Cold In The Grave_A Kilroy Mystery

by Stephen Mertz

  She regarded me with skeptical eyes and an artfully raised eyebrow.

  “I don't suppose you have any proof of any of these incredible accusations?”

  “I'll leave that to the cops,” I told her. “But let's not kid each other any longer, okay? You do know that I know. Right, Mrs. C? And I am going to blow the whistle on you. So why can't we talk about what happened?”

  She thought about that, and the resistance visibly flowed from her.

  She said at last, with feeling “Salvatore Fallaci was an odious man. The world is a better place without him. You all are, you animals who would corrupt my dear daughter and take her from me. You and Fallaci and Somerset. You are terrible people.”

  “You did pay Somerset to run down Cheryl Kaplin?”

  “It was not necessary to pay Leon to eliminate that woman. Leon was in love with my daughter. He fell in love with Sara when she was brought here. Leon would do anything for Sara, to try and win her love.”

  I didn't need dialogue from a sappy romance novel. I looked at the pregnant girl on the bed.

  “Sara, would you like to leave here?”

  Her weak nod was slight and hardly perceptible.

  “I haven't wanted any of this,” she said in a small child's voice that sharply contrasted with her condition. “They made me stay here. I'm afraid! I had contractions this morning but it was . . . a false alarm. I’m afraid!”

  Mrs. Carlyle, sitting next to Sara on the bed, continued stroking her daughter's hand.

  “Sara, Sara, my child. You must relax. You're perfectly safe here. I'll prepare another injection for you.”

  “No! Oh, please!” Sara was pleading to me now. “Don't let her touch me! My baby- -”

  I didn’t aim the .44 at Mrs. Carlyle but I did gesture with it.

  “Sit back down,” I told her. “Sara's had enough injections. You have a lot to answer for, lady. But right now, you can pick up the phone and- -”

  The girl moaned from the bed.

  “There isn't a phone. Oh God, my baby and I are going to die out here . . .”

  Outside, the wind and snow howled.

  “I can answer for all I have done,” Mrs. Carlyle said haughtily. She shifted moods like a Ferrari shifts gears. “My husband has served the people of Colorado faithfully for more than forty years. Our family name is well respected at all levels of society in this state. The election of Paul Richmond to the office of District Attorney will be a major contribution by my husband to the welfare of this city he loves so much, before he retires completely from politics. It is of vital importance to Lloyd, to me, to the Carlyle name that Paul Richmond win this upcoming election. I could not permit this tramp, this Cheryl Kaplin, to make her foul demands of the Carlyle name, to risk our total disgrace at this, Lloyd's crowning hour. The hussy got what she deserved!”

  “How did Cheryl Kaplin find out that your daughter was carrying Fallaci's child?”

  “I don't know. Too many people knew.”

  “Tell me about Somerset,” I pressed.

  “My daughter met him during the time when she was living with Fallaci,” said Mrs. Carlyle, “when Leon would come to see Fallaci about . . . business. They felt an attraction for each other at the time, but of course they could do nothing about it. Fallaci is . . .” She corrected herself with a small smile. “I should say was a dangerous man. Then, when Sara agreed to stay here until the baby arrived, she told Leon where she would be. She was lonely. Leon came here to visit. That is when he truly fell in love with her.”

  I looked at Sara.

  “Was it mutual?”

  She shook her head, no.

  “I thought it might be at first, but . . . it was just nice having someone come out here to visit with. I was such a fool. I was a fool about everything. I'm trying to be strong. Before this, I always thought I could handle anything that came along. So much for that theory! I didn't want to stay here after the killing started. I begged them not to. I didn't want any part of it. I just want to get away. But they wouldn't let me leave this place. They forced me to stay. I don't want my baby born into this madness!”

  I looked back at Mom.

  “So, Leon agreed to kill Cheryl Kaplin for you. To his way of thinking, it was a way of trying to score points with Sara and you, who he hoped would be his future mother-in-law. His big mistake was that he failed to clue in Sal Fallaci on what he was up to. He didn't want to make Sal mad that he was interested in Sara, one of Sal's ex-live-ins, although I doubt Sal couldn't have cared less. But Leon made Sal angry anyway because Leon had orders not to indulge in on the side jobs like the one he took on for you. Disobeying strict orders from a Mafia don makes guys like Fallaci mad enough to kill.”

