Prime Suspect

by A. W. Gray

  Dick was seated exactly as he had been on Lackey’s last visit, on the same stool, in fact, with his elbows behind him on the bar, his ankle resting on his knee, and his shin stuck out at an angle. He was dressed the same, too, in a khaki shirt open to the third button. He was wearing the same sunglasses and the ends of his greasy hair were touching his collar. His nose was wrinkled the same as well, as though he were squinting behind the dark lenses. His nose must be frozen that way, Lackey thought. Jesus, it was as if the guy was roosting on the barstool.

  On the stool beside Dick sat a hooker. At least that’s what the girl looked like—a hooker, a shade on the fat side with oversized hips, showing thick calves and heavy thighs in too-tight blue shorts which molded into the contours of her crotch. She also wore a sleeveless red and white-striped knit shirt that was about two sizes too small for her, showing big pillowy breasts and chubby upper arms. She was a bleached blond and badly in need of a touchup; a full inch of mouse-brown hair showed near her scalp. Lackey wondered if she was over eighteen. It would be a tossup. The jukebox was playing a rap number, either Vanilla Ice or M. C. Hammer. Lackey didn’t know one rap musician from the other and wished they’d all go out and get a job. The blond was vacantly chewing gum and rocking her foot in time to the music. She wore sandals with medium heels.

  Lackey skirted the tables and approached the bar. No one was visible except for Dick and the blond, and Lackey was pretty sure there was no place inside the club for anybody to hide. There might have been a back office, but there didn’t seem to be any interior doors. The odor of stale smoke mixed with the odor of stale beer.

  Dick allowed his jaw to slack for a heartbeat, then resumed his deadpan look. The girl regarded Lackey with a mild curiosity in her gaze. Dick raised a hand in her direction. “This dude ain’t after no trim, Paula.” The girl lowered her gaze and chomped down on her wad of gum. When Lackey had stopped a few feet away, Dick said to him, “I told you I’d get back to you, friend.”

  The guy’s pretty good, Lackey thought. But what had happened at Frank Nichols’s place had only one explanation, this longhair had been talking to somebody. If Lackey had thought things out, he wouldn’t have gone to Percy Hardin’s to begin with, he’d have come straight here. But he was sort of glad he hadn’t; if anything bad had happened to Nancy, both Hardin and this longhaired bastard were going to pay. “Yeah,” Lackey said. “You were going to get back to me. Through Frank. You got back to somebody else first, didn’t you?”

  Dick scratched his sunken, hairless chest. “I don’t know who you mean.”

  Lackey touched his forearm through the bandage; it was sore as hell, but he thought he could still throw a righthanded punch. “I think you’d better figure out who I mean,” Lackey said.

  Dick lifted his narrow rump from the stool and hooked one heel over the stool’s rung. “You pushing me? Man, I’m just in here running my business. That’s fucking all.” He flattened his hand, palm down, and made a sideways, that’s-the-end-of-it motion.

  “Well, let’s say I am pushing you,” Lackey said. “And let’s say that if you don’t start talking to me, I’m going to do worse than that.”

  Dick glanced at the hooker and snickered, then said to Lackey, “I think you better go back where you come from. You don’t know what you’re fucking with.”

  Lackey grabbed Dick’s collar in both hands and yanked the skinny guy forward, holding Dick’s nose a half-inch from his own as he said, “You probably already know your buddy killed Frank Nichols, but you might not know about the lady he took. I don’t have any time to fuck around with you, Dick. Understand?” Visible in the corner of Lackey’s vision, the hooker’s jaw dropped. Her gum clung to her lower teeth.

  Dick lightly placed his hands on Lackey’s wrists and smiled, a narrow smile without much friendliness.

  “Hey, cowboy, take it easy. You want to know something, just ask nice. There ain’t no need for this shit.”

  Lackey had expected the guy to pull a knife or something. He released the collar and lowered his hands. “The guy you talked to. I want to know how to find him.”

  Dick raised both hands, palms out. “Sure. Hey, sure, no problem. Problems I don’t need. I got the guy’s name and address right back here.” Still smiling, his expression earnest, Dick circled around behind the bar. “Right under here, I got an address book.” He bent down and reached underneath a counter.

  The stunt nearly worked. Lackey had been expecting a fight, and the longhair’s attitude was something he hadn’t been ready for. It was the hooker who gave the stunt away. As Dick bent over, her gaze flicked at Lackey, then instantaneously downward. It was just enough.

