It looked like another drug-related snuffing, except for the method. Drug traffickers like their guns.
My mail, which I’d ignored first time through, was piled ankle-deep under the slot in the outer office door. I circular-filed the junk in my private tank and carried the rest—three letters—over to my desk to read. One was a late Christmas card from a former acquaintance named Iris in the West Indies, where she’d gone back to live with her mother. I read it twice and filed it with the others. It doesn’t pay to have a lot of clutter lying around. The second turned out on closer inspection to be one of my own bills in its original envelope, stamped addressee moved—not forwardable. The last bore the letterhead of the Michigan State Police in Lansing. I left it unopened while I dialed the answering service. My last official act.
“That man Horn called twice, Mr. Walker. He wouldn’t leave a number.”
I thanked the girl and cradled the receiver. I didn’t know anyone named Horn. For a moment I sat there doing nothing. Practicing. Then I ditched the .38 and holster in the top drawer of the desk, tugged open the file drawer in the bottom, pondered the bottle of expensive Scotch—and pushed the drawer shut. I’d grown past the point where drinking helped in murder cases. The bodies were still there when the buzz wore off.
I tore open the envelope from Lansing. In response to felony charges filed by the Iroquois Heights Police Department and City Prosecutor Cecil Fish, my investigator’s license and permit to carry a concealed weapon had been revoked. Failure to surrender my permit and credentials to the officer who called for them would result in my immediate arrest. The commander’s signature was splashed illegibly at the bottom.
While reading through the letter a second time, I came to the slow realization that I wasn’t alone. I looked up at a thickset man in a blue suit and gray overcoat standing just inside the connecting door, which I hadn’t closed. Hatless, he had very dark, very thick hair cut closely around the ears and neck but long on top, a bland, broad, unmarked face, and a huge torso slightly out of proportion with his arms and legs, which were a tad short for him. Small hands and feet. His eyes tilted down from an unremarkable nose and his complexion was very fair, so that his beard shone gunmetal blue under the skin of his cheeks and chin. For the most part his features were ordinary and about as memorable as yesterday’s lunch. The only truly distinctive thing about him was a splash of white bandage showing below his shirtcuff above the hand on the doorknob, where a dog might have bitten him recently.
“You’re Walker. I saw your picture in the paper.” His voice was thick and soft, like a tiger’s purr. “I’m Horn.”
19
HE WAITED POLITELY FOR my response. I made a thing of putting the letter from Lansing away in the top drawer while I studied him under my lids. I didn’t close the drawer afterward. The Smith & Wesson lay inside, its butt pointed toward me. I considered the bandage on his wrist and remembered Moses True’s dead mongrel and the threads in its teeth.
“I’m parked at the moment, Mr. Horn,” I said. “If it’s a detective you want I can recommend a couple.”
His lips smiled. “No mister. Just plain Horn. I’m not a customer. I want to talk to you about Paula Royce.”
“Everyone’s talking about Paula Royce this season. I’m thinking of putting out a line of jeans with her name on the tush. Sit down, Horn. Or can I call you Just Plain?”
He ignored my watered-down wit, came forward, and put a hand on the back of the customer’s chair. His steps were graceful and silent, as I’d guessed they would be. He hesitated. “How come it’s bolted down?” Suspicion uncoiled itself under his purring tone.
“I get a lot of salesmen, most of whom have breath that would cripple a brass buffalo. I like to keep them downwind. You aren’t a salesman, are you?”
He let the question die on its own. “If I prove I’m not armed, will you close that drawer?”
I said nothing. He took off his coat and folded it over a corner of the desk, the pockets on my side, unbuttoned his jacket with his left hand—the one without the bandage—opened it, turned around slowly and lifted the tails to show me he wasn’t wearing a hip holster. There were sixteen other places he could be hiding a ladies’ automatic, but the drawer was more convenient to me than any of those were to him. I pushed it shut. He sat down. His eyes prowled the room.
“This isn’t the Oval Office,” I assured him. “It’s not wired.”
The polite smile played around with his mouth. “Then I won’t worry. Because if you say it’s not and it turns out it is I’ll kill you.”
That’s how you tell them, by the way they say kill; the way you and I say eat, sleep, and dress. The colorful euphemisms are another invention of Hollywood. I wished I hadn’t closed the drawer.
“Who are you, Horn?”
“I’m someone who is looking for Paula Royce.”
“Paula Royce is dead.”
“Then I’m someone who is looking for Paula Royce’s body. I’d rather you didn’t smoke.”
I’d gotten one out and was tapping it on the desk. I opened my mouth to say one of those things I’m famous for, but he cut me off.
“I’d really rather you didn’t.”
We watched each other. I said, “A little thing like that?”
“Little things have a way of piling up and becoming big things.”
I put it back in the pack. “Who are you, Horn?”
“Excuse my rough manners.” He sat back, sounding genuinely apologetic. “I just got off three years of a nickel stretch in Jackson. The guards—they call them correctional officers now—they like you to say please when you ask for something, but that’s as far as it goes. I’m a working stiff, like you. I’ve been hired to find Paula Royce—and to make sure that anyone else who is looking for her stops.”
