The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  THE LIME PIT

  The Harry Stoner Series, #1

  Jonathan Valin

  TO KATHERINE

  Copyright © 1980 by Jonathan Valin

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First ebook edition 2012 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.

  Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-312-9

  Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9336-6

  Cover photo © Ron Bailey/iStock.com.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS

  THE LIME PIT

  1

  IT WAS a warm noon in early July. From my desk I watched a black-bodied wasp floating past the screen of the office window. He and a dozen or so of his cronies had built a hive on the sixth-floor cornice of the Riorley Building, directly below my office; and now, in the early summer heat, they circled and droned through the air in a lazy, rancorous cloud, like a little spot of bad weather in an otherwise flawless sky.

  I had just gotten back to Cincinnati Thursday morning, after spending the better part of two days in Chicago, running down a con-man by the name of Aaron Mull. He was an interesting character, Mull—a kind of corn-belt Prospero who had tricked two realtors into parting with a large sum of cash. It was a beautiful scam and it could only have been run on the very greedy or the maladroit, which was why the two real estate men had looked so goddamn angry when they'd popped into my office on the first of the month. The taller and more imposing of the pair, a bug-eyed man named Leo Meyer, explained the situation in a hoarse, aggrieved voice, while his partner, Larry Cox, literally wrung his hands in rage. These were not-so-newly-rich men, used to getting their own ways in a world of cutthroat scheming. They had worked their way up (so Meyer told me) the “hard way,” had “fought” for every penny that was theirs. And (so I told myself, though I didn't tell Meyer) it had taken this schemer, Aaron Mull, to summon up a history that had been, for a decade at least, buried under the loose earth of acquisitions—fine houses, fine cars, and the fine clothes, the tailored suits, the Brooks Brothers shirts and ties, the Bally shoes—that now seemed to Meyer mere figments from some dream of worldly happiness.

  I took the case. Hell, why not? Meyer's self-righteousness may have been as phoney as Mull's scam and his usual business ethics just as questionable, but money is money, whoever has handled it. And, once in your hands, it's an orphan, a new limb waiting to be grafted green on the family tree.

  I'd found Mull, all right. Working the same scam on a Northside Chicago realtor. And I'd turned him over to the police. Not without a tussle, however, because Aaron Mull was a crafty son-of-a-bitch and, like most imaginative men, a selfish one. In fact, when I finally caught up with him in the tar lot of a Northside I.G.A., he denied he was Aaron Mull. And, for just a second, in the dry shimmering heat of that grocery parking lot, I believed him. Maybe it was the heat or maybe it was just another facet of that gift that made him so good at what he did, but, by God, in his checked short-sleeved shirt, his Levi's and Hush Puppies, with his shock of pale brown hair, his tan beardless face and huckleberry grin, he didn’t look like an Aaron Mull. He backed away, smiling with just the right air of affronted good nature. And then I collared him.

  Mull jerked away, and there followed a merry chase among the parked cars and abandoned grocery carts. I had to bash him one at the end of it—a hard tap across the noggin with my pistol, which really wasn't fair, as Mull pointed out when I cuffed him and called the police.

  It was about midnight when the Chicago cops finished with me. The night was blessedly cool after the heat of the day and, rather than waiting for it to warm up again and driving in a sweat all the way back to Cincy, I walked over to the police lot, got in my Pinto and headed out Lake Shore to Stoney Island and from there to the Indiana toll road and the interstate that led to home. I stopped once at a Stuckey's outside of Indianapolis for a cup of coffee and an egg salad sandwich; and, while the waitress sauntered sleepy-eyed behind the counter and a handful of truckers, dressed in jeans and workshirts with open-backed CAT (for Caterpillar) caps on their heads, chatted and joked in one of the booths, I nursed my cup of coffee and watched the sunrise through the truck-stop window. I felt good. I'd done a good job. And, with the money I'd made from it, I could just keep driving on 65, all the way down through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi to the Gulf. It was a wonderful feeling of freedom that didn't last much longer than the moment it took me to reflect on how hot it would be on the Gulf and how little I liked driving through the swelter of July; but it was a feeling that very few people can afford to indulge in. Maybe the truckers at the nearby booth. And maybe the two real estate tycoons, whom I would call from my office that morning. You have to be god-awful rich or one of the chosen poor to entertain the illusion that your life is a matter of free choices. It's mostly an illusion, as Mull had found out. But it's a damn good feeling while it lasts. Almost worth a year to two in the slammer, which was all Mull would get as a first offender. And certainly worth the crap that I had to put up with daily.

