The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  “You're probably right,” she said. “You know detectives aren't ordinary mortals either. At least, they haven't been in my life.”

  She smiled and said, “Give me a few days to adjust.”

  Jo sat down on the couch beside me and stared out the rainy window. “It's nasty out there. Will you be gone long?”

  “I don't know,” I said. “Maybe an hour or two.”

  “You're still angry, aren't you?”

  I was, though I pretended not to be. She wasn't the real reason I was angry, anyway. I was worried about what was waiting for me on Celestial. I could show up and find Lance Jellicoe sitting on the stoop. It wasn't all that likely, not if Preston hadn't done something foolish like waving the Vice Squad at the Jellicoes. But the melancholy bravado in his voice had made me nervous. While Jo was in the kitchenette, I went over to the desk and got a .38 caliber Police Special out of the right-hand drawer. I slipped it in my coat pocket and pulled a hat from the rack.

  “Wait!” Jo shouted.

  She came running up to me at the door and kissed me hard on the mouth.

  I laughed. “The iconoclast's farewell?”

  “Just be careful, Harry. Please. I don't care about broken idols. I just want you to come back in one piece.”

  ******

  It was, indeed, a very nasty night out there.

  The wind was shaking the dogwoods as I walked out the front door, and the footpath that led to the rear lot was slick with waxy leaves. I was soaked to the skin before I got to the Pinto.

  It took me twenty minutes to get to Mt. Adams and another five to wind my way around the crabbed streets to Celestial and the Vicarage.

  The courtyard was bright and wet and full of rain and of the sound the rain made as it exploded against the cobbling. Most of the light was coming from the rear windows of the five or six condos that faced away from the river and toward Hyde Park. There were dark figures in some of those yellow windows, but the wind-blown rain was smeared like jam on the glass. I couldn't tell a man from a woman, much less make out a face.

  I cracked the car door open and made a quick dash to the sweet-smelling cedar tunnel that led to LaForge's apartment. The rain made a drum-like sound inside the tunnel, which was lit brightly by a series of lanterns strung along the west wall. I wiped the water off my face and shook my sleeve out and started down the walkway and, right away, I could see that something was very wrong.

  There were two condos on the west side of the tunnel. The one at the rear was LaForge's, and its door was wide open and banging in the wind. I shivered through my wet coat and pulled the revolver out of my pocket and edged down the hall to the open door.

  There were no lights on inside the LaForge apartment, but as I neared the door I could hear a woman's recorded voice singing softly. I ducked down beside the frame. If there was someone inside waiting, I would make a perfect target coming through the door. For at least a second, I'd be framed like a picture and illuminated by the light from the small lantern hanging on the outer wall. I stood up, back pressed against the redwood, and, reaching to my right, cracked a pane of the lantern with the gun butt. The glass made a bright tinkling sound as it hit the walkway and the last third of the tunnel went dark.

  I ducked back down immediately and, pressing an arm against my torso to reduce the size of the target I’d make, I swung around the door frame, rolled onto the cream-colored carpet and flattened myself against the floor.

  There wasn't a sound inside but the sweet singing voice from the record, which I now recognized as Barbra Streisand's voice. The rain was cascading down the great triangular window across the room from me, but some diffuse light was filtering through from neighboring condos. As my eyes adjusted to it, I made out Preston LaForge lying in the center of the room beneath the cathedral-like vault of the ceiling. Something about the stillness of that body sent a thrill of horror down my spine. I crept about five feet into the room and listened for the sounds of breathing or of movement.

  There wasn't any sound but the rain. And, as my heart beat slowed down and the hair-raising prickle of adrenalin washed out of my system, I realized that there probably wasn't going to be any sound but the rain. Not with that body lying in the center of the room and the front door wide open. Whoever had been there before me had left in a rush. Either appalled by what was lying on the floor or frightened away from what he or she had done. On the surface, it didn't look like a murder or, if it had been, it was a pretty sloppy one, executed on the spur of the moment. High class killers rarely leave doors open or track up cream-colored rugs. There was muddy scuffing on the floor, just visible in the thin greenish light.

