Cannon's Mouth_A Rafferty P.I. Mystery

by W. Glenn Duncan

  “The other times you phoned him, how long did it take him to call you back?”

  “Oh, I have no idea. A few hours, perhaps.”

  “But always the same day?” I said. “Not the next day?”

  “Well, one time it was the next day, I think. Why on earth are you asking me all these things? Just phone Carl; he’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we’ll do that,” I said.

  Chapter 26

  Mrs Dresden smiled at me from her perch on the couch, while I pretended to read a blank page in my notebook and wondered how to play it from here.

  Kevin Noonebury would have a long wait until this woman did anything incriminating. She was clean. I’d have bet money on that. When people lie to you often enough, you learn to recognize it.

  “Mrs Dresden,” I said, “I’m sorry to say we’re not making much progress in finding the people who killed Mr Krandorff.”

  “Oh, my,” she said. She held her head tilted slightly to the right, and she paid very close attention to what I said. Which didn’t make it any easier.

  “I’d like to have a look at … uh, does your husband have an office here at home?” Nearly messed up there, Rafferty.

  “Carl uses a corner of my sewing room sometimes for his business work.” She smiled. “Though he likes to say that I use three corners of his office.”

  I said, “We’d like to have a look at the room, please.”

  I avoided the word search, because that puts people off. Trouble was, the only euphemism I could think of was “have a look at.” Weak, Rafferty. Very weak, actually, because I was thinking in terms like loot and plunder.

  “Oh, my,” she said again. “How very strange. Why would you want to do a thing like that?” She frowned and reminded me of that algebra teacher again. This time I wasn’t doing so well.

  “There may be some reference to, uh, Mr Krandorff. Clues to who—”

  “But that was a robber who killed poor Maxwell. Wasn’t it? That’s what Carl said.”

  “Yes, ma’am, it probably was. But we have to look at ever poss—”

  Cowboy interrupted me with a soft drawl so loaded with Texas gallantry, it dribbled on its way to Mrs Dresden. “We’d surely ’preciate your help here.” He pronounced it hep hair. “Surely we would, ma’am.”

  Cowboy smiled at her, too, a down-home, aw-shucks, country-boy smile that melted Mrs Dresden like an ice cream cone on a noon sidewalk.

  “Well, if it’s important,” she said, getting up. “I’ll show you where it is.” Cowboy unfolded himself from the soft chair and towered over the small woman. She looked up at him and said, “I’ll have coffee and cake ready when you’re done.”

  I said, “Don, why don’t you help Mrs Dresden with the coffee. It won’t take me a minute to, ah, examine the room for clues.”

  Mrs Dresden turned toward me. “What a wonderful idea. It’s right up the stairs, Inspector. On your left.”

  Behind and above her, Cowboy glared at me. He mouthed “Don? Don Eider?” and grimaced. But he had that slow, sleepy grin back in place when Mrs Dresden beamed back at him and said, “Come with me, Sergeant. I do hope you like chocolate cake. I put nuts in it, you see, because Carl …”

  They disappeared into the kitchen. I went up the stairs like a rat up a drainpipe. The two shoe boxes we’d seen before were still on the counter in the workroom, sewing room, office, what ever the hell it was.

  The boxes were loaded with paper, apparently stuffed in at random. There were a couple of wire-bound steno pads, pages torn from several different scratch pads, and folded sheets of typing paper. Some of the scribbles were do-this, do-that reminders, but most of what I saw in a quick riffle was financial calculations. As Cowboy had said, it was too abbreviated and unlabeled to decode here.

  I tucked both boxes under my arm and carried them downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs, I took Dresden’s telephone number gadget out of the phone-table drawer and put it into the boxes. I prowled around a little more, too, but didn’t find anything particularly interesting.

  There was a screened porch on the back of the house; I slipped out that way to get the loot past Mrs Dresden in the kitchen and the Noonebury surveillance teams out front. I carried the boxes through the backyard and left them under a bush by the gate from the alley.

  On the way back to the house, I noticed a door in the back wall of the separate garage. It was unlocked. Never could pass up an unlocked door.

