“I quite understand, but we would rather pay you something for your time.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing exactly what I was doing but not liking it. “If you insist.”
“Oh, I do. We don’t have a very large budget for this sort of thing, but I think I can offer you a reasonable sum,” he said, amused with himself and the way he had beaten me as easily as he had the shuffleboard machine. He took an envelope from his inside coat pocket and handed it to me, saying, “Shall we say, a thousand now—earnest money, so to speak—and another when this situation works out satisfactorily.”
I took the envelope, folded it and stuck it in my hip pocket, and told him, “That’s not much.”
“Oh, but that’s all there is, Mr. Milodragovitch. We will, of course, expect results,” he said, his hand rising to flick a speck of dried blood off my jacket. “If this works out, we might be able to find a place for you in our local business. Provided you were neither greedy nor stupid, which I’m certain you aren’t.” He smiled broadly, his eyebrow cocked again, his plump fingers finding another spot of loose blood. “Think about it.”
“I will,” I said, thinking about it for a second, remembering what Muffin had said about me, wondering how Helen Duffy would take it if I went to work for their organization, and I found myself smiling. “Sure, I’ll think about it. Changing sides might change my luck.”
“Really,” he said, his hand reaching up to pat my cheek gently. “You don’t seem to be terribly concerned about the insidious tendrils of organized crime choking your hometown.”
“That’s true,” I said, my hands moving up to straighten his tie. “I just hate arrogant assholes.” Then I tugged on the short end of the tie, tugged hard. His smile had faded, his handsome face bloomed wonderfully florid. Then I jerked the tie, saying, “I told you not to condescend to me.” Then I pulled the tie harder. He struggled for air, his mouth gasping loosely, his arms flapping as if they weren’t connected to his shoulders.
I swung him around like a ball on a string, knocking over Pierre’s table and slamming the guy into the jukebox, which went silent with a long scratchy burr, then leading him like a dog on a leash, I ran him at the shuffleboard machine and threw him down the board. His head banged into the plastic cover, then buried among the plastic pins with a fine crash.
That was too much for Pierre. He rose from his chair, walked around the overturned table and stood beside the nifty hood, raising his gnarled thick hands and bringing them down on his back, slamming heavily against the guy as he struggled to get his tie loosened and his head out of the machine. Pierre grunted like a man splitting firewood until the hood’s struggles ceased.
As I looked toward the front door, remembering Arnold, heads and bodies were aimed toward the back until they heard Arnold’s platform shoes banging on the wooden floor. I stepped into the aisle between the booths and the bar, and shouted “Freeze!” at him.
He meant to, I think, but the moment seemed too perfect: the showdown between the handsome young stranger and the tired old drunk, the shared celluloid moment. He stopped, nearly falling down, but the roles had been written too long for him to change them now, and his hand went for his piece. It was still under his jacket, and he had a long instant to realize that the dying was going to be real, when I pulled the trigger. He was the wrong man, but it wasn’t my fault.
Eighteen
After it was over and the echoes of the gunfire stilled, the bar emptied quickly, the afternoon drinkers fleeing into the sunshine, careful not to touch the blood-splattered doorframe or step on the fragments of bone and flesh scattered all the way out the door and across the sidewalk to the side of their Cadillac, which was spotted with bullet holes and human debris. The four jacketed rounds had gone through and into the door of their car. Arnold had managed to get his revolver out after the second time I hit him, but he didn’t have the strength to pull the trigger. At least it was in his outflung hand.
“Nice shooting,” Freddy said as he walked up behind me.
“Goddammit, Freddy, shut up,” I muttered as I walked away from him around behind the bar to pour a drink. The bartender still huddled behind the bar, crouched like a whipped dog.
“It’s over?” he asked, holding a bloody nose with his hand. He had banged it on the cooler trying to get down. I nodded at him, and he fled outside too, away from the stink.
