The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  Coral patted one of the boxes. “I'm moving away,” she said brightly. “Going to make a fresh start, like I told you. That's how I met Bobby. He's helping me move out. He's a nice-looking boy, isn't he?” She peeked out the front door to where Bobby was marching back and forth in the yard. “A little young,” she said with a blush. “But he's sure enough willing.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Coral laughed. “I guess I owe all of this to you, in a way. What brings you around here, anyway?”

  “I need some help, Coral,” I told her. “Things just haven't been falling my way, lately. And I need some help.”

  “About that girl?” she said.

  I nodded.

  Coral pointed to the couch and I sat down. “You want a drink? I've got a bottle right over here.”

  She lifted a half-filled quart of Old Grandad from behind the couch and plucked two glasses out of a crate. “Here,” she said, handing me a glass.

  She plopped down on the couch beside me and curled up, like a cat making herself comfortable. “So what can I do for you?”

  I took a quick look at her—brown and pretty and fairly bursting her shirt and slacks. And she smiled shyly, as if to say that it was all right if that's what I wanted. And, I suppose, a huge disloyal part of me did. But then I thought of Jo and felt properly chastened. Absurd, in this insanely picaresque universe, to obligate yourself to one person, to make up loyalties that time itself, not to mention whim, chance or change of weather, will explode like hurtled glass. Absurd, I told myself. And knew that it was even more absurd to protest. So, I shook my head sadly and balefully and said, “I'm probably crazy, Coral. But what I want from you is some information.”

  “I'd like to help you if I can.”

  “Then tell me all you know about Laurie and Lance Jellicoe. Because things have changed since Friday. A man is dead. That girl may be dead. Both at their hands.”

  “Could be,” Coral said. “Like I told you before, they're a rough pair, although, from what I've seen, murder's not exactly their style.”

  “What is their style?”

  “Blackmail,” she said. “Blackmail and raw sex. They've got quite a list of customers, too, from what Abel used to tell me. Abel liked that part best. He liked to see the mighty brought low. Hell, Abel liked to see anyone brought low.”

  “Do you know any names or places. Customers I might talk to or houses where they might keep their store of little boys and girls?”

  Coral shook her head. “For a talkative man, Abel could be mighty close-mouthed when it came to things that really counted.”

  “Damn it!” I said. “I've got to meet that girl tonight. And I need some kind of edge.”

  Coral looked about the room as if she were checking to make sure that no one was listening. “You know about Escorts Unlimited, right?”

  I nodded. “And the office on Plum Street. And the prostitution in Newport.”

  She shrugged. “Then I don't know what more I can tell you. Abel was just a part-time handyman for them. I do know that they had him working over in Kentucky. And that sometimes he'd be gone for a couple of days at a time. But, knowing Abel like I do, that could mean any number of things.”

  I swallowed the rest of the drink and put the glass down on one of the liquor boxes. “Well, I gave it a try anyway. I'll just have to bluff it out with what I've got.”

  “Hold on a second,” Coral said. “Do you know about the other one?”

  For a second I didn't know what she was talking about, what that slightly sinister phrase meant. But it chilled me just the same. “What do you mean?”

  “The partner,” she said, looking anxiously into her drink. “The other one.”

  “Whoa!” I said and it was as if I'd gotten a second wind on that hot, windless afternoon.

  She looked up from her glass and smiled broadly when she'd realized that she'd given me something I could use. “Don't go asking me what his name is. Hell, I don't even know for sure if he's a he! But I do know that someone else works with them. Abel knew his name. And I had the feeling that he was the brains behind the escort service.”

  “What does he look like, this partner?”

  “Oh, Harry,” she said, and I thought she would cry. “Honey, I just don't know.”

  “Do you know why they wanted Abel to get rid of those pictures—like the one of Cindy Ann?”

  She bit her lip. “They didn't need those pictures—the ones with just the girls in them. There were others that they'd keep.”

  “For blackmail?”

  She nodded.

  “Where did they take these pictures?” I asked her.

  “That I don't know.”

  “And you don't know the name of their silent partner?”

