“I guess they didn’t expect you to find out, Al.”
Al seemed lost in brooding thought for a long minute. He sighed. “I got to stop kidding myself about there being any other way of handling a thing like this.”
“How will you handle it?”
Al grinned without mirth. “You got yourself into this sideways, kid. This has tired us both out.” He looked at his watch. “We need a rest. Use all the pressure you got to get us a couple of airplane tickets for tonight, to two different places. Set me up for El Paso, and get me out of here before midnight, and make it a round-trip first class. Get a reservation to come back, say, next Sunday. Better make it for two people. I’ll take a broad along. I got friends there, and they’re going to see a lot of me. You take your choice where you go, kid, but stay at least until Sunday, and if you got friends you can move in with, it’s good policy. Phone me the word soon as you line up the tickets.”
“Okay.”
“I like the way you don’t start asking questions. This is like an impulse, kid. I don’t even get time to say good-bye to anybody, not to any of my old buddies.”
“You haven’t proved that Max.…”
“He’d have to be in it. It’ll be checked out. Everybody gets every break, Darren. I’m a very fair guy. I’m very warm hearted. For old friends I’ll do one big favor. I’ll put in the request it don’t hurt.”
Al Marta picked up the money and dropped it into a desk drawer. He hesitated, then flipped one bundle into Hugh’s lap. “Wherever you go, buy yourself a big week, kid.”
“Thanks. Is there anything else I can.…”
Al sat down. “Now you can just get out. Thanks for everything. I am a guy who always likes the action, and I like a lot of people around, having fun, laughing it up. But right now for one time I am going to sit right here all by myself for a little while.”
Just as Hugh pulled the door shut as he left the small study, he caught an incredulous glimpse of tears shining and quivering on thick black lashes.
The newspapers, television and radio and, a little later, the news magazines hit the incident heavily—as though the men who edited the news realized that it would never be a continuing story, that nothing else would ever be discovered to keep it alive. An itinerant laborer spotted the gray sedan at dawn next to the main highway, just twelve miles west of Phoenix, Arizona, on a Friday morning, the fifteenth day of July. The car had California plates and was later identified as having been stolen in Los Angeles the previous Wednesday noon. It had been driven off the shoulder and parked behind a fringe of small trees.
The three men sat in the back seat, wedged upright by their own bulk, with wrists, ankles and mouths bound with wide surgical tape. Their three heads were bowed. In each forehead, almost perfectly on center in each case, was a single dark hole, ringed by powder burns. There was no identification on the bodies, and all surfaces on the sedan that could have taken fingerprints had been wiped clean.
The autopsies disclosed a misshapen .32-caliber pellet deep in the torn brain tissue of each body. Aside from the fatal wounds, there were no marks of violence on the bodies. The autopsies disclosed the presence of alcohol and barbiturates in sufficient quantity to have rendered the three men helpless, if not unconscious, at the time of death.
The routine check on the fingerprints taken from the bodies and relayed to the Central Files of the FBI identified the three men as Maxwell Hanes, Harold Charm and Dillard “Gidge” Allen.
All three men had criminal records, and it was soon learned that all of them had been connected in one way or another with the Cameroon Hotel in Las Vegas. When Al Marta was located and questioned about these men, he said that to the best of his knowledge the three of them had left Las Vegas together on Tuesday night en route to Los Angeles to investigate personally some sort of investment proposition in which they all seemed to be interested. Marta told the reporters that it had evidently turned out to be a bad investment. The reporters laughed. Al Marta was a very funny man.
• • • fourteen
The blue shadows of the late September dusk had begun to stretch across the flatlands of Texas.
There was a wind-beaten porch along the west side of the old ranch house, and Homer Gallowell sat there with the black hat tilted to shade his eyes, wearing a wool shirt and stained work pants, the heels of his riding boots hooked onto the railing, his chair tilted back precariously.
“So what did you do about your own job?” Homer asked.
Hugh Darren sat lean on the railing, his back braced against a pillar. He sipped his drink slowly. “I don’t know why I had to give a damn about the hotel. But I’d put a lot of thought and time into it. I’d put a good staff together. And so—when it was all finished—that thing we had to do—I knew I had to stay around for at least a month and work along with the new people who came in. But I thought I’d just put in time.”
“But you couldn’t do that?”
“No. Hell, I had to get things back on the track. My gestapo technique did a lot of damage, Homer. I weeded out all those bad apples. I had no more use for them. I made my peace with the top people on my staff, who just couldn’t figure out what had happened to me. Ladori, Trabe, Welch, Sanderson, Rice. Decent, capable folk. Maybe I owed them that final effort. It took more than a month. When I left, three days ago, it was a good, tight operation, just about ready to show the first operating profit on the hotel, food and liquor end since the place was built.”
“Where do you go from here, son?”
