Cat's-Paw, Inc.

by L. L. Thrasher

  Only an attorney could turn a night fraught with danger and sudden death into two hours of sheer boredom. Bundy finally rescued me. I knew by the look on his face that the news was bad. We went to his office without speaking.

  He sat behind his desk. He had been at work for close to twenty-four hours by then and looked it. “Peggy died late this morning,” he said. “Never regained consciousness. Her family will never know what happened to her.”

  I nodded. There wasn’t anything to say.

  Bundy filled me in on the latest developments. Tony, who had been picked up by the sheriff on his way up to the old house, claimed he had been hired to help Featherhill move and denied knowing anything about the fat man’s business. Nikki’s jock and Blackbeard were alive and talking. They both claimed to be completely innocent of any major wrongdoing and were more than happy to spill their guts about the fat man’s operation, placing all the blame on each other and on the dead men.

  They both said that only Featherhill had known the identity of the rapists. When a girl was at the house, the rapists would arrive, strip, do their job, collect their pay, and leave without ever removing the ski masks. Telephone records from the house were being checked but Bundy wasn’t optimistic. Featherhill had been cautious enough to drive Jessica to a pay phone to make the calls to Hank so he probably hadn’t called the rapists from the house either.

  Richard Bolin, the man I shot under the Burnside Bridge, had been hired to keep me under surveillance while the fat man tried to decide how much of a threat I was. Bolin was the ideal choice for the job. Besides having no objection to committing cold-blooded murder, he could recognize the girls who posed a threat to Featherhill because he had spent a month out at the old house earlier in the summer and had entertained himself with marathon viewings of the rape films. According to Blackbeard, Bolin had lost me several times. It was just sheer bad luck that he happened to be around when both Brandy and Peggy contacted me. As Bundy had guessed, the fat man had ordered Bolin to kill Diane Dobbs and Karen Baylor simply because they were easy to find and he was worried about them talking.

  After I killed Bolin, I as tailed by the smoker, whose name was Bill Thompson. He wasn’t good at, even with Virginia setting me up for him, and the fat man came up with the alternate plan of kidnapping Nikki and leading me out to country. Since they were moving their operation, getting rid of me seemed unnecessary but evidently Featherhill had taken a strong dislike to me. I was relieved to know it was Thompson who tailed me in Portland. Neither of the men in the hospital had seen me running around with the notorious blonde who was on the front page of the paper.

  “There are twenty-three rape movies,” Bundy said. “Ten of them were made somewhere else, maybe back in California. Thirteen were made out at the house. Thirteen girls—Dobbs and Baylor, Brandy, Peggy, and Jessica. Two of the others are known prostitutes here in town. Four are complete unknowns. And two are a couple of our unsolved homicides. We probably can’t prove it, but I’m betting Featherhill had them killed because he didn’t trust them to keep quiet. That leaves eleven girls who were raped so the fat man could make a profit off the S and M crowd, and not one of the reported it.”

  “They’re young. They were scared. Jessica might have told. I think she would have.”

  Bundy rode down in the elevator with me. When the doors slid open on the ground floor I came face to face with Virginia Marley, who was waiting to enter the elevator. She was flanked by a woman cop and a man who was probably her lawyer. Virginia didn’t look at all cute.

  “You fucking prick!” she screamed. “You’re lousy in bed!”

  I smiled down at her. “You’re perfect. Comes from practice, I hear.”

  Bundy yanked me one direction and the cop yanked Virginia the other direction and Virginia’s claws raked harmlessly through the air in front of my face.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I picked up some soup and sandwiches and headed back to the motel to set in motion my plan for returning Allison to the scene of the crime. Trying to keep her from jumping out of a moving car for over two hundred miles didn’t appeal to me so I had decided to be devious.

  She managed to eat a little soup and keep it down but I had to eat both sandwiches. As soon as we finished, I called my office number. The line was picked up by Harriet Smith—no relation—who had been working at the answering service since before I was born. Her voice quavered, “Arrow Investigations, good afternoon.”

  “Hi, Harriet. How are you?”

  “I’m just fine, Zack. No messages. How are your parents, dear? I suppose they’ll be coming up when Carrie has her new little one.”

  “What time did he call?”

  “Oh, my, are we being sneaky?”

  “Let me have the address.”

  I scribbled a made-up address on a notepad while Harriet said, “This is so exciting. It’s just making my poor old heart go pitty-pat, pitty-pat.”

  “Call him back and tell him I’ll meet him there. I’m going to be out of touch for a while. Hold my messages. If any desperate clients call, refer them to someone in Pendleton. If any rich clients call, tell them to try to cope until I get back to town.”

  “Oh, you devil, you,” Harriet said. “If only I were thirty years younger. Well, forty.”

  I laughed and told her goodbye. I hung up the phone, frowning at it, trying to look like a man who just encountered an obstacle.

  “Well, hell,” I said to Allison. “There’s been a new development in a child custody case I’ve been working on for months. I have to meet the father in Washington late tonight.” That was the sum total of the cover story I had concocted but I trusted that Allison’s burning desire to get out of Oregon would keep her from asking questions.

