by Linda Barnes
"Not then," Leider corrected. "I laughed in his face. He didn't have a smidgen of proof. A case of wine was mislabeled. Tough. Someone made a mistake."
"When did Lenny locate Mark Jason?"
Leider's toes tapped the wooden floor. His voice bit off the brittle words. "He knew I'd have needed help. I couldn't blend the wine myself, couldn't run the damn bottling line alone. Once he found Jason, he had to die. They both had to die."
The top barrel of Spraggue's chosen triad was blessedly empty. One of the other two seemed only partially full. Spraggue crawled down into the crevice. If he executed the maneuver just right, he might start an avalanche of barrels.
"Is that the end of your story?" Leider asked, his voice back in control. "Isn't the big bad pig supposed to get punished? Or was he too clever for you?"
Spraggue wriggled over on his back, drew his knees up to his chest, and pressed his feet flat
against the key barrel.
"Spraggue, say something!"
With last-minute inspiration, Spraggue fumbled the shoe out of his jacket pocket. If he could create a loud noise, far away, Leider might help him out by taking a few steps away from the precious landing. He took a deep breath and flung the shoe hard over his head. It smacked satisfyingly against the far wall.
The flashbeam jerked. Leider took three quick steps forward. The silence, the tension, the sudden noise betrayed him. He fired his gun wildly, in the direction of the fallen shoe. Spraggue closed his eyes and put every muscle he commanded into the
task of straightening his bent knees.
The room exploded with barrels and bullets. Spraggue jumped for the landing.
"You missed." Barely halfway down the flight of stairs, Spraggue heard the hissing whisper and whipped his head around. Leider, on the landing, raised his pistol steadily. It had a bore as big as a cannon's mouth.
Without conscious thought, Spraggue fell.
26
The stuntman's words roared in his head: relax, cradle your head, hit with your thighs. Leider's gun barked. The fall took forever, like a slow-motion replay of one of the Boston location shots.
Roll when you land! His ankle ached and his breath came in sharp, painful jabs but he kept moving, veering in and out between the tanks. He tried the steps to the catwalk; his ankle refused the climb.
He passed the centrifuge, spotted the switch, and flicked it on. Machinery droned. Everything he passed, he switched on, hiding his dragging, panicked footsteps in a forest of noise. The bladder press wheezed. The bottling line rattled through its empty motions. Every door he tried was locked. The windows were too high for escape.
Moonlight filtered through the dusty panes. Spraggue was shocked by the darkness. He had no sense of the time spent on the second floor; it could have been three minutes or three hours. Surely, by now, someone would be searching for him. Someone might find those broken bottles at Lenny's place, figure out where he'd gone and why ....Behind a huge wooden tank, Spraggue collapsed on the floor and rubbed his swelling foot.
The roaring machinery benefited the hunter as well as the hunted. Leider couldn't hear Spraggue's rasping breath. Spraggue strained for Leider's approaching footfalls.
The bottling line jerked to a halt. The bladder press gasped and gave up. Leider turned off the centrifuge. His footsteps rang on the catwalk steps.
"You didn't finish your story," he said. The flashlight made him a moving target. But he had the only gun. Dammit. Leider had a strategic position overlooking the room. Leider had the keys. Leider had the gun. How many bullets did the fat man have left?
Spraggue ran a hand through his hair, clamped his lips together. Shit. Old Harry Bascomb would know. Given a single split-second glance at Leider's hunk of blue-gray metal, he'd ID it as a .38 caliber Webley or whatever automatic. He'd holler, "That's your final shot, Leider. Your number's up!" Or some such garbage.
Spraggue was almost certain, he'd heard four distinct shots at the top of the stairs. And three on the way down. Seven .... That seemed about right for an automatic. But he couldn't be sure.
In answer to his unspoken question, he heard a sound that could only be a magazine clicking home in Leider's pistol. Seven more shots. How could he draw them without playing clay pigeon? Did Leider carry yet another clip?
The catwalk creaked overhead, and Spraggue scuttled crablike around to the other side of the tank.
