by Bill Crider
MURDER TAKES A BREAK
Bill Crider
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
© 2012 / Bill Crider
Copy-edited by: Daz Pulsford
Cover Design By: David Dodd
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OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS PRODUCTS BY BILL CRIDER
Novels:
Dead on the Island (Truman Smith, Book 1)
Gator Kill (Truman Smith, Book 2)
When Old Men Die (Truman Smith, Book 3)
Westerns:
A Time for Hanging
Medicine Show
Ryan Rides Back
Horror (writing as Jack MacLane):
Blood Dreams
Goodnight MooM
Just Before Dark
Keepers of the Beast
Rest in Peace
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CONTENTS
Murder Takes a Break
Cap'n Bob & Gus a Bill Crider Bonus story from the "The Nighttime is the Right Time"
Shadder – a bonus story by Tom Piccirilli from "Futile Efforts"
1
Randall Kirbo had come to Galveston in March for spring break. That had been nine months ago, and no one in his family had seen him since. As far as they knew, no one else had seen him, either. And now they wanted me to find him.
I didn't want to take the job. I used to do things like that for a living, but that was before my own sister had disappeared. You could say I'd found her, in a sense, but it had been far too late to do her any good.
And then there was the time I'd tried to find Dino's daughter. I'd found her, all right, but the less said about all that had happened then, the better, at least as far as I was concerned.
After that little bit of unpleasantness, I'd sort of given up my profession.
Dino thought it was time for me to take it up again. It wasn't the first time he'd asked.
"It's like a personal favor, Tru," he said. "You know I hate to ask you, but there it is."
He didn't hate to ask me at all, but he probably felt he had to say so.
"Let's see," I said. "The last time you asked me to do something; you said there was nothing to it. Just an old high school friend of ours who needed a little investigation done. But it didn't work out quite that way, did it?"
"Hey," Dino said. "That wasn't my fault. I thought it was just about some dead bird."
"Prairie chicken," I told him.
"Whatever. A bird's a bird, right?"
"Wrong," I said, but I didn't elaborate. I didn't figure that Dino wanted to hear a lecture on endangered species. "And you were wrong about the job, too. I wound up getting shot at and beat up and — "
Dino raised a hand to stop me. "OK, OK, you win. It was a mistake for you to get involved. But it'll be different this time."
He stopped and waited for me to say something. So I said, "You forgot to say 'trust me.'"
"Trust me," he said, with what might have been an honest attempt to look sincere.
"I feel a lot better already," I told him. "You want something to drink?"
We were in the living room of my house, which actually belonged to Dino. He was just letting me live there. I was sitting on my couch, which had been a really nice one in about 1956. Dino was in a chair that might have been a little newer, but not much. I got most of my furniture at garage sales.
"Not Big Red," Dino said. "Somebody told me that if you spill that stuff on a carpet, you can never get the stains out. No matter what you use."
Big Red was what I drank, and Dino was convinced that it was going to eat through my stomach lining any day now. He didn't much like the way it tasted, either, and now he was glancing around to see if there were any suspicious stains on the furniture. There were plenty, but it would be hard to say exactly what caused them.
"I don't usually have guests," I told him. "So Big Red's about all I have on hand."
"You got any ginger ale?"
"You drank the last of it."
"That was months ago."
"Well, if you'd come out more often, I'd keep a bigger supply."
Dino didn't push it. His uncles had practically been the barons of Galveston Island years before, back in the days when you could go out on the long pier to The Island Retreat and drop your silver in their slot machines, watch the little clickety balls bounce around their roulette wheels, or lose as much as you could stand at blackjack.
But hurricanes had shortened the pier, the Texas Rangers had dumped the slots into the Bay, The Island Retreat was closed, and Dino wasn't like his uncles. He preferred to stay in his house, which didn't even have a view of the water, and watch infomercials on TV.
"I don't get out much," he said. He was a master of understatement. "But I'm getting better at it."
That was true. He'd gotten together with Evelyn Matthews, the mother of his daughter, after a lapse of a lot of years, and she'd done wonders for him. He wasn't going to win the Outdoorsman of the Year award, but he wasn't spending all his waking minutes inside any more. Most of them, yes, but not all.
"How about some water?" I asked.
"Water would be OK." He looked around the room. "Where's Nameless?"
Nameless was my cat. Or the cat who lived with me. You couldn't really say he was mine. He didn't belong to anybody other than himself.
"He's outside," I said. "Did you think he'd come to welcome you?"
Dino looked hurt. "I think he's beginning to like me."
"Maybe," I said, but I didn't think so.
For that matter, I didn't think Nameless really liked anybody. He liked chasing the little geckos that lived in the oleander bushes that surrounded the house, and he liked having his head rubbed now and then. And eating. He liked eating more than just about anything. But I wasn't sure he had ever developed a real attachment to anyone human, even to me, and I was the one who provided his food.