  “Washington? DC?” she asked.

  “No, the state. Walla Walla.” I looked her right in the eye and added, “It’s up in the northeast part of the state. Almost to Canada.” Walla Walla is, in fact, in southeast Washington, not far from the Oregon border. “I guess I’ll have to take you with me.”

  She didn’t quite manage to hide her relief. “I didn’t think that was a real place. Walla Walla, Washington.”

  “It’s real. They grow good onions there.”

  “Are we leaving now?”

  “No, I don’t want to get there early and have to sit around waiting for my client.” I did some quick figuring. Drive north until the sun was down then head southeast. I never met a woman yet who knew what direction she was facing unless the sun was rising in front of her. And some of them don’t know then. “We’ll leave about seven,” I said.

  The phone rang just then. It sounded innocent enough, so I answered it. It was the last person on earth I wanted to talk to. Bundy had already screwed up my plan to claim I didn’t know about Allison but I still didn’t want to talk to Phil.

  “So watcha think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve been busy. What do you think?”

  “We got her getting off the bus at eight o’clock Sunday evening. We got her walking across the lobby at the Arms a few minutes later. We got her sitting in Sparky’s drinking tea right after the murder. We got an old geezer who gave her a ride to Allentown. We got her trying to gag down an English muffin at the Allentown Café and we got her leaving there about six-twenty.

  “Nobody noticed how she left but we know she made it to Portland. The Portland cops have been getting calls all day. She’s been seen all over town and out at Clackamas Town Center. There’s a shoe salesman who swears up and down he sold her a pair of shoes. Says some man paid for them. A white man. End of description. White male adult really narrows it down, huh? Couple other people say she was with a man, too, which seems a little funny since I talked to her school and they say she’s the sweetest, most innocent little thing that ever lived. Didn’t even date except for some dances when they bused in the boys from another school. Of course, after murder, picking up a stranger and cozying up to him enough to get him to buy you a pair of shoes is pre
tty tame. And, get this, Bucky. She spent Friday at the zoo and Saturday at the Saturday Market. I think little Miss Vanzetti is a few bricks shy of a load. Commits murder then goes off to play tourist in Portland.”

  “Maybe she didn’t do it.”

  “So what the hell’s she doing? She was at the hotel. She’s gotta know he’s dead. If she didn’t do it, why the hell isn’t she here burying the son-of-a-bitch? Goddammit. She looks like one of them angels Botticelli or somebody was always painting. Not that I got any trouble with her pulling the trigger. Anyone can kill. We had that baby-faced sweetheart just last winter, took an axe to her stepdaddy. Anyone can kill. I got a little trouble with her be-bopping over to Sparky’s for tea and crumpets afterward, but what the hell, she wouldn’t be the first cold-blooded bitch with the face of an angel.”

  “You have a motive?”

  “Yeah, she was mad at him. The woman I talked to at the school says Allison—she goes by her middle name—was in a real tizzy Saturday. Vanzetti called her. She hadn’t heard from him in months and she was pissed as hell because she graduated in the spring and wanted to leave school and she’d been waiting all summer to talk to him about it. So he finally calls and says no way is she leaving school until she’s eighteen, which is next April. So she was crying and carrying on something fierce, saying her father didn’t love her and how could he be so mean and on and on and on. Then the next morning she’s cool as a cucumber and asks permission to go to some art exhibit. Waltzes right out of school and hops a plane to Portland.

  “I figure she tells him she isn’t going back to school and he says oh, yes she is, on account of the last thing a man running from the Feds needs is some little girl slowing him down. And they have a big fight—although why they pick four-thirty in the morning for it, I don’t know—and Vanzetti’s gun is lying around somewhere handy and she picks it up and bang, bang, bang. How many was that? Bang. Four shots.

  “Or who knows? Maybe she had a damn good reason to kill him. She might have been his daughter but the man hardly knew her. Maybe the sight of that sweet young thing prancing around the room in her nightie got to him and he tried some funny business.”

  “Has anyone ever told you you talk too much?”

  “Who, me?” Phil laughed uproariously.

  “You seem to be in a better mood.”

  “Harkins took off early today. I been working forty-eight hours a day and that bastard takes the afternoon off. Ain’t no justice in this world.”

  “No rest for the wicked, anyway,” I said, which set Phil off on another laughing fit. He broke off abruptly and said, “We got a notification from Portland PB this morning to the effect that one Jessica Finney, missing person case number such-and-such, has been recovered intact and turned over to her loving parents. I reckon you know all about that?”

  “I found her last night.”

  “So are you coming home tonight?”

  “No, I have some loose ends to tie up.”

  “Okey-dokey. Well, I gotta go. See you when you get here, okay?”

  I said okay and told him goodbye.

  I checked my watch and turned on the television just in time for the news. Someone had been slow releasing information. There was just a brief mention that the Portland police had been involved in breaking up a major pornography operation in which young prostitutes were hired to make movies and were then raped while the cameras rolled. The anchorman promised more details during the eleven o’clock broadcast. Jason Finney was going to love the bit about the young prostitutes.

  I turned the television off and stretched out on my bed. Allison joined me. “What did he say?” she asked.

