Cat's-Paw, Inc.

by L. L. Thrasher

  “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  I turned to face her, leaning back against the window sill. She was sitting up, her arms wrapped around her bent legs. She rested her check on her knees, looking at me with beautiful, innocent eyes.

  “When a person witnesses a murder, the usual response is to scream or faint or run for help or pick up the phone and call the cops. You’re telling me you just walked away.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to be there.” She said it in a toneless, dreamy voice. It was the excuse of a child who sees something frightening, something incomprehensible, something adult, and believes it will go away if its existence is denied. I thought of Melissa, covering her eyes and thinking no one could see her.

  “You saw a man kill your father and you can identify him and you’re letting him go, letting him get away with it? Why not go to the police and describe him and help them find out who he is?”

  “I know who he is.” She spoke again in that dreamy voice, as if what she was saying was of no consequence at all.

  “You mean you know his name?”

  “I know his name.” Dreamily, dreamily.

  “How?”

  “Daddy told me.” She suddenly shifted to a cross-legged position, her back very straight, her wrists on her knees. She spoke brusquely. “After the man left the first time, when Daddy told me he was taking me to Pendleton, I asked him who he was and he told me. Maybe he thought it would reassure me.”

  “He might not have told you the right name.”

  “He did.”

  “How do you know? Had you seen him before?”

  “I never saw him before.” She was speaking in that dreamy voice again.

  “Then how do you know it’s the right name?”

  She shrugged. “I just know.”

  “Why won’t you tell the police?”

  Very patiently, as if I should have known, she said, “Because if I tell anyone, he’ll kill me, too.”

  I sat on the bed beside her and took her hand. “No, he won’t, honey. He won’t even know you talked until after he’s arrested. The police won’t let him anywhere near you.”

  “He will kill me. I don’t want to die.”

  She lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. I got up and looked out the window again. Down in the parking lot a woman was trying to put a little boy about Melissa’s age into a child’s car seat in the back of a small tan hatchback. The baby kept stiffening up, struggling against the restraints. His mother finally yanked him out, smacked him on the backside, and then stuffed him into the seat, fastening the belt around him. The little boy was screaming his face contorted. The woman crossed her arms on the top of the car and lowered her head against them. After a moment she straightened and leaned in to kiss the sobbing child. The she got in the car and drove off.

  I leaned my forehead against the cool glass and thought about motives for murder.

  Family ties bind with steel that is often barbed. In every way that matters, Allison had been orphaned at the age of five. But unlike a true orphan, she would have been unable to dream of adoption; unable to hope for placement in a loving foster home; unable, out of loyalty to an absentee father, to form an attachment to a surrogate parent of her own choosing; unable, finally, to turn a face of cold indifference to the world and say, “There is no one.”

  Any other man she saw only twice a year would have been a stranger. But Carl Vanzetti was her father. No matter that he sent a bereaved child to the home of a dying old woman to be cared for by servants; no matter that he abandoned her at a posh school to be cared for by teachers; no matter that he abdicated all but financial responsibility for her—he was her father. I could only imagine the mixture of loyalty and betrayal she must have felt.

  Her anger would have grown as she grew older and compared her life to the lives of her friends, as she realized how odd her own life was, as the depth of his betrayal became apparent to her. And she finally rebelled, as all teenagers rebel. But she didn’t want a later curfew, or more money, or more freedom. She wanted a home. Vanzetti had slipped up and revealed his whereabouts to her, underestimating the daughter he hardly knew. She had seen an opportunity to force the issue, to confront him, to demand her rights, to ask him to be a real father and give her a home.

  And he refused.

  And she shot him.

  A physically and emotionally exhausted child, face to face with the father who didn’t want her. As a motive for murder, it wasn’t bad.

  I turned from the window. Allison was asleep, her hands loosely gripping the pillow on top of her. I took the pillow away and covered her with the blanket from the other bed and let her sleep until seven o’clock when I lay down beside her and kissed her awake, not feeling guilty about it any longer because the last thing I wanted to do was discourage her. Now that she knew that I knew, I wanted her in love with me so she would stay. She was going to panic when the police identified her and she was going to run if she could, but until then she would stay because staying was easier than running and because running meant leaving me.

