Deep Kill (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  “Last I heard he had offices in the old Maison Blanche building. Gulch Investigations. Around here they call him Dry Gulch. Watch out, Micah, he’s strictly half-assed, and that can be a problem. He’s too stupid to know when to stop.”

  “Thanks, Sal.”

  “Part of the service.” He hesitated. “By the way, I saw you on the news.”

  “Great.”

  “Take it easy. There’s a limit to the number of enemies that are healthy.”

  I told him good-bye and punched in the number for John O’Rourke.

  “Micah, where the hell are you?”

  “In my normal place of work,” I said dryly. “What’s up?”

  “That’s my line. I heard about you mixing it up with Condon.” I went cold and then I realized he must be talking about my first, videotaped and televised, visit to the church. “Is there anything I ought to know to protect you?”

  “I’m not guilty.”

  “I didn’t think so. It sounded like a setup. But you’ve got to go easy. That man’s politically very astute, and he’s as ambitious as hell.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I told you he has his eye on a council seat. This kind of thing is grist for his mill. If you get in his way he’ll pull out all the stops.”

  I knew that if I told O’Rourke about my caper the night before, he’d hit the ceiling and read me a lecture about being forced into a corner as my legal adviser. I’d argue that he hadn’t been so legalistic in the sixties when he’d broken into the draft board building on Canal with a bunch of protesters, and we’d end up going round and round like a couple of dogs, which wasn’t going to do any good, so I kept it to myself.

  “But I called the DA’s office, and so far Condon hasn’t pressed any charges against you for extortion,” he was saying, “so my guess is it’s all smoke, and he was just using it to get you out of the way.”

  “I don’t think he’s implicated, anyway,” I said. “At least not directly.” Then, on an off chance, I asked, “Ever heard of a smalltime PI named Eddie Gulch?”

  “Can’t say that I have. Why?”

  “Our paths crossed, that’s all.”

  “Micah, look, do you know where Calvin Autry is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I had to ask. He needs to get his ass in here and surrender.”

  I sighed. “Calvin isn’t one of your uptown types. He’s a frontiersman at heart. He hasn’t got any use for the government or any of its legal machinery. You can count on him staying out of sight till he thinks it’s safe to come up for air.”

  O’Rourke sighed. “Well, I’ve done my duty as an officer of the court.”

  “He’ll be glad to know. Look, I’ll be back in touch. Right now there are some other things I’ve got to deal with.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Sandy. “Okay, where is it?”

  “What?” Her eyes were big and innocent.

  “You know what.”

  “Oh, this.” She reached into her handbag and brought out the .38 and the clip holster that had been in my pants. I put them on the desk, pulled out a cleaning rag, and rubbed gun and holster all over. I flipped out the cylinder and checked the chambers for obstructions, looking down the barrel at the reflection of my fingernail, the way they teach you in the military. When I was satisfied, I held out my hand for the speedloads I knew she must also have taken from my pants pocket.

  She handed them over. I wiped the grime and lint from them and went into the drawer again for some more cartridges and reloaded the gun.

  “You’re not going after Condon, I hope.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to see Eddie Gulch.”

  “Micah, look at you: you aren’t worth a damn right now. Give your bruises a chance to heal, for God’s sake. Or were you planning to go disguised as a hunchback?”

  “You’re a real comic,” I told her, and stood up. She was right: it cost me an effort, because my bones were sore and my muscles didn’t want to function. Whatever energy I had now would drain away in five or ten minutes like a charge from a battery with a dead cell. But I didn’t have much choice.

  “He’s just in the Maison Blanche building,” I told her. “It’s not far from here.”

  She shrugged. “Okay, fool, but at least let me go along for backup.”

  I knew that if I told her no she’d agree and then follow me anyway. Nodding, I stuck the gun in the holster and thrust the holster down inside my belt.

  “Look up his phone number,” I said. “I’d like to know if he’s there.”

