I took a deep breath. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re a hostage. Just do what you’re told and shut up.”
“A hostage for what? Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”
I didn’t answer and after a few seconds Phil ran both hands roughly through his hair. Looking up as if he could see Harkins through the ceiling, he said, “Man, are you gonna be pissed.”
He hunkered down by the phone, telling me all about how he could hardly remember how to use a phone with a rotary dial. His conversation with Harkins was mercifully brief. He stood up, his knees cracking loudly. “Damn, old age setting in already. Now what?”
“Look at that poster behind you. Don’t turn around or do anything else unless I tell you to. And keep your mouth shut.”
Phil, without a word for once, turned to face the poster that was tacked crookedly on the wall beneath the window. He shoved his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and rocked back and forth on his heels. I turned the light off and opened the door to a ninety-degree angle from the wall and stood behind it, watching Phil. I leaned against the wall and tried to slow down my breathing. My nerves jangled when Phil spoke.
“Maybe a good lawyer can get you off on account of diminished capacity. You’re acting like a goddamn nut case. How about putting the gun away before he gets down here?” The Texas twang had disappeared from his speech.
“Don’t talk.”
He sighed loudly. There was a metallic slam and a murmur of voices from the locker, then heavy footsteps, first on the stairs then on the tile in the corridor. Harkins walked into the room. He flipped the light on and stopped about a foot from the edge of the open door. He was wearing dark pants and a pale blue short-sleeved shirt. His gun was in a shoulder holster. He said, “What’s up, Pauling?”
Phil didn’t answer. I pushed the door closed and Harkins spun around, crouching automatically, his hand going to his gun. He drew a deep breath and dropped his hand, straightening up. His face had drained of color. “What the fuck are you doing?”
I leaned against the door. “Put your hands on your head.”
He laced his hands on top of his head and said, “What’s going on here, Pauling?” He didn’t look away from me.
Phil didn’t answer.
I stepped away from the door, then changed my mind and leaned against it again, fighting an incredibly strong urge to sit down on the floor. “Take his gun, Phil—slowly—and put it on the table.”
Phil followed my instructions. I stashed the gun with the other one and leaned against the door again. “Stand there beside him, Phil. Hands on your head.”
Phil obeyed. There was a long moment of silence in the room. I was holding the two top cops in Mackie at gunpoint. Phil looked like a man watching his best friend’s life pass before his eyes. His expression changed when he looked at Harkins, who looked like a man seeing his own life pass before his eyes and end with the clank of a jail cell closing.
“Where is she?” I asked him.
“You crazy fucking bastard. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Harkins’ face was pasty white. A tremor ran across it as I raised the gun and sighted on the bridge of his nose.
“You didn’t have much time. I could make Phil send someone to search your house and find your car. Did you bother to change guns? We could sit here for hours waiting for a ballistics report, but I’m not waiting. Tell me where she is or I’ll kill you and find her myself.”
“Jesus Christ,” Phil said.
Harkins drew a jagged breath.
“I didn’t mean to kill him. I didn’t…”
“Jesus Christ,” Phil said.
“Where is she?”
“Jesus Christ,” Phil said.
“In my car. In the trunk. It’s in the City Hall parking lot.”
“Jesus Christ,” Phil said.
“You have your keys?”
Harkins nodded and pulled them from his pocket.
“Give them to Phil.”
Phil took the keys. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You want me to go?”
“No. Yell down the hall. Fogel’s in the locker room. Tell him to bring whoever’s with him.”
I moved away from the door and Phil opened it and shouted, “Hey, Fogel.” There was a distant “Yeah?” then Phil said, “Get down here. You, too, Andy.”
“Send them both to the car,” I said to Phil. “One of them stays with her and one comes back here.”
Phil nodded and stepped out in the hall to give the two cops their instructions. They left running. The fire door at the end of the corridor clanged against the wall.
Phil came back in the room. “Call an ambulance,” I said.
