Rainy City (27 page)

Stepping onto the rock floor from the boards, I turned around suddenly and faced the Crowel/s. He didn’t want to gat too close, so I was forcing them to stop in the middle of the sagging boards. Angus didn’t seem to notice. I could tell from the manner in which he moved that he knew these tunnels like he knew his own heart. He had been across the perilous passage so many times, he no longer thought of it as a hazard. He was like somebody in an apartment on the thirtieth floor leaning over his balcony. The height ceased to seem like a peril after one had lived around it for a spell. And Crowell had lