“Kerwin? Kerwin … I—”
“Congressman Stephens. His brother’s been at the Villas for the last week—he’s the Congressman’s representative, sort of advance man, you know—but the really important thing is to impress the Congressman himself, you understand.”
“Sure …”
“After all, what happens at the council meeting this afternoon may have a lot to do with whether Sunrise Villas gets an AGING grant or not. I’d like to be there myself, so we’d better hurry.”
“Congressman Stephens. That Kerwin. His brother has been … His brother—”
“David Stephens. Brother of Kerwin Stephens, head of the Committee on AGING.” She paused. “I thought you said you’d been reading about it.”
I nodded, gathering my thoughts. I nodded for a while.
I would like to put it on the record that I am not a dummy. Actually, my brain often hums along like a well-oiled machine. Obviously Lucrezia had assumed I knew what she was talking about. Her comment “reading about it” proved the key clue. Lucrezia was making it difficult for me to demonstrate my keenness—but she’d been throwing a lot of good stuff at me there. And she had lots of good stuff to throw.
Now, however, I had it straightened out. Kerwin. Congressman Stephens. David Stephens. Brother. AGING. Council. Friday afternoon. It was July, and I was at Mountain Shadows, and Mountain Shadows was in Arizona.
“Right,” I said decisively. “We sure better.”
“Better what?”
“Better hurry.”
Lucrezia waited in the lobby while I made a quick trip to my suite, strapped on my gun harness and shoved my Colt .38 Special into the clamshell holster. For a case which had begun in this happy fashion, and involved merely the kind of “crooks and thieves and ruffians” one might expect to find in a retirement community where people sort of dawdled about, I was ninety-nine-percent certain I wouldn’t need the revolver. Still …
With Miss Brizante at my side, peering past my shoulder, I left a note at the desk for Dr. Paul Anson. Paul, who lives a couple doors down the hall from me in the Spartan, is a movie-colony medicine man and sometime healer, a jolly, vital and vigorous cat who is my very good friend and stimulating companion. He was at the moment en route from L.A. to attend one of several conventions currently being held in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area, this one a gathering of electronic and other scientific experts, including several top-notch medical men, here at Mountain Shadows. I had been looking forward to spending a couple of days in Paul’s company, that being one of the reasons I had chosen this time and place for my own vacation.
Probably, I thought, as Lucrezia and I went out through the lobby’s swinging glass doors and headed for my Cadillac, I’d have time to wrap up this job and—unless Miss Brizante at least let me start calling her Lucrezia—still have plenty of time left over for Paul.
And so it happened that, with Lucrezia Brizante at my side, in Arizona, in July, I headed gaily for Sunrise Villas—and the sunset.
CHAPTER TWO
The drive to Sunrise Villas was quite pleasant—it could hardly have been otherwise with Lucrezia Brizante in the car. But she insisted upon wearing her seat belt. When she also insisted I put on my seat belt, I concluded Lucrezia’s mother had taught her that Yes was a No-No, and let my thoughts wander a bit.
At least it helped me unjumble what Lucrezia had been talking about back there in the bar. I had read a good deal about it, but concentration was easier with Lucrezia wearing a seat belt instead of leaning over a cocktail table. Probably she should wear a seat belt when leaning over cocktail tables.
AGING. It was an acronym, part of the alphabet sop so dear to the heads of legislators and bureaucrats in the Capitol. The Capitol letters stood for the “Agency for Gerontological Investigation and Need-Grants.” Congressman Kerwin Stephens was the chairman of the Commission on AGING. His brother David had for a week or so been surveying the situation at Sunrise Villas, but today Congressman Stephens, the boss-man himself, would be present in the flesh. And with her father president of the council of something-or-other, I could understand Lucrezia’s feeling that the upcoming meeting was very important.
I supposed it was pretty important, at that. I did think the growth of retirement communities was in many ways a splendid development—men and women from the young-middle-aged on up, often with kindred interests, able to afford living in an environment specially designed for them. That part was fine.
