Susannah Screaming (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 2)

by Carolyn Weston

  “All right.”

  Casey listened to her soft breathing. All right—meaning what? he wondered. That’s that, enough of cops? “Joey, I’d really like to try again. Like sometime soon when I’m sure I can—”

  “Do that,” she said distantly, and hung up.

  Well, at least I finally got hold of her, Casey thought. But leaning against the glass side of the phone booth, listening to the dial tone, he found small comfort in the idea. Try again. Do that, she’d said. And he hadn’t the remotest hint whether she meant encouragement or a put-down. Wouldn’t know, he realized, until he did try again. Not exactly, he thought sadly, what you’d call a replay of Love Story.

  The cabinetmaker, who was also Hopper’s tenant, lived in the end unit of a one-story stucco apartment building staggered like children’s blocks up a steep rise. Lights were still burning, and in the open garage which separated the cabinetmaker’s apartment from his next-door neighbor’s stood a battered-looking Ford panel delivery truck. Neat but unprofessional lettering on the rear loading door advertised S. T. “Swede” Olsen—Cabinetmaker—Your Yob Is My Yob.

  No dour Svenska this, Casey decided as he punched the doorbell. Can’t help but make my yob a little easier. But the idea did little for his state of mind. “Yah—” He heard an angry voice yelling inside. “Who’s dere?” And Casey’s spirits hit bottom. The whole world was obviously in conspiracy to down him.

  “Have to excuse me,” Olsen kept saying when Casey finally managed to gain entrance into the apartment. “But I didn’t hear no sireen. And you got no uniform on. How’m I gonna know you’re a real policeman, hah?”

  “Mr. Olsen, I showed you my badge and ID card—”

  “But, dammit, young fella, you don’t look like no cop!”

  Try me twenty years from now. Picturing a beefy, balding fortyish self, Casey sighed glumly. But his voice was mild, consciously patient as he said, “Let’s get back to today, Mr. Olsen. You got to your shop about eight to pick up some cabinets. You delivered and installed them, and got back about—what time?”

  “Maybe noon.” The homely horse-faced cabinetmaker shrugged indifferently. “Like always, I stop for dinner on the way.”

  “Was the U-Haul truck parked in the alley behind Tantra Press when you got back to your shop?”

  “Nah, that was later on I seen it. When I went out for a beer.” He grinned slightly, showing yellowish teeth, an exact color match with his thick, lank home-barbered hair. “Used to be it was whiskey, but I only drink the beer now. Baby stuff,” he added contemptuously. “Drink a quart, piss a gallon. Guess you think that’s all an old coot like me is good for, huh?” He waited expectantly, but experienced with this sort of fishing common to the aging sexual braggart, Casey kept silent. But Olsen persisted: “You want to guess how old I am? Come on, take a guess. Let me tell you, young fella, you be surprised, I bet you! All the girls, I tell ’em, they’re surprised.”

  “For Chrissake, I figured you eloped with the guy,” Krug snarled when Casey dragged into the squad room almost two hours later. “What’d you run into at Olsen’s, an orgy or something?”

  “Uh-hunh.” Casey flopped into his desk chair. “Trouble was, it was all in his head.” He fished out his notebook, flipping pages. “What would you prefer to hear first, Al? I’ve got it all here. ‘Four times with Myrtle on Friday night.’ Incidentally, I have her phone number and vital statistics. ‘Three times with’—”

  “Okay, okay, I get the picture—an old fart with a big imagination. What else did you get?”

  “He buddied a little with Barrett at the local pub. Stud stuff mostly, I imagine. But Barrett dropped some hints once in awhile. Big-shot line. He’d be in the bread soon, et cetera. Olsen figured him for as big a put-on as he is, I guess. Oh, and I checked out the beer joint too,” he added before Krug could ask. “Seems somebody was making discreet inquiries about Tantra Press yesterday. Could be the feds, maybe.”

  “Yeah, Hopper talked to ’em, too. Said he figured they were Internal Revenue snoops.” He chewed on a pencil, staring into space. “One of the plainclothes boys from Narco picked up word from some beardo-freaks who were mousing around that alley this afternoon. They claim a woman delivered the U-Haul. Blonde, they said. Funky-looking, whatever that means. Probably Godwin’s wife.” He tossed the pencil aside. “You got any word about our muscleman?”

