The Baby Blue Rip-Off (17 page)

His was a voice from this afternoon, the voice of the guy who had seemed second-in-command to the as-yet-unseen Frank Petersen. He was short, dark-haired, and lean, and he wore dark green gardener’s coveralls with a conspicuous lump in the right pocket. The lump was shaped like a small automatic. He was pale and had a more than superficial resemblance to the girl I’d seen at Tony’s. This, then, was Chet Richards, friend and accomplice of Pat Nelson, pimp and brother of Felicia Richards.

“You!” he said. “Mallory! You son of a....”

He didn’t finish, because I raised the tire iron as if to strike, and he covered his head and cowered.

“Nice meeting you, Chet,” I said. “But then we’ve met before, right?”

“Where’s the old lady? Where’s P. J.?”

“P. J. wanted to be here, but he got all tied up. And I sent the old lady someplace where no one’s trying to kill her.”

“Listen, nobody meant to kill that other old broad.”

“Shut up. I don’t think I want to hear that line of bullshit when I don’t have to. You just keep quiet, Chet.”

“What... what are you going to do?”

“Wait. I’m going to wait for just a few minutes for the cops to get here.”

“Cops?”

“That’s right. I already called them. It’s all over.”

Something got going in his eyes. Thoughts of the gun in his coverall pocket, most likely.

“Don’t even think about it, Chet. As close as I am anyway to opening you up with this tire iron, you just don’t want to push me.”

And the door behind me swung open hard, knocking me over, sending the tire iron pitching from my hand. I reached out after it, but the guy kicked the iron across the room, then came back and stepped on my hand, grinding my fingers like they were grapes and he was making wine.

“Well, look who the hell it is,” Pat Nelson said.

His voice sounded different than it had the other night in the stairwell when he was doing his Dean Martin parody. But it
was
a voice I recognized; I’d heard it back at Tony’s, and at Mrs. Jonsen’s, and one night outside my trailer. Pat had been the third party—the whiner—the guy who’d stayed behind at the garage before the Cooper job. But evidently, when Chet and P. J. went back to the garage after that fell through, they’d talked Pat into coming along to Mrs. Fox’s. That was something else I should’ve figured, damnit! After all, Felicia Richards had been alone when Brennan and the cops had raided Tony’s; there’d been no sign of the whiner. I should’ve considered the possibility of his being here. Damn.

“Mallory,” Pat said, “I tell you, you got to be the craziest goddamn bastard I ever run across, you know that? Why do you cause so much goddamn misery for you and everybody else?” He too was in green coveralls, but his gun was in hand, not in pocket. It was a little thing, an automatic sized to fit a woman’s purse, and it was ridiculous that it scared me as much as it did.

“Never mind that, Pat,” Chet said, scrambling onto his feet. “The cops are on the way; we got to get the hell out of here.”

Pat’s face narrowed, and he came over and called me a bastard again and kicked me in the ribs. Not a very forceful kick, really, but it didn’t take much; pain shot through me like a flare, and I blacked out for a moment.

When I came to, I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. They were gone. I wondered for how long.

Then Pat told me. His voice, from outside, was saying: “Where are the goddamn keys! What did he do with the goddamn car keys!”

By the time they reentered, I had managed to crawl over to the tire iron and get hold of it. I pitched the thing at Pat; I missed by a mile. He grabbed me by the shirt front, heaved me off the floor, and stuck his gun in my Adam’s apple. “What did you do with them, Mallory? What did you do with the goddamn keys?”

“I left them with your wife,” I said, “the last time I had her.”

That was not the sanest thing I might’ve said; it got me slapped with the automatic and thrown back to the floor.

“Hey, what he said,” Chet said. “Your wife, you had her listening, right? She had to hear the squeal on the radio, right? She ought to be on her way.”

Meaning Pat had a police-band radio; either at home or rigged up inside his GTO, or both. No big deal; anybody can
buy a radio like that—or steal one—and they prove quite useful to guys in Pat’s line of work.

“Let’s hope she beats the cops here,” Pat said.

“Come on,” Chet said. “We’ll head down the hill—that’s the way she’ll be coming.”

“First I ought to shoot that bastard—”

“Never mind him; come on!”

