Off the Mangrove Coast (Ss) (2000)

by L'amour, Louis

  Brennan broke and saw Ketchell’s face was set and cold. There was a killer in him. Well, he’d need it. Paddy walked in, hooking low and hard, smashing them to the head, slipping short left hooks and rights and all the while watching for that wide left hook of Ketchell’s that would set him up for the inside right cross. Through the blur, he saw Ketchell’s face, and he let his right down a little where Ketchell wanted it and saw the left hook start.

  His own right snapped, and he felt his glove thud home. Then his left hooked hard but there was nothing in front of him and he moved back. He could see Tony Ketchell on the floor, and hear someone shouting in the crowd. He could see Bickerstaff on his feet, his face white, and behind him, Vino, his face twisted, lips away from the teeth. Then the referee jerked his arm up, and he knew he had won the fight.

  Clara came running to meet him in the dressing room. She had been crying, and she cried out when she saw his face.

  “Oh, your poor eye!” She put up her hand to touch it, and then he grabbed her and swung her away … Vino was standing in the door with a gun in his hand.

  “You’re a real smart kid, huh? Back up, sister. Lover boy and I are walking to my car. You’ll be lucky if you get him back.”

  Brennan lunged with his right in the groove and saw the white blast of a gun and felt the heat on his face. Then his right landed, and Vino went down.

  All of a sudden, Clara had him again, and the room was full of people. Sergeant O’Brien was picking Vino up, and Vino was all bloody, and his face twisted in hate.

  “Get off a me, copper!” he snarled. “You haven’t got anything on me I can’t get fixed “

  “You’re under arrest for murder,” O’Brien said to Vino. “You and Bickerstaff and Cortina. And when this hits the papers the boys in Brooklyn won’t fix you up, they’re going to drop you like a hot potato.”

  Vino’s face turned a pasty white.

  “You got nothing but this pug’s say-so,” he declared.

  “Oh, yes, we have,” O’Brien said. “We’ve got Farnum’s statement, and Cortina’s. But we don’t need them. We were in the next room when you talked to Brennan. We had a wire recorder microphone hung on the shower partition. It was Paddy’s idea.”

  When they had gone, Brennan sat down slowly on the table.

  He pulled Clara toward him. “They’re all big money fights from now on, Clara. There’ll be time now … time for us.”

  “But we’ll fix that eye first,” she said. “I don’t intend to have my man dripping blood all over everything.”

  She hesitated.

  “I can’t stand seeing you hurt, but, Paddy I guess it’s the Irish in me oh, Paddy, it was a grand, grand fight, that’s what it was!”

  TIME OF TERROR

  When I looked up from the menu, I was staring into the eyes of a man who had been dead for three years.

  Only he was not dead now. He was alive, sitting on the other side of the horseshoe coffee counter, just half a room away, and he was staring at me.

  Three years ago I had identified a charred body found in a wrecked car as this man. The car had been his. The remains of the suit he wore were a suit I recognized. The charred driver’s license in his wallet was that of Richard Manner. The size, the weight, the facial contours, the structure of the burned body, all were those of the man I knew. I was called upon to identify the body because I had been his insurance agent, and I had also known him socially.

  On the basis of my identification, the company had paid the supposed widow one million two hundred twenty thousand dollars. Yet the man across the room was Richard Mariner, and he was not dead.

  Who else could know of my mistake? His wife? Was she still alive? Was I the only person alive who could testify that the man across the room was a murderer? For he must be responsible for the man whose body was found. The logic of that was inevitable.

  He was getting up from his place, picking up his check. He was coming around the counter. He sat down beside me. My flesh crawled.

  “Hello, Dry den. Recognized me, didn’t you?”

  My mouth was dry and I could not find words. What could one say at such a time? I must be careful..- . careful.

  He went on. “It’s been a long time, but I had to come back. Now that you’ve seen me I guess I’ll have to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “That you’re in it, too. Right up to your neck.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Have some more coffee, we have a lot to talk about. I took care of all this years ago … just in case.” He ordered coffee for both of us and when the waitress had gone, he said quietly, “After the insurance was paid to my wife, one hundred thousand dollars was deposited to an account under your name at a bank in Reno.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s true. You took your vacation at June Lake that year, and you fished a little at Tahoe.” Marmer was pleased with his shrewdness … and he had been shrewd. “I knew you went there to fish, and I knew when your vacation was so I timed it all very carefully. The bank officials in Reno will be prepared to swear you deposited that money. I forged your signature very carefully. After all” he smiled “I practiced it for almost a year.”

  They would believe I had been bribed, that I had been in on it.

  He could have done it, there was no doubt of that. He had imitated me over the phone more than once; he had fooled friends of mine. It had seemed merely a peculiar quirk of humor until now!

  “It wouldn’t stand up,” I objected, but without hope, “not to a careful investigation.”

  “Possibly. Only it must first be questioned, and so far there is no reason to believe that it will ever be doubted.”

  There was a reason; I was determined to get in touch with the police, as soon as I could get out of here, and take my chances.