Freddy checked Arnold’s body, covering the entrance wounds with his hand, shaking his head like a man who couldn’t believe it. Then he went to take Pierre off the other hood, sat him down, and tugged the guy out of the machine. He seemed to be alive, breathing shallowly but lying very still on the board, like a man laid out for a wake. Freddy walked over to the bar, moved my automatic out of the way, and I poured us a drink. We toasted something. When Jamison came charging into the bar in front of a squad of patrolmen, he found me hanging over a glass of whiskey, grieving and sick of the scene, acting as tired as Gregory Peck or Glenn Ford. And Jamison played the lawman well: confused.
—
Eventually he worked it out, though. By late afternoon he had arrested and impounded and searched to his heart’s content. His boys found Nickie’s heroin stash inside a water softener in the basement of the house on Wild Rose Lane. Wanda had been arrested at the airport, and when the police rushed in, the secretary in the police department who had faked the records about the destruction of a kilo of heroin went into hysterics and confessed to everything. As it turned out, she had been seduced by the Duffy kid, that gem of a young man. I was allowed to leave the police station on a personal recognizance bond, but I had to walk to the bank parking lot to get my rig. And when I got home, it was nearly sunset and the lady’s mother was there.
She sat in the backyard on one of my lounge chairs, her trim legs crossed, her strong face inclined toward the setting sun, her neck arched gracefully. Helen sat on the back steps in the shade, hugging her knees and humming to herself. She heard me at the back door, rose quickly and came inside, hugging me fiercely, brushing her lips across my face, touching the stiff sutures with her soft mouth, murmuring, “Oh, darling, I heard. How terrible, how awful, you poor darling.”
Then she tucked her face against my chest, her arms tight around my body as she swayed and hummed childlike in the still afternoon air.
“It will be all right. I have some time to spend in court, but then we can go away. Everything will be all right.”
“Oh, no,” she whispered, stepping back from me, looking up but not in my eyes. “She knows. She’s here and she knows.”
“What?”
“Everything,” she crooned, “she’s here and she knows everything.”
“What?”
“She does that to me, you know. She insists, she always does that, you know, insists on knowing everything, I hate—hate it when she makes me tell, you won’t be angry—”
“I won’t be angry,” I said, silencing her against my chest, too tired to think, too wasted to really care.
“Helen.”
At the sound of the voice, her head rose and she moved away from me, her hand wiping her nose.
“Yes, Mother,” she answered the voice.
“Bring your friend outside, please. I’m sure he’s quite tired, and we must hurry. Perhaps you might make the two of us a drink.” The voice was as soft and melodious as the ramble of the creek—as insistent too. “Please.”
Helen stepped around me into the kitchen, her shoulders hunched, her hands cupped before her. She walked around the kitchen in small aimless steps, muttering, “Damn damn damn damn…” Then she looked at me. “Whadda ya wanna drink?”
“A beer. That’s all. Are you all right?”
“Are you kiddin’? With that old bitch here? How can anybody be all right? She ruins everything, you know that—everything.”
“Mr. Milodragovitch,” the voice intruded. “Please come outside. Helen is quite capable of preparing the drinks.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked ag
ain.
“Oh, go outside. She wants to talk to you.”
As I stepped out the door, Mrs. Duffy rose to greet me, lifted herself out of the lounge chair as gracefully as if she had been borne on silver wires, and she stood there, as tall and cool and slim as the frosted glass she held lightly in her firm hand.
“I’m quite pleased to meet you,” she said, taking my hand, holding it in a dry, muscular clasp. “Finally.”
I nodded and took back my hand.
“I meant to come much sooner, but Helen had told me that you were indisposed. From what I hear, though, not completely helpless. I’m afraid Helen exaggerated your condition. She painted a portrait of you either mewling like a baby or dying of age. I suppose I should have recognized the symptoms—”
“Symptoms?”
“Of the lying.”
“Lying?”
“I thought you knew. But I can see that you didn’t.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“I simply assumed that Mr. Diamond had told you that Helen is a pathological liar.”
