The Baby Blue Rip-Off (A Mallory Mystery)

by Max Allan Collins

  Then I noticed Lou.

  Sometime in the last thirty seconds or so, Lou Brown had pulled up in front of Mrs. Fox’s in one of the Sheriff’s Department units, and now he was standing there in his cream-colored uniform, watching Chet and Pat approach the GTO and, apparently, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

  “Lou!” I hollered. “Get those guys!”

  He turned and saw me, and something odd floated across his face. Then he looked away from me and back toward the jogging figures and yelled, “Halt!” His voice was quavering; he was scared shitless.

  Pat and Chet both stopped dead, glanced at Lou for a moment, glanced at each other and exchanged confused grins, then resumed their jogging. They were just a few feet from the GTO now and didn’t seem worried.

  They should’ve been.

  Lou had drawn his big, long-barreled .357 Magnum and, both hands entwined around the butt, both fingers on the trigger, he yelled again, “Halt!”

  And fired.

  Chet did a jerky ballet movement as the bullet hit, blood spurting from him, and he flopped onto his back on the pavement. He had a surprised look on his face, frozen there now, and Pat had a similar look of surprise on his face as he looked down at his dead friend. He swung around, automatic in hand, and said, “What...?”

  And Lou fired again.

  Red spurted out the front of Pat’s chest and splattered against the side of the GTO, and he did his own jerky ballet movement and joined Chet.

  Debbie’s blonde hair caught a glint of the dying sun as she tumbled out of the GTO and cradled her husband’s head in her lap, sitting there with him in the street. She rocked him like she was easing a baby off to sleep, but the job was already done. Pat was as asleep as you can get.

  24

  Lou covered his mouth with one hand and holstered the big revolver with the other. I joined him. His eyes were red, wet, shifting rapidly as if to avoid seeing me or anybody or anything. He said, “Jesus... what else could I do? They had guns.”

  The stench of cordite was making me sick. I breathed through my mouth.

  Lou said, “What else could I do, Mal?”

  I shrugged.

  I walked over to Debbie. She didn’t look up at me, but she knew I was there. She wasn’t crying yet. She said, “I’m sorry, Mal.” Tiny voice.

  “Me too, Debbie.”

  “Will there be an ambulance soon?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not that an ambulance would do him any good. I just don’t want him in the street like this.”

  “Can I do anything, Debbie?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.”

  “Mal?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you... for... not hating me.”

  “I couldn’t hate you, Debbie.”

  “Don’t let Lou get away with this, Mal. He’s going to have to answer for this.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but I said, “I won’t,” to soothe her.

  And so I walked back over to Lou, who was standing with a hand over his mouth and another on the butt of the holstered gun, his face especially pale, his black sideburns and thin mustache looking pasted on, unreal. In the background, porches and lawns were filling with people: people who’d heard the cannon blasts of the .357 Magnum, people standing with looks of detached horror on their faces as they viewed the two torn bodies that lay in the street.

  The guy who lived next door to Mrs. Fox, the gray-haired, gray-suited old businessman, joined us for a moment to say that he’d called for an ambulance.

  “And,” he said, “Mrs. Fox would like to know if she can go home now. She says she has a lot of straightening up to do.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Lou said.

  The old guy nodded and turned to go. Then he added, “Oh, and you, young man... your name is Mallory?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Fox said to tell you you were a fool to go back in there... but a nice fool, and she wants to thank you personally and would like to know if you could stop over to see her before you go?”

  “Tell her sure.”

  He returned to his home, and we watched while he brought Mrs. Fox by the arm down his porch steps and walked her back to that same side entrance of her house. Before she went in, she turned to smile at me, and I found a smile to throw back to her.

  But I couldn’t make the smile last long.

  Because somewhere in my head, somewhere I was finally putting it all together. The information had been there the whole time, but I hadn’t seen the pattern; I hadn’t assorted the file cards in their correct, most revealing order. What Debbie had said to me—and the frozen looks of surprise on the faces of the husks that had been Pat Nelson and Chet Richards—made it all make sense.

