His buddy? Not exactly.
The man I’d followed was less than ten feet from the house when the big guy placed his left hand against the doorframe, steadied himself, lifted his right arm. Light gleamed dully on the gun in his fist. When it was levelled he didn’t wait.
My man was in midstride, one leg swinging, when the big guy squeezed off two shots and slammed both slugs into his buddy’s chest. The bullets hit him while he was moving forward and threw him violently back toward the street, spinning him, the lifted leg jerking crazily and bending at the knee, his foot flipping upward.
The blast of sound was familiar, too, the deep heavy crack of a .45-caliber handgun, and it was as if the crashing noise itself struck the man, whirled him, shoved him down, killed him. When the shots rang out I kicked the accelerator and the cushion behind me rammed against my back, then my foot hit the brake pedal hard and muscles lumped in my arms as I squeezed my hands around the steering wheel, holding my weight away from it.
I slapped the gearshift up, slid over the seat. When I shoved the Cad’s door open the man had already fallen onto the brittle yellow grass. As I jumped out he lay with his mouth and nose pressed against the ground, but he wasn’t dead yet, not quite dead. He lifted his right arm into the air, the hand dangling loosely, held it up for a fraction of a second, then arm and hand fell like a stick, like something not really part of him. The big man was still in the doorway, head turning left, from the body before the house to me.
I had my hand on the Colt’s butt, was yanking it from under my coat, but the big guy didn’t swing his gun toward me. Instead he half-stepped, half-jumped, backward, started to slam the door.
I sprinted past the limp body, trying to reach the door before it closed completely. But when still eight or ten feet away I knew I wasn’t going to make it unless I managed to move just a little faster, so I left my feet in a marvelous bound and sailed the last few feet through the air. Why? How do I know why?
Maybe at that moment I felt I could go faster through the air. Maybe at that moment I keenly calculated my speed and the door’s speed, and wind resistance, and drag of gravity, and concluded that if I gave a marvelous bound I could hit that door a split second before it closed and locked. Maybe, maybe not; who knows now?
If I had done it, the door would have sprung open lightly, it would have offered very little resistance to me, I would hardly have noticed the impact as I sailed past it and on into the little house.
Yes, if I had done it.
It was when already in the air that I realized for sure I wasn’t going to do it. It was the wrong place to be. I was in flight and still a couple of feet from the door when I heard it slam with a great crash and even heard the metallic clicking of the spring lock snapping into its slot. But that was only an instant before the much greater crash, the truly astonishing smack and thud and crack and horrible yell.
I knew I couldn’t have been sitting sort of sprawled out, with my head propped against the door, which had gotten behind me somehow, for very long. It couldn’t have been long, because I could still hear the car’s engine whining, hear the squeal of its tires as it skidded out of the alley. I wondered why the big guy hadn’t shot me instead of slamming the door and racing away. Probably he was another dumb one. Like Famous.
I also wondered why anyone would have such a remarkable door in such a beat-up and dilapidated old house. The way I’d hit it, the whole wall should have caved in. The house should have crumpled about my head, instead of vice-versa. But the house was still standing, even if I was not.
After a little while I got to my feet. I held my head in both hands for a little while longer, then hunted around until I located my gun, and my car. After that I went through the back door, the usual way, and checked the house. Nothing was in it except rummage-sale furniture. A few minutes later I was many blocks from the scene. Some things were still unclear to me, in fact quite a lot of things, so I pulled over and parked at the curb.
Twenty minutes later I’d smoked three cigarettes and come to a firm conclusion: I was going to have to quit reading the warning printed on cigarette packs, or I might get lung cancer. I had also come to another conclusion. Though I hadn’t realized it until now, the kidnapper, blood-spiller, hell-raiser, killer, the guy I’d been after all along, was—had to be—Dave Cassiday.
This time I did not pull into the drive and use the handy little phone. I parked a couple of blocks from Cassiday’s home in Beverly Hills, cased the area and found a spot behind the house where shrubs and the bulk of an old silk oak tree would conceal me from anyone inside while I negotiated the wrought-iron fence.