  “Nothing that helps much. Guy had dark hair, Olsen claims. Jump suits must be big around there, he was wearing a brown one. But maybe Olsen meant coveralls. Anyway, he was a real Goliath type. Handled cartons that Godwin could hardly lift as if they were marshmallows.” He scrutinized Krug, who was leaning back in his swivel chair now, hands clasped behind his head. No good news there. “Hopper couldn’t make him?”

  “Nope, not even a nibble.” He kept chewing the inside of his cheek—a sure sign of suppressed emotion. “Got word back on Rees a while ago. ‘Exemplary behavior.’ Nice, hah? Kept to himself mostly. Cellmate was an embezzler with no previous criminal record.” He kept staring at the ceiling, the muscles along his jaws moving rhythmically, like pulse points. “That son of a bitch,” he said softly. “He may think he’s clean, but I’m gonna nail him yet. Sure as God made little green apples, I’m gonna nail that mother for a long walk.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  His mind seemed to be operating at a great distance now, moving clumsily, imprecisely, around his immediate problems. He must stop for gas soon. And he was in need of a comfort station. Some place with food, Rees decided vaguely, although he was not hungry.

  An old stake truck passed him, the back jammed with long-haired college-age kids, all waving their arms and singing something. Jesus freaks? Their voices were snatched away in the high-speed roar before he could identify their song. Something from Jesus Christ, Superstar probably. Hosannah! Heysannah! The new disciples, he thought, free, young, confident. Had he ever felt that way? He could not remember. The decade between his own age and theirs seemed a long voyage into another country.

  Sickening waves of deep physical alarm kept rising in him, unreadable messages from the limbo beyond panic. What am I doing? he wondered suddenly. Running. But from what to what? If I cross any border, I’ll be a fugitive.

  Like a membrane tearing, his mind opened then, flooded with an intense anxious awareness of himself and his actions. He saw an exit marked Roadside Business, and swung off, feeling the Volkswagen drifting dangerously on the curve before he could slow and shift down. Recognizing the interior ghost as an old one—fatalism as dense and unthinking as instinct—he braked hard. Fatalism with a new face now, he thought as his tires squealed and the chassis rocked. Self-destructiveness. The other thing Stevens had warned him against.

  “It may look like something else, Paul,” the parole officer had said. “Anything from righteous anger to a desire to play hookey. It takes lots of forms. But what it really is, is hopelessness. You set yourself up in situations which inevitably lead to one fall after another.”

  Like that side trip to Tahoe, he thought bleakly as he pulled into the floodlit parking area for a motel-coff eeshop-gas-station complex. Like fastening himself blindly to Susannah. Like setting up Krug as some cruel force before which he would always be prostrate, helpless.

  He climbed out of the Volkswagen stiffly, slamming the door. The two blood-drenched bodies burned like coals in his mind, and leaning against the car, knees and hands shaking badly, he lit a cigarette. Murder. Hopelessness. The words seemed truths in another language—murder too incredible, hopelessness too dire—only half understood. But the full meaning of “fugitive” grasped him like claws, ripping the thick spurious skin of fatalism. The loser’s disease, he thought. He had not realized how profoundly prison had altered his thinking.

  Trying to remember how he had thought and acted when he was an ordinary citizen—not lonely and frightened, plagued by a sense that he had lost contact with the world—he found that memory failed him. Had he always, in some way, been running, then? Cou
ld be, Rees decided. Because running men are friendless, aren’t they? And he had discovered, when Ellen died, that there was no one to call for help. No family, no long-time friends anywhere—the result of a life style traveling here and there for years, working for foreign companies. In his intense happiness with Ellen, he had never asked himself why change had always seemed more desirable to him than advancement. Gypsies, his wife had called them. International gypsies, the new breed.

  Or an old breed of rootless beings? he wondered. Was it alienation, a secret dread of responsibility, settling down, which had kept him moving two years here, three there? All those sleepless nights in prison, he had turned the questions over and over in his mind, but he had never arrived at any answers. Only that he had been happy. Only that. Even when it is gone forever, he had discovered, joy stubbornly resists analysis.

