Lemons Never Lie

by Richard Stark

  "Hughes. I don't think I know him. Harry?"

  "Never heard of him."

  "He drives, too."

  "Organizer and driver? Unusual."

  Grofield said, "He says we'll probably buy the truck we'll need from a fellow named Purgy."

  Myers smiled with recognition. "Up in Arkansas? So where does that put the job? Memphis? Nashville?"

  Harry suddenly lifted his arms and brought his hands together. Squeezing his right fist with his left, he made all the knuckles crack. At the same time, he said, "We're doing all the talking. This bird don't talk at all."

  "He'll talk. Alan is intelligent, he knows it's best to avoid violence. Don't you, Alan?"

  Grofield was thinking, He got to me through Mary, but she's been calling so he must have left her alive. There may be all kinds of mess up there at the theater, but he did leave her alive.

  "Alan?"

  Grofield said, "What?"

  "It's time for you to join the conversation," Myers said, and his smile was suddenly wearing thin.

  Grofield glanced at Harry, who wasn't smiling at all. It was time to allow himself to be cowed a little. "I can tell you it's in Little Rock," he said.

  "Little Rock. And what are you going to do in Little Rock?"

  "You know," Grofield said, "you two can give me a bad time tonight if I don't talk, but what if I do talk? Then the other guys give me a bad time tomorrow."

  "Well, tonight is here," Myers said. "And tomorrow's a long way off. Maybe you ought to just, worry about one thing at a time."

  Grofield looked over at Harry again, and shook his head. "I don't like this," he said.

  "Then get it over with fast," Myers suggested. "Like taking off adhesive tape. One yank and it's done with. What's the thing you're going to do in Little Rock?"

  "A bank," Grofield said, reluctantly.

  "A bank. Which bank?"

  "First National," Grofield said. He didn't know if Little Rock had a First National Bank or not, but most places did, and with any luck Myers wouldn't know Little Rock well enough to be able to catch him in a lie.

  "First National," Myers echoed. "Come on, Alan, why do I have to keep asking questions?"

  "Well, we don't have the whole operation worked out yet," Grofield said. He was thinking about the guns he'd helped throw in the Mississippi just an hour ago. He never carried a gun or any other weapon except during a job, and this was one of the very few times in his life he was regretting that. A pistol would be a very nice thing to have right now.

  Myers was saying, "I'm not asking about the operation, I'm asking about the bank. Is it the main office? A branch?"

  "A branch."

  "Where?"

  "I don't know, in a suburb someplace. In a shopping center."

  "What's the shopping center called?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, what's the suburb called?"

  Grofield had no idea of the names of Little Rock suburbs. He had to say again, "I don't know."

  "He's crapping on us," Harry said. His voice rumbled in his chest. He sounded very irritated.

  "It is taking you a long time, Alan," Myers said. "Now, tell me which Little Rock suburb."

  "I don't know. I never paid attention, it didn't matter to me."

  "We'll let that pass for a minute. But we'll come back to it, Alan. What's your job in it?"

  "Crowd control," Grofield said. "That's what I'm good at. I talk to the customers, keep them cooled out, watch them while the others clean out the cages."

  "This is a daytime job?"

  "Yes."

  "In a-"

  A sudden siren erupted outside somewhere, interrupting him. Myers looked surprised, and then as the siren receded he grinned and said, "Maybe somebody's working in this town tonight." He grew serious again. "In a shopping center, you're pulling a daylight robbery?"

  "That's right," Grofield said. He was sweating lightly, he could feel it. Improvisation had never been his strong suit, he'd always preferred to work from a prepared script. The caper he was making up wasn't emerging very well, it didn't have quite the smooth sound of truth.

  "So the gimmick," Myers said, "must be in the getaway. What's the brilliant getaway, Grofield?"

  Grofield licked his lips, trying to think about brilliant getaways from daylight robberies in shopping centers. "We're starting a fire," he said. "In a… in a hosiery store just down from the bank."