  “Was killing them the only way, Lou?”

  “I was just trying to stop them,” he said. “I didn’t mean to kill them.”

  “I heard that before.”

  “What are you...?”

  “Pat Nelson said that, about Mrs. Jonsen, just a few minutes ago, when he was still alive. He didn’t mean to kill her. Nobody meant to.”

  “I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure it started out as a robbery and—”

  “Go messing in mud and you’re bound to get dirty, know what I mean, Lou? You go ripping people off and the damnedest things start happening.”

  “What are you saying, Mal?”

  “You know what I’m saying.”

  And he did, too. He knew I’d finally pieced it together. Pieced together the factors, the odd factors that didn’t seem to make sense until they were placed side by side. Like that, except for this one last-ditch robbery, all the break-ins had taken place outside the city limits in the sheriff’s jurisdiction, where a deputy like Lou Brown would be privy to all sorts of information. And of course it was Lou who had taken the call from Pat Nelson the night Mrs. Jonsen was killed, that imaginary call that had supposedly reported the GTO stolen. And remember Lou questioning me that same night at the hospital coffee shop? Asking what my intentions were and then going straight to a phone—to check in with Brennan, he’d said, but in reality calling up Chet and Pat, who had gone over to my trailer to wait for me and further discourage me from poking around. And, too, Lou had graciously offered to keep me informed of Brennan’s activities, while keeping track of what I was onto. Would I mind if he dropped in now and then? His folks were bugging him. Dropping in to misdirect me with false or at least wrongly slanted information, like his own reasoning behind why the break-ins were outside the city limits. He had given Pat the go-ahead with the keep-Mallory-busy scheme; after he’d ascertained yesterday afternoon that I was still set on looking into the break-ins, he had pretended to call his parents to let them know he wouldn’t be home for supper, when he had actually been cuing Pat to have Debbie make her weepy phone call.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The Petersens are long gone, am I right? Brennan’s out there now, looking at nothing more than a deserted antique shop and barn. Because you had plenty of time to call the Petersens and tell them the heat was coming. So they’ve split, right?”

  “I don’t follow any of this.”

  “But when you called Tony’s to warn your buddies, nobody was there but Felicia Richards. You didn’t warn her, though, did you? Don’t bother explaining why; I got that figured out, too. Only certain people knew about you, right, Lou? Only certain people knew about the inside man at the sheriff’s office. Like the Petersens. And Chet. And Pat. But not P. J., huh? He’s just a stooge. And not the women. Or the people you fence the goods through. Just the inner circle, the masterminds. Mastermind small-time, low-life punks like you, Lou.”

  “You better keep quiet, Mal. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “Sure I do. So what happened, anyway? When you called Tony’s and found nobody home but the woman, what did you do? Figure that they might try Mrs. Fox? Or were you listening to the police-band radio in your car? Or at the office? Oh, wel
l. Doesn’t matter. Probably none of it can be proved, anyway.”

  Under the pencil-line mustache, Lou’s mouth formed a smile, just a little one.

  “Because you tied up the loose ends, didn’t you, Lou? You shot them. You blew ’em apart with your gun. You’re really something, Lou. You’re some goddamn friend in need. Indeed.”

  The sirens were starting now. Brennan would be here soon. Cops. Ambulance. In the background, people were watching us, Lou and me, watching a conversation they couldn’t hear but wanted to. Morbid curiosity, it’s called.

  “I’ll tell Brennan, of course. And he’ll believe me. But I can’t be sure it’ll do any good. With the damn civil service the way it is, I don’t even know if he can get away with firing you, let alone pressing charges. So you win, I guess. You ripped everybody off, and the spoils are yours. Have fun.”

  “I will,” Lou said softly. “And I’m not worried. Because nobody’s left.”