“Oh, yeah, he did, but I thought he was lying,” I said, waving my hand vaguely.
“Really,” she said as we looked each other over like a couple of dogs about to fight.
She was slightly shorter than Helen, but slimmer, and so poised and held herself so erectly, she seemed much taller than her daughter. Her hands were aging but well tended, the nails glossy and tapered under a coat of clear polish, and the fingers that held the glass were as motionless as ice. She, too, had red hair but streaked with an arrogant gray, as if by some spell she had reversed the process by which steel was destroyed by rust. The blue of her eyes was steady, a deep violet, confident and cool. Her face might have been marked by age, like her hands, but the years didn’t show beneath the smooth matte finish that covered the bevels and planes and angles of her face. Not a wrinkle marred her skin, which she hadn’t exposed deliberately, not a hint of freckles. Beneath the soft sweep of her simple gray dress, her body looked as strong and supple as a willow switch.
“Have you surveyed me sufficiently?” she asked, her eyes locked on my face.
“Yeah,” I grunted.
“And what do you think?” she asked, tilting her head just enough for the sunlight to glisten off her firm jaw line, waiting with the first quivers of a confident smile for my compliment.
“Frankly?” I asked, puzzled by all this.
“Of course,” she said, straightening her head, letting the warm glow of light stray gently across her face. “I admire frankness in a man.”
“Well, frankly, lady, I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark alley.”
She laughed. Not loudly, not throwing her head back, but laughed, deep and husky, the sort of laugh that insinuates itself through a noisy cocktail party like visiting royalty, making the women feel quite shabby and dated, making the men surreptitiously check their flies before edging toward the fount of that precious mirth.
“Well put,” she said. “I like a man who can see beneath the surface.” Amusement wrinkled her eyes, and they sparkled wisely. Shafts of sunlight drifted within the blue and inviting depths of her eyes. “Men are too often fooled, too easily impressed by the physical appearance of a woman, by the outer beauty. It’s the cause of much grief, I’m sad to say—beauty and the inability of some men to see beyond it.”
She had confused me. At first, I had thought she was talking about herself, but at the end she seemed to mean Helen. I glanced toward the house, wishing Helen would bring the beer, come out and help me with her mother.
“Helen,” Mrs. Duffy said sharply, “please bring the drinks.”
She must have been waiting just behind the screen door because she came out before her mother finished the command. She brought her mother another tall frosted drink, took the empty glass, then handed me a can of beer. She stood in front of us, her feet together, her hands held tightly at her waist, her head bowed.
“Perhaps Mr. Milodragovitch would like a glass, Helen.”
“Oh, no,” I said quickly.
“Then if you’ll excuse us for a moment, Helen. Your friend and I have several things to discuss.” I reached for Helen to keep her with us, but she moved away from my arm, crossed the yard and hunkered on a large stone on the creek bank, doodling with a twig in a hand’s span of dirt between the stones. “Why don’t we sit down,” Mrs. Duffy suggested firmly, sitting as easily as she had stood, so I took the other chair, slumping all the way into it. “I understand from Helen that you have asked her to marry you,” she said, the tone of her voice letting me know how difficult it was to believe poor Helen. She sat on the very edge of her lounge chair, her knees together, her body and face posed as if for a portrait sitting. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “Or was that just sugar to blow in her ear?”
“No. I was serious.”
“Was?”
“Am serious.”
“Then I feel it is my responsibility as Helen’s mother to acquaint you with several matters of some importance. I know that you must be quite fatigued, so I won’t impose on your hospitality any longer than necessary.”
“Okay.”
“Are you a good man, Mr. Milodragovitch?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Are you a man with many virtues? Aside from the obvious one of endurance, which I judge by the condition of your face. A lesser man would have found a way to quit a long time ago. But do you have any other virtues?”
“Lady, I don’t know,” I grumbled, irritated, wanting to take a hot shower and lie down next to my lady.
