He Was Her Man

by Sarah Shankman

  Sam slumped. The end of the line, and they’d come a cropper. “Back around. Pack it in, I guess.”

  “Go pick up Jack?”

  Jesus, she’d forgotten all about him.

  Early started to back around, and as he did, Sam saw that a rutted path road continued on behind the shack.

  “Wait,” she caught Early’s arm and pointed. “Go there. Go back there.”

  In another quarter mile the woods ended and the earth dropped off into a man-made crater a half-mile in diameter. The huge red hole in the earth looked like a strip mine. It held a couple of dump trucks, a backhoe, a grader.

  And, perched right at the edge, sat a silver Mercedes.

  Sam said, “Pull right up on her ass and bump her.”

  Early turned and stared.

  “What? I said bump her!”

  Early pulled up, gave the Mercedes a good whack. The silver car jumped within inches of the precipice.

  Mickey’s head spun in the driver’s seat, and then her hand came up.

  “Duck! She’s going to shoot!” Early yelled.

  Sam scooted down in the brown leather only a few inches. She wanted to see. “Hit her again, Early. Hit her!”

  He slammed her. The Mercedes’s front was edging over, going, going, and in the last instant before it was gone, Mickey flung open the door and jumped. She landed onto solid ground, rolling and tumbling.

  Sam was out of the Rolls and stomping on Mickey’s right wrist before Early got his seat belt unlatched.

  “Get the hell off!” Mickey screamed.

  “Drop the gun!” Sam yelled.

  “What gun?”

  What gun, what gun, what gun? The echo bounced back from the other side of the rock crystal crater, the big ugly gouge in the earth.

  Sam looked down and saw only a fresh manicure, her own foot, a slender arm, and a pretty face. Mickey was saying, “Jesus, that was one hell of a waste of a good car.”

  28

  THEY FOUND JACK calmly smoking a cigar by the side of the road exactly where they’d left him. “Hi,” he said and climbed in the backseat with Mickey, whose wrists and ankles they’d bound with a rope. He took one look at her and said, “Absolutely, Early. She’s most definitely a redhead.” Sam liked that, his assumption that they had a good reason for deserting him in the middle of nowhere, and sure enough… Then he said, “Now, why don’t we run over to my place and have a little chat, unless someone has a better idea?”

  Mickey did, but her vote didn’t count.

  Fifteen minutes later the four of them were sitting around a big oak table in Jack’s kitchen in his redwood and glass lake house. Jack turned from chopping celery and peppers and onions for a crayfish étouffée and asked Mickey didn’t she agree everybody would feel better, find it easier to talk, with a little something in their stomachs.

  Mickey said she’d felt just fine until these two, nodding toward Sam and Early, had tried to drive her off the road. Pushed her car into a ravine. Knocked her down and tied her up.

  Jack said, “Oh, Sammy, tell me it isn’t so.”

  He was joking, but Sam herself was feeling like this thing was snowballing, totally out of control. It just kept accumulating more debris, involving more people, as it rolled along.

  First, if what Jack thought was right, you had the lost ring scam at the Gas ’N Grub. Were Mickey and Doc both responsible for Olive’s death? She still didn’t know.

  Then there were Speed and Doc and Mickey and the phony kidnapping, about which, at this point, no one gave a rat’s ass. Lateesha, the 15-year-old-honor-student-car-thief, Early, and Fontaine.

  And Bobby, how about Bobby Adair, the most polite ex-con in the state of Arkansas, maybe the whole South? She hadn’t even asked Early what they’d done with him.

  But right now the player she was looking at was the lovely Miss Mickey Steele. She was sitting there, they’d cut her loose, drinking a cup of coffee like she was taking a break from shopping on Fifth Avenue. Sam was thinking about how to frame the first question when the phone rang.

