Total Recall td-58

by Warren Murphy

  "We detest child killers," Chiun said.

  "Oh, yeah?" Palmer said. "How do you feel about someone who would kill his own parents while they were asleep?"

  "Was that proven?" Remo asked.

  "If you know anything about this case, you know that it never was, but it would have been if we had been able to get him to court. It's better this way, though."

  "Why?" Chiun asked.

  "Because somebody saved the city a lot of money by killing the little bastard, and I'm all for that."

  Remo stepped in before Chiun could reduce the detective to something less attractive than he already was.

  "My friend just doesn't like to see any child killed," he explained.

  "Child? Billy Martin wasn't a child," Palmer said, screwing up his already ugly face. It was a mass of bumps and creases that successfully disguised his age, which could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. "This was a snot-nosed little bastard with absolutely no regard for human life. He got what he deserved." He looked directly at Chiun and added, "You can tell your friend that."

  The detective turned and walked to the rear of the squad room, apparently finished talking with them, but Remo wasn't finished with him.

  "Chiun, wait for me here so I'll have a chance to get something useful out of him."

  Chiun snorted and studied the ceiling while Remo headed for the detective's desk.

  Palmer was already engrossed in paperwork when Remo approached him, but he looked up when Remo's shadow fell on his desk. "What's with your Chinese friend?" he asked. "Is he some kind of bleeding heart?"

  "He's not Chinese, he's Korean."

  Palmer shrugged and said, "Same thing."

  "Don't let him hear you say that," Remo warned. "He's even more sensitive about that than he is about child killing."

  Palmer looked past Remo at Chiun and said, "What the hell could he do?"

  "Let's not go into that now. I want to talk a little more about the Martin kid."

  Palmer sighed heavily and then said, "All right. I'll tell you another reason why I'm glad somebody chopped him up into little pieces."

  "Please do."

  "He was gonna get off."

  "You're assuming he was guilty."

  "Hell, man, I know he was guilty. He didn't make any secret of it."

  "He confessed?"

  "Not formally, but he didn't do much to deny it, either."

  "Then why was he going to get off?"

  "He was going to buy his way off by giving some information on something big he said was going down."

  "What?"

  Palmer shrugged and said, "He never got to it, but he claimed it was really big."

  "Any guesses?"

  "I don't deal in guesses, mister," the detective said, "I've got too many facts to juggle."

  "I guess you do. Can you tell who the lawyer was that bailed him out?"

  "What are you, a private dick or something?"

  "Something."

  "Hell, it's no skin off my nose," Palmer said. "Here." He wrote something on a pad, ripped off the top sheet, and handed it to Remo.

  "That's the guy. A loser. I still wonder where he got the money from."

  Remo took the slip of paper and said, "If I find out, I'll let you know."

  "Yeah, you do that," Palmer said. "You do that."

  Chiun was quiet during the ride to the lawyer's office, which made his pupil suspicious. "This is the place," Remo said, pulling up in front of the address Palmer had given him. "Weems. Harvey Weems. Sounds like someone who should be related to old Elmo Wimpler, remember, Chiun?"

  Chiun maintained a stony-faced silence, indicating to Remo that something was definitely going on inside his head.

  "Well, let's go and pay him a visit," he said, getting out of the car. Studying the building, he added, "Can't be the world's most successful lawyer, not if he's got his office in this dump."

  "You assume," Chiun said, and they'd been all through that before too.

  "I'm sorry, Little Father," Remo said. "I should not assume that a pig is a pig simply because it lives in a pigsty."

  Chiun declined to comment, which was just fine with Remo. He was hoping they'd find this "child killer" quickly just so Chiun would get off his soapbox.

  They went inside the four-story building and learned from the directory that Weems's office was on the fourth floor. In fact, it was the only occupied office on that floor, and one of only four occupied offices in the entire building.

