She had combed her hair, too, carefully copying the style from an advertisement in one of the magazines in the house. Her face, seen in the gloom, was lovely in its open simplicity.
“How would you like me to sit?” he smiled.
“It ain’t that. It’s the way you watch, without moving. The way you look. Like you could kill somebody. Like you’re just waitin’ to do it. I keep thinkin’ of poor Johnny.”
“What do you think about, when you think of him?” he asked.
“How he is. He ain’t like you. You’re different. Johnny has lots of weaknesses—I never fooled myself none about him. Maybe he always thought he was foolin’ me, thinkin’ I was just a dumb little nobody, satisfied with cornbread livin’. But I could tell the kind of man he was—never sure about himself or the world, even when he looked so fine in his uniform.”
Pleasure bent forward eamestly. “Mr. Sam, I know he didn’t want to go through with—whatever thing he did wrong last night. I just know it. It was somethin’ pretty awful, what he did, wasn’t it? You got all these men spread around, just to catch him.”
“And the others,” Durell reminded her. “The men you saw unloading the plane.”
“But it’s mainly Johnny, isn’t it? I don’t want you to hurt him. And the way you look, sitting so quiet at the window like a rattler behind a stone—’
“I’m just watching,” Durell said.
Pleasure suddenly got up from the settee and slipped to the floor beside him. She put her arm and then her head on his knee and looked up earnestly at his shadowed face.
“I’m all mixed up,” she whispered. “I used to think I was in love with Johnny, even when I knew he was weak and all. Maybe I was just hoping somebody like you would come along, Mr. Sam. Somebody who knows what the world is really like.”
“I don’t know about that.” He thought of all the evil things he had encountered. “The more I see, Pleasure, the less certain I am of what I think I know.”
She sighed. “I used to dream about a man like you, and I figured Johnny was the best I’d ever get.” She moved, and he was aware of the warm, pressing roundnesses of her. She spoke again. “Have you got a girl of your own, Mr. Sam?”
“Yes, I have,” he said.
“Are you true to her?”
“I try to be.”
“Where is she now?”
“Far away,” he told her. “She’s working in Europe.” “What’s her name?”
“Deirdre.”
She repeated Deirdre’s name thoughtfully, and the image of Deirdre Padgett, tall and lovely and immaculate, walked through Durell’s mind. Pleasure stood up and looked out through the window. He saw that she had given up her first crude applications of cosmetics. She looked clean and scrubbed. He felt a wave of warm sympathy for her, as he would toward a lost child.
“Johnny really did something terrible, didn’t he? What will happen to him when you catch him?”
“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully.
“Well, why should I help you?” she demanded. “If I love him, what do I care what he’s done? If he’s true to me, I ought to help him, not try to catch him and put him in jail.”
He said flatly, regretting the necessity for saying it, “Pleasure, I’m sorry, but I think it’s time you knew something about Johnny.”
She turned abruptly at the sound of his voice. “What?” she asked. “What is it?”
“Johnny’s married. He’s been married for two years, to a woman who lives across the street from this house.” Her voice was a fragile, broken crystal shivering in the dark. “Mr. Sam, you wouldn’t be sayin’ that just to make me change my mind about him, would you?
“I think you already know me better than that.”
“He’s married! But you didn’t tell me right away.” “I didn’t think it would be wise.”
This, unexpectedly, struck hardening anger. He heard her suck in a quick, hissing breath of fury. “Wise? You think you’re so all-fired smart? I know. You think I’m just a dumb girl from the mountains who don’t know how to eat or dress or keep herself clean! You didn’t fool me none with these clothes! I know what you’re tryin’ to do!”
She trembled with rage. All at once she tore at the sweater, flung it away, ripped at her white blouse, at the wide skirt, kicked off a shoe. “I don’t want none of it! I’m sorry I let you show me what the world is like! It was better back home, with Pa, more honest! I don’t want your clothes and your fancy manners—not when it all adds up to killin’ a friend, to sneakin’ and watchin’ and waitin’ like a rattler behind a stump—and you think you can buy me with some pretties, to help you get Johnny—”
“Pleasure, stop it,” Durell said sharply.
