“Yes, you did. You and Jurgenson, talking in my basement. You must have been near the furnace. Your voices carried right up the ducts. And you had mentioned that she lived in Ralston. There aren’t too many Eloise Slaters in Ralston …” Her shrug was negligible. “Getting the address was as easy as opening the phone book.”
“Getting her to tell you the location of the seventy-eight grand—or what of it that Monroe James doesn’t have—must not have been.” I waved a hand at the scene on the bed. “What finally did the trick, the whip or the hot wax?”
“Neither.” Carolyn brought her right hand up and out of the shadows. “This did.” In her fist was a gun, a gun that looked very much like the .22 I had taken away from Marlon Abel the other day. I had no reason to think it was not the gun that had done in its ex-owner.
“Just like in the detective books,” I said. My voice sounded a little high-pitched, even to myself. I cleared my throat and said, “I’ve really got to start keeping better track of things like that. You never know when they’re going to come back to haunt you.” I drifted, very slowly, toward the foot of the bed, my right hand outstretched, palm up. “This is just a little too melodramatic, Carolyn. Why don’t you hand over the iron and we’ll end this thing now before someone gets hurt—really hurt.”
“I thought you liked drama.” She raised the gun ever so slightly but ever so definitely in my direction. I stopped my negligible advance toward her. “You should love this,” she said. “It’s just like one of your detective stories, isn’t it?”
Yes, except I don’t care that much if Spenser or Scudder or whoever gets drilled.
I said, “Where’d you get that popgun?”
She looked at it as if just noticing it. “I found it in the closet when I was looking for the things to tie her up with.” She glanced toward the closet. The thought of rushing her flashed across my brain and disappeared just as fast. I couldn’t have gotten around the bed in time to reach her before she pulled the trigger. I followed her glance at the sliding doors near the foot of the bed. One side of the closet was open, and junk spilled out of it and onto the carpet. Dark shapes, mostly, in the dim and flickering light. Clothes. Shoes. Items that may have been more of Eloise’s playthings. More clothes …
“I hit her over the head,” Carolyn was saying. “God, I thought I had killed her, the way she just … dropped. She was still conscious. I was going to just look for the money while she was out, but …” Carolyn looked at me. Her eyes were black in the dim light. “I brought her in here. You had talked about the … equipment she used with Gregg. I found it.” She looked at Eloise, an alabaster mannequin in the bizarre light. “It was just as well. I’d’ve never found the money on my own.”
“Under the front steps.”
Carolyn’s eyes came back to me, wide. “You knew?”
“I guessed. I’m guessing all over the place. The landscaping work out there looked recent—and ongoing. Easy to wrap the dough in plastic, scoop a shallow dugout, bury the loot, cover it with a layer of dirt, a landscape cloth, a layer of stone. Easy to get to. You could do it in broad daylight if the neighbors weren’t too nosy. Incidentally, you might not want to get your fingerprints all over that thing.” I nodded at the gun. “I have the feeling it’s the gun that killed Abel, probably Patavena, too.”
The smile had left her face. “Don’t worry. I’ll get rid of it.” She looked long at me, her face impassive. When she spoke, her lips barely moved, her words barely made it across the room to me. “God, Ivan, I wish you hadn’t come here.”
“I’m beginning to feel the same way. By the way, you were wrong.”
“Wrong?
“I don’t like this at all.”
A smile made its way across her face, most of it collecting in one corner of her mouth. It was a small, sad smile, a smile of regret, a smile of resignation. Or, hell, maybe it was just a trick of the light.
“I mean it,” Carolyn said. “I mean it. I really wish you had stayed away.”
For Eloise’s benefit I said, “What she’s getting at is, she was just going to leave you here like this and vanish into the night. Someone would find you, and she wouldn’t have to worry about your tattling on her. It’d be embarrassing for you, but what the hell.” I glanced at Carolyn. Her cheeks were wet. Moisture inched into the lines between her nostrils and the corners of her mouth, but her face was as expressionless as a china doll’s.
