Kill Me Tomorrow

by Richard S. Prather

  “Yeah. It is a bit queer, isn’t it?”

  He sighed. “At any rate, I asked Mrs. Blessing if she would communicate with Mr. Yarrow, and if possible come to the church in his company. She agreed, and they both arrived within ten or fifteen minutes.”

  The Reverend appeared to hesitate in his recital for the first time. After a few moments he went on, “It is true, as I have already said, Mr. Reyes did not seem to me excessively upset, but he was without question extremely tense and nervous. Especially during the time when we were awaiting the arrival of Mr. Yarrow and Mrs. Blessing.”

  “That’s understandable enough if he really thought the guy about to drop in for a visit might be Joe Civano. I’d have been nervous myself.”

  “That is the salient point, Mr. Scott. It was almost as though Gil was in the grip of delusion, had become possessed by a completely irrational thought, an idée fixe.”

  “Are you saying he acted like a guy cracking up?”

  “Oh, no, no. Of course not. I’m merely thinking back—it was a rather incredible situation, really. That Gil should mistake a resident of Sunrise Villas for a totally corrupt gangster. I believe he said Civano was a member of what is called the Mafia.”

  “Gil was right as rain about that. OK, Yarrow and Mrs. Blessing came to the church, talked to Gil, and Gil left—left, convinced of his error.”

  “That is correct.”

  “How come? In the morning Gil thought this guy was—maybe—Civano. What big deal happened to change his mind?”

  The Reverend frowned slightly. I don’t think he was crazy about my manner. Or maybe I hadn’t made a grand impression on him when we’d met. As his face smoothed he said, “Mr. Yarrow has been a rather prominent businessman here for several years. In addition he produced abundant evidence of his identity. Gil seemed quite convinced of his error after the four of us had engaged in several minutes of discussion. But, further, to be certain Gil was completely convinced that this Joe Civano was indeed deceased, I phoned the police in Tucson and investigated the remote possibility that the victim, because of the nature of the crime, might have beeen someone other than Mr. Civano.” The Reverend shook his head vigorously. “There was, and is, no such possibility.”

  I nodded. “I’ll buy that. Did Gil say anything about where he was going after leaving the church?”

  “No. I naturally assumed he intended to return home.”

  I asked the Reverend to cover his meeting a little later that evening with Tony Brizante, Yarrow’s coming to the church again; but there was nothing new for me there. While speaking, the Reverend made a few notes on a pad before him.

  I stood up. “Well, I guess that’s it. Thanks for your help, Reverend. By the way, could you give me the addresses of Mrs. Blessing and Mr. Yarrow?”

  He let his lips smile sweetly, ripped the top sheet from the pad on his desk and handed it to me. “I assumed you would wish those addresses, Mr. Scott.”

  He had a neat mind, this guy. “Ask and ye shall receive,” I said. “New Testament. How about that? It really works.”

  “Indeed it does, indeed it does.”

  I had almost begun to like old Archie. But then he had to spoil it. Just as I was going out the door, he said from behind me: “John: Sixteen, Twenty-six.”

  The church was dark now, except for softly glowing lights near and around the altar and two similar small lights halfway up each of the outer aisles. I walked up the aisle on my right, and in the glow from the small lamp checked those addresses the Reverend had given me. Mrs. Blessing lived at 2430 East Claridge Street. Mr. Henry Yarrow’s address was 1694 North Palma Drive. I decided I would call first on Mrs. Blessing. The lamp was above an exit door, so rather than go out the main entrance I opened the little door and went through it instead.

  From the side exit a path led between masses of green bushes to the darkened parking lot. A hedge of oleander paralleled the near edge of the lot, a six-foot-wide space cut into it. When I stepped through the opening I turned left, started to step toward my car which was parked ten yards away, near the street.

  The man’s back was to me.

  He stood close to a eucalyptus tree, his body in the faint light appearing to merge with its trunk, the lowest branches spreading out seven or eight feet above the ground forming a cover above him and dropping more shadow on and around him.

