Graveyard Plots

by Bill Pronzini

  I went out into the rain, got the set of emergency handcuffs I keep in the trunk of the car, took them back inside, and snapped one cuff around the wiry guy's wrist and the other around the brass rail. I was over looking at Sam Kern again when Kerry finished with her telephone call.

  "They're sending people out right away," she said.

  "Good. This is Kern, all right, and I think he'll be okay; but you can't tell with head injuries. We'd better just leave him where he is."

  She wet a cloth and brought it over and laid it across Kern's neck without touching his wound. Her eyes were big and her cheeks had a milky cast; she still looked confused.

  "How did you know?" she said.

  "That the other guy was an impostor? Half a dozen reasons. You're always trying to play detective; how come you didn't spot them?"

  "Don't kid around, you. What reasons?"

  "All right. One, he told us he was just getting ready to close up and go home, yet there's a big log fire blazing away in the fireplace. No tavern owner would stoke up a fire like that just before closing for the night.

  "Two, he told us this man here was a regular customer and that he wouldn't let him drive home until he sobered up. But where's his car? It's not out front; the parking area was deserted when we drove in. There's no room for a car around back and there wasn't one on that access road either.

  "Three, the hat the real Kern was wearing. How many men sit in a bar and get drunk with their coat off but their hat still on?And not only on, but jammed down tight on his head. Had to be some reason for the hat—to hide something like that head wound.

  "Four, you asked the other one for a toddy; he didn't know what you meant at first. Then he made it with rum instead of bourbon. Could have been a mistake, but that's not likely for a man who has been serving drinks at the same bar for twenty years; that man knows which bottle is which. No, it's the kind of mistake somebody makes if he not only doesn't know how well the bottles are arranged but isn't enough of a bartender in the first place to know how to make a martini.

  "Five, he said he couldn't change my twenty because he'd taken every dime out of the cash register and put it in the safe. And the drawer is empty; I saw it when you paid him. But what kind of businessman empties his cash drawer before he locks up for the night, when customers like us might still show up? And how many businessmen clean out their cash drawers completely? All the ones I know leave at least the change in there and most also leave a few singles, so they won't have to bother putting it all back the next day."

  Kerry no longer looked confused; now she looked a little cowed. She said, "You said he's probably an escaped convict or a recent parolee. How could you possibly know that?"

  "That's number six," I said. "The color of his skin, babe—it's white, pasty. No man who has lived in these mountains for twenty years, as hot as it gets up here in the summer, could have a complexion like that; the only people who do are shut-ins, hospital patients, and convicts."

  "Oh," she said in a small voice.

  "I figure it happened something like this: He arrived here earlier tonight—hitchhiking, probably; which would make him a parolee, or else he'd have picked up his own set of wheels. He found himself alone with Kern and it was a set-up he couldn't resist. Maybe he had that .357 Magnum with him; more likely it belongs to Kern. In any case he used something hard to knock Kern over the head—out on this side of the bar, maybe while Kern was stoking the fire. Then he rifled the till. But he's not too smart; he forgot to lock the front door first.

  "Then we showed up. When he saw our headlights through the window he didn't know who we might be. He could have done any of three things. Run and lock the door and pretend the place was closed—but what if we were friends of Kern's? What if we looked through the window in any event and saw Kern lying on the floor? His second alternative was to let us come in and throw down on us, rob us too and steal our car; and that's probably what he would have done if we'd been locals who knew Kern. But he didn't want to do it that way; it would only buy him more trouble, leave one or more people who could identify him as an armed thief a lot more easily than a man with a busted head. And he's not a killer, thank Christ, so that alternative was out. His only other choice was to find out if we were strangers—he asked about that right away, remember—and if we were, to run a bluff and get rid of us quick.

  "He picked Kern up off the floor, draped him over the table, and shoved that hat down over his head to hide the wound. His own hat, maybe; it had to have been handy. Kern was probably wearing the apron, so all he had to do was yank it off and tie it around himself to cover the gun inside his belt. All of that wouldn't have taken more than thirty seconds—less time than it took us to stop the car, get out, and come inside."

