John D MacDonald - The Executioners (aka Cape Fear)

by The Executioners (Aka Cape Fear)(Lit)

  Rent a legitimate car. Stay in a good hotel. Pick the time and the place and do it fast and clean and then get out. An amateur always gets caught and always sucks in the guy who hired him."

  Sam's polite laugh sounded forced and hollow.

  "I haven't been thinking along those lines, Sievers."

  Sievers came back out of his memories and looked at Sam.

  "I don't want to make you any more nervous than you are, Mr. Bowden, but I might as well tell you this. Just out of curiosity I had Apex in Wheeling run a check on him. When there's no specific client, it's done as a courtesy between branch offices. The Cadys are old stock. Hill people. There were four brothers, two older than Maxwell and one younger. Max Cady had no record prior to the Army sentence, but he wasn't any angel. None of the Cady boys were. Max got in the Army after he cut a man badly with a broken bottle. It was a fuss over a woman. The court gave him the choice of enlisting or going to prison, so he enlisted. The old man was in and out of prison his whole life. He was a moonshiner with a violent temper. He died of a stroke three years ago. He married the boys' mother when she was fifteen and he was nearly thirty. She's living with the youngest brother and she's been feebleminded her whole life.

  The oldest brother was shot to death eight years ago in a running gun battle with federal agents. The next oldest was killed in a prison riot in Georgia. He was serving a life sentence for felony murder. My pride was hurt when I did so bad tailing him. Now I don't feel so bad. He's one of the wild ones. They don't think the way people do. He was headed for jail whether he got caught on that rape charge or not. People like that have no comprehension of right and wrong. Their only thought is whether or not they'll be caught. Anything you can get away with is worth doing."

  "Isn't there a word for that?"

  "Psychopathic personality. They make us learn the terms. But that's a classification where they put people they don't know what else to call. People they can't treat. People who don't respond to any appeal you can make to them. Except maybe the one we're trying to make." He stood up.

  "I've got a lot of stuff to clean up before I take off in the morning. Joe will fix it up for you."

  It was a long time after Sievers left before Sam could get his concentration back on his work. He respected Sievers for giving him all the unpalatable facts, but they served to make Cady even more ominous than he had been thus far. It was like when you were a child and a frightening shadow seemed to grow larger and blacker and more threatening as you watched it. He told himself Cady was human and vulnerable. He told himself it was shameful to be frightened of a man. And he decided there was no point at all in telling Carol what Sievers had learned. He would tell her of the new arrangement, but she needed no new reasons to be afraid of Cady.

  On Friday, the twelfth of July, after the dinner dishes were done, Sam looked up from his book when he heard Carol make an odd sound. She was sitting on the couch, reading the paper. She lowered the paper and stared at him with an odd expression.

  "What's the matter?"

  "What was the name of the man you have to see next Wednesday night?"

  "Tanelli. Joe Tanelli."

  "Come and look at this."

  He sat beside her and read the obituary of a Joseph Tanelli, age 56, address 118 Rose Street, who had died the previous night in Memorial Hospital of a heart attack. Mr. Tanelli had been a retail merchant in New Essex for the past eighteen years. There was a very long list of his survivors.

  "It's probably not the same one, dear."

  "But what if it is?"

  He spoke confidently.

  "Even if it is, I can make a contact with somebody else at the address Sievers gave me."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Practically positive."

  "I don't think you ought to wait until Wednesday, dear. I think you ought to go in tomorrow night."

  "Don't we have to go to the Kimballs' party?"

  "I can go alone and you can meet me there."

  "I'll drive in tomorrow afternoon."

  "In the afternoon? It seems like something you ought to do at night, somehow."

  "I can find out what the score is in the afternoon at least. If it's the same man."

  But underneath his assurance he knew it was the same man. A malicious fate was dealing Cady every joker in the deck.

  It was brutally hot on Market Street at four in the afternoon. Sam found a meter in the eighteen-hundred block and carefully locked the car. It was a neighborhood where you automatically locked the car. Number 1821 had no sign showing ownership or management.

  The door was two steps below sidewalk level. The small show window, almost opaque with dust, displayed a few weary soft-drink posters and cigar ads.

  In peeling gilt across the window was painted CIGARS MAGAZINES CANDY. That side of the street was in shade. A half dozen stone steps went up to the entrance of the neighboring building. A grossly fat woman with red hair sat on the top step. Her suety body bulged the soiled pink dress she wore. She took small sips from a can of beer.

  He went down and tried the door, but it was locked.

  "It's locked on account of Joe, honey," a loud brassy voice informed him. He looked up into the round face of the fat woman. She was younger than he had guessed from his quick glance at her.