She backed away until her shoulders hit the wall. For another instant she stood in her tom clothes, as wild as any forest creature caught in a terrifying trap. Then she suddenly lifted her hands to her mouth, pulling at her lips, and the tears came.
“Mr. Sam. . . .”
He took her in his arms as she ran to him. “It will be all right, Pleasure.”
“I don’t care,” she whispered. Her sobs shook her soft body. “I still don’t honestly want to help you catch Johnny. Even if he wasn’t playing true to me.”
“But you will help, won’t you?” he asked.
“Yes. I reckon so.” She looked up at him with big, tear-filled eyes. “For you, Mr. Sam.”
Jensen said that Garry Fritsch had arrived. It was six-thirty in the morning. Durell turned the girl over to Jensen and told her to try to get some sleep on the settee in the watch-room, and then went downstairs to the kitchen.
Garry Fritsch was talking on one of the telephones installed at the kitchen table when Durell walked in.
“I could use some coffee.”
“Help yourself. Jensen made some,” Durell said. He added, “You look beat.”
“Never mind how I look. I’ve been working.”
“So have we all.”
Fritsch nodded grudgingly. “You got the area bottled up nicely,” he admitted. “Maybe too nicely. You’ve got to leave a cork open for the suspects to slip through.”
“The girl is the cork,” Durell said. "When they come into the neighborhood, she can identify them. Then we put the plug in.”
“You hope.”
“Do you have any other suggestions as to what to do?”
Fritsch shook his head; he breathed heavily, his lower lip pendulous. “I’ve done all I can. They got through the roadblocks—probably hours before we reached the mountains to set them up.” He looked up at Durell from under his shaggy brows. "I just hope your hunch about this crowd is right.”
Durell got the coffee pot off the electric stove. The daylight was strong enough now, and he turned off the overhead light that was allowed back here behind the closed kitchen door.
“Any word on Duncan?” he asked.
Fritsch drank his coffee greedily. “Thanks.” He nodded then. “Duncan’s been spotted—were reasonably sure, anyway. He’s alone, all right. I don’t figure it. He came down the mountain yesterday morning and hitched a ride on an oil truck headed for Nashville. The driver was pretty certain of the identification, but he says the Major wasn’t in uniform, and he looked pretty well beaten up.”
Durell felt a stir of tension. “Then what?”
Fritsch shrugged his meaty shoulders. “He was dropped off close to the center of town. He was seen in the Greyhound bus terminal, but we’re not sure he boarded a bus. All buses have been checked, but there’s no trace. We’ve done the rental car agencies, the railroads and airlines, too. He’s dropped out of sight. I figure Duncan turned chicken all by himself and ran out on his pals and he’s holed up alone somewhere.”
“Why do you figure he’s alone?” Durell asked curiously.
“His footprints on Piney Knob didn’t have company. But I don’t make a pattern on the rest of it yet. Do you?”
“Not quite,” Durell said.
“You think
he’ll turn up here?”
“He’ll contact his wife. He’s crazy for her,” Durell said. “If he’s involved in this at all, it’s because of her. He’ll try to get in touch with her soon.”
“Maybe he’ll use the telephone. Have you—”
“It’s been bugged,” Durell said. “Jensen took care of it. The mikes are in, and the recorders are in the back-room stakeout across the alley.”
Fritsch gave grudging approval, then suddenly scowled again. He stood up with a lurch. “You’ve got that girl here, haven’t you? Look, I think she knows a hell of a lot more than she pretends. She’s in it with Duncan. I think she’s making a fool out of you—out of all of us. I want to talk to her."
“Leave her alone for now,” Durell said quickly. He didn’t want Fritsch using his heavy-handed methods on Pleasure. “She’s knocked out—none of us has had any sleep—and she’s upset just now because I told her Duncan was married. She’s in love with Dunk.”
