Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll

by John Farris

  He shook hands with me strongly. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said. “From Macy.” His mouth told the tone of his thoughts. It stayed surly. “Macy thinks a lot of you,” he went on. “I’m Charley Rinke. I suppose Macy told you about me.”

  “No, he didn’t,” I said. “I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Rinke.”

  “Oh?” It seemed to disturb him that Macy hadn’t mentioned him. “I guess you’ll be with us for a while, Mr. Mallory.”

  “Probably.”

  “I know you want to be left alone.” He glanced at his wife. “You’re not feeling well, Evelyn?”

  She shook her head. Her agitation had become worse since the sudden appearance of her husband.

  “Did you have an accident, Mr. Mallory?” Rinke said, still looking at Evelyn. It was a trick he had, to look at one person and talk to another. He seemed interested.

  “Sort of. I’m all right.”

  He waited for more information. When I didn’t offer any he said, “Evelyn, a hot bath would help, wouldn’t it?”

  “I... I don’t think so, Char—”

  “But it has helped before, hasn’t it?” he said, taking her by the arm. “It does relax you. Wouldn’t you like to have a hot bath? I’ll wash your back for you.”

  “Ch-Charley...” she said unhappily, her head hanging. She allowed herself to be guided toward the door.

  “We’ll be seeing you in the morning, Mr. Mallory,” Rinke said pleasantly. Evelyn turned to me for a moment, and there was a glitter of anguish in her eyes, of a plea that had been ignored often. She tugged with her arm and he let her go quickly, followed her into the hall.

  After a moment I shut the door and finished undressing, set the alarm for eight. It was ten after four then, but I wasn’t there to catch up on my sleep.

  Chapter Eight

  I slept right through the alarm but a Puerto Rican house-boy shook me awake a few minutes later and got me out of the sack. He had to assist me in getting to the bathroom, then held me up under the shower until the feel of the water penetrated gritty layers of pain. I might have stayed under all day but he reminded me politely that Macy expected everyone to be at breakfast by eight-thirty. I shook my head gently to test the reliability of stiff muscles, and got out.

  My fingers had trouble holding the razor and my wrist was rubber as I shaved. I felt like death warmed over. Clean clothes and hot coffee thoughtfully provided by the houseboy helped some. I made the dining room at twenty of nine. The others were eating. Macy looked up from a plateful of eggs and threw introductions around carelessly. Then he went back to eating.

  I knew most of them. Only Rudy and Mrs. Rinke were absent. I took a vacant seat beside Rinke, looked at Diane more carefully. She was a tall lemon-haired blonde with a serene face every bit as beautiful as my quick look in the cigarette glow last night had suggested. She paid no attention to me. She was wearing shorts and some kind of pullover playshirt with elbow length split sleeves laced together and tied with little cord bows.

  Next to her was Aimee, a thin, undersized little Cuban girl with straight black hair and a flat nose. Aimee and Macy did most of the talking, back and forth across the table. Macy was in good spirits. He took great delight in learning everything the child had done the day before.

  Aimee would twist her head from side to side and smile big but vaguely and answer in a few halting words. Her attention was easily distracted. Diane had to coax her patiently to eat.

  “We gonna go boat riding ’safternoon, Daddy?” Aimee asked Macy, lifting a napkin to wipe away milk from the corner of her mouth. I noticed a wide glossy scar on her arm.

  “Well, I don’t know, dear,” Macy said, with a slight frown. He looked better this morning, in a bright yellow sport shirt, his hair carefully combed and face shaved. He looked more like the old confident, angle-wise Macy. “You know I don’t care for boats...”

  Aimee stuck with it. “I haven’t been boat riding all week.” There was a trace of her ancestry in her speech.

  “Diane can take you,” Macy said, cutting up a piece of steak.

  “But I want to go with you,” Aimee said pathetically.

  Macy reached across the table and patted her hand. “I know, baby. Well — ” He scratched his jaw. “Maybe tomorrow. Daddy has to work today.”

  One of the servants brought me orange juice and a platter of steak and eggs. Rinke had said nothing to me when I sat down, only nodded, but when he was through eating he turned and asked, “How are you this morning, Mr. Mallory?”

