by Thomas Ross
“An M-1 carbine.”
“I think you’d best get it.”
“I think you’re right.”
Inside the house, I went to the living room closet and opened the door. I kept the carbine on two pegs at the rear of the closet, but it wasn’t there.
“I was wrong,” I told Slick. “I don’t have a weapon.”
“What happened to it?”
“I don’t know.”
We heard the car making its way over the bumps in the lane. It was going a little fast and its tires were bouncing up and grinding themselves against the fender wells.
“I don’t think I want to wait for them, do you?” I said.
“I have no desire to,” Slick said.
“Let’s try the pines.”
We hurried down the steps of the porch and ran around the pond and up into the pines. They were thick enough so that we couldn’t be seen from the house, but if we carefully pulled some branches down we could watch the car as it pulled up and stopped near the house, not quite a hundred feet away.
The car was a black four-door sedan, a Plymouth, I thought. Its front doors opened and two men got out. A third man got out of the rear of the car. The three men had guns in their hands. I recognized the first two men. One of them, sitting outside my sister’s house, had told me that his name was Detective Knaster, but he had lied. The other man was dark and had caterpillar eyebrows and the last time I had seen him he had been bounding down some stairs after having cut Max Quane’s throat.
I recognized the third man with a gun, too. The third man was Ward Murfin.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MURFIN LED THE WAY toward the house. The two men followed behind him for about five paces and stopped. The blond man went into a crouch and raised his gun with both hands. I recognized the crouch although the last time I had seen the blond man go into it he had been wearing a ski mask. A red one. So had the man with the caterpillar eyebrows, although his ski mask had been a different color. Blue, I remembered.
The blond man was taking careful aim just as he had when he had shot Sally Raines. I yelled it as loudly as I could. I yelled, “Murfin! Behind you!”
It may have been something that he had learned from Filthy Frankie in Pittsburgh because Murfin went down into a tumbling dive and then rolled and kept on rolling. The blond man fired at him, but missed.
Murfin fired twice as he rolled and the blond man staggered, dropped his gun, clutched at his stomach just above the belt, and then sank slowly and perhaps even carefully to his knees. He stayed there on his knees for a moment before he toppled over onto his left side.
The man with the caterpillar eyebrows snapped two shots at Murfin, but when he didn’t hit anything he darted back behind the parked Plymouth. Murfin got quickly to his feet and ran around the corner of the house just as the man with the caterpillar eyebrows aimed carefully and fired again. I didn’t think that he had hit Murfin, but I wasn’t sure.
“That’s not quite the way we had it planned, dear boy,” Slick said.
I turned and looked at the gun that Slick held in his right hand. It was aimed at me. It looked like a Walther, the PPK model. I had won one just like it in a poker game a long time ago.
“Well,” I said, “thanks for letting Ruth and the kids go.”
“I’m sorry, Harvey,” he said. “I really am.”
“Sure.”
“I think it would be better if we went up the mountain a bit.”
“Okay.”
“You first.”
I started through the pines up the mountain. “Whose idea was it, Slick, yours or Gallops’s? But that’s a dumb question; it had to be yours, didn’t it?”
“Mr. Gallops’s imagination is somewhat limited.”
“The two-million-dollar ransom. Do you split it?”
“You don’t really think I was in it for the money, do you, Harvey?”
“No. Not really. I suppose you were in it for the power.”
“And a certain amount of quiet acclaim,” Slick said.
“Is this far enough?” I said.
“A little farther.”
“Who backed you, Slick?”
“Some old friends and acquaintances put up the seed money although I didn’t, of course, tell them specifically what I was up to.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I merely outlined to them the political consequences of what you’ve chosen to call your Yellow-Dog Contract Theory. They were fascinated. I spelled it out only in general terms, of course.”
“Probably on a golf course, wasn’t it?” I said. “It’s where all those heavy plots are hatched.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, several of our conversations did take place on a golf course. It’s such a convenient spot. I remember that it was on the sixteenth green of Burning Tree that we came up with the perfectly marvelous idea of how we could channel the money with no danger of it ever being traced.”
“How?” I said.
“Unfortunately, dear boy, we’re not going to have time to go into that.”
I saw the movement up ahead of me. One of the pine branches trembled a little and I thought I caught a flash of brown. I didn’t think it was a deer. I kept on going up the side of the mountain.
We went another twenty or twenty-five feet before Slick said, “I think this is about as far as we’ll go, Harvey.”
“Maybe we should talk it over,” I said, raising my voice just a little.
“I think we’ve talked enough.”
I decided to talk some more anyhow. It might just keep me alive. “You made a couple of mistakes, you know. Minor ones.”
“Really?”
“They came to me this morning,” I said, edging my volume up another notch. “There was only one person who knew where both Max Quane and Sally Raines were just before they were killed.”
“And I was that person, of course. How very clever of you, dear boy.”