"Why the hell . . . couldn't you just . . . leave me alone?" Leider shouted. His breath came in great gulps, tearing the sentence into three separate bits. His agitation and grief were palpable. He was starting to fray, his self-possession coming apart at the seams. Spraggue hoped his emotions would affect his marksmanship.
"Why did you try to pin it on Kate?" Spraggue asked. Leider whirled and fired. Three shots lodged themselves harmlessly in the tank. Spraggue waited for a fourth, but none came. Leider must have pulled himself together, realized the folly of firing with no clear target. Three shots gone. .
"I had to," Leider said. Spraggue held up the tape recorder and shook it. It whirred merrily along. During the fall, his ribs had sustained more damage than the machine.
"Everyone said that Kate would sell out," Leider continued. "Some executive from United Circle was sniffing around Holloway Hills. Dammit, I'd spent most of a year negotiating with them. If they'd bought Holloway Hills, that would have killed my deal. Holloway Hills has a better location, better facilities."
"Kate would never have sold," Spraggue said.
"I'm supposed to take that on faith? I had to dump the bodies; I thought I'd put Kate out of action at the same time. She couldn't sign any United Circle contract from a jail cell."
"What a very clever piggy you are," Spraggue said. "Only——"
"Only you had to stick your nose in. And keep it in, even after I got Kate off the hook. Why the hell couldn't you . . ."
Spraggue felt a deep sick wrenching in his gut. That was why a teenager had been found in the trunk of an abandoned car so far from Holloway Hills ....
"You murdered that boy just to get me off your back," he said haltingly, hoping for Leider's denial.
"You were starting to be a greater risk than the chance of Kate selling out to United Circle." Leider laughed softly, a laugh tainted by a hint of hysteria. "Don't you remember what I told you coming down in the car that first day? Hitchhikers gamble every time they get in a car with a stranger" The vintner's laugh intensified.
"You're crazy," Spraggue said. He spat into a corner and forced himself to think—not about some child killed without compunction—but about how to take this Leider, this sweating, giggling maniac. How to wrap his hand around that fat throat . . .
"On the contrary," Leider hollered triumphantly.
"I considered the matter carefully. Judiciously. A third ‘Car-Trunk' slaying would make even the most moronic cop release Kate. The murder was a refinement, another step in an unavoidable chain of regrettable actions. My sole error was in figuring that you would drop the whole mess and return to work you're more suited for."
Spraggue liked the way Leider's voice had tightened when he'd called him crazy. He picked at the sore. "You loony bastard," he said. "You psycho case—"
"I'm a pragmatist," Leider shouted. "I did exactly what I had to do, no more, no less. Every act was well planned. A reason behind every act."
"Why did you use sulfur dioxide on Mark Jason? You could have drowned him, too, couldn't you? But the cruelty appealed to you, turned you on."
Spraggue put all the disgust he hadn't been able to spit out into his voice.
"Shut up! Come out where I can see you. If you do, I'll give you an easy death, a clean death. Later, I might change my mind, shoot you in the kneecap first—"
"Was setting fire to Jason's apartment carefully planned?" Spraggue said quickly. Bringing out the worst in Leider wouldn't help if he gave the vintner a chance to think, to plan instead of react. "You could have killed twenty, thirty innocent people."
"How
was I to know what papers Jason might have kept, linking him to me? You forced my hand that time, too; I never thought you'd get that far. Even when I overheard you say you were going up to Davis, I never dreamed. But when I saw you hurry out of his apartment, hurry out empty-handed, I had to act quickly. I improvised. That's where most criminals fail. They have no imagination, and they're not willing to take the necessary steps. I'm different. I'm special. Don't think I'll hesitate to kill you."
Full-blown megalomania, Spraggue thought. A With God knows what kind of delusions.
"Hey, Phil," he said in a stage whisper. "Have you been listening to yourself lately? Giggling and gibbering. Out of control. I doubt you could stop killing if you wanted to. After me, who? You want the list of everybody else who might be on to you?"
"Who knows?" Leider screamed.
"Or maybe you'd rather tell me about that boy you killed .... Why would Enright call that a sex murder?"
"That was part of the plan," Phil said defiantly. "They'd know it wasn't Kate Holloway, wasn't a woman."
