Authors: Richard Stark
3
Grofield put his left foot into the stirrup and stepped up into the saddle. Holding the reins loosely in his left hand, he looked down at the stableman who'd brought this roan mare out to him, and said, "You'll tell Mr. Recklow when he comes back from lunch."
The stableman, a rangy gray-bearded old man who thought he was Gabby Hayes, nodded with a show of exasperation. "I said I would."
"What will you tell him?"
"You're here. Your name is Grofield. You're a friend of Arnie Barrow's."
"That's right." Grofield looked out at the wooded hills extending away beyond the barns. "Where should I wait for him?"
"See that lightning-struck elm down there, end of the meadow?"
"I think so."
"Keep to the left of it, and head up-country. You'll find a waterfall up there."
"Fine," Grofield said. He lifted the reins.
The stableman nodded at the mare's head. "Her name's Gwendolyn."
"Gwendolyn," Grofield said.
"You treat her right," the stableman said, "she'll treat you right."
"I'll remember that." Grofield lifted the reins again, heeled the mare lightly, and she stepped daintily around the sign in front of the barn that read RECKLOW's RIDING ACADEMY –
Riding Lessons – Hourly Rentals – Horses Stabled.
"Giddyup, Gwendolyn," Grofield said softly. He had never said giddyup to a horse before, but he liked the alliteration.
Gwendolyn turned out to be more spirited than her name, and carried Grofield across the meadow at a fast trot, moving with the eagerness of a puppy let off a leash. Grofield enjoyed her so much he didn't head directly for the waterfall but took her off at an easy lope down a wooded valley spaced with open, sunny fields lush with spring grass. Twice he saw, at a distance, other riders; both times they were moving their mounts at a much more cautious pace than he. East of the Mississippi, horsemanship was becoming a lost art – like cave painting. No wonder Recklow had to supplement the riding academy's income.
When they came to the stream, shallow and rapid over a bed of stones, Gwendolyn expressed a desire to drink. Grofield dismounted and had some of the water himself; it was so cold it made his teeth ache. He grimaced, and remounted. "That can't be good for you, Gwendolyn. Come along."
The stream crossed his route from left to right. He turned left, therefore, and followed it uphill, allowing Gwendolyn to travel now at a walk, after her exertions.
The waterfall, when he reached it, was narrow but surprisingly high. He had to leave the stream entirely and make a wide half-circle to get up the slope to the top. When he did, he found an open area of shale on both banks, and no one in sight. He dismounted again, and let the reins trail on the ground, knowing that a well-mannered horse will be trained to stay put with the reins like that. He stood on tan flat rock in sunlight and looked down at the valley below, a green tangle dotted with those open meadows. Now and again he saw riders down there.
It was almost possible here to believe the twentieth century had never existed. Here in western Pennsylvania, less than fifty miles from Harrisburg, he could stand on this bit of high ground and look northward and see exactly what an Indian at this spot would have seen four hundred years ago. No cars, no smoke, no cities.
It was good that he hadn't left last night. Spending the one night with Mary had calmed him, had taken the edge off his rage. He was still as determined as before, but not with the same obsessiveness. A good thing to be rid of, that; it could have made him careless out of haste and impatience.
The waterfall was loud and unceasing. He never heard Recklow coming. He turned his head, and Recklow was just dismounting from a big mottled gray beside which Gwendolyn looked like a donkey.
Recklow was a man in his sixties now, but he was tall and thin and straight, and from a distance he could have been taken for a man of thirty. It was only his face that gave him away, as deeply lined and seamed as a plowed field. He'd been a ranch hand in his youth, and then a stuntman and extra in cowboy movies in the thirties and forties. He'd never had any politics, but he had personal loyalties to those he considered his friends, and when the days of the blacklist spread across the land it was inevitable that a man with Recklow's attitudes about friendship would wind up in trouble. In the early fifties he had left the West Coast and come east to Pennsylvania and bought this riding academy. It had kept him, but not very well. These days Recklow gave his loyalty almost exclusively to his horses, and took a kind of cold satisfaction in earning extra money to keep them by stepping outside the law.
