“Al, what happened? With Rees, I mean.”
“Ah, hell, what d’you think?”
“He got roughed up a bit, that’s all,” Lieutenant Timms said soothingly from a corner. “Nothing a couple ice packs and a steam bath won’t cure.” He smiled as Casey sank back into the pillows again. “Don’t worry, we’ve got him pretty well pegged now.”
“Th at’s for sure,” Krug agreed enigmatically. “Anyhow, like I was saying, it’s showdown time, see. We got Freddy stashed in one of the Sheriff’s units. And by this time he’s shaking like a bowl of jelly. He takes one look at Rees and his boyfriend, and, man, does that fruitcake start talking!”
“Russo—that’s the big one—hasn’t done any yet,” Timms took up the story. “But we’ve got everything we need from the other one, Hassler.” He peered at Casey. “How’s the arm, by the way? The orthopedic guy said no complications expected.”
“Thanks, he already told me, sir. I’ll be out of here tomorrow.” As he yawned helplessly, the burning wreck blazed up in Casey’s mind, a troubling vision of Rees as a fiery, unaiding, somehow judgmental spirit. If he had not shouted for help, he wondered, would he be dead by now? More than ever, he was aware of the mysterious opacity of human behavior—
“Seems we figured it right,” Timms was saying. “The girl put the whole caper together. She met Barrett at one of those disco joints on the Sunset Strip. Last November. They spent the night together—which was all it took to open up a boob like Barrett. The next day she nailed those two restaurant characters with the big scheme. Then she lined up Godwin. They all met once to put it together, and from then on the girl was the go-between.”
“Only one fly in the ointment”—Krug was grinning—”Godwin’s wife. Jealous, can you beat it? Her husband’s out knocking off a partner yet, and all she worries about is he’s out all night with another woman.”
“Well, that’s Freddy’s version, she may have another story.” But Timms looked as if he believed this one. “Seems she didn’t know the night of the party what they’d been up to the night before. Evidently she must’ve found the black hat ditched in the Renault—anyway, wherever Godwin stashed it when he transferred it from the Mercedes. Rees saw her blowing her top to Roche about it. Nobody but Roche and Godwin knew then it was a piece of red-hot evidence. Rees is lucky they didn’t waste him for seeing it.”
“So Godwin was the hit-and-run driver?” Aware that his mind was dragging, Casey struggled to focus. “Then he was the one who searched Rees’s room.”
“Right.” Timms nodded. “What he thought he’d accomplish nobody knows. Maybe he only meant to scare Rees off. But when he found those parole papers—” He made an offering gesture. “Pure gold if he could think how to use ’em. Anyway, he must’ve passed on the news to Roche, because she told the two at the restaurant later. Guess they figured Rees might turn out to be their ace in the hole.”
Nobody mentioned that he almost had been.
Timms kept chewing his lip, frowning into space. “Looks to me like their big trouble all along was the right hand never knowing what the left was up to. For instance, the two restaurant guys didn’t know till Monday that Barrett had blown their deal. Godwin and the girl were afraid to tell ’em, scared they’d call it off —so Freddy claims. So instead of warning everybody, winding things up and getting the hell out, they staged their phony accident in the alley. But Monday night when she took Rees to the restaurant, she spilled the beans.”
“Smart broad probably figured she was covering all bases,” Krug said. “Didn’t I tell you it was a natural she outsmarted herself?”
“Russo was wise enough to track down the Mercedes right away,” Timms continued. “He was the so-called brother who phoned the old man Barrett rented the garage from. And once he knew we had the Mercedes—well, you can figure the rest. Probably guessed we could connect Barrett with the girl sooner or later. Time for another accident.” He leaned against the hospital bed, yawning. “Where they really went wrong was trying to have it both ways. Typical amateurs,” he added contemptuously. “Pros would’ve had a getaway plan worked out in case they needed it. But these clucks figured they could have the whole banana—a quarter of a million each, tax-free, nary a problem. Let six months or so pass after the paper’s peddled. Godwin and Russo sell their businesses. Off they go, scot-free, thumbing their noses at the law.”
