Deep Kill (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “It was a lie,” I said. “Your car’s fine. You’re the one with the problem.”

  “What?” His mouth dropped open.

  “Get lost,” I told the girl. “This one’s out of business.”

  “But—”

  “Get lost,” I repeated. When she saw I had the gun drawn, she didn’t need another warning.

  “Look, you,” Villiere tried to bluster, but his eyes went down to the revolver like it was the only thing in the lot besides him.

  “Throw me your keys,” I said.

  He fumbled and came up with a keychain.

  “Just slide ’em across the roof.”

  “Man, that’ll scratch the car.”

  “Probably. Do it anyway.”

  He did, and I unlocked the passenger door. Then I slid the keys back. “Open yours and get in.”

  “Look, man, you want money?”

  “You wish.”

  He opened the door, but it took a little while because his hand was shaking, and when I’d slid in beside him, it took him longer to fit the key into the ignition.

  “Now,” I said, “drive.”

  “Where?”

  “How about Norco?”

  “Norco? Man, that’s miles. That’s—”

  “Another parish.”

  “For God’s sake, you wouldn’t kill somebody over some fucking tires.” It was a statement, not a question: he was too scared to ask because the answer might be yes.

  “And don’t go too fast,” I said. “We don’t want to get pulled over.”

  We got onto the interstate, headed west. Traffic had thinned by the time we reached the airport, and I had him take the off ramp, onto Williams. The airport was on our right now, and a big jet thundered in a hundred feet above us.

  “Man,” he said, and then swallowed his words when I prodded him with the pistol.

  We reached Airline Highway and I motioned for him to go right, passing in front of the airport. We stopped at the traffic signal and I could see his mind working, but in thirty seconds he still hadn’t thought of anything better than trying to get out into the traffic. I cocked the gun and he stopped with the door half open, then closed it. The light went green and we started forward again.

  It was six or seven miles to Norco, a town built around a chemical plant. The plant made the air unfit to breathe, and a few years before it had blown up and killed some of the workers. But the state was in a depression and there were other workers willing to take their places. As I smelled the acrid fumes, I wondered what happened to the lungs if you grew up in such a place.

  Villiere slowed for the light. Ahead was a green sign that pointed the way to the Bonnet Carré Spillway structure. Late in 1927, after New Orleans had its close call during the Big Flood, it was decided to build an outlet from the river to Lake Pontchartrain, five miles to the east. The spillway structure stretched like a low bridge for a mile on the northern edge of the town, across the grass-grown expanse that was the floodway in times of high water. It was a lonely area, with a few cows and occasional fishermen, spanned only by a narrow blacktop crosscut by a series of dirt tracks.

  Dead bodies turned up there with monotonous regularity. It was a good place for a heart-to-heart talk.

  We came to the levee, and I made him turn right. We were going uphill now, and the dark bulk of the structure rose in front of us. He saw where we were heading and gulped.

  “Man, look,” he said. “We can work this out.”

  “I know it,” I said.

  “If it’s part of the action, see, we can fix that. If it’s girls—”

  “Keep your mouth shut until I ask you to talk,” I said.

  He licked his lips. “Look, I could run this thing off the bank, kill us both.”

  “You could. But I think even with the coke you’ve been snorting, dying doesn’t sound like so much fun.”

  He didn’t have an answer, and I was glad, because I’d been taking a chance: if he was high enough, he might not give a damn, feeling like Superman with a snow white cape. But my guess had been that he regularly went to Playtime to score, and that meant he’d been running on residuals, looking for his next hit. Not a fun guy to be with, much less to have behind the wheel of a car, but not yet at the point where he wanted to die, either. That would come later.

  We came down off the embankment and into the floodway, with the spillway structure itself on the left.

  “Turn onto this road,” I said, pointing to a dirt trail on the right. The trail headed off toward the lake, passing under a couple of railroad trestles along the way.

  “Man, don’t do this,” he said.

  “You haven’t given me a good reason not to,” I said. The tires bumped in the ruts, and I was glad it hadn’t rained in the last week. “Slow down,” I said. “We don’t want to get stuck.”

  The car came to a near halt and crept along the little dirt road, the chassis jarring with each rut. When we were far enough away from the blacktop, I told him to cut the lights and the engine.

  “Oh, shit, man,” he said, and I could see him shaking in the dark.

  “Yeah. That’s probably what Eddie Gulch said when he saw the ice pick.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You forgotten him already? You know who I mean. Eddie, the small-timer you hired to hit me. The man they found dead the day before yesterday.”

  His mouth came open and he tried to say something, but it took him a couple of tries. When he finally did manage to talk, it was in a near whisper.

  “Man, I didn’t hire nobody to do nothing to you. I heard the guy was dead, yeah, but it didn’t have nothing to do with me. You gotta believe that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the fucking truth. Hey, you think I hired him to kill you? That’s crazy: All I did was hire him to see why you came to me with that bullshit story about wanting to buy property. He followed up, that’s all. He told me you were some kind of private detective, like him. I paid him off, and that was that. I figured you were probably working for old man Autry. That old fart’s had it in for me for a long time, just because I started making him pay his rent on time.”

