Nothing to Lose But My Life

by Louis Trimble

  “Bleed you,” I said. “Make you work for him like he has.”

  “Work for him?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why else would you have kept on my tail like you did, done what you did? Except to keep me out of Nikke’s hair.”

  She didn’t even bother to answer me but swung the car off the highway, up a gravel road and finally onto a flat mesa that looked out over the valley and the city toward the ocean. There was a stone outdoor fireplace and a couple of wooden benches and tables. It was a public picnic park. We had it to ourselves.

  Tanya reached into the rear and came up with a big sack. She drew a can of beer, still sweating, from it. She opened the can and handed it to me. I drank, letting the beer run free down my throat until it threatened to start back up. It was still cold and my throat was hot. I began to feel a little better. Tanya dug some more and got me a sandwich. I ate that and drank more beer. I had three cans in all.

  When the sack was empty, we lit cigarettes and stared at one another in silence. The moon had reached us and it touched Tanya briefly across her eyes and nose and full, warm mouth. I started to shake again but not from anger this time.

  “God, you’re stubborn, Lowry.”

  “And you know why,” I told her. “The only thing for me to do is go find who killed Hoop. Until I do that, I damned well won’t let Nikke use you to lure me down to Mexico. Do you like being that kind of bait, Tanya?”

  “For Nikke, yes.” She was very quiet. She put out her cigarette and folded her hands in her lap. She looked resigned, as if she had just made an unpleasant decision. I had never seen Tanya quite this way before. It was a little frightening.

  I said, “For Nikke! You still feel that way about him after what happened—between us?”

  “I’ll always feel that way about him, Lowry. He’s my father.”

  Chapter XII

  I HAD promised to listen to Nikke for ten minutes before I made up my mind to do anything to him. Now I wouldn’t need to keep that promise. I listened to his daughter instead.

  It took Tanya more than any ten minutes. She spoke rapidly once she was started, in a low, steady voice. She didn’t look at me often but I didn’t need to watch her face to know that what she said was the truth. I heard it all and when she was through, I got up and walked out. I couldn’t face her.

  Nearly six years ago the Syndicate had moved in on Nikke. They had done it the easy way, not working on Nikke directly but on his daughter. Tanya was Nikke’s secret pride and joy. He had been only eighteen when she was born, the result of a spontaneous and deeply felt love affair. Her mother had died. Nikke took the girl and left his home and went elsewhere. He did a bit of everything to make money, to see that Tanya had the things money could buy.

  He didn’t keep her with him. When she was very small, he sent her to the United States, to an uncle, and sent money, a great deal of money as he got wise to the ways of making it.

  When Nikke himself had to run, it was only natural that he run to the United States. He was a well-to-do man with investments in America by this time. But he really knew only one business well—that of gambling. He settled in Puerto Bello and started his club and because he was honest, actually little more than a provider of entertainment to his well-heeled clientele, he was accepted and protected.

  Tanya did not even know that her father was still alive. She got her money from a trust fund and, in addition, she made her own living. She had gone through college and become a designer of exclusive dresses in Beverly Hills. She had plenty of friends, men and women both, but she had never found anyone she cared to be really intimate with, certainly no man she wanted to marry.

  Then the Syndicate stepped in. It wasn’t any big deal at first. It was a little outfit run by Jake, a local County outfit sniping at the edges of things. But after Nikke established himself, Jake had his one big idea. He wanted a piece of what Nikke had. It didn’t take too smart a man to realize that to move in and drive Nikke out would be killing the egg-laying goose. The only solution was to keep Nikke as a front, use his reputation and establish some dives with that as a screen. Only Nikke wouldn’t play.

  Jake went down to L.A. and laid it on the line with some friends he had there. They went to work and did what my detectives couldn’t do—they checked Nikke so thoroughly they came up with Tanya.

  Then I heard one of the things I wanted to hear. Jake’s friends had played it wise and gone to a young, up-and-coming behind-the-scenes string-puller. That was Charles Conklin, a fairly well-to-do stock and bond salesman who was just starting an organization of his own. Conklin had brains; Jake and his friends were smart enough to know they needed a man with brains.