  “I’m hanging on.” I remarked on the absence of his wife.

  “Evelyn’s not feeling well this morning. Her back is giving her some pain.” He turned his glum face away abruptly, put a cup of coffee to it. “Evelyn has a problem with her nerves,” he said, sipping slowly. “She suffers a great deal. We’ve been unable to find anything that might help her.” He put the cup down and straightened his glasses precisely. “I wanted to be sure you understood about Evelyn. About how she is.”

  “I think I know what you mean,” I said.

  He nodded, his large eyes on me. He blinked once, slowly.

  “I’m engaged to be married, myself,” I said.

  He nodded again, and smiled disarmingly. “Is that so?” The news seemed to please him. “Is that right?” he said again, as if he were afraid I was only funning.

  “I sure hope Mrs. Rinke feels better,” I said.

  “I’m sure she will.” He got up then, having tugged at my heartstrings enough, and excused himself.

  “You going into town, Pete?” Macy said through a mouthful.

  “Yes.”

  Diane looked up and glanced at me fleetingly. “Could Aimee and I go in with Mallory?” she said to Macy.

  “I’m going in later. I can take you,” a new voice grumbled. It came from Taggart, Macy’s hired hand, a formidable giant as solidly and thickly built as bridge piling. He was good-looking but his features had no mobility and his expression was gluey, turtle-slow.

  “I wanted to go in earlier so I could take Aimee shopping after we leave the doctor,” Diane explained. She touched the back of Taggart’s brown hand. “You can pick us up at the department store this afternoon.”

  His face inclined toward his plate by half an inch. He didn’t look at the blonde girl. Her fingers touched his hand for a moment longer, then withdrew. Despite the lack of words, there seemed to be some bond of intimacy between them. He picked up a piece of bread and wiped up the egg yolk on his plate with it, crammed the bread into his mouth.

  Most of them were through eating before I started. I had the dining room to myself when Owen Barr came in. I had forgotten that he was in the house. He wore a shiny purple bathrobe and flopping slippers. He was a little chunky man with red hair that stuck out here and there in tufts around his ears. The top of his head was bald. He had a bristly mustache and mean eyes. He looked worse than I felt.

  He tottered to the table, grabbed the coffeepot and poured a slug into somebody else’s cup. He drank it, sobbing a little between gulps. He looked at me while he was drinking, but not as if he saw me.

  “God damn it,” he said passionately. “Oh, God damn it.” He walked around in a big circle, his slippers flopping, his short arms stuck out to balance him. Then he had another cup of coffee, after which he half sat in a chair and half leaned on his elbows against the table and held the cup tightly with stubby fingers and worked up a belch, a look of great concentration on his blotched face. Big drops of sweat appeared on his forehead.

  I drank the last of my orange juice, left the room and went in search of Macy. I found him in a study in an air-conditioned wing of the house, his feet on the desk, reading the morning paper. There was a loaded .45 on the desk within easy reach. When he heard my step in the doorway he put the paper across the desk, covering the automatic and the hand that grasped it.

  Then he looked at me, picked up the paper again, flicking ashes off a cigarette in his mouth with a corner of it.

  “
Ready to go?” he muttered.

  “Yeah. I’ll need a car. Rudy can return that rented job when he’s up and around. Expense money, too.”

  “We got a lot of cars in the garage. Pick out one you like. Keys are in the ignition.” He went to his wallet and counted out money for me.

  “From now on you don’t talk about what I’m doing,” I said. “You don’t tell anybody where I go or who I see. Is the phone bugged?”

  He folded the paper and put it in his lap. “As far as I know, it isn’t. Telephone company watches it to see the line stays clean. I trust everybody here, Pete.”

  I reached over and picked up the .45. “And you’re using this for a paperweight.” He didn’t say anything. I took it by the barrel and threw it at him. He sat there holding it foolishly.

  “I don’t trust anybody,” I said. “Nice little family you got here, Macy. The blonde in particular. Where did you get her?”