  In the absence of an elevator, they began to climb the stairs, which seemed to be more a popular location for excretory functions than anything else. In fact, on the second landing they came across a man who was relieving his bladder in a corner, and Remo asked apprehensively, "You wouldn't be Harvey Weems, the attorney, would you?"

  "Shit, no," the man said, shaking off the last few drops and tucking himself away, "I'm Blackie Danelo, the brain surgeon." Giving Remo a disgusted look and Chiun a look of disbelief, the brain surgeon walked past them, descended to the first level, and exited to the street.

  Chiun gave Remo a glare that could charbroil a hamburger and preceded him up the remainder of the steps to the fourth level.

  "I just asked," Remo said, following.

  They scanned the doors on the fourth floor and finally found the one that read HARVEY WEEMS, AT OR EY-AT-AW.

  "This is it," Remo said. "At-or-ey at-aw."

  When Chiun did not even reply with a glare, Remo knocked on the door. When there was no immediate reply, he knocked a second time.

  "Try the doorknob," Chiun suggested as if talking to a child.

  "I was about to."

  Remo reached for the doorknob and found that it turned freely. He pushed the door open and peered inside the dark office.

  "Light," Chiun said.

  "Don't you just hate it when someone keeps telling you to do something a split second before you're about to do it anyway?" Remo asked nobody in particular. He flicked on the light and stepped into the room, which turned out to be an outer office with no windows. Across from them was another door, which presumably led to the at-or-ey's office.

  "Let's see if he's in there," Remo said.

  "Someone is," Chiun said.

  "Oh?"

  "You do not smell it?"

  Remo stopped and sniffed the air, and damned if he didn't smell it. Blood, sharp and acrid, accompanied by the odor of death. Somebody was in there, all right, and whoever it was wasn't about to open the door for them— or anybody.

  He walked across the room and opened the door. The room was dimly lit by a shaft of light coming through the lone window. He switched on the light, knowing what he would find.

  There was blood everywhere, on the walls, the floor, the desk, the window. The body was not immediately noticeable, which meant it had to be behind the desk.

  Three long strides across the room confirmed his guess.

  "Whew" he said, "looks like the blade men got here ahead of us."

  Chiun came over to examine the body, which had been hacked almost to pieces.

  "Weems," he said.

  "Maybe," Remo said. "Are you assuming?"

  "I do not assume," Chiun said stiffly, "I employ logic. This is Weems's office, Weems's desk—"

  "And that makes it Weems? That's logic."

  Chiun closed his eyes and continued. "This man has his jacket and shoes off. The jacket is on the back of the desk chair, and the shoes are underneath the desk. Who else would make himself that comfortable?"

  Remo shrugged and said, "Maybe you're right."

  "Get his wallet."

  Remo checked the jacket on the back of the chair, and when that did not yield a wallet, he checked the dead man's pants, coming up with a faded brown leather billfold.

  "Driver's license," he said, extracting same from the wallet. Reading the name on the license aloud, he said, "Harvey Weems." He put the license away, replaced the wallet, and said, "And I'm Dr. Watson."

  "This man cannot hel
p us."

  "Good observation."

  "We must, however, determine why he was killed."

  "I'll bite. Why was he killed?"

  "He knew something."

  "Ah."

  Chiun looked at the top of the desk and noticed a pad with some writing on it. A large dollar figure inside a heart, and a smaller figure next to it. Also the words "phone" and "man's voice" scribbled on the pad.

  "There," Chiun said, pointing.

  Remo looked at the pad and said, "The larger figure is the amount of the bail."

  "And the smaller?"

  "Ten percent," Remo said. "Probably his fee for posting the bail."

  "And the words?"

  Remo read them, then said, "He got his instructions from a man's voice over the phone. This guy didn't know who went for the bail."

  "Perhaps he did," Chiun said, "and he was not supposed to."

  "And that's why he was killed?"

  "A possibility."

  "A good one," Remo admitted grudgingly. "You may out-Holmes Holmes yet, Chiun."

