Judge Me Not

by John D. MacDonald

  “But while we’re sitting here…”

  “Let me think a minute.”

  “How about the F.B.I.?” Teed demanded. “Kidnaping is federal, isn’t it?”

  “With the girl insisting that she’s staying there of her own free will?”

  “And the local cops are no good,” Teed said.

  “Oh, they’re fine. All they’re doing is hunting for you.”

  Barbara said, “I was out there… for a little while, after Maria came to the jail to see me. I know this. It would take a small army to get in there by force. But if a person was known…”

  Armando patted her hand. “I was afraid I was going to have to ask you, Barbara.”

  “What can she do?” Teed demanded angrily.

  “The thing to do is to get word to the girl, of course. She can tell the Dennison girl that what they’re using on her to hold her there is just a bluff. Then I could make a legitimate kidnaping charge. Barbara, do you think you could get to see her?”

  “That’s going to depend on who is out there, Mr. Ro-gale. If Maria Gonzales is out there, it isn’t going to work very well.”

  “That’s a hell of a risk for you to take,” Teed said. “I don’t like it.”

  She smiled wanly at him. “I’m a lot better able to take care of myself than that Dennison kid is.”

  “You aren’t going to be popular out there, Barbara.”

  “It’s worth the risk. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I can get her out of there. Say that Maria sent me to bring her to town.”

  “I’ll drive you out,” Armando said. “If you can’t work it, I’ll come in after you and try a bluff of my own.”

  “I’m coming along,” Teed said firmly.

  “You are staying right here,” Armando said, with equal firmness.

  “I can be useful, dammit.”

  “In what way? Kicking a hole in the stone wall? Or catching bullets in your teeth? What’s your specialty?”

  “You can’t stop me from coming along,” Teed said.

  Armando gave him a long stare and then shrugged. “O.K., O.K. We can’t spare the time to argue with you. Go get dressed, Barbara.”

  She dressed quickly, returned to the kitchen wearing a gray wool suit, a short fox jacket. She opened her purse and held it so that Armando could look into it. “I’m taking this along,” she said.

  “A toy thing like that?”

  “It’s twenty-five caliber and I know how to use it.”

  “You don’t want the kind of trouble that can bring you.”

  She put her purse down, held up a small mirror, carefully painted her lips, compressed them, examined the result. “I’m taking it along,” she said. “In my whole life I’ve been frightened of only one person. Maria Gonzales. I’m taking it along.”

  Anna came to her, put her hands on Barbara’s shoulders, looked intently into her face. “You come back here. Stay for as long as you want.”

  Barbara’s face softened. “Thank you, Anna.”

  “And you are not making the sauce right yet. Practice you need.”

  “Thank you for everything.”

  Anna hugged her. “Such a silly girl,” she said.

  The puppy awoke and whined. His tail whapped against the side of the carton. They went down the stairs and out onto the dark sidewalk. Armando walked around his car, slid in behind the wheel. Barbara sat in the middle.

  Before he started the car, Armando said, “If you want to go back upstairs, Barbara, we’ll both understand. And we’ll think of another scheme.”

  “I want to do it,” she said. Her voice was remote. “I have to do it, I guess. You can’t just stop thinking and stop remembering. The scales are all out of balance for me. I have to put a little weight on the other side of them.”

  Armando said, “Good girl.” He started the motor and they moved slowly down the street.

  “I liked your note, Barbara,” Teed said.

  She gave him a smile, quick and pallid in the darkness of the car, barely visible in the glow of the dash lights.

  Armando drove with extreme care. Route 63 left Deron at the southwest edge of the city. It was two-lane asphalt, crossed by many spur tracks that led to sleeping factories. Beyond the tracks was a mile of grubby drive-ins, gas stations, beer joints. And then the road began to lift into the hills, began to curve through farmland. The faint spice of Barbara’s perfume was in his nostrils and her knee touched his. He increased the pressure a tiny bit and she took her knee away. It made him remember the perfume Jake had swiped from Marcia, made him remember the absurd reek of her in the darkness, the pathetic youngness.

  Armando pulled over to the shoulder. “We’ll get out here, Barbara. Once we’re over the next hill, the gate guard might notice the car stop and start wondering.”

  Armando got out and Barbara slid under the wheel. Teed put his hand on her arm. “Be careful. Please be careful.”

  She turned to Armando, who stood at the window, beside her. “Don’t you two try anything foolish. I’ll try to be out in twenty minutes. If I’m not out of there by then, you’ll know I’m… not coming out for a while. Then you head back for the city and get help. I will be held against my will.”

  “You were thinking of that angle from the beginning?” Armando asked.

  She said, “Yes.” Her voice was low. “Please get out, Teed.”

  He stepped down into the shallow ditch. The car moved back out onto the asphalt, up the slope, over the crest.

  “Very special gal,” Armando said. “A very gutty young lady. That’ll teach me to go around judging people too fast.”

  “If Maria Gonzales is there, it will be bad?”

  “Maria has a temper. And a knife.”

  “We shouldn’t have let her try it, Armando.”

