The Baby Blue Rip-Off m-2

by Max Allan Collins

  A green van with the words GARDENING SERVICE on the side.

  23

  The house next door was smaller than Mrs. Fox’s, but of the same gothic, dignified type, and seemed in less of a state of decline. My insistent knocking was answered by a man of perhaps sixty-five, wearing an obviously expensive ash gray suit that indicated he was still active in business; he was thin without looking frail, with hair the same color as his suit and a long face whose deep lines were presently deepened further in irritation. He hadn’t even finished asking who the hell I was when I pushed my way in and closed the door behind me.

  “What do you think you’re doing,” he sputtered, frightened now, “barging into a person’s house-get out of here before I call the police!”

  “That’s just what I want you to do,” I said.

  I gave him a second to say, “What…?” and calm down a bit.

  Then I excused myself for barging in and explained about the robbery next door. I was just finishing up as a handsome, silver-haired woman in a beige dress appeared at the mouth of the entryway; she was a few years older than her husband. “What’s the fuss, Henry? Who is this young man?”

  “He says there’s a robbery going on next door, Genevieve.”

  “Good heavens! Is it that green van pulled up to the house?”

  I nodded, getting impatient, wishing these people would get a move on.

  “I thought that was suspicious,” she said. “She always has her son do the gardening for her. She can’t afford having it done. Are these the same people who killed that poor Mrs. Jonsen?”

  I nodded again and said, “And no doubt they’re holding Mrs. Fox captive right now.”

  The man said, “I’ll phone the police at once,” and rushed off.

  Finally!

  His wife was shaking her head back and forth, saying, “I just don’t understand people anymore, I really don’t.”

  “Ma’am,” I said, “do you have a back door?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Could I use it?”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll show you the way.”

  But first I had to step back onto their front porch for a moment to retrieve something: a tire iron I’d gotten from my van, the best short-notice weapon I could come up with. I didn’t intend to lay my ribs on the line again without some protection. I’d left it out of sight on the porch before knocking, as I hadn’t wanted to alarm these people any more than necessary. Now that they understood the situation, my being armed wouldn’t shock them, even if my weapon was somewhat unorthodox.

  So I slipped out the back and was glad to be able to avoid coming up on the van from the street side; this way, cutting through the neighbors’ yard and up the hill on the passenger’s side of the vehicle, my approach was less obvious, more unexpected. I moved quietly but not slowly-in a crouch, like a humorless Groucho Marx, holding onto the tire iron with two hands, as if I were expecting somebody to try and take it away. There was no sound coming from the van: no voices, no shuffle of feet, no scrape of objects being moved. At first I thought they were just being extra-cautious in their loading, but even when I got right up next to the van, there was nothing but silence within. Either the van was already full and the two guys were inside the house having a final look around; or the van was empty and the loading hadn’t begun yet. The latter made more sense to me, but that doesn’t mean I eased my grip on the tire iron, though it did give me the courage to go squeezing through the space between van and house.

  Nobody there.

  Nothing in the van.

  Meaning they hadn’t started loading yet; they weren’t far enough along with the heist for that. Which made sense. After all, they were short-handed; only two of them had gone along. That one guy, the whining one, had decided to stay behind. Damn! I should’ve guessed when the guys in the van struck out at the Coopers’ place that they’d go on ahead and try Mrs. Fox’s-the groundwork had been laid, they’d said; why waste it? I would’ve kicked myself in the butt if I’d had the time and energy to spare.

  I moved around to the front of the van, opened the door on the passenger’s side, and got a nice surprise. The keys were in the dash. One key stuck in the ignition, the other (the rear-door key) dangling like an earring in poor taste. I yanked them out of the dash and dropped them in my pocket; our two rip-off artists wouldn’t be leaving in this van, not unless they cared to go coasting down the hill in neutral. The thought of that made me smile and helped chip away at my tension, my apprehension; started to loosen me up. I’d been too late to help Mrs. Jonsen, but, damnit, the cavalry was going to be on time this trip.