Getting past the eight-feet-high barrier was surprisingly easy. I grabbed one of the upright bars near its top, put my left hand lower on the bar next to it, jumped up, pulling hard, swung my legs alongside the fence and over its top like a pole-vaulter going over the mark, and landed inside on my feet. I’d come down with my back to the house, so I turned around, waited, but there was no sound and nothing moved.
It was a small thing, perhaps. Nonetheless, I felt quite pleased with myself. Instead of cracking into the bars, or impaling myself on their tops, I had soared over them as lightly and gracefully as a bird. After my recent difficulties with the door, overcoming this first new hurdle with such ease gave me something I sorely needed: confidence.
I stepped to the trunk of that silk oak tree and confidently looked for other cover that might hide me as I moved to the back door. There wasn’t any. No cars were parked on the lawn now. And neither here nor anywhere nearby had I spotted a dark blue sedan.
All the cars were gone; thus all the Citizens FOR—and the ten gorgeous tomatoes—were gone. Maybe Dave had taken off, too, and I was preparing to sneak up on an empty house. I checked my watch. Just after five P.M. In another half hour, or close to it, those lovelies would be marching along Filbert Street carrying their signs and banners, on their way to picket the Church of the Second Coming, to make their statement for and protest against while trying to grab newspaper space and time on T.V.
I’m not much of a guy for pickets and picketing, whether by unions on sympathy strike or students in unsympathetic revolt, by hot-eyed militants of the left or right or middle, spokesmen for the poor or rich, vegetarians or meat eaters, whoremongers or chastemongers, or even lovely ladies greatly exercised about Erovite or whatever else lovely ladies might become exercised about.
Still, I suppose there are times when a public “demonstration” serves a purpose and even has positive value—so long as it is benign, so long as the insistence upon “my” rights doesn’t limit or deny you yours, or break your head. But the more I thought about—I reached back a few hours into memory for the names, and the faces, bodies, eyes and lips, voices and warmth that went with them—Lula and Britt and Silvia, Yumiko and Emilie and Leonore, Thérèse and Ronnie and Margarita and Dina, the more a kind of chillness of worry grew in my middle. It had grown from a mere cool twinge of concern to a small gut-clench of cold, as if a single icy cell of fear had split, again and again, dividing and multiplying like a virus in my blood.
I tried to ignore the worry. I couldn’t be dithering about supersexy tomatoes when there was a job—an important job—to be done. But that was the nub of the trouble, those gals were supersexy, and whenever that thought crossed my mind it was double-crossed by another thought, of the hate and fear of sex and sexiness, and above all supersexiness, which possessed Festus Lemming and his joyless, juiceless, loveless flock.
But I pushed that out of my mind, or at least over to its edge, took the Colt from its holster and moved away from the silk oak tree. I was out in the open for only a few seconds while walking rapidly alongside the fence on my right, then left at the rear of the house to the back door. I turned the knob, pushed. The door was unlocked. I felt my pulse pick up a few beats, because to me that meant Dave Cassiday was, very likely, home.
His den was empty. The smell of pipe smoke was strong. I found him in the living room, sittin
g alone on the big curved divan recently warmed by ten splendid derrieres. He was on its far side, opposite the five- or six-foot opening that allowed entrance to the inside of the circle, seated facing me, pencil in his hand and a pad of yellow paper on his lap. His eyes were on a big color television set in the corner on my right, but they flicked to me as soon as I stepped into view. And I went into the living room with the Colt .38 in front of me.
Cassiday stared as I walked toward him. “What the hell is this, Scott? What in hell’s the gun for?”
“For you, Dave.” I stopped between the two ends of the divan. “Sit on your hands, pal. Lace your fingers together, and sit on them.”
“Is this some kind of joke? I’ll be goddamned if—”
“Sit on them.”
He hesitated, then put his arms behind him, leaned forward, sat down with his hands pinned under his hips. I moved around the little table, noticing that the carnations in their colorful vase were already beginning to wilt, frisked Cassiday for a gun. He was clean. When I stepped back and sat on one edge of the divan, he was a good eight feet away—it was a big hunk of furniture.