  “You see,” he continued, “you would be implicated at once. And of course, you would be implicated in the murder, too.”

  The skin on my neck was cold. My fingers felt stiff. When I tried to swallow my throat was dry.

  “If murder is ever suspected, they will suspect you, too. I even” he smiled “left a letter in which I said that you were involved … and that letter will get to the district attorney. I have been very thorough, Dryden! Very thorough!”

  “Where’s your wife?” I asked him.

  He chuckled and it had a greasy, throaty, awful sound. “She made trouble.” He turned a bit and something metallic bumped against the counter. I looked down. The butt of a flat automatic protruded from the edge of his coat. When I looked back up, he smiled.

  “It’s all true, Dryden. Come out to the car, I’ll prove it to you.”

  My thoughts fluttered wildly at the bars of the cage he was building around me. And yet, I doubted that it was really a cage at all. He had killed an innocent man, now it seemed he had killed his wife, what was there to keep him from killing me, too? He had nothing to lose, nothing at all. What he had told me of the involved plot to implicate me was probably a lie. Somehow I couldn’t imagine a man who would kill someone in order to cash in on his life insurance, and then kill his wife, giving up one hundred thousand dollars on the off chance that it would keep me quiet. Marmer just wanted to get me out to the car. He wanted to get me out to the car so he could kill me.

  What was left for me? What was the way out? There had been an officer in the army who told us there was always a way out, that there was always an answer … one had only to think.

  Fear.

  That was my salvation, my weapon, the one thing with which I could fight! Suddenly, I knew. My only weapon lay before me, the weapon of my mind. I must think slowly, carefully, clearly. I must be an actor.

  Here beside me was a man who had killed, a man with a gun who certainly wanted to kill me. My only weapon was my own mind and the fear that lay ingrained deep in the convolutions of his brain. Though he was behaving calmly he must be a frightened, worried man. I would frighten him mor
e. What was the old saying about the guilty fleeing when no man pursued? I must talk to him … I must lie, cheat, anything to keep myself alive. There was an old Arabic quotation that I had always liked: “Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for the trickster and catch him at first attempt, but beware of an honest man.”

  His fear was my weapon, so I must spin around this man a web of illusion and fear, a web so strong that he would have no escape …

  “All of you fellows are the same” I picked up my coffee, smiling a little “you plan so carefully and then overlook the obvious. I always liked you, Manner,” that was a lie, for I never had, “and I’m glad to see you now.”

  “Glad?” He stared at me.

  “What I mean,” I made my voice dry and a little tired, “should be obvious. I’ll admit I was startled when I saw you here, but I was not worried because this could be an opportunity for both of us. You can save your life and I can regain my reputation with the company.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” He stared at me.

  He was skeptical, but he was not sure. That was my weapon … he could not be sure.

  For what mind is free of doubt? In what mind lies no fear? How great then must be the fear of a man who has murdered twice over? The world is his enemy, all eyes are watching him. All ears are listening, all whispers are about him.

  When could he be sure that somebody else, some clerk, some filling station attendant, somebody who had known him … when could he be sure he was not seen?

  A criminal has two qualities in excess of other men, optimism and egotism. He believes things will turn out right for him and he believes he is smarter, shrewder … or at least he believes that on the surface … beneath lies a morass of doubt, a deep sink of insecurity and fear.

  “Manner,” I spoke carefully and in a not unfriendly tone, “you’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. Not one instant since you committed your crime have you been free. Your wife got your insurance money so you believed your crime had been successful.”

  Behind the counter was a box of tea bags, it was partly behind a plastic tray of spoons but I could see constant com … written on the box.

  “You forgot,” I continued, “about Constant.”

  “What?”

  “Bob Constant was an FBI man, one of their crack operators. He quit the government and accepted a better paying job as head of the investigation setup in our insurance company.

  “He’d been in the business a long time and such men develop a feeling for wrongness, for something out of place. So he had a hunch about your supposed death.”

  Oh, I had his attention now! He was staring at me, his eyes dilated. And then as I talked I actually remembered something that had bothered me. I seemed to see again a bunch of keys lying on a policeman’s desk … his keys. Something about those keys had worried me, but at the time I could find nothing wrong. How blind I had been! Now, at last, I could see them again and I knew what had been wrong!

  “He checked all your things, and when he came to your keys, he checked each one. Your house key was not among them.”

  He drew a quick, shocked breath. Then he said, “So what?” But he did not look at me, and his fingers fidgeted at his napkin.

  “Why should a man’s house key not be in his pocket? He was puzzled about that. It was not logical, he said. I objected that your wife could let you in, but he would not accept that. You should still have a key.

  “Suppose, he asked me, that the dead man is not the insured man? Suppose the dead man was murdered and substituted, and then at the last minute the murderer remembered the key … perhaps his wife was away from home … then he would take that key from the ring, never suspecting it would be noticed.

  “So he began to investigate, the money had been paid, but that was not the end. Your wife had left town, several months, at least. But probably you didn’t trust her with all that money. She had said she was going to live with her sister … only she didn’t. He knew that within a few hours. Then where had she gone?