"But they already knew it couldn't be Kate. She was in jail, Phil. Remember? What kind of movies do you show at your house, Phil? Family-night stuff? Did you help Lenny out with his photography?"
The bullet's ricochet came closer than Spraggue liked, but he was certain he'd found another wound to probe. Four bullets gone.
"You read about those crazy perverts, Phil? What happens to them when they get caught? Tough life in the state prison. The guards won't dare put you in with the general population because of what they'd do to you, Phil."
"Shut up! You hear me? Shut up!"
Spraggue's fingers worked at his key ring. He removed the corkscrew and tossed it against a distant steel tank. Leider whirled and fired twice. Six shots gone. Was that enough? The uniformed Boston police, he knew, carried the S&W six-shot revolver. Had he actually heard seven shots before Leider changed the clip? Had his imagination or an echo played him false?
"Bad shot, loony," he yelled. "Why don't you tell me about the boy? About what you did before you strangled him? Did you bring him here, Phil?" What else could he throw? Not the car keys. If Leider hadn't put the station wagon out of commission, he'd need it. If he got away. He hurled his tiny flashlight in the opposite direction and again it drew fire.
Where the hell was old Harry Bascomb when you needed him? If he'd counted right, if the pistol held seven slugs, then Leider was either out of ammunition or inserting a fresh magazine. Spraggue decided not to take any chances.
He let out a heartrending groan, just the kind of sound Dave, the actor, made when he died on the trolley tracks at Park Street Station.
The catwalk swayed. Leider hurried over to the tank he'd fired upon a moment ago, his flashbeam searching for Spraggue's prostrate body. Spraggue was shocked by the man's appearance. Saliva dripped from one corner of his open mouth. His face was a livid, chalky white.
Spraggue shut off the tape recorder, removed the cassette, jammed it into a niche under the tank. He hefted the now empty tape recorder, measured the distance between himself and the outline of Leider's belly. He was almost close enough, but only a major league catcher could make a throw like that from his knees.
Supporting his weight against the tank, Spraggue straightened up, aimed at the light, heaved the recorder up and to the right, dead on target.
Leider saw it coming late, sidestepped, flailed wildly. Spraggue hit the floor, just in case the fat man had managed to reload.
Leider stumbled, tottered against the flimsy rotten guardrail. Screamed.
For an instant, Spraggue thought Leider might regain his balance.
He plummeted awkwardly, landed with a sickening thud, one leg at a horribly unnatural angle, his gun arm trapped under his massive chest.
As Spraggue scrambled to a sitting position, a blaring voice filled the room: Bradley's voice, dehumanized, amplified a thousand times.
"Come out with your hands up," the deputy cried. Leider, a twisted mass on the wooden floor, groaned softly, struggled to move, failed.
By the time the cops found Spraggue, he was twisting his shirt around his swollen ankle, laughing to himself. "Come out with your hands up!" he repeated delightedly. Maybe the dialogue in Still Waters was better than he'd thought.
27
"Ten minutes!" shrieked the elegantly tanned production assistant, a brightly garbed blonde whose enthusiasm proclaimed her a novice. Spraggue tried not to limp as he walked wearily off the set. He pulled the letter out of his pocket, slit the envelope with Harry Bascomb's nasty little prop-knife. Settling himself gingerly in a softly upholstered chair, he rested his bandaged ankle on a stool. "Keep off that foot as much as possible," the doctor had
warned. Sure.
He rubbed a hand across his forehead. The pressures of playing tough guy with three cracked ribs, a sprained ankle, and assorted bruised and tender spots all over his body were starting to get him down. The taped ribs itched like crazy. He stifled the impulse to scratch. Hell, old Harry Bascomb would have taken those steps with hardly a scrape off his hard-boiled flesh.
The envelope was square, marked "Photos—Do Not Bend"
"Michael, dear." Kate's inverted greeting was as standard as her spiky printing and her purple-ink-on-lavender-stationery combination. Her correspondence needed no signature, much less a return address.
Well, Howard's agreed to come back, [the letter began]. I'm giving him a raise. He didn't ask for one; he wouldn't. But I'm sure you'll agree that he deserves one in his own convoluted way. If he hadn't finally gone to the cops with those pages from Lenny's cellar book, I shudder to think what might have happened to you . . .
