The Fifth Script: The Lacey Lockington Series - Book One

by Ross H. Spencer

Leslie waved Curtin to silence. “You were Erika Elwood’s bodyguard?”

  Lockington said, “Briefly—after a fashion.”

  Leslie said, “All right, shall we run through the matter just once, for my edification?”

  Lockington said, “Suits me. Does it suit Lieutenant Curtin?”

  Leslie ignored the tag-on. He said, “My understanding of it was that you were to bring the lady home and that you stood a good chance of being confronted by her husband who’d probably have a gun, a 9mm Repentino-Morté pistol with its firing pin filed flat. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You were to be wired and we were to wait back in the woods, monitoring and taping the conversation in the event they implicated themselves in half-a-dozen unsolved murder cases—we were prepared to take the couple into custody. This jives with the plan you sketched to Lieutenant Curtin?”

  “That’s the way it should have worked.”

  Leslie said, “Your own gun’s firing pin was to have been filed, this to preclude the possibility of the husband using it when he disarmed you.”

  Lockington took his .38 police special from its holster, handing it to Leslie. “It’s been filed—check it.”

  Leslie said, “Later.” He slipped the weapon into his hip pocket. “You’d hidden a back-up gun behind a cushion of her living room couch, this one in good working order. You figured to cover them?”

  “If it got down to hardball, yes.”

  “The plan came apart at the seams when Erika Elwood arrived alone in a taxi.”

  “She’d given me the slip in St. Charles—we’d stopped at The Wigwam for a drink.”

  “How did she manage to do that?”

  “Simply enough—she went to the ladies’ room and didn’t bother coming back.”

  Curtin said, “It took you forty-five fucking minutes to find out she’d taken off?”

  Leslie said, “Cool it, Curtin—I’m asking the questions.” His voice was soft, but his eyes were gray flint.

  Lockington said, “What happened here?”

  Curtin said, “What happened here—what the fuck didn’t happen here, you stupid—”

  Leslie said, “Curtin, you aren’t in Chicago, you’re in Kane County. Now, I’m requesting your cooperation and, God damn it, I’m going to get it, one way or another!” He returned his attention to Lockington. “She opened close-range fire when his back was turned, apparently. She got the whole clip into him—shot him in the heel, the calf, the upper leg, the hip, twice in the ass, twice in the back—he took one frontal hit in the left shoulder, probably when he was flat on the deck, getting one round off—he put it through her navel. Both were dead by the time we got the door knocked down.”

  Lockington made no comment.

  Leslie said, “The firing pin of his gun had been filed, but not thoroughly—a trace of a stub remained—probably not enough projection to detonate a rim fire cartridge, but considerably more than enough to pop a fulminate of mercury cap.”

  Lockington said, “So I blew it.”

  Leslie was studying him with canny eyes, a smile twitching a corner of his mouth. He said, “Y’know, Lockington, I rather doubt that I’ll ever be certain of that.”

  Curtin said, “If the second heater was hidden, how’d she manage to locate it five seconds after she went into the house?”

  Lockington said, “That quickly?”

  Leslie nodded. “There was gunfire almost immediately following her arrival.”

  Lockington said, “I guess she just lucked out.”

  Curtin stomped toward Lockington, hollering, “She just lucked out, shit! You told her where it was, you sonofabitch—you set it up—you had it figured from scratch—you wanted a shootout!”

  Leslie stepped into Curtin’s path. He said, “It’s over, Curtin—you’re spinning your wheels!”

  Curtin snapped, “They’re my wheels, ain’t they?”

  Leslie said, “Don’t push your luck.”

  Curtin puffed up like a pouter pigeon. He said, “Fuck you, you one-cylinder, barnyard shitkicker!”

  Leslie cupped his hands to his mouth. He yelled, “Hey, Sam!”

  A heftily-built young man left the gathering at the front steps, coming at a gallop. He said, “Yes, sir!”

  Leslie said, “The coroner about through in there?”

  Sam said, “Yes, sir—he’s waiting for the photographer—they’re gonna stop for a few beers.”

  “Okay, then you can run Lieutenant Curtin down to Geneva and lock his ass up.”

