Suicide Season

by Rex Burns

  “Half a million.”

  “What?”

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  He stared at me with his mouth open and his lips began to work around some unheard word, and for once his sentence trailed off at the front, “ … crazy?”

  “It could have been a lot cheaper except for the shit you’ve pulled, Kaffey. Those two gumballs you sent after me—running down women with cars, pushing one off the road with her kids in the car. That doubled the price, Kaffey, and if it happens again, there’s no price you can pay.”

  “ … out of your mind!”

  I took the papers from his shocked fingers and put them in the briefcase with the tape player and snapped its locks with two sharp clicks. “McAllister doesn’t know about these yet. But if he finds out, it’s a court case for sure.”

  “You said something about this guy Spilotro. You said you had something about him.”

  “That was just to get your attention, Kaffey. I’ll let you worry about how I got his name.”

  He stood, frowning, and started to leave, then turned back. “What road? What kids?”

  “You know what I’m talking about. And that’s the price. Just think of it as overhead for the cost of your way of doing business.”

  “I got to talk to …”

  “Better make it soon.”

  Bunch set his equipment on the back seat and, scraping mud from his shoes onto the park grass, slid in beside me. “It sounded like he bought it.”

  “It looked like it, too. You should have seen the bastard’s eyes.”

  “I tried. But I didn’t want to make too much noise. Muddier than hell along that creek. How come you always get the dry spots and I get the mud?”

  “Evolution.”

  “Yeah? Well I’d like to get my primordial fingers around somebody’s throat. Did you hear him ask ‘What kids?’”

  “I heard.”

  “He really choked when you said half a million.”

  “So will Neeley. They were thinking a few thousand—ten at most. Now they have no choice but to come after us.”

  Bunch cracked his knuckles. “I know.”

  At the office, I called Margaret to see how she was doing, and before hanging up asked to speak to Dutch. “Everything quiet?”

  “The way I like it, Dev.”

  “Has the alarm company come out yet?”

  “No. But they called to find out what time we’d be home this afternoon.”

  “All right. If he’s not there by four, give me a ring and I’ll get on them.” I told him as much as he needed to know about the possibility of people wanting to do nasty things to Bunch and me. “Don’t make any unnecessary trips for the next few days, and if there’s anything at all suspicious, don’t take a chance.”

  “Got you. You going to come by?”

  “When I can. But if you need help, call. I’ll get there.” I hung up, a bit more comfortable knowing that Dutch was with Margaret and was forewarned. The next call was another try at reaching Loomis. But like the earlier times, the telephone rang unanswered.

  Bunch prowled restlessly from the door to the large domed window spilling light into the office. “You should have told Kaffey he had only twenty-four hours. I don’t like this waiting.”

  “We put him in a bind. He’ll need time to talk it over with the big boys and figure out which way to go.”

  “Yeah, I know. But—” He paused, listening. “Somebody’s outside the door.”

  Through the frosted glass I could see a hazy figure poised as if listening. Bunch moved quickly to the wall beside the door and I sank down slowly behind the thick wood of the desk. The knob turned and swung in and a moment later Vincent Landrum’s face came around the frame. “What, you sleeping under the desk?”

  “Just dropped a pencil, Vinny.” I slid my pistol back into the holster that rode awkwardly on my kidney. “What brings you out in the daylight?”

  “I like you, too, Kirk. That’s why I’m going to do you a favor.”

  Bunch, holstering his weapon, came silently from behind the door to Landrum’s back. “What’s it cost?”

  “Jesus, I hate it when you’re off the leash, Bunchcroft. What the hell’s with you guys? You act like you’re waiting for the Indians to attack.” He looked from Bunch to me. “Somebody finally catch up with you?”

  “What’s this favor you want to do us?”

  “I don’t know if I should. I come in here trying to do something for you guys and I get handed all this shit.”

  “You’re used to it by now, Vinny. Like I said, how much?”

