The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  The sun was well beyond meridian as I slalomed through those S-shaped turns, where the expressway dipped down to the river through that dry sulfur-yellow gorge. On my right, the Quality Court Motel was blazing in the sun, like a pillar of fire, and all those stores and auto lots that had been dead shadows in the early morning were filled with color and life. I zipped by them and up onto Brent Spence, where the tires sang on the roadbed. Across the muddy Ohio with its half dozen coal barges pushed by white-capped tugs. And back to the city. Then up Columbia a mile or so to the suspension bridge and back across the river to the sleepy’ hamlet of Newport.

  The day was vivid and crystal clear. One of those rare summer days when the smog is washed down river by a hot wind and, suddenly, you can see—numbers and lettering and the texture of skin. Like getting a new pair of eyes. The Pinto dipped down again, past the concrete ponds where hundreds of cars sparkled in the sunlight, through the shady streets with their worn and suffering houses, and out to Main, down that avenue that's lined for half a mile with flat, glassy, unattractive shops. And, then I could see the marquee of Keeler's theater, lit faintly by soft yellow bulbs, and the big pink Cadillac parked in front of it, with lean, bullet-headed Red Bannion propping himself against it and gazing sedately at the street. I pulled in behind him and parked. I was full of unhealthy excitement as I stepped out the door, and I could feel both of the guns weighing against my body as if they were the only things I had on.

  Red had a tin of film in his right hand, and he waved with it to me and pointed to the theater lobby. I took a very close look at the cars parked along the street and across from the theater and began to feel some of the danger I had placed myself in. But it was too late to start acting sanely. I took a deep breath and followed Bannion into the lobby.

  It was cold inside the theater. And dimly-lighted. It took me a few seconds to adjust to the dark.

  Willie Keeler wasn't anywhere around. And that worried me.

  The only other person in the lobby was a rough-looking kid, sitting on a stool behind the candy counter. He had a blue usher's cap on his head and a bored, vicious look on his face.

  Bannion didn't look at him as he passed by the counter and through the door marked “Office.” He sat down behind Keeler's desk and folded his hands at his lips.

  “Shut the door behind you, will you, Harry?”

  I closed it and he pointed to a chair in front of the desk. I sat.

  He studied me for a moment, his hands folded at his lips. Try as I could, I couldn't make anything out of that look. It was the same weary, small town cop's face, with its cold, dispassionate eyes, magnified slightly by the lenses of his glasses. And the same bland clothes—the same loamy brown leisure suit and flat, tieless white shirt that Porky wore. Sitting there scratching his upper lip with one finger and eyeing me expressionlessly, he looked exactly like the shrewd old cop that he was.

  “So,” he said after a time. “We got a problem.”

  “No, Red. You've got a problem.”

  “Well, I guess I seen some trouble in my life. I'll get by.”

  “Not this time,” I said coldly.

  “Maybe not.” He sat up in the chair and pushed the tin of film over to me. “There she is.”

  “Who?”

  “That damn girl. That damn Cindy Ann.”

  I looked at the aluminum can and then back at Red.

  He sat back in the desk chair and stared dully at the desktop. “You know, you can figure and you can figure. Cover ‘bout every angle there is. Then some jackass comes along with one you never heard of and it all goes to hell. I didn't want that girl dead. Last thing in the world I needed. But some no-account fool with too much liquor in his fat, silly gut goes a little crazy one night. And . . .” He slapped the edge of the desk with his fingertips. “There you are.”

  Red unscrewed the can of film. There was a viewer on Keeler's desk, probably what he used to preview the loops for the quarter machines. Red patted the reel of film into his palm, slipped it on one of the arms of the viewer, and fed it through to the take-up reel. He flipped a switch on the housing, and the prism lit up.

  It was hard to see what was going on at first. Whoever had been holding the camera had been doing a very bad job. The lens jumped around the room from face to face until it finally settled on the bed.

