USA Noir Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple

  As I rolled, I hurled sidearm the first of the baseball-sized rocks I’d palmed from the outside of the firepit. Not as fast as when I struck out Jim Thorpe twice back at Indian school. But high and hard enough to hit the strike zone in the center of Luth’s face. Bye-bye front teeth.

  Heavy Foot had hesitated before bringing his gun up to his shoulder. By then I’d shifted the second stone to my throwing hand. I came up to one knee and let it fly. It struck square in the soft spot just above the fat man’s belly.

  Ooof!

  His gun went flying off to the side and he fell back clutching his gut.

  Luth had lost his .303 when the first rock struck him. He was curled up, his hands clasped over his face.

  I picked up both guns before I did anything else. Shucked out the shells and then, despite the fact that I hated to do it seeing as how guns themselves are innocent of evil intent, I tossed both weapons spinning over the edge of the cliff. By the time they hit the rocks below, I had already rolled Heavy Foot over and yanked his belt out of his pants. I wrapped it around his elbows, which I’d pulled behind his back, cinched it tight enough for him to groan in protest.

  I pried Luth’s hands from his bloody face, levered them behind his back, and did the same for him that I’d done for his fat buddy. Then I grabbed the two restraining belts, one in each hand, and dragged them over to the place where the cliff dropped off.

  By then Luth had recovered enough, despite the blood and the broken teeth, to glare at me. But Heavy Foot began weeping like a baby when I propped them both upright at the edge where it wouldn’t take more than a push to send them over.

  Shut up, Braddie, Luth said through his bleeding lips, his voice still flat as stone. Then he stared at me. I’ve killed people worse than you.

  But not better, I replied.

  A sense of humor is wasted on some people. Luth merely intensified his stare.

  A hard case. But not Braddie.

  Miss your gun? I asked. You can join it.

  I lifted my foot.

  No, Braddie blubbered. Whaddaya want? Anything.

  A name.

  Braddie gave it to me.

  I left them on the cliff edge, each one fastened to his own big rock that I’d rolled over to them. The additional rope I’d gotten from my shack insured they wouldn’t be freeing themselves.

  Stay still, boys. Wish me luck.

  Go to hell, Luth snarled. Tough as ever.

  But he looked a little less tough after I explained that he’d better hope I had good luck. Otherwise I wouldn’t be likely to come back and set them loose. I also pointed out that if they struggled too much there was a good chance those delicately balanced big stones I’d lashed them to would roll over the edge. Them too.

  I took my time going down the mountain—and I didn’t use the main trail. There was always the chance that Luth and Braddie had not been alone. But their truck, a new ’34 Ford, was empty. An hour’s quiet watch of it from the shelter of the pines made me fairly certain no one else was around. They’d thoughtfully left the keys in the ignition. It made me feel better about them that they were so trusting and willing to share.

  As I drove into town I had even more time to think. Not about what to do. But how to do it. And whether or not my hunch was right.

  I parked the car in a grove of maples half a mile this side of the edge of town. Indian Charley behind the wheel of a new truck would not have fit my image in the eyes of the good citizens of Corinth. Matter of fact, aside from Will, most of them would have been surprised to see I knew how to drive. Then I walked in to Will’s office.

  Wyllis Dunham, Attorney at Law, read the sign on the modest door, which opened off the main street. I walked in without knocking and nodded to the petite, stylishly dressed young woman who sat behind the desk with a magazine in her nicely manicured fingers.

  Maud, I said, touching my knuckles to my forehead in salute.

  Charles, she drawled, somehow making my name into a sardonic remark the way she said it. What kind of trouble you plan on getting us into today?

  Nothing we can’t handle.

  Why does that not make me feel reassured?

  Then we both laughed and I thought again how if she wasn’t Will’s wife I’d probably be thinking of asking her to marry me.

  What happened to your cheek? Maud stood up, took a cloth from her purse, wetted it with her lips, and brushed at the place where the bullet had grazed me and the blood had dried. I stood patiently until she was done.

  Thanks, nurse.

