What attracted my attention was a kind of crash and a lot of voices at the front of the room. Half a dozen men were coming inside, and one of them had pushed the door so hard it swung around and banged against the wall. Even as I realized the first conventioneers were arriving a bit early I became aware of a bunch of noise near me. Very near. And horrible noise it was.
It was a cracking and snapping of wood breaking and splintering, a grunting and snarling, a sound savage and awesome and blood-curdling. It was the sound of Bludgett.
By the time I got my head around and was looking at him with something approaching anguish his ankles were no longer bound to a chair but merely attached to splinters of cracked wood. And Bludgett was kicking speedily, reaching with his manacled hands, very close to getting the bonds off his feet. Even as I watched he got them off entirely. He was standing up, looming in the air, looking awful.
Immediately, just as soon as it was an instant too late, I realized the emergency, the serious emergency, had arisen; and now that Bludgett was unbound there was nothing to stop him—except me—and you have no idea with what emotions that filled me.
First thing, I shut off my imagination entirely.
It had already failed me, utterly. So I would use my other weapon: logic. And even elementary dumbness said there was no point in trying to strike this guy down with tremendous blows unless there was no other way. Fortunately, logic indicated another way. I had long ago stuck the Colt back into its clamshell holster, and as Bludgett got his legs free enough to move and took a giant step toward me, I slapped my hand to the Colt’s butt and started springing to my feet.
In my mind was the knowledge: I am springing to my feet.
But somehow that knowledge was not in my feet. Nor in my calves and knees or even, to a large extent, my hind end. It isn’t that I failed to move at all. I moved. I moved very much like that guy I’d seen upon first arriving at Sunrise Villas, the one bowling on the green.
I sort of rose a little bit, and stuck, and got up a little bit more, unfelt muscles turning me involuntarily toward my left, a move which if speeded up a hundred times or so might have been quite graceful. As it was, I probably resembled a man in a strange half-squat slowly peeking around to see if anybody was watching. But not for long.
I had turned a bit left, but I could see the looming bulk of Bludgett on my right, and something swinging, and then a force not of this earth smacked me partly on my right shoulder and partly on my back, and at last I was moving with real speed. Such speed in fact that to this day I cannot recall if my feet touched the floor as I flew off the edge of the stage. The only clear memory is of my head crashing into the front row of seats after my body hit the auditorium floor and skidded for …
Well, I don’t know how far I skidded, either.
People were around me. Men were talking.
After a little while I got my head out from under the seats. Then I groped around until I was sitting up. The people looked pretty blurry.
“What the hell was that?” one of them asked me. “We’d just walked in and I noticed something or other on the stage, then this big guy swung both his hands around together and smacked you right across the back. Why, I never saw anybody take such a terrible tumble as you did. You just went sailing—”
“Will you quit telling me what I already know?” I snarled. “What happened then? Where is he? Uh, let me at him.”
“He ran out of here like a wild moose two, three minutes ago.”
“That long?”
While I struggled to my feet, other men volunteered additional information. It was all a bunch of beans, as far as I was concerned. The vital fact was that Bludgett by now would be long gone. I could probably trace him partway, simply by looking for holes in various walls, like you see in animated cartoons when the villain runs through houses. But—outside the hotel, in the darkness? Hell, he was gone.
I’d learned a number of things, however. One thing I’d learned was that I was damned lucky Bludgett had not got me with all his force, and had hit me across the back and shoulder—lucky even though it would be tough to manage a quick draw immediately. I still couldn’t quite get my right hand up any higher than my pants pocket. Probably I wouldn’t be able even to work a cricket for a while. Not that I gave a goddamn if I ever worked another cricket.
Still, I thought, what if he’d cracked me a good one, boom, smack on the kisser? Wow, that would—No, mustn’t even think about it. Some things shouldn’t be thought about at all. Better I should think of what he’d told me. For while events had been going my way he’d told me quite a lot.
Perhaps two dozen men were in the big room now. I looked at my watch. Seven-forty-five P.M. Only fifteen minutes until the lectures and demonstrations would start. Lectures and demonstrations … That reminded me.
