Blood Relative (The Jacob Lomax Mysteries Book 4)

by Michael Allegretto

  “To go home to her husband.”

  “Hey, she never told me she was married.”

  I gave him my two-dollar grin. “Why else would she avoid being seen with you?”

  “I don’t know…” Pruitt looked around his office for an answer. “I suppose I thought it was part of her—”

  “Her what?”

  He hesitated. “Kinkiness.” He pressed his lips together, then said, “I don’t see why I have to tell you any of this.”

  “You don’t.” I crossed my legs, settled into the chair, and let him know I wasn’t about to leave.

  He held my gaze for a moment, then looked down at his hands, curling one into a half fist, examining the nails.

  After a moment, he said, “She liked bondage.” He shrugged. “I’d never done anything like that before. She showed me what to do, how to tie her up. We used some of my old neckties.” He fingered the one he had on, then guiltily moved his hand away. “After she was bound, she’d tell me what to do to her, spank her, slap her, push her onto the floor, whatever, then have sex. None of it vicious or hurtful, you understand. It was just play.”

  He frowned, remembering.

  “Things changed, though,” he said. “Pretty soon she wanted me to hit her. I mean, really hit her. She’d be tied up and telling me slap her, harder, harder. If I wouldn’t do it, she’d start calling me names, wimp, faggot, whatever, trying to get me mad. And I would get mad. And I’d slap her harder…and then we’d have sex. It was getting to be too weird, too sick. After about two months, I was ready to call it quits with her. Then her husband found out about us…”

  “He put a stop to your affair.”

  “Oh, that he did,” Pruitt said. “He called me at work one day, gave me a phony name, said he was interested in looking at a house that had my name on the for-sale sign. I met him there, we went inside, and he proceeded to beat the hell out of me. He knocked out this tooth”—Pruitt put his finger on a top incisor—“before I covered my head with both arms. He kept hitting me until I fell. He kicked me. I pissed blood for a week. He told me if I ever went near his wife again, he’d kill me. I believed him.”

  I felt no pity for Pruitt. “Did you go to the police?”

  “How could I? What would I say, that a guy beat me up because I was screwing his wife? I didn’t tell anyone.” He waved his arm. “The people here think I was mugged.”

  I said nothing.

  Pruitt gave me a crooked smile. “Afterward, I wondered if Clare had sensed our affair was ending and sicced her husband on me out of spite.”

  “When was the beating?”

  Pruitt ran his tongue over his front cap. “The first part of January.”

  “Did you see Clare again after that?”

  “Hell no, you think I’m crazy? I told you what Butler said.”

  “Was she seeing anyone else during your affair with her?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did she ever mention another man to you—in any context?”

  “No. We didn’t talk much while we were together. She’d come over, we’d do our thing, and she’d leave.”

  “Did you ever do drugs while you were together?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Meaning she did?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Which drugs?”

  “Something she smoked in a little glass pipe. She said it made sex better for her.”

  “Did she ever say where she bought it?”

  “I never asked.”

  “Did the police question you about any of this?”

  Pruitt shook his head no. “The only two things they wanted to know were, one, was I still seeing Clare. No. And two, where was I the day she was murdered. San Diego, at a real estate convention. And I’ve got the credit-card receipts and a dozen witnesses to prove it,” he added proudly.

  “Lucky for you,” I said, standing. “Or you might be learning some real kinkiness in the state pen.”

  I left him fingering his tie.

  I spent the rest of the day going door-to-door in Samuel Butler’s neighborhood. At least the sun had come out and mopped up the thin snow, so my feet stayed dry. I asked everyone the same question: Did you see any suspicious-looking vehicles or persons on the day Clare Butler was murdered? They’d all been asked this before by the police. Their answers hadn’t changed.

  No.

  When I got home that evening, the phone was ringing as I came through the door.

  “Jacob Lomax?” A man’s voice.

  “Yes.” I tossed my keys on the kitchen counter and got ready to hang up the moment he said “magazine subscriptions” or “carpet cleaning.”