“Bull,” Fritsch exploded. “She conned you with those big cow-eyes and that juicy little tail, that’s all. She’s playing you for a patsy. She knows more than she’s told you, and I’m going to get it out of her.”
Fritsch swung violently toward the kitchen door. Jensen was coming downstairs, and the plump, bald man stepped aside with eyebrows shot up inquiringly at Durell as Fritsch slammed past. Durell got up and followed. There was a narrow flight of steep stairs from the rear of the hall to the upper floors, and Fritsch started up them two at a time, as if unable to contain his impatience.
“Garry, wait,” Durell called quietly.
“To hell with it. She’ll talk. You know what’s loose in this country, in the hands of God knows what sons-of-bitches? We haven’t got forever, man!”
Fritsch was halfway up the narrow steps when he suddenly faltered. A strangled coughing sound came from him. His hand shot out, groping, and grabbed for the rail. He went down to one knee on the oak treads and clutched at his necktie, pulling it loose frantically.
Durell leaped up after him and caught his stocky bulk as he swayed.
“Garry, what is it?”
“Nothing!” Fritsch gasped. “Get your goddam hands off me!”
“Sit down, Garry. You look—”
“Get the—hell away!”
Durell did not let him go. He looked back down the stairs, but Jensen was not in sight. Fritsch’s heavy body shook as if something were hammering at it with massive, unbearable blows. There was a blueness around his open mouth. His eyes stared at Durell, bulging, and saw nothing.
Durell lowered him to one of the steps. “It’s your heart, isn’t it?”
“No, I—”
Durell left him there, ran upstairs and searched through cabinets until he found a bottle of Scotch.
Fritsch was already on his feet again when Durell returned. The man was breathing easier now, and some of the traces of cyanosis had left the area of his mouth. His eyes flickered to the whisky bottle in Durell’s hand and he reached for it.
“Thanks,” he said grudgingly.
“That’s not all of it,” Durell said. “When was the last time you saw a doctor, Garry?”
“So I’ve got a bum ticker,” Fritsch said. He chopped at the air with his big, square hand. “I’m not supposed to run up the stairs any more, and I keep forgetting. So when are you going to report it?”
“Is that what you’re worried about?”
“I don’t like you, and you don’t like me, and we got ourselves teamed up on this job together. So now is your chance to get rid of me, hey?”
Durell said nothing. In the semidarkness of the upper hall, he saw the strange expression on the older man’s face. And he suddenly understood. He saw hatred in Fritsch’s pale eyes, but it wasn’t directed personally at him. It was aimed at what he represented—a younger man, in good health, capable of doing the job that Fritsch wanted to do so badly, with the use of all his years of training and skill. Fritsch didn’t want to quit. He wanted to die on the job, rather than be put out to the retirement pasture. He didn’t want it any other way.
Fritsch had recovered. He smoothed his thick, silvery hair. “Well, Sam? What are you going to do?” Durell knew that the older man meant. Fritsch was a liability now, a danger and a threat to anyone who worked with him and depended on him. There was no room in this business for compassion. Not when life and death might depend on split timing, instant reflexes, fine coordination of mind and muscle.
He knew what his decision had to be. But for the moment he could not make it.
“Get some rest, Garry. We’ll talk about it later.”
“The girl—-”
“Leave her to me. It will be all right.”
Fritsch breathed heavily again. “She’s making monkeys out of us.” Then he paused and shrugged, as if in defeat. “All right, Sam. Whatever you say. You’ve got the club over me. How much time will you give me?”
“We’ll talk about it later,” Durell said again.
“If she spots Duncan, or knows where he’ll turn up-”
“She’ll tell me,” Durell said. “She won’t keep anything from me about Johnny Duncan.”
Chapter Ten
At ten o’clock that morning, Johnny Duncan telephoned Carlotta, his wife. At four minutes after ten Durell knew about it, and ten minutes after that he sat in the back room that overlooked the alley behind the Cortez house and listened to a tape recording of Johnny Duncan’s halting voice.
