The Second Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  Hepperling meant sugar millions; McMurdy, shipping; Convers, oil. The three were the latest stems on family trees that in all branches meant a good slice of a billion dollars in economic wealth and power. For each of them the coming of age had meant trust funds, allowances, and inheritances the rest of us wouldn’t risk dreaming about. The three might have pooled their resources and bought themselves a small, undeveloped country rather than a mere island.

  As Quixotes, they’d frequently made headlines; crashing a plane and disappearing in Alaska for a week after a Kodiak hunt, going after jaguar in restricted tribal grounds in South America, creating an international incident when Kenyan authorities had arrested them for poaching bull elephants, and they’d taken pains to insult the Kenyan government before a bank of international television news cameras.

  LaFarge was saying, “Rogers is completely safe, fellows. No family ties, no close friends. Nobody to ask the first question about his disappearance.”

  “We know.” McMurdy dismissed LaFarge as a human being. “We always make our own inquiries when you have a prospect in custody, and we’ve the agents and the means.”

  LaFarge endured McMurdy’s insulting tone like a well-trained hound.

  McMurdy studied me head to toe. “You seem to come from a tough-luck line, Rogers. Father walked out when you were six or seven—never seen or heard from him since. Mother remarried—a real stinker. Both of them killed in a car crash when you were hardly out of high school. Worked your way through a couple years of college, then the Army taps you. Off to Vietnam. Rough time over there. MIA for a while. Wounded once. Finally hung up dockside, one of the last to leave.”

  “I didn’t have much to come back to,” I said.

  “But you survived,” Hepperling said. “You seem to survive anything. That’s a good omen. That should make it good.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Convers said. “We haven’t had a good island hunt in months now.”

  I think I’d suspected the truth when they’d first ringed the grounded chopper with their carbines, but now as it was coming closer to me with every passing second, I still couldn’t believe it I wouldn’t believe it Then I looked at them, at the jungle, and back at them—and I had to believe it Convers bobbed his woolly white mane toward the jungle. “You’ll be given a canteen of water and some field rations before you go in there, Rogers. How much life you buy for yourself is up to you, your wits and strength.”

  I was unable to move.

  Hepperling said, “You do understand, Rogers?”

  “Sure.” The word was a husky whisper. “You guys have hunted everything, everywhere, until you’ve run all the way out of normal pleasure. So now, when you have the chance and can arrange it, here on this island…you hunt the prime game of all.”

  “How afraid are you, Rogers?” Convers asked as if the subject really interested him.

  “If I wallowed on my knees would it help?”

  “Last time the prey almost went nuts before dashing off into the jungle,” Hepperling said, “screaming that we were crazy, not for real.”

  “Oh, you’re for real,” I said. “In twenty-seven years of living I’ve discovered that anything can be for real on this planet. Adolf Hitler. Scientists who talk about dedication, and devote their lives to thinking up bigger bombs and deadlier germs. Charles Manson. The Mafia. I don’t doubt that you three are rather mildly real, compared to some of the things that go on.”

  I walked a few steps from the chopper and stood looking at the jungle. Then I sat down on the green coolness of the grass. “Only I’m for real, too, fellows. And you’ve left me just one thing. You’ve stripped me down to this one real thing. I won’t do it. The hunt is off.” They came stalking toward me, their shadows flowing across me. “That’s the whole point of it,” I said. “Without the point, there is nothing in it for you. Without fleeing prey trying to hang onto a few more hours of life there in the jungle, you’ve lost the point, and it’s no dice. You’ve got the wrong tiger this time.”

  “LaFarge,” McMurdy ordered in a quiet tone.

  LaFarge came around to stand close in front of me. He pulled out his gun. “You want it right here, Rogers?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t want it anywhere for years and years yet But you’re betting against an enemy with nothing to lose, LaFarge. No matter what you do, the hunt is off. And I don’t believe you’ll be paid for this one or trusted in the future.”

  He fired the gun almost in my face. The flash blinded me. I felt the bullet nip the hair on my crown.

  I pushed back the need to be sick all over the place. “You’ll have to do better than that, LaFarge.”

  He put the gun to my temple and slowly eased back the hammer.

  “That’s the surest way of guaranteeing no hunt, LaFarge.”

  Taking a step back, he ventured a glance at the faces of his young employers. He didn’t like the way they were looking at him. He didn’t enjoy what he felt as they measured him. He wasn’t liking any of it at all.

  He coupled my name with a curse. “On your feet, Rogers. I’ll make you run! Hit for the jungle!”

  He exploded his booted foot directly at my face. He didn’t have nearly the coordination or quickness of a Viet Cong. My handcuffed hands met the driving ankle. I flipped him hard, onto his back, and before he could catch the next breath, I’d wrung the gun from him and spun to face the others.

  “Hold it!” I ordered.

  Not a carbine moved. They had brains as well as loot. They knew they could have taken me—but not safely.

  It was one of those crossroads moments in life for me, not because of anything outside myself, but because of the thought coming full-blown to my mind. I thought about the gig I’d had from the moment of birth. It seemed that the time was overdue for a putting of things in balance for a fellow named Rogers. The big, basic questions didn’t bug me any longer. I was certain, right then, of the direction my life would take. I let a grin build on my lips.

  In response, the first edge of tension eased from the Quixotes. They slipped glances from me to each other. Actually, there was a lot more rapport between the Quixotes and myself than between any of us and LaFarge.

  “Fellows,” I said, “being a country sheriff in mean bayou territory is risky business. If LaFarge turned up in some back bayou shot to death, no one would figure it any way except that he’d cornered one mean moonshiner or poacher too many.”

  I eased the snout of the gun in LaFarge’s direction. “Into the jungle, big man.”

  “You’re nuts, Rogers… Fellows, you tell this character—” His words broke off as he looked at them. He couldn’t take his eyes from their faces. He took a backward step…then another…and whatever it was that he’d substituted for nerve all of his life died inside of him. He broke and ran, disappearing quickly into the jungle.

  McMurdy was standing closest to me. Carefully, I turned the police pistol around and handed it to him butt first.

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “I think the hunt resumes. And don’t forget to get the keys to the handcuffs when you’ve tracked him down.”

  That’s how my association with the Quixotes began. Now I draw seventy-five grand a year, plus expenses. I travel the plushiest resorts. I drive a thirty-five-thousand-dollar sports car. I buy the finest food and wines and wear a hand-tailored wardrobe.

  Not surprisingly, I practically have to fight off the chicks. I usually pick the best-looking and healthiest of the crop of empty-headed dropouts and runaways from good, substantial homes. They’re easiest to con, and once on the Island it’s too late for them to come to their senses and realize they’re facing something entirely different from the romantic and exciting weekend they’ve been promised. They’re among the runaways who every year are simply not found. None is ever traceable to the Island. I see to that.

  Girls…the ultimate prey. The Quixotes thought the suggestion was the greatest when I hit them with it. I coupled the idea with the offer to act as their agent, roaming the
country, recruiting the prey, and bringing them to the Island. I’ve proven my absolute reliability, and the Quixotes respect my advice.

  Summing up the brand-new life, I guess you could say I owe LaFarge a vote of thanks.

  NEW NEIGHBOR

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1975.

  “Each of us lives in one world only,” Mrs. Cappelli said, “the singular world within the skull. No two are alike. Who can possibly imagine some of the dark phantasms within the worlds other than one’s own?”

  Isadora, old, gray, spindly, gnarled, more friend and companion than servant, drifted to Mrs. Cappelli’s side. The two women were of an age, in the autumn of their lives, with a close bond between them. The years had touched Mrs. Cappelli with the gentler brush. She was still trim; her face had not entirely surrendered its youthful lines; her once-black hair was braided in a coil atop her head, a silver tiara.

  The two stood at the window of Mrs. Cappelli’s slightly disarrayed and comfortably lived-in bedroom and looked from the second-story window at the youth in the back yard of the house next door.

  “A strange one,” Isadora agreed.

  He was lounging on a plastic-webbing chaise, indolent, loose, relaxed, calmly pumping a pellet rifle. In scruffy jeans and T-shirt, he was long, tanned and lean, slightly bony. Even in repose he was a suggestion of quick, whip-like agility and power. His face was cleanly cut, even attractive, his forehead, ears and neck feathered with very dark hair. Idly, his gaze was roving the bushes and trees, the pines at the corners of the yard, the avocado tree, the two tall, unkempt palmettos.

