Gracie
That was all there was to it, but it was enough. I stuck the stuff back in the envelope, pulled up the rubber carpet on the floorboard and laid it against the boards. The carpet fell back and covered it nicely.
I drove on up the street to a bar, went in and ordered a drink and carried it back in the phone booth with me. Then I shoved in a nickel and sipped the top off my drink while I was connected with police headquarters.
A voice said, “Sergeant Walker speaking.”
“Captain Lindsey.”
“Hang on, I’ll connect you.”
A couple of clicks later Lindsey growled into the phone. I said, “McBride, Captain. I have news for you.”
“I have news for you too.” His voice sounded raw. “Where are you?”
“Downtown.”
“We just found your friend.”
I grabbed the phone. “Troy?”
“No. Logan. His car was run off a cliff and smashed itself to hell in the bottom of the gully.”
The air couldn’t find its way into my lungs His words were still there in my ears and I finally got the sense out of them. “He was... run off?”
“Yeah. At least that’s the way I figure it. All the other experts around here think he was cockeyed drunk when it happened.”
“He was on a bat...” I started to say.
Lindsey cut me short. “Yeah, we could smell it. The doctor said the same thing. There was a body in the car we couldn’t identify. Smashed to pieces.”
“Damn it, what about Logan!”
His voice was very soft. Too soft. “Logan’s alive. Barely. If he lives it’ll be a miracle. He’s in a coma and nobody’s going to get to speak to him for a long, long time.”
My breath whistled out through my teeth. “When did it happen?”
“Evidently the other night. He’s been lying there all this time.”
“The other body?”
“A man. They’re working on him now. He fell out of the car on the way down and the heap landed on top of him. Not much left. What was Logan working on?”
“I wish I knew,” I said slowly. “I wish I knew.”
“There was an envelope on the car seat beside him with your name on it.”
I finished the rest of the drink and laid the glass beside the phone. “Yeah, now I’m beginning to get it,” I said.
“Maybe you’d like to tell me about it.”
“I’ll be down to see you. I still have some time left.” I dropped the phone back in its cradle and took my glass back to the bar. Maybe Lindsey would be wondering what my news was. He shouldn’t have spoken up so fast.
I started out the door.
The blonde in the booth said, “Hello, big feller.”
She smiled and the guy she was with smiled too. A little unpleasantly. I said, “Hello, Carol.”
“Have a drink with us?”
“No, thanks. I’m pretty busy.”
She pushed out from the booth, still smiling at her companion. “I’ll be right back, Howie. I have to talk business with this lug a second, mind?”
He shrugged and told her to go ahead.
The grin was impish and she backed me into a comer by the cigarette machine. “You didn’t come back to see me,” she said. “I waited in every night.”
“Except tonight,” I reminded her.
She nodded. “Pride. Besides, I got lonely. We could have had fun. I like famous people.”
“My kind of famous?”
“Especially. Will you come?”
“Maybe. I was thinking about it earlier. I wanted to ask you if anything was seen of Servo’s playmate.”
The grin faded. “I couldn’t tell you that.”
“Then tell me something else.”
“What? Ask me anything else you want to.”
“Didn’t that peroxide sting?”
The imp came back in her eyes and she pulled at the zipper on my jacket. “The peroxide didn’t but the ammonia did. Want me to tell you about it?”
“Maybe I’ll come up and watch you do it some day.” I pushed her hands away and stepped past her.
“Do that,” she said. “I’ll let you help me.”
Pine Tree Gardens looked more dismal than before, if that was possible. I drove around it once and parked down a ways from the building. There weren’t any lights in the place.
It was too close to the end of things to take any chances. I reached down beside the seat and pulled the gun out I had wedged there previously. I tried sticking it in my waistband but the handle caught me under the ribs. The pockets of my jacket held the thing as long as I let the handle stick up. I didn’t like that either. If I bent over it would fall out and I wasn’t in the mood to be putting a bullet in myself accidentally. There was some kind of a gimmick pocket on the leg of my new work pants that it fitted in snugly enough, so I tucked it down there, closed the flap over it and got out of the car.
The rain was slanting down, driven in my face by a stiff wind. The thunder was still upstairs, but there wasn’t any sheet lightning left in the clouds. I walked back to the building and turned in the yard. There was a new sign stuck in the ground. Wind had torn the corner loose and it slapped against the backboard.
It read:
For Sale. I. Hinnam, Realtors, Call 1402.
Somebody could get the place cheap, I thought. There was a curse on it now. A death curse. Maybe Lenny Servo would pick it up and make another joint out of it. The location wasn’t bad. He could even have rooms for rent upstairs.
The door was locked. A skeleton key could have opened it but I didn’t have a skeleton key and wasn’t about to waste time picking it. I wrapped a handkerchief around my hand, punched a windowpane in, opened a catch and raised it. For a minute or so I stood there listening. The rain drummed against the windows and my breath made a soft whisper in the darkness. Nothing else. I crossed the room, stopped and listened again.
The house was the only thing that talked back to me.
A door banged at steady intervals, keeping time to the gusts outside. There was a faint creak of wood from upstairs, a rattle of windows as the foliage bent and scraped against them.
All the furniture was in the house, carelessly covered with sheets and wrapping paper. I crossed between the hulks of white, went out in the hall and found the steps. Every detail of that place was so plain in my mind it was as if I had studied a blueprint of the place beforehand. I tried to figure it out, but it didn’t make sense. The last time I had just come in with Logan and breezed in. Hell, I didn’t study the place at all.
Or did I?
What unconscious instinct did I follow if I did?
I could even remember the curious pattern in the newel post at the top. A door to one room had been warped. There was a torn spot in the carpet beside the wall as if a phone had hung there at one time.
My face worked itself into a grimace and I went on up. The post and the carpet was as I had expected. The door that made the steady slam was the warped one that wouldn’t close all the way.
The room where the body had lain was closed off, but not locked and I went in half expecting to see it still there, the head cradled in the arms, face down.
But it wasn’t the same. Not nearly.
Somebody had taken that room apart piece by piece and stacked all the bits in the middle. The bed, the dresser and the chair had been disassembled and a knife had made a tattered farce out of the mattress. Rayon satin ribbon from the blanket edgings were confetti unfurled on the floor.
The baseboard had been pried loose and jutted out awkwardly. I struck a match and looked in the closet. The cedar paper that lined it had been torn off and lay piled up on the floor. Dents in the plaster showed where something heavy had tapped around seeking out a hollow space.
It was a better job that I could have done. A much better job. So good that there wasn’t any place left to look.