  And there she was. Hugo's Cindy Ann. Preston LaForge was on top of her, and for a few seconds he obscured her body. All you could see was his naked back and her white legs stretched out on either side of his buttocks. LaForge began to pump faster—the speed of his movements exaggerated by the speed of the film. And then he stopped moving, arched his back, and pushed up from the bed with his arms. You could see Cindy Ann's pale face again beneath his chest. It was twisted with pleasure. Her little mouth opened in a silent “Oh,” then the film went blank for a second where it had been spliced.

  The prism filled again with the bed, this time from a closer vantage. Cindy Ann was sitting up on it, her back to the headboard, and you could see her naked torso from the forehead to a little below the hips. She had a vibrator between her legs and, from time to time, she would press her knees together luxuriously and make a silent groan. Someone got in the way of the lens momentarily, then backed out of the picture. Cindy's face had grown rapt. She tossed her head from side to side, moving the vibrator with her hands and licking her pale lips. She was trembling on the edge of orgasm and you could see the pale flesh of her chest grow mottled and her red hair—dark in the black and white film—sway like it was seaborne about her face. Just as she was about to come—her eyes squeezed closed, her mouth opened in noiseless wail—someone put a pistol to her head and pulled the trigger.

  The right side of Cindy Ann's skull exploded in blood and she fell out of the frame. There were arms and frightened faces, the camera jerked around; then the prism went bright with light.

  Red took a deep breath and clicked off the viewer. The motor whined down and the leader stopped slapping against the prism housing.

  When I looked up from the prism, I saw the gun in his hand.

  “Harry, y'all got to believe me. I didn't want that to happen.”

  “Sure,” I said. And my voice sounded as if it were coming from another world. “What I got to do is kill you, Red.”

  “I was afraid you'd take that point of view. I guess I would, too. If I was in your shoes.”

  “You could have taken care of the sick, twisted bastard that did that,” I said. “You could have done that much, Red.”

  He sighed. “I wanted to. You can believe that. But he's a powerful man, Harry. And I guess I just couldn't bring myself to kill the goose. Not over a kid like her.”

  I surged out of the chair and lunged at the pistol.

  But he moved with terrific quickness and slammed the revolver barrel across my cheek.

  “Don't try that again, son,” he said grimly. “I'll blow your face off if you do.”

  He'd split my cheek wide open with the gun. I could feel the blood pouring down it. Red pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tossed it over to me.

  “You better staunch that.”

  I pressed it to my cheek and glared at him. “Now, what?”

  “We're going for a ride, Harry.”

  He stood up behind the desk. “Y'all pull that gun from your belt and toss it on the desk. Gently now, son. With two fingers, like y'all was at a lady's tea.”

  I pulled the gun out and dropped it on the desk.

  “Now the one under your shoulder, Harry. Same way.”

  I pulled out the magnum.

  “Nice weapon,” Bannion said. “Now, here's how it's going to be, son. We're going to walk out to the car. You try anything, I'll kill you. It don't make no difference to me, now, whether I get seen or not. I'll come out of it one way or t'other. Y'all understand what I'm saying?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.” He collected the can of film and slipped it in his pocket. “Now move it.”

  I open
ed the office door and we walked out into the lobby.

  Red nodded at the usher. “There's some guns in there, son. Y'all want to collect them for us?”

  “You want some help with him?” the kid said.

  “I don't think so,” Red said gently.

  26

  THERE WAS a driver sitting in the front seat of the Cadillac when we walked back out into the glare of Main Street. He was high yellow with a wispy black goatee on his chin, big yellow wolfish teeth, and the high puffed cheeks of the ex-boxer. He hadn't been hard to hit in his prime—that one—but he'd been hard to put down. There was scar tissue over both of his eyes, and his left ear was badly deformed, like someone had hung a barbell from the lobe when he was a child. He was wearing a knit skull cap on his head, a white T-shirt, and yellow rayon slacks with a scarlet bunting down either leg. He smelled of sweat and whiskey, and he looked at me, as Red pushed me into the back seat, with a kind of savage anticipation—the way a cannibal must size up a prospective meal.

  “This heah's Rafe,” Red said, getting in beside me. “You going to be seein' a lot of him, Harry.” Red reached into a coat pocket and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. “Hold out your hands, son.”

