The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  It was love night on the Hill. Hot July weather. The air was sticky and rank with the too-sweet smell of honeysuckle. And I was alone in a car, waiting for Tracy Leach to finish with his boy lover. While Hugo Cratz was slipping quietly off into death in a hospital bed, dreaming of a girl he had loved. And Jo was dreaming in her Beeker Street apartment of her dead Marine husband and of one Harry Stoner. A detective. Who sat, dreamlessly, in his car, watching the tall yellow street lamps, curved at the tops like feeding giraffes, and the pacific unpeopled street dusted by the tawny lights and rife with the smell of the honeysuckle that flourished along the viaduct. One by one the houses along Ida went dark. The night sounds stopped. And, with them, the occasional laughter of men and women at play. Around three, the music stopped tumbling down the hillside from Celestial. The air grew still and cooler by a decade of degrees. And all that stirred were the branches of the willow tree above my car.

  I swallowed tepid coffee and smoked and sang a few songs to myself and waited for the yellow Dodge truck, which didn't come until the night sky had turned violet in the east. At five the keen white beams of the headlights flashed from the north end of the street. They disappeared momentarily as the truck rounded Seasongood Pavillion, then flashed back on as the Dodge entered the stretch of Ida where the park dies away in a grove of pine and the houses start up on the west side, while on the east, where I was parked, the ground rises in a hillock of dense shrubbery and low-hanging willows.

  In a few seconds I could hear the sound of the engine and then I could see the truck itself, lazying up the asphalt. The headlights gleamed off the chrome of the cars parked around me. I ducked down again among the styrofoam cups.

  Jellicoe stopped in front of Leach's house and sat there, with the motor running. The front blinds opened again, the porch light snapped on—dull yellow in the false dawn. And the little boy came running out of the red door. Jellicoe opened the passenger side door and he crawled in. The truck ground back into gear and started south on Ida, passing me at a slow pace and crossing the viaduct and disappearing down the hillside where Ida drops to the city.

  I started the Pinto, pulled out, and U-turned in the street. They were half a mile ahead of me, but I wasn't worried about losing them. Ida is blind down the hillside—just a coil of asphalt carrying through the trees—and the Dodge was going slowly and would be easy to spot on the barren, early-morning streets. I started to feel alive for the first time that night, nervous with excitement as I slid down Ida, through the S-shaped curves, and saw in the distance the big yellow van stopped at a light beneath a trestle in the East Bottoms. I slowed down and pulled to the curb. There was no traffic at all on Front Street and I didn't want Jellicoe to spot me.

  I glanced at my watch. It was ten after five.

  When the light changed, Jellicoe turned left onto a ramp leading to the parkway. I sped down the hill after him, wheeling through the struts of the L & N trestles and past the smoky warehouses that abut Front Street to the west and up the ramp onto Columbia Parkway.

  Jellicoe continued driving due west on Columbia, past the wall of red brick buildings that is the city's south side, past the stadium, lit green and skeletal across from the downtown buildings. Then he veered south onto I-75, where it feeds the Brent Spence bridge that crosses the Ohio into Covington. I laid back half a mile and followed. A dozen cars and trucks, early birds on their way south, were already on the expressway—formed in a fast-moving pack. It wasn't a crowd, but I managed to lose myself behind a semi, edging out into the fast lane every once in a while to make sure the van was still ahead of me.

  We touched down on the Kentucky side. Drove past the dark marts and the deserted auto dealerships and the tall cylinder of the Quality Court Motel, lit in a red band at its topmost floor. And, then up through the sandstone gorge, where the expressway sweeps left and right as it climbs to the flat, bluegrass plain above the river. The highway is divided through those turns by a cement retaining wall, and the wall makes the traffic close and quick and dangerous.

  The dawn began in earnest as we topped the gorge, driving the violet and dark blue sky ahead of it. A band of light streaked the eastern horizon and, as the expressway jogged southeast past the mall of the Erlanger Shopping Center, the sun rose bright orange. I flipped down the visor and fished through the glove compartment for a pair of sunglasses—a tricky proposition at close to sixty miles an hour.

