The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  So I had to freeze them by keeping them guessing about the photographs. And, in the meantime, I had to turn up a witness who'd be willing to testify to the kind of organization that the Jellicoes ran. Tracy Leach would be perfect, if he'd cooperate. And maybe he would, once he learned why Preston had killed himself. That is, if he didn't already know why Preston had blown his head off, if he hadn't been a part of the whole ugly business to begin with.

  18

  I'D HOPED to get to the Busy Bee early, just to check things out. Not that I'd expected to be ambushed by the Jellicoes in the restaurant. That would be preposterous madness, especially if I was right and all they were interested in was getting out of town as quickly and cleanly as possible. But there was always a chance that they were as preposterously mad as Preston LaForge had turned out to be. So I took a long, careful look around before getting out of the Pinto.

  I'd taken the precaution of bringing a gun along with me— a .45 caliber Colt Commander with a nickle-plated barrel, which is the only weapon I keep in the downtown office. I had it strapped in a shoulder holster under my left arm. And I had a micro-cassette recorder with a built-in condenser mike in my coat pocket. If Laurie proved as talkative as Lance had been on Sunday night, I wanted to get what she had to say down on tape. Of course, what I recorded would never hold up in open court, but it might be enough to interest the D.A. and a grand jury.

  When I was sure that no one was lurking around the lot, I got out of the car and walked briskly up the alleyway to Ludlow and turned left onto the sidewalk and left again into the Busy Bee.

  Jo was standing by the door as I walked in. She looked pleased and flustered when she turned around, menu in hand, and saw me smiling at her.

  “You know I'm not off until ten tonight,” she said.

  “So? A man has a right to eat, doesn't he?”

  She whirled demurely around. “Right this way, sir.”

  I pinched her on her pretty butt and one of the waitresses barked with laughter. “Harry,” she hissed.

  Jo put me at a table in the rear of the room, beneath the bar. “I'll get you a drink,” she said. She'd started up the three steps to the bar level when I grabbed her hand.

  “I'm going to be having some company, Jo,” I said. “Laurie Jellicoe.”

  “In here? Tonight?”

  I nodded. “Any second.”

  “There isn't going to be any trouble, is there, Harry? I mean you're not in any danger, are you?”

  “No.”

  “I don't believe you,” she said under her breath.

  Jo walked up to the bar and came back down a minute later with a Scotch, which she smacked down in front of me.

  “Just watch it,” she said.

  “I'll do my best, lady.”

  Someone started calling my name from the front of the restaurant. “Har-ee! Har-ee!”

  I didn't even have to look up. If I'd heard that voice over the phone, I would have asked to speak to her daddy. It was that fulsome. By all rights, it should have gone with floppy hats and big white beads and print dresses that spangled like oil spilled on water. But, aside from her show girl's smile, Laurie Jellicoe just didn't fit the part. Not that she wasn't dressed to kill. On that night she'd left Cardin in the closet: tight lame blouse with a good deal of pretty brown cleavage showing and black silk slacks that barely made it over her rear. She'd dressed with cold professional skill. And the impression I was supposed to take away from it and the smile in her fruity voice was that we were way past the first name basis now. We were pals. Instead of exciting me, Laurie Jellicoe made me nervous and very suspicious.

  “That's her?” Jo whispered. “That's Laurie Jellicoe?”

  “This is beginning to sound like Shane,” I said with a laugh. “Go up to the door, darlin', and usher the poor girl in.”

  Jo tugged at the bodice of her dress and stalked off to the front of the restaurant. I reached into my coat pocket and flipped on the recorder.

  It didn't look as if Jo had exchanged any words with the Jellicoe girl as she guided her to my table. But Laurie's smile had become a pinched, joyless grimace by the time she sat down. Jo flapped a menu in front of her, and Laurie kept smiling with effort, as if that toothy grin were painted on her face for all time. As soon as Jo walked off, Laurie turned to me, still smiling, and said, “I'd like to get that cunt alone for ten minutes,” in the sweetest little girl voice imaginable.