He came over now to Grofield, squinting at him as though Grofield were at least half a mile away, and said, "Do I know you?" He spoke at a near shout, to be heard above the waterfall.
Grofield replied at the same volume. "I was here once with Arnie Barrow."
"I'm no good on faces… Or names either, for that matter. How'd you like Gwendolyn?"
"Fine." Grofield nodded his head toward the valley. "We played together down there for a while."
Recklow smiled for a split second with one half of his mouth. "If you come here this way, friend of this one and that one, it's guns you want. I only sell handguns and rifles. Shotguns and Tommy guns aren't my line."
"I know. I want two pistols."
"To keep on your body or in a drawer?"
"One to carry, one to keep in the car."
"To show, or to use?"
"To use."
Recklow gave him a quick sharp look. "You said that a different way." They were very close to one another, because of the difficulty of hearing.
Grofield turned his head to look toward the waterfall, as though to ask it to shut up for a while. When he looked back, he shouted, "What do you mean, a different way?"
"People that come to me are professionals. They want guns in their line of work."
"I'm in the same line of work."
"But you aren't working now."
Grofield shrugged. "No, I'm not."
Recklow frowned, and shook his head. "I don't think I want to sell to you."
"Why not?"
"A professional won't go spraying bullets around. He wants the gun to use if he has to, to show if he has to. I don't like a man to use a gun to work a mad off."
"I'm still a professional," Grofield said, pushing the words over the sound of the water. He echoed Recklow's smile of a minute ago and said, "I have to drum somebody out of the corps."
Recklow considered him, still frowning, and finally shrugged and said, "Come here."
Grofield went with him over to where Recklow had left the big gray. The horse carried saddlebags, into one of which Recklow reached, taking out three revolvers, all short-barreled and double-action. "Body guns," he said. It wasn't necessary to shout quite as loud here, farther from the drop-off. "I don't sell automatics. They're too much trouble, they don't work right." He squatted down on his heels and spread the three revolvers on the tan rock. "Look them over."
Grofield squatted down in front of him to study the guns. Two were Smith & Wesson and the third was a Colt. The Colt was the Detective Special in.32 New Police, with a two-inch barrel. One of the S&W's was a Chief's Special in.38 caliber, the other a five shot Terrier in.32 caliber. Grofield said, "How good's the Terrier?"
"As good as the man shooting it. It'll cost you fifty dollars."
Grofield held the gun in his hand. It was very light, very small. It wouldn't be any good at a distance, but up close it would do very well.
"You want to try it?"
"Yes."
They both stood, Grofield holding the Terrier. Recklow rooted into the saddlebag again and came out with two.32 cartridges. "Fire at things in the water," he said.
"Right."
Grofield felt Recklow watching him load the gun. Recklow had the ability to make you feel you had to prove your competence to him, and Grofield was just as glad he was handling a gun of a type he'd operated before. He walked over near the stream, went down on one knee, looked around to be sure he wasn't observed, and then took careful aim at a white pebble in the stream bed up a ways to his left, away from the falls. He squeezed off a shot, a miniature geyser sprang up, and the stones in the vicinity of the white pebble jumped, roiling the water. It was hard to tell, but he thought the bullet had hit a bit to the right of where he was aiming. He might have done it himself, though, in squeezing the trigger; it was such a small gun.
He chose another target, this one near the opposite bank, and fired again. He squeezed with great care, and watched the result one-eyed, then nodded and got to his feet. He walked back to Recklow and said, "It's off to the right."
"By much?"
"Just a little."
"Consistently?"
"Oh, I could correct for it," Grofield said.
Recklow looked sour. "But you want a cut in the price."
