The Lime Pit (27 page)

"Buck up, honey," I told her. "You'll
be better off without them."

At three some agents from the Juvenile Court came to
pick up the children. And as they were rounding them up, Cissy ran
up, threw her arms around my neck, and gave me a sultry kiss goodbye.
It made me sad to think that she would probably never know how wrong
that kiss had been."Goodbye, honey," she said cheerfully.
"I'm off to the work farm."

"Take care, Cissy."

"I shall," she said. She started to walk
away, then turned back. "I thought of something I meant to tell
you at the house. You know that man you was asking me about--the one
that come to see Laurie and Lance fairly regular?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Well, I don't remember his face none. But I do
remember that car." She got a dreamy look in her eye. "It
was a Cad-ee-lac," she said lovingly. "A pink Cad-ee-lac.
And it had the funniest thing on the hood!"

I shivered up and down my spine. "Bull's horns."

"Sure enough," she said with surprise.
"How'd y'all know that?"

"A lucky guess."

"Yeah." She
looked at me oddly, then a smile broke across her face. "Goodbye,
Harry. Some day I'll come see you. You can count on that."

***

There was a pay phone in the hall of the Highway
Patrol building. I got a couple of dimes out of my trousers, sat down
in the booth, and closed the folding door. A little fan went on
overhead with a whisper. I just sat there for about five minutes,
juggling the coins until they were warm from my palm and thinking
about Red Bannion--an ordinary old man with glasses and a pink
Cadillac. It made perfect sense that it would have been him. He had
the connections throughout the state to set the Jellicoes up in
business and to keep the local police away from the farm. And it had
been Red Bannion who had touted me onto Preston LaForge, when I
started asking questions about Cindy Ann. And, if Laurie could be
trusted at all, it had also been Red Bannion who had driven up to
Preston's house--in the heart of that storm--and frightened him into
committing suicide.

It did make sense.

That's why Lance had been upset the night of the
suicide. Preston's death truly hadn't been his doing. Perhaps, at
that point, he didn't know what had happened. Perhaps, Laurie didn't
either. But she had learned by the following night when she met me at
the Busy Bee. And she'd kept me occupied with drinks and small talk,
while Abel Jones searched the apartment and prepared to murder me.
That had probably been Red's idea, too. He'd seen three of the
pictures. He wanted to see them all. And Abel Jones was just the man
to jump at the chance to do Red Bannion a favor.

Good old Red, who only wanted to be a help.

Well, he had warned me off, in a way. Although he
must have known I'd go after LaForge. In fact, he'd probably wanted
me to. Preston panics and kills himself. Cindy Ann's death is
accounted for. The Jellicoes go on with business as usual. And nobody
ever has to be the wiser. Escorts Unlimited must have been a sweet
and profitable enterprise to make a man like Bannion take so many
chances to protect it. But, then, to keep Howie Bascomb--who owned
half of the Riverside Mall--in your back pocket, along with most of
the officials in Boone and Franklin counties, you'd be willing to
take risks.

I juggled the coins and listened to the fan blades
whirring through the hot enclosed air. There was no way around it.
Sooner or later I was going to have to ask myself just how big a part
Porky Simlab had played in Red's scam. On the surface, the Jellicoes'
operation seemed as far from Charles Street as you could get. But
then, on the surface, Red Bannion had seemed a tough and earnest old
man, eager to put some unsavory characters out of business.

Well, I owed Porky something after ten years. And
what it came down to was the benefit of the doubt. I don't have that
many loyalties in my life--if loyalty was the right word for what I
felt for that seedy, amiable old hoodlum with his cracker barrel
speech and winking mouth. But after what I'd done that morning to
Lance and Laurie Jellicoe, after what had happened the night before
between Jo and me, after seeing Hugo being wheeled to the grave, I
felt the need to show some loyalty to someone. Just to reestablish my
own sense of myself as a decent man. Or as a sentimental fool.
Sometimes I can't tell the difference.

