The James Michael Ullman Crime Novel

by James Michael Ullman

  It was ironic. If Dinah was to be believed, Adam Lord would soon salvage Jon’s reputation. Howard would finance the trip to Vegas. Slowly but surely, Jon’s problems were being solved. All but the big one. The fact that when he went West, he’d be working for Lou Gardino.

  “That’s good of you, Howard.”

  “I told you, forget it. What’d you mean just now, the remark about Schatz never being found?”

  “He went off with someone, very likely someone he’d seen before. Someone he knew slightly at least. I think he was murdered, and his killer hid the body, so nobody’d ever be sure what happened to him. And that leads to what Schatz would have called an interesting speculation. If the old man knew his killer, maybe I know him too. Maybe the key to the whole puzzle’s been under my nose from the beginning.”

  “That’s a pretty farfetched notion.” Howard smiled. “I think you’re…”

  The phone rang. Suddenly preoccupied with a flood of memories, Jon got up, walked to the telephone table and lifted the receiver.

  “Chakorian speaking.”

  “Jon?”

  The connection was poor. The line crackled with faint interference, but he recognized that voice.

  Stunned with disbelief, he froze. It was his fathers voice. Absolutely, positively, his father…”

  “Jon, say nothing. Get away. There’s been a terrible mistake. I’ll explain it all. Come alone, right now, to your favorite place.”

  The line went dead.

  CHAPTER 14

  Slowly, Jon put the phone back on its cradle.

  “Who,” Howard asked, “was that?”

  “Wrong number.”

  “You sure you feel okay? You look…”

  “I’m a little bushed, yes. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll turn in early.”

  “Of course. There’s just one other matter I wanted to discuss. I…”

  “Tomorrow, Howard.” Jon went to the door and opened it. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow, first thing. And thanks again.”

  “Yeah. Well—I get the message. See you around.”

  Howard left, a little miffed. Jon watched from the window as his uncle trotted down the steps and merged with the crowd on North Wells.

  The squad car was still out front. Someone might be watching the rear, too, but he didn’t think they’d be observing the building’s sides, not with his apartment on the second floor.

  He loaded the .45, shoved it under his belt and strolled through the apartment, turning off lights. Then he went out the front door and down to the first-floor landing. A family named Clancy lived in the apartment below his. The parents ran a gift shop. They’d be at the store now, but one or more of their children should be home.

  He knocked on Clancy’s door. The twelve-year-old son opened it.

  “Hi, Timmy. Your folks in?”

  “No. Just me and the kids.”

  “That’s good.” Jon stepped inside. “How’d you like five bucks? Just for letting me climb out your bedroom window?”

  From Clancy’s window, he dropped to a gangway, climbed a fence to the adjoining yard, climbed another fence and emerged on Wells Street behind the squad car. His Pontiac was at a service station on LaSalle. He walked there, and a few minutes later was driving on the Eisenhower Expressway toward his favorite place, the Retreat, the tract of land Rudy Chakorian had once dreamed of making the residential showplace of the Midwest.

  * * * *

  He parked in a lane a mile from the Retreat’s entrance road. Thanks to a toll way that covered most of the distance, the Retreat was little more than an hour from the city limits now, but the urban complex hadn’t reached here yet. A few homes and farms were spotted around, but the land on the Retreat’s side of the highway was too low and wooded, too sandy, too subject to flooding from the stream that flowed behind it to encourage residential development.

  Jon got out and opened the trunk. The trunk light splayed on its contents: the gun case, a box holding the magazines, loaded now with caliber .30 M-l ball cartridges, and the fatigue jacket, GI pants and GI shoes he always kept there for weekends of shooting with Molloy in Wisconsin.