  “Who?”

  “Your policeman friend. That was him you were talking to, wasn’t it?”

  “He thinks you did it.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while then she asked, “What are you going to do with me?”

  I smiled and said, “Maybe I’ll just keep you.”

  “Finders, keepers?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  She moved into my arms just as if she belonged there and after a moment she said, “I wish I could stay here forever.” I had the feeling she didn’t mean in a motel room in Portland. We spent the remainder of our time there cuddled up on the bed. I kept thinking about Virginia Marley, who had seemed to enjoy the things we did together just as much as Allison seemed to be enjoying the much more innocent things the two of us were doing now. Virginia put on a good show. Allison was putting on a good show. April had put on a good show. I really knew how to pick them.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Shortly after seven o’clock on the last Sunday in August I drove the most wanted blonde in Oregon across the Columbia River and across the state line. I tried to figure out how many laws I was breaking, then gave up. I couldn’t count that high.

  I drove north on I-5 until the sun was completely down. I had checked a map in the motel lobby and plotted a course that would take us east across Washington then south. It was a long, slow route. Allison had to be asleep before we got close to the state line and since she had slept most of the day, I didn’t expect her to doze off early.

  Considering the circumstances, it was a pleasant journey. We stopped frequently, usually at moonlit roadside parks. A minor problem occurred to me and at a stop for snacks I called Carrie and told her to put a set of my house keys in her mail box so I could pick them up.

  There were frequent news flashes on the radio informing us that Mary Allison Vanzetti was still being sought in connection with the shooting death of her father. Mary Allison Vanzetti seemed untroubled by them. She entertained me with stories of her classmates’ escapades and with gossipy tidbits about the school staff. The trip to Walla Walla had obviously seemed like a reprieve to her. I was positive she planned to make a break for it whenever the opportunity presented itself, but I began to wish she would act more like a young woman who had killed her father and was sorry and was scared to death of the consequences, instead of like a schoolgirl enjoying an unexpected holiday. Possibly I had my priorities backward but I could cope with Allison being a killer better than I could cope with her being crazy enough not to care that she was a killer.

  I assured myself she wasn’t crazy. It was just that any show of remorse on her part would contradict her claim of innocence. I had no doubt that the casual chatter concealed a frantic desperation. She was waiting for her chance, praying she could get hold of the keys to the rented Chevy with its nice little automatic transmission, praying my business in Walla Walla would distract me enough for her to get away, with or without the car, without or without any money. Time was running out for her. She was going to run and she’d do it barefoot and broke if she had to.

  For once, one of my plans went according to plan. We had passed several signs giving the mileage to Walla Walla when Allison fell asleep shortly after midnight. My down jacket was gone with the Nova but she had Mr. Smith for a pillow and was sleeping soundly when we passed through Walla Walla and when we crossed the border into Oregon shortly afterward. She slept through Milton-Freewater and Pendleton and Pilot Rock and Mackie and the brief stop at Carrie’s mailbox. I got the car into the garage and even got her out of the car without really waking her up. She murmured something against my shoulder and I murmured back comfortingly and carried her into the house.

  If I had ever burped the damn waterbed, she might have stayed asleep. As it was, she rolled over when I put her down and then sat bolt upright as the mattress bucked and sloshed loudly beneath her.

  “Where are we?” she demanded.

  “Just a place to sleep.”

  She looked wildly around the room and when she saw the photographs, she hissed, “This is your house. You brought me back to Mackie. You lied to me. You tricked me. I hate you!” The last words were accompanied by a kick to my ribs. She swung her legs off the bed and stood up.

  “Just go back to sleep,” I said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  She wa
sn’t in the mood to sleep. She preferred to fight. It was an unfair match. I outweighed her by close to a hundred pounds but I didn’t want to hurt her and she was out for blood. I fended off blows for a while, waiting for her to tire herself out. She didn’t get tired. I wrestled her to the floor and straddled her hips, holding her wrists tightly. Her legs thrashed impotently behind me.

  I shifted my grip and got both her wrists in one hand and used the other to brush hair back from my eyes. It suddenly didn’t seem so hard to imagine her picking up a gun in a moment of rage. If one had been handy now, she’d have used it on me.

  “Shut up and listen to me, Allison.” I waited until she got tired of telling me how much she hated me. “You’re going to be all right. Nobody gives a shit about your father. He was an ex-con, he did time for murder, for Christ’s sake. He was peddling drugs all over the country. Nobody’s crying over him. It’s your word against his what happened at the hotel and he isn’t talking. If you claim any justification at all for shooting him, even if you just say you were sick and confused, nothing at all is going to happen to you. People are convicted of felonies every day of the week and get a slap on the wrist. All you have to do is cooperate. The press’ll love you. They’d drum up so much sympathy for you that no judge in his right mind would do anything but pat you on the head and say ‘poor baby.’”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I’m turning you in to the police, Allison. If your mystery man exists, you’d better tell me right now who he is.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why? Who is he? A hit man? The head of the mob? Tell me who he is and I’ll find him and put him out of commission until after you’ve talked to the cops and I’ll be sure you’re hidden away where he can’t find you.”