Cannon's Mouth_A Rafferty P.I. Mystery

by W. Glenn Duncan

  I gave her the phone number from the Dagger ad and the approximate date. Forty-five seconds later, she told me his name and forwarding address.

  I said, “By golly, next time you come to Baton Rouge, pop into the business office at lunchtime and ask for Dave. I’m gonna buy you a big bowl of the best gumbo you ever tasted.”

  “Happy to help out. Bye now.”

  “So long.” I hung up and said, “Bingo. Scottsdale, Arizona.”

  Cowboy shook his head slowly. “My, oh my,” he said. “You surely do work at it.”

  During my telephone search for him, the hitter did not call about the money. Well, maybe he tried to call and couldn’t get through. Hell with him. As long as I was making progress, I’d tie up my phone as much as I wanted.

  “What is it?” Waspish male voice.

  “This is Special Agent Preston,” I said, “at the Federal Building. We have reason to believe one of your boxes may have been used for fraudulent purposes at one time.”

  “Your problem,” he said. “My people just collect the rental and put the mail in the boxes. No skin off our necks. I can show you in the book where it says that, too.”

  “We’re in absolute agreement there, Mr Postmaster,” I smarmed. The bastard hadn’t even told me his name. “There is not a shadow of suspicion about anyone at your Post Office. Not a shadow. About anyone. However, for the purposes of a successful investigation, certain information would be—”

  “Court order,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Court order. What are you, deaf? Get a court order if you want to see my box records.”

  “Well, I could do that, of course, but I thought we might save—”

  “Saving’s for banks, buster. This is a post office. Let me know when you’ve got your court order. I’m busy now. Good bye.” He hung up.

  “I hope your stamps fall off,” I said to the dead phone.

  We finally ran that one down, but not until I’d enlisted Ed Durkee’s help and accumulated a stack of owed favors I couldn’t jump over.

  And after all that, the ad—it was the Occupant one—turned out to be a junior college criminology project to study “Sub Rosa Recruiting Techniques in Modern America”.

  No kidding, this business can break your heart sometimes.

  While I numbed my ear on the telephone, Cowboy cross-checked our ever-changing list against Dresden’s telephone index and the printout of Ford Tempo registrations. We continued to strike out on both fronts.

  One of the old ads had a Dallas phone number but no one ever seemed to be home. I dug around in my stack of old phone books and such, and came up with a Cole’s reverse directory for the same year as the magazine ad. The phone number tied back to an address in northeast Dallas. The old Cole’s said A. Cordington lived there then. This year’s Cole’s had ever better news: Cordington still lived there. Southwestern Bell’s current book said so, too, but neither Cole’s nor Ma Bell had any thoughts on why A. Cordington didn’t answer his phone.

  Cowboy looked up from the Tempo registration list. “He ain’t in here,” he said. “Or in Dresden’s phone number doohickey, either.”

  “I’ll keep trying him between other calls. And what the hell, this guy’s a local. We can pull his chain any time we want.”

  I called Hilda Thursday. Well, I called her Wednesday night, but she hadn’t spent a night alone then. By Thursday she had.

  “Slept like a baby,” she said.

  “No nightmares?”

  “No. I woke up once, about three-thirty, feeling a little uneasy. But I went right back to sleep.”

  “That’s great, babe,” I said. “But listen, you don’t have to be so stalwart about all your nighttime problems. It’s all right to admit that you couldn’t sleep, you tossed and turned, and pined for the presence of my body.”

  “Slept like a baby,” she said again. “Sorry.”

  The cat came around on Friday morning. It drank half a bowl of milk not ten feet from me, then eyed a leftover chicken leg I’d brought out for it. Cat wouldn’t take the chicken leg out of my hand, but it finally sneaked up when I put the drumstick on the ground and pretended to look the other way. It was incredible how slowly the cat moved and how rigidly it froze into position when it thought I was peeking. When the cat picked up the piece of chicken, it trotted away, all bouncy and busy but still controlled. I could tell it wanted to run but it was too cool to do so.

  Cat had a lot of class.

