But I did the next best thing. I laughed. I threw my head back and laughed. The noise pounded in my chest, gushed out of my throat. It felt good and strong and hard and my face didn’t come apart. My chin and cheek muscles contracted naturally and I stopped laughing long enough to look at Harry, huddled up like a Salvation Army case in one corner of the compartment. Laughter, the great healer, he had said. He sure could use it now.
I stood where I was, collecting all the pieces, finding the right answers in my head. Sub-consciously, maybe unconsciously, my fingers fumbled to my shoulder holster, closed on the .45 which Harry had returned to me. It felt great in my hand. Like a thousand dollar bill might feel. My eyes strained in the dimmed lights of the compartment.
Schnapps was hiding under his seat cushion, still barking. And his redheaded owner was sprawled across the folding bed-chair like it was a fancy chaise longue. Her two piece beige outfit had split its seams to reveal her long, perfect legs and her elegant fanny was facing me in an almost unnatural position.
I stumbled over to her and righted her, untangling her full body until all the parts came out even again. She fell back against her seat, her fingers clawing feebly at her buttoned-up throat, her mouth fighting for air. Wisps of her fire-red hair tumbled down her forehead. A long, irregular scratch ran down one side of her classic profile. Her eyes didn’t recognize me for one teetering instant of insanity and she pawed at me; pushing me away until I slapped her. Then she remembered me and a faint smile prodded at her mouth corners. The deep red of her lipstick was only a blurred memory now. Her face had come up hard against the cushions and she looked like a little girl who had been careless with a jar of strawberry preserves. I pulled her over to the shattered window that was closest. With all its lights, night noises and yells of terror and confusion. She sucked in gratefully, her rounded breasts rising and falling in the most rhythmical movement in the feminine world.
Suddenly, she jerked her red head away from the window. Her eyes were wide and fearful all over again.
“Opal …” she hoarsed. “My God–Opal–is she all right … ?”
It was a good question. And the answer was more terrible than a knock on the door at three o’clock in the morning in Russia.
I had unraveled slow all right. Real slow. One thing at a time. And as they came up. Harry was only unconscious, Schnapps was okay and barking and now Marlene Kelly was all right too. But Opal–my eyes flew around the twisted compartment. Forgot the noise and confusion, thought only of Opal with her big, wonderful eyes and the awfully hard time she had had in this thing we laughingly call life. In this our twisted life …
She wasn’t hard to find. The question had barely faltered out of Marlene Kelly’s mouth when I saw her.
I sat down stiffly on the chair seat across from Marlene Kelly and stared dumbly at the corpse hanging out of the broken compartment window in the second half of the room.
For corpse she was.
Lying on one curved hip, legs dangling grotesquely into the car, her body doubled up in a ghastly crush. Her torso hanging outside the car, the frame of the sill anchoring her middle like she had been nailed down to it like a butterfly specimen. Her arms were outflung beyond the falling mass of her now-loose beautiful hair, the hands seeming to be trying to touch the muddy brown ground beneath them. Her white flesh gleamed back at me. The soft underside of her thighs and the pink-white of her calves mocked me with their beauty.
There was something awesome about her near-nakedness, something pathetic about the torn blue sleeve fluttering off one arm in the strong night wind. Something terrible about the jagged, awful shard of window glass that had rammed into her white throat and come out the other side, so that you could see the deadly, bloody points. Her life had rushed out of the wound in a torrent.
Marlene Kelly jammed her white hand into her mouth to stifle the screams that started to bubble in her throat. And I couldn’t take any more. I staggered through the splintered door into the pitched corridor, scrambling like a chimp. The floor angle was almost 45 degrees but I maneuvered like a wild man.
And ran right into Duffy.
His visored cap was gone and his uniform was missing a few buttons, but he still had his .32 and his steel blue eyes were glad to see me. Even though one of them was closed and badly puffed and purpling fast.
“Bad,” he rumbled, out of breath. “Bad. We hit a station wagon parked at Wills Crossing. Some drunk bastard. We’re still on the tracks but it’ll take some doing to clean this mess up. Noon …”
It was one of those times when words don’t mean much. I jerked a nod at him to show him I was all right.
