Vermilion
Page 19
“My name is Lovelace,” said Clarisse loudly, “there’s been a shooting. One man is injured, and the other is being held down. We need police and an ambulance as soon as you can get them here.” She gave the address and the apartment number. She hung up after a moment and said. “They’re on their way. Good old Marjorie upstairs must have already called in.”
“You fags—!” breathed Searcy.
“Anyway,” Valentine went on lightly, “Professor Lawrence said that you seemed more interested in finding out that he didn’t see anything New Year’s night, than in hearing what he did see. And it’s also why most of your investigation has been done when you were off duty, and alone. We assumed that it was just Scarpetti, down on your back, but you were out to protect yourself. Were you even on this investigation at all?”
“Yes—”
Valentine twisted his arm again, and went on. “But then you started looking around to see who you could pin this on easiest, trying to find some squishy faggot who knew Billy, but it turned out there weren’t any more squishy faggots in Boston. You—”
Boots appeared in the doorway. She’d removed her leather jacket. Her arms were raised as she pulled a brown woolen dress over her head. She had not taken off either her leather pants or boots. She stared at Frank as she feverishly worked with the button at the back of the collar. “I’m going to turn state’s evidence! Just like Linda Kasabian! I’m going to—”
Frank yelled inarticulately.
Sirens wailed outside on Commonwealth.
“Here come the cops!” cried Boots. “I’ll be ready as soon as I get on my makeup!”
“Boots, for Christ’s sake…” Clarisse sighed.
Without bothering to hook up the zipper, Boots retreated to the bedroom. “I won’t need a lawyer or anything!” she called out.
“Get out here!” demanded Valentine.
“Just a minute!” she cried.
Boots appeared again in the doorway. She held a comb in one hand and a tube of lipstick in the other.
Clarisse glanced at Boots for a second, and then swung the gun about and aimed directly at her. “Get over by Frank,” she said.
“What…?” Boots stammered.
Clarisse pulled back the hammer. “Do it,” she said coldly. She held the gun steady as she tracked Boots with it. The woman stepped carefully around Searcy to stand beside Frank.
“You said I could be state’s evidence!” she cried. “I—”
“Clarisse…” Valentine asked, confused.
“It was you in the backseat New Year’s night,” said Clarisse.
“No! It was Frank and Bill. I was—”
“No!” cried Searcy. “I wasn’t there!”
“You killed Billy,” said Clarisse, staring at Boots.
The comb dropped out of her hand. Frank swatted at her legs maliciously and then doubled up in pain. Boots stepped wildly back, and fell onto the couch.
“It was you who killed Billy,” said Clarisse again.
“It was an accident! Billy was yelling and hitting Frank and screaming about wanting money and those Polaroids and…” She gulped air. She stared down at Frank’s wounded leg and seemed for a few moments to forget herself. She picked up more calmly then. “…and I was speeding my brains out, and Billy was hitting Frank, and we nearly ran off the road, and Frank grabbed Billy and shoved him back over the seat, and then Billy started screaming at me, telling me to give him money, and he reached out and grabbed me, he grabbed my shoulders, and he started shaking me, and…” Boots seemed to lose herself again.
“And what?” demanded Valentine.
Frank continued to groan loudly.
“…he grabbed me and he was hurting me, and the crook-lock was on the backseat, so I picked it up and swung it at his face to make him let go of me, and then there was all this blood, so I threw the crook-lock out the window and then we had to go back and pick it up because Frank said he wasn’t going to buy another one and—”
Searcy abruptly jerked his legs up. Valentine lost his balance and fell sideways. Searcy’s wrists slipped from his grip as he tumbled backward.
Confused shouts filled the hallway outside and a high-pitched voice yelled “Police!”
As Valentine came to his feet, Searcy pushed him hard against Clarisse. The gun fired toward the ceiling as she fell back against the door, Valentine tripping over her feet. Searcy grabbed the gun and stepped back, pointing the barrel point-blank at them. Both jumped aside in opposite directions. He fired and the door splintered just above Clarisse’s shoulder.
Boots screamed again. Searcy turned toward her, the gun still raised. Valentine threw the hallway door open wide.
Chapter Twenty-four
VALENTINE STOOD on the landing with his back to the open apartment door. Clarisse sat sideways on the stairs leading to the top floor. She leaned her head against the wall and smoked, a little nervously. The runner beneath their feet was littered with splinters of wood. Another door on the hallway was open a crack and two young women peered out, neither saying anything. Two policemen had just disappeared around the stairs that led down, with handcuffed Searcy between them.