  Tossing the cigarette away, Rees looked at his watch. It was almost ten and a long way back. He opened the car door again. First, he told himself savagely, get rid of the goddam plastic bag. And tomorrow tell the whole crazy story to your new PO More than anyone, a parole officer must understand the parolee’s problem of police persecution.

  Fishing blindly, his fingertips found the small, smooth plastic bundle lying on the floor between the back and front seats. But it was heavier than he expected, something solid and weighty inside now with the pieces of cardboard. His heart expanding, then contracting painfully, Rees tipped up the bag, and with a soft thump a handgun slid out. A gleaming nickel-silvered pistol.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Okay, Barrett shows up at the printshop Sunday,” Lieutenant Timms began to lay it out again, piece by piece. “The printer, Godwin, gets a call from his landlord, and hightails it over there. But Godwin doesn’t know yet that Barrett’s already blown their caper, so he probably plays it cool. This is a partner, after all. And they’re almost ready to make their big move. Stands to reason Godwin probably sicked the girl onto Barrett to find out what he was up to. And then the fat was in the fire.”

  “They had a thing going, the snapshot proves that,” Krug agreed. “And Barrett was a fool for anything in skirts. So if he spilled to her he’d blown it—Well, you can see what’d happen. He’d been filching enough paper he had the price of a getaway. All she had to do was talk up a rendezvous somewhere later to keep him around till they could deal with him.”

  “A real nebbish crook, this guy.” Harry Berger grinned at Casey. “What every young cop should learn, right? Crime only pays the smart guys. But okay,” he went on, yawning, “so much for putting it together. The feds are covering all the U-Haul rental places. So we wait till they find something to follow up, right? What they figure so far is five people in on it. All amateurs, probably. A nice little deal somebody put together.” And he began to enumerate: “Barrett with the plates and photo-reproduction stuff. Godwins with the press. The girl with something—maybe the brains, for all we know. For sure she had the guts! The fifth one probably has the syndicate contacts. Maybe furnished the financing all these months.”

  “Wouldn’t make any bets then on his amateur status,” Krug grunted. “Could be four little Indians and one chief.”

  “Plus a mysterious visitor to the Godwins’,” Casey added. “Unless the kid who saw him is lying, he can’t be our killer—so who is he? The ME says they were shot at least three hours before the visitor showed up.”

  No clear prints had been identified yet at the Godwin house, Timms told them. Two night-tour men were trying to locate Paul Rees to see if he could identify the raincoat they had found at the Godwin house as the one the girl had been wearing at the scene of the Barrett homicide. No sign of the murder gun as yet, so an assumption that the killer had carried it away with him was valid so far. An APB on the U-Haul truck had gone out immediately, but Timms felt that Godwin’s helper could be the coolest one of the five. He had probably stashed the counterfeit money and would lie low till the heat was off. Or, if he had run it right away, he had probably transferred the load to another vehicle.

  “Probably a local drop,” Harry Berger declared. “Makes more sense than chancing a stop with a load like that.” Taking a liberty which any of the detectives in the squad wouldn’t have dared with a stickler like Timms, he perched on the corner of the lieutenant’s desk, staring across the half-deserted squad room. “Say it took them a couple hours or so to pack it,” he went on thoughtfully. “Another hour or so to load the truck.” Taking a note pad out of his pocket, he began figuring. “Must be somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen to twenty cartons to take that length of time. Maybe fifty pounds apiece?” As he talked, he did sums rapidly, looking more and more discouraged. “Could be a record-breaker we’ve got here. If I’m anywhere close, fifteen to twenty good-sized cartons could hold something like eight to ten million dollars in blocks of twenties.”

  “Jesus,” Krug breathed. “No wonder those Treasury guys’re running around in circles.”

  Peddled at a discount, Berger went on, the haul figured to split into something like a quarter of a million dollars each for the five counterfeiters—after discounting, that is. “So our killer’s ending up with over a million, right? Nice work,” he muttered. “If you got the stomach for it.”

  “What bothers me,” Timms said, “is where that U-Haul got to. With an APB out, we’d have a pickup by now if he was still on the road.”

  They agreed that the truck was probably hidden somewhere, possibly the load already transferred to another vehicle. Their only hope of a lead lay in locating the U-Haul truck.