  "That's right. Joe up and died. Somebody did him out of a dime and his heart give out on him from shock." She giggled.

  He went back up onto the sidewalk and looked at her.

  "Have you any idea when they'll open up again?"

  "Hell, they're open. It's just the front door locked sort of like a courtesy to Joe. You know. I don't know who's running it or who'll take over permanent, but they won't miss out on a day's action, especially a Saturday."

  He realized she was happily tight.

  "How do I get in?"

  "Now, if you want to get in, Doc, you go down there to the first alley and go back through the alley and take a left and count three doors and knock on the third one. But those horses will nibble you to death every time. Now just suppose you had twen'y bucks to kick away. It so happens there's a cute little blondie right in this building that's dying from being bored.

  You see, she's a singer with a band and the band folded and she's got to make a stake so she can get out to the Coast where she's got a tryout lined up. She's an honest-to-God college girl and " "No, thanks. Not today."

  She scowled at him.

  "Horse players," she said.

  "Lousy horse players."

  He thanked her and followed her instructions. It was a door of heavy construction, with no window in it. It opened six inches and a round white face of uncooked dough with raisin eyes looked out at him and said, "Yah?"

  "I... I want to talk to whoever is in charge." He could hear a rumble of voices beyond the door.

  "What about?"

  "I... Sievers sent me."

  "Hold on." The door closed. A full minute passed. It opened again.

  "Nobody ever heard of no Sievers."

  "Joe Tanelli knew him."

  "That's great." The raisin eyes seemed to be looking through him and beyond him.

  "Suppose... I wanted to get a bet down."

  "Go to a track."

  "Wait a minute..." But the door had closed firmly. He waited a few minutes and then knocked again.

  "Now look, friend," the white face said.

  "Listen to me. Joe was going to do something for me. Now he can't. But I still want it done and I still want to pay for it, and I want to know who to see."

  "Me. So what was it?"

  "I can't stand here in the alley and tell you."

  "Look, Mack. I take orders. I don't make private deals. Joe made private deals. He had his way and I got my way. So go tell your committee you couldn't even get into the place."

  The door started to shut and then opened again.

  "And don't hang around, Mack, and don't knock on the door any more or somebody comes out and reasons with you." The door banged shut.
>
  Sam did not leave the Market Street area until almost ten at night. It was always so effortlessly accomplished in the movies. Sinister types were always available to the hero. He hit the roughest looking bars he could find. He'd never been adept at striking up a conversation with a stranger. He tried to select suitable-looking types and start a conversation and steer it around to the point where he could state his problem in a hypothetical way. Now just suppose, for the sake of argument, this friend of mine wanted to pay to get the man who is messing around with his wife beaten up.

  "The chump better get a couple friends and take care of it himself. Or let him have the wife. He'll be better off without her."

  One man looked properly violent and comfortably shrewd. But after the question was stated, the man said, "Let your friend turn the other cheek and ask God for forgiveness for plotting evil. Let him get down on his knees and pray for the seducer to see the sinfulness of his ways and the wanton woman to find her way back to Christ."

  Discouraged, he tried another tack. Who runs the town? Who is the big wheel of the New Essex underworld?

  A sad-faced bartender gave him a low-key lecture on that subject.

  "Chief, you better stay away from that television set. As far as rackets, this town is out to lunch. Nothing is organized and I hope to God it never is. There's a couple of floating games, and there's some girls to be found, and once in a while a tea peddler comes through, and then there's the union strong arm stuff now and then. But there's no boss because there's no control of the wards. That's where the rackets get a good holt. If you can deliver a block vote, you can hire the politicians to keep the cops off your neck and then you can consolidate. All around here is small tiney, Chief."

  "How about a man like, say, Joe Tanelli?"

  "I don't like badmouthing the dead, but Joe was a nothing. He'd do a little fencing when there wasn't any risk. And he'd bank a game now and then. He was just smart enough to know he couldn't expand or somebody would step on him. We got tough, smart cops here, Chief."

  "So who is more important than Joe was?"

  "I'm trying to tell va and you don't hear me or something. I'm not getting through. There are maybe three or four Joe Tanellis. Boys working the angles. A good week maybe they make three bills. What you're talking about doesn't happen here. This town has the lid on. I hope it's for keeps. A long time ago I got tired of wondering when I was going to get worked over for selling the wrong brand of beer. That's why I moved here."

  Sam knew from the way his mouth felt that he was getting slightly drunk.

  "I'll tell you what I really want."

  "Let me tell you something first. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to know nothing about what you've got to buy or sell. The less I know, the better I sleep at night."