  Kerry was silent for a space of time. Then she asked, "You didn't know he had that gun, did you? Before you hit him?"

  "Sure I did. It made a bulge under his apron when he moved around. Didn't you notice it?"

  "Well," she said, "I . . . um, I guess I did, when we first came in. But I thought . . . I mean, I didn't look again because . . ."

  "Because why?"

  "I thought . . . oh hell, I thought something had aroused him."

  "Aroused him?"

  "I thought he had a damn erection, all right?"

  I looked at her. And then I burst out laughing. "Kerry Wade, star detective," I said between cackles, "the female Sherlock Holmes. She can't even tell the difference between a gun barrel and an erection!"

  "Oh shut up," she said.

  I was still chuckling when the Highway Patrol and a county ambulance got there a few minutes later.

  FROM THE COLLECTION NIGHT FREIGHT

  "Stacked Deck" is solidly in the Black Mask school (and was, in fact, first published in The New Black Mask, a short-lived revival of that fine old pulp magazine). It is one of the few stories of this type that I've written, despite the critics and labelers who persist in calling the "Nameless Detective" series "hard-boiled." The "Nameless" series is actually humanist crime fiction, with dark-suspense overtones—or, as another labeler once termed it, "confessional crime fiction." The true hard-boiled story was born in the Depression thirties and died in the post-McCarthy fifties; everything since that has been termed hard-boiled is either an imitation, an intentional tribute, or some other kind of criminous tale (usually one featuring a private detective as protagonist) that has been misrepresented so it will fit into a convenient niche.

  Stacked Deck

  1.

  From where he stood in the shadow of a split-bole Douglas fir, Deighan had a clear view of the cabin down below. Big harvest moon tonight, and only a few streaky clouds scudding past now and then to dim its hard yellow shine. The hard yellow glistened off the surface of Lake Tahoe beyond, softened into a long silverish stripe out toward the middle. The rest of the water shone like polished black metal. All of it was empty as far as he could see, except for the red-and-green running lights of a boat well away to the south, pointed' toward the neon shimmer that marked the South Shore gambling casinos.

  The cabin was big, made of cut pine logs and redwood shakes. It had a railed redwood deck that overlooked the lake, mostly invisible from where Deighan was. A flat concrete pier jutted out into the moonstruck water, a pair of short wooden floats making a T at its outer end. The boat tied up there was a thirty-foot Chris-Craft with sleeping accommodations for four. Nothing but the finer things for the Shooter.

  Deighan watched the cabin. He'd been watching it for three hours now, from this same vantage point. His legs bothered him a little, standing around like this, and his eyes hurt from squinting. Time was, he'd had the night vision of an owl. Not anymore. What he had now, that he hadn't had when he was younger, was patience. He'd learned that in the last three years, along with a lot of other things—patience most of all.

  On all sides the cabin was dark, but that was because they'd put the blackout curtains up. The six of them had been inside for better than two hours now, the same five-m
an nucleus as on every Thursday night except during the winter months, plus the one newcomer. The Shooter went to Hawaii when it started to snow. Or Florida or the Bahamas—someplace warm. Mannlicher and Brandt stayed home in the winter.

  Deighan didn't know what the others did, and he didn't care.

  A match flared in the darkness between the carport, where the Shooter's Caddy Eldorado was slotted, and the parking area back among the trees. That was the lookout—Mannlicher's boy. Some lookout: he smoked a cigarette every five minutes, like clockwork, so you always knew where he was. Deighan watched him smoke this one. When he was done, he threw the butt away in a shower of sparks, and then seemed to remember that he was surrounded by dry timber and went after it and stamped it out with his shoe. Some lookout.

