"Where's this address, buddy?" I shoved the piece of paper toward him.
"Man! You did hang one on! That's right here in Highland Park. About the third block down to the left, you'll run into it."
"Thanks." I paid up and walked out, squinting against the glare.
I checked the few numbers I could find as I walked, and had no trouble spotting the one I wanted. The ancient LaSalle I'd left shortly before was still right there at the curb in front of it.
The Dixon house was a sumptuous Texas colonial, dove-gray brick with huge white columns. Like the paper said, wealthy. A movie-set driveway curved up to a wide veranda facing the pampered lawn. I managed the red brick drive without crumpling in awe and pushed an ornate silver button that rang chimes somewhere deep inside the mansion. I wasn't quite sure I wanted that door to open. But it did.
The young woman who opened it stood very still and examined me with eyes that must have inspired the choice of the dove-gray bricks and were as cool as the spray in which I had drenched my head. But the rest of her was strangely out of harmony with the cold eyes. The warmth of pervasive sex oozed from her full-blown figure like milk from a discarded can. She'd be better in a dream than the cashier in the grill would be in wide-awake flesh.
"I'm Bill Brown," I explained lamely.
"A reporter?" She was ready to slam the door.
"No." I hated to be the one to hurt her. "I have information about Mary Ann. I can tell you where she is, in fact."
I don't know just what joyous reaction I expected; but I could still be waiting, because there wasn't any.
"Come in," she invited in a level voice. Then an expression almost like recognition altered her deadpan features as she examined me again. "Did you say Bill Brown?" I nodded, waiting, as her features assumed the former cold mask. "Follow me," was all she said.
I followed her down a hallway lined by a photo-mural of an oil field in full production. Bathed in indirect lighting, it was symbolic advertising, in a small way, of the origin of wealth in a big way.
"In here," she said. She was certainly thrifty with her words. And she must be thinking that I might have answers to a lot of questions she should be asking.
She had brought me to a library too large to be called a room. Two walls were filled with books, and an enormous photograph, in full color, of a single steel oil derrick and rotary drilling rig dominating a barren desert area of sagebrush, mesquite trees, and a few scattered white-face cattle hung on a third wall. The last wall was all glass, facing a garden planned for color by somebody like Bonnard.
"Sit down," she told me, just under the inflection of a direct order. I took a different chair than the one she offered. Just to be short of obedient.
"Dad," she said, and we both looked at the elderly man across the room sitting in a lounge chair the size of a respectable throne, richly upholstered in spotless white slick leather. He was facing the window-wall, staring out into the garden, and made no sign that he had heard us come in. I decided he must be the affluent, brokenhearted Mr. Galin Dixon. And the girl would be the popular Miss Kay ditto if I was right.
"Dad," she reported, "this is a Mr. Brown, and he says he has some news about Mary Ann."
Mr. Dixon finally let it through and slowly turned his head toward us. His eyes belonged to a dog that gets a daily beating, is due for that beating, and knows he can't escape it.
"I'm Galin Dixon," he said, and neither of us made any move to acknowledge by physical effort the delayed-action introductions. "Tell us what you can, Mr. Brown." His voice was tired but calm and steady, and his strong gnarled hands were clenched in tight bunches on the arms of his chair. The girl I took to be Kay stood almost before the center of the desert scene with her hands behind her, her straight back and proud head strangely incongruous among the cattle and sagebrush upon which her beauty was superimposed.
I hated the job I had fallen heir to. Mr. Dixon--and Miss Dixon--I wish I had good news for you. I'd like to soften this, but I don't know how. The little girl is dead."
They took it well. But then I guess it was about what they had been expecting. Mr. Dixon unbailed and reclenched his fists and turned away to stare at the garden again. Miss Dixon audibly exhaled the breath she'd been holding, and her own hands curled and flexed like large claws.
"You dirty tramp! Why didn't you tell me she was dead--so I could tell Dad?"