“I couldn’t say, Homer. Everything I own in the world is in two suitcases, if you don’t count that car out there. I’ve got more money in hand than I’ve ever had before, and I was piling it up to use for a special purpose, but that little dream has gone sort of dead on me.”
“What’s the dream you were saving for?”
Hugh explained it all, and then said, “Nothing is going to be any good without her, I guess. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever. Right now I’m sick of people. I’m sick of hotels. I’d go crazy trying to loaf, and I have the feeling I ought to work with my hands. Can your empire offer me some brute labor, Homer?”
“Get you something real different if you want a big change in your life. Put you on an oil rig out in the Gulf, boy. It’s good money and it’ll either toughen you complete, or kill you dead.”
Hugh thought it over. “Sounds about right, if you mean it.”
“Gave up saying things I don’t mean long ago. I got to talk to Gulfport in the morning. I’ll fix it then.”
“Thanks.”
“When you got enough of it, you come on back here and we’ll talk about that Peppercorn Cay of yours. It might look better to you, say, by next year this time.”
“It might. Right now I couldn’t say.”
The two men sat in a long silence watching the slow violent explosion of the sunset.
“We did it,” Homer said. “Just the right combination, you and me, each needing just what the other feller could provide to get the job done. Maybe it don’t make her rest any easier way off there in San Francisco next to her maw and her daddy, but it sure makes me grin like a snake.”
“Your idea of how to work Beaver’s death into the story I told Al was what made it work.”
“All my life I been good at thinking up the stories men are likely to listen careful to. But it was you had to make it sound just right, or you’d be long dead by now. You know, there’s just one thing wrong with the whole business, son. It’s like missing the best part of it. I don’t so much mind those other fellers not knowing why their life was over, or knowing it was you and me cooked them on account of what they done to Miz Betty. But I sure wish that top man, that Al Marta, could have knowed.”
“I think he did know, Homer.”
“Now how the hell could he know?”
“Because he had time to realize that what was happening to him was just another variation on what had happened to the others. And he got it in the spine, so he was a long ti
me dying—maybe longer than what they planned for him. It would have given him time to tie me into it. He would remember letting me know the name of the man he reported to, the man responsible for all operations on the West Coast.”
“What did you say in the note you sent that man, son?”
“I wrote it over and over until it sounded right, and then I printed it, using a ruler. I said something like ‘Al had my man Beaver and those others killed to shut them up, because he was in it too. Before they killed him, Beaver told me Al keeps getaway money in a coin locker at the airport. The key is taped to the underside of the middle drawer of his desk. He is a dirty thief and murderer and he had my man killed’ And so on. A woman after revenge.”
“It worked just fine, son.”
“I was very unsure about it. I was afraid Al would talk too fast and make too much sense, and be too well trusted. But now I think I know a couple of reasons why it worked. When they checked it out and found that cash in the locker, there was enough of it to numb their minds. Thirty thousand, Homer. Because I donated the five he’d given me in return for exposing the others.
“But suppose it didn’t daze them enough so they swallowed the story whole? Suppose they figured it as a plant, a frame-up?” Hugh said. “Would it have mattered too much? Al was losing control of the operation. They knew that the men closest to him had crossed him. They all give high points to this love and loyalty and old-buddy bit, but there is no such thing as firing any executive personnel. There’s just one way to get rid of a top man. The decision was made and they had a job to do, so there was no reason to give Al time for any summit conference.”
“I read about how they found him in that ditch,” the old man said.
“He had time to think about it, Homer. They tumbled him out into a deep ditch not far from Riverside, California. When the body was found they saw how stubbornly he had clawed at the wall of that ditch, trying to pull himself up so one of the passing motorists might see him in the headlights.”
The two men sat in the silence of the evening, in the changing light as the afterglow of the sun diminished.
Hugh thought: That night while Al was dying, and tonight too, it is all just the same back there. The cabs are bringing the marks in from McCarran Field to fill up the twelve thousand bedrooms. At all the places in the gaudy roster of the Strip—El Rancho, Sahara, Mozambique, Stardust, Riviera, the D.I., Sands, Flamingo, Tropicana, Dunes, Cameroon, T’Bird, Hacienda, New Frontier—the pit bosses are watching all the money machines. Smoke, shadows, colors, sweat, music, the bare shoulders of lovely women, the posturings of the notorious—and that unending, indescribable, clattering roar of tension and money. I shall never see it again, but I will always know it is going on, without pause or mercy, all the days and nights of my life.
The old man sighed and said, “Wish that damn woman would ring for supper.”
Just as he sighed again, they heard the clang of the triangle calling all hands. The sun was gone; the long land was purple dark. They stood up together and went into the old house where the smiling Mexican woman awaited them. The screen door slapped shut behind them as they walked into the orange glow of the lights.
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
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