“Thanks,” I winked and took them out of the drawer.
“What are you going to do with that?” Heather asked, nodding at the gun.
“I’m taking it down to the police station with me. They may need it as evidence.”
“Do you think you’re well enough to go?” she cautioned with a concerned wrinkle between her eyes.
“Sure, I feel a lot better. Besides, it’ll do me good to get outside. That’s modern medicine, get the patient on his feet right away so he can go back to work and pay his bill.”
Heather looked doubtful but the wrinkle finally disappeared.
“Shall we meet back here?” I asked after I’d washed my face.
“I don’t know,” Heather answered. “I really can’t afford it here, but I don’t know where else to go. I don’t have very much money left in the bank; you see, I was supposed to get paid next week and there’s no telling how long what I have will have to last us.”
“I don’t have any money at all,” Melinda added. “I already spent my allowance.”
“And I’ve got about twenty dollars,” I said.
“Well . . .” Heather hedged. “I had to use that twenty dollars to buy your shoes. I didn’t have enough on me and didn’t have time to go to the bank, what with the police and everything.”
“That’s all right,” I lied.
“I know it’ll be tough for a few days or so, but if the three of us stick together, we should be able to get by. That is if we can find a cheap place to live until this is all settled.”
“How about at the house?” I suggested. “Some of those rooms must still be habitable.”
“No good. The police have it blocked off and on a twenty-four-hour guard. They only let us in because we complained about needing some clothes and even then we had to smuggle your things out so they wouldn’t know we knew where you were. There’s no way of getting back in there.”
“How about the office? It’s big enough,” was my second suggestion.
Heather shook her head. “They’ve taken that over too. They’re running this investigation as if it were a matter of national security.”
“Well, you said he was an important man,” I reminded her.
“Humpf,” Melinda stated bitterly.
I ignored her expression of grief and tied my shoes.
“Hey!” Melinda jumped. “I’ve got it! We can stay at Dad’s business apartment over on Wilshire.”
“Yes!” Heather joined in. “That’s perfect. I’ve got an extra set of keys at the office.”
“What’s this business apartment?” I asked.
“Like most large businesses, Mr. Bartlett kept a furnished apartment for visiting members in his firm. Whenever one of his business associates was in town, he’d stay there.”
“What about the keys?”
“I’ve got a set at the office. Melinda and I will go down there with some excuse about having left spare clothes there or something and lift the keys.”
“Why can’t we just tell them that we want the keys because we don’t have any place to stay?” Melinda asked.
“Because the way they’re locking everything up that has to do with this investigation, as soon as they find out there’s another apartment, they’d take it over and kick us out.”
“That’s right,” I confirmed, feeling proud of Heather’s good sense. “Then it’s settled. You two get the keys and set the place up and I’ll go down to the police station and meet you afterwards at the apartment.” There was a round of enthusiastic agreement. “By the way, Melinda, just what business was your father in?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, some kind of investments.”
Not finding that a completely satisfactory answer, I asked Heather. “That’s about it,” she agreed. “He invested extremely large sums of money for giant corporations, insurance companies and such, into stocks, small businesses and everything else imaginable.”
I shook my head. “That’s a rougher business than I would have thought.” I borrowed five dollars from Heather for traveling expenses since she and Melinda were taking the car. I repeated the apartment’s address for her.
“Okay,” I said at the door. “I’ll see you later at the apartment.”
“Don’t keep us waiting,” Melinda grinned.
“Be careful,” Heather warned, the wrinkle back again.
“Don’t worry, what more could happen?” I asked naively.
Chapter Ten
You’ve probably already guessed that I lied to them, that I had absolutely no intention of going voluntarily to see the police. It’s true that I felt a certain sense of responsibility about Mr. Bartlett’s death—after all, I was his bodyguard at the time. But the question now was whether I was responsible enough to risk my own freedom by going to the police. I decided I wasn’t.
My real plan, while not as honorable as the one I’d told Heather and Melinda, was infinitely more practical. I would hock the gun at one of the pawnshops downtown, one I’d not been in before, and use that money plus the five dollars from Heather to take the next plane I could afford out of town, perhaps to San Francisco—thus, once again avoiding a potentially embarrassing situation. Not to mention unhealthy.
Don’t think it was easy lying to them that way, especially after the way they’d helped me out, what with nursing and trying to protect me from the police. But I figured it would be unfair of me to ruin all that they had done on my behalf by sticking around and getting arrested. That would have been terribly rude and ungrateful of me. After all, a man’s got to have some principles. Having ended the discussion on that logical note, I ran to catch a bus that was boarding half a block away.
My body, having been battered slightly out of shape, did not react with the speed and agility to which I was accustomed. Consequently, I reached the bus just as the doors had closed and it was preparing to pull away at the first hint of a green light. I rapped sharply on the doors and I could see the driver concentrating on ignoring me. I kicked the door a few times which only caused him to gun the motor.
“If you don’t open this goddamn door you son of a bitch, I’m going to cut your goddamn heart out,” I said calmly—not because I was particularly calm, but because I was too winded to shout.