  He said, “I know who killed Clare Butler.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “WHO IS THIS?”

  “A friend,” he said. “I have proof that Samuel Butler didn’t kill his wife.”

  I didn’t recognize his voice. Not young, not old. Nervous.

  “Take it to the police,” I told him. I rarely trust people who say they have precisely what I want.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s— They’d arrest me.”

  “For what?”

  “Look, do you want what I have or not?” He was getting exasperated. Tough.

  “What exactly do you have?”

  “Photographs that can prove who killed Clare Butler. And it wasn’t her husband.”

  “Who was it?”

  “You look at the pictures and decide for yourself.”

  “Okay. I’ll leave the porch light on for you.”

  “No, we’ll meet someplace else, someplace where I feel safe. After you see the photos, we’ll talk price.”

  “I don’t have much money.”

  “Samuel Butler does.”

  “I see.” Oddly enough, now I trusted him. At least I trusted his motive. “Okay, when and where?”

  “Ten o’clock tonight, Willis Case golf course.”

  “How about somewhere more public?”

  “No way, pal. The cops are looking for me. And so is someone else, someone who wants these photographs.”

  “Who?”

  “The person who killed Clare. Be at the starter’s shack at ten.” He hung up.

  Willis Case golf course is in the northwest part of town, bordered on the south by I-70 and on the other three sides by city streets and residential neighborhoods. I’d often driven past it and seen golfers whaling away at the elusive and hated little white ball, their steel clubs flashing in the sun. Or they’d be stalking said ball, trudging about the hilly, pine-laden grounds, mighty quivers slung from their backs. Others, perhaps fearing sweat, puttered about in motorized carts.

  At nine o’clock, I steered the Toyota up the ascending, narrow entrance road, flanked by tall pines. My headlights flashed across the deserted starter’s shack and one side of the clubhouse. I continued on to the players’ parking lot. It was empty and dark.

  I shut off the Toyota and climbed out.

  The sky was clear, and the air was cold. The only sounds were the ticking of the Toyota’s engine and the distant hum of traffic on the freeway. I turned up my jacket collar, adjusted the holster on my hip, then switched on my flashlight and walked back toward the starter’s shack.

  The shack abutted one end of the clubhouse, with windows on two sides and a door on the third. All locked. To my left was a garage door, behind which I assumed golf carts were stored.

  I moved to my right, stepped over a low metal-pipe railing, and began circling the clubhouse, keeping to the asphalt cart path. I swept my light across the flat, grassy tee box and the tall, dark pines, looking for anyone lurking in the shadows.

  There were plenty of places to lurk. The golf course was a two-tone mosaic—dark fairways and black trees. The grounds fell steeply away from the clubhouse to the south and west. In the distance, the mountains were flat, dark shapes against a starry sky. A crescent moon hung over them like a scythe. Through the t
rees I could see portions of the interstate, a quarter mile away, flowing with traffic.

  I continued around the building, peering through the windows. The restaurant was dark save for a single light over the cash register. The empty drawer stuck out like a tongue.

  I entered the parking lot from the rear. The Toyota looked lost and abandoned. I moved past it to the starter’s shack and clicked off my light.

  At least I knew I was alone. No one was lying in ambush or waiting to sneak up on me. Not that I thought there would be. But something was making me nervous. Maybe this place. It was a little too dark and a little too remote. Or maybe the enticement itself—a convenient phone call with the promise of the answer to my biggest question. And if the answer was real, photographic evidence of Clare’s murderer, why hadn’t the mystery man contacted Butler’s lawyer or one of his children? Why me?

  Unless, of course, the attorney and the kids had been involved in the murder.

  The only way to find out was to meet the mystery man. So I stood in the chill night air, shifting my feet and flexing my fingers to stay warm.

  An hour later, I heard a car.

  It moved slowly in low gear, coming up the entrance road, invisible behind a thick wall of trees. Then headlights appeared, at first merely blinking through the branches and finally erupting in full glare as the car rounded the last curve.

