The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  And then there was a terrific silence. With him just sitting there in all that plaster dust and blood. And me, stretched out on the pavement with my gun five feet away from me and a sharp pain beginning to form in my left side.

  And then there was noise. Lots of it.

  People inside the building were yelling. And Jo was crying “Oh, my God, Harry,” in a shrill, broken voice. And lights went on all over the building, so that the little courtyard was lit up like day. Then I could see some man on the landing, looking in horror at the dead gunman. And a woman shrieked from the stairwell. The man on the landing told her to “Shut up!” and stepping over the dead man's legs, worked his way down the broken staircase and out into the yard. He came running over to me and stooped down.

  Before he could say anything, I said, “The girl. See about the girl.”

  He looked over to the rosebush and back at me. “She's all right.” He looked at my back and said, “You're wounded.”

  Good thinking, I said to myself.

  Then Jo appeared.

  Her face was bleeding at the hairline and the blood had run down one cheek. The rest of it was chalk white and so twisted with emotion that it didn't look like Jo's face.

  “Do something!” she shrieked at the man.

  “I'm doing my best, lady. There's an ambulance coming.” He looked down at me and said, “How does it feel?”

  “It hurts,” I said.

  “Oh, God!” Jo stamped her feet furiously.

  “I'm O.K., honey,” I said to her. “Really. I'm O.K.”

  She looked down at me and started to cry.

  “I've taken a few pellets in my left side,” I said to her. “It's not serious. I've been shot before, so I know. Unless I go into shock, I'll be O.K. The fact that it hurts is good. If it were a more serious wound, I wouldn't feel anything for an hour or so.”

  “How can you be so calm?” Jo screamed at me.

  “What do you want me to do? Get hysterical? I'd get up, but I'm not sure I haven't broken some ribs.”

  “Just stay there,” the man said, urging me back with his hands.

  For some reason, Jo thought that that gesture was funny. She laughed and wiped a little blood off her face. Then she kneeled down and kissed me on the lips.

  “I love you,” she said, wiping the hair from my forehead.

  “And I love you.”

  She glanced back over her shoulder at the stairwell and got a sick look on her face. “Oh, my God,” she said quietly.

  I touched her hand. “Don't look at him.”

  “He wanted to kill you.”

  “He damn near succeeded.”

  She looked back down at me. “He's dead.”

  Sirens and flashing blue lights filled the street. Two white-clad ambulance attendants lifted me onto a stretcher and put a blanket over me. With Jo holding my hand, they carried me out to the ambulance.

  “Did you see the guy in the hallway?” I heard one say to the other.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sweet Jesus, what a mess.”

  20

  THREE PELLETS were embedded in my back, in an ellipsis that stretched from below my left arm pit to about an inch from the spine. The shot hadn't entered deeply enough to do any more than tear the latissimus dorsi. The biggest problem, the intern explained, as I was being wheeled into surgery at Cincinnati General, was the chance of blood poisoning.

  “That and the police,” he said gravely. “I understand you killed a man tonight.”

  “What would you do if someone pointed a sawed-off shotgun at you and pulled the trigger?”

  He didn't answer.

  It took about ten minutes of probing with forceps to get the pellets out. I didn't feel any pain; they'd given me a shot of Xylocaine. But I could hear the sound the pellets made as he dropped each one into a metal tray and could feel the dull purchase of the suturing needle as it passed through my flesh. When the intern was through, a nurse put me on a bottle of glucose and wrapped some gauze and an Ace bandage around my middle. Then she and the intern wheeled me up to the second floor for observation.

  “How long will I be in?” I asked the intern.

  “A day or so. There could be some edema or residual shock.

  We want to keep an eye on you until morning.” He took a look at the bandage and said, “You're very lucky. An inch or so to the right and those pellets could have fractured your spine. As it is, you'll have a sore back for a few weeks. And you won't be using your left arm for awhile. At least, not for heavy lifting. But, aside from that, you should be as good as new.”

