The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. Not with Jo feeling so vulnerable. And not with LaForge newly dead. I owed him something for trying to be a good boy, and the bitterest part of the truth didn't seem like too much to pay.

  “Nothing,” I told her. “He was just an acquaintance of the Jellicoes. He was just a means of getting in touch with them. Preston was an unhappy man who couldn't live up to his all-American image. And I just happened to catch up with him on the last day of his life.”

  “Bad luck,” Jo said, closing off the topic.

  She got up from her chair and walked slowly toward the bedroom. “Bad luck for you both.”

  15

  MONDAY STARTED off as badly as Sunday had ended. Hugo called at half-past eight, and I spent half an hour trying to convince him that everything was fine and that he should stay with his son in Dayton. It's hard to lie convincingly very early or very late in the day—salesmen and bill collectors know it and so, I think, did Hugo Cratz. Try as I might to make my sleepy voice sound cheerful and confident, some of the previous night—some of that horror that Jo had written off as bad luck—seeped in. And Hugo caught it, the way a dog catches a trace of dogginess in an old rug.

  “Hold up, now, Harry,” he said crankily. “Just what's going on down there? I got the right to know.”

  They were Jo's very words and, like Jo, he'd spoken the truth. He did have the right to know. But, after what had happened the night before, I just wasn't prepared to tell him. So I tried to edge around the ugly part and, at the same time, to suggest what had occurred to me as soon as I saw Preston LaForge's shattered face. “Right now, I'm not having much luck finding her, Hugo. I'm beginning to think that it wouldn't be a bad idea to let the police in on it.”

  “Police!” he exploded. “Damn it, I told you I didn't want no cops sniffing around my little girl. If you're getting tired of helping me, just let me know. I got other places I can go.”

  Like where? I almost said.

  And I almost said, “What if she's dead.” But it would be a hellish mistake if I were wrong. So there was nothing to do but tell him, “I'll keep at it,” and to mumble a silent prayer that the Jellicoes could be bluffed into telling me what had become of Cindy Ann.

  Only that seemed more and more unlikely as the day started in earnest over coffee and the newspaper and the sounds of Jo showering and getting dressed. The Jellicoes had no intention of trading information to me. Moreover, I had nothing to trade. Once Laurie saw one of the pictures and realized that neither she nor Lance was in it, I'd be cooked. That is, unless I could convince her that the photos were more damaging than they seemed, unless I could keep her guessing about what they really pictured. It would be a risky bluff. Perhaps a fatal one, if Jellicoe had been lying to me about LaForge's death, if, in fact, he were setting me up the way I had set up Preston. What it came down to was the tricky question of how far the Jellicoes could be pushed. And, at ten in the morning, the only person I could think of who might know was Tracy Leach—the woman I'd sworn to leave alone the night before.

  It's always depressing to recognize just how fragile good intentions are. Preston's, my own, and Jo's. That “bad luck” business wasn't going to carry her through the day, and she was seething as she walked into the living room. She sat down on the couch and I passed her a cup of coffee and the morning Enquirer. As soon as she saw the front page, the big picture of Preston and the smarmy headline, it all came out in one confused burst.

  “You got a lousy job, Harry!” she muttered. “And I hate it. I hate what I saw last night. And I hate the people you deal with. And right now, I hate you for being part of the whole thing!”

  She shot up from the couch and I grabbed her hand. “It's not that I'm a coward,” she said. “You know I'm not. I've seen terrible things in my life. And I've survived them. I'll survive this, too. The thing is I just don't know whether I want to commit myself to a relationship with a man whose professional life is like the buried half of a log. I don't need any more grief. I want something . . .” Her gray eyes darted about the room as if the word she were looking for were hidden in a corner. “Quieter.”

  She pulled away and said, “I'm going to go home now and think about this.”

  She started for the door and whirled around and pointed an accusatory finger at me. “I think I could love you, damn it! I think I already do. And what I want to know is what you're going to do about it.”

  “I love you, too,” I said helplessly, which, I suppose, is the only way it's ever said.

