by Anthony Rome
I racked my brains, going over and over those events. Among them something had happened that had caused someone to want Kosterman dead. I had the feeling the answer was right there, waiting for me to reach out and grab it. But each time I thought I almost had it, it slipped away from me.
I’d been in the diner for less than an hour when Chief Patrick came in, grinning.
He ordered a container of coffee to go, and told me: “Come out to the car. I’m expecting a radio call.”
We left the diner together, Patrick carrying his coffee. It had grown dark out. We got into the front seat of his car. The police radio was on, crackling with static and terse messages that didn’t concern us.
Patrick peeled the lid off his container and tasted the coffee. “Too hot,” he muttered, and began blowing on it. “Come on,” I snapped. “Give.”
He laughed, pleased with himself. “We found the garage. It’s one of five that were listed for rent in the Mayport Sunday News. Attached to a house on the outskirts of the township. The man who owns the house got a phone call late Sunday night from a guy who wanted to know if he’d rented the garage yet. He hadn’t. So the guy brought his car around, rented the garage for a month, put the car in it. The guy didn’t come back for it Monday or Tuesday. But he did today. Around four in the afternoon. Drove off and hasn’t come back yet.”
“He won’t,” I said. “The owner of this garage get the license number?”
“No. But it was a blue Ford. New. And the time element fits like a glove.”
“What kind of description of the man were you able to get?”
“You told me the shooter had a hat on,” Patrick said. “What color?”
“He was wearing a brown hat.”
“So was the man that rented this garage. And a tan summer-weight raincoat. I figure he wore that raincoat so nobody’d see the kind of clothes he had on underneath. Then after he shoots Kosterman, he ditches the stolen Ford, takes off the raincoat and hat, gets into his own car, and goes his merry way.”
I nodded. “A real pro. Any more to the description? Outside of his clothes?”
“Uh-huh. A short, skinny man. Walks with a pronounced limp. And he’s got a crooked nose. Looks like it was busted, the tip of it turned to one side, like.”
I just sat there for a moment, looking at him, remembering the man who had bumped into me when I was tailing Nimmo from Turpin’s hotel. Some of the loose ends began tying themselves together for me. I had a sense of things coming full circle.
“With that good a description,” I said absently, my mind on other matters, “you’ve got a real chance of finding his trail.”
“We’re on it now. I’ve got every available man out checking him down. Also, I asked the sheriff to have his men look for him in places outside the township. Didn’t tell him why, just that I want the guy for questioning.” Patrick nodded at the crackling radio speaker. “I’ll get called soon as anybody finds any trace of our killer.”
“Try checking with the state troopers,” I said. “They might have a record on him.”
“I already did,” Patrick told me, looking pleased with himself again. “And they do. Or anyway, it sounds like the same man. A gun for hire, though they’ve never been able to prove any killings against him. Works all over Florida. Got a string of aliases as long as your curiosity. Jim MacDonald, Harry Lye, Joe Bailey . . .”
“Calls himself Catleg, lately.”
Patrick gave me a sharp look of surprise. “You know him?”
“I think so. He bumped into me last Saturday. Not by accident.”
“Come on,” Patrick snapped impatiently. “Give.”
“That’s all I’ve got that could help you,” I told him.
He glared at me, finally shrugged. “Okay, play it cagey. Anyway, the state cops’ve been looking for him the past six months. Ever since he shot and killed a gas-station owner in Miami. Seems a small bunch of extortionists was trying to make the independent gas-station owners pay protection. This one wouldn’t pay. He wasn’t dead when the cops got to him, though he died an hour later. He gave them a description of the guy who shot him. Sounds just like our killer. Except for the limp. And maybe the gas-station owner gave him that. He said he was expecting trouble, so he was carrying a gun when the killer came for him. He put a bullet in the killer’s hip before he went down. The killer managed to stagger back to his car and drive off. But that’d account for the limp easy enough.”
“It could,” I said. “Do they have any kind of lead to him?”