"You didn't ask, Miss Dixon, remember? I think you were convinced of it before I came here." Mr. Dixon stirred and turned to look at me again.
"Where is my little girl, Mr. Brown? Who's got her?"
"She's out front in an old car someone drove here and left."
Miss Dixon took a couple of steps toward the big desk. "Yes--someone named Brown drove it here." She reached for the telephone.
"Hold it, Miss Dixon!" I was with her in a split second and held her wrist in my hand. "Let's get it all straight before lousing the place up with those incomparable Dallas policemen."
"I believe I've got it pretty straight--straighter than you know, Brown." She relaxed a little and I released her hand. "But let's hear you tell it before they work on you."
The old man was watching us, and held up his hand to cut us off. "First, Kay, Mr. Brown, please get Mary Ann into the house, at least."
"Sorry-I'll bring her," I told him.
"We'll both bring her," Miss Dixon told me. She picked up a purse lying on a small comer table inside the door. I shrugged and walked out through the oil field in the hall to the door, Miss Dixon right at my heels.
As we approached the old LaSalle she asked, "Will that thing run?"
"Maybe," I replied, "if they left the keys."
"They!" she snorted, when she saw the lone, ringless key sticking in the ignition lock. She took a long look at the blanket-bundle in the back seat, then opened the front door next to the curb and got in. "Get in and drive it around to the back."
"Yes, ma'am!" I got a little edgy with sarcasm.
The old engine jumped to life and was surprisingly smooth as I swung into the drive and turned into a loop that circled toward the back of the estate.
"Stop at the second set of steps--with the iron railing," she ordered. "I'll open the door, you carry her in and I'll show you where to put her until I can make arrangements." Keys from her purse opened the big door and I followed with the little body still wrapped in its blanket. She led me to a downstairs bedroom and motioned to the big satin-covered bed.
"How was it done?" she asked me. "You ought to know.
"No. I wasn't present, Miss Dixon. From a brief look, out of simple curiosity when I found her out there, I'd say she was strangled." She'd learn about the child's broken neck soon enough.
"Uncover her, and throw that filthy blanket over there in the corner. The police will want it."
I didn't get sarcastic. I just did as she said. She stood beside the bed looking down at the little girl. She reached down to pat the blonde hair into its natural shape, and a short, sharp moan escaped her lips. I didn't know if it was finally a bit of evidence that she was human and expressing some grief, or had noticed the child's ravaged neck, or if touching the cold, waxen flesh had simply shocked her. She covered her face with both hands for a moment and turned away, leading me again through the house to the sumptuous library.
"I put Mary Ann in the south guest room, Dad," she said. The old man just nodded. "Now we'll listen to whatever story Mr. Brown has made up."
"My story may not be told at all. If I'm a liar before I start, what's the percentage?"
"A few percentage points could be that it might keep you alive as long as it takes to tell it," she said.
"You have a persuasive and compelling personality, Miss Dixon. All right, here're the hard-to-prove, hard-to-believe facts. All I want is freedom from judgment on circumstantial appearances." I was trying to decide how much to tell, how much to hold. "First, I can see you wouldn't be too disturbed if you don't recover the ransom. But I feel sure you're both eager to h
ave the kidnappers run in. Right?"
"If there were more than one, yes. We are. I think we have one already. You."
"Wrong, Miss Dixon. I am not and never was one of them. I do know there are three. I've met one personally--even chatted with him about this very subject. Another one of them bashed me over the head subsequently, before I saw him, dumped me in the car with Mary Ann, and apparently left me out there to be found with her body. The third one I haven't had any business with at all. I swear to God I had absolutely nothing to do with the crime against Mary Ann. I got involved in this trouble purely by most unfortunate coincidence. I may as well admit I am probably wanted for questioning by the police in connection with it, but only because I got involved after it was all over and done."
"I'll bet!" she said. "And after we are through with you they'll get their chance. If you are able to answer any questions then."
