Mourn The Living (15 page)

He smiled and said, “Hi, buddy,” and then he noticed the .38 in his visitor’s hand.

The gun went to his temple, the visitor fired and Saunders joined his wife.

LYN PARKS
had been with Broome long enough. He was a lousy bed partner, he smelled bad and his manners were nonexistent.

They were in the backstage dressing room at the Third Eye, and it was three o’clock in the morning. Broome had been trying desperately to get her to come across since after the band’s last set and his failure was getting him angry, despite the fact that he’d shot up with horse a few minutes before and should have been feeling quite good by now.

“Get your goddamn hands off me!” She shook her head in disgust with him, with herself. “You’re really a sickening bastard, Broome, and it’s pretty damn revolting to me to think I ever let you touch me.”

“Come on, babe, you ain’t no cherry. . . .” He groped for her and she was sick of it. After seeing him shoot up with H—he’d never had the poor taste before to shoot up right in front of her—she was almost physically ill with the thought of her few months of close association with the man. She was ready to move on—life with Broome and these sick creeps was worse than life with her father, “One Thumb” Gordon, a gangster who pretended respectability. She hated phonies, like her father, and she hated Broome as well, for his brand of phoniness.

“You aren’t anything but a pusher, Broome,” she told him bitterly. “Flower power? Some of the kids in this town are on the level with their peace and love, but you . . . you’re a bum, a peddler, a cheap gangster worse than my father ever was.”

“Your father? Who’s your father?” Broome wasn’t having much luck with trying to speak, everything was coming out slurred.

It was disgusting to Lyn, this rolling around with a doped-up lowlife on a threadbare sofa in a back-stage people closet with dirty wooden floors and graffitied walls. Broome was no threat, he was already on the verge of incoherence, sliding into dreaminess. She started for the door.

Then heard the footsteps.

Somebody banged on the door.

Fear caught her by the throat and she instinctively ducked in the bathroom, where Broome had so often shot up, his works still on the sink.

She heard Broome mumble something out there, maybe a greeting. A few more words.

Then a gun-shot.

Kneeling tremblingly, she peered through the keyhole and saw a person she recognized pocket a revolver and turn and go. She waited three long minutes before opening the closet wide enough to see Broome, lying on his back like a broken doll, his freaky blond Orphan Annie curls splattered with blood and brains, skull split by a bullet.

She puked in the sink.

She wiped the tears from her eyes, found control of her retching stomach, wondered what to do . . .

Webb.

That was it, she had to find Webb.

He could do something about this.

At least he could take her away from it. . . .

She ran.

GEORGE FRANCO
was pissed, in several senses of the word.

He sat by the window and stared down the block at the extended sign of Chelsey Ford Sales, the building he’d seen Nolan enter several times during the day—the last time around midnight with a pretty girl, a girl George thought he recognized.

It was too late to be drinking, but George was. He sat in his red and white striped nightshirt like a colorful human beach ball and nursed a bottle of Haig and Haig.

That fucker Nolan. Who did he think he was, pushing George around? And why hadn’t Nolan called? One whole day gone since he and Nolan had made their pact, with Nolan saying he’d check in every now and then. Well, why the hell didn’t he?

George had decided he wanted a favor from Nolan—in return for keeping quiet about the thief’s presence in Chelsey. It was only fair . . . and it would be a favor that Nolan would get something out of in return. . . .

George swigged the Scotch, looking out at the blank street, the naked benches by the courthouse cannons. He didn’t see anybody watching him; Nolan said he had three men taking turns watching George, only now George wasn’t so sure. The tower clock read three-fifteen, but George wasn’t tired. He was all worked up. And he was thirsty.

It had come to him tonight, how he could use Nolan to better his position. To make his brother Charlie reconsider his opinion of George; to have some responsibility again. To get rid of that smug bastard Elliot and have the last laugh. . . .

If he could only remember that girl’s name! That girl who’d been with Nolan, it was
her
apartment they’d gone into!

He’d met her once in the drugstore below. She was a friendly little thing, she said she’d seen him and she guessed they were neighbors and how was he? But that was a long time ago, a year or so, and he couldn’t remember. . . .

Vicki something.

More Scotch. It would help him remember, more Scotch . . .

Trask.

Vicki Trask.

He waddled to the phone book, a pregnant hippo in a nightshirt, and thumbed through the pages.

Sure it was late, and Nolan would be pissed, but that was just too bad. He couldn’t push a Franco! Why, George could have his brother and an army down from Chicago in a few hours, with just a snap of his fingers! He could erase Nolan, have him wiped out like a chalk drawing on a blackboard! It was that easy.

He dialed. Nolan would talk to him, he knew he would.

It rang a long while and a female voice answered. He asked to speak to Mr. Webb and she said just a minute.

He waited for Nolan to come to the phone. The female voice had been pleasant. Like his whore’s, Francie, only more sincere. He’d been mean to Francie today, edgy over the thing with Nolan, and she’d walked out mad. He’d called her twice and asked her to come back and let him try and make it up to her. She’d hung up both times, but he still hoped she’d show. Maybe could patch things up with dollars and Scotch.