  “I'm sorry. Abel would know. But you're not likely to see him again. And I know I sure as hell don't want to see him.”

  She looked so damn eager to please that I began to feel guilty for making what, after all, was nothing more to her than a show of gratitude into a full-scale exam. So I let up, feeling content with what I'd learned, and changed the subject.

  “You're taking off with that big Oakie?”

  “Uh-huh.” She grinned and her whole body relaxed.

  “What does he do for a living—your Bobby?”

  “He's got prospects, Harry.”

  She said it in a way that made me think that she'd said the same thing many times before. For just a second, I think she caught the echo, too. And her dark, handsome face reddened with the memory of all the Abels and the Bobbies and their prospects that never turned out. When she realized that I was thinking the same thing, she blushed more deeply and looked up at me with a touch of defiance in her eyes.

  “I better be going,” I said quickly. “You take care of yourself, Coral. And if you ever need a detective, give me a call.”

  “I'll remember that,” she said, brightening. “But we'll be halfway to Colorado by tonight, so it isn't likely we'll be seeing each other again.”

  I guess, finally, we were both glad of that. We said goodbye. Bobby came stomping onto the porch and pounded on a newel post like a jealous stag sharpening his antlers on a tree trunk. I went out. He went in, slamming the screen door behind him. And I walked back up the marl slope to the car, thinking I'd learned a lot more than I'd expected for one short morning.

  17

  I DROVE down to the Riorley Building after finishing with Coral. There was exactly one letter beneath the mail slot on the anteroom floor—a bulk-mailed circular urging me to vote for the right-to-work law—and there was one call on the answer-phone from a woman identifying herself as Ulgine Ruhl. Ulgine spoke with the sweet, nasal lilt of a soloist in a Baptist church choir. “I wanchu to find my Wilmer for me,” she began. “ ‘Cause ...” And that was it. She must have changed her mind about Wilmer in the middle of the sentence, when she couldn't think of one good reason why she wanted him back. I was proud of her. Wilmer was no good—a high-stepper with a checked tarn and a gold eye-tooth and a taste for the booze and the ladies. She was better off without him.

  I spent a quarter of an hour running through scenarios for the evening—how I would time my disclosures and how much I would disclose. I was feeling so good I decided that I wouldn't even bother bringing a photograph. I would simply go with what I already knew and make them guess about the hard evidence.

  Around two I walked down to the coffee shop in the lobby and traded stories with Lou Billings, my dentist, who has an office on the third floor of the Riorley. Preston LaForge seemed to be the topic of every conversation in the room, which wasn't surprising; and eventually Lou got around to him, too. Jim Dugan, a courthouse lawyer who also has an office in the Riorley, dropped by just as Lou began to theorize about LaForge's motives.

  “I'll tell you, Lou,” he said. “Something's not kosher about the whole thing.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked him.

  “Scuttlebut.” Dugan leaned across the table and whispered, “They
found some strange gear in LaForge's apartment. But the Bengals' brass is trying to keep a lid on it. Looks like he was a little . . .” Dugan rotated his hand in that classic gesture of equivocation.

  Lou sat back in his chair and looked hurt. “No. I don't believe it. Not LaForge.”

  Dugan shrugged. “I'm just telling you what I heard. And I'll tell you something else. He wasn't alone last night when he did it. He had company.”

  I squirmed a little in my chair. “Are they saying who?”

  Dugan shook his head and jabbed at his horn-rim glasses with a meaty forefinger. “Could be they're not saying for the same reason they're not talking about what they found in his bedroom.”

  That was enough to get me interested.

  I told Lou I had an appointment to keep, paid my chit, and walked uptown to the Courthouse.

  It was a lazy Monday on Courthouse Square. Outside of a guard or two manning the gazebo-like information booth on the first floor, there was very little traffic inside the arcade. There wasn't much doing on the second floor either. Most of the old hands from the D.A.'s office were out for lunch, but I did spot one familiar face, Carrie Harris's, coming out of an office marked “Private.”

  “Long time no see,” I called to her.