  You’ll get my bill.

  He in?

  For you. She gestured me past her and went back to reading Ladies’ Home Journal.

  I walked into the back room where Will sat with his extremely long legs propped up on his desk, his head back against a couch pillow, his eyes closed.

  Before you ask, I am not asleep on the job. I am thinking. Being the town lawyer of a bustling metropolis such as this tends to wear a man out.

  Don’t let Maud see you with your feet up on that desk.

  His eyes opened at that and as he quickly lowered his feet to the floor he looked toward the door, a little furtively, before recovering his composure. Though Will had the degree and was twice her size, it was Maud who laid down the law in their household.

  He placed his elbows on the desk and made a pyramid with his fingers. The univeral lawyer’s sign of superior intellect and position, but done with a little conscious irony in Will’s case. Ever since I had helped him and Maud with a little problem two years back, we’d had a special relationship that included Thursday night card games of cutthroat canasta.

  Wellll? he asked.

  Two questions.

  Do I plead the Fifth Amendment now?

  I held up my little finger. First question. Did George Good retire as game warden, has the Department of Conservation started using new brown uniforms that look like they came from a costume shop, and were two new men from downstate sent up here as his replacement?

  Technically, Charles, that’s three questions. But they all have one answer.

  No?

  Bingo. He snapped his fingers.

  Which was what I had suspected. My two well-trussed friends on the mountaintop with their city accents were as phony as their warrant.

  Two. I held up my ring finger. Anybody been in town asking about me since that article in the Albany paper with my picture came out?

  Will couldn’t keep the smile off his face. If there was such a thing as an information magnet for this town, Will Dunham was it. He prided himself on quietly knowing everything that was going on—public and private—before anyone else even knew he knew it. With another loud snap of his long fingers he plucked a business card from his breast pocket and handed it to me with a magician’s flourish.

  Voilà!

  The address was in the State Office Building. The name was not exactly the one I expected, but it still sent a shiver down my spine and the metal spearpoint in my hip muscle twinged. Unfinished business.

  I noticed that Will had been talking. I picked up his words in mid-sentence.

  . . . so Avery figured that he should give the card to me, seeing as how he knew you were our regular helper, what with you taking on odd jobs for us now and then. Repair work, cutting wood . . . and so on. Of course, by the time he thought to pass it on to me Avery’d been holding on to it since two weeks ago which was when the man came into his filling station asking about you and wanting you to give him a call. So, did he get tired of waiting and decide to look you up himself?

  In a manner of speaking.

  Say again?

  See you later, Will.

  * * *

  The beauty of America’s trolley system is that a man could go all the way from New York City to Boston just by changing cars once you got to the end of town and one line ended where another picked up. So the time it took me to run the ten miles to where the line started in Middle Grove was longer than it took to travel the remaining forty mil
es to Albany and cost me no more than half the coins in my pocket.

  I hadn’t bothered to go back home to change into the slightly better clothes I had. My nondescript well-worn apparel was just fine for what I had in mind. No one ever notices laborers. The white painter’s cap, the brush, and the can of Putnam’s bone-white that I borrowed from the hand truck in front of the building were all I needed to amble in unimpeded and take the elevator to the sixteenth floor.

  The name on the door matched the moniker on the card—just as fancy and in big gold letters, even bigger than the word INVESTMENTS below it. I turned the knob and pushed the door open with my shoulder, backed in diffidently, holding my paint can and brush as proof of identity and motive. Nobody said anything, and when I turned to look I saw that the receptionist’s desk was empty, as I’d hoped. Five o’clock. Quitting time. But the door was unlocked, the light still on in the boss’s office.

  I took off the cap, put down the paint can and brush, and stepped through the door.

  He was standing by the window, looking down toward the street below.

  Put it on my desk, he said.

  Whatever it is, I don’t have it, I replied.

  He turned around faster than I had expected. But whatever he had in mind left him when I pulled my right hand out of my shirt and showed him the bone-handled skinning knife I’d just pulled from the sheath under my left arm. He froze.