  She found the listing E. GULCH, INVESTIGATIONS; CONFIDENTIAL, ALL MATTERS. I dialed and after one ring got a recording. It was comforting to know there were others who couldn’t afford secretarial help, either.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  It was two thirty when Sandy let me out on Iberville, at the west end of the French Quarter. If Gulch had answered the phone, I would have given him a phony name and asked some bullshit question. But since he wasn’t there, it meant that with luck I’d have time to search his office and could be waiting for him when he got back.

  I waited for Sandy to return from the parking garage. When I saw her coming across the street, I went inside and headed for the elevator. We’d go up separately, because, after all, this was New Orleans, and a white and black couple was the sort of thing people remembered. I was running a big enough chance just going myself; somebody was likely to see the bruise on my cheek and note that I kept my left arm close to my body. A man with a lame arm doesn’t get many shots in undercover work.

  I checked the directory in the lobby and went up in the elevator with four other people: a woman on the way to her gynecologist, who kept whispering to her friend just loud enough for me to hear; a man with a Masonic ring, who looked like an insurance agent; and a fellow from the phone company, with a tool belt.

  The elevator stopped at the sixth floor and I got off. As the doors closed behind me, I went down the hallway, heading for the stairs. The building was an old one, dating from the Depression, and the doors all had frosted glass panels with the names of doctors and lawyers stenciled on them. There was a brass stand with sand for cigarette butts just beside the elevator, and the hallway smelled vaguely of cigar smoke. I went through the door to the stairwell, glad that nobody else was in the corridor to see me, and down the stairs to the fifth floor. I cracked the door and looked out. The way was clear, and I walked quickly along, counting off the names and numbers on the doors as my feet made slick sounds on the wet floor.

  ALVIN TRASKER, M.D.; STEARNS, ROBICHAUX AND HARTNESS, CERTIFIED PUBLIC ACCOUNTANTS; FOLKS AND SMITH, INVESTMENT COUNSELORS; CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS.

  No name, just Confidential Investigations. I turned the handle and the door opened. Careless, I thought. Or had he returned?

  I froze, listening, but there was no sound except the far-away honk of a horn down on Canal. I was in an anteroom, with a desk and a couple of chairs that looked like Goodwill specials. Behind the desk was a door that had to lead to his inner office.

  I went through the door and found him sitting in his chair, smiling at me. It was a silly smile, the kind you have when you’re caught out at something and don’t know what to say.

  It didn’t take me more than a second to realize he was dead.

  Thirteen

  His hands were hanging down by his sides, and when I touched his face it was cold. I’d seen smiles like his in Nam, a few hours after death. They weren’t pretty. Neither was the red spot on his chest. I bent over to look at it. It wasn’t a bullet hole. Someone had jabbed him in the heart with something like an ice pick. Quick, lethal, and silent.

  I heard the outer door open and straightened. It was probably Sandy, had to be Sandy. But my hand went down to my belt anyway and closed over the grip of the revolver.

  Sandy’s face appeared in the doorway, registering a split second of shock at the sight of Gulch. Then her presence of mind took over. “Micah, we’ve got to get
out of here,” she said.

  “In a minute,” I said. “But I need to check his office first.”

  “But Micah, there was somebody downstairs. He saw us go up.”

  It was my turn to register shock. I was too tired to be functioning well or I’d have seen him myself. The question was, who was he? “Stand outside in the hall and try to buy me some time,” I said. “If it looks like rough stuff, get clear first.”

  She hesitated, then nodded and vanished through the doorway.

  I exhaled slowly, trying to regulate my reactions. I should have been in bed; demanding still more of my body within so short a time was asking for trouble. But I’d been through some rough spots during the war and I knew that long after the physiologists tell you the body is ready to collapse, it has reserves to draw on. The problem comes afterward, with the letdown, but I couldn’t worry about that now.

  I went through Gulch’s pockets quickly and found nothing out of the ordinary, just a notepad with scribblings. The first few pages didn’t make much sense, but on the last page I found my office address and a time. The time was about when I’d left for the rendezvous with Taylor Augustine.