  Inside, the garage was typical. Messier than most, maybe, but still tidier than mine. Mrs Dresden’s Chrysler was there. The other parking bay was empty. Whatever Carl drove, it was probably parked in an airport lot somewhere. That was a shame. It would have been useful to toss Dresden’s car.

  The Chrysler hadn’t been out for several hours; its hood was cool. I don’t know why I checked that. Some things you do by reflex action, I guess.

  I was leaving the garage, going out through the back door again, when I noticed a pile of magazines in a big garbage can half filled with papers and bottles. The magazines were the top layer of trash, the latest things to be thrown out. I picked them out of the garbage and spread them across the hood of Mrs Dresden’s Chrysler.

  They were all gun, survivalist, or quasi-military magazines like the one he’d carried the day he approached me downtown. One of them might have been the same magazine; I couldn’t remember well enough. Some were current issues, newsstand pristine and apparently unthumbed. Others were far out of date, soiled and dog-eared. There were some I recognized and some I didn’t. They had titles like Firefight, Aftermath, and Combat Action. I found myself grinning broadly. I had a good feeling about those magazines.

  I scooped them into a pile, carried them outside, and hid them with the shoe boxes of papers.

  Then I sneaked back into the house and let Mrs Dresden hear me clump around.

  “Oh, there you are, Inspector!” she said, and smiled as she wagged a finger at me. “Hurry now. Poor Sergeant Eider is waiting for his cake.”

  We sat at the dining room table, used the good china, and looked at two thousand snapshots of the Dresden grandchildren who lived in a place named—I swear this is true—Succasunna, New Jersey.

  I couldn’t tell Billy from Donny, or remember which of them played Little League ball, and I didn’t even have a second helping of cake. That pile of goodies outside gnawed at me. All those juicy clues waiting to lead me to the hitter. I was on to him. I could feel it.

  Rafferty’s Rule Twenty: Any hunch so strong it hurts just has to be right.

  I hoped.

  Chapter 27

  “Now I understand how he’s doing it,” I said to Hilda. “It’s pretty cute. Dresden flew to Houston—probably flew, anyway, too much driving otherwise—and checked into a hotel.”

  We were sitting on Hilda’s living room floor, surrounded by my booty from Dresden’s house. I waved a survivalist magazine as a pointer and expounded Rafferty’s Theory of Dresdenivity.

  “After he checked in, the sneaky bastard boogied away into the dark, dark night. So, officially, he’s there. He’s not hiding, oh, no. The hotel registration records prove it. But he’s not there, not really. What he’s doing, babe, is phoning in every once in a while to get any messages. Betcha. He might be actually going back to the hotel, but I doubt that. Using the phone is safer.”

  Hilda put her coffee mug on a coaster in the midst of the debris. “Why would he use such a complicated routine?”

  “To keep his options open. Eventually, if the dust settles, Dresden can surface with a song and dance like ‘Boy, have I been busy! Work, work, work. And by the way, did anything interesting happen while I was gone?’”

  Hilda said, “Won’t the hotel wonder about him being away from his room all the time? They’d worry about getting paid wouldn’t they?”

  “No problem. Once the old credit card’s been through the imprinter, the hotel doesn’t care if he sleeps in the room, or uses it to store his suitcase, or j
ust likes to walk around with the key in his pocket. Hell, he’s not breaking any laws down there.”

  “Hmm.” Hilda said.

  “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” I said. I tossed the magazine onto the pile of others like it and drank some beer. Thirsty work, expounding theories. “Now, here comes the really cute part, Hil. If the dust doesn’t settle, if the cops start looking seriously for Dresden, he has a big head start. Hell, they’d still be talking to the Holiday Inn desk clerk while Dresden cinched up his seat belt and placed his seat back in the upright position. Next stop: Rio.”

  Hilda looked at her watch. So did I. Seven-fifty; well past hungry. Cowboy and Mimi had gone for Mexican food and would be back any minute. None too soon, either.

  Hilda said, “Who, exactly, is this man Dresden hiding from? The police, the man he hired to kill his partner, or you? Or all three of you?”

