The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels

by Charles Alverson

  Shearer was in favor of breaking out the thumbscrews without a lot of time-wasting formalities. But Grenby was one of those new-breed cops who liked a little chat first. Besides, he was probably afraid of catching hell from Fischer if he splattered my blood on the floor.

  With a bit of encouragement, I told them about my little visit with J.B. the night before. Neither of them wanted to feel the bump on the back of my head. Even words of sympathy were in short supply. So much for the mythical brotherhood of the law.

  Despite the fact that I was probably the next to last person to see Carter alive, Grenby and Shearer didn’t seem to be very impressed with the information I had to give them.

  “You don’t think it’s even remotely possible?” I asked Grenby. “Remember that, from the cliff in front of his cave, J.B. had an overview of the roof. He may have seen something.”

  “Yeah,” said Shearer, “and I may be the mayor of San Francisco. If Carter had known anything that might have pinned the Pierce thing on somebody here, he’d have been down at headquarters singing like six canaries. He didn’t know anything.”

  “Did you talk to him after Katie was killed?” I asked.

  “Talk to him?” said Shearer. “As soon as he saw a uniform, he came storming down here prepared to swear to anything that would put Fischer and his flaky folk out on the curb looking for a home.” If Harry was aware that Grenby was less than happy with his description of Fischer and The Institute, he didn’t let on.

  “But he didn’t know anything?” I asked.

  “Hell, he knew everything,” Grenby said, “but what we wanted to know. If you listened to Carter, Fischer was Jack the Ripper, Al Capone and the guy who nobbled Judge Crater all in one. He knew so much, that if I’d had my way, he’d have been a star boarder in a laughing academy.”

  “Maybe you should have had your way,” I said. “He’d be alive now, anyway.”

  Grenby cleared his throat to indicate that he hated to break up our intellectual conversation and then sent Harry out to make sure that his boys hadn’t forgotten to pack anything for the trip back to Monterey. Harry said, “So long, Joe,” but didn’t break down at the prospect of leaving me. Then it was just Grenby and me in that cloakroom.

  “Do I get the impression,” I asked, “that Harry is going?”

  “That’s right,” said Grenby. “Harry is going back to Monterey. When I need him, I’ll send for him. Why?” Grenby looked at me keenly, and I don’t think he was trying to guess my weight.

  “I just wondered,” I said. “Harry may be a bit cynical, but he’s a pretty good detective.”

  “So am I, Mr. Goodey,” Grenby said. “I have a feeling that you think that I sent Harry away so that I could lose this case in some way, just sweep it under a convenient carpet until everybody forgot it. Is that right?”

  I raised my eyebrows—I hoped not too expressively—and stayed mum.

  “If you do, you’re totally wrong. You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t think there’s anybody here who wants to find out who killed J.B. Carter more than I do. And I am going to find out.”

  “No matter who it is?”

  “No matter,” said Grenby positively. “I’d take Hugo himself out of here in cuffs if it turned out to be him.”

  I didn’t believe him, and apparently neither did my face.

  “You don’t have to believe it,” Grenby said without anger. “It’s true. Goodey, neither you nor Shearer can understand what’s happening here at The Institute. Hugo started it all, and he’s the motivating force, but it’s much bigger than even Hugo. There is something here, Goodey, that changes people’s lives. I don’t know what it is, but it certainly has changed mine. There’s something almost magical here, Goodey, something precious.”

  “That could be, Lieutenant,” I conceded, “but it seems to me that that’s all the more reason for you to protect The Institute, even if it meant sliding over the little matter of who put an end to Katie Pierce and J.B. Carter.”

  He looked at me with more sorrow than anger. “It just doesn’t work that way, Goodey,” he said. “The Institute is built on truth, not lies and cover-ups. I did my best to find out what happened to Katie, and I’ll do the same on this case. I have to. If I found out something and tried to hide it, it would be the same as trying to destroy The Institute.”