  I'd gotten into town at seven A.M. and, still exhilarated, driven straight to the Riorley Building. It wasn't until that noon, as I sat drowsing, feet up on the desk, staring at the cloud of wasps as if they were an omen, that the fatigue caught up with me and the excitement left me the way it leaves an active kid—in a sudden swoop, a downward spin that makes you wonder if there will ever be anything in the world worth getting that excited about again.

  I was sitting in the diner, watching the sun rise in a great purple aura above the horizon line of treetops and skeletal high-power stations, when the kitchen phone rang. The waitress was too tired to pick it up; and the truckers didn't seem to hear it. Baby-faced Aaron Mull, dressed in bib overalls and a collarless shirt, walked out of the kitchen and said, “I'm not going to answer it.” Which left me. I reached across the lunch counter, but the space between the mushroom-shaped stools and the far wall was suddenly extended, and it was like reaching across the dead space toward the wild animals at a zoo. The phone kept ringing. And I kept reaching. And then I opened my eyes and I was back in the office, with a telephone buzzing insistently on my desk.

  I picked it up.

  “I want to speak to ... Mister . . . Harold . . . Stoner,” a high-pitched, whimsical voice said. The speaker was male, probably elderly; from the lacunae in his speech, the emphatic pauses between words, I imagined he was either a man who took himself very seriously or that he simply wasn't used to talking over the phone, wasn't sure the contraption would convey clearly the nuances of speech—like my own grandmother who used to yell into the receiver to be sure she would be heard over “all that distance.”

  I rubbed my eyes with my free hand and said: “This is Stoner speaking.”

  “Harold Stoner?”

  I held the receiver away from my ear and looked at it. “Yes. This is Harold Stoner.”

  “My name is Cratz, Mr. Stoner. Hugo . .. Harold . . . Cratz. We got the same
name.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Cratz?”

  “It's not me,” he said with a sorrowful catch in his voice. “It's my little girl, Cindy Ann. They done something to her.”

  And with that Hugo Cratz began to whimper—weak feminine sobs that made me shift uncomfortably in my chair. I let him have his cry over Cindy Ann—wife, daughter, granddaughter, whoever she was he had loved and lost. And when he'd finished, I told him to call the police, because I had the feeling that Hugo Cratz didn't need a private detective yet, just a friendly ear.

  But he surprised me. “Shoot, I already been to the police. Goddamn fools try to tell me she's left town. I says to them, ‘If she left town, how come she don't leave no word? How come that friend of hers, Laurie, is acting like she is?’

  “Well?” Cratz said when I didn't speak up. “How come?”

  “I don't know.”

  “You think you could find out?”

  “I can try,” I told him. “Come downtown to my office tomorrow. Say about nine-thirty. And fill me in on the details.”

  “Can't come downtown,” Cratz said. “Had a stroke last year and I don't get around much any more, save for a walk in the park. You can come out here if you like. 2014 Cornell. First floor front.”

  I started to write down the address on a notepad. And then I put the pencil down. With what I had made from the Meyer deal I didn't need Hugo Cratz's money. Or the trouble he was bound to give me. Because Hugo Cratz was trouble. I didn't need any omens to tell me that. “Wouldn't you be better off waiting a couple of days,” I said to him. “Maybe Cindy Ann did leave town. Maybe she'll be back in a couple of days.”

  “She's all I got,” Cratz said weakly. “My little girl is all I got.”