I slipped the coins in the phone slot and dialed the
Charles Street house. If Porky could be kept out of it, I'd do my
part. I wouldn't bring the state police down on his greasy old head
until I knew for sure just where he fit in.Bannion answered almost
immediately. "Yessuh?" he said. "Red Bannion heah."

"This is Harry, Red."

"Harry, boy," he said warmly. "We
heard some rumor y'all got shot at last night. T'aint true, is it,
son? I done warned you about them fellas."

"Yeah. You sure did."

"What's wrong, son?" He was a quick old
man. He'd heard right through my voice to the heart of it.

"I know, Red," I said wearily. "I know
all about the Jellicoes and the farm outside Belleville. I know about
Preston. And I know what happened to Cindy Ann."

"I see," he said.

"Why, Red? Why'd you do it?"

"Aw, hell, son. For the money. Why else?"

I sighed heavily. "I'm going to go to the
police, Red. I just figured I owed you the courtesy of a call."

"Well, you go on right ahead, son. Do what you
think is best."

That bothered me. "You don't care?"

He made that sound again--that plaintive "hem."

"I ain't going to jail, son. I know too many
people for that. I ain't sayin' that you couldn't be a bother. No
sir, I ain't sayin' that at all. You know a good deal 'bout my
affairs. And I ain't sure who all you done already told. But, son, I
been hanging round courthouses most of my life and you may bring the
law down on me, but they ain't going to be able to prove a thing.
That girl, for example. Don't have to be no lawyer to know that
without a body there ain't no crime."

"Where is it, Red? Where did you stash her?"

He snorted merrily. "Hell, son, I tell you that
and we wouldn't have nothing to discuss. I'm a gambler, Harry. I been
one most of my life. You want to find out what happened to Cindy Ann,
you come to me. But I got to warn you, son. You best come prepared. "
Something calm and wintry filtered into Red's voice like that blue
snow that Preston had seen falling on those beautiful children.
"Might be better that way. Just you and me. I ain't got no
hankering to see this drag through the courts. I ain't got that much
time left. You want to know about that girl, you meet me at Willie
Keeler's theater in about an hour."

I didn't say anything.

"It's a slim chance, son. I ain't really
offering you nothing but a shot at me--head-on. And, of course, a
chance of finding out what's left of that girl. If I was you, I'd
turn me down. But, then, I'm not you." He hung up.

I hadn't had any sleep in some thirty hours, and I
was feeling too fuzzy to drive. I popped the bennies at a water
fountain beside the phone booth. Then sat down on a wood bench and
waited for the rush. In ten minutes, I was rarin' to go again. I
checked out with the desk sergeant and walked through the station
house door into the clean blue afternoon. The Pinto was parked in a
gravel lot beside the station. I climbed in, spun my wheels in the
loose rock, kicked up a little white dust, and, in a minute, I was
back on the expressway, heading north.

I thought about Red Bannion as I breezed along the
highway.

He was going to try to kill me. That much was sure.
But not until he knew how much I knew and whom I'd told it to. That's
the only way I could account for this recklessness. As for my own
...maybe it was the bennies, but I had the strange feeling that I was
driving through that bright beautiful afternoon to participate in an
old-fashioned drama of justice and revenge. I was a little drunk on
the absurdity of it. A gunfight in front of the shoe stores and
liquor stores and dry cleaners of North Main Street. Just like the
old Golden Deer days, when Red had been chief of police and Seventh
Street had echoed with gunfire. It tickled some dark spot inside me
to think of it. And I had to make myself calm down and relax. Remind
myself that meeting him face-to-face was probably the only way to
settle this business. Scare up sanity like a ghost, to mask the
insane excitement--the vicious need to know what had become of the
girl and to seek revenge for it. And for myself, too. Because he'll
get away, Harry, that little man was whispering in my ear. He'll get
away, just as he said he would. Bribe a judge, pack a jury. And go
free. After all the bloodshed and the death. He'd go free. And that
was an imperfection that little man couldn't abide. A crack in the
damn world.