  “Well, goddamn it!” Jo said and stalked out of the room. “I'll be at the Bee tonight,” she called over her shoulder. “I'm off at ten.”

  ******

  I'd dressed in a pair of light gray slacks and a pale blue broadcloth shirt, and I'd dug through the closet until I found a navy blazer that didn't look as if it had been torn from the rack during a twelve-hour sale. I wanted to look natty and reputable for Miss Tracy Leach and, standing in the bright morning sunlight in front of her jewel-like house and watching the sparse traffic saunter down Ida Street, I felt relatively respectable.

  I'd tried to picture what she'd look like as I'd driven over to Mt. Adams. But what does a rich, young woman with a jaded sexual palate and Preston LaForge for a boyfriend look like? She could be anything from a robust and rambunctious Dallas Cowgirl to one of those ethereal young things with blue-veined, china-white skin and large nervous eyes. All I knew for certain was that she liked her callers well-dressed.

  Looking up at that exquisite house with its Chinese red doors, I decided that she was probably closer to the ethereal type—one of those shy, serious, half-pretty young women who prefer the company of weak and troubled men. The kind who has hundreds of “friends” in different places and who lives nervously from friend to friend in an endless round of homing and small talk and idle, uneventful romance. She was probably thin and blonde and gauzy-looking. And she would dress elegantly and speak in a soft, shy shimmer, like the slip of a small blue wave. I liked the woman I had conjured up on the doorstep and decided to handle her with care.

  I knocked once at the red door.

  A pale, straw-haired man—shirtless beneath a white waiter's jacket and navy-blue pinstriped pants—answered it. In the face, he had the fragile look of the young Truman Capote; but, as with those photographs of the young Capote, there was a distant malice in his pale green eyes and something absolutely vicious about the cut of his mouth, which was much redder than the rest of his face and seemed to stand out from the surrounding flesh as if it were carved in bas-relief. Beneath that face, he was wiry and slender. But not at all weak-looking. Twin cords of muscle pillared his neck, and his pale naked chest had the oiled, overdeveloped musculature of the weight-lifter. He was about forty years old and wore that boyish face as if he were thoroughly tired of being told how young it looked.

  “Yes?” he said. “What is it?”

  “I want to speak with Tracy,” I said. “Is she home?”

  The man grinned nastily. It made him look his forty years and then some. “Is this a joke?” he said and I could see the muscles beneath that waiter's jacket tightening up. “Because if it is, I don't think it's funny.” His face fell suddenly and for a second I thought he was going to cry. “I've had an awful night and if Tony or Mark or one of that crowd sent you over here to rag me, I’m warning you now I'm in no mood for games. Maybe they didn't tell you, but I'm expert at sabot. And I can assure you that if you don't get off this porch in two seconds, I'm going to give you a lesson that you'll never forget.”

  I stepped back from the door and looked down at myself ruefully, at those clothes I had hand-picked for Miss Tracy Leach. I wanted to laugh, but I knew that if I did he'd start kicking. It was an awful joke, anyway. And if I hadn't been such a sentimentalist, I would have seen it coming sooner. Serves you right, I told myself, for making the world over in your own image.

  “Uh . . . you're Tracy Leach,” I said. “Aren't you?”

 
He nodded.

  “I'm sorry about the mistake in gender, Mr. Leach. No joke was intended. I was under the impression that Tray was a girl.”

  “Tray!” he said and squinted at me. “Do I know you?”

  “No. But I knew Preston LaForge and he mentioned your name to me.”

  Leach winced at Preston's name and gripped his belly. “You're the detective!” he said in a pained, aghast voice. “You're the one who got him killed!”

  Leach bent forward and straightened suddenly, as if something had locked inside his spine. He let out a blood-curdling yell and sent his left, shoeless foot flying toward my head.

  He shouldn't have yelled. They say that's supposed to freeze your target, but it only made me jump. The foot whistled by my temple and I went charging forward, knocking him off his right leg and back into the house.