  When I hesitated, he gave me a good hard shot on the right arm with the gun barrel.

  “That's better,” he said, cuffing me.

  He pointed with the gun to Rafe, who started the car up and pulled out onto Main. We were heading south, into the farmland.

  “Let me tell you a little story about Rafe, yonder,” Red said, settling back on the seat. “He used to be a boxer. Golden Gloves. He had him some professional bouts, too. Didn't you, son?”

  The back of Rafe's head went up and down. “Yessuh,” he said softly.

  “Rafe don't like white boys none. One of them killed his brother. Ain't that right, Rafe?”

  “Yessuh,” he said.

  “Cut his throat up in Lima, when the boy didn't have but six months left to serve. I helped him out a bit with funeral expenses and such. But that didn't change nothing about the way Rafe feels. Son—the last white boy I turned over to him took twelve whole hours in dying. Probably would've taken longer, only Rafe bled him so much there just wasn't anything left for his poor heart to pump. You ever seen a man die, Harry? I don't mean quick. I mean slow. Razor cuts and burns from a solderin' iron. Why towards the end, they just go sleepy with the pain of it. They take a look at what's become of ‘em, and they just don't care anymore.”

  “Is that how you got to Preston? Threatening him with Rafe?”

  Bannion laughed. “Hell, no. All we had to do with that fairy was show him a few pictures. A bit of splicin' in that movie made it look like he done fucked her and killed her all by hisself. Weren't no question in my mind when I left him what he'd do. But I did have Rafe waitin' around—just in case.”

  We passed a sign marking the city limit and kept heading south, through a hilly section green with blue grass and pine. Then the road curved up out of the river bottoms, past old Beverly Hills, and leveled out. Shops began to appear at half-mile intervals—little roadside cafes and two-pump gas stations with junk autos in their lots. And, then, we broke free of town life entirely. Huge tobacco fields, tented for acres with gauze canopies, filled either side of the road.

  “Lookie there.” Red pointed out the window.

  A farmer was burning off the stubble in a corn field, and the late afternoon sky was filled with black, corn-sweet smoke.

  “I should never have left that,” Red said wistfully. “But, hell, it was depression and a man has to eat. And, then, Porky's always done right by me.” He looked out the window at the wind-blown smoke and sighed. “It sure ain't been my day, has it, son?” He looked over at me. “You busted the Jellicoes, didn't you?”

  I didn't say anything.

  “Sure you did,” Red said, hefting the gun in his hands as if he were testing its weight. “You're a good young cop, son. I always liked you.” He jiggled the gun for a moment. “I'm going to try to make it easy for you, Harry. You got to die. There ain't no discussin' that. But, it don't have to be Rafe's way.”

  It was the old Ike and Mike act—the good cop and the tough one. Only he was doing it all by himself. He'd never really stopped being a cop—Bannion. Maybe it'd been the only thing he'd ever worked at with talent and pride.

  “I need to know a few things, Harry,” he said gently. “I need to know how far you done gone in this business. It may not seem like much I'm offerin', son. But, ‘bout noon tomorrow, you're going to see it a mighty different way. You think on't, heah?”

  He sat back on the seat and stared through the front windshield with a watery eye. He was actually crying, so moved had he been by his own account of the hopelessness of my situation.

  I laughed out loud.

  Bannion took a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and flipped them on, pocketing the horn-rims with his right hand.

  He licked his lips and stared through the dark green glasses at the open road.

  ******

  It must have been close to seven when we pulled off the highway. The sun was setting above the treetops in the west, and we headed into it, down a paved side road into a cool green dell of oak and maple. The trees were thick on the hillsides—so thick I thought we must have entered a park or a preserve. It was virtually night in the woodland—the sun just a red glow on the tree-capped shoulder of the hills. Rafe flipped on the headlights and turned left off the road onto a gravel lane that carried back into the woods. We followed the lane for half a mile until the headlights bounced off the windowpanes of a small cabin tucked among the trees. It was a weathered plank hunting lodge, set up on stilts, with a pitch roof overhanging a railed porch. It looked as if it hadn't been visited in many years.

