The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “In a minute.” She went over to lean down near Armando. “Armando, do you remember last Sunday, when Peter first came to the house here and you reached out with your hand and pinched me? And all the other times you’ve done that?”

  He stared at her blankly.

  “Well,” she said, straightening, “that wasn’t a nice thing to do at all.”

  Before I realized what she had in mind she kicked Armando sharply on his trick knee. I lunged for her arm and threw her none too gently into a nearby chair.

  “Where’s Beverly Jean?” I asked her.

  Bobbie shrugged. “I have friends looking after her.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “In San Francisco?”

  “I doubt it. We just talked to her a bit ago. Didn’t we, Armando?”

  Armando didn’t say anything. He sat glassy-eyed in the chair.

  “How about telling me what’s going on?” I asked him. He didn’t reply. “You know who John Caine was, don’t you?”

  He managed something that sounded like yes.

  “He committed suicide about a year and a half ago. His daughter here didn’t find out about it until six months later. She went back to Sand Valley then and asked questions around town. From what she learned, she decided you and Moon were responsible.”

  Something approaching a frown crossed Armando’s brow.

  “It wasn’t only that,” Bobbie said quietly. “My father was in the middle of killing himself long before then. The last time I saw him. With his drinking.” She looked up at me. “You don’t know what that was like, Pete. To return home and find your father a hopeless drunk. He couldn’t even carry on a rational conversation. He made me sick to my stomach.”

  “So you packed up and ran. Six months later you found out he’d killed himself and, I suspect, felt a little guilt.”

  “Never mind what I felt.”

  I crossed to Armando. “You probably heard about the bank account John Caine had. The one that eventually got him bounced off the force. What you didn’t know was that your man Moon was making regular cash deposits to that account. He didn’t realize that’s what he was doing. And when Bobbie began asking around town following her father’s death, she heard about Moon making the deposits. And since Moon worked for you, she assumed you were the one behind it. To get her father kicked off the police force. And she thought that because he’d lost his job is why he started drinking, and in the end killed himself. That’s why she took it upon herself to kill you and Moon. She found out you were in San Francisco from one of Moon’s old girlfriends working at the Truck Stop.”

  Armando didn’t say anything, but just stared dully across at Bobbie.

  “Then she came to San Francisco, probably watched your operation until she had you figured out, then came on the scene and performed in a manner she knew would interest you. She’s good at that. She suckered me in the same way.”

  Bobbie looked at me briefly, then turned away.

  “She worked up a really good hate for you, Armando. She shot at you from the street above the Chop House, but she purposely missed. And she sent the sympathy cards. She wanted you to sweat for a while. When you hired me, she had to do some fast improvising. On Monday, when the whole household takes the day off, she made arrangements to meet Moon at the Pimsler Hotel.”

  Armando raised his head.

  “Sure,” I told him. “She had him in her pocket as well. It just occurred to me how much she looks like one of Moon’s old girlfriends. He must have been daffy over her. So she tells the poor sap to rent a room at the Pimsler, so that no landladies or anyone will see them together and snitch to you sometime. What she really wanted was for him to die in a manner nobody would suspect a girl of pulling off. She must have gotten him out in the hallway to look at the view down in the lobby while she was describing the swell time they were going to have back in the room. Then the ice pick in his neck and heave-ho over the railing. That would have been the hardest part with a man Moon’s size, but a girl could do it with a little thought and dedication, and she seems to have had both.”

  “That’s not true, about Moon,” Bobbie told me. “Not all of it.”

  “Maybe not. I’m not even worried about Moon. He’d done enough things in his life to have deserved that a long time ago. But I am worried about Beverly Jean. I want to know what you did to her.”

  “I’ll bet you do. I forgot to thank you for that.”

  “What does she mean?” Cathy asked.

  “I was the smart guy who suggested to Armando that he send Bobbie to take her out of a private school she was in.”

  Armando made a snorting sound.

  “That was before I became so interested in John Caine’s daughter.”

  “You really did do an amazing job,” Bobbie told me. “My father would have admired you.”

  “I don’t think he would have admired what you’ve done. What happened to Beverly Jean?”

  “Relax, Pete. She’ll be all right, as soon as Armando does me a favor.”

  “What do you want him to do?”

  “Die,” she said simply.

  “That would be a mistake,” I told her. “Same as killing Moon was a mistake.”

  She glanced up sharply. “I don’t believe that business about Moon not knowing what he was doing, putting money in the savings account in Dad’s name.”

  “It’s true, Bobbie. I know because I’m better at this sort of thing than you are. If you’d spent a little longer talking to Harmony you might have stumbled onto the truth. Moon was banking that money as a favor to Harmony. He didn’t know what it was going for. And Harmony didn’t know the real purpose of it, either.”

  “What was its purpose?”

  “Just what you suspected. To set up your dad so he’d be tossed off the force and out of everybody’s hair. But it was a little more elaborate than it appeared. Armando wasn’t the man behind it. Carl Slide was.”

