Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales

by Loren D. Estleman

  It was a moment before his eyes adjusted themselves to the dim light inside the house. When they had, his first thought was that the interior had not changed since he was a boy. The Victorian clutter, from the overstuffed rockers festooned with doilies to the glass-fronted china cabinets and papered walls upon which hung framed and faded prints of every conceivable shape and size, was the same as he remembered it. The only difference was the pile of cartridges on the pedestal table beside the door. Beyond it, Molly Dodd stood in the shadows at the open front window, her dark eyes glittering above the stock of the 30-year-old carbine she held braced against her shoulders. Thickett was looking right down its bore.

  “Say your piece and get out.” Her voice was taut. Small but wiry, she wore her black hair pulled straight back into a tight bun. Although her eyes were small above her hooked nose, they had a remarkable depth of expression. Her mouth was wide and turned down at the corners in a permanent scowl. Her print dress looked new, as did the sweater she wore buttoned at the neck like a cape. The firearm remained steady in her hands.

  “Why don’t you give me the gun, Molly?” Vernon asked quietly. “You aren’t going to shoot anyone.”

  “When it comes to protectin’ my property I’d shoot my own son if I had one,” she snapped.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  There was an almost indiscernible change in the expression of her eyes. “This place is mine,” she said. “I know what the courts said, but they was wrong. They didn’t see the record that proved Clyde paid off that loan because it don’t exist no more. Not after that slippery nephew of mine got rid of it.”

  “Why would Leroy do that?” Thickett began to breathe a little more easily. He had her talking now.

  “Why do you think? He knows there’s oil on this land just like everybody else. If he can grab it for his bank he’ll make hisself a big man and maybe they’ll forget about checkin’ his books like they been threatenin’.”

  “His books?”

  She nodded curtly. Her eyes were black diamonds behind the peepsight of the rifle. “He’s been stealin’ money from his accounts for years. You seen that car he drives, the clothes he wears. He can’t afford them on his salary. I was in the bank once and overheard a man threatenin’ to take his books to the main branch in Oklahorna City to have ‘em checked out. Leroy fell all over hisself tryin’ to talk him out of it.”

  Thickett found himself growing interested in spite of the situation. “You say he destroyed the record that proved Clyde repaid the loan? Don’t you have any proof of your own? What about a receipt?”

  “Clyde never told me what he done with it. I been all over the house. It ain’t here.”

  “What did you hope to gain by barricading yourself in the house?”

  She smiled then, a bitter upturn of her cracked and pleated lips. “I wanted to see that squirrel’s face when I stuck this here carbine under his nose. I never meant to drag you boys into it, Vernon.”

  “Don’t you think it’s gone far enough? Come on, Molly. We’re old friends. Give me the piece.”

  She hesitated. Slowly the hard glitter faded from her eyes. Now she was just a tired old woman. At length she lowered the rifle and handed it to him.

  Now that the danger was over, the deputy felt no triumph. For a long moment he regarded Molly with compassionate eyes. “What are your plans?” he asked.

  “I sent my luggage on to Mexico this morning.”

  “Mexico? Why Mexico?”

  “That’s where Clyde and me spent our honeymoon. I got a reservation on a plane leavin’ tonight from Tulsa. Don’t suppose I’ll make it now.”

  “Not if Leroy decides to press charges.”

  “That squirrel? Don’t worry, he won’t do nothin’ that might attract attention.” She looked at him apologetically. “I sure am sorry about that busted windshield.”

  He laughed good-naturedly. “You’re good for it, Molly. Besides, the experience was almost worth it.”

  There was an embarrassed silence. Then: “What about Luther Briscoe? What was he going to think when he got back from Kansas and found you gone?”

  “That’s his business, I expect.”

  Thickett chose not to press the point. “Well,” he drawled, “I’m faced with a decision. I can either put you in jail or drive you into Tulsa in time to catch your plane. Since my duty is to the citizens of Schuylerville, I think I’d be acting in their best interests if I saved them the expense of your room and board and took you into Tulsa.”

  She placed an affectionate hand on his arm. “You’re a good boy, Vernon. I always said that.”