  Curtin grabbed Leslie by the front of his denim jacket. “On what charge, you tin star rube cock—”

  Leslie set himself and nailed Curtin with a whistling right uppercut. Curtin staggered into the arms of Moose Katzenbach who caught him, picked him up, and dropped him face-down on the roadside gravel.

  Sam said, “Yes, sir, but what is the charge, sir?”

  Leslie glanced at Lockington. “Give me a charge, for Christ’s sake!”

  Lockington said, “How’s ‘chronic diarrhea of the mouth’?”

  Leslie said, “You catch that, Sam?”

  Sam said, “Yes, sir, but I can’t spell ‘diarrhea’.”

  There was a weariness in Joe Leslie’s voice. He said, “Use the dictionary in my desk—bottom drawer.”

  51

  Moose Katzenbach broke the Route 31 silence. He said, “There ain’t no LAON?”

  Lockington said, “LAON was a gimmick designed to mess up my thinking, and it did. What time did Duke show this afternoon?”

  “Shortly after three. We’d been in the woods behind the house since about two—Joe Leslie knows the area—he brought us in on foot from a side road.”

  “How did Duke get there?”

  “Came in a cab—he probably ditched that rented Buick in St. Charles.”

  A yellow full moon was topping the hills beyond the slimy muck of the Fox River. Moose said, “Any idea why Duke changed his name from Herzog to Denny?”

  “He didn’t trash ‘Herzog’, he used both names. There were certain advantages, two valid driver’s licenses, for instance. He was ‘Herzog’ to one woman, ‘Denny’ to the next. Duke was a slippery guy.”

  They were rattling eastbound through Streamwood when Moose growled, “Well, it was her best shot at the whole fifty million—they’d needed each other to get that far down the pike, then I guess it became a case of ‘what have you done for me lately?’ Hell, since when ain’t twenty-five million been enough?”

  “Since there’s been fifty million.”

  Lockington could sense the big man’s struggle to herd recent events into understandable order. After a while Moose said, “Y’know, Lacey, if you’d given that firing pin a couple more strokes, she’d have dropped Duke, he wouldn’t have fired a shot, and she’d have been on top of the world!”

  Lockington nodded. “She’d have walked free on a self-defense plea—the gun in Duke’s hand was her ticket to anywhere.”

  “Yeah, but, dammit, how do you claim self-defense when you’ve shot the other guy in the back?”

  “Joe Leslie said that he took one in the left shoulder from the front, probably the last round in her clip, but it could have been the first, her response to being threatened with a gun, and how would they prove differently? Duke was right-handed—if he’d been shot in the right shoulder, he’d have dropped his gun and there’d have been an element of doubt, but as it worked out, there’d have been none.”

  Moose said, “She’d have claimed that she’d blacked out, not realizing that she was still blazing away—the blind panic thing.”

  Lockington said, “Erika Elwood was an excellent actress—she’d have sold that package to any jury in the country.”

  “If they’d bothered to indict her.”

  “Which is doubtful.”

  “I wonder why she tore him up like that—it was almost like she enjoyed it, thinking that he couldn’t shoot back.”

  “If that’s what she thought, it cost her. Duke was a
lead-pipe cinch to get one in—he was a damned good hand with a gun.”

  “But why would she think that?”

  “How do we know that she did?”

  “What about that firing pin, Lacey?”

  Lockington lit a cigarette, pitching the match through his open window, ushering in a long period of silence.

  Moose didn’t chase the subject. Instead he said, “She must have known that Duke intended to kill her.”

  “Apparently.”

  “How would she know?”

  Lockington shrugged. “Female intuition, maybe.”

  Moose shifted his bulk on the sagging front seat of the Pontiac. He said, “What kicked this business off in the first place?”

  “Fifty million dollars.”

  “Yeah, but where did it actually begin?”

  “God knows. I’d say that it started with Duke Denny who may have struck up a drinking buddy relationship with Gordon Fisher, possibly on the Gold Coast. Fisher had big bucks, Duke pretended to be up in the chips, and the Gold Coast attracts both types, the genuines and the phonies. Somewhere along the line, Fisher could have hoisted a few too many and let it slip that his ex-wife was the daughter of Max Jarvis and that she, her mother, and her sisters would hit the jackpot when Jarvis died.”