“O.K.,” I said. “You can relax.”
He shifted his weight, let both hands drop into his lap, scowling. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
I grinned. “That was the wrong thing to say, Dave. You should hope I don’t know what I’m doing. But I do, finally. Didn’t really take so long at that, though, did it? Hell, it hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since you snatched Bruno, drained the blood out of André—incidentally, what was it you pumped into Strang?”
“You’re not only getting paranoid, you’ve got a damned short memory, Scott. You forget I was grabbed along with Doc, tied up and gagged—”
“Yeah, tied. Not very carefully. Bruno was really wrapped up, separate ropes for his wrists and ankles, and they were tight. So tight it was several minutes before he could walk at all. Not Dave Cassiday though. In about five seconds you were moving around like a ballet dancer—making sure Monk was dead, by the way—because there was only one rope around your arms and legs, and even it was pretty loose. I imagine if I’d started to work on those knots I’d have wondered why they unraveled so easily compared to the dandies holding Bruno. Fortunately—for you, Dave—I didn’t untie them but cut you free instead. Using your handy knife, at that.”
“You’re talking nonsense. Maybe I wasn’t strapped down like Doc, maybe I was. How would I know? After all, he was the important man, not me. And is it some kind of crime to carry a pocket knife? It’s just lucky I had it in my pocket—”
“Not so lucky. Pretty careless kidnappers to leave a knife in your pants. I suppose if you’d had a pistol, or a bazooka, they’d have let you keep it, too. But that’s a small item. Let’s take a look at the big picture, from your point of view, Dave. You were taking a swing at a tricky multimillion, maybe billion, dollar operation. If you were quote kidnapped unquote along with Bruno, you could keep an eye on the whole operation, and on those three hard boys you hired, could protect your interests—the Erovite formula, essentially—but at the same time appear not to be the villain but one of the victims if anything went wrong. Which it did, of course.”
“You’re going to feel damned silly—”
“Hold it a minute. You just said a chunk of it yourself, Dave. That Bruno was the important man, not you. It makes sense that our bruisers might force André to phone the Doc, get him down to the church—good sense, because considering the time, and the nature of recent events, very few people other than André could have got Bruno to a spot where he could be snatched. Or beaten, or killed. Lots of people around these days who’d at least like to pound on the Apostle of Sin, and Bruno knew it. So André was the right man to lean on, the perfect lever for moving Bruno when they wanted him moved. Naturally, after that they’d have to kill him. But how did our bruisers know about André, Dave?”
“What?”
I didn’t say anything. I waited, watching him, while his brow crinkled and a corner of his mouth started to twitch slightly.
“Yeah,” I went on softly, “how did they know about André? He was cooperating with you and Bruno, undercover in the Church, passing news of Lemming’s plans to you and Bruno. Nobody else was supposed to know about that. Sure wasn’t common knowledge. Bruno wouldn’t have told the boys. Dru wouldn’t have. Sort of points the finger at you, Dave. Right?”
This time he didn’t say anything.
“Maybe you knew it would tag you—if there was a hitch, that is, and if anybody ever learned these little details—which possibility might have helped you decide to be a covictim with Bruno. But you should have stayed home in bed, that was another mistake.”
“What?”
He was in a rut. Both times the word had just popped out. “If our boys knew as much as we now realize they must have, they also knew they didn’t need Dave Cassiday, not if they had Bruno. No reason to pull you down to the church and snatch you, too, Dave. No reason at all. Except your reasons.”
He smiled oddly. “You make a pretty good case with nothing to go on but half-witted guesses. I’d almost turn myself in if I didn’t know you were full of—”
“I wasn’t quite finished. And I’m not guessing, not any more. Once I realized you had to be it, the rest was easy. For example, if André had phoned Bruno and you about the same time, Bruno should have arrived at the church well before you, since he lived much closer to Weilton. He didn’t. You admitted to me yourself that you waited several minutes for the Doc. Besides, both calls from Weilton would have been long-distance, and thus recorded. So on my way here I checked with a contact in the phone company. You know what I found out. There was a call to Bruno from André’s phone—same number as Lemming’s, by the way—in the church. But none to you, Dave. Not near seven P.M., or at any other time yesterday. How do you explain that half-witted guess?”