  “This one isn’t much for false modesty,” I said to Cowboy on Friday. “Listen to this. ‘Rugged, fearless, skilled.’”

  “He ain’t much for basic security, either. Imagine putting your name, address, and phone number in one of them ads.”

  “I’ll mention that to rugged, fearless, and skilled Lee Forelander when I speak to him,” I said.

  The address was in Dayton, Ohio, which seemed a long way to commute to a Texas killing. But the ad was five years old and he might have moved since then, and besides, you have to start someplace.

  Ten minutes later, I wished I hadn’t left him until so late in the search.

  I put down the phone and told Cowboy, “This one looks pretty good. Forelander doesn’t live there anymore, but the woman I spoke to used to rent the house to Forelander and his family. Now get this. He’s career Air Force, stationed at Wright-Patterson while he was there.”

  “Probably a pilot or something,” Cowboy said.

  “Not according to his old landlady. She says he’s an MP.”

  “Promising,” Cowboy said. “That sounds downright promising.”

  The Wright-Patterson base security office remembered Forelander and suggested I try Travis Air Force Base. The voice at Wright-Pat was pretty goosey about giving out that kind of information, so when I phoned Travis, I stayed away from the higher, more inquisitive, levels of the system.

  “Yes, sir, I remember Sergeant Forelander,” an airman on duty at the base post office said. “I didn’t know him personally, but I saw him beat Major Cavanagh by eleven points last year. And that was after Major Cavanagh had been base champion for three years straight. It was very exciting.”

  Wonderful, I thought. I’m trying to find a killer, and this guy wants to chat about bowling. “Imagine that,” I said. “Would you have his home address handy, maybe a phone number?”

  “It’s probably in the files, sir. I’ll check.” While he looked, he rambled on about that stupid bowling tournament. “Most of us didn’t know Sergeant Forelander, so we were surprised when he made the finals. Then he won. By eleven points, wow. Major Cavanagh was really steamed, but that’s the way it goes, right? The major’s good, but Sergeant Forelander was better. The best, probably. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone shoot like—aha, here we are. Sergeant Forelander isn’t stationed here at Travis anymore, I guess you know that, but—”

  “Wait a minute. Shoot?”

  “Yes, sir. I just told you. Sergeant Forelander won the base pistol shoot last year. Is this phone all right today? Because sometimes it—”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “A memorable phone. Go ahead with the address, please.”

  “Right.” He sounded puzzled but still friendly. He read out a phone number. “That area code is 817, sir.”

  “Fort Worth is area 817,” I said. “Good old 817.”

  “Um, believe you’re right, sir.”

  “A perfect phone,” I said. “One of the great phones of all time.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” He didn’t sound like he wanted me to say yes. I didn’t. We hung up.

  I told Cowboy what I’d learned and said, “Forelander is probably stationed at Carswell. How’s that for handy? A fast run across on the freeway, down Walnut Hill Lane, pop Max in the back of the head, and back to the guardhouse before you can say ‘Let me see your security pass.’”

  Cowboy stopped flipping through the Tempo registrations and said, “I ’spect I oughta make the next call,
then.”

  “Yeah, he might recognize my voice. Try to hire him for something; set up a meet, anywhere he’ll go for. Hot damn, I think this is it.”

  I got two beers from the refrigerator and handed Cowboy one while he called the Forelander number in Fort Worth. I paced back and forth twice, then thought to check the Fort Worth phone book. Lee Forelander wasn’t listed, but that didn’t mean much. What with a recent transfer and all …

  “Howdy,” Cowboy said, “Lee Forelander, please.”

  After that Cowboy’s side of the conversation was mostly “Um-hmm,” and “Yes’m,” and “Do tell.”

  We’re on a roll, I thought.

  Then Cowboy said to the phone, “It probably don’t matter now, ma’am, but I’m calling about an ad he—”

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  Back to “Ums,” and “How ’bout that,” and “Ain’t it the truth.” Cowboy began to grin and shake his head ruefully.

  Aw, shit, I thought.

  With some justification, as it turned out.

