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“Shoot.”

“Just in case you didn’t know, the boss of our operations here is a pretty mysterious guy. He does business by mail, sending instructions either to Mr. Soolpovar, to Vito to Kellum or to me. Do you know him?”

“No, I don’t know his identity.”

“Do you work for him?”

“No comment.”

“That’s not fair.”

“I’ve got to find out for sure where you stand first, that’s all. Anyway, I’ve got another question. How did Kellum break his arm?”

“That was a long time ago. Vito thought we were playing around. At the time I thought it was really something, the way a boy like Vito could take on a monster like Kellum and whip him. I was really impressed.”

“I whipped both the monster and the boy,” I pointed out. “What does that make me?”

Sheila giggled. “I guess I’ve changed. As near as I can see, it makes you a trouble-maker.”

“I’ve only just started,” I said. “If the cops aren’t getting anywhere, maybe I can help them.”

“Well, you can forget about them helping you. Billy Drake and a couple of others are paid off regularly.”

“I figured as much. Now I’ve got another question. If this boss gets in touch with you by mail, how do you get in touch with him?”

“We never have to.”

“All right. After Bert Archer was separated from service, did he find out what was going on?”

“I’m not sure.” Sheila wasn’t kidding. The question puzzled her all right. “But he did have a lot of fights with Karen. They were accusing each other of — something. I don’t know what. Probably, I’d say Bert found out.”

“Where do you fit in? I mean, you said you had a crush on Bert. You once asked me if it were possible for a girl to love two men at the same time, remember?”

“! — I didn’t hide what I felt for Bert. I’m not the type. But Karen wasn’t jealous. I’d only known him for a short time after he came back, until he got killed. But I don’t think Karen would have been jealous, anyway. Whatever was between them before Bert went away wasn’t there anymore, and it had nothing to do with what they were accusing each other of. Karen was only infatuated with him, that’s all. It didn’t last and she knew it but she wasn’t sure how to tell Bert.”

“Karen wouldn’t have told anyone that.”

“A girl knows without being told, Gideon. That’s…”

Sheila was interrupted by a scream. Something like a scream, but hardly human. An animal cry that they’d never permit on television because it would scare all the kiddies.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A FIGURE LUMBERED toward us in the darkness. It screamed again, a horrible sound which carried far across the almost silent beach and drowned out the giggles from the blanket fifty yards away, a sound compounded of terror and hate.

Something crashed flatly. A brilliant flash lit up the shapeless figure. Face distorted, hair disheveled, it was Becky Lutz. And she had fired a pistol.

“Lie flat!” I yelled at Sheila, and got down beside her. “You put that thing away, Becky,” I said. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

“You killed my Ben.”

“I didn’t kill anybody. I want to find out who killed Ben as much as you do. Just take it easy, Becky.” I climbed to my knees and watched her. She was crazy-mad all right. Even if she had known I was out here on the beach, at this distance she couldn’t have been sure it was me. Dandy.

“I liked you,” she said. “I thought you could help Ben. Ben is dead, you know. The police said you killed him.”

“They were wrong. They let me go.” I stood up and took a step toward Becky. The pistol roared again. This time I was looking straight at the muzzle blast and it blinded me. If I hit the dirt again I figured I was a dead duck, so I kept walking.

“You put that thing away. Someone will get hurt.”

The gun blammed once more. Bless Becky, she couldn’t hit the side of an apartment house from the delivery entrance. But accidentally, she might hit something a lot smaller than that. Me.

The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Becky shrieked and I grabbed the pistol away from her.

Becky kept right on shrieking. “Help! HELP! You killed him. Help!”

I hadn’t been aware of it, but the teen-agers, six of ’em by latest unhappy count, had clustered around us while their girls stood in a group a few yards off, chattering. “What the hell you shooting that thing off, for, mister?” one of the boys demanded. “Don’cha know that’s dangerous?”

And another: “Lady, is he bothering you?” Considering what they thought to be the true state of things, that was the understatement of this or any other century.

Becky had resorted to her wail again.

“You give us that pistol, mister. Don’t want no trouble.”

It was getting to be an ugly situation. They’d crowded in close. Any moment, one of them might decide to out-hero the others and hurl himself at me. I’d gladly take them on two at a time if I had to, but six had altogether too many arms and legs to mess with.

I said, “Boys, you’re making a mistake.”

But Becky’s wail was far more convincing.

They began to close the circle. This close I could see that one of them had found a shiv, though God knows where he managed to hide it in his bathing trunks. They smelled so loaded if you shook them they might overflow. So it suddenly occurred to me the situation wasn’t one in which I might merely find myself mobbed. I might find myself killed.

Before Becky could repeat her wail I raised her pistol, a .32, and squeezed the trigger, praying it wouldn’t misfire again. It didn’t. It roared a pleasantly deadly sound and backed the circle up a few steps. When it roared a second time I found my weak spot. It was the hero with the shiv. It was why he carried the shiv. He was yellow.

I lunged at him and bowled him over but lost my footing in the soft sand and went down with him. He was yelping to beat the band and I felt his blade scrape against my chest, nicking the flesh and grazing the ribs.

People were shouting. Brave souls heading towards us from the boardwalk. In a minute the place would be crawling with cops and every last one of the six male and six female witnesses, stewed to their gills or not, would swear I had attacked Becky and I wasn’t sure that Becky would testify in my behalf or not. As for Sheila, she had decided to take a quick powder while Becky’s cannon was changing hands. I couldn’t blame her, but that left me without a witness for the defense. All this, of course, was secondary. Sort of like a man with six or seven bullets in his gut in an ambulance on the way to the hospital and wondering if he’d catch a cold or measles or something there.

I rolled clear and leaped to my feet and got a good rap across the bridge of my nose for the trouble. Hands tugged at my shoulder but I threw them off and broke away. I stamped down when something coiled around me ankle and heard a little-boy scream.

Then I was in the clear and running. Not toward the boardwalk and more trouble, if of a milder variety. I made for the ocean and kicked off my loafers along the way. I took a dozen running strides in and it was cold as the Bering Sea on New Year’s Day. I kept running, surface-dived and began to swim out, straight out and good riddance.

I’d lost Becky’s .32 in my haste, but it didn’t matter. I just wanted to get away and think. Things were buzzing around inside my head like flies around a Korean honey bucket. From one source and another I’d gathered odd scraps of information. Put them all together and maybe you had a killer. Maybe you had a headache and plenty of wild notions. I had to talk to Kellum. Once he would have clammed up, but not now. Now I’d knocked the stuffings out of him. The way his sick mind worked, if Karen knew her Freud and company, I was Kellum’s Marilyn Monroe. But I wasn’t the only one. For Vito Lucca had broken his arm. Hot damn, I was getting somewhere! Maybe Kellum was covering up for Vito. Kellum discovered the body. And maybe… but it didn’t make sense, none of it. It made so little sense that it filled my lungs with water. There I was, swimming out beyond the jagged stone breakwaters which batter the Coney Island tide before it can tumble on the beach, thinking up a storm. And coughing and gagging and cursing myself before I re-established the rhythm, and where the hell was I?