by Lou Cameron
“I want a lawyer,” she said flatly.
“You’ll need one.”
“Then she was in on the murder of Romero?” asked the captain.
“No,” I said. “That was Stretch Voss’s bright idea.” I shot Hazel a look and added, “Voss heard I’d been seen around town with his girl and, bright as always, decided to do something about it. He sent a hopped-up safe cracker named Foster to blow up my cruiser. Foster did. Then he blew his cool when a chance prowl car drove into the motel where he was staying, and he wound up dead. By this time, Voss was in a maximum security block and out of touch. But the local hoods knew he’d tried to kill a cop, and some of them tried to use that to scare me off the case. You see, they didn’t want me to catch MacDonald. They wanted to teach him some manners in their own way. If he beat the murder rap and was sent up for larceny, he’d have made a lot of trouble for them by telling other little boys in the can how he’d taken the Mob for all those goodies with his cute trick. Too many guys already know about switching chips with a confederate, and the Syndicate tries to keep some things trade secrets.”
One of the FBI men asked, “Where does Weeping Willie Wagner fit in, Talbot?”
“I’m coming to that,” I said. “After Kathy Gorm and her larcenous Romeo cut out, leaving a trail of unpaid bills and charged goodies hocked for his gambling habit, the local Mob decided they needed some outside help to clean house. They sent for a brace of hired guns, one of them being Weeping Willie. But Willie was getting old, for a gun. He was hot as a two-dollar pistol and wouldn’t stay under cover. He worried the Mob by cavorting around in broad daylight in a cream sports car, with half the cops in the country looking for him. So they decided to retire Willie. But he was a pro, and dangerous. So they switched the plates on his rented car and killed two birds with one stone. They gave us Weeping Willie on a silver platter and had safe plates for the stolen car they ran up to Carson City for Stretch Voss.”
“Hold it,” said the captain. “You say Voss stole from the Syndicate, too! Why would they want to spring him from state prison, Talbot?”
“To teach him some manners, too,” I said, staring thoughtfully at Hazel. There was no way I could think of to soften the blow. So I said, “Stretch was not too bright. Awfully pretty, I’ll admit, but inclined to think with his glands. Scars Masulli was a Mob gun. They contacted Scars, had him talk Voss into escaping with him, and then, once they had Voss on the outside, killed him.”
Hazel stared at me, wide-eyed, and said, “Oh, no!”
“There’s a new stretch of highway running out near Hot Springs,” I said quietly. “A certain contractor with a Sicilian name and friends in high places just poured twenty miles of concrete over there. I doubt the state will see fit to dig it all up just to find one small-time hood. But if you want an educated guess, I’d say that’s where they buried Voss. I imagine Masulli shot him right after they drove away in that hot car.”
“But Masulli tried to kill you,” said the captain. “If he wasn’t a friend of Stretch Voss, why would he try to knock off you and Miss Collier, here?”
“He wasn’t sent to do that,” I explained. “They sent him to kill MacDonald. MacDonald was supposed to be using that empty store across from the glue factory as a front for his phony charge accounts. When he saw us wandering around inside, Masulli must have figured he’d skipped, and then, since I’m not the most popular guy on the Mob’s list, decided he might as well take a crack at me as long as he had the chance. They’d have blamed it on Stretch, or MacDonald, if he’d gotten away with it. Only, Scars was a bit rusty, after doing so much time in the can. Or maybe I was just lucky. They don’t always win, you know.”
“Somebody had to tip them off about that empty store,” said one of the FBI men.
I smiled crookedly at Roberta Grey, and said, “Somebody did. And only two people, aside from men on the force, knew MacDonald was in Elko, and where. Why don’t you turn state’s evidence, Roberta? You’ll be an old woman by the time you get out, unless you give yourself a break.”
“Why don’t you go screw yourself?” the fat woman asked in a conversational tone.
“Better an old woman than a dead woman, huh?” I shrugged. I looked at Hazel, who’d turned away and was leaning against the wall with her hands to her face, and said, “I don’t think any of my boys are working for the Mob, this season, and Miss Collier stepped out ahead of me. I think that lets her out of knowing the late Scars Masulli was up there on the roof with a scoped rifle. So that means Mrs. Grey gets the tab for sicking the Mob on MacDonald and me, and we can get back to little Miss Innocence, here.”
“I didn’t tell anybody,” Kathy wailed. “I don’t know anybody in the Mob, and besides, I left you a note, remember?”
“I remember,” I said. “You knew we were closing in on you and that it was only a question of time before we caught MacDonald and made him talk. He wouldn’t leave the state, and I imagine you were somewhat annoyed to find out he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, marry you after you told him you thought you were in a family way. So you set him up, Kathy. You left us the note and got him to drive you to Rochester. I imagine it surprised hell out of him to find out Rochester was a ghost town.”
“You’re crazy!” she sobbed. “How would I know it was a ghost town?”