“Now, unfortunately, she has to kill you. What’s worse, she has to kill me, too.”
Across the bed from me, Carolyn sniffed wetly. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I was just going to take the money and go away. I wouldn’t even be here except I came back after I loaded the money in my car to take the gag out of her mouth so she could breathe okay.”
“A humanitarian with a gun. What a refreshingly quirky combination.”
The wall that held in her emotions cracked, crumbled, and fell away. “Goddammit,” she sobbed harshly. “I only wanted the money. I deserve it. My husband died for it. It’s mine.” She looked at me almost pleadingly, willing me to believe her, agree with her, give my blessing to the deed—robbery, murder … my murder.
I said, “Gregg didn’t die for it.”
The half-hysterical sobs stopped abruptly. She looked at me through streaming eyes, snuffled loudly, wiped her nose with the back of her left hand.
“He died because of the money, but not for it. The sick irony is, it was the biggest money trouble Gregg was ever in … and he wasn’t in it. The only stolen money he ever saw was a crummy hundred bucks that she gave him”—I jerked a thumb at Eloise—“and which he never even got to spend. He gave half of it to Lou Boyer and died with the other half in his jeans. He didn’t even know it was stolen.”
Carolyn looked from me to Eloise and back—stupidly, as if drugged, as if just coming out of a deep and unrestful sleep. “But … But then …”
“She did.” I repeated the thumb gesture. “You know why Gregg came here, Carolyn: to have Eloise do to him what you’ve done to Eloise. Picture Gregg in that position: trussed up, helpless. He can’t see, he can’t even hear too well. Eloise would leave him like that for … who knows? A good long time. Long enough to take Gregg’s car—a precaution—and go make some money. Dressed in men’s clothes, covered from head to foot, she could pass for a slightly built man. And did.” I moved quickly—and recklessly, but Carolyn was temporarily too confused to react—and scooped up a handful of clothing from the floor. “See? Here are the work gloves.” I dropped them on the bed, near Eloise’s left leg. “Long-sleeved shirt. Men’s. Small.” I dropped it. “And this.” I held up the dark ski mask for a moment before letting it fall to the bed.
Carolyn made no attempt to mask her surprise and confusion.
“That’s why Gregg didn’t pay his gambling debts,” I said, “why he didn’t skip town, why no one could tie him to the robberies. He never had the money.”
“Why didn’t she leave town?” Her eyes were on the naked woman.
“What for? Everyone had been looking for a holdup man, as she had planned all along, and when Gregg died with stolen money on him, everyone thought they had their man.” Carolyn’s moist eyes had come back to my face. “Gregg died for nothing,” I said quietly.
She sniffed. “It’s still my money.”
“Possession is nine points of the law,” I agreed. I was near the foot of the bed, where I had stayed after grabbing the stuff off the floor. Now I began to edge around the foot, very, very slowly. I made my voice go low, slow and soothing, the way you might talk to a frightened animal. “Look, Carolyn, you haven’t done anything really stupid yet. Don’t start. Give me the gun, give me the money, and you can walk away. I’ll turn it over to the cops and feed them some kind of line. I’ll keep you out of it, I’ll keep Eloise out of it, too, to guarantee she won’t squawk. She couldn’t nail you without nailing herself. Everybody’s in the clear.” That was an out-and-out lie, of course: Eloise Slater had murdered one, mayb
e two men, and it would take someone with colder blood than mine to simply ignore that. But I didn’t share that thought with Carolyn.
“Everybody’s in the clear,” Carolyn echoed. “And poor. Do you know what it’s like, Ivan? To not know if there’s going to be enough to cover the bills? To have people calling the house, collection agents, creditors, wanting their money now, and you haven’t got it? To be scared all the time—scared you’ll lose everything, they’ll take everything away?” The waterworks had started again. “Do you know?”