  Lackey put both hands on the bar and vaulted over; a dull ache throbbed in his injured forearm. As he came over the top, he lashed out with both feet and kicked Dick in the ribs and side of the neck. Dick uttered a startled grunt and both men fell headlong into a stack of empty beer cartons. The boxes scattered like bowling pins. Dick had been bringing a little revolver up from under the counter, and his gun now dropped from his fingers and clattered down between two of the wooden slats which lined the floor. As he went down on top of the longhair, Lackey dug for his .45, brought the big army pistol out, pressed the end of the barrel against the longhair’s chin. Dick froze with his fist cocked beside his ear.

  “You fuck,” Dick said.

  Lackey rose to his feet and glanced over his shoulder. The blond’s fat bottom jiggled as she made for the exit. “Hold it, sweetie,” Lackey said. She halted, then retreated to the bar and sat down. Her eyes were wide and round as dinner plates.

  Lackey grabbed Dick by the arm and hauled him to his feet. The longhair nervously rubbed the back of his neck. Lackey bent down and picked up the revolver from between the slats. It was a chrome-plated .38 with a bone-white handle. Lackey dropped the extra gun into his pocket.

  “So you’ll know,” Lackey said, “I’ll shoot you in a heartbeat. I got things at stake you wouldn’t understand. Now, you found out who I was the second I left here yesterday, if you didn’t already know, and then you told the guy that did the things I’m taking the heat for. Now the guy’s got a woman with him. Where is he?”

  Dick’s upper lip curled. “Man, I ain’t worried about no cunt.”

  Lackey pistol-whipped Dick across the jaw. Dick’s head snapped back and an ugly red welt appeared. “Well, let’s say you’d better start worrying about her,” Lackey said. “You got two seconds.” He put the .45 against Dick’s chin and clicked the hammer back.

  The glance that Dick gave was almost bored and showed no fear at all. The longhair was measuring the odds. Lackey’d say this, old Dick had some guts. Finally Dick said, “Everett Wilson. Two blocks north of Sylvania, half a block from Northeast Twenty-eighth Street. There’s an apartment building. Up the front stairs, second door on the right. The building’s about to get condemned, there ain’t nobody else living there except two old women on the first floor.”

  Lackey put more pressure on the .45. The barrel pressed deeper into the longhair’s skin. “You’re dead if you’re lying to me,” Lackey said.

  “I ain’t lying. You’re too fucking tough for me to lie to.” Dick’s tone said that he didn’t think Lackey was tough at all.

  Lackey stepped back and let his gaze roam from Dick to the hooker and back again. “Well, now I got to figure out what to do with you two,” Lackey said. “No way can I have you calling anybody.”

  Lackey sort of hoped that the blond teenage hooker bathed regularly. He found a quarter in his pocket and dropped it into the phone slot. The pay phone was in a small strip shopping center on Lancaster, a half-mile east of Herb’s, attached to a wall outside a Wyatt’s Cafeteria. The midnight blue Mercedes sat behind him at the curb with its engine running. Faint trails of exhaust rose from its tailpipes.

  He didn’t really have any reason to think that the hooker didn’t bathe, but as she’d climbed awkwardly into the Mercedes trunk he’d glanced down at her feet. Her th
ick ankles and the portions of her feet visible between the straps on her sandals were grimy. If she hadn’t had a bath lately, things inside the trunk were going to get pretty ripe. Lackey had turned Betty Monroe over to face the hooker because it hadn’t looked as though Betty and Percy Hardin were getting along too well. With Betty, Percy, and the hooker in the trunk, Lackey had measured the trunk’s interior walls with his gaze, then done the same to Dick the longhair. He’d decided that Dick wasn’t going to fit. He’d had them unload, then had stood by with his gun ready while Dick muscled the spare tire out and set it on the curb. It was still a tight fit, but they’d made it. He’d almost put Dick and Hardin together, but when the longhair had said to Percy, “Man, you rich pricks are really fucking dumb, running your mouths,” Lackey had decided against it. If he’d laid the two down together, Dick might’ve bitten Hardin’s nose or something. So, while Lackey was now using the pay phone, Dick lay at the front of the trunk, nearest the back seat, with Hardin at the rear and the women in between. Lackey hoped to hell that the Mercedes didn’t have a flat. He called the sheriff’s office, asked for Homicide, then told the detective in Homicide that he wanted Morrison’s home telephone number.

