Death Trap (8 page)

“What’s it about, friend?”

“I want to talk to Ginny for a few minutes.”

“What’s the rumble?”

The girl got out of the car. She wasn’t tall. The sweater emphasized the ripeness and heaviness of her breasts. She wore tailored gray flannel slacks that went well with her yellow sweater. Her dark hair was worn in a mussy boyish cut. She looked up at me, her expression sulky, unpleasant, rebellious. She wore pale lipstick with heavy eye make-up. Except for her nose, her features were fairly good. An infatuated male might have thought the nose cute. It was small and pugged and tipped back so that her nostrils were too evident. It gave her something of the look of a pig.

“So what is it?”

“I want to talk to you alone for a few minutes.”

“Say it in front of Smith.”

“This isn’t trouble, Ginny. I’m not law. It’s a couple of questions. Let’s say it’s about where certain clothes came from. You remember who they belonged to, I guess. Now do you want to have a talk? My car’s around on the other side.”

“Clothes?” she said with exaggerated innocence. “What’s with clothes?”

“Nobody wants them back. I just want to talk to you about them.”

Smith put his arm around her. They stared at me with a hard and tolerant amusement. “You got a new way to get your kicks, chief?” Smith asked. “Go feel a woolly sweater. I know a guy goes for shoes. He’s got a crate full of them.”

I talked directly to Ginny, ignoring him. “There was money too. But they didn’t find it until later.”

I saw the quick gleam of interest in her eyes. She bit her underlip.

Smith tugged at her. “Honey, this type is a real conversationalist. Come on. Does talking send you any place?”

“Shut up a minute,” she said. Smith let go of her and looked annoyed. “What are you after?” she asked me.

“Just some talk. I’m not law and I’m not a reporter. You don’t have to pose on a tractor.”

“Is there any money in this talk?”

“There could be, if it goes right.”

“For God’s sake,” Smith said disgustedly.

“How much? I’m short this week.”

“Twenty, if you really talk, Ginny. My car’s around on the other side.”

“You said that,” Smith said.

She turned to him. “You mind too much, honey?”

He looked at her. He spat a casual six inches from my foot. “Take your time, baby. Take all the time there is. Take forever.” He turned his back and headed toward another car.

“Darn it,” Ginny said bitterly. “Well, let’s get it over with.”

We went around to my car. She wobbled and clenched her hips with each step, and kept her young breasts out-thrust. I opened the door for her and she plumped in. I went around and got in beside her.

“Get me a Miller’s,” she said. “You owe me something.”

I nicked the lights. The girl came out with the bottle. I ordered a Miller’s. She peered in at Ginny, then gave me a look of scorn and disgust.

When the carhop walked away Ginny said, “So what about the clothes?”

“Jane Ann’s.”

“So she said if anything happened to her, I was to keep them. We both fit into them.”

“Did she say anything was going to happen to her?”

She didn’t answer until the waitress had left the beer and taken the money for it and walked away. Ginny didn’t want the glass. Just the bottle. She tilted it up. “Let’s get something straight. Nobody can prove she didn’t say that, and nobody can prove they ever were her clothes and besides, before I’d turn them over to that priss sister of hers, I’d cut ’em all up with a razor. So where are you?”

“You’re a rough kid, Ginny.”

“I get along fine. What’s your angle? Want some cut-up clothes?”

“You keep them, Ginny. Too bad you didn’t have a key to her locker. You could have cleaned that out too.”

“Say, whatever happened to that stuff? I waited for the sweaters to show up on Lady Iceberg, but they never did.”

“Mr. Paulson gave them to the Salvation Army.”

“There’s a type for you. That butcher. You know, if my old man ever tried to bust me around the way he did Jane Ann, he’d wake up some morning with a pair of air-conditioned tonsils. Every once in a while I’d see the black and blues where he thumped her. I’d ask her why she took it. She said it didn’t bother her. She said she’d never let out one yelp, and that always made him madder. Look—whatever you’re after, you better get to it. I got to go group up again.”

“Ginny, are you satisfied that Landy did it?”

“So that’s it!”

“That’s it.”