  He lifted the gun with a casual motion and squeezed the trigger. A bird toppled from the topmost reaches of the taller pine tree, the small body bouncing from limb to limb, showering a few needles, hanging briefly on a lower limb before it struck and was swallowed by the uncut grass along the rear of the yard.

  The youth showed no sign of interest, once again pumping the gun and stirring only his eyes in a renewed search of the trees.

  Mrs. Cappelli’s thin figure flinched, and her eyes were held by the spot where the bird had fallen.

  Isadora touched her arm. “At least it wasn’t a cardinal, Maria.”

  “Thank you, Isadora. From this distance the details weren’t clear. My eyes just aren’t what they used to be.”

  Isadora glanced at the face that had once been the distillation of all beauty in Old Sicily. “I think we could use some tea, Maria.”

  Mrs. Cappelli seemed unaware when Isadora faded from her side. She remained at the window, as hushed as the hot Florida stillness outside, looking carefully at the young man on the chaise.

  Mrs. Cappelli had been delighted when the house next door was rented at last. It had stood vacant for months, a casualty of Florida overbuild. Dated by its Spanish styling, it was nevertheless a sound and comfortable house in a substantial and quiet older neighborhood where urban decay had never gained the slightest foothold.

  Mrs. Cappelli had expected a family. Instead there were only the mother and son arriving in a noisy old car in the wake of a van that had disgorged flimsy, worn, time-payment furniture. Mrs. Ruth Morrow and Greg. A lot of house for two people, but Mrs. Cappelli supposed, correctly, that the age of the house and its long vacancy had finally caused the desperate owner to offer it as a cut-rate bargain on the sagging rental market.

  After a settling-in day or two, Mrs. Cappelli saw Mrs. Morrow pruning the dying poinsettia near the front corner of the house and went over to say hello.

  It was a sultry afternoon and Mrs. Morrow looked wan and tired, with hardly enough remaining strength to snap the shears. Mrs. Cappelli wondered why Greg wasn’t handling the pruning tool. He was at home. Who could doubt it? He was in there torturing a high-amplification guitar with amateurish violence. His discordant efforts were audible a block away.

  “I’m Maria Cappelli,” Mrs. Cappelli said pleasantly. “It’s very nice to have new neighbors.”

  Mrs. Morrow accepted the greeting with hesitant and standoffish self-consciousness. Her glance slipped toward the house, a silent wish that her son would turn down his guitar. She was a thin, almost frail woman. She needs, Mrs. Cappelli thought, mounds of pasta and huge bowls of steaming, mouth-watering stufato.

  Mrs. Morrow remembered her manners with a tired smile. “Ruth Morrow,” she said. She glanced about the yard. “So much to do here. Inside, the place was all dust and cobwebs.” Her gaze moved to Mrs. Cappelli’s comfortable abode of stucco and red tile. “You have a lovely place.”

  “My husband built it years before his death. We used to come here for winter vacations. To me, it was home, rather than New York. I love Florida, even the heat of the summers. My son was born in the house, right up there in that corner bedroom.” Mrs. Cappelli laughed. “Shortest labor on record. Such a bambino! When he decided to make his entrance, he wouldn’t even take time for a ride to the hospital.”

  Mrs. Cappelli’s unconscious delight in her son brought Ruth Morrow’s fatigued and hollow eyes to Mrs. Cappelli’s face. Mrs. Cappelli was caught, held, and slightly embarrassed. Such aching eyes! So many regrets, frustrations and bewilderments harbored in their depths… They were too large and dark for the thin, heavily made-up face that at one time mast have been quite pretty.

  “My son is named Greg,” Mrs. Morrow murmured.

  “Mine is named John. He’s much older than your son. He has a wife and five children—such scamps!—and he comes to see me now and then when he can take the time. He is a contractor up north, always on the go.”

  “He must be a fine man.”