  Between the two seats was a big box of gardener’s tools, probably containing its share of burglary tools, too, if you cared to dig deep enough. I didn’t, but the top level of the box provided me with several items I felt would prove useful: a piece of grease-smeared cloth, the stuff that gags are made of; and a coil of rope, probably the remainder of a larger coil of rope, part of which had been used to tie up Mrs. Jonsen last Thursday. And it was no trick to guess what use a similar length of rope had been put to in the past few minutes.

  I returned to the rear of the van and glanced in the open side door of the house. A half flight of stairs rose to a landing and a closed door. I stuck my head inside for a closer look, and somebody behind that closed door said, “I’ll get started, Chet.”

  It was a distant voice, but not that distant, and I once again ducked inside the van’s rear compartment. That van’s rear end was getting to be a second home for me, and I huddled in its darkest corner, hiding in its deep shadows, the tire iron in my hands like a rifle. A plan of sorts had started to form in my head, having partially to do with the rag I’d stuffed in my pocket and the coil of rope slung over my shoulder. I waited for the distant voice to get closer.

  Didn’t take long. The door at the top of that half flight of stairs popped open, like it had been butted open, which in fact it had. Hulk (or P. J., or whatever the hell you want to call him) came down the stairs, arms filled with a big box that blocked his vision.

  So. After the Cooper score had fizzled, they’d gone back to Tony’s to get some boxes so they could pack up Mrs. Fox’s antiques carefully, on the scene; since they planned to cut out tonight, that would save time. And that accounted for why they weren’t any further along with the robbery than they were. They must’ve got out of Tony’s just a whisker before Brennan and the cops made the scene.

  P. J. ducked into the van. He put his load down near the front, his back to me, and though that big ass of his made a damn tempting target, I had something better in mind. There’s a streak of revenge in the best of us, you know, and I swung that shaft of iron into his side, into his ribcage, and at the same time covered his mouth with my left hand, a hand now holding that greasy rag. Once I had the rag stuffed in his mouth, I let him turn himself around, still doubled over with pain; he took one look at the tire iron and, out of reflex action, stood up straight.

  Which is something you don’t want to do inside a van, especially when you’re Hulk’s size. But he did it anyway and, in doing so, banged his head into the roof of the van like a hammer driving in a nail, making a thunk sound that echoed hollowly in the small compartment. He fell to his knees, then on his face. He couldn’t have been out colder if I had bashed him in the head with the tire iron.

  I used the rope to tie his hands and feet together behind him, in one big package. He was breathing well, despite the greasy rag crammed in his mouth, and as long as he didn’t choke to death on the taste of the thing, he’d be okay; besides, he wouldn’t be waking up for a while anyway.

  After I locked the van’s rear doors, I tossed the keys over into a hedge in the neighbors’ yard. I figured that was as good a place as any for them. Then the tire iron and I walked back around the van, entered the house, and crept up the stairs to the landing, cracking open the door to see what was beyond, ready to cave in the first unfriendly skull that presented itself.

  Fortunate
ly, what was beyond the door was the kitchen, with not an unfriendly skull in sight. It was big, a high-ceilinged ballroom of a kitchen, with light pine cabinets surrounding the room and gleaming white walls showing beneath them. Two of the walls were lined with ancient but well-preserved appliances: multiple-burner gas range, big round-shouldered Westinghouse, long horizontal freezer you could store a buffalo in, with an electric dishwasher the only apparent recent addition. Otherwise the room was empty, with the exception of the small, square pine table and its chairs in the center of the room. Sitting at the table, tied to one of those chairs and gagged, was Mrs. Fox.

  She was wearing what she’d worn that first evening I’d brought her hot supper around-a blue cotton dress with white cameo brooch-and was maintaining her usual quiet dignity. She seemed to be waiting, with patience, and with some irritation, for these intruders to be done with their sacking of her home and leave her alone.