  Bobbie stood up. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Don’t take my word for it. Call the Truck Stop in Sand Valley and have Ma get Harmony herself to the phone. Slide gave her the money and said it was for a secret fund for your dad to use to keep organized crime out of Sand Valley. She was dumb enough to believe it, and she swallowed another story Slide told her in order to get Moon to make the deposits. Slide did it that way so if something went wrong everybody would believe just what you did, that Armando was behind it. But he wasn’t, and believe me, maybe John Caine didn’t approve of some of the action Armando was letting into the Truck Stop, but it was stuff Slide was starting to pull that he really was interested in.”

  Bobbie’s face had taken on a stark expression. Cathy crossed to Armando. His head was slumped to one side.

  “Something’s wrong with this man.”

  “What did you do to him, Bobbie?”

  “Oh, Jesus, Pete, I had no idea…”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Just before you got here I made him drink a bottle of vodka. The whole thing, in about one swallow. Along with a few pills I had handy. I told him that was the only way he could save Beverly Jean’s life. I wanted him to die the same way my father was dying the last time I saw him.”

  “Get him on his feet,” Cathy told me. “Where’s the kitchen in this funhouse?”

  Bobbie pointed to a far doorway.

  “But he’s got a bad knee,” I reminded Cathy.

  “I don’t care if he’s missing a leg. If you want to save him, get him up and moving.”

  I went over and tugged at Armando’s arm. He was limp.

  “Get me some ice,” I told Bobbie.

  She brought some from the refrigerator behind the bar. I took a handful and held it to the back of Armando’s thick neck. There were a few things I’d learned during the spell I’d worked at the No Name. How to get a passed-out drunk up and moving when two o’clock closing rolled around was one of them. Armando stirred and raised one hand toward the unco
mfortable cold I was pressing against his neck.

  “Come on, pal,” I told him, just like in the old days. “You gotta upsy-daisy.”

  Bobbie got on his other side and between us we got him onto his feet. He didn’t protest from pain in his knee. I guess he couldn’t feel it any longer.

  “Walk, Armando. Walk!”

  We moved around the room some. He didn’t contribute too much. Cathy came back in with a jar of soapy water and headed for the hallway. “Bring him along,” she said. “We’re going to have to give him a lot of room to vomit in.”

  We dragged Armando to the front door and outside onto the lawn. Cathy held up the jar to his mouth.

  “Drink this, Mr. Barker.”

  He didn’t drink.

  “Hold his head back,” Cathy told me.

  I held back his head. Cathy forced open his mouth with her fingers and poured in some of the stuff. Armando gagged and tried to brush her away.

  “You have to drink this, Mr. Barker,” she told him. “If you don’t drink this and void your stomach, you’re going to die.”

  He still resisted.

  “But he wants to die,” Bobbie cried. “He thinks it’s the only way he can save Beverly Jean.”

  “Come on, Armando,” I roared in his ear. “Open up!”

  Maybe he didn’t have enough left to resist further. We got the soapy water into his mouth and over us and some nearby geraniums as well. He swallowed, and a moment later he gave a violent retch and doubled over to relieve himself on the ground and my shoes and down his own pants. It was really enjoyable.

  “Keep him at it,” Cathy told me. “When he seems done, get him back inside and wrap some blankets around him. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “He’s throwing up all over me,” I complained.

  Cathy paused in the doorway. “Would you rather help me give him a coffee enema?”

  She went on inside while Bobbie and I tended to Armando.

  “It would really take a devious mind to get at Armando this way,” I told her.

  She looked at me across the sick man’s hanging head. “I’m not as smart as you might think. It was Slide’s idea. He came up with it after I convinced him I wanted Armando dead. He told me to let him know when I was ready to do it. He said he’d sent up a couple of men. I phoned last night. The men arrived today. I met them after I got Beverly Jean out of the Academy. They went somewhere with her. I told her we were arranging a surprise party for Armando.”

  “I guess you were, at that.”

  Bobbie’s face was grimly set. She was blinking back tears. “Don’t look at me like that, Pete. I’m not an evil person.”

  “Too bad you can’t tell that to Moon.”

  “That was an accident.”

  “Sure it was. Guys go around poking ice picks into their own neck and pitch over high railings every day.”

  “It wasn’t his neck, it was more toward his shoulder. Honest, Pete, I knew what I was doing. It wouldn’t have harmed him that much. Only it went wrong.”

  Her face was all twisted up now, and by this time she was crying. It was one of those moments I treasure in the business I’d decided to be in—a man beside me throwing up on my shoes and next to him a hysterical woman.

  “If you’re going to have me believe that, you’ll have to stop bawling long enough to tell me about it.”

  “Would you even want to hear about it?” she sniffed.

  “If it’s the truth, I would.”

