Prime Suspect

by A. W. Gray

  He rose into a crouch and went after the gun like a lineman after a fumble, driving off at his instep, ramming the woman with his left shoulder and encircling the pistol with his body, then wrapping his left hand around the handle. His right hand was numb and useless and blood seeped from a gash on his forearm. Breath whooshed from the woman’s lungs as she stumbled backwards; her knees hit the corner of a long leather sofa, and she sprawled headlong onto the cushions in a flash of arms and shapely suntanned legs.

  Lackey rolled over on his side and leveled the .45 in his left hand. Percy Hardin was holding the shattered bottle aloft, ready to strike, but now froze in his tracks and let the bottle fall to his side.

  For long seconds no one moved. There was no sound other than the crooning of Sinatra and Lackey’s ragged breathing. Hardin was dressed as though for his tee time, in a purple Ralph Lauren knit, matching slacks, and snow-white canvas shoes. His blond hair was combed and sprayed. Lackey had never seen Hardin without his sunglasses before. Hardin’s eyes were pale blue and the skin across the center of his face was fishbelly white in contrast to his tan.

  Finally, Hardin said, “You take money? How much?”

  The woman snickered. “What money? He’ll have to wait in line with everybody else.”

  “Shut up, Betty,” Hardin said, then directed his gaze once again to Lackey. “How much you take to just go away?” Hardin said.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lackey said. The climb over the wall and up on the balcony plus the bottle smashing down on his arm had left him weak; the pistol in his grip seemed to weigh a ton.

  “Can’t you hear?” Hardin said. “I’m talking about money. And you just walking out of here.”

  Lackey steadied the gun. “You don’t have enough money. There isn’t enough anywhere. Where’s Nancy?”

  Hardin glanced at Betty, then cocked his head. “Where’s who?”

  Lackey’s jaws clenched. Just as he’d told Ronnie Ferias, Lackey had never shot anyone. Shooting Hardin would be easy, though. “I’m not fooling around with you,” Lackey said. He rose to his feet and aired back the hammer with two sharp clicks. The muscles in his forearm tensed in preparation for the recoil.

  “Good God, man.” Hardin extended a hand, palm out. His lingers were trembling. The bottle slipped from his grasp and fell on the floor. “I don’t know any Nancy. I swear to God.”

  “Somebody knows her,” Lackey said. “Somebody’s got her. Why not you, you fuck? You killed your wife.” His right arm throbbed as a drop of blood fell onto the rug. The wound was only seeping, so the arteries were still intact.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Hardin said. “I wouldn’t ever.”

  “He means he wouldn’t have the guts,” Betty said, scooting around and sitting up on the sofa. “That much is true.”

  Lackey backed up a step and leveled the .45 at a spot midway between Hardin and Betty. “I tell you something, Mr. Hardin, you got me in a helluva mess here. I’d just as soon have the law on me for something I did as something I didn’t. Now wherever Nancy is, she’s there because of you. I think you better start talking to me.”

  Hardin’s jaw thrust forward like a spoiled kid’s. He pointed at Betty. “I didn’t do anything,” Hardin said. “It was her.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Percy,” Betty said.

  “It was, too,” Hardin said. “She found the guy. She did.”

  The way Hardin was pointing reminded Lackey of Pig Newton, a kid Lackey had known in grammar school who went around telling the teacher on everybody. “Right now I don’t care who did what,” Lackey said. “What I want is for you to lead me to this hit guy, wherever he is.”

  “Well you’ll have to ask her,” Hardin said. “Go on, ask her.”

  Lackey swiveled the gun around to point at Betty. Would he shoot a woman? If it would help Nancy, he damn sure would.

  Betty nervously licked her lips. “I don’t know where the guy lives. I just set the meeting up. You ask Mr. Hardin over there where he lives, he made all the arrangements with the guy.”

  Lackey’s right arm was hurting like the blazes, and he was having trouble getting his thoughts straight. He did. She did. What did it matter who did, with Nancy somewhere out there and probably—

  Lackey tightened his grip on the pistol and swung it back and forth in arcs. “First we’re going to do something to fix this arm.” He raised his right hand and clenched it into a fist. “Then we’re going for a ride, the three of us. You two’d better hope I find what I’m looking for. You damn sure had.”

