“Do you know where he is?” I said.
“Oh, sure.”
“Will you tell me?”
“Yes.”
Chapter 33
Tony Cordington came away from her front door and dropped onto the sofa beside me. I moved to the sofa opposite; I wanted to watch her while she told me about Eagle.
She stretched a long arm out along the sofa back and looked at the end wall. She bit her lip and made a sharp clicking sound with her tongue. She blinked a lot, too. She was holding back the tears, but it wasn’t easy.
I said, “This probably doesn’t help much, but you’re doing the right thing, Why don’t you start with his name?”
She nodded jerkily four or five times, then said in a low voice, “His name is Bert Cannon. He’s really a very decent guy, but …”
“Where does he live?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Tony, it’s no use—”
She glared at me and said, very deliberately, “I am not protecting him. I do not know where Bert lives.”
The question was too obvious to need asking, so I just waited. When she had finished glaring at me, she developed a great interest in the seam along the back of the sofa. Finally she said to the seam, “There’s this store in Richardson called Moretins. On Jupiter Road. It’s a, oh, you know, an outdoor store.”
“Tents, sleeping bags,” I said.
She nodded. “And packs and boots and ropes and things. Bert works there. That’s what I meant when I said I knew where he is.”
“That’s fine, Tony. Thank you.”
“Can I tell you more about him, before you go aft—before you leave?”
“Sure,” I said.
She scootched to the edge of the sofa and leaned forward, with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her. “I’ve known Bert Cannon for years and years, almost as long as I can remember,” she said. “We grew up on the same block in Abilene. I had a crush on Bert when I was nine. He was seventeen then. An older man, swoon, swoon. Pretty dumb, eh?
“Even with him being so much older, because we lived so close, I saw Bert around a lot. He was always so kind to me. He was the only boy I knew who would listen. He wouldn’t laugh or tease me. He’d listen to me. You probably don’t know how important that is to a young girl. That, and the way I felt so mature and grown-up when I talked with Bert.” She smiled a little and mock-grimaced. “God, this is embarrassing! Important, though. It won’t kill me. Well, Bert has always been freaky about guns and soldiers and all that.”
She saw Cowboy and me look at each other, and her eyes opened wider. “No, no,” she said. “Don’t get the wrong idea! He wasn’t mean or a bully or anything like that. He liked to hunt, that’s all—everybody in Abilene liked to hunt, I think—and he planned to join the marines. He wanted to be a marine so badly, and he wanted to go to Vietnam. It was really strange. Other boys talked about how terrible the war was and how they’d go to Canada to beat the draft and all that, but Bert had this huge Marine Corps recruiting poster on his bedroom wall. Anyway, Bert went to junior college first—his parents insisted—then he joined up. In time for Vietnam, too. Just barely, but in time, if everything had worked out for him.
“It didn’t, though,” she said. “During basic training, on the rifle range, another recruit did something wrong. They have these rules, you know, about handling the guns, but this other guy messed up, and Bert got shot in the foot. They had to amputate one entire toe and most of another one. You’d never know it, except he walks a little funny when he’s tired. It was bad enough, though. The same week Bert got out of the hospital, the Marine Corps discharged him. It nearly broke Bert’s heart.”
Cowboy murmured, “Don’t know about the marines, but the army used to have problems with that. Some old boys managed to get themselves shot in the foot deliberate-like. To get out.”
Tony shook her head firmly. “No way! Not Bert. In fact, he worried himself sick that people might think that. He appealed to some government board or committee or something, trying to get back into the marines, but it didn’t work. He wrote to his congressman, too. Fat lot of good that did.” She shrugged. “He even tried to join the army, too, starting from scratch. Because of his toes, he couldn’t pass the physical.
“Bert stayed with his folks, there in Abilene, while he tried all those things. We talked a lot. I was still pretty young. Eleven or twelve, I guess, but we got along amazingly well. Then he left. Came here, to Dallas. I was sorry to see him go, but I was over that crush by then. We were friends, that’s all.”