  Jack grabbed it. “No,” he said, “you did the right thing. Put her through.” He tucked the phone under his chin while he added rice to a pot of boiling water and stirred. He dropped a lid on the pot and said, “Loydell! Hey, darlin’. No, not at all. I’m sorry I wasn’t here earlier. So tell me.” He listened for a bit, Sam and Early and Mickey listening to him listen. “Unh-huh. No. No, you don’t worry about it. My man Early took care of that. He brought him to me. Yes, sweetie, Bobby’s with me. No, I know he didn’t. Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. You and Cynthia, you just stay cool. Yes, I’ll let you know. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  He hung up and motioned to Sam with the crook of a finger to follow him through a swinging door into a dining room where stood a handsome bird’s-eye maple and ebony Biedermeier table and chairs for 12. Sam looked up at Jack, waiting to hear what he had to say, and he leaned over her, propping one hand against a cream-colored wall. It was like being enclosed in a tent of Jack.

  He said, “You could hear that was Loydell. It seems that that asshole, pardon my French, Archie Blackshears called Corrections and found out Bobby was sprung yesterday, they’ve been out to Olive’s, found his gear, and they’ve lifted his prints from Olive’s Rabbit they found parked in front of Tate’s Bar.”

  “When he showed up in the cemetery, I never thought what he might be using for wheels. He probably took the bus, hitched, or something from Cummins, then of course he’d use Olive’s car.”

  “Well, Archie’s got an APB out on him. They’re going to try to hang Olive’s murder on him, no doubt about it. The fat man told Loydell so himself.”

  “Jack, I don’t know for certain Bobby didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, but what does your gut tell you?”

  “Tells me no way. I like the kid, plus it’s sort of like Early said about Fontaine getting away with an insanity plea if they tried to pin Olive on him. It doesn’t make much sense, does it, Bobby’d kill his grandmother, put her in the trunk of his old car, and then, what? Give the car to Mickey and Doc? And then pretend to go looking for the car? He’d have to be nuts. He’s awfully polite, but I don’t think he’s crazy.”

  They exchanged small smiles. It was sort of nice, Sam thought, being up under this man-triangle. She, part of the right angle of the wall and the floor, Jack, the diagonal.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked. “We’re gonna beat up on Mickey till she tells us about Olive, then we take her to the cops downtown, the sane cops, assuming there are some who aren’t set on pinning this thing on Bobby, and we save Bobby’s butt?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “So who gets to go the first round, me or you?”

  “You bring your gloves?” He tapped her gently on the chin.

  She reached up and touched the tip of his nose with a forefinger. His eyes were beginning to go black and blue above the Band-Aid. But she didn’t say she was sorry for belting him.

  “Come on, tiger.” He winked. “Let’s go get her.”

  *

  Mickey didn’t flinch when Sam told her that they could put both her and Doc at Olive’s store (which wasn’t exactly true, but so what), put Olive’s car in the carport of the house where she and Doc were staying, put Olive’s body in the car’s trunk—which is where they’d found it.

  Mickey said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. You must have the wrong person.”

  “Don’t think so,” said Sam, pulling the queer diamond ring out of her pocket and holding it in front of Mickey’s turned-up nose. “Doesn’t this belong to you?”

  “No. Never saw it before.” Her voice was even. Sam had to give it to her, the woman had nerves. “But if it’s connected with someone’s death, don’t you think you ought to call the cops? Or are you the cops?”

  “Nope,” said Jack. “We’re the vigilantes. You know, the guys in the gray hats. The kind of guys who could understand your running
a few card scams on the turista mooches—”

  Mickey favored them with a wintry smile.

  “Even you and Doc doing the hokey-pokey with Speed McKay, trying to shake down his fiancée.”

  Mickey took another sip of coffee. She held the cup steady.

  “But, you see,” said Sam, “back to the original topic. That’s Olive Adair, in case you forgot, and she was strangled and stuffed in the trunk of her grandson’s car. You remember her grandson, don’t you, Mickey, you met him and his dog, Pearl, up near your place? But, then, you’d met Pearl before, at Olive’s store.” Sam leaned over in Mickey’s face. “Anyway, just to make ourselves abundantly clear, con games and shakedowns are one thing, but we draw the line at murdering old ladies. Particularly old ladies we like.”

  “Ah, hell, Sam,” said Jack, throwing up one hand. “The woman’s right. We ought to call the cops, turn her over to them. They’ll pick up Doc. She’ll say he did it. He’ll say she did it. What the hell do we care?”