"And if you turn me in before I do a job on the real murderers, they'll get away from you altogether. I'm your only hope, Miss Dixon. The only one with a lead to them. It all hinges on whether you want the right ones, or whether you are so upset you just want anybody you can get."
"I want all of you." No encouragement, no objection. Just a statement of her desire, and the cold eyes punctuated that statement with a big period. So I went on, thinking feverishly and feeling my way through the look in her eyes.
"I'm out of a job. Not a tramp, but I need a job. If you ever expect to get them, you'll hire me. My services are expensive."
"You must be crazy, Brown. Or think I am. It's plain you're one of the gang, if there is any gang. It's possible I've got a little information you don't know I have.'
"But you don't have the information that will throw a loop around this gang, or you'd know what I know. I know. And I repeat, I am not one of them. I have quite a personal score to settle with the one who used a sap on my head. Not to mention how he set me up for a frame."
"Are you quite sure the frame doesn't fit you to a T? You pretend to be so smart and expensive, for a tramp-how could your friends frame you so easily?"
"Not my friends, Miss Dixon. In a most unfortunate and unheard-of set of circumstances I--let one of them leave a suitcase with me. I had no way of knowing that suitcase was wanted by the police. I was, to put it mildly, unlucky. The police found it in my hotel room. When I learned they were looking for the occupant of my room, I naturally postponed returning there. It would be embarrassing now to try to prove the suitcase was not mine, I'm sure.
"As they say in so many books and plays, that's a likely story. Do you honestly expect me to fall for it?"
"You have no choice, Miss Dixon, if you ever expect to get your pretty hands on the real killers. I am the only lead and as we have both mentioned before, unemployed at the moment, but expensive."
"Even if you are one of a gang, Brown--if I can buy the others from you, we just might make a deal. Remembering, of course, that I can always get you later, somehow, somewhere--and make you real sorry you ever asked me for a job."
"Are you hiring me, Miss Dixon? Shall we discuss contract?"
"I'm just considering." She looked at me, long and thoughtfully, half-shook her head. "Why should I? The best men in Dallas are working on it."
"Yeah. I read the sage remarks of one of them in the morning paper."
"I don't mean just the police."
I considered. I was going to have plenty of trouble staying out of the lockup long enough to clear myself, without wondering if every citizen who happened to be going my way was one of her private eyes, intent on grabbing fame and part of her fortune for nabbing me as a fugitive from a hotel room full of ransom money.
"So pull them off this job. Now. There's no openings for the bright private boys on this job. You'll pay out good money for perfect alibis of every known Dallas hoodlum and dopehead. I'm telling you, they didn't do it. Except on the million to one chance one of these rednecks I'm after does something logical, nobody can tag them. Nobody, and I repeat, nobody but me, Bill Brown."
I'll take the million to one chance." "Then you don't hire me. I don't want a crowd of bright boys tailing me when I leave here for the roundup.
She started to be obstinate, but I cut her off.
"Call them off, Miss Dixon, or you lose your bet." She stared at me for a long time. I wasn't sure, but I told myself those cold gray eyes thawed just a little.
"There's another thing," she said. "We want them before the police get them. How do you feel about delivery here, if you can deliver at all?"
"I think I can deliver, and money talks. If it talks here, here is where I deliver."
She debated my offer in her mind for so long I almost dozed off. Finally she walked over toward her father. "What do you say, Dad?"
"Hire him. Pay him. To bring them here." He kept looking, without seeing, at the garden. "He'd be crazy to come here if he'd been one of the gang. And he wouldn't be hiring out if he had the ransom."
I smiled at her as she came back to the desk. "Five hundred will do for the retainer," I told her. I was trying to beat that greasy spoon out of a star performer. "And a bonus of five hundred for each one I deliver before the police touch them."
The old man had been listening. "Brown, the bonus will be one thousand apiece if they are alive and you bring them here to me."
"That's fair," I agreed. I figured rapidly that I'd soon be back in something like the chips those goons at the hotel had removed from me. Then I could put my interrupted plans back to work.