  He went down on his butt and I pinned him with my body, but not very successfully. He just kept yelling and kicking and throwing his head around like a frenzied child. Some of those kicks were finding their mark on my ankles and on my legs and dangerously close to my knees.

  “Cut it out!” I shouted at him.

  When he didn't stop, I clipped him hard—a foreshortened right cross that landed on the tip of his chin.

  His body went limp and his head lolled to the carpet.

  “Jesus Christ!” I said as I got to my feet.

  I rubbed my sore legs and took a quick look at Tray. He wasn't going to start kicking again for a few minutes at least, which gave me a moment or so to examine the room. It was a rose-colored parlor, an old-fashioned sitting room, furnished predictably with Chinese screens and Beardsley prints and velvet Victorian settees with inlaid burl and carved oriental teak boxes with brass handles and an oversized rosewood chiffonier filled with expensive knicknacks. It was a rich, eccentric old woman's room—many homosexuals have a dowager's taste in furnishings, but flashier, like the old woman discovered sex at the age of seventy. It depressed me. Tracy Leach depressed me. And so did Preston LaForge. The all-American boy.

  It didn't look like Tray was going to come out of it on his own, so I grabbed him by the collar of his waiter's jacket and dragged him over to one of those squat Chinese boxes. There was a silver bowl on top of it, filled with water and floated with rose petals. I dumped the whole thing on Leach's head and stepped back.

  He sputtered and shook and wiped the petals off his face.

  Leach sat up when he'd gotten his bearings and looked in horror at the rug. “These things are expensive,” he blubbered. “Who's going to pay to have this cleaned?” He got slowly to his feet and stared at the waterspot on the carpet.

  “Why don't you have Oscar come in and redecorate?” I said drily.

  Leach looked at me with surprise. “You know Oscar?”

  I laughed in spite of myself.

  “There's nothing funny about this.” Leach kneeled down and prodded the carpet.

  For a split second I had the feeling he was about to attack me again. So I said to him, “Don't try it, Tracy.”

  “Bully,” he said, straightening up.

  I folded my arms and shook my head at him. “That's always the way it is with you guys, isn't it? The world's always divided into two camps—the bullies and the gays.”

  “That happens to be the way it is.”

  “Don't make me sick, Tray,” I said. “I know too much about you to fall for that put-upon crap. You buy little boys and girls. Just like Preston did. You probably shared a few with him, calling him up like a housewife passing along a good recipe. So don't get self-righteous with me.”

  Tracy Leach squeezed a little rose-water out of his sleeves and walked over to one of the velvet settees. “What do you want from me?” he said.

  “Some information about the Jellicoes.”

  He sat down delicately on the edge of a cushion and looked disbelievingly into my face. “You must think I'm crazy. You saw what happened to Pres. Why in God's name do you think I would try the same thing?”

  I shrugged. “I thought maybe you'd want to do something for a dead friend.”

  “Like what?” he said viciously.

  “Like finding out who killed him.”

  “He killed himself,” Leach said. “Preston would have killed himself some day no matter what I or anyone else did.” He took a husky, sorrowful breath and sat up on the settee. “He just couldn't handle being gay. He'd do stupid, dangerous things. Make jokes, expose himself publicly. All he ever really wanted was to be caught and . . . sent home.” Leach massaged his face as if it were a knotted muscle. “I'm not like Preston, Mr.—”

  “Stoner.”

  “Stoner. I made my choice, if you can call it that, early in life. And most of the time, I'm not ashamed of it or disturbed by it. You asked me before how deep my loyalties went. Well, you won't understand it, but I loved Preston and I tried to protect him while he was alive. Now . . .” Leach dropped his hands to the settee.

  I studied him for a second. Muscling the poor bastard wasn't going to help Cindy Ann Evans. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a card and set it on the Chinese box. “All right, Tray. Call me if you change your mind.”

  “I won't, you know,” he said. “I don't know why I should say this. I don't like you. And I don't approve of what you did to Preston. But, if you're smart, you'll leave this alone. They're a ruthless pair. And if you keep investigating this girl's disappearance, they will kill you.

  “Now get out,” he said. “Get out and leave me alone.”