“It’s your two pals,” Duffy rasped. “They busted loose when we hit. Headed down this way. You coming … ?”
I raised my .45 and turned around. The Mainliner was alive with noise and yells and more confusion. Like a madhouse.
“I’m with you, Duffy,” I bit out between my teeth. “I’m with you.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Duffy and I shoved on, with me pushing everything out of my mind except wanting to catch up with Spider and Dean again. So much had happened since the silly Beret and the snappy Velour had marched in on Opal Trace last night in Manhattan. And now Opal Trace was dead. Sure, they hadn’t killed her. They hadn’t parked a station wagon on the crossing for the Mainliner to plough into.
But she was dead anyway. And Spider and Dean were killers. The worst kind. For money and gain and profit.
Broad-shouldered, tough old Duffy led the way and filled me in with the details as we clambered through the pile and mess of the train corridor. Dean and Spider had made their break when the Mainliner had hit. Just broken loose and run wild. Duffy’s other helper had tried to stop them, and Spider had chopped him down savagely with his own gun. Duffy had lit out on their heels. Mad as a hornet and with a black eye to boot. He was boiling and had just run into me, so the boys couldn’t be far ahead.
We reached the end of the car when Duffy let out a yell. The door was banged shut and passage into the next car was impossible. The gaping car door was wide open and as we popped into the square areaway, we were just in time to see Spider’s big body rocket out of view on the dead run.
Duffy sprang to the road bed and I sailed down right behind him. We hit the ground with two distinct, spaced sounds and rolled away from each other–as if we had decided to do just that hours ago. It was a wise move and it’s a live manhunter who knows what kind of animal he’s following.
Two shots rang out, splitting the night air like aerial rockets for noise and color, and two big fistfuls of mud jumped up from the ground and disintegrated. I spread out in the mud of the road bed, burrowing against the dark overhang of a low ridge of earth, and squinted into the thinning darkness. Dawn had just started to filter in from the East and a long gray haze of light hung over the scene.
An answering blast came from where Duffy lay and orange spurted toward the huddled figure down on one knee in the long shadow of the passenger car that had its front wheels climbing up on the porch of the car ahead of it. I could see Dean, his stubby body with coat tails flying, barreling down the cinder path beside the train. Then he cut over toward a rising hummock of ground that disappeared into the densest part of the woods.
Spider was a game bird. Nuts but game. He jumped out from the protection of the cars and advanced on Duffy, ducking and firing as he came. The .45 in his big brown mitt was alive and jumping with noise. Duffy was pinned where he lay, trying to get up out of the mud that was miring him, trying to avoid getting killed. Unable to fire a shot back.
I diverted Spider. I sighted on the running Dean, snapped off a fast shot, had the satisfaction of seeing the slug take Dean in the lower part of his left thigh, spin him around like a top and slam him at right angles to the ground. Dean went down with a hoarse shout of pain and Spider saw me leave my position just above and to the right of the fallen Duffy.
Even in the dissipating darkness, with the smoke and confusion
of the crashed train all around us, I could see the expression on Spider’s face as he halted his forward lunge toward Duffy then spun in my direction, with his .45 going my way. He’d heard Dean go down, saw him fall, saw the orange flash of my fire and now he was ready for me.
His handsome brown face split apart in an ugly leer and just for a second his cold blue eyes cursed me from beneath the brim of his snappy velour. And that was all either of us had any time for.
It was like those westerns you’ve seen so many times. The bad ones and the good ones. Spider and I were maybe thirty feet apart but it was a gun duel pure and simple. We both had .45’s. Duffy was out of the picture for the few seconds it was going to take. And Spider wanted me real bad. I’d caused him all the trouble I was ever going to cause him. His quick leer had told me as much.
Our .45’s seemed to go off simultaneously. And for the first time in my life, I fired high with a .45. High and remorselessly. Because I was feeling mean. Because I remembered the way Opal Trace had looked just a few minutes ago.