  The rest of the pages were ripped out, with only the torn tops left.

  Next I went through his desk drawers. The only gun I found was a .44 Magnum, a cannon that would knock down a small tree. But it hadn’t been a .44 that had been loosed on me last night; the crack had been lighter, more like a .38. So had he ditched the gun?

  The drawers also held some old case folders. It looked like he did a lot of skip tracing for loan companies. I shoved the folders back where I’d got them and went to the file cabinet in the corner. It was unlocked, but the two top drawers held only a handful of folders, and the bottom two were empty, unless you counted the office bottle and a stack of porno magazines.

  I didn’t have much more time. Frustrated, I checked his answering machine.

  The message tape was gone. Somebody had called him, set this thing up by leaving a message, and then covered himself by taking it when he left.

  I was still standing there, perplexed, when I heard the hubbub outside. A woman screamed, and my belly went weak. Then it registered that it sounded more like hysteria than pain.

  Sandy. She was buying me time.

  I stepped away from the dead man and was halfway to the anteroom when the office door opened and Fox came in, pistol in hand.

  “Freeze,” he said.

  I raised my right hand slowly, and he barged forward, another cop behind him.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Is this burglary or something else?”

  “Looks like murder to me,” I said, nodding at the man in the chair.

  Fox’s little eyes went narrow. “Against the wall!” he ordered, going over to the corpse.

  “Touch his face,” I said. “He’s cold. Your man in the lobby’ll vouch that I just got here.”

  “That’s right, Lou,” said the detective behind him.

  “Shut up,” growled Fox, but he touched the dead man anyway, bringing his hand away slowly.

  “Then why the lookout outside?”

  “No lookout,” I lied. “I just asked her to wait for me.”

  “Is that why she pitched a nigger fit?”

  I felt my blood rise, but there wasn’t anything I could do. Backing away so as not to crowd him, I felt my foot hit something on the floor, something that rustled. I looked down casually. A slip of paper. I put my foot on it.

  “Can I tie my shoe?” I asked.

  His gun moved to cover me, wavering. “No tricks,” he ordered.

  A man came in. “I got the woman some water from the bathroom,” he said to Fox. “Goddamn mess. Why can’t they fix the pipes in these buildings?”

  It was enough time for me to slip the paper from under my shoe and into the shoe itself, between my sock and the leather.

  Fox looked back at me, his face angry. “Hey, you’re wearing loafers.”

  “Wouldn’t you if you only had one good arm?” I asked.

  “What?”

  He didn’t have time to figure it out because they were bringing Sandy in. When she saw me she relaxed and dropped the hysterics.

  “Can we go now?” I asked.

  “You wise-mouth son of a bitch,” Fox snarled, bringing his face only a few inches from my own. “You’re coming to the bureau, and you’re gonna explain about obstruction of justice and breaking and entering—to start with. Then we’ll see what we can do about murder. Now spread!”

  I let them search me, the slip of paper still crumpled in my shoe. They took my gun, and Fox pocketed it with a grunt.

  “I have a deputy’s commission,” I said. “Right in my top left pocket.”

  “Deputy’s commission,” he muttered. “What’d you do, kick the sheriff a few hundred for his last campaign?”

  Rough hands shoved me out through the door, my good right hand manacled in front of me to my useless left one. I knew Fox would rather have shackled both hands behind me, but he figured a one-arm wasn’t much of a danger, and he didn’t want me to yell about excessive force. The excessive force would come in the continual jabs he was giving me as he moved me down the hallway and toward the stairs.

  “Who pissed on the floor?” he demanded, as we tracked water down the hallway.

  “I told you, Lou, the john’s overflowed.”

  The door to the stairwell was yanked open, and they pushed me through. I kept trying to look behind me for Sandy, because I knew Fox was a bigot, and he’d take out on her whatever he couldn’t on me. But she was behind me with a couple of the others, and the best I could do was catch a glimpse from time to time and hope she was all right.

