The Devil's Odds

by Milton T. Burton

  “When?” I blurted out.

  “Not more than an hour ago. They just called me.”

  “Who did it?” Simms asked.

  “Who knows?” Maceo replied. “Five shots fired from a gray Dodge sedan just as he was coming out of his office at the Turf Club.”

  “Is he—” I began.

  He shook his head. “No. He took a bullet through the fleshy part of his right arm. But one of the bodyguards got it in the lung. He’s in surgery at John Sealy Hospital right now, and he may not make it.”

  “Where’s Rosario?” Simms asked. “Isn’t he at the hospital, too?”

  “No, he’s at his penthouse at the Buccaneer. The doctor’s taking care of him there.”

  “Even better,” Simms replied. “Keep him there and tell him I’ll call him tomorrow.”

  “Sure,” Maceo said, shaking his head in bewilderment. “But I wish I knew what the hell is going on. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Apparently Salisbury was only the tip of the iceberg,” Simms replied with a grimace as he buttoned his coat. “Take care, Sam. This business appears to be far from over.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It rained again during the night and the morning dawned gray and cold. I skipped breakfast and then drove by Jim Rutherford’s house to take him to the funeral. We arrived at the cemetery about ten minutes before it began. There were around fifty mourners present, most clustered around a half dozen chairs that had been set up for the family under the funeral home’s tent. A plain gray steel coffin with bronze handles sat on a catafalque over the grave. The service was short and simple and dignified. A young Baptist preacher read from the Bible, then gave a brief eulogy in which he spoke of the tragedy of such an untimely death. Thankfully, he knew when to stop and didn’t belabor the point. Then a tall, slim young woman he described as Madeline’s best friend stepped forward and did a magnificent job of singing “Amazing Grace” in a crystal clear soprano voice. After a short prayer it was over.

  I asked Rutherford to introduce me to Madeline’s parents. They were a tired-looking, graying, sixtyish couple who looked like they hadn’t slept in days. “I’m Virgil Tucker,” I said. “And I’m deeply sorry this happened.”

  The woman nodded and shook my hand then buried her face in her handkerchief and turned away.

  Madeline’s father said a quiet, “Thank you for trying, Mr. Tucker,” that came close to breaking my heart.

  “I’m going to do more than that. I plan to do my best to find out who was behind this.”

  “Do you have any idea…?” he began, only to let his voice taper off.

  There was no reason they shouldn’t know. “She witnessed a murder a few nights ago. I think she was killed to silence her.”

  “Was it Henry DeMour’s killing, by any chance?”

  I nodded.

  He shook his head sadly. “I told her she was involved with the wrong sort of people when she first started seeing that Dunning boy. Young people don’t listen, do they?

  Not knowing how to respond, I muttered something I hoped sounded decent and got away from them as gracefully as I could. Glancing around, I spotted the soprano headed for a small Ford coupe that was parked about fifty yards away. Moving swiftly, I caught up with her and gently took her arm. “Is your name Alma, by any chance?” I asked.

  She stopped and turned and peered at me with guarded eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I’m Alma Copeland.”

  “I’m Virgil Tucker. Is that name familiar to you?”

  She was dressed in a pair of well-tailored wool slacks and a matching coat. Her hair, which had been bobbed at ear-bottom length, was combed simply to one side and she wore only a little pink lipstick. She paused a moment before she answered my question, then gave me a hesitant nod and whispered, “Yes.”

  “Then you know I’m the man who was trying to help Madeline?”

  Chameleon-like, her mood changed and she pulled away from me. “You obviously weren’t very good at it,” she spat and turned and began hurrying toward her car.

  I caught up with her just as she was opening the door and pushed it gently shut with the heel of my hand. “No, I suppose I wasn’t,” I said. “But then it wasn’t really a paying job, now was it?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you extracted enough from her to make it worth your while.”

  I stared right into her eyes for a few seconds before I spoke, then I said gently, “Isn’t that just another way of saying your friend was promiscuous? Or that you knew she wasn’t above using her body to get what she wanted?”

  Her mouth fell open in amazement. “Why, why…,” she sputtered. “How can you say such things about—”

  “About the dead?” I asked, interrupting her. “That’s always puzzled me. That business of not speaking ill of the dead, I mean. If you say something bad about someone who’s alive it could conceivably hurt them. But criticism has never damaged a corpse that I know of.”

  “You’re hateful,” she spat.

  “And you’re being childish. If you’d think for a moment you’d realize that I didn’t have to help her in the first place. And if I didn’t care what happened to her, would I be standing out here in this drizzle right now?”

  She lowered her eyes and shook her head. “No, I suppose not,” she admitted reluctantly.

  “Then will you help me?”

  “I don’t see how I can.”

  “I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  She stared off across the cemetery until I thought I’d lost her.

  “Miss Copeland…”

  She turned and gave me a curt little nod. “Let’s get in the car where it’s warm,” she said.

  Once we were inside the Ford she cranked the engine and turned on the heater. “What do you want to know?”