  Once out of the suburbs the traffic thinned, and we travelled through corn fields turning gold in the sunlight, where farmers on their tractors were already chugging among the tall corn rows. South past hog sties and cow pastures. Under the high-power lines and the concrete overpasses. Through country measured only by mile posts. Decent and featureless as a map.

  And, after three-quarters of an hour, with the sun fully up and beginning to warm the air, we stopped.

  I saw him pulling off at an exit marked Belleview, and I slowed down, letting cars pass me, until he was off the ramp and heading west along a country road. I took the same exit and found myself in the middle of farm land, on an old two-lane highway lined with telephone poles and fenced-in corn rows that bent so close to the roadside that, in some spots, I could have picked an ear from the car window.

  The sky was almost fully lighted now. Pale blue and very bright in the rearview mirror. I studied the yellow speck in front of me. Here and there access roads cut through the cornfields and spilled dusty tongues of farm dirt on the highway. About a quarter of an hour up the pike, the yellow van slipped off onto one of those roads and disappeared behind the corn rows.

  He'd come to a destination, an ending spot.

  Five minutes later, I turned right onto the same dusty road and jerked to a stop. Yellow dust swirled around the car and settled thickly on the windshield and hood. I cracked a window and dry overheated air flooded through. It must have been a hundred degrees in that field and it was barely seven in the morning. I took a pair of binoculars out of the glove compartment, stepped from the Pinto, and gazed down the road. It continued for a mile or so flanked by the fields, then seemed to fall off abruptly into a gully. The van was parked at the gully's edge and beneath it, in a grove of shade trees, was a white frame farm house with a red tile roof. It was a good-sized house—two rambling floors—with a porch in front and a porch in back. To the north there was a silvery reflection that could have been the beginnings of a creek, and, beyond that, small hills shagged with locust and maple and pine fanned out in a semicircle. The ground in front of the house was grooved like a brain—big yellow grassless whorls of eroded dirt. Behind the house, there was a fenced lawn, with a play-set standing in its center, and a tire hung from a dead oak tree near the fence. A big propane tank was lying on its side next to the rear porch. Nobody was moving around. They'd gone inside to sleep—the Jellicoes and the children who belonged to that play-set.

  I put down the binoculars and did some calculation. I couldn't move the car much closer to the house without taking the chance of waking them all up. And walking straight down the road wouldn't do either if someone happened to be looking out a window. I shaded my eyes and searched the corn field. It grew very close to the yard behind the house. If you walk about half a mile down the road, I told myself, and stick close to that corn field, then cut west through the field, you could come out behind the house in that grove of shade trees and make your way through the back yard to the rear porch. What happened after that would depend on the Jellicoes.

  I got back in the car and pulled it down about thirty yards and parked it so that it blocked the road. I didn't want anyone making an unexpected entrance or exit. Then I took off my coat and got out. A hot wind blew off the corn field, raising a prickle of sweat on my bare arms. At least the heat felt good on my back. I patted both of my weapons nervously, the way a man pats his coat to make sure he hasn't forgotten his billfold, and started up the dirt road, crouching a little and holding close to the corn row on the west side. A dog barked once, making me jump. But aside from that t
here wasn't a sound, save for the wind clicking among the shucks.

  When I got about two hundred yards from the house, I stepped off the road and into the field. The corn was chest-high and green and smelled of milky sap and of pesticide. I could see clearly over the tops of the rows as I curled through them, frightening birds and field mice and one black, pearly snake. When I got to the grove of oak trees, I ducked behind a gnarled trunk and studied the rear of the house.

