by Jack Lynch
“All right, it will have to do,” I told everybody. “Melody, this is going to get hairy. Are you sure you want to come along?”
It was hard to tell about the expression that crossed the girl’s face in that dim light. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw pain, enough of it to last a couple of generations. Then she got control of herself again and turned to me.
“Cookie would have done it for me,” she said quietly.
I nodded, and we started across the road. Anthony had a few keys of his own. One of them got us through the pedestrian gate and onto the grounds of the house. We left Dustin and the backup man there. Christopher and Eric still supported Anthony up to the front porch. Melody and I trailed along behind.
Anthony had a little difficulty at the front door getting his key into the lock. Christopher finally did it for him. Anthony opened the door just wide enough to see that nobody was standing just inside. The sound of a television set came from the nearby living room.
I motioned for Dustin’s men to get Anthony back to the car. Melody and I stepped inside, and I closed the door quietly. Melody was already going up the carpeted stairway. I followed. There weren’t any lights on the landing or in the hallway above. I took out my penlight. The upper hall was carpeted as well, which made movement easier. The people down below wouldn’t come looking for us unless our footfalls made the floor creak.
Melody crossed to a door and opened it. It was dark inside, except for some dim light entering windows on the side of the room. She went in and I followed, then shut the door behind us.
“Keep your light down,” the girl whispered. “This is near enough the front of the house it could be seen from outside.”
We were in the master bedroom. It stretched toward the rear of the house.
“This room, the study beyond and a bathroom off that take up this whole side of the floor,” Melody told me. “These rooms connect, but their entrance to the corridor has been sealed off.”
“The bedroom door is the only way in and out?”
“The only way onto the corridor. There’s a narrow servants’ stairway at the rear landing between the study and bathroom.” Melody crossed to a small stand next to the bed and searched through a couple of drawers before she found a ring of keys. She touched my sleeve, and we crossed the long room to the study. Its door was ajar. We went in, and I closed the door behind us. The room wasn’t as large as the bedroom. It was sparsely furnished, with a desk in one corner and several file cabinets along one wall. I crossed to the cabinets.
“Can we turn on the lights in here?” I asked quietly.
“I wouldn’t.”
I grunted and ran my penlight over the cabinets. Either Fitzmorris had changed his coding system, or Anthony had lied. There weren’t any identifying tags on the cabinet drawers. That meant things would take longer. I began trying cabinet drawers. Not all of them were locked. I figured what I was after would be in one of the locked ones.
In all, there were six rows with four file drawers in each. Two of the rows were locked. I took the keys from Melody and tried to guess which key would open the file drawers. The two locked rows would take separate keys, so there should have been two keys that looked alike. There weren’t. Maybe it was a wrinkle in key security I didn’t know about. At least twenty keys were on the ring. I began trying them, one by one, on the first locked row of file drawers. It was slow going.
Something made a clanging sound downstairs, from the rear of the house. I hesitated. It probably was from the kitchen. I went back to work. Melody was hugging her arms to herself as if she were cold. I was feeling sweaty, myself. She paced back to wait by the door to the bedroom.
It took me several minutes. A sound from the street made me drop the keys onto the carpet once. I finally found a key that unlocked one of the rows. I didn’t stop to go through it, but kept trying keys until I had the second set of drawers open. I did a brief survey of the eight drawers. There was a lot of material to be gone through. I tried a random sampling first, dipping into four places in each of the drawers. That was thirty-two dips, and tedious going. Besides whatever incriminating evidence he might have kept, Fitzmorris had a lot of plain junk: receipts, invoices, check statements, doctor bills, auto repair statements and miscellaneous paperwork that amounted to about a quarter-century of meticulous living.
I tried something else, a quick survey of the first few folders in each drawer, as well as the last few folders. It seemed to me that anything as important as was supposed to be there would be easily accessible, not jammed down in the middle somewhere. I had tried this technique on five drawers and twenty-eight folders before I found something that looked promising. There were some receipts, dated over the past twelve months, of money transfers between a stockbroker’s office in Kansas City and a savings and loan firm in Scottsdale, Arizona. The next folder looked innocent enough, containing confirmation statements and monthly summaries of an account Fitzmorris had with a local brokerage house. He had a lot of money to play around with, from the looks of things.
The next folder was pay dirt. It not only contained statements showing transfers of money between the Scottsdale savings and loan firm and Fitzmorris’s accounts in San Francisco, it also had itemized breakdowns of sums of money deposited in the Kansas City broker’s office by various people. It showed the unbroken line of transfer of the money, and the next folder and some of the transfer statements themselves.
I spread out the folders with the most damaging material and carefully lifted out the telltale sheets. At the rear of the next file drawer, I found copies of correspondence between Mr. Elliott Fitzmorris of Ross, and Mr. Marshal Glickman of Lake Forest, Illinois; Mr. Cassie Castelli of Grosse Point, Michigan; and Mr. Mervin Wen of Kansas City, Missouri. It was more than I could have hoped for. Melody came back across the room.
“I’m going to have to risk the light,” I told her, “just long enough to photograph this stuff.”