  With Charles Conklin was a high-priced lady-killer, Bill Mace. Tanya was twenty-six, successful, beautiful and, although she did not realize it, lonely. Mace had money and he displayed it in a quiet, well-bred way. They met first in Mexico where Tanya had gone to pick up some design ideas.

  Mace was clever and smooth. He didn’t rush things. It was over a year before they were married. Nikke had an eye kept on Tanya for him but Mace fooled even his operatives. He never stepped out of character, he was always the rich, smooth playboy. But after he and Tanya were married, things changed.

  The newly formed Syndicate was now ready to move. Only Mace crossed them up. He fell for Tanya. With her money and what he had stashed away chasing hungry widows, he figured that he and Tanya could live on their own. He told her his part of the deal.

  That’s how she found out about Nikke being her father.

  Now the Syndicate had to move and move fast. The first thing Mace knew, he had a drunk-driving rap hung on him. Then the “victim” died and it was manslaughter. Hearing it made me think of the frame on Jen. The pattern had worked once so they tried it a second time. I hoped there wouldn’t be a third.

  The Syndicate sprung Mace, told him to jump his bail, arranged passage for him to Central America. They even had it fixed, they told him, for Tanya to join him. He was in so deep, he couldn’t do much but accept. Either that or spend twenty years in prison. He followed their orders.

  When Mace disappeared, Tanya got the news that he had gone south and that he wanted her. She even got a letter ostensibly from him, telling her that the whole thing was a frame-up and could she come to him. He had proof she could take back with her. Tanya was a loyal person and she loved her husband.

  She was careful about it and, she thought, clever. She got a plane to a different Central American country and then went by car to where he was waiting. When she looked back, she realized that it had been too easy to escape the police. The Syndicate had helped.

  She found Mace all right; she found him dead. She walked in on him and into a crude but satisfactory frame. Before the two boys who were waiting for her had finished, she looked as if she had been beaten up by Mace and had taken revenge by sticking a knife into him. Those photos I’d seen were two of the number that they took.

  It was crude but not too crude for the unsophisticated country where they were. The police came and they found Tanya “passed out” over her husband’s body, her hand on the knife, empty liquor bottles around. A few words of explanation to the police from the “friend” who had discovered the scene and the solution was obvious—Tanya had come to help her husband, found that he was truly a murderer. She had tried to leave him, they had fought. She killed him.

  The Syndicate had chosen its country and policemen well. The news never reached the papers. The records of the crime disappeared without a trace. So did Tanya and Bill Mace. When she got back to the States, she found herself confronted with photostatic copies of police records and glossy, detailed photographs. Mace himself was in the Pacific somewhere, far down on the bottom. There was even an affidavit from the man she supposedly hired to put him there.

  Tanya did the only thing she could think of. She went to Nikke. And that was what they’d been waiting for. Nikke sent her back to L.A., to take up her former life, to do what she could to make thing
s appear the same on the surface. Meanwhile, he would put up all the fight he could.

  It wasn’t much. They had his every move blocked before he made it. They gave him a choice—go on fighting and have his daughter’s crime splashed on every paper in the country or give in gracefully. Nikke gave in.

  Tanya couldn’t take it. She gave up her business. Nikke refused to let her come to him; he couldn’t make himself believe that she would approve of his way of making a living. She tried travel; she tried a little house in the country. Nothing worked. Two years ago she threw the whole thing over and came to Nikke anyway.

  And the Syndicate took advantage of that. Neither Nikke nor Tanya had broadcast their relationship. The Syndicate saw a further use for her. They forced her to make a play for Hoop. She was in the same boat as Nikke; she had no choice.

  When all the groundwork was laid, the Syndicate moved itself to Puerto Bello. And their investment began to pay off. Nikke was a fine front. Conklin kept in the background as he always had, but he wasn’t just a quiet partner. With Puerto Bello ripe for plucking, he made it his business to pluck. First, he sized up Hoop and moved in on him.