She snorted softly. “How many times have you heard that one? Just friends. It was true, though. Then, anyway. After he left, we didn’t even write to each other very much. Oh, at first we did, or l did anyway, but then … a card at Christmas, that’s about all.”
She pressed her hands against her knees and arched her back. “So, Bert was gone. I finished growing up and eventually did the junior college thing, too, and right after graduation I lucked into this job with the airline. Before you know it—boom boom, I’m in Dallas, too. Mr and Mrs Cannon wrote to Bert about it. One day he knocked on the door and it was like … well, it was wonderful to see him, but it was sure different. And better! We’d known each other for years, but that was the first time ever when we were both adults.”
She smiled fondly. “Two weeks later, Bert moved in here. We lived together for almost three years.”
She didn’t say any more after that. The silence had stretched out for several minutes when I finally said, “What happened?”
She dropped her head and looked at her hands. “Bert began to change. Or maybe he had already changed, but I didn’t see it at first.” Her shoulders slumped a little more, and she said. “You remember, I told you how disappointed he was when the Marine Corps wouldn’t let him stay in? Well, he never really got over that. He was almost compulsive about being a soldier. He bought all kinds of magazines about soldiers and mercenaries and all that stuff. He went to a convention one year, out West somewhere. When he came back, he was all worked up. He said he’d talked to people about where to get mercenary jobs. He was finally going to be a soldier.”
She sniffed loudly. “But that didn’t work out for Bert, either. He wrote letters, and he phoned people, and he went to join up or apply or whatever mercenary soldiers do, but no one wanted him. He didn’t have any military experience. So poor Bert couldn’t be a pretend soldier because he’d never been a real soldier. It didn’t seem fair.”
Cowboy squirmed when she said “pretend soldier,” but before he could say anything, I jumped in. “Then Bert only claimed to have been a marine in his ad, so he’d have a better shot at a merc contract.”
Tony nodded. “Yes. And that ad was the last straw for me. I had tried to help him get over that … that need to be a soldier. It was crazy! Well, not crazy-crazy, I don’t mean that, but crazy-odd, right? And why? That’s what I could never figure out. Why? He had a decent job; he got a little money from Veterans Affairs; he was old enough to settle down and stop pipe dreaming about being a mercenary in Africa or wherever. Then he sent in that stupid ad. Eagle, for crying out loud.” She shook her head sadly.
I said, “Did many people answer it?”
“Some. Nothing worthwhile, nothing like what he wanted. I think he expected a great big tank to pick him up out front. He cleaned his guns over and over, and he started wearing those funny clothes on weekends; the blotchy brown-and-green ones. Ah, camouflage, that’s it.”
“I think they call them cammies now.”
“That’s right! The first time he said that, I thought he said ‘jammies,’ and I wondered why he was going to put on his pajamas at five o’clock.”
“So no one hired him?”
“No. The poor guy was so disappointed. He started drinking too much, and I was already mad about that stupid ad, so when I came home from a terrible, stinking flight and Bert was here with a guy he’d met in a bar, and it wa
s so obvious the jerk was stringing Bert along, that I …”
The memory of it still bothered her. She rubbed her eyes with both hands and said between her wrists, “I told Bert to get out. I was sick to death of smelling dumb old gun oil and listening to him talk about this battle and that revolution.” She lowered her hands and looked at me with reddened eyes. “He wore me out. I swear, he just plain wore me out. I was so tired of seeing him fool himself. I wasn’t angry. I loved him. I still do, a little bit anyway. But I couldn’t take it anymore. We had a good cry, both of us, and he moved out the next morning. I told him to come back when he got over his problem. That was five years ago. He hasn’t come back.”
“But you took a phone call for him recently, and passed the message on, didn’t you?” Shows you the benefit of being a trained detective. When someone paints the obvious in bright red letters and underlines it and dots the I’s with flashing lights, hey, I notice it right off the bat.
