I went over the fence with only a minor nip from a single barb. My shoes squished water at each step. I reached the car and unlocked the driver’s-side door. Val was sitting up in the back seat with her face in her hands. She started violently at the first sound of the key in the lock.
“All that s-shooting!” she said faintly.
I pulled my automatic from its holster and dropped it on the seat beside me. I reached across to the glove compartment, opened it, and removed Roger Kirkman’s foreign automatic. I made the change reluctantly but for a purpose. I could have made my gun serviceable in ten seconds despite the water it had been in. But I had fired six shots from it, and I had no replacement ammunition. Kirkman’s gun presumably held a full load. Where I was going, firepower could be more important to me than the feel of a familiar weapon.
I checked Kirkman’s gun. There was no bullet in the chamber. I worked the slide manually and pumped a slug into a ready-for-business position. Then I started the car’s engine. When I looked around, lights were coming on in berthed cruisers and excited voices were calling to each other across the water.
I edged the Cutlass out onto Lincoln Boulevard and headed for Pasadena. I pulled off my sodden hairpiece and threw it into the back seat. I handed my makeup kit back to Val. “Open that and get me a dry wig,” I told her.
I put the dripping briefcase down beside my left leg, keeping it away from the packaged dry money that was on the floor on the other side of the front seat. I could feel myself soaking into the car seat. Val reached over the seat-back and handed me a wig. I parked on the shoulder in a dark area.
I took the kit back from her and dried my head and face with tissues. I put on the dry toupee and did a sketchy job on my face with toning cream and powder. Val stared, fascinated, through the entire process. “You killed those men on the boat, didn’t you,” she said when I closed up the kit.
“Is that a statement or a question?” I asked her.
She didn’t pursue it. Her nerves seemed to be under better control. I had the Cutlass back on the highway again. Stan Kirkman was on my mind again. It looked as though he’d had the Hind Site staked out. He’d never have had the nerve to attack those on board, but he’d demonstrated that he was ready to pick them off one at a time. A very greedy young man.
“Where do you want me to take you?” I asked Val Cooper.
“Take me?”
“You said you were going to San Francisco.”
“Oh. Yes. But first I have to go back to the Viking and pack.”
That started a new train of thought. I began watching the shoulder of the highway for a telephone booth. I was beginning to feel chilled in my soggy clothing. I pulled the Cutlass over again when I saw a booth. “Be right back,” I told Val, opening the car door and climbing out. I wrested change from my wet, wrinkled pocket with difficulty and entered the booth. I couldn’t remember the number of the Viking Motel, so I had to look it up.
“Mrs. Valerie Cooper,” I said to the answering voice after I’d dialed.
“Whom shall I say is calling, sir?”
Motel switchboard operators don’t ordinarily ask that. “Oswald Finnegan, her uncle,” I said.
A male voice came on the line. “Good evening, Mr. Finnegan,” it said smoothly. “I’m so glad you called. Mrs. Cooper doesn’t seem to be here right now. Do you have any idea where else she might be? I’m trying to locate her myself. Nothing serious. I just wanted to check on—”
I hung up the receiver and walked back to the Cutlass. “You can’t go back to the Viking,” I said when I had the car moving again. “The police are camping in your room.”
“Oh.” She sat there in the back seat, seemingly drained of thought and emotion.
“How about your house?” I asked.
“Yes.” She said it quickly. “Yes, that’s where I want to go.”
I was sorry the minute I’d asked the question. Her house—anywhere she’d have to stay alone—should be the last place she’d want to go. Her nerves were in tatters, but she wanted to jump off my sled so badly she’d say yes to anything. And how the hell could I blame her?
“Wait, I don’t have a key,” she was saying. “It’s in my purse at the Miramar.”
“If you really want to go there, Val, a key is the least of our problems. After what’s happened are you sure you want to stay alone?”
“It will only be for tonight,” she answered. “Tomorrow I’ll go to my sister’s.”