As soon as he made the call I told him to stand beside Harkins and put his hands on his head again.
“Why don’t you just let me— ”
“You’re still a hostage. If she’s dead, I’m killing him.”
“The pills were just to knock her out,” Harkins said. “I didn’t give her enough to kill her.”
I stepped forward and put my left hand on his chest and shoved hard. He staggered backward and hit the wall, then slid down it, sending Mr. Smith skidding across the floor.
“You gagged her, you bastard. She has a weak stomach. If the pills made her sick…” I stopped. The image of Allison chocking to death on vomit was overwhelming.
Phil said, “Take it easy, Bucky.”
Harkins got slowly to his feet and stayed out of reach, leaning against the far wall with his hands on his head.
The room was silent except for the buzzing of the light and Harkins’ rasping breaths, which made mine sound calm. Phil was looking at Mr. Smith. The wail of a siren wavered on the air, crescendoed, and died. After another long noisy silence the fire door clanged against the wall again and there were running footsteps in the hall and Fogel burst into the room, skidding to a halt. He looked uncertainly at me, even more uncertainly at his two superior officers with their fingers laced across their scalps, then back at me.
“What did you find?” Phil asked.
Fogel spoke to me. The man with the gun is always in charge. “The Vanzetti girl,” he said and shot a quick curious look at Harkins.
“Is she alive?” Phil asked for me.
“Yeah,” Fogel said. “Tied and gagged and sleeping like a baby. We took her out and undid her. She threw up all over and tried to talk. Didn’t make any sense. Looks like she’s doped up pretty good, but she’s breathing okay and everything.” He paused for a second, glancing at Harkins again. “The ambulance is there,” he added.
Phil stepped toward me, holding out his hand. “Okay, Bucky?”
“Yeah,” I said and handed him my gun. I picked up Mr. Smith and headed for the door. Phil started to say something to me but I brushed past him. No one stopped me.
Chapter Forty-One
The ambulance was gone when I reached the City Hall parking lot so I stood at the curb and watched the cars passing by. Within five minutes I spotted a familiar one and flagged the driver down. Small towns have their advantages. Another five minutes and I was up on the hill at the north edge of town, where Mackie General Hospital shone antiseptically white in the moonlight.
In the lobby, a year-old sign announced that Mackie General’s emergency department now had a physician on duty twenty-four hours a day. A smaller sign next to it announced that the physician on duty tonight was Thomas R. Harry, M.D.
The woman behind the admissions window was busy at her computer. Police Office Andy Riggs, in civvies, was using the phone on her desk. He kept saying “Harkins? Harkins?” in stunned disbelief into the receiver.
I walked past them and went into the only examination room that had its door closed. I ignored the nurse inside who told me I had to wait outside. Tom was in his doctor persona and his expression was a masterpiece of clinical detachment as he looked me over.
Allison was on the examination table, looking as pale as the hospital gown she was wearing. Her eyes were half-o
pen but she didn’t see me when I bent over her. I put Mr. Smith beside her and stood at the head of the table, smoothing the long fall of hair spilling over the edge of it.
“She’ll be fine,” Tom said. “Have you been admitted?”
“I’m okay.”
“If you aren’t admitted, I can’t bill you. Go do it.”
I went and got admitted. By the time the paperwork was done and I had been pushed in a wheelchair to and from the X-ray department, Allison had been taken upstairs. I sat in the same examination room for the obligatory thirty-minute wait. Tom finally came in with a big folder of X-rays in his hand.
“So where does it hurt?” he asked.
“I don’t want any Popsicle sticks up my nose.”
“We don’t use Popsicle sticks. Your nose isn’t broken, just bent a little. Nothing else is broken either. I was on the phone with Carrie. She fell asleep in front of the television and had a terrible nightmare about you.”
“Christ. I wish she’d stop that. I don’t have bad dreams when she’s in trouble.”
Tom grinned. “She’s never in trouble. Look over there.”