“Mallory,” Pat said, “I ought to blow your head off, you know that? But I’m going to prove something to you. We told you we didn’t mean to off that old broad, told you we weren’t no goddamn murderers, and I’m going to prove we aren’t by letting you keep your goddamn worthless skin. What do you think of that?”

“Will you quit wasting time?” Chet said, and yanked Pat by the arm.

Pat gave me one last foul look, and they left.

I pushed up on my hands, then hands and knees, and then got on my feet. My legs were wobbly and my vision blurry, but I managed to navigate myself toward the door, and finally I was down the steps and outside, leaning against the van. Half a block away, Pat Nelson and Chet Richards were jogging, jogging easy toward the red-white-and-blue GTO double-parked across the street. I don’t have to tell you who was behind the wheel. Debbie’s apartment was only a few blocks away, and so of course she beat the police here. A wave of helplessness washed through me; she and Pat and Chet would get away clean now, wouldn’t they? Some goddamn cavalry I was.

Then I noticed Lou.

Sometime in the last thirty seconds or so, Lou Brown had pulled up in front of Mrs. Fox’s in one of the Sheriff’s Department units, and now he was standing there in his cream-colored
uniform, watching Chet and Pat approach the GTO and, apparently, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

“Lou!” I hollered. “Get those guys!”

He turned and saw me, and something odd floated across his face. Then he looked away from me and back toward the jogging figures and yelled, “Halt!” His voice was quavering; he was scared shitless.

Pat and Chet both stopped dead, glanced at Lou for a moment, glanced at each other and exchanged confused grins, then resumed their jogging. They were just a few feet from the GTO now and didn’t seem worried.

They should’ve been.

Lou had drawn his big, long-barreled .357 Magnum and, both hands entwined around the butt, both fingers on the trigger, he yelled again, “Halt!”

And fired.

Chet did a jerky ballet movement as the bullet hit, blood spurting from him, and he flopped onto his back on the pavement. He had a surprised look on his face, frozen there now, and Pat had a similar look of surprise on his face as he looked down at his dead friend. He swung around, automatic in hand, and said, “What...?”

And Lou fired again.

Red spurted out the front of Pat’s chest and splattered against the side of the GTO, and he did his own jerky ballet movement and joined Chet.

Debbie’s blonde hair caught a glint of the dying sun as she tumbled out of the GTO and cradled her husband’s head in her lap, sitting there with him in the street. She rocked him like she was easing a baby off to sleep, but the job was already done. Pat was as asleep as you can get.

Lou covered his mouth with one hand and holstered the big revolver with the other. I joined him. His eyes were red, wet, shifting rapidly as if to avoid seeing me or anybody or anything. He said, “Jesus... what else could I do? They had guns.”

The stench of cordite was making me sick. I breathed through my mouth.

Lou said, “What else could I do, Mal?”

I shrugged.

I walked over to Debbie. She didn’t look up at me, but she knew I was there. She wasn’t crying yet. She said, “I’m sorry, Mal.” Tiny voice.

“Me too, Debbie.”

“Will there be an ambulance soon?”

“Yes.”

“Not that an ambulance would do him any good. I just don’t want him in the street like this.”

“Can I do anything, Debbie?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“Mal?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you... for... not hating me.”

“I couldn’t hate you, Debbie.”

“Don’t let Lou get away with this, Mal. He’s going to have to answer for this.”

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but I said, “I won’t,” to soothe her.

And so I walked back over to Lou, who was standing with a hand over his mouth and another on the butt of the holstered gun, his face especially pale, his black sideburns and thin mustache looking pasted on, unreal. In the background, porches and lawns were filling with people: people who’d heard the cannon blasts of the .357 Magnum, people standing with looks of detached horror on their faces as they viewed the two torn bodies that lay in the street.

The guy who lived next door to Mrs. Fox, the gray-haired, gray-suited old businessman, joined us for a moment to say that he’d called for an ambulance.

“And,” he said, “Mrs. Fox would like to know if she can go home now. She says she has a lot of straightening up to do.”

“I don’t see why not,” Lou said.

The old guy nodded and turned to go. Then he added, “Oh, and you, young man... your name is Mallory?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Fox said to tell you you were a fool to go back in there... but a nice fool, and she wants to thank you personally and would like to know if you could stop over to see her before you go?”