  He broke Hoop and then saw to it that he recouped. Before Hoop knew what was happening, he and Conklin were partners. Then Hoop began to get a little big for his straight jacket. He was as good a crook as the next man, but the way the Syndicate worked wasn’t his way. He tried to rebel. That’s when they turned Tanya loose on him. At the same time, they put other squeezes on him where it hurt—mentioned certain stock deals he had made, small things and big ones, but all together they made an ugly record. And then, of course, there was what he had done to me and the others he had fleeced.

  He hadn’t done all the fleecing but the records were set up to make it look so. Conklin was no man to miss a bet.

  And so now I knew. I knew that it wasn’t Nikke who had forced me to take the case that caused my disbarment. It wasn’t Nikke who had tried to build around my wife the same kind of frame that had caught Bill Mace. Nor was it Nikke who had taken advantage of Hoop when he was on the rocks and forced him into refusing me money. Not any of it could I honestly lay at Nikke’s feet, and only part of it at the Colonel’s.

  I didn’t blame Nikke, not now. He had had his choice—sacrifice me and himself or sacrifice Tanya. And he dared not tell me, no more than he dared tell the police. The Syndicate had him tied no matter which way he might turn.

  It was strange, I thought. I’d spent five years hating Nikke and hating Hoop and now that hatred was so much dust in my mouth. I should hate the Syndicate. But I couldn’t. Even knowing that Conklin was at its head, I couldn’t hate them. Not in the way I had hated Nikke and Hoop. There was something too impersonal about the Syndicate. It was Emmett—who had taken the photographs of Bill Mace’s body and of Tanya and who had killed Mace; it was Jake—who had thought it up in the first place; it was Perly—who took care of the rough stuff; it was a handful of unnamed gunsels such as those at the club on the highway, and it was Conklin—whose brain directed it all. And yet it wasn’t anyone. No one definite enough for me to hate.

  So I stopped hating, and that was good. I stopped hating and really began thinking. And I got the answers to a lot of things I hadn’t been able to see before.

  But I still lacked the answer to one question: Who had killed Hoop and why?

  I hadn’t gone far from the car, just to one of the picnic benches. Now I returned to it, walking slowly, feeling the pain from my wound. I put my head back, not wanting to look at Tanya.

  “Don’t be foolish, Lowry,” she said softly. “I can see how you think Nikke changed. Most people do. But you don’t any more, do you?”

  “Not any more,” I said. I turned my head and I got the full impact of those green eyes. “You should have told me sooner.”

  “I didn’t dare,” she said. “I wanted to get you a long ways away—Mexico—before I did. But you’re so damned stubborn. Look at it from Nikke’s point of view. You came back and you were dangerous to him. But you’d have been more dangerous if you’d known the truth—and believed it.”

  I understood. “That’s right,” I admitted. “Once I believed it, I’d have gone gunning for the Syndicate—to help Nikke and to pay them back for Jen, for everything. I can see why Nikke was afraid. That would have stirred up the hornet’s nest he had sacrificed so much to avoid. That’s why he really wanted me out of town—for all our protection.”

  “That’s the way Nikke saw it,” she said. She smiled at me. “And he was right.”

  “Yes. Only now it doesn’t matter. Now if I can’t do something, it’s finished anyway—for you.”

  Tanya sighed and put out a hand and touched my hair. I caught her wrist and pulled her hand down and kissed it. “I’ve seen it Nikke’s way,” I said. “Now you see it mine.” I made my voice flat, with no room for argument. “I’m going back. I told you I had some thinking to do. Well, I’ve done it. Those dossiers of mine have a lot of information in them that applies to others besides Nikke and Hoop. If I can get a few answers out of you, I’ll know what to do and how to do it.”

  Tanya knew when she was licked. “I’ll tell you all I can,” she agreed. “I’ll help all I can, Lowry.”

  I said, “I won’t get you and Nikke into any more trouble than you’re already in, Tanya. Just remember that it’s my neck too.”