  I didn't want to do it, but it had to be done. And quickly, if I was to get out of that building without being spotted. And God knew, I didn't want to be spotted. Not with a gun in my pocket and a dead body in the room and a snapshot floating around somewhere which could be traced back to me. I pocketed the revolver and walked quickly over to the window and examined Preston LaForge for any sign of life. The rain-filtered light streaked his face, making it look like something seen through the glass of an aquarium. One side of it looked as boyish as it had when I'd seen him that afternoon. The blue eye was open and placid. The other side had no eye and no shape and I didn't look at it long. His babyish mouth had fallen open in an aghast grin and a thick smear of blood covered the chin and flowed down the neck and pooled in a shiny spot on the rug.

  That was one stain he wasn't going to get out. Ever. The poor, sad, son-of-a-bitch.

  I took a long look at the body, trying to fix it and everything around it in my mind. A small caliber automatic was lying near LaForge's hand. There were foot-tracks beside his left shoulder and throughout the room. The record was playing “Until the Right Man Comes Along.” There were no lit cigarettes in ashtrays. There was a whiskey glass on the glass coffee table in front of the couch. There was something else on the coffee table. Something white.

  A tremendous crack of thunder made me jump, and I almost stepped in the pool of Preston LaForge's blood. I walked quickly to the coffee table and pulled a damp handkerchief from my pocket. And used it to pick up the piece of paper sitting on the table. There was a name written on it and a phone number. It said “Tracy” and underneath the name was written “899-7010.” I dropped the slip of paper back on the coffee table and repeated the phone number as I walked back to the door.

  It's best to do these things boldly, I told myself. A ridiculous thing to say, since “these things” happen once in a lifetime. But it gave me a vague sense of confidence.

  I stepped out into the tunnel and just kept walking briskly across the courtyard to the Pinto. I didn't look up or right or left. If anyone could see me through the rain, it wouldn't do me a damn bit of good if I saw him, too. I got in the car and pulled out and didn't turn on any lights until I was well onto Celestial with the Vicarage a block behind me.

  14

  “IT SHOULDN'T have happened this way.”

  That was the first thing I told myself, when I felt like I could talk again without my throat backing up.

  I was sitting in the car on the Ida Street viaduct across from Tracy Leach's white stucco dream house. And I'd been sitting there for ten minutes—smoking Chesterfields, drinking from a flask I keep in the glove compartment, and trying to calm down.

  “It shouldn't have happened this way,” I said again. “No one should have been hurt.”

  It was logic meant for a dead man with a broken face, who wasn't going to be convinced by the argument or appeased by the tone of apology, and it made me feel sick and sad all over again to say it. I stared out at the rain from the seat of the Pinto and felt bad for Preston LaForge.

  Yet, I knew I had to be right, that it shouldn't have happened, that LaForge shouldn’t have been dead, and that that damn girl should have been sitting on the car seat next to me. But that's the trouble with the subjunctive mood; it's always one tempo ahead of or behind the inexorable, should-less flow of events.
r />   “I should have had her!” I said aloud. But she wouldn't be convinced either. And it was just more bad philosophy to blame her or Hugo for what had happened. They weren't responsible. I wasn't sure who was.

  People killed themselves every day. Even people with as much to live for as Preston LaForge. And it was barely possible that his death didn't have anything to do with me or the girl or the Jellicoes. Barely possible. But not likely. What was likely was that a plan which should have worked with minimal risk had ended in death. And it had been my plan; so, to the degree that I'd fobbed it off on Preston LaForge, I was feeling responsible.