  “How is Jo?” I asked him. “The girl who came in with me?”

  “She had a nasty cut on her scalp and some bruises and lacerations on her arms and legs. But there's no sign of fracture or concussion. She should be fine.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “I'll see.” He walked out of the room.

  About an hour later, a short ugly man in a brown business suit walked in. “Lieutenant Alvin Foster,” he said, drawing a chair up beside the bed. “I'd like to ask you a few questions.”

  Foster was in his late forties, balding in horns that curved around a thatch of thin black hair. He had a jowly, big-pored face, five o'clock shadow, yellow teeth, dark-ringed green eyes, and the kind of thick lips that look like lozenges of hard rubber that someone has knicked with a penknife. He smelled strongly of tobacco and after-shave, and he spoke in a thin, crackling tenor. Like Walter Brennan's scratchy voice, only huskier and not as whiney.

  He looked at me unpleasantly, then took a pack of crumpled Tareytons out of his pocket. “I guess they won't mind,” he said, shaking a cigarette from the pack. He lit it and puffed a white cloud of smoke toward the floor. “I understand you used to be on the force.”

  “Just the D.A.'s office,” I said.

  He waved his hand. “Same difference. This guy you wasted, do you have any idea why he was trying to drop you?” He didn't let me answer. “It was a professional job.” He explained it to me with his hands. “He's sitting on the landing. He tells a neighbor that he's waiting for you. The neighbor doesn't know different—why should he? But the guy knows where you live and when you're coming home and how you'll be coming through the door. From the landing, it's a sweet set-up. Four steps up and a banister to lean it on. And maybe a thirty degree angle down, so he's sure to take your legs off even if he don't get off a timely shot. And what're you going to do when you make him? You got your hands full of door and keys and that girl. It's like shooting fish in a barrel.” He clapped his hands together and looked at me with lively malice. “You should be dead.”

  “I was lucky. I spotted him before he got the gun set, just as he was peeking around the banister.”

  “Lucky don't cover it,” Foster said. “Were you expecting his kind of company?”

  “No.”

  He dropped the cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with his heel. “We got a problem, then.”

  “Look, why don't you call up Bernie Olson on the D.A.'s staff. He'll tell you what kind of man I am.”

  “Uh-huh.” Foster reached painfully inside his coat, as if he were about to scratch himself. Instead, he pulled out a small photograph of Cindy Ann Evans. One of my photographs. “We found this on the guy. He had about twenty of them in his pocket. Does that mean anything to you?”

  I thought it over quickly. Jones had robbed the apartment before ambushing me. The police wouldn't have any trouble putting that much together. The rest of it—the why of it—was what he was waiting to hear. It was just a question of how much I wanted to let him know.

  “Her name is Cindy Ann Evans. I was hired to locate her.”

  “Having any luck?” he said coyly.

  “Not yet. She's disappeared.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “That's privileged information.”

  “Bend the rules a little,” he said with an ugly edge in his voice.

  “Sorry.”

  “All right, we'll skip
that for the time being. The guy who shot you, do you know who he was?”

  “Never saw him before in my life.”

  “His name is Jones. Abel Jones. He's a low-life from River-view. He loan sharks on the West Side. And he wasn't the type to kill unless there was a dollar in it. So it looks like we got someone with a powerful grudge against you. So powerful he's willing to shell out five grand for a contract. Any ideas who that could be?”

  “In my line of work,” I said casually, “you make enemies.”

  Foster eyed me coldly. He knew I wasn't telling him the truth, and he wanted to punch me for it. In another place, at another time, he probably would have punched me. Cops hate a lie worse than sin and love to catch folks telling them. Like evangelists, they make a living off depravity and they need to have their prejudices confirmed from time to time. It gives them a lift.

  “O.K., Stoner,” he said. “We'll talk again.”

  “Any time, lieutenant.”