“Not here,” she warned. “They keep a small bulb burning in the bathroom next door. You can turn on more light there, and it won’t be as noticeable.”
“Show me,” I told her. I took the documents and followed her through a rear doorway onto a landing. That’s where the narrow, steep servants’ stairway spiraled down, probably to the kitchen. She opened another door off the landing, and a dim wedge of light came through it. I went in, and she closed the door behind me. I turned on an overhead light, then set up a form of production line. We had all learned from Henry Ford. I put one sheet on the toilet lid, one atop a small hamper next to it, and several along the wide outer ledge of the pink-tiled bathtub. I had them in place and was just bending over with the camera the chain’s distance from the first sheet on the toilet lid when Melody opened the door quickly, sending papers sailing off the ledge into the bathtub.
“Somebody’s coming,” she told me in a harsh whisper.
“Upstairs?”
“No, down in the drive. A car just drove in.”
“Go back and wait, and close that door slowly.”
She did as I said while I scrambled to lift pages out of the tub and put them back where I could photograph them. I took two photos of each document, stacked them in order again, and put out another set to be photographed. By now I could hear some clumping around downstairs in the back of the house. Melody hadn’t closed the door all the way. She was standing just outside.
“I think I heard Fitz’s voice,” she whispered in to me.
I didn’t reply, and she went away. I finished the photographing, put the documents in order, turned out the overhead light and hustled back into the study. Melody was standing over by the door to the bedroom. She was getting jumpy. So was I. She came over to me while I began to replace the documents in the proper folders.
“I went in and listened at the bedroom door,” she told me quietly. “Men are talking in the landing downstairs. I’m afraid he’s on his way up here.”
“Can we get down the back stairway?” I asked her.<
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“Maybe, but I don’t know if they keep it locked down below.” She gasped once as she looked down at me. “The keys, quick!”
The cabinet drawers could be relocked by depressing the locking lug; I didn’t need the keys for it. I tossed them to her, and she moved like a gazelle back the length of the room and into the bedroom. I was putting the last of the folders into their proper drawer when lights went on in the front bedroom.
“Surprise, honey,” I heard Melody say.
“You!” shouted Fitzmorris. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I slid the drawers closed, clicked the locks and moved around the deep end of the cabinets, dropping to a crouch on the floor. I heard Melody feign a yawn.
“Waiting for you, baby, what else?”
The door at the far end of the room was jerked open and light spilled across the carpet in front of me. “How did you get in?” Fitzmorris demanded.
His voice sounded as if he’d turned back toward the bedroom. With my head as close to carpet level as I could manage, I sneaked a quick look. Fitzmorris had his back to me. He was in an angry stance. I could see Melody beyond him, sitting back on his bed with her hands stretched behind her, jutting out her breasts.
Fitzmorris wasn’t buying any.
“I just snuck in, honey. I was in a mood to see you. You know how I am when I’m in the mood to see a man.”
She gave him a dazzling smile. He walked to the bed and stood over her. He was wearing a dark sports jacket and trousers. I could almost sense his anger from where I was. He reached out and slapped her, just once, but it was a heavy-handed blow and sent her sprawling sideways on the bed.
“I don’t believe you,” he told her. He stood over her, then thought of something. “That kid you’re engaged to, does he have anything to do with this? Or his dad’s partner, Dustin? Did he put you up to it?”
Melody had gotten to her knees, holding one hand against her face where he’d hit her. “Honest, no, honey. I just wanted to see you.”
He smacked her with the other hand, sending her reeling back onto the bed. “Don’t lie to me!” He was practically screaming. He seemed neurotically unnerved. Maybe it told me something about him I hadn’t thought of before. He turned abruptly from the bed and crossed to the corridor door.
“Jackie! Get up here,” he shouted down the stairs. That would be Jackie Clark, who’d been with Anthony when they’d given Shirley such a devastating beating.
The younger man joined him in a moment—a shorter man, under six feet, but broad shouldered and thick through the middle. Fitzmorris returned to the bed, grabbed Melody by her hair, and dragged her to her feet. She was silent, but her face had turned hard.
“Take this one across the hall and make her talk. Find out how she got in, why she got in, whether she was with anybody.”
Jackie hesitated. “How, persuasive…?”
“Just make her talk. I don’t like the looks of this.”
“You’re the boss,” he said. He took Melody’s arm in a firm grip and led her from the room.
Fitzmorris came back to the study doorway and turned on the light. I tried to back through the wall to the outside stonework. He stood for another moment, then snapped off the light and slammed the door. I moved like a ghost out the back end of the room and down the little servants’ stairway. I couldn’t change the order of priorities now. I knew what sort of things could happen to Melody in short order, but my first commitment was to Shirley, because…Well, just because. Out of that grew my commitment to McDonnough and the need to get the cameraful of film outside the estate perimeter. After that, Melody and Jackie Clark would get my undivided attention.
