Trouble Is My Business (19 page)

I let my heap stall itself, got out and took my hat off.

“Mister Wallace live here?”

She had a handsome face, quiet, firm-looking. She nodded.

“Would you like to see him?” She had a quiet firm voice, a good accent.

It didn’t sound like the voice of a train robber’s wife.

I gave her my name, said I’d been hearing about his fish down in the town. I was interested in fancy goldfish.

She put the spray gun down and went into the house. Bees buzzed around my head, large fuzzy bees that wouldn’t mind the cold wind off the sea. Far off like background music the surf pounded on the sandbars. The northern sunshine seemed bleak to me, had no heat in the core of it.

The woman came out of the house and held the door open.

“He’s at the top of the stairs,” she said, “if you’d like to go up.

I went past a couple of rustic rockers and into the house of the man who had stolen the Leander pearls.

TEN

Fish tanks were all around the big room, two tiers of them on braced shelves, big oblong tanks with metal frames, some with lights over them and some with lights down in them. Water grasses were festooned in careless patterns behind the algae-coated glass and the water held a ghostly greenish light and through the greenish light moved fish of all the colors of rainbow.

There were long slim fish like golden darts and Japanese Veiltails with fantastic trailing tails, and X-ray fish as transparent as colored glass, tiny guppies half an inch long, calico popeyes spotted like a bride’s apron, and big lumbering Chinese Moors with telescope eyes, froglike faces and unnecessary fins, waddling through the green water like fat men going to lunch.

Most of the light came from a big sloping skylight. Under the skylight at a bare wooden table a tall gaunt man stood with a squirming red fish in his left hand, and in his right hand a safety-razor blade backed with adhesive tape.

He looked at me from under wide gray eyebrows. His eyes were sunken, colorless, opaque. I went over beside him and looked down at the fish he was holding.

“Fungus?” I asked.

He nodded slowly. “White fungus.” He put the fish down on the table and carefully spread its dorsal fin. The fin was ragged and split and the ragged edges had a mossy white color.

“White fungus,” he said, “ain’t so bad. I’ll trim this feller up and he’ll be right as rain. What can I do for you, mister?”

I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and smiled at him.

“Like people,” I said. “The fish, I mean. They get things wrong with them.”

He held the fish against the wood and trimmed off the ragged part of the fin. He spread the tail and trimmed that. The fish had stopped squirming.

“Some you can cure,” he said, “and some you can’t. You can’t cure swimming-bladder disease, for instance.” He glanced up at me. “This don’t hurt him, ’case you think it does,” he said. “You can shock a fish to death but you can’t hurt it like a person.”

He put the razor blade down and dipped a cotton swab in some purplish liquid, painted the cut places. Then he dipped a finger in a jar of white vaseline and smeared that over. He dropped the fish in a small tank off to one side of the room. The fish swam around peacefully, quite content.

The gaunt man wiped his hands, sat down at the edge of a bench and stared at me with lifeless eyes. He had been good-looking once, a long time ago.

“You interested in fish?” he asked. His voice had the quiet careful murmur of the cell block and the exercise yard.

I shook my head. “Not particularly. That was just an excuse. I came a long way to see you, Mister Sype.”

He moistened his lips and went on staring at me. When his voice came again it was tired and soft.

“Wallace is the name, mister.”

I puffed a smoke ring and poked my finger through it. “For my job it’s got to be Sype.”

He leaned forward and dropped his hands between his spread bony knees, clasped them together. Big gnarled hands that had done a lot of hard work in their time. His head tipped up at me and his dead eyes were cold under the shaggy brows. But his voice stayed soft.

“Haven’t seen a dick in a year. To talk to. What’s your lay?”

“Guess,” I said.

His voice got still softer. “Listen, dick. I’ve got a nice home here, quiet. Nobody bothers me any more. Nobody’s got a right to. I got a pardon straight from the White House. I’ve got the fish to play with and a man gets fond of anything he takes care of. I don’t owe the world a nickel. I paid up. My wife’s got enough dough for us to live on. All I want is to be let alone, dick.” He stopped talking, shook his head once. “You can’t burn me up—not any more.”

I didn’t say anything. I smiled a little and watched him.

“Nobody can touch me,” he said. “I got a pardon straight from the President’s study. I just want to be let alone.”

