Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll

by John Farris

  “Lying down before dinner,” Diane said without moving. “What’s wrong, Pete?”

  “Why would anything be wrong?”

  “I could tell by the way you were walking. The quick way you breathe.” She looked up then. “Are you going into town?”

  “Soon.”

  Diane sighed. She got up from the pillows stiffly. “Too dark to read,” she said. “I guess I’ll go now.” She looked toward the bay again. “It’s really beautiful here. I like to come here and just sit. Get away from things that aren’t so beautiful.” She looked a bit wistful. “I guess it won’t be long before we leave this house for good.”

  “What makes you think so?” I said.

  “It’s — just a feeling I have.”

  “What will you do then?”

  “I’ll go where Aimee goes, I suppose,” she said carelessly. “It doesn’t really matter.”

  “You like the kind of life you’ve got here?” I asked her. “You like the people you live with?”

  She looked away, bent to pick up the pillows. “I think we are in rats’ alley,” she said almost inaudibly, “where the dead men lost their bones.”

  The odd line jostled memory, and I looked at her thoughtfully. “Where did you get that?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve known it for years. I’ve always liked that poem, because he seemed to write it for me. I’m the girl who looks in the mirror and wonders what difference it made.”

  I wanted to hear her say more, but she was suddenly silent, as if she had revealed too much of the self that she usually kept carefully wrapped and put away from the curiosity of strangers.

  I took the pillows from her, stacked them under my arm. We walked back to the house together, saying nothing. Her jaw was set, and there was a melancholy look in her eyes, as if she were reaching back to another time that had held more promise than now. At the patio I left her and went to the garage, picked out a car for the drive into town.

  Chapter Twenty

  At seven o’clock I placed the call. I listened to the drone as it rang for a long time at the other end. Then she answered. “Yes?”

  “You told me to call,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Do you know where Railroad Avenue is?”

  “I can find it.”

  “Get in touch with a man called Harry Small at Nineteen Railroad Avenue.”

  “Why?”

  “He raised Carla Kennedy,” she said. “He knows where she is now.” The connection was broken with a hollow click.

  I wrote the address down, left the Coral Gardens Hotel. In the car I unfolded my city map and found Railroad Avenue. It was a two-block street that ran diagonally into the Seaboard’s Moreland Yards, not far from the bay.

  I found the street without much trouble. It was hardly wider than a driveway, lined with gray, tottering rooming houses, narrow brick buildings. I parked near the entrance to Railroad Avenue, beside a littered embankment next to the railroad property. A long diesel freight pounded by on the outside track as I got out of the Buick.

  Number Nineteen was half a block from the glittering bands of tracks. I picked out the number lettered above the door in the light of a lamppost on the corner. It was a deserted store of some kind. The windows had been painted over, and there was a large rusted padlock on the door. It probably hadn’t been opened in years. Somebody had scratched a ludicrous face in the scaly paint near the keyhole.

  I wasn’t amused. I had bought myself twenty bucks worth of nothing. I looked up and down the dark street. Lights burned here and there in the high windows, but there were no faces, no people to share the ledge of sidewalk with me. I walked past the store slowly, stopped. There was a crevice between two buildings, barely four feet wide. A dozen steps down this brick canyon a small yellow light glowed feebly, making long groping shadows. There was a door beneath the light.

  I listened to the sound of boxcars clanking together in the freight yard, the deep chuff of an old locomotive. I walked down the alley, my feet rattling the trash. A furry shadow raced from a small paper box ahead of me, darted into blackness beyond the reach of the light.

  No one answered my knock. I looked down at the brass doorknob. It gleamed dully. No rust. I touched it. My fingertip came away clean.

  I put my hand around the knob, turned it slowly. The latch clicked, the door was free of the jamb. I pushed it open.

