Great Noir Fiction

by Ed Gorman (ed)

  The voice told me not to go away and hung up. Five minutes later the telephone rang.

  “Barry says you’re okay. What do you want?”

  “Just talk. It isn’t cheap like they say.”

  After a moment the voice gave me directions. I hung up not knowing if it was male or female.

  It belonged to Ma Chaney, who greeted me at the door of her house in rural Macomb County wearing a red Japanese kimono with green parrots all over it. The kimono could have covered a Toyota. She was a five-by-five chunk with marcelled orange hair and round black eyes embedded in her face like nail heads in soft wax. A cigarette teetered on her lower lip. I followed her into a parlor full of flowered chairs and sofas and pregnant lamps with fringed shades. A long strip of pimply blond youth in overalls and no shirt took his brogans off the coffee table and stood up when she barked at him. He gaped at me, chewing gum with his mouth open.

  “Mr. Walker, Leo,” Wi wheezed. “Leo knew my Wilbur in Ypsi. He’s like another son to me.”

  Ma Chaney had one son in the criminal ward at the Forensic Psychiatry Center in Ypsilanti and another on Florida’s Death Row. The FBI was looking for the youngest in connection with an armored car robbery in Kansas City. The whole brood had come up from Kentucky when Old Man Chaney got a job on the line at River Rouge and stayed on after he was killed in a propane tank explosion. Now Ma, the daughter of a Hawkins County gunsmith, made her living off the domestic weapons market.

  “You said talk ain’t cheap,” she said, when she was sitting in a big overstuffed rocker. “How cheap ain’t it?”

  I perched on the edge of a hard upright with doilies on the arms. Leo remained standing, scratching himself. “Depends on whether we talk about Virgil Boyd,” I said.

  “What if we don’t?”

  “Then I won’t take up any more of your time.”

  “What if we do?”

  “I’ll double what he’s paying.”

  She coughed. The cigarette bobbed. “I got a business to run. I go around scratching at rewards I won’t have no customers.”

  “Does that mean Boyd’s a customer?”

  “Now, why’d that Texas boy want to come to Ma? He can deal hisself a shotgun at any K mart.”

  “He can’t show his face in the legal places and being new in town he doesn’t know the illegal ones. But he wouldn’t have to ask around too much to come up with your name. You’re less selective than most.”

  “You don’t have to pussyfoot around old Ma. I don’t get a lot of second-timers on account of I talk for money. My boy Earl in Florida needs a new lawyer. But I only talk after, not before. I start setting up customers I won’t get no first-timers.”

  “I’m not even interested in Boyd. It’s his girlfriend I want to talk to. Suzie Frechette.”

  “Don’t know her.” She rocked back and forth. “What color’s your money?”

  Before leaving Detroit I’d cashed Howard Frechette’s check. I laid fifteen hundred dollars on the coffee table in twenties and fifties. Leo straightened up a little to look at the bills. Ma resumed rocking. “It ain’t enough.”

  “How much is enough?”

  “If I was to talk to a fella named Boyd, and if I was to agree to sell him a brand-new Ithaca pump shotgun and a P-38 still in the box, I wouldn’t sell them for less than twenny-five hunnert. Double twenny-five hunnert is five thousand.”

  “Fifteen hundred now. Thirty-five hundred when I see the girl.”

  “I don’t guarantee no girl.”

  “Boyd then. If he’s come this far with her he won’t leave her behind.”

  She went on rocking. “They’s a white barn a mile north on this road. If I was to meet a fella named Boyd, there’s where I might do it. I might pick eleven o’clock.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I might pick tonight. If it don’t rain.”

  I got up. She stopped rocking.

  “Come alone,” she said. “Ma won’t.”

  On the way back to town I filled up at a corner station and used the pay telephone to call Howard Frechette’s room at the Holiday Inn. When he started asking questions I gave him the number and told him to call back from a booth outside the motel.

  “Ahearn’s an anachronism,” he said ten minutes later. “I doubt he taps phones.”

  “Maybe not, but motel operators have big ears.”

  “Did you talk to Suzie?”