  "You're pulling the job dressed as firemen? That's my gimmick!" Another siren sounded outside, farther away; Myers turned his head to listen to it, his expression growing thoughtful. Grofield watched Myers' face, sensing what was going on in the brain behind there, and knowing what it meant when Myers' eyes moved and he looked at the attachй case on the floor at the foot of the bed.

  Grofield threw an ashtray at Brock and a pillow at Myers, jumped to his feet, grabbed the attachй case, and ran for the door. It took him too long one-handed to get the door open, and both of them were swarming all over him. He kicked and punched, lunging himself backward through the doorway, knowing it was more than the money involved now; Myers would kill him for trying the Little Rock con, there was no question about that.

  Myers had both arms wrapped around the attachй case, and Harry Brock was trying to get both arms wrapped around Grofield. Finally there was no longer any choice; Grofield let go the handle of the attachй case. Myers jerked backward into Brock; Grofield tore his arm loose from Brock's fist; and while the two of them in the room sorted themselves out, Grofield ran like hell down the hotel corridor.

  PART FOUR

  1

  Grofield walked into the theater at four in the afternoon, and stood for a second just inside the door, looking down past the rows of seats at the stage. A white sheet was draped over the sofa. Grofield had called here last night, after getting away from Myers and Brock; the conversation had been short, neither of them wanting to say much over the phone, but Grofield had understood from things she said and didn't say that Dan Leach was dead. She had lived here for thirty-four hours now with that thing under the sheet.

  Grofield hurried down the aisle and went up the steps to the stage. Mary was on none of the sets, nor in either of the wings. Grofield didn't want to call her name; he didn't know why, exactly, but he just didn't want to shout in here right now. He thought it would be bad for Mary. He found her in the female dressing room, a long narrow room under the stage with one stone wall. She was sitting at the make-up table, doing nothing, and when he walked into the room their eyes met in the mirror and he saw no expression in her face at all. He'd never seen her face so completely empty before, and he thought, That's what she'll look like in her coffin. And he ran across the room to pull her to her feet and clamp his arms tightly around her, as though she were in danger of freezing to death and he had to keep her warm.

  At first she was unmoving and unalive, and then she began violently to tremble, and finally she began to cry, and then she was all right.

  They were together fifteen minutes before they started to talk. Grofield had made soothing noises and said words to reassure her before that, but there had been no real talk. Now she said, "I don't want to tell you about it. Is it all right?"

  "It's all right." She was sitting again, and he was on one knee in front of her, rubbing his hands up and down her arms, still as though trying to keep her warm and alive.

  "I don't want to talk about it ever."

  "You don't have to. I know what happened; I don't need the details."

  She looked at him, and her expression was odd-intense, and somehow sardonic. She said, "You know what happened?"

  He didn't understand. They'd come here, Myers and Brock. They'd killed Dan Leach. They'd forced Mary to tell them where Grofield was and what name he was using. What else?

  She saw his face change when he realized what else, and she closed her eyes. Her whole face closed, it seemed; it went back to the expression he'd seen when he'd first walked in here.

  He pulled her c
lose again. "All right," he said. "All right."

  2

  Grofield dropped the body in the hole and picked up the shovel again and started pushing the dirt back in. It was a cool night and cloudy, very dark. Despite the chill, Grofield was sweating as he worked. His eyes glared at everything as he moved, his jaw was clenched, his mind was turning and turning and finding no rest.

  He finished filling in the grave, returned the pieces of weedy sod to the top, and walked back and forth to tamp the fresh dirt down. Then he walked over to his car, a five-year-old Chevy Nova he'd bought secondhand two years ago, put the shovel and flashlight and ground cloth in the trunk, and drove on back to the theater.

  Mary was moving around in bathrobe and slippers, making a midnight snack. They'd made love earlier, downstairs in the dressing room, more awkward with one another than they'd ever been before. The sex had been cumbersome and difficult and not very satisfying in the usual sense, but afterward Mary had been more relaxed, more her normal self. And now that Dan was gone she was even better.