“Nothing. Not where he is or where he’s been . . . I’d sure like to be the one who gets him. It’ll probably turn out he’s got a lot of other kills to his record. Turning up a killer like that’d be awful good publicity for me. With something like that under my belt, it wouldn’t be so easy for the lousy politicos to boot me out of my job just because I step on somebody’s toes.”
He didn’t look at me as he said it, but we both knew what he meant.
He blew on his coffee again, sipped at it. “That’s much better,” he murmured, and began to drink it.
The Surf Motel was a row of neat little cabins on a strip of waterway beach. Phelps, the motel owner, was waiting in his office with a Mayport prowl-car cop when I entered with Chief Patrick.
Phelps repeated for us what he’d told the prowl-car cop: A man answering our killer’s description had registered into one of the motel cabins Sunday night a few minutes before midnight. Phelps had noticed him particularly because of the limp and because he was wearing a raincoat when it wasn’t raining. He’d registered under the name Robert Donald. And he’d signed out that morning at eleven o’clock.
“What kind of car was he driving?” Patrick asked him.
“I didn’t see no car,” Phelps answered. “He come walking, he left walking.”
A real pro.
“What kind of hours did this Donald keep?” Patrick asked.
“Well, I don’t have time to just sit around keeping tabs on my customers. But as far as I can tell you . . . let’s see . . . Monday morning he must’ve got up real early. He was gone by the time I got up. Came back sometime between ten and eleven that night. Near as I remember. Maybe he was back in his cabin sometime during the day, but I didn’t see him.”
“How about Tuesday?”
“Same thing. Gone before I got up in the morning. Back late at night. And then this morning like I told you. He checked out at eleven A.M. You gonna tell me what he did?”
“No,” Patrick snapped. “Did he have any visitors?” Phelps shrugged. “I don’t know. Not that I know of.”
“Did you notice anything at all about him that might give us a lead to him. Anything he told you, or . . .”
“Well . . .” Phelps said, “last night after he came in he made a phone call. It was almost midnight. That help any?” Chief Patrick stiffened. “How do you know? Don’t your cabins have their own phones?”
“Uh-uh. Haven’t put any in yet. Just got this office phone here, and the pay phone outside the door there. He used the pay phone.”
“Could you hear what he said over the phone?”
“How could I? I was in here, he was out there.”
“Don’t you ever eavesdrop?” Patrick demanded.
Phelps reddened. “Hell no! I don’t . . . What do you take me for?”
“You’d be a hero, if you did this time.”
Phelps shook his head. “Well, I didn’t. Honest. I heard him dropping the coins in, but that’s all I heard.”
Patrick sighed. “Big help.”
“Maybe it is,” I said. I looked at Phelps. “You said you heard him drop coins in. You mean coins? Not just one coin?”
“No. Like I said. I heard a bong, and a couple tinkles, like, and . . . Why?”
Patrick and I looked at each other.
I said, “Long distance.”
“Yeah,” Patrick breathed happily. “That means there’ll be a record of it.”
He snatched up the desk phone
, used it to call the telephone company. It didn’t take him long to get the information he wanted. He hung up and motioned to me. We left the motel office together.
In the darkness outside Patrick told me, “The call went to Miami. The Hotel Blue Bell.” He gave me the address. “Miami ain’t my territory. But your license is supposed to be good anywhere in the state.”
“Lucky me.”
“Yeah,” he said dryly. “You get to go down there after him.”
“Wish me luck.”
“You wear a gun,” Patrick said. “Take some advice. This killer is nobody to play games with. You spot him—shoot him first and ask the questions after.”
“Can’t,” I told him. “The questions I have to ask him need answers.”
Patrick raised and lowered a shoulder. “Do or die for dear old Kosterman.”
“I’ll be in touch,” I said.
“Sure. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll look for your name in the papers. The obituary column.”
CHAPTER
18
IT WAS ONE A.M. when I reached Miami.
The Blue Bell was at the bottom of Miami. Not geographically, but in every other way.