  “Minor setback,” I said. “Your sister gave her and Boyd the boot and no money.”

  “Tight bitch.”

  “I know where they’ll be tonight, though. There’s an old auto court on Van Dyke between 21 and 22 Mile in Macomb County, the Log Cabin Inn. Looks like it sounds.” I was staring at it across the road. “Midnight. Better give yourself an hour.”

  He repeated the information.

  “I’m going to have to tap you for thirty-five hundred dollars,” I said. “The education cost.”

  “I can manage it. Is that where they’re headed?”

  “I hope so. I haven’t asked them yet.”

  I got to my bank just before closing and cleaned out my savings and all but eight dollars in my checking account. I hoped Frechette was good for it. After that I ate dinner in a restaurant and went to see a movie about a one-man army. I wondered if he was available.

  The barn was just visible from the road, a moonlit square at the end of a pair of ruts cut through weeds two feet high. It was a chill night in early spring and had on a light coat and the heater running. I entered a dip that cut off my view of the barn, then bucked up over a ridge and had to stand the Chevy on its nose when the lamps fell on a telephone pole lying across the path. A second later the passenger’s door opened and Leo got in.

  He had on a mackinaw over his overalls and a plaid cap. His right hand was wrapped around a large-bore revolver and he kept it on me, held tight to his stomach, while he felt under my coat and came up with the Luger. “Drive.” He pocketed it.

  I swung around the end of the pole and braked in front of the barn, where Ma was standing with a Coleman lantern. She was wearing a man’s felt hat and a corduroy coat with sleeves that came down to her fingers. She signaled a cranking motion and I rolled down the window.

  “Well, park it around back,” she said. “I got to think for you, too?”

  I did that and Leo and I walked back. He handed Ma the Luger and she looked at it and put it in her pocket. She raised the lantern then and swung it from side to side twice.

  We waited a few minutes, then were joined by six feet and two hundred and fifty pounds of red-bearded young man in faded denim jacket and jeans carrying a rifle with an infrared scope. He had come from the direction of the road.

  “Anybody following, Mason?” asked Ma.

  He shook his head, and I stared at him in the lantern light. He had small black eyes like Ma’s with no shine in them. This would be Mace Chaney, for whom the FBI was combing the western states for the Kansas armored car robbery.

  “Go on in and warm yourself,” Ma said. “We got some time.”

  He opened the barn door and went inside. It had just closed when two headlamps appeared down the road. We watched them approach and slow for a turn onto the path. Ma, lighting a cigarette off the lantern, grunted.

  “Early. Young folks all got watches and they can’t tell time.” Leo trotted out to intercept the car. A door slammed. After a pause the lamps swung around the fallen telephone pole and came up to the barn, washing us all in white. The driver killed the lamps and engine and got out. He was a small man in his early twenties with short brown hair and stubble on his face. His flannel shirt and khaki pants were both in need of cleaning. He had scant eyebrows that were almost invisible in that light, giving him a perennially surprised look. I’d seen that look in Frechette’s Houston Chronicle and in both Detroit papers.

  “Who’s he?” He was looking at me.

  I had a story for that, but Ma piped up. “You ain’t paying to ask no questions. Got the money?”


  “Not all of it. A thousand’s all Suzie could get from the sharks.”

  “The deal’s two thousand.”

  “Keep the P-38. The shotgun’s all I need.”

  Ma had told me twenty-five hundred; but I was barely listening to the conversation. Leo had gotten out on the passenger side, pulling with him the girl in the photograph in my pocket. Suzie Frechette had done up her black hair in braids, and she’d lost weight, but her dark eyes and coloring were unmistakable. With that hairstyle and in a man’s work shirt and jeans and boots with western heels she looked more like an Indian than she did in her picture.

  Leo opened the door and we went inside. The barn hadn’t been used for its original purpose for some time, but the smell of moldy hay would remain as long as it stood. It was lit by a bare bulb swinging from a frayed cord and heated by a barrel stove in a corner. Stacks of cardboard cartons reached almost to the rafters, below which Mace Chaney sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the empty loft, the rifle across his knees.

