by Lou Cameron
“Easy, Talbot,” warned Benson with a hand on my arm. “Show yourself with that gun and he’s liable to come unstuck.”
I knew he was right. But if Hazel had heard me, you couldn’t tell from where I crouched in the lee of the rusty stamping machinery.
“Kathy!” she called again. “Are you all right, honey?”
“Damn fool dame,” I muttered. “How good are you with that gas gun, Wayne?”
“Tolerable good. “The deputy grinned, raising the short-barreled weapon to his cheek.
“Not in the shaft,” I warned, tensing my legs under me. “I want some smoke right outside the entrance to cover me. Think you can manage it?”
“Watch that clump of sage just this side of the opening,” said Wayne, pulling the trigger.
There was a pop-gun noise, followed by a long, hissing trail of smoke as the gas grenade arced across the knee-high scrub to land a few yards upwind of the mine entrance. It exploded with a puff of acrid white smoke. I didn’t notice how close to the sagebrush the confident deputy had lobbed it. I was too busy running.
I angled down the slope, tearing through the scrub at a dead run as I closed the distance between the stamping mill and the blue Volkswagen. Two-thirds of the way there, I heard another shot from the mine shaft. It reverberated hollowly, and I remember noting it must have been fired from well inside the mine even as I winced in anticipation of the slug.
I lost one shoe in the sand and kept going, dimly aware of what was happening to the one foot as I tore down the slope. And then I whipped past Hazel, sticking out my free arm like an express train snagging a mail sack, and pulled her down beside me behind the Volkswagen.
“This,” I gasped between wheezes for breath, “is getting to be a habit.”
“I saw Kathy!” Hazel exclaimed. “I saw Kathy looking out, and I was afraid somebody was going to shoot her!”
I started to tell her she was crazy as I raised a cautious head to peer through the windows of the abandoned car. Then I realized one had a better view of the mine shaft from this angle. The light of the setting sun was beaming a good ten or twelve yards inside the entrance as the tear gas drifted off to the north on the desert breeze, and I could see someone standing in there, just on the edge of visibility. The someone took a hesitant step towards the entrance, and I could make out a skirt and two bare calves. I yelled, “Hold your fire!” up to the stamping mill and waited to see what happened next.
For a long time, nothing did. Then Hazel, peeking through the glass at my side, gasped, “It’s her!” and yelled, “Come out, Kathy! It’s me, Hazel!”
The figure in the mine entrance took five or six more steps until she was out in the open sunlight. Then she collapsed to her knees and covered her face with both hands.
I said, “Stay put, now, dammit! He might be using her as a decoy.”
Then, hoping Hazel would show some common sense at least once in her life, I was up and moving again. My foot was hurting like hell by now, but I couldn’t retrieve my shoe. I wasn’t going that way.
I’d noticed a cluster of nondescript buildings a few yards south of the abandoned car, and I made it in a few running steps. There were some men crouched in the lee of the buildings, most of them local deputies, with a sprinkling of troopers and FBI men. Somebody asked what I thought I was doing as I dog-trotted down the deserted sidewalk past them. It was a good question, but I didn’t take time to answer. I ran to a narrow alleyway between two buildings and squeezed through, cutting my stockinged foot again on what I hoped was not a rusty nail.
I took a quick peek out the end of the alleyway, and as I’d hoped, saw I was now out of the line of the mine opening. I could still see the girl, sobbing on her knees a few yards outside the mine. Nobody inside the shaft could see me without sticking his head out. With the others covering the entrance from the stamping mill, I didn’t think I had to worry much about that.
I stepped out into the light and limped up the slope at a walk. My purple shadow danced ahead of me across the desert scrub, outlined by the salmon light of the gloaming sun. I kept an eye on that shadow, until I saw there was no chance of it falling across MacDonald’s line of sight and betraying me. Then I put on a little steam and moved towards the girl, Cobra in hand.
I was quite close before I noticed the gun lying on the ground near her knees. It was a .22 target pistol. Not the kind of gun to make a very big bang, but the mine shaft might have magnified the roar. Or MacDonald might have fired something heavier.