  It was dusk when Thickett eased the scout car he had borrowed from Luke Madden into the parking slot in front of the sheriff’s office and went in. After the long drive back from Tulsa, it felt good to be using his legs again.

  Earl Briggs, on his feet behind Thickett’s desk, was hanging up the telephone as the chief deputy entered.

  “I’m glad you’re still here, Earl,” Thickett said. “First thing tomorrow morning I want you to get in touch with the Great Midwestern Bank and Trust Company in Oklahoma City and–what is it?”

  The look on the boy’s face sent a wave of electricity through Thickett’s weary limbs.

  “That was Leroy Cooper,” said Earl, inclining his head toward the telephone. “He just got back to find his head cashier tied up and gagged and the rest of his employees locked in the vault. Seems the bank was held up for a quarter of a million dollars while we were all out at Molly’s place. You’ll never guess who he says did it.”

  Thicken felt a sinking sensation as the pieces fell into place. He tightened his grip on the doorknob. “Luther Briscoe.”

  Earl stared at him. “How on earth did you know that?” he said.

  THE USED

  “But I never been to Iowa!” Murch protested.

  His visitor sighed. “Of course not. No one has. That’s why we’re sending you there.”

  Slouched in the worn leather armchair in the office Murch kept at home, Adamson looked more like a high school basketball player than a federal agent. He had baby-fat features without a breath of whisker and collar-length sandy hair and wore faded Levi’s with a tweed jacket too short in the sleeves and a paisley tie at three-quarter mast. His voice was changing, for God’s sake. The slight bulge under his left arm might have been a sandwich from home.

  Murch paced, coming to a stop at the basement window. His lawn needed mowing. The thought of it awakened the bursitis in his right shoulder. “What’ll I do there? Don’t they raise wheat or something like that? What’s a wheat farmer need with a bookkeeper?”

  “You won’t be a bookkeeper. I explained all this before.” The agent sat up, resting his forearms on his bony knees. “In return for your testimony regarding illegal contributions made by your employer to the campaigns of Congressmen Disdale and Reicher and Senator Van Horn, the Justice Department promises immunity from prosecution. You will also be provided with protection during the trial, and afterwards a new identity and relocation to Iowa. When you get there, you’ll find a job waiting for you selling hardware, courtesy of Uncle Sam.”

  “What do I know about hardware? My business is with numbers.”

  “An accounting position seemed inadvisable on the off chance Redman’s people traced you west. They’d never think of looking for you behind a sales counter.”

  “You said he wouldn’t be able to trace me!” Murch swung around.

  Adamson’s lips pursed, lending him the appearance of a teenage Cupid. “I won’t lie and say it hasn’t happened. But in those cases there were big syndicate operations involved, with plenty of capital to spend. Jules Redman is light cargo by comparison. It’s the senator and the congressmen we want, but we have to knock him down to get to them.”

  “What’s the matter, they turn you down?”

  The agent looked at him blankly.

  Murch had to smile. “Come on, I ain’t been in this line eighteen years I don’t s
ee how it jerks. Maybe these guys giving your agency a hard time on appropriations, or—” He broke off, his face brightening further. “Say, didn’t I read where this Van Horn is asking for an investigation into clandestine operations? Yeah, and maybe the others support him. So you sniff around till something stinks and then tell them if they play ball you’ll scratch sand over it. Only they don’t feel like playing, so now you go for the jugular. Am I close?”

  “I’m just a field operator, Mr. Murch. I leave politics to politicians.” But the grudging respect in the agent’s tone was enlightening.

  “What happens if I decide not to testify?”

  “Then you’ll be wearing your numbers on your shirt. For three counts of conspiracy to bribe a member of the United States Congress.”

  They were watching each other when the doorbell rang upstairs. Murch jumped.

  “That’ll be your escort,” Adamson suggested. “I’ve arranged for a room at a motel in the suburbs. The local police are lending a couple of plainclothesman to stay there with you until the trial Monday. It’s up to you whether I ask them to take you to jail instead.”

  “One room?” The bookkeeper’s lip curled.