  Lackey didn’t like the idea of having a woman on cocaine bandage his arm, but he didn’t see any way around it. He herded the woman (Betty, he thought, her name’s Betty) and Hardin upstairs into the huge master bath, and kept the gun ready in his left hand while Betty dabbed alcohol on the cut and then rolled gauze around his right forearm. Hardin sat on the marble counter with one hip hanging off the edge, keeping his gaze steadily on the gun. The bathroom fixtures were shiny brass, and there was a big parabola-shaped sunken tub. Betty stood back and looked at the bandage, then broke into a nervous giggle. The gauze was loose and twisted in places.

  “Sure you won’t reconsider?” Hardin said. “About the money,” He had calmed down and now sounded as though money was the answer to everything. In this guy’s world, Lackey thought, it probably is.

  “No way,” Lackey said.

  “There’s a lot of it.”

  Betty snickered. “Not now there isn’t. Maybe when the insurance check arrives.”

  “Keep out of this,” Hardin said.

  Betty cut a strip of tape from a roll—Lackey swung the .45 in her direction the second that she touched the scissors—and plastered the gauze’s end into place.

  With the top of her head near Lackey’s mouth, she said, “I’ll tell you something, Mr. Muscleman. Percy-pooh over there is full of it. If he’s got two cents he owes it to somebody. And the part of the money he’s talking about giving you? Let’s see, I think that makes a hundred and fifty percent he’s got committed to people.”

  “Damn it, Betty,” Hardin said.

  “Four banks,” Betty said, “plus the mortgage company, not to mention a couple of bookmakers and the guys he plays golf with out at the country club. He hasn’t even paid his old hit man, can you believe it? And me. And as soon as the money shows up, my daddy’s going to be lurking around for a piece of it.”

  Lackey couldn’t believe this, the woman standing here bandaging him and telling this stuff. “Your daddy?” Lackey said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “Percy-pooh’s father-in-law.”

  Now it dawned on Lackey why she’d looked familiar. He’d never seen her before, it was just the resemblance. “Jesus Christ,” Lackey said. “You’re her sister?”

  Betty got an Ace elastic bandage from the cabinet and began to wrap over the gauze. “Decadent, huh?” she said.

  Hardin folded his arms and regarded his own swinging foot. “Just go right on, Betty. I guess you know what you’re talking us into.”

  She raised a plucked eyebrow. “To him? You can’t exactly call the police, Mr. Muscleman, Can you? You going to tell on him?” She jerked her head in Hardin’s direction.

  “On us,” Hardin said.

  “On him,” Betty said.

  The two glared at one another while Betty secured the elastic with two metal clips.

  Lackey clenched his fist and flexed his arm. The bandage was a shoddy-looking job, but gave more support than he’d expected. “Well maybe I can’t call the cops,” he said, “but I’ll tell you something. If Nancy’s not a hundred percent okay, you’re going to wish I had.” He showed Betty a businesslike wink. “Get a coat on, lady. You might feel funny, running around town in that outfit.”

  If it hadn’t have been for the throbbing in his arm and his worry over Nancy, Lackey might have enjoyed the feeling of being a westside guy, sitting in the back seat of a midnight blue Mercedes and getting chauffeured around by J. Perciva
l Hardin III. With the plush leather seats cradling his back and buttocks, the .45 resting in his lap and the outline of Hardin’s head directly in front of him, and with Betty Monroe, wearing an olive green raincoat over her nightie, batting cocaine-glazed eyes at him over the back of the passenger seat, Lackey still thought that guys who drove Mercedes were getting screwed. Yeah, the ride was soft, and, yeah, the interior had a lot of doodads—a wraparound stereo with what sounded like about ten speakers, an automatic sentinel that turned the lights on and off, and a built-in phone, the receiver of which now lay disconnected beside Lackey on the seat in case Hardin thought about trying any funny business—but sixty thousand dollars’ worth? No way.

