For the next twenty minutes I pulled the rope, released tires, and fired steadily, pausing only to reload the three clips I kept interchanging in the automatic. Sometimes I had four tires coming down the hill at the same time. When the chute was empty, I scoured the wooded area across the road for the downed tires. A pleasing number of the cardboard centers had bullet punctures. Some holes were small and clean-looking from wide-angle shots, while others were jagged serrations from almost head-on snap shots.
Breathing the pine-laden, frosty morning air made a man feel good that he was alive. I drove up the hill again and reloaded the chute after I’d collected the tires. On the second round I stopped shooting when the chute was still half-full of tires. I still had some ammo left, but an increasingly strong mental image was playing havoc with my concentration.
The image was of Hazel in bed at the ranch house.
I climbed into the jeep, drove back to the barn, went into the house, and climbed the stairs to the second floor bedroom.
When I opened my eyes, sunlight was streaming in the Miramar Motel window. I hit the floor in my stocking feet and pulled the shade. The angle of the sunbeams indicated that it was still very early and that I’d only slept a few hours, but I hadn’t intended to sleep at all.
I stripped and showered, luxuriating under the hot water and gasping under the cold. The dream had made me think of Hazel. It was the first time we’d been separated recently for any considerable period, and I missed her. Not only for what she could do for me in bed.
I went back into the bedroom and dressed. Then I put my makeup kit and newly purchased briefcase on the bed and began carefully counting and separating into stacks the cash that had come from the Davis, Dodds, and Badger brokerage office. I had piles of money all over the top of the bed when the telephone rang.
I knew who it was.
I picked up the receiver and said, “Hello.” I watched the tape start moving inside the cassette.
“This is y’all know who, frien’,” Cottonmouth said. “If I c’n b’lieve what I see in the paper, you got the money.”
“I’ve got the money,” I agreed.
“What-all is yore reg’lar line of work?” Cottonmouth asked. Genuine curiosity seemed uppermost in his voice.
“I’ve got the money,” I repeated.
“Yeah, that’s the important thang. Well, now, since yore all set, we’re all set. We’re movin’ the schedule up. Listen t’ me now. When—”
A key rattled in the lock of the motel room door. I pivoted on the balls of my feet, drawing my gun in the same movement. The door opened, and I found myself sighting the automatic upon Val Cooper. She stood in the open doorway in rigid astonishment, her eyes drifting from the weapon trained upon her toward the money on the bed. I beckoned for her to come inside, motioned to her to close the door, and held a finger to my lips to indicate silence about as quickly as the signals could be given.
She obeyed as though sleepwalking. I wasn’t overly concerned that she might say something that Cottonmouth could overhear on the telephone. The sight of the mass of green bills carpeting the top of her bed had left Valerie Cooper momentarily speechless.
With the other part of my mind I had been trying to keep up with the instructions being given to me on the phone, but my concentration wasn’t that good. “Whoa, whoa,” I stalled. “Let me get a pencil to write it down so I won’t make any mistakes.”
“You don’ write nothin’ down, frien’,” Cottonmouth said coldly. “An’ you damn well better not make any mistakes if’n you care what happens to the girl, y’hear?”
“Let me talk to her,” I said.
“She’ll talk to you.” The quality of Cottonmouth’s voice changed as though he had turned his face away from the phone. “Drag her over here,” he said.
There was a slight pause, and then Melissa’s breathless, high-pitched voice sounded in my ear. “Oh, please do what they say, Earl! Please! I’m so f-frightened! Don’t go to the police or they’ll k-kill me! Please do what they say!” There was the sound of a slap. “Ohhh-h!”
“That was her bare ass that I slapped,” Cottonmouth’s voice came back on the line. “She looks real cute with her pants down.” He waited for me to say something, then resumed when I didn’t. “Satisfied?” he growled.
If I had ever heard total fear and panic in a female voice, I had heard it in Melissa’s. “Yes,” I said.