  He was right. The Petersens clearly had made it away before Brennan got there. Chet was dead. Pat was dead. P. J. knew nothing. The women knew nothing. Me? I had a patchwork quilt of guesses; try that out in court.

  “I’m left,” Debbie said.

  We hadn’t heard her come up behind us. I’m sure she hadn’t wanted to leave Pat behind, but she’d felt the need to come over and join us. To let Lou know.

  That she knew.

  Husbands don’t keep much from wives. Lou should have thought of that. And maybe Felicia Richards would turn out to know as much as Debbie. After all, Chet was her brother. Among other things.

  Lou’s hand tightened around the butt of the holstered .357 Magnum once again. Began to draw it out.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Listen to those sirens. They’re thirty seconds away. Look at all these people standing in their yards, on porches, watching. You going to shoot them, too? Get serious.”

  He let the gun drop back down in the holster.

  He said, “I really didn’t mean... want... to kill them. But it was all I could think of to do.”

  The tears came now. Debbie’s, I mean. She buried her face in my chest, and I patted her head.

  Lou touched his forehead with one hand and mumbled, “Damn sirens.” He went over to the curb and sat and covered his ears with his hands, while the cars started rolling in on the scene: first cops, then ambulance, then Brennan, in close succession. Across from Lou, Pat and Chet were staring, empty-eyed. Lou was staring, too. With eyes just as empty.

  25

  I spent the next several weeks trying to forget the whole damn affair. I didn’t have much luck. Every time I turned around, Brennan (who had become friendly due to the favorable publicity I’d helped him get) was stopping by to tell me the latest. I came to dread those visits, but also looked forward to them, since my desire to put the mess out of my mind was equaled by my natural curiosity to see how the details worked out. You might be curious, too, so I’ll give you the nutshell version of what Brennan had to say.

  While the Petersens had made it away that afternoon before Brennan could get out to their antique shop, they’d left a truck behind in their barn, a furniture truck with ramps set in back for the loaded green van to be driven up inside. The truck’s place of purchase was traced to Cleveland, Ohio, where, not coincidentally, Lou Brown had been working in a factory until he decided to move back to Port City.

  Brennan also said that a pattern involving the Petersens was forming, which should facilitate their eventual capture. Apparently, under various names, the couple had on at least four other occasions (in Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois) made down-payments on down-at-the-mouth antique shops located out in the boonies, keeping up the payments for several months and then leaving town suddenly. The young couple skipping out after failing to make a go of their investment had never been remotely connected to the local outbreaks of breaking-and-entering. Now that it had, and the pattern was clear, it was just a matter of time, Brennan said, before the Petersens would join Lou Brown, whose trial was set to come up in three months.

  My hunch about Felicia Richards was right; she, too, knew of Lou Brown’s link to the break-in ring and was bitter enough about her brother’s death to testify. The fact that doing so brought her immunity from prosecution may have had something to do with her cooperation. Because of such cooperation, neither Felicia nor Debbie was to be charged with anything.

  Which was fine with me.

  And now two weeks had gone by since the shooting out in front of Mrs. Fox’s. I was getting back to my mystery novel and hoped to get the final draft typed up and in the mail by the middle of next month. And I had a good idea what my next one would be. Right now, however, I was drinking a Pabst, enjoying the solitude of my trailer. Didn’t even have the stereo or TV on.

  The phone rang, of course.

  Solitude has a way of not lasting long—when I’m enjoying it, anyway.

  “Mal? This is Debbie.”

  “I know. How are you doing?”

  “Better. I haven’t seen you since....”

  “Right. You making the adjustment okay?”

  “I suppose as well as can be expected. We’re moved in with Mom now. A lot of our stuff was... stolen property, you know, so all of that was confiscated. Cindy’s taking it kind of hard. She was crazy about her daddy.”

  “Most little girls are. I’m sorry.”