  “Some hope,” Krug commented sourly. “Godwin’s wife probably rented the damn thing. Nothing to tie it from there, right? So all he has to do is leave it on the street somewhere. Unless we nail him in that truck, it’s a dead end.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  From a public phone booth outside the coffeeshop where he had stopped, Rees dialed the Pelican Motel direct, sweating as he listened to the ringing at the other end. Let it be the woman. Getting around the gossipy manager would only waste—

  “Good evening, Pelican Motel.”

  Thank God. “This is Paul Rees. I have Room—”

  “Number Eleven, yes,” she acknowledged pleasantly. “What can I do for you, Mr. Rees?”

  “Well, it may sound silly—” No, wrong tack. He cleared his throat and started again. “When I was in there earlier this evening—you remember?—you mentioned something about my car.”

  “Sounds like you’re having more trouble with it. Golly, isn’t it awful trying to get anything fixed these days?”

  “Then you saw someone?” Don’t flog it, she’s already given you the cue. “Like a mechanic, I mean,” he added hastily. “Someone working on my car?”

  “Well, I don’t know about working.” She sounded amused. “But he was a mechanic, all right. You know those dirty old coveralls they always wear. And he had a toolbox with him.” He heard her sighing. “Probably closed now, Mr. Rees. But if you remember the name of the place—”

  A mythical garage. Yes, he would try calling them, he told her. No problem, he was an Auto Club member. As he thanked her and hung up, an uncontrollable shivering seized him, the sort of mindless terror of the unknown which he had not experienced since he was a child. While he’d been sleeping this afternoon, someone had planted the gun. Not the police, he knew now, but someone even more dangerous to him. Whoever it was who had searched his room yesterday. A murderer.

  He was afraid to touch the gun, afraid to leave it in the car, but even more afraid of carrying it. Poking it back into the plastic bag with his knuckles, Rees shoved the bundle under the front seat on the driver’s side. Then he risked a fast trip into the coffee shop, which was almost empty, smelling of charcoal-broiled hamburgers and some sort of pine-scented floor cleaner. “Just coffee, please,” he said to the waitress, and headed for the restroom.

  His face in the men’s room mirror was tallow-colored, he noticed vaguely—frighteningly, nakedly desperate. Eyes dilated. Veins pulsing i
n his temples. Urine boiled out of him hot as acid, and he couldn’t stop shaking. For God’s sake, he told himself—as he washed his hands, splashed his face with cold water—get hold of yourself. Yes, it’s a nightmare. But this time it isn’t yours. So this time there has to be a way out of it.

  His coffee was sitting on the counter when he came out—steaming hot and stale-smelling, too hot to drink. Didn’t matter, Rees thought, he couldn’t swallow anyway. Something sticking in his craw, as Ellen, a country girl, used to say. A planted gun. Possibly a murder weapon. And no one to help, least of all the police.

  “Anything wrong with your coffee?”

  “What? Oh, no, it’s fine, thanks.”

  The waitress drifted off, wiping the counter slowly, humming under her breath with the canned music issuing through ceiling speakers.

  The tune was familiar—Nashville sound—and after a moment, Rees realized where he had heard it lately. At the Godwins’ party. Over and over again, the same song. Ooo-wowyou-scare-me. His heart clenched. Play it for giggles, Jervy.

  As the music twanged, his mind kept turning the fragments like a kaleidoscope: Godwin and the coat Susannah had worn… Witness in the alley…Hit-and-run…Her boyfriend…Godwin trying to tell her something…Keep living dangerously…What you can’t see…

  The wheeling, whirling in his brain ceased suddenly, and spellbound, he saw the clear space. Space which, with luck, he might operate in with some degree of safety. Find out something. Even a thread would help.

  Not your nightmare, he told himself again as he left a half dollar on the counter. So there’s got to be a way out. Five minutes later he was on the freeway again, headed north.

  TWENTY-NINE

  “So all we’ve got going for us now is Rees.” Lieutenant Timms’s eyes kept swiveling from Krug to Casey, appearing like eggs over-poached in some purple-brown substance. “If he can identify that raincoat, he can probably make the hat, too. And he told you she picked it up at the party—those were his exact words, right?”