  "But-" "Let's be friends. Here's one on the house. Now, you want to keep talking, we talk women or baseball. Take your choice."

  He drove carefully back to Harper and directly to the Kimballs' party. It was out in their yard behind their house. Dorrie Kimball found him a cold piece of steak and heated it over what was left of the charcoal embers. It was leathery. There were a dozen couples.

  They were playing an intricate game that amused them vastly and left him spectacularly cold. When he had a chance he got Carol over into the shadows.

  "I was a great success," he said bitterly.

  "I was overwhelmed by my own competence. It was like trying to sell dirty post cards at a Sunday-school wienie roast."

  "How much have you had to drink?"

  "Plenty. It was an occupational hazard. I skulked through low dives, my collar turned up, my thumb on the button of my switch-blade knife. I've been called Doc, Mack and Chief. Oh, the hell with it!"

  "Can you do anything!"

  "I can call Sievers Monday morning. My God, this is a horrible party!"

  "Ssh, darling. Not so loud. And it isn't that bad."

  "How soon can we leave?"

  "I'll give the usual signal when we can. What a ghastly piece of luck, Mr. Tanelli dying like that!"

  The drink Joe Kimball had given him seemed to be having more effect than all the others he had had. He swayed and peered down at her.

  "Ghastly luck for good old Joe, too."

  "Don't be nasty to me."

  "I've got it figured out. You know what it is, don't you? It's the finger of fate diddling little Sammy Bowden. That good man. That noble and righteous man. Ah, how he's slipped! Now he goes forth to hire assassins. But we can't make it easy for him. Because then ole Sam will not be sufficiently aware of his fall from perfect grace. We gotta make him roll in it. We have to impress it on him so he won't forget it."

  "Darling, please."

  "Law and Order Bowden, we all called him around the office. The next best thing to the second coming.

  His strength was as the strength of ten because his grail was full. The brittle type. He could break but not bend. He would never compromise with his honor.

  And what a pitiful sight he is these days. Slinking through the slums, picking pockets, drinking canned heat, bumming dimes. They say that any day now he's going to be arrested for indecent exposure."

  The crack of her small hard palm against his cheek was loud and shocking. The sting made his eyes water.

  He looked down at her and she did not look angry or hurt. She stared up at him quite calmly.

  "Hey!" he said.

  "Drinks or no drinks, I don't think it is an awfully good time for us to start feeling sorry for ourselves, dear."

  "But I was just-" "Mad at yourself for not being able to do something entirely out of your line and contrary to what you believe in. So you were starting to roll in bathos, nib bing it in your hair."

  "That's a sneaky right you've got there, pardner."

  "Well, were you?"

  "I guess."

  "I need a lot of strength to lean on at this point. Up until a few minutes ago there's been plenty."

  "It's back now. Resume leaning."

  "Are you mad at me?"

  "Enraged, furious and plotting revenge," he said, and kissed the tip of her nose.

  To his astonishment she began to cry, thoroughly and helplessly. When she had begun to quiet down he learned the reason for the tears. It had upset her to strike him. All our emotional reactions are becoming shrill and raggedy, he thought. Tension is washing the sand from under our castle walls.

  On Monday morning the local branch of Apex gave him the information he needed in order to phone Sievers in California. Mr. Sievers was not in the office, but he would call back. It was eleven before Sam could place his first call because of the time differential, and three before Sievers returned the call.

  Though the connection was clear, Sievers had a sound of remoteness, of lack of interest.

  "Heart attack? That's too bad."

  "It makes it pretty awkward for me, Sievers."

  "I can see how it would."

  "Who shall I contact for the same... kind of service?"

  "I don't think there's anybody else to go to."

  "What do I do?"

  "It might be set up some other place. Some people might be sent in. It would cost more and it would take some time."

  "Can you help me with it?"

  "I'm pretty well snowed under out here. And... frankly, I'm on a different basis here, Bowden. I mean that was a personal arrangement. I can't do anything officially. Not along that sort of line. Do you understand?"

  "I think so."

  "I did what I could. You had a bad break."

  "Maybe I can find somebody on my own."

  "I don't think you can. And it would be a bad risk.

  You might better just... get your people out of the way."

  "I... I see."

  "Sorry I can't be more helpful."

  It was a most unsatisfactory conversation. And it meant the end of a possible line of defense. They would have to fall back to another defensive position.

  He talked it over on Monday night
with Carol. She took it more calmly than he had anticipated.

  "I know that it makes a certain kind of sense," she said, "but we will be so dispersed. Nance and Jamie down at camp. Bucky and me off God knows where. It leaves only you and that frightens me, darling. What good will any of us be if something should happen to you?"