  “It’s worth something, Homer. It sure as hell is. You guys screw up my business and then toss a few peanuts my way when I come up with stuff that neither one of you could find out. And now I’m getting bad publicity about Carrie. Yesterday the goddamn newspapers said whose office she was found in. You’re damned right it’s worth something.”

  “If it is, you’ll get something. What is it?”

  “I got a call from somebody you know. This Professor Loomis. He’s the guy whose name was in Carrie’s purse, remember?”

  “I remember. What did he want?”

  “Anything I could tell him about Carrie. And about why she hired me. The guy was sweating, literally. I could hear it over the phone. He wanted to know everything about her—who her friends were, who she talked to. Everything.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. I got this call at the office and at first I thought it’s some guy selling insurance or something. Then he starts asking me about Carrie. When I told him I’d found a suspect, he just about shit.”

  “You told him that?”

  “Well, I told him I’d come up with a good lead, yeah. Something nobody else has been able to dig up—the cops, nobody.”

  “And?”

  “And he wanted to know who it was. I told him it was confidential.”

  “So he didn’t find out we were looking for a woman?”

  “I know how to keep my mouth shut, Kirk.”

  “That means he didn’t offer you any money for it,” said Bunch.

  “Listen, I’m doing you a favor. You’re not doing me one. I don’t have to take your crap.”

  Loomis again. Suddenly, and in some way I hadn’t expected, things seemed to be converging, and there at the point of convergence was not Aegis but Loomis. “Maybe we’d better call on the professor, Bunch.”

  “You think that’s a good idea right now?”

  “Why not? What are you guys covering up?”

  “Out, pissant.”

  “Cut it! Get your goddamn paws off me, Bunchcroft!” The man’s red face bobbed up over Bunch’s shoulder. “Pay me, Kirk—damn it, Bunchcroft, wait a minute! I brought you something, Kirk—you owe me!”

  “I’ll send a check.”

  “How much?”

  The door slammed on the writhing figure and I heard the iron steps clang heavily as something rattled on them. Then Bunch, his breath a pinched hiss through his broken nose, came back in. “I just took out the garbage.”

  “You should have wrapped it first.” I finished dialing and a few seconds later the voice at my ear was saying that Professor Loomis wasn’t at the university and that his classes had been canceled.

  “Is he ill?”

  “He was called out of town on an emergency.”

  “Can you tell me when he’s expected back?”

  “I’m sorry I can’t. He telephoned this morning to cancel classes for the rest of the week. That’s all I know.”

  I thanked her and settled the receiver in its cradle. “Let’s go by his house.”

  We checked the car for tampering before getting in—a routine precaution against a routine style of greeting from people with Las Vegas connections—and caught the Valley Highway south to University Park and a brick and timber two-story that featured English cottage design. It was the kind of home one imagined a professor would live in, stately in a quiet way and private with its yard full of shr
ubbery and trees.

  A rolled-up newspaper lay in the driveway as we pulled up the gravel strip to a porte-cochere and an open and empty garage beyond. Bunch walked to the back of the house while I went up the two wide brick stairs and rapped on the door arched beneath its concrete Gothic tracery. My knuckles made a pecking noise on the solid wood and I waited, trying to hear the sound of feet inside. Nothing. Invisible behind the shrubbery next door, a neighbor’s dog continued to bark loudly at us, and on the other side of the yard, a car pulled slowly out of a driveway hidden behind a tall hedge. I rapped again. An answering rattle came from a chain behind the door and a moment later the latch clicked. The door swung back to show Bunch. “The place is ours.”

  “Was the back door open?”

  “Almost.” He folded his lock pick and dropped it in a pocket. “My guess is he’s gone for good.”

