Operation Deathmaker

by Dan J. Marlowe

  “Afraid?”

  “Well, of Swope and Toad together. Since they both live on the boat, it would be kind of like throwing them out on the street. I believe the boss halfway thinks they might lay for him some night when he was here late catching up on the bookwork.”

  “I see.” I held up the key. “I’ll bring this back in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  I went out of the office and walked back to the Hind Site. I stepped down onto the deck again and once more made my way aft to the cockpit. I was about to go down the three-step ladder when I heard a burbling sound. I looked over the cabin roof toward the main channel. A cabin cruiser, apparently exploring the back fingers of the marina, was easing around in the cul-de-sac. It started to churn up mounds of roiling water as its powerful engines brought it about and under way. Its stern dug into the water, and its bow began cutting heavily through the narrow channel.

  I stopped watching and started down the ladder. I was on the middle step when the waves created by the cruiser reached the Hind Site. An experienced seaman would have anticipated the result, but the boat’s sudden lurch flung me from the ladder into the locked door. My injured arm struck it first, painfully, and I cursed as I rebounded. The boat’s countersway tossed me in the other direction, but I was able to grab the binnacle pedestal and hang on until the Hind Site settled down again.

  It didn’t improve my mood when I unlocked the cabin door and found another one inside with a sturdy padlock barring entrance. At least the inner door was hidden from outside observation. I searched the boat until I found a length of rusty metal resembling a tire tool. One quick application of force and the padlock snapped open and hung uselessly.

  It was stiflingly humid inside the cabin, but it lacked the telltale mustiness of a long-enclosed area. I could smell bacon grease and the locker-room odor of stale perspiration. Unlike its exterior, the interior of the Hind Site was a crummy mess.

  My automatic had replaced the discarded padlock-opener in my right hand. I knew no one was aboard, but the gun appeared seemingly of its own volition. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. I hoped it would be some hard evidence linking the boat’s residents to the kidnapping. Something like a discarded, unlabeled aerosol can that had once contained a noxious gas.

  Another four steps led downward into the main cabin. A quick look around verified recent occupancy and the seeming expectation of continued usage. The compact galley was well-stocked with an abundance of stores. The cooking stove’s propane tank was full. Aside from the dirty dishes scattered around, the Hind Site seemed almost ready to depart upon a lengthy cruise.

  I looked into two tiny bedrooms—bunkrooms would have been a more appropriate word—that were in as great a state of disarray as the galley. A quick tour of the main salon turned up nothing of interest. A complete sound entertainment center was built into a sideboard. It contained an all-band radio and an extensive library of cassette tapes.

  Beyond the main cabin a narrow passageway led to two staterooms, one on either side. The one on the left was spotless. It even had a bedspread on the bed. The stateroom on the right was dark when I opened its door. My foot struck something on the carpeting. I stooped to pick it up. When I had it in my hand and in the light, I saw that it was the belt from the bright-yellow travel dress that Melissa had worn to the airport.

  I went to the porthole and ripped the covering from it. Sunlight flooded the room. One look was enough to make me wish I hadn’t bothered. The matching bedspread had been pulled off and flung into a corner. Dried bloodstains spotted and smeared most of the sheet that was visible. Melissa’s torn, bloodstained slip, panties, and bra were strewn on the floor. There was also a section of line that looked similar to the rope that had bound the girl’s dead body to the rocking chair in the abandoned store.

  The odor in the room almost made me gag. My right hand was hurting, and I looked down at it. I was squeezing the grips of the automatic so hard it was cutting into my palm. I wished for nothing so much in the world as to have Mr. Martin Swope and Mr. Toad Almeida board the Hind Site right at that instant.

  The stateroom had been both prison and torture chamber for Melissa Andrews. At least one of her kidnappers had a very sick mind. Her kidnappers had probably known from the outset they were going to kill the girl, but that hadn’t been enough for them. She had died as no one should have to die. I intended to make a few people very unhappy about that.

