Cold In The Grave_A Kilroy Mystery

by Stephen Mertz

  Fallaci was another story. He had enough modesty to pull the sheets up around his hairy chest. His mean face split apart in a snarl as he glared at me.

  “You! What the hell are you doing here? I'm gonna have you wasted, you son of a bitch!”

  He must have forgotten or not noticed that I was holding a gun. He was twisting his body and reaching for a bedside phone. I double timed it across to him and whacked his right wrist with the barrel of the Magnum. He grunted in pain and yanked his arm back.

  I used my free hand to lift the telephone and wrench the cord out of the wall socket. I tossed the phone across the room. I looked back at the man on the bed and did some glaring of my own.

  “You lied to me, Sal,” I said. “You told me this afternoon that you didn't have anything to do with ordering Cheryl Kaplin's death. You told me her death was Leon Somerset's doing. That was the reason you wasted Somerset, you said.”

  Fallaci had his rage under control.

  “You'd better use that gun,” he growled in a monotone that sounded more menacing than any upraised voice ever could. “I'll see you dead for this, Kilroy.”

  “Don't be so sure I won't use this gun, Fallaci. I'm not some good guy in a story.”

  “What do you want here?” he demanded. “I'm not talking to you about nothing.”

  “You'll talk to me about Sara Carlyle,” I said.

  That got a reaction. It was the first time since I’d entered the bedroom that he registered surprise.

  “Sara?”

  “I heard that you keep a steady turnover in lady friends,” I said. “Sara was one of those friends, wasn't she?”

  Martha still looked, alongside Fallaci, like she was buzzing out in the ozone. But she'd heard something she felt strong enough about to comment on in a slurred voice that matched her drugged appearance.

  She said, “Sal used to be like that but he's not anymore. I've been here three months and I'm going to stay, right, Sally?”

  Fallaci grunted in disgust.

  “You goddamn airhead,” he said, and he backhanded her one across the mouth that sprawled her out on her back across the sheets.

  The hell with her, I decided. This stupid young woman had her chance to get away. She had gotten away. But then she comes back, and it didn't look as if it was by force. I would help her if I could, but there were other fish to fry.

  I said, “I've been running around Denver all day and last night, looking for a missing link. A missing link that connects a string of killings. Now I know who that missing link is. It’s Sara Carlyle, isn't it?”

  Fallaci's reply was a darker glower than before.

  “Have fun, you bastard. I am going to watch you die very slow, you do know that.”

  It sounded like prophecy more than a question. I needed this information, and the only way to get it was to play the game Fallaci's way.

  “You still don't understand,” I said. “I’m here to find out from you where Sara Carlyle is. If she's alive, I think she'll be able to fill me in on most of the gaps in what's been happening and the truth about why Cheryl Kaplin had to die. And you, Sal, are going to tell me where Sara is . . . or I'll kill you.”

  Sal’s sneer stayed right in place.

  He said, “Go to hell.”

  I stepped forward before he could move. I cracked him across the side of his head with the butt of the .44, using a snapping, jerking wrist action. He growled like a wounded animal and fell sideways across the bed, holding that side of his head with both hands.

  “Now do you understand?” I said. I leaned over and swatted down with the gun again as hard as I could on the back of his neck just above the collarbone. He screamed. I stepped away. I said, “Or would you like some more?”

  “Okay, okay,” he yowled. “I used to know Sara!” He rasped through the hurting. “But I don't know where she is . . . haven't seen her since last June.”

  “Damn you, Sal,” I said. “I don't want to do this, but you're forcing me.”

  I lifted the gun and started to hit him again, and he knew I was going to use it.

  “Wait,” he grumbled. He sat up in the bed, his back against the headboard, every thought of modesty forgotten. Blood ran down his face. “Jeezus, don't hit me again, I think you broke something, you bastard. Sara Carlyle is at some place called The Sun View Rest Home out in Longmont. She--oh, sweet Christ, no!!”