“Then tell me how to get to your place.”
She gave me directions, and I headed the Cutlass toward Holmby Terrace.
ELEVEN
I PARKED A BLOCK FROM VAL’S HOUSE. I WANTED TO look it over for police surveillance before I took her to her door. She had nothing to say when I left the car. She still didn’t have herself back in gear.
My clothes clung to me clammily. I was becoming more chilled all the time as the night breeze attempted to dry me. I did a quick tour of Val’s house and grounds. The police were taking no interest, so I went back to the Cutlass to get her.
She stood beside me at her back door while I removed the torque wrench and pick from under my soggy collar and opened the door in seven or eight seconds. “Call a cab to take you to the airport when you’re ready to leave,” I said.
“Yes.” She stood there, making no move to go inside. “You did some terrible things, Earl.”
It got to me. “Tell me just one thing I might have done differently, Val. Would it have changed anything?”
She had moved inside the doorway, and we were talking across the threshold. “I shouldn’t have said it,” she said quickly. “Say goodbye to Hazel for me.” Unexpectedly she reached out and touched one of the seams of my rebuilt face with her fingertips. “I think Hazel is lucky to have you, but I don’t know how she stands it. Or maybe what I’m saying is that I’m sorry I don’t measure up to Hazel.”
I refrained from saying that not many did.
“Would it—could it have been different for us if—if those awful men hadn’t come to the Miramar?” she asked wistfully.
“You’re a very attractive woman, Val,” I said diplomatically.
“I’ll say goodbye before I begin slobbering on your shirtfront,” she said more briskly. “Good luck.”
“The same,” I said, and I meant it.
I waved from the end of her front walk.
Then I drove across town to Roger Kirkman’s apartment.
I still had two unfinished pieces of business there.
Inside the apartment garage, I manipulated the lock on the self-service elevator. The lift rose silently to the fourth floor. I turned left toward 4-D. The door stood partially open. That told me what I was going to find. When I entered the apartment, I had Roger Kirkman’s gun in my hand.
I could hear Stan Kirkman before I could see him. “… old fool!” he was storming. “Who tied you up like this?”
I walked through the intervening rooms to the study where Val and I had been before. Stan Kirkman was sawing furiously with a letter opener at the gag tied across his uncle’s mouth. Their similarity in looks, minus 150 pounds of flab on the nephew with its accompanying breakdown of the body processes, was unmistakable when they were seen together.
“Who did this to you?” the nephew demanded again when the gag finally yielded to his efforts with the letter opener.
Roger Kirkman’s arms were still tied. His gross body was still roped to his chair. He turned his head and wiped the bloody lower half of his face on the shoulder of his shirt. “Needed—you,” he mumbled.
“I was busy,” Stan Kirkman said. “It took me so long to find the boat there was a hell of a shootout going on when I got there. I waited to see if they’d do the job for me, but one of them came out of the cabin carrying the briefcase with the other half of the money. It was so dark by that time I couldn’t even see which one it was.”
He grinned briefly. It was a shark’s grin: all teeth and no humor.
“But then, godd
amn the luck, when I shot him he went off the boat into the water with the briefcase. I think it’s at the bottom of the harbor. I hung around the entrance after the police came, and I watched what they carried out. Two bodies, but no briefcase.”
“B-bodies?” his uncle croaked.
“Did you think either of those types was going to hand the cash over to me?” Stan Kirkman flared. “Besides, I didn’t like the idea of their being able to talk later about what had happened. Listen, you didn’t answer me. Who tied you up? Swope? Before he went to the boat?”
Roger Kirkman’s tongue circled dry lips. “Drake,” he said.
“Drake?” The nephew’s voice soared dramatically. “DRAKE?” He took a step toward his uncle, then checked himself. “Those idiots didn’t kill him?” He passed a hand over his face as though trying to clear a fogged movie screen.