  It wasn't as if he'd gone into the whole thing blindfolded, with me prodding him with a gun in his back. I knew for a fact that he had weighed the risks. And in good company, too. Tracy Leach, Preston's “Tray,” was not the innocent girlfriend I had pictured earlier that afternoon. Judging from what LaForge had said over the phone, she was as familiar with the Jellicoes’ operation as Preston had been. And, therefore, should have been qualified to judge how far Lance and Laurie could be pushed before it came to shove. She'd apparently approved LaForge's strategy late that day, when he'd come visiting in his Ralph Lauren outfit. Which meant that something that neither she nor Preston had anticipated had gone wrong enough to drive Preston to suicide or to drive the Jellicoes to murder him. And it was that something that made me breathe more easily, because it was that something that I could never have foretold. Whatever it was, it was somehow connected to a red-haired sixteen-year-old girl with a thin, avaricious face and a market value that seemed to keep soaring far beyond any reasonable estimate. Whatever it was, it was unpredictable and fatal. And, in the rain and the dark, Tracy Leach had seemed like one of the few people who might be able to guess.

  At ten-thirty, I got out of the car and dashed through the storm to the Chinese-red door of the Leach house. Lights were on on the first floor, but no one answered my knock. I tried the doorbell, knocked again, and suddenly realized that Tray wasn't going to answer no matter how many times I banged at the door. In a bizarre way, Preston LaForge had told me why.

  He wouldn't have needed to write down her phone number. Not if he had a key to the house. Which meant that Tracy Leach was out for the evening and that the number I'd memorized belonged to the home she was visiting.

  Deep down I was glad she wasn't home. Glad because I didn't want to break the news to her. Glad because I didn't want to press her into service, at least not on that unlucky night. Glad because if she wouldn't cooperate, if Preston's death didn't shake her into action, I'd have to try the same ploy on her that I'd used on LaForge. Tell her that I knew that same dirty, ruinous secret and that I'd tell the world if she wouldn't play along.

  Hugo or no Hugo, Cindy Ann simply wasn't worth it. Not to me. Not on that night.

  ******

  Jo looked shaken when I unlocked the front door of my apartment. She'd been sitting by the phone in front of the rolltop desk and, when I trudged through the door, she jumped to her feet and threw her arms around me.

  “You'll get wet,” I said softly.

  She held me at arm's length and looked me over. “Thank God, you're all right. You are all right, aren't you?”

  I shook the hat off and pegged it on the rack and said, “I guess I am,” without much conviction.

  “I heard it on the radio about an hour after you left. A neighbor found him in the living room. I couldn't believe it! Preston LaForge!” She pulled me against her. “Then I got that damn phone call and I didn't know what—”

  “What phone call?”

  She pointed to a yellow tablet on the desk. “I wrote it down for you. He said you should call him tonight.”

  I walked over to the rolltop and read what was written on the tablet. “Lance Jellicoe called,” it said. “At 10:30. Has to talk with you about tonight.”

  “That man had a brutal voice,” Jo said nervously.

  “He's a very brutal man,” I told her.

  “Then why . . .”

  Jo looked at me haplessly. She was being better than considerate. She was being good, in the reformed, touching way that children are good after an argument or an ugly scene. It moved me enough to want to tell her everything she was dying to know. And I told her that I would, as I picked up the phone and dialed Jellicoe's number.

  Jellicoe answered on the fifth ring in a grumpy, inhospitable voice. He sounded edgy and just the slightest bit confused, as if he weren't quite sure he wanted to talk with anyone. I could understand that, especially if he thought the police might be calling.

  “This is Stoner,” I said to him.

  His voice toughened a little. “You go by LaForge's apartment?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you seen what happened to him. Before you call the police, I want you to know that Laurie and me had nothing to do with that. You hear? Nothing. Don't make no difference if you believe me. Truth is I like Preston. He was a good ol' boy. He had his faults, but meanness wasn't one of them.”

  Once he'd gotten that out of the way, Jellicoe got down to business.

  “Now, you listen to me, mister,” he said. “You want that girl back, you won't tell the police about us. Hear? We'll lose her sure as hell if you do.”

  “Why didn't you deliver her to LaForge?” I said to him. “Why did he kill himself?”

  “I don't know about that,” Lance said with a surprising depth of feeling. “He was dead when we got over there. Don't make much sense to me. A man like him. Don't make no sense a'tall.”

  I didn't believe Lance Jellicoe. At least, I didn't think I did. But I found that I had to remind myself that he was certainly a pimp and possibly a killer—his tone was that far removed from what I'd anticipated.

