Private Eye 2 - Blue Movie

by David Elliott

  "Here and there. Are we bird-watching or something?"

  Fontana pointed high in the fork of a pine. "That's a body up there, Jack. They've been turning up in the damndest places lately, and every one of them have been connected to you. Like Tom McNeil."

  "How did you even find this one?"

  "Some hikers saw him—somehow."

  Cleary was gazing up into the dark shadows of the thick tree. Somehow was right. In Cleary's book, those hikers would have been prime suspects.

  A lumberjack was trying to attach a line to the body. "Who is it, Charlie?"

  "We found a bus ticket down here at the foot of the tree. It's round-trip from Modesto to here and made out to Orin Schooley."

  "Schooley?"

  "Yeah, rings a bell, huh? By the way, you look like shit."

  "Which is a compliment given the way I feel, Charlie. Do you think that's Schooley up there?"

  "Before I answer your questions, I've got a few of my own. I gather you know the chopped-up lady at the Franklin Arms wasn't Eva Miles."

  Cleary nodded.

  "And you're anxious to tell me where I can find Eva Miles, aren't you, Jack?"

  Cleary eyed his former partner. "If and when I talk to her, I'll let her know about the interest."

  "What's so special about her, Jack?"

  Cleary might have told Fontana. If anyone on the force had the compassion to understand, it would be Fontana; but now wasn't the time, and it certainly wasn't the place.

  "She just is, Charlie. You'll have to take it on faith." The body broke loose and tumbled a few feet before it became lodged in another jumble of tree limbs.

  "Try to keep the poor kid together," bellowed Fontana. "The coroner will appreciate it."

  He then glared hard at the former detective. "If you can get in touch with her, she had better come to see me. The sicko that killed that farm boy used an axe and went to all the trouble of hauling the body up a tree."

  "It must have happened this morning," Cleary said, more a thought spoken aloud than a comment he wished to share.

  Fontana gave Cleary a puzzled look. "Not this one, Jack. He's on the verge of being ripe. According to the boys that have been up there, he's been dead three or four days at least. What the axe left, the birds didn't. Course we're lucky in one respect. His face was jammed into the joint of the tree. They say he can be recognized."

  "How can you be sure it's Schooley?"

  "We can't," Fontana said, "but there's one thing certain and another sure. If it isn't Schooley, then Schooley was here. Either way, Mr. Schooley's taken on a whole new perspective. Right?"

  "Right, Charlie."

  They both heard the loud snap of a limb, followed by a drawn-out rustling.

  "Look out below."

  The body came crashing down at them. Its feet caught in a cluster of limbs near the base, jerking it to a stop right in front of Cleary's face. Before the odor even reached his nose, he saw the blood-darkened shirt and the face, which he had seen before...

  ... in a photo with Eva Miles and the dead girl named Susan Greever.

  FIFTEEN

  The man Johnny Betts assumed to be Orin Schooley didn't bother to knock on the trailer door. He just opened it and stepped inside.

  "What's up, Johnny?" At that point, he saw Eva Miles. "Sorry, I didn't know you had company."

  Johnny was on his feet, grinning broadly. "Some shocker, huh?"

  The man with the flattop looked first at Johnny and then to Eva Miles. The look of total bewilderment on his face moved quickly to Johnny's face.

  "Who's that?" Eva asked.

  "For God's sake, Eva, that's Orin—" Johnny looked at her in puzzled disbelief. The blow, coming from his rear, caught Johnny on the side of the head and sent him reeling face-first onto the floor.

  He heard Eva scream and saw her make a break for the door. The other man started after her, but Johnny managed to reach out to wrap his arms around the man's legs. The imposter went crashing to the floor as Eva fled from the trailer.

  "Who are you?" Johnny was asking as he pulled himself onto the stunned man.

  The man's hand found the bottle of beer Eva Miles had been drinking. As Johnny struggled to get his leverage, the bottle exploded on top of his head. Johnny slumped. The man who had represented himself as Orin Schooley pulled free and rushed from the trailer.