My bullet smashed into his brown face in the split second before he fired. His features had started to dissolve in a bloody blur when he triggered off. His bullet whined far above my head, booming off into the night and I watched him go down. And before he fell, Duffy’s gun blasted somewhere behind me finishing the job.
The shots had all been heartbeats apart but a lot happens when guns are going off.
Spider was falling backwards, almost faceless, when Duffy’s .32 calibre’ slug buried itself in his chest and slapped him around angrily, driving him down into the mud. He lay there with his bloody face mixing with the mud and the snappy velour rolling off his head.
I leapfrogged over him and went over to where Dean was lying on his side, alternately cursing and trying to stanch the flow of red from the hole in his thigh where my first shot had gone in. He cursed when he saw me and threw a rock at me. It sailed harmlessly by me. I reached down and shoved his hand away and looked at the wound. My bullet had gone right on through, but he wasn’t going to walk right for weeks. And his silly beret was still on his head flattened down like a pancake.
More yells and shouts came from the train. Lights and lanterns were moving all the way up and down the line. And darkness was almost gone now. The gray light in the sky had fanned out magically, and a cold sun was just beginning to poke its circular kisser over the mountain range at our backs.
Duffy stamped up alongside me, slapping mud off his clothes, wiping his muddy gun barrel dry. He stared down at Dean and smiled frostily. But his eyes told me he was having the time of his life. Disrupted schedule or no disrupted schedule. Bosses or no bosses.
“Okay, Homer,” he grumbled at Dean. “Stop wiggling and hollering and I’ll stop that bleeding for you. You’re lucky you’re alive.” His left hand came off his belt with a first aid kit. He grinned at me. “Wild Bill here coulda blown the back of your head off if he wanted to. You’re lucky your alive.”
Dean showed me his teeth and glared up at me. Trying to hide the pain, trying to stay the scholar who had no time for personal pleasures.
“Brobdingnagian endeavors, Mr. Noon. Brobdingnagian.” He cursed as Duffy’s fingers probed into his thigh. “Now you retain The Blue Green for your own personal disposition and practical peregrinations …”
“Knock it off,” I said. “I haven’t got the damned thing. Somebody else has.”
His eyes tried to read me. They couldn’t. So he got sarcastic again. Sarcastic, lying in the road bed, bleeding like a stuck pig and a smashed beet.
“Prestidigitation? Dumb show, Mr. Noon? You and the perfidious Miss Trace …”
“The perfidious Miss Trace is dead, sweetheart. Killed when the train hit. Guess again.”
Something seemed to go out of him. I thought Spider’s death would have bothered him more. But it hadn’t. Opal Trace seemed to be another matter entirely. Because Dean suddenly averted his head and didn’t look at me or Duffy either. And Duffy was close to him, busily circling his shattered thigh with a wide band of gauze. I let things stay silent and lit a cigarette. My brain was back in business again. Slowly but surely but–back in business. I’d been some dummy this trip. And all the time it had been staring me in the face. Maybe it had been the dizzy rate of events, the mad pinwheel of screwy happenings. The corpses, the bomb in the baggage car, the train wreck.
I went down on one knee and looked at Dean. But his head was still turned away.
“Listen, Dean. And don’t interrupt. This train will still get to Chicago and the Violent Virgin still belongs to you. It’ll buy you a lot of privileges in that nice big jail you’re going to. But if you co-operate, Duffy here and me will give you a big boost with the law. Won’t we, Duffy?”
“Sure thing,” Duffy said without inflection, finishing off his Florence Nightingale stint.
Dean’s head slowly revolved to where I could see it again. Damn, if there weren’t tears in his eyes.
“Propositions or proposals, Mr. Noon?”
“Both,” I said just as the Mainliner’s whistle reverberated across the clearing. “I heard Harry’s version of the Maine cabin fire. But I don’t believe it. No fire department got you out of that cabin alive. Opal doubled back after Harry left. She couldn’t leave you and Spider to burn to death. No matter what you had tried with her. So she came back with The Blue Green and you stayed the same sweet bastards you always were. But you did something else before she took off on you for the last time–didn’t you?”