  “She’s special, Teed. But she’s still expendable.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Let’s get as close to the gate as we can.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  After the motor sound faded, the countryside silence was like a blanket across the stars. Wind skittered through the dry grass. Dried leaves rustled. A distant rooster crowed in sleepy protest.

  “How do we stand on time?” Teed asked.

  “She’s been gone three minutes. At twenty of four her time will be up.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we can try a bluff.”

  “A good idea?”

  “Frankly, Morrow, it stinks. But the alternative is heading back for town on foot and trying to talk somebody into sticking Uncle Sam’s neck out for the sake of one of our local call girls. That stinks too.”

  They crossed the ditch and walked beside the fence. “Lights coming from town,” Armando said tersely. “Flatten out.”

  They stretched out beside a rusty wire fence. The car boomed by. It dropped over the crest and reappeared later, twin red taillights sliding up a far slope. Teed got up. Something pricked his knee. He picked a cluster of burrs out of his trouser leg.

  “This the Castle Ann fence?” Teed asked.

  “No. They really have a fence. See where it starts up at the crest there?”

  At the top of the crest there was a place where they could see over the high wall. It was a four-story oblong—a frame building that sat on the top of a small knoll about two hundred feet from the road. Some windows were lighted on the two top floors. Lights were visible in all the windows of the far end of the main floor.

  “See those ground-floor lights? The bar is in that end.”

  There were no trees around the structure. It had a curiously naked look. “Why four stories out in the middle of nowhere?” Teed asked.

  “A farmer built it in the early twenties. The kindest thing you could say about him was that he was slightly eccentric. He made dough in the first war. Always wanted to live in a hotel. So he had one built. A few salesmen stopped there until the old guy decided he didn’t like guests in his hotel. He lived there alone, getting screwier every year. When he decided people wer
e laughing at him he had the big stone fence built, with barbed wire on the top. Had all the trees cut down. He’d sit up in a fourth-floor room and fire a shotgun in the air whenever anybody stopped by the gate. When he died, in the thirties, a couple bought it cheap, and went broke trying to run it as a restaurant. Later, one of Raval’s front men bought it. It’s ideal for them. No interruptions. It’s outside the city, and the county cops don’t bother with it. It has been raided a couple of times by narcotics people. But they didn’t find a thing. Take a good look and memorize as much of it as you can, Teed. This is the last look we’ll get at it until we get inside the wall. Better whisper from here on.”

  They moved cautiously down toward the gate, staying close to the wall.

  Armando stopped, his back against the wall. He put his lips close to Teed’s ear. “We’re thirty feet from the gate. Time is three-thirty-two. Can you spot the guard?”

  As Teed watched there was a puzzling glow that lasted a few seconds, and then a click, clearly audible.

  “Cigarette lighter,” Armando whispered.

  The smell of tobacco drifted down the night wind, verifying the guess. Teed wanted a cigarette badly. He took the automatic out of his coat pocket, shoved it inside his belt.

  “Four more minutes,” Armando whispered.

  Teed’s nerves were drawn tight. There was a hollow feeling in his middle. It had been easy enough to think of taking on Castle Ann singlehanded when he had been back in the city. But now it was a place where you could go behind a high wall and be suddenly taken dead. Both the girls were in there. And from the hilltop he had seen the shiny cars flanked near the bar.

  Armando put his mouth close to Teed’s ear again. “Rumor has it that several people who became objectionable to Raval are planted behind that wall. Look, stay right where you are.”

  “But…”

  “Shut up. You’ll be able to hear how it goes.”

  Armando walked silently up the hill, away from the gate. Teed waited, puzzled. Armando crossed the ditch, reversed his direction, and came noisily down the road, heels clacking loudly.

  He walked right up to the gate. Teed saw the flashlight catch Armando full in the face.

  “Get the light out of my eyes,” Armando demanded in an irritated tone.

  “Where do you think you’re going, friend?” a deep voice asked.

  “I’m trying to get a phone. My car ran out of gas about a mile back.”

  “I seen you some place.”

  “Get the light out of my eyes!”

  The light shifted down to the ground at Armando’s feet. “What do you want a phone for?”

  “I want to call up the Vassar field hockey squad. We’re all going to dance barefoot on your dewy grass.”

  “Wise, eh? This is private property. Where did I see you before?”

  “Maybe you want my birth certificate. What kind of a place is this? Just let me go phone, will you?”

  “Say, aren’t you Rogale?” the guard asked.

  “So skip it,” Armando said. “I’ll try the next place.” He started to move back. The light caught him in the face again.

  “You just stand nice and still, Mr. Rogale. People are going to be glad to see you. They’re going to want to know why you’re nosing around. Now stand still while I get the gate open.”

  Teed moved slowly, quietly down toward the gate. The gun was going to be no good. A shot would ruin what feeble chances they had. Teed heard a metallic clack, a creak of hinges. The man moved out into view, gun and flashlight pointed at Armando.

  Teed fumbled in the grass, found a pebble. He flipped it over the guard’s head so that it landed in the grass beyond the gate. As the guard’s head turned, Teed tried to reach him in four running strides. But the moment that he had turned, Armando had kicked the man lustily in the pit of the stomach. As the guard bent forward from the waist, Armando laced his fingers around the back of the man’s neck, yanked down hard as he raised his knee. The guard fell with a thud that drove the air out of him.

