Cannon's Mouth_A Rafferty P.I. Mystery

by W. Glenn Duncan

  I wasn’t happy with my performance; I wanted to sound nervous, but it came out whiny. You suppose Gielgud and Olivier ever had days like that?

  On the other hand, the hitter responded to whiny pretty well. “I almost shot you, asshole,” he said. “You were out like a light; didn’t even know I was there. Remember that, and don’t try to fuck with me!” His voice got a trifle screechy there at the end.

  “No problem. You’re calling the shots, Dick. Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “Wait there. I’ll call you right back.” The phone clattered briefly, then went dead.

  Cowboy said, “You don’t do a bad grovel, boss-man.”

  “It wasn’t good enough. He’s suspicious. I think I was too anxious to hand over the money.” I slipped the Mustang into gear and drove off again.

  “How’s he sound?” Cowboy said.

  “Nervous. Cautious. I think he’s using phone booths, in case we try to trace the call or lock the line. He’s changing booths now, I’d say.”

  “Tell me about him,” Cowboy said. “Never knowed anybody to load a Molotov cocktail with water before.”

  “Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it? As a warning it’s reasonably inventive. Most people wouldn’t know how to make one the right way, let alone modify it. And he knows a little bit about phone tricks and traps, too. He didn’t learn that kind of thing playing Trivial Pursuit. But at the same time he’s worried about meeting me to pick up the money. Hell, he’s more than worried; he’s downright flaky.”

  Cowboy said, “How’d that ‘burn alone’ routine go down?”

  “Great. He picked up on it, bragged that he had looked through the window and seen me asleep. So the good news is he doesn’t know about Hilda. She’s in the clear, as long as I don’t lead him to her.”

  We came to Central Expressway; I turned onto it and let the Mustang trundle along in the slow lane. “He gets angry,” I said. “Sometimes it sounds like he’s stirring himself up deliberately. For courage, maybe, or motivation; I can’t tell exactly. Oh, and he gave me a phony name, then forgot what he’d said.”

  Cowboy blew out his breath in disgust. “When you add it all up, it says this dude ain’t no pro.”

  “’Fraid not,” I said. “Sorry about that.”

  “Shit,” said Cowboy. “Goddamned amateurs can make you dead too easy.”

  “Good point.”

  He was right; amateurs are bad news. They don’t know how to read a situation, so they pull the trigger at strange times for even stranger reasons. They’re usually emotional, too, and that makes them unpredictable. But because of that unpredictability, they are sometimes very effective. Which is yet another problem with amateurs.

  You can’t ignore them; they’re too dangerous for that.

  The Mockingbird Lane exit came up. I took it and drove east, past the Dr Pepper plant. “Let’s go home,” I said. “If he calls back to set up a meet, I’ll need a case or something to pretend I still have the money.”

  “Did he try a con about how much money Dresden gave you?” Cowboy said.

  “Yep. He wanted to make sure I actually had the cash.”

  “Which was a good idea, you gotta admit that.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Goddamned amateurs.”

  “You’re starting to repeat yourself.”

  We arrived at my house a little after eleven. The phone rang at eleven forty-five.

  “That big art gallery place between Woodall Rogers Expressway and downtown,” he said. “You know it?” His voice was tight.

  “I’ll find it.”

  “The parking lot,” he said. “Twelve-thirty.” He hung up abruptly.

  “It’s on,” I told Cowboy.

  “’Bout time,” he said. “Let’s go hang that sucker out to dry.”

  Chapter 24

  The Dallas Museum of Art sits well back from Harwood Street, on the northern side of the central business district. The building looks drab to me, but most people like it. Most people don’t go there at one o’clock in the morning, though, and they don’t stand around beside their cars, squinting out into the night, wondering who’s out there.

  Those people definitely have the right idea.

  “What’n hell are you bitchin’ about now?” Cowboy’s voice floated up out of the Mustang’s darkened backseat.

  “I wasn’t bitching,” I said. “I was, ah, humming.” I strolled around the car, then came back to lean on the same fender. I carried my scarred old vinyl attaché case so the hitter—goddamn it, who was he?—could see it. He was late. I was tired. And maybe Cowboy was right; maybe I did bitch a little.