Perhaps it was the quiet intensity with which I’d said it rather than the threat itself that broke his concentration and caused him to look at me—contemptuously, of course—for the first time. When he did, his eyes widened, his mouth fell slack and the door immediately hissed open.
As I climbed triumphantly aboard, trying to suppress my unsightly gasps for air, I noticed that the driver’s eyes remained fixed on my hands, or more specifically, on the gun and holster which I was carrying without the benefit of a bag. I’d forgotten all about it in my rush to leave the motel before Heather offered to drive me to the police station. I smiled at the driver to assure him I had no intention of hijacking his bus. He remained unconvinced.
“The light’s green,” I told him.
“Yeah, sure buddy,” he said, reluctantly turning his eyes from me to the road. The bus lurched forward with a jerk that sent me scuttling halfway down the aisle. Except for a few circumspect glances, everyone was busy pretending I wasn’t there. I walked to the rear of the bus, usually reserved for winos and delinquents, and sat down with the happy knowledge of not having paid the bus driver. It’s funny, but no matter how bad things are going, discovering that you’ve gotten away with something, no matter how small, tends to cheer you right up—as if there really is justice after all.
As usual, the back of the bus was littered with newspapers spanning the last two days of sports events. Picking up the cleanest page I could find, I wrapped the gun and holster like a dead fish and kept an eye out for my stop.
Downtown Los Angeles, like the downtowns of most of the large cities I’ve been in, looked like a giant going-out-of-business sale, busily trying to unload its goods before the buildings are all demolished or condemned. The store fronts are br
ight enough, but it’s the old brick and black mortar that sit sluggishly above them and their rickety side entrances and the constant smell of something unidentifiable being fried that have forced the big businesses to shift their locations to more suburban surroundings until all that’s left are lost-our-lease sales, greasy spoons and pawnshops.
I wandered cagily into one of the latter and slid the parcel under the wire-mesh cage that enclosed the broker. I purposely neglected to unwrap the newspaper, not wanting there to be any mistake about my intentions. Plenty of cheap hoods have come into pawnshops waving pistols only to be carried out after receiving a blast from a broker’s under-the-counter shotgun.
This broker was a big man, about forty, with huge hands that made everything he held in them look like toys. He was bald, and the harsh unshaded light bulbs made his brown skin glisten. He examined the gun with the confident smile of a master fisherman reeling in another one.
“That yours?” he said without looking up.
“Yeah.”
“Got any papers for it?”
“Nope. I found it in an alley,” I said, jerking my head toward some mythical alley.
He slid his eyes up at me, his head still bent over the gun. “You’d be surprised how many people lose guns in that same alley,” he chuckled. “That sure must be some special alley the way it makes those little guns want to jump right out of their owners’ pockets.”
“Yeah, especially when for only a few dollars more they could visit Disneyland.”
He looked at me again, his smile broadening. “Ain’t that the truth, brother.” He deliberated a moment. “Give you a fast fifteen, man. That’s the best I can do.”
“That’s a shame. The best I can do is thirty-five.”
“Hey, man, you wouldn’t be trying to take advantage of me ’cause I’m black, now would you?” he said with a hurt look.
“Nooo, I wouldn’t be trying to take advantage of you ’cause you’re too big,” I said, looking up the ten inches from my eye level to his. “But now that I know you’re black, it’ll cost you fifty dollars.”
He laughed aloud. “Okay, brother, okay. You got me by the hazel nuts and ain’t nothing I can do—twenty dollars.”
I reached across the counter and began to rewrap the gun and holster. He shrugged and walked away to see if I was bluffing.
“All right, twenty-five dollars, but that includes the holster.”
“Are you kidding? I wouldn’t even let you marry my sister for that little. Twenty-five bucks for the gun and two for the holster.”
“What can I do,” he said, shaking his head. “You white guys just come in here and walk all over us black folk. Ain’t nothing we can do about it.”
“Except double the price when you sell it,” I said as I counted the money. He flashed another exaggerated hurt look, his smile following me out the door.
I now had thirty-two dollars, enough to get me to the airport and on a plane away from here. With joy to the world and cash in my pocket, I headed for a phone booth to find out when and where I could catch the next bus to the airport. The information committed to memory, I hurried to the proper bus stop. A surprise bonus from the lady who gave me the transit information was that I now knew what time it was; I’d forgotten I even wanted to know. It was quarter to three.
There was one unexpected drawback to knowing the correct time. I had this uneasy feeling that I’d forgotten something. It nagged me for several blocks of lip-chewing until I realized what it was: I’d neglected to eat breakfast or lunch. And once having discovered the problem I also realized that I was starving. Besides being hungry, my mouth tasted as if I’d spent the last twelve hours sucking on a dirty sponge.
My pace stuttered in hesitation before each restaurant, my eyes lingered on each announcement of pancakes and sausage and my stomach growled as I passed each one by. But I knew that with the police out looking for me there was no time to lose. My only hope was that I had enough money to get on a plane going a distance far enough to serve meals. Being hungry reminded me of my injuries, which gave me more to complain about, which added to my arguments for leaving Los Angeles though Heather and Melinda waited in hiding for me to return.