The call was traced to a toll booth in a luncheonette in Mt. Vernon, New York, just a few minutes’ walk from the railroad station there.
Johnny had thought a long time about the telephone call. He knew it might be a risk. But he had not yet reached the point where he could conceive of the line being tapped by the police. So he took the chance.
The hours behind him were lost in a fog of fear. He didn’t want to think too deeply about it. If he did, he would have to follow the thoughts out to a rational conclusion. And the only answer was that Justino had meant to kill him up there on Piney Knob. And if Justino’s plan called for his murder, it had to be with Carlotta’s consent. This was what he couldn’t bring himself to believe. He rejected it, absolutely and completely.
Yet something had happened that needed an explanation. Perhaps it was an accident. Or a mistake. Justino could have blundered. He accepted this and rejected the other, because if it was the other, he might just as well lie down and die, or call the cops right now and give himself up.
He drank three cups of coffee before he made the phone call. The commuter rush hour had passed, and the station across the street was just crowded enough so he could walk in unnoticed and not feel conspicuous, and he could sit here in this lunchroom and not be noticed at the counter. People came in and went out all around him, and nobody looked at him twice.
“More coffee?” the waitress asked.
Duncan was startled.
“No—no, thanks.”
The waitress made him nervous. He didn’t want to talk to her or have her remember him. He dropped coins on the counter, gave her a brief artificial smile and got up. The phone booths were at the deep end of the lunchroom. A fat woman in a mink coat occupied one. She was talking loudly and persistently. Duncan slipped into the other booth and closed the door.
He was nervous. He dialed the wrong number the first time. Luckily, he had more change and didn’t have to go hunt some more. He dialed again. His hands were shaking. The woman in the next booth hung up and got out, and he felt relieved. He listened to the distant ringing of the phone in the Cortez house.
Then he heard her voice in calm inquiry. Deep for a woman, melodious, with just a faint undertone of concern.
“Carlotta?” he said. “Carlotta is that you?”
He heard the quick intake of her breath, hissing. “Johnny?”
“Me,” he said. He added quickly, “I’m all right. Were you worried?”
“Johnny, querido—where are you?”
“Not far. Are you alo
ne?”
“Johnny, there was a man here last night—your friend, Sam Durell—”
“Durell?”
“Yes, he was here.”
“He’s on it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
He had not expected this. Not Sam. He felt fear again. He wanted to hang up and start running again.
“Johnny?” Carlotta’s voice seemed small and artificial in the receiver. “Johnny, what on earth happened to you?”
“Didn’t Justino tell you?”
“He said you ran away.” She checked herself. “Johnny, be careful how you speak, do you understand? I’m worried. Justino thinks the house is being watched. You remember that man, O’Brien, last month? That young devil? He’s been seen here. And Justino is sure there are others—he doesn’t know, he hasn’t identified them—”
Duncan drew a deep breath. He had to ask his question. The words stuck in his throat, though, and he couldn’t ask. But he had to.
He said, “Carlotta, why did Justino try to kill me?”
‘‘You—you must be mistaken. Where are you, Johnny?”
“No mistake,” he insisted. “Justino tried. He missed. That’s why I ran.”
“Surely, you can’t think—oh, this is ridiculous. I love you, Johnny. Do you think I would let him—if he did, it was his idea, you know Justino, he is a devil, perhaps he took it upon himself for some reason—”
“He takes orders from you, Carlotta.”
She sounded impatient. “Johnny, you are tired and upset. You’ve had a bad time, I’m sure. We can’t talk like this. It is too dangerous. Where are you?”
“I’ll come to you,” he said. “I agree, the phone is no good. But I’ve got to talk to you. I want you to answer me when I can see you.”
“Johnny, how can you believe I would have a part in such a terrible thing?”
Assignment Carlotta Cortez Page 7