  “This turkey better show up soon,” I said. “My feet hurt.”

  Cowboy’s chuckle floated out of the car into the warm night air. “Hell, you might never see him,” he said. “Situation like this, lotsa old boys would hang back in the dark, use a deer rifle to take you out, then come pull that case out of your cold, dead hands.”

  “I’m not too impressed with that scenario,” I said.

  The backseat chuckled again. “Oh, it’d turn all right. I’d whack him for you, don’t worry about that.”

  “Wow, that’s a relief.”

  Cowboy had a good point. If the hitter was out there with a long gun, I couldn’t do much about it.

  And me with all that weaponry, too. I had my big military Colt in the back of my belt, a Spanish .25 in an ankle holster, and a sawed-off shotgun crammed into the attaché case. I’d had to cut that old twelve-gauge double-barrel way, way down to get it into the case. It was too short now. Having had a chance to think about it, I didn’t really want to be holding on to that thing when it went boom.

  Way to go, Rafferty. Three guns, and not one of them much good over, say, forty yards. Maybe I could throw the shotgun at—

  “Thing I can’t figure,” Cowboy said, “is why Dresden hired an amateur like this dude to waste his partner.”

  “Dresden’s an amateur himself. What does he know about hiring hard men?”

  “I s’pose. He paid way over the going rate, too.”

  “True,” I said.

  “And you gave all that money away,” Cowboy said wistfully. “To the cops.”

  “Heads up,” I said. “Company coming.”

  A lone car—medium-size GM; dark, maybe green—cruised up Harwood. It cautiously eased toward the curb and stopped. A man got out. He left the engine running and headlights on, and started into the parking lot, walking directly toward me.

  “Come to Papa,” I said softly, and reached back to grasp the comforting weight of the .45.

  Cowboy didn’t say anything, but there was a dry metallic click, and the Mustang shifted a fraction on its springs.

  The man was still thirty yards away; still coming. The headlights of his car threw a bright corona around his shape, turned him into a two-dimensional cutout with hard edges, but no detail. Both his hands were free, though. And empty. Why?

  I stepped away from the Mustang, holding the attaché case in front of me. The man stopped abruptly.

  “Hey, somebody there?” He leaned forward from the waist and wobbled as he peered into the dark. “Whozat anyway?”

  I moved around in an arc to get his car’s lights out of my eyes. His head didn’t follow me; he kept peering at where I’d been.

  “Shit-fire, anybody there or not?” he said.

  He sounded so obviously drunk, I was sure it was a gimmick. I looked around to make sure no one was coming up behind me, then pointed the Colt at him and said, “How’re you doing for Molotov cocktails tonight?”

  “Oops! Knew there was somebody there. Pearl for me buddy, but”—he fumbled with his zipper—“the damn stuff goes right through me. Drink a can and piss a quart, swear to God.”

  His belch blended with the splash of water as he urinated on the asphalt.

  After a long time—he was almost right about that quart—he sighed happily, zipped up, turned unsteadily, and stomped back toward his car
.

  “Drop in anytime,” I said.

  Back in his car he screeched his starter motor trying to start the idling engine, then lurched away with a sharp tire chirp. I walked back to the Mustang.

  “Forget it,” I said. “False alarm.”

  “What the hell was all that about?” Cowboy said.

  I told him. The car shook for several seconds.

  It was well past one o’clock. Every four or five minutes a car scuttled past on the lighted street. Mostly, though, nothing happened.

  “You know,” I said, “Dresden’s wife didn’t seem very upset. A little, maybe, but not much. You’d think she’d be climbing the walls, what with hubby gone and the cops pestering her.”

  “Maybe they haven’t talked to her yet,” Cowboy said. “Maybe they don’t want to spook her, figure to wait and see which way she jumps.”

  “Maybe.”

  At one-thirty I said, “This jerk is not coming. No way. He’s giving me time to give up and go home; then he’s going to call with another location.”