  “Okay,” Cowboy said when he’d hung up. “Here’s the story. Mama’s kind of a talker, so I found out lots more than we need to know.”

  “Or want to know, I suspect.”

  He nodded. “That’s so. Anyhow, there’s two of ’em. Airman First Lee Forelander and Sergeant Lee Forelander; a boy and his daddy. But ain’t neither one of them stationed at Carswell like we thought. The sergeant—he’s the pistol shooter—he’s been freezing his butt off at Thule. In Greenland, you know. Four months temporary duty. The boy, the airman, he works on cruise missiles. He’s been in England for a year, his mama says, ‘where all those horrible women are outside the base,’ and she hopes he don’t meet one of them and catch anything,”

  “Who put the ad in the magazine?”

  “The kid. He was in high school then, having the usual growin’-up hassles with his folks. Miz Forelander thinks the young’un was trying to impress his daddy. You know how kids are. It got to be a family joke, she says. He got a coupla calls way back then, not that he did anything about them. When I mentioned it just now, that was the first time she’d thought of it for years.” Cowboy shrugged. “Too bad. It looked real good for a little while there.”

  “Well, goddamn,” I said.

  As Friday lurched into the weekend, the list of possibles steadily shortened. Some people we found and talked to. Others led us up blind alleys, or their trails grew cold and barren in distant cities. When that happened, we asked ourselves if we’d followed them farther than Dresden would have. If we had, we quit there and called it even. If we hadn’t, we stuck with it.

  Southwestern Bell announced record profits for the quarter and increased dividends, but that was probably only a coincidence. Probably.

  Between working the other leads, I kept circling back to my own telephonic backyard and listening to A. Cordington’s phone ring.

  I had come to think of him as my ace in the hole. No matter how the others worked out, I always had good old A. Cordington handy. If he wouldn’t answer his phone, I could always go to him.

  Except, way in the background, there was the nagging worry that Cordington would turn out to be clean, too.

  And if they were all clean, I was in big trouble, because I didn’t know what to try next.

  By one-thirty on Saturday afternoon, we had shaved the list down to three. There was Cordington; Striker, who had left a Montreal forwarding address at a Baltimore boardinghouse eighteen months ago; and a Kansas City phone number we were almost ready to abandon as a lost cause.

  I called Cordington for what seemed like the seventy-third time.

  “Hello?” someone said.

  Chapter 32

  “Hel-lo-o-o?” the voice said again. It was a woman.

  “Uh, right,” I said. “Hello.”

  “I think we’re finished with that part,” she said. “Now what shall we talk about?”

  “Right,” I said again, and scrabbled on the coffee table for the magazine with the right ad in it. I’d tried the Cordington number unsuccessfully so many times, I’d forgotten who he was supposed to be. Or who I was supposed to be.

  “This is Colonel Sandowski,” I said. I almost said Colonel Sanders, for god’s sake. “Put Eagle on.”

  She sighed a sharp, disgusted sigh. “Again?” she snapped. “How many times do I have to tell you? Play your dumb Eagle games if you want but leave me out of it. I’m working the worst block on the roster; I walked every inch of the way from Chicago to D-FW this morning, and you expect me to—oh, go to hell.” She hung up with a noisy rattle and a final click.

  Cowboy looked at me with a sleepy question on his face. I slowly hung up my phone and extended my open hands in a broad see-how-easy-that-was gesture. “Ta-da!” I said.

  Cowboy stood up and stretched. “’Bout time,” he said. “Let’s go git him.”

  Twenty-seven minutes later, we got out of the Mustang in front of A. Cordington’s address. It was one of a hundred or more apartments in a complex that sprawled across a rolling site off Greenville Avenue. The apartments were built in two- and four-unit blocks, with no building taller than two stories. The complex had a fancy name with Crest or Creek or Glen in it. Maybe all three; I’d already forgotten it.

  The area was fairly new, well landscaped, clean, and aggressively healthy. On the way in, we had passed a glass-walled building full of exercise equipment, and two Olympic pools. Joggers in headbands and bright clothes grinned and sweated along the winding drives. The carports were bright with RX-7s, Fieros, and small BMWs. The place looked like an outdoor set for Thirtysomething.