  He paused, pushed his glasses back in place with a forefinger and continued. “Besides,” he said, “even if I wanted to bury this one, I couldn’t. While you were talking with Emma, I got word that Sheriff Dominguez is taking a personal interest in this case. Apparently, Crenshaw got to him in some way. God knows how.”

  “Maybe he promised to get him elected governor of California. Or president. Or pope.”

  “Could be,” said Grenby seriously. “But however he did it, my job—and my future—is on the line. Goodey, I’m an ambitious man. I always have been, but since I’ve been exposed to The Institute, my ambitions have changed. I believe that by using what we have here, the world can be changed for the better—on a large scale. And I can help do it. But it’s not going to help me if Dominguez ties a can to me for allegedly protecting The Institute’s good name. I’ve got to find out who killed J.B., Goodey, and I don’t want you getting in my way. If you do, I’ll take Hugo’s advice and send you out of here in handcuffs.”

  “I’m sure you could,” I said. “But I hope you won’t have to. I seem to have picked up another job here. Emma Carter has hired me to find out who killed her husband.” That really surprised him.

  “Why, for Christ’s sake?” he nearly shouted.

  “Maybe she wanted a second opinion,” I said. “She can afford the best, you know. But don’t worry. I’ll stay out from under your feet. I still haven’t made a lot of headway in finding out who zapped Katie Pierce.”

  “You just stick to that one, Goodey,” he said, “and we’ll all be a lot better off.” He turned and walked out of the cloakroom.

  I followed him out, but by the time I got to the foyer, Grenby was off in a corner kissing Harry Shearer goodbye, and nobody else seemed very interested in my existence. I considered looking Rachel up for a chat about old times, but after the confrontation of the night before, it seemed better to let the radioactivity count drop a bit first. I was wandering in the general direction of my room with the idea of staring at the ceiling for a while from a horizontal position when I heard my name called.

  I turned around and Jack Gillette was coming my way with an amused expression on his face. “Well, Goodey,” he said. “You seem to be making a lot of friends around here, but are you influencing people?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” I said. “But you seem to be bearing up pretty well under my lack of success.”

  “I do my best,” he said.

  “Tell me, Jack,” I said, “do you still think I’m barking up the wrong guru? Do you subscribe to the theory that J. B. Carter bashed his own skull in and jumped off the cliff?”

  “I don’t believe in theories,” he said. “Only answers. Are you coming up with any?”

  “I’m working on some. What do you think of Rudolph Verrein?”

  “As what? A suspect?”

  “No, just in general.”

  “Rudy was all right,” Jack said. “He just tried to go a bit fast and found that somebody had cut the ground out from under him. He got the idea that this is a social movement.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Nah,” he said, “it’s a nut house. Rudy forgot that.”

  “Is that why he got thrown out? I got the idea that it might have had something to do with Katie Pierce.”

  Gillette shrugged. “You get a lot of interesting ideas.”

  “You’re not being a hell of a lot of help, Jack.”

  This accusation didn’t seem to gnaw at his very being, but he said, “Tell you what, you seem to have a lot to think about, right?”

  “You could say that.”

  “If it will help any, I’ll tell you where I do all my be
st thinking.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “In the sauna. Downstairs in the basement. It’s absolutely magic. As the sweat pours out of you, all your worldly problems dissolve. Everything becomes crystal clear. You’ll probably come out of the sauna with the name of the murderer on the tip of your tongue.”

  “You guarantee it?” I asked.

  “Double your money back,” he said.

  I remembered seeing a sauna bath during the tour the day before, and it didn’t take me long to find the basement again. Actually, I just followed the steamy haze until I got to its source. It was the old-fashioned kind, constructed of stripped pine and made up of several airtight compartments, each with a separate door. Across the tile-floored hall was a shower room with a door to one side leading out to the deep end of the big swimming pool.

  The little square windows to each of the compartments were opaque with steam, but the compartments all seemed to be empty. I stripped, hung my clothes on wall hooks, and took a thick towel from a pile on a slatted bench. The floor was cold and slightly gritty under my bare feet as I chose a compartment at random. The hot air hit me as I opened the door. I began to wonder if this were such a good idea, but pushed into the steamy fog and pulled the door closed behind me. Nearly blinded, I groped slowly across the wooden-slatted floor until my knees touched a bench.