  I stayed hidden in the shadow beside the starter’s shack.

  The car stopped about thirty feet from the shack, passenger side toward me, nothing between us but a flat stretch of asphalt, a few concrete benches, and spiny bushes that rimmed the road. I could see the dark outline of a man behind the wheel.

  “Is that you, Lomax?” he called.

  I guess I wasn’t so well concealed, after all. I switched on the flashlight and pointed it at the car. A new Thunderbird, dark, hard to tell the color in the pale yellow beam of the flash. The man behind the wheel was partially hidden by the doorframe, but I could see that he was heavyset, middle-aged or older.

  “It’s me,” I told him.

  “Come over to the car.”

  I took two steps forward.

  Someone rose from the backseat and pointed something at me, and I dove to the ground.

  In the next instant there was a flash and a boom, and the starter’s shack window exploded behind me in a shower of glass. I rolled under the pipe railing as a powerful beam of light fell on me. Two booms, close together. Lead shot splattered into the asphalt and the brick building. I scrambled on all fours, then ran in a crouch around the corner of the clubhouse.

  From behind me I heard, “You two go that way. I’ll drive around the other side.”

  Three of them. At least two had shotguns. I didn’t know Who or Why, but I knew What, Where, and When—kill me, here and now.

  I considered breaking into the building through a window and making my stand inside. But there were too many ways in, too many entries to defend. Besides, there wasn’t time. They were running now. They’d blast me before I climbed halfway in.

  I ran past the end of the clubhouse. To my left was the parking lot. A car door slammed.

  I reached the end of the cart path. Beyond it was a short stretch of grass that fell away in a steep slope. I heard the action of a pump shotgun behind me, and I dove forward as a tight bundle of lead slugs tore the air over me. I rolled twenty feet downhill and landed with my face in the sand. The night-blackened green stretched before me. Beyond it, the ground dropped into the pines. To my right, past the front of the green, the grass sloped down to a wide open fairway.

  I was still holding the flashlight, and it was still on. I heaved it to my right.

  “There!”

  A boom.

  I scrambled out of the sand trap, ran across the green, and stumbled down the slope into the trees.

  “No, there he goes!”

  A boom.

  Slugs smashed into the trees, stinging me with bits of bark and wood. I dodged through the pines, slipping on the bed of needles. Branches grabbed my coat and slapped my face.

  Suddenly, I was in the open.

  The ground sloped gently down from me across the width of another fairway, then up to a distant, high chain-link fence. Beyond the fence was the interstate, with cars and trucks humming along in a thin but continuous stream. Between me and the fence was about fifty yards of open ground, stretching both ways parallel to the traffic. It was doubtful I could run that far without being cut down from behind. And if I did make it across and if I could scale the fence, then what? Run headlong into sixty-mile-an-hour traffic?

  I heard the crunch of needles behind me. They’d entered the pines.

  I faced in their direction, backing into the open, scanning the island of trees. It was about twenty yards deep and stretched fifty yards to either side of me. I figured the driver was coming toward me from the right and the other two from straight ahead.

  I moved to my left, dodging from tree to tree, keeping my back in the open and as much timber as possible between me and the shooters. After a dozen yards, I stopped and listened, quietly unholstering the .38, wishing it were an Uzi, wishing more that I’d stayed in Mexico. I saw movement in the trees, shadows among shadows. One stopped and turned toward me, a man-shape twenty feet away. I pointed the snub-nose and popped off three rounds, knowing my odds of hitting anything at that distance were slim. I was answered at once by gunfire, thundering booms interspersed with sharper cracks. I hugged the base of a tree under a shower of pinecones and ripped bark.

  Someone moaned. I held my breath and hoped it wasn’t me.

  “Shit, Royce is hit.”

  “Forget about Royce. Let’s get that son of a bitch.”

  I started moving again to my left, dodging in the dark from tree to tree.