  I picked up the pencil and scratched out the street number. It was in northside Clifton—a respectable address. “All right, Mr. Cratz. It'll cost you two hundred dollars a day plus expenses.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said too quickly. “All right.”

  “You've got that kind of money?”

  “Well, not just lying around, I don't,” he said. “I can get it for you, though. In a couple of days. And as for those expenses ... it don't cost but twenty-five cents to get from here to downtown on the Metro, and twenty-five cents back. So I don't figure that should amount to much.”

  “What if I have to spend a few days on the job, Mr. Cratz?”

  He snorted. “With Laurie living right across the street! Hell, you can find out the right of this in half an hour. And that don't come to but eight dollars and thirty-three cents. Figuring twelve hours in a work day,” he added.

  I took a breath. “So you estimate between the bus fare and the half hour I'll be working for you that you'll owe me . . .”

  “Eight dollars and eighty-three cents,” Hugo Cratz said smartly. “And I'll have it for you in a couple of days.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “Don't you believe me?” Cratz said. “Mister, I need your help. No matter what it costs, I need your help.”

  He needs my help.

  What the hell? It was only a couple of miles out of my way, and I was going home anyway. And I'd made a big bundle for doing practically nothing. And I could afford to be charitable. And a little, quite unprofessional part of me—maybe the best part, all things considered—very much wanted to take a quick look at the man behind that stubborn whimsical voice.

  “All right,” I said. “I know I'm making a mistake, but I'm going to take you up on your deal, Mr. Cratz. One half hour's work. Pro-rated. I'll be out around three. And we'll see what we can do about finding your little girl.”

  2

  NORTH CLIFTON is one of the oldest suburbs of Cincinnati—a neighborhood of storied frame houses and spindle-railed verandas, of white-capped gaslights and maple-shaded lawns. It's picturesque and, like many picturesque neighborhoods, it has a chilling uniformity of character, as if the householders propped sternly in their lawn chairs or gazing out from the black space of a porch have been chosen and supplied to ornament their homes. It's not that the houses don't look lived in; on the contrary, Clifton looks thoroughly lived in, richly historical in the clutter and detail of everyday life. But it is a sedate and melancholy clutter that smacks of decay. Despite the contradictory evidence—the deserted bicycle blazing on a sunlit lawn, the bright yellow plastic truck abandoned on the sidewalk, and the occasional dart of a child's playful voice—I felt as I drove up Cornell that, like a bar or a graveyard, this was not a place for the young. Perhaps Cindy Ann Cratz had felt that way too.

  Hugo Cratz lived six doors in from Ludlow in a three-story red frame house with a white slat veranda and a tall maple tree set in a modest yard. A hedge of rosebushes flowed about the veranda and continued back along the driveway to the rear of the house. Two old men were walking up the driveway when I pulled in. One of them had been burly once—big-shouldered and strong-armed. But he had shriveled away in his old age and now carried himself with a kind of sodden, humpbacked fatigue, as if it pained him slightly to move at all. His chest was caved in and showed, sallow and hairless, through the front of his checked shirt. The head above the chest was sharp-featured and crowned with a tonsure of wispy white hair. His chin, peppered with stubble, turned upward; his sharp nose turned down; so that his mouth ran like a thin dark crease between them. The other man was fat, nimble, and deeply tanned on the face and arms. He wore a tight yellow T-shirt that accentuated the sway of his gut and the fat paps that sagged above his belly. His face was square, pleasant and considerably younger-looking than the other man's. I guessed that the frail one was Hugo Cratz, and I was right.

  “Hello!” he called out, waving his arm as if it were as jointless as a stick. “You must be Stoner. Glad you could come out.”

  There was something of the planter's manner in Cratz's voice, a Southern geniality that I'd missed over the phone. I figured he was putting it on for his big-bellied friend; and, oddly enough, it made Hugo come alive for me. That swagger was human. It fleshed him out, gave him the bulk he once must have had and a little of the athlete's vanity, that condescension that sportscasters and fans confuse with kindness. It put money in his loose khaki trousers, a wad of it tied with a rubber band. Blackened his hair and eye. Gave him a temper and a streak of mean parsimonious pride. Hugo Cratz, I decided, was probably a tough and devious old man.