  He could have been merely a guy overly fond of eucalyptus, but in my business a man standing in shadow, silently, is Trouble. Or even patient death. I reached under my coat, eased the .38 from its holster and moved, very slowly, toward him.

  The man was midway between me and my Cadillac, but he wasn’t looking at the car. His gaze was fixed on the street, or on the strip of sidewalk beyond the oleander hedge where anybody walking from the church entrance to the parking lot would appear. I took four slow, careful steps and was no more than a couple of yards from him when he heard me.

  It was a stone or pebble that grated beneath the sole of my shoe. The sound wasn’t loud. But he heard it.

  He didn’t swing suddenly around. I could see his whole body jerk slightly, though. And with a quick but almost instantly checked movement he started to turn his head. Maybe part of the reason he stopped was because a fraction of a second after the stone grated beneath my shoe I thumbed back the hammer of my revolver. If he was the kind of night cat I assumed him to be, he knew what that sound was, and what it meant.

  His head was angled to his right and I could see part of his face in profile. I took one more step toward him.

  I made him then, and a cool breeze brushed over my skin. At least that’s what it felt like. It was still hot, though; it wasn’t a real breeze.

  “Hello, Lucky,” I said. “Where do you want it, pal?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  His reaction surprised me.

  In a gruff and almost jolly voice he said, “Shell? Am I right? That you, Shell Scott, you old bastard?”

  “Turn around, Lucky. Slow or fast, it’s your hide.”

  He moved with hardly any speed at all, and even as he started turning, his arms were rising to point over his head. But when he’d swung around enough so I could see, again, that square milk-white face I’d last seen behind a cocked .45 automatic aimed at my gut, his right hand and much of his arm were still hidden by the tree.

  So I kept the Colt centered high on his breastbone and said, “One step left, out in the open. And do me a favor, Lucky. Just wiggle a little the wrong way. I don’t need much of an excuse, but I need a small one.”

  He stepped sideways, slowly, moving almost gracefully for such a chunky man. He was grinning, or trying to. At least his lips were pulled apart and the faint light gleamed on his teeth. There was enough light so I could see now that both his hands were empty, fingers splayed.

  “Man, don’t go ape on me,” he said. “You act like you want to plug me.”

  “You guessed it.”

  “What in hell’s the matter with you, Scott? I ain’t done nothin’. I guessed maybe it was you—”

  “You weren’t doing anything in L.A. a few weeks ago, either. Except starting to squeeze off about five into me.”

  “Oh, for chrissake, Scott. That was then. Shee-it, it’s all in the business, ain’t it? Man, you pooped two of my friends, didn’t you? It was a job, that was then. All I—”

  “What are you doing in Arizona, Lucky? We’ll get to this particular part of Arizona in a minute.”

  “It ain’t too healthy for me in Southern Cal, old buddy. It’d be different if I’d had time to cut you all the way down and lam before them fuzz like to poked my eyes out with the goddamn arc lights or whatever they hit me with. Another second and I’d of got you for sure and been on my way, right? Man, you know it. Way it is, there’s some jokers what feel resentful to me for lettin’ you get away.”

  He sounded sincere, almost bubbling with good humor. He seemed to enjoy talking about how close he’d come to killing me. I didn’t. “Lean over against the tree trunk. Feet
way back, spread ’em. You know how.”

  “Yeah. I done it enough.”

  He did it again. I went over him for heat. Nothing.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Jimmy Ryan without the tools of his trade? Where’s the rod?”

  “I ain’t got a Arizona license—”

  “You want me to clip you?”

  “Man, you’re touchy as a bus driver with grapes, ain’t you? OK, OK. I’m sprung from that rap what hit me account of you, Scott. Out on bail. I get picked up with a banger on me and I’m up for big numbers. Way it is, I got a chance of beating this rap.”

  “Yeah, if you knock me down. I was more than merely a disinterested witness. I assume you remember?”