Fortunately, I’m neither the romantic nor the sentimental type I’m often mistaken for. As far as romance goes, I’ve been around enough to know that once you get serious about one woman, your life is no longer your own. I mean, you’ll be all the time worrying about what she wants instead of what you want. And she’ll be worrying about what you want instead of what she wants. Not that I’m knocking it, it just seems more efficient to take care of your own wants. Besides, you can get all the same benefits without actually having to love each other and you can still call your soul your own. Simple as that.
And as to sentimentality, it wasn’t exactly my fault that Melinda’s father was killed. Even an expert bodyguard couldn’t have stopped that bomb from exploding. Besides, she didn’t like him anyway. They could get along fine without me—better in fact. Heather would find another job and Melinda would probably come into a healthy inheritance.
At least I wasn’t thinking about food anymore. Having checked the time in a dry cleaners I passed, I decided it might be quicker to jog to the bus stop through the alleys since they weren’t as crowded as the main streets. However, after a few painfully jostling jogs I settled for a forced march.
If you’re the kind of person who for some reason or other doesn’t find himself in alleys too often, everything you’ve ever read in paperbacks or seen on TV is true. They have the damp musty smell of something growing there that you’d rather not know about. And no matter how long it’s been since the last rain, alleys are always a little wet with occasional black puddles to mark the way. Crushed beer cans, shattered pints of Southern comfort and the kind of garbage cans gangsters are always knocking over in their getaways on “The Untouchables” line each alley. About a dozen yards in front of me a large tattered gray overcoat was tucked against the wall. As I came closer I noticed there was a slender lump inside the coat from which extended two bony legs.
Believe me, things were spooky enough without some idiot behind me tripping over a garbage can. Nevertheless, a loud shattering crash echoed through the alley into the street ahead. I was too anxious to catch my bus to worry about some drunken lout who couldn’t walk straight, so I ignored the sound and continued walking. Suddenly there was another crash echoing through the alley. I was right alongside the overcoat from which a small bony head suddenly popped out like an irate turtle with an accusing stare. Extremely annoyed I swung around while shouting, “Watch where you’re going, you clumsy . . .” the remainder of my insult being stopped short by the sight of a darkly clad man at the alley’s entrance, pointing what looked like a gun at me. The sun was behind his back so that all I could see was his outline, not that I wasted any time trying to do anything else. I instantly fell to the ground and rolled toward the wall through some of those black puddles and slimy gardens into the lumpy overcoat, just as another shot slammed into a nearby garbage can. The bony head popped out again accompanied by a bony fist that jabbed weakly at me in an effort to push me away.
“I may be just a drunken old man,” he rasped with toothless gums. “but I haven’t yet sunk that low!”
Not having the time or inclination to assure him about my romantic intentions, I jumped to my feet and ran along the wall toward the street ahead like the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel. I glanced over my shoulder to see whether the footsteps slapping against the pavement were coming toward me or running away.
You guessed it.
The footsteps stopped abruptly and I stole another hopeful glance over my shoulder. He had assumed the same aiming position as when I first saw him, his gun steadily following my attempts at zig-zag running. The old man was standing up next to him draped in his giant overcoat. “That’s right, officer,” he shouted, shaking his bony fist at me, “he tried to molest me.”
I was almost to the main st
reet. He’d have to fire now or never. Just one more energy burst and I would be among the busy shoppers, hopefully a deterrent to his taking any more shots. I could feel his sights on the back of my head as I ran, my throat too dry to yell for help. He’d have to shoot now. I turned my head and for a fraction of a second stared into the barrel of his poised pistol imagining what it would feel like to be dying. The rest of that second I spent running into a garbage can that sent me tumbling out of the alley and into the street to the surprise of some passers-by and the amusement of others. My tumbling was finally halted when I sprawled into a parked car.
I lifted my dazed head in time to see him turn the corner at the other end of the alley. All that remained was the bony old man shaking an empty fist at the deteriorating state of manhood.
I began to hoist myself up by the handle of the car door when a strong arm slid under mine and helped me the rest of the way up.
“You all right, sir?” asked the husky voice.
I turned around to see a nicely dressed businessman with a leather attaché case, gray hair, Caribbean tan and expensive shoes.
“Fine, thanks,” I said. “I just tripped and fell.”
“Well then, good day,” he smiled and walked briskly off as if to a meeting of the board.
My mind and body were in such a state of confusion I just leaned against the car while I tried to sort everything out. Out of habit I looked to make sure I wasn’t leaning against anything too dirty when I noticed two things. First, I noticed that my clothes were not only already dirty and sticky, but that I smelled like a fire hydrant in a kennel. The second thing I noticed was a black hole in the car door that looked suspiciously like a bullet hole, apparently caused by one of the bullets that missed me. My immediate reaction was of appreciation at how realistic it looked. I remembered all those cops-and-robbers movies I’d seen in which when they’re shooting at each other in the middle of Market Street, if the bullet doesn’t hit anybody it just evaporates. It never goes through Macy’s window and kills the salesman in the shoe department.
The Goulden Fleece Page 6