  He was glad that Hardin had finally gotten the point and quit offering money. In fact, if Hardin had offered money one more time, Lackey didn’t know if he could have kept from beating the shit out of the guy. If getting a lot of money meant losing Nancy, Lackey Ferguson would just have to figure out how to get along without a dime, and if getting to be a westside guy meant having to be a wimp like Percy Hardin, then Lackey Ferguson would stick to being a broke.

  As the Mercedes left Camp Bowie Boulevard and made the gentle climb onto westbound I-30, Hardin said over his shoulder, “You know we can’t guarantee to find this man, don’t you?”

  Lackey glanced out the tinted back window, at darkened trendy shops and restaurants along Camp Bowie. “That’ll be bad for you,” Lackey said.

  “You’ve got to be reasonable, man. All we can do is go to the place where Betty found him to begin with. I don’t have the slightest idea where he lives, or even if he’s still in town.”

  “He’s in town,” Betty said. “Percy owes him money, along with a big percentage of the rest of the population.” She was coming down from her high and her words were beginning to slur. As they’d come from Hardin’s kitchen into the connecting garage, she’d tried to slip a vial of white powder into her pocket. Lackey had taken the vial away from her and washed the powder down the sink. Without the cocaine to bolster her, Betty was more subdued, and she was beginning to act just as jittery as Hardin was. That was okay with Lackey. He wanted them to be afraid of him.

  “How did you find this guy?” Lackey said.

  Hardin chuckled, the first time he’d laughed since he’d brought the bottle down on Lackey’s arm. “Tell him, Betty,” Hardin said.

  Her gaze dropped as overhead freeway lamps made patches of moving light across her cheek and one side of her nose. “You go to hell,” she said.

  “No, go ahead and tell him. You’ve been getting a charge out of putting me down, tell him all about your dope connections.”

  She flashed a painted-on smile. “Sure, love. Let’s start with how you started screwing around with your sister-in-law.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Hardin said. “Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about how my sister-in-law came over and seduced me one day while my wife was playing tennis.”

  “Like you weren’t thinking about it,” Betty said.

  “Of course I was. What man wouldn’t, when a woman goes around hiking up her skirt so he can see her panties?”

  Lackey couldn’t understand these two, how if they hated each other this much they could stand to get into bed together. Sex with Nancy was great, but just lying beside her in the dark was about as much of a kick as the sex itself. He decided that these two were really missing something in life and even felt just a little bit sorry for them. The cut on his arm was beginning to sting. He looked across the freeway at headlights going by in the opposite direction like a parade of spooky yellow eyes. Hardin was making the slow curve from I-30 onto I-35, headed south. Lackey wasn’t surprised, most of the illegal stuff he heard about seemed to originate on the south side.

  “Let’s talk about,” Hardin said, “a woman that will jump into bed with anybody that’ll furnish her drug money. You hear that, Mr. Contractor? That first time, that first time she came over we hadn’t even begun to get it on before she was asking if I had a connection to buy cocaine. It was her fucking coke dealer that introduced her to the hit guy, what do you think about that?”

  “I think maybe you shouldn’t have been screwing around on your wife,” Lackey said.

  “I’ll grant you that,” Hardin said. “I’ll admit that was wrong.”

  “How benevolent of you,” Betty said.

  “But I’ll say I’m no different than any other man.”

  Oh, yeah, you are, Lackey thought. He pictured Marissa Hardin, the day she’d come on to him, the day he wished had never happened. As good-looking as Marissa Hardin had been, Lackey wouldn’t have touched her with a ten-foot pole as long as he had Nancy. If he hadn’t had Nancy, well, things might have been different, but to Lackey’s way of thinking that didn’t make Percy Hardin any less of an asshole for screwing around with his sister-in-law. These westside guys are really fucked up, Lackey thought. The Mercedes had left the freeway and stopped at the red light at the intersection of Lancaster Avenue. The left turn signal bonked monotonously.

  “You’re damn sure different in bed,” Betty was saying to Percy. “They should have named you Peter Cottontail.”

  “That’s a good one,” Hardin said. “Hey, Betty, really funny. Hey, back there, you really want to know how I came to hire this killer guy?”

  “I guess. If you want to tell me,” Lackey said.