  “Quick and efficient,” Teed said.

  “I grew up in a rough neighborhood. Haven’t hit anybody in six years. Thought I’d forgotten how.”

  Armando found the flashlight, swept the beam around until he located the gun. He searched the man. “Gun and a sap. Which do you want?”

  “Take them both. I’ve got Weiss’ automatic.”

  “Are we thinking along the same lines?” Armando said in a low tone.

  There was unsteadiness in Teed’s voice as he answered “There isn’t much else to do, is there? I’m scared.”

  “And you are not alone. Help me drag him inside. Well leave him in the brush. First let me give him this.” The sap made a small dull sound as Armando swung it.

  They dragged him through the gate, off to one side. Armando opened the gate wide, said, “We’ll leave the gate like this. I don’t know how much time we’ll have. I think another guard patrols the fence line. Any ideas?”

  “Just move fast, see if we can find both girls, and try to get out. Go ahead. You know the layout.”

  The drive was of coarse gravel. They walked on the grass beside the drive. A hundred feet from the gate Armando veered sharply to the left. They circled the lighted windows. They could not see in.

  “Eight cars, not counting mine,” Armando said in a low tone. “How do you like those odds? If the Bar Association could only see me now. Let’s hope for an unlocked back door. I’m trying to pretend I’m Humphrey Bogart. Who are you?”

  Teed laughed softly, nervously. “Henry Aldrich.”

  “You a good shot?”

  “At a target. I’ve never tried people.”

  At the rear of the building Armando risked using the flashlight. He narrowed the beam by shielding part of it off with his hand. He swept the narrow beam across a battered row of garbage cans. They were overflowing and the stench was rancid, nauseous. There was a secondary odor of faulty plumbing. The light touched the bottom step of a short flight that led up to a back stoop, a narrow door. Armando tiptoed up the steps and tried the door. He came back down.

  “Not that way,” he said softly.

  It was the only door in the rear of the building. As they reached the back corner on the end opposite the bar music blasted out into the night, freezing them in their tracks for a moment. An old Armstrong that Teed knew well. Gravel-voice, sweet and true.

  “That means people in the bar,” Armando said tautly.

  “A window?” Teed asked, above the music sound.

  “Too high, and too risky.”

  Armando stepped around the corner of the building and then tried to dodge back, treading so heavily on Teed’s instep that he made an involuntary gasp of pain. Armando stared, then let out a long sigh. “It’s O.K.”

  A man stood, face to the building, spread-legged, one arm flat against the wall, forehead against his forearm. He made a dry retching sound.

  As they watched he fell to his knees, struggled up again. He moaned.

  He paid no attention to them as they walked around him. Armando paused after they were by him. “I wonder,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Sometimes those people get in the way. They get well too quick.” He shrugged, took two quick steps and swung the sap. The man slid down the wall, face first, and rolled over onto his side.

  “Who is he?”

  “Belongs to Stratter. Drives for him sometimes. Come on.”

  The front door was on ground level. Armando raised his head cautiously and looked through the glass. He beckoned to Teed. Teed stood beside him and looked in. Three wide wooden steps six feet inside the door led up to the lobby. Directly opposite the lobby a stairway went to the floors above. The lobby was dark, but the bar lights shone through an open door.

  The music was louder.

  The bar lights made a bright wide streak through the lobby, ending at the deserted desk.

  “Maybe nobody is looking into the lobby,” Armando said. “But we
got to figure they are. If we sneak, somebody will investigate. Can you walk across like you owned the place?”

  “I can try.”

  A man’s heavy laugh came from the bar. The music ended. Armando, his hand on the door, paused. There was silence in which Teed could hear conversation, a woman’s voice taking part, rising high and shrill. And the music started again. The same piece. Somebody liked it.

  “Like you owned the place,” Armando said, pushing the door open.

  The board floor was bare. They walked across the light path. Out of the corner of his eye Teed saw a smoky room, the corner of a dark-stained bar, a big round table with a group sitting at it, a shirt-sleeved man with a cigar carrying a tin tray of drinks to the table.

  They passed the light. They were almost to the stairs when somebody in the bar yelled, “Hey! Who’s that out there?”

  Armando yelled back, in whining falsetto, “It’s Greta Garbo, you stupid jerk.”

  “Wise guy,” the man bellowed. The others laughed at him. The man didn’t come out to investigate.

  Halfway up the stairs to the wide landing, Armando whispered, “Stratter is in there. And that is not good.”

  “Where do we go from here?”

  “Eyes and ears open. I can’t think of anything else.”

  The second-floor hallway stretched the long way of the building, with a window at each end, doors opening off both sides of the hall. Teed counted nine doors on a side. Eighteen rooms. Three floors. Fifty-four rooms to wonder about, to search.

  The hall was carpeted. Armando started in one direction. He held his ear close to the first door, motioned Teed to head the other way and do the same. The first two rooms were silent. In the third he heard a woman saying, “… so I told Joe that if that was the way he was going to act about it, he could damn well kiss…”