I shook my head and kept on smiling at him. “That’s the one thing you can never have—until you give in.”

“Listen,” he said softly. “You may be new on this case. It’s kind of fresh to you. You want to make a rep for yourself. But me, I’ve had almost twenty years of it, and so have a lot of other people, some of ’em pretty smart people too. They know I don’t have nothing that don’t belong to me. Never did have. Somebody else got it.”

“The mail clerk,” I said. “Sure.”

“Listen,” be said, still softly. “I did my time. I know all the angles. I know they ain’t going to stop wondering—long as anybody’s alive that remembers. I know they’re going to send some punk out once in a while to kind of stir it up. That’s okey. No hard feelings. Now what do I do to get you to go home again?”

I shook my head and stared past his shoulder at the fish drifting in their big silent tanks. I felt tired. The quiet of the house made ghosts in my brain, ghosts of a lot of years ago. A train pounding through the darkness, a stick-up hidden in a mail car, a gun flash, a dead clerk on the floor, a silent drop off at some water tank, a man who had kept a secret for nineteen years—almost kept it.

“You made one mistake,” I said slowly. “Remember a fellow named Peeler Mardo?”

He lifted his head. I could see him searching in his memory. The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

“A fellow you knew in Leavenworth,” I said. “A little runt that was in there for splitting twenty-dollar bills and putting phony backs on them.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”

“You told him you had the pearls,” I said.

I could see he didn’t believe me. “I must have been kidding him,” he said slowly, emptily.

“Maybe. But here’s the point. He didn’t think so. He was up in this country a while ago with a pal, a guy who called himself Sunset. They saw you somewhere and Peeler recognized you. He got to thinking how he could make himself some jack. But he was a coke hound and he talked in his sleep. A girl got wise and then another girl and a shyster. Peeler got his feet burned and he’s dead.”

Sype stared at me unblinkingly. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened.

I waved my cigarette and went on: “We don’t know how much he told, but the shyster and a girl are in Olympia. Sunset’s in Olympia, only he’s dead. They killed him. I wouldn’t know if they know where you are or not. But they will sometime, or others like them. You can wear the cops down, if they can’t find the pearls and you don’t try to sell them. You can wear the insurance company down and even the postal men.”

Sype didn’t move a muscle. His big knotty hands clenched between his knees didn’t move. His dead eyes just stared.

“But you can’t wear the chiselers down,” I said. “They’ll never lay off. There’ll always be a couple or three with time enough and money enough and meanness enough to bear down. They’ll find out what they want to know some way. They’ll snatch your wife or take you out in the woods and give you the works. And you’ll have to come through . . . Now I’ve got a decent, square proposition.”

“Which bunch are you?” Sype asked suddenly. “I thought you smelled of dick, but I ain’t so sure now.”

“Insurance,” I said. “Here’s the deal. Twenty-five grand reward in all. Five grand to the girl that passed me the info. She got it on the square and she’s entitled to that cut. Ten grand to me. I’ve done all the work and looked into all the guns. Ten grand to you, through me. You couldn’t get a nickel direct. Is there anything in it? How does it look?”

“It looks fine,” he said gently. “Except for one thing, I don’t have no pearls, dick.”

I scowled at him. That was my wad. I didn’t have any more. I straightened away from the wall and dropped a cigarette end on the wood floor, crushed it out. I turned to go.

He stood up and put a hand out. “Wait a minute,” he said gravely, “and I’ll prove it to you.”

He went across the floor in front of me and out of the room. I stared at the fish and chewed my lip. I heard the sound of a car engine somewhere, not very close. I heard a drawer open and shut, apparently in a nearby room.

Sype came back into the fish room. He had a shiny Colt .45 in his gaunt fist. It looked as long as a man’s forearm.

He pointed it at me and said: “I got pearls in this, six of them. Lead pearls. I can comb a fly’s whiskers at sixty yards. You ain’t no dick. Now get up and blow—and tell your redhot friends I’m ready to shoot their teeth out any day of the week and twice on Sunday.”

I didn’t move. There was a madness in the man’s dead eyes. I didn’t dare move.

“That’s grandstand stuff,” I said slowly. “I can prove I’m a dick. You’re an ex-con and it’s a felony just having that rod. Put it down and talk sense.”