  It seemed such a waste. A bright, cheerful, happy girl in the throes of her first love affair. It was her misfortune to fall in love with a creep so weak he couldn’t control his partners, or who took an active part himself.

  I left that horror of a stateroom and went back up on deck. Before I could climb up onto the pier again I heard a shrill whistle that seemed to come from right alongside the boat except that there wasn’t anything there. When I raised my eyes, I found myself looking across an elbow of water to the harbormaster’s office beyond. Carl Hagedorn, bare to the waist, was raising a bullhorn to his lips. “Telephone for you, Mr. Elliott!” he blared. “Telephone!”

  I waved mechanical acknowledgement.

  Telephone for me?

  Telephone for Dewey Elliott?

  There was something rotten a lot closer than in the state of Denmark.

  Valerie Cooper knew that Dewey Elliott could be found at the Marina del Rey.

  Val Cooper and nobody else.

  I went along the pier at a fast trot until I reached the office. “The call was for Dewey Elliott or Earl Drake,” Carl explained, holding out the phone to me. “Lucky I asked your name, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lucky.” I took the telephone. “Hi,” I said into it casually for his benefit.

  “Th-this is Val.” I could hear a tremor in her voice. I had the whole picture before she said another word. She was standing there with a gun against her spine saying whatever the holder of the gun wanted her to say. “Can you c-come back to the M-Miramar right away? S-something’s come up.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Probably take me three-quarters of an hour.” I knew it would take less than thirty minutes. “Okay?”

  I could actually hear her swallow before she replied. “O-okay.”

  “Thanks,” I said to Carl Hagedorn, handing him the receiver. I also gave him the key to the Hind Site. “I’ll be back for another look.”

  “I don’t think you’d be making any mistake,” he said earnestly. “I’ve got a feeling that Swope’s price would probably be right considering the shape he seems to be in.”

  “All right,” I said and left.

  During the drive back to Pasadena, I had time to wonder who I’d find waiting for me at the Miramar. The Kirkmans, uncle and nephew? Swope and his Cuban deckhand? No need to wonder now how the ransom money had been retrieved from the bus. One of the “Mexican laborers” on the bus had undoubtedly been Toad Almeida.

  It wasn’t hard to understand their persistence in wanting to get rid of me, either. They had to think that if they succeeded in wasting me they were home free. It must have been a nasty jolt for them when they went to the Miramar looking for me and found Val Cooper. She was now a potential witness against them, too. The tremor in her voice when she phoned me under duress indicated that the kidnappers had made that clear to her, also.

  Whoever was holding Val hostage at the motel apparently expected me to walk right in the door. They should be feeling smugly pleased with themselves while they waited. Two more killings and they had an airtight, steel-riveted crime. No, three more killings. To be absolutely sure they had to eliminate Hazel, too.

  I knew how I was going to handle the present situation. Val’s room at the Miramar had two large windows shaded by coconut palm trees. A quick stalk from outside, glass shattered by my gun butt, and the element of surprise would be transferred to me. The prospect of the sounds of shattering glass and even of gunfire didn’t bother me. When I left the Miramar this time, it would be for good.

  I parked on a sid
e street near the motel. I cut through the grounds, avoiding the shady walks. I detoured by the parking area to see if the gray sedan with the black vinyl roof was there. It was. I debated letting the air out of the tires, but decided against it. If I got rid of whoever was inside the motel, I’d have to get rid of the car, too.

  I circled the wing of the building that contained Val’s room, easing along the side of the motel, always keeping a bush or a tree trunk between me and her room in case someone should be looking out a window. The foot-wide glass transom at the top of one of the windows had been cranked open. I could hear them before I could see them.

  “S’pose ‘e don’t come?” a foreign-sounding voice was saying. “What is thees woman to ‘im?”

  “He’ll come because he’s got no idea we’re here,” a second voice said. It sounded confident. “Will you put that goddamn knife away, Toad?”

  My shadow would fall on the glass if I tried to look in the window from my present position. I dropped to my knees and crawled past the brickwork below the window. My shadow was no longer in front of me. Inch by careful inch I moved my head forward so I could see inside the room.