  Mrs. Carlyle nodded in agreement.

  “It is only right that I should punish Mr. Fallaci for all the wrong he did us,” intoned Mrs. Carlyle. “I was not his judge. I was his judgment. He had to die.”

  “So, you don't deny capping him tonight,” I said. “Good. You won't deny any of it?”

  The corners of her old lips crinkled in a sweet smile. Another mood change.

  “I see no reason why I should deny it, given that all you say is all true. Also, you will not live to tell anyone else what you know.” Then those eyes were glinting at someone over my shoulder, behind me, and the only crazy in those eyes was crazy like a fox. “Take him, Limp,” she commanded. “Kill him!”

  18

  It could have been a trick, but it wasn't. Of course, it wasn't. Limp Gallagher had to show up again sometime sooner or later and now was the time.

  Of course . . .

  If Sara was being detained here against her will, it would take more than just Leon Somerset and Mrs. Carlyle to keep her under watch around the clock. Sara looked to be a strong, healthy enough young woman with a new life within her wanting to be born. Sara’s mom had paid Limp Gallagher, the not so friendly neighborhood Neanderthal, to help keep watch over her daughter just as she had paid Gallagher and Sparky Boines to take Gia Passionne out of the picture last night, in case Cheryl Kaplin had mentioned to Gia/Sandy about the shakedown scam she had going.

  I was sure Sara would've warned me if she’d known Limp was in the building, but she was too woozy from the drugs they’d been pumping into her for her to keep track of everyone’s coming and going. The thing had been too convoluted and had moved too fast for me to have figured it all out until I got here.

  I went into a low spin, pivoting to my left, trying to track the .44 around with me but knowing even as I started that there wasn't a chance. I was halfway around when Limp brought the barrel of his pistol hard against my wrist. It was the same big old .45 automatic he'd packed last night in Gia's dressing room, and it struck me a blow that sent the Magnum flying from my fingers. I tripped off balance to one knee.

  Limp Gallagher took a step backwards. He thumbed back the .45's hammer and aimed the big handgun at a point between my eyes.

  “Die, you bastard,” he growled at me with surprising softness, and I could see his index finger whiten on the trigger.

  From the bed, Sara screamed.

  No one expected the scream, and that's why it saved my life. It startled me. It startled Gallagher and Mrs. Carlyle. The difference was I had a lot more to lose so I recovered a lot faster. I was startled, but I did not look in Sara's direction the way they did.

  Instead, I piled full tilt into Gallagher and sent him sailing backwards to the floor with me on top of him. I grabbed his gun hand with both my hands and smashed it into the bare wood floor. The .45 rocked from his grip, landing about two feet away. It looked like an easy reach, so I made a scramble for it, but Gallagher had other ideas. He snarled and kicked out with the toe of his shoe, nailing a direct hit to my chin, the force of the kick flipping me over onto my back.

  The room tilted and circled around my head and for one displaced moment, I imagined that I was back in LA doing stunt work on the set of some western, getting clobbered half to death in a dance hall brawl. The
n I shook the cobwebs out from between my ears and after one look at what was happening in this room in Broomfield, Colorado. I really wished I was back in LA.

  The first one I saw, as I recovered from that brief hiatus of the senses, was dear Mrs. Carlyle. As at Paul Richmond's that afternoon, the old bat was reaching into her purse. When the withered old hand came out, just as it had that afternoon, it held a small .32 caliber pistol. She pointed the gun at me.

  She snapped, “Get away from him, Limp. Stay back! I'll finish him.”

  Limp's only reply was, “He killed Sparky,” and he leaped at me with a grunting noise, pinning me to the floor, those hellacious hands of his clamping around my throat. The oversize thumbs pressuring down on my Adam's apple, cutting off my air.

  Mrs. Carlyle smiled with glee.

  “That's it, Limp. Yes! Kill him!”

  Gallagher hissed at me, and his spittle splashed into my eyes with hot, bad breath.

  “You marked me up good yesterday. No one does that to me and goes on living! No one!”

  I was starting to believe him.

  I chopped and tugged at his arms, trying to loosen the double-handed grip on me; trying to fight off the panic that was threatening to grab hold of me. He had me down with a knee across my chest and he outweighed me by seventy pounds. Those pressing thumbs were still blocking off my wind. I felt my face turning colors. My strength began flowing out of my body.