Tony said, “Uh-huh. I was going to tell the man on the phone to get lost; then I thought, it’s a perfect test. After five years, if Bert can ignore this, maybe he can make it. So I called Bert at the store and told him. He phoned me back the next day, absolutely berserk with goofy plans. He was going to take this job: whatever it was, and make a zillion dollars. The money would let him buy land down in the Piney Woods, he said, and he would start a training camp for mercenary soldiers. He’d teach them jungle warfare and survival and I don’t know what all.” She shook her head, saddened, but dry-eyed about it now. “He sounded worse than ever.”
I said, “Tony, I didn’t tell you everything before. Bert is getting worse, all right. He’s up to dangerous now. The man you talked to hired Bert to kill his business partner.”
“No!” Her eyes were huge.
“Yes. And Bert took the job. And the partner is dead.”
She shook her head, slowly but positively. “Bert did not kill him. I cannot believe that. He gets carried away, sure, and he’s pretty silly about this soldier thing, but … never, not in million years.”
“You understand, though, that if I’m right—take it easy, I said if—it’s still better for Bert to be out of circulation.”
“I understand that,” she said, “but you’re wrong. Bert wouldn’t kill anyone.”
“Well …”
Her face creased in a sudden frown. “You’re not going to let the police go after him, are you?”
“Tony, the police have to be involved here. Whether you think so or not, Bert’s wanted for—”
“No,” she said sharply, “I don’t mean that! I know the police will have to hold him, at least for a while, until they find out he didn’t do it. The thing is, I want you to take Bert to the police. Why do you think I told you all those personal things?”
“But—”
“You know about Bert now. Real cops, sorry, um, ordinary cops won’t realize what his problem is. They might shoot him if he did something foolish.” She looked from me to Cowboy; her face anxious. “Please?”
Cowboy gave me a look that said he, too, would shoot Bert if he did anything foolish, so what else was new? But he shrugged and said, “It don’t make no never-mind to me.”
“If we can,” I told Tony. I’d halfway planned on it anyway, what with Kevin Noonebury gumming up the works. “Do have a picture of him?”
“Oh, sure. Hang on.”
Five minutes later, as we climbed into the Mustang, I said to Cowboy, “When it happens, let’s give the silly bastard a break, if we can.”
Cowboy snorted. “They ain’t a whole lot we can do about it,” he said. “It depends on good old Bert. However we bring him back, laughing or bleeding or cold dead meat, it’s all up to him.”
Chapter 34
“Got him,” Cowboy said, looking up from the list of Ford Tempo registrations. “Bertram L. Cannon. Address out in Mesquite. It looks like an apartment house.”
“Well, well,” I said.
The phone rang. Ed Durkee’s voice said, “I knew if I gave you that damned cellular phone, I’d regret it.” I had chased him down at home twenty-five minutes earlier.
Now he said, “The first Saturday in months that we’ve had people over and … anyway, Cannon has form but nothing serious. He got picked up for drunk-and-disorderly two and a half years ago. A bar fight. He pleaded guilty and paid his fine. Officially he is now a model citizen.”
“Hey—”
“Think about it, Rafferty. If we had Dresden, and if Dresden had confessed, I’d have Cannon by the balls. But I don’t. And the firebomb thing at your house won’t wash. You didn’t ever see him.”
“The phone calls?”
“Aw, come on. You know better than that. Can you see me trying to convince one of those smart-ass assistant DAs to bring a charge on that? First thing they’re gonna ask is, how can Rafferty testify the calls came from the defendant? They’re gonna say: ‘What is he, a walking voiceprint machine?’”
Ed grunted. “And that’s assuming I could keep Noonebury’s troops from hearing about it and stealing the case away. Which I doubt. Look, I’m sorry as hell, but there isn’t enough here to work with. Yet. Officially.” He stopped talking. Way in the background on his end of the line, a child screamed happily. Then Ed said, “So what are you going to do?”
“I might give him a call. Maybe he’d like to meet me in your office Monday morning, nine sharp, to confess.”
“Yeah, you could try that,” Ed said.
“Or maybe I should snatch him off the street and sweat him until he comes up with hard evidence even a DA can underst—”
“Goddamned phone’s gone dead again,” Ed said. “I gotta get this fixed some day.” He hung up.