  Inside, it was stifling. The one window was shut, shade pulled over it. The only light came from a battered metal table lamp in the center of the room. A man sat upright in a wheelchair beside the table. He was a short man with a bald head, powerful arm and shoulder muscles. His hands dangled at the spokes of the big wheels. He wore a T shirt, gray pants, suspenders. His face was yellow and dry, the eyes half open and slightly protruding. His parted lips twisted convulsively. He leered at me. It was nothing personal. He would leer at anybody who came through that door, even the cops who would have found him sooner or later, if I hadn’t come first.

  I walked closer to him, trying to smell death in the hot room. But he hadn’t been dead that long. I found out what was holding him up so stiffly. A knife had been thrust through the canvas back of the wheelchair, getting him just to the side of the left shoulderblade. From the size of the handle I judged it was a pretty large knife. The blade was aimed slightly downward. It had probably got the heart or one of the important arteries nearby. He would be a big sack of blood. A little of it had run down his T shirt in back, dried darkly.

  It would have required a husky man to stab him like that, through the thick muscles developed from years of self-locomotion in the wheelchair. The tread on the rubber-capped wheels was almost worn away.

  A stock of up-to-date newspapers and magazines with the front covers missing suggested he probably made his living as a newsdealer. His room needed a good cleaning. He didn’t have enough shelf space for all his books. They were piled on the windowsill, on the floor, under a bunk bed. There was one on the table near the wheelchair, opened at about the middle. I glanced at the cover. It was a collection of poems by Robert Browning.

  Next to the Browning reader was a telephone, and a small notepad was stuck halfway under the base of the phone. I pulled it out, looked through it. It wasn’t new, but there was only one notation in the little book, a Bay-view phone number. I picked up the receiver of the phone, dialed. There were six rings, then a sound as if someone had cut in.

  “Stan’s Restaurant,” a female voice said cheerfully.

  I hung up, looked at the number again. I tore the page out of the notebook and shoved it back beneath the telephone. Apparently Harry Small had had Stan’s private phone number at the restaurant. They cut in from somewhere else when he didn’t answer.

  Listening to the echo of my own thoughts in the silent room was making me nervous. Perspiration soaked my face. For a moment I almost envied him his dry skin.

  I walked around the table and my foot kicked a piece of broken porcelain. I looked down and saw a little glazed figure, a Napoleonic soldier standing stiffly at attention. His feet and rifle were broken and there was a long crack down his face to the white cross-chest cartridge belt. I wrapped him in my handkerchief, not taking time to look for the missing feet, and put the broken doll in my coat pocket.

  It was almost impossible to find anything in the cluttered room, but I gave it a try, looking in the most likely places for pictures. I found none. No faded snapshots of little Carla Kennedy. No trace of the girl at all. And Harry Small was supposed to have raised her.

  I was ready to go. I had stayed too long already. But I went to the phone and dialed another number, the number the old woman had given me. It rang again and again. I waited for her to answer, but she never came. I hung up and wiped the phone with a towel from the sink. I thought about turning off the light above the door and leaving through the alley that led to the rear of the building. But I was liable to blunder into more trouble if I didn’t go out the way I had come. I left Harry Small, smearing the doorknob with the palm of
my hand as I went out. As far as I could tell, no curious eyes tracked my progress down Railroad Avenue to where the Buick was parked.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  At a quarter after eight I parked the Buick in a metered rectangle on Kelvin Boulevard, walked half a block to Monessen. Down at the other end of the street, near the apartment house where Victor Clare had lived, children gathered under a streetlight. This end of Monessen was deserted.

  There were no lights in the grim brick fortress of the used-furniture store. I cupped my hands against the glass plate in the door, looked inside. It took me a few seconds to notice the splinter of light between the curtains at the rear. I watched it, reached out with my fist and knocked loudly. Nothing happened. I knocked again. The light went out suddenly.

  I thought about that. Then I turned and walked across the street, stood partially behind a leaning tree to see if anyone ventured out. I waited for what seemed a long time. I decided it wasn’t worth it, but I stayed there anyway. Then I saw the tip of a cigarette glow in an alley next to the store. Nothing else. Just the cigarette to tell me I wasn’t the only one who waited.