  Something had caught his attention from the window a few feet away from the bed. I glanced in the direction of his wide-eyed stare, expecting a trick. But it was no trick. The window gave onto a fire escape. The lacy curtains that draped the window were nearly transparent. I saw what he saw: a shadowy, barely discernible figure out there beyond the curtains with its right arm extended like some apparition of Death come to claim the living.

  Then the shooting started.

  An instinctual response to gunfire--indoors or anywhere--is or should be: hit the deck! And that's exactly what I did. I dropped flat to the floor. From the window, sound and fury invaded the room and seemed to wrap around me. A blasting barrage from the window accompanied by the shattering of glass. An abrupt gasp from Fallaci amidst the ugly thwack-thwack! -thwack! sound of bullets splattering open human flesh.

  Then a brief pause. Only the reverberations of gunfire . . .

  Then the handgun opened up again, twice, and I knew these rounds were meant for me. Then the clatter of footfalls scurrying down the fire escape, muffled by the snow but enough to indicate that the shooter was in a big hurry.

  I was up and moving.

  An icy breeze hit me as soon as I made it to the window. Snowflakes swirled into the bedroom, blurring my vision. The storm outside had increased in intensity but I was able to make out the figure that dropped from the bottom rung of the fire escape to the ground. I couldn't tell if it was a male or a female, young or old. A shapeless black slicker and the falling snow rendered all detail indistinguishable.

  I fired a round. The .44 yammered in my ears. A spurt of snow geysered up inched from the moving figure's right foot.

  Then he-she disappeared around the corner of the building, vanishing into the swirling whiteness.

  I raised the bedroom window sash and climbed out onto the fire escape. Martha started screaming somewhere behind me, her hysterical wailing rising in pitch and intensity and staying with me as I gave chase into the night.

  Into the blizzard.

  17

  There was no sign of the shooter once I reached the bottom of the fire escape.

  And so, with the killer long gone, I left the city via the Denver-Boulder turnpike, catching the Broomfield exit at the halfway point about twelve miles northwest of the Denver city limits.

  The storm made that Broomfield three times longer than it would normally have taken. The snow was blowing full-force at a straight angle across the highway, sticking and starting to pile up to a serious degree even on the freeways. Visibility was terrible, and traffic was sparse, mostly big tractor trailer rigs which at least provided tail lights for me to follow. That made it a little easier.

  In the office of a gas station, a kid, huddled next to a portable electric heater, looking surprised to see anyone out on a night like this. Even more surprised that the idiot driver--that is, me--intended to continue. But he gave me the directions I wanted and we both chuckled over him reciting directions to a place called Sun View Rest Home on a night like this. He described the place as old and abandoned and said it had been out of business and closed up for as long as he could remember. It was located on a back-country road, the kid said, and would be real hard to find in the daylight when the weather was nice.

  I thanked him and went back out into the storm that showed no sign of letting up.

  There had been a pay phone on the wall of the service station office, and for a crazy moment I thought about putting a call through to Sandy, the new friend who called herself Gia Passionne. It would be nice to hear that voice coming to me in the middle of this blustering storm from Las Vegas,
that land of clear sky nights and warm desert days. I had the number in Vegas that she had given me that morning. But I let that idea pass.

  The shooting scene at Sal Fallaci's apartment had caught up with me when I leaned against my car in the parking lot, after the shooting, and blindly puked my guts out. I'd been alright since then, if I didn't think about what Fallaci had looked like after catching those bullets.

  So, this was the crowd I was supposed to be saving Robert Pierpont from. It was worth the effort if I could save an innocent from them. Or had he already become one of them? I wondered if Robert had gone to the police, as he’d promised me he would and instead circled back and climbed that fire escape in the snow, and opened fire on Fallaci before trying to blow me away too because I would sooner or later guess he was the one.

  It would be a long time before I forgot this night. Those things I had seen and done, I would begin trying to forget first thing tomorrow morning.

  Tonight, I had to find Sara Carlyle, snowstorm or no.

  The killing had to stop.