Then Nolan was on the phone.

“Yes, I know it’s late, Mr. Nolan . . . sorry, Mr.
Webb
. . . but I have to talk with you . . . I can help you take Elliot down. . . .”

There was a soft rap at the door.

George said, “Just a second, Nolan, I mean
Webb
. . . the door, I think my girl friend might be back, jus’ a second.”

George stumbled to the door, thinking to himself about how fine it would be to see his Francie at the moment, have a nice drink with her.

He opened the door and an orange-red blossom exploded in somebody’s hand and burst George’s head and he went down, a sinking barge.

Four

1

NOLAN REACHED
out in the darkness and stroked the sleeping girl’s breast. She stirred in her sleep, a smile playing on her lips. He ran his hand under the sheet and over her smooth body, over her thighs to the flat stomach, across the soft rises of breast, nipples now relaxed, the tightness of passion a memory.

Vicki Trask’s eyes opened slowly; then blinking, yawning, she said, “Are you still awake? It must be after two in the morning—”

Nolan flipped back the sheet. He took a gentle bite out of her stomach, nuzzling her. His lower lip cradled the dip of her navel, his upper lip tickled by the tiny hairs on her flesh.

“Salty,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“You taste salty.”

“I ought to,” she replied. “You worked me hard enough.”

“It’s good for you.” He moved up to her breasts and nibbled. The tips, remembering, grew taut again.

“Ouch! Take it easy!” Then she laughed and looped her arm around his neck.

He looked into her little girl face and said, “You were good, Vicki.”

The faint light from a street lamp poured through a circular window into the balcony and gave her skin a glow, an almost mystical look, like a textured photograph. She sat up in bed and propped her knees up and rested her chin on them, locking her hands around her legs. She stared at him, her smile slight.

“You were wonderful,” she told him. “I . . . I never felt so much a woman before.” She leaned over and brushed her lips across his cheek.

“You’re a woman all right,” he said. Not entirely true, but she had been a lot less girl than Nolan had expected.

Boredom from the so far sleepless night mixed with the infrequency of sexual activity in his life of late tempted Nolan to go another round with the girl. She’d admitted she wasn’t a virgin, but she’d been close to one, and he didn’t want to press her unduly.

But then her lips were on his chest and her fingers had found their way to his back, where they were digging in. She looked at him, resting her head against his chest, her expression one of sweet shame, asking him if . . . ? He reached his arms around her and covered her mouth with his.

Twenty minutes later Nolan was sitting in the dark smoking, his back against the headboard, his mind adrift. His left arm was around her shoulder, his hand cupping a breast. The other arm rested on the nightstand by the bed, where he’d laid his un-holstered .38. Vicki had floated into sleep a few minutes before, but he remained awake beside her, thinking and smoking, smoking and thinking . . .

Around three a.m. Vicki awoke suddenly and found Nolan still sitting back against the headboard with the fourth, maybe fifth cigarette tight in his lips. His grey eyes were open, two dead coals in the darkness.

“What’s the matter? What is it? Why are you still up?”

He didn’t look at her. “Have to be leaving soon.”

“Is it getting to be dangerous for you to stay around Chelsey, or what?”

“No, that’s not it . . . it’s always like that for me. It’s just that I got a feeling there’s nothing here that needs to be found out about Irene Tisor.”

Her hands played with the blanket. “When do you have to leave?”

“Soon, I said.” He had to figure a way to hit the Chelsey operation first—he had to get his hands on this Elliot guy and make his hit for the cash on hand and the hell with Chelsey and Sid Tisor’s dead kid.

“Will I see you again? After you leave Chelsey?”

“Sure.”

“You’re not telling the truth.”

There was no answer to that.

She buried her head in his chest and he felt her tears on his flesh.

He smoothed her hair. It was soft and fragrant. “Don’t pretend to yourself that you want me to stay.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m one or two nights in your life and that’s all I am. Accept me that way.”

She studied him, her eyes moist. “You know something, Nolan? No, don’t object to me calling you Nolan, you’re not Earl Webb you’re Nolan and in my bed I’ll call you Nolan if I damn well please. I have you pretty well figured out. You walk around like a mobile brick wall. So cold, the ice forms on your shoulders. And you know what you are under all that ice, Nolan?”

“You tell me.”

“You’re all the emotions you despise to show. You’re like that gun over there. You’re a hunk of metal until you get in a demanding situation, then you explode. I’ve been with you only a few hours, but I’ve seen you kick a man in the head and later come out of your motel room looking like you just wrestled a grizzly and won. And I’ve shared my bed with you, and you were tender enough, I guess, but that damn gun of yours remained on the nightstand beside you all the while. Anybody as violent as you, and as passionate, is a fire-bomb of emotion. Now . . . what do you think about that?”