  “We don’t make a practice of that. Something I can do for you?” The voice was deep, with a heavy good-old-boy accent.

  Lackey decided that he didn’t have time for a bunch of red tape. “This is Lackey Ferguson. So you’ll know, I’m in a phone booth and I’m not going to stay on the line long enough for you to get a position on me. I got to talk to Morrison. Or Henley. Either one’ll do. But I got to talk to one of them, nobody else.”

  After the barest hesitation, the cop said, “I can’t give you the number, but I can patch you through.”

  “No soap,” Lackey said. “If the next words out of your mouth aren’t one of them’s number, I’m hanging up.”

  There was another half-second pause, then, “Here’s Morrison’s. Three-five-eight, six-four-oh-two. Listen, Ferguson, maybe you should—”

  Lackey disconnected, found another quarter, and punched in the number. As the ringing sounded over the phone, he stuck his free hand into his pocket and crossed his ankles. Finally there was a click and Morrison’s talking-down-to-you tenor said hello.

  “This is Lackey Ferguson. How you doin’?”

  “Well I’ll be damned. I’m not doin’ too good, Lackey. I’d be doing a lot better if you’d quit screwing around and come see me.”

  “Well I might just do that,” Lackey said.

  “Now you’re talking, bud. Hey, I’d even come downtown right now, if you’d meet me.”

  “Not exactly that,” Lackey said. “Listen, I got a lot of trouble right now because of all this. I think you know I never touched that woman.” He glanced toward the street. A forty-foot trailer rig rumbled west on Lancaster; across the median in the eastbound lanes were a little foreign car and a city bus. The bus driver applied the air brakes and stopped at a passenger loading zone.

  “Well, sure, that’s something we got to talk about,” Morrison said. “Whether or not you did it. Anything you got to say, believe me, I’m all ears.”

  “I’ll bet. Listen, I’m driving a Mercedes, license number”—he squinted toward the curb—“six-seven-two-TWD. It’s blue, but so dark it’s probably going to look black at night. In half an hour I’m going to come through the intersection of Sylvania Avenue and Northeast Twenty-eighth Street. North, I’ll be going north on Sylvania. Why don’t you bring a few guys and wait for me?”

  “I’ll be glad to,” Morrison said.

  “I’ll bet on that, too. Oh, yeah, Detective Morrison, I got a few hostages. A couple of them, well, they might not be worth much ransom. But you got to take what you can get, you know?”

  21

  Nancy Cuellar lay wide awake in the dark, her ankles and wrists aching and her knee joints stiff as rusted hinges. The crazy’s head lay inches from her face on the mattress. He was snoring gently. His onion breath made Nancy want to gag. Nancy worked her fingers, straining for some sort of grip on her bonds for the umpteenth time, even though rationality told her she was wasting her energy. As she bit her lower lip against the pain in her wrists, someone knocked loudly on the apartment door.

  Nancy froze. God, could she be off her rocker? Nobody could possibly be coming here. Maybe she’d finally gotten so bone-weary and sick of hoping that she was having a dream.

  The knocking resumed, bang, bang, bang. Nancy opened her mouth and sucked in her breath to scream.

  Quick as thought, a rough hand clamped over her mouth. The scream died in her throat. Her breath flowed slowly out between thick rigid fingers. The crazy kept one hand over her mouth as he raised up on one elbow. The knocking continued.

  In a gruff whisper, the man said, “Use your head, girl. I don’t want to hurt my baby.” He shifted on the mattress, reached down to the floor and brought up a snubnosed pistol. His head was cocked in an attentive attitude. The knocking quickened in tempo and increased in volume.

  The bedsprings creaked as the crazy climbed to his feet. He reached once again down to the floor, then stood squattily erect. Before Nancy had time to wonder what he was doing, he’d laid his pistol aside and stuffed the rags back into her mouth, and was knotting the strip of cloth behind her head. She’d forgotten how foul the gag tasted; she pressed her tongue helplessly outward. The crazy finished tying the cloth, then stood back and retrieved the gun from the mattress. “Be just a minute, girl,” he said, then crept noiselessly out of the bedroom.

