I was trying to think. All I had done up to now was let other people tell me what to do. It had been a game. Hell, it all started as a game, going out to play policeman with Danny. Then play spy with Carole. I wasn't worked up over Danny any more, I'd shot his killer myself, even if it was more of an accident than revenge, but I wanted more than an accident for the bastard who had Carole killed. I wanted his neck in my hands. It seemed to me maybe there would be a few other people who didn't like being used.
I didn't say anything to Janie when I got to my car, just unlocked the door for her and got in on the other side. While I warmed it up, she said, "I know you don't feel like talking, but where are you going?"
"You'll see. I'm not going off to warn anybody, if that's what you mean."
I just about blew it by driving too fast. My little Formula S Barracuda may not be a sports car, but she'll do better than most buggies you drive on streets. At least she will for me. I can't do a lot of spectacular things, but I can drive cars. There was a time when I drove in sports car races down at Shelton, and while that might have been a while ago, you don't forget how. It's a miracle we didn't get a ticket.
Sunday nights are quiet in Seattle. Sometimes there are parties, but not too often, and most of the coffeehouses close early. You can find people at home, alone, on Sunday nights. I was hoping I could, anyway.
I drove to Ron's houseboat. We walked up the gangways past the other houseboats, and nothing moved except some of the alley cats who seem to live around the boats but never belong to anybody. There was a light in Ron's place, and he opened the door right away. I couldn't see anybody else around.
He was drunk. This was one weekend he hadn't forgotten to stock up.
"H'lo, Paul. Come in. Who's your new chick?"
"She's not my chick, she's my watchdog. Do you know Carole's dead?"
He didn't say anything. I've known Ron for years. He's a drunk, and maybe there's a lot wrong with him, but he's a lousy liar and always has been, and I could tell. He hadn't known. It was a real shock to him.
"She's dead. Somebody arranged for her to bring something into the country from Canada, and then he sent one of his friends with a hand grenade to make sure she didn't talk about it. One of your friends, Ron. One of the antiwar group. She thought she was carrying antiwar films, so it had to be one of that gang."
"Hey, no, man! You're putting me on," he said. He sat down on the cheap flowered rug and drained the glass he'd left there when he answered the door. "You gotta be putting me on. Who'd do that?"
"You tell me who'd do that. You tell me who'd use her to do his dirty work and then kill her. You know what else he did? He didn't waste her dying, either. He had her killed so it would look like a Black Power plot, so he could use that to get a little race hate going. Now you tell me who'd like a race riot. Who's the big true believer, Ron? Who'd do anything for the cause?"
He put his hands to his head and squeezed hard, shaking his head in his hands. He got the bottle of whiskey and tried to pour a drink, but his hands shook and he didn't get much in the glass. Finally he drank it out of the bottle. I just looked at him.
He looked up at me and said, "How would I know. Hey, hey, no man, you don't think I'd do that. You don't think me."
"No," I told him. "I don't think you. But I think somebody's been asking around about me lately. I think somebody's talked to you about Carole, and could they trust her to do something for the movement. I think somebody's shown a lot of interest in our trip, and you damn well know who it was. Now goddamn it, Ron, I want to know. I'm going to kill the bastard and you're going to tell me who it is."
It was pitiful to watch him. Everything he'd lived for was coming apart, and you could see it happening to him. His causes, peace, brotherhood, and all the rest of it, and it ended up with a girl dead. A girl he'd liked. He wanted to believe I was a liar, but he knew better. He knew I wasn't acting because I wasn't, and he'd known for a long time there were people in his organizations who'd do something like that, but he'd never admitted it to himself.
He started to take another drink, and I slapped the glass out of his hand. Then he tried to get up and I kicked him in the crotch, not too hard, but hard enough to hurt. He fell down and whimpered.
"Who was it, Ron? You're going to tell me, the only question is whether I have to ruin you before you do. Think about it, Ron old buddy, no more girls. And when it happens, it's pain, Ron, it's pain." I kicked him again, harder than the first time, just to let him know I meant it.
He screamed this time, loud enough to disturb people outside if they were the kind of people who got disturbed.
"That won't help you," I told him. "Your buddies have passed out. Nobody gets involved here anyway, right? Everybody's cool here. Maybe when we leave somebody'll come over and ask you what happened, if he's sober enough to get here. But it'll be too late for you. No more girls, Ron. Okay, get set, here it comes." I stepped closer to him.
"No, oh Jesus, no, don't," he moaned. "It was John Murray. He sent her for the films. She met him here one night, and he told her to go with you and bring the films back. He told her where to get them and who to call, a B.C. YPSAL member. O God, no, leave me alone."
"Where can I find him?"
"Ivar's place. Ivar's out of town, John Murray's staying there." He started shaking all over, and got hold of his bottle. I let him take a big slug, then tilted his face up so I could see it.
"Did you know about the grenade?" I asked him.
"No man, you know better. No."
He wasn't lying. He drank some more, and I hustled Janie out. Ron had done the only thing the movement could never excuse. He'd finked. If there's any honor in that crowd, it's centered around never finking on anybody. I felt a little sorry for him, but not much.
