Death Wore a Smart Little Outfit

by Orland Outland

  Jack blinked. “You have gotten respectable. Okay, on my way.”

  It was after dark when Doan met Luke and his men behind the warehouse. “Do you have the key?” Doan asked.

  Luke went to confer with his sergeant. “The key.”

  The sergeant flushed and looked at the ground.

  “Sir, you’re not going to like this.”

  “What.”

  “The designated officer failed to procure the key, sir.”

  “And who is the designated officer, so that I may kick his ass from here to kingdom come?”

  “Sergeant Flaharity, sir.”

  “Flaharity!” he shouted, before remembering that this was to be a silent entry. “Where is he?”

  “Um, we don’t know. That is, he was supposed to stop at that gallery and pick it up, then come here. He failed to show, sir.”

  “Sergeant, write this up. Let’s see if we can’t get Flaharity fired at last.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He returned to Doan and filled him in. “So much for that, huh? Well, we’ve got the warrant, so we can break the door down, I suppose.”

  “Hold on.” Doan disappeared for a moment and came back with Jack in tow. “If you don’t mind something that’s probably not quite regulation ...”

  “Go for it.”

  “Would you do the honors?” Doan asked Jack, who set to picking the lock.

  “Would you believe,” Doan whispered to Luke, “that this criminal genius, this overgrown urchin, was once the love of my life?”

  “You do get around,” Luke understated tactfully.

  “Okay,” Jack said, stepping back.

  “You stay outside,” Luke ordered Doan, drawing his revolver.

  “No problem. Gunfire and I are not good friends.”

  So Luke led his men into the building. The completely dark building, it turned out. There were either no skylights, or they had been blacked out so well that there might as well not be. The door had opened silently, so the element of surprise was still with them. A light burned in the office at the other end of the building. Luke waved his hand and his men fanned out. There was a creak from the office that froze them all in their tracks. Then the front door slammed, and they began to run.

  “Police!” Luke shouted when he got to the office. No response. He whipped around, kicked the door open hard enough to make sure it hit the wall so that he could be sure no one was hiding behind it, then he jumped into the empty room. There was a roar from outside. He ran out the front door onto the street.

  “Vive la Republique!” a harsh voice shouted from the window of a van just before it turned the corner out of sight. He ran back inside and through the building, herding his men ahead of him. “Dark blue Ford van, late ’70’s, California plates. Get it!”

  “Are you sure it was them?” Doan asked, getting into the car with Luke.

  “A hoarse old woman shouting ‘Vive la Republique’ seemed like the Eleanor you described.”

  “Oh, God, that means she’s slipping again. And the one where she’s the French Resistance fighter is the worst one.”

  “Don’t say anything,” Luke whispered to Doan, “but someone must have tipped them off. Someone inside the PD.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Don’t worry, Doan. We’ve practically got them now.”

  This, unfortunately, was not the case. The moment the van had disappeared around the corner, out of Luke’s view, Charles stopped. Alholm jumped out of the back, grabbed at the bottom of the back door, and started pulling. The dark blue paint came off in great sheets, revealing a white van with an extermination company name printed on the side, one of a dozen cars on the freeway on-ramp by the time the squad cars were pulling out.

  Neither Charles nor Alholm was worried. The warehouse had been meant to be a refuge only for the day, as it was an obvious place for the police to search. The plan they had formulated the day before under duress was still working smoothly - with one exception.

  There was only one reason Eleanor was still alive, and that was the existence of the master set of papers. Their henchman had been adroit in following Doan around the world, undoing Eleanor’s precautions. But there was one set left, and only Eleanor knew where that was. Their problem was, the shock of the kidnapping had sent Eleanor back into her senile dementia. By the time they hit the highway, it was eight hours and counting since she’d slipped back. No amount of cajoling, threatening, or even physical violence (which they were still not ruling out) could extract the location of a set of papers from a woman who was refusing to tell the Nazi swine the number of Resistance fighters and their deployment, a woman who, in short, didn’t even know the papers existed. They could only guess that they were in the city somewhere, and so found it advisable not to leave it, despite the scope of the manhunt for them. They were not concerned. There were other, better places to hide than the one they’d just vacated.