“All right. Be at the phone booth on the corner of Myrtle Avenue an’ Huntington no later than eight this mornin’. That’s just west of Duarte. Got it?”
“Yes. What are the rest of the instructions?”
“You’ll get ‘em when we’re damn well ready to give ‘em to you. Myrtle Avenue an’ Huntington at eight. Doahn’t miss.”
Cottonmouth hung up on me.
I looked at my watch.
I had three-quarters of an hour.
“Where did all that come from?” Val inquired, gesturing toward the bed.
I began to jam the stacked and counted greenbacks into the briefcase. “As the ex-wife of a lawyer, you don’t really want to know that, do you?” I countered.
“You’re actually going to pay the ransom?”
“Yes. I just heard Melissa on the phone. She’s a very badly frightened girl.”
“I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing this.” There was more warmth in Val Cooper’s voice than I had ever heard before. “No matter what you had to do.”
“I’m doing what Hazel would do if she were here. How is she?”
“She had a restful night. The doctors are going to examine her again this morning.”
“Have the police tried to question her yet?”
“No.”
But they would. I was pretty sure I didn’t have to try to get word to Hazel to dummy up, but I would just as soon not have her questioned at all. That was going to be my first order of business after I took care of Cottonmouth and Company. I was going to move Hazel out of that damn hospital without benefit of clergy.
“Oh, I also made a few telephone calls about Roger Kirkman,” Val said.
I snapped the latches on the briefcase and turned to confront her. “Learn anything?”
“He’s Stanley Kirkman’s uncle. He practices criminal law, and because of that has some rather unusual associations. He’s a bachelor and a heavy drinker. He’s not too well thought of in the profession. One man I spoke to gave me a number to call today that will supposedly furnish more detailed background.”
“It’s a good start, Val. Thanks.”
I set the packed briefcase down and went back to the tape recorder. I rewound the cassette enough to play back the most recent conversation with Cottonmouth, then sat down to listen to it. I concentrated on listening to the background sounds on the tape, rather than the voices, hoping that I might be able to get some idea of where the phone call had been made from.
I could gain no more than a vague impression that the call had been made from an open area, this being indicated by a slightly hollow sound. But then Melissa’s voice came on the tape. It was sharp, clear, and quite plainly she had spoken in a confined space. There was none of the echoing effect that had been present when Cottonmouth was speaking. But the hollow background sound was there again when he came back on the line to give me my instructions.
“That poor girl sounds scared to death!” Val said when the tape stopped.
I avoided looking at her.
I didn’t care at all for what I was thinking.
It seemed I wasn’t the only one who could play around with tape recorders. It probably would have taken an expert to say so positively, but I felt now that Melissa’s voice had been recorded. And if it had, there was no longer any guarantee that she was still alive, or would be after I made the ransom payment. Especially if my steadily increasing suspicion that her boyfriend was an integral part of the kidnapping proved correct.
I reset the unit to record incoming calls again. I picked up my cash-laden briefcase. “If
I’m not back in three hours, call the police, will you, Val?”
“Why wouldn’t you be back?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
“These are unstable types I’m dealing with,” I avoided a direct answer. “They might want to hold me up temporarily after the payoff so they can make their getaway. It might be important for Melissa to be released right away, and if I can’t manage it, someone else should have a crack at it.”
“You’re expecting trouble, aren’t you?”
“It’s not exactly like selling Girl Scout cookies.” It was the only answer I could think to give her. I put the handle of my makeup kit in my left hand; I was carrying both kit and briefcase in that hand. I found that I could manage it. It left my right hand free. “Get some rest, Val.”
“I’m not tired,” she said. “First I’ll make a couple more phone calls and see what else I can find out about Roger Kirkman. I’m beginning to dislike the sound of that name.”
I let myself out into the corridor. The motel was enveloped in early-morning quiet. Even the maids weren’t on duty yet. There was one more thing I wanted to do before I departed for the appointed rendezvous. I stopped at the lobby phone booth and placed makeup kit and briefcase inside it while I stood and gave the long-distance operator Jed Raymond’s number in Hudson, Florida.