  “A better idea: Why don’t we just shoot her?” said Sam.

  “I like that,” said Early, who’d been so quiet they all turned and stared at him. “Hell, Jack, they were gonna kill you anyway. The three of ’em. I say, hit ’em first. We’ll start with her, then we’ll go do Doc and Speed.”

  Mickey sat up. “Kill you? Why would I kill you? I don’t even know who the hell you are.”

  “Jack Graham, Mickey. You know, Smilin’ Jack from New Orleans. Don’t tell me Doc never brought me up. Gee, that’d hurt my feelings.”

  Sam watched Mickey’s gaze focus on the middle distance. She was figuring the odds on something. It didn’t take her long. When she spoke, her voice was softer than it had been before, and slower. “I heard Doc and Speed mention you, Jack, between themselves. But Doc never talked to me about you. I’ll admit I was curious, so I asked around about you a little last night at the hotel. You run the games in town?”

  “Good,” said Jack. “Very good, Mick.”

  She turned and gave him her full attention. “So what I’m hearing is that your concern is you think Doc’s here to do you?”

  “Yep. That’s where I came in, anyway. It’s gotten a lot more complicated since then, but, bottom line, you could say the two of us are not wild about one another. Of course, the way I see it, I’m a reasonable man. Doc’s not. Neither is Speed, for that matter.”

  Mickey shrugged. “Little sucker never stopped talking, drove you nuts.” Then she looked at the trio of captors, slowly, one by one. “You guys aren’t really going to shoot me, are you?”

  You bet, they all nodded as one. Sam, for punctuation, pulled Early’s Walther out of her jacket pocket and handed it to him across the table. “Could you make it look like a suicide, Early, plant a gun?”

  “Sure, but I don’t see any reason there’d ever even be a body to find,” said Early, looking over at Jack. “Do you?”

  Jack waggled a finger, No body.

  “What are you going to do? Burn me up? Drop me in acid?” Mickey stared at her hand drumming on the table as if she were considering what her pale flesh might look like when they got through. She turned to Sam. “Are you a cop?” Then she answered her own question. “Nope, of course not. You’re too intelligent.” She leaned back in her chair. “What do you want, guys? Lay it out for me.”

  “Just tell us what happened,” said Sam. “From the top.”

  So Mickey did. She took a deep breath and told them about meeting Speed at the Oaklawn track. It was sheer coincidence that he and Doc had had some business together down in New Orleans. The little man telling her about this woman he was going to flimflam out of a million bucks, but there was this problem about a prenuptial agreement.

  “Jeetz. I didn’t know Jinx was that smart,” said Sam.

  “So, we came up with the kidnapping scam, not knowing that she was broke. You weren’t part of the deal,” she said to Jack. “Honest to God.” Mickey had the grace to smile.

  “So you rented the house, went back and picked up Doc somewhere.…” Jack made a rolling motion with one hand: Cut to the chase.

  Mickey walked them through the lost ring scam and how Doc queered it. How he ended up with the car, and then the car disappeared.

  “I knew we were screwed. I knew he wasn’t coming clean. I sort of guessed what had happened to Olive, but I didn’t really want to know.”

  She told them about Doc chopping off Speed’s finger.

  “Jesus!” Early flinched.

  Then there was the business about Doc and Speed swimming to the float.

  “You think he’s dead?” said Sam.

  Mickey nodded. “It’d be my guess.”

  “So, Doc’s gone psycho?”

  Mickey thought for a minute. “Well, I guess you’ve got to be crazy to be killing people, but I bet something went wrong in the store, Olive picked up the phone, pulled a gun, he panicked.”

  “And Speed?” asked Jack.

  Mickey shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, like I said, anybody’d want to kill him, they hung around him long enough, but—I don’t know. Maybe you’re right, Jack, about your being the real reason he’s here, some kind of vendetta.…” She trailed off, waiting for Jack to fill in the gap, to explain what the thing was between the two of them. Jack let it hang, and Mickey went on. “I mean it could have been a really big score, if we’d hit that million, but now that I think about it, it was when I said the deal was going down in Hot Springs that Doc’s eyes really lit up. Hey, what do I know? I used to sell psychology books for a living, but I never read what was inside.”