“Oh, vaguely,” I answered. The gun had remained in her fist, forgotten. Not by me: by her. We were separated by the width of the double bed and another two or three feet, the distance between Carolyn and her side of the bed. If the bed had been narrower, or Carolyn had been standing closer to it, or I was in better shape or any kind of shape at all, I might have contemplated doing something stupid like the guys on the TV crime shows. Instead I took a couple more baby steps and rounded the foot of the bed.
My thinking about the gun seemed to remind Carolyn of it. She raised it slightly, aiming at my breastbone.
“I don’t want to do this, Ivan.” Her voice shook. Tears dripped from her chin onto her shirt.
“Then don’t. Quit it now. You know you can’t get away with it.”
Despite herself she laughed at the Saturday-matinee dialogue. I felt my mouth twist into an involuntary grin. “Sorry, but the Private Detective Code requires me to say ‘You won’t get away with it,’ or words to that effect, at about this point. The truth is, your original plan—leave the Priestess of the Whip as is and just vanish—probably would have worked. This one certainly won’t. Eloise wouldn’t have reported you to the cops; how could she? But kill us and there will be an investigation. Your name will come up. And you will be conspicuous by your absence. You’d be surprised how fast seventy-eight grand, or however much is left, evaporates when you’re on the lam, honey.”
Her dark eyes scanned the room as if looking for a way out. Suddenly they seemed to catch fire, and she looked back at me excitedly. “Then … Then I won’t run. I’ll go home and stay there, and I’ll hide the money, and I’ll tell the police I don’t know anything about—No! I’ll tell them you came to my office today, because you did, there are witnesses, and you told me that you had set up a meeting with someone who could tell you more about Gregg and the money. And that’s all I’ll say. They’ll assume something went wrong, someone double-crossed you, whatever. Because there’s nothing to connect me with her or this place.” Her eyes locked on mine. “That will work!”
The hairs on my neck came to attention, mainly because she was right.
“Well,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level, “that’s better than saying you’re going to make it look like I killed Eloise and then killed myself, which is what Hollywood would have you do. What if I tell you that I brought the police with me and they now have the place surrounded, which is what Hollywood would have me do? … No, I didn’t think so.”
She had raised her right arm. Now she extended it toward me, bringing up her left hand to support her wrist. Her hands trembled. Her shoulders shook.
For a small gun, the .22 looked awfully big.
“I’m sorry, Ivan.” She sniffled. Her cheeks shone with moisture that danced and glittered under the flickering candle flame. “There’s no other way. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t even want to hurt her. But there’s no other way.”
“Carolyn … Carolyn, this is a big mistake …”
“Good-bye, darling …”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The moment comes in every detective story. Things look bleak for the intrepid hero. He has brilliantly pieced the mystery together, but in such a fat-headed fashion as to leave himself high and dry. The villain has the advantage. But our noble knight-errant, while seeming to prattle on aimlessly, has subtly maneuvered himself into a position from whence he can conveniently douse the lights. The room goes black. A shot explodes into the darkness. A struggle ensues. Someone bites someone else on the hand. The gun skitters across the floor like a spooked cat. Another struggle ensues. Protagonist and antagonist lock in mortal combat, the gun at the center of the struggle. Again it spits fire. There is an awful moment of suspense …
It didn’t go quite so elegantly in this case.
In fact, it didn’t go elegantly at all.
Carolyn’s finger tightened on the trigger of the .22.
The barrel of the gun erupted in a white-hot flashbulb explosion.
I dived for the floor on my side of the bed and hugged it like it was my long-lost mother.
And someone held a red-hot rod to my left biceps.
I shouldn’t have been standing there when Carolyn’s gun went off. Another nanosecond and I wouldn’t have been, I’d have been on the floor, hiding behind the bed like any sensible person. But there it was, and there I was, and there the bullet was. Irresistible force meets not-quite-immovable object.
Funny. In the movies it happens in slow motion. In real life, when it happens, it happens fast, impossibly fast, an unintelligible blur of events, of sounds, even of smells. You don’t put the components together until later. If you live.