  Insects swirled around the trunk light as Jon removed his suit, shirt, tie and shoes and tossed the clothing into the back seat. He donned the GI pants and fatigue jacket and laced his feet into the GI shoes. Fine. He was properly dressed for the night’s work, in loose clothes that wouldn’t rip or tear in the woods. He didn’t know who or what waited at the Retreat. If his father was there alone, these precautions would have been unnecessary. But if someone else was there, or his father had made that phone call under duress, someone else was about to get an unpleasant surprise.

  Cumbersome as it was, he’d take the .45 under his belt as a back-up gun. The carbine, though, was his big artillery. He hauled that from its case, loaded it with the fifteen-round magazine and shoved the thirty-round magazine into his hip pocket. He worked the bolt once, transporting the first cartridge from the magazine to the chamber, ready to be fired. Thereafter, the gun would fire each time Jon squeezed the trigger until the fifteen rounds were spent.

  Jon closed the trunk. With long, silent strides, he went back to the road and loped along the shoulder toward the Retreat. Jon’s favorite place. A peculiar phrase, that. He hadn’t used it since childhood, since a day many years ago when he’d told Mike Bonella about it. Only a few people knew Jon had ever said that about the Retreat. Most of those people would have forgotten the phrase by now. His father though—his father would never have forgotten it.

  He stayed on the highway for half a mile, darting off just once to hide as a car went by. But as he neared a bend leading to the Retreat’s border, he swung into the woods. His plan was to work his way to the stream and then move along it, approaching from the rear, where he’d be least expected. He’d last visited the place a few months ago. The cabin was still in the clearing, near the grate where Rudy, Jon and Bess had cooked wieners so many times. The cabin would be the critical point. If his father waited at the Retreat, he’s probably be in or near that cabin.

  A full moon bathed the terrain with a silver haze. The forest broke; for a while, he trotted over open country. Visibility was very good in the open. It was a pleasant night, cool, with a light breeze, but his mouth was dry and his heart pounded. In a few minutes, he’d know. In a few minutes, the big question in the Chakorian case—was Rudy Chakorian still alive?—would be answered.

  The forest closed in again. Jon slowed to a walk, turning toward the Retreat. To his right, placid and slow-moving, the stream glittered. Another hundred yards or so and he was on the property. The clearing came into view on his left, the cabin several hundred yards off, but Jon stuck to the woods, moving along the clearing’s fringe. Finally, when abreast of the cabin, he crawled to an outlying bush, flipped the carbine’s safety off, and peered around.

  Overhead the treetops swayed, but in the woods and near the cabin nothing stirred. There was a dim light in the cabin, though. A shaft of yellow filtered from a window at the side facing the entrance road.

  Jon wanted a better look at that, the view that would have greeted him if he’d entered the Retreat the normal way. Foot by foot, he continued to work around the clearing’s perimeter. Open space surrounded the cabin for at least a hundred yards on all sides. If this was an ambush, the open space would be the danger zone. The moon provided more than enough light for a hidden marksman.

  Gradually, his angle of sight of the cabin window widened. Something was in the window, blocking the light, but Jon couldn’t make it out. He covered another twenty yards, crawled beyond the woods to a thicket, and peered at the cabin again.

  A man sat there, only his head and shoulders visible, looking out at the break in the forest where the entrance road terminated. He was a small man, much too small, it was easy to perceive even at this distance, to be Spook. He wore what appea
red to be a suitcoat and a Homburg hat.

  Fascinated, Jon stared. He rose. In a half-crouch, he took a few steps forward, drawn toward the cabin almost hypnotically. He had to get closer. He had to see more. Why, that was his father…

  To Jon’s right, on his side of the clearing, something in the woods moved. A man, perhaps, shifting position.

  Jon whirled and threw himself back into the thicket.

  As he did, someone opened up with a burst from an automatic weapon, filling the air with bullets, kicking up dirt where he’d been standing and then spraying the thicket with another burst.

  * * * *

  Jon lay still.

  The man who’d fired screamed, “Jeez, he’s behind us!”

  From the other side of the clearing, another man hollered, “You get him?”

  “I dunno.”