  Deighan held his watch up close to his eyes, pushed the little button that lighted its dial. Ten-nineteen. Just about time. The lookout was moving again, down toward the lake. Pretty soon he would walk out on the pier and smoke another cigarette and admire the view for a few minutes. He apparently did that at least twice every Thursday night—that had been his pattern on each of the last two—and he hadn't gone through the ritual yet tonight. He was bored, that was the thing. He'd been at his job a long time and it was always the same; there wasn't anything for him to do except walk around and smoke cigarettes and look at three hundred square miles of lake. Nothing ever happened. In three years nothing had ever happened.

  Tonight something was going to happen.

  Deighan took the gun out of the clamshell holster at his belt. It was a Smith & Wesson .38, lightweight, compact—a good piece, one of the best he'd ever owned. He held it in his hand, watching as the lookout performed as if on cue—walked to the pier, stopped, then moved out along its flat surface. When the guy had gone halfway, Deighan came out of the shadows and went down the slope at an angle across the driveway, to the rear of the cabin. His shoes made little sliding sounds on the needled ground, but they weren't sounds that carried.

  He'd been over this ground three times before, dry runs the last two Thursday nights and once during the day when nobody was around; he knew just where and how to go. The lookout was lighting up again, his back to the cabin, when Deighan reached the rear wall. He eased along it to the spare-bedroom window. The sash went up easily, noiselessly. He could hear them then, in the rec room—voices, ice against glass, the click and rattle of the chips. He got the ski mask from his jacket pocket, slipped it over his head, snugged it down. Then he climbed through the window, put his penlight on just long enough to orient himself, went straight across to the door that led into the rec room.

  It didn't make a sound, either, when he opened it. He went in with the revolver extended, elbow locked. Sturgess saw him first. He said, "Jesus Christ!" and his body went as stiff as if he were suffering a stroke. The others turned in their chairs, gawking. The Shooter started up out of his.

  Deighan said, fast and hard, "Sit still if you don't want to die. Hands on the table where I can see them—all of you. Do it!"

  They weren't stupid; they did what they were told. Deighan watched them through a thin haze of tobacco smoke. Six men around the hexagonal poker table, hands flat on its green baize, heads lifted or twisted to stare at him. He knew five of them. Mannlicher, the fat owner of the Nevornia Club; he had Family ties, even though he was a Prussian, because he'd once done some favors for an East Coast capo. Brandt, Mannlicher's cousin and private enforcer, who doubled as the Nevomia's floor boss. Bellah, the quasi-legitimate real estate developer and high roller. Sturgess, the bankroll behind the Jackpot Lounge up at North Shore. And the Shooter—hired muscle, hired gun, part-time coke runner, whose real name was Dennis D'Allesandro. The sixth man was the pigeon they'd lured in for this particular game, a lean guy in his fifties with Texas oil money written all over him and his fancy clothes—Donley or Donavan, something like that.

  Mannlicher was the bank tonight; the table behind his chair was covered with stacks of dead presidents—fifties and hundreds, mostly. Deighan took out the folded-up flour sack, tossed it on top of the poker chips that littered the baize in front of Mannlicher. "All right. Fill it."

  The fat man didn't move. He was no pushover; he was hard, tough, mean. And he didn't like being ripped off. Veins bulged in his neck, throbbed in his temples. The violence in him was close to the surface now, held thinly in check.

  "You know who we are?" he said. "Who I am?"

  "Fill it."

  "You dumb bastard. You'll never live to spend it."

  "Fill the sack. Now."

  Deighan's eyes, more than his gun, made up Mannlicher's mind for him. He picked up the sack, pushed around in his chair, began to savagely feed in the stacks of bills.

  "The rest of you," Deighan said, "put your wallets, watches, jewelry on the table. Everything of value. Hurry it up."

  The Texan said, "Listen heah—" and Deighan pointed the .38 at his head and said, "One more word, you're a dead man." The Texan made an effort to stare him down, but it was just to save face; after two or three seconds he lowered his gaze and began stripping the rings off his fingers.