  “You will never crush us, pigs!” Eleanor shouted from the back of the van.

  “Can’t you gag her?” Alholm asked.

  “No way. We need to know the very instant she comes back.”

  “How will you know?

  “She’s always disoriented, asks where she is. Asks for Frannie, then for that faggot.” He smiled and looked at Eleanor in the rearview mirror. “Hear that? Faggot. Cocksucker. He’s looking very hard for you, Eleanor. But he won’t find you. I’ve got you, Eleanor. Now it’s going to be just like before. All those papers he scattered all over the globe? I’ve got ’em. Now we just have to wait till you wake up and tell us where the last set is, and we’re home free. Hey, I’ve got an idea. You know, we might even get out of this kidnapping charge? If she stays nuts, we can say we took her out to amuse her, that she told us to take her.”

  “What about the nurse? I hit her pretty hard.”

  “She’ll do anything for the old lady. If I tell her that keeping shut will keep Eleanor alive, and that we’ll let her stay with her when we send her off to the booby hatch, she’ll go for it,” he finished with certainty.

  Alholm smiled. “So now we just get those papers, and we’re clear on the murder rap.” He laughed. “We could come out of this smelling like roses.” They laughed together and started to plan what they’d do next; maybe go down south and run a scam on some pre-Columbian art.

  Consequently, they failed to realize that before she’d even been hustled into the van, Eleanor had come back to this world.

  As previously recounted, the police had lost the van. So, glum-faced and clueless, Doan and Luke had slunk back to the apartment, now deserted, save for Binky.

  “I am now going to have a much-needed cocktail,” Doan announced, throwing his jacket on a chair. “Anyone care to join me?”

  “Make it two,” Binky added, collapsing on the sofa.

  “Three,” Luke finished, also landing on the sofa and putting his head in Binky’s lap, whereupon she began to soothingly stroke his hair.

  Doan handed out the cocktails and took the chair. “Good night, all,” he said, taking one sip of his drink and sliding down in the chair. Then a moment later he was bolt upright. “Eleanor is perfectly safe.”

  “What?” Luke asked.

  “The papers! The papers on Charles! They’re scattered all over the globe. If he finds out we’ve already got the goods on him, he won’t have any reason for holding Eleanor.”

  Luke hesitated before telling Doan, “Doan, if we already have the papers on him, that means she’s useless to him - so he can kill her.”

  “That is a bit sticky,” Doan confessed. “But, listen. Who do you think has done all the killing? Charles is not the kind of man who’d get his hands dirty. No, Alholm’s the one who does the killing, I’ll bet on it. Charles is evil, but deep in his heart, he’s just a wimp. We have to separate them and make sure Eleanor ends up with Charles, not Alholm. Then, if we tell Charles we’ve already got the goods on him, he’ll know the game is over. He’ll give Eleanor up.”

  Luke mulled i
t over for a minute. “I think you’re right. But the question is, how do we split them up if we can’t even find them?”

  Doan smiled. “Ah, the power a cocktail has to restore one’s mental faculties! Here’s how...”

  Eleanor might have been old and ill, but she was not stupid. Until she could sort out the wealth of information she’d acquired in those few short minutes after coming back from France, she knew it was to her advantage to act as if she were still quite gone.

  Never has “La Marseillaise” been sung more stirringly or more off-key than it was sung in that van as it sped through Civic Center, nor had it often ended as suddenly as it did when they came to a screeching halt in front of the old neoclassical Museum of Modern Art on Van Ness. They escorted her to the front door, where she announced she was more than ready to meet the Nazi firing squads (Doan’s filling her in on her periods of blankness was now proving invaluable) and demanded a last cigarette as her right under the Geneva Convention. She had no idea whether it was true or not, but it sounded good. Alholm produced a key and let them in, turning off the alarm. It seemed there was no corner of the art world where Alholm’s arm did not reach.