  “She told me there was a girl with her at the Snake Eyes the night Henry DeMour was killed. Was that you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then who could it have been?”

  “I don’t know. She never said.”

  “But you do know about DeMour?”

  She sighed a long sigh. “Yes, and I wish I’d never heard the man’s name.”

  “Tell me about Madeline. What was she really like?”

  “She was my best friend, and she was a nice girl. A little confused, maybe. Looking for love, like everybody. And looking for a good time.”

  “Had you known her long?”

  She nodded. “Since grade school.”

  “Okay, then what about Nolan Dunning?”

  “A bastard of the first order.”

  “So you don’t like him?”

  “No, I don’t, and I told Madeline he was worthless when they first started dating. But she was taken in by his looks.”

  “I see,” I mused. “But she’d recently broken it off with him, hadn’t she?”

  “Yeah. Say, do you have a cigarette?”

  I pulled my Chesterfields from my coat and lighted us each one. “Thanks,” she said, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. “I’m trying to quit. My doctor thinks it’s bad for people.”

  “He’s probably right,” I said. “But back to Dunning. She told me he was a real caveman. Tried every way in the world to get her back, including intimidation.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you think he might have killed her?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t see it. I really believe he was too nuts about her.”

  I stared at her for a few moments. Something didn’t fit. Her voice was strained and the whole conversation seemed somehow awkward. Reluctant to meet my eyes, she kept looking off across the cemetery. Finally I said, “I had her safely lodged with some reliable people up near Palestine, but she bolted and took a bus to Huntsville. She was supposed to get a Greyhound connection there for Beaumont, but she never made it. Somebody must have picked her up at the bus station in Huntsville. You wouldn’t have any idea who that might have been, would you?”

  She shook her hea
d absently.

  “Is there anything you can tell me that might help me?” I asked. “After all, she was your best friend. Please believe me when I say that I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

  “No, nothing,” she replied in a soft voice.

  “After she broke up with Nolan, did she start seeing anybody else?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  I shrugged. “She was a pretty girl, and I can’t see her being by herself for very long. I just thought that maybe—”

  She shook her head. “Nobody.”

  I watched her thoughtfully for a moment, convinced that she was lying on that one point at least. Maybe about other things as well. I felt like slapping the hell out of her. Instead, I took one of my cards from my pocket and wrote Jim Rutherford’s number on its back. “If you think of anything else,” I said, “either tomorrow or a month from now, please call. This man can get a message to me.”

  “Okay,” she said in a bare whisper.

  I opened the door and climbed from the car. Then I leaned down and looked at her once more. “Madeline didn’t tell me the whole truth,” I said. “And we both knew it at the time. I believe in my heart she would still be alive if she had. That’s something you should think about.”

  She gave me a nod without meeting my eyes, and once I’d closed the door she put the car in gear and was gone. I stood and watched the little coupe as it made its way out of the cemetery, convinced that I was no nearer to the solution to the puzzle than I’d been when I first saw Madeline Kimbell in the barroom of the Weilbach hotel. I was wrong.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I dropped Rutherford off at his place, then got a light lunch of Gulf shrimp at a little seafood place only a block from my hotel. Henry DeMour’s home turned out to be a huge, two story, high French Victorian with a mansard roof of gray slate. It sat on a half block of deeply shaded yard of ancient magnolias and moss-hung oaks. A pair of oleander bushes at least ten feet high flanked the front steps. I climbed up to the deep, shady porch and rang the old-style doorbell. A few seconds later I heard a faint stirring inside. After about a minute a severe-looking Negro maid opened the door. “I’m Virgil Tucker,” I said.

  But before I could explain my business, she stepped aside and commanded in an imperious tone, “Come in, suh. She’s expecting you.”

  I had no more than stepped across the threshold when my hostess appeared before me. There was something annoyingly schoolmarmish about Lucinda DeMour, something of the well-heeled and aristocratic old maid who takes a job teaching in the public schools out of a sense of obligation, then spends her lifetime making young people miserable by drumming the more esoteric points of English syntax into their reluctant skulls. She was tall and slim, with graying brown hair worn in a style that could only be called severe. Her gray dress was severe, too, both in cut and fit, its austerity relieved only by a small cameo broach at her throat. She reminded me of my own tenth-grade grammar teacher, and I was well on my way to disliking her when she smiled. It was the sort of tired smile you’d expect from a woman not a week past her husband’s funeral, but still there was a world of sunlight in it. It was a smile that made you think of bees and jonquils and tender green grass and the fragrance of wisteria floating in the early spring air. So instead of disliking her, I decided that Henry DeMour had been a very fortunate man.

  “Mrs. DeMour—” I began.

  “I’ve been expecting you, Mr. Tucker,” she said, extending her hand. “Simms called me on your behalf this morning. And yes, you may see my husband’s diaries if you wish. But there are a few things I need to tell you first.”

  “Sure,” I answered, my voice gentle. “And I appreciate this very much.”