I got off the couch and went into the kitchen to get the water. I decided I'd have water, too. Maybe Dino was right about my stomach lining. I took a plastic ice tray out of the refrigerator's freezer compartment and twisted it until the ice loosened up. Then I put four or five cubes in two glasses and filled them from the tap.
"Tastes great," Dino said when I gave him his glass and he'd taken a swallow.
"It's just water."
"Yeah." He took another drink. "But it's good water."
I looked at him. "You going to talk about how great the water is, or are you going to tell me some more about this personal favor you want me to do?"
He put his glass on the low wooden coffee table. The glass was beaded with moisture, and it would probably leave a ring, but that would be all right. There were plenty of other rings there to keep it company.
"You still look for people, right?"
"No. I don't look for people. You know that."
"Well, what you do is practically the same thing."
"No, it's not."
What I did now was all done right there in the house, with a computer. I did background checks, mostly. It's easy, and it's profitabl
e. I run a little ad in the classified section of the Houston Chronicle, and I get plenty of calls from women who want to find out about the men they're dating, from businessmen who're considering hiring someone but who aren't quite sure about the resumè they've been given, from fathers who wonder about the guy who's been seeing their daughters.
If you ever sent in one of the little warranty cards that came with your new toaster or your new hair dryer, you're in a data base somewhere, and I can find you.
Or if you've played around on the Internet and ordered one of those free CD-ROMs that car companies and state governments offer you, you've probably provided all kinds of information that I can get to.
If you have a telephone with a listed number, I can get the number and your address in a few seconds.
Credit checks are just as simple if you know what you're doing, and I do. I worked for a bail bondsman for a while, and I learned a few tricks. I can even find out where you've used your credit card or an ATM.
If you're trying to hide something, it might take me a little longer to find out about you, but eventually I'll get there. Not everyone knows it, but thanks to the Information Superhighway, personal privacy is pretty much a thing of the past.
But checking on people the way I do is nothing like going out and actually looking for someone that no one else can find, and Dino knows it. He also knows very well why I don't like doing it the hard way anymore.
"OK," he admitted. "It's not the same thing. But it's close. And like I said, this would be a personal favor."
"For you, or for someone else?"
"For me."
"But you're asking for someone else."
"Right."
"Why?"
"Well, see, Tack Kirbo's a sort of an old friend."
"What kind of friend?"
"From college. I guess you don't remember him. We played football together."
I felt a twinge, but I didn't say anything. Dino knew what I was thinking, though.
"The knee doing OK these days?" he asked.
Dino had practically destroyed my knee with his helmet when he'd tackled me just as I was about to break away for a long run. On a beautiful fall day, he'd ended what most sportswriters thought was a great football career that was going to become even greater when I turned pro.
What had happened hadn't been Dino's fault, but he couldn't quite get over the idea that it was.
"The knee's fine," I lied. "But I don't remember Kirbo. What position did he play?"
"He was mostly a back-up. Played tight end. No reason you'd remember him."
"But you do."
"Sure. We were pretty good buddies in those days."
"And now he's lost his kid."
"Right. And the cops can't find him. No one can find him. I thought you might give it a try."
"As a personal favor. Sort of like when I looked for Outside Harry."
Outside Harry was a local character that Dino had developed an attachment to. He'd disappeared not so long ago, and Dino had asked me to find him. I did, but not before nearly getting killed three or four times.
"That was different," Dino said. You knew that might be dangerous."
"Sure I did."
"Tack would pay you, if that's what you're worried about."
"I'm not talking about money."
"You can be a real bastard sometimes, Tru."
I smiled. "You're only saying that because you like me."
"Fat chance. Will you do it or not?"
I thought about it. The people were missing their son, and while I didn't think I could help them, it wouldn't do any harm to talk to them. Or that's what I thought at the time.
"I'll talk to the Kirbos," I said. "As a personal favor."
Dino smiled. "I'd appreciate it," he said.
2
You can never be sure what kind of weather to expect on Galveston Island in the winter. In 1886, so the story goes, the temperature dropped to somewhere near zero, and the bay froze to a depth of two and a half inches.
The day Dino drove me to see Tack Kirbo was different. According to the television news I'd seen a day or so earlier, it was snowing in New England and upstate New York. In Seattle, there was a cold, drenching rain. The Midwest was freezing, and ice covered the highways.
But in Galveston, it was a lot like springtime, seventy degrees, a deep blue sky with not a cloud in sight, and a strong southerly breeze the whipped the gray-green Gulf of Mexico into second-rate whitecaps.