But instead, one thing had led to another. Casey kept blinking, trying to make the connections. But his brain felt like a mass of soggy cotton. “It’s the timing today that really bugs me—”
“Yesterday, you mean.” Krug jerked a thumb toward the window letting in gray dawn light. “It’s tomorrow, Sleeping Beauty.”
Another day. Casey thought he had never seen anything as beautiful as that misty, shadowless, silken light from which tomorrow was emerging like a dream realized. “What I can’t figure—if they were going to do it—why they waited so long to kill the Godwins. Something else unexpected must’ve happened. Besides the slide, I mean.”
“We happened.” Krug laughed at Casey’s expression. “Yeah, you and me, sport. With the help of that waiter we never laid an eye on.”
“But…Oh.” Casey saw it suddenly. “Charley tipped them we were checking on—what did I say? ‘A couple that had dinner there the night before’?”
Krug nodded. “According to Freddy, they figured we were getting closer. Too close, anyway, with that truck sitting there. And they’re ready to flip anyway, what with the slide—meaning an audience of twenty road crew guys if they try to get the U-Haul out.”
“But the Godwins,” Casey reminded him.
“More trail-covering, according to Freddy. They were scared we’d get to them next, and the Godwins’d blow it. Freddy says he called ’em to see if we’d been there yet. They said maybe, but they were laying low. That was about three-thirty, four. Half an hour later, Russo pays ’em a fast call—”
“Christ, we had it straight from the horse’s mouth,” Timms broke in disgustedly. “ ‘Something or somebody was ready,’ remember? Only what the Godwin woman was trying to say was ‘Freddy,’ not ‘ready.’ If we’d used our heads—”
Another near miss.
But it didn’t seem to bother Krug. “Okay, Russo knocks off the Godwins,” he went on. “Then he stops by Rees’s motel long enough to stash the murder gun in his Volkswagen. Incidentally,” he interrupted himself, “Rees was our mysterious visitor, would you believe it? This is a guy that’s gonna fall in the shit no matter what. Stupid bastard claims he was so scared we wouldn’t believe it was accidental he found ’em that he couldn’t think straight. Won’t admit it, of course, but what I figure is, he ran as fast as he could. Then he found the gun in his car about ten. Guess it scared him enough to get him back on the track again.”
“Some track,” Timms grunted. “Instead of reporting it to us, he walks right into the snakepit.” He blew out his breath. “Amateurs. They’re the real policeman’s nightmare, not the crooks. But we should’ve figured out the red herring angle,” he added as if he had invented the expression. “Why the possibility didn’t occur to us with that phony anonymous call—” He shook his head. “What comes of getting locked in on one idea, right?”
“Right,” Krug agreed solemnly. “Got to keep an open mind in this business, that’s for sure.”
With the promise of three full days off, and at least a month of day-tour desk work to be assigned until the cast was off his arm, Casey fell asleep, smiling. Thirty beautiful nights free ahead. Surely time enough for even a one-armed lover? It was sweet-dream time. The sweetest. Visions of reconciliation and romantic advancement—
But he had slept only an hour, Casey discovered when he was wakened for breakfast. And he had another visitor.
“I’m on my way to the Parole Authority,” Paul Rees said awkwardly. “Thought I’d drop by first and thank you.”
“Seems to me it should be the other way around.” Casey studied the sallow, exhausted face.
Something concealed there still, he thought. But Rees was a man who would always harbor ghosts. “Aren’t you starting out kind of early for a nine o’clock appointment?”
“Probably. But I don’t know how long it might take to get my Volks out of the garage. The police garage,” he added stiffly. “They—you—impounded it. But I was told I could get a release in a little while.”
They chatted in a half-friendly but cautious fashion for a bit. Then suddenly reminded, Casey said, “About that money. Doesn’t matter, but I’m still curious. Did you really win it in a poker game?”
God, Rees thought, don’t they ever quit? A policeman is a policeman is a policeman. He was not out of danger yet. “Let’s just say I won it, period. The details belong to a time I’d like to forget about forever.”