The phone rang several times before Jed’s sleepy voice answered. He had never been noted for being an early riser, but by East Coast time he was overdoing it even for him. “Big party last night?” I said when he finally answered.
“Oh, hey, it’s you! How’s—”
“No names,” I cut him off. “She’s doing as well as can be expected.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jed thought a lot of the big girl. “I can’t find out a damn thing from that hospital! Why all the secrecy? Why can’t you tell me—”
“I don’t have time to talk, Jed. Right now I need the answers to a couple of questions.”
Jed knew me well enough to understand I couldn’t always do things in normal channels. He simmered down. “What is it?” he asked.
“Did the niece know about the substantial appreciation of her educational trust fund which made her an heiress?”
“She didn’t know anything specific about it until two months ago when she first called me on the subject. And in gettin’ an answer together for her I checked Nate’s files, too.” Nate Pepperman had been Jed’s predecessor as Hazel’s money manipulator. “Nate kept good notes, and there was nothin’ in them to indicate the girl had ever asked him the same question.”
“Thanks, Jed. That’s what I wanted to know. I’ll be talking to you.”
“Wait! What are you—”
I hung up on him.
Impolite but necessary.
I had just about enough time to get to Myrtle Avenue and Huntington Street.
SEVEN
I PICKED UP MAKEUP KIT AND BRIEFCASE AGAIN AND walked out to the motel parking lot and the Cutlass. I put the two cases on the front seat beside me, then sat for a moment, considering.
It was tempting to use the kit and change my appearance again before starting out. It would avoid the possibility of a rifle bullet at long range and the subsequent retrieval of the briefcase by the kidnappers with no objection from me. If the kidnappers had done their homework, the Cutlass was recognizable, of course. And there was no reason to believe they hadn’t. Swapping the Cutlass for another rental car could eliminate that weak link, though.
I finally put both ideas out of my mind because it was distinctly possible that recognition of me and the Cutlass might be a necessary part of whatever was to follow. If I shuffled the deck as far as appearances went, I might be doing Melissa no favor at all.
My thoughts again focused on Stan Kirkman.
Melissa apparently had had no knowledge of the extent of her wealth until two months ago.
Had she called Jed at Kirkman’s urging?
Had Kirkman coaxed her to cash in her endowment as Hazel suspected?
Had Melissa found out from Jed there was nothing she could do without Hazel’s signature?
Had Kirkman sent Melissa on an ostensible visit merely to acquire that signature?
And when she failed to acquire it, had he set up the kidnapping scheme to achieve the same result?
There was one major factor that seemed to argue against it. The escalation from simple con game to a life-imprisonment possibility for kidnapping seemed too great a leap for a college student. Although how many college students would have the cunning or the gall to attempt to pressure a. girlfriend into liquidating her inheritance and making it available to him?
Well, eventually I intended to acquire answers.
Right now I had a job to do.
I drove to the outskirts of Pasadena and the designated phone booth at Myrtle Avenue and Huntington Street. Despite the early hour, there were no vacant parking spaces along the curb close to the glass-walled telephone booth where I was to receive the next message. The aluminum-framed enclosure was situated near the corner, where bus passengers to Pomona and San Bernadino waited on a bench.
I drove around the block after glancing at my watch. The time factor was getting tight. The only times I envy motion picture stars are when I’m looking for a parking space. Cars driven by actors in the movies invariably draw up into a vacant slot no matter how busy traffic might be in the scene. They never need to jockey back and forth to get into a small space. There’s always plenty of open curbside area for a smooth sweep, right in front of the camera.
I speeded up in the midst of my second circuit when a compact foreign car pulled away from the curb only three spaces from the phone booth. I squeezed into the barely adequate space with the convenient help of the Cutlass’s power steering.