I shivered and told myself I was talking sense, while
the countryside whirled past me in a dream.
The
sun was well beyond meridian as I slalomed through those S-shaped
turns, where the expressway dipped down to the river through that dry
sulfur-yellow gorge. On my right, the Quality Court Motel was blazing
in the sun, like a pillar of fire, and all those stores and auto lots
that had been dead shadows in the early morning were filled with
color and life. I zipped by them and up onto Brent Spence, where the
tires sang on the roadbed. Across the muddy Ohio with its half dozen
coal barges pushed by white-capped tugs. And back to the city. Then
up Columbia a mile or so to the suspension bridge and back across the
river to the sleepy hamlet of Newport.

The day was vivid and crystal clear. One of those
rare summer days when the smog is washed down river by a hot wind
and, suddenly, you can see numbers and lettering and the texture of
skin. Like getting a new pair of eyes. The Pinto dipped down again,
past the concrete ponds where hundreds of cars sparkled in the
sunlight, through the shady streets with their worn and suffering
houses, and out to Main, down that avenue that's lined for half a
mile with flat, glassy, unattractive shops. And, then I could see the
marquee of Keeler's theater, lit faintly by soft yellow bulbs, and
the big pink Cadillac parked in front of it, with lean, bullet-headed
Red Bannion propping himself against it and gazing sedately at the
street. I pulled in behind him and parked. I was full of unhealthy
excitement as I stepped out the door, and I could feel both of the
guns weighing against my body as if they were the only things I had
on.

Red had a tin of film in his right hand, and he waved
with it to me and pointed to the theater lobby. I took a very close
look at the cars parked along the street and across from the theater
and began to feel some of the danger I had placed myself in. But it
was too late to start acting sanely. I took a deep breath and
followed Bannion into the lobby.

It was cold inside the theater. And dimly-lighted. It
took me a few seconds to adjust to the dark.
Willie
Keeler wasn't anywhere around. And that worried me.

The only other person in the lobby was a
rough-looking kid, sitting on a stool behind the candy counter. He
had a blue usher's cap on his head and a bored, vicious look on his
face.

Bannion didn't look at him as he passed by the
counter and through the door marked "Office." He sat down
behind Keeler's desk and folded his hands at his lips.

"Shut the door behind you, will you, Harry?"

I closed it and he pointed to a chair in front of the
desk. I sat.

He studied me for a moment, his hands folded at his
lips. Try as I could, I couldn't make anything out of that look. It
was the same weary, small town cop's face, with its cold,
dispassionate eyes, magnified slightly by the lenses of his glasses.
And the same bland clothes--the same loamy brown leisure suit and
flat, tieless white shirt that Porky wore. Sitting there scratching
his upper lip with one finger and eyeing me expressionlessly, he
looked exactly like the shrewd old cop that he was.

"So," he said after a time. "We got a
problem."

"No, Red. You've got a problem."

"Well, I guess I seen some trouble in my life.
I'll get by."

"Not this time," I said coldly.

"Maybe not." He sat up in the chair and
pushed the tin of film over to me. "There she is."

"Who?"

"That damn girl. That damn Cindy Ann."

I looked at the aluminum can and then back at Red.

He sat back in the desk chair and stared dully at the
desktop. "You know, you can figure and you can figure. Cover
'bout every angle there is. Then some jackass comes along with one
you never heard of and it all goes to hell. I didn't want that girl
dead. Last thing in the world I needed. But some no-account fool with
too much liquor in his fat, silly gut goes a little crazy one night.
And ..." He slapped the edge of the desk with his fingertips.
"There you are."

Red unscrewed the can of film. There was a viewer on
Keeler's desk, probably what he used to preview the loops for the
quarter machines. Red patted the reel of film into his palm, slipped
it on one of the arms of the viewer, and fed it through to the
take-up reel. He flipped a switch on the housing, and the prism lit
up.