  The rest of them didn't make any fuss. Bellah was sweating; he kept swiping it out of his eyes, his hands moving in little jerks and twitches. Brandt's eyes were like dull knives, cutting away at Deighan's masked face. D'Allesandro showed no emotion of any kind. That was his trademark; he was your original iceman. They might have called him that, maybe, if he'd been like one of those old-timers who used an ice pick or a blade. As it was, with his preferences, the Shooter was the right name for him.

  Mannlicher had the sack full now. The platinum ring on his left hand, with its circle of fat diamonds, made little gleams and glints in the shine from the low-hanging droplight. The idea of losing that bothered him even more than losing his money; he kept running the fingers of his other hand over the stones.

  "The ring," Deighan said to him. "Take it off."

  "Go to hell."

  "Take it off or I'll put a third eye in the middle of your forehead. Your choice."

  Mannlicher hesitated, tried to stare him down, didn't have any better luck at it than the Texan. There was a tense moment; then, because he didn't want to die over a piece of jewelry, he yanked the ring off, slammed it down hard in the middle of the table.

  Deighan said, "Put it in the sack. The wallets and the rest of the stuff too."

  This time Mannlicher didn't hesitate. He did as he'd been told.

  "All right," Deighan said. "Now get up and go over by the bar. Lie down on the floor on your belly."

  Mannlicher got up slowly, his jaw set and his teeth clenched as if to keep the violence from spewing out like vomit. He lay down on the floor. Deighan gestured at Brandt, said, "You next. Then the rest of you, one at a time."

  When they were all on the floor he moved to the table, caught up the sack. "Stay where you are for ten minutes," he told them. "You move before that, or call to the guy outside, I'll blow the place up. I got a grenade in my pocket, the fragmentation kind. Anybody doubt it?"

  None of them said anything.

  Deighan backed up into the spare bedroom, leaving the door open so he could watch them all the way to the window. He put his head out, saw no sign of the lookout. Still down by the lake somewhere. The whole thing had taken just a few minutes.

  He swung out through the window, hurried away in the shadows—but in the opposite direction from the driveway and the road above. On the far side of the cabin there was a path that angled through the pine forest to the north; he found it, followed it at a trot. Enough moonlight penetrated through the branches overhead to let him see where he was going.

  He was almost to the lakefront when the commotion started back there: voices, angry and pulsing in the night, Mannlicher's the loudest of them. They hadn't waited the full ten minutes, but then he hadn't expected them to. It didn't matter. The Shooter's cabin was invisible from here, cut off by a wooded finger of land a hundred yards wide. And they wouldn't be looking for h
im along the water, anyway. They'd be up on the road, combing that area; they'd figure automatically that his transportation was a car.

  The hard yellow-and-black gleam of the lake was just ahead, the rushes and ferns where he'd tied up the rented Beachcraft inboard. He moved across the sandy strip of beach, waded out to his calves, dropped the loaded flour sack into the boat, then eased the craft free of the rushes before he lifted himself over the gunwale. The engine caught with a quiet rumble the first time he turned the key.

  They were still making noise back at the cabin, blundering around like fools, as he eased away into the night.

  2.

  The motel was called the Whispering Pines. It was back off Highway 28 below Crystal Bay, a good half mile from the lake, tucked up in a grove of pines and Douglas fir. Deighan's cabin was the farthest from the office, detached from its nearest neighbor by thirty feet of open ground.

  Inside he sat in darkness except for flickering light from the television. The set was an old one; the picture was riddled with snow and kept jumping every few seconds. But he didn't care; he wasn't watching it. Or listening to it: he had the sound turned off. It was on only because he didn't like waiting in the dark.

  It had been after midnight when he came in—too late to make the ritual call to Fran, even though he'd felt a compulsion to do so. She went to bed at eleven-thirty; she didn't like the phone to ring after that. How could he blame her? When he was home and she was away at Sheila's or her sister's, he never wanted it to ring that late either.

  It was one-ten now. He was tired, but not too tired. The evening was still in his blood, warming him, like liquor or drugs that hadn't quite worn off yet. Mannlicher's face . . . that was an image he'd never forget. The Shooter's, too, and Brandt's, but especially Mannlicher's.