  Her eyes smiled when she saw me, and when I took the gag off, I saw the corresponding smile below. But she was a smart old gal and didn’t say a word as I untied her. I whispered, “Go out the side here, and go over to the house next door. The police are on their way.”

  And she whispered back at me, “You’ll have to help me to the door. My cane is in the living room, and I’ll never make it without support.”

  “What about after you get outside?”

  “Then I’ll crawl if I have to. I just don’t feel that my falling down in here and causing a commotion would be ideal, do you?”

  I walked her over to the door and helped her on down the steps and out of the house, as carefully as an usher at a wedding seating the mother of the bride. Once outside, however, I realized she’d had an ulterior motive in asking for my aid. She said, still whispering, “Now listen here, young man, you just come along with me; you’re not going back inside that house.”

  “I have to.”

  “You said the police are coming,” she said. “Let them take care of this. You stay away from those people in there. Don’t go in that house.”

  “I have to.”

  That was when the old guy from next door appeared and took Mrs. Fox by the arm and began walking her over to his place. She kept her eyes on me, however, her expression making it clear she didn’t approve of my going back in.

  But I did anyway, of course, and my first action was to kick over the chair Mrs. Fox had been sitting tied-up in. It clattered to the floor, and the noise brought on the hoped-for response; I heard movement out in the other part of the house and positioned myself to the right of the swinging kitchen door, and when somebody pushed through, I cut him in half with the tire iron.

  “Sh… i… i… it,” he gushed, the air emptying out of him.

  His was a voice from this afternoon, the voice of the guy who had seemed second-in-command to the as-yet-unseen Frank Petersen. He was short, dark-haired, and lean, and he wore dark green gardener’s coveralls with a conspicuous lump in the right pocket. The lump was shaped like a small automatic. He was pale and had a more than superficial resemblance to the girl I’d seen at Tony’s. This, then, was Chet Richards, friend and accomplice of Pat Nelson, pimp and brother of Felicia Richards.

  “You!” he said. “Mallory! You son of a….”

  He didn’t finish, because I raised the tire iron as if to strike, and he covered his head and cowered.

  “Nice meeting you, Chet,” I said. “But then we’ve met before, right?”

  “Where’s the old lady? Where’s P. J.?”

  “P. J. wanted to be here, but he got all tied up. And I sent the old lady someplace where no one’s trying to kill her.”

  “Listen, nobody meant to kill that other old broad.”

  “Shut up. I don’t think I want to hear that line of bullshit when I don’t have to. You just keep quiet, Chet.”

  “What… what are you going to do?”

  “Wait. I’m going to wait for just a few minutes for the cops to get here.”

  “Cops?”

  “That’s right. I already called them. It’s all over.”

  Something got going in his eyes. Thoughts of the gun in his coverall pocket, most likely.

  “Don’t even think about it, Chet. As close as I am anyway to opening you up with this tire iron, you just don’t want to push me.”

  And the door behind me swung open hard, knocking me over, sending the tire iron pitching from my hand. I reached out after it, but the guy kicked the iron across the room, then came back and stepped on my hand, grinding my fingers like they were grapes and he was making wine.

  “Well, look who the hell it is,” Pat Nelson said.

  His voice sounded different than it had the other night in the stairwell when he was doing his Dean Martin parody. But it was a voice I recognized; I’d heard it back at Tony’s, and at Mrs. Jonsen’s, and one night outside my trailer. Pat had been the third party-the whiner-the guy who’d stayed behind at the garage before the Cooper job. But evidently, when Chet and P. J. went back to the garage after that fell through, they’d talked Pat into coming along to Mrs. Fox’s. That was something else I should’ve figured, damnit! After all, Felicia Richards had been alone when Brennan and the cops had raided Tony’s; there’d been no sign of the whiner. I should’ve considered the possibility of his being here. Damn.