  Then I reached the tip of my island. Not quite ahead of me, at an upward angle to my left, was the elevated green. About fifty yards beyond it was the clubhouse, the top half of its windows peeking over the slope at me. Directly ahead of me was the stand of trees, angling in on me from both sides like the tip of a giant spear.

  The two able-bodied shooters crunched through the pine needles, working their way toward me.

  Their friend Royce may have been careless, perhaps believing I was unarmed. But these two knew better. They’d pinned me with my back to the fairway, and they were about to flush me into the open. There was no out-gunning them, so. I turned, prepared to run and take my chance as a moving target in the open fairway.

  Then I hesitated, thinking about the clubhouse windows. Something I should have thought of before.

  I turned and held the .38 before me with both hands. I fired my two remaining rounds at the distant, dark building, praying for a miracle.

  I got one.

  Glass shattered, and the night came alive with the clang of a burglar alarm.

  “Goddammit,” I heard through the clanging.

  “What if it’s tied to a cop station?”

  “God damn it. All right. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  “Help me with Royce.”

  “Forget about him. He’s finished.”

  “We can’t just—”

  Three sharp gunshots. I hunkered down behind my tree.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Come on.”

  Movement in the trees. Then two shapes ran across the green and up the slope, disappearing over the top. A few moments later, an engine roared, and tires squealed. The engine raced off in the night.

  The alarm continued its steady clang.

  I listened for Royce. He’d stopped moaning.

  I waited a good five minutes before I left the trees and began hunting for my flashlight. It was still switched on, lying in the fairway. I carried it back into the trees.

  Royce was lying on his back in a bed of pine needles. He was a husky guy, my age or older, late thirties, with long hair and a bandido mustache. He wore Levi’s and a black crew-neck sweater. His eyes and mouth were open, as if he’d just ma
de a hole in one. Actually, there were four holes, glistening with blood.

  I climbed the grassy slope to the clubhouse and waited for the cops.

  CHAPTER 16

  I SPENT THE NIGHT in the city jail.

  It wasn’t too surprising, since a man had been shot dead and I’d been the only one around with a gun. Except, of course, for the uniformed officers.

  They’d arrived a few minutes after I reached the clubhouse, two men and a woman in three white patrol cars—lights out, sirens mute, tires squealing. The loudest sound was the clanging of the alarm bell. I stood in plain view away from the building and waved both arms in the air to show them I was a responsible citizen. Still, they felt it prudent to point their weapons at me.

  I gave them the short version: I was a private detective meeting an informant, and three guys had driven up and tried to kill me, so I’d shot one of them, then shot the window, setting off the alarm.

  They took my gun and walked me down to the trees to the body. Then they put me in the backseat of a patrol car and called for Homicide. After that, detectives and technicians swarmed the place, photographing the body and searching for the dead man’s gun. None was found.

  The detectives asked me a lot of questions. I’d answered most of them.

  The others, I told them, were privileged information. They said, “Okay,” and then took me downtown. I told them I wanted to talk to Lt. Patrick MacArthur, a close personal friend of mine. They said, “Fine,” and then had me pictured and printed. I told them MacArthur and I had been cops together, had in fact gone through the academy together. They said, “Swell,” and then locked me up.

  I slept very little that night.

  I have that problem in a strange bed. Particularly if it’s a narrow cot surrounded by concrete and steel. There were other distractions—steel doors clanging, toilets flushing, guys yelling. And when I did nod off, I kept having the same dream: men with shotguns were chasing me through the trees.

  At ten o’clock Thursday morning a detective let me out of my cell and took me upstairs.

  He was an Oriental named O’Roarke. We’d met some months ago under equally distressing conditions, but he acted as if he’d never seen me before in his life. He was the silent type. In fact, he didn’t say a word as we went up the elevator, then walked through the busy squad room to a glass-paneled door in the back. On the door was stenciled Robbery/Homicide Section—Lt. P. MacArthur. I could see MacArthur going through some papers on his desk. O’Roarke knocked. MacArthur looked up and waved us in.