I paused, just out of line from the entrance, and called, “Kathy?” in a gentle tone.
The girl looked up, her rather bovine face wild with terror and grief, and I got my first good look at Kathy Gorm.
She was prettier than I’d expected, though hardly a one to make Miss America lie awake nights. She’s lost some weight, and her hair, if it was natural, was very nice. I smiled at her and said, keeping it down, “I’m a friend of Hazel’s, Kathy. Can you move from there without getting hurt?”
“He’s dead,” she said in a dull, childish tone. “I didn’t want to do it. I loved him. But he was so scary, and when I saw him pointing the gun at you and Hazel I just… couldn’t let him do it!”
“You shot him?” I frowned, taking a couple of cautious steps toward her. She might be telling the truth. And then again, MacDonald might have told her to say that.
I said, “Come over here, Kathy.”
The girl started to cry. She buried her face in her hands again, and I could see she’d chewed her nails to the quick. I unhooked the flashlight from my belt, flicked it on with my free hand, and muttered, “Here we go again.”
Then I stepped around the corner of the mine opening, firing from the hip.
Behind me, I could hear Kathy Gorm screaming as I walked down the shaft between the rusty rails of the abandoned ore trucks. The shots made a hell of a racket as they bounded off the ties between the rails to send gravel, dust, and keyholing slugs down the tunnel ahead of me.
Then the beam of my light picked out a dark form lying spread-eagled on the floor, and I stopped shooting. I walked over to MacDonald and shone the light down into his eyes. He was dead. His eyes were filmed with dust as they stared at the overhead timbers, and his teeth were bared in a ghastly grin. He might have been a handsome guy, alive, and that muscular build probably made him hell on wheels in bed. But right now he wasn’t very pretty. I knew it hadn’t been one of my slugs that finished him. That weird grin—risus sardonicus, Doc Evans would call it—takes a little while to form on a dead man’s puss. So Duncan MacDonald, the great ladies’ man, had been nailed by one of his ladies, with a kid’s target pistol.
It figured.
• • • It was twenty-four hours before Kathy Gorm was in shape to tell her story. They’d run her into Elko in an ambulance. All she’d been able to say to Hazel and me after I checked the mess she’d left in the mine shaft was, “My baby! My baby!”
That turned out to be a false alarm. When they checked her over at the hospital, they found she only thought she was pregnant. She was in a state of nervous exhaustion, and that, plus the weird sex life she’d been having, had apparently thrown her timing off.
By the time Kathy was ready to tell her version of her misadventures, Roberta Grey had flown to Elko on a jet. She hadn’t been able to find a broom.
She was mad as hell. She claimed she was mad at Kathy for making a fool of herself and at us for allowing MacDonald to run loose so long. I let her rave on. Actually, I was glad to see Roberta. It made everything easier to have them all together while we tied up the loose ends.
Roberta and Hazel were there, along with myself and more fuzz than you’d think one hospital room would hold, when Kathy was ready to make a statement.
Her statement was a lulu. You know the beginning, so I’ll get right to the ending at the ghost town.
“I was awfully scared when we drove to Rochester and I found out it was a ghost town!” she said in that sexy-scared voice of hers.
She took a sip of water through the glass straw at her bedside and continued, “I mean, it was so quiet and creepy and all. And then, while we were in this awful old dusty hotel lobby, he started telling me about that other girl. I mean, he came right out and said he’d killed a girl. He was as calm about it as if he’d been talking about the weather!”
Someone asked, “Would that be Sandra Dipple, the divorcée?”
“Was that her name?” asked Kathy Gorm in a puzzled tone. “He didn’t say what her name was. Just that this girl in Vegas had tried to double-cross him and gotten what was coming to her! I started to cry because he kept looking at me so strangely. And when I tried to tell him that I’d never double-cross him, he yelled, ‘Oh no?’ and started to laugh. Only it wasn’t a nice laugh, and his eyes were all glassy and wild. I thought, at first, he was just kidding. Duncan had a funny way of kidding sometimes. But he kept it up and I started to get scared!”
“Did he say he intended to kill you?” I asked.
