Chapter Sixteen
We didn’t talk on the way home. But when I stopped in front of Walt Adams’s house, he didn’t get out. I reached across Olga and gave him a shove. “Go to bed. You need your rest.”
“Did you put up bail for me?”
“The trouble with this country is, everybody reads detective stories. You can’t have bail unless you’ve been arraigned; you can’t be arraigned till you’ve been arrested; you shouldn’t be – this isn’t always true – arrested till you’ve committed a crime. And you have, Walt, you have. You socked a student, and that is something teachers shouldn’t do, but since you did it on your own time, the D.A. is going to forget it. Good night.”
He stumbled out of the car, and stood there in the glow of a street lamp. “What’ll I tell Ellie?”
“Good God, Walt, I haven’t been married long enough to learn to lie to Olga yet. She always catches me.”
Olga chuckled, and then Walt turned and started walking towards his house. I’d almost forgotten something, I called him back. “You have to get rid of Miss Crowther.” He nodded. “A classmate of mine has been looking for an assistant principal in Montana. . . .”
I drove to our house.
I was getting into my best uniform when Olga came into the bedroom with our largest cup, full of coffee. “What happened?” she asked.
So I told her. “At least two felonies, and a flock of misdemeanours,” I said. “Assault by Junior Wright, blackmail by Nora Patterson, two adulteries, an assault and battery. Not a prosecution in the lot.”
She said: “And Naranjo Vista remains unsmirched.”
“No. The Patterson case got in the papers. It’ll be dropped, now, and people will forget, but if you think I did all this to keep Mr. Bartlett’s investment safe, you –”
“I think you’ve committed a little adultery, too. I’m referring to what you’ve done to law and order.”
“Huh?” Then I got it. All I had to do was translate it. “I’ll go along with the gag, Olga. Maybe I screwed law and order, but I ended up making love to justice. I’ve always had a yen for the old lady, anyway.”
She sat down at the foot of the bed, and watched me tie my black silk tie. In the mirror I could see her nodding. “But when Hal Levy did the same thing, you were sore as hell.”
“Hal Levy is too damned good looking to be my wife’s partner. I was looking for an excuse to slough him.”
Now she was grinning, the good old Olga grin. “Okay, loot. You win. I’m going to medical school. Four years from now, I’ll start looking for a good-looking partner.”
“Pick a lady osteopath. Four years from now I’ll be ready for a little gentle massage.”
She got up, took my uniform coat off the chair where I’d hung it, brushed some dust off one elbow. “You going to tell me why the Class A garb at midnight?”
“Bailey Spratt,” I said.
I left her laughing.
Dressed in my best uniform, I walked into what I persisted in thinking of as a police station, instead of a Civic Security Centre. Not at all to my surprise. I found Captain Jack Davis there, chatting with the desk sergeant.
We walked to his office. He said: “Hansen called me from up at the sheriff’s office. You’ve done a nice piece of work, Andy.”
“By bluff and gall. How’s our vigilante situation?”
Jack Davis clucked. “We now got two police headquarters. This one, and one at Bailey Spratt’s house. So, all right, say I told you so. You wanted to sock those amateurs hard, and all I could remember was that they were among the most important guys in our town. What now?”
“Check it to me, Jack?”
“Hell, yes, Andy.”
“I’m bluffing good tonight. I got two things on Bailey Spratt. I think I can bluff him quiet. With a pair of treys. Trey one – you use that confession I got out of his kid?”
“Certainly not,” Jack Davis said. His big red hands jerked at his desk drawer, drew out the three papers I’d had the high school boys sign. “They’re not worth a thing,” Jack said. ‘The kids were scared of the big policeman. You threatened to beat them. Yeah, yeah, I know you didn’t, but just your size and your position has been ruled as being terrifying. If you’d had a juvenile officer from the court present, they might – repeat, might – stand up.”
“I’ve been threatening winos and consorting with fugitives,” I said. “And buying drinks while wearing a gun, in violation of the penal code. I’m an outlaw, daddy-o, as no doubt no kid ever said. Gimme that paper, and I’ll try one last bluff. After all, you have a pre-dated resignation from me.”