“Max Quane called me at your place and I said his address out loud so I could remember it. You caught it. Then when Sally called Audrey, well, Audrey called you to find out where I was and you must have got Sally’s address out of her. You had your hired guns hurry over and kill both Max and Sally.”
“Harvey?”
“What?” I said.
“You don’t want to turn around, do you?”
“Now!” I yelled and threw myself down and to one side.
Thirty feet or so up the mountain Audrey stepped out from behind a pine. She was wearing a brown shirt and tan slacks. She also carried the missing M-1 carbine. It was pointed casually at Slick.
I glanced back at Slick. He looked at me and then at Audrey. Audrey seemed to be the only danger so he raised the Walther carefully, aiming it at her with both hands.
“Don’t do it, Slick,” she said. “Please.”
Slick aimed carefully. At thirty feet he would miss if he didn’t. His mouth worked a little. Audrey brought the carbine up to her shoulder in one smooth motion and shot Slick through the head just below the left eye. Then she shot him in the throat as he fell and when he was sprawled on the ground she put two more shots into his body right above the heart.
I rose and quickly went up to her and put my arms around her, pulling her close to me. She was trembling. “I—I can still shoot, can’t I, Harvey?”
“Yes.”
“Jack taught me.” Jack was Jack Dunlap, her dead husband.
“I know. I was counting on it.”
“Jack said I was a good shot. A damned good shot. He always said that.”
The trembling had turned into uncontrollable, almost violent shaking so I held her closer and tried to soothe her with meaningless words. She buried her head in my shoulder and started to sob. I held her even closer and as I did I could feel a kind of gentle sexual arousement. Audrey must have felt something, too, because between her sobs, she said, “I don’t give a damn! I want you to hold me. We don’t have to be ashamed of it, do we, of holding each other?”<
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“No,” I said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Finally, her sobs stopped and she moved away from me. I found my handkerchief and gave it to her. She blew her nose and then looked up at me. “I didn’t want you to fuck me,” she said, “I just wanted you to hold me, but it felt like that, didn’t it.”
“Something like that.”
“What are we, rotten or just normal?”
“Just normal, I think.”
She looked down the mountain to where Slick lay. “Goddamn you, Slick, anyway. What was the matter with him?”
“I don’t really know.”
“I heard you talking and I could make some of it out and then when you raised your voice, I could hear all of it. I’m not sorry I killed him. I’m just sorry that he was the way he was.”
“Audrey?”
“What?”
“Why’d you take the carbine?”
She looked down at where she had dropped it. “I had some crazy idea.”
“About what?”
“That I’d come up here on the mountain and pop a few pills and then put the muzzle in my mouth and pull the trigger. But I couldn’t do it. Or maybe I just didn’t really want to.”
I knelt down and picked up the carbine and handed it to her. “Stay here until I come get you.”
“Where’re you going?”
“There’s another one still loose down there near the house.”
“What’re you going to do, throw rocks at him?”
“I’ll take Slick’s gun.”
I moved down to where Slick lay and picked up his gun. I looked back up at Audrey. She was staring at Slick.
“What do they call it?” she said.
“What?”
“Killing your uncle. It’s not patricide or fratricide. It must have some Latin name.”
“Avunculicide,” I said, although I really wasn’t sure.
I used the pines as cover to move south of the pond away from the parked Plymouth. I jumped across the narrow stream just below where the beavers were remodeling their dam and moved back into the pines again and started working my way down toward the house.
The trees thinned out fifteen or twenty feet from where the Plymouth was parked. I peered through the branches and saw the man with the bushy caterpillar eyebrows as he crouched by the car’s rear fender, trying to look around it at the house. I couldn’t see Murfin.
I took a deep breath, raised the Walther, and called, “Don’t move!”
The man with the eyebrows moved anyway. He whirled around, searching for somebody to shoot at. I didn’t know whether he could see me or not so I shot him in the left leg although I was aiming at his chest. He went down on his knees, but brought his gun up again and fired twice. I shot him again, this time in the shoulder, the left one, and when he still didn’t go down, but once more brought his gun up, I fired again and this time the bullet hit him in the face just below his nose. The gun dropped from his hand and he pitched forward onto his face. He twitched once or twice and then after that he didn’t move anymore.
I left the trees and moved over to the sprawled man. He looked dead, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him to see whether he really was. Instead I walked around the Plymouth and called to Murfin.
He came slowly around the corner of the house, his pistol still in his hand. He looked at the blond man he had shot and then he looked at me.
“Where’s the other one?”
“He’s over there. Dead, I think.”
“You shoot him?”
“Yes.”
“Before that, I heard some other shots.”
“That was my sister.”
“Jesus. What was she shooting at?”
“My uncle. He’s dead, too.”
“They called me this morning,” Murfin said. “They called me and when I got down there they gave me this story about you.”
“What story?”
“About you and your uncle. They said that you and your uncle had Mix kidnapped. It was quite a story.”
“Did you believe it?”
“Part of it. So I went home and got my gun and came out here with them.”