  “I have to go to work now,” I said. “Promise me you won’t leave.”

  She moved her head restlessly against my shoulder. “I can’t leave. I don’t have any money. I don’t have anywhere to go. And I’m afraid. Monday, I could have done anything, slept in the woods, robbed a bank. It wouldn’t have bothered me. I wasn’t afraid then, not of being alone anyway. I just knew I had to get away and I could have done anything. But now, I don’t know. What happened in Mackie seems so far away, like it never really happened, and being alone with no money and no place to go is so scary.”

  “You aren’t alone. I’m here. And I’ll help you, but right now I have to find Jessica.” I kissed her again then got up and put on my holster and my denim jacket. “I’ll be back about two-thirty. You get some rest, okay?”

  She clung hard to me at the door. I left but was back ten minutes later. On impulse, I had stopped at a store a few blocks from the motel and bought her a big, soft, understuffed teddy bear. When I re-entered the room, she was sitting up in bed, wearing my T-shirt and watching television. She took the bear and smiled and thanked me. “I think I’ll name him Mr. Smith,” she said. She snuggled down against the pillows, Mr. Smith clasped to her breast. Freud would have loved it.

  I drove down to the Justice Center and met my two babysitters. Bert Wilson looked more degenerate than any wino I’d ever seen and smelled as if he had poured a bottle of Thunderbird on his clothes. Ernesto Garcia was small and wiry. In dim light he could pass for a street-tough eighteen-year-old. I thought I did a fine job of keeping my expression noncommittal during the introductions but something must have shown in my eyes.

  “Go ahead,” Wilson said. “Say it once, then don’t say it again.”

  I grinned. “Bert and Ernie?”

  “That’s right, Big Bird. And it’s only funny the first few thousand times.”

  I hit the street at ten o’clock. With Bert and Ernie somewhere in my wake, I tramped all over downtown and Old Town. It might have been my imagination but it seemed to me that the regulars on the street thought of something pressing to do in the opposite direction when they saw me coming. I was a walking death warrant. Typhoid Smith on the loose in Portland.

  Nikki found me at midnight, running to me on slippered feet, a black and red caftan swirling around him. He flung his arms around my neck, his feet leaving the ground, and kissed me. On the cheek, for which I was grateful. I disentangled myself from him and told him to go away.

  “I just want to walk with you,” he said. “I promise I’ll behave myself.”

  “I’m bait for a killer at the moment, Nikki. Go away and stay away.”

  “Would you be sad if I got shot?” he asked.

  “Nikki, I think you’re a very nice boy and I like you and I guess your lifestyle is your own business but I’m not gay and I’m not going to suddenly turn gay and I think you should give that some thought. Now go away. Yes, I’d be sad
if you got shot.”

  He smiled and blew me a kiss and left. I passed Ernie farther down the block. He was leaning against a storefront, his shadowed face a sullen mask of adolescent arrogance. Our eyes met and I saw the laughter in his. I winked at him. Let him wonder. I had been rebuffing advances from homosexuals since I was a kid and had learned not to let it bother me. It was the price I paid for being the flip side of my beautiful sister.

  I stayed on the street until two in the morning. Absolutely nothing happened.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The mountains were out again on Saturday and I bent Bundy’s rule a bit to spend the morning at the Saturday Market. Allison and I separated at the parking lot. I kept catching glimpses of her in the crowd of shoppers. Besides the hat and sunglasses, she was wearing her denim skirt with the blue blouse, which had a high collar and, of course, huge sleeves. Even in denim, she had a well-bred air and a cool elegance that made her about as inconspicuous as a nun in a whorehouse.