Outside it had started to snow. I could hear the flakes sifting down onto the window sill. The temperature was too high for them to stick. So far that winter we were eighteen inches behind normal, with no change in sight. I said, “Were you also hired to find Bud Broderick?”
“They let me go Christmas Day. I was inside when his string ran out. But I read up on it. She took his Jeep and parked it around the corner from your office building. After that she fades, and she don’t pop up again till they winch a stolen car out of Lake Ontario. I’d kind of like to know how she got there from here. On account of I don’t think that was her.”
“Have you been up there?”
He stroked the calluses on his left hand with the fingertips of his right, as if he wasn’t used to having calluses there. His hands were small as I said, and as slender as a woman’s. “I try to stay on this side of the border and out of small towns. That’s why I came straight here from Jackson after they gave me my papers. So far you haven’t answered any questions.”
“So far you haven’t asked any. Maybe you’d care to tell me why I should when you do.”
“I think you know why.”
“Let’s stop skating and start walking, Horn. I wasn’t inside long enough to cultivate your patience.”
“Remember, you asked.” His down-tilted eyes had a sad look. And crocodiles always look like they’re smiling. “Once there was a girl who said something about something that she ought not to have said anything about. My employers hired me to prevent others from making the same mistake by example. The reason they came to me and not to some others I could name is I don’t get so caught up in my work I don’t know when to stop. I only work when I’m getting paid. I don’t like it, I don’t dislike it. But because I’m good at what I do I’ll do it if it’s part of the job, to anyone I feel I have to if it will help me do that job. How much of this are you getting?”
“You lost me about four turns back,” I said. “But I think I know where you’re going. Congratulations.”
He studied my face. I hoped he wasn’t getting any more out of it than I was getting from his. “What for?”
“For screwing up the language just enough so if I were tapin
g this, the tape wouldn’t be worth a dime in court. Which I’m not. Taping.”
“You screw it up pretty good yourself.” He waited.
I knew what he was waiting for. I glanced down at my hands on the big scribble calendar that did for a blotter. My fingertips were white around purple nails. I undamped them, leaving little indentations throughout the middle week of December. “I’ll give you what I gave the cops. It’s public record anyway. I don’t know where Paula Royce is. I didn’t know where she was when I was in jail, and all I know about where she is now you can get from tonight’s paper. Officially her book is closed, which means I have no reason to hold back. As of just a few minutes ago I don’t even have a license to stand in front of.”
“You haven’t been listening.” He leaned forward in his seat, placing his hands on the desk. They were nowhere near as large as mine, and as clean and pink and hairless as a mannequin’s. They fascinated me. The bandage was a sudden white gash at the base of his right palm. “Being locked up can be like dying. In some ways it’s worse, especially at night. But you come back from there, that’s the difference. You come back from there.”
His voice didn’t change, and his complexion remained fair just this side of pale. But I’d come within touching distance of armed Vietcong and I’d never stood that close to the rim. I held his eyes with mine while I used my knee to work open the desk drawer from the bottom.
Keep his attention. “That looks nasty,” I said, nodding at the dressing on his wrist. “Dog bite you?”
“I caught it on a nail. Go ahead, stall. I’ve got patience, like you said. As long as I leave with what I came for.”
The drawer caught on one of the runners with a flatulent noise. I spoke loudly to cover it.
“I saw the nail you caught yourself on. What sort of hammer did you use on it?”
Something dark and empty with no bottom opened behind his pupils. I had some of the drawer out, I couldn’t tell how much. It had to be enough. I wouldn’t try to clear the gun; I’d fire it right through the desk and take a chance on the bullet’s glancing off something. The noise might be enough. I moved.
He moved faster. His hands were flat on the desk top, and then they were gripping my wrists. That fast. He didn’t even have all his fingers around them, they weren’t long enough to encircle them. Only his thumbs and forefingers were pressing the hollows in front of the bony knobs at the breaks. But I couldn’t move. Numbness crawled toward my fingers. Moses True’s mongrel and Sergeant Zorn’s handcuffs hadn’t held me any tighter. I looked at the empty dark yawning maw behind his pupils and I couldn’t move.
“There are a hundred and six ways to kill a man without weapons,” he said. “A hundred and six. I haven’t tried them all yet.”
The blood couldn’t get to my hands. I could feel its angry frustrated surging, could hear the thrum-thrum-thrum of my pulse amplified by the pressure holding it back, like the noise of a destroyer’s screws passing within depth-charge range of a submarine in an old war movie. It wasn’t hypnosis. It was the awesome proximity of nonexistence.
“What do you want?”
I wondered who had said that. It wasn’t a voice I recognized. Later I’d tell myself I was just buying time to think, but I wasn’t. I’d have tossed him my mother to pull myself back from that gaping hole.
“Where is she?” Same conversational tone as before. If there was any effort at all behind his grasp he was good at hiding it.
“I don’t know.”