I hung up, too, and turned to Cowboy, lounging on my sofa with a beer in one hand. “Care to sample the fleshpots of Mesquite?”
Cowboy nodded and levered himself upright. “Something gonna go wrong,” he said. “Whenever you get all chirpy like that, by God, something goes wrong.”
“No way!”
“Wait for it,” he said.
Mesquite is a small city on the southeast side of what the Chamber of Commerce likes to call the Dallas Metroplex.
Mesquite is like most cities; it has good parts and bad parts. Where Bert Cannon lived was in-between, slowly slipping toward bad. It was a boardinghouse, not apartments; it had been there a long time and it showed every decade.
“There’s his car,” Cowboy said. I parked the Mustang thirty yards away, where we could watch both the Tempo and the front door of the white frame building.
“How you want to play this?” Cowboy said. “Me, I ain’t too whipped up about dragging him out of no third floor room if he don’t want to come. That’s an old building. Probably got cardboard walls. He decides to hole up and shoot, It’s gonna be hard on folks up, down, either side of him.”
“Let’s sit tight for a while. It’s, what, six-thirty on a Saturday night? He’ll probably be going out soon. We’ll grab him then.”
But he didn’t, so we couldn’t, and we sat there, bored out of our skulls, for the next six hours. I kept Cannon’s picture propped up on the dashboard. No one like him entered or left the building. “Told you this wouldn’t be easy,” Cowboy said.
At midnight I left Cowboy standing under a tree and I went looking for food. Fifteen minutes later, I was back with a bag of McDonald’s finest. We dined alfresco, hunkered down well back in the tree shadows. Hot tip for gracious living: Hamburgers under a tree in the small dark hours will never replace real picnics. Trust me on that one.
“Don’t even know if he’s in there,” Cowboy said. “He might have walked, or gone away with somebody in their car.”
“‘Stake out the suspect’s house or car or both,’” I said. “‘Eventually they will return.’ I distinctly remember highlighting that part in my Philip Marlowe Crime Fighter Manual.”
Cowboy grunted. “Hilda’s right. You are weird sometimes.”
By the time we could reasonably as
sume Bert Cannon was either in for the night or wouldn’t be back till tomorrow, it was tomorrow. Too late to go home, get any sleep, and be back for an early start. So we slept in the car. Well, we took turns trying to sleep in the car.
At six a.m., I leaned against the tree while Cowboy scrounged the wilds of Mesquite for food. And so the day began, with bitter coffee, doughnuts, scratching, and a personal grimy feeling. Welcome to Sunday morning. I much preferred Sundays at Hilda’s, with icy Ramos gin fizzes, platters of grazing food, and Garrick and Maria on the kitchen television set.
At seven-seventeen Cannon came out of his building. He was a little shorter than I’d thought he’d be, but chunkier. He had a mustache, a close-cropped, military-style haircut, and a purposeful, in-control-and-loving-it stride.
“Tony was right,” I said. “You’d never know he has a shot-up foot.”
“Early in the day,” Cowboy said. “And he only walked fifty feet. I bet he don’t step out like that halfway through a twenty-mile forced march.”
“Who does?”
Cannon unlocked the Tempo, got in, and led us away to downtown Mesquite. He parked in front of a coffee shop, bought a paper from a dispenser, and went inside slowly, scanning the headlines.
“I didn’t have him pegged for the power-breakfast type,” I said.
“He ain’t,” Cowboy said. “He’s the hot-plate-in-his-room, too-much-trouble-to-cook type.”
Cowboy got out and followed Cannon into the coffee shop. I made a quick sweep through the alley behind the building, on the off chance he’d made us. There was no sign of him, though, so I parked near the corner, then pawed through the cluttered backseat, looking for … inspiration, I guess.
Cannon had apparently seen me take the money from Dresden, so it seemed a good idea to disguise myself. Nothing fancy, just enough to confuse him momentarily; let me get close enough to short-circuit a Shoot-Out In The OK Coffee Shop.
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