  They took her to a room whose sole objet d’art was a cage hanging from the ceiling, painted various colors. Much to her surprise, this turned out to be a working cage, for which Alholm had another key. She was shoved unceremoniously into it and the door was locked behind her.

  “German pig!” she shouted at the retreating figures. “Now,” she muttered to herself once they were gone, “what the hell do I do?”

  Certain things were clear from the overheard conversation. First, that the cops were onto Charles for his art scams. Second, that murder was involved as well. Third, that the copies of her documentation on Charles’s wrongdoings that Doan had deposited had somehow been recovered. So fourth, the set she had secreted in San Francisco was the only remaining one, and its existence was perhaps the only reason she was still alive. “Fifth, I am in it very, very deep.”

  Then she realized that perhaps worst of all, her would-be rescuers were operating under false assumptions. What measures would they take if they were confident they had the goods on Charles when they really didn’t? As she realized that for the first time in her life she was truly helpless, she began to cry.

  But that stopped quickly; she made it stop. She needed to be strong, but more than that, she needed to be sharp. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with her mental processes now, especially not anything like grief and self-pity that could send her back.

  “So l’m on my own. So be it. Now, think of something.”

  So she began to think, idly moving from side to side so that the cage began to move with a slight, hypnotic rhythm. Her body was useless, that was a fact, even if she could get free of this cage she was too infirm to make a break for it or overpower anyone. Her mind, well, an incredible sharpness had been given her by God’s grace, and that must be her tool. It would have to be something could do from in here.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Although Eleanor took all day formulating her plan, she had little trouble with the general scheme. Since Alholm was the only one she saw, as he brought her meals, he was the one she would have to work on.

  And what to say to a nut case like this one wasn’t hard to think of, either. It was the particulars that had taken up most of her thoughts. Because the problem was first to concoct a story he would buy, but second and more important, to do it in such a way that she would not become the victim of whatever rage she drove him into.

  “Dinner,” he announced that second night, bringing her a Burger King bag. “Eat up.”

  She took the bag from him with a smile that unnerved him. “What’s so funny?” he demanded.

  She shrugged, hiding the smile behind her burger but not losing it.

  “Hey,” he said, reaching into the cage and grabbing her wrist. “What the hell’s going on. Spill it right now, or you’ll starve.”

  Then she laughed. “Oh, my poor Lieutenant, you are a child playing a man’s game.”

  He ran his hands through his hair, jumping with nervous energy from one foot to the other. The Nazi bit was wearing on his nerves, but they were still street-smart nerves, and they told him the lady may be crazy, but right now she knew something he didn’t.

  That was enough for him.

  He took her dinner out of her hands. “Starve, then.”

  “That is a violation of the Geneva Convention! The Red Cross will hear about this!”

  “Mmmm,” he said, waving the burger just out of her reach. “Doesn’t it smell good? Huh?” Then without warning he dropped it, grabbed her arm, pulled her forward, put his other arm through the cage and hit her in the face. She screamed in surprise more than in pain, although that came a split second later.

  “Talk!”

  She took her free hand off her face and looked up at him. “All right. It’s all the same to me, now. And you’re all the same. Why should I care what you and your Commandant do to each other?”

  “What do you mean?” he growled, not letting go.

  “I heard him on the phone. With someone in the Allies. He’s planning his surrender, mein herr.” What she had really heard was Charles telling Alholm that he was getting nervous, and that was enough to convince her this ruse would work.

  He looked at her blindly for a moment, seeing with that survivor’s instinct a dozen instant plans for escape. Then he came back to himself. “You’re lying,” he said in a flat tone.

  “He was speaking to a Captain Fisher, Lieutenant,” she said, using the name of Detective Faraglione’s supervisor, which Doan had mentioned when he was telling her about the SoMa murders, and his suspicions about Charles. “Does this not sound like the name of an Allied officer to you?”