It was in hillbilly town, a festering sore of a neighborhood jammed against the railroad freight tracks. It was mostly clapboard shacks, few with inside plumbing, set up on concrete blocks and surrounded by lush, untended eruptions of wild subtropical vegetation. Each shack was home for a dozen or more of the dirt-poor Southern whites who kept trickling down to Miami from the swamps and backwoods hills of the states bordering northern Florida. They brought no sense of law with them—only a rigid code of crude private justice. Shootings and stabbings were so common in hillbilly town, and their survivors so dangerous, that the Miami cops seldom entered it except for a major riot threatening to spill out into neighboring sections. Then they came by the dozen.
The Blue Bell was part of a short block that comprised the best street in the neighborhood. First of all, the street was asphalt, instead of gravel or dirt. And it had pavements. Most of its buildings were gin mills. From each thundered a weird perversion of music—part Western, part hillbilly, part rock ‘n’ roll, part pure howl of rage; the blending of these parts sounding as if it had been accomplished in a cement mixer.
I got hostile, suspicious glares as I came down the pavement. I wasn’t wearing the right uniform, didn’t have the right look. The males prowling the street all wore skin-tight Levi’s tucked into cowboy boots and gaudy sports shirts unbuttoned to show their bare chests and navels; they sported sideburns and long greasy hair, sullen mouths and vacant eyes. Most of the females were indistinguishable at a quick glance from the males—except that some of them had their shirts partly buttoned. And some wore sleazy dresses made of some material not too far removed from tissue paper.
The sign painted on the stucco wall over the open doorway between two of the gin mills read:
HOTEL
BLUE BELL
The narrow wooden stairway inside was dark. But there was light at the top of it. A naked light bulb dangled at the end of a ceiling electric cord. I made my way up the rickety flight of steps to the glare of the lighted landing. There was a sort of foyer there, just big enough to contain the wooden table with the hotel register book on it, two kitchen chairs, and space to squeeze past to an unlighted corridor of room doors.
No one was there. A pullrope hung by a cardboard sign on which had been printed in pencil: “ring bell.” There was another penciled cardboard sign on the wall: “NO Guests Allowed in Rooms After 9 P.M.” By hillbilly-town standards that sign—enforced or not—proclaimed the Blue Bell a solid, first-class establishment.
There was a pay phone on the opposite wall. I had a look at the number on its dial. It was the number the killer had called from the Surf Motel in Mayport.
I yanked on the pullrope.
He was quick enough opening the nearest room door and popping out into the corridor. But he did everything after that with a lethargy so deep it could only have been acquired through a lifetime of effort. He was about forty—tall, consumptive, pot-bellied. He had on baggy brown trousers, a green shirt, a threadbare blue jacket. There was a bulge in the right-hand pocket of the jacket. I guessed it was a gun he carried for protection, though in that neighborhood a gun would be about as much help to him as a blunt knitting needle.
He leaned against the comer of the wall next to the table, looking at me sleepily. “You’re wrong,” he drawled.
“About what?”
“I see you looking at my pocket. You think maybe I can’t get the gun out before you jump me. But I can.”
“Why should I jump you?”
He shrugged in slow motion. “Maybe you’re thinkin’ of holding me up, maybe.”
I stared at him. “Is there anything around here worth stealing?”
“No . . . but maybe you wouldn’t know that.”
“I might guess it.”
He began cleaning his grimy fingernails with a toothpick. “Well . . . one thing I know. You didn’t come up here looking for a room.”
“No? How much are the rooms?”
“Dollar a day. But you don’t want one. Not you.”
“Any of the rooms have a phone?”
He nodded at the pay phone on the wall. “We’re lucky we still got that one. Next time some damn fool drunk rips it outa the wall, the phone company ain’t gonna put it back.”
“Who answers the phone when it rings?”
“Me.”
“Suppose you’re not here?”
He finished cleaning his nails with the toothpick. They didn’t look any cleaner. He began using the toothpick on his teeth. “I’m always here. This is my hotel.”