  The open-air market had grown even larger since the last time I was there. Hundreds of booths were set up, providing an impressive array of hand-crafted merchandise and an assortment of food that I sampled liberally. I bought a miniature carousel horse mounted on alabaster for Carrie and a wooden train and a fuzzy blue jacket with bunny ears for Melissa. After picking out some things for Allison, I worked on my surveillance technique by tailing her.

  She collected admirers and gifts as she moved through the jostling crowds. A young man selling silk flowers presented her with a red rose, flourishing an imaginary hat as he handed it to her. And old man gave her a sample of chocolates and gazed after her with nostalgia for his youth plain on his face. An artist did a quick sketch of her as she watched a magician working a crowd by the Skidmore Fountain. She accepted all gifts with polite delight, seemingly unaware that none of the other shoppers were being showered with free samples.

  The admirers were more of a problem to her than the gifts but she finally got the hang of it and sent them all away clutching scraps of paper with what I assumed was a phony name and phone number on them. She was leaving a trail of broken hearts behind her as well as a trail of evidence that the police were going to find frustrating.

  A young Marine who had left his hair behind at boot camp talked her into having lunch with him. They sat at a table beneath a canvas roof and ate pita sandwiches. I ate teriyaki-on-a-stick while I leaned against a tall counter nearby and listened to the Marine’s war stories. Allison pretended very hard that I wasn’t there. When they finished eating, she told him a long involved lie about how she absolutely had to leave right this minute. He reluctantly settled for a paper napkin. I moved closer to see what she wrote on it. Allison Smith at the Hilton. A nice hotel. And as good a name as any.

  The Marine stayed at the table after Allison left. He carefully folded the napkin and tucked it in his pocket. I felt bad for him.

  I met Allison, as planned, at the parking lot at one o’clock. It was a pay-as-you-enter lot. When we arrived that morning, I had dropped her off around the corner. Now, the attendant was busy at the entrance as we made a clean getaway out the exit.

  When we got back to the motel, Allison told me not to look and busied herself at the table. When she finished, she presented me with an oak picture frame holding one of her scratchboard drawings. It was an ancient gnarled tree made of thousands of tiny lines. In miniscule letters that formed part of a twisted root were the date and the words “From A to Z.”

  I thanked her and kissed her and kissed her some more until the telephone interrupted us. Marilyn said hello, asked if it was raining, sounded disappointed when I said no, and gave me my messages. Call Phil Pauling. Call Jason Finney at the Hilton. Call Bundy at home.

  I talked to three of Bundy’s children before word finally got to him that the call was for him. “Peggy’s still hanging on,” he said, “but the doctor doesn’t sound optimistic. We found Bolin’s car and the motel where he was staying but all we got out of them was an airplane ticket from LAX to Portland Monday afternoon. The fat man worked fast if he got him up here because of you. The ballistics report came in. Same gun on Brandy and Peggy and the twenty-two was the one used on Dobbs and Baylor. Smith?”

  “Yeah?”

  “For what it’s worth, the doctor said your first aid under the bridge is the only reason she wasn’t DOA at the hospital.”

  “My brother-in-law’s an emergency room doctor. He talks shop a lot.”

  “Like hell. Listen, I got three kids wailing that their social lives are going down the tube because they can’t get to the phone. Come in at two and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

  I called Phil next. He didn’t seem to remember why he wanted to talk to me unless it was just so I could listen to him call Chief Harkins foul names.

  I finally interrupted him. “Take it easy, Phil. Why don’t you just tell the son-of-a-bitch to fuck off. He can’t fire you. You’re the only cop in town who knows it’s still against the law to spit on the sidewalk in the city limits.”

  Phil laughed and said, “Oh, shit. Okay, Bucky. You’re right. I got a lot on my mind and I’m letting him get to me. Son-of-a-bitch, you’d think I arranged to get Vanzetti killed just to piss Harkins off. That man is losing it, mark my words. He’s going to have himself a good old-fashioned nervous breakdown if he doesn’t learn to relax a little bit.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “It won’t be long now.”

  “It’ll keep. I gotta go, Kemo Sabe. Adios.”

