The Lime Pit (21 page)

"How is Jo?" I asked him. "The girl
who came in with me?"

"She had a nasty cut on her scalp and some
bruises and lacerations on her arms and legs. But there's no sign of
fracture or concussion. She should be fine."

"Can I talk to her?"

"I'll see." He walked out of the room.

About an hour later, a short ugly man in a brown
business suit walked in. "Lieutenant Alvin Foster," he
said, drawing a chair up beside the bed. "I'd like to ask you a
few questions."

Foster was in his late forties, balding in horns that
curved around a thatch of thin black hair. He had a jowly, big-pored
face, five o'clock shadow, yellow teeth, dark-ringed green eyes, and
the kind of thick lips that look like lozenges of hard rubber that
someone has knicked with a penknife. He smelled strongly of tobacco
and aftershave, and he spoke in a thin, crackling tenor. Like Walter
Brennan's scratchy voice, only huskier and not as whiney. He looked
at me unpleasantly, then took a pack of crumpled Tareytons out of his
pocket. "I guess they won't mind," he said, shaking a
cigarette from the pack. He lit it and puffed a white cloud of smoke
toward the floor. "I understand you used to be on the force."

"Just the D.A.'s office," I said.

He waved his hand. "Same difference. This guy
you wasted, do you have any idea why he was trying to drop you?"
He didn't let me answer. "It was a professional job." He
explained it to me with his hands. "He's sitting on the landing.
He tells a neighbor that he's waiting for you. The neighbor doesn't
know different--why should he? But the guy knows where you live and
when you're coming home and how you'll be coming through the door.
From the landing, it's a sweet set-up. Four steps up and a bannister
to lean it on. And maybe a thirty degree angle down, so he's sure to
take your legs off even if he don't get off a timely shot. And
what're you going to do when you make him? You got your hands full of
door and keys and that girl. It's like shooting fish in a barrel."
He clapped his hands together and looked at me with lively malice.
"You should be dead."

"I was lucky. I spotted him before he got the
gun set, just as he was peeking around the bannister."

"Lucky don't cover it," Foster said. "Were
you expecting his kind of company?"

"No."

He dropped the cigarette to the floor and crushed it
out with his heel. "We got a problem, then."

"Look, why don't you call up Bernie Olson on the
D.A.'s staff. He'll tell you what kind of man I am."

"Uh-huh." Foster reached painfully inside
his coat, as if he were about to scratch himself. Instead, he pulled
out a small photograph of Cindy Ann Evans. One of my photographs. "We
found this on the guy. He had about twenty of them in his pocket.
Does that mean anything to you?"

I thought it over quickly. Jones had robbed the
apartment before ambushing me. The police wouldn't have any trouble
putting that much together. The rest of it--the why of it--was what
he was waiting to hear. It was just a question of how much I wanted
to let him know.

"Her name is Cindy Ann Evans. I was hired to
locate her."

"Having any luck?" he said coyly.

"Not yet. She's disappeared."

"Who hired you?"

"That's privileged information."

"Bend the rules a little," he said with an
ugly edge in his voice.

"Sorry."

"All right, we'll skip that for the time being.
The guy who shot you, do you know who he was?"

"Never saw him before in my life."

"His name is Jones. Abel Jones. He's a low-life
from Riverview. He loan sharks on the West Side. And he wasn't the
type to kill unless there was a dollar in it. So it looks like we got
someone with a powerful grudge against you. So powerful he's willing
to shell out five grand for a contract. Any ideas who that could be?"

"In my line of work," I said casually, "you
make enemies."

Foster eyed me coldly. He knew I wasn't telling him
the truth, and he wanted to punch me for it. In another place, at
another time, he probably would have punched me. Cops hate a lie
worse than sin and love to catch folks telling them. Like
evangelists, they make a living off depravity and they need to have
their prejudices confirmed from time to time. It gives them a lift.

"O.K., Stoner," he said. "We'll talk
again."

"Any time, lieutenant."

He passed a hand through that thatch of black hair.
"I don't know who you think you're protecting, but we have
reason to believe that the girl in that picture was murdered."

I tried to look surprised.

"No," he said
lightly. "That won't cut it." He started for the door. "You
think about it for a few days. See if you can't remember why someone
tried to kill you. Because they're going to try again. And, next
time, fella', you won't be so ... lucky."

***

He was absolutely right. And the sane part of me was
pleading, "Tell him the whole thing." But that was the sane
part. The other seventy-five percent kept feeling Laurie Jellicoe's
hand stroking mine and hearing her sweet urgent voice swearing that
it wasn't a set-up and seeing that shotgun go off like a windblown
torch and all that glass and debris flying out at me like a crystal
wind and smelling the cordite smoke afterward and the sweet tang of
blood. I just didn't get shot all that often. I didn't have to toss
my lover bodily into a thornbush and pray that she wasn't lying dead
in the dirt of a bullet wound.

And then there was the thought of Preston, bleeding
on that cream-colored rug. And of Cindy Ann, puffing up in the river
water like dough rising in an oven. And the plain old reflex
stubbornness that comes over me when a cop tries to push me around.
Coupled with the intuition, born of years of experience, that, if I
turned it over to Foster without giftwrapping it with a bow, he would
certainly blow the case. And, with it, any chance I might have of
visiting justice on the Jellicoes, if justice was the right word.

I dozed in the hospital bed, high on Xylocaine and
fantasies of revenge, and dreamed gruesomely about what I would do
when I caught up with Lance and Laurie and their silent partner.

Some time during the night, Jo came in the room and
called my name. But it wasn't until the next morning, when the
anaesthetic had worn off and the pain began to bite at my back, that
I was healed enough in mind and spirit to answer her.

