Bring Him Back Dead

by Day Keene

  Fully dressed except for his shirt and shoes, Jean Avart was standing in front of one of the tall French windows overlooking the lawn. He seemed puzzled. “May I ask the reason for this intrusion?”

  Mullen, completely exhausted, sat in the first chair he came to. “I think you know,” he said, quietly. “It concerns a little matter of murder and rape. Four rapes, to be exact.”

  Avart stood with his back to the window, his hands at his sides. “You’re out of your mind, Tom.”

  “I doubt that,” Mullen said. “I’ve always figured you for a good joe. But it happens this way sometimes, they tell me. A man who has led a respectable life for years, who’s never even been tagged for a parking ticket, flips his wig over some doll that isn’t available to him and all hell breaks loose. And when his need gets too great, he takes it out on the first babe that’s available. You wanted Andy’s wife the minute you saw her. And three girls paid for it. Girls you raped and beat up even while you were taking them, because they weren’t the girl you really wanted.

  “The girl you wanted was Mrs. Latour. You thought that by stopping the drilling on his land and leaving Andy broke, with what he thought were two dry holes, Olga would fall into your arms. But it didn’t work out that way. She wanted money. She married Andy in the belief that he was going to be very rich. But having made a bargain, she kept it. Perhaps because she loves Andy. That’s between the two of them.”

  Mullen took a cigar from his pocket and bit the end off it. “Anyway, while he worked as a deputy for two hundred and fifty dollars a month, you sat here in this antebellum bird cage of yours and ate yourself sick with jealousy. But you couldn’t do a damn tiling about it until her brother arrived from Singapore a month ago. How you got together, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he wanted money as badly as you wanted Olga. He knew his sister. He knew that because of her religious faith and because she was the type of woman she was, a divorce was out of the question — that the only way you could possibly have her was if Andy was dead.”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Avart repeated. The attorney sounded as if he were trying to convince himself of the truth of the statement.

  Mullen lighted the cigar between his lips. “No. Just a crooked cop who’s kissed the Book.” He continued, “As I see it, you were torn between your desire for the girl and the fact that, except for the three lapses I mentioned, you’d never done a wrong thing in your life. Then something happened, something that concerns Mr. Feldman, here, that goosed you into positive action. His head office stopped trying to deal with you and tried to contact Andy directly. In fact, they wrote him a half-dozen letters, letters that Georgi, well paid by you, sneaked out of his mailbox before Andy saw them. But you knew it was only a matter of time before the Delta Oil Company would stop writing letters and would send a member of their legal department to talk to him in person. It could happen any day. Time was running out on you. So the other morning you lay in wait for him, and when he came out of his house you tried to kill him, hoping the blame would fall on one of the punks he’s pushed around since he’s been wearing a shield.”

  Avart took a dressing gown from a chair and slipped into it and started for the door of the bedroom. “I won’t stand here and listen to such nonsense.”

  Jack Pringle drew his gun. “Uh-uh. Stay put. I wouldn’t want to mess up this pretty carpet, but I will if I have to.”

  The attorney returned to the French window.

  Mullen enjoyed his cigar a moment. “Then you tried again the other evening. I remember now. You dropped into the office that afternoon and asked me where Andy was and I told you he’d gone to serve a warrant on Lant Turner. And you know the Big Bend country as well as any of us. You knew he’d have to pass the Lacosta place on his way back to town with his prisoner. What you didn’t know was that shortly before you took up your position in the cane brake, Jacques had returned to town and parked his house trailer in the clearing.

  “The way I have it figured, he both heard the shots and saw you. At the time, Jacques thought you were hunting. But you knew it was only a matter of time before he figured out why you were plowing through the brake. So when Georgi phoned you at two o’clock in the morning, you had a fair idea where Andy might be heading. On police business. So you beat him to the punch.”

  It was an effort for Avart to breathe. He took a package of cigarettes from his pocket and put a cigarette in his mouth in one continuous motion. But after the cigarette was in his mouth he was unable to light it. His hands were shaking too badly.

  Mullen pushed his hat back on his head and stretched his legs in front of him. “You drove out to the clearing in one of your farm trucks and waited by the trailer. Then, after Andy knocked on the door and identified himself, you stepped forward and sapped him unconscious. You wrenched the screen door open and shot Jacques and attacked Mrs. Lacosta, knowing the blame would fall on Andy. You had him where you wanted him — on his way to the chair. But even then you didn’t feel safe. It might be a month, six months, before he was tried, convicted, and executed. And long before that time a representative of the Delta Oil Company would have contacted him and shown you up for the louse you really are. So you whipped up that lynch mob. You brought some boys down from New Orleans. You paid Villere and Georgi plenty to act as spark plugs. You even made that fool speech they tell me you made on the steps of the jail to incite the mob still more. Now to the motive behind it.” Mullen looked at the field engineer of the oil company. “You were in charge of those two test wells that were drilled on the Latour land?”

  “I was.”

  “Why did your company stop drilling?”

  “At Mr. Avart’s insistence. He repurchased the leases, giving us a substantial profit.”