  “Wait. What about phone calls? Did Vanzetti make any calls from his room?”

  “You’re a few days behind me. He didn’t make a single call from his room, but this is interesting. Two different hotel people remember him using the pay phone in the lobby. Now why would he want to stand up to gab on the phone when he could stretch out on a nice bed to do it? And this is even more interesting. The clerk on duty Saturday says he got ten bucks’ worth of quarters and left the hotel. I can’t see an old geezer like Vanzetti feeding quarters into Pac-Man down at the arcade so my guess is he used a pay phone somewhere else. Real secretive, huh?”

  “Yeah, what about incoming calls?”

  “No one remembers anyone asking for him by name. If someone asked for the room number, nobody’s going to remember that.”

  When I got off the phone, Allison was looking worried.

  “They haven’t identified you yet,” I said. She continued to look worried. I sat across from her at the table. “You know, if I had wasted my time trying to guess your last name, Vanzetti would have been way down on the bottom of my list.”

  She smiled wanly. “I’m not really very Italian. I never even thought about it until I read something about Sacco and Vanzetti. I asked Daddy the next time I saw him. He said my great-grandfather was an Italian named Carlo Vanzetti who came to the United States and married an American girl. I don’t know anything about her but they had one son, also named Carlo Vanzetti. He was my grandfather, of course, and he married—well, obviously he married my grandmother, the one I lived with. She was from Sweden and was very fair. Daddy was their only son and, of course, my mother was a blonde. Daddy called me an American mongrel.”

  “I’d call you a genetic work of art myself.”

  She smiled, not quite so wanly.

  “What did he look like?” I asked. There had never been a picture of Vanzetti in the paper or on the newscasts I had seen, maybe just because he wasn’t local or maybe the FBI was being covert again. The only picture I had seen was of his covered body being removed from the hotel.

  “He had brown hair and his eyes were sort of greenish-brown. I don’t look like him.” She rearranged the clutter that had accumulated on the table and sighed. “I’ve been thinking about my mother. I told you I don’t know anything about her family. I’ve been wondering if I even know her real name. Guess what her maiden name is on my birth certificate.”

  There was on
ly one possible guess. “Smith?” She nodded and I added, “There are a lot of us. That’s why the name is such a joke.”

  “Everything else he ever told me was a lie. Why should I expect him to tell the truth about my mother? This probably wasn’t even hers.” She yanked hard on the thin chain around her neck, snapping it in two at the clasp. She threw the broken necklace against the wall. “I’m not going back to Mackie. I can’t.”

  “You can’t spend the rest of your life running. Nothing terrible is going to happen. You’re a minor. There’s no public outrage over your father’s death. No one is going to insist on trying you as adult. Any lawyer with half a brain can get you off. You might have to spend some time in a hospital for psychiatric evaluation but that’s it. It’ll all be handled in juvenile court and then you can start over.”

  “But I didn’t kill him.”

  “Then, for Christ’s sake, tell them that.”

  “They won’t believe me. You don’t even believe me.”

  “I’ll believe you if you tell me who he is.”

  “I can’t. Don’t you see? He committed the perfect murder. He got away with it. No one suspects him and he’s sure to have an alibi worked out and I don’t have any proof he was there. They’ll think I’m making it up. I’ve heard you on the telephone. They have my nightgown and my fingerprints and when they find out how I got out of town… well, it all looks so guilty. If I hadn’t been there, no one on earth would ever know he did it. The perfect murder. Except that I was there. And if he finds me, he’s going to kill me.”

  When she talked about it, I almost believed her. Almost, but not quite. It was too coincidental that Vanzetti would be killed within hours of his daughter’s unexpected arrival. Too coincidental that not one but two people got in and out of the Mackie Arms without being seen. And it was impossible to commit a perfect murder. Phil Pauling’s rattletrap mouth concealed a steel-trap mind. Even with evidence pointing to a woman, he would have kept searching. The fact that he hadn’t come up with a single shred of evidence pointing to someone else meant there wasn’t anyone else.