  I walked through the front door into the bright July sun and tried to think of one good reason why I shouldn't find another line of work.

  16

  I WAS out along the river in half an hour, coasting past the barren industrial landscape of Riverview—past the big oil depots and the railroad yards, where the track smiled savagely in the noon sun. And then the tanks and the tank cars vanished, and I could see the river again, the somber brown Ohio, as it jaunted southwest down the roller-coaster slope of the Kentucky line.

  Five more miles due west and I came to the lonely frame house on the clay flats. I pulled over to the embankment, cut the engine and just sat, for a moment, on the seat—smelling the river again as it was borne in across the desolate yard and up the marl slope. But this time it didn't carry the jungle smells with it—the rot and the diesel oil and the burnt-grass smell of the LZs. This time, the smells were like the fulsome smells of Tray Leach's Spanish house and of the missing girl herself. The smells of a sweet and secret decay, half-hidden, half-wanting to be found. And for more than a moment, I considered nakedly what I was really trying to find. A corpse, lying like the black, charred tire in the yard of Abel Jones's house? A killer? A conspiracy? But that wasn't it. The little man knew better, especially after learning what he had about Leach and Preston LaForge. He wanted the source. He wanted Nick himself by the nose.

  Suddenly, I was for it, again. For what I couldn't explain to Jo. For what I can't even explain to myself. For finding all secret, evil things and making them known.

  A shirtless man had come out on the porch of Jones's house and, with one hand shading his eyes, was gazing up at the Pinto. Even from a hundred yards away I could tell that he wasn't Jones. His hair was too light and too long and his skin had been burned to the color of a mahogany door by the sun. He stared at me for a minute and then started up the slope, moving with great, bearlike swipes of his arms. I got out of the Pinto when he was about twenty-five feet away and leaned against the door handle with one hand holding the pistol in my coat pocket. I wasn't going to have any trouble asking questions of this one—he'd do all the talking, at least at first. It was what happened after he finished that had me a little worried. He was a big strapping kid, and the closer he got the fiercer he looked.

  “What is it you're looking for?” he said when he got up to me. He was older than I thought. Maybe thirty. Brown-haired, high-cheeked, with a touch of Indian blood in his swarthy face.

  “I'm looking for Coral
Jones,” I said to him. “She knows who I am.”

  “I don't,” he said plainly. “Maybe you better tell me what your business is.”

  “My name's Stoner. Coral is helping me find a missing girl.”

  “Shoot, you'd better find him first,” the man said.

  “Abel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He's gone?” I said.

  “All weekend.”

  “And Coral?”

  He colored a little on his high cheeks. Just enough to give me the feeling that he wasn't sure how to answer the question. Or, perhaps, how Coral would want him to answer it.

  “Maybe you'd better talk to the lady,” he said at last.

  Down we went into the yard, where the Falcon sat next to the frame porch. Then up onto the porch and into the hallway.

  There had been a few changes since the last time I'd been there. Most of the portable items—the fairground mementos—had been packed away in liquor boxes, half a dozen of which were stacked on the living room floor. The larger furniture had been covered with throws.

  Coral Jones, her head wrapped in a plaid scarf, was bending over one of the boxes when I walked into the room. She was wearing tight bluejeans and a man's workshirt, which she'd knotted at her waist instead of tucking into the jeans. She smiled, a friendly smile, when she saw me and said to the shirtless man, “Bobby, go out for awhile.”

  “You sure, Coral?” he said, warning her with his eyes that I was trouble.

  “I'm sure, honey. You go on.”

  He let out a steamy breath, looked bothered and, then, walked out the front door. “I won't be far off,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Isn't he the sweetest,” Coral said with a giggle.

  “Where'd you find him?” I said.

  “Well, I got to thinking after you left how little I was looking forward to Abel poking me in the eye. And I said to myself, ‘Girl, you don't have to take that, either.’ So, when he got sober, I just told him we were quits. He took it better than I thought he would. Or worse. I guess it depends on your point of view. Anyway, he left more than two days ago and I haven't seen him since.”