  Tanya moved away. Now I could think better. “What do you want to know, Lowry?”

  “First, why did you put those photos in Hoop’s safe?”

  “I didn’t know he was dead at the time and I was trying to help him.” The way she explained it was: Conklin had a file of photographs, copies of the two I’d seen as well as others just as damning, and of affidavits, police reports from the country where Bill Mace had been killed, that sort of evidence. Every now and then Tanya or Nikke would receive a little envelope with a report or a picture in it. That was Conklin’s way of reminding them who was top man. Tanya disliked Hoop but she saw in him a chance for salvation. He was rebelling against the Syndicate. She hoped to give him more ammunition, and hoped too he would use it with discretion.

  “I planted the pictures that way,” she explained, “because I didn’t dare come out and tell him directly. If things backfired, I didn’t want to get Nikke or myself in trouble. I had to keep us out of it.”

  I said, “Just how pushy was Hoop getting toward the end?”

  “Very,” she said. “That was why Charles was trying to force me into marrying him right away. He knew how much the Colonel thought of me and he thought the Colonel would quiet down if it would help protect my name.”

  I was puzzled. “But what did he have to fight the Syndicate with?”

  “Information,” Tanya said. “Once he decided to break free of them, he started collecting little bits and pieces of information. I know once when he got drunk and I helped him home he let something slip. It didn’t make much sense at the time but later it did. He said something to the effect that he had the weapon he wanted and he was ready for the next step.”

  “And that?”

  “And that,” Tanya said, “was what I couldn’t get out of him. I tried—don’t think I didn’t—but he was too drunk, really, and he passed out on me. All he did was mutter ‘Sofia,’ and smile and wobble his head.”

  “What the devil did Sofia have to do with it?”

  “I don’t imagine anything,” Tanya admitted. “But you know a drunk’s mind. It goes off in all directions. Of course, there was the rumor that Sofia picked him up after she found out he and Enid were sleeping together.”

  I sat up and grunted as the pain of the sudden movement took my breath away. When I had recovered, I said, “Enid and Hoop?”

  “They were going together when I first came here,” Tanya said. “Not openly very often. On the surface it just looked as though he squired her around in a fatherly sort of fashion. But he was very fond of both Proctor sisters. Part of the money he held back from you and the other investors th
at time went to bolster their estate. He managed it for them, you know.”

  I had known but only in a vague way. I thought of Enid and the gross Hoop and wondered at the adaptability of the human being. I thought of Sofia too and I snorted. “Enid I can swallow; Sofia, no.”

  “No more could any of us,” Tanya said. “It wasn’t much of a rumor and it didn’t get far. It came from something Enid said one night when she was having a ‘spell.’”

  I was silent a moment. There was something I had to ask Tanya, but it wasn’t the kind of question you tossed at the woman you loved—or at very many women, for that matter. But now I had to have the answer.

  “Did you and Hoop ever sleep together?”

  Tanya’s expression told me that she knew how hard it was for me to ask her that. She answered as if I’d asked the time of day, “No. I never slept with any man but my husband—until you, Lowry.”

  I tried to hide my pleasure at hearing that. “Speaking of Enid,” I said, “what happened to her since last night?”

  “I don’t know,” Tanya said, “except she isn’t at the flat. I imagine Sofia took her home or sent her to the sanitarium where she put her before.”

  I needed Enid; I hoped Sofia wasn’t guarding her. But there was something more pressing on my mind. I asked, “Why should Conklin worry about losing Hoop? I doubt if he made a good Syndicate man anyway.”

  “He never was a Syndicate man except to take part of the profit,” Tanya said. “But remember, he carried a lot of political and financial weight in Puerto Bello. Charles couldn’t afford to lose him.”

  That was food for thought. A good front man to hide behind was the dream of every racketeer. And killing Hoop would have meant losing him.

  I mulled over what I’d heard a while longer. Then I said, “How quickly can you get us back to town, Tanya?”

  “As quickly as I got here.”

  I lit us cigarettes and passed her one. “Let’s get started then.”