  Yeah, thought Sam, then a lot must have seeped through the covers.

  Mickey continued. “There’s always been something strange about Doc. He’s half gypsy, did you know that? He doesn’t talk about it very much, but his mother was one of those real old-timey fortune-tellers who traveled from place to place wearing the big skirts, her life savings in gold coin necklaces. He still uses some of her tricks.”

  “You don’t say,” said Jack.

  “Yep. Has lots of her ways. Including he carries his nest egg with him. Just like his mother with those gold coins, Doc doesn’t believe in banks.”

  “The man carries around a bunch of gold?” Early perked up.

  “No.” Mickey smiled. “In Doc’s case it’s not gold. It’s one perfect diamond. A huge sucker. Flawless. Doc says it’s worth half a million, easy. Maybe more. It should be in a museum.”

  “He wears it?” Early was aghast.

  “Oh, no. It’s unset. To tell you the truth, I don’t know where he keeps it. He’s pulled it out a couple of times when he was drunk, playing with it, showing off. He talks about it like it’s his baby. He calls it Little Doc.”

  Jack laughed. “Little Doc? The guy’s crazier than I thought.”

  “But you don’t know where he keeps it?” Early really wanted to know.

  “No, and don’t think I haven’t sniffed around. But Doc hasn’t stayed in the game as long as he has without a few tricks up his sleeve. He’s a master of the sleight of hand. He’s so good, sometimes I think it’s magic. Boom, you see it. Boom, you don’t.”

  “And where is our Doc now?” asked Jack.

  “In the house up on the lake. Locked in a closet, with a big old heavy chest of drawers in front of it.”

  “Dead or alive?” asked Early.

  “Alive when I last saw him. I was just trying to give myself a little time to split. Of course you all put a crimp in that plan.” Mickey drained her coffee cup. Jack poured her some more. “But let me tell you all one thing. If you think that there’s any way in hell I’m ever going before a court of law and testifying to any of this business with Olive or Speed, you’re dead wrong. And don’t start with me about plea bargains. Don’t start with me about anything. Because here are the choices.” She ticked them off. “One, I testify against Doc, and the son of a bitch walks, I’m dead.” She raised a hand before anybody else could talk. “It happens all the time. Some technica
lity, some little screwup, they spell Doc’s middle name wrong, they forget to tell him he has the right to lie to his lawyer, whatever, the next thing you know, he’s out, and I’m dead. Two, let’s say he actually serves some time. But there’s not enough time in the world that he’s going to forget, so when he gets out, I’m dead again. Three. They fry him. Now, what do you think the chances are of that really happening? And even if they do, even if they do…” She dropped her voice. She’d have made a hell of a trial lawyer, thought Sam. She’d have the jury over on its back, legs up. “I’m still going to spend the rest of my life watching my rear, because I know that silver-tongued son of a bitch, and he’s good. He’s very very good, and he’ll convince some poor sick bastard he’s jailing with that the way to salvation, the way to redemption, hell, the way to five hundred bucks, is to hold me down and carve his initials in my boobs and pour Drano down my throat. So, I’m not singing, lady, gentlemen.” She nodded at each of them in turn. “I’m not saying one official word. And, furthermore, you guys have obviously stepped in some kind of doo-doo, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me. Now, I’ve told you what you wanted to know. Beyond that, forget it.” And with that, Mickey leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms across that pretty bosom that she thought Doc had evil designs on.

  At which point, Sam and Jack excused themselves for another trip to the dining room, and this time there was no cozy Jack-tent.

  “You heard what she said, Sam. Mickey’s not going to testify, so what’s the point of going to the cops?”

  “Do you believe her story?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  “Yes. So what you want to do is ignore the fact that we know for sure Doc murdered Olive?”

  “Not ignore. I just don’t see any point in involving the authorities if they can’t make the case without Mickey.”

  “That’s nuts, Jack. Nuts.”

  They went back and forth until finally they were each leaning against the back of a chair, facing one another, panting, and Jack played his trump card. “You forgot about Bobby, Sammy.”

  “What?”