Gulls swooped and dipped over the waves as if some kid were pulling them on kite strings. Out near the horizon, oil rigs squatted over the water, and a tanker seemed painted on the sky.
I lived on the west end of the Island, and Dino hadn't wanted to drive along the seawall, but I'd insisted. He preferred to stay in his house, and if he had to get out of it, he wanted to get as far from the water as possible. But the Kirbos were staying in the Galvez Hotel, which is right on Seawall Boulevard. There was no use to go out of our way to avoid seeing the Gulf.
A girl in a skimpy halter top and tight cut-off jeans was skimming along the top of the wall on a pair of in-line skates. She had long legs, a blonde pony tail that hung out from under her safety helmet, and skin the color of almonds.
"Aren't you glad you came this way?" I said.
Dino didn't answer. He looked straight ahead as if he were having to concentrate on the traffic. There were only about four cars in sight.
"Want to stop and walk along one of the jetties?" I asked. "Have a look at the mural?"
The Gulf side of the seawall had been painted with what the tourist office was calling the world's longest mural between 25th and 61st streets: surfers, giant clams, fish, waves — all kinds of briney stuff like that.
Dino cut his eyes in my direction. "You're kidding me," he said.
"It might do you good. You could get a little sun."
"Sun gives you skin cancer. I don't need that."
I thought about the girl on the skates. Dino was right, and I hated to think what might happen to her in twenty or thirty years or so. On the other hand, Dino looked like a man who'd just returned to the free world after doing twenty years in solitary in one of the fine units of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The Pillsbury Dough Boy had as much color as he did. There had to be a reasonable compromise somewhere.
"How about that beach?" I said.
Dino didn't look. "It's not as big as it used to be," he said.
He was right about that, too, though the city had invested millions in widening the beachfront. The sand had been dredged off the bottom of the Gulf and pumped along the shore line. The sand had smelled like the bilge in a shrimp boat for a while, but before long the smell went away and the beach had been almost as wide as I remembered it from my childhood, before storms and tides had carried most of the sand out into the Gulf. But after only a couple of years the beach had begun shrinking again. Nothing stays the same.
Nothing, that is, except for the Galvez Hotel, all two hundred and fifty rooms of it. It's been sitting right there behind the seawall just across the street from the beach since 1911. There are some people who think the hotel is even older than that, that it survived the big storm of 1900, but it didn't. In fact, one of the reasons it was built was to help Galveston recover from the devastating economic effects of that storm.
It did survive the hurricane that roared out of the Gulf in 1915, however. That storm wasn't nearly as bad as the one fifteen years earlier, but it was bad enough to tear four-ton granite boulders out of the jetties and toss them over the seawall while dancers in the Galvez's ballroom swirled and turned as if they didn't have a care in the world.
The Galvez is a huge white building, a lot like one of those resort hotels that you see on old picture postcards, with palm trees and couples dressed all in white playing croquet on wide expanses of lawn. Lots of famous people have stayed there. Phil Harris and Alice Faye — remember them? — were married there, a long time ago.
The Galv
ez doesn't have much of a lawn, but there are palm trees, all right, except that today the trunks of the palm trees in front of the hotel were ringed from bottom to top with white Christmas lights. Christmas lights on palm trees had always struck me as pretty strange, but it didn't appear to bother anyone else as far as I could tell. Certainly not Dino, who didn't even seem to notice. He turned his big old Pontiac off Seawall Boulevard and pulled around to the back of the hotel to enter the parking lot.
He locked the car when we got out, and we walked past the BFI Dumpster to the back entrance. There were several chartered buses parked along the walk.
"Dickens on the Strand," Dino said.
I'd forgotten about that. Every year, one weekend early in December, there's a pseudo-Victorian Christmas celebration along The Strand, an area of restored buildings and shops near the docks. I've never participated in the festivities, and I was willing to bet that Dino hadn't, either. Plenty of tourists showed up for the fun, however, as the chartered buses, from San Antonio, Waco, and Dallas, proved.
We went through the doors and up the steps into the lobby, where there was a fifteen-foot-tall Christmas tree, decorated with gold ribbons and red balls. To our right were the elevators and the check-in desk, and on our left hand bells of all sizes lay atop a long table covered with a red cloth. A sign informed us that a hand bell choir would be playing in about an hour.
"Maybe we can finish up before they start," Dino said hopefully. "Or maybe we won't be able to hear them from the bar."
He wasn't exactly in the Christmas spirit, not unless you thought Ebenezer Scrooge was an appropriate role model.
I said, "The bar?"
"That's where Tack and his wife are meeting us."
"You were pretty sure of me, weren't you?"
"I figured you wouldn't turn down an old friend, even if you hadn't always had a great time doing me favors. And if you didn't want to help, I could always use a free drink. Tack can afford it."