“We’ve been kicking it around a lot. Rook says that Landy was too chicken. But everybody else thinks it was his big brain. Like racing a motor until you burn it out. His eyes were funny. Nobody figures he was getting any kicks from Nancy. Maybe sometimes she let him help her make fudge or weed the flowers. But it’s all just talk. I guess he did it.”

“But you have some reservations.”

“It’s been just dandy talking to you. It’s been a ball.”

As she put her hand on the door handle and as I opened my mouth to protest, a sedan turned into the lot and a red dome light began to blink. She tensed and watched it. It headed toward the other side of the lot. Car doors chunked and motors made raw sounds of power over the continuous music. Tires yelped. The cars scattered like a flock of chickens when the hawk shadow moves across the dooryard.

“Unhook the tray and set it on that shelf there and drive out slow,” she ordered.

I did as she asked. She slid down onto the floor and crouched half under the dash. A spotlight caught the car, hesitated and then flicked away as I drove out sedately and turned back toward town. She got back up onto the seat, drank the rest of her beer, tossed the bottle into the ditch.

“Trouble?”

“That was Quillan. I don’t dig it. He’s village. It’s the county cops make the most trouble. People report how Angie sells beer to minors.”

“Why does he serve you?”

“Why? You got a ventilated head? Rook and Smith and Powie and the kids would tear his joint up for him. We tore up the Snack Shack one time. Rook had this hairy old jeep. We come out about four in the morning, hooked onto the roof and pulled it right off, honest. From then on we got service, but nobody goes there any more. Don’t ask me why.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Jeez, we didn’t pick an assembly point, like we do when anybody’s hot. We weren’t figuring on this. Go on back and park on the square and somebody will be coming by.”

“You were saying you weren’t completely certain that Landy killed her, Ginny.”

“Was I saying that? I wouldn’t say that.”

“Who gave her the clothes, Ginny?”

“Probably her family.”

“Come off it. You know what kind of clothes her family gave her.”

“Then I don’t know. She just had them. I don’t know where she got them.”

I knew she was lying, and I had no real hope of breaking her down. “Suppose we trade, Ginny.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I’ll tell you something you didn’t know about her, and you tell me where the clothes came from.”

“Why should I want to know anything about her? The kid’s dead. She’s been dead a long time.” She was elaborately casual. “Is it about money like you said?”

“Well, you see what you think of this. While the trial was on, her father found money hidden in her room, fastened to the back of a dresser drawer. You had to take the drawer out to get to it. Over eight hundred dollars, Ginny.”

“Hey now!”

“And that’s something you didn’t know.”

“Look, I knew she had some money. I don’t know where she got it. She was all the time springing for the whole bunch. But I didn’t know she had
that
much stashed. Wow!”

“So where did the clothes come from?”

“You already got the answer. She bought ’em. Usually I went with her. Sometimes we’d take the bus, but most of the time we’d get a ride over. We bought the stuff in Warrentown. See these here slacks? This is the best flannel you can buy. Forty-five I think these were. Somewhere around there. You know I felt kinda funny wearing her stuff, afterward. But they’d just go to waste. Now it doesn’t bother me.”

“She paid cash?”

“All the time. Better than half those sweaters were cashmere. And those add up.”

“Park here?”

“Anywhere along here.”

“You must have asked her where she was getting the money.”

“I did. Mister, I asked her a hundred times. You can say we didn’t have any secrets from each other. I knew that kid like I know myself. We did everything together. We compared notes on everything. If she had a boy that was real good, she’d hand him along to me and I’d do the same for her. But just that one thing I couldn’t get out of her. Sometimes I’d get really sore. I thought for a while she was stealing from the market, maybe from the cash her old man brought home. She said she wasn’t. She said the way he kept books, you couldn’t even lift a Coke without he knew it. I finally stopped asking the one time she got real mad. She says to me, ‘Damn you, Ginny. I get the money and we spend the money and you wear the stuff too. Isn’t that enough? I got a place to get it. It’s going to keep coming and there isn’t ever going to be any trouble.’ So I stopped asking. By then I guess I had it figured. Like this. She had some guy on the hook. I guess maybe she had the proof on him. Some family-type guy. Maybe some big church wheel. Jane Ann had a good head on her. She wouldn’t try to bleed him dry. She’d try to just keep the money coming. Maybe fifty bucks a crack. And that would explain why she wouldn’t tell me.”