  I pressed the snout of the gun into his side and felt him trembling. “Why the hell would Gulch take a shot at me if you didn’t order it?”

  “How should I know? Maybe he was working for somebody else. I dunno. But I can’t see that little asshole taking a shot at anybody, you ask me. I’ve used him before. Guns aren’t his style. The guy’s a weasel, I’m telling you.”

  “Was,” I admonished. “He’s dead, remember?”

  “Yeah. But I didn’t do it. I read it in the goddamn paper. I wasn’t nowhere around when that happened. I was at my place, asleep.”

  “In the afternoon, on a weekday?”

  “Man, you see the hours I keep.”

  “And I guess the girl can corroborate it.”

  “What? Oh, yeah. If anybody would believe that silly cunt.”

  I lowered the hammer to give him a chance to stop shaking, but his tremors kept on, and I guessed it was all mixed in with his need for drugs now.

  “Why would you put Gulch on me to start with? Why was I such a threat?”

  He sighed, his hands squeezing the wheel like it was a life ring in a stormy sea. “Look, I got problems, see? I mean, business problems. I owe some money. There’s people that are after me if I don’t pay.”

  He didn’t have to spell it out, because I’d already pretty much figured the situation. He’d been left a small fortune by his aunt, and in a couple of years he’d managed to squander just about all of it on coke and women. His office was a front, a place where he could claim he worked while he ran around selling off his inheritance. He’d been squeezing Cal because of his own shortfalls, and now he was into some people that didn’t like to hear the word no.

  “You figured I was working for one of them.”

  “Yeah, sure. I had you figured for some small-time shark, maybe somebody that bought some
paper of mine. But I wasn’t sure. Look, I’ve been trying to work things out, like, and it’s been rubbing some people the wrong way.”

  “You’ve been dealing yourself, you’re saying.”

  “Yeah. Nothing big, see, just a little bit, to try to make back some of what I lost. I buy it at Playtime and then I sell it to some folks I know, only now my contacts won’t give me credit. I’ve gotta have cash. But the people I sell to have been poor-mouthing.”

  “Got you in a squeeze,” I said.

  “That’s it.”

  “And by selling you’ve been moving onto somebody else’s turf.”

  “Something like that. I had some threats, you know? So I had to know who you were working for.”

  “You ever heard of a man named George Guidry?”

  It was a shot in the dark, and he just shook his head. “No. Should I? Did he hire you or something? Look, if it’s money—”

  “How about a black preacher named Condon?”

  “Condon? Oh, yeah. The nig that wants to run the city.” He turned his head a little, frowning. “You mean he hired you?”

  “No.” I cocked the revolver. “Well, you haven’t been a lot of use to me, Herman.”

  He flinched and tried to flatten himself against his door, but there wasn’t any place to go.

  “Christ, man, you don’t have to do this. I told you the truth. I don’t know what Gulch did on his own time. I never trusted him anyway. You gotta ask him if you want to know about all that.” A pause while he remembered Gulch was dead. “At least, you gotta ask somewhere else. I swear to God I told you everything.”

  “You ever have any other dealings with Calvin Autry besides his lease?”

  “No, I told you.”

  “What’s so important about the garage?” I demanded. “Why are you holding on to it and selling everything else?”

  “Because, damn it, I’ve taken a beating on everything else I sold. You know how property values are. Now that old Autry’s paying his rent regular, I might as well keep it. Besides …” He looked down at the floorboard. “I tried once or twice, and couldn’t get any takers.”

  It had the sound of the truth, so I changed my tack. “Who’s your main supplier at Playtime?”

  “Fat guy called Turk. Cheap bastard. Thinks he’s the only source in town. If I’d’ve known what slime I was dealing with, I’d of never started.”

  “Get a Life’s a Bitch bumper sticker.”

  He waited, still shaking, and I let him sweat. A car passed a hundred yards away on the blacktop, but we might as well have been a thousand miles from civilization and he knew it. That’s why I figured he was telling the truth. The trouble was that the truth I was hearing didn’t help much.

  “Who would want to kill Eddie Gulch?” I asked.

  “How the fuck should I know? Anybody that dealt with him. He was a chiseler, nothing but mountaintop bullshit. He did peeper jobs and delivered packages, whatever paid. He probably got caught in some kind of feud.”

  “He didn’t tell you anything about me that would help?”

  “Man, all I got for my money was that Micah Dunn was some kinda small-change investigator who got mixed up in political things sometimes, like that crap with the congressman last year. Said you had one bad arm. Like I couldn’t see that myself. Shit, most of what I paid for he got out of the city directory. I paid him two fifty for a day’s work, and that’s what I got for my trouble. I decided not to waste any more money.”

  He acted cheated, but that was his problem. Gulch had just done what most PIs do: use their sources. And a PI’s best sources are available to the general public, except they don’t know where to look.

  “So you paid him off.”

  “I owed him. He acted pissed, but I didn’t have it.”

  “Maybe you killed him to shut him up.”

  “Over a lousy two hundred and fifty dollars?”

  “People have gone to the death house for less.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  And that was the bottom line.

  “Start up and back out of here,” I said. “You bought yourself another day.”