  The big Neanderthal was rocking back and forth above me. The world was starting to get dark around the edges. He lifted my head and slammed it back down into the floor a few times to hurry it along while he kept choking me.

  I heard Sara cry out again from the bed. I had the impression that her screams had nothing to do with what was happening to me. Her cry was one of both surprise and pain of her own, like her other scream had been. Birthing pains. I also heard Mrs. Carlyle barking orders for Limp to get away, so she could shoot me.

  Limp ignored those orders, grunting and sweating with the exertion of killing me but enjoying it. We both knew that in another twenty seconds, at most, I would be dead. There came another cry from pregnant Sara, and I had a millisecond flash of the metaphysics of what was happening here. One life in. One life out. And the life out . . . Kilroy. I was almost losing the will to fight anymore. I was that close. Gallagher squeezed his ham-sized hands tighter around my neck and gave the back of my head another hard rap against the floorboards.

  This is when Mrs. Carlyle stepped around Limp, to my right. I could make out her blurred figure, aiming at me with the .32 for a clear shot to finish me off. She was a trigger-happy biddy and no mistake but stepping around like that with the gun, into my view, was the dumbest thing she could have done because panic, instinct, whatever you want to call it, reacted from some reserve deep within me at the sight of her pointing that pistol at me and some last-ditch jolt of primal energy surged through me.

  I reached up and grabbed Limp's throat and with the last of my strength I rolled onto my side, pulling Gallagher down between me and Mrs. Carlyle just as the old woman squeezed off a round.

  It was a small caliber pistol, but it had a loud report in the confines of the small room, the explosion cutting through the sounds of our struggle like a hot knife through butter.

  Limp Gallagher sat up straight with his knee still on my chest. His hands slipped away from my neck. His eyes opened wide and so did his mouth, into an agonized, shocked, frightened O’s. Then blood started gushing out of his mouth. The eyes and mouth closed, and he toppled sideways like an axed tree. He was dead.

  I was moving before he landed. I still couldn't tell where my Magnum had landed when Limp knocked it from my hand, but I saw his .45 still lying a couple feet away and that was good enough for me. Now that I could breathe again, the room had stopped spinning around me. My vision cleared, and I moved fast.

  Having shot the wrong man slowed Mrs. Carlyle down a bit but not to a stop. But by the time the aging Annie Oakley began to track her .32 in an arc for another try at me, I was already on one knee and bringing up Gallagher's .45 with the hammer still cocked, drawing a bead again on this old woman's black, black heart.

  “No more!” I snarled at her. “I'm better at this than you are, lady. Drop it.”

  The honorable Mrs. Carlyle was crazy but not that crazy. Another mood change. The energy and tension ebbed away and this time I sensed that it was for good. The .32 pistol, still looking as out of place as ever in that aged aristocratic hand, fell from her fingers to clunk noisily at our feet.

  I got to my feet and looked at the writhing, mountainous figure on the bed. Sara was gasping.

  “Better heat up some water, Mrs. Carlyle,” I advised. “It looks like you're about to become a grandma.”

  7:30 the following morning

  It had been a hectic night, to say the least.

  An hour after Mrs. Carlyle and I delivered Sara's healthy baby boy, and after it had been ascertained that both Sara and her baby were doing reasonably well, I left the Sun View Rest Home to fetch the authorities.

  The old rest home had a security room for violent patients, and that's where I locked Mrs. Carlyle away while I went for help. I wasn't too happy locking her away like that. She seemed calm enough all through the delivery, ever since I'd ordered her to drop her gun, but she’d thrown down too much evil for me to leave her alone with a helpless new mother and a newborn child, even if they were her own flesh and blood.

  The storm had slacked off some by then and I made the trek back into Broomfield without mishap. The police allowed me one call, so I called Teddy Bostwick and gave him a concise report on what happened. The remainder of the night was spent enmeshed in the cop bureaucracy. And with good reason. People had been dropping dead all over town, powerful political folk were involved, and I was supposed to be the man with the answers.

  I told them what I knew, all of it from Robert Pierpont coming to see me up until the present. I felt a satisfaction in knowing that I was nailing the coffin lid down on any future hopes that Paul Richmond might ever entertain about holding public office. This would mean a shoo-in for Dickensheets’ boss and his crowd, who I didn't see as being all that distinguishable from Richmond and company but at least they would owe me a favor and that's always a good position to be in.