  “And who would know better than Fisher? He was the Sentinel’s attorney and he’d drawn up the will! You think he identified the other beneficiaries by name?”

  Lockington shook his head. “Probably not, but Duke had been a police detective, he knew the tracer’s tricks, and he had Bugs Grayson and the City Hall computers at his disposal—chances are he took much the same course that we’ve taken. Duke was a man dedicated to hitting the heavy lick, the one that’d put him on Easy Street. This was a long shot, but it represented a chance to score big. He located the ladies in question and he went to work. When Duke Denny was in overdrive, the average female was at a decided disadvantage!”

  “You’re saying that he romanced all of’em with an eye toward marrying one.”

  “Exactly. Marry one and eliminate the others.”

  “He made it with their mother, the old stripper?”

  Lockington grinned. “Why not? She’d have appreciated the attentions of a younger man. Duke was thorough.”

  “Yeah, but, Jesus Christ, she must have been a thousand years old!”

  “Uh-huh, but for fifty million it could be managed, don’t you think?”

  “So he got acquainted with ’em, charmed ’em into bed, and sorted ’em out.”

  “They were easy lays—Julie Masters was a lost lamb, confused, a snap for a guy with Duke’s persuasive powers—Eleanor Fisher was a hot-crotched divorcee, so was Connie Carruthers. A few repeat performances and he had ’em sized up. He settled on Erika Elwood—she was the prettiest, the sexiest, the weakest in a few respects but the strongest overall, certainly the greediest. Duke poured on the coal, marrying her in January. He felt her out—did she know that five people stood between them and fifty million dollars? Erika Elwood knew a good thing when she saw one—Erika went along.”

  “She actually dropped the boom on her own family?”

  “That wouldn’t have been particularly difficult for Erika—she’d never known these people as relatives, and it wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference if she had. The bottom line was fifty million bucks and Erika wasn’t the type to get sidetracked by sentiment.”

  “Julie Masters was the first in line?”

  “Yeah, Duke got it into Julie early, and when she’d moved in with me, he continued to see her—not often, but once too often.”

  “They’d set you up as their fall guy right from the beginning?”

  “No, their campaign was already underway when they realized that I’d make an excellent red herring. I shot Sapphire Joe Solano and Stella Starbright did a column on that. The Timothy Gozzen incident helped, and when that thing with the two Mexican switchblade artists got me suspended, I’d become a coincidental bonus, a guy convincingly portrayed as a screw-loose renegade likely to go off the high board with no urging.”

  “Okay, but why did they need you, anyway? Nobody suspected either one of ’em—they could have taken the money and lammed.”

  “I was the plug, Moose—a dead Lacey Lockington would have sealed off the past, there’d have been no further investigations of the murders. The law would’ve jumped at the chance to clear the books. Framing a corpse is easy—it’d have worked.”

  They were at Elmhurst Road and North Avenue, waiting for a green traffic signal. Moose said, “What put you onto Duke—where did he slip up?”

  “Well, the clincher came when I stumbled onto his black Cadillac convertible parked in the underground garage at 814 North Michigan Avenue where he lived in Erika Elwood’s condo, but there were other little blunders. He called, ostensibly from Cleveland, on the afternoon following the death of the Carruthers girl, and he mentioned that his Cleveland attorney would be closing his office in three hours.”

  “All right, what about it?”

  “Duke called at two, lawyers close shop at five, there’s a one hour time differential between Chicago and Cleveland, it was three o’clock in Cleveland, and a Cleveland attorney would have been closing his office in two hours, not three. Then he called yesterday, and during our conversation I distinctly heard a clock chime Chicago time. I ain’t no Ellery Queen, but I can do simple arithmetic.”

  “Then he never was in Cleveland—not at all?”

  “I don’t think so. He probably packed a suitcase and left his apartment like he was going on a trip. He moved into Erika Elwood’s apartment and he did Connie Carruthers, Gordon Fisher, and Jarvis from there.”