  “Welcome to level one of yuppie nirvana,” I said. “From here on, it only gets more glitzy.”

  Cowboy shook his head. “It don’t do nothing for me. Ain’t no horses, far as I can see.”

  Cordington lived in a single-story two-unit building, in the apartment on the left. I pushed the doorbell. Chimes bonged inside.

  Nothing happened for two or three minutes, then the door to the other apartment opened. A young woman in her early twenties came out. She was short, busty, pretty, with red hair and a button nose. She wore spotless, perhaps ironed, high-cut jogging shorts and a Hash House Harriers tank top. She said, “Oh, hey, guys, I think Tony is still— Whoops, I tell a lie.”

  She pointed to a yellow Honda Prelude in the carport. “Silly me.” She looked Cowboy up and down, smiled, and waggled her fingers at him. “Bye.” When she walked away, she waggled her butt at him. At the curb she began to jog. That was pretty interesting, too.

  Cowboy watched her go, then said to me, “I flat don’t understand it. Don’t you reckon all that bouncin’ and floppin’ would hurt?”

  Before I could agree, the Cordington door opened. Another woman, slightly older and taller, stood with one hand on the doorknob. She wore a full-length white terry cloth robe and had a towel wrapped turban-fashion around her hair. Her face was scrubbed and pink. She said, “I think I made a big mistake opening this door.”

  I grinned at her; gave her my absolute best winning smile. “Hi,” I said. “We’d like to talk to Tony.”

  It occurred to me that I should have sent Cowboy to cover the back. Cordington could be crawling out a bedroom window while we stooged around at the front door.

  The robed woman looked confused. “Go ahead,” she said.

  Then I began to get confused. “Tony Cordington,” I said. “Eagle. He put an ad in a magazine …” Weak, Rafferty, weak.

  She rolled her eyes and said, “Was that you on the phone? Look, I’m Tony Cordington. Antonia; Tony, get it?”

  Well, damn! I said, “That sound you hear is me kicking myself.”

  She frowned. “The sound you hear is me deciding whether to call the cops or slam this door in your face or both.”

  “Two things to consider, Tony. One: this is important. Whoever Eagle is, I’m going to find him. It will be easier on all of us, especially him, if you help me. Two: if you do help me, we’ll go away, not com
e back, and I’ll keep you out of the official part of it. Oh, hey, I just thought of a third thing.” I showed her my winning smile again. “Would a face like this lie to you?”

  After ten seconds she shrugged and stepped aside. “I’m messing up,” she said. “I know I’m messing up, but this one I gotta hear.”

  I don’t care what Hilda says, the old Rafferty smile gets ’em every time.

  Tony Cordington waved us ahead into her living room, toward two beige leather sofas with a glass coffee table between them. She hung back, though, and when we turned around, she held up a small black aerosol can.

  “You guys sit down,” he said, “and tell me what’s going on. But first let me tell you something. The biggest, meanest man in Dallas lives right across the street. He and his shotgun will be here in two seconds if I set off this siren gadget.” She put the aerosol alarm back in her robe pocket, left her hand in there, too, and leaned against the open front door. “So talk,” she said.

  “You got it.” I sprawled on her sofa and committed an unnatural act. I told her the truth.

  Not the whole truth, of course. I skipped the part about Eagle killing Max Krandorff. I thought Tony might be more willing to point me toward her friend—or whatever he was to her—if she didn’t know that we knew that he … anyway, it seemed like a good idea.

  But for once I was too cynical. Almost from the beginning, it was obvious Tony Cordington was learning all this for the first time. She grimaced when I told her about the almost-firebomb and shook her head when I mentioned how bleary Eagle had sounded in his last phone call. “He’s running, Tony. And he’s running down, too. Pretty soon he’ll do something stupid and someone will get hurt. It might be him.”

  Tony Cordington stood with her shoulders slumped and her head down. She took her alarm hand out of her pocket—empty—and used the heel of it to rub her eyes. “The poor damn fool,” she said.