The door at the bottom of the steep stairwell wasn’t locked, but stuff was piled up against it on the other side. I shoved the door open enough to stick my head through. It opened into the back of either an old-time pantry or vegetable preparation room. Bags of flour and sugar and other foodstuffs, including a couple of sacks of potatoes, were piled against the door. Fitzmorris must have bought stuff in wholesale lots. I shoved the door open far enough to slip through, then closed it and shoved foodstuffs back against it. I was stopped by a sharp scream coming from upstairs.
Nobody was in the kitchen, and I went out the back door, leaving it unlocked behind me. There was a light on in the old carriage house now used as a garage, and its front doors were standing open. It reminded me of the first time I’d been there, and that, in turn, reminded me of something else. Maybe Melody couldn’t be the immediate priority, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t take a few seconds to create a little diversion.
I crossed the lawn and took out the .45. I edged around the open front door. The man I’d seen patrolling that other night was bent over getting something out of the back of a late-model Lincoln. His shotgun was leaning against the wall just inside the door. I went up behind him quietly and smacked the muzzle of the automatic alongside his skull. He fell with a little hum of surprise.
I swung shut one of the front doors and dragged the watchman’s limp form up behind it. I also emptied the shells out of his shotgun before making a quick search. Under a bench in the corner, I found an entire case of barbecue charcoal-starter fluid. God bless fellows who buy in wholesale lots. I grabbed several cans and carried them around to the back of the carriage house, where the tank trap of junk sat like a patient beacon waiting to be touched off. I spread the charcoal fluid generously and dug out the book of matches I carry for when I run into women who still smoke.
Each of the burning matches made a little poof as it touched one of the fluid-soaked pieces of wood, and in another moment flames were licking upward, and the pile of scrap took off in a full-bodied roar.
I shouted Fire! at the top of my lungs a couple of times, then ran back to the side fence next to the vacant lots. I was over the fence and dodging around underbrush, heading for the road, when the front door to the Fitzmorris house banged open. Somebody from around there shouted that the fire was in back by the carriage house.
I trotted down to Dustin’s Cadillac. Other cars were now parked on both sides of the road. I saw McDonnough clamber out of one of them. I crossed over to him and jammed the camera into his hand.
“That should have everything you need. It’s in folders at the rear of a locked file drawer in a study behind the master bedroom on the second floor. When can you go in?”
McDonnough had already passed the camera to another man, who ran over to another car and took off with a roar.
“There’s a federal judge riding along in that car to the photo lab. He’ll have to see some of the processed material. He’ll sign the warrant, my man will race back here and we’ll go in.”
I murmured an obscene word and turned away.
“Where are you going?” McDonnough asked.
“Back inside. There’s a girl there who needs getting out.”
Dustin, Christopher and Eric had crowded around while I was talking to the captain.
“Let’s go back in the easy way,” said Christopher. “I got the fellow’s keys before Stan hauled him off to the hospital.” He held up Anthony’s keys as the four of us began moving toward the front pedestrian gate. I heard a fire truck in the distance.
“There’s going to be a lot of confusion in a minute,” I told them, “but even that might be too late. Mr. Dustin, I’d like you to wait out here, but I’ll take your boys with me this time. I want to go in and out fast.”
Christopher already had the front gate open. We trotted up the walk and tried to move quietly up the front stairs. The door was still ajar from their coming out to investigate the fire. We went in, but I didn’t see anybody. I started up the stairs, then stopped. The man they called Jackie was halfway down the staircase. He had a stricken look on his face. One arm was hooked over the railing to support himself. The other was pressed across his groin. He lost his hold just as he saw us, and crumpled down onto the stairs with a moan.
Then I saw Melody. She was starting down the stair
s above him. Both her sweatshirt and jeans looked as if a bear had tried to maul them. She’d been popped in one eye as well. It would be swelling up shortly. She stopped when she saw us, then recognized me, and managed a grin as she trotted down the stairway.
“Are you all right?” I asked her.
“I am now,” she told me, clutching my arm.
“What happened?”
“I fought back,” she said.
I looked up at Jackie, collapsed on the staircase, then back at Melody.
“Well really, Mr. Bragg. A girl like me has to learn to fight back.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I told everybody. We left.
TWENTY-SIX
So far as I was concerned, the activity by the men still waiting in front of the Fitzmorris house would be fairly cut-and-dried once McDonnough’s man came back with the search warrant. Firefighters were laying hose and dousing the bonfire in back. I figured my own work was finished.
Dustin told the driver, Stan, who’d taken Anthony to the hospital, to give Melody and me a lift back to where we’d left our cars at the Shores building site. Melody was quiet during the ride. She sniffed once and wiped a corner of her good eye. I assumed that was for Cookie Poole. I hadn’t judged him to be one who could bring a tear to anybody’s eyes, but she’d known him longer than I had.
The driver let us off, and I walked Melody to her car. She was in control of herself, but she moved with an exaggerated tiredness. Or maybe it wasn’t exaggerated. Maybe she was just more honest in some ways than I was used to.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked her.
She hesitated, with the door to her car open. “I expect I’ll go off somewhere and mourn my man.”
“Cookie?”
“Yes.”