  “Mal, I can’t tell you what it means to me that you’re not... bitter about what... what I did to you. I think about that—what I did—and it makes me feel so, God... well, let’s just say this wasn’t an easy call to make.”

  “It wasn’t a necessary one, either,” I said. “I can understand what you did, without approving of it. Pat was your husband. You loved him. What you did came out of that.”

  “That’s not completely true. We... we really were unhappy. Pat wasn’t a drunk, he didn’t beat me; that was all a lie. But our lives weren’t going anywhere. He couldn’t keep a job. His job at the silo plant was the best he ever had, and he lost that for filching cases of Pepsi meant for the pop machine. That stuff I told you about him quitting was a cover-up. Pat was a kid—never grew up, still thought he could cheat and con and steal his way through life. But he didn’t have it figured out, did he, Mal?”

  “Have what figured out?”

  “That when you take things from people, you take something from yourself, too.” Silence for a moment. “Like me ripping you off, Mal. Emotionally. Like I have since we were kids.” Silence again. “There are two really big rip-offs, Mal, the two biggest rip-offs of all. Know what they are?”

  “No.”

  “One’s death. Guess the other.”

  “I can’t.”

  “It’s life, silly.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “I know that, Mal. It usually is, though, isn’t it? Can I ask you something?”

  “Debbie... I really don’t think seeing each other is a good idea.”

  “How do you know I was going to ask you to see me?”

  “I just know.”

  “I’m glad you do, because... well, it started out with me lying to you, using you, to help Pat... but it became more than that, and I really did... do like you, Mal. Remember that morning you saw Sarah Petersen and me together at breakfast? Know what we were arguing about? I didn’t want to do it anymore; didn’t want to lie to you, use you, just couldn’t stand doing that to you any longer.”

  “But you did.”

  “I did. I’m not strong, Mal. Neither was Pat. If I’d had somebody strong, it could’ve been different. You made me realize that, Mal. How things could’ve been different.”

  “They always could.”

  “Good-bye, Mal.”

  “Bye, Deb.”

  That conversation called for a fresh Pabst. I finished off the dregs of my present can and went for another. I got settled down to relax and couldn’t get my mind empty, so I got up and put on a record album, a golden oldies record, hits from back in my junior high days
. I listened to half a song, took it off, put on something newer.

  And the phone rang again.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Edward Jonsen.”

  “What do you want, Jonsen?”

  I had a good idea what he wanted. Several days ago I’d been contacted by the lawyer representing Mrs. Jonsen’s estate. Seemed she’d made an addition to her will, codicil they call it, leaving all those Christmas plates to me. And the damn set of plates turned out to be even more valuable than Mrs. Jonsen had realized. The lawyer wouldn’t give me their exact worth, but he did admit, “We’re talking in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars, Mr. Mallory.” Which was a nice neighborhood.

  Of course, Mrs. Jonsen had had plenty of other valuable antiques, and that fabled hidden loot of hers that Pat, Chet, and P. J. had searched so diligently for turned up in a bank safe-deposit box, and so Edward Jonsen was going to do all right even without the plates. But I’d made my mind up to give him the damn things anyway. What did I want with them? They’d just stir up memories I didn’t want stirred, that’s all. Let the fat bastard have the plates. Let him eat caviar off ’em; what did I care?

  “Look, Jonsen, I’ve made a decision about those plates—”

  “Don’t bother asking for money, Mallory! I don’t intend to pay you one cent for the plates. They are legally mine. I’m going to have that will broken; I’ve spoken to my attorney and he agrees with me. I’m going to fight this all the way; I can prove my mother was incompetent when she made that addition, I—”

  I hung up.

  Well, I supposed I could clear the movie posters off one wall and make room for the plates. Or maybe just sell them to some collector; my funds were getting kind of low. A mystery writer can always use a little extra cash, you know.

  Edward Jonsen really did have more right to those plates than I, but some people just seem to deserve getting ripped off.

  In the meantime, I had some hot suppers to deliver.