  Rita Marlo sat at the glass table by her pool, her gaze affixed to the pink roses gathered in the vase. Instead of the customary dozen, there were two dozen. In the light of the news Cleary had delivered, it was an omen—a bad omen. For some reason, Rita knew they were the last she would receive. The gesture had been exaggerated as a kind of grand finale. It was over—finished... all of it.

  She pulled one of the thornless stems from the vase and brought the bloom to her nose. Roses smelled of love and death. Lovers sent them to their paramours; mourners sent them to the dead. In funeral homes, the blooms were so many that the smell became cloying, overpowering, as if to conceal the stench that was death.

  "You were right," Jack Cleary had told her.

  Which was the last thing she wanted to be. Last night, when he had broken the news she had suspected was coming, she had wanted more than anything to know what woman he could love more than her. The night had been sleepless and lonely. He hadn't come home. Really, she hadn't known how she would have reacted if he had appeared in her bedroom—mad... sad... glad. For a long time, she pondered forgiveness. For a time, it was within her, but, as night turned to dawn, her feelings had hardened. When the roses arrived, the blooms so prolific that they reminded her of death, she knew her agony hadn't really mattered anyway. She doubted she would ever see him again.

  "I got business tonight." That's what Nicky had said—his final words to her. Despite what Cleary had told her, she believed Nicky about the business. Whenever he was doing something for his associates, the ones who had sent him to California, he lost all his sense of humor and became glum, sometimes outright morbid. That's how he had seemed when he spoke those last words of parting.

  So, she had wasted the night agonizing over it. As the dawn sun breached the crest of the San Gabriel mountains, she had reached her decision. The studio was through with her. She really didn't know why. Nicky was through with her. She had no idea who the other woman was. In both cases, she had concluded, her ignorance was bliss. Wasn't that what they said? The truth—or the possibility of hearing it—frightened her more than the prospect of never knowing. That's what they said, too. It was the cliché that popped up in the best of scripts: "What you don't know won't hurt you." Maybe she should never even have hired Jack Cleary. Like the characters of Shakespeare, perhaps she had been the instigator of her own downfall.

  The sound of soft footsteps turned her from the flowers. It was the maid.

  "This was just brought, senora."

  The maid offered her a plain manila envelope.

  Rita accepted it. "By whom?"

  "A messenger... a service, senora. There was no note on the outside. I did not think it my place to open it."

  "Of course not. Thank you."

  As the maid left, Rita weighed it in her hand. She examined the outer surface. No return address, just her address on a label supplied by the messenger service. Her eyes returned to the vase jammed with flowers. Was it from Jack Cleary?

  Rita's gut instinct urged her to throw away the envelope. On the other hand, perhaps Lou Kaplan had experienced a change of heart—or of mind, since there was so much doubt as to whether he ever had any heart.

  Just as soon as she had seen the envelope, though, there wasn't ever the slightest chance that she could dispose of it unopened. She had never been self-disciplined. Her long fingernails separated the gummed flap from the envelope. Trembling fingers reached inside and touched the glossy surface of photographs. The flap quivered, invigorated by her emotion.

  The photographs seemed to leap out into her line of vision. One minute they were safely concealed by the envelope; the
next, they were in front of her eyes, offending her as she never thought possible.

  Rita Marlo crushed the photographs, all unseen but the one on the top, and started to throw them toward the pool, but she stopped. Instead, she gathered up several roses, and, with the photographs and roses in hand, walked toward the spacious cabana located on the other side of the pool.

  Coldwater Canyon was a long way from Johnny Betts's trailer, so far, in fact, that Cleary stopped at the first phone booth he saw. Betts needed to be warned as soon as possible. He never could remember the rockabilly's number, but he dug in his wallet until he found a small piece of paper with Betts's number on it, scribbled in Dottie's handwriting. He dialed the number and heard it ringing. There was no answer.

  Damn! How could he have been so gullible? He raced back to the Eldorado and jumped into the interior without even opening the door. He left a thirty yard trail of rubber as he peeled out on the mountain highway. The weight of the car made it easy to handle around the banked turns, but, still, the Eldorado screamed in protest as it tried to grip the steep curves. Cleary ignored the sound as he heaped the blame on himself.