  At that name, Alholm turned cold and knew she was telling the truth. He knew Fisher was Luke’s boss. In fact, he knew quite a lot about the Police Department.

  “Do you want to know the rest, Lieutenant?” she said, laughing freely now. “When the Allies take Paris, and you, he will go free and you will hang for your war crimes!”

  Alholm let her go and left the room. Now what? He asked himself. Kill Charles, the strongest voice urged. No, the cool voice contradicted. Remember, you have a source. Someone who can tell you if all this is true or not. Assume the worst, but hold off.

  Charles was sitting at the table in the office kitchen. “I think it’s time we moved again,” he said to Alholm. Alholm said nothing while he poured his coffee and weighed this. That would be his instructions from the cops, he thought. Because they won’t just barge in here when they know we’ve ... I’ve got the old lady. Eleanor, he decided, would live. Now that the cops were practically at the doors, he could use such a perfect hostage. Besides, when they knew where he was, he’d know they knew.

  “Oh, yeah?” he finally said. “Where do you think we should take her?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want to stay here more than another day.”

  “Sure. We’ll think of a place tomorrow. Okay?”

  Charles smiled, visibly relieved. “Good. Great. Okay.”

  Alholm smiled back.

  “So anyway,” Doan finished, “that’s it.”

  The assembled audience was quiet. Finally Soheila whispered, “Wow.”

  The spell broken, everyone spoke at once. “Forget it, Doan,” Binky said. “Stick to strategy.”

  Stan, protective arm around him, counseled, “Hey, come on, babe, I just got you back. This is too dangerous.”

  Doan looked to Luke. “Well?”

  “No.”

  He realized one person hadn’t spoken. He turned to KC. “And will you explain that smile for me? What’s the matter? Never mind, I know. You think silly Doan has finally flipped out completely. Thinks he can be Nancy Drew. Never mind what you think, anyway.”

  “I think it’s a great idea,” KC said.

  Doan’s already distracted head whipped back around. “What?!”
r />   “I think it’s gutsy, it’s smart, and it’ll work.”

  Doan continued to stare at him. “Are you serious?”

  KC nodded. “And if no one else will, I’ll be your backup.”

  Doan started laughing. “God has a strange sense of humor. Luckily, he gave me one just like it. It would he an honor and a pleasure,” he said with a regal bow, “to work with you.” And then he turned to Luke.

  “What you have just witnessed,” he began, “is history. The most cautious, dare we say rabbity in his decision-making, person...” He turned to KC with a sweet smile. “No personal offense...has just agreed that this is a great plan. And can you think of anything else? Right now, with Eleanor in mortal danger?”

  Luke rubbed his eyes. Neither he nor Doan had gotten more than a few hours of sleep since Eleanor had been taken, but Doan was still alert - more than alert - practically vibrant. And, right now, he was on the warpath with an idea stuck in his head, and that was a force hard to resist at full strength. Luke’s reservations were only those of procedure. Endangering civilians was a no-no. But then he remembered the jimmied locks, the internal documents photocopied for Doan’s staff by a club kid temporary, the degree of undoubtedly non-regulation involvement Doan already had.

  “Besides, I don’t need your permission. A private citizen is entitled to do anything that’s not illegal - ”

  “All right. Fine. Whatever. I’ll back you up.”

  Doan and KC simultaneously shouted a cheer, then stopped short and looked at each other, then blushed. “Well,” Doan said, “I’ve got some preparing to do. So if you all would excuse me ...”

  There was a general movement to go. “KC,” Doan said, tripping over it even as he realized that this was the first time he had pronounced those initials out loud, “could you stay a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  The others left, Stan going out last after giving Doan a kiss and a squeeze and a “Later, babe.”

  Doan shut the door behind him and turned to face KC. “I can think of few things I hate more than being called babe. ”