  Bizarrely, the figure in the cabin window continued to stare at the entrance road. It had been a lure, bait for the trap. This wouldn’t be any tea party either. If the first guy packed an automatic weapon, a submachine gun or a semiautomatic rifle illegally altered to fire bursts, instead of single shots, the second guy probably did too.

  A large, uprooted tree lay less than ten yards from Jon. It was in an exposed position. Once behind it, he might be pinned there, but it would offer more protection than this thicket.

  Jon got up and ran for it. They both saw him and opened fire.

  He made it, and the firing stopped.

  Whatever they were shooting, they counted on firepower, not accuracy, to do the job. And if they’d caught Jon in the open near the entrance road, as their positions indicated they’d planned, Jon would have been cut to ribbons. He had a chance now though, and the longer the battle lasted the more likely they’d break it off and run. This wasn’t a remote section of Arizona. People would hear the noise, and sooner or later a state trooper or sheriff’s deputy would come down the highway seeking its source.

  The man nearest Jon was the immediate problem. Jon heard him moving through the woods trying to get behind him, so he crawled to the tree’s uprooted end and fired blindly in the direction of the sound. The guy fired a short burst in return, hoping to force Jon to keep his head down. Jon spotted the flashes in a grove of trees. He poured it right back—eight, ten, twelve rounds, expending every cartridge in the magazine. As he fired, the advantage switched to his side. After a second burst, the man in the grove didn’t fire any more. He was either hit, reloading, or just scared and chewing dirt.

  Jon ducked, switching magazines. The guy across the clearing fired a burst, and Jon poked his head up and returned that fire too, four quick shots at a clump of bushes where he thought he’d seen a pinpoint of light. He ducked again.

  Across the clearing, the second man called, “You okay?”

  The guy in the grove yelled, “Yeah, but let’s cut out! It’s a bust!”

  “No!”

  More bullets splattered around Jon’s tree. Jon ignored the far-off guy and concentrated on the man who wanted to quit. He aimed at the grove and poured bullets into it as fast as he could pull the trigger, another ten or twelve rounds.

  That did it. When the shooting stopped again, Jon heard him blundering through the brush toward the highway.

  Now he had a choice to make: go after the man fleeing in the woods, who was maybe a hundred yards away, or stay here and shoot it out with the man on the other side of the clearing, who was several hundred yards distant. He wasn’t even sure where the second man was. He had a hunch that any minute now he’d flee too, so he got up and ran after the first guy. Three last, forlorn shots sounded from across the clearing. The bullets whined around Jon, and then he was hidden in the forest himself.

  He knew every inch of this property; he veered to a path and sprinted along it. His quarry had a good head start, but the highway was a long way off. Running on the path, Jon just might reach the highway first.

  The path ended at an embankment overlooking the road. When Jon got there, he paused, getting his breath. To his left, the man was still stumbling through the forest. Below the embankment and behind a screen of bushes, the top of a car gleamed.

  Crouching, the carbine at the ready, Jon moved toward the car.

  Forty yards from Jon, the guy broke out of the woods and spotted him immediately. He whirled, swinging a submachine gun, firing even before he had it in position, while Jon brought the carbine to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger twice.

  The man spun around, tumbled into a thick clump of weeds and lay very still.

  Jon ran to him and kneeled. It was Spook. He was still breathing, but judging by the blood spilling from his chest and stomach he wouldn’t live much longer.

  Jon shook him. Spook opened his eyes.

  “My father!” Jon yelled. “Where’s my father, what’d you do to him?”

  Spook managed a grin. He was a tough one, all right.

  “Screw you.”

  “Come on, come on, you’re dying, for Christ’s sake. Where’s my father? Who’s your pal? Where’s Schatz?”

  “T-together.” Spook thought that was funny. His grin broadened. “Schatz—Chakorian—together…”

  His eyes closed. That was all anyone would ever get out of Spook.