“Tell her sure.”

He returned to his home, and we watched while he brought Mrs. Fox by the arm down his porch steps and walked her back to that same side entrance of her house. Before she went in, she turned to smile at me, and I found a smile to throw back to her.

But I couldn’t make the smile last long.

Because somewhere in my head, somewhere I was finally putting it all together. The information had been there the whole time, but I hadn’t seen the pattern; I hadn’t assorted the file cards in their correct, most revealing order. What Debbie had said to me—and the frozen looks of surprise on the faces of the husks that had been Pat Nelson and Chet Richards—made it all make sense.

“Was killing them the only way, Lou?”

“I was just trying to stop them,” he said. “I didn’t mean to kill them.”

“I heard that before.”

“What are you...?”

“Pat Nelson said that, about Mrs. Jonsen, just a few minutes ago, when he was still alive. He didn’t mean to kill her. Nobody meant to.”

“I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure it started out as a robbery and—”

“Go messing in mud and you’re bound to get dirty, know what I mean, Lou? You go ripping people off and the damnedest things start happening.”

“What are you saying, Mal?”

“You know what I’m saying.”

And he did, too. He knew I’d finally pieced it together. Pieced together the factors, the odd factors that didn’t seem to make sense until they were placed side by side. Like that, except for this one last-ditch robbery, all the break-ins had taken place outside the city limits in the sheriff’s jurisdiction, where a deputy like Lou Brown would be privy to all sorts of information. And of course it was Lou who had taken the call from Pat Nelson the night Mrs. Jonsen was killed, that imaginary call that had supposedly reported the GTO stolen. And
remember Lou questioning me that same night at the hospital coffee shop? Asking what my intentions were and then going straight to a phone—to check in with Brennan, he’d said, but in reality calling up Chet and Pat, who had gone over to my trailer to wait for me and further discourage me from poking around. And, too, Lou had graciously offered to keep me informed of Brennan’s activities, while keeping track of what
I
was onto. Would I mind if he dropped in now and then? His folks were bugging him. Dropping in to misdirect me with false or at least wrongly slanted information, like his own reasoning behind why the break-ins were outside the city limits. He had given Pat the go-ahead with the keep-Mallory-busy scheme; after he’d ascertained yesterday afternoon that I was still set on looking into the break-ins, he had pretended to call his parents to let them know he wouldn’t be home for supper, when he had actually been cuing Pat to have Debbie make her weepy phone call.

“Let me guess,” I said. “The Petersens are long gone, am I right? Brennan’s out there now, looking at nothing more than a deserted antique shop and barn. Because you had plenty of time to call the Petersens and tell them the heat was coming. So they’ve split, right?”

“I don’t follow any of this.”

“But when you called Tony’s to warn your buddies, nobody was there but Felicia Richards. You didn’t warn her, though, did you? Don’t bother explaining why; I got that figured out, too. Only certain people knew about you, right, Lou? Only certain people knew about the inside man at the sheriff’s office. Like the Petersens. And Chet. And Pat. But not P. J., huh? He’s just a stooge. And not the women. Or the people you fence the goods through. Just the inner circle, the masterminds. Mastermind small-time, low-life punks like you, Lou.”

“You better keep quiet, Mal. You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“Sure I do. So what happened, anyway? When you called Tony’s and found nobody home but the woman, what did you do? Figure that they might try Mrs. Fox? Or were you listening to the police-band radio in your car? Or at the office? Oh, well. Doesn’t matter. Probably none of it can be proved, anyway.”

Under the pencil-line mustache, Lou’s mouth formed a smile, just a little one.

“Because you tied up the loose ends, didn’t you, Lou? You shot them. You blew ’em apart with your gun. You’re really something, Lou. You’re some goddamn friend in need. Indeed.”

The sirens were starting now. Brennan would be here soon. Cops. Ambulance. In the background, people were watching us, Lou and me, watching a conversation they couldn’t hear but wanted to. Morbid curiosity, it’s called.

“I’ll tell Brennan, of course. And he’ll believe me. But I can’t be sure it’ll do any good. With the damn civil service the way it is, I don’t even know if he can get away with firing you, let alone pressing charges. So you win, I guess. You ripped everybody off, and the spoils are yours. Have fun.”