  Orin Schooley—or whatever his name really was—had just been too composed, too confident. Cleary should have suspected something the night he had encountered the man in Eva Miles's apartment. Service station attendants from Modesto just didn't commit clandestine entries at the scenes of crimes, even when the victim had been his high school flame. What about his fingernails? Had there been a residue of grease around them? There certainly should have been, but Cleary, who never had figured out any of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, hadn't bothered to look at such details.

  He slammed his palm against the cushioned steering wheel. The warm late morning air tore at his hair. His heart was racing just like it had when he answered a police call with lights and siren.

  He slowed down only a little as the Cadillac rumbled into the trailer park where Johnny Betts lived—and then it was only in deference to the number of children he had observed playing in the park. All four wheels of the Eldorado cleared the dusty road when he hit a hump. People rushed from their trailers to witness the latest of the day's disturbances. The car slid to a stop in a storm of dust behind Betts's Mercury.

  With gun drawn, Cleary bounded from the car. The front door to the trailer was wide open.

  "Oh, shit," he said to himself—at himself—as he leaped into the trailer.

  Betts lay on the floor, his forehead stained with blood.

  "Johnny!" Cleary dropped to his knees beside the young man.

  Immediately he realized his mistake. The sensation—some second sense a cop develops—was overpowering. It grasped his neck like a vise—the same feeling that he had in McNeil's office the evening he found Eva. Or maybe there had been a sound—or a slight tremor of the floor? Someone was lurking behind him! He swiveled his head just in time to see the shiny axe blade flashing through the air toward him.

  "Son of a—" He dived out of its path.

  The .45 automatic thudded against the floor as the massive blade of the axe buried itself in the floor not half a foot from Johnny Betts's leg. Cleary kicked out at the only thing in reach. The sole of his foot exploded against the handle of the axe, wrenching it from the hands of the as-of-yet unseen assailant.

  Cleary heard a cry of surprise as he tried to stand. Something—the hard toe of a shoe probably—caught him in the chin and sent him stumbling back over Betts's body. As he was falling, he found himself wondering if Betts was alive. Rather than falling full force on the prostrate figure, Cleary jerked his body to the side. His elbow cracked against the hard arm of a chair, sending shooting pains up to his jaw and neck.

  For the first time, he had an instant in which to see the man who was determined to kill him.

  "Who the hell are you?" The face was the one he had known as Orin Schooley.

  The man's features were contorted into a vision of madness, his eyes wide and white, the pupils black and small, his lips drawn back into a snarl over yellowing teeth. Worse, the axe was being cantilevered back over his head for another assault.

  Cleary summoned every ounce of his strength and launched himself at the man just as the axe started its descent. Cleary's back intercepted the lower butt of the handle, short-circuiting its murderous arc. The pain spurred him into the man, his left shoulder burying in the hard gut. He heard the air burst from the man's lungs. The former cop drove with his feet, just like they had taught him way back in high school when he had played football. He kept driving until the man's torso slammed into the trailer's small refrigerator.

  The gun! Where the hell is it? Cleary used his weight to pin the man against the appliance. The axe was useless to the killer in his present posture, but he was trying now to knee Cleary in the face. Looking like a desperate prizefighter, Cleary jerked his head first one way and then the other to dodge the knee.

  A dark familiar form focused in Cleary's confused mind. He tried to calm himself as he held the man, every so often avoiding the knees that came up to assault him. The object lay on the floor, not three feet from the end of his reach. It was the .45. Could he make his break and reach it before the killer could cock and swing the axe? Was it a gamble he was prepared to take?

  Talk to him, Cleary thought. Dull his edge.

  "You killed the wrong girl, asshole," Cleary said, jerking his head to the right to avoid a particularly powerful thrust of the man's left knee.

  "Yeah, I guess I did." His voice was raspy, almost matter-of-fact. "She could have at least mentioned that little fact."

  "And you woulda stopped, I guess... and let her go."