  “What did she say to you?” I said with real curiosity.

  Laurie only laughed—the belle-of-the-ball laugh. “It doesn't matter.”

  She reached inside her purse for a pack of cigarettes, but her hand was shaking violently. I held her hand to steady it. She giggled mindlessly and ran a long-nailed finger down my palm.

  “You know, I like you,” she said. She shook her hair a bit for effect and breathed out a cloud of white smoke. Behind that cloud her eyes were bright and devilish. “It's a shame I didn't meet you before I tied up with Lance. We could have made nice music together. I like to blow things.”

  “I'll bet you do.”

  “U'm.” She puckered her lips with lazy sensuality and blew a smoke ring across the table. “Maybe we should get out of here,” she said, glancing jealously at the bar where Jo was perched like a bird of prey.

  “We have to talk first.”

  “We've got time for that. Let's go up to the park and talk. It'll be dark in an hour. We can talk then. C'mon. I swear it's not a set-up, if that's what you think. Let's take in a little nature.”

  “I don't think your boy, Lance, would like that.”

  She snorted. “God, Lance and I aren't even talking anymore. Much less . . .”

  “Why?” I said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why aren't you two talking anymore?”

  “Preston,” she said wearily. “He's angry about Preston.”

  “What about him?”

  She put a finger to her lips. “I'm not a fool, Harry, honey. I didn't come here to tell secrets.”

  “What did you come here for?”

  “The pictures. That's what Lance thinks, anyway. But we can talk about them later. I need a lover right now.”

  “Why me?”

  Laurie looked sulkily into my face. “Because!” she said with mock-petulance. “I need you. Isn't that enough?”

  I shook my head, and she gave me just the shadow of a grin. “You're an odd man, Harry Stoner. A couple of days ago you were undressing me with your eyes.”

  “I've grown up a lot in the last few days.”

  “All right,” she said. “Say I'm lonesome, then. Say this has been a very lonely and very bad week for everybody. And I need someone to pretend I'm in love with. Is that O.K.?”

  “What do I get out of it?”

  She looked at me with astonishment. “You put a mighty high value on yourself, mister. What do you want out of it?”

  “Cash,” I said. “Say twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Listen, Dillinger,” she said. “I don't have to pay anybody to make love to this.” She looked down at her body as if it were something detached and arrayed on a pedestal. “You can go to hell with your lousy cracks.”

  “The money's not for you, Laurie. I wouldn't know how to set a price on that.”

  She glared at me savagely. “For what, then?”

  “For the pictures. You know, the ones with you and Lance and poor Cindy Ann in them?”

  “What do you mean poor Cindy Ann?”

  “Didn't you know, Laurie? She's dead. Preston killed her.”

  Some of the anger left Laurie Jellicoe's face. “You know about that?”

  “Yep. I got friends at the D.A.'s office.”

  “I see,” she said. “Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  “Yes, it is. But if you don't come up with it, I'll have to go to the police.”

  “We wouldn't like that.”

  “I wouldn't like to do it myself.” I patted her hand. “I'd hate to see something
as good as you end up in the can.”

  She giggled nervously. “Would be kind of a waste, wouldn't t?”

  “So, I want the money, Laurie. And, because I know how people can be, how antsy they can get at times, I want some security, too. You see I have the feeling that if I was to turn those pictures over to you, me and my twenty thousand dollars wouldn't be around very long.”

  “What would it take to make you feel secure?”

  “A few names. A few details about how you run your business. The name of your partner . . . yeah, I know about him, too, Laurie. What I want is a deposition that I can file with my lawyer. I mean, just in case. And I want to know exactly where Cindy Ann Evans was dumped.”

  “We didn't have anything to do with that,” she said stiffly. “Preston just went a little crazy. He was always a little crazy, if you ask me.”

