I was on the floor, my back propped against the wall. When I tried to move my right arm I couldn’t. At first I thought it was still numb, but after a few seconds I realized it was tied to my body. I bent my head so that my chin touched my chest, feeling something cold and hard: wire. He had tied me up with wire, the same way he had the Augustine boy.
I’d been stupid. I’d thought he would come at dawn, because that’s when I’d told Melville I’d be here, but the killer had been smarter than I’d given him credit for. He’d come early, to wait for me, just as I’d come to wait for him.
The floor creaked, and I saw the light flashing in the kitchen. There was a strong smell and I recoiled at the recognition of what it was.
Gasoline.
The light hit me in the face, making me flinch.
“You shouldn’t of never come here,” the killer said. “Now I guess I got to let you burn with the place.”
I didn’t say anything, just kept trying to think of something to do and kept coming back full circle to the realization that there wasn’t anything to be done.
“Just one thing, though,” he said, and I heard the springs of the big chair across the room squeak. “I’d like to know how you got on to me. Was it that bitch, Francine?”
My throat was dry, but I managed to make my vocal cords work. “No,” I said. “It wasn’t Francine. It was you.”
“Me?” He managed a short laugh. “What do you mean?”
“You killed Eddie Gulch,” I said. “And you probably killed Taylor Augustine. The only reason I could think of for killing Gulch was that you were trying to kill me that night, and he saw you. He saw you and you saw him. He could identify you, so you tracked him down. You went into the lobby of his building with a cop standing there and went up in the elevator to his floor and went to his office. But he wasn’t there yet, so you did something else while you were waiting. People saw you, but they didn’t pay any attention. When he came you dropped what you were doing and went down to his office and killed him. Then you took the message tape with your voice on it and walked out as easily as you’d come in.”
“How did you figure all that out?”
“Because it made sense, and because of something I saw on the elevator, going up.”
“What?”
“A telephone repairman,” I said. “I’ll bet if I’d have asked the cop in the lobby he wouldn’t have seen him, either. You made a real mess in the men’s room.”
“Pipes were old. I just wanted to make like I was working on ’em in case anybody came, but the drain was rusted. I got the wrench on it and it crumbled. Damn water went all over the floor.”
“I noticed,” I told him.
“You’re a smart bastard,” my captor said. “I’m going to feel a hell of a lot safer when you’re gone.”
“It won’t do you any good,” I said. “People know. I’ve told them.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Seems to me if all those people knew, you wouldn’t be up here all by yourself.”
“It’s a flaw in my character,” I said. “Just like murder is a flaw in yours. They’ll find her, you know. And the trail will lead right back to you.”
“They won’t ever find her,” he said. “The water’s at least fifteen feet there, and I’ve already made an offer on this property. Nobody’ll come here then.”
“They’ll come here because I’ve already found her,” I said.
“How?”
“It’s called a magnetometer, sort of a supermagnet you hang on a boat. It picks up things under the water, like steel shipwrecks—and automobiles. When we got a suspicious reading we sent a diver down. He saw it. The police will be here in a few hours to haul it out. I just wanted to be here first.”
“You’re full of bullshit,” he said. “I don’t believe you.”
“You believe me,” I said. “That’s what’s got you scared.”
“Shut up!” He got up and started to light a cigarette, then sniffed the fumes and put it away.
“When they find the same kind of wire on me that they found on the Augustine boy, that’ll help cinch it.”
“Shut up, I said. I gotta think.”
“And then,” I said, trying to keep him rattled, “there was the van. Cal Autry has a van. But vans are used a lot by other kinds of tradesmen. Electricians. Locksmiths. And plumbers.”
“I knew from the first you weren’t any goddamn insurance man,” Virgil Bonchaud said. “I should of killed you then.”
Twenty-Three
He spat on the floor. I tried to stretch my legs, to see if they were bound, too. I found I could move them a few inches, and I wondered if he could see the movement in the dark.
“I should have figured you from the first, too,” I said. “The next-door neighbor; you were a natural. I thought it was funny about the wire in his garage.”
“What?”
“So convenient. It’s a lot easier to get into a garage than a locked house. He didn’t even have a lock on it. Just a barking dog. That was the other thing: that dog wouldn’t let anybody close. Anybody except you or Melville. It knew you. You could walk right by it.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Bonchaud said. “You got it.”
“Just like the liquor I saw in Melville’s place,” I said. “I remembered seeing that label in Francine LeJeune’s wine shop. For a little while it threw me. I thought Melville or Cal had bought it there. But then I thought, what if neither of them had? And it came to me that sometimes neighbors exchange gifts. Melville probably got the bottle from Cal, but Cal probably had it from you.”
“Smart. Yeah, I give him a bottle for Christmas every year.”
“And the boy: you tried to make a good case for how Cal met him when he came by to do yard work. But the boy’s house is at least three miles away, and the kid only had a bike. He wouldn’t come all the way to Metairie to cut lawns. And if Cal was innocent, who could come up with a frame like that? Only somebody who had the experience to make it stand up. Somebody who knew a boy who could be expected to make a false complaint for enough money, because he did other things for money too. You got the boy through Francine LeJeune, didn’t you? He was on her list. You were the child molester, not Cal.”