I had not informed Dr. Fretsindler, who so kindly explained the operation of his immensely valuable, unique, one-of-a-kind YAG laser, that I was going to operate it. The two suitcase-sized segments of the unit fit snugly into a small specially built trailer normally hauled behind Fretsindler’s car. I had noticed this when I removed the apparatus from the trailer. And it struck me that it was about time I put it back.
The first guy who’d spoken to me said, “What were you doing up on the stage? You giving one of the lectures?”
“No, I …” My glance fell on the laser. “I just clean up around here.” It hurt a little that he believed me so readily.
But at least nobody interfered while I “cleaned up” by lugging the laser and water-container off stage. Outside, what was probably going to be one of Arizona’s thunderingly dramatic storms—which sometimes strike with a fury unexpected of July—seemed to be building from adolescence toward full maturity. It was much colder and a light rain had begun to fall. Thunder rumbled in the air. Lightning flashed not far away. I replaced the good doctor’s equipment where it belonged, trotted to the door of my suite, poked my key at the lock.
Inside, the phone was ringing.
I reached it before the ringing stopped—but realized as I picked it up that in my haste I’d left the door standing open behind me. Probably it didn’t make any difference, but the sight of a virtual hole in the wall made me uneasy. Especially with one such as Bludgett running around loose—like a wild moose as one chap had expressed it—somewhere out there in the darkness. Another flash of lightning turned everything white for a split second and outside the darkness following it seemed even more intense, more black—until it was ripped suddenly by two nearly simultaneous flashes. The thunder hit almost immediately, not only the speed of its arrival but the almost solid and shocking crack evidence of how close those bolts had been.
“Hello,” a voice in my ear was saying. “Mr. Scott?”
“Yes, who’s this?” I noticed the message-light indicator near the phone was glowing.
“It’s Elliott, Mr. Scott. Professor Irwin. I called you twenty minutes ago, but—”
It was five past eight. “I was … elsewhere,” I said. “Have you got the information for me?”
“Yes, yes.” He sounded excited. “Three of them match. Beautiful, simply beautiful!” He was excited.
Well, now, so was I. “Which three—wait just a second, Professor.” That open door was bugging me. I walked to the door and shut it, made sure it was locked, then went back and grabbed the phone again.
It was doubtful that anybody would be listening in either on the professor’s end of the line or mine, but we’d arranged for him to convey his information to me in simple and clear fashion which nonetheless would be mere gibberish or code to anyone else. I’d given the professor a copy of the transcript on which the speakers had been assigned letters from A to G, and my list of numbered names. In my notebook I had listed Henry Yarrow as No. 1, then all eleven members of the council, not including Tony Brizante, and finally Lieutenant Weeton. So there were seven letters, thirteen numbers. Match a letter with a number and, hey presto, you’ve got one of the bastards pinned.
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br /> “Fire away, Professor. What’ve you got?”
“Number Two is A, Six is D, and Thirteen is E.”
It started sort of humming in my head, as the significance—the full significance—of what the professor had said began to hit me.
He was going on, saying it was “beautiful,” and he was certain of those three and that they were the only three, and after a few seconds I said, “Professor, I’m very much in your debt for this. It’s more important than you know, sir. I hate to hang up, but there’s a great deal for me to do.”
“We must discuss this another time, then, Mr. Scott.”
“We will, Professor. That’s a promise.” I hung up.
Two is A, Six is D, Thirteen is E.
The second man to speak on the tape I’d recorded at Sunrise Villas this morning had been the first man, A, on the tape recorded by Fred Jenkins. Which was to say: Pete Lecci. No great surprise there. Only a little surprise, certainly no shock, that No. 13, Lieutenant Dan Weeton, was the “E” so willing and even anxious to “do the job,” that is the job of killing Shell Scott, his way if the Lucky-hits-him-and-gets-hit plan came a cropper. The surprise might have been greater if Bludgett hadn’t told me about Weeton’s being inside the old King mansion at the time I’d been outside it getting shot at. It seemed apparent that Weeton, and perhaps other “big apples,” had gone there soon after Jenkins’ transmitter was spotted.