“I hope you do. I sincerely hope so. Particularly the virtue of forgiveness, because you have a great deal to forgive.”
“Can I get another beer first?” I asked. Somehow my beer was already empty. “I always forgive better when I’ve got a beer.”
“How quaint. Don’t bother to get up. Helen can get it. Helen! Another beer for your friend, please.”
Helen rose obediently from her stone and shuffled across the lawn, her gnawed hands stealing toward her mouth.
“Don’t bite your nails, child.”
“Yes, Mother.”
We were silent as we waited. She sat as still as a bird sleeping on a limb, but I shifted constantly in my chair, finding a new sore spot each time I moved.
“You may stay if you like,” Mrs. Duffy said to Helen when she brought me the beer. But she went back to her stone. “I understand that you’ve had quite a hard time of it since Helen first came to your office.”
“At least I’m alive,” I said. “Some people aren’t.”
“Yes, so I understand,” she said, nodding her head in a brief sympathetic dismissal. “But I must go on. We have a flight to catch—”
“Goddammit, lady, slow down. All this crap got started, all this, a lot of people are dead, all because of your goddamned son, so don’t tell me you’ve got a flight to catch, that—”
“Not my son,” she said bluntly. “Hers.”
“What?”
“Raymond was her illegitimate son.”
“Come on—she’s not old enough to—”
“Don’t be silly. She’s quite old enough. She seduced her high school band director when she was barely thirteen. I think she had had two periods before she became pregnant. I see you’re having difficulty believing me. The women in my family have always been sexually precocious. We mature at an early age. Helen was a love child. I gave birth to her three weeks to the day after my fifteenth birthday. Unfortunately, unlike me, she had seduced a married man, which I could understand if not forgive, but I made the mistake of trying to atone for her mistake by adopting her son. Perhaps if she had never told Raymond of their relationship, he might have been a different sort of young man. Who knows? As it was, she told him and spoiled him terribly, and he grew up weak and effeminate, a vicious and greedy boy, full of senseless violence and hate. I tried, God knows I tried, but each time I corrected the boy, he ran to her for protectio
n—”
“Hey, wait a minute,” I said, flat in my chair like a man who hadn’t rolled with the last punch. “This is all very interesting, but I don’t see what it has to do with me.”
Her slender legs crossed with a nylon hiss, she sipped at her drink, then she looked at me with her smoothly amused smile. She said, “As you can see by Helen’s face, this has a great deal to do with you.”
When I looked at Helen, her eyes were wild again, her hands held up like a mask, and I recalled why her eyes were familiar. They were Raymond’s eyes without the hate.
“I still don’t see—”
“I must apologize,” Mrs. Duffy interrupted quietly, “for waiting so long to interject myself into this affair, but my husband is an invalid while I am still a healthy woman, with, as my mother used to say, my own special needs, and I admit that I’ve been occupied fulfilling them. Otherwise, none of this might have happened. You see, I’ve been in the habit of allowing Helen to spend her summers as she chooses as long as they are spent away from home. She is quite childish about some things and she lacks my discretion. In the past she has caused me considerable embarrassment in Storm Lake, which is, after all, a small town. I had no idea that she had used this freedom to come out here to see Raymond—I’d expressly forbidden it—until after his death, and I had no idea that she had come back to hire you to investigate the death until it was too late.”
“So?”
“So this afternoon, I caught her in rather a compromising lie, and made her tell me the truth. It’s a rather dreadful story, but I’m quite certain that it is the truth.”
“And?”
“Well, it seems that Helen knew from the beginning that Raymond intended to use her money for his nefarious scheme. She didn’t approve, of course, but she was, as usual, unable to resist his demands. And when he telephoned her, suicidally despondent because he had caused the death of one of his vile friends—”
“One Willy Jones,” I said. “Raymond shot him accidentally.”
“Whatever you say.”
“And burned down the hotel to cover it up.”
The Wrong Case Page 28