around her.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Mr. Strait,” she said.

  “I suppose,” I said. “But neither should he.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Acting again. The line was perfectly executed. I didn’t envy the prosecutor who got this case. If Leonora were put on the stand, her performance would become the stuff of legend, and it just might let her walk.

  “I’m talking about the hack writer you bumped into in my office on Friday.”

  She tilted her head a little, a quizzical look on her face. Then she shook her head and said, “You’re not making any sense.”

  I turned toward her and stood up, ready to lay out my claims and see where it went. But then I got a good look at her in that blue dress, and it was impossible not to think of how she’d looked in it while dead—here, in this house. Jeanie’s house. Whatever had caused her to be here in that dress in that world, to take her own life in the back bedroom, it hadn’t happened here. At least not the same way.

  A new sense of alarm rising up in me, I said, “Where’s Jeanie?”

  “Jeanie’s fine.”

  “Why don’t you go get her? I’d like to talk to both of you about this.”

  “Whatever you have to say, you can just say it to me.”

  She sounded haughty, in control. Her tone said that I was the help, the hired man, and it wasn’t my place to dictate terms.

  I didn’t like it. Instead of standing out here debating, I should be storming inside, looking for Jeanie, and probably calling O’Neal. But I could tell from her body language that a move like that would require me to strongarm Leonora Rigsby, maybe even knock her down in order to get past her and through the little house’s back door. That wouldn’t play well with the cops when they eventually got here.

  So, I tried another tack.

  “Did she use a hammer?” I asked.

  The quizzical expression jumped up in intensity a few notches. “Are you quite all right, Mr. Strait?”

  “I’m more than all right, Leonora. But I don’t think Jeanie is. And I know Carl Culpepper isn’t.”

  “I think you should leave now.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “Maybe you should call the police and have me escorted off the property. That way, they can check on Jeanie, and I can also invite them to bag that shovel around the corner as evidence. Is that what she used instead of a hammer?”

  Leonora dropped the act, going stone-faced instead.

  “I won’t stand here and put up with this abuse.”

  She turned, making as if to stalk back to the house.

  “Did you know he’d been out here spying on her?” I asked. “Watching Jeanie undress?”

  That stopped her. She turned to look at me again, disbelief on her face.

  “If Jeanie says he came back last night, says he wasn’t satisfied with peeping anymore, she might do all right against a prosecutor. Did he come at her? Did she defend herself?”

  Leonora said nothing.

  “The cops have evidence that he was peeping. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine him taking it further. Jeanie’d still face conviction for disposing of the body, and if you helped her take the car to Santa Monica, then you’re an accessory after the fact, but…if she was defending herself, they may go easy on the both of you.”

  Her jaw tightened, a look of steely regret in her eyes.

  “I mean, you and I both know that’s not how it went. He might have come here hoping for a little something. After all, he thought I was sleeping with the both of you. I expect he figured he could work his magic on her, especially since he knew I was up at your place last night.”

  She raised an eyebrow at this.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Leonora. I had your place staked out, but nothing happened. You didn’t put the money out and no one came looking for it. Culpepper spotted me up there and then he came here. Probably saw Jeanie putting the money out. When he came up to the house to investigate, she let him have it, trying to protect you from your supposed blackmailer. What did she use, though? Not a hammer. Not a shovel. A brick, maybe? And then…what? She drags the body to the gate and just about has him in the backyard when you show up. She had no idea you were there to retrieve the money, so you probably had to play it off as you showing up unannounced to make sure she was all right, wasn’t that it? I’d give ten thousand dollars myself if I could have seen the look on your face, especially when you figured out the corpse was the guy you’d met in my office last week.”

  I shook my head, getting back to the story. “You helped her bury him and then the pair of you took his car down to the beach, came back here and tried to act like everything was all right. Found comfort in each other’s arms, and all that.” Looking her square in the eyes, I added, “How am I doing, Leonora?”

  “You’re a fool. I never should have come to you with my case.”

  “Well, you did. You were probably hoping for someone who’d take the money and be satisfied at being called off when you said the game was over. I don’t give up so easy. Maybe I should put that on my business cards.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I never should have trusted a person like you.”