  Val Cooper was bending over the bed, palms flat on its surface. She had on bra and panties; nothing else. Both pieces were of the bikini type, and ample flesh overflowed them. The muscles in the backs of her thighs stood out like corded ropes.

  Behind her a flat-featured, dark-faced man was holding a long-bladed knife against the crease of her buttocks, rubbing it slowly up and down. I could see no cutting pressure, but it was obvious from the strained, ashen expression on Val’s face that the knife was making solid contact.

  It was almost impossible to realize that just two days before this woman had nothing on her mind but redecorating her house, running back and forth from the Viking Motel to supervise painters and paperhangers, wondering if the new draperies were expensive enough. I had done her no favor.

  Toad Almeida was crooning something in a hoarse voice. He repeated it several times before I recognized it. “Fuck you later, baby,” he was sing-songing over and over.

  “Stop it, Toad,” a second voice said.

  “Eef you wan’ obedience from a female, jus’ put a knife to her ass.” There was a dreamy quality to Toad’s voice as though he was high on something. He laughed suddenly, a grating sound. “You weel come soon, yes, woman?”

  “Goddammit, Toad, I’m telling you to stop it! Where’s Drake?” Martin Swope, previously unseen, wheeled into view, striding across the room impatiently. He was good-looking, deeply tanned, sharply dressed. “I’ve got a damn good mind to call the boy genius and tell him to come over here and kill his own snakes. We should be on the boat and heading out of the harbor.”

  “You theenk he found anythin’ on the boat?” Toad asked. His knife continued to rub between Val Cooper’s thighs.

  “I think it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what he found.” Swope said it emphatically. “We finish him off here, and that’s it.”

  Toad Almeida’s knife had changed the equation for me.

  I could kill them from where I stood, but probably not without Toad’s wicked-looking knife inflicting irreparable damage to Val’s voluptuous body. I backed away from the window silently, circled the wing of the building swiftly, and went in through the front entrance.

  Inside the lobby I went straight to the house phone. My back was to the switchboard operator behind the front desk counter. Even if she could see me she wouldn’t recognize my changed appearance since I’d left the country store.

  “Room 105, please,” I said when the operator came on the line.

  I could picture the tableau in the room when the phone rang. Toad Almeida hurriedly holstering his knife. Martin Swope hustling the trembling Val to the telephone, threatening her with unnamed horrors if she didn’t respond properly. The receiver clicked in my ear. “Y-yes?” Val’s voice said tremulously.

  “I want to speak to Mrs. Valerie Cooper,” I said. I knew Swope would be listening, so I tried to make my voice sound as official as possible.

  If Val recognized my voice, she did a good job of hiding it. When she spoke again, her voice was fainter, as though she’d turned her head away from the mouthpiece to speak over her shoulder to the hovering Swope. “I’m not registered here in that name,” I heard her murmur to him.

  “Who is it?” I could hear Swope’s background question.

  “I don’t know.”

  There was an instant’s silence, and then Swope’s voice thundered in the phone. “Who the hell is this?” he barked.

  “Lieutenant Danton of the Pasadena Police Department,” I said snappily. “I want to see Mrs. Cooper. If she’s not out at the front desk here in two minutes, you tell her I’m coming down to her room.”

  There was another momentary silence. “Yeah, sure, she’ll be right there,” Swope’s voice said finally. “A few clothes and a little lipstick. You know how it is, Lieutenant.” He chuckled heartily. I heard the thud of the phone being set down on something hard. “It’s the police!” I heard Swope say. He sounded incredulous. “What the hell do the police want to talk to you about?”

  “I theenk we not wait to see, eh, Marteen?” Toad Almeida’s voice overrode Val’s when she started to say something. “Right. We get out of here. Get your dress on, you.”

  “There was a shuffling sound as if Val had been thrust away from the telephone. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but we can’t let her talk to the police,” Swope said. “We’ll take her to Kirkman’s condominium and let the boy genius handle it from there. It’s about time he started carrying his share of the load, anyway. Come on.”