  The man laughed. "Nope, but I mighta said I'm sorry—which is more than you're gonna hear. One thing I hate worse than cops is private dicks. And, when they're private dicks that used to be cops—"

  He tried to catch Cleary off-guard with a sideways blow from his big fist Cleary blocked it with his shoulder, but it hurt like hell.

  "—then I really wanna croak 'em."

  Cleary jammed his shoulder deeper in the man's gut, pushing as hard as he could on the balls of his feet. Sweat rolled from his face as his mind sought some plan of escape from the harrowing deadlock. "Whatsa matter?" Cleary asked. "You gettin' tired?"

  "It beats being dead, and that's what you are even if you're too stupid to know it. I guess they musta found that jerk from Modesto. Did he make good bird food?"

  Cleary felt the man's strength failing. The jabs from the knees weren't even coining close now, and each deep gasp for breath was transmitted to Cleary through the man's heaving stomach.

  "Kaplan isn't going to be happy," he told the killer.

  "You're a real ass, Cleary. I'm gonna enjoy chopping you into pieces."

  The time had come. "And I'm going to enjoy—" Cleary finished the sentence by twisting his body sideways and jamming a hand into the man's crotch. The blow itself produced a sudden scream of pain, but Cleary showed him no mercy.

  "Oh, sweet Jesus—" The man doubled over, driving Cleary to the floor.

  With the killer momentarily disabled, he rolled for the gun, struggled to get a grip on it, and brought it up just as the man lifted the axe over his head.

  Cleary fired.

  The explosion echoed through the trailer. A small window, already weakened by a crack, shattered from the concussion and crashed to the floor. The heavy slug smacked into the man's chest right where his ribs came together. The projectile exited the back in a storm of flesh and dark lung blood.

  Cleary heard panicked screams from outside the trailer. But the axe remained poised in the killer's hand. The man, whose face had been grimacing in pain, suddenly smiled. Cleary waited for his body to drop. When it didn't, Cleary sighted the weapon. This time, he enjoyed a split second of time to aim before the dying man made his move. A second explosion brought more screams from those who were gathering outside. The bullet produced a symmetrical wound about half an inch above the bridge of the man's nose. His forehead and
the neat flattop evaporated in a starburst of gore.

  The man who never had been Orin Schooley crumpled to the floor.

  Four addresses to the east, Eva Miles hid in the dusty crawl space beneath a trailer. A large, chocolate-brown spider dangled just inches from her face. It felt as if others, hundreds of them, were crawling over her legs. Her breath came in rapid, shallow gasps. When the first shot rang out, she screamed. Others in the trailer park screamed, too. At the sound of the second, she jumped, but managed to choke off her scream.

  That's when the hand wrapped around her ankle. She couldn't stifle her shriek this time and struggled to escape the coarse grip.

  "Easy, girl," a man said.

  "Let me go!" She squirmed to look back toward the daylight. All she could see were battered cowboy boots.

  "C'mon outta there 'fore you get snake-bit or something."

  Snakes! She hadn't thought about that.

  "I'm coming."

  The man helped her to her feet. She started knocking off the dust. The man in the cowboy boots was middle-aged, maybe forty-five. He wore grease-streaked jeans and a wrinkled western shirt. The uniform was topped off with a sagging, sweat-stained ten-gallon hat. His sun-wrinkled face reminded Eva of the farmers who lived around Modesto.

  "Now, little lady, what are you doing beneath my trailer?"

  "Uh... I dropped my earring."

  The man laughed. "I ain't as ignorant as I look. Does it have anything to do with that commotion down at the kid's place?"

  Her eyes darted toward the west. The bulk of the cowboy's trailer shielded her from Betts's place. "Look, mister. I need a lift into town."

  "I dunno."

  "Please, mister."

  His cold blue eyes roamed her body. "It'll cost ya."

  "How much?"

  He smiled. "Oh, maybe ten or fifteen minutes."

  Cleary only half noticed the frightened faces peering through the open door of the trailer. He was scrambling toward Betts.

  "Johnny?"

  He put a palm to his young operative's bloody face. In a movement that startled the shaken detective, Betts's hand came up to knock it away as if it were a bee about to sting.