  Robert Pierpont finally showed up and cleared me with the police of any homicidal wrong-doing. I had not spoken to Joe Gallegos yet, but I felt certain that I'd be restored to his good graces there too, especially after he heard about the events out at Sun View. With something like this involving the ruling class elite, the authorities wanted the windup as tidy with as few loose ends (like me) as possible. That also applied to those who had died: a dead hooker who tried blackmail, the hit man who’d attempted to make her murder appear as vehicular homicide, and two lowlife thugs named Limp and Sparky. What did you matter to the police or anyone else if your life had brought you to an end like those? You were history. Cold in your grave. The cops were content with the answers I provided.

  But that was last night.

  Early sunlight, brighter than usual, reflecting off the fresh white carpet of snow that blanketed the city, the aftermath of last night's storm, peeked in through my living room drapes. Joni Mitchell sang softly from the bedside clock radio.

  There had been one more surprise, waiting for me in my apartment when I had dragged my weary self home an hour earlier. The name of that surprise was Sandy, the dark-haired beauty better known professionally as Gia Passionne. At the moment, spooning bare ass between the sheets, she was pure Sandy.

  Dark eyes had smiled at my surprise at finding her here.

  “I told the man in the office that I was your sister, and he let me in to wait. He said something about how you sure have a lot of sisters.”

  “None of them like you,” I assured her truthfully, and we’d traded a kiss that went a long way toward making my fatigue a thing of memory.

  Damn, it was good to see her again. Better than I'd thought it w
ould be after I had all but resigned myself to that one magic night being all that would ever be between us.

  “I had to come back, Kilroy,” she said simply. “My plane back from Vegas got in just before the storm hit last night. I, uh, I hope you don't mind me waiting here like this. I just couldn't run out on you like I tried to. I had to find out more about what happened to Cheryl, and . . . I had to find out more about you. About us.” A flicker of doubt, then. “You are glad to see me again?”

  I showed her how glad I was that she’d come back. And she showed me. And all that took the better part of an hour. Fiery magic again, better than the first time.

  We showered together, and then I outfitted myself for winter and hiked through the snow to a convenience store for the morning paper while Sandy went about fixing us a breakfast of French toast, sausage and eggs. I was feeling human again, better by the minute, despite my lack of sleep in more hours than I cared to count.

  Along with Sandy's incredible breakfast, I’d ingested Teddy Bostwick's front page coverage in the News.

  “How deeply was Mr. Carlyle involved?” Sandy asked. “I know that Cheryl's murder was engineered by Mrs. Carlyle, but it's hard to believe that her husband didn't have any idea of what she was up to.”

  “Not that hard to believe when you put it in context,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. I nibbled on her ear. “I was wrong about Mr. Carlyle. I'd thought he'd be a good judge of character and I'll bet he was, and maybe still is. But he was sidetracked, funneling all his energy into Paul Richmond's campaign and nothing else. I'm sure he was aware of Cheryl's initial blackmail demand, but his wife is saying that she offered to take care of the matter and Mr. Carlyle left it completely in her hands. That sounds to me like what probably did happen. The ironic thing is that Cheryl thought she was playing it safe.”

  “Safe? How can extortion be safe? That's a dangerous business that Cheryl was involved in.

  “I'm speaking comparatively,” I said, “which is the way Cheryl would rationalize it. She thought about blackmailing Paul Richmond about his tie-in with Sal Fallaci, which is another thing I'm sure Mr. Carlyle was too preoccupied to know or care about. Cheryl knew about the connection, though, from her days when she and Richmond were seeing each other. That photograph you provided of Cheryl with Richmond and Fallaci and Sara Carlyle at a party together is proof that Cheryl knew, but she decided not to cash in on it. It might have paid more, but who wants to fool with the Mafia? So, she opted for approaching the respectable, low profile, supposedly peace-loving Carlyles with her threat of exposure of their coming grandchild. She figured she was safe from Fallaci because Mrs. Carlyle was working overtime already to keep the blessed event secret from the media and that was good enough for Sal. Mr. Mafia was keeping his distance from that whole deal. He likely knew all about it through Limp, who was playing both sides. But Cheryl soon found out that the Carlyles weren't so harmless. No one is, especially if they’re in politics. Mr. Carlyle told me how important his wife had been in his rise to power. She's a hard-headed lady who went nuts.”