  “Diane? Oh, I found her wandering around the hotel one night three or four years ago. Nearer four. She was looking for a job. Well, you know, I liked the way she was built. I thought I’d try to get me some, but when I went to peel her clothes off she threw a hysterical fit and said she’d kill me.”

  His eyes were fond with the memory of her and the pleasures of younger times. “I didn’t give up easy. I kept her around, but I never could — you know, hardly even touch her, she was so damn jumpy. Finally I got tired of chasing her and passed her on to Maxine and told him to put her to work somewhere. That was when I could still tell him things. Later on when I had Aimee on my hands I took her back because she was the only one who could handle the kid.”

  “She a nut of some kind?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Diane’s probably a little off balance, but harmless. She has these fits sometimes if people try to push her. Or maybe she’ll just sit around and stare and not say a word. But she’s really okay and she’s good for Aimee.” He grinned. “How do you like Aimee? How do you like that little monkey, huh?”

  I was expected to like Aimee. “Cute. She has a look like somebody chases her through her dreams.”

  He wagged his head. “Couple more years, she’ll forget all about it. I’ve given her something here. Security. She wakes up screaming now and she’s not alone. She’s sleeping in a big bed with Diane, not on some piss-caked cot in a stinkin’ room. She’s in a solid house with the ocean outside singing her to sleep. I’ve done something for her. She’ll forget.”

  “What’s she done to you?”

  “Huh?” He looked at me stupidly, shaking loose the clinging paternal thoughts.

  “Skip it,” I told him, and started toward the door.

  “You let me know when you got something,” he said, far too casually. I could hear the tension in his voice.

  “I’ll let you know.”

  In my room I picked up a coat and put it on over my sport shirt. I walked down the hall and ran into Owen Barr. He stopped and chugged back like a myopic beetle. He showed some signs of being conscious, so I spoke to him.

  “Hello, Owen. You still managing the Coral Gardens for Macy?”

  He looked up at me and almost snarled, “Get out of my way so I can go to my room, unless you’d rather I puke here in the hall.” I sidestepped and he went rapidly along, tipping against the wall a couple of times. I shrugged and went outside to the garage.

  Chapter Nine

  Diane and Aimee were waiting for me at the garage. Diane had changed from shorts to a tweedy-looking green skirt and Aimee was wearing a pink and white dress and white shoes and looking as if she might be suffering from it.

  I selected a Buick from the garage and they climbed in. Diane took sunglasses with heavy pink shell frames from her purse and put them on. Aimee regarded me steadily and inquisitively when she thought I wasn’t likely to glance at her. She was wearing a bit of lipstick, Diane’s shade. When we drove by the house Macy waved from the front porch and Aimee waved back, breaking out a smile for an instant. Then she sat forward on the edge of the seat with her small fingers curled over the dashboard and looked intently through the windshield.

  Reavis let us through the high gate, having left his submachine gun inside the house out of respect to the ladies. This was my first look at him by daylight, and there wasn’t much to see. Medium height and heavy in the chest, but in time the flesh would sag. He was a younger Rudy Mask.

  “It’s a beautiful morning,” Diane said. “I hope we don’t have to waste all of it in the doctor’s office.”

  “What’s Aimee going for?”

  “Shots.” Aimee almost flinched, her face troubled. Diane put an arm around her. “There’s nothing to it, baby. Diane’s going to get a couple herself.”

  “Then can we go to the show?” Aimee said insistently, as if she had been asking since waking up that morning.

  “Maybe we’ll have time. We have to eat lunch and see about your playsuits, too.”

  “And a bicycle.”

  Diane sighed. “I don’t know where you’re going to ride a bicycle around—”

  “But Daddy said—”

  “I know he did. I was just trying to be practical. We’ll see about the bicycle, too.”

  “I want to see a Bob Hope picture.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Diane said cheerfully. She smiled at me. “See how busy we’ll be today. You should come with us.”

  “I can’t take those shots. Pass out every time.”

  Aimee lapsed into stricken silence and Diane scowled at me, her eyes rolling in Aimee’s direction. She fussed with the child’s hair. Aimee began singing something to herself.

  “Are you working today?” Diane said.

  I nodded.