  The final leg of tonight's journey was every bit as hairy as the kid at the filling station had warned. There was no other traffic out here on a night like this. I’d encountered no snow plows. After I left the clustered lights of Broomfield's business district, I could only guess at where the winding country road was most of the time by watching at the periphery of the headlights for the occasional mailbox or stretch of fence.

  The storm only grew worse. The force of it rocked the Lancia, the steering wheel tugging in my grip and gouging furrows into my palms. The wind was a constant howling, ear-piercing whistle. With the elements at their fiercest, it was hard to believe only yesterday had seemed like Spring. A few times I went into sideways skids and almost lost it but for the radials and having come of age driving in Wisconsin winters. After thirty nerve-wracking minutes of narrowly avoiding trees, culverts, and rapidly forming snowdrifts, I finally braked the Lancia to a sideways stop in front of my destination.

  A closed iron grill towered above me, set into the high brick wall that surrounded the place. A weather-beaten two-story structure sat on a rise about thirty yards beyond the gate. The building was barely visible through gusting eddies of white, like an elusive presence in a dream. A sign hinged to the top of the gate, rattling in the strong night wind, read Sun View Rest Home.

  I killed the Lancia’s car's engine, tried to hunker myself deeper into my leather jacket, and stepped into the winter wonderland gone berserk. I made a dash through the wind, over to the front gate. I expected it to be locked and it probably was most of the time. But the last person through must have had other things on their mind. They had been careless and now the gates pushed inwardly easily in the snow that was still light and powdery except where a car had been through recently, leaving twin matted tracks that were already close to disappearing under the falling snow.

  Once inside the grounds, I struck a direct course on foot toward the main building. Approaching by car would advertise my presence. I did not want that. The biting arctic wind burned at my face. The snow was already well past ankle depth. Wind whistled through the tall pines that dotted the grounds, sounding to me like a sound track from some occult movie. As I got closer, I saw that the old structure was dark except for one square of pale yellow, on the second floor.

  A roofed porch fronted the building, offering a shelter of sorts from the snow but not the wind. Before I tried the latch of the front door, I unleathered the Magnum. Then I went in, closing the door quickly and quietly as I could behind me. The wind was whistling like crazy and I hoped no one in the building was listening too closely. If they were, they would not miss my arrival.

  I stood in what had once been a waiting room. Faint light filtered down from a stairway straight ahead that led up. I looked around but all I could make out of my immediate surroundings were a few scattered old chairs in the dreamlike silvery dimness cast by the snow beyond windows. I stood perfectly still for a full minute, waiting, listening. Nothing moved in the abandoned building. Nothing but the wind howling through those pines, rattling this old pile of brick and mortar, seeming to make the building itself shiver to its foundations against the storm’s fury.

  I started toward those stairs and that dim light filtering down from overhead. A floor board creaked beneath me. I stopped and waited. My breathing sounded loud to me, but that must've been my imagination. There was no response and so I continued and this time I made it to the foot of the stairs without any more creaking sounds. I went up the stairs with my back to the wall, the .44's muzzle trained on the landing at the top of the stairs. My footsteps stayed close to the wall as I ascended to avoid any more loose, noisy boards.

  The landing gave onto a corridor that stretched off in either direction into deep shadow. The light I had seen from below and outside came from a partially open door to my right, three doors down along the hallway. The illumination spilled into the corridor in a long pale rectangle. I crossed over to the lighted door and stood to one side. I nudged the door open the rest of the way. I peered in.

  There were two women in the room who were unaware of my presence.

  The younger of them was tucked into a bed. She was Sara Carlyle. I recognized her face from that old snapshot, but just barely. She looked worn and tired and pale. She had been crying. Beneath the bedcovers, she was very pregnant.

  Mrs. Carlyle, Sara's mother, sat on a chair alongside the bed. A black slicker, still shiny with droplets of melting snow, lay crumpled at Mrs. Carlyle’s feet. She was holding one of her daughter's hands in both of her own.

  “There, there,” Mrs. Carlyle was cooing quietly, as if softly singing a lullaby. “It's all over, my little dear. He's dead and he will be the last one, I promise.”