“Don’t talk like a cheesewit. I need you around here. You said you had a pair of threes. What’s the other one?”
“It’s a pretty limp card,” I admitted. “But my luck’s in. Maybe. Did Hansen tell you that Junior saw this Luther Schmidt on a date with the Patterson girl? . . . Schmidt’s in the car business, so is Bailey Spratt. Those guys all know each other. As you’ve found out if you tried to turn a car in. Think a big saleman type like Schmidt could keep from telling another big saleman type like Spratt that there was a nineteen-year-old piece in Spratt’s town?”
Jack Davis stared at me. Finally he said: “There’s something to be said for living with a psychologist, after all.”
“Don’t bandy my wife’s name around your filthy police station.”
We stared at each other. I don’t remember who started laughing first. When we stopped, Jack Davis said: “I thought it was damned funny Walt Adams and Bailey Spratt would slug each other over the high school gun team. The girl had told Walt she’d gotten a proposition from Spratt.”
“You know, I never thought of that,” I said. “Sure. If Walt didn’t come up with some money, she was going to Bailey. Spratt’s the kind of guy Walt would really hate.”
Jack Davis said: “I ain’t about to offer to adopt him, my own self. You got a white thread on your sleeve, Andy. I want you should look real good over at Mr. Spratt’s house.”
So I left him the thread for a souvenir.
Driving to Bailey Spratt’s I passed several cars on slow patrol. Amateurs.
The guy who answered my ring was just a kid. He was, for heaven’s sake, in the uniform of corporal of the Civil Air Patrol, the semi-military outfit that teaches kids ground control and aircraft maintenance and radio and so on. He had a .38 revolver strapped around his waist, in a highly-tailored holster and belt. He wore it quick-draw fashion, on the left side, butt forward.
I snapped: “Corporal, that is a military uniform you have on. That gun is not G.I. It should be a .45 automatic, and it should be worn in a neat and military position. Take it off!”
He said: “Yes, sir,” because I had spoken that way. Of course, I had no authority in Bailey Spratt’s house to tell anyone to take off an unconcealed weapon. I said:
“This way, sir.” His ears were a pair of Harvard beets going ahead of me.
“Take me to Mr. Spratt. Your leader.”
Old Bailey really had himself a setup. He had two more CAP kids working a short-wave radio; he himself was behind an ornately-carved Spanish desk, dressed in his sheriff’s posse uniform. The belt alone would have cost me a week’s salary.
I said. “Why the Air Force, Spratt? You going to bomb Los Angeles?”
He had the sense to blush a little. “These boys are radiomen,” he said. “One of them repairs car radios for me. It was their own idea to wear their uniforms.”
“No matter,” I said. “Go home, kids. I hope that’s your own transceiver you are using. I’m Military Intelligence, and I’d hate to have to tell the Air Force their equipment was being misappropriated.”
“It’s my set, sir,” the kid at the controls said.
“Okay, then. Just issue an over-and-out: all posse patrol cars will be off the streets in five minutes. Thereafter, they’ll be held for inciting to riot. I mean, their drivers will.”
Bailey Spratt grinned at my slip. He said: “I’m giving th
e orders here,” in a non-grinning voice.
The radio kid looked from one to the other of us, uncertainly. He must have been the one who worked for Bailey.
It was all very military; there was even a daybook lying on the desk in front of Gruppenfuehrer Spratt. I turned it around, picked up a ballpoint and wrote across it: “I’ve been reading Nora Patterson’s diary. A high misdemeanour, contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
Bailey Spratt looked down at what I’d written. Then he slapped the book shut with two sweeps of his big hands, and said: “Kids, go on home, and thank you. The lieutenant here has cleaned up the case. Everything is okay.”
He could think fast enough when he had to.
The boy at the controls plugged in, and said: “Headquarters to all cars. Cease patrol, return to your homes. Over and –”
“Add: By order of the police to that.”
He did, and this time got over and out and started to take his set down. Bailey Spratt said: “Let that go, Pete. Come over tomorrow and get it. Doesn’t matter if you don’t get to the shop till noon.”