  “There’s something to that effect in my memory banks,” he said. “Fact is, that’s why I come over here. Seen your car parked there where it’s at and I’d read a newspaper story telling you was in Arizona, and I says, that looks exactly like Scott’s car, what do you bet it is his? So I hung around so if it was you we could strike up old acquaintances and maybe you’d be feelin’ good or drunk or something and say let’s let bygones be bygones, and I wind up beatin’ that goddamn L.A. rap.”

  “You’ve reformed, huh? You were listening for my dainty footsteps, so you could spring out and kiss me.”

  “Shee-it, you are the damn suspicious most dumb flatheel in the en-tire world, Scott.”

  “You are going to get knocked on your can, Lucky—”

  “Will you listen? Look”—he pointed toward a green year-old Thunderbird parked fifty feet from my Cad—“there’s my heap. I told you, I seen your car and swung in. Checked the registration like a burglar and it was you, all right. All I wanted was to chop it up a minute, tell you there ain’t no hard feelings on my side.” He paused. “Don’t need none. You got enough for both of us.”

  “At least.”

  “And a couple gorillas left over. Now what good’s it going to do if you puke on me when I come up to trial, Scott? I know you can use a friend or two on the turf, right? Well, I got friends like you wouldn’t believe. Do you lots of good.”

  “Shove it, Lucky.”

  “OK. What you gonna do with me then? Turn me in for bein’ outside California? Tie me up and hang me on your car like they do with deers? Or do we just stand here and jaw at ourselves all night? Use your conk, Scott. If I was on the arm, wouldn’t I be rodded up for you?”

  He had a point. “So why were you doing a crouch over there in the shrubbery?”

  “Man, you don’t think I wanted you to see me first, do you? Sometimes you ain’t the easiest guy to get along with.”

  He had a couple of points. While I was wondering what, if anything, I should do with jolly Jimmy Ryan, my newfound pal, he said, “C’mere with me, Scott,” and took a step toward the lot.

  I guess the gun in my hand jerked a little. I know my finger moved on the trigger, and on that trigger it doesn’t have to move much. Lucky held himself motionless, licked his lips, but he didn’t come apart at the seams.

  “Easy, tiger,” he said softly. “You need a rest, that’s what. Now come on and look at what I want to show you.” He moved, slowly as a cat at first, then more rapidly, walking toward that green T-bird. I followed half a dozen feet behind him. If he wanted to try something dumb, then he could die trying something dumb.

  But all he did was walk to the Thunderbird, slowly open the door, and reach inside. When the door opened, light flooded the car’s interior and there was no problem about keeping in sight the one hand with which he reached past the steering wheel. He fumbled with the holder of the registration slip, unfastened it from the steering post, and held it up where I could see it.

  “The idea come to me maybe you thought I was lyin’ about this being my heap,” he said. “This convince you any?”

  The registration was in the name of James Q. Ryan, address in Los Angeles, California.

  He tossed the holder back inside, reached into his pants pocket, saying, “You went over me, Scott, so you know I got nothing on me. Just gettin’ the keys.”

  He pulled a key ring out, leaned over and stuck one key into the ignition, slid very gently onto the seat but didn’t close the door. “Just open your chops and say you can use a friend who knows where there’s bodies buried, and a lot of who does what, and your friend is on his way.”

  I was about half ready to let him be on his way, at that—only not until we’d talked a little longer and I’d learned a few more things, such as where he was staying, why he was not merely in Arizona but specifically at Sunrise Villas, and a few other odds and ends.

  But he slid a little farther into the car and pressed the key over in the ignition, and as the engine caught he turned his head toward me and lifted it in such a way that the dash light slanted up over his face and for a moment he not only looked different—and older, much older—but the trick of light and shadow made his face resemble a skull, just a little.

  And that faint resemblance to a skull plus memory of Jimmy Ryan standing over me with a gun, and memory of another almost skull-like face and of much that had occurred since I’d met Lucrezia Brizante this afternoon, combined with the faint, faint sound of ancient bells to race along my nerves and into my brain with a shock that was like reaching in the dark for that extra step at the top of the stairs, the one that isn’t there.