“A girl who spent her time phoning every town in the state would know when a switchboard had been discontinued,” I said. “But MacDonald was from out of state, and on the map, Rochester’s just another town-type town. You wanted him there, Kathy. You wanted him in a deserted town, where you could kill him without witnesses.”
“I didn’t want any such thing!” she wailed. “I loved Duncan!”
“Not enough to go to the gas chamber for him. You knew we’d sweat the truth out of him, once we took him alive. So you lured him to the abandoned mine and shot him in the back of the head with a gun you bought on credit. He died instantly, and dropped well inside the mine. Then, when Agent Benson here spoiled your plan by turning up early, you took a shot at him and waited for Hazel and me to arrive so you could go into your act. It was a pretty good act, by the way. But you can knock it off, honey. We’ve got you cold.”
“You’re just making it up that way,” she insisted in a petulant tone. “You haven’t any real evidence. Why won’t someone tell him he’s just making it all up?”
“How about it, Talbot?” asked the captain. “It’s a nice story and it holds together. But what proof do you have that it didn’t happen the way Miss Gorm says it did?”
“It couldn’t have happened the way she said it did,” I said. “MacDonald had been dead for hours by the time I reached him. His face was set in risus sardonicus and that goes with rigor mortis. Yet she claims to have shot him just as I was running across his line of fire. You know how long it takes for rigor mortis to set in, Captain?”
The captain looked thoughtfully at Kathy Gorm. Then he said, “Yeah, three to six hours.”
“You… you’re all crazy” Kathy Gorm whimpered. “You’ll never get anybody to believe such a crazy, crazy story!”
She was wrong. The jury that tried her consisted of four men and eight women. They found her guilty of murder in the first degree. They say she cried a lot on the way to the gas chamber.
Roberta Grey was indicted on a conspiracy charge. She made bail, walked out of the courtroom, and hasn’t been seen since. She might be living, quietly, in some nice, respectable neighborhood on a Mob pension. Or she might be lying in an unmarked grave with a ton of concrete over her.
You can’t win them all.
• • • It was raining in Las Vegas. It does happen, you know. It was around Christmastime, and I was ready to call it a day. I said goodnight to Bert and the others in the office and put on my raincoat. It was a little early, but rank has its privileges, and now that I was drawing a captain’s pay, I could afford the date I had that night with a showgirl from the Flamingo line.
I walked out into the corridor. It was cold an
d damp, and they hadn’t turned the lights on yet. Someone in a white trench coat and white beret was waiting for me near the radiators by the far door. It was Hazel Collier. She looked like a million bucks, except for the tears in her eyes.
“Hi,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“I’ve been busy, Frank. Busy finding another job and busy… thinking.”
“Yeah?” I said. “What are you doing these days, kid?”
“Receptionist.” She shrugged. “It’s not important. Frank, I’ve been thinking about you.”
“Me?” I smiled thinly. “I thought your heart belonged to the late Stretch Voss.”
“Don’t be cruel, Frank. I know how I hurt you. I know, now, what a fool I was. Don’t you even want to know why I treated you the way I did?”
“He had a bigger dick,” I said brutally.
“Don’t,” she sobbed. “You know I never slept with him!”
“You didn’t?” I sneered. “Funny a grown woman would carry such a torch for a guy just because he uses expensive cologne. How do you like the stuff I’m wearing, by the way? Guess you know I’ve been promoted, huh? We used to talk a lot about what we’d do when I finally made captain, remember?”
“I remember,” she said softly. “Frank, I’m not going to apologize for Stretch. You’ve got to understand I didn’t leave you because of him. I went to him because I left you.”
“There’s a difference?” I laughed bitterly.
“I left you because I didn’t understand. I left you because you frightened me. You can be so tough and cynical, Frank. You act, sometimes, like you don’t trust anyone or even like anyone in the whole world.”
“So?”
“So I know I was wrong. As your girl, I never really knew you. Not the way I’ve learned to know you while I watched you work. You look like a tough cop, Frank. You look even harder and more cynical on the job than you did when we were dating and you said things that frightened me. But I remember the day Larry Romero was killed, Frank. I remember looking into your eyes. I remember seeing tears, real tears, before you caught me looking at you and turned away with a flip remark.”
“Yeah. Under this hard exterior, I’m a real pussycat.”
“Okay,” she sighed, “play it cool. Play it tough. Play it any way you want to, darling. But you’re not fooling anyone but yourself. You know what your friends on the force think of you? They think you’re a nice guy. They tell stories about you taking the responsibility for mistakes the men under you make. They tell about a tough, hard-boiled cop who threw up the night he had to shoot a wanted killer.”
I glanced at my watch. Hazel caught the movement and said, “Frank, I’ve been such a fool.”
“That’s right,” I said, “you have.”
“I can make it up to you, darling. All I ask is the chance. Won’t you, can’t you forgive me?”
“No,” I said, “I’m afraid I can’t.”