But the rest of it was enough to keep my brain spinning, almost reeling, as in the space of a few seconds at least half a dozen ideas tried to crowd together in my mind. The first thought beyond the obvious teetered on the edge of my mind, then fell, exploding and spreading, like a small soft bomb. Friday night, last night, when I’d had my pleasant chat with Henry Yarrow, I had not been talking with Henry Yarrow. More accurately, not with “Henry Yarrow.” And like a second bomb gently exploding I realized what Gil Reyes had meant by saying—swearing—to quote Tony Brizante, “Jesus Christ. Mary, Mother of God.” And then, “Stop, stop the car.” I knew I’d made one hell of a mistake when listening to the Jenkins tape.
I knew—well, all that and more, for it all followed from Professor Elliott Irwin’s telling me that No. 6 was D—or: the Reverend Stanley Archibald. Oddly, in my mind I could almost hear him saying syrupily, “‘Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.’ Psalms: Sixty, Two-twelve.”
But I remembered his quoting something else about, “Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak,” and I took my hand off the phone and lifted it up before mine eyes and made it into a rather formidable fist and smiled upon it. For I had—according, at least, to Reverend Archie—a Commandment from the Lord. And I meant to keep that Commandment. Meant to keep it despite the slings and arrows and bullets of the evildoers, despite even the much more formidable fist of Bludgett. Verily, I had my work cut out for me.
Beyond the drawn blinds white incandescence flared, thunder cracked, banged against the walls and in my ears. After it the rumble of much more distant thunder rolled, fluttered upon the air.
My copy of the tape Fred Jenkins had made—and died for—was in an envelope in the Mountain Shadows safe. I wanted to hear it again, for a lot of reasons. I went out and headed for the lobby desk, walking through rain becoming heavier now, letting the thoughts form, get fixed in my mind.
When I’d first talked privately with Reverend Archibald a bit more than twenty-four hours ago, he had of course been lying to me. It followed from simple premise to QED that Mrs. Blessing had been lying, and Henry Yarrow had been lying, and I knew finally why Gilberto Reyes had been murdered, who had ordered his murder and why. It wasn’t important, at least not now, that Ace and Fleepo had done the actual killing. The whole thing—almost the whole thing—was starting to become clear.
When I’d listened to the Jenkins tape this morning part of the answer had been banging away at my ears, obvious, unmistakable, if I’d had the sense to realize it. An answer not in those last six minutes but in the three-quarters of an hour before then. I was a little late getting it—but better late, goddammit, I thought, than never.
Jenkins recorded only when there was something of interest, a phone call, the arrival of somebody at the house—no point in recording silence. In other words, on that fifty-one minutes of tape was a record of everything said between, roughly, two or three P.M. Friday afternoon until a little after two A.M. this morning when the transmitter had been spotted.
I had been so intent upon listening for talk of murder, a damaging revelation, even a voice I might recognize, that I had completely failed to note the most important thing on the first forty-five minutes of that tape. Or, rather, the important thing which was not on it: Me.
The words I had spoken last night to Henry Yarrow, in his home, were not on the tape. Interestingly, too, Professor Irwin had told me three of his comparisons matched and only three. Yet No. 1 on my comparison tape, made this morning at the Villas, had been Henry Yarrow. Thus Yarrow’s voice was not on the Jenkins tape, either.
As I trotted past the pool the sky above me was black. Before I reached the glass doors of the lobby fat drops of rain were churning the pool’s surface and splattering heavily on cement. At the desk I gave the clerk my claim check and asked him to get the envelope I’d left in the safe. He did, but before handing it to me checked my box and plucked a slip of paper from it.
“Did you get your call, Mr. Scott?” he asked. “From the lady who phoned?”
“What lady?”
“She didn’t leave her name. I mentioned it because she spoke to me personally, asked if I knew where she might reach you—apparently she had already phoned your room. She requested that we have you paged.”
I couldn’t think of any ladies who might have called and paged me except Lucrezia and—maybe—my “old gray-headed” Mary Blessing, widow with the hotly hypnotic thighs.