  In another minute or two, the cigarette was flipped away, toward the sidewalk. I kept my eyes on that alley. I counted the steps he might be taking. Then there was a crack of misty pale light along the side of the furniture store as a door was opened. I thought I saw someone go inside, but I wasn’t sure. It was quite a distance. The light vanished as the door was shut.

  I yawned to lessen springlike tension, put a hand inside my coat to loosen the automatic that rode in the shoulder holster there. I crossed the street casually, my shoes popping the crisp little asphalt bubbles raised by the heat of the sun that day. Down at the other end of the street the children played in the circular glow from the streetlight. A voice chanted, “Ten... twenty... thirty...” and there was a quick scuffle as figures fled to favorite hiding places. Soon there would be the long moments of breathless search, a yelp of discovery, a frenzied dash to the circle of light. Home free.

  I walked into the alley.

  “Seventy... eighty...”

  I pulled the heavy automatic from the holster, slid my fingertips along the smooth, faintly oily slide. I put my thumb on the rasp top of the hammer, eased it back. I walked very slowly. I lived a long time between each step. The noise of the children faded, belonging to another world beyond the mouth of the tar-black alley.

  This was the world now. A world of silence where you shot fast and quick at a misstep, a fatally accidental sound ahead. Scrape of shoe against an unexpected break in the pavement. Tiny whispering of fabric against a brick wall.

  I found the depression in the wall of brick where the door was. I stopped again. He might not have gone inside. Or there might be another one a dozen feet down the alley, waiting with a gun on the door, waiting for me to frame myself in the dusty light. If it was a shotgun it would tear me in half.

  My fingers touched the knob of the door. It turned without any difficulty.

  If someone were waiting for me, he’d be as nervous as I was, as tightly wound, looking for an excuse, any excuse, to blast away.

  I put the automatic in the shoulder holster for a moment, peeled out of my coat. It would be a poor decoy. It might not work. But if it did, I had him like shooting pigeons in the park... That is, if anyone were waiting.

  Holding the coat by the collar, I turned the knob all the way. I brought the automatic up in my other hand, steadying it against my stomach. I pulled the door open, flung the coat high into the entrance so that it flared open, sleeves flopping.

  Nothing happened. The coat landed inside with a muted plop. I went through the doorway quickly, rolled past the jamb and against the wall inside. Light came from a single unshaded bulb hanging on a frayed cord from the ceiling. There was no one here, either. There were many crates inside, pieces of broken furniture. Enough dust to shovel out.

  And freshly made footprints in the dust on the floor. About a size-nine shoe. Not a very big guy. The tracks stopped at another door across from me. This door was open about two inches and there was more light in the room beyond. And voices.

  I eased the alley door shut, picked up my coat and put it on.

  I followed his steps to the other door. Only one person was talking. He spoke with a soft drawl. He talked almost incessantly, and there were overtones by a woman. She didn’t speak. She moaned in terror and pain. The speaker didn’t seem to mind this. He talked on. I moved very close to the door and stopped. I could see inside. It was the room where the woman modeled her figures. The fan was still on. I could hear it, above the frightened sobbing, the tough persuasive drawl.

  The drawl went like this:

  “Mothah, did you tell him wheah Cahla Kennedy is? Did you, mothah?”

  “He... went to Harry Small. Harry... told...”

  “No, mothah. Harry Small didn’t tell him nothin’. He couldn’t, because Harry Small is dead.”

  I couldn’t tell where the man was standing in the room. The soft flowing voice was confusing, and acoustics were bad. It was Winkie Gilmer, of course. It had to be Winkie Gilmer. I felt very grateful that it was Winkie Gilmer.

  “I want to know what you told him, mothah. Befo’ I open up that othah cheek fo’ you.”

  I kicked the door wide open and stepped into the room, knowing instantly that I had been suckered good, that Winkie Gilmer had been expecting me, had led me on with the drawling voice as he waited for me to come inside. I knew he was very close to me even as something chopped down on my wrist and the automatic jumped out of my hand. I felt as if I had grabbed a live wire. I did the only thing I could. I fell away from the direction of the blow and part of my flaring coat was ripped cleanly and noiselessly by the slicing blade.