  Mrs. Cappelli was urged to say something comforting to the wearied mother before her. “Oh, John sowed an oat. I guess they all do, before they settle down. Nowadays John is always after me to sell the old antique, as he calls the house. Come and live with him, he nags. I tell him to peddle his own papers. This is not the old country where three or four generations must brawl under one small roof.”

  Mrs. Morrow nodded. “It’s been real nice of you to say hello, Mrs. Cappelli. I do have to run now. I work, you see. At the Serena Lounge on the beach, from six in the evening until two o’clock each morning. I always have a good bit to do to get ready for work.”

  “The Serena is an excellent place. John took Isadora and me there the last time he was down.”

  Ruth Morrow punched the tip of the pruning shears at a small brown twig. “Being a cocktail waitress isn’t the height of my ambition, but without professional training, it pays more money than I’d ever hoped to make. And God knows there is never quite enough money.”

  It might ease the situation, Mrs. Cappelli mused, if her boy dirtied his hands with some honest toil. She said, “The honor of a job is in its execution, and I’m certain you’re the best of cocktail waitresses.”

  The sincerity of Mrs. Cappelli’s tone brought the first touch of animation to the tired face with its layered icing of makeup and framing of short, dark brown hair. Before Mrs. Morrow could respond, the front door of the house slammed, and Greg was standing in the shadow of the small portico. Both women looked toward him.

  “Greg,” Mrs. Morrow called, “this is Mrs. Cappelli, our next-door neighbor.”

  “Hi,” he said, bored. He gave Mrs. Cappelli a single glance of dismissal, dropped to the walk with a single smooth stride and headed around the house.

  “Greg,” Ruth Morrow called, “where are you going?”

  “Out,” he said, without looking back.

  “When will you be home?”

  “When I’m damned good and ready!” He rounded the corner of the house and was out of sight.

  Mrs. Morrow’s face came creeping in Mrs. Cappelli’s direction, but her eyes sidled away. “It’s just his way of talking, Mrs. Cappelli.”

  Mrs. Cappelli nodded, but she didn’t understand. How could Mrs. Morrow accept it? Parental respect was normal in a child, be he six or sixty.

  A car engine was stabbed to roaring life and Greg
raced down the driveway. He cornered the car into the street with tires screaming.

  “I really have to go now, Mrs. Cappelli.”

  “It was a privilege to meet you,” Mrs. Cappelli said.

  “Well?” Isadora asked us soon its Mrs. Cappelli stepped into the house.

  “She is a poor woman in the worst of all states,” Mrs. Cappelli said, “a mother with a cruel and unloving son.”

  Isadora crossed herself.

  “He is killing his mother,” Mrs. Cappelli said.

  Greg was an immediate neighborhood blight, a disease, an invasion. The Ransoms’ playful puppy bounded into the Morrow yard and Greg broke its leg with a kick, claiming that the flop-eared trusting mutt was charging him. He hunted chords on the thunderous guitar at one o’clock in the morning, if the mood suited him. Many evenings he was out, usually returning about three a.m. with screaming tires and unmuffled engine. Frequently he filled the Morrow house with hordes of hippies for beer and rock parties.

  Neighbors grumbled and swapped irate opinions of Greg among themselves over back-yard fences and coffee klatches. Lack of leadership was a stultifying, inertial force, and nothing was done about Greg until about two, one morning, when the biggest blast yet hit the peak of its frenzy in the Morrow house.

  Mr. Sigmon (the white colonial across the street) decided he just couldn’t stand it any longer. He threw back the cover, sat up in bed, turned on the bedside lamp, and dialed Information on his extension phone. Yes, Information informed, a phone had been installed at the Morrow address. Mr. Sigmon got the number, hesitated for a single minute, then dialed it.

  The Morrow phone rang six or seven times before anyone noticed. Then a girl answered, giggling drunkenly. “If this isn’t an obscene call, forget it.”

  “Let me speak to Greg,” Mr. Sigmon said, the phone feeling sweaty in his hand.

  The girl screeched for Greg, and he was on.

  “Have a heart,” Mr. Sigmon pleaded. “Can’t you tone things down just a little?”

  “Who’s this?” Greg asked.

  “I…uh… Mr. Sigmon, across the street.”