  We wandered through the vacant rooms. In the kitchen, dirty dishes half filled the washer, and the scraps of a hasty breakfast sat on a plate in the sink. The refrigerator held the usual collection of milk and vegetables and open cans that a single diner saved from one meal to the next. Upstairs, a towel lay on the floor of the master bedroom where the bed was tossed unmade and a clock radio glowed. The closets were half empty; the only clothes left were an overcoat and a couple of dark suits, as well as a number of shirts, slacks, and ties. In the bureau drawers, we found some sweaters, half a dozen pairs of socks, some underwear and handkerchiefs. The shelves of the bathroom cabinet were scraped clean, all the toiletries gone. Downstairs, in the study with its bay window opening into a small garden, the desk’s contents had been cleaned from a couple of drawers and the others held the usual detritus of life’s routines: bills to be paid, notes and documents for classes, correspondence, advertisements that for some reason had been kept.

  “He was in a hurry, but it was planned,” said Bunch. “If he’d panicked, this crap would be thrown all over hell and gone.”

  There was nothing among the papers and correspondence that dealt with Aegis or McAllister or, most important, personal finances. Checks, bankbooks, statements, all the expected signs of business transactions had been taken. That was, apparently, one aspect of his life he did not want to leave for inspection.

  The rest of the house—other bedrooms and downstairs bath—was neat and generally unused. The living room had a scattering of financial periodicals and a week-old collection of the Wall Street Journal, as well as yesterday’s Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. The News lay open to an inside page and a small item in a lower corner that said “Murdered Woman Identified” and summarized the Carrie Busey case. It was the first article to identify the detective agency where she had been found, and that was how Loomis got Landrum’s name.

  I heard an electronic squiggle and turned to see Bunch rewinding the tape on the answering machine that sat beside the telephone.

  “He forgot to erase this.”

  Bunch clicked the Play switch and, after a few hums and toots, the telephone computer’s voice said, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, please hang up and dial your op—” The tape fell into scratchy emptiness and Bunch nudged the Fast Forward until he heard a garble of a voice and then reversed to pick it up from the first. Again it was the telephone voice starting to offer advice and then cut off as the leader ran out. Then another and still more. “Somebody wanted the prof pretty bad.”

  Finally Bunch reached a variation: “Loomis, it’s me. I know you’re there. You call me as soon as you hear this.”

  Beyond that, a few more squawks of computer voice, then a fragment of a woman’s voice that had been partially run over by a later unanswered call: “ … as soon as you can.” Followed by the hiss of empty tape.

  Bunch reversed the tape to the man’s message and listened intently to it again. “Dev, that’s Neeley.”

  “You’re sure?” It was too brief, too twisted by the speaker for me to hear the things Bunch noticed.

  “I’ve listened to him enough times. We can check it with Doc Goodman, but he’s going to tell you the same damn thing: that’s Neeley’s voice. I know it.” Snapping the cassette from the answering machine, he wagged it at me like a stubby ruler. “Loomis and Haas. Both of them tied to Neeley. They were both in on it, Dev—the son-of-a-bitch was doing his thing just like he did in New York: stealing corporate secrets.”

  To judge from the many unanswered calls that preceded it on the tape, Neeley—or someone, or a lot of someones—had been trying urgently to get a reply. “I can guess why Neeley wants to talk to him.”

  “To ask about us? To find out if Loomis is working with us to shake him down?”

  “Maybe even to make sure he won’t be able to.”

  Bunch gazed around the room with its lifeless scatter of magazines and books. “I think he skipped before Neeley could get him. He took too much with him.”

  I nodded, still hearing the echo of both of those voices on the tape. “My guess is the airport.”

  “With a different name. He wouldn’t want Neeley following him. Or anyone else.”

  “We have that picture—the one Vinny took of him and Margaret talking. Stan can blow it up for us.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “You want just the man’s face?” Stan Hupp, senior partner of Hupp and Twomey Photo Labs, Inc., adjusted the magnifier so that the negative swelled to picture only Loomis against the screen inside the bottom of the cramped hood.

  “How tight can you make it and still have a clear picture?”

  “That’s about it. That okay?”

  I stared at the face with its mouth open in speech. The magnification had caused the picture to become grainy, but the features were still identifiable. “It’ll have to do.”