“Nice place you’ve got here.”
His eyebrows inched upward. “Maybe you’ve seen better.”
“I’ve seen worse, too.” I took out a five-dollar bill, fanned it across my fingers. “A long-distance call came in here last night from Mayport. About midnight. Who was it for?”
He contemplated the five, scratching his ear with the toothpick. I gave him time. He took it.
Finally my patience ran thin. I slapped my palms together, loudly, concealing the fiver between them.
His eyes widened in astonishment, as though I’d performed a feat of magic. “Hey . . .” he murmured unhappily.
I opened my hands and showed him the five-dollar bill again. “The call,” I said.
“Well, now . . . why? Who’re you?”
I started to close my hands, slowly this time, making the bill vanish an inch at a time.
The toothpick snapped between his fingers. “Make it ten?”
“I’m thinking of dropping it to two-fifty.”
The five was almost out of sight between my closing hands. He hated to see it go.
“Sally Bullock,” he said. “The call was for her.”
I opened my hands and lowered them, letting the five dangle from a thumb and forefinger. “Sally Bullock. She have a room here?”
“Naw. I don’t let in that kind. This guy asked me to get her from the joint next door. The Gulch. Phone company took their phone out. So I got her.”
“Know who the man on the phone was?”
He shook his head.
“Who’s this Sally Bullock?”
He did his slow-motion shrug. “A girl. Used to see her around a lot. Till she moved away. Now she only comes around once in a while. Dresses nice now.”
“What did you mean when you said she was that kind?”
“You know. A junkie. I don’t let ’em in here ever. They’re worse’n drunks. A junkie’ll kill you for the price of a shot. Pretty thing though.”
“You said she moved away. Where’d she move?”
“Dunno.”
“She next door now?”
“Wouldn’t know. Ain’t been in The Gulch tonight.”
“Did you hear what she said over the phone here?”
He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “
That oughta cost you extra.”
“You haven’t earned the five yet.”
“Suppose I lie to you?”
I smiled at him. “What do you think I’d do about it when I found out?”
“I carry a gun,” he reminded me.
“So do I.”
He sighed. “It figures.” He yawned. “She didn’t say much.
Just come to the phone and said ‘Hello.’ Then she said ‘When?’ And ‘I’ll be waiting.’ Then she hung up and left.” He eyed the bill in my hand. “The five?”
“One more thing.” I described the man who’d shot at Kosterman—his limp, the crooked nose. “Ring a bell?”
He wagged his head from one side to the other. “Don’t know anybody like that. Know lots of busted noses. Some limps. Not the two of ’em together.”
I gave him the bill. He took it and stuck it in his pocket like it didn’t mean much to him.
“Anything else I ought to know?” I asked him.
“What d’you want from me? You got your five’s worth.”
“Sure,” I said. I got another five-dollar bill from my pocket and stuck it in his hand. “This is for nothing. Just because I like your face.”
His jaw sagged. After the way I’d squeezed him for the first five, my sudden generosity shocked him.
I said, “So long” and turned to go. But I didn’t hurry it. “Wait,” he said.
I looked back at him.
“Folks in The Gulch don’t like strangers wanderin’ in,” he told me slowly. “It’s kind of a club. You know? Get in and out fastlike if you want to come out in one piece.”
I said, “Thanks.”
He frowned and went on fingering the five, looking guilty about having it, wanting to earn it.
“This’s real generous of you,” he murmured.
“It’s not my money,” I told him. “Expense account.”
“Yeah?” He frowned some more, then stuck the five in his pocket to warm the other one. “I’ll tell you what. If Sally Bullock ain’t there . . . there’s a gal hangs out in The Gulch used to be thick with her when Sal worked there as a barmaid. Name’s Fat Candy. Maybe she knows where Sally Bullock’d be. You make out like you want her company for an hour and get her the hell outa there. Won’t none of the boys stand in the way of her makin’ some quick dough.”