  You? he said.

  Only one word, but it was as good as an entire book. No doubt about it now. My Helper felt like a burning coal.

  Me, I agreed.

  Where? he asked. I had to hand it to him. He was really good at one-word questions that spoke volumes.

  You mean Mutt and Jeff? They’re not coming. They got tied up elsewhere.

  You should be dead.

  Disappointing. Now that he was speaking in longer sentences he was telling me things I already knew, though he was still talking about himself when I gave his words a second thought.

  You’d think with the current state of the market, I observed, that you would have left the Bull at the start of your name, Mr. Weathers. Then you might have given your investors some confidence.

  My second attempt at humorous banter fell as flat as the first. No response other than opening his mouth a little wider. Time to get serious.

  I’m not going to kill you here, I said. Even though you deserve it for what you and your family did back then. How old were you? Eighteen, right? But you took part just as much as they did. A coward too. You just watched without trying to save them from me? Where were you?

  Up on the hill, he said. His lips tight. There was sweat on his forehead now.

  So, aside from investments, what have you been doing since then? Keeping up the family hobbies?

  I looked over at the safe against the wall. You have a souvenir or two in there? No, don’t open it to show me. People keep guns in safes. Sit. Not at the desk. Right there on the windowsill.

  What are you going to do?

  Deliver you to the police. Along with a confession. I took a pad and a pen off the desk. Write it now, starting with what you and your family did at your farm and including anyone else you’ve hurt since then.

  There was an almost eager look on his weaselly face as he took the paper and pen from my hands. That look grew calmer and more superior as he wrote. Clearly, he knew he was a being of a different order than common humans. As far above us as those self-centered scientists say modern men are above the chimpanzees. Like the politicians who sent in the federal troops against the army of veterans who’d camped in Washington, DC this past summer asking that the bonuses they’d been promised for their service be paid to them. Men I knew who’d survived the trenches of Belgium and France, dying on American soil at the hands of General MacArthur’s troops.

  The light outside faded as the sun went down while he wrote. By the time he was done he’d filled twenty pages, each one numbered at the bottom, several of them with intricate explicatory drawings.

  I took his confession and the pen. I placed the pad on the desk, kept one eye on him as I flipped the pages with the tip of the pen. He’d been busy. Though he’d moved on beyond Indian kids, his tastes were still for the young, the weak, those powerless enough to not be missed or mourned by the powers that be. Not like the Lindbergh baby, whose abduction and death had made world news this past spring. No children of the famous or even the moderately well-off. Just those no one writes about. Indians, migrant workers, Negro children, immigrants . . .

  He tried not to smirk as I looked up from the words that made me sick to my stomach.

  Ready to take me in now?

  I knew what he was thinking. A confession like this, forced at the point of a knife by a . . . person . . . who was nothing more than an insane, ignorant Indian. Him a man of money and standing, afraid for his life, ready to write anything no matter how ridiculous. When we went to any police station, all he had to do was shout for help and I’d be the one who’d end up in custody.

  One more thing, I said.

  You have the knife. His voice rational, agreeable.

  I handed him back the pad and pen.

  On the last page, print I’m sorry in big letters and then sign it.

  Of course he wasn’t and of course he did.

  Thank you, I said, taking the pad. I glanced over his shoulder out the window at the empty sidewalk far below.

  There, I said, pointing into the darkness.

  He turned his head to look. Then I pushed him.

  I didn’t lie, I said, even though I doubt he could hear me with the wind whistling past his face as he hurtled down past floor after floor. I didn’t kill you. The ground did.

  And I’d delivered him to the police, who would be scraping him up off the sidewalk.

  Cap back on my head, brush and paint can in hand, I descended all the way to the basement, then walked up the back stairs to leave the building from the side away from where the first police cars would soon arrive.

  I slept that night in the park and caught the first trolley north in the morning. It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the top of the trail.