  “Let's sit and talk,” he said when I'd walked to where he and his pal were standing. “Up on the porch.”

  There were two painted lawn chairs on the veranda and a big porch swing. Cratz took one chair, I took the other. And his friend sat on the top step of the stoop.

  “George is O.K.,” Cratz said, glancing down at the fat man. George raised his head and nodded seriously.

  I glanced at the pack of Lucky Strikes that George had rolled in his shirt sleeve.

  The poverty of some men's lives never fails to shake me. And, sitting on the porch, with George hunched affably below me and Hugo Cratz leaning intimately forward in his chair, I was suddenly conscious of just how much I represented in the way of excitement and novelty to those two old men. It made me feel like backing off that porch on tiptoe, climbing in the car and driving straight home to the Delores. Instead, I squirmed and made small nods and tried to avoid looking into Hugo Cratz's juicy blue eyes as he reminisced, walking slowly through a maze of memories, establishing along the way his own credentials as a man, until he arrived again at that center space where his manhood failed—his daughter's, Cindy Ann's space—and he broke down in big tears. Even his friend George turned away then, though he must have heard it a dozen times before. And I ... I stared out at the tired, sundrenched street and thought what a fool I was to play detective with Hugo Cratz.

  Cratz excused himself and walked into the apartment house to wipe his nose. I could see him through the first-floor bay window. There were plants in the bay—leafy asparagus ferns, begonias, and purple-leafed Wandering Jew. Either Cindy Ann had a pleasant domestic touch or Hugo Cratz was le
ss the crusty played-out old man than he appeared to be.

  “You've got to excuse him,” fat George said suddenly in a low, unfriendly voice. “He just ain't been the same since that little bitch left him.”

  “You want to tell me about her, George?” I asked.

  George looked quickly at the glass-frame door of the apartment building and took a deep noisy breath in through his nostrils.

  “What do you want, mister?” he said hoarsely. “He don't have any money left, if that's what you want.” George took another deep breath and his big chest heaved. “He ain't got nothing left,” he said, looking down at the seams in the pavement. “Time was he wouldn't need me to say it for him.”

  I sat back in the lawn chair and tried manfully to look like a tough detective for slow, stubborn George. But the harder I tried, the more I felt as if my mail-order diploma were showing—the one with the machine guns on it. And after a moment or so, I realized that it wasn't only George who was making me feel like a boob. Something wasn't right. Whatever that something was, George considered it criminal, a pathetic by-product of Cratz's old age. And Cratz thought it was embarrassing and just too damn sad.

  And then it came to me with a certainty that made me shiver in the hot July air. I shivered and then I blushed for Hugo, for George, and for myself. A chorus of cicadas started a shrill round in the nearby rosebushes, and I remembered the wasps outside my office window. That's what they were trying to tell you, Harry, I thought and laughed to myself. The cicadas grew shriller. The sunlight on the lawn glowed as whitely as a fluorescent bulb. I squinted and searched the yard for some evidence—some sunlit toy or sign of kinship. A yellowhammer drummed on a distant maple tree. Then the cicadas died down. A cloud passed across the lawn. And, in the hush, I asked myself what are you going to do now?

  Cindy Ann ————. Whatever it was, it wasn't Cratz. She wasn't his daughter, his granddaughter, his wife. She wasn't any relation at all. She was just a girl, probably poor-white from lower Vine, who had seen old Hugo as a stepping stone on the way out of tarboard shacks, poverty, and the old age that comes on almost overnight. She'd probably bilked the old man out of a few dollars or a few Social Security checks. And then went on her merry way. And Hugo, Hugo Cratz, the man I was working for, who had loved the little gold-digger with that shameless, impotent infatuation that age has for youth ... Hugo Cratz was just a very sentimental, very lonely, and very dirty old man.