  With a set of glossy and still-damp prints, Bunch and I headed over to Stapleton Airport. It was possible that Loomis would have driven wherever he was headed, but my hunch told me he flew, and for good reasons. For one thing, he had been selective about what he took from his home—enough to fill maybe two suitcases rather than a whole car. For another, his Audi Quattro had license plates, and Bunch had already managed to get the number on the wanted file that went out to the Colorado Highway Patrol and to neighboring states. And finally, I figured that if Neeley was after Loomis, the professor wanted to cover as much distance as he could in the shortest time possible.

  “You think Loomis knew something about Busey? You think that’s why he ran?”

  I pulled the ticket from the machine guarding the airport parking ramp and the arm lifted to let us speed up the concrete lane. “I think so. I think he and Busey and Haas were all in this together. Now he’s the only one left alive and all of a sudden he’s getting phone calls from Neeley. If Loomis does know where the Aegis payoff is stashed, or if Neeley thinks he’s working with us to shake him down, Loomis has a right to be worried.”

  “That’s really funny, Dev. We shake the tree for the scumbag boys, and one fat professor falls out. Birds of a feather all on the same branch.” Bunch grinned, pleased at his metaphor. “Not all that bad for a cowboy, right?”

  “Not for one cowboy, anyway.” I swung the car into a dimly lit slot under the garage’s low concrete sky. Among the regularly spaced piers reaching up to the next level, caged bulbs shone dully and glinted on the domes of parked cars. Somewhere in the shadows tires squealed on a ramp as Bunch and I hustled toward the glassed bridge that crossed to the airport and its ticket booths.

  “I’ll start at the south end.” Bunch strode off the slowly moving belt that carried us through the almost deserted hallways. In the evenings or on a weekend, or during ski season, the concourses would be jammed with people and their luggage. But at this hour, before the afternoon flights from both coasts began to stack up in the approach paths, only a few travelers strayed down the carpeted hall.

  “See you at the escalator.”

  There were maybe thirty airline counters, including the commuters, and some of them
did double duty by selling tickets for sister lines. But the question was the same for all of them: Did this man buy a ticket this morning? Ask each person behind the desk and make sure to include anyone on a coffee break. Occasionally someone would ask if I was police, and I’d flash my p.i. identification, but usually they just looked at the photo and shook their heads. I had hoped to get lucky at one of the big carriers, those that had direct flights to New York where Loomis had lived before coming to Colorado, but their answer was as negative as the others, and I was two-thirds down my half of the counters and hoping Bunch was having better luck when a large hand wrapped around my arm. Bunch’s excited voice said, “Dev—I got him. He went out on United this morning. Ten o’clock flight to Mexico City.”

  “Mexico? You’re sure?”

  “No question about it—they remembered him. He came in at the last minute and booked for a no-show. He gave them a Canadian passport in the name of Edward Holtzmann and paid cash.”

  “Mexico.” Or farther down. Someplace in South America that had no extradition.

  “The plane stops in Houston and then goes straight to Mexico City. He didn’t have a connecting flight, but he could get one there.”

  “Nora Challis … Doesn’t she live in Houston?” I glanced at my watch. If the plane was on time, he would now be somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico lounging back against the seat and sipping a glass of wine. Smiling, probably, as he thought about his unanswered telephone still ringing.

  “Let’s see if Nelson’s found out anything yet.”

  At a pay phone, Bunch—his shoulders blocking the two adjoining booths—jabbed at the numbers for our office code and then for the Nelson Hunt Agency. After a series of rings he nodded at me and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Nellie? This is Bunch. Did you get anything on that female we asked about? Nora Challis?”

  I watched while Bunch grunted answers and nodded as if the man on the other end of the line could see him.

  “And that’s it? Nothing else on her at all? Hang on a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece. “He says she’s clean. No record of arrests, no credit problems, nothing in the automobile files.”

  “Is she married? Single?”