  Only one rock and its human companion stood at the edge of the cliff. Luth had stayed hard, I guessed. Too hard to have the common sense to sit still. But not as hard as those rocks he’d gotten acquainted with two hundred feet below. I’d decide in the morning whether to climb down there, so far off any trail, and bury him. Or just leave the remains for the crows.

  I rested my hand on the rock to which the fat man’s inert body was still fastened. I let my gaze wander out over the forested slope below, the open fields, the meandering S of the river, the town where the few streetlights would soon be coming on. There was a cloud floating in the western sky, almost the shape of an arrowhead. The setting sun was turning its lower edge crimson. I took a deep breath.

  Then I untied Braddie. Even though he was limp and smelled bad, he was still breathing. Spilled some water on his cracked lips. Then let him drink a little.

  Don’t kill me, he croaked. Please. I didn’t want to. I never hurt no one. Never. Luth made me help him. I hated him.

  I saw how young he was then.

  Okay, I said. We’re going back downhill. Your truck is there. You get in it. Far as I know it’s yours to keep. You just drive south and don’t look back.

  I will. I won’t never look back. I swear to God.

  I took him at his word. There’s a time for that, just as there’s a time when words end.

  EASY AS A-B-C

  BY LAURA LIPPMAN

  Locust Point, Baltimore

  (Originally published in Baltimore Noir)

  Another house collpased today. It happens more and more, especially with all the wetback crews out there. Don’t get me wrong. I use guys from Mexico and Central America, too, and they’re great workers, especially when it comes to landscaping. But some other contractors aren’t as particular as I am. They hire the cheapest help they can get and the cheapest come
s pretty high, especially when you’re excavating a basement, which has become one of the hot fixes around here. It’s not enough, I guess, to get the three-story rowhouse with four bedrooms, gut it from top to bottom, creating open, airy kitchens where grandmothers once smoked the wallpaper with bacon grease and sour beef. It’s not enough to carve master bath suites from the tiny middle rooms that the youngest kids always got stuck with. No, these people have to have the full family room, too, which means digging down into the old dirt basements, sending a river of mud into the alley, then putting in new floors and walls. But if you miscalculate by even an inch—boom. You destroy the foundation of the house. Nothing to do but bring the fucker down and start carting away the bricks.

  It’s odd, going into these houses I knew as a kid, learning what people have paid for sound structures that they consider mere shells, all because they might get a sliver of a water view from a top-floor window or the ubiquitous rooftop deck. Yeah, I know words like ubiquitous. Don’t act so surprised. The stuff in books—anyone can learn that. All you need is time and curiosity and a library card, and you can fake your way through a conversation with anyone. The work I do, the crews I supervise, that’s what you can’t fake because it could kill people, literally kill them. I feel bad for the men who hire me, soft types who apologize for their feebleness, whining: I wish I had the time. Give those guys a thousand years and they couldn’t rewire a single fixture or install a gas dryer. You know the first thing I recommend when I see a place where the “man of the house” has done some work? A carbon monoxide detector. I couldn’t close my eyes in my brother-in-law’s place until I installed one, especially when my sister kept bragging about how handy he was.

  The boom in South Baltimore started in Federal Hill twenty-five years ago, before my time, flattened out for a while in the ’90s, but now it’s roaring again, spreading through south Federal Hill and into Riverside Park and all the way up Fort Avenue into Locust Point, where my family lived until I was ten and my grandparents stayed until the day they died, the two of them, side by side. My grandmother had been ailing for years and my grandfather, as it turned out, had been squirreling away various painkillers she had been given along the way, preparing himself. She died in her sleep and, technically, he did, too. A self-induced, pharmaceutical sleep, but sleep nonetheless. We found them on their narrow double bed, and the pronounced rigor made it almost impossible to separate their entwined hands. He literally couldn’t live without her. Hard on my mom, losing them that way, but I couldn’t help feeling it was pure and honest. Pop-pop didn’t want to live alone and he didn’t want to come stay with us in the house out in Linthicum. He didn’t really have friends. Mee-maw was his whole life and he had been content to care for her through all her pain and illness. He would have done that forever. But once that job was done, he was done, too.