  Cowboy grunted. “Maybe, maybe not. You and me, we was in his shoes, we wouldn’t be in no hurry. We’d hide somewheres and just watch for an hour or two. ’Specially if we didn’t trust the opposition to play fair.”

  “We’re pros,” I said. “He’s an amateur.”

  “Yeah, but, for an amateur, this dude’s got some pretty good moves.”

  “True, damn it,” I said.

  At one forty-five, we decided to wait until two o’clock. A few minutes before two, though, a DPD prowl car went by twice, cruising slowly, being oh-so-cool.

  Why explain messy details like sawed-off shotguns? We left while the prowl car was on the other side of the block.

  Cowboy complained about “goddamned amateurs” all the way to my house.

  I was wrong about the hitter; he didn’t phone again. So now he was a wild card. He might do anything, or nothing. Cowboy was right. Goddamned amateurs.

  We split what little remained of the night into two-hour segments and took turns sleeping and watching.

  During my first watch I put a bowl of milk out back for the visiting cat, but it never showed up.

  I came on duty again at six-thirty on Tuesday morning, eye-gritty and brain-fogged, far too groggy to enjoy the cool dawn. The milk bowl was empty.

  Cowboy said the cat had dropped by while I slept. “It ain’t such a bad-looking critter,” he said, “if you happen to like cats.”

  Then he went back to bed and left me to blink and scratch and work out what we were going to do next.

  Chapter 25

  Noon Tuesday. My house. The hitter still had not phoned. “Hell with this,” I said to Cowboy. “Let’s go back to Plan A.”

  He looked up from his plate of ham and eggs. “I forget what Plan A is, exactly.”

  “That is the one where we don’t wait around for this stupid phone to ring. We backtrack through Dresden to find the hitter.”

  Cowboy nodded and pushed his hat half an inch higher on his forehead. I wondered if he wore his hat at the breakfast table at home. Probably. Mimi probably wore hers, too.

  “Oh, that Plan A,” Cowboy said. “The one where we break into Dresden’s house, wander around with our thumbs in our ears, then leave with nothing to show for it.”

  “Go to hell. Today we’ll do better. I have an idea.”

  Cowboy nodded again. “Well, as long as you’ve got an idea …”

  We walked up Carl Dresden’s sidewalk at two-thirty, after running Noonebury’s surveillance gauntlet. The fake catering truck was gone today. There was another department Dodge at the curb, though, and across the street a workman in a Dallas Power & Light uniform didn’t seem to know what he was looking for in the bottom of a utilities access hole.

  “Do they seem awfully obvious to you?” I said, as we stepped up onto the front porch.

  Cowboy sniffed. “Funny thing for you to say, walking around in a suit like that.”

  There was nothing wrong with my suit. It was light gray mostly, with a very small black jiggly pattern that made the suit seem dark gray from more than a foot away. I thought it was pretty classy.

  “Suit looks like it’s made out of that screen door stuff,” Cowboy said.

  I pushed the doorbell button. “Never mind the suit,” I said. “The real problem is this dumb tie. Twice in one week is a bad precedent. And I haven’t figured out how to explain you.”

  Cowboy had flatly refused to wear anything remotely resembling a working cop’s wardrobe. He had his usual boots, jeans, western shirt and hat. So there.

  “You’ll think of something,” he said. “Tell her I’m a Texas Ranger.”

  Then there were rapid footsteps inside the house, and the front door opened. Mrs Dresden swiveled her head from me to Cowboy and back again. The action was like her picture come to life—darting and birdlike.

  “Mrs Carl Dresden?” I said formally.

  “Yesss. What is it?” More head-darting, but apparently only honest confusion in her bright blue eyes.

  I flapped my wallet at her, to give her a quarter-second glimpse of my honorary deputy sheriff’s card and a dime-store plastic badge. “Detective Inspector Ptarmigan,” I said. “This is Sergeant Eider. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Cowboy shuffled and grunted beside me, then slowly took off his hat and drawled, “Howdy, ma’am.” Only a professional Texan could take a corny line like that and turn it into a courtly romanticism. He did. She loved it. She preened and twittered.