  The sofa looked strange. He'd taken the slipcovers off and burned them, but the upholstery itself was stained with blood – Myers had been using his knife again – so Grofield had covered the thing with an old blue bedspread from the storage room downstairs. Under normal circumstances, they would have had their midnight snack sitting on that sofa, but tonight Mary without comment put the things on the table in the dining room set, and Grofield said nothing about it.

  She'd made sandwiches and coffee, and she'd put out cookies. They sat at right angles at the table, eating, and Mary started a conversation about the coming season. There were three or four actors from last year they should get in touch with again, people they particularly wanted back. Grofield kept up his part of the conversation and did his best to keep his voice normal and not to glare all the time at the opposite wall. He thought he'd been doing pretty well, when Mary suddenly said, in a matter-of-fact way, "I don't suppose there's any point to my asking you not to go after him."

  Grofield looked at her in surprise. "I don't know what to do," he said. "I don't want to leave you here alone."

  "I'll go to New York," she said. "Remember, June said we could always stay with her if we came to the city. I'll go there and talk to some of the people we want this year."

  "We still don't have the money," Grofield said.

  "You'll get it." She said it offhand, as though there were no question.

  "You don't mind going to New York?"

  "Of course not… Alan?"

  He couldn't read her face. "What?"

  "Please don't leave tonight," she said. "Please don't leave till tomorrow."

  Surprised, he suddenly realized he'd been turning over in his mind various ways to tell her he had to leave right away. As though there were any hurry now. "There's no hurry," he said. Abruptly his face changed; he stopped glaring, and uncovered a natural smile. Reaching out to hold her hand, he said, "I won't leave till you're ready."

  3

  Grofield put his left foot into the stirrup and stepped up into the saddle. Holding the reins loosely in his left hand, he looked down at the stableman who'd brought this roan mare out to him, and said, "You'll tell Mr. Recklow when he comes back from lunch."

  The stableman, a rangy gray-bearded old man who thought he was Gabby Hayes, nodded with a show of exasperation. "I said I would."

  "What will you tell him?"

  "You're here. Your name is Grofield. You're a friend of Arnie Barrow's."

  "That's right." Grofield looked out at the wooded hills extending away beyond the barns. "Where should I wait for him?"

  "See that lightning-struck elm down there, end of the meadow?"

  "I think so."

  "Keep to the left of it, and head up-country. You'll find a waterfall up there."

  "Fine," Grofield said. He lifted the reins.

  The stableman nodded at the mare's head. "Her name's Gwendolyn."

  "Gwendolyn," Grofield said.

  "You treat her right," the stableman said, "she'll treat you right."

  "I'll remember that." Grofield lifted the reins again, heeled the mare lightly, and she stepped daintily around the sign in front of the barn that read RECKLOW's RIDING ACADEMY – Riding Lessons – Hourly Rentals – Horses Stabled. "Giddyup, Gwendolyn," Grofield said softly. He had never said giddyup to a horse before, but he liked the alliteration.

  Gwendolyn turned out to be more spirited than her name, and carried Grofield across the meadow at a fast trot, moving with the eagerness of a puppy let off a leash. Grofield enjoyed her so much he didn't head directly for the waterfall but took her off at an easy lope down a wooded valley spaced with open, sunny fields lush with spring grass. Twice he saw, at a distance, other riders; both times they were moving their mounts at a much more cautious pace than he. East of the Mississippi, horsemanship was becoming a lost art – like cave painting. No wonder Recklow had to supplement the riding academy's income.

  When they came to the stream, shallow and rapid over a bed of stones, Gwendolyn expressed a desire to drink. Grofield dismounted and had some of the water himself; it was so cold it made his teeth ache. He grimaced, and remounted. "That can't be good for you, Gwendolyn. Come along."

  The stream crossed his route from left to right. He turned left, therefore, and followed it uphill, allowing Gwendolyn to travel now at a walk, after her exertions.