  I didn’t go down but was wedged awkwardly between an old dresser and a defeated easy chair. I got my eyes on Gilmer then. He recovered with cat-quickness, brought the blade lower with a flourish, moved in on me with a little crouching step. I had to watch the blade. It was honed sharp, thin, about six inches long. Everything was happening in split seconds. I knew the futility of trying to squirm loose from the grip of the furniture. I kicked up and out hard, trying to get his elbow with the toe of my shoe. It missed, skidded off his forearm, but knocked the arm up and threw him off stride for a second. I sprawled backwards, my shoulders against the floor, head tilted against the wall, legs sticking up and out, one of them bent over an arm of the sagging easy chair. I couldn’t have been more helpless.

  But Gilmer had to wait another second, indecision in his eyes, before he could decide to lean across the chair, elude my legs and start the blade low, away from my arms, ripping out bowels and intestines and lungs with one jerking slash. It gave me a second to twist sideways, get one arm under the chair, one behind it, and throw all the muscles of my arms and shoulders into play as I lifted the chair, shoving it forward enough so that it tipped over into him just as he lunged, hitting him right above the knees. I followed the chair, shoving it like a football blocking sled, and Gilmer was carried forward a few feet, his body sprawled out.

  Chair and Gilmer slammed into a shelf, and little modeled figures showered down. Gilmer had powerful legs. He was sitting on his rump at the base of the shelf but he kicked up, tearing the clumsy chair from my grasp, knocking it away from both of us. He scrambled up, his face reddening, his fist still holding tight to the knife. He was a stocky little fellow with a face like a college cheerleader. A pleasant-looking little man who wanted to slash my gut inside out.

  I was just a little off balance. The human body is always off balance, unless you’re standing still with both feet planted. The ancient Tibetan monks who worked up the sciences of jiu-jitsu and bar-jitsu knew that. There are ways to fight a knife flashing at you, edge up. The bar-jitsu boys make it look easy. Two slaps with either hand. A nerve bitten at the base of the thumb, on the back of the hand. The knife jumps away, there is only a pain in the forearm. It was something to know. I wished I knew. I only
knew to duck low, under the knife he held at belly level, shoving forward to knock him off balance so he couldn’t get the knife around and use it against my neck. I pushed him back and straightened up, taking my arms from around him, shoving his good right arm high so that he had to reverse it to make use of the blade. I got hold of the arm first and, when Gilmer’s reflexes stiffened it, used the arm like a lever to throw him halfway across the room. He sailed in a flat arc to the table where the woman had worked at her figures. He hit the table on his back and rebounded slightly so that when momentum carried him to the edge of the table he was almost sitting up. He went off the table and sprawled face first into another shelf of figures. He got one arm up to ease the impact. The little dolls jumped from the shelves, popping against the concrete floor.

  Winkie spun away. He wasn’t holding the knife. His other arm, the one that wasn’t in front of his face, lashed out and cleared a shelf of bottles. He would have fallen but his fingers gripped the edge of the shelf, and he held himself up. A broken jug of something that looked like linseed oil was emptying down over his face and the front of his shirt. He turned, one hand closing on the neck of the broken bottle as I hopped across the table after him. I was going to go into him with my fists but changed my mind in mid-air and hit him with both feet together, right above the belt. The broken bottle went spinning. Winkie’s legs shot out from under him. His hands broke his fall.

  Gilmer crawled to his knees. I had hit the floor after kicking him, and one of my elbows was numb. I was afraid it was broken. I turned on the floor to defend myself if he came after me. It would be a poor job with one arm. But Gilmer apparently didn’t know I was hurt. He looked away from me quickly, his face wrinkling with alarm. I glanced under the table and saw the woman on her hands and knees near the door, picking up my automatic. I hadn’t paid any attention to her until now. I saw blood dripping slowly from her face. The gun was all set to go off — when she found something to shoot at.