“Not right out,” the girl replied, “but how much of a hint does a person need? He had this pint of liquor I couldn’t remember either of us buying, and I was frightened by the look in his eyes when he asked me to drink it. I told him it wouldn’t be good for my baby. I mean, the baby I thought I was going to have. But he kept insisting and said something about it being easier on both of us if I’d just take a good stiff drink of the stuff.”
Kathy sobbed, wiped a hand across her face, and continued with her story, saying, “That’s when he hit me! I told him I just didn’t want any and asked him why he didn’t drink it himself if he wanted us to get drunk. He said something about needing a pregnant dame like a hole in the head and then he yelled at me that I wanted to see him tied up in knots on the floor. He hit me over and over again, and said I was trying to get him to commit suicide. I still don’t know what he was talking about!”
“I do,” snapped Roberta Grey. “He was trying to get Kathy to take strychnine, like the other girl.”
I said, “What happened then, Kathy? How come we found you safe in the mine if he was trying to poison you in one of the deserted buildings?”
“Poison me?” Kathy blinked. Then she sighed and said, “I might have known that was what was in the bottle. He’d been acting so funny the past few days. Anyway, I ran into one of the other rooms after he hit me. I locked the door, and he went up and down smashing things like a crazy person. Then after a while, he came back to talk to me through the door. He said he was just kidding and that there was a police car coming up the road. I thought he was lying. But when I went to the window, I saw he was telling the truth. And I was afraid I’d be arrested. So I unlocked the door for him and we ran out the back way to the old mine shaft. And I guess you know the rest.”
“Not everything, Kathy,” I said gently. “You haven’t told us why you shot him yet.”
“I had to,” the girl sobbed. “We were in there the longest time, and Duncan never said a word. I tried to talk sense to him, but he wouldn’t answer. Then this man came to the entrance and Duncan took a shot at him! I told him he was acting crazy. I told him we’d get in terrible trouble if he killed anybody. But he acted like I wasn’t there.” She stifled another sob and added in a deliberately emotionless voice, “I knew what I had to do when I saw Hazel down by the car. I had to think of Hazel and my baby. And I knew he was going to kill all of us before he was through. I’d taken a target pistol out of the things we’d bought in Elko after Duncan started acting so wildly. But I don’t think I could have used it if it hadn’t been for Hazel being down there behind that car. Duncan was pointing his gun right at her. And then there was this puff of smoke, and I saw you running down the slope towards Hazel, and Duncan swung his gun around to shoot at you—and that’s when I killed him.”
She plucked aimlessly at her sheet and said dully, “I held the pistol in both hands and pointed it at the back of his head. I said, ‘Duncan, you’re going to get us both killed,’ but he never answered. So I… shot him. I pulled the trigger, and he never said a word. He just fell down and died without saying a thing.”
The captain from Elko troop shook his head and said, “I guess that about wraps it up, Miss Gorm, except for a few loose ends we’ll get to later.” He looked at me as if he expected me to agree with him.
I didn’t.
Smiling thinly, I said, “I’d like to get to those loose ends now, Captain, while we’re all one big happy family.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I’m charging Kathy Gorm with homicide and Roberta Grey with criminal conspiracy,” I said. I looked at Hazel’s staring face and added, “Miss Collier here is just stupid. I’m afraid we can’t throw her in jail for that.”
“Homicide?” The captain blinked. “MacDonald was a psycho killer, Talbot!”
I snorted. “Nuts. Duncan MacDonald was a weakling, a coward, a congenital liar, and a born loser. But he never killed anyone, unless you want to say his compulsive gambling was a form of suicide.”
“You’re crazy!” gasped Kathy Gorm. “I told you I had to kill Duncan! He killed that other girl and he was aiming his gun right at you when I shot him!”
“He was well inside the mine,” I said, “and shot in the back of the head. How could you have seen us from behind him, Kathy? You’d have had to be right in the entrance to spot me running through that tear gas cloud.”
“He ran back down the tunnel,” she wailed, hiding her face in her hands again as she added, “You’re crazy and mean and trying to mix me up!”
“I’m mixed up, too, Talbot,” put in the captain. “Suppose you fill us in from the beginning.”