  I stepped openly into the room.

  I said, “You're right about that, lady. Fallaci will be the last one. Now all we have to do is call the police.”

  A sharp intake of breath came from the form on the bed.

  “Oh, thank God! Someone's finally found me! Help me,” she called out in my direction. “Whoever you are, help me. Please!”

  Mrs. Carlyle's sharp eyes snapped in my direction. I clearly recalled my first impression of her that afternoon at Paul Richmond's house. I had thought this woman in her late sixties was beautiful in an elegant, regal kind of way. But those adjectives did not apply now. Her thin, bloodless lips were drawn back tightly to reveal gnashing, age-yellowed teeth. Insanity glittered in her eyes. She was a witch materialized from a child's nightmare.

  She said, “Well then, Mr. Kilroy. This is an unexpected surprise.”

  “Please, mother . . . don't!”

  Sara’s protesting voice was feeble, but the anxiety coursing through her words was real and raw.

  As the older woman kept watching me, she reached over and commenced stroking her daughter's hand as she had been doing before I stepped in.

  “Hush, child. Mother will take care of everything.” Then, to me, in a different, flat tone, “How did you find us here?”

  The dark purse she'd been carrying that afternoon at Richmond's, the one I remembered she kept her gun in, sat on the floor to her right, against a leg of her chair. I kept a close watch on the woman and the purse. I aimed my pistol in her general direction and she seemed to get the point. She sat still.

  I said, “I didn't expect to find you here, Mrs. C. All I expected was to see Sara. If I'd have slowed down enough to do some thinking, I might have pieced it together. Your shooting spree this afternoon at Richmond's proves how close to the edge you are. How capable you are of committing homicide. And just before you started shooting this afternoon, you said something to your husband about how he should know by now that there's only one way to deal with matters like me. I showed up on Richmond's doorstep talking about Cheryl Kaplin. You and Mr. Carlyle immediately thought I was there for a blackmail squeeze.”

  “Well, weren't you?”

  “It's a long story,” I said, “but no, I'm not
a blackmailer, Mrs. Carlyle. For a while, I suspected Cheryl Kaplin of trying to blackmail Salvatore Fallaci. In that scenario, Fallaci had her capped to keep from having to pay her off. But it didn't happen that way at all. You and Mr. Carlyle were the ones Cheryl was blackmailing. You were the one who arranged to have her killed. The only question left was: what was she blackmailing you people about?”

  Mrs. Carlyle held herself ramrod straight in her chair.

  “I know nothing of what you’re talking about, nor does my daughter.”

  I indicated the expectant mother on the bed.

  “Cheryl Kaplin was blackmailing you about the baby Sara is about to give birth to. Sal Fallaci is the baby's father.”

  Sara didn't mutter a word. She watched me with damp eyes that I could not read.

  But Mom was still in there pitching.

  “This is entirely preposterous,” Mrs. Carlyle insisted, her voice and expression dripping with blueblood indignation.

  “I heard your daughter was headstrong,” I said, “and wild. And maybe a little nuts? Nutty enough to go for the caveman type? That fits Fallaci to a T. It could have been a new kick for Sara, playing house with a real hood. Or did she really think she was in love with the creep?”

  “I was in love,” said a small voice from the bed.

  I stayed focused on Mrs. Carlyle.

  I said, “When Fallaci found out Sara was pregnant, he booted her out, which would have happened sooner or later anyway from what I've heard. Sara decided to have her baby. That is the big, dark secret Cheryl found out and tried to blackmail you about. The daughter of the grand old man of state politics, the man behind a crime-busting reform candidate for District Attorney, had a daughter tucked away here, about to give birth to the illegitimate child of a Mafia boss. That would rock a lot of boats and lose a lot of votes. No wonder Cheryl was confident that she had something worth ten grand to you to keep quiet about. Maybe she was right. Maybe it was worth that much. Maybe you should have paid her, Mrs. C, instead of killing people. But Fallaci will be your last victim, like you said.”