There was a long silence before he spoke.
“No. You missed there, by a mile. Did you think I was into little black boys?” He laughed. “You think I’m a pervert? It was always girls. Francine handles them, too, you know. That’s what I went to her for to start with. Young girls. Fresh meat. Unspoiled. Expensive, but God, worth it. It was only after I was using Francine for a while I found out she kept lists of boys, too. That’s when it came to me to use one of ’em against Cal. Because he was talking about building that damn pier, and I couldn’t let him do that.”
“No,” I agreed. “He would have found the car when he tried to sink the pilings. So you had to figure a way to make him have to sell the place instead. I checked with the owner of the subdivision; he confirms that you called a couple of times about buying Cal’s lot if it ever got put on the market.”
“I offered him good money for it, too, just like I offered Cal over the years. But he never would take it; always gonna hold onto it for a vacation place. Didn’t matter, so long as nothing was done. But this year, when he started talking about the pier, I knew I had to force his hand.”
“And the best way was a criminal charge that would make him have to come up with money quickly.”
“Sure. Lawyers ain’t cheap.”
“Why did you kill her?” I asked. “Was it just a fight?”
He grunted. “You never seen nobody like Marie Autry. Always coming on, always touching you, throwing herself at you. Couple of times the old lady and me come up here with ’em, and all the while Marie was looking at me, giving me them eyes. Finally one day she came over from next door and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride with her. I said what the hell, and we come up here.” He chuckled again. “It ain’t never as good as you think it’ll be, but it was go
od, I’ll give her that. But afterwards I couldn’t get loose from her. She was always after me, always asking for things, presents and money. She had a big mouth. I was scared she was gonna say the wrong thing to Cal. We come over here that day, it was in December. She’d had a fight with Cal, said he was being cheap with her. She said she wanted to get away from him, told me she even left him a note saying she was fed up. All of a sudden I realized what she was setting me up for—like I was going to run away with her, leave my business and all. I knew I had to cut it off while there was time. But she cussed and cried and threatened to tell her old man. I grabbed her, tried to shake sense into her, and …” The boards creaked, and I sensed that he had turned away at the memory.
“So you put her body in the car,” I said, “and drove it to the edge of the lake and pushed it into the deep water. And walked back out to the highway and thumbed a ride, I’d guess.”
“Yeah. That’s what I did. And it was pretty damn near perfect. I found some letters in her purse, and I copied her handwriting on a postcard and had somebody mail it from California. One of those remailing services, you know. Far as Cal or anybody else knew, she just run off. And good riddance.”
My legs were numb, the circulation cut off from the way I’d been sitting. There was no chance of my making a fast move.
“Why did you have to kill Taylor Augustine?” I asked, trying to keep him talking.
“The kid’s uncle? Hell, the uncle found out about the kid. The kid talked. The uncle called me, asked if it was true, like he expected me to tell him. That’s a dumb nigger for you. I told him it was all lies. Then one night he called me back, told me you’d been by and he was going to talk to you. So I went out there first and picked him up when he left the house. Put a gun to his skull and made him tell me where he was supposed to meet you. Then I killed him and took his body with me when I went to meet you. Too bad I missed.”
“You dumped his body later that night, I guess.”
“Where they won’t find it.” He sighed. “But they’ll find yours. There just won’t be much to see.”
A match flared in the darkness. I tried to shrink away, but it came sailing toward me like a shooting star, landing between us. A sheet of flame sprang up from the floor. For an instant I saw his face, wavering like a death’s-head on the other side of the flames, and then he was gone.
I rolled away, toward the wall, as the heat breathed death at me. The fire was everywhere now, except for my little island, where the gasoline hadn’t flowed. Finding strength somewhere, I lurched halfway to my feet and then collapsed onto the couch. The hair on my head was already singed, and I knew it was only a matter of a couple of seconds before the fire reached me. I raised my legs and kicked at the curtains that hid the big glass window. The glass shattered and I felt the flames leap toward me, drawn to the fresh oxygen. I used all my willpower to force myself upright and then dove through the curtains, away from the inferno.
I landed on my shoulder and rolled, the smell of burning cloth in my nostrils. Looking back, I saw bits of the curtain still afire. The cabin itself was a mass of hissing flames. I rolled some more, trying to get as far away as I could, finally coming to a stop against something hard.
A tree. I turned my head, trying to get my bearings.
And the tree moved.
“You’ve got more lives than a cat,” said Virgil Bonchaud. “But I think you’re about out of ’em now.”
The reflection of the flames glinted on the pistol, and I heard it click as he cocked the hammer.
“Good-bye, Mr. Dunn.”
The shot cracked like a piece of green kindling, and then the cabin behind us collapsed into sparks. Virgil Bonchaud swayed slightly, letting the pistol fall to the ground. He got about two steps and then sprawled flat on his face. Footsteps emerged against the crackle of the fire.
Melville Autry stared down at the body of his father’s neighbor. Then he squatted down and went to work on my bonds.