The car I had heard seemed to be stopping outside the house. Brakes whined on drums. Feet clattered, up a walk, up steps. Sudden sharp voices, a caught exclamation.

Sype backed across the room until he was between the table and a big twenty- or thirty-gallon tank. He grinned at me, the wide clear grin of a fighter at bay.

“I see your friends kind of caught up with you,” he drawled. “Take your gat out and drop it on the floor while you still got time—and breath.”

I didn’t move. I looked at the wiry hair above his eyes. I looked into his eyes. I knew if I moved—even to do what he told me—he would shoot.

Steps came up the stairs. They were clogged, shuffling steps, with a hint of struggle in them.

Three people came into the room.

ELEVEN

Mrs. Sype came in first, stiff-legged, her eyes glazed, her arms bent rigidly at the elbows and the hands clawing straight forward at nothing, feeling for something that wasn’t there. There was a gun in her back, Carol Donovan’s small . 32, held efficiently in Carol Donovan’s small ruthless hand.

Madder came last. He was drunk, brave from the bottle, flushed and savage. He threw the Smith & Wesson down on me and leered.

Carol Donovan pushed Mrs. Sype aside. The older woman stumbled into the corner and sank down on her knees, blank-eyed.

Sype stared at the Donovan girl. He was rattled because she was a girl and young and pretty. He hadn’t been used to the type. Seeing her took the fire out of him. If men had come in he would have shot them to pieces.

The small dark white-faced girl faced him coldly, said in her tight chilled voice: “All right, Dad. Shed the heater. Make it smooth now.”

Sype leaned down slowly, not taking his eyes off her. He put his enormous frontier Colt on the floor.

“Kick it away from you, Dad.”

Sype kicked it. The gun skidded across the bare boards, over towards the center of the room.

“That’s the way, old-timer. You hold on him, Rush, while I unrod the dick.”

The two guns swiveled and the hard gray eyes were looking at me now. Madder went a little way towards Sype and pointed his Smith & Wesson at Sype’s chest.

The girl smiled, not a nice smile. “Bright boy, eh? You sure stick your neck out all the time, don’t you? Made a beef, shamus. Didn’t frisk your skinny pal. He had a little map in one shoe.”

“I didn’t need one,” I said smoothly, and grinned at her. I tried to make the grin appealing, because Mrs. Sype was moving her knees on the floor, and every move took her nearer to Sype’s Colt.

“But you’re all washed up now, you and your big smile. Hoist the mitts while I get your iron. Up, mister.”

She was a girl, about five feet two inches tall, and weighed around a hundred and twenty. Just a girl. I was six feet and a half-inch, weighed one-ninety-five. I put my hands up and hit her on the jaw.

That was crazy, but I had all I could stand of the Donovan-Madder act, the Donovan-Madder guns, the Donovan-Madder tough talk. I hit her on the jaw.

She went back a yard and her popgun went off. A slug burned my ribs. She started to fall. Slowly, like a slow motion picture, she fell. There was something silly about it.

Mrs. Sype got the Colt and shot her in the back.

Madder whirled and the instant he turned Sype rushed him. Madder jumped back and yelled and covered Sype again. Sype stopped cold and the wide crazy grin came back on his gaunt face.

The slug from the Colt knocked the girl forward as though a door had whipped in a high wind. A flurry of blue cloth, something thumped my chest—her head. I saw her face for a moment as she bounced back, a strange face that I had never seen before.

Then she was a huddled thing on the floor at my feet, small, deadly, extinct, with redness coming out from under her, and the tall quiet woman behind her with the smoking Colt held in both hands.

Madder shot Sype twice. Sype plunged forward still grinning and hit the end of the table. The purplish liquid he had used on the sick fish sprayed up over him. Madder shot him again as he was falling.

I jerked my Luger out and shot Madder in the most painful place I could think of that wasn’t likely to be fatal—the back of the knee. He went down exactly as if he had tripped over a hidden wire. I had cuffs on him before he even started to groan.

I kicked guns here and there and went over to Mrs. Sype and took the big Colt out of her hands.

It was very still in the room for a little while. Eddies of smoke drifted towards the skylight, filmy gray, pale in the afternoon sun. I heard the surf booming in the distance. Then I heard a whistling sound close at hand.