  "I do not know this Holmes you refer to, but that is no matter. It is a reasonable assumption that this man discovered who had supplied the bail, and either that information or what he tried to do with it got him killed."

  "Blackmail?"

  "A possibility."

  "Then whoever killed the kid killed him as well," Remo said, quickly adding, "I'm not assuming, mind you."

  "No, simply stating another possibility," Chiun said.

  "Right," Remo said. "I guess we might as well take a look around… see if we can find anything helpful."

  Remo started going through the dead man's desk while Chiun simply strolled about the room, looking at nothing but seeing everything.

  Remo finally found something useful in the top drawer of a file cabinet, the only drawer that wasn't empty.

  "This guy wasn't exactly overburdened with cases," he said, pulling out the case files. Sifting through them, he came up with one on Billy Martin.

  "A file," he said.

  "Containing what?"

  He opened it and found some newspaper clippings and one sheet of paper. On the paper was what appeared to be the kid's home address.

  "This must be the scene of the crime," Remo said, holding the paper up.

  "The child's address," Chiun said. Every time he called the Martin kid a "child," Remo actually winced.

  "Yeah, the kid's address," he said, dropping the folder on the desk. "I guess we'd better try there next."

  He closed the folder and then replaced it in the drawer.

  "After we leave, I'll find a pay phone…." Remo started to say, but then he had second thoughts.

  "Yes?" Chiun asked, giving him an arched eyebrow.

  "If we call the cops, they'll be looking for us because Palmer knows we came here. We'll have to avoid that as long as possible."

  "We will go directly to the child's house," Chiun said. "Perhaps there we can find something that will help me avenge his untimely death and prevent the deaths of other children."

  Remo didn't quite agree with Chiun's reasoning, but at least they agreed on what their next move should be.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Using a map supplied by the rental agency, Remo finally located the neighborhood where the kid's house was. Remo was surprised because he was expecting a slum. What he found was a better-than-middle-class section of town and a nice, neat, expensive house with an equally expensive car in the driveway.

  "Not what I expected," he said, stopping the car behind the expensive model.

  "Do not expect anything, and you will never be disappointed," Chiun said.

  "Right," Remo said. "Let's take a look."

  As they started up the walk of the house, a neighbor came out of the house next door and stared at them. The neighbor was a small man with a hangdog look on his face, who looked to be in his mid-fifties. Remo just knew that there was an overbearing, money-grubbing wife in the house somewhere.

  "Hello," Remo said.

  "Hello. If you're looking for the people who live in that house, you're not going to find them."

  At least we don't have to try and get him to talk, Remo thought.

  "Oh? Why is that?"

  "They're dead."

  "Dead? How did that happen?"

  "Don't you read the papers?"

  "We're from out of town," Remo said.

  The man looked past Remo at Chiun and then confided, "I would have guessed that about him."

  "You're very observant."

  "That's what everyone tells me."

  "You probably know more about what happened here than I could have found out by reading the papers anyway."

  "You're right."

  "So what happened?"

  "The kid, Billy, he went crazy and killed them."

  "Who?"

  "His parents. He beat them to death with a tire iron while they were asleep."

  "That's awful."

  "It sure is, but nobody around here was really surprised about it."

  "Why not?"

  The man shrugged and said, "He was just that kind of kid, you know? See that car in the driveway?"

  "Expensive machine," Remo said.

  "That was the kid's. He drove it all the time, and he wasn't even old enough to drive."

  "Is that right?"

  "On top of it all, he had friends who did the same thing, you know. Drove expensive cars even though they weren't old enough to have licenses. And they were over all the time."

  "I see. How long did the Martins live here?"

  "Actually, they only moved in a couple of months ago. I think the father— Allan, his name was— got a raise or something from the company he worked for."

  "What company was that?"

  "An automobile company, what else? I think it was National Motors. Yeah, that's it."