It was misting up more outside, and that made it hard to see. If anybody heard our conversation with Ron, they didn't come out to talk about it, which was probably as well for them, the way I felt. Janie hadn't said a word while we were inside, but on the way to the car she said, "Hadn't we better do something about him?"
"Short of killing him, what?" I asked her. "He used to be a friend. You kill him if you want him dead. Anyway, he's busy doing something about himself right now. I doubt he'll talk to anybody before morning." The way I said it, she didn't argue.
I was more careful driving back to the District. Now that I knew what I had to do, I wanted to be sure I got the chance. Ivar lived in a rundown old shack of a place which used to be a garage. It's not far from the ship canal, down toward the Fremont district west of the university, just outside the area students will live in. It's just too far to walk if you're late for a class, so the rents are low. Lots of the fringe crowd live around there now the university has got so big that rents have gone out of sight in the District. I can remember getting a two-room and bath apartment only four blocks from the campus for $25.00 a month. Now the same place goes for fifty and it hasn't been repaired or even cleaned since I lived there.
Janie made me stop on the way and she telephoned in the information about Murray. I didn't want to let her, but she was right, and she kept at it until I agreed. She received an okay from downtown to pick him up. They wanted to talk to him.
As we drove to Ivar's place, Janie said, "That order was to pick him up, not kill him. The mood you're in, I don't know if it's a good idea for me to let you near him."
I didn't answer for a while, then said, "You aren't letting me, and there's only one way you can stop me. Maybe I'll get him alive and maybe not. He's an ex-paratrooper, he can outshoot me, and I expect he can take me apart unarmed. I'll use whatever advantage I have. What happens if we do get him alive?"
"They question him to find out who he works for. If he's been in the San Francisco office, he may have some important information."
"He wouldn't tell you a damn thing," I told her. "John Murray's a different breed of cat from these losers. I wasn't surprised when Ron said it had to be him, I couldn't think who else was that
tough."
Janie shrugged. "They usually do talk to Shearing's experts. I think they use lie detectors and things. You can get a yes-no answer from anybody with a polygraph if there's a good enough operator on it. Then you just have to ask the right questions. They have other techniques as well."
"Yeah. What happens to them after that? I mean, I never heard anybody tell a story about how he was questioned forcibly by the counterspies."
She lit a cigarette and held the match so I could see her face when she answered. "I don't know what happens to them. I never asked." She blew out the match.
I pulled up about a block from the shack. To get to it, you have to go down an alley unless you want to try climbing fences and cutting through respectable people's yards. Not too many people knew anybody lived in the alley, and there had never been a party with more than three or four at a time there. I knew about it because I had played poker a couple of times, with Ivar and some fish. Ivar was pretty good at the game and played about every week.
There was a light in the shack. The window shades were down, and since I'd been inside, I knew Ivar had taped them down to keep anybody from looking in. He was a nut on privacy. Ivar is an old guy, over fifty, and I'm told he was once some kind of officer in the IWW or something like that thirty years ago, and that's why he's still so suspicious of police. He threw Dan Ackerman out of a poker game when he found out Danny was a reserve police officer.
We got closer, and I could hear people talking, but I couldn't tell how many. I told Janie to wait outside for me, and took the little .38 out of its holster and held it in my hand in my trench-coat pocket. Then I tried the door with my left hand. It was locked, but that place is half rotten. I put my shoulder against the door and shoved, and part of the jamb tore loose.
John Murray was sitting behind the old kitchen table Ivar uses for a desk. There was a big guy standing against the wall near him, and they were looking at a city map on the table. Murray looked up, recognized me, and it looked like he'd seen a ghost.
"What's the matter, John? Think I was dead?" I asked him. "Why'd you think that? You son of a bitch, you have two choices. You can come with me, or I'll beat your brains in with my bare hands." I was leaning against what was left of the door, both hands in my pockets, and I tried to look unarmed. I wanted to see what they'd do.
"See if he's alone, Ben," Murray told the big guy. I looked at him, and I remembered seeing him before, but I'd never met him. One of the new guys, probably came up with Murray. He was taller than I am, maybe an inch or so, but he outweighed me a hundred pounds. He would have looked all right on a pro football team.
"Sure, John," Ben said. "Move, punk." He started toward me and I took the pistol out of my pocket and held it about two feet from his chest and pulled the trigger twice. The gun was loaded with wadcutters, which are good target ammunition. They are also good people ammunition because they flatten out if they hit something hard like bone, and transfer most of their energy to whatever they hit. Ben was stopped by the first slug and thrown backward by the second. He stayed on his feet for maybe a couple of seconds, but he was gone.
Murray was reaching for something. I took a step closer to him, put the gun next to his leg, and shot him in the thigh. He screamed and threw his hands to where he'd been hit, and I looked in the drawer of the table. There was a little gun in it, one of those modern high-powered .22 replicas of a Derringer pistol. I never thought they were much use, but you can carry one in a pocket.