  “She was still one of your girls, Laurie. And I mean your girls, baby. The kind you liked to undress and, what shall we say, play with.”

  She didn't blush, not this one. “How do we know you have the pictures?”

  “I've got them and a lot more to go with them. You'll just have to take my word for that.”

  “I don't know,” she said. “I don't know if that's good enough.”

  “It's going to have to be, honey. Either I get that money in the next twenty-four hours along with the information I want, or I'm going to the cops with what I know. And the way they're worked up about Preston LaForge, it won't take them a minute to bust your sweet ass. And, I'd hate to see that, Laurie.” I stroked her cheek. “Because it's such a sweet ass.”

  “It isn't up to us,” she said. “I mean, not entirely.”

  “You mean you'll have to consult your partner. That's all right. Newport's only an hour away.”

  She flinched and pushed back from the table. “I'll have to talk this over with Lance.”

  She looked me up and down and sighed. “How ‘bout buying me a drink? I need something to do with my mouth, as long as we're not taking that little ride up to Mt. Storm together.”

  I grinned at her. “O.K. One for the road.”

  19

  WE HAD our drink, Laurie and I. And another. And another. And around a quarter of eight she glanced at her gold Cartier watch and said, “I better be getting back.”

  She gave me one sweet, lingering smile and murmured, “Too bad.”

  “Like you once said, another lifetime, maybe.”

  “I guess so.” She stirred the drink with her fingertips. “You know it's funny how people's lives turn out. A few home-town pageants. A couple of rugged years trying to crack the big-time. Some photo spreads and . . .” Her voice trailed off and she frowned.

  It was one of those revealing moments when you can see the sixty-five-year-old woman in the twenty-five-year-old girl—the mouth drawn down and wrinkled at the tips, and the skin stretched grimly across the model's high cheekbones, and the bones themselves poking through like things imprisoned in the flesh. I understood suddenly why she smiled all the time, even when the rest of her face was joyless. It was to keep her from looking as old as she felt. I probably would have felt sorry for her, if she'd had better reasons to frown.

  She got up from the chair. “See ya,” she said. Her mouth opened up and the smile popped back on like a refrigerator bulb. “In that other life.”

  She walked out of the Bee and I settled back in the booth seat, switched off the tape recorder, which had run out long before, and toyed with the rest of my Scotch. Down the track, I could see some powerful trouble coming. I didn't know who, yet. But it was coming. And that third partner—the one with the final word—was the engineer.

  Because it was starting to fall apart between the Jellicoes. Two people were dead. What had begun as a profitable scheme was turning into a nightmare. Given enough time and a little pressure from me, the two of them would be at each other's throats. And whoever that third partner was, if he had any brains at all, he wasn't going to sit around and get eaten alive. No, he'd come after me. And, maybe, after the Jellicoes, too. Of course, the bright side was that, if I survived it, I'd have the whole vile crew where I wanted them—filled with murderous hate and ready to sell each other out for the price of immunity. If I survived.

  Jo sauntered up to the table and gave me a peaked grin. “I see little Miss Muffett is gone.”

  “Just now.”

  “Leaving the reek of sulphur behind her.” Jo sat down across from me. “About what I said this morning . . .” She prodded my fist with a finger. “I take it back.”

  “You don't love me?”

  “Not that part. The other. I guess people do what they have to do, and there's no explaining it. I started to think about why I work here at the Bee, about the hundreds of reasons that led me to this place. And the best one I could come up with was that I do what I do because it answers some sense of obligation inside me. I guess your job means the same thing to you?”

  “I've always been good at finding things for other people,” I said, poking her finger with one of my own. “That's the best I've been able to come up with.”

  We stared wryly at each other.

  “Did she make a pass at you?” Jo said.

  “Pass is probably the wrong word. She showed a certain interest.”

  “The bitch.”

  “She had some kind words for you, too. What did you say to her?”

  “Something about the way she was dressed,” Jo said tartly. “I would have liked to have torn her eyes out. She's the one who's responsible for what happened to that little girl, you know.”