  “What excuse did he give you?”

  “None. We didn’t ask for any. At the time there was still plenty of land available and we were content to take our profit and pull our tools out of the holes. But we did insist on a clause in the agreement specifying that if Mr. Latour should decide to drill, we would be given the first chance to re-lease the land. That’s why we have been trying to contact Mr. Latour recently. According to a new geological survey made of the district, we have every reason to believe that the abandoned holes could prove to be among the most valuable producing wells in the area.”

  “Why didn’t you talk to Latour two years ago?”

  “We had no reason to talk to him. In fact, when the leases were signed, he was in the Army and Mr. Avart had his power of attorney, which empowered him to act as his agent. It’s been only during this last month, when our legal department attempted to renegotiate the leases and Mr. Avart refused even to listen to us, that the company’s lawyers began to wonder why any man would prefer to work as a salaried deputy sheriff instead of collecting oil royalties. That’s when we tried to contact Mr. Latour by mail.”

  “And that would seem to be it,” Pringle said. “Any way you turned, Jean, you were between the devil and the deep blue sea. And I thought I was crooked.”

  Avart succeeded in lighting the soggy cigarette he’d been holding between his lips. “Not that I admit a thing. But what led you to these, shall we say, erroneous conclusions?”

  Latour told him. “A number of little things. Your offer of twenty thousand dollars for my land. A cigar dying in the mud, when I seldom smoke cigars. Your accurate description of the breasts of a girl whom you allegedly had never seen. The way you put a cigarette in your mouth in one continuous motion. Most cigarettes are packaged with the brand name up. And after you left my cell, I found half a dozen butts on the floor with the brand name burned off, just like the ones I found in the brake. Another thing was my shield. After you finished with Rita, you put it in her hand to make certain I was hooked. But you put it in the wrong hand. I wore my shield on my left shirt pocket. It was found in her left hand. And a girl pushing up at the chest of a man forcing her — Well, figure it out for yourself. We know that you’ve stayed with at least th
ree other girls, probably pretending they were Olga and hating them because they weren’t.”

  Avart’s smile was thin. “I don’t seem to be a very savory character. I’m under arrest, I presume?”

  “That’s right,” Mullen said.

  The attorney shrugged. “Then I might as well dress and accompany you downtown.”

  He opened the drawer of a dresser and Mullen, moving surprisingly fast for so big a man, crossed the room and slapped the pistol Avart had taken from the drawer out of his hand.

  “Uh-uh. The old man was my friend. Remember? And you’re going out the hard way. And I’m going to be there to see it. Even if I have to ask the warden for permission to leave my cell long enough to watch you burn.”

  “But I didn’t kill Belluche.” Avart collapsed on the bed and held his head in his hands.

  “No,” Mullen admitted. “Georgi did. And we have a motion picture to prove it. Being a lawyer, you should know that anyone who conspires to murder is equally guilty with the man who pulls the trigger.” He refitted his hat to his head. “O.K. Let’s go, Jean. Just the way you are.”

  Latour asked, “What about me?”

  Mullen looked mildly surprised. “I’ll bite. What about you?”

  “Am I still under arrest?”

  Mullen considered the matter. “Technically, I suppose, yes. But it so happens our jail is rather crowded. So you know what I think I’d do if I were you?”

  “What?”

  Mullen grinned. “Well, if I were twenty-eight, a potential oil millionaire, and married to a pretty little blonde who has been bawling her eyes out between phoning the jail every fifteen minutes to make sure I was still alive and safe, I think I’d go home and prove it to her.”

  Chapter Twenty

  LATOUR LOOKED in the living room and in the den and in the kitchen. Then he climbed the stairs to the bedroom. Olga was sitting in her slip in front of her dressing table, attempting to repair with make-up the damage that hours of constant crying had caused.

  She made the sign of the cross when she saw him. Her voice was small. “He did answer my prayers. You are all right.”

  Latour felt strange with her but it wasn’t the same kind of strangeness that had tormented him for two years. “Yeah. Sure. I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  Olga turned on the stool to face him. “They did not hurt you, those men who took you from the jail?”

  The morning sun was beginning to make its presence known. It was hot in the room. Latour took off what was left of his shirt and fitted the torn rag over the back of the chair. “No. Jack and Tom got back in time.”

  “So Mr. Mullen kindly told me on the phone. But when neither you nor Georgi came home, I could not help worrying.”

  She had to be told sometime. Latour got it out as best he could. “Georgi won’t be home. He’s in jail, charged with murdering Sheriff Belluche. It seems that he and Jean Avart were working together to get me killed so Jean could marry you.”

  He expected Olga to cry. She didn’t. “Then I have no brother,” she said, dry-eyed. Her voice was small but fierce. “Believe me, had I known that Georgi had any part in what almost happened to you, I would have killed him myself before such a thing could be.”

  Latour sat on the edge of the bed, enjoying the pleasure of just looking at her, wondering how he could possibly have been so stupid. Olga meant what she said.

  She shrugged her bare shoulders. “As for this man Avart you say desired me, I could have told you that two years ago. It was in his eyes every time he looked at me.”