“Just like that?”
“Lemme show you something,” Murfin said. “Lemme show you who fed me the story and then maybe you’ll understand why I came.”
He went over to the Plymouth. “I wantcha to see this,” he said. He opened the rear door. Lying on the back seat on his side with his knees drawn up to his chest and his thumb in his mouth was Roger Vullo. His eyes were open and staring. When I went closer I could smell the urine. Roger Vullo had wet his pants.
“Hey, Vullo,” Murfin said.
Vullo didn’t move. His eyes blinked once, but I don’t think he really heard anything.
We stared at him for a moment and then Murfin slammed the rear door shut. “Well, at least he’s not biting his fingernails anymore.”
“They’re going to have to get some auditors,” I said.
“For the Foundation?”
I nodded. “My uncle said that they’d thought up a way to channel the money. They used the Foundation. He and Vullo must have set it up that way.”
“It was phony, wasn’t it? I’ve figured that out,” Murfin said. “The whole fuckin’ thing was phony, right from the start.”
“Right from the start,” I said.
Murfin thought about it for a moment and then he looked at me and smiled one of those terrible smiles of his that almost made me want to turn away. “You know something?”
“What?”
“It damn near worked. Shit, I bet if they’d come to me, I could’ve figured out how to’ve made it work.”
We heard the sirens then. It sounded as if they were drawing near, so we stood there and waited and listened to the sirens. When the sheriff’s cars turned into the lane I could tell that they were going far too fast. But The Proper Villain slowed them down. He always did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
IT WAS THE FIRST SATURDAY in September and Senator Corsing and I were sitting on my porch, drinking gin and watching the sweet-voiced Jenny as she grasped the rope of the swing.
She looked back. “Like this?” she said.
“Like that,” the Senator said.
She pushed off the rail of the porch and sailed out over the pond and when she let go she screamed just a little as she fell and her yellow bikini seemed to flash in the hot afternoon sun. She came up spouting and laughing and swam over to where Ruth was lying on the new raft that I had built.
The Senator took a swallow of his iced gin. “They held a meeting,” he said.
“Who?”
“The candidates.”
“Both of them?”
“Uh-huh. I put it together.”
“What’d they meet about?”
“How to cover it up.”
“Everything?”
“Almost everything.”
“I didn’t think anybody was going to do that anymore.”
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Just a little,” I said.
“One of the problems was the money that your uncle raised.”
“What about it?”
“They’ve managed to trace some of it. Where it came from. It went to the Foundation, of course, and then some of it went to the union. It helped pay the salaries of those two hundred guys they sent out. It’s a real mess. If they disclosed where the money came from, then they’d have to tell where it wound up, so they decided that it was a no-win deal. Neither of the candidates would have an advantage and that’s why they decided to put the lid on it.”
“I suppose it makes sense.”
“It does to a politician.”
“Where’d the money come from?”
The Senator looked at me. “Where does big money always come from?” He took another swallow of his drink. “Your uncle had a lot of big-shot friends.”
“Eight hundred,” I said.
“Did he count th
em?”
“That’s how many Christmas cards he sent out.”
“He got to Vullo.”
“Slick?”
“Yes. He got to Vullo with the idea of the Foundation. I don’t know whether he knew Vullo was a little nuts or not. Anyway, it wasn’t a bad idea. All that big corporate money going into a foundation that supposedly was set up to find out who really shot Jack Kennedy, et al. It was really rather clever, if you like that sort of thing.”
“It sounds like Slick,” I said. “He must have been the one who had Vullo bring me into it.”
“Why?”
“Why was I brought in?”
“Yes.”
“To poke holes, I guess.”
“So that they could cover them up, if need be.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you did poke a few, didn’t you?” the Senator said.
“And they almost covered them up, too.”
“Yes,” he said, “they did.” He took another swallow of his drink. “It was really quite a scheme, wasn’t it? First, they set up the Foundation. Then your uncle and Vullo had Mix kidnapped. After that they went to Gallops.”
“What’d they offer him?”
“The two million in ransom. That was the carrot. The stick was that if he didn’t go along with the strikes, the same thing could happen to him that happened to Mix. Or worse. He believed them. I’m not sure that I blame him.”
“You think they’ll ever find him?”
“Gallops?”
I nodded.
“I’m not even sure that they’re looking for him too hard. The Candidate told me that they’ve heard rumors that he’s somewhere down in the Caribbean. Spending the money, I guess. It should take him a while to spend two million.”
“What’s the diagnosis on Vullo?”
The Senator shrugged. “They’ve got him in this sanitarium in upstate New York. He’s catatonic—just like my wife. Did I tell you I’m going to divorce her?”
I shook my head.
“I filed for it two days ago when I was back in St. Louis. If the voters don’t like it, fuck ’em. I can always open a diner. While I was out there I also saw Freddie Koontz. He got his old job back.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“He told me about you and Murfin at that meeting. Does Murfin always carry a blackjack?”