  “Mallory,” Pat said, “I tell you, you got to be the craziest goddamn bastard I ever run across, you know that? Why do you cause so much goddamn misery for you and everybody else?” He too was in green coveralls, but his gun was in hand, not in pocket. It was a little thing, an automatic sized to fit a woman’s purse, and it was ridiculous that it scared me as much as it did.

  “Never mind that, Pat,” Chet said, scrambling onto his feet. “The cops are on the way; we got to get the hell out of here.”

  Pat’s face narrowed, and he came over and called me a bastard again and kicked me in the ribs. Not a very forceful kick, really, but it didn’t take much; pain shot through me like a flare, and I blacked out for a moment.

  When I came to, I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. They were gone. I wondered for how long.

  Then Pat told me. His voice, from outside, was saying: “Where are the goddamn keys! What did he do with the goddamn car keys!”

  By the time they reentered, I had managed to crawl over to the tire iron and get hold of it. I pitched the thing at Pat; I missed by a mile. He grabbed me by the shirt front, heaved me off the floor, and stuck his gun in my Adam’s apple. “What did you do with them, Mallory? What did you do with the goddamn keys?”

  “I left them with your wife,” I said, “the last time I had her.”

  That was not the sanest thing I might’ve said; it got me slapped with the automatic and thrown back to the floor.

  “Hey, what he said,” Chet said. “Your wife, you had her listening, right? She had to hear the squeal on the radio, right? She ought to be on her way.”

  Meaning Pat had a police-band radio; either at home or rigged up inside his GTO, or both. No big deal; anybody can buy a radio like that-or steal one-and they prove quite useful to guys in Pat’s line of work.

  “Let’s hope she beats the cops here,” Pat said.

  “Come on,” Chet said. “We’ll head down the hill-that’s the way she’ll be coming.”

  “First I ought to shoot that bastard-”

  “Never mind him; come on!”

  “Mallory,” Pat said, “I ought to blow your head off, you know that? But I’m going to prove something to you. We told you we didn’t mean to off that old broad, told you we weren’t no goddamn murderers, and I’m going to prove we aren’t by letting you keep your goddamn worthless skin. What do you think of that?”

  “Will you quit wasting time?” Chet said, and yanked Pat by the arm.

  Pat gave me one last foul look, and they left.

  I pushed up on my hands, then hands and knees, and then got on my feet. My legs were wobbly and my vision blurry, but I managed to navigate myself toward the door, and fin
ally I was down the steps and outside, leaning against the van. Half a block away, Pat Nelson and Chet Richards were jogging, jogging easy toward the red-white-and-blue GTO double-parked across the street. I don’t have to tell you who was behind the wheel. Debbie’s apartment was only a few blocks away, and so of course she beat the police here. A wave of helplessness washed through me; she and Pat and Chet would get away clean now, wouldn’t they? Some goddamn cavalry I was.

  Then I noticed Lou.

  Sometime in the last thirty seconds or so, Lou Brown had pulled up in front of Mrs. Fox’s in one of the Sheriff’s Department units, and now he was standing there in his cream-colored uniform, watching Chet and Pat approach the GTO and, apparently, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

  “Lou!” I hollered. “Get those guys!”

  He turned and saw me, and something odd floated across his face. Then he looked away from me and back toward the jogging figures and yelled, “Halt!” His voice was quavering; he was scared shitless.

  Pat and Chet both stopped dead, glanced at Lou for a moment, glanced at each other and exchanged confused grins, then resumed their jogging. They were just a few feet from the GTO now and didn’t seem worried.

  They should’ve been.

  Lou had drawn his big, long-barreled.357 Magnum and, both hands entwined around the butt, both fingers on the trigger, he yelled again, “Halt!”

  And fired.

  Chet did a jerky ballet movement as the bullet hit, blood spurting from him, and he flopped onto his back on the pavement. He had a surprised look on his face, frozen there now, and Pat had a similar look of surprise on his face as he looked down at his dead friend. He swung around, automatic in hand, and said, “What…?”