He held on for a beat. I didn’t care. I couldn’t feel anything below my wrists anyway. Then he sat back, drawing his hands back and laying them on his knees. But the phantom pressure of his thumbs and forefingers remained.
“I believe you.” He rose. From where I sat he was as tall as a factory stack. Actually he was probably my height. He lifted his coat off the desk and shoved his fists into the sleeves. It wasn’t tailored like his suit, and the cuffs hung to his fingers. He looked down at me speculatively. “You never met anyone like me before, did you?”
So he had vanity. It made me fear him a little less, but not enough less to try again for the revolver in the desk. I resisted the urge to rub circulation back into my hands and met his gaze. “Mechanics come a penny a carload in this town,” I snarled. “I’ve met the hard eggs with their coat collars turned up and their hands in their pockets and ventriloquist’s lips that only let them talk out of the sides of their mouths. I’ve dealt with the cowboys who can’t talk without a lot of knuckle-cracking and two packs of spearmint snapping between their molars, and I’ve bandied words with the funny-funny boys who kick the comic-book slang around like a sissy quoting Shakespeare and whose brains you couldn’t find with a magnifying glass, and after you found them you couldn’t pick them up with tweezers. The preppie types with guns in their briefcases and the same upwardly mobile junior executive look just bore me. I’ve had them all, the nuts who like to see them squirm just before they bust the cap and the tired pros with families waiting for them at home who think Daddy’s on a sales trip to Houston. Occasionally, not as seldom as I’d like, I run into the jeeters with skinfuls of hop and so much firepower in their fists they can’t hold them still. They scare me the most, because they can’t predict what they’re going to do next any better than I can. Next to them you mild ones who won’t threaten a person except in the most general terms are so much spent wind. Maybe I never met anyone like you, or maybe I did and I just don’t remember because they didn’t make that much of an impression.”
“That’s quite a pep talk you give yourself.” He buttoned his coat with his good hand. I was glad I’d caught him when they weren’t both good. “You’re scared, all right. You just carry it better than most. I’ve read enough psychology to pick up a degree if I wanted to attract that many flies. Being afraid’s nothing to be ashamed of. The rest of you draw lines for yourselves you won’t cross. When you meet someone who doesn’t observe any, fear is a natural reaction.”
I yawned.
He said “Ha” involuntarily, and moved to the door without turning around. When he got there I said, “You don’t happen to own a gold LeBaron, do you?”
“I don’t own a gold anything. My driver’s license expired my second year in the can. Why?”
I shrugged.
He squinted at me a moment longer, then let go. “I’m going to go on looking for Paula Royce,” he said. “The other half of my job is to see no one else does.”
His chest swelled, and then he spun on his left foot and lashed out horizontally with his right, snapping the leg perpendicular to his body. The ball of his foot struck the edge of the connecting door, splintering the heavy crossbar and shattering the pebbled glass. Furnaces explode with less noise.
“That’s one. There are a hundred and five more where that came from.” He backed out, footsteps crunching on the broken glass. He moved like someone who was used to leaving rooms that way.
I waited until the door to the outer office closed against the pressure of the pneumatic closer, then got out the gun and the bottle and put them both on top of the desk. My hands had been steadier.
20
I FORCED MYSELF to drink slowly. Alcohol blessed alcohol. Makes lions out of mice, and when applied properly allows a frightened ex-snooper to use the telephone, provided he speaks more slowly than he drinks and holds the receiver in both fists. The office was growing dark. I switched on the desk lamp, which just made the shadows more ominous. I started to dial Barry Stackpole’s private number at the News, forgot it, looked it up in the special book I kept locked in the file cabinet, and tried again. No one knew local talent better than Barry, whose column on organized crime was syndicated throughout the country.
“Stackpole.”
“Like hell,” I said after a pause. “I know Barry’s voice since Nam and this ain’t it.”
“This is Gable Reinhardt, his research assistant.” The voice was a good ten years younger than Barry’s, almost boyish. I pictured Jimmy Olsen, bow-tie a
nd freckles.
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“Would you, if your name was Gable Reinhardt?”
“Where’s Barry, who never to my knowledge had a research assistant until this moment?”
“He asked for a raise. He got me. He’s under cover right now, working on a story. Who is this?”
I told him who it was.
“No shit?” He spoke more quickly. “I read where you were in jail.”
“They let me out when they clean my cage. Where can I reach Barry?”
“You can’t. Under cover is under cover. I can’t even get a message to him. What’s the story?”
“Who am I talking to, you or your sheet?”
“Me, when you put it that way, damn it.”
I sighed. Well, I was a free agent now. “What do you know about heavyweights in these parts?”
“Not much. Try Sports.”
“I’m not talking about fighters. I mean mechanics. Lifetakers. Soldiers. Button men. Choose your own cute name for people who kill other people for pay.”
“Okay, I know what you mean. I just wanted to hear you say it. Pros or part-timers?”
“Pros.”
“I’ve got some stuff. I don’t know that it’s current.”
“This one’s been out of circulation a while.”
“What you paying?”
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