I looked over there and he flashed his little light into my eyes, then told me to open my mouth. “What a mess,” he said.
“Don’t try to impress me with doctor talk.”
“Halsey can put a down payment on a new Mercedes.” Halsey was my dentist. A nurse came into the room and I lay down and perfected my macho act while Tom stitched and poked and prodded and made everything that had stopped hurting start hurting again.
“How’d you get these cuts on your back?” he asked when I was sitting up again.
“Self-inflicted knife wounds.”
“The wrist is a bit more traditional.”
There was a moment of silence while I felt guilty about Carrie and Tom felt guilty about making me feel guilty.
“I should keep you for observation but I’m not in the mood to argue. Don’t drive and don’t go off by yourself. And no sex for six months.”
I promised him two out of three and headed off to find Allison.
Three nurses stopped me on the way. One told me I couldn’t walk around a hospital barefoot. The others asked me what I was doing out of bed. I charmed my way past them, which was no small feat considering what I had seen when I glanced into the mirror in the examination room.
Allison was in a private room on the second floor. Mr. Smith had been tossed on the bedside table. I tucked him into bed with her and pulled a chair close.
Phil shook me awake a couple hours later. I straightened up and yawned, immediately regretting it. My mouth had felt better before Tom went to work on it.
“Right off hand,” Phil said, “I can think of about a hundred other ways you could have handled this, like maybe just telling me what was going on.”
I shook my head. “I meant what I said. If she was dead, I was killing him. You would have stopped me.”
“Well, that’s true, I guess.”
“Is Harkins talking?” I asked.
“Can’t shut him up. He didn’t even wait for his lawyer. I reckon he figures his only chance is to cooperate and hope the judge sends him some place where an ex-Chief of Police can survive prison. Ex-Chief of Police. Damn, I like the sound of that.”
“How do you like the sound of Chief of Police Philip J. Pauling?”
He grinned. “I’m Acting-Chief right now. The mayor about keeled over when I told him I arrested Harkins. I don’t know though—too damn much pencil-pushing. I’ll have to think about it.” He walked around the bed and stood looking down at Allison. “He sure kept her a secret, didn’t he? The Feds turned green when they found out about her. Kinda shot the shit out of their Big Brother image.”
He pulled another chair away from the wall and sat down across the bed from me. “How’d you find her?”
“She left Allentown on foot and I picked her up down the road.”
“What? You mean last Monday? She’s been with you since right after the murder?”
“She didn’t tell me her last name.”
Phil’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “Malcolm found her purse out at your place. Plenty of ID in it. Big hot-shot detective, you never thought of searching her purse?”
“She hid her ID. I found it Wednesday night.”
“Wednesday. This is Monday. That’s five days. What the fuck have you been doing with her for five days?”
“I behaved myself.”
“That’s not what I mean and you know it. Goddammit, what did you think you were doing?”
“She was sick. I’d already spent a couple days with her when I found out. I thought she killed him and didn’t think a few days would make any difference. It seemed—“
“—to make sense at the time. That’s what you always say, every goddam time you do something stupid. Well, I know exactly why you did it and it’s the only reason and don’t you go trying to tell me there’s any other reason. You did it because you went and fried most of your brain cells back when you were dipping into every illegal substance you could get your hands on and the few piddly little brain cells you have left are the ones in charge of your hormones and they go ga-ga every time you get within a hundred feet of a pretty face and that’s why you did it. You have been nothing but a royal fuck-up since the day I met you. I swear to god, if there was a law against stupidity, you’d be about ten years into a life sentence by now. If I didn’t need you to be my best man, I’d throw you in a cell and drop the key down the nearest sewer. I just might do it anyway.”
“Your best man?”
“Yeah, I’m getting married next week.”
“You’re getting married?”
Phil craned his neck upward, checking all the corners of the room. “Seems to be an echo in here.”
“I’ll do it, sure, but who are you marrying? You haven’t even been going with anyone. That redhead at City Hall?”