It was those giant brains in Washington, D.C., which bothered me, that and the giant AGING grants which might eventuate from government intervention, because when the federal government started out to improve a situation it almost invariably managed to screw it up beyond the power of mortal minds to comprehend. Besides, these vast spending programs always cost a lot of money. It is undeniable that spending costs money. But … maybe this time it would be different.
About halfway to Sunrise Villas Lucrezia said, “What happened to you in Los Angeles, Shell?”
“Nothing happened to me. I’m perfectly marvelous. Just a little quiet, that’s all—”
“I mean the trouble mentioned in the Republic article. The fight, and your getting shot.”
There wasn’t much to tell, but I hit the high spots for her. The head of a construction company had hired me to check into the background of some unsavory characters he suspected of muscling his employees and sabotaging expensive machines. Behind the violence was a union boss—with reputed but never formally proved Mafia ties—who had demanded that my client sign a closed-shop contract with his union, despite the fact that eighty percent of my client’s employees, by secret ballot, had turned thumbs down on the proposal.
During the investigation I arranged to meet a nervous informant who was to supply me with additional info on four lobs whom I already knew to be professional heavy men. It turned out that my presumed informant was buddy-buddy with the four hoods, who thus were awaiting me at the meeting place. Because that meeting place was on a dimly lighted stretch of lonely road and I am suspicious of nervous informants anyway, I had my gun in my hand before the first shot was fired at me. Because that was the way those lads said Hello.
The slug banged my side and bounced off a rib. It didn’t knock me down but I let myself go down, hoping whoever was after me would think he, or they, had got me. Presumably they did think I was, if not dead, unconscious; because all four of them trotted toward me and, from flat on my back, I shot and killed two of them while they were still trotting.
As for the rest of it, I got up and emptied my Colt Special, slugged one guy and knocked him pretty far into unconsciousness, took another slug in my leg and went down. The Arizona Republic’s Maggie Wilson had been right about the arrival of police cars barely in the proverbial “nick of time.” Because the only man on his feet when spots from two prowl cars hit his face was a short, burly hood named James Q. Ryan, called Jimmy Ryan or more often simply “Lucky,” and I was still conscious enough to see the heavy .45 in his hand pointed at my gut, and his square, milk-white face behind the gun.
Some years back, for reasons not now important, Ryan’s associates had decided it was necessary to get rid of him. Three times in two weeks they’d tried to kill him, and each time he almost miraculously escaped completely unharmed. From that time till now he’d been called “Lucky,” and since then Lucky Ryan had led a charmed—if not charming—life. Even in L.A. with me his luck had held, since I had pumped one squarely into his head—or, rather, it would have gone into his head if my gun had not by then been empty.
I finished it up for Lucrezia. “Anyhow, the cops scared Lucky Ryan off but caught him and my informant a couple of blocks away, took them and the guy I’d clobbered in to book them and hauled the other two downtown in the dead wagon. Me, I started taking a nap about that time, so the last part is hearsay.”
“You really got shot twice?”
“Yeah, but the one in my side was nothing, and I limped for a while from the pill in the leg, that�
��s all. I guess I’m just a lucky fellow. When it comes to getting shot.”
“Now, don’t start that again. Turn left up there, Shell—that’s Sunrise Villas, a mile down Saguaro Way.”
So I took a left, and there it was sprawled out in the desert ahead of us. We drove beneath a huge orange sign arched like the upper rim of the rising sun, on which was lettered SUNRISE VILLAS and beneath the name the slogan, “Where the Golden Days of the Golden Years Begin.” Here Saguaro was a two-lane street bisected by a four-foot-wide strip of grass enclosed between cement curbs, with palm trees planted in the grass every fifty feet or so. On left and right were clusters of adjacent apartments forming three sides of a square, the fourth side open next to the sidewalk and street, plus rows of small houses, most set back behind recently mowed lawns or individually planted cactus gardens, some with beds of green or dull-red crushed rock in place of lawns.
We passed two big shopping centers crowded with cars and people moving leisurely in and out of stores and through the black-topped parking lot, and a group of long, low wood-and-cement-block buildings which Lucrezia pointed out as the Community Recreation Center. As we passed it I got a glimpse of blue water in a curving swimming pool beyond one of the brown-and-white buildings. It all looked pleasant, and peaceful.