  Prison had made a light sleeper out of Everett Wilson; in the joint, a guy never knew when some stinking lousy pervert was going to sneak up and grab his pecker or something. Everett moved quietly out of the bedroom on stocking feet and closed the door gently behind him. Who in hell would be knocking on somebody’s door at this time of night? He crept to the front of the apartment, stood close to the door and turned his ear to the wood.

  The knocking paused, and then resumed. Some nutty bastard trying to beat the door down. Trying to pester Everett while Everett was with his baby. Everett stood back and leveled the Smith & Wesson at chest level. Blow the fucker away if he had to.

  The knocking ceased abruptly, and a tenor voice out on the landing said, “I know you’re home, Everett. Your car’s outside. It’s me, Sam Lincoln.”

  Everett’s sloping forehead bunched. The voice had sounded like a nigger’s. Lincoln, Lincoln, Everett thought. Oh, yeah. Jesus, the parole officer.

  Everett jammed the pistol into his back pocket. “Hey, yeah. Yeah, sure, I „as asleep.”

  “Well you sure go to bed early,” Lincoln said. “It’s only nine. Open up.”

  “Sure. Sure, just a minute.” Everett clicked on the overhead light and looked hastily around him, letting his gaze linger fleetingly on the rickety breakfast table, the couch, the ancient black-and-white TV like a blank unseeing eye. Nothing of Nancy’s laying around. Everett moistened his palm with his tongue and slicked back his hair, then clicked the latch and opened the door.

  It was Lincoln, all right, tall and thin, his hide the color of a chocolate malt, shaved clean, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark slacks. A beeper hung from the parole officer’s belt. Lincoln swept Everett head to toe with an uppity-nigger, I’m-suspicious gaze. “You took your time about it,” Lincoln said.

  There was a woman standing beside the parole officer. A little-bitty good-looking thing she was, short dark hair done at the beauty parlor, an alert erectness about her, wearing a dark blue sleeveless dress and white high-heeled shoes. Matthews, Everett thought. Sure, Dr. Anna Matthews, the psychiatrist broad. Old Everett had damn sure fooled her. Had her thinking Everett Wilson wouldn’t hurt a fly. She’d quit seeing him just when Everett had been pretty sure the psychiatrist was about to offer him a little pussy. Ain’t got time for you no more, girl, Everett thought. My baby’s right in the next room.

  “Good evening, Everett,” Dr. Anna Matthews said. Her gaze was cool and confident, the
all-business professional lady. Bet she’s one hot bitch in private, Everett thought. Sometime he just might try some of that. Would have to be sure his baby didn’t find out, though.

  Samuel Lincoln was already more than a little pissed over having to go with the highbrow psychiatrist to Everett Wilson’s apartment, and Wilson letting them cool their heels while he took his time about coming to the door hadn’t helped Lincoln’s mood one bit. If Dr. Anna Matthews wanted to go over Lincoln’s head to get her way, that was one thing. Lincoln figured that everybody had to make a living, and he really couldn’t blame the psychiatrist for not wanting to give up the easy money from the state. But going so far as to have Lincoln’s supervisor order him to go to Wilson’s apartment with her—the business about Anna Matthews being afraid to go alone was a lot of shit, all these fucking feminists wanted to act like a man until falling back on their gender suited their purpose better—making him go with her was pure harassment. Nothing but an I’ll-show-you attitude from the highbrow psychiatrist, just because Lincoln wouldn’t approve any more state-paid counseling sessions.

  Sam Lincoln had already made up his mind what he was going to do about it. Actually, he was going to do two things. The first thing had to do with the completed application that at the moment lay in Lincoln’s top desk drawer, the application for a transfer to the Texas Department of Corrections as a prison guard. The pay was about the same—more, in fact, when you counted the overtime hours one could log sitting up in the guard tower listening to the radio, subbing for somebody who wanted to take off to visit a sick relative or knock off a little strange or something—and there weren’t a third of the headaches. If some guy who was in the joint gave you any shit, all you had to do was lock the bastard up in solitary. None of this running around in the middle of the night with some uppity female psychiatrist who had something to prove, and none of the mountains of paperwork to justify the reason you wouldn’t let your parolees work for some sex pervert like that Lackey Ferguson guy. Lincoln had known there was something funny about that contractor the moment he’d laid eyes on him, and the fact that Mr. Lackey Ferguson was a pervert murderer came as no surprise to Samuel Lincoln.