The boy muttered something about being up to his neck in repairs, but there was something in Bailey Spratt’s face that stopped him. He and his two friends left. When their car started, I could hear the voom of twin pipes, which are illegal in our town. I didn’t chase after them to give them a ticket.
Then we were alone. Bailey Spratt stared at me across his desk. He had gotten his composure back. He said: “Boys like that ought to have respect for authority. No use letting them hear two leaders fighting each other. Now, what you got to say?”
He hadn’t asked me to sit down. But I went and got a chair and brought it over and put it opposite his desk, and sat down, and crossed my knees. I took plenty of time to do it, too.
Bailey Spratt said: “You trying to blackmail me, lieutenant? My friend the sheriff –”
“Your friend isn’t coming out in favour of adultery, with an election in the future.”
Neither of us smiled.
I took it on. “The Patterson girl will talk. We’re not going to push charges. You weren’t the only one. She was obliging anybody who had the money.”
His face was red, again.
While I had him off-balance, before he could raise enough anger to overcome his common sense, I played my second card. I slapped his son’s confession down on the closed daybook. He looked at its few words.
“You’ll look hot,” I said. “A great big civic leader who can’t control his own son. Who doesn’t know what’s going on in his own house. Who chases high school girls.”
I had to put it that way; I wasn’t sure whether he’d connected with Nora or only gotten to the negotiating stage.
Bailey Spratt said: “Does this have to get in the papers?” He pushed at the kid’s confession with a fingertip. I remembered all he’d said about law and order and running the break-and-entry criminals out of town and away for life. He’d been talking about his own son, and hadn’t known it.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” I said. “That is, if you listen to me.” Didn’t he know juvenile crime was privileged, that no paper could print a j.d.’s name? Apparently not. Well, I didn’t know the turn-in value of a 1949 Ford.
“Go ahead, lieutenant,” he said. Then he perked up, but just a little. My treys were standing up like aces. “Not that I’m scared,” he said. “But my son’s future is at stake.”
“You’re resigning from the sheriff’s posse,” I said. “Let someone else be the president of the gun club. Run your automobile business, and leave the guns to people who can carry them without losing their brains.”
The big man was quiet. “And if I don’t?”
“We’re not pressing charges against you,” I said again. “But we need to know the facts. A star chamber inquiry at the police station. No reporters present, just the principals. Nora Patterson and her parents. The other men involved with her. Their wives. You. Your wife.”
He flinched. I don’t think it was love; he didn’t love anything but the image of himself with a big gun on his hip. But alimony, now –
“Then, a transcript would go to juvenile court. If the judge thinks an offender comes from an improper or immoral home, he could hold your boy till he was twenty-one.”
“I don’t see –”
“Just call it personal pique,” I said, and I started to get up. “You tried to take this city away from the police, with your vigilantes. We resent that.” There was no use telling him he didn’t have stability enough to carry a gun; we were removing his badge and his uniform, and that would have to do, the law being what it was.
I said: ‘If you want, we can take this up with the sheriff tomorrow, you and I.”
“I’ve only met the sheriff a couple of times, at barbecues and dinners,” Bailey Spratt said. His son had looked better, in the high school office.
I was on my feet. Time to go. If I stayed and watched him as he was now, humiliated and crushed, I’d make a real enemy. I couldn’t afford to.
The wind had come down to ground level at last, it was cool and fresh in the streets. I could almost smell salt air, but the ocean was a long ways away. I looked at my watch. One-thirty.
Tomorrow I had the duty at eight o’clock, and I would have to take time to see Nora Patterson and put the fear of God into her. Maybe I wouldn’t have to tell her parents.
But I would, or they’d be spending money looking for the fiend who assaulted their stainless daughter. Their stainless-steel daughter.
That got a self-appreciatory grin out of me. But it would be a lousy interview. Also, I’d have to get some sort of release from Junior Wright and his lawyer, so they wouldn’t sue Norman Patterson for shooting Junior. That would be easy, a swap for not prosecuting Junior, but it would take time.
A heavy day tomorrow. Time to go home to my medical student wife.
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A Nice Girl Like You (Lt. Andy Bastian Mysteries Book 2) Page 16