  “Where's the girl?” I said.

  “We'll get to that.” And suddenly his tone wasn't odd at all. “You meet Laurie tomorrow night. Bring one of them pictures with you. She'll tell you about Cindy Ann.”

  I thought it over quickly. I didn't understand the importance of the pictures, although it was clear enough why the Jellicoes wanted the police kept out of their affairs. “I'll come,” I told him. “But on my terms. We meet where I say and when I say. And if there's any trouble, Lance, the pictures and a deposition get sent straight to the cops.”

  “Call it,” he said.

  “The Busy Bee. At six tomorrow night.”

  “She'll be there,” he said and hung up.

  I put the phone back in its cradle and stared at the desk top. If I'd have been the head-scratching, chin-pulling type, I would have been paring away at my sandy noggin and my chin would have been stretched out like taffy. It just didn't make any sense. Jellicoe calling me up, suddenly showing interest in those snapshots, practically agreeing to be blackmailed. He must have found out about me and my little photo album through Preston or Abel Jones. That was clear cut. What I couldn't understand was why the hell he'd be so interested in a scummy picture that no one could trace back to him or to his organization. I thought about it until it became obvious. And then I laughed out loud—a single bark of berserk amusement. It wasn't at all funny. If I'd thought of it a few hours earlier in the day, Preston LaForge might still be alive.

  “What's wrong?” Jo said uncertainly.

  “He thinks he's in those pictures!” I said, half to myself.

  “What pictures?”

  I looked at her a second. She cocked her head and looked back at me expectantly. She had every right to know, and I had every reason not to tell her.

  “Are you sure you want to hear this?” I said.

  She nodded. “I think I have the right to know.”

  “I guess you do, too.” I opened the lower right-hand drawer of the desk and took out the box of photographs. “These are pictures of Cindy Ann Evans. Hugo's Cindy Ann. They were taken by the Jellicoes.” I patted the lid and handed the box to Jo. “Now you'll understand why the old man wants her back.”

  I talked to her as she sorted through the photos, not lookin
g at her because I knew what her reaction would be. Disgust, horror, anger—the same responses I had had. Besides, I needed to talk about the Jellicoes. I needed to air my own ideas, and I needed someone to hear them, to make them seem real or, at least, plausible.

  “I think the Jellicoes want those pictures because they think they might be in some of them. They're not sure, though. And that's what interests me. Having been photographed with Cindy Ann Evans must be a powerful liability. Or else Lance Jellicoe would never have risked calling me and blowing his alibi by telling me he was at the LaForge apartment tonight.”

  I looked over at Jo. Her hands were folded on the shoe box and she was staring at them as if they were pictures of her hands taken in an untroubled year.

  “You don't want to hear this, do you?” I said gently.

  “Why not?” she said in a dull, wounded voice. “I don't think anything you could tell me could be worse than what I just saw.”

  “I warned you.”

  She shuddered and said, “Not strongly enough.” Jo looked up from her hands. “What's happened to the little girl, Harry? Do you know?”

  “This afternoon, I wasn't sure. Now . . .”

  I took a breath and said, “I think she's dead, Jo.”

  I'd said it for myself, as well as for her, to take the sting out of it by making it conscious. But all it did for me was remind me of Hugo and of the dreadful look on LaForge's face. And, as for Jo, she looked back down at her hands and started to cry. “My God, what an awful thing. Why would they do it? She's just a child.”

  I sat back heavily in the chair. I was sorry I had told her. I was sorry I'd admitted it to myself. “I don't know why. All I know is that the Jellicoes don't want any photographs lying around that could connect them with Cindy Ann Evans. And, to me, that means that Cindy Ann Evans is in serious trouble. I could be wrong. But she did drop out of sight. And LaForge is dead, maybe by his own hand, as a result of something that I started this afternoon by showing him those same pictures.”

  “It's not your fault,” Jo said hoarsely. She wiped her eyes with her fingertips and asked, “What did he have to do with the girl anyway?”