  As soon as I’d sat down in a blanket of tropical fog, I began to realize that Gillette had been wrong. A sauna bath was the last place I’d go for a nice, quiet think. Only someone with a frozen brain could think at all in such heat. Not to mention the boredom. It suddenly occurred to me that there’s nothing to do in a sauna bath but sit and sweat. I could do that anywhere. I got to my feet and was reaching down for the towel when a voice from the burning mists in a far corner said: “Can’t take it, eh, Goodey?”

  I didn’t have to strain to discover who my sauna mate was. It had to be Hugo Fischer or the devil, and I didn’t think the devil could have taken the heat.

  “Not at all, Mr. Fischer,” I said, pretending to adjust the towel and sitting back down again. “I was just wondering whether the heat in this thing had gone off.” I didn’t want that pompous old fart to think that he could take something that I couldn’t. Besides, I wasn’t bored anymore.

  I sat quietly just feeling the sweat trickling off me and wondering what would happen when all the liquid was gone. In the misty reaches of the sauna I could make out a dim shadow of Fischer. I think he looked his best in a thick fog.

  “You think I’m just an old prick, don’t you, Goodey?” he said. “Isn’t that right?”

  I couldn’t resist saying: “You’re not so old,” but his snort told me he didn’t think that was funny.

  “Well, then,” he asked, “what do you think?”

  “I think you woke up one day and decided that you were God and have been trying to live up to the reputation ever since.”

  Deep inside his cloud, Fischer gave a divine sigh of mingled regret and disgust. “You know,” he said, “you’re all alike, you cops and reporters. You’re so afraid that you’ll believe in something, you close your tiny minds up like fists. Nothing can get in, and sure as hell nothing is going to get out.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “Grenby’s a cop, and to hear him tell it you’re the Messiah come to lead us all out of Egypt.”

  “Ah!” said Fischer, in modest triumph, “that’s because Mike is no longer a policeman. He doesn’t quite know it yet but he’s on the verge of growing right out of that uniform. That gold badge is beginning to shrink, and it will go on shrinking until it completely disappears.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He just told me that he’s prepared to lead you out of here in steel bracelets if that’s the way the investigation goes. That sounds like a cop to me, not a disciple.”

  He thought that was funny, and he laughed through his nose at me.

  “You were right to stop being a policeman, Goodey,” he said. “You’ve got too much imagination, wrong-headed as it may be.”

  “I didn’t jump,” I said. “I was pushed. Like Katie Pierce.”

  He snorted again. He should have had that seen to. “For Christ’s sake, Goodey,” he said. “Are you still humming that old tune? You don’t really think I had anything to do with Katie’s death, do you? At the risk of sounding immodest, I don’t kill people, I create them. Hell, I hardly knew Katie Pierce was around until she caused all this damned fuss by throwing herself off the roof.”

  “That was inconsiderate of her,” I said.

  “It sure as hell was,” he said, stepping over my sarcasm.

  “And now J.B. Carter hits himself over the head and throws his body off the cliff. I think he did it just to spite you. Is that what you’re going to tell Grenby to find out?”

  “J.B. Carter.” He said the name ruefully. “You know something, Goodey? No matter how hard you try, there are some people you just can’t help. J.B. was one, and I think you’re another. It’s a sad thing.”

  “I don’t want your help any more than Carter did,” I said. “Since I got here yesterday, I’ve seen what it did to Lennie and Barbara and Jack Willis. I can’t afford that kind of help.”

  He seemed to think about that for a moment. All I could think about was how hot it was in that hellbox. It might have been my imagination, but I’d have sworn it was getting even hotter. Or maybe I just wasn’t good sauna material. I could feel my mouth getting drier and drier, and my speech was slurring a bit. But I was determined not to say anything about the heat before he did, even if it did feel as though someone had set my face on fire.

