by Gorman, Ed
“I’ve done hard time, Paul. I can do it again if I have to.”
“My mother didn’t want this.”
“Maybe she’s changed her mind,” Deke said evenly. “Why don’t you ask her? Or ask Lisa. Lemme know what they say.”
“You know what they’d say.”
“Dammit, when Mabel asked me to wait I went along for her sake, but I’m done waitin’, Paulie, so save your breath.”
“I’m not asking you to wait, Uncle Deke. You’re right, we’re way past that. But whatever you decide to do, I want in.”
“You’d better think about that, boy. Your mother —
“I don’t have a mother anymore! Mel Bennett saw to that! We’ve held two Canfield funerals and that sonofabitch doesn’t have a mark on him. And now this?” I nodded at the flowers. “Enough already! I can’t let this pass anymore than you can.”
“Slow down, Paul. We ain’t talking about some classroom problem here. Collecting a debt like this will be an ugly, dangerous business. And afterward, you’ll have to live with what’s done for the rest of your life. You really think you’re up for that?”
“I’m in, Uncle Deke. All the way. If you tell me no I’ll do it on my own!”
He eyed me in silence, reading my face like a stranger. Which wasn’t a comfortable experience.
My uncle and I were never close. I was already a teenager when my uncle got out of prison. I heard he’d gotten mobbed up in Jackson and hadn’t been straight since. Some people call him a gangster.
I call him sir.
He’s my mother’s brother. She loved him and he’d always been welcome in our home. And that was good enough for me. Especially now.
“Well?” I demanded.
“Maybe there’s more La Motte blood in you than I thought, boy,” he shrugged. “Take a look at this.” He handed me a typewritten note. Lisa, I heard about your situation. Maybe I can help. We should talk. I’ll pick you up after work. F. “It was on Lisa’s office computer,” he explained. “She got it the day she was killed.”
“How did you get it?”
“Don’t ask. My crew’s got more connections in the north counties than Michigan Bell.”
“All right then, who’s F?”
“The police think F is Fawn Daniels, but it was e-mailed from a coffee shop so it can’t be traced. The DA couldn’t use it. It makes sense, though. Lisa was pregnant, who better to talk to about it than Mel’s other girlfriend? Or so she thought.”
“My god, that’s why Lisa walked home alone that night. She was expecting a ride.”
“I think the Daniels woman set Lisa up for Mel,” Deke nodded. “Probably expected to be Mel’s new lady, but he’s banging some high school cheerleader now, seventeen years old. Fawn’s history, in more ways than one. She goes first.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It ain’t complicated, boy. The Daniels woman and Bennett killed Lisa together. She’s as guilty as he is. They’re both going to pay for it, but she has to be first.”
“Why?” I managed, swallowing hard.
“Your mother called it right. If anything happens to Bennett, the law will be all over me and my sons. But the Daniels woman is a different matter. They won’t be expecting that, especially not from you. If I set it up right, you’ll get away clean. And if not, well, you’re a simple schoolteacher who lost his mother and sister. Maybe you’ll get the benefit of the doubt. One of them Valhalla verdicts. Me and Bo definitely won’t.”
“But if I...” I swallowed, hard.
“Kill her. Say it.”
“If she dies first, won’t that make Bennett even harder to get to?”
“For awhile. But he’ll be scared spitless the whole time. Waiting for his number to come up. Could be he’ll get nervous enough to make a mistake.”
“What kind of a mistake?”
“Maybe he’ll take a run at me or Bo. If he tries that, it’ll be the last thing he ever does. Or maybe he’ll confess, and take that perjury fall you mentioned.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To a frightened man, a jail looks like a safe place. Stone walls surrounded by guards. Serve a few months, wait for things to cool down. But I’ve got contacts inside, guys who’ll do Bennett for a carton of cigarettes. If he ever steps through a cell door, he won’t come out.”
“And if he doesn’t confess?”
“Then I’ll let him sweat awhile, then take care of him myself. Up close and personal.”
“You can’t possibly get away with it.”