  The traffic signal flickered to green and Lockington eased the Pontiac into the intersection, braking abruptly to avoid a southbound Omni that had ignored the red light. A fat woman, Lockington thought. Moose said, “How did you pinpoint tonight as fireworks night?”

  “With Max Jarvis out of the way, I represented the last barricade. Erika Elwood had maneuvered me into exactly the right position for the coup de grâce, the plan appeared to be working flawlessly—Duke had momentum. I knew how he thought, he believed in striking while the iron was hot—tonight had to be the night!”

  “Straighten me out on something. Why did he hit Gordon Fisher? Fisher couldn’t have figured into the Jarvis will, not when he was divorced from Jarvis’s dead daughter.”

  “Gordon Fisher was no numbskull. He recalled telling Duke of the Jarvis will conditions and if he didn’t know that Duke and Erika Elwood were married, he certainly knew that they were close companions. He put two and two together, and if he didn’t come up with four, he had a sure three-and-a-half. He came to Classic Investigations to question Duke Denny and he bumped into you. I made mention of the Fisher contact to Duke. That was a mistake—it got Fisher murdered.”

  Moose said, “They couldn’t possibly have hung all of those killings on you.”

  “If I was alive, no—but I wouldn’t have been alive, and dead men have no alibis.”

  “What about this Cleveland character who was covering for Duke?”

  “Jack Slifka. Slifka kept Duke informed, and he lied for him, but I think Jack’s okay. Slifka probably thought that he was helping Duke with some sort of innocent practical joke.”

  Moose stretched and yawned. “Well, I gotta say one thing for old Max Jarvis—he took good care of his own. But how come Julie Masters didn’t get a crack at that Stella Starbright column?”

  “She’d probably received a job offer from the Sentinel, but Julie was geared differently, her ambition was to write a novel. Julie was a dreamer—hardly practical enough to settle into the everyday grind of a newspaper column.”

  They were in Chicago and the moon was high, its glow dulled by city night-smog. Moose Katzenbach said, “Uhh–h–h, Lacey, one more question, if it’s any of my business.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How was Erika Elwood in bed?”

 
Lockington thought it over. Then he said, “Like fifty million dollars.”

  52

  It was a typical Friday night at the Shamrock Pub when Lacey Lockington walked in at 11:45. He sagged onto a seat at the end of the bar, just in time to see Jennifer Hallahan fall head-first from her barstool. Mush O’Brien said, “The usual?”

  Lockington nodded, watching Rip Rafferty knock Tom Conroy on his ass. Lockington said, “Full moon tonight.”

  Mush O’Brien said, “Yeah, and all them werewolves ain’t out in the woods.”

  There was a light touch on Lockington’s shoulder. Edna Garson stood beside him, studying him with smoky-blue eyes. She said, “Let’s go to bed.”

  Lockington said, “But I just got here.”

  Edna said, “So did I. Let’s go to bed anyway.”

  Mike McBride threw a chair through the television screen. Lockington said, “You want a drink?”

  Edna said, “No, I want to go to bed.”

  Mamie Horton got sick on the floor. Mush O’Brien covered his eyes with his hands. He said, “Oh, Great and Flaming Omnipotent God Almighty!”

  Edna Garson said, “Locky, have you ever seen a woman go up in flames?”

  Lockington said, “Not to the best of my recollection.”

  Rosie O’Toole was whacking Hank Desmond over the head with a beer bottle. Edna said, “Well, if we ain’t in bed by midnight, you are in for a brand-new experience!”

  The bar phone was ringing and Mush O’Brien grabbed it, speaking briefly before handing it to Lockington. He said, “For you.”

  Lockington took it and growled, “Yeah?”

  Moose Katzenbach said, “Hey, Lacey, are you watching television at the Shamrock?”

  Lockington said, “No, the television set’s out of order.”

  Moose said, “Big fire downtown!”

  Lockington glanced at his watch. It was 11:54. He said, “In just six minutes there may be one at the Shamrock.”

  Moose said, “The Chicago Morning Sentinel Building’s burning and they can’t save it—she’s going to the ground!”

  Lockington said, “I’ll be damned!”

  Moose said, “WGN got a mobile unit on the scene and it just announced that a radical group is claiming responsibility—outfit identifying itself as ‘LAON’.”