  He passed a hand through that thatch of black hair. “I don't know who you think you're protecting, but we have reason to believe that the girl in that picture was murdered.”

  I tried to look surprised.

  “No,” he said lightly. “That won't cut it.” He started for the door. “You think about it for a few days. See if you can't remember why someone tried to kill you. Because they're going to try again. And, next time, fella’, you won't be so ... lucky.”

  ******

  He was absolutely right. And the sane part of me was pleading, “Tell him the whole thing.” But that was the sane part. The other seventy-five percent kept feeling Laurie Jellicoe's hand stroking mine and hearing her sweet urgent voice swearing that it wasn't a set-up and seeing that shotgun go off like a windblown torch and all that glass and debris flying out at me like a crystal wind and smelling the cordite smoke afterward and the sweet tang of blood. I just didn't get shot all that often. I didn't have to toss my lover bodily into a thornbush and pray that she wasn't lying dead in the dirt of a bullet wound.

  And then there was the thought of Preston, bleeding on that cream-colored rug. And of Cindy Ann, puffing up in the river water like dough rising in an oven. And the plain old reflex stubbornness that comes over me when a cop tries to push me around. Coupled with the intuition, born of years of experience, that, if I turned it over to Foster without giftwrapping it with a bow, he would certainly blow the case. And, with it, any chance I might have of visiting justice on the Jellicoes, if justice was the right word.

  I dozed in the hospital bed, high on Xylocaine and fantasies of revenge, and dreamed gruesomely about what I would do when I caught up with Lance and Laurie and their silent partner.

  ******

  Some time during the night, Jo came in the room and called my name. But it wasn't until the next morning, when the anaesthetic had worn off and the pain began to bite at my back, that I was healed enough in mind and spirit to answer her.

  I opened my eyes and saw her sitting in a plastic lounge chair beside the door. There was some sun in the room, coming through the drapes by the window. I took a deep breath and the keen smell of the disinfectant blown through the air-conditioning ducts made me momentarily giddy.

  I tried lifting my left arm. It went up, but it hurt mightily. I managed to stretch it out far enough to snag the phone on the nightstand by the bed. According to the Provident Bank time lady, it was ten-thirty A.M. on Tuesday the twelfth and the temperature outside was eighty-eight degrees. Jo heard me hang up the phone and sat up in the chair. She had a gauze bandage on her forehead and there were some splotches of iodine on her arms and on her legs below the hemline of that floral print dress. But she still looked brownly pretty, in a wounded and bedraggled way. Like Ava Gardner playing the nurse in Snows of Kilimanjaro. Heart-shaped face, coal black hair, olive skin, gray eyes—all sleepy and concerned.

  She smiled at me—a pained, visitor's smile. And I felt compelled to tell her that I wasn't about to die.

  “I know that.” She ran her eyes up and down my body and they filled with tears.

  She got up, and walked over to the bed, and I pulled her down beside me and kissed her.

  She looked away for a second. And I could see her seeing Abel Jones, lying in the wreckage of the lobby.

  “It couldn't be helped,” I said.

  She nodded quickly. “I know. But that doesn't make it any less awful.” She took a deep breath and looked back down at me. “A man named Foster asked me some questions about those pictures you showed me.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him to talk to you. I told him I didn't know anything about them.”

  “You told him right,” I said.

  “He didn't believe me. You are going to tell him about the Jellicoes, aren't you?”

  “When I'm ready.”

  “That's crazy.” She smiled uncertainly. “You want them to try to kill you again?”

  “I'd like to see them try,” I said grimly.

  “You are crazy!” Jo's gray eyes flashed and she hopped off the bed. “I'm going to the coffee shop,” she said with disgust. “I can't take any more of this macho crap on an empty stomach.”

  “Just don't wander too far off,” I said. “I intend to get out of here by noon.”

  She looked like she was about to tear her hair. “You're shot,” she said between her teeth, like she was explaining something for the umpteenth time to a very stupid child. “You're wounded. You can't get up, champ. You're down for the count.”