  Ma reached into an open carton and lifted out a pump shotgun with the barrel cut back to the slide. Boyd stepped forward to take it. She swung the muzzle on him. “Show me some paper.” He hesitated then drew a thick fold of bills from his shirt pocket and laid it on a stack of cartons. Then she moved to cover me. Boyd watched me add thirty-five hundred to the pile. “What’s he buying?”

  Ma said, “You.”

  “Cop!” He lunged for the shotgun. Leo’s revolver came out. Mace drew a bead on Boyd from the loft. He relaxed.

  I was looking at Suzie. “I’m a private detective hired by your father. He wants to talk to you.”

  “He’s here?” She touched Boyd’s arm.

  He tensed. “It’s a damn cop trick!”

  “You’re smarter than that,” I said. “You had to be, to pull those two jobs and make your way here with every cop between here and Texas looking for you. If I were one, would I be alone?”

  “Do your jabbering outside.” Ma reversed ends on the shotgun for Boyd to take. He did so and worked the slide. “Where’s the shells?”

  “That’s your headache. I don’t keep ammo in this firetrap.” That was a lie or some of those cartons wouldn’t be labeled C-4 EXPLOSIVES. But you don’t sell loaded guns to strangers. Suzie said, “Virgil, you never load them anyway.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Your father’s on his way,” I said. “Ten minutes, that’s all he wants.”

  “Come on.” Boyd took her wrist.

  “Stay put.”

  This was a new voice. Everyone looked at Leo, standing in front of the door with his gun still out.

  “Leo, what in the hell—”

  “Ma, the Luger.”

  She shut her mouth and took my gun out of her right coat pocket and put it on the carton with the money. Then she backed away.

  “Throw ’er down, Mace.” He covered the man in the loft, who froze in the act of raising the rifle. They were like that for a moment.

  “Mason,” Ma said.

  His shoulders slumped. He snapped on the safety and dropped the rifle eight feet to the earthen floor.

  “You, too, Mr. Forty Thousand Dollar inward,” Leo said. “Even empty guns give me the jumps.”

  Boyd cast the shotgun onto the stack of cartons with a violent gesture.

  “That’s nice. I cut that money in half if I got to put a hole in you.”

  “That reward talk’s just PR,” I said. “Even if you get Boyd to the cops they’ll probably arrest you, too, for dealing in unlicensed firearms.”

  “Like hell. I’m through getting bossed around by fat old ladies. Let’s go, Mr. Steward.”

  “No!” screamed Suzie.

  An explosion slapped the walls. Leo’s brows went up, his jaw dropping to expose the wad of pink gum in his mouth. He looked down at the spreading stain on the bib of his overalls and fell down on top of his gun. He kicked once.

  Ma was standing with a hand in her left coat pocket. A finger of smoking metal poked out of a charred hole. “Dadgum it, Leo,” she said, “this coat belonged to my Calvin, rest his soul.”

  I was standing in front of the Log Cabin Inn’s deserted office when Frechette swung a rented Ford into the broken paved driveway. He unfolded himself from the seat and loomed over me.

  “I don’t think anyone followed me,” he said. “I took a couple of wrong turns to make sure.”

  “There won’t be any interruptions then. The place has been closed a long time.”

  I led him to one of the log bungalows in back. Boyd’s Plymouth, stolen from the same lot where he’d left the van, was parked alongside it facing out. We knocked before entering.

  All of the furniture had been removed except a metal bedstead with sagging springs. The lantern we had borrowed from Ma Chaney hung hissing from one post. Suzie was standing next to it. “Papa.” She didn’t move. Boyd came out of the bathroom with the shotgun. The Indian took root.

  “Man said you had money for us,” Boyd said.

  “It was the only way I could get him to bring Suzie here,” I told Frechette.

  “I won’t pay to have my daughter killed in a shootout.”

  “Lying bastard!” Boyd swung the shotgun my way. Frechette backhanded him, knocking him back into the bathroom. I stepped forward and tore the shotgun from Boyd’s weakened grip.

  “Empty,” I said. “But it makes a good club.”

  Suzie had come forward when Boyd fell. Frechette stopped her with an arm like a railroad gate. “Take Dillinger for a walk while I talk to my daughter,” he said to me.