“They found a woman in his room when they went to his motel.” The uncle’s voice was still husky but more nearly normal. “They used her as a decoy to get Drake to come back to the room. But the police came to the motel looking for the woman. Swope and Almeida brought her here and said she was your problem. The worst of it is she knew me. I used to see her and her ex-husband at parties.”
“Knew you?” The nephew’s voice rose to a shout. “Where is she? WHERE IS SHE NOW?”
“Drake took her with him after he got here.” Roger Kirkman struggled to raise his bound hands. “Cut me loose, Stan.”
“You said DRAKE tied you up?” his nephew blared, unheeding. “Why would he—?”
He stopped in mid-sentence. He swung around from his uncle and stared in the direction of the wall safe whose door still hung open. Stan Kirkman darted toward it and rummaged frantically inside. “It’s gone?” he panted in a questioning tone. Rage immediately overtook him. “IT’S GONE!!”
He whirled on the balls of his feet, confronting Roger Kirkman again. He stalked his bound uncle pantherishly until he was bending down over him. “You fool!” the nephew shouted. His voice was a scream ground out between clenched teeth. “You tub of guts!” The uncle shrank back in his chair as much as his bonds permitted. “You let him take the money? You let him take away the woman who can identify you?”
“Stan, listen to me!” his uncle pleaded. “What could I do? What could I—”
The anger left Stan Kirkman suddenly. When he spoke again it was with an icy clarity. “I’ll tell you what you never will be able to do, uncle dear. You’ll never exchange your information with a prosecutor for a deal.”
Then his voice rose again, raging. “All that work for nothing! FOR NOTHING!!” His hand darted into his jacket pocket, and I saw Roger Kirkman flinch. Two shots rang out so close together they sounded almost like one. A bright red stain appeared on the dried blood stains on Roger Kirkman’s shirtfront.
“You bungling, incompetent moron!” the nephew snarled, still standing over his uncle’s slumped body.
He backed away finally, gun still in hand. I shot him in the wrist. He screeched as the weapon flew from his hand, bounced once, and disappeared under a filing cabinet.
“Who the hell are you?” he whimpered, turning to face me.
It was a shock to realize that despite our almost obscene intimacy during the past thirty-six hours he hadn’t seen me before to know who I was.
I wanted him to know.
“I’m Drake,” I said, walking toward him.
He was holding his shattered wrist to his mouth like a child with a burn. His eyes widened. “Drake!” Then, incredibly, he was smiling. “Look,” he said swiftly, “we can work this out. The money—”
He stopped, his smile frozen. He was having difficulty realizing he didn’t have the money, and thus had nothing to offer in trade.
I moved behind Roger Kirkman’s desk so that the slumped body in the swivel chair was between Stan Kirkman and me. His eyes were upon the gun in my hand. His expression was wary but not particularly concerned. I knew that this self-centered pup was already busily scheming how he could remove the witness to his uncle’s shooting.
“We can still work it out,” he offered. He might have been an amateur, but he was an actor to the core. “I can—”
“Stan,” I cut him off. I held my voice down with an effort. “Remember Melissa? Remember how she died?”
“That was Toad!” he said quickly. “I only—”
He stopped.
“Yes? You only helped?” He was silent. “You only contributed forty percent?”
“I tell you it was Toad!” He was suddenly frantic again. “The knife—I didn’t know what he was going to do! He just—went crazy when he got her clothes off! I couldn’t stop him after—after—” He ran down again.
“After you helped Toad rape her?”
“No! No! No!”
“But you knew you were going to kill her anyway because she could identify you?”
“Well, what else—I mean—no, of course not!” he floundered.
I’d heard enough.
I felt more cold anger toward this sniveling, baby-faced juvenile than I’d felt toward anyone in a long, long time.
I picked up the letter opener from the desk top where Stan Kirkman had set it down after cutting free his uncle’s gag. I used the opener to cut the rest of Roger Kirkman’s bonds, and I picked all of them up as the sheet-ropes fell to the floor. The body slumped even more in its chair. Stan Kirkman watched me uncomprehendingly.