  Seventeen

  Villiere pulled into the parking lot at Playtime and stopped.

  “Just one more thing,” I said.

  He gave me a furtive look, as if afraid I might be getting ready to renege.

  “You owe me for a tire. I figure it comes to sixty bucks.”

  He went for his wallet like a fast-draw artist, except that his hand was shaking too much for him to hold it steady. He thrust four twenties at me, peeling them from a roll that was obviously intended to buy coke.

  “Is that enough?”

  “It ought to do it,” I said.

  I pulled the keys from the ignition and got out.

  “Hey,” he yelled after me. “How am I supposed to move this thing?”

  Ignoring him, I crossed over to the rental car. I drove two blocks down the boulevard and dropped the keys in a trash barrel.

  I don’t know what I’d expected from Villiere. Some kind of fumbling admission of guilt, maybe. But his story held together: he’d put Eddie Gulch on me because I’d shown up out of the blue and scared him, and a scare was the last thing he needed. He had no motive to try to kill me. Of course, he could have hired Gulch to miss on purpose, to scare me off, but how would he have known to call Taylor Augustine in order to set me up?

  No, damn it, everything pointed to Gulch’s acting on his own. Which meant somebody else had hired him. Which was a lot to swallow.

  I rolled the window down and let the night wind hit me in the face. I had to rethink things. I was adding two and two, but the answer I was getting was five. That meant there was something else that belonged in the equation. But what?

  It was eleven thirty when I parked in front of Katherine’s house on Prytania. Her light was still on and I was only halfway up the walk when her door opened and she started out into the night. When she saw me she stopped short.

  “Oh, God. I heard the car pull up and I thought maybe it was Scott.”

  “No word?” I asked.

  She came to me, and I put my arm around her. For the first time since I’d known her, I felt her shaking with fear.

  “Micah, I’m so damned scared.”

  “It’ll be all right,” I said, holding her tightly, but by now the words sounded hollow even to me.

  “His car’s gone,” she said. “I tried all his friends and the professor he works for.”

  We went in and I closed the door behind me as if somehow by shutting out the night we were controlling the situation.

  “Micah, we have to call the police.”

  I knew about missing persons, and how much attention it would get. I went over to the phone, looking at my watch. This time I connected with Mancuso at home.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, “but something’s come up. I need your help.”

  It must have been the tone in my voice, because he didn’t come back with a wisecrack but just asked me what it was.

  I told him about Scott.

  “Well, there’s not much we can do,” he said. “It’s a big city. Young people have been known to try to lose themselves, and it’s not hard. Hell, don’t tell Katherine, but he’s probably shacked up with some girl. I would’ve been, at that age.”

  “He’d call,” I said. “He wouldn’t just drop out of sight.”

  “Well, give me his description, and the make and license number of his car, and I’ll call it in, ask the patrol units to keep a look out. That’s about all I can do.”

  I got the information on the car from Katherine and described Scott for him and gave him the number of his apartment.

  “Okay, I’ll pass it on,” he said. “Hey, what’s this about Gulch?” he suddenly asked. “You no sooner ask me about the guy than he turns up cold, and Fox turns up hot as a branding iron. You want to watch that guy, Micah. He’s after you now, and I can promise, he won’t turn loose till he gets you, fair m
eans or not. Plus some ADA starts butting in before Gulch hardly gets to the morgue and starts telling Fox what to look for and what tests to run. If he wasn’t pissed before, he’s pissed out of his goddamn mind now.”

  “I’ll bet,” I told him. “By the way, what’s the narcotics angle? Was Gulch dealing or just working for people in the business?”

  “You’ll have to ask somebody else. They keep those things under wraps.”

  “Right.” I remembered Taylor Augustine. “Have you heard about the boy’s uncle disappearing?”

  “What?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ll look into it,” he said. “For whatever that’s worth. I don’t guess your buddy’s ready to give himself up?”

  “Calvin? I doubt it.”

  “Well, I can’t say I blame him. If he’s guilty, he hasn’t got a thing in the world to gain.”

  “And if he’s innocent?”

  “I’d hate to have Fox on my ass, either way.”

  I said good night and turned to Katherine. “He’ll put out the word,” I said. “If Scott’s around, they’ll pick him up.” My words didn’t sound very convincing, even to me.

  She came to me and pressed her face against my chest, shaking her head, and I felt the wetness of her tears.

  “It’ll be okay,” I promised. And wished I believed it.

  We went upstairs and lay together for a couple of hours, just touching each other, for comfort. I knew she wasn’t asleep but was staring up into the darkness, as I was.

  I kept running scenarios through my mind: somebody had picked Scott up and was holding him hostage, to get me off the case. But who? And why not make contact?

  He had become the victim of a random act of violence, somewhere in the city. But I dismissed that one, because we were dealing with a disappearance, not a corpse.

  And I kept coming back to the third possibility, the one almost as bad as the second, because it was a dead end, with no way out. He had blundered into something trying to be helpful, and now he couldn’t get loose, either because he was a prisoner or because he was dead.

  I cursed myself for not taking him seriously. I could have pulled him aside, given him some little useless, harmless task that made him feel needed.