As I pulled up to a stop sign, preparing to turn on Palos Verde Drive following Lucrezia’s directions, I glanced out the Cad’s window at a large, velvety, lawn-bowling green across the street. Nearest me, in a group of four fairly ancient citizens, one man was preparing to bowl. He was tall, thin as a string, and about a hundred and fifty years old. I got the impression he’d been preparing to bowl for some time. The three men watching him seemed frozen, but he was bent over, head thrust forward on a long thin neck, rigid except for his right arm which swung forward, back, forward again, hand holding a grapefruit-size bowling ball. Back went the arm again, forward once more. Back, forward. Man, I thought, I might run out of gas before he gets that thing on its way. But finally he unleashed the wooden projectile and it began rolling, rolling, and he began straightening up, straightening.…
“I said, we turn left here, Shell.”
“Yeah. Just a minute. This is fascinating.”
The ball, moving a bit more rapidly than a three-legged turtle, was about midway to the stake, and the bowler was still straightening, straightening. He’d got his left hand on one side of his lower back, and was making a sort of cranking motion with his right hand.
The ball was barely moving as it approached the stake. It gently kissed one of the three balls already there, rolling it out of the way, nudged a second ball, came to rest against the stake. Two of the men near the bowler smacked fists into their hands as if disappointed, while the other whooped and waggled both arms in the air. The old boy was still trying to reach an approximately vertical position.
As I swung left around the corner into Palos Verde Drive, a sense of peace, of laziness almost, was stealing over me. This job was going to be a dandy. I could feel it in my bones.
A block ahead on our right were two more long, low buildings in the same wood and cement-block style of the Community Recreation Center we’d recently passed. I guessed, correctly, that they housed the Town Hall and various offices of the Sunrise Villas city government—and in one of them the meeting of the Sunrise Villas Community Representation Council was now under way.
As I found a spot at the curb and parked, I said, “Just what is this council, Lucrezia?”
“It’s a kind of semiofficial group, twelve men chosen by other homeowners to represent them, plan and discuss improvements, make recommendations for needed services, hear complaints. Once a month their reports go to the official governing body of the Villas. Mainly they’re a kind of buffer between all the homeowners and residents and the mayor and council and other elected city officials—Dad could tell you more about it.”
We proceeded up a wide cement walk lined with low green shrubs, several mimosas, and half a dozen thin-trunked palm trees, and turned between the two buildings to enter the one on our left. The air-conditioned interior was pleasantly cool after the hot-but-dry oven outside. Lucrezia rested one hand on my arm as we walked down a hallway to a pair of heavy double doors. From beyond them I could hear the muted sound of someone speaking. We went in.
Near us were about forty wooden folding chairs, only seven of them occupied by interested citizens. Beyond the chairs, around an elongated oval table, sat twelve men, one of them tapping the tabletop with the eraser end of a yellow pencil as he spoke.
“—in consequence,” he was saying as Lucrezia and I took seats in the front row, “I recommend that we submit a formal resolution to the mayor and City Council expressing our combined agreement on the urgent need for action on this matter. And that we make it unmistakably clear, if there is no improvement in trash and garbage collections, it is our unanimous opinion a lawsuit should be brought against Tri-City Sanitation Engineers. Preferably by the city of Sunrise Villas, but that if the city fails to act, this citizens’ group will itself initiate the legal action.”
A man at the end of the oval table on my right said in a strong, resonant voice, slightly accented, “We’ve discussed this at length, and it seems to me we’re in agreement. So I’ll just ask if there are any objections.”
Heads shook around the table. Nobody spoke.
Lucrezia whispered, “That was Dad, Shell.”
Brizante was an impressive-looking old gentleman. Not really so old—in his middle fifties, I guessed—and with the firm features and strong voice of a younger man, but the large moustache adorning and almost completely hiding his upper lip made him appear older than he’d have looked without the brush. It was a regular old-time handlebar job, curving out and up a good four or five inches on each side, thick and uniformly gray. Those whiskers looked wiry and strong enough to support a small boy without bending. His eyes were stern, hawklike under heavy brows.