  She choked and sniffed some more. “I wanted it to be like the night I shot at Armando. Not to really hurt anyone. I did tell Moon we could spend the night at the Pimsler. He had already checked in. I showed up with a little overnight bag. When he came to the door I raved about the view of the lobby from the railing. In the bag I had the ice pick from Sand Valley and a sort of improvised billy club I’d read was supposed to work—some wet sand in a stocking. My plan was to wallop him one on the head, then jab him with the ice pick where I knew it wouldn’t do anything but give him a sore shoulder for a couple of days. Then I’d leave and tell him later he was attacked by a stranger who came down the hall. I was going to tell him the man hit and stabbed him, then I tried to throw him over the railing, but that I’d fought him off, and after the stranger had run off that I’d done the same, not wanting Armando ever to find out we’d been together. It was a really good plan. It just didn’t work.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “I walloped him, all right, but instead of crashing to the floor like he was supposed to, the big ox just looked up at the ceiling, as if something had fallen on him. I couldn’t believe it. I hit him hard enough to lay up a normal human being for a week. Then he started to buckle, just a little, and I poked him with the ice pick. I was shaken badly enough so it wasn’t exactly where I meant to stick it, but it wouldn’t have killed him. But when he folded up he grabbed the railing and was sort of half hanging over it. I figured that was okay and ran back to grab the bag I’d just left inside the room doorway. When I turned around again the big lummox was still trying to pull himself back to consciousness, only in the process he was working himself farther over the rail.

  “I almost wet myself. He was half there and half gone. I ran over and tried to pull him up by his coat tails. That’s when he tried to rear up and swing at me. One foot slipped out from under him…And he was gone.”

  It was just possible. Moon was that big, that headstrong and that dumb. “What did you do next?”

  “Are you kidding? I closed the door to the room and got out of there like a streak. I went home and changed and then drove over to Sausalito. I’d had that part planned too. I was going to tell you about the mysterious attack on Moon. I figured you would have believed me if I was willing to tell you I had planned to spend the night with him.”

  “You’re right. I would have.”

  “But it turned out I didn’t have to tell anybody anything. In fact, it was such a screwy death I guess even the news services picked up the story. Slide heard about it on the radio. He figured I’d done it deliberately. It convinced him I was serious about wanting Armando done in. The next time I phoned him he offered to send the two men to help.”

  “I should have known he was lying to me all along. About the two men. What was the arrangement?”

  “Slide told me to phone him when I had things set up. I did. He knows where the men took Beverly Jean. Then he phoned the two men, wherever they are, and they phoned here. They convinced Armando they’d kill Beverly Jean if he didn’t do exactly what I told him to.”

  “Do you know the names of the two men?”

  “One of them is Kenny.”

  “Yeah, they could convince him.”

  Armando hung between us. He seemed emptied and exhausted. We struggled back over toward the front door. He was heavy and Bobbie lost her grip on him. I set him down in the doorway.

  “Don’t worry, Pete,” Bobbie told me. “They won’t really hurt her. I made Slide promise that.”

  “My God, Bobbie, what sort of people do you think these are that you’re dealing with? Of course they would. In fact the one called Kenny enjoys hurting people. And he’s got something kinky going with girls. I’ve seen him work.”

  “Oh, Christ,” she murmured. She looked up in a moment, trying to blink back fresh tears. “It really wasn’t such a bad plan, though. If only I’d had the right man.”

  “But there is no right man, Bobbie.”

  “There’s the bank account, and Carl Slide.”

  I knew then that I was going to tell her. It was the only thing that might get her off this vengeance trip. Besides, my well of humanity was running dry. I had only the vaguest outline of a plan to save Beverly Jean from whatever sickness Soft Kenny might have in store for her. The plan, while vague, promised a measure of discomfort for myself.

  “The bank account isn’t what started your dad drinking that way, Bobbie. He kept up his investigation even after they fired him.”

  “What did, then?”<
br />
  “Something a little closer to home. You must have known Beverly Jean’s mother, Theresa Moore.”

  “Yes.”

  “When Theresa Moore learned she only had a little time left, she decided to marry Armando, and she told your dad about it. She told him that Armando had promised to look after her for whatever time she had left. And that he’d look after her daughter as well. That’s what started your dad’s drinking. It was a pitiful effort to make things more bearable. Because Beverly Jean’s father wasn’t some soldier boy who was killed in Vietnam, as Theresa told everyone. And it wasn’t Burt Slide, as some people suspected. It was your own father, Bobbie. He told that to just one person. Old Tom Nolan who lived across the street. And Nolan told me.”

  Bobbie stared at me with a terrible look on her face. She knew I was telling her the truth. And then she screamed, and the sound of it made an eerie harmony with the approaching siren.

  TWENTY-TWO

  They got Armando trundled inside of the ambulance. Cathy talked briefly to one of the attendants, and then the thing shrieked off into the night the way it had come. We went back inside the house. In the main living room, Bobbie was just turning away from the phone on the bar. Her face was falling apart again.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I just talked to Slide. I told him it was all over, and asked him to call the men who have Beverly Jean and tell them to let her go. He said he would call them, but that it might be a while before they freed her. He said it was a part of the deal. Because of the risk involved. He said he’d promised to let Kenny—play with her some.”

  “My God,” said Cathy.

  “Where are they holding her?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Where is Slide? At the lodge?”

  “No, he’s at home.”

  I crossed to the telephone. If I had been in Sand Valley then, I could make Slide tell me where Lou, Kenny and the girl were. I am not a vain man. What I could do, others could do. I put through a call to the Sand Valley police. Merle Coffey was still in his office. I asked how things were going.