  Latour felt his way cautiously and told the things he wanted to tell. “Jean has a lot of money.”

  “So what is that to me? I am married to you.”

  “But you thought I had money when you married me.”

  Olga considered the matter. “True. From the time I was very small I was raised with the one idea, to marry a wealthy man. And when we first came to this country, when we thought there was oil on your land, I was very hopeful. All of my dreams had come true.”

  “Until they shut down the test wells.”

  “That was not your fault. You couldn’t help it if there was no oil.”

  “Then why have you treated me like you have for the last two years?”

  Olga shook her head. “That is not the question. The question is how you have treated me. You built a wall between us. You no longer even conversed with me. You acted as if I despised you.” She pressed her right hand to her heart “Which, believe me, I never did. I still remember my lover. The husband I had in Singapore. The husband I had on the ship that brought us to this country.”

  Her small body swelled with indignation. She was more angry than Latour had ever seen her before.

  “But when we found out that instead of being rich, we were only going to have a modest income, did you come to me and say, ‘I am sorry, Olga. But I love you just as deeply. Nothing will ever change that?’ ”

  She answered her own question.

  “No. If you had, I would have waited on the tables in a café. I would have worked in a store to get you money. Nothing would have mattered, because I would have known that you loved me. But instead you built this wall I could not climb. I cook a meal for you. I cook three meals each day but most of the the time you do not even come home to eat them.”

  Hot tears filled her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She brushed them away with an angry gesture.

  “At night, before we go to sleep I have never once failed to offer to be a wife to you. But night after night you do not take me. What am I to think but that is there is some other woman? Judging from what used to be between us, God knows how many other women.”

  She cried even harder.

  “And when you do take me, as you did the other night, and I do everything I know to please you, to bring back what we once had, what happens? You do not even say, ‘That was nice,’ or ‘I love you, Olga,’ or any of the other little things a wife has a right to be told. You make me feel like a prostitute who has just stayed with a man for her supper.”

  She cried in silence for a moment. Then her Oriental background got the better of her righteous indignation. She wiped her eyes on the hem of her slip and stood up.

  Her voice was composed. “I am sorry. Such things a wife should not say to her husband. It is just that I have been so upset. I am so glad you are safe I forget my place. You are hungry?”

  Latour sat on the bed and unlaced his shoes and took them off. The fault had been his, not Olga’s. In his own hurt and resentment he had created a bitch where none existed. He felt slightly smug. Every man in French Bayou, in the entire United States, for that matter, should have such a wife. How to tell her, how to undo the past two years, was the problem.

  “No,” he said, “I’m not hungry.”

  Olga was understanding. She knelt in front of him and pulled off his socks. “But very tired.”

  Latour finished undressing and lay back on the bed. “That I’ll buy. I feel as if I could sleep for a week.”

  “No wonder, after such an experience.”

  Latour turned his head on the pillow. “Where were you going just now?”

  “Down to the jail,” Olga told him. “I thought if I applied in person to Mr. Mullen he could tell me more about you.”

  “But it’s three miles to town.”

  “That’s true.”

  “How did you expect to get there?”

  “The same way I did when I brought you your breakfast and lunch. I have legs. I can walk.”

  Latour admired them. “So I see.” He patted the bed beside him. “Sit down here a minute, honey.”

  Olga was pleased. “I like to have you call me that. It is almost as nice as sweetheart or darling.”

  “It means the same thing.”

  Latour tried to put what he felt in words. After the past two years, it was impossible. It was something that he would have to prove by constant daily attention. He could tell her one thing. “There has never been any
other woman, Olga. Not since the day we were married.”

  “What about this other girl?”

  “What other girl?”

  “The red-haired one. The one Mr. Avart abused. You were not attracted to her?”

  Latour was truthful. “Yes, I was. As any man is attracted to a pretty girl. In fact, the night I drove her home we made a tentative date. But, looking back, I don’t think I meant to keep it when I made it. And after I’d come home to you, I — well, I wasn’t even physically attracted to her.”

  Olga was pathetically pleased. “You make me very happy.”

  “When I left here that night I was acting strictly as a deputy sheriff. She was, in a way, my responsibility, and all I wanted to do was make certain she was safe.”

  “What sort of girl is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Latour said. “She may be a tart, but I doubt it. I’d say she was basically good, but a bit confused. A nice small-town girl who made a tragic mistake in marrying an old man. The kind of girl who should be married to some young farmer or an oil-field roughneck. And if it’s all right with you, when she gets out of the hospital, I’d like to give her enough of a stake to get her back to her home town, where she can start all over again.”

  “Of course it is all right with me.”

  Latour debated telling Olga about the new status of their wells and decided the news would keep. He didn’t want to cheapen the moment, not now that he knew how she felt about having or not having money.

  “Know something?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  For a moment he thought Olga was going to cry again, but she didn’t. Instead she bent over and brushed his lips with hers. “And I love you. Very much. I am very proud to have such a man for my husband and the father of my children.”

  “Our children.”

  Olga touched the still visible tooth marks on his chest with the tips of her fingers and blushed.