“Who else? You should have worked that out before this.”
“Well, he’s got friends,” he muttered. Then he got down to business. “Like I said, I got this fillum and it’s for sale. How much will her old man pay for it?”
“Not a nickel, if she’s dead.”
“She’s... she isn’t dead.” I didn’t like the way he stammered over it. He realized that he had to say Laurie was alive. But he hadn’t sounded convincing. “How much, Carmody?”
“Five hundred,” I said carelessly.
He laughed scornfully. “Just multiply that by ten and we’ll go on from there.”
“Where’s a small town doctor going to get that kind of money?”
“He wouldn’t want the fillum to be rented out some more!”
“At five thousand, he couldn’t do anything about it. I think he might raise a grand. But I’m not sure.”
Wensel was bitterly disappointed. He swore vigorously. “Well, how soon can you get it?”
“In a week.”
“A week!” he screamed. “I got to have it tomorrow. Anselmo will find me in a week.”
I shrugged. “Where’s the girl?”
He got crafty again. “How much is that worth?”
“In dollars and cents about one Roosevelt dime. But I might get that thousand for you tomorrow if you steered me to Laurie—” I broke off.
Wensel had stiffened and he was peering down the path. Even in the darkness I could see that he was no harmless little street photographer. The way he reacted told he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot the eyes out of anyone who tried to come up that path. “No stake-out, eh?” he snarled at me, and tried to backhand me with the flat of the gun. I ducked; and then half way down the hill a gun exploded.
Wensel bleated softly and went down. He was hit, but not out. He fired from the ground, the muzzle blast almost scorching my face. Down the hill a woman screamed, and I thought: What in hell is a woman doing here?
But I was doing my thinking on the move. I wasn’t hanging around between two gun fires. I dove sideways at what looked like a thicket. It was all right but it was also the edge of a ridge. I went over the side and down twenty feet in two bounces. I thought I was never going to stop rolling.
Then, suddenly, I came up on my knees and a shadowy form flashed across my line of vision. I was so dizzy and turned around I thought I was back in college playing left end. I reacted from instinct. The tackle I threw then was better than anything I’d ever done at Boston College. Simultaneously, I realized it was possibly not a very bright move. I might be tackling the guy who was doing all the shooting. But it wasn’t; it was a woman.
If you think tackling a woman on a wet hillside, even with lead singing through the air is nice work, forget it. She might have been a big fullback. She was big, all right, and she was active. She struggled with a frantic strength that just sent us further down the side of the ridge. Which was all right too, because it took us farther from the firing.
I tried to get a gentlemanly sort of hold on her, and she tried to bite my wrist. The moment I felt her lips I knew who it was. Only one woman in this case wore so much lipstick it felt like a gob of grease.
I said: “Relax, Miss Vaughn. You’re among friends.”
She gave up then and she had no worse than a split decision due her.
In the meantime the firing seemed to have quit on the ridge above us. There was no sound except the rain falling on the leaves of the scrub trees around us. Then below us, heading down, we heard someone leaving the battle field. I couldn’t tell whether he was staggering or just having trouble with that steep, crooked path. But he was making a lot of noise.
“Who is it?” I asked Eva.
“John Anselmo,” she said sullenly. “He made me come with him. I didn’t want to.”
“You didn’t want to follow me this afternoon either, did you?” I sneered. “You were better at it, anyway. Let’s get up the hill and see how Wensel is.”
He was there, not far from where Anselmo’s first shot had dropped. At first I thought he was dead, but when I tried to turn him over off his face, he spoke.
“Don’t move me, Carmody,” he whispered. “The rat got me good.” He seemed to be hurt along the spine because he couldn’t lift his head to talk. His face was down in the mud and wet leaves, but he couldn’t do anything about it.
I knelt beside him and put my face close to his. “I. didn’t cross you, Wensel. They tailed me here.”
“Don’t make a hell of a lot of difference now. I got it good this time, Carmody.” His voice got suddenly weaker. “Behind the trunk of a big tree up aways — the fillum. I been carrying it with me. That’s all there is. You can have it. It’s worth a grand.”
“Where’s Laurie Bressette?” I asked.
He didn’t seem to hear me. “Don’t let Anselmo have it,” he breathed. “The double crossing rat! Fifty thousand dollars I had coming. Fifty thousand — that was my split.. ” His voice trailed away and I thought he was gone, but he rallied for an instant. “Ask Randolph — ask her what she’ll pay to get back... everything that was stolen...”
He died then, with his face still in the wet cold leaves of that park he’d played in as a kid. Maybe since he had to go, dying here gave him a little comfort. I don’t know. Nothing comforted me. I left him lying there for the rain to fall on.
I took his flashlight and I peered around until I found the film under a tree. Then with Eva Vaughn following I slipped and slid down the tortuous path to the foot of the hill. I didn’t offer to help Eva, but she didn’t seem to notice.
When we got to the little bridge we found Anselmo sitting there with his small neat head against the railing. He still wore that long, straight top coat. He’d stopped to rest, because he had been shot twice in the chest and he’d lost a lot of blood. He never got up again. He was as dead as Marty Wensel and I left him there too, with his long, thin legs stretched out half the width of the bridge...
In the beam of the headlights on his car I examined the film of Laurie Bressette. She’d been a pretty girl, with or without her clothes on. In most of the few frames I looked at she didn’t have any on. It got better as it went on, but I guess I just wasn’t in the frame of mind for that sort of stuff right then.
I put it in a brick picnic fireplace and touched a match to it. It was probably just my imagination that it gave off more heat than any ordinary film would.
I got in beside Eva and drove down the slope of Western Avenue. In the glare of a street light Eva Vaughn looked like a sandhog. Her dress was torn and muddied, and half off her. Her face was smeared with dirt and wet leaves, and all her makeup was gone. So help me, she looked better that way.
I said: “Do you want to talk to me or to the Homicide squad?”
“I haven’t done anything. I mean,” she added, remembering those forged checks, “nothing more.”
“I’m in no mood to humor you,” I said. “Just tell me!”
“All right,” she said. And she started to talk and when she finished I could see, a little foggily perhaps, the whole messy, complicated, blood-strewn picture. She asked: “What are you going to do?”
“There isn’t much left to do,” I said wearily. We always like to think of every case ending in a dramatic arrest, but it doesn’t happen that way very often. After a time, enough blood is spilled, enough people are hurt for the hatred to fade out and the whole brutal business grinds to a dull, heavy stop. That’s what had happened now.
I called CBS and Lida Randolph said she was meeting DeCoudre and O’Leary at Ricardo’s for a drink and a discussion on how to break the news of her signing in his picture. That was a big, important event, and up on a hillside were two men lying dead in the rain. I told Randolph I’d join them in Ricardo’s.