"Well, let's take a look at one of those others," Grofield said. He hunkered down again and looked at the other two guns.
Recklow remained standing. He said, "That Terrier costs sixty-five dollars new."
"This one isn't new," Grofield said. He was still holding the Terrier while looking at the other guns, as though he'd forgotten the thing was in his hand.
"The hell with it," Recklow said. "I'll load it and give it to you for forty-five."
Grofield grinned up at him. "Done," he said. He held the Terrier out to Recklow, butt first. When Recklow took it, Grofield picked up the other two guns and got to his feet. "I'll put these away for you."
"I'll do it." Recklow stuffed the Terrier in his left hip pocket, took the other two guns from Grofield, and stood there holding them. "Now for the car. You want one in the glove compartment? Maybe a small one, too, one of these."
"No. I want to store it under the dash, I want to put a holster under there."
"Not a holster," Recklow said. "A clip."
"Have you got one?"
"Seven-fifty. It's got a spring. When you want to put the gun away you just push it up and the clip holds it. When you want it back, you put your hand under it, push the lever with your thumb, and it pops into your hand."
"I'll take it," Grofield said. "Now, about the gun to put into it."
"You want something with more distance accuracy for outside," Recklow said. He put the two rejected body guns away, poked in the saddlebag some more, pulled out a larger revolver, and said, "Here's one. I've got a couple more on the other side." He handed the revolver to Grofield and walked around the gray to look in the other saddlebag.
The gun Grofield was holding was a Ruger.357 Blackhawk. It had the weight and heft of a solid gun, and is one of the best-looking of contemporary handguns. Looking it over, Grofield saw several short scratches, all at the same angle, on the left side of the barrel.
"Here's two more." Recklow came around the horse with a pair of guns in his hands, and stood with his palms up, displaying the guns for Grofield to inspect.
"Not the Ruger," Grofield said. "Somebody was hitting something with it." The gun on Recklow's right hand was a Colt Trooper, also in.357, with a six-inch barrel. Grofield picked it up, handed Recklow the Ruger, and studied the Colt. "This looks pretty good. What's that one?"
It was a Smith & Wesson, the model 1950 Army in.45 caliber. Grofield looked at it without taking it, and said, "Let me try the Colt."
"Of course. Hold on, I'll get you ammunition."
Grofield waited, holding the Colt, turning it over and over in his hands, studying it. When Recklow handed him the two deceptively slim.357 cartridges, Grofield said, "I don't want to shoot into the water with these. I won't be able to see anything."
Recklow pointed across the stream, where the land continued to slope upward toward more woods. "Shoot into those rocks over there. I just don't want you to hit a customer in the woods."
"I won't."
Grofield loaded the two bullets into the Trooper, aimed at a particular fold of rock, and saw the shards fly from the exact spot he'd been pointing at. He fired the second one at once, and hit the same place. "That's good enough for me," he said, walking back to Recklow. "How much do you want for it?"
"Seventy-five."
Grofield grinned at him. "You wouldn't be tacking the five dollars from the Terrier on this, would you?"
"Seventy-five is the price," Recklow said. "I'll load it for you."
"All right."
"We'll make it five for the clip," Recklow said, as Grofield handed him back the Trooper. "That'll make it an even hundred and a quarter."
Grofield took out his wallet. He'd left the cupboard bare back at the theater to pay for this trip. He counted out four twenties, three tens, and three fives. Recklow took the money, tucked it into his shirt pocket, and said, "Ride around a while. Give me a chance to clean them up and load them and get them ready for you."
"Sure."
They both mounted and went separate ways, Recklow turning back toward the barns, Grofield deciding to head upstream a while. The water came along with little drops and pools through this stretch of tan stone, but ahead was more greenery – woods, hills. Grofield rode that way, listening to the clack of Gwendolyns shoes on the rockface. In western movies, people rode over land like this to cover their tracks. Grofield, twisting around in the saddle, looked back and saw no mark of Gwendolyns passage. He grinned at himself – the mighty hunter. Not out here.