  Halfway to the second landing I bounced off the wall and went flat. Hands jerked me upward, but I’d managed to slip the piece of paper out of my shoe and sneak a look before I crumpled it in my right hand.

  The word I saw was PLAYTIME. I didn’t worry about the scribbled address, I already knew where it was.

  They kept me at the detective bureau for three hours, which pissed them off because it was a Friday and they had to stay into the next shift instead of going home to drink beer. I kept looking for Mancuso, but I knew Fox was keeping this to himself, hoping I’d cough up something so he could get credit.

  They took my picture with all the bruises, so I couldn’t claim they’d hit me, and then put Sandy and me in two different rooms and came at us in turns. I asked for my lawyer and got the usual bullshit about how I didn’t have to worry if I was innocent.

  “You know I’m innocent,” I told him. “Unless you can figure a way to fuck up the coroner’s report and make Gulch die a couple of hours earlier.”

  “The girl says you were there to go through his shit. That’s breaking and entering.”

  “The girl didn’t say anything,” I told him. “And I don’t say anything, either, without my attorney.”

  “Tough guy,” Fox snarled, and brought his face down to within an inch of mine. I could smell his after-shave.

  “What’s it with you?” he leered. “You like the dark meat?”

  I knew he was goading me to hit him, so I tried to tune him out. He kicked the legs of my chair to get my attention.

  “Don’t you try to ignore me,” he shouted.

  “Why don’t you ask your man in the lobby who went up this afternoon?”

  “You know goddamn well half the city went up.”

  “Then why were you following Gulch? Who put you onto him?”

  His face went crimson. “I ask the questions.”

  “Sorry. I forgot.” But the answer was already bashing its way into my skull. Of course.

  I looked at the cop standing on the other side of the room. Young, with dark hair and a narrow face, he was narcotics; I’d run into him once a few months before in the station, when Mancuso had pointed him out to me.

  “Who beat you up?” Fox asked.

  “I fell down a stairwell. A different stairwell,
” I added.

  “Did that nigger Condon have something to do with it? You tried to shake him down, we know that. What did you do, go over there afterwards and hit him with your face?”

  Too close to the truth for comfort. “Look,” I said, “it’s after six thirty. The worst of the traffic is over. You can go home now, unless you want to fuck around like this the rest of the night. If you do, give me a cell and a quarter for the pay phone. And book me for something besides being at a murder scene.”

  He balled his fist, and I knew if the other cop hadn’t been there he’d have hit me, but I was counting on what Mancuso had told me about the other cop: that he was straight and fair, and he didn’t take shit or hand it out either. Still, I could tell Fox wanted to hit me, badly, and it was probably only my being disabled that saved me. Sometimes having just one good arm is an advantage.

  Fox wheeled, jerking his head at the other cop, who hesitated and then preceded him out of the room. Fox followed, slamming the door behind him. I was left alone in the little interrogation room, with just the big mirror to admire myself in.

  They would be on the other side of the mirror now, arguing, and Fox would be sneaking glances, hoping against hope to catch me pulling something out of a hollow heel or the lining of my pants.

  Twenty minutes later the narcotics cop came back. “You can come get your things,” he said.

  Fox watched from across the hallway as they gave me my wallet and my gun. I counted my money and shoved my gun down into my belt holster.

  “I’m going to have my eye on you,” Fox threatened.

  “I know,” I said. “But you guys are pretty easy to spot.”

  Sandy met me in the hallway and we walked out through the front door, conscious of their eyes on us.

  “Brrrr,” she said, shivering. “Now I know what civil rights workers felt like in the sixties.”

  “They’re not all like that,” I said.

  It was dark, and I was too stiff to go very far, so we flagged a cab. As we got in I saw the plain Chevrolet pull away from the curb and fall in behind us.

  I gave the driver O’Rourke’s address on Henry Clay, and tried to relax the rest of the drive.