“I don’t expect to,” Deke said simply. “If I die in the joint over this, so be it. That’s my problem. Fawn Daniels is yours, if you got the belly for it. I know it goes against your nature, Paul, but it’s the only way. If you want out, say so now.”
I looked away, avoiding his eyes. Found myself staring at my mother’s casket instead. I knew what she’d say to this. But she couldn’t talk me out of it. Nor could Lisa. Never again.
“I’m said I’m in, Uncle Deke. I meant it. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing for a few days. If you change your mind — ”
“I won’t.”
“Then go back to your life and stay cool til I contact you. Bo will come by with instructions. When that happens, you’ll probably have to move fast. Understand?”
I nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak.
“Say it!” he snapped.
“I understand!”
But I didn’t. Not really.
I stumbled through my mother’s funeral service like a zombie, going through the motions. I read her eulogy, and laid a final rose on her coffin as they lowered it into the ground. And I didn’t understand any of it.
She was laid to rest beside my father, who was killed long ago in Vietnam. And beside Lisa and her unborn child. Buried so recently the earth was still raw over the grave. As raw as the jagged wound in my heart.
Somehow I managed to teach classes over the next few days, but I must have asked myself a thousand times how it all happened. The two funerals, so close together, had shattered my life. Everything was spinning wildly out of control.
Our branch of the family was suddenly reduced to an army of one. Me. And I was waiting for my uncle’s instructions to murder a woman I’d never met.
My god, how had it come to this?
Then I’d see Mel Bennett doing an interview on television, offering a million-dollar reward for the arrest of Lisa’s killer. Smiling all the while.
And I’d get a quick memory flash of Lisa’s smile. Or my mother’s.
And I’d remember exactly how it all happened. And what I had to do now.
• • •
Ten days later, I was walking to my car after the day’s classes, when a black Cadillac Escalade pulled up beside of me. Bo La Motte climbed out, glancing around to be sure we were alone.
“Put these on,” he said, stripping off a pair of black leather gloves. “The Caddy’s stolen so you’ll have to move quick. Fawn Daniels jogs along the lake shore after work. There’s a hundred yard stretch near Michikewis where the shore road parallels the beach. Run her down there, just like Lisa. Put that bitch in the ground! You sure you’re up for this?”
I nodded, too shaken to answer.
“Afterward, dump the Caddy in the supermarket lot downtown, then walk to Valhalla Park. We’re having a family barbecue this afternoon. Twenty witnesses will swear you were there the whole time. Gimme your car keys. Move!”
As I fumbled them out of my jacket, he grabbed my arm.
“One last thing, cousin. You remember all the times I stood up for you in school?”
“I remember.”
“Good. Because if anything goes wrong, if you get stopped, get stuck, whatever, you dummy up and take the weight, understand? If my dad does one day in prison because of you, Paulie, I’ll make up for every beatin’ you ever missed and then some!”
Scrambling into my Volvo, Bo sped off.
A moment later I
was on the road too, heading for the lakeshore in a stolen Cadillac SUV. Taking deep breaths. Pumping myself up. For a killing.
I didn’t question the justice of it. Fawn Daniels helped arrange my sister’s death and by standing mute on the witness stand, she’d gotten Lisa’s killer off scot-free. And put my mother in her grave.
Half the men in my family were army vets and my father died in Vietnam. If killing strangers on behalf of our government was honorable, how could I fail to retaliate against people who’d murdered members of my family?
The Daniels woman justly deserved a death sentence. But knowing that, and being able to carry it out are very different things.
I didn’t know if I was capable of killing. I only knew that the law had utterly failed our clan. Justice had been left to me.
Turning onto the shore road, I headed toward Michikewis Beach. Half a mile ahead, I could see a blonde jogger running along the shore. Fawn Daniels, lithe and athletic, decked out in skin tight pink spandex. Enjoying a relaxing run in the warm autumn afternoon.
While my mother, my sister and her unborn baby lay cold in the moldering darkness.