  She stopped in front of the frosted glass door and glared at me with foot-tapping impatience.

  We'd never been good friends, Carrie and I. We'd never hit it off. She was bright, bitchy, and pretty in a smug, aggressive way—one of those attractive women whose charm and beauty are as depthless as stamped tin, the kind whose dark speculative eyes are always finishing conversations before they've begun. In the six years since I'd quit working in the same office with her, she'd found a suitable object for her attention—a young assistant D.A. named Harris, who had a thin crocodilean smile and a solid political future. But old grudges die hard. And I could see from the bare tolerance on Carrie's face that she hadn't forgotten the bad feeling between us.

  “Got a minute?” I asked her.

  She glanced at her watch. “Maybe half of one.”

  “I hear you got married. Congratulations.”

  She shrugged, just as I thought she would. The ring was already chafing her finger, and that gave me something to work with.

  “Marriage not all it's cracked up to be, huh?” I said sympathetically.

  She smiled a tight-lipped smile and ducked her head. She couldn't pass up the opportunity to complain, not Carrie.

  I took her by the arm and she looked suitably mortified; then she struggled with her conscience for half a second and won; and down we went, the spider and the fly, to the Courthouse coffee shop to talk over old times and new.

  By the time Carrie and I had finished our talk it was close to four. I'd heard all about Dick, about what a well-hung beast he was and about how Carrie kept feeling that there had to be something “more”—meaningful glance—to a man-woman “thing.” Not that she was a prude. Far from it. She loved sex and she loved to do it in funny places and she was always protected. And, so on.

  I got a little hot under the collar. I'll admit it. Carrie Harris was a sexy lady and she liked to flaunt it. She was also personal secretary to Walker Parsons, the district attorney. Between intimacies, I managed to pump her about Preston LaForge.

  They knew all about Preston down at the D. A.'s office. He had quite an arrest record. Indecent carriage. Soliciting minors. D & D's. Window peeping. Just about every unsavory misdemeanor on the books. But there had been no convictions, because none of the charges brought against Preston had ever been pressed. He'd been too valuable to the Bengals and to the city; so he'd gotten away with a handslap and a promise to behave.

  I could have guessed that much from what I'd seen of him. What I would have had trouble guessing was what the cops had found in his bedroom. Good old Preston had kept a photo collection of his own on the dresser. And chief among his mementos were snapshots of an unknown sixteen-year-old girl with a thin, avaricious face. There were dozens of them, Carrie said. Most picturing carnal and sadistic acts between the girl and Preston.

  What I never could have guessed was what they found with those photographs.

  On the dresser, beside the cache of photos, was a little note in Preston's childlike hand. The gist of it was that he had murdered the girl in the pictures one drunken night, mutilated the body, dropped it in the murky Ohio, and now felt so guilty about what he had done that he couldn't live with himself. And, so, he had bid the world goodnight, had Preston LaForge.

  There was some indication that the apartment had been visited after Preston had gone to his reward. But, aside from that, the Preston LaForge suicide seemed to be a closed case. In fact, the D.A. was getting a court order that very afternoon to start dredging the Ohio down by the locks.

  “There's no chance that the suicide was faked, is there?” I said, trying to sound cool and casual and not doing a very good job of it. “That the note was forged?”

  She shook her head. “The forensic team went over the whole place three times. They wanted to be sure. Walker told them to make absolutely sure.” She wrinkled her nose. “You wouldn't believe how disappointed he was when the ballistics team and the coroner and the handwriting people said that murder was out. Can you imagine how much hay he could have made out of prosecuting Preston LaForge's murderer? Preston LaForge, for Christ's sake! He walked around all morning in a black funk. It was as if he'd lost the nomination for governor.”

  “And the other people in the house—the ones who arrived after the suicide?”

  “We don't know for sure. But it appears they didn't stay for more than a few minutes. Just time enough to spot the body and vamoose.”

  “Nothing was taken?”

  She shook her head. “Why are you so interested, Harry?”

  “Well, after all,” I said with grim humour. “Preston LaForge!”