4
The woman had been dead at least a couple of days. Grofield saw her lying on the kitchen floor, face down, a brown lake of dried blood forming an irregular shore about her head and extending out to make an island of one chair leg, and he didn't have to turn her over to know he would find her throat cut, or to know Myers had been here, or to know that this would be the lady of the house – Dan Leach's wife.
He had used a small screwdriver with a compartment in the removable head for several other shafts – Phillips-head, awl, and so on-to break in through this kitchen door, and now he slipped the tool away in his hip pocket and quietly closed the door. The kitchen smelled like sweet garbage. Grofield stepped over her legs, and went on through the doorway opposite to look over the rest of the house.
It was a small and neat house near Enid, Oklahoma, with a vegetable garden in the back, a farm-equipment dealer in a concrete block building for the nearest neighbor, and a straight flat two-lane concrete state highway out front. Grofield had phoned Leach here two or three times, but had never actually seen the place before. He was surprised now at how modest and small it was, and supposed that reflected Mrs. Leach's viewpoint on life, rather than Dan's. He'd had the impression Dan, when flush, liked to party, but now it seemed his wife had been a different type entirely.
Well, neither of them would do any more partying. Or cleaning. The house was almost painfully clean, so neat and orderly that the thin layer of dust that had settled since the woman's death became the place's most prominent feature, simply because it was so obviously an interloper.
Kitchen, living room, bedroom, bath. A crawl space for an attic, reached by a trap door in the bedroom ceiling and not high enough for a man to stand up straight in. A basement only barely big enough for the utilities it contained.
It was clear what had happened. Myers had come here since Grofield had seen him, knowing that Dan Leach's wife, through her brother, had been Dan's route to find him, and not wanting Grofield to be able to use the same route.
If he found the wife's brother, would Myers have been there first, too?
Grofield, in his half-dozen years working with professional thieves, had met a number of social misfit types, but he had never before met anyone so ready to kill, or so quick to assume that murder was the best answer to any problem. How many people had Myers murdered in his life and how had he managed to avoid the law so far?
And what was the brother's name? Dan had known Myers through his wife's brother. Even assuming the brother was still alive, what was his name, and how would Grofield now go about finding him?
Grofield searched the house. He found photographs of Dan and a woman who was more than likely the woman now dead in the kitchen. He found a few photographs of Dan and the woman with another man, and some with the woman and the other man without Dan, and supposed he was looking at the face of the brother. But the face wouldn't get him very far without the name.
Didn't any of these people write to each other? He searched dresser drawers and boxes on closet shelves, to no effect. A bookshelf mounted on the bedroom wall contained about thirty books, all Reader's Digest condensed volumes; he shook them out one at a time, and in the process found Dan's emergency fund, ten hundred dollar bills, five of them fluttering down from each of two books. But no names and no addresses. Grofield stuffed the thousand dollars in his wallet and left the bedroom.
The only phone in the house was in the living room, standing on the Enid directory on the end table beyond the sofa. But there was nothing written in or on the directory, and nothing but poker chips and playing cards were stored in the end table. There was no personal notebook with addresses and phone numbers anywhere around.
After a while, Grofield had to admit to himself that he was wasting his time, the house had been stripped. A woman who maintained a home like this one, small and neat and orderly, would surely have kept addresses and phone numbers neatly in a pad somewhere handy to the phone. More than that, she would surely have a Christmas card list somewhere in the house, and Grofield guessed she'd been the type who'd keep whatever letters from friends and relatives she'd ever received. That they were all gone, without a trace of search, suggested that Myers had made the woman gather up letters and address books and the like herself before he'd killed her.