  It was in surprisingly good shape. The siding was relatively new and freshly painted. The storm windows looked new. There were none of the usual holes or rust spots in the mesh enclosing the porch. It seemed too neat to me, too new. Almost as if it had been built for show. I wondered for whom. Through the wire I could see the kitchen, where sunlight from a front window glared off the tile floors and the aluminum pots and pans hung along a side wall. The kitchen appeared to open on a larger room, perhaps a dining room. It was hard to tell. All of the windows on the second floor were drawn with drapes. The whole house had the clean, righteous look of country life. Currier and Ives. Save that no farmer would still be asleep at seven-thirty in good weather.

  There was a grass lawn between me and the rear porch, dotted with children's toys and that sinister jungle gym I'd seen through the binoculars. Fifty feet of open ground. It wasn't going to grow smaller if I just kept looking at it. I slid out from behind the oak, hopped the low wire fence, and ran across the yard.

  When I got to the rear porch, I flattened myself against the side of the house. Nobody shrieked or poured burning oil out of the upstairs window. Which was a little disconcerting. When you take pains, you want to feel justified. I had the distinct impression that I could have walked in the front door and nobody would have cared. Either the Jellicoes were incredibly careless, or they felt absolutely safe in their rural hideaway. The lock on the porch door was hook and eye—easy to open with a penknife. I jimmied it quickly and pulled at the handle. The door opened noiselessly and I stepped through onto the planking of the porch. There were a couple of lawn chairs and a chaise on the enclosed porch and a few more toys. I walked through the doorless opening that led to the kitchen.

  What I wanted to find was an office or a study—someplace where records might be kept. But I could wander through a lot of rooms and into a lot of trouble before I lucked onto the right one. I thought once about the people I was going to be dealing with and that scared all of the dumb luck philosophy out of my head.

  I’d taken some pains to surprise them. It seemed lunatic to blow what little edge I had. I took a deep breath and blew it out and knew that it was better to get the rough part over right away—to put the Jellicoes out of commission and give myself a free hand with the kids and the records, if there were any records.

  I looked around the kitchen and decided on a long-handled pot. I didn't want to make too big a racket and bring the whole house down there. Just Lance or Laurie or both of them, at worst.

  The kitchen door opened inward and was propped with a rubber stop. Between it and the east wall was a clear space big enough for a man to stand in without being spotted by someone coming through the door. Back to the wall, right arm extended, I would be about two feet from the opening, pointing the pistol chest high on Lance and head high on Laurie. If he came through in a hurry, I might be able to sap him from behind. If he played it cautiously, I'd have no choice but to fire as soon as he peeked around the jamb. There would be no question of missing him at that range. Or of wounding him, either. The bullet would drop him instantly.

  I didn't really like it, but at that moment I couldn't see an alternative. Lance was a tough boy. I wasn't sure what I would find outside the kitchen. So it had to be the way I'd imagined. And it had to be in the kitchen. And it had to be soon. I walked over to the pothanger on the north wall, lifted off the long-handled sauce pan, and dropped it to the floor. It clattered and rang against the tile.

  I heard a noise overhead. And my heart began to pound.

  Someone had gotten out of a bed. I could hear the springs creak and then the pad of footsteps. A male voice said something indecipherable. Another, higher one responded. And then there was a laugh.

  That was good. I hoped he'd keep right on laughing all the way to the kitchen.

  I backed against the east wall, took the magnum from the shoulder holster, braced my feet against the floorboards, extended my right arm, and pulled back the hammer on the gun.

  From the front of the house, I heard a creak of stairs. Then the sound of footsteps got louder and closer. He was coming at a sure, unhurried pace. And before I could take a breath, he was through the door and bending over to pick up the pot. He was naked, hairy on his back. Big, lithe man. With terrific muscles in his arms and thighs. I knew immediately that I wasn't going to be able to sap him—not without both arms. So I took dead aim on his spine and whispered, “Lance.”

  He didn't move at all for a second. Just stood there, bent over, with the pot in his hand and his back to me. I watched the muscles in his legs. He was taking too long, which meant he was going to charge me. Which meant I was going to kill him where he stood. With a painful effort, I braced my right wrist with my left hand.

  “Stand up,” I said softly. “Slowly.”

  His whole body quivered. And his back began to sweat.