Miss Dixon sat down at the desk and started to fill in a check.
"Cash, Miss Dixon. If you don't mind. I'll be too busy when I leave here to transact any banking business."
She curled her lips in a contemptuous sneer, stood up, and walked out of the library. She came back with the purse she had left in the bedroom where we took Mary Ann's body. She carelessly counted ten bills off a large head of cabbage taken from the purse and tossed them to me.
"Make the call," I ordered her.
"What call?"
"The one that pulls the private eyes off my tail."
I had to hand it to her. When she played a hand, she played it to the showdown. It only took a couple of minutes. She got some objections from the other end, naturally, but she plainly informed the man who paid his operators' expenses that the gravy train had pulled into a siding. I knew their interest would die hard but awfully fast when the well dried up.
"Satisfied?" she asked me.
"I'll need a gun."
She shrugged, dug in the purse again and came up with a pretty, pearl-handled .25 toy. I knew then why she had taken the purse with her when we went after Mary Ann outside. The girl would have shot me if I pulled a fast one! When she held this dainty bit of lethal artillery out to me, I just shook my head.
"I'll need a gun," I repeated.
She dropped it back in her purse, impatiently jerked open a drawer of the big desk, reached deep inside and threw me an Army .45 automatic. She hadn't even checked the safety. It was loaded.
"I'll need a change of clothes."
She left the room without a word and I went right along behind her. I watched the play of her flesh as she preceded me up the sweeping staircase. She was some bundle. Her rhythm of calculated movements disclosed that she was aware of it.
I guessed the room we entered was her father's bedroom. She slid open the door to the wardrobe and carelessly pointed to a long rack of suits. She stood watching me, and I waited. Again I had a feeling the eyes were warming a little. She kept watching. I began to wonder what she would do if I started stripping down. But it was bad enough just being in a room that contained both this woman and a bed.
"I'll be down as soon as I change."
I couldn't tell whether or not she scorned my cowardice; but as she turned away, I felt she did. She left.
Mr. Dixon had class. Being closer to thirty-eight than thirty-two at the centerline I had to play a lot of hide-and-seek before I found anything to wear. I finally found
a tweed suit I could get into, and I suspected Mr. Dixon had seen more portly days at some period in the past.
Tweed, in Dallas, in the middle of the summer. Well, I couldn't wear the rag Ed had brought to the bus station any longer. I picked a white nylon sport shirt, no tie, argyle socks. I felt better when I found the shoes were the right size and I took a pair of perforated Oxfords. At least my feet would be cool. I went downstairs.
She was waiting, the deadpan right back in place. "I've decided to go with you."
"No, Miss Dixon. The party may be rough. Some other night, maybe."
She sneered from the doorway as I walked down the drive to the street. I found a bus stop at the drugstore corner and waited. I boarded the first bus. I took off the tweed coat and wished I could do the same with the pants.
With the help of the driver, I left the bus within a couple of blocks of the right bus station. It was discomforting to realize I still had no plan of action. I walked to the station and went in. The air conditioning was efficient and I enjoyed it for a short while.
Then I looked for, and found, my man.
He was looking at a much-thumbed comic book he had probably saved from a broom pusher. An intense frown separated his yellow eyes and his lips moved slowly as he struggled with the printed word. Between the eyes and lips his big bruised nose glowed, red and repulsive.
I aimed a sharp kick at his shin. It landed, and he leaped to his feet, or, rather, one foot. He was holding his shin and doing an odd dance.
"Where are they?" I asked him.
"Dangit, dangit, dangit! You done skint all the hide off my leg! What in thunderation's eating on you, Mister?"
"Let's talk business."
"Heck of a way to start a talk! Trying to break a man's leg."
I moved toward him.
"Now wait a minute! They're gonna meet us, Mister. I had a hard time finding Junior; but I told you I would. Only thing, Junior, he wouldn't meet you in town."
"No? Then where?"
The Whip Hand Page 8