  The waterfall, when he reached it, was narrow but surprisingly high. He had to leave the stream entirely and make a wide half-circle to get up the slope to the top. When he did, he found an open area of shale on both banks, and no one in sight. He dismounted again, and let the reins trail on the ground, knowing that a well-mannered horse will be trained to stay put with the reins like that. He stood on tan flat rock in sunlight and looked down at the valley below, a green tangle dotted with those open meadows. Now and again he saw riders down there.

  It was almost possible here to believe the twentieth century had never existed. Here in western Pennsylvania, less than fifty miles from Harrisburg, he could stand on this bit of high ground and look northward and see exactly what an Indian at this spot would have seen four hundred years ago. No cars, no smoke, no cities.

  It was good that he hadn't left last night. Spending the one night with Mary had calmed him, had taken the edge off his rage. He was still as determined as before, but not with the same obsessiveness. A good thing to be rid of, that; it could have made him careless out of haste and impatience.

  The waterfall was loud and unceasing. He never heard Recklow coming. He turned his head, and Recklow was just dismounting from a big mottled gray beside which Gwendolyn looked like a donkey.

  Recklow was a man in his sixties now, but he was tall and thin and straight, and from a distance he could have been taken for a man of thirty. It was only his face that gave him away, as deeply lined and seamed as a plowed field. He'd been a ranch hand in his youth, and then a stuntman and extra in cowboy movies in the thirties and forties. He'd never had any politics, but he had personal loyalties to those he considered his friends, and when the days of the blacklist spread across the land it was inevitable that a man with Recklow's attitudes about friendship would wind up in trouble. In the early fifties he had left the West Coast and come east to Pennsylvania and bought this riding academy. It had kept him, but not very well. These days Recklow gave his loyalty almost exclusively to his horses, and took a kind of cold satisfaction in earning extra money to keep them by stepping outside the law.

  He came over now to Grofield, squinting at him as though Grofield were at least half a mile away, and said, "Do I know you?" He spoke at a near shout, to be heard above the waterfall.

  Grofield replied at the same volume. "I was here once with Arnie Barrow."

  "I'm no good on faces… Or names either, for that matter. How'd you like Gwendolyn?"

  "Fine." Grofield nodded his head toward the valley. "We played together down there for a while."

  Recklow smiled for
a split second with one half of his mouth. "If you come here this way, friend of this one and that one, it's guns you want. I only sell handguns and rifles. Shotguns and Tommy guns aren't my line."

  "I know. I want two pistols."

  "To keep on your body or in a drawer?"

  "One to carry, one to keep in the car."

  "To show, or to use?"

  "To use."

  Recklow gave him a quick sharp look. "You said that a different way." They were very close to one another, because of the difficulty of hearing.

  Grofield turned his head to look toward the waterfall, as though to ask it to shut up for a while. When he looked back, he shouted, "What do you mean, a different way?"

  "People that come to me are professionals. They want guns in their line of work."

  "I'm in the same line of work."

  "But you aren't working now."

  Grofield shrugged. "No, I'm not."

  Recklow frowned, and shook his head. "I don't think I want to sell to you."

  "Why not?"

  "A professional won't go spraying bullets around. He wants the gun to use if he has to, to show if he has to. I don't like a man to use a gun to work a mad off."

  "I'm still a professional," Grofield said, pushing the words over the sound of the water. He echoed Recklow's smile of a minute ago and said, "I have to drum somebody out of the corps."

  Recklow considered him, still frowning, and finally shrugged and said, "Come here."

  Grofield went with him over to where Recklow had left the big gray. The horse carried saddlebags, into one of which Recklow reached, taking out three revolvers, all short-barreled and double-action. "Body guns," he said. It wasn't necessary to shout quite as loud here, farther from the drop-off. "I don't sell automatics. They're too much trouble, they don't work right." He squatted down on his heels and spread the three revolvers on the tan rock. "Look them over."

  Grofield squatted down in front of him to study the guns. Two were Smith & Wesson and the third was a Colt. The Colt was the Detective Special in.32 New Police, with a two-inch barrel. One of the S&W's was a Chief's Special in.38 caliber, the other a five shot Terrier in.32 caliber. Grofield said, "How good's the Terrier?"