  “Jack Willis,” Fischer said. Either my ears were melting or he was slurring his words a bit. “Shall I tell you a little bit about Jack Willis, Goodey?” I felt too weak to resist, so he rolled on. “Jack Willis first came down here as a hotshot newspaper reporter. To write about The Institute—about me. He thought he knew everything, but you know what, Goodey?”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out but steam. My pulse was trying to escape through my head, and I was thinking more about several gallons of beer than about Jack Willis.

  “Willis,” Fischer went on, but slowly, “wasn’t here for more than forty-eight hours before…before he knew that his life was a…fraud, Goodey. A f-fraud. And he literally begged—begged me to let him…to let him…join…that is…move into….whew…” Fischer made a painful swallowing noise. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  “You know, Goodey,” he said, “it’s getting very…getting very…in here…” The bench squeaked as he heaved his considerable bulk from it. “I think I might just open the…” He gave a deep sigh and then hit the floor like two hundred pounds of wet baloney.

  It dimly occurred to me that perhaps there was something going wrong. Either Fischer was a masochist, or this sauna bath had taken a wrong turn. Putting both hands on the bench at the sides of my legs, I gave a shove. Nothing happened, except that my wet hands slipped off the boards and I nearly joined Fischer on the floor. I didn’t want to join Fischer on the floor, so the next time I pushed a bit more carefully, and after more effort than I thought possible, found myself standing on my feet. At least I think they were my feet. They were down there in the fog somewhere, and when I leaned toward the sauna door they reluctantly came with me. But very slowly.

  I couldn’t make a voice, but I mentally urged my legs, one at a time, to carry me all the way over to the door with the square little window. At that point, I was close enough to fall to the door, but I knew that if I did, I’d never get up to open it. So I waited for my legs, which waited for my feet, and finally we all got to the door and deputized my right arm to turn the knob. It did, and we all pushed on the door together, but it didn’t budge. At first, I thought I just didn’t have the strength left to push the door open. So I laid my head against the window for a bit of a rest—the comparative coolness of the glass was like a Caribbean cruise. Eventually, my eyes stopped rolling long enough to see that Tommy Carter was o
n the other side of the glass leering at me with idiotic good nature. His face was flattened on the window, further distorting his rubbery features, and his big shoulder was squarely against the outside of the door. I pushed with all my reduced might against the door but it was like leaning against a mountain. I tried shouting at Tommy, but all that came out was a gasping shriek that couldn’t do justice to my well-chosen invective. I resorted to making menacing faces at him through the window, but that only inspired Tommy to screw up his face even more and press harder—if that were possible—against the door.

  I gave up my efforts for a moment and just leaned against my side of the hot door, listening to my heart laboring like an oil pump sucking on a dry hole. With each stroke, a progressively constricting pain pythonned itself around my chest, making even shallow breathing not much fun. I felt as though someone was piling manhole covers on my chest one by loving one.

  I looked through the little window again, hoping not to see Tommy anymore, but there he was. He hadn’t changed a lot, and he was apparently still having a swell time. I thought about pushing on the door again, but was finding it hard enough just to keep my legs—which had somehow turned to rope—from collapsing. Soon, I found that the door was the only thing holding me up, and I clung to it like a vertical life raft, my cheek separated from Tommy’s distorted face by only a sheet of glass. I began to fantasize that we were dancing cheek to cheek, and Tommy was leading.

  Then my lolling, desperate eye caught on to something moving in from the side. The something turned into Jack Gillette floating toward Tommy as if in slow motion, then hitting Tommy’s massive frame and bouncing awkwardly away like rubber on rubber. Nice going, Jack, I prayed. Try again. Jack got to his feet, but didn’t make another rush. For a heartbeat I thought he’d given up a bad job. But then, after what seemed like an eternity, Gillette raised a clenched fist with deliberate slowness and launched it at Tommy’s head. I watched the punch every inch of the way, and felt—rather than saw—it land squarely on Tommy’s ear. The squashed face suddenly slid off the glass, and the door seemed to dematerialize as I fell through it onto the ice-cold white tiles outside.