“We got to get Mama out,” he said. “I can’t stand the thought of her being down there.”
Epilogue
It was midmorning before they got the car out of the water. I stayed because it seemed fitting to be there at the end. Melville stood apart, slightly hunched, hands deep in his pockets. At first they’d cuffed him and put him in the back of a police cruiser, but I’d intervened, and with Sal Mancuso’s pleas added, they agreed to free him, though a deputy was always two steps behind, as if they still half expected him to run.
It was a big production: three cops in a skiff and a couple of divers, and the high sheriff himself, who knew a good story when he saw one and figured this was a way to double-trump both the New Orleans cops, who’d been dead wrong about the killings, and his predecessor, who’d been sheriff five years ago and had had a body left under his nose. There were crews from all the New Orleans stations, and when the wrecker cable snapped the first time, I half suspected it was part of the show.
But finally they got it hooked up right and the diver’s head popped to the surface. He gave the thumbs-up, and the sheriff walked over to the brink and that was the sign for all the cameras to roll. The wrecker’s engine raced, and the cable went taut and I smelled something burning, and for a second I thought it was going to happen again, a no-go, but the cable moved, and then it moved a little more, and I heard somebody say, “Here it comes.”
Two seconds later there was a boiling of water as the hood of the old Caddy broke the surface, and I wished Scott were here to see what he’d only glimpsed under the murky waters.
Somebody said, “I see her,” but I think it was imagination, because the car was being hauled up the bluff at about a forty-degree angle, nose up, and the body inside would have been thrown back against the seat. But maybe it was just my own mind at work; maybe I didn’t really want to see her. I’d seen enough dead bodies already for one lifetime.
And after five years there wouldn’t be that much to see, anyway.
They got the car to the top of the bank and it rolled forward onto the lawn, and immediately the deputies and newsmen swarmed forward, craning to look in the windows.
But even as they jostled for a view, someone must have said something, because they parted again, making a place for Melville. He stood beside the rusted hulk, staring down through the window, and he was still staring when I turned away.
“Shit,” Mancuso said. “Well, I guess he has the right.”
“I guess so,” I agreed.
“I talked to O’Rourke,” he said, as if to take our minds away from the macabre drama going on a few feet away. “They found the white stuff where you said it would be.”
“Good,” I said.
The detective chuckled. “I’d like to have been there to see Fox’s face. Here he gets this anonymous tip to raid your apartment—and you’re somebody he’d love to stick it to. So he grabs a packet of coke from the trunk of his car, to plant in your place in case he comes up dry, and as soon as he’s out on the sidewalk a damn sniffer dog comes up and starts barking, and the DEA asks him to step over and explain a few things. How the hell did you know he’d try to plant something?”
“Because he did with Cal. There was no reason in the world to try to plant cocaine on Cal after that shootout, but Fox is the kind who always tries for overkill. I knew he’d been the one, and I figured he wouldn’t miss the chance again. I figured he was always prepared.”
“You know he’ll find some way to talk his way out of it. Then he’ll come back with both barrels.”
“Let him. At least he’ll get a few days off without pay.”
“Oh, by the way: O’Rourke wants to know what the crap about Father Brown and Arthur Conan Doyle was all about. He said to tell you he doesn’t have time to go to the library.”
I smiled. “Tell him to read The Invisible Man. The killer was the mailman, only nobody saw him because they weren’t looking for somebody in uniform.”
“And Doyle?”
“In Silver Blaze the dog d
idn’t bark because he knew the person who went past him. Cal’s dog wouldn’t let anybody close—except people he knew: Melville and Virgil Bonchaud.”
“Okay.”
We turned at the sound of steps behind us. Melville had seen what he needed and had walked away from the crowd to light a cigarette.
I made my way over to him.
“I guess I owe you one,” I told him. “But I didn’t expect you to come out here.”
“I knew I had to come,” he said. “As soon as you told me you wanted me to go to the house and mention to Virgil how the case was going to be all wrapped up, because you were going to have the lake dragged at daylight. I went to the hospital and asked my old man what he thought you figured was down there. He knew right off. He knew it had to be Mama. So I had to come.”
I followed him out in my car. An hour later we were standing next to Cal’s hospital bed. I let Melville talk, because it was his place, and because I didn’t need to tell Cal what Virgil had said about Marie’s intending to leave him. When Melville had finished, Cal just nodded grimly.
“You done good, son,” Calvin said, and I saw Melville stand up a little straighter. “Your Mama and me may have had our problems, but she shouldn’t’ve been killed.”
“No,” Melville agreed.
“I’m still gonna have to sell the property,” Cal said. “And I’ll have to fight for my business.”
I didn’t say anything, because it was true. Getting justice doesn’t mean having things come out right.
“But I was thinking while I was laying here with nothing to do that even if I can’t afford to stay in the garage, I can make it. I’ll find some other place. And I got some good customers, who won’t give a damn about all this. I ain’t gonna quit.”
“Good for you, Cal,” I said. “You know you’ll get my business.”
Deep Kill (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 21