I lived. The problem with the first-person narrative is that you know, or ought to, that the bullet didn’t kill me. Of course, in the moment I wished it had. I couldn’t decide whether to throw up, crap in my pants, or break down and cry, so I did none of the above. Swallowing hard to keep what was in my stomach in my stomach, I flipped onto my back and reached over my head to grab a leg of the bedside table. I tipped the table and the candle extinguished itself harmlessly. Better late than never. I took a splash of wax across my face, like a razor slash, but it was nothing compared to the fire in my arm.
My face was wet with sweat and tears. I reached over with my right hand, tentatively, fearfully. The slug had caught me in the upper left arm—I’d begun to move, otherwise it would probably have taken out my Adam’s apple—spun me around and knocked me on my butt. They always do that, bullets. Except on television.
I took my hand away and rubbed the hot, sticky fluid between my fingertips. Blood. My blood. What I get for trying sweet reason when what I should have done was grab the .38 out of my back pocket and blow Carolyn’s pretty little head clean off.
Still not too late for that: I rolled halfway onto my left side and yanked out my gun with my right hand. The effort probably hurt monstrously. It was hard to tell, because already the pain in my arm was starting to feel remote, as if it was someone else’s injury, not mine. My arm was beginning to feel sort of numb. So were my lips and my fingers. I was beginning to feel kind of dopey, too—more than usual—and I caught a kind of nervous giggle, a tee-hee-I’m-not-dead chortle trying to sneak out on the end of a fast, ragged breath.
I swallowed a few more times and concentrated, concentrated on listening for Carolyn, concentrated on staying conscious, concentrated on staying alive.
I think I may have drifted off, but only for a matter of seconds. Then I registered the sound someone’s harsh breathing—mine?—and the night wind grabbing the house and shaking it angrily, and a faint swishing sound like a brush on canvas.
Carolyn, feeling her way across the blackened room, her fingers grazing wall, furniture.
I waited, trying to hold on to the bare whispers over the sound of the wind and of my heart pounding.
An eternity later I kicked out, kicked again—kicked something that yielded.
Carolyn. She cried out and fell on top of me and was all arms and legs in the darkness, thrashing, fighting, clawing.
Inevitably my injured arm ended up on the receiving end of one of her blows, and an Independence Day display went off behind my eyes as pain rocketed from my arm to my brain. I struck out just as blindly as she had, caught her hard—I don’t know where, but hard—and felt her weight suddenly lifted from me as she crashed against the wall opposite the bed. It knocked the wind out of her, and I heard her half-sobbing, half-hiccuping
breath as she tried to get it back.
“Carolyn …” I croaked.
I got up onto my right elbow and tried to drag myself toward where she must have fallen. The side of my hand, the hand that held the gun, touched bare flesh. A leg, an arm, whatever it was, it jerked away from me, accompanied by a kind of scared-animal cry.
“Carolyn—”
There was a sound in the darkness, a sound I didn’t recognize, and then the impact of something flat and hard on the side of my head.
The room got very bright.
And then it got very dark.
I didn’t lose consciousness. I heard Carolyn drag herself up, crying, heard her stumble out of the room and to the front door. I heard that door open and close. I heard a fitful rain hammering the roof, like handfuls of gravel that someone occasionally tossed up. I heard an engine sputter to life. But for all the use I was, I might as well have been fettered like Eloise.
I don’t know how long it was before I could cajole my arms and legs into going back to work. It didn’t matter. Two minutes would be more than enough time for Carolyn to have headed off in any of four directions. With seventy-eight thousand dollars, less however much Eloise Slater had given to her friend Monroe James.
I groped for and found a light switch and, after I got my eyeballs put back in, started untying Eloise.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Douglas County sheriff’s department found Carolyn that very night, or, more accurately, early the next morning. She was in her car. The car was a burned-out husk that had lighted the night sky above a lonely, rain-slick highway west of town. There had been no accident. The car was neatly pulled off to the side of the road; there were no skid marks; there was no sign of trouble. There was only a charred, melted, grotesque wreck. The sheriff suspected foul play and investigated accordingly. Nothing came of it.
If there had been any money in the car, it was long gone. One way or another.
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