“Why would you think I want to marry her? Oh, I remember. No, that was just a business date. I owed her a dinner on account of she put in some unpaid overtime looking for some papers in those old files in the City Hall basement. Patsy knew all about it.”
“Patsy knew about it?”
Phil did his echo-seeking look again.
“You and Patsy are getting married again?”
“Well, yeah. Damn, this is embarrassing. I been wanting to tell you but Patsy made me promise not to say anything until she made up her mind for sure, which I guess she did because we went and got the license this afternoon. And I don’t need anyone telling me it’s a mistake. Her parents already covered that. As far as they’re concerned, the only bright point is she isn’t pregnant this time.”
“I never thought you should get divorced in the first place. When did all this happen?”
“We been working up to it for a while and then this past week everything went to hell at work and I’ve been over there crying on her shoulder every day and, damn, that woman does have fine shoulders. Not to mention a lot of other perfectly nice body parts.”
“That’s where you were. Damn it, I spent half the day trying to find you. I even called Patsy.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I hung up.”
“That was you, huh? Well, Patsy’ll be glad to hear it. She’s been going crazy trying to figure out who caught us in flagrante delicto over the phone.”
“When I couldn’t find you, I finally decided to call Harkins. You know what’s really scary? He could have just shot us both out at the house. No one ever would have known what happened. She convinced him I didn’t know anything. Which was true. I figured it out afterward from some things she had told me.”
“I want to hear the whole story but it’ll wait till tomorrow. You want to hear Harkins’ story?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, well, Harkins says he never heard of Vanzetti until a week ago Friday when Vanzetti called him and said they needed to talk. Vanzetti was pretty vague but I guess he threw a scare into Hark
ins because he agreed to go to his hotel room late that night. I need to backtrack a bit. Vanzetti had got himself between a rock and a hard place. Not only were the Feds after him but so was his ex-boss. It seems that when Vanzetti left Chicago one step ahead of the law, he was a little low on traveling money so he liquidated some assets that weren’t rightfully his. To the tune of almost two hundred grand. He wanted to get out of the country but he was afraid to use his passport with a federal warrant out for him and his cohorts in the drug business had a contract out on him and he figured they’d get the word out and tip off whatever contacts he had who might have got him out illegally. A real double whammy. So Vanzetti spent six months wandering around the country trying to figure out how the hell to get out. At some point in his travels, he remembered that he knew where to find a crooked Chief of Police and decided that was just the ticket he needed. So, he came to Mackie and contacted Harkins, made a lot of threats, said if he went down he was taking Harkins with him.”
“What did he want from Harkins?”
“Wanted him to get him out of the country.”
“How the hell was Harkins supposed to do that?”
“Vanzetti had this bright idea that Harkins could rig up some phony papers and take him out as a prisoner being extradited. Harkins kept saying there was no way he could do it and Vanzetti kept saying he better come up with a way. Harkins never met him in public, always went to the hotel room late at night. He says he never meant to kill him. He just went back one more time to try to talk some sense into him and he saw red and pulled his gun and fired away.”
“Harkins must have had a key to get in the back door, right?”
“Shit, he’s—was—the Chief of Police. Right after Vanzetti called him the first time, Harkins stopped by the Arms, asked the manager to look up some records for him and when the guy’s back was turned, he helped himself to a spare key to Vanzetti’s room, which wasn’t likely to be missed until he checked out. Then, Monday morning Harkins showed up at the hotel right after the murder and put the key back. Hell, who’s going to watch what the Chief of Police is doing, right? So when we got around to counting keys, they were all there.” Phil laughed suddenly. “There it is—the flaw in the perfect murder and I missed it. I didn’t want Harkins getting in my way that morning so I made sure nobody called him. And the son-of-a-bitch showed up anyway. Got there a few minutes after I did. I just shrugged it off, figured some busybody at the hotel called him.”
Cat's-Paw, Inc. Page 28