  “Well, sweet little Betty sold me on the idea. She’d been hassling me to divorce Marissa anyhow—”

  “Now don’t start that,” Betty said.

  “Oh, don’t worry. She didn’t really mean it, not when she found out I was out of money. Before she found that out, I think she really did. But when she found out my divorcing Marissa would cut sweet Betty off from her coke money, she changed her mind.”

  “He was living off my sister’s money,” Betty said. “Sweet guy, huh?”

  “My wife’s money,” Hardin said, “which translates into her father’s money. Who is also Betty’s father, but you want to know why Betty can’t get her hands on any more of daddy’s money?”

  “Fuck you, Percy,” Betty said.

  Jesus, but they hate each other’s guts, Lackey thought. Even Frank Nichols and those convicts on the job had liked each other.

  “Why, Betty’s an addict,” Hardin said. “That’s why she’s home right now instead of screwing around someplace in Europe, so daddy could put her little butt through a treatment center. You know Betty likes her dope so much that one time she even pimped for her own father so he wouldn’t cut her money off? Fixed daddy right up with this friend of hers.”

  They’re all a bunch of loonies, Lackey thought, every one of them. There was a wad of bills in Lackey’s pocket, the fifteen thousand dollars Marissa Hardin had given him, less what he’d spent of it. A bunch of loony money, Lackey thought, and also thought that if he ever got out of this he was either going to turn the money over to the law or throw it in the nearest trash can. Right now, he didn’t care which. They were driving east on Lancaster now, in the lane nearest the island median, cruising along in the Mercedes with topless bars and X-rated bookstores on both sides of them. Two hookers—a black girl in tight jeans and a blond white girl in a leather mini and knee-high boots—lounged on the curb and gave the Mercedes the once-over. You can have the fucking Mercedes, Lackey thought, and the westside crowd and the horse that they rode In on. All that Lackey wanted was Nancy. And if he hadn’t tried to make a big score on Percy Hardin’s bathhouse job, instead of being satisfied with what he had, Nancy would be safe now. Lackey softly closed his eyes.

  “So what Betty did,” Hardin said, “was come to me one day and tell me she knew a way out for us. For us, she said, when she really meant just for her. Just hire this guy to do away with Marissa, collect on her insurance, and on to the good life. Isn’t that the way you put it? “He swiveled his head to sneer.

  “I just said I knew someone,” Betty said. “The rest was your own doing, don’t be putting it off on me.” She faced the fro
nt and hugged herself inside her raincoat. Lackey suspected that with the wearing off of the cocaine, Betty was getting a chill. On the left, the lights inside the washateria were now visible across the median. Lackey wouldn’t have noticed Herb’s unless he’d known where to look, next door to the lit-up windows with all the washers and dryers standing in a row.

  “You’re going through the turnaround in the median up there, aren’t you?” Lackey said.

  Hardin had already slowed down, pulled over to his left and applied the brakes. “Christ, you knew where we were going all along.”

  “I didn’t,” Lackey said. “But now I do. I just figured out a couple of things.”

  Lackey didn’t know what he would have done if the Mercedes trunk hadn’t been roomy enough. But it was, big enough for Percy Hardin and Betty Monroe to lie nose to nose, their legs drawn up behind them with their knees touching and even some room to spare. They didn’t look very comfortable, and Lackey wondered briefly whether he should place them back to back, or maybe both facing the same direction, one behind the other. He decided against it; Percy and Betty needed to be face to face so they could carry on a conversation. Maybe work out their differences. Hardin’s lips were pulled back in a grimace, and Betty looked even less happy about the arrangement than Hardin did.

  Lackey closed the trunk lid with a solid thunk and jammed the .45 into his back pocket. He skirted the Mercedes to mount the curb, looking warily right and left. A yellow Nissan was parked nose-on to the curb, the same car that had been there before, and Lackey decided that the Nissan had to belong to Dick the longhair. At least he hoped so. An old Ford Ventura was parked beside the Nissan. Lackey didn’t like that; he’d hoped to catch Dick alone. No matter, though, Nancy didn’t have any time for Lackey to waste. He pushed the door open and entered Herb’s.