He was looking at me as if I were a mind reader. “Prognostication, all of it …” he blustered.
I grinned. It was Bluster’s Last Stand. And all the answer I needed.
“Is it? Shrewd guessing is more like it. I’ll tell you what you did. The Blue Green was hot. All over the world. Stolen from a millionairess. So you did what you had to do. You chopped the big-as-a-fist stone down into a lot of little pieces. So you could sell it that way and earn a lot more money. It was a great idea. But Opal ran out on you–taking the little pieces with her. All of them.”
He sneered. “Pure conjecture.”
I stood up. “Okay. Have it your way.” I looked at Duffy. “C’mon, Irish. Help me walk him back to my car. Before you get this choo-choo on the road again, you’ll have something for your cop friends in Chicago. And maybe a reward to go with it.”
Duffy frowned. “You mean you got to the bottom of all this hocus pocus, finally?”
“Finally,” I said, throwing an arm around Dean and helping him to his whining feet. “I know where The Blue Green is. Where’s it’s been since this train ride began. Where it’s been all the time.”
Duffy threw a big arm around Dean and we propped him experimentally on his feet. The ground was soft but stable beneath us. Dean cursed again as he put weight on his bum leg.
Duffy’s blue uniforms and hired hands were dashing towards us with wild shouts and queries, but Duffy had time for one more question.
“Okay, bright boy. I’ll play straight man for you. Where the hell is it?”
I leered into Dean’s sick-looking face.
“Who exactly is man’s best friend? Authorities differ on the subject. What do you think, Dean?”
He had nothing to say so I let it go at that and didn’t say another word until we got back to Compartment B.
Compartment B was as silent as a losing team’s clubhouse when we returned. The madhouse had died down and the Mainliner was making the necessary repairs to get back on the road. Duffy and I helped the grumbling Dean into the compartment and everything was just as it was before. With a couple of exceptions.
Opal Trace was still hanging over the window sill like a rolled-up rug bent in half but Marlene Kelly had found a blanket somewhere and spread it over her. The redhead herself was sitting as neat as you please in her seat, one perfect leg crossed over another perfect one, peacefully smoking. The cigarette holder was chrome and silvery. Even the fact that her dress was torn and split in five places couldn’t e
rase the portrait of the great lady. Schnapps was lying across her lap, his eyes closed, his long snout buried against her full hip. Harry was squatting like the fat Buddha he was, rubbing his eyes and alternately yawning and stretching his whale’s body. Aside from a lump on his dome, he looked all right.
Marlene Kelly seemed glad to see me again. Her live hazel eyes flashed warmly. Harry’s reaction at seeing Dean was something else again. Rumbling angrily in his deep throat he started to get up.
“Stay put, Fat Man,” I said, closing the door behind us. “Duffy’s running this show. And there isn’t going to be anymore rough stuff. Spider went West. Way West. And the trouble is all over unless you want to make some yourself.”
Duffy helped me sit Dean down next to Marlene Kelly. His tough old face creased in a leathery grin.
“That’s right, folks. I’m the head man around here. I run the train. But my young assistant here does all the brain-work. He might make President someday.”
Harry wasn’t listening. His tiny eyes were pinned on Dean and his parrot’s mouth was contemptuous.
“Animal!” he hissed. “So glad to see you in irons …” He tried to rise again and I shoved him back gently.
“Easy, Harry. Dean’s not going anyplace. And I want to settle this Blue Green business once and for all.”
Harry’s eyes shone. “He has it, of course … ?”
“No, he hasn’t,” I said lighting a cigarette. I looked at Duffy and he nodded at me, giving me the go-ahead sign. “All he has is that statue back in the baggage car. A statue I might add which is not genuine.”
I had everybody’s attention now. Marlene Kelly made an O with her mouth, Duffy looked puzzled, Harry was dumbfounded and Dean raised his eyebrows an inch. Only Schnapps slept on.
The Case of the Violent Virgin Page 11