“Fair enough,” Casey started to say, but the phone on the stand beside his hospital bed rang. Joey, he thought. It’s ESP. But nothing so mysterious, it was his mother: What on earth had happened to him? Was he all right? She hadn’t been able to get a single sensible word out of those men he worked with, so Dad had called the captain—
“Oh, no,” Casey groaned. But he couldn’t help laughing.
He was still laughing as Rees signaled good-bye and slid out into the long, waxy hospital corridor busy with attendants wheeling carts full of breakfast trays. A disembodied voice kept paging doctors. Nurses rustled by Rees as if he were invisible. Another closed world, he thought. Like prison. Like the courtroom he would be appearing in soon to testify against murderous strangers. Like the jail cell he might still occupy today if he were not lucky—
And he knew he was not when he pushed out into the cool gray morning and saw Krug lounging against an official-looking car parked at the curb.
“No answer at the Pelican, so I figured you might be here.” He opened the front passenger door of the car. “Want a lift?” He grinned as Rees shook his head no. “Come on,” he said derisively, “what’re you scared of? Better than hoofing it to the garage, ain’t it?”
Knowing he had no choice, Rees climbed into the car, his exhaustion becoming despair as he looked at the radio equipment, the rifle clamped under the dashboard, the clipboard holding lists of wanted cars and other police bulletins. The plastic bag containing the pistol had been found in the Volkswagen’s trunk and impounded with the car as evidence. Evidence which someone—Krug probably—had reexamined. And a bloodhound like Krug would not miss the significance of those pieces of shoe-box lid, like a jigsaw puzzle, spelling out parole conditions broken—
“Y’know something really bugs me,” Krug was saying as he pulled jerkily away from the curb. “About that scene up on the hill?” He glanced at Rees. “How come a guy like you makes a grandstand play like that? I mean, look”—he seemed to be arguing with himself—“here’s a ten-ton killer about to waste a cop. No skin off yours if he does, right? Only makes it easier for you to get away, save your own neck. But instead, you mix in like a—” he broke off, laughing. “That’s what bugs me! You playing hero. It just don’t figure with a guy as easy to scare as you.”
“Maybe you’ve been reading me wrong, Sergeant.”
“The hell I have.”
Rees stared blindly out the window. “Well, even a rat fights when it’s cornered,” he said bleakly.
“That’s what I’m talking about, fella. You wasn’t cornered up there.”
“So I’m a different sort of rat. Something new for your book.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure. Something real new.” Krug swung into an alley and stopped the car abruptly. “Okay, this is it.” And again He grinned at Rees’s reaction. “See what I mean? Easy to scare.” He shook his head sadly, plunging his hand into his pocket.
Expecting a gun, brass knuckles—anything but what appeared—Rees flinched back against the door. Then numb with shock, he stared at the two pieces of cardboard which Krug had flipped at him. Buff shoe-box cardboard with small black printing. Put together, the two pieces spelled out Stateline, Nevada.
“Garage is half a block down,” Krug was saying. “I signed the release, so all you got to do is receipt it and split.” He leaned across Rees, opening the car door. “They’ll charge you for three inner tubes, but the labor for changing the tires is on us. So we’re even-steven, right?”
Rees climbed dazedly out and the door slammed behind him. Before he could turn, Krug had gunned away. Even-steven, the harsh voice kept echoing in his head as Rees watched the City of Santa Monica departmental car roll down the alley and disappear. Meaning debt paid. Game over. He looked at the two ragged pieces of cardboard shoe box in his hand. Then very slowly he shredded them into confetti which he scattered behind him as he walked down the alley. In two hours he was due at Parole. And with any luck, his new parole officer might be someone he could talk to…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carolyn Weston grew up in Hollywood during the Depression. Hollywood Boulevard was the scene of her truancies; movie houses one refuge, the public library another. She spent part of World War II working in an aircraft plant, and afterward gypsied around the country, working at anything and everything (Reno gambling club, specialty wallpaper house as decorator, New Orleans nightclub, Prentice-Hall and Lord and Taylor in New York, among others!). All this time she had been writing and discarding manuscripts, until at last one of the novels was published. Now she lives in California.
Susannah Screaming (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 2) Page 18