He was silent for a good half-minute. Then he smiled that very engaging crooked smile of his and said, “I don’t suppose that’s all you’ve got?”
“No, that’s not all.”
Still smiling, he sighed. “Well, it wasn’t supposed to get this screwed up, Scott. It was arranged so Lemming would be in the squeeze, not me. It was beautiful. It was supposed to work. And if it hadn’t been for you, you sonofabitch, it would have.”
18
Cassiday relaxed, crossed one leg over the other, folded his arms, and went on, “If it had worked, none of these questions would have been asked—there wouldn’t have been anybody to ask them. Even if Dru refused to deliver the Erovite envelope, Doc would never have suspected me for a minute. I could even have tried it again, maybe a different way, made it work. I suppose you know I’m the only man who could have made it work.”
I nodded. “That’s what brought me here. Anyone who squeezed the formula out of Bruno would then have to kill the Doc of course. But as soon as he tried to market Erovite, even if he called it something else, he would automatically tag himself as the guy who’d killed Bruno to get the formula. Unless—unless he was a man who already knew the formula, or could claim he’d known it all along, because he was the very lad who’d been producing and marketing Erovite. Someone like you, Dave. More accurately, only you.”
“You mind if I smoke? I can’t shoot you with my pipe.”
“Go ahead. I’d hate to put two or three into your gut, but I will if you get cute. I suppose you remember what these pills did to Monk.”
He pulled his pipe and a tobacco pouch from his coat pocket. “I remember,” he said. After tamping tobacco into the pipe’s bowl he added, “You said you had more, Scott. That all there is?”
“Not quite. Last night on Fifty-eighth Street, Bruno and André were brought into that back room first so you could be alone with at least one of your kidnappers long enough—besides getting that part-of-the-convincer tap on your eye—to give last-minute instructions. Such as ordering the murder of a lovely gal, who’d seen one of your men and probably Strang
as well in the church parking lot, and might even have recognized you in the front seat of the car. Just as Strang wasn’t killed merely to make Bruno write his note to Dru, or even because he could identify your two heavy-men, but because he knew you were behind the snatch from the beginning, since he hadn’t phoned you at all but instead had been forced to call Bruno by you.”
Dave had gotten his pipe lit and was drawing on it. After a couple of puffs he said, “You’re pretty good.”
“I don’t have to be good when a guy makes as many mistakes as you did.” I paused. “Tell me something, Dave. A minute ago you mentioned setting things up so Lemming would be in the squeeze. Lemming, not you. Mind explaining that?”
He was quiet for a few seconds, squinting at me. Then he said slowly, “Matter of fact, I’d kind of like for somebody to know just how good it … was. But what difference does it make to you?”
“You’re going to tell it sooner or later. Besides, maybe the only thing that kept me from tagging you before now was the idea, damn near a fixation I guess, that of Earth’s entire population the man most likely to kill or ruin Bruno—and Erovite along with him—was Festus Lemming. If Festus wasn’t such a weirdo and so obviously out to get the Doc, you’d have been number one sooner.”
“Very natural assumptions, Scott—for you and a hundred million other people. That’s what made it so sweet.” He paused for a while, then went on easily, “If half the country was ready to believe Lemming could kill Emmanuel Bruno, or have him killed, why not help them to believe he did?”
“Come again?”
“Use your imagination. Say it had worked my way—Bruno’s dead, nobody knows for sure who killed him, half the country thinks maybe Lemming had something to do with it. A gun, knife, that wouldn’t be the Pastor’s style. But an unknown rot in artery and vein? Something creepy in the blood? More like it, huh? No worry about ballistics, either, no fingerprints, just—the Antichrist is dead! Praise the Lord!”
Dead-Bang Page 17