  I decided not to bother with my story that Cowboy was an undercover cop on the stockyard detail.

  “Oh, my,” Mrs Dresden said, “this must be about poor Maxwell. Do come in, officers, please.”

  Cowboy smirked at me as we filed past her. Inside, she wondered aloud about where we should sit for our chat. She offered, and we declined, coffee, tea, lemonade, and whatever was next on the list.

  We went into the living room. Mrs Dresden fluttered across the room to fiddle with the fold on a drape, then came back to plump a cushion. She was one of those people who seem to be in constant motion but never accomplish anything noticeable.

  She finally maneuvered Cowboy and me into overstuffed chairs, and she landed on a floral-patterned couch. Even then she kept reaching out to adjust magazines on the coffee table, pluck imagined fluff off her couch, and rearrange her skirt around her legs. It made me tired just to watch her work that hard.

  “We’re investigating the, uh, death of Mr Max Krandorff.”

  Mrs Dresden nodded. “Yes, I thought that might be it.”

  “I hate to trouble you with this, Mrs Dresden. I’d rather talk to your husband, but he seems to be out of town.” I took out my notebook and flipped through it. A few seconds of frowns and notebook-flipping always puts the final polish on the fake-cop routine. With me, you get all the optional extras.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Carl’s in Houston on business.” She took a dainty handkerchief out of her left sleeve, fiddled with it then put it back.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That’s what I was told at his office. A person named, uh …” I frowned at the notebook page with a new barbecue sauce recipe and said, “Can’t quite read my own—”

  “Sharon, perhaps. Sharon Palmerston?” She turned to Cowboy and said confidentially, “Sharon practically runs that office. I don’t know how they’d get along without her.”

  “That’s it,” I said. “Palmerston.” I wrote it down. The woman I’d talked to yesterday was named Sharon. “Mrs Dresden, where is your husband staying in Houston?”

  She smiled. “At the Holiday Inn. Carl always stays at Holiday Inns.”

  I said, “When did he leave for Houston, ma’am?” I’m not proud; if down-home stuff like “ma’am” works, I go with it.

  She frowned prettily and touched a fingertip to her lips. “Why, um, last Wednesday. I remember because it was the very night when Number Three was held up and Max was … well, you know.”


  “Yes. Have you spoken to your husband since then, Mrs Dresden?”

  “Of course! Carl was beside himself with grief. They were close, you know. Some business partners aren’t, I know, but Carl and Max, well …”

  We tsk-tsked over the injustice of it all; then I said, “Did you phone your husband, or did he phone you?”

  “Now let me think … I believe he phoned me, because—Yes, he did! I had just hung up from speaking to Sharon. She called me—a darling girl, Sharon—so I wouldn’t hear about poor Maxwell on the news first, you know, and right after that the phone rang, and it was Carl.” She leaned forward, suddenly anxious. “Is that important?”

  I smiled at her. “Just a routine question, ma’am. Have you phoned him in Houston since then?”

  “Oh, certainly. Twice—no, I tell a lie—three times. The last time was only last night. Late. After a totally incompetent airline employee said Carl was coming home and needed a ride. You wouldn’t believe it; I spent hours at the airport waiting and Carl never—”

  “Pardon me, Mrs Dresden. You say you phoned him last night?” This sounded like pay dirt.

  “Yes, that’s right, officer.” She smiled at me encouragingly, I suddenly remembered a schoolteacher somewhere who had looked at me like that on the rare occasions when I got lucky with algebra.

  “And where did you phone him, Mrs Dresden?”

  “Why, at the Holiday Inn, Inspector. Where else would I leave a message for him?”

  Cowboy nodded to himself and seemed to melt farther into his chair.

  I said to Mrs Dresden, “Bear with me, please. I want to make sure I understand this. You called him last night?”

  “Yes.” Smiling more encouragement.

  “At the Holiday Inn.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t talk to him, because he wasn’t in his room. So you left a message, and he called you back.”

  “Well, Carl hasn’t called me back yet,” she said, “but he will. He’s very busy, you understand. The poor dear works far too hard.”