“Is the message from her?” I indicated the slip of paper in his hand.
He shook his head. “This was from a gentleman who phoned, oh … perhaps three-quarters of an hour after we paged you.”
I read the note. “Shell, call Tony. Very urgent. Call this number.” But the number was not Tony Brizante’s.
I turned away from the desk, then stopped. I was getting a very funny feeling. The time of the message had been logged as seven-thirty-six P.M. It was ten minutes past eight now. According to what the clerk had said, I must have been paged only a few minutes before seven P.M. That would have been when I was trying to set things up for my episode with Bludgett—probably while still speaking with Dr. Fretsindler in his room.
“Let me talk to your switchboard operator,” I said.
She told me she had logged the call from the lady who’d spoken to the desk clerk at sixty-fifty P.M., then added, “There were three other calls for you about that time, Mr. Scott. All four within ten minutes or so. I remember because I knew you weren’t in your room, but I had to keep ringing it anyway. I was ringing your room for the third time while you were still being paged from the call before—”
I interrupted. “The one call that was completed, to the desk here. If it was a toll call, the woman would have had to give her number to the operator. I want that number.”
It didn’t take long. The six-fifty P.M. call had been from Sunrise Villas. The number was Tony Brizante’s. And Tony’s phone was probably—almost certainly by now—tapped.
I shoved the note and envelope with the tape into my coat pocket, mumbled some kind of thanks and was gone, running.
The rain was coming down like water squirted from a hose. I ran through it, slipped once but kept my balance, dug for my key as I reached the door of my suite. Inside, dripping on the carpet, I grabbed the phone and had the operator get for me the number on the soaking-wet slip still in my hand.
Tony didn’t answer. It was a woman. “Who is this?”
“Shell Scott. I got a message—”
“Oh, yes. One minute. You wait. Pl
ease.”
I could hear the sound as she put the receiver down. Silence. A minute. A minute and a half. My throat was getting tight. And dry.
Then: “Shell?”
“Yes, Tony?”
“It is Tony. I called you, they said—”
“Never mind. I got your message. What’s the matter?”
“It’s Lucrezia. Lu, she’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“Just—gone. She left, took my car. I didn’t think she would leave. I had told her, Lu, stay in the house—”
He sounded like a man about to crack up. “Tony, cool it. Slow down. What the hell happened?”
“I was next door, I mean here where I am now—after our talk I did not want to use the phone in the house. I think, then, Lucrezia phoned somebody, maybe you. Mama said she heard Lu talking, but not what she said. When I got back to the house Lu had gone, taking the car.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s—”
“Wait. I was concerned, but not so frightened. I kept expecting her to come home. But—” He paused, and I could hear him breathing raggedly. “About an hour ago the Highway Patrol called me. They said on the road between here and Scottsdale they had found my car.”
“Found it? It wasn’t … wrecked, was it?”
“Not turned over or crashed. It was off the road, angled off. The left fender in the front was crushed, bent in.”
“Tony. Lucrezia, was she—”
“The car was empty. She was gone.”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
Words began pouring from him, but they made little sense to me, partly because half of them were in Italian. I was probably nearly as shaken as he was, but I said, “Tony, dammit, slow down. A lot of things have happened that you don’t know about. I may be able to help—if you’ll talk so I can understand you.”
“But she—” He cut it off. There was a short silence. When he spoke his voice was lower, steadier. “Yes. I will tell it to you just the way it came about. Late this afternoon, Lucrezia and I went to see Mrs. Reyes—for sympathy, from friendship. We did not go alone. Sergeant Striker drove us. Afterwards, when we were going up Palma Drive toward Claridge, where we turn to come home, there was a man walking from a house to his car in front. Lu said, ‘Dad, there’s Mr. Yarrow.’ I looked and it was him, yes, but it was a different car. And it was not the house where I saw him go Tuesday morning. I told Lu this, saying he must be visiting somebody, but she asked many questions, and had the sergeant slow down, almost stop, when we came to the house where I had seen Mr. Yarrow go before. It was nearly two blocks farther.”
Kill Me Tomorrow Page 17