  “You mean all two of us. Remember, Dresden thinks I’m the one he hired to kill Max.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “He thought that when he gave you the money, but he may know better by now. After all, the real killer apparently has some way to contact him. And if he does know that he paid the wrong person, he’d hide from both of you, right?”

  “That’s good, Hil. And it might explain why the hitter runs so hot and cold about contacting me.”

  “Because he’s looking for Dresden, too,” she said. “Trying to get his fee from either one of you, and he doesn’t care which.”

  “Right,” I said. “You’re very good at this, babe. I’m surrounded by talented amateurs this time.”

  Hilda stood up and ruffled my hair. “Running you ragged are they, big guy?”

  “Cowboy and I are chugging along. We’re getting there.” I got up, too, and we started to set the dining table.

  “Chugging is the right word,” Hilda said. “I’m sorry about that car.”

  I shrugged. “It got us here.”

  It was an ancient Rambler from an el cheapo car rental company I had never heard of. This afternoon, after we’d picked up the things I’d swiped from Dresden’s house, I had decided to fall back and regroup at Hilda’s. While I changed from my suit to comfortable clothes, Cowboy arranged for Mimi to drop a car at the parking garage we’d selected for a cutout point.

  We left my house with no sign of the hitter or his white Tempo, doubled back more often than we needed to, and finally drove to the big garage and searched for whatever car Mimi had rented for us.

  “You should have seen us,” I told Hilda. “I swear that place had forty floors. And we must have checked every car on every floor, looking for the one with a green ribbon on the rearview mirror and a copy of Western Horseman on the back shelf.”

  Hilda stood in one spot, leaned over the table, and distributed four place mats and plates. I walked around and around the table, dealing out silverware. Memo to behavioral science department: there’s a doctoral thesis on gender differences in table setting just waiting to be snapped up.

  “Finally,” I said, “way the hell up in a corner on the top floor, we found the Rambler Mimi rented. There was a pickup parked next to it, a pickup with one of those little campers on the back. Not the walk-in kind, just a low roof over the bed. Ah, I say bed deliberately here, because there was a bed in there, and a couple who were, shall we say, locked in the throes of passion.”

  Hilda said, “Don’t come a-knockin’ when this van’s a rockin’.”

  “You got it. Plus, there were two other guys standing around, leaning on cars. Hanging out, being cool. Soon as they saw us, one of them came down with a sudden case of ‘Feet, don’t fail me now.’”

  Hilda put a napkin beside each plate. She put two extra napkins at my place. I don’t know why it is, but I always seem to get the drippy tacos.

  “Cowboy and I figured it for a gang rape. We bailed out of the Mustang. I grabbed the guy who’d tried to rabbit, and Cowboy damn near ripped the back flap off that camper top. But the woman inside just smiled and called him honey and told him to wait his turn.”

  “Oh, really,” Hilda said.

  “Yeah. It turned out she’s a hooker. That was her camper. I don’t know how she operates exactly. Maybe she drives around till she gets a full truckload, then parks to work off the backlog. Whatever.”

  Hilda shook her head slowly and went to the kitchen for glasses. When she came back, I put the glasses around the table and said, “Well, you know how much weaponry Cowboy lugs around; he feels naked unless he’s fully outfitted for World War III. We had to shift Cowboy’s armory from the Mustang to the Rambler. We didn’t need an audience for that, so we chased the two guys away. Pretty soon the third guy, the one who was in the camper, came out. Maybe he finished; maybe Cowboy put him off his stroke, I don’t know. Anyway, we ran him off, too.”

  Hilda put a vase of flowers in the center of the table. We went into the kitchen. She got out serving dishes and platters and put them on the counter.

  “But,” I said, “funny part was when the hooker came out. First, though, she saw me and offered her services. Free, naturally. Probably wanted something to remember during her twilight years—”

  “Naturally,” Hilda said.

  “—but then she realized we’d scared away her customers. I never saw a woman get so mad so fast. She accused us of restraint of trade and harassment and violating her civil rights.”