  “It is hard to believe, isn't it?” Carrie said. “You'd think a man like that could have found other ways to amuse himself.”

  “Yeah. You'd think so.”

  “There's probably no chance of finding the body now. That's what Dick says. Not after a week or so in the river. There are so many backwaters and marshy spots and things. It'll probably pop up by itself a year from now—all slick and bloated.” She shivered and pressed my hand for comfort. “I wonder who she was?”

  “Just a girl,” I said with a heavy heart. “Who was very unlucky.”

  “I guess so,” Carrie Harris said.

  ******

  I got back to the office around four-thirty. Although I'd been expecting it, Cindy Ann's murder had shocked me. Preston LaForge just hadn't seemed as if he'd had that kind of violence in him. Crazy he had been, without a doubt. But crazy enough to murder a teenage girl? To mutilate her body? Then to pretend that he was going to rescue the girl he himself had killed? That was crazy with a big C, as a psychiatrist friend once put it. But, then, I was being crazy with a little c to dispute what was indisputable. The girl was dead. LaForge was dead by his own hand, with a note of apology pinned to his sleeve. Even a die-hard sentimentalist, suspicious of any theory that confutes what the heart and the gut say must be so, balks at the cold fact of death.

  I hesitated a minute before picking up the phone. But I couldn't con myself this time with the pleasant fiction that she might still be alive. It would have come to this anyway, I told myself. Whether it had been Preston or the Jellicoes or anyone else. Sooner of later, he'd have had to face the truth. And, sooner or later, you would have had to tell him.

  Hugo's son, Ralph, answered the phone.

  “Hello!” he said buoyantly. “I guess you want to talk to Dad.”

  “Look, Ralph,” I said. “I've got some very bad news for him.”

  “Oh,” he said and the good spirits vanished. “It's that girl, isn't it? The one he hired you to look for?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She's dead, Ralph.”

  “Oh, my God.” There was a moment of silence and then he said, “
I guess he'll have to know.”

  “He's sure to find out. They're keeping a lid on it now, but my guess is that it'll make the papers in a day or so.”

  “How did she . . . how did it happen?”

  “She was murdered. It's very ugly, Ralph.”

  He sighed heavily. “Should I tell him?”

  “No,” I said. “I think I should. But not over the phone. I'll come up there tomorrow morning.”

  “All right,” he said. “I'll make sure he's around. There's nothing you want to say to him now, is there?”

  “No. It'll be hard enough tomorrow.”

  I hung up the phone and leaned back in the chair. She hadn't been much, Cindy Ann Evans. Venal, manipulative, sick in mind and soul. But she'd had what Preston had called a “sweetness,” which probably meant a simple and fatal pliability to LaForge, but which to me suggested the beginnings of a heart—that decency that Hugo had loved about her and that even hardbitten Laurie Jellicoe had granted her. Whoever she had been, she hadn't deserved to die in the way she had. And she hadn't deserved to be served up to that death by a pair of middle-class pimps and their silent partner, all of whom were scrambling desperately, now that she was gone, to disassociate themselves from her murder. That's why they wanted those damn pictures back so badly. They didn't want any evidence floating around that could connect them with the murdered girl and through her with Preston LaForge. That's why they'd searched the apartment—to get rid of anything that might lead the police to them. Murder investigations have a nasty way of proliferating. They're dangerous and unpredictable things, especially dangerous if you happen to be accessories before the fact.

  Well, I was still working for Hugo Cratz. At least, until the morning. And I thought it would do us both some good to see the Jellicoes behind bars. That little man inside me was wide awake and calculating like mad.

  The thing to do was to make sure they stayed in town long enough for the police to build a case against them. Because it seemed certain that once they'd tied up the loose ends they would make a discreet exit. Disconnect the answerphone in their Plum Street office, blackmail a few selected customers into forgetting that Escorts Unlimited had ever existed, change their names, dye their hair, go underground for a few years and resurface in another place to run the same seedy scam. And the truth was that they could easily get away with it. As long as no one could connect them to LaForge or Cindy Ann, the Jellicoes and their partner would escape scot-free.