Janie came in carrying a .38 like mine. She looked at the situation, handed the piece to me, and looked at where I'd shot Murray. As I took the gun from her I wondered where she'd kept it. Somewhere under her skirt, I figured, because there sure hadn't been any room for it anywhere else.
She found a necktie hanging in the closet and made a tourniquet around Murray's leg. "Help me get him out of here, you idiot. The neighbors will have the police here any minute."
I doubted that, because in that district kids shoot at street lights, and trucks backfire, and people mind their own business. Still, somebody might be new around there, and I didn't particularly want to explain things. I took a quick look, but as I figured, there wasn't any point in trying to carry Ben, even if I could have lifted his 270 pounds.
Murray didn't want to come. I put my gun against his ribs and said, "That's right, fat boy. Make trouble for us. I wish you would, it wasn't my idea for you to come out of this alive." He looked at me and tried to get up.
With Janie carrying her artillery again and mine tucked in its holster, I let Murray lean on me. He didn't walk too well, but he managed to hobble out and down the alley to the car. Janie looked competent enough, so I let her sit in back, with Murray next to me in the other bucket seat. Then I strapped him in with the safety belt and used his shoelace to tie his hands together in front of him.
"Where to, doll?" I asked her.
"To a telephone." She was on the phone a minute, then came back and got in the car.
"Head out toward Bothell," she said.
Driving along, I waited for the reaction. The first time I'd been involved in killing somebody, I thought I'd never get over being sick. Now all I had was a tight feeling in my stomach, and that was more worry about being stopped by the police than anything else. In fact, I was surprised to notice, I felt pretty good. I didn't miss Ben at all. If anybody looked sick, it was John Murray, although I wondered about Janie too. She didn't talk much, but then there wasn't much to say.
I got us out of the district and onto Bothell Way.
There wasn't a bit of traffic. Janie told me to go out almost to Bothell, but I said, "That's up to Johnnie boy. I can go to a place where they'll take care of you, Murray, or I can take you to Samammish Slough and turn you loose. Well, maybe not quite loose, but you'll be found in the morning. When they find you, they'll loosen the tourniquet, but of course gangrene will have started by then. You'll be interested in whether taking your leg off will stop it, won't you?" I made this as casual as I could.
He didn't answer, but Janie piped up. "You can't do that."
"The hell I can't, doll. I didn't agree to bring this chump in alive for nothing. What good is he to us if he won't talk to us? Won't be long before we get to the Samammish turnoff," I observed.
Janie didn't say anything else, and when we got to the turnoff I took a right, heading away from the Bothell highway.
"Save it," Murray spat out. "You can't let the police find me alive and we both know it. Hell, you're scared of the police yourself."
"Are we?" I asked Janie. She shook her head. "See, John? Ever hear of alibis? Think Janie and I can't have the world's best by tomorrow morning? You know how it's done. But you go on thinking I won't leave you. I'm going to tell you one thing, baby. When I dump you off, I'm not coming back. So you don't have very long before you can stop worrying about what to do."
He looked at me, swiveled around to look at Janie, then looked back at me. "She told me you went for her. Bad. You crazy bastard, you'd do it. Just for that girl, you'd do it. Gangrene. You never saw gangrene, did you? You never saw a man rot to death."
"Nope. Maybe you can tell me about it. I can think about how you'll feel for the next couple of days."
He looked at Janie, saw she wouldn't do it, but she wouldn't stop me either. Then he looked back at me. He was trying to figure out whether I'd really leave him out there tied up. Well, as a matter of fact, so was I. He decided before I did.
"All right. What do you want? Names?"
"I'll take some names," I said. "But mostly I'm interested in why you had Carole killed. Give us a name for a start."
"Roger Balsinger."
"I knew that one, but it'll do for a minute. Oh yeah, we knew it. He made one mistake too many and got tagged. Now tell me a story about Carole." I stopped the car, but I didn't make any move to turn it around, just got a plastic raincoat out from under the seat and held it under his leg while I loosened the tourniquet. He bled all over the place, in a flood, not spurts.
Venous bleeding.
Janie said, "You've got to get him to a doctor before he bleeds to death. Get back on Bothell Way, it's not far from there."
I turned on the ignition and kicked over the motor, but I left her out of gear. "I'll start when he starts," I said.
"I knew you were an agent for somebody," Murray said. "The others didn't think so, and I got overruled by that Balsinger. Carole was sure you weren't working for anybody, but she was hot for you anyway. So I had to finish you before you turned up something important. The kid heard me planning it, and she got scared. Said she'd turn us all in first. I talked her out of that by making her think she didn't understand what she'd heard, but then both of you had to go. So we waited for you with the grenade. Wasn't sure of getting you at the boat, so we waited at your house."
"Why wait?" I asked him. I got the car going toward the highway.
"We needed that junk. Balsinger decided to let you bring it in. It looked to me like they might let you get in the country with it and try to see who you delivered it to. The grenade would have stopped them finding anything out anyway. Uh. Oh man, that's bad. You got anything to drink in here?"
Red Heroin Page 12