  I nodded and said, “And what exactly is a person like me, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  The smug self-assuredness was back but tempered now by an awareness of all the sadness in the world. I’d seen the look on dozens of GIs’ faces, men whose youth had been tempered by the ugliness of combat but who still seemed to think all the bullets were going to continue flying over their heads. As far as I knew, not one had made it home whole.

  “A person like you,” she said, “is someone who doesn’t give up regardless of the cost. A person who’s more machine than man. Wind you up and point you in a direction and you don’t stop until something stops you. Or you die. Just the wrong type of detective for me to hire.”

  Having delivered her dismissive insult, she turned again, and this time she did stalk back to the house.

  I went right behind her. When she entered the door, she tried to close it on me, but I was too close and wedged myself inside.

  “Where’s Jeanie?” I asked. “Is she still alive?”

  Her eyes lit up, a fire in her pupils.

  “Get out of this house! You’re trespassing here. I swear I’ll scream!”

  “You go ahead and scream,” I said, pushing past her.

  She tried stopping me as I made my way to the back bedroom, finally resorting to pounding on my back and shoulders with her fists. It was going to take more than that to make me put on the brakes, though.

  The scene I found in the bedroom was nothing like what I’d seen in my vision of the other world. There, Leonora had died a mess—spilled booze and pills around her body, which had writhed as she’d gone through her death throes. In this world, the woman in the bed looked dignified, at peace. I saw no evidence of pills or liquor, but I knew I’d find them if I looked hard enough.

  Jeanie looked like she was asleep, the covers pulled up to her chin. Her hair and make-up were perfect, ready for the police photographers to make her a star of sorts.

  On the nightstand was a note, and beside it was Leonora’s fancy pen.

  Finally having had enough of Leonora’s abuse, I turned and shoved her away from me. Then I stormed over to the bed, putting a hand on Jeanie’s throat. It took a moment, but I was able to find a faint pulse.

  There was a phone on the nightstand, and I picked up the receiver, dialing zero before Leonora was on me again. She fought for the phone, all her composure gone now as she cried and shouted, “No! Leave us alone!”

  I managed to keep hold of the phone until the operator came on. “I need the police,” I shouted into the phone as Leonora finally was able to wrench it from my grip. In the scuffle, the nightstand had been knocked askew and the phone’s base had fallen. Leonora scrambled to grab it so she could hang up on the operator, b
ut I got hold of her shoulder and pulled her toward me, yanking the receiver away from her again.

  “Operator!” I shouted into the phone.

  “Yes? What’s happening there?” said the stranger on the phone.

  I rattled off Jeanie’s address and added, “Police, quickly! And an ambulance!”

  “No!” Leonora screamed.

  “Hurry!” I yelled, and then Leonora had the phone cord wrapped around her closed fist and yanked it free from the wall. The line went dead in my ear.

  She turned to me, tears streaming down her face. “Bastard!” she managed to croak through her sobs, no more acting now.

  “Save it,” I said as I turned back toward Jeanie.

  “Leave her alone! Let her die!” she yelled.

  “Why the hell should I?” I shouted back.

  “She can’t handle living with what this will do to her. She can’t!”

  Then she collapsed to the floor, her back against the wall and her face buried in her hands.

  “Where are the pills?” I asked. “What did you give her?”

  “Nothing. Nothing,” she moaned.

  “I don’t think she did this to herself, not any more than she wrote that note.” Squatting down, I took both her forearms into my grasp and shook her a little, hoping to put an end to the hysterics. “Where are the pills, Leonora?”

  Something seemed to break in her. The fight and resistance went out of her arms and the noises coming from her throat shifted from rage to desolation. Still sobbing, she managed to say, “My overnight case. By the front door.”

  I left her there and ran to the living room. A sudden movement to my right revealed Jeanie’s cat, startled by my entry into the room, scurrying into the space behind the couch. The overnight case was next to the front door. When I popped it open, I saw stacks of ten- and twenty-dollar bills, more money in one place than I’d seen in my life. With the money was an empty prescription bottle for sleeping pills. The name on the label was Janice Pasternak.

  Leonora Rigsby, I thought, is actually Janice Pasternak. It would be one more secret that would come out at the trial.