A woman with long blond hair leaned far over the railing above. “Clarisse!” she hissed, “what the hell happened down there?”
Clarisse looked up. “Domestic quarrel,” she answered shortly. The woman whistled and disappeared from the stairs.
Clarisse nodded in the direction of the door behind Valentine, and he turned around. Two paramedics angled a stretcher into the hallway. Frank Hougan’s leg had been hastily bandaged and he lay with one arm flung across his eyes; it was apparent he had been given some kind of painkiller.
“How’d you know it was Boots who killed Billy?” demanded Valentine.
“I didn’t,” said Clarisse, “I only knew it wasn’t Frank.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the right side of Billy’s head that was caved in. If Frank had hit the boy while he was driving, he would have hit him on the left side.”
“But if the kid had been turned around screaming at Boots in the backseat then his right side would have been toward Frank.”
“But Frank couldn’t hit anybody hard enough to kill him at the same time he was driving, so it had to be whoever was in the backseat.”
“Yes,” said Valentine, “but what if they had stopped the car, and gotten out, and that’s where Frank hit him over the head and killed him?”
Clarisse paused. “I didn’t think of that.” She brightened. “But I was right, so it doesn’t matter really, does it?”
“But the question is, how did you know it was Boots in the backseat and not Searcy?” argued Valentine. “Trudy said she saw two men in the car.”
Clarisse laughed. “Val, even you mistook Boots for a man, and that was at pretty short range. Besides, it didn’t make sense for Searcy to be in that car.”
“Why not?”
“Searcy’s a cop. You don’t think he’d be stupid enough to be in a car that was circling the Block and the bus station at three in the morning, with police headquarters a block away, and squad cars going through there all the time?”
“I guess not,” admitted Valentine. “But maybe if he had wanted to get rid of the kid bad enough, if he thought his whole career depended on having the kid out of the way…”
Clarisse nodded. “I wasn’t sure till she came out of the bedroom the second time, putting on her makeup.”
“What? She didn’t say a word then—she just said she wasn’t going to need a lawyer.”
Clarisse pointed over Valentine’s shoulder.
A policeman was leading Boots out the door, and Valentine regarded her closely. Her hair fell across her forehead, and the light eye shadow she’d applied was already streaked. She stared at them with vague unemotional eyes, and took a short noisy breath. Her lips were bright with vermilion lipstick.
“She must have got the lipstick on him sometime that night, either playing around with
him or by accident, and then he wiped it off on his handkerchief, or maybe she just borrowed it when she was putting it on,” said Valentine.
“Who knows?” shrugged Clarisse. “But when I saw that, I realized that she had been with Billy that night and that she had lied to us. And if it had been Hougan who killed the boy, then Boots wouldn’t have lied to us about being in the car. She must have thought she was going to get away with it.”
“Well,” said Valentine, “I guess we have to go down to District One, and clear all this up. I’d love to be the one to break the news to Scarpetti that the ‘homosexual conspirators’ in this case were a straight couple and a Boston cop.”
“That’s some comfort,” said Clarisse, standing. She put an arm around Valentine’s shoulder. “Let’s do something.”
“What?”
“After we finish things off at the police station, let’s go have a few stiff drinks, cry over our plight, and then call TWA and book ourselves on the first flight to Key West.”
“I am not about to put this bruised and broken body out on the beach for all those tanned good-looking uninjured men to laugh at.”
Clarisse sighed and pulled her coat up. A policeman waited to escort them down.
“You still want the drinks though?” Valentine said.
“Honey, I just got a pistol fired at my face!” She shoved the leather envelope under her arm. “In the immortal words of Mildred Pierce, ‘Let’s get stinko!’”
All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
VERMILLION
A Felony & Mayhem “Traditional” mystery
PUBLISHING HISTORY
First print edition (Avon): 1980
Felony & Mayhem print and digital editions: 2013
Copyright © 1980 by Nathan Aldyne
All rights reserved
E-book ISBN: 978-1-937384-89-0
For the two Donalds and Louis
You are reading a book in the Felony & Mayhem “Traditional” category. We think of these books as classy cozies, with little gunplay or gore but often a fair amount of humor and, usually, an intrepid amateur sleuth. If you enjoy this book, you may well like other “Traditional” titles from Felony & Mayhem Press, including (available as print books):
S.F.X. Dean
By Frequent Anguish
Such Pretty Toys
John Norman Harris
The Weird World of Wes Beattie
Marissa Piesman
Unorthodox Practices
Personal Effects
Heading Uptown
Daniel Stashower
Elephants in the Distance
Peter Watson
Landscape of Lies
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