  I hung up the phone and left the lobby. I went directly to my parked car and moved it around the corner until I could watch the Miramar parking lot. In less than a minute Swope, Toad, and Val showed up alongside the black-vinyl-roofed gray sedan. Val was still trying to tug down the dress she had hurriedly pulled on. Toad shoved her into the back seat, and the sedan left the lot with a screech of tires.

  Martin Swope was at the wheel.

  I followed them in the Cutlass.

  I wasn’t concerned about losing them during the drive across town, because I knew Roger Kirkman’s address. I had no difficulty in remaining three or four cars behind, however. Swope drove above the speed limit all the way. He was acting like a man with a lot on his mind.

  At a different time and place I might have admired the bastard’s nerve.

  He had reacted well to the seemingly difficult situation into which I had thrust him.

  But admiration was not the emotion uppermost in my mind.

  If the two Kirkmans were at the apartment when Swope and Almeida delivered Val, a number of things were going to be settled permanently.

  TEN

  THE TAILING JOB BECAME MORE CHALLENGING AFTER Swope left the Santa Monica Freeway and turned south on La Brea, heading toward Windsor Hills. I had to close up to avoid being cut off by changing traffic lights. Swope gave only cursory attention to the cars around him. I didn’t want to lose him because of the chance he might change his mind about taking Val to Kirkman’s place.

  Swope made a right turn on Slauson Avenue. When I followed, both of us were driving into a setting sun so diffused by a dissipating smog bank that it was like heading into a wall of fire. Because of it, I almost missed seeing Swope turn back up La Cienega Boulevard. It really wouldn’t have mattered too much at that point, because we were within four blocks of Roger Kirkman’s apartment, and it was plain that Swope hadn’t changed his mind.

  I was still watching street numbers when Swope slowed in front of a building whose first-floor facade consisted of large expanses of smoked plate glass set in gold-anodized steel framing. A richly furnished lobby could be dimly seen behind the opaque, gray-tinted glass. Room airconditioners projected from every windowsill of the seven-story building, giving it a mechanically geometrical—yet wartlike—pattern.

  Swope drove past a semicircular dri
ve in front of the building. He drove to the next corner, hugged the curve going around it, and immediately headed the sedan into a sloping drive that could only lead to a garage under the building.

  By the time I parked across the street from the ramp, Swope had left his car and was approaching an elevator. Toad was a few yards behind him with Val’s arm in his grasp. Swope used a key to open the elevator door. They all stepped inside, and the elevator indicator tracked upward to the fourth floor and then stopped.

  I walked down into the garage and took a look at the lock on the elevator door. It was a simple type. I was just getting ready to pick it when I heard the whine of the elevator descending. I moved away from the door and around the corner of the elevator shaft. I didn’t think either Swope or Almeida would be leaving that quickly, but I didn’t want to risk it.

  A man and woman stepped off the elevator. He was in a white dinner jacket, and she wore an ankle-length gown. They walked toward the lineup of parked cars, and I moved around the elevator shaft and slipped through the elevator door before it was completely closed. I punched the self-service button marked “L” for lobby. I knew Roger Kirkman’s apartment was on the fourth floor, but I didn’t know its number.

  A doorman was sitting on a bench alongside the elevator when I walked off. He had more gold braid on his uniform than a Peruvian general. I moved past him to the mailboxes near the front entrance. A quick glance showed that Kirkman’s apartment was 4-D.

  I snapped my fingers as though I’d forgotten my key, walked back across the lobby, and reboarded the elevator, which hadn’t moved during my stopover. The doorman barely glanced at me. I was inside the building, so I must be all right.

  The fourth floor corridor was cathedral quiet. I turned right, then had to reverse direction before I arrived at the door of 4-D. No sounds came from inside. The door looked impressively heavy. I loosened my tie and took the thin-steel z-shaped torque wrench and pick from under my collar. The door lock yielded in ten seconds with just a slight snapping sound.