  "He must have gotten a large raise."

  The neighbor made a face. "Nah, they were flashing more money than he could have gotten just from a raise."

  "You noticed that, did you?"

  "How could I help it, what with that car and all? Maybe they came into an inheritance or something."

  "I guess that's possible."

  "Especially since they paid cash for the house."

  "That is a lot of money to flash," Remo agreed, wondering if there was anything this man didn't know. Maybe he'd ask him who killed the kid.

  "So you don't really know where all the money came from, then?" he asked.

  "Hey, I'm not nosy."

  "I can see that," Remo said. "Just observant."

  "Right, that's what everybody says."

  That's because they're too polite to say "nosy," Remo thought.

  "So what happened to the son after he murdered his parents?" Remo asked.

  "That's the funny part," the neighbor said, and Remo could feel Chiun stiffen behind him.

  "Funny?" Remo said.

  "Yeah. You see, the police arrested him, and a judge let him out on bail. Less than an hour later, Billy Martin was dead. Somebody killed him."'

  "Really? That must have been a shock."

  "Especially to him," the man said, and then laughed at his own joke. Remo just hoped that Chiun would be able to keep himself under control.

  "So now they're all dead," Remo said.

  "Looks that way."

  "Daaa-vid!" a woman's voice called from inside the neighbor's house.

  "Oops, there's the Mrs.," David said. "I've got to go in and tighten a faucet or something. Listen, I didn't ask you— why were you looking for the Martins?"

  "Oh," Remo said, "I was just going to try and sell them a set of encyclopedias."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "I don't suppose you'd want to buy—"

  "Oh, I couldn't. My Mrs. would kill me. Well, better luck with someone else."

  "Thanks."

  When the neighbor went back into his house, Remo could feel Chiun take a deep breath behind him.

  "I do not
know how I can stand to be among you people," Chiun said. "There is no sensitivity, no warmth, no pity for a child cut down in the prime of life. There is—"

  "—Someone in the house," Remo said, cutting Chiun off.

  "What?"

  Pointing, Remo said, "There's someone in the Martin house, and the house is supposed to be vacant. I'm going to take a look."

  "Now we have to break into the home of a dead child," Chiun said despairingly.

  "Somebody already beat us to it." Remo said.

  "For once, you are right." The old Korean started for the house. Remo hurried after him.

  "Let's just hope no one calls the cops," Remo said as they reached the front door. "You want me to break it down?"

  Chiun made a rude nosie, reached forward, and effortlessly forced the door open with the touch of one hand. "Only a pale piece of pig's ear would break down the door of a dead child's home," he said in disgust.

  "When I said 'break,' I didn't mean 'break'…." Remo started to explain, but then decided to let it go. "Let's see who's inside."

  The front door opened right into the living room, which was empty. There were a couple more rooms on the first level— kitchen, family room or den— and they were empty too.

  "Upstairs," Chiun said.

  "Good guess."

  "I heard—"

  "I know, I heard it too," Remo assured his mentor. Someone was walking around on the second floor, walking without stealth, because whoever it was thought the house was empty. The rooms on the first floor were intact, so if the intruder was searching, he was doing a decent job of it.

  "Let's go up and see who it is," Remo said, starting for the stairs.

  "I will wait here," Chiun said.

  Remo started up the steps without arguing. Chiun obviously had something on his mind, and Remo decided to leave him alone with it.

  Upstairs, he went through the first bedroom, then found the intruder in the bathroom, gong through the medicine cabinet.

  The man was tall, with curly brown hair and very pale skin, as if he had been ill or had never been introduced formally to the sun.

  "Do you prefer aspirin or Tylenol?" Remo asked.

  The man started violently, knocking a couple of plastic vials into the sink as he turned to look at Remo. His eyes immediately caught Remo's attention. They were dark, deep set, and very intense, with a lot of white showing. There was no way to tell if that was their normal state, or merely a manifestation of the man's surprise.