  I stuck out a hand, but Boyd slapped it aside and got up. His right eye was swelling shut. He looked at the Indian towering a foot over him, then at Suzie, who said, “It’s all right. I’ll talk to him.”

  We went out. A porch ran the length of the bungalow. I leaned the shotgun against the wall and trusted my weight to the railing. “I hear you got a raw deal from Texas Federal.”

  “My old man did.” He stood with his hands rammed deep in his pockets, watching the pair through the window. “He asked for a two-month extension on his mortgage payment, just till he brought in his crop. Everyone gets extensions. Except when Texas Federal wants to sell the ranch to a developer. He met the ’dozers with a shotgun. Then he used it on himself.”

  “That why you use one?”

  “I can’t kill a jackrabbit. It used to burn up my old man.”

  “You’d be out in three years if you turned yourself in.”

  “To you, right? Let you collect that reward.” He was still looking through the window. Inside, father and daughter were gesturing at each other frantically.

  “I didn’t say to me. You’re big enough to walk into a police station by yourself.”

  “You don’t know Texas Federal. They’d hire their own prosecutor, see I got life, make an example. I’ll die first.”

  “Probably, the rate you’re going.”

  He whirled on me. The parked Plymouth caught his eye. “Just who the hell are you? And why’d you—” He jerked his chin toward the car.

  I got out J. P. Ahearn’s card and gave it to him. His face lost color.

  “You work for that headhunter?”

  “Not in this life. But in a little while I’m going to call that number from the telephone in that gas station across the road.” He lunged for the door. I was closer and got in his way. “I don’t know how you got this far with a head that hot,” I said. “For once in your young life listen. You might get to like it.”

  He listened.

  “This is Commander Ahearn! I know you’re in there, Boyd. I got a dozen men here and if you don’t come out we’ll shoot up the place!”

  Neither of us had heard them coming, and with the moon behind a cloud the thin, bitter voice might have come from anywhere. This time Boyd won the race to the door. He had the reflexes of a deer.

  “Kill the light!” I barked to Frechette. “Ahearn beat me to it. He must have followed you after all.”
r />   We were in darkness suddenly. Boyd and Suzie had their arms around each other. “We’re cornered,” he said. “Why didn’t that old lady have shells for that gun?”

  “We just have to move faster, that’s all. Keep him talking. Give me a hand with this window.” The last was for Frechette, who came over and worked his big fingers under the swollen frame. “There’s a woman in here!” Boyd shouted.

  “Come on out and no one gets hurt!” Ahearn sounded wired. The window gave with a squawking wrench.

  “One minute, Boyd. Then we start blasting!”

  I hoped it was enough. I slipped out over the sill.

  “The car! Get it!”

  The Plymouth engine turned over twice in the cold before starting. The car rolled forward and began picking up speed down the incline toward the road. Just then the moon came out, illuminating the man behind the wheel, and the night came apart like mountain ice breaking up, cracking and splitting with the staccato rap of handgun fire and the deeper boom of riot guns. Orange flame scorched the darkness. Slugs whacked the car’s sheet metal and shattered the windshield. Then a red glow started to spread inside the vehicle and fists of yellow flame battered out the rest of the windows with a whump that shook the ground. The car rolled for a few more yards while the shooters, standing now and visible in the light of the blaze, went on pouring lead into it until it came to a stop against a road sign. The flame towered twenty feet above the crackling wreckage.

  I approached Ahearn, standing in the overgrown grass with his shotgun dangling, watching the car burn. He jumped a little when I spoke. His glasses glowed orange.

  “He made a dash, just like you wanted.”

  “If you think I wanted this, you don’t know me,” he said. “Save it for the Six O’Clock News.”

  “What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Friend of the family. Can I take the Frechettes home, or do you want to eat them here?”

  He cradled the shotgun. “We’ll just go inside together.”

  We found Suzie sobbing in her father’s arms. The Indian glared at Ahearn. “Get the hell out of here.”

  “He was a desperate man,” Ahearn said. “You’re lucky the girl’s alive.”