  I hadn't forgotten. I hadn't forgotten that, for a second.

  Two very respectable Cincinnatians walked through the door of the Bee and Jo got to her feet. “See you later?” she said hopefully.

  “I'll be here,” I told her.

  ******

  The Bee shut down at half past nine. I sat alone in the dining room while the waitresses cleared the tables and smoked and joked and toasted each other with empty Coke glasses. A restaurant is a far cheerier place after the customers have gone. Everyone is loose and clubby. Leftovers are eaten. Drinks are poured. No one wants to go home. It's like leaving a warm, friendly kitchen.

  Jo and I spent half an hour chatting with Hank and the bar girls. And, at ten, we sneaked out through the kitchen door. The night air was mild and romantic. And I could feel it like a soft, warm hand on my face. I'd been sorely tempted three times that day, so I wasted no time in driving back to the Delores. I looked so intensely preoccupied that, at first, Jo thought something had gone wrong on the case. I played up to her, putting a tight, maniacal grin on my face and staring madly at the roadbed. But, about halfway home, she caught on. And, by the time I pulled into the lot at the rear of the building, we were both a little drunk and breathless.

  We walked, arm in arm, around to the front of the building. And I had just unlocked the framed-glass front door and was pushing it open with my left hand and pulling Jo with my right when I saw him peer around the banister of the first landing. I didn't see much of his face. Just that nose like a letter opener and a tuft of coal black hair. He was wearing a blue sweater cap and a light blue windbreaker over a plaid shirt and jeans.

  He couldn't have caught me at a better moment—of course, that was the way it had been planned. And, while I remember what happened next in minute detail, like a slow motion sequence in a Peckinpah film, it only took thirty seconds of actual clock time.

  As soon as I spotted him, I whirled around to face Jo. She was smiling, expecting a joke, because that was the mood we'd been in. When she saw my face, her own face knitted in confusion and she started to say something. I pushed her, with all my strength, back out of the hall light. She let out a little yell, as she lost her footing, and went crashing backward into a prickly rose bush. I dove to the opposite side of the stoop just as the first shot went off behind me.

  The entire front door flew outward off its hinges, spewing glass and splinters for a good thirty f
eet up the pathway and leaving a ragged hole where the frame had been. I knew at once that I'd been hit in the back by some of the pellets. But I didn't feel any pain. Just a wetness and a warmth, as if someone had thrown hot broth on my coat.

  I landed in the brambles on the left side of the front walkway, face down in the dirt. I could hear Jo crying my name. I reached inside my coat and pulled out the pistol. My hand came away red and slippery. But I wasn't thinking of the pain yet. Or the seriousness of the wound. Gun in hand, I rolled left into the light of the hallway and looked up toward the landing. He was slipping two more shells into the breech. I watched him for a split second. His hands seemed to move with incredible dexterity and yet there was nothing rushed about his movements.

  I braced my right arm with my left, just as he was snapping the breech closed. He looked up and spotted me there on the sidewalk, but the shotgun was still facing toward the stairwell. I pulled the trigger of the Colt four times. The gun jumped wildly, leaping completely out of my hand on the fourth shot and skittering across the concrete. God knows where the other three shots went, but one of them slammed into Abel Jones's chest and out his neck. I could see the yellow wall behind him turn red, as if some invisible hand had splashed bright red paint on it. He pitched forward; his head nodded down, so that all I could see were the eyes, bulging whitely from the compression of the bullet he'd taken in the throat.

  Then the shotgun in his hands went off with a terrific, smoky blast—straight down into the staircase. The explosion was like a small grenade going off. It bit a huge chunk out of the first three stairs, whirling tile and stone and metal about the hallway like shrapnel, and sent Jones flying backward against the bloodstained wall of the landing, as if he had been jerked on a taut rope. He slumped to his ass and lolled forward, his legs stretched out in front of him, the shotgun lying at the foot of the stairs.