Which meant it had to be done a different way; another trail would have to be found. But what about this house, and the body? Grofield's own presence here couldn't be entirely erased, so that would have to be taken care of. And, for the good of everybody Dan had worked with in the last few years, it would be best to cover up the fact of the murder itself, if he could. It was always dangerous when the police got interested in the family of a man in this business, whatever their reasons. A murder investigation here, spreading out as it would from Dan's wife to a search for Dan himself and on to a study of his former associates, could cause difficulties up and down the line.
He had come in here in the middle of the afternoon, having learned a long time ago that it's always safest to break into private homes in the daytime, accidental witnesses tending to believe that things done openly in the middle of the day are of necessity legal. He now had about two hours of daylight left.
To get started, he had to go back to the kitchen. He hated the fact of the woman lying there, face down in the lake of dried blood, and avoided looking at her as much as he could. He could only open the cellar door part way, because of her hand; the truth was, he could have pushed her arm out of the way and opened the door wider, but he preferred to use the narrow opening.
The cellar was like the interior of a submarine made of stone – small and narrow and low ceilinged and crowded with greasy machinery. Also shelves up over the sink, containing a variety of bottles and boxes and cans. Grofield went through them and found half a dozen labels that claimed the contents were flammable – turpentine, paint remover, spot remover. He carried them all upstairs, leaving the door to the kitchen open after he'd slipped through. Putting the rest of the cans on the kitchen table, he carried the rectangular quart can of turpentine with him as he went through the rest of the house, opening all the windows and being sure the doors were open between rooms. He then left a dribbled trail of turpentine from a pool in the middle of the bed down and across the bedroom floor and through the living room on a wide arc and on into the kitchen. Now the swing door had to stay open, too.
He tossed the empty turpentine can down the cellar stairs, then opened a can of paint remover and poured that all over the body. Kerosene, spot remover, everything was poured out and spread around, and the containers thrown down the cellar stairs.
The original sweet nauseating smell was gone from the kitchen now, blanketed by the sharper odors of all the things he'd spilled. Avoiding looking directly at the body as much as he could – sometimes it seemed very large, sometimes very small – Grofield pushed the wooden kitchen chairs around it, and then backed away to the exit door. He opened it, looked out carefully at the next back yard, the low wire fence, the field beyond. There seemed to be no one in sight. He nodded to himself, turned away, and went over to the stove, which was gas, of the pilotless type that needs to be lit by matches. A container of wooden matches decorated with pictures of Switzerland was hanging on the wall. Grofield took this down, held on to one match, and scattered the rest of the matches around on the floor. He turned on one of the gas burners atop the stove without lighting it, and walked back across the floor listening to it hiss. He knew that one open burner would be sufficient to cause an explosion, and that if the stove wasn't completely destroyed some sharp-eyed investigator might notice if more than one burner switch was turned to
on.
He opened the rear door again, and the outside world still seemed just as empty of people. Standing in the slightly open doorway, he turned back to the room, struck the match on the wall beside the door, held it with the flaming end downward until it had caught well, and then tossed it gently toward the dead woman.
It didn't reach all the way, but landed on one of the wet trails on the floor. There was a tiny
phum!
and yellowish flames that were almost invisible skittered away along the trails, like ghosts of midget racers.
Grofield stepped out, shut the door behind him. He trotted away across the neat yard, jumped the low fence, and jogged around the rear of the farm-equipment dealership, leaving the way he had come. His car was a half mile down the road, in a diner's parking lot. He reached it without incident, climbed aboard, and drove away. It was a mark of how completely he thought of this as a personal thing he was on and not work that he was driving his own car, the used Chevy Nova.
He circled the area, and half an hour later he couldn't resist driving back that way to see how it had worked out. Sometimes a fire is a tougher thing to start than it should be.
A state trooper was in the road a quarter mile from the house, directing traffic down a side road detour. Grofield stopped and stuck his head out and called, "What's the matter, officer?"
"Just keep moving," the trooper said.
"Yes, sir," Grofield said, and made the turn, following the other shunted traffic. He didn't get to see the house at all.