I shoved the money-crammed briefcase out of sight under the front seat, stepped out, locked the car, and put a dime in the meter. Then I checked the condition of the telephone in the booth. Pay phones are ripped-off from one hour to the next, even though receiver cords are encased in a wire-cutter-resistant steel conduit. It doesn’t seem to discourage determined vandals from tearing the entire phone out. This one appeared intact and workable, although the directories were missing and the glass panes of the booth itself were either cracked or missing.
I had seven minutes to spare on the timing set up by Cottonmouth. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion since his last call. I had made up my mind to steer would-be phone users away no matter how much persuasion it took, but no one came near the booth despite the patiently waiting bus riders, who would have seemed to be prime candidates to be phoning to announce late arrivals.
When the call finally came, it was the same mush-mouthed Southern accent I’d come to despise. “That you, Drake?” Cottonmouth rasped.
“Yes, it is.” I obeyed a sudden impulse. “I want to talk to Melissa again.”
“Would you b’lieve I don’ give a good goddamn what you want? Now you jus’—”
“No talk, no cash,” I interposed.
The honeyed tones turned flat and deadly. “You jus’ keep on talkin’ that way if’n you want the girl’s hide mailed to you in six inch strips.” There was an instant of heavy-breathing, threat-laden silence. “Y’get the point?”
“I get it,” I surrendered. I couldn’t gamble with Melissa’s welfare, and Cottonmouth knew it. I could feel the back of my neck heating up from frustration.
“Thass better,” Cottonmouth announced. “Now feel under the base of the phone.”
I felt. My fingers brushed over the edge of a small envelope taped flat against the metal. I peeled it loose.
“I’ve got an envelope,” I said.
“There’s a cah key inside. It fits a vee-hickle in the Acme parkin’ lot in the middle of the block on Puente Avenue jus’ beyond the Claremont intersection. Got that?”
“How will I know the car?”
“The license number’s wrote on the back of the envelope.”
I turned the envelo
pe over. Crudely printed letters and numbers delivered the message. “What happens then?”
“There’s a note in the cah. Do what it tells you.”
“How much time—”
A click came over the receiver. I was talking to myself. Cottonmouth was removing the faint chance I might somehow try to trace his call, although he must have known that not even the telephone company’s most sophisticated equipment could guarantee success from a pay phone.
I was more frustrated than ever.
So far the bastards hadn’t made a single mistake.
I had started to ask how much time I was allowed to reach the new place of assignment. Morning commuter traffic on the freeway hadn’t built up to the bumper-to-bumper peak it would attain in another hour, but there was enough of it to make the pace poky. It made me irritable. If it was Cottonmouth’s intention to keep me off balance, he was succeeding admirably.
It was with a feeling of relief that I reached the Puente exit. The Acme lot was in the middle of the block as promised, an asphalt-paved lot between three stories of bricked walls rising canyonlike on all but the street side.
When I turned in from the street, a tall black youth stepped out of a sentry-box-sized shed large enough only for a single standing man and a cash register. He tore a perforated, printed tag in two and stuck half “of it under the windshield wiper. He handed me the other portion. “How long do you expect to leave it?” he asked.
His clear, crisp speech, without a trace of Dixie accent, surprised me in the context of his deep-black skin and bushy Afro. I had somehow expected him to sound like Cottonmouth. “It might be quite a while,” I said, recovering.
He said something in reply, but he had lost my attention. I was looking at a sedan parked farther back in the lot. The license number written on the key envelope was superfluous. The car was the same gray sedan with black vinyl roof that I had first seen in the L.A. Airport parking lot in Scene One of this nightmare involving Melissa.
The attendant parked my car while I, carrying makeup kit and briefcase, walked to the gray sedan. I had already looked underneath the gray sedan from both sides when the attendant came back to me. “I’m picking this one up,” I said, showing him the loose key in my hand. I inserted it into the door lock, and the key turned easily. But I didn’t open the door.
Operation Deathmaker Page 9