  “What will you try first? I just don’t see how you could track down someone like this. I’ve heard Macy talk about the newspaper clippings. They’ve been mailed from everywhere.”

  “I have to give it a try. There’s always a place to start.”

  “Where will you start?”

  I just smiled.

  Diane pouted. “Trusting, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “What clippings, Diane?”

  “Hush.” She turned her face and I could see it out of the corner of my eye — a very rare thing, fine bones and full, curved cheeks and clear creamy skin. No bumps, no marks. Small white teeth. “Well,” she said, “if I was going to be the detective I know where I’d go first.”

  “Oh, you do?” Her good spirits were beginning to warm me.

  She smiled smugly. “Yes. First of all I’d want to know about the child who didn’t die. Then I’d want to find... relatives, friends. Persons like that. Maybe one of them has carried a grudge all these years.”

  “It’s possible.”

  She hit me sharply on the leg. “You’re hopeless.”

  “How has Macy felt about these newspaper stories?”

  “Diane, what stories?”

  “Now, we’re talking about something — grown-up. Very stuffy.”

  Aimee bounced once on the rich leather seat cover and was still. We passed a parrot jungle and her eyes were large as she turned her head, catching glimpses of the bright-feathered birds. I slowed down so she could look.

  “Can we go there sometime?” She bounced on the seat again.

  “Sometime,” Diane said. To me she said, “He’s sort of acted like it was a joke. You know, the kind of joke somebody thinks is funny to make again and again but really isn’t, only you laugh so people won’t know you’re irritated by it. He doesn’t think anything can happen to him.”

  She looked away, not liking the questioning to be reversed. Her fingers reached out to the radio and she turned it on.

  “Do you think you’ll find this killer, Pete?” she asked, then, when Aimee looked curiously at her, apparently wished she hadn’t said killer.

  “I don’t know.” I slowed down, looked down the road, sped past a wobbly truck smoking like a clogged fireplace. “Maybe.”

  “You must be pretty g
ood,” Diane said. “I’ve heard Macy talk about you. He doesn’t understand you, but he likes you. Maybe for the same reason I like you. Because you’re not so easy to understand. You’ve a hard shiny surface around something that might be very good to know.”

  A guitar whanged furiously from the radio. An astonishing voice cried: “... Down at the end of Lonely Street, that’s — Heartbreak Hotel.” Diane made a face and changed stations.

  “Easy, lady,” I said, half-kidding, half-warning. I remembered the beach scene the night before, the long lush body, the touch of her fingertips.

  She dug in her purse for cigarettes, found one and lit it. She offered a drag to me and I took it, passed the cigarette back.

  “You married, Pete?”

  “No. Engaged.”

  She smoked for a while, silently. Breeze from the rolled-down windows lifted her hair away from her neck. She smoothed it absently. “Why did you leave her to come back?”

  “That’s kind of a stupid question, coming from you. It wasn’t because I wanted to.”

  “Let up on me, mister. The tone hurts.”

  “Sorry. I’m hurting, too.” I wished she hadn’t spoken. Thinking about Elaine wasn’t so good. It took my thoughts away from the job I had to do, so Macy could go on living. I wondered how Elaine would explain to her parents why I wasn’t around, why I had to leave so suddenly for Castile. For a moment I regretted I hadn’t told her everything. But it would only have caused her to worry more. My fingers ached from the tightness of my grip on the wheel. I knew now how others had felt when Macy’s kind of pressure was applied. Like the city official who committed suicide. I could hate Macy now, where once there was only dislike.

  “What has he got on you, Pete?” Diane asked.

  “You know everything else,” I said. “You should know that.”

  “That’s not fair,” she murmured, and turned from me to look out the window.

  I wondered about her. By her own admission she wasn’t normal. But nothing she had said or done in the brief time I had known her indicated any irrationality. She seemed shrewd and well-bred, with a spark of fun in her. From a purely physical standpoint, she was breathtaking. She could have been twenty-five or thirty. She was something of a mystery herself, and there were questions I wanted to ask her, and would, at a better time. I wanted to know why she was with Macy, why she had let herself be handed around like a piece of furniture.