Flooring the gas pedal, I rapidly closed the distance. There were a few tourists strolling along the beach, but none were close enough to interfere. All they could do was watch.
Not that they could see much. The stolen Escalade’s windows were smoked glass. And in the split second before I whipped it off the road onto the beach, it occurred to me that my Uncle Deke had planned this killing extremely well on very short notice. A sobering thought.
Then it was too late for thinking! The big SUV slewed in the sand, and I was fighting the wheel to keep the unruly machine upright, wrestling it back on course. Forty yards ahead, I glimpsed Fawn Daniels’ terrified face as she glanced over her shoulder to see the monster Cadillac hurtling toward her. It must have looked like a messenger of death. A roaring black juggernaut.
For a split second our eyes met through the windshield — and then I cranked the wheel over, veering away to avoid her! Too late!
I heard a thump, saw Fawn go sprawling into the shallows. But then she was up again, scrambling to her feet, sprinting out into deeper water, limping, but making pretty good time.
Matting the gas pedal, I nearly rolled the SUV in the loose sand as I swerved back toward the shore road. Running for my life.
Though I knew it was already too late.
She’d glimpsed my face, if only for a moment. And she’d seen me often enough during the trial to know who I was.
I’d destroyed myself. Thrown my life away. For nothing. At the moment of truth, I simply couldn’t do it.
I didn’t hear police sirens yet, but they’d be coming soon enough. All I could do now was try to avoid dragging anyone else down with me.
As instructed, I abandoned the Escalade in the supermarket lot, but I didn’t join my family in the park. I’d failed them. I’d take the weight for that failure alone.
I walked home instead. Not to my apartment. Home. To my mother’s house. A small white clapboard on a quiet side street, shaded by maple trees.
It stood empty now. Locked, shades drawn, eyeless windows staring blindly at me as I trudged slowly up the porch steps. Utterly exhausted.
I still had a key, but didn’t bother to use it. Sat on the front steps instead. Waiting for the police. Knowing they’d be on their way as soon as the Daniels woman got to a phone.
It was a good place to wait. I’d grown up in this house, roamed these streets as a boy. With my little sister tagging along after me. Closing my eyes, I could almost hear Lisa’s voice calling me. The autumn sun warm on my face ...
I snapped awake, startled. Wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep but dusk was coming on now, shadows falling.
A car screeched to a halt at the curb.
Not a police car. My Volvo. With my Uncle Deacon at the wheel. “What the hell are you doing here, Paul? You’re supposed to be at the park.”
“You’d better get out of here, Uncle Deke. I blew it completely. The police will be coming.”
“They’ve already been. They arrested Mel Bennett twenty minutes ago. Seems he tried to run down Fawn Daniels. Half a dozen people saw his car at the beach. That big, ugly SUV was hard to miss.”
“Mel’s SUV?” I echoed stupidly.
“Whose did you think it was? He left it parked in front of his new girlfriend’s place. She swore he was with her the whole time, but a star-struck kid isn’t much of an alibi. Not with Fawn Daniels in the back of a prowl car, screaming that Mel tried to run her down. Positively identified him.”
“I don’t understand. She saw me! At the beach she — ”
“Saw what she was most afraid of,” Deke finished. “Mel’s car coming straight at her. She’ll swear on her mama’s eyes he was at the wheel because she damn sure knows how he did his last girlfriend. I expect they’re going at each other like rats in a box about now, throwing their own lives away.”
“I still don’t — ” But suddenly I did understand. “My god. This was the plan all along, wasn’t it? You knew I’d never go through with it. Why the hell did you ask me to do it?”
“It had to be you, Paul. Your mama was right, the law’s been all over us since the trial. We couldn’t make a move.”
“Bo managed the car.”
“I said they were watching us. I didn’t say they were real good at it. “
“And if I’d been caught, Uncle Deke? What then?”
“A poor, heartbroken schoolteacher who just lost his mom and sister? You’d get the benefit of the doubt, same as Mel Bennett did.
What did the DA call it?”
“A Valhalla verdict,” I said slowly.