God, Howard must have been furious when I hired Lenny! Imagine our bumbling Howard actually breaking into Lenny's place, bent on revenge! And, finding no one home, stealing those pages from Lenny's cellar book!
Of course, the more I brood on it, the more likely it seems. Howard just wanted to improve himself by studying Lenny's secrets. (I will try not to tell him that it was never his wine-making skill that I doubted, just his personality that I can't stand. Tactful of me, don't you think?)
Wasn't it brave of Howard to go to the police? Belatedly brave, I'll admit. But then he thought he'd get thrown in the clink himself, for stealing Lenny's book. Besides, it took him a while to figure out Lenny's added notes on Leider's '75 Private Reserve. (And a while longer to get up his nerve. Thank God, he had enough sense to go straight to Bradley. Enright would have terrified him to death.) Anyway, Howard's timing certainly worked out well for you. But then you always had the luck.
Your tape recording turned out to be a gem. You, of course, came through loud and clear; Leider's voice is very faint, but definitely understandable. His attorney is making "inadmissible evidence" noises, but no one pays him any mind.
One sad thing: I did as you asked, hung around and played mother hen when Carol Lawton came up to identify her Mark. Poor kid . . . She went back to stay with her parents. She's young. But I wonder if you can ever get over something like that . . .
Spraggue, about those photos . . . A confession: I haven't turned them over to the police. Mostly because I'd hate to corrupt Enright's beastly mind any further. I mean, I can't stand half those women, but I just can 't turn the stuff in. Lenny was a worse toad than I thought. Mary Ellen Martinson was well represented. (Well endowed, too.) She must have been looking for Lenny's dirty picture collection when she called on Grady. Further confession: I burned the photos and the negatives. So that you won't just have to take my word for the artistry involved, I've sent you one sample—of a lady who I'm sure wouldn't mind.
So all's well, et cetera, darling. My "Mr. Baxter" is fine, but I have that "he's-going-back-to-his-wife-for-the-children's-sake" feeling. The crush is slowly winding down. Both Howard and I have hopes of an outstanding vintage.
Oh, I bought you a present. An entire case of Leider's '75 Private Reserve Cabernet. The real McCoy. According to George Martinson, it'll drink
superbly around the year 2000. Imagine: you'll be fifty-three, with just a touch of gray at your temples; I, a mere child of fifty-one. Do you suppose we'll be settled, solid citizens at the turn of the century, our children already in their teens? Will a dignified middle age creep up on us or will we fall into bed exhausted after one more rip-roaring battle? Do you suppose those mythical children might be ours, yours and mine?
There was a sloping capital K for a signature, another Holloway trademark. And a postscript.
This should cheer you up: Enright was absolutely furious that Bradley made the arrest. A promotion is definitely in order. Don't you think Brad is a very attractive man?
Spraggue crumpled the note.
The envelope was stiff. He pulled out a thin packet, wrapped in brown paper, glanced fleetingly around the room: No one was watching. No trouble identifying the model, even though the black-and-white print didn't do justice to that hair. The background clicked only after the first few minutes: that deep maroon sofa, the fat gray cushions . . . Part of the blackmail: Lenny got to use Leider's house for his off-beat entertainment. Spraggue thought back to the evening of Leider's tasting, to Grady's blatant overtures in that same room. Had Phil been behind a camera, waiting to click some blackmail shots of his own? Had Grady known, been instructed? Was that the reason for her abrupt amorousness?
The sudden hum in the air told him a presence had entered even before the heavy steel doors banged shut. A head honcho; the whispers swelled like a spring breeze. The producer, maybe.
Spraggue struggled to his feet.
Dear Lord.
Spraggue stared down at the nude photo, up at the clothed original.
She'd sure dressed for the occasion. Her jeans were the narrowest he'd seen in a city full of fashion-conscious asses. The pale pink shirt, frilled at the wrists, slit almost to the waist, did wonders—not the least of which was that it set that incredible hair on fire. Spraggue's mouth shaped itself automatically into a whistle.
Grady posed on her stilt heels, did a great bewildered look-around, murmured into an entranced focus puller's ear.