“What would you do now if you were me?” I asked him.
“I’d—I’d—well, I’d—” He stumbled to a stop.
“I’ll tell you what I’d like to do. I’d like to shoot a kneecap off you to hold you in place here until the police came in and picked you up for the murder of your uncle. Your fingerprints are on the gun under the filing case.”
He swallowed hard.
“You couldn’t say anything about the kidnapping, because then you’d get a double life sentence instead of a single one.”
He was staring at me, his wounded wrist cradled in his other hand.
“I’d keep track of you,” I told him. “And wherever the feds put you away, I’d send word inside. And after the boys got through gang-raping you, you’d be someone’s punk for at least fifteen years before you became eligible for a parole.”
“You—you—” He couldn’t get the words out.
“But I can’t do it.” He started to smile, then tried to choke it off. He tried to look penitent. “You know why? Because you know me. You know my name. I’ve used others, but I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to keep this one clean. That’s why I’ve got to kill you.” I raised Roger Kirkman’s automatic. I was still standing right behind the body. I wanted the angle of entry of the bullet to be correct.
“You can’t kill me!” Stan Kirkman screamed. “YOU CAN’T KILL—”
The slug hit him right in the center of his fast-moving mouth. His teeth, or his palate, changed its direction, because it burst from the top of the left-hand side of his skull. Part of his brain was splashed on the wall behind him before he slammed back into it, bounced off, and pitched forward onto his belly.
I rounded the desk and went over to him, shoved a foot under a shoulder, and flipped him onto his back. With the lifesaving techniques available to the medical profession these days, if a man doesn’t die at once from a gunshot wound he might not die at all.
There was no medical technique available that was going to be of any assistance to Stan Kirkman.
Instead, there was going to be a considerable problem identifying him.
I wiped the handgrip of Roger Kirkman’s gun carefully, took it back to his desk, raised his limp right hand, and firmly placed his dead fingerprints on his own weapon. Then I dropped the automatic beside his chair. The police would draw their own conclusions. If they tied all the ends together and came up with the kidnapping, uncle and nephew had shot it out over the hiding place of the ransom money since it wasn’t in the room. If they didn’t come up with the kidnapping, uncle and nephew had shot
it out in a family argument.
I was rid of the Kirkmans in either case.
I rode the elevator from the apartment down to the basement, walked across the street to my car, and drove to the Miramar. I carried the wrapped package of money and the still-dripping briefcase into my room. I pulled off my damp clothing and threw it into the closet. I had to use a worn-before shirt to outfit myself in dry clothes.
I opened the briefcase and spent half an hour spreading bills on every available flat surface to dry. By the time I finished the motel room was wall-to-wall green money except for a narrow path to the door.
I went out to the lobby phone then and called Jed Raymond. “Melissa’s dead, Jed,” I told him after the preliminaries.
“Dead?”
“You’ll be hearing it from the school. She was kidnapped by a group set up by her boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend?” Jed was having a hard time keeping up. “What happened to the kidnappers?”
“I found them afterward.”
“Well? Oh!”
“Do the necessary things for Melissa.”
“Won’t I need Hazel’s signature?”
“I wouldn’t think so until you get into administering Melissa’s estate. Hazel will be available by that time.”
“How is she?”
“Better than the hospital thinks. I’m taking her out of there in a day or two.”
“Taking her out?”
“I don’t want her being pressured by the police to answer questions about a lot of different things. I’ll let you know where I take her.”
“How will the police let you take her out of there before she answers their questions?”
“They aren’t going to know anything about it until after it happens.”
“Oh. Yeah. I see.”
“I haven’t mentioned everything that happened here. Let it be a surprise to you when it comes up.”
“Now why did I feel it was like that?”
“Take it easy, Jed.”
“You, too.”
Operation Deathmaker Page 15