  “I'm getting up,” I said between my teeth.

  “Madness!” She turned on her heels and marched out of the room.

  At eleven-fifteen, the young intern who had treated me the night before came by. “How's the patient?” he said in a chipper voice. He looked at a clipboard. “Looks like you're going to live. Does it hurt much?”

  “Enough,” I said.

  “It will for awhile. We'll give you some codeine to help kill the pain. If it cramps on you, you may also need a muscle relaxant.”

  “Would it kill me to leave here this afternoon?”

  “It wouldn't kill you, no. I think you'd be better off waiting till tomorrow morning. To be on the safe side.”

  “I want to live dangerously.”

  He shrugged. “Let's take a look.”

  He examined the wound, put some fresh gauze on my back and rewrapped the Ace bandage. “I guess it'll be all right if you want to leave.”

  He had the nurse get me a prescription and a fresh supply of bandages and he warned me that I would get some drainage and that I shouldn't be alarmed and he cautioned me against overexerting myself. And we shook hands. And that was that.

  At high noon, I took an elevator down through the sanitized hospital air, stepped out into the lobby, walked over to the coffee shop window and rapped on the glass.

  When she saw me, she looked down at her cup of coffee and shook her head.

  21

  AT TEN after twelve, Jo and I caught a Yellow Cab in front of the hospital on Goodman Street and had the cabbie drive us down Burnett to the Delores. It was a very short trip—maybe a mile and a quarter—and the driver, a black man with a grizzled beard and a little brown bald spot on the back of his head, wasn't too happy about the fare.

  “Hell, you could've walked this easily,” he said, as he pulled up in front of the apartment building. “Big strong man like you.”

  “I'm an eccentric millionaire,” I said, handing him a couple of dollars.

  For a few seconds, Jo and I just stood there on the sidewalk and stared at each other—me with my box of gauze and my bag of prescriptions in my right hand and my left arm dangling uselessly at my side, and Jo in her rumpled, dirt-stained print dress with that bandage on her forehead and all those iodine stains on her arms and legs. I started to laugh, but she eyed me grumpily.

  “It's not funny. You could be dead. I could be dead. It's not funny.”

  “I guess not,” I said. “Although it sure feels good
to be alive this beautiful morning.”

  She mumbled something about cats and their lives, and we walked up the walkway into the shadow of the building, where broken glass still pebbled the ground like rocksalt. Someone had cleared away most of the large-scale debris and piled it in a dusty, cement-colored stack to the right of the stoop. The landing had been swept clean, too; the yellow wall had been washed; and the staircase patched with boards. There was still a jagged hole where the door should have been, but, as I walked through it, I could hear the sounds of someone hammering and planing in the basement. I stuck my head around the door beneath the stairwell and hollered down, “Leo?”

  The sounds stopped immediately, and a hammer clattered to the floor, and someone cursed viciously. Old Leo, the handyman, rumbled up the stairs, in his denim overalls and white T-shirt, his belly swinging like a sack of meal above the belt he'd tied around his hips.

  “Oh, it's you,” he said in a brittle voice. “It ain't enough you got to blow up the first floor, you don't need to take ten years off my life by yelling. You ‘bout scared me to death, just now.” He took a polka-dot bandana out of his back pocket and mopped his sweaty face. “I swear, two-thirds of my life just passed before my eyes.”

  “Which two?” Jo said over my shoulder.

  “The first and the last,” he said with a wink. “There's a long time in between there I don't like to think about.”

  He snorted with laughter and started back down the stairs.

  “Hold up!” I said to him. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Yeah?” He cocked his arm on the door frame and looked at me impatiently. “I got work to do, you know.”

  “Last night, after I'd gone off to the hospital, did I have any more visitors? Maybe a tall guy with cowboy boots? Or a pretty blonde who looks like Farrah Fawcett?”