“As good a place as any,” I replied. “Let’s start with Duncan MacDonald, a running-type gambler and skirt chaser who blew into Vegas a few months ago, working as a lead burner, and went ape over the fun and games along the Strip. When he wasn’t playing the roulette wheels, he was playing house with as many girls as would let him. He was having an affair with Phoebe LeRoy—his boss where he worked as a shill after losing his job burning lead—as well as with a thrill-happy nympho named Sandra Dipple, and a frustrated skip tracer named Kathy Gorm, who’d probably fallen for him while she was checking on him for the people he’d stiffed around town.”
“What’s this crap about criminal conspiracy?” growled Roberta Grey.
“I’ll get to it,” I said, “but let’s keep things in order, huh? MacDonald gave Kathy a sob story, and probably the first good roll in the feathers she’d ever had, and got her to cover for him at the collection agency while he and Sandra Dipple planned to rob the place where he worked and another she took a job at. They were both new in the state and neither knew how the Mob frowned on that sort of thing. MacDonald’s sleeping with Phoebe LeRoy probably convinced him he’d be safe from prosecution if and when his boss found out what he’d done. By dyeing her hair, the Dipple woman figured to change her appearance enough to throw her employers off. Or maybe she just dyed her hair for the hell of it. She seems to have been a wacky dame and was probably going along with him for a gag. Her husband was sending her money, so she didn’t really need it. Anyway, they took a couple of joints and ran to cover. Somewhere along about then, Kathy Gorm learned her boyfriend was two-timing her and did not like the idea one little bit. But she couldn’t get MacDonald to ditch Sandra. Sandra was feeding the jerk, and she was better-looking, besides. So little Miss Innocence killed her.”
“That’s not true!” wailed Kathy.
Ignoring her, I continued: “She knew about strychnine victims tying themselves in knots, remember?”
“Duncan told me,” she sobbed. “He told me how he poisoned that girl and how she flopped all over the floor at the motel.”
“That where you did it?” I shrugged, going on with my story. “MacDonald knew nothing about it, of course, or he’d have left the state. Nobody’s psycho enough to stay on the same side of a state line they’ve committed a particularly nasty murder on. I imagine it was hell for Miss Gorm here
, as she tried to get him to leave Nevada. I know I wondered myself why he didn’t run. MacDonald’s whole past history is that of a runner. He ran from bad debts, a wife and kids back East, or anything that said boo, all his life. Anyway, Kathy killed the Dipple woman and then, remembering her lover’s car and having an extra set of keys, she went to the motel where it was parked and stole it. She was seen, and the red hair threw us all off the track for a time. But she didn’t know she’d been spotted and it almost didn’t matter. She drove the dead woman out to that wrecking yard, disfigured her body, and then, as an afterthought, threw her own slave bracelet in with the body. I don’t know whether this was to give us another red herring to chew on in the million-to-one chance we’d find the corpse before it went into the blast furnace, or if she was just tired of Tab Hunter, now that she had a real live lover.”
“Make him stop!” sobbed Kathy Gorm. “Can’t any of you see he’s making all this up?”
Nobody answered. Roberta Grey’s face had turned to stone as little wheels went tick-tick-tick inside her head, while Hazel stared at Kathy as if she’d just seen her crawl out from under a wet rock. The captain nodded thoughtfully and mused, “If they hadn’t found that body before the car went into the crusher—”
“Sandra Dipple and Kathy Gorm would have vanished without a trace,” I finished. “But she didn’t know about white sidewall tires and she forgot she had friends who’d worry about her.”
I smiled at Roberta Grey and said, “You were on the level when you called us in to look for her, Roberta. That is, you were on the level until you found the Mob was looking for MacDonald and that Kathy was with him. That must have made you feel funny. You liked the girl. But you owed the Mob your first loyalty, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know what mob you’re talking about,” she muttered.
I smiled. “Come on. You couldn’t run an operation like yours in Vegas without Mob connections, Roberta. They contacted you to help them find a guy who’d skipped out with seven thousand bucks. I imagine they were a bit annoyed to discover you’d tipped the state police off about him, huh?”