  He made a deep, violent noise—as if he were expelling all the air inside his huge chest. And very slowly, he stood up.

  If he hadn't been naked, I think he would have charged me, whirling madly and bulling into me with all of his strength. But there is nothing quite as vulnerable as a naked body. Lance was human enough to feel that vulnerability for the moment it had taken him to make up his mind.

  “Whatchu doin' heah?” he said, without turning around. “What the hell you want?”

  “Well, right now, I want you to call Laurie down here. Sweetly, Lance. Like you were calling her to bed.”

  “Laurie!” he boomed. “C'mon down heah.”

  He didn't have much of a bedside manner, Lance. But, then, he wasn't a subtle man. He didn't need to be, with Laurie for a partner.

  “Turn around,” I said to him. “And go over to that chair and sit down.”

  He turned. And the look on his big, square, pretty Texas face was purely murderous.

  I pointed to a glass breakfast table on the west side of the room. “Sit. And keep it shut, Lance.”

  He walked over to the table and sat down on a chair.

  In a minute I heard Laurie's footsteps. “Hon?” she said sleepily. “What is it?”

  Then she came through the door and saw him at the table and I said, “Hello, precious.”

  “Hello, Harry,” she said sweetly. “We thought you were in the hospital.” She turned in the doorway and smiled at me.

  She was a shameless enough thing. She didn't cover herself. She didn't even blink. She just smiled whitely and stood there, glowing in the sunlight. And she was certainly a voluptuous sight to behold.

  “Get over to the table.” I waved the gun at her and she stuck out a pouty lip.

  “I thought you had more imagination,” she said in a hurt little voice. She sashayed to the table. “Tray certainly had his share. We're going to have to have a little talk with him after this is settled.” She looked down icily at Lance.

  “Jus’ shut up,” he said to her.

  “Now we don't want to wake the little ones,” I said. “So let's do this quick. You”—I pointed to Laurie—”get some twine.”

  She went straight to a drawer by the sink and pulled out a ball of hemp twine. “Now tie him up, Laurie. And I mean good. I know you can do it, honey. You've had lots of practice.”

  She smiled devilishly and went to work on Lance. It was something to see. When she was through, he was hog-tied face down on the floor, his hands stretched behind him and his legs bent at the knees.

  “I have a few fillips of my own,” she said. “Want me to show you?”

  I shook my head. “Gag him.”

  She
took a dish cloth from the sink and gagged Lance with it. When she finished, he looked like a trussed bird.

  “Sit down,” I told her.

  She sat at the table, while I examined the knots.

  She'd done a good job. It might have fooled someone who couldn't tell a slip from a square. But I'd been in the Boy Scouts, so I knew better. He'd be loose in five minutes, and I'd be dead in six. For some reason that little piece of treachery infuriated me.

  I stepped back and kicked Lance hard in the jaw. His head snapped to the left and fell forward on the tile. A dark blood bruise sprang to his cheek.

  As soon as I'd kicked him, Laurie shrieked and bolted for the door. I shot a foot out and tripped her as she went by. She sprawled indecently to the floor.

  “My God, my God,” she moaned.

  “Shut up!” I said viciously.

  I walked over and grabbed her by her pretty blonde hair.

  “Don't hurt me!” she shrieked again.

  “I thought you liked that sort of thing, honey. Clothes pins and darning needles and the sound of some kid in agony.”

  I pulled her by her hair to her feet. And perhaps, for the first time in ten years, Laurie Jellicoe put an arm across her sweet breasts and a hand in front of her sex, and stood, knees shaking and face contorted with terror, like a modest Eve.

  I shoved her against the wall and she let out a yelp.

  “Now we're going to talk, precious.”

  She nodded spastically. “Talk.”

  “I'll skip over the personal stuff. Jones is dead, anyway. What I want to hear you tell me is what happened to Cindy Ann Evans?”

  “Preston killed her,” she blurted out.

  I shook my head and slapped her across the mouth.

  Laurie Jellicoe urinated on the floor.