  “Let’s go back to the kitchen and have a cup of coffee, shall we? I was just making a pot when you knocked.” She waved the maid off. “I can manage coffee without help, Lucy,” she said. The woman gave us a nod and disappeared somewhere back into the recesses of the old house.

  “I have two servants who’ve been with me forever,” she said over her shoulder. “They’ve been treating me like an invalid ever since Henry was killed. It’s gotten to the point that I feel like strangling them both, but they are so devoted.…” She shrugged.

  The kitchen would have served a medium-sized restaurant. On a gas range even bigger than the one at home a large ironstone percolator bubbled away. To one side of the room sat a large maple table surrounded by a half dozen captain’s chairs.

  “I’m afraid Emily Post wouldn’t approve of my entertaining guests in the kitchen,” she said as she began to pour the coffee. “But I feel more comfortable here than anywhere else. Please sit down.”

  “It’s fine with me, Mrs. DeMour. Sometimes I feel like I grew up in the kitchen back home.”

  “And where is your home, Mr. Tucker?”

  “Matador County, right down on the border. My family are all ranching people.”

  “A reassuring activity,” she said. “I’m from Savannah. By the way, do you like old-fashioned pound cake, by any chance?”

  “It’s my favorite.”

  She placed a large pound cake in the center of the table along with two small plates and two large, steaming cups of dark, chickory-laced coffee. We sipped our coffee and ate pound cake for a while, making small talk, then at last she asked, “What have you heard about my husband, Mr. Tucker?”

  “That he was a good man. Very civic minded, a person who cared a great deal about the community where he lived.”

  “That’s all true. And he’d been disturbed about the public corruption in this county for years.”

  “You knew that he was thinking about running for the senate, then?”

  “Of course. We had discussed it at length. We talked about everything.”

  “I see,” I said. “Then he must have mentioned the name Marty Salisbury to you.”

  “Yes. He’s a hoodlum who runs a nightclub here.”

  “Not anymore. An old Ranger named Charlie Grist beat him to a pulp and ran him out of the state two days ago. At first I was convinced that Salisbury was responsible for your husband’s death, but I’m not so sure anymore. He was involved, but I’m beginning to think there’s more to it.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute,” I said. “But first, do you know who the Maceo brothers are?”

  She nodded. “Certainly. My husband was acquainted with them both. He said they were reasonably decent men, when you consider that they operate outside the law.”

  “They are. Now, what you need to understand is that Salisbury is the nephew of a very powerful New Orleans gangster named Angelo Scorpino. Apparently he was sent up here by Scorpino to take over the Maceo brothers’ operation. It was equally apparent that your husband was about to get in their way. Grist and I both assumed that was the reason he was killed. Then after Grist ejected Salisbury, we met with one of Scorpino’s top men just over the Louisiana line and he assured us that Scorpino had come to realize that the whole thing had been a mistake from the first, and that as far as he was concerned the hatchet was buried.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  I grinned at her. “Yes, because I think the beating Grist gave Salisbury actually scared Scorpino enough that he was afraid the old man would come down to New Orleans and do something to him.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You see, most cops handle these Mob people pretty gently even when they arrest them and make cases on them. But Charlie Grist is a law unto himself. At any rate, that meeting should have put an end to it, but last night five shots were fired at Rosario Maceo outside his office. Obviously somebody still has their eye on the Galveston gambling rackets.”

  “Who could it be?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a notion, but it’s pretty far-fetched. I’d really rather not say anything until after I’ve looked at your husband’s journals.”

  She nodded and sighed a long sigh. “Then I’d better tell you what I have to te
ll. Mr. Tucker, my husband had a serious character flaw, and that flaw was younger women. Over the years he had numerous affairs.”

  “Mrs. DeMour, there’s no need—”

  “Yes, there is, and for more than one reason. In the first place, I’m convinced that Henry’s philandering contributed to his death.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Yes. But I also want to tell you because my house was burgled two nights ago, and I feel sure the intruder was after those diaries.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Henry’s library was rifled, but not a single thing was taken. They came in through the porch window and went straight to the library and searched it thoroughly. I didn’t even discover the burglary until the next morning, and nothing else was disturbed in any way. That’s why I’m convinced they were looking for his journals.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  She looked at me sharply. “Are you joking? With the kind of law enforcement we have in this county? What good would that have done? And I don’t mind telling you that I haven’t slept securely since then, but what can I do? My bedroom door is sturdy, and I keep a pistol beside my bed. Beyond that, I just trust in God.”

  “I see your point,” I admitted with a nod. “Who else knew about the diaries?”

  “All his friends, I’m sure. He talked about them a great deal. They contained his observations on national affairs and whatnot, and he was really quite proud of them.” She smiled sadly and put down her cup. “But back to his womanizing. The first time it happened we’d been married fifteen years. I was terribly hurt, and almost left him. He begged me to stay, and I did. Oh, it’s not what you’re thinking. He didn’t promise to do better and then backslide later on. Quite the contrary. He told me that it was almost certain to happen again. You see, tender young female bodies were like an intoxicant to him. And he was handsome and very charming and able to get almost any woman he wanted.”

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.