  “There’s an economy move on in Washington.” Adamson got out of the chair and stood waiting. The doorbell sounded again.

  “I want a color TV in the room,” said Murch. “Tell your boss no color TV, no deal.”

  The agent didn’t smile. “I’ll tell him.” He went up to answer the door.

  He shared a frame bungalow at the motel between the railroad and the river with a detective sergeant named Kirdy and his relief, a lean, chinless officer who watched football all day with the sound turned down. He held a transistor radio in his lap; it was tuned in to the races. Kirdy looked smaller than he was. Though his head barely reached the bridge of Murch’s nose, he took a size forty-six jacket and had to turn sideways to clear his shoulders through doorways. He had kind eyes set incongruously in a slab of granite. No-Chin never spoke except to warn his charge away from the windows. Kirdy’s conversation centered around his granddaughter, a blonde tyke of whom he had a wallet full of photos.

  The bathroom was heated only intermittently by an electric baseboard unit and the building shuddered whenever a train went past. But Murch had his color TV.

  At half past ten Monday morning, he was escorted into the court by Adamson and another agent who looked like a rock musician. Jules Redman sat at the defense table with his attorney. Murch’s employer was small and dark, with an old-time gunfighter’s handlebar mustache and glossy black hair combed over a bald spot. Their gazes met while the bookkeeper was being sworn in, and from then until recess was called at noon Redman’s tan eyes remained on the man in the witness chair.

  Charles Anthony Murch–his full name felt strange on his tongue when the court officer asked him for it–was on the stand two days. His testimony was complicated, having to do with dates and transactions made through dummy corporations, and he consulted his notebook often while the jurors stifled yawns and the spectators fidgeted and inspected their fingernails. After adjournment the first day, the witness was whisked along a circuitous route to a hotel near the airport, where Kirdy and his partner awaited their duty. On the way Adamson was talkative and in good spirits. Already he spoke of how his agency would proceed against the congressmen and Senator Van Horn after Redman was convicted. Murch was silent, remembering his employer’s eyes.

  The defense attorney, white-haired and grandfatherly behind a pair of half-glasses, kept his seat during cross-examination the next morning, reading from a computer printout sheet on the table in front of him while the government’s case slowly fell to pieces. Murch had thought that his dismissal from that contracting firm up state was off the books, and he was surprised to learn that someone had penetrated his double-entry system at the insurance company he had left in Chicago. Based on this record, the lawyer accused the bookkeeper of entering the so-called campaign donations into Redman’s ledger to cover his own thefts. The jurors’ faces were unreadable, but as the imputation continued Murch saw the corners of the defendant’s mustache rise slightly and watched Adamson’s eyes growing dull.

  The jury was out twenty-two hours, a state record for that kind of case. Jules Redman was found guilty of resisting arrest, reduced from assaulting a police officer (he had lost his temper and knocked down a detective during an unsuccessful search of his office for evidence), and was acquitted on three counts of bribery. He was fined a hundred dollars.

  Adamson was out the door on the reporters’ scurrying heels. Murch hurried to catch up.

  “You just don’t live right, Charlie.”

  The bookkeeper held up at the hissed comment. Redman’s diminutive frame slid past him in the aisle and was swallowed up by a crowd of well-wishers gathered near the door.

  The agent kept a twelve-by-ten cubicle in the federal building two floors up from the courtroom where Redman had been set free. When Murch burst in, Adamson was slumped behind a gray steel desk deep in conversation with his rock musician partner.

  “We had a deal,” corrected the agent, after Murch’s panicky interruption. His colleague stood by brushing his long hair out of his eyes. “It was made in good faith. We gave you a chance to volunteer any information from your past that might put our case in jeopardy. You didn’t take advantage of it, and now we’re all treading water in the toilet.”

  “How was I to know they was gonna dig up that stuff about those other two jobs? You investigated me. You didn’t find nothing.” The ex-witness’s hands made wet marks on the desk top.

  “Our methods aren’t Redman’s. It takes longer to subpoena personnel files than it does to screw a magnum into a clerk’s ear and say gimme. Now I know why he didn’t try to take you out before the trial.” He paused. “Is there anything else?”