  “That’s it!” Hilda put her fists on her hips. “Rafferty, if you think I’m going to believe this one, you’re crazy,” she said. “You got me last week with that flasher-in-a-wheelchair story. I admit that, but not this one. No way!”

  “Hil, baby, would I lie about—?”

  “Yes,” Hilda said. “You would.”

  “Anyway, the hooker carried on until Cowboy said he’d let the air out of her tires. She called that ‘preempting her economic potential.’ I assume that meant she couldn’t cruise for customers on four flat tires. So she left and—”

  Cowboy and Mimi arrived then. The kitchen became crowded with people and food wrappers and spicy aromas. There may well be things that smell better than Mexican food, but I’d have argued about it at the time.

  While we put burritos and tacos and frijoles and chili Colorado into serving dishes, Hilda said to Mimi, “Wait until you hear Rafferty’s latest tall tale. He claims they met a prostitute who talks like an economist. It’s hilarious, the stories he makes up.”

  Cowboy frowned at me. “Economist? Said she was a law student, didn’t she? Thought she said law student anyway.”

  “I rest my case,” I said.

  Hilda and Mimi looked at each other. “It could be,” Mimi said. “With these two, you just never know.”

  We ate then. Cowboy had also brought Mexican beer to go with the food. An inspired move. I got stuck with the drippy tacos again—what else?—but it was a great meal.

  At least it was great until halfway through my third taco, when my fancy portable phone began to ring in the living room. Hilda put down her fork and looked grim. Mimi attacked another burrito.

  “Here we go again,” Cowboy said.

  I went into the living room, snagged the phone off the coffee table, and answered it.

  It was him.

  Chapter 28

  “Funny thing happened to me last night,” I said. “I stood around the Museum of Art for a couple of hours, waiting for a guy who never showed up.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, Rafferty,” the hitter said. “Just do what you’re told, unless you want to be a fucking french fry.” He sounded bone-weary. His voice was flatter than before, and the threat was reflex action, a meaningless social nicety. How you doing today? Hot enough for you? Want to be a french fry?

  I said, “Well, you see, it’s just that I don’t know what you want from me. You call and want the money; I say, take the money; all of a sudden you don’t want the money anymore. I don’t understand what’s happening, and, uh, I’d like to get this wrapped up, you know?”

  Gawd, did I
really say that? I hate it when people say “you know.”

  I felt like I was several different people. I was me, standing in Hilda’s living room, burping taco fumes over a high tech phone to a hired killer who thought I was hiding under a bed at my house. And I had to stay in character as that submissive wimp until I’d drawn the killer out into the open, whereupon I would be tempted to cheerfully beat the living shit out of him. Probably, though, the best thing to do was turn him over to the cops. As long as it was the right cop. Ed Durkee, say. Definitely not Kevin Noonebury.

  To accomplish all that—or even any of that—I had promised to hand over a pile of money I didn’t have to a man whose name and location I didn’t know. I was getting clandestine help from one side of an interdepartmental police squabble and carefully skirting around the other side.

  It was a crazy-quilt mind-set; a schizophrenic smorgasbord. When it eventually ended, I’d probably be lonely. What if I wasn’t there when I needed me?

  “Hell, yes, I want the money,” the hitter’s voice said in my ear. “How many times do I have to tell you that?” He perked up a little but only a little. Still didn’t seem to have his heart in it.

  I said, “And I want you to have the money. So come get it. Let’s get this over with.”

  He made a noise that sounded half growl, half sigh. “There’s a lot going on you don’t—I’ll get back to you.”

  “Hey, wait a minute!”

  “You’re doing good,” he said, very weary now. “Keep hangin’ in there by the phone; you’ll be all right.” He hung up.

  I spat short, sharp words at the dead phone, then realized Hilda was standing in the living room doorway. Her face was still and stony. Her lips were clamped down into a thin hard line.

  “Nothing new, babe. I can’t seem to flush him out.”

  She nodded, turned, and walked away. I fumbled the phone handset back onto its bulky base and followed her. By the time I sat down at the table, she was smiling and passing chili Colorado to Mimi.