He was silent for a moment. Then said, “I think you talk too much.”

She laughed her warm laugh and nodded that she guessed he was right and leaned her head against his shoulder.

“You going to stay in Chelsey, Vicki?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have . . . have a problem or two that may keep me here.”

“It’s your business,” Nolan shrugged.

She smiled. “I guess you think I was out of line a minute ago with my dimestore psychology. Now here I am keeping secrets from you. But . . . everybody needs a few secrets.”

“Sure.”

The phone rang.

“Who the hell would call you at this hour?”

“Nobody.”

“You better get it.”

“Are you here, Nolan?”

“Earl Webb is.”

“Okay . . .”

“Careful,” he told her. “Too goddamn late for a phone call. It’s going to mean something, whatever it is.”

“Even a wrong number?” She laughed.

“Answer it before they give up.”

She climbed out of bed and threw a filmy negligee over her creamy-white skin. She flew down the spiral staircase that connected the balcony to the living room and grabbed up the phone, which was on the bar in the kitchenette. Upstairs, Nolan leaned back and took a cigarette from the half-empty pack and popped it into his mouth.

From below, her voice came, “It’s for you, Earl.”

He got out of bed, slipped into his pants and shoes and went down the spiral staircase, taking his .38 with him.

“This is Webb.”

“This is George, George Franco . . .”

“What do you want, George? A little late for you to be up, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I know it’s late, Mr. Nolan . . .”

“Webb.”

“Sorry, Mr.
Webb
. . . but I have to talk to you!”

“About what?”

“I can help you take Elliot down.”

There was a hesitation at Franco’s end.

“What’s wrong, George?”

“Just a second, Nolan, I mean
Webb
, the door, I think my girl friend might be back. Jus’ a second.”

There was silence and Nolan looked at Vicki and said, “Think he’s been into the cooking sherry again.”

She smiled in confusion and Nolan half-grinned and the receiver coughed the sound of a gun-shot.

Nolan dropped the receiver as if it were molten and ran out the door and down the steps to street level. He wasn’t wearing a jacket—just a T-shirt—and the cold air hit him like a pail of water.

From the doorway above Vicki called down, “Nolan . . . what are you doing . . . ?”

“Wait here,” he said. “Somebody just got shot. Stay put, don’t let anybody in but me.”

“But . . .”

“Shut the door and wait, Vicki,” he told her, wheeling around to face the deserted courthouse square, marked only by a few scattered parked cars whose owners lived in apartments over stores. Down the street a light was on in George’s penthouse above the Berry Drug.

Nolan ran to the corner, turned and slowed into the alley. He kept the .38 in front of him and made sure the alley was empty. Then he jumped up and pulled down the fire escape and climbed to where he had used his glass cutter to get in the day before. He elbowed the cardboard patch and it gave way easily. He slipped in his hand, unlocked the window and crawled into the apartment.

There was no one inside except George, and he was over by the door, dead, his head cracked like a bloody egg.

The killer had used a .45, Nolan thought, or possibly a .38 at close range. Plugged George right square in the forehead with it. Effective. Not particularly original, but effective.

The killer hadn’t bothered to hang up the phone, which was making the loud noises the Bell people use to persuade you to hang the damn thing up. Nolan slipped it onto the hook and heard sounds coming from the drug store below.

He climbed back out the window and down the ’scape and dropped silently to the ground. Cautiously he made his way around to the front of the store, wondering if the killer had made his way out yet.

Then Nolan heard tires squealing away from a curb down the street from behind him.

In the alley he found a back door, still open, where the killer had hot-footed it from the drug store to a car parked along the side street. Nolan could see it in the distance, blocks down. It was a dark blue Cadillac having no trouble at all disappearing.

He stood there for a while thinking, cold as hell and just as he was wishing he’d brought his cigarettes along, a blue-and-white squad car sidled up next to him. “Chelsey Police” was written on the door in small print, as if they were ashamed of it.

A man in a nicely-pressed light brown business suit stepped out of the squad car, flanked by two uniformed officers. The plainclothes cop had a tanned, weathered face, a shrewd, tough cop’s face, and that was one of the worst kinds. The cop being a plainclothes meant he was probably one of the smartest, most experienced officers of the Chelsey force. Which didn’t necessarily mean much. Nolan figured being a top cop on Chelsey’s force was an honor akin to being the harem’s head eunuch.

The cop motioned the uniformed pair up the ’scape and into George’s apartment, everyone obviously knowing just what to expect. A few minutes after they went in, one of them, a scrubbed-faced type, looked down at the cop who was standing below with Nolan and said, “Yup.”

The cop smiled. “What’s that you got in your hand?”

“It’s a gun.”

“You got that filed with the city?”

“I got,” Nolan said, stuffing the .38 in his waist band, “a closed mouth till I see a lawyer.”

“I’d tell you to keep your shirt on, pal, if you were wearing one.” The cop’s tough face broke into a wide grin. “I sure hope you haven’t fired that thing lately.”