  Back toward the clearing, a car started. That made sense. It would have been a big risk, the two of them coming out here with just one getaway car. Jon waited to see which way the car would go. Headlights flashed against the sky; then they turned the other way toward the toll road, and the sound of the engine faded.

  That made sense too. Assuming Jon was still alive and armed, driving into his line of fire in a car would have been tantamount to committing suicide.

  Quickly, Jon went through Spook’s pockets. He found a wallet and some keys and carried the stuff to Spook’s car, a late-model Chewy with Illinois plates. No doubt the car was registered under a fake name. These boys had plenty of money, the expense of buying an extra car wouldn’t mean much to them.

  Documents and credit cards identified the wallet’s owner as Berkley T. Harris, rancher, of Dry Springs, Nevada. Something else was in the wallet too—a receipt from a realty management firm, for a month’s rent on a basement apartment in a building on North Broadway Avenue in Chicago. Probably, Spook had used the place as a Chicago base of operations.

  It was an interesting situation. Spook was dead, but his friend didn’t know it. For all his friend knew, Spook had killed Jon in that last exchange of fire.

  Jon thought about that for a few moments. He thought about other things too. It had been his father’s voice on the phone, and with that as the starting point the pieces in the puzzle were suddenly falling into place. Yes, it all fitted. As he’d told Howard, it had been under his nose from the beginning. Almost every last detail became clear including, and especially, the identity of Spook’s friend…

  Jon tried Spook’s keys in the ignition. When he found the right one, he started the car and drove off in a hurry, away from the toll road.

  * * * *

  He dialed Gardino’s number from an outdoor booth in a small town. The gangster came on the line a few seconds after Jon identified himself.

  “Yeah?”

  Gardino’s voice was grating and high-pitched. Just hearing it set Jon’s nerves on edge, making him clench his fist, wishing he could get his hands on the guy one day…

  “The name you want,” Jon said, “is Berkley T. Harris. He was a rancher, he lived in Dry Springs, Nevada. I just killed him.”

  “You what?”

  “Killed him. He and a friend tried to kill me. They lured me into the country with a phone call, offering to sell information. The friend got away.”

  “The cops know this?”

  “Not yet. I don’t think they’ll find the body until morning. Even if they do, he won’t be identified right away, I took his wallet and his car. Tha
t’s our deal, Gardino. You’ve got the name and address, so lay off Bonella.”

  “I ain’t sure.” He sounded angry. “I wanted the guy alive.”

  “Well, he’s dead, it was him or me. His pal’s the only one who can tell you about the diamonds now. You must have friends in Vegas. Maybe they can get a lead to his pal before the police do.”

  “If this is a double cross—if you’re holding out anything…”

  “Look, I have to find a lawyer. I’ll be in a ton of trouble, running off with Harris’s car and leaving a body in the woods. I’ll tell the police I was trying to chase the other guy, but without a witness to the shooting I might get stuck with a homicide rap myself. I’ve done my part, and if anything happens to Mike, you son-of-a-bitch, I’ll put a bullet in your skull.”

  * * * *

  The building named on Spook’s rent receipt was a big, yellow, brick structure in an advanced state of disrepair.

  Jon drove past it and parked around the corner. This was a rough neighborhood, many of its occupants white migrants from the hill country. It was also a neighborhood of transients. Maintaining an apartment here would have had many advantages for Spook. He’d enjoy more privacy than in a motel or hotel; he’d be just another stranger and could come and go as he pleased, attracting little or no attention.

  The scene had been set during the ride back from Chicago. Newscasts told how state troopers, investigating reports of gunfire in a rural area, found Jon’s car near the highway, his clothes in it. Chicago police said he’d evaded guards at his apartment earlier in the evening. The troopers drove into the Retreat and discovered a mannequin, wearing a suit and a Homburg hat, in a cabin. They also found many expended shell casings at points around a clearing. A search of the wooded area would begin at dawn, and a police spokesman expressed fears that Jon had been murdered.