I opened my eyes and saw her sitting in a plastic
lounge chair beside the door. There was some sun in the room, coming
through the drapes by the window. I took a deep breath and the keen
smell of the disinfectant blown through the air-conditioning ducts
made me momentarily giddy.

I tried lifting my left arm. It went up, but it hurt
mightily. I managed to stretch it out far enough to snag the phone on
the nightstand by the bed. According to the Provident Bank time lady,
it was ten-thirty A.M. on Tuesday the twelfth and the temperature
outside was eighty-eight degrees. Jo heard me hang up the phone and
sat up in the chair. She had a gauze bandage on her forehead and
there were some splotches of iodine on her arms and on her legs below
the hemline of that floral print dress. But she still looked brownly
pretty, in a wounded and bedraggled way. Like Ava Gardner playing the
nurse in Snows of Kilimanjaro. Heart-shaped face, coal black hair,
olive skin, gray eyes--all sleepy and concerned.

She smiled at me--a pained, visitor's smile. And I
felt compelled to tell her that I wasn't about to die.

"I know that." She ran her eyes up and down
my body and they filled with tears. She got up, and walked over to
the bed, and I pulled her down beside me and kissed her.

She looked away for a second. And I could see her
seeing Abel Jones, lying in the wreckage of the lobby.

"It couldn't be helped," I said.

She nodded quickly. "I know. But that doesn't
make it any less awful." She took a deep breath and looked back
down at me. "A man named Foster asked me some questions about
those pictures you showed me."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him to talk to you. I told him I didn't
know anything about them."

"You told him right," I said.

"He didn't believe me. You are going to tell him
about the Jellicoes, aren't you?"

"When I'm ready."

"That's crazy." She smiled uncertainly.
"You want them to try to kill you again?"

"I'd like to see them try," I said grimly.

"You are crazy!" Jo's gray eyes flashed and
she hopped off the bed. "I'm going to the coffee shop," she
said with disgust. "I can't take any more of this macho crap on
an empty stomach."

"Just don't wander too far off," I said. "I
intend to get out of here by noon."

She looked like she was about to tear her hair.
"You're shot, " she said between her teeth, like she was
explaining something for the umpteenth time to a very stupid child.
"You're wounded. You can't get up, champ. You're down for the
count."

"I'm getting up," I said between my teeth.

"Madness!" She turned on her heels and
marched out of the room.

At eleven-fifteen, the young intern who had treated
me the night before came by. "How's the patient?" he said
in a chipper voice. He looked at a clipboard. "Looks like you're
going to live. Does it hurt much?"

"Enough," I said.

"It will for awhile. We'll give you some codeine
to help kill the pain. If it cramps on you, you may also need a
muscle relaxant."

"Would it kill me to leave here this afternoon?"

"It wouldn't kill you, no. I think you'd be
better off waiting till tomorrow morning. To be on the safe side."
"I want to live dangerously."

He shrugged. "Let's take a look."

He examined the wound, put some fresh gauze on my
back and rewrapped the Ace bandage. "I guess it'll be all right
if you want to leave."

He had the nurse get me a prescription and a fresh
supply of bandages and he warned me that I would get some drainage
and that I shouldn't be alarmed and he cautioned me against
overexerting myself. And we shook hands. And that was that.

At high noon, I took an elevator down through the
sanitized hospital air, stepped out into the lobby, walked over to
the coffee shop window and rapped on the glass.

When she saw me, she looked down at her cup of coffee
and shook her head.
 
 

21

AT TEN after twelve, Jo and I caught a Yellow Cab in
front of the hospital on Goodman Street and had the cabbie drive us
down Burnett to the Delores. It was a very short trip--maybe a mile
and a quarter-and the driver, a black man with a grizzled beard and a
little brown bald spot on the back of his head, wasn't too happy
about the fare.

"Hell, you could've walked this easily," he
said, as he pulled up in front of the apartment building.
"Big strong man like you."

"I'm an eccentric millionaire," I said,
handing him a couple of dollars.

For a few seconds, Jo and I just stood there on the
sidewalk and stared at each other--me with my box of gauze and my bag
of prescriptions in my right hand and my left arm dangling uselessly
at my side, and Jo in her rumpled, dirt-stained print dress with that
bandage on her forehead and all those iodine stains on her arms and
legs. I started to laugh, but she eyed me grumpily.

"It's not funny. You could be dead. I could be
dead. It's not funny."

"I guess not," I said. "Although it
sure feels good to be alive this beautiful morning."

She mumbled something about cats and their lives, and
we walked up the walkway into the shadow of the building, where
broken glass still pebbled the ground like rocksalt. Someone had
cleared away most of the large-scale debris and piled it in a dusty,
cement-colored stack to the right of the stoop. The landing had been
swept clean, too; the yellow wall had been washed; and the staircase
patched with boards. There was still a jagged hole where the door
should have been, but, as I walked through it, I could hear the
sounds of someone hammering and planing in the basement. I stuck my
head around the door beneath the stairwell and hollered down, "Leo?"

The sounds stopped immediately, and a hammer
clattered to the floor, and someone cursed viciously. Old Leo, the
handyman, rumbled up the stairs, in his denim overalls and white
T-shirt, his belly swinging like a sack of meal above the belt he'd
tied around his hips.

"Oh, it's you," he said in a brittle voice.
"It ain't enough you got to blow up the first floor, you don't
need to take ten years off my life by yelling. You 'bout scared me to
death, just now." He took a polka-dot bandana out of his back
pocket and mopped his sweaty face. "I swear, two-thirds of my
life just passed before my eyes."

"Which two?" Jo said over my shoulder.

"The first and the last," he said with a
wink. "There's a long time in between there I don't like to
think about."