  I felt the pull of muscles in my back and shoulders, a sensation like a tiny fist clenching in my solar plexus, but it was the mental shock that kept me from telling Lucky to get totally paralyzed and maybe eased the pressure of my finger on the Colt’s trigger enough to let him slip the car into gear, kick the accelerator, and burn rubber out of the lot and into the street.

  In a few more seconds he was out of sight and I could hear the car’s engine whining up the scale. But I wasn’t overly concerned about that. There was something more important than Lucky Ryan on my mind. Besides, other things were moving in my brain. It was as if that mental shock had opened a few extra circuits, let a little more juice flow into my noodle.

  I walked back to the spot where I’d first seen Lucky, glanced up into the tree, along the trunk, to the first of those spreading branches. There, precariously balanced at junction of trunk and branch—where jolly Jimmy Ryan, my newfound pal, while his raised right arm and hand had been out of my sight, had planted it—was the heat.

  I reached up, grabbed it, pulled it down. The cliché gun, an Army Colt .45 automatic pistol. Common, both among amateurs and pros, partly because it’s available, but primarily because it kills so well. The gun was cocked, safety on. All Lucky had to do was thumb off the safety and pull the trigger gently, a bang or two and there you are.

  I had to say this for him. He was not only hardboiled as a two-hour egg but he had what the kids call “cool.”

  Well, if I saw Lucky Ryan again, he was going to get a lot cooler.

  It was a forty-mile round trip from the Villas to Del Webb’s Sun City, but I made it there and back in just over an hour. I went there to see Walter Maypole, which is a funny name for a cop. I hadn’t seen him for three years, but he’d been in police work for three decades in Southern California.

  For nearly half of those thirty years Walt Maypole worked out of Intelligence, and he had gathered together, organized, and indexed a private file on thugs, thieves, ex-cons, felons, hit-men, you name it, known to and often referred to by nearly every law-enforcement agency in the Golden State. And, more than once, by me. When Walt moved from L.A. to Sun City he brought all those filing cases and records, mug shots and rap sheets, copies of ID reports and the other criminous miscellany that was his private property, with him. He was retired now, true; but crooks and crime were still his hobby. His special area of interest: the shadowy, secret organization of hoods known as the Mafia.

  I’d phoned him on my way and he was expecting me. When I parked in front of his house on Peoria Avenue, the door opened and he walked out to meet me.

  “Shell, good to see you,” he said s
miling. “What the hell you doing in my country?”

  I grinned and shook his hand. He’d put on some pounds, looked tanned—and rested. Otherwise he was the same small, intense, hyperthyroid guy I’d last seen in Los Angeles.

  “Wish this were just a social call, Walt. But I’ve got a problem.”

  “Hell, that’s social enough. Come on in.”

  He led me into the house—and through it. Walt hadn’t lost his passion for getting straight to the point. We went out in back to a separate one-room building, his “workshop,” in which three walls were lined with gray metal filing cabinets and against the fourth was a long table piled with papers, folders, stacks of letters.

  I sat down in a sagging overstuffed chair while Walt got two cans of beer from a small refrigerator, opened them and gave one to me, then perched on the edge of a narrow cot.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked me.

  “A guy. I’ve seen him, or his picture, somewhere, but not for a long time. I saw this boy today at Sunrise Villas and it stretched a few nerves in me, but I can’t put a name with the face.” I swallowed some of my cold beer and lit a cigarette. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen him in person. And he’d have been before my time, anyway. Right now he must be half as old as the redwoods.”

  “Describe him, give me what you can.”

  I hit all I could remember about DiGiorno, the man who’d been sitting on Brizante’s right at the council meeting this afternoon. Walt sat quietly for a full minute, swallowing beer. Then he shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”

  “Remember, I’m telling you what he looks like today. Right now he looks like Father Time after a long illness. I’ve got a hunch, if he ever was any kind of hood, he’d have been active a long time back. Think of him as at least twenty years younger. Or forty. Say a guy in the rackets, maybe already pooping out, during your first ten years as a cop.”

  “Six-one?” Walt asked.

  “About that now. They say guys shrink as they get older. If so, he might have been seven feet tall when in the bloom of youth.”