“All right, then. We’ll let you draw up the proposal.” The man nodded, tapping away with his pencil. “You can bring it to our meeting next week,” Brizante finished.
The next fascinating discussion concerned potholes in a couple of streets paved by the Atlas Paving Company, unreasonable delay in the beginning of construction on the Sunrise Villas Doctors’ Hospital and such—all stressing the great need for money—so I looked over the men seated around the conference table. And almost immediately I got a queer feeling. Like that cool prickly sensation you get on your skin just before the goose-bumps pop out.
I was glancing from Brizante to my left, casually eyeing the men whose faces were visible to me, when I felt that prickly chill. I pulled my eyes back, let my gaze stop on the man seated next to Brizante. And it was as though ancient little bells rang, tolled in a slow and measured rhythm somewhere deep inside my brain. So I lit a cigarette and took a closer look at the guy on Brizante’s right.
Nothing. I didn’t recognize him. As far as I knew I’d never seen the creep before. And creep he was.
It was an old, lined face, very old, very lined. He had to be pushing—or, more likely, pulling—ninety, and he looked a little bit like one of Death’s pallbearers. The brows were thick, gray with a few streaks of black, over dark, sunken eyes. The nose was big, fleshy, and even from twenty feet away I could see that it appeared pitted, as if dotted with enormous open pores or strangely scarred. Under that big nose and the bushy brows his mouth appeared much too small for the wizened face, the too-thin lips puckered, contracted, grotesquely wrinkled, as if it were the mouth of a thousand-year-old boy. The skin of his face was almost gray but faintly marked with darker amoeba-like splotches, resembling the liver spots elderly men get on the backs of their shiny hands, and it sagged beneath his eyes, under his sharp cheekbones, at the corners of his mouth. Loose flesh hung in a long crepey wattle underneath his pointed chin.
“Who’s the dead guy on your father’s right?” I asked Lucrezia.
She winced slightly. “That’s Mr. DiGiorno
. One of the oldest residents here.”
“I had a hunch he wasn’t one of the youngest.”
“I mean one of the first people to buy a home and settle here at the Villas, after it was opened to the public six years ago. He was one of the original organizers of the Community Council, served two years as president. He’s quite wealthy. I understand he owns a good deal of property here.”
“Like mortuaries, cemeteries? Funeral—OK. You don’t have to look at me like that.”
“Dad could tell you more than I can—he’s been on the council with Mr. DiGiorno for over three years now. I think he owns a hundred acres or so where they’re considering building the new golf course. And—” She stopped for a moment, brows elevated prettily. “I think he does own the cemetery. Or at least sold the city most of the land for it. How did you know that?”
“I didn’t. I just figured a guy with his looks had to live—skip it. Can’t I make a little joke once in a while?”
I was gazing at Lucrezia’s profile when another man began speaking. It was a voice I hadn’t yet heard this afternoon, but even without taking a look I figured it belonged to a preacher or reverend or pastor of some kind. The voice was one of those syrupy humbler-than-thou sounds which at the same time managed to be sonorous and oracular, its pitch and rhythm—even while the guy spoke to his fellow council members about the desirability of improving sewage systems so toilets wouldn’t back up—throbbing with that peculiarly oboe-like vibration and gently swinging Pavlovian meter which issues from many pulpits on Sunday mornings.
“I have personally been the recipient of more than twenty complaints, merely from among the members of my congregation,” he said solemnly. “This in the seven-day period since last Friday alone, since our previous meeting. Much linoleum has been soiled, and two living room carpets have been damaged beyond repair. One particularly distressing example, gentlemen. Mrs. Ginsburg and Mrs. Okiyame live in adjacent houses on Pomegranate Street. Whenever Mrs. Ginsburg flushes her toilet, Mrs. Okiyame’s overflows. Whenever Mrs. Okiyame lets the water out of her bath, it appears in Mrs. Ginsburg’s kitchen sink. They have very nearly come to blows. And can we blame them? Of course we cannot. I feel sure I need not cite other examples, gentlemen. But clearly, action must be taken. Something must be done!”
Kill Me Tomorrow Page 2