Black Sheep, White Lamb
Page 22
“Because I’ve got an invitation to another one.” Bassett took a long chance. “Want to turn State’s evidence against him?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”
“MacAndrews’ murder. Remember?”
“I keep forgetting it wasn’t a heart attack,” Daley said. “Just about everybody does—except you. And maybe you’re going to have to.”
There was a little more than insolence in his voice, Bassett thought, a touch of threat. Weighing him and Rocco by the same scales, he would have chosen this lad as the potential killer. But if he were, the detective felt, and Rocco the accessory, Rocco would have cracked open by now. He used the phrase that had come into his mind:
“Not a chance. Your friend’s going to crack open any time now. He destroyed his own alibi tonight.”
Daley shrugged. “It’s no skin off my ass,” he said, and went back into the house.
Bassett went to join Kearns where he was waiting in the detective’s unmarked car.
Mrs. Tonelli stopped in front of the ruins of the Rocco house, Georgie silent at her side, scuffling his feet. He’d have liked to pick her up and carry her home—or pitch her down the hill. She was getting on his nerves. He had a feeling inside of him like jelly. The smell of damp burnt rubbish was turning his stomach.
“When will they clean up this ruin?” she said. The light of the half-moon made it look like a movie battlefield.
“When’ll they pay for it, that’s what I want to know,” Georgie said.
“And what will you do then, Georgie? Tell me the truth. If you get a part of the money, what will you do?”
Georgie shrugged. “I might just go away some place—to school, I mean. I want to make something of myself, Mrs. Tonelli.”
The old lady snorted. “So earnest, so hard working,” she derided. “I want you to do something for me tomorrow, Georgie.” She gestured with her cane. “I want you to dig up that hydrangea bush.”
Georgie thought he was going to pass out. The sidewalk was like the crazy house at the amusement park. He didn’t know for sure if it was his own voice, but he said, “What for?”
“Buried treasure,” the old lady said, and started across the street to her own walk.
Georgie couldn’t get his mind to think straight at all. It was running in all directions. She’d seen him, she must have seen him burying the tape. And him purposely not going back for it. But she couldn’t know what it was. Or could she? The police could. Bassett could. They’d put that under a microscope … He’d been afraid to go back for it. He knew that now. Christ! He hadn’t meant to kill old MacAndrews … It was an accident. Daley and Mike knew what he’d meant to do …
“Open the door,” the old lady said, and gave him the key.
His hand was shaking so much he couldn’t get it in the keyhole. She snapped on a small flashlight and watched his fumbling.
“Give it to me,” she said.
“I shouldn’t’ve drunk so much wine,” he said, not having touched a drop.
The old lady said nothing, opening her own door.
He finally got her to her bedroom. It was like getting a piano into a closet.
She sat down at the dressing table. “Good night, Georgie.” She watched him, letting him get to the door, and then said, “If somebody burns down his own house, Georgie, there is generally evidence—if you know where to look for it. I think you are going to live with me—for a long time.”
“Sure,” he said. “I intended to.” He gained confidence even while he talked. She didn’t really know … Not what he’d thought. “I mean, I had a terrible choice to make, Mrs. T., between you and my own flesh and blood.”
She laughed. “So did I,” she said. “Good night, Georgie.”
He turned on the television in the living room, lowering the sound to where it was but a faint hum. Then he smoked a cigaret. He had to wait a few minutes. He wasn’t going to run right out like maybe she expected him to. But he had to know. He had to take the stinking rotten tape in his hands again and get rid of it … if it was there. He waited out one more commercial—Be a Two-Car Family … If he had a car, just … a one-car family. A bicycle family. He hadn’t even the price of a pair of roller skates. Even Billy Skillet had that.
He went to the bedroom door and knocked. Then he opened it a crack to ask, “Is the television too loud, Mrs. T.?”
“No, dear,” she answered.
At least that’s what he thought she said. No dear, and thinking he’d burned his house down! She was crazy. A loony!
He went out of the house, leaving the key on the inside of the door, the door open. He dared to glance up the street only once. He was afraid to look again, just dashing across it blindly, and falling on his knees beside the bush, he began digging wildly, like a dog, with his hands among the wet, dead leaves.
Bassett got out of his car even as the boy crossed the street, leaving the door for Kearns to close. “Softly,” he said, and moved in to watch Georgie from the shadows of the hedge.
He could hear the boy’s breathing as he paused between one patch of digging and another, and he heard a noise from him like crying … It might even have been praying. But Rocco gave up, at last. He rose, his hands empty, and ran across the street, back to the house.
Bassett, following him, tried the door through which he had entered. Locked. He ran back to the car and told Kearns to get up to the Tonelli house, and went himself back to Lodini’s for Scully. He tried to get him outside, arousing as little suspicion as possible. “Have you got a key to your grandmother’s?”
Scully had. It was best to have Scully with them in any case. They had no warrant to enter the house, and only Bassett’s intuition that something might be within the house now to justify their entry, quick. They found Kearns putting his shoulder to the door. The old lady was screaming.
“Her bedroom!” Scully said, and they started to run around the house. Kearns flashed on his torch. Inside, the woman was still screaming. Bassett took the butt of his revolver to the window and smashed it open; he tore away the shade from the inside. Mrs. Tonelli was sitting upright in her bed, her hands at her face. Nor did she stop screaming until Martin climbed in through the window to her.
“He’s stolen my jewels, my purse … and the ball. Martin, the ball …”
Bassett ran from the bedroom, through the living room. The boy could have got no further than out of the house. But before he himself reached the door, a series of shots rang out. He fell back of the door for a moment, for his own safety, unsure of where the bullets were spraying. Then silence. Everywhere silence. He went outdoors. Kearns, who had stayed outside the house, had doubled back toward the door. He played his flashlight now on the fallen figure of the boy. The police chief had not drawn his gun. Other people were coming. The party had taken alarm. Bassett took the flashlight from Kearns’ hand and quickly shot it around: the circle of its light picked up Phil Daley, standing a few feet away, his rifle in hand. He broke the barrel and let the empty cartridges fall out. He hadn’t taken any chance of the fugitive’s being taken alive.
Bassett dropped to his knees and turned Georgie over. He would tell neither truth nor lie again. The old lady’s purse lay beside him—and a wadded ball of electrical tape. The ball, Martin, the ball … The detective took it.
The two priests had come. Kearns shouted to keep women away. Bassett got hold of Father Walsh who was about to kneel down at the boy’s side. “Let the other priest do that, Father, will you? I need your help.” To Kearns he said, “Lock up Daley. I’ll be in touch with you at the station.”
Father Walsh spoke to the older priest and then followed Bassett on a run to the car.
The detective opened the car up, racing to Pekarik’s house.
Within ten minutes, in the priest’s and his parents’ presence, Michael Pekarik confessed to his part in the attempted robbery. Bassett virtually reconstructed it for him: he had but to fill in certain small details. The priest stayed
on with the family when Bassett took the boy out with him.
In the car Pekarik said, his voice as small as he looked himself, “Georgie didn’t mean to kill him—I don’t think.”
“And Daley?”
“All he did was close the safe—afterwards.”
Which, the detective thought, was what he had proposed to do again tonight when he filled his friend Rocco with bullets.
“What’ll they do to me, mister?”
“How old are you?” The detective glanced at him: a scared punk, accessory to homicide.
“Sixteen.”
“I don’t know what they’ll do to you—but it can’t be much worse than what’s already been done.”
About the Author
Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.
Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1963 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-6069-0
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