  “We're there.” Red tapped Rafe on the shoulder.

  Rafe cut the engine, and a dead, woodsy silence filled the car.

  “Quiet, ain't it?” Bannion said.

  He got out of the car, walked around to my side, and opened the door.

  “Git on out, Harry.”

  Rafe got out, too, and stretched his long, muscular arms.

  I took a quick look around.

  There was a stone wall on the west side of the cabin. To the east, the forest grew to within ten feet of the cabin wall. The ground behind the lodge seemed to fall away abruptly. There were some stone steps set in the earth where it plunged downward. I estimated we were about seventy miles southwest of Newport, on a private estate about halfway between Cincinnati and Louisville.

  Red pushed me toward the cabin. “Git on up there,” he said.

  My shoulder had been aching dully for better than two hours, and my face stung where Red had gashed it with the gun barrel. But I was just too tired to care. I trudged up the path to the cabin and up four steps to the porch and stood there waiting for Bannion and Rafe.

  In an hour or so, I'd be dead—if I was lucky.

  It wasn't that I wasn't afraid of it. I was. But I was more disgusted with myself than I was afraid. And angrier than I was disgusted. If I hadn't been so cocksure, three hours before, that Bannion was as much of a loner at heart as I was, I wouldn't have been standing on that porch. I would have been standing on Porky's porch on Charles Street, trying to explain why the highway patrolmen were interrupting his barbecue.

  Red Bannion hadn't turned out to be a bit sentimental where it really cost him. He had a cop's mind, pure and simple. For him it would always be a question of the right tool for the job. And there wasn't going to be any shoot-out, any last minute drama of justice and revenge. If I hadn't been so damn coy and self-involved—so set on finishing it off on my own—I would have know it immediately, as soon as I walked into that theater and saw the tough kid behind the candy counter. The only thing I couldn't understand was why he'd dragged me seventy miles into the woods before pulling the trigger.

  “Why are we here, Red?” I asked him.

  “You wanted to find that girl, didn't you?” he said archl
y. “Well, there's a lime pit down back aways. That's where she's lying. That's where you'll be lying, too, Harry. They say it's supposed to comfort a man to know where his bones will rest.”

  He pushed the cabin door open and pulled me through.

  There was a trestle table inside the cabin, two wood chairs, a fireplace on the south wall facing the door, open rafters overhead, and dust and cobwebs everywhere else. Even the windows were coated with dirt.

  Red lit a hurricane lamp and set it on the table.

  “Start a fire, Rafe.”

  The black walked back out the door to gather kindling. Red sat down on a chair by the table and looked up at me through those dark green sunglasses. It looked like he had two hurricane lamps for eyes.

  “Well, son, looks like the end of the road. You ain't had a long life, but it's been a lively one.”

  “I'm not dead, yet, Red,” I said to him.

  “Yes, you are. You just don't know it yet.”

  He tilted back on the chair and hefted the gun in his hands.

  I thought a second about rushing him. Now would be the time, while Rafe was outside. The room was about thirty feet square and he was in the middle of it. From where I was standing by the door, it would take me three strides to reach him and pitch him to the floor. Give him a second to react. And I'd just be on top of him when the first slug exploded through my belly. He wouldn't be able to get the barrel up much higher than that in a second. Hell, he wouldn't have to.

  “You're welcome to try, son,” Red said and grinned. “I would, too, if I was in your shoes.”

  “If I were in your shoes, you'd be dead.”

  “Why in hell'd you do it, son? That's what I can't figure. Why'd you go down to the theater? You must've known I wasn't going to let you leave.” He grinned again, his teeth yellow in the lamp light. “But, then, you figured you could take a sixty-year-old man, didn't you?” He laughed spitefully. “You're a fool, son. Getting yourself killed for a half-witted old man and a girl that didn't have the sense of a hog. Porky'd be plumb ashamed of you.”

  I had to try something. And soon. So I said, “Porky already knows,” and watched his reaction.