“Exactly,” Deke grinned. “Sometimes, livin’ in a town where folks cut one another a break ain’t such a bad thing, Professor. C’mon, the family’s at the park and you need to be with your people. Damn it, Paul, we’ve won for once. And it was long overdue.”
I couldn’t argue with that. Trotting down the steps, I slid into the car beside my uncle. Breathing in the aroma of woodsmoke and whiskey. Reading his wolfish smile as he gunned away from the curb.
I knew he’d played me. All the way. Maybe he had the right to. Maybe it was the only way we could get justice.
Still, I couldn’t help wondering ... About those flowers.
Did Mel Bennett really send that wreath to my mother’s funeral?
But I didn’t ask. Uncle Deke was my mother’s brother. She loved him and that was good enough for me.
And it’s best to give people you love the benefit of a doubt.
Even when you know better.
• • •
Award-winning author DOUG ALLYN has been published internationally in English, German, French, and Japanese and more than two dozen of his tales have been optioned for development as feature films and television. The author of eight novels and over a hundred short stories, his first story won the Robert L. Fish Award for Best First from Mystery Writers of America and subsequent critical response has been equally remarkable. He has won the coveted Edgar Allen Poe Award (plus six nominations), three Derringer Awards for novellas, and the Ellery Queen Readers Awardan unprecedented nine times, including this year. He studied creative writing and criminal psychology at the University of Michigan while moonlighting as a guitarist in the rock group Devil’s Triangle and reviewing books for the Flint Journal. Career highlights are sipping champagne with Mickey Spillane and waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark.
PURE PULP
By Bill Crider
One
I was pounding out the words so fast that the keys of my battered Underwood were almost smoking. I could practically smell the hot metal.
Ding went the bell, and I slapped the return lever. The carriage double-spaced, slid to the right, and stopped hard. When you’re working for a quarter of a cent a word, some of the time, and half a cent a word at better times, you have to write fast. Either that or give up eating and drinki
ng, and I wasn’t ready to give up either one, especially drinking.
Which reminded me that I was thirsty. I stopped typing for just long enough to take a small sip of cheap bourbon from the squat, thick-bottomed glass that sat to my right. A quick swallow, and I was typing again.
The story was titled “Tommy-Gunner’s Holiday.” It was aimed at Gun Molls, and I’d just reached the big scene where a dangerous dame, a blonde, of course, had gunned down a bespectacled teller during a botched bank job when I heard a roscoe sneeze: KACHOW!
That’s the way Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, would have put it, anyway, though the sound was nothing at all like a sneeze. It was more of a sharp crack, as if someone had slapped a couple of flat boards together. Not that I’m criticizing Robert Leslie Bellem. His Dan Turner stories sold for a good bit more than any of mine ever did. Maybe it was the scantily clad babes that did it, but it could have been the roscoes. You never know.
At any rate, I didn’t jump right up from my chair to see what was going on. I had a page to finish, and I couldn’t stop, not when I was going so well, not even for gunshots. So the teller dropped twitching to the cold marble floor of the bank, the moll sneered and asked if anybody wanted some of what the teller had gotten, and then I reached the bottom of the page.
I took the paper out of the Underwood, separated the original from the carbon, and removed the carbon paper. I stacked each page one in the proper place. I put the carbon paper, which was getting pretty worn, between two fresh white sheets, and inserted them behind the typewriter roller. After I rolled the paper into place, I stepped out into the hall.
Two or three men were standing outside Ron Thane’s door. Or Guy Dane’s door. Or Frank Lane’s. Or lots of other names. Thane, or whatever his real name was, had so many pseudonyms that it was next to impossible to keep up with them. The same was true of the three standing outside his door, and of me, too, for that matter.
We all lived in The Regis Arms, a shabby residence hotel not too far from Columbia University. Now and then we’d catch sight of a co-ed, which was about as close as any of us came to having any contact with the opposite sex. We were too busy hacking out hair-raising tales for that kind of thing. Well, I was. I couldn’t really speak for the others though I was sure their situation was the same.