  “Damn right there’s something else! You promised me Iowa, win or lose.”

  Adamson reached inside his jacket and extracted a long narrow folder like the airlines use to put tickets in. Murch’s heart leaped. He was reaching for the folder when the agent tore it in half. He put the pieces together and tore them again. Again, and then he let the bits flutter to the desk.

  For a numb moment the bookkeeper goggled at the scraps. Then he lunged, grasping Adamson’s lapels in both hands and lifting. “Redman’s a killer!” He shook him. The agent clawed at his wrists, but Murch’s fingers were strong from their years spent cramped around pencils and the handles of adding machines. Adamson’s right hand went for his underarm holster, but his partner had gotten Murch in a bear hug and pulled. The front of the captive agent’s coat tore away in his hands.

  Adamson’s chest heaved. He gestured with his revolver. “Get him the hell out of here,” His voice cracked.

  Murch struggled, but his right arm was yanked behind him and twisted. Pain shot through his shoulder. He went along, whimpering. Shoved out into the corridor, he had to run to catch his balance and slammed into the opposite wall, knocking a memo off a bulletin board. The door exploded shut.

  A group of well-dressed men standing nearby stopped talking to look at him. He realized that he was still holding pieces of Adamson’s jacket. He let them fall, brushed back his thinning hair with a shaky hand, adjusted his suit, and moved off down the corridor.

  Redman and his lawyer were being interviewed on the courthouse steps by a television crew. Murch gave them a wide berth on his way down. He overheard Redman telling the reporters he was leaving tomorrow morning for a week’s vacation in Jamaica. Ice formed in the bookkeeper’s stomach. Redman was giving himself an alibi for when Murch’s body turned up.

  Anyway, he had eighteen hours’ grace. He decided to write off the stuff he had left back at the hotel and took a cab to his house on the west side. For years he had kept two thousand dollars in cash there in case he needed a getaway stake in a hurry. By the time he had his key in the front door lock he was already breathing easier; Redman’s men wouldn’t try anything until their boss
was out of the country, and a couple of grand could get a man a long way in eighteen hours.

  His house had been ransacked.

  They had overlooked nothing. They had torn up the rugs, pulled apart the sofa and easy chairs and slit open the cushions, taken pictures down from the wall and dismantled the frames, removed the back panel from the TV set, dumped out the flour and sugar canisters in the kitchen. Even the plates had been unscrewed from the wall switches. The orange juice can in which he had kept the rolled bills in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator lay empty on the linoleum.

  The sheer cold logic of the operation dizzied Murch.

  Even after they had found the money they had gone on to make sure there were no other caches. His office alone, its contents smeared out into the passage that led to the stairs, would have taken hours to reduce to its present condition. The search had to have started well before the verdict was in, perhaps even as early as the weekend he had spent in that motel by the railroad tracks. Redman had been so confident of victory he had moved to cut off the bookkeeper’s escape while the trial was still in progress.

  He couldn’t stay there. Probably he was already being watched, and the longer he remained the greater his chances of being kept prisoner in his own home until the word came down to eliminate him. He stepped outside. The street was quiet except for some noisy kids playing basketball in a neighbor’s driveway and the snort of a power mower farther down the block. He started walking toward the corner.

  Toward the bank. They’d taken his passbook, too, but he had better than six thousand in his account and he could borrow against that. Buy a used car or hop a plane. Maybe even go to Jamaica, stretch out on the beach next to Redman, and wait for his reaction. He smiled at that. Confidence warmed him, like whiskey in a cold belly. He mounted the bank steps, grasped the handle on the glass door. And froze.

  He was alerted by the one reading a bank pamphlet in a chair near the door. There were no lines at the tellers’ cages and no reason to wait. He spotted the other standing at the writing table, pretending to be making out a deposit slip. Their eyes wandered the lobby from time to time, casually. Murch didn’t recognize their faces, but he knew the type: early thirties, jackets tailored to avoid telltale bulges. He reversed directions, moving slowly to keep from drawing attention. His heart started up again when he cleared the plate glass.