Tulip started back toward Nolan with the .45 in hand and Nolan sent a fist flying into Tulip’s gentle mouth. Tulip yiped and clubbed Nolan with the .45 again and kicked him in the back as he went down. From the floor Nolan could see Tulip spitting out a tooth. Just then Dinneck kicked Nolan in the kidney and pain won him.
He opened his eyes a few seconds later and saw Dinneck standing above him, contemplating kicking him again. Nolan grabbed Dinneck by the right heel and heaved him, hard enough, he hoped, to land Dinneck on his tail bone, snap it and kill him. But Tulip was there to brace Dinneck’s fall, and train the .45 on Nolan’s head.
Nolan reached for his towel and, sitting in a puddle of pool water and his own blood, cleaned off his face while Dinneck spat questions.
“What were you nosing around the Big Seven for? What did Hal Davis tell you?”
Nolan said, “Ask Davis.”
Dinneck said, “He cut out. Last he was seen was talking to you. We checked his apartment and all his things were gone. His car, too. Didn’t even leave a forwarding address at the Globe. Why did you visit George Franco?”
“You want the truth?”
“Yeah, try the truth for a change.”
“I’m doing a story on the Chelsey hippie scene. For my magazine. I heard rumors that Franco was a racket boss peddling LSD to the college crowd.”
Dinneck and Tulip glanced at each other as if they almost believed Nolan’s story.
Dinneck said, “I can just about buy you as a reporter, Webb... just about, but not quite. I picture you more as a man running. That’s the way you travel, anyway. Or hunting, maybe. Which are you, Webb? Hunter or hunted?”
“Maybe I’m neither,” Nolan said. Or maybe both.
“Two .38’s. Half a dozen boxes of cartridges. Unmarked clothing, not a laundry mark or a label or anything. Rented car. No address beyond Earl Webb, Philadelphia, on the motel register. Not any one thing to identify you as a living human being.”
“So what?”
“So... so I begin to think you’re a dangerous man, Mr. Webb. And I don’t think your presence in Chelsey benefits my employers.”
Nolan said, “What do I get? Sunrise to get out of town?”
“You’re a man with a sense of humor, Mr. Webb. Maybe you’ll like this, just for laughs...”
Nolan rose up, his muscles tensed, his back arched like a cat’s.
“Tulip, toss me the .45 and we’ll give Mr. Webb here a swimming lesson.”
As the ox was handing the gun to Dinneck, Nolan snapped his towel in Dinneck’s face like a whip. It made a loud crack as it bit flesh. Dinneck clutched his face and screamed, “My eyes! My God, my eyes!”
The .45 skittered across the tile floor. Nolan leaped for it, grabbed it. He whirled and saw Tulip coming like a truck. He waited till the ox was a foot away, then smacked the barrel of the .45 across Tulip’s left temple. Tulip cried out softly and pitched backward, stumbling into the pool; he hit the water hard but got lucky and didn’t crack his head on the cement. Water geysered upon the big man’s impact. He wound up in the shallow section, the top half of him hanging over the side of the pool, semi-conscious, his petal-like mouth sucking for air.
Dinneck was on the floor, screaming, fingers clawing his face.
Nolan slapped him. “Shut the fuck up, before the whole motel’s in here.”
Dinneck quieted, still a blind man, his eyes squeezed together and his face slick with tears.
“Who sent you, Dinneck?”
“I’ll... I’ll never tell you... you lousy cocksucker!”
Nolan seized Dinneck by the scruff of the neck and dragged him over to the pool. Nolan knelt him down and said, “Now I’m going to ask you some questions.”
Dinneck kept swearing at Nolan and Nolan pushed Dinneck’s head under water for sixty seconds. Dinneck came up gasping for air.
“Who sent you, Dinneck? George?”
“You son-of-a-bitch, Webb, goddamn you...”
Nolan put him back under for another minute. When he brought Dinneck back up he had quit talking, but his breath was heavy and his unconsciousness only a ruse.
“Did George Franco send you?”
Dinneck kept his eyes closed, tried to act unconscious.
“The next time I put you under,” Nolan said, “you won’t be coming back up.”
No response.
Nolan shrugged and pushed Dinneck toward the water. Dinneck screamed, “No!” and Nolan hesitated before dunking him again, holding him an inch above the water.
“Who, Dinneck?”
“Not George, he doesn’t know anything about this... George claims he never saw you!”
“You still haven’t said who, Dinneck.”
“Elliot, his name is Elliot! He’s the one in charge... George doesn’t have any power.”
Nolan released Dinneck and the man fell in a heap at the pool’s edge.
Nolan grabbed up his towel, slung it around his shoulders and headed for the door. His cigarettes were in a small puddle in the corner so he let them lay.
“You... you gonna leave us? Just like that?”
Nolan turned toward the voice. Tulip, coming out of his stupor, was standing in the pool, looking puzzled and wet.
“I’m not going to kiss you good night.”
Tulip, dripping wet, looking ridiculous, pouted.
“And get out of those clothes, Tulip. You’ll catch your death.”
Tulip crawled out of the pool. He was hefting his friend Dinneck over his shoulder as Nolan left.
Back in the room, door locked, Nolan laid a loaded .38 on the nightstand by his bed, then washed up and treated his head wounds. Next time he wanted to relax, he thought bitterly, he’d take a hot shower. Hell with swimming.
He was asleep when his head hit the pillow.
4
She wore a black beret, had dark blonde hair and was smoking a cigar. She was looking into the sun, squinting, so it was hard to tell if her features were hard or soft. Her body was bony, though she had breasts, and she was leaning against a ’30’s vintage Ford, holding a revolver on her hip. The woman was staring at Nolan from a grainy, black-and-white poster that was a yard high and two feet wide.
The poster was tacked onto a crumbling plaster wall in a room in what had once been a fraternity house. No one Nolan spoke with in the house seemed to know what fraternity it had been — just that about four years before the frat had been thrown off campus for holding one wild party too many — and since had been claimed by assorted Chelsey U males on the hippie kick. The fraternity symbols over the door were Greek to Nolan.
The room in which Nolan stood staring back at the stern female face was inhabited by a Jesus Christ in sunglasses and blue jeans. Underneath a beard that looked like a Fuller Brush gotten out of hand, the thin young man sported love beads and no shirt. Outside of the beard and shoulder-length locks his body was hairless as a grape.
“Doesn’t she just blow your mind?”
Nolan said, “Not really.”
“Bonnie Parker,” the young man said with awe. He wiped his nose with his forearm. “Now there was a real before-her-time freak.”
“Freak?”
“Right, man. Before her time. She and that Clyde really blew out their minds, didn’t they?”
“They blew minds out, all right.”
“Don’t believe what the press says about them, man! They were alienated from the Establishment, persecuted by society, victims of police brutality.”
“Oh.” Nolan glanced at the poster next to Bonnie Parker’s which was a psychedelic rendering in blue and green; as nearly as he could make out, it said, “Love and Peace Are All.”
“Some of the other freaks got pictures of the movie Bonnie up on the walls. Not me. I insist on the genuine article.”