  “You see, Manner? Bob Constant (I was beginning to admire my invention) was suspicious, so he started the wheels moving. All over the United States a description went out, a description of you and of your wife. New people in a community were quietly looked over, your relatives were checked. Your sister-in-law had been getting letters from your wife, and then they stopped. Your sister-in-law was worried.

  “More wheels started turning,” I said quietly, “they are looking for you now in a thousand cities. For over a year, we have known you were alive. For over two years evidence has been accumulating. They don’t tell me much about it. I’m only a small cog in a big wheel.”

  “You’re lying!” His voice was louder, there was an underlying strain there.

  “We dug up the body,” I continued quietly, “… doctors keep records of fractures, you know, and we wanted to check this body for a broken bone that had healed.

  “Did you ever watch a big police system work? It doesn’t look like much, and no particular individual seems to do very much, yet when all their efforts mesh on one case the results are prodigious. And you … you are on the wrong end of it.

  “No information is safe. Baggage men, hotel people, telephone operators, all are anxious to help the police if only to be known as cooperative in case they want to fix a parking ticket.”

  I was talking for my life, talking because I knew this man was willing to kill me, and that he could do it now and there would be small chance that I could protect myself in any way. Suppose I grabbed him suddenly, and throttled him? Suppose I killed him? I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do it because I didn’t know if I could and because of the fear that he hadn’t been lying, that he had, in fact, set me up.

  Never had life been so beautiful as then! All the books I wanted to read, the food I wanted to taste, the hours I wanted to spend at many things, all of them seemed vastly greater and more beautiful than ever before.

  Fear … it was my only weapon … if I was lucky he might let me go or, more realistically, if I got away he might choose to go into hiding rather than pursue me. I also realized I might have another weapon … hope.

  “They can’t miss, Marmer, you’re not safe and you never have been. Did you ever see a man die in a gas chamber? I have. You hear that it is very quick and very easy. You can believe that if you like. And what is quick? The word is relative.

  “Did you ever think how that could be, Marmer? To live, even for an instant, without hope? But in those months on death row, waiting, there is no hope.”

  “Shut up.”

  He said it flatly, yet there was a ring of underlying terror in it, too. Who was to say what responsive chords I might have touched? “Have it your own way,” I said, then I moved to close the deal. “You can beat the rap if you’re smart.”

  “What?” He stared at me, his interest captured in spite of himself. “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” I was dry, patient. “Do you think that I want to see you dead? Come on, man, we’ve been friends! The insurance company could be your ally in this. Suppose you went to them now … Suppose you went up there and confessed, and then offered to return what money you have left? You needn’t even return it all.” I was only thinking of winning my safety now. I was in there, trying. “But some is better than none. They would help you make a deal … extenuating circumstances. Who knows what a good lawyer could do? We’ve only been collecting evidence on you, that you weren’t dead. We’ve nothing on the dead man in the car; we’ve nothing on your wife. They would be glad to get some of their money back and would cut a deal to help you out. You could beat the death penalty.”

  He sat very still and said nothing. He was crumpling the paper napkin in his fingers. I dared not speak. The wrong move or the wrong word … at least, he was worried, he was thinking.

  “No!” He spoke so sharply that people looked up. He noticed it and lowered his voice. “Come on! We’re getting out of h
ere! Make one wrong move or say one word and I’ll let you have it!”

  He said no more about showing me the deposit from Reno. Had I thrown away my chance at life by pushing him too hard? Had I forced him to kill me? We got up.

  Maybe I could have done something. Perhaps I could have reached for him, but there were a dozen innocent people in that cafe; within gun range. I wanted no one else injured or killed even though I wanted to save myself.

  We paid our checks and stepped out into the cool night air … a little mist was drifting in over the building. It would be damp and foggy along the coast roads.

  We walked to his car, and he was a bare step behind me. “Get behind the wheel,” he said, “and drive carefully. Don’t get us stopped. If you do, I’ll kill you.”

  When we were moving, I spoke to him quietly. “What are you going to do, Rich? I always liked you. Even when you pulled this job, I still couldn’t feel you were all wrong. Somewhere along the line you didn’t get a decent break, something went wrong somewhere.

  “That’s why I’ve tried to help you tonight, because I was thinking of you.”

  “And not because you were afraid to die?” he sneered.

  “Give me a chance to help you … I’d rather die than go through what you have ahead, always ducking, dodging, worrying, knowing they were always there, closing in around you, stifling you.

  “And now, of course, there will be this. Those people in the cafe saw us leave together. They’ll have a good description of you.”

  “They never saw me before!”

  “I know … but they have seen me many times. I’ve al ways eaten in there by myself, so naturally the first time I sat with somebody else they would be curious and would notice you.”

  Traffic was growing less. He was guiding me by motions, and he was taking me out toward Palos Verdes and the cliffs along the sea. The fog rolled in, blanketing the road in spots. It was gray and thick.

  “The gas isn’t like this fog, Manner,” I said, “you don’t see it.”

  “Shut up!” He slugged me backhanded with the gun. It wasn’t hard, he didn’t want to upset my driving.