“Why not?”

“We were best friends like I said, but you should see how we live. I got two brothers in the Navy and they were smart to get the hell out. There’s five younger than me, and my old man is just no damn good. I seen times there was nothing in that house but rice. The joint is ready to fall down. So what happens if she tells me? Sooner or later I go tap him too. And another thing, when I get loaded I tell every damn thing I know. Jane Ann could keep her mouth shut. Sooner or later I’d tell the kids and everybody would move in on him and spoil it quick. The one thing it did was give me an idea. I think I’m going to have me somebody on the hook. I’m playing him easy. Anyway, that’s none of your damn business. I wonder where everybody got to.”

“You don’t know how she actually got the money. By that I mean how it was given to her. In person, or mailed to her, or left some place for her.”

“I wondered about that. I know it wasn’t mailed. And I don’t think it was a regular amount. Sometimes she was as broke as anybody. She hadn’t been buying things for a few months before she was killed. I thought she was broke, but from what you say, she was stashing it. Say! I remember something. She hinted about maybe the two of us taking a trip. Nothing real definite, but I bet she was saving it for that. Jeez, it’s too bad we never got to go. It would have been a ball.”

“What did Jane Ann think of Landy?”

“She said he was certainly a good match for Nance. She used to drive him nuts trying to heat him up a little. She said she wished she could get him off some place and teach him some facts. But she wouldn’t do it on account of Nancy.”

“She thought that much of Nancy?”

“She wouldn’t let us talk about what a cold fish Nancy is when she was around. She said if something was wrong with Nancy, there was one damn good reason for it. She used to try to make Nancy wake up and come alive, but it would just make Nancy cry. And she said that even if Landy was definitely on the creep side, it was good for Nancy to run around with a boy. I think Jane Ann was afraid Nancy would go queer. The only other boy friend Nancy had got drowned a little over two years ago. You know, it’s funny. Jane Ann was younger, but she knew so much more that I think she felt toward Nancy more like I feel toward my little sisters.”

“Do you want your little sisters to live just like you do?”

“Whip out your tambourine, brother, there’ll be some holy rollin’ tonight.”

“I just wondered.”

“Keep wondering. The Garson kids start with two outs and a full count and the bases loaded in the last half of the ninth, with Perry Score pitching. See what you think. What’s the best angle? Sing in the choir and make your self a virgin marriage to some clown who’ll keep you swole up with kids for twenty years, or get out where the people are? Get out and sharpen up. Take your choice.”

“Where are you going from here, Ginny?”

“Who wants to go? I’m already here. I’m having a ball. Maybe you ought to loosen up a little yourself. The way you rattle that tambourine gets on my nerves. Why don’t you buy me a steak and then we can curl up some place with a bottle?”

“I guess not.”

“How much is a dime worth? Eleven cents?”

“Not to me.”

“You act it. I won’t try to work you for more than the steak and the bottle.”

“Jail bait, Ginny. Sorry.”

“In this county? Sheriff Turnbull can’t even spell statutory rape. Skip it anyway. I changed my mind. Who you working for?”

“Landy’s sister. She isn’t employing me. I’m a friend.”

“That one. You know, Rook goes drooly over that one. He says she’s a sex pot. That I can’t make. To me all she needs is a broom and a pumpkin. Is she really any good? Rook is itching to know.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why don’t you just—Hey!” She reached over quickly and gave three fast taps on the horn ring. We were diagonally parked. The Cord eased in beside me, twin pipes burbling. Smith got out and came over to her side.

“Been cruising,” he said.

“They want anybody?”

“I don’t know. They blocked Quarto and gave him the strip job. Mickey, the damn fool, had two sticks on her. What was left from what Powie brought back last week. So real fast she eats them. So she’s been heaving ever since. Quarto took her home. They didn’t even lift Quarto’s knife. He stuck it in his sock. It was a loose strip. Mickey could have stuck the sticks in her bra.”

“It was better what she did.”

“Maybe. You coming along?”

“Forever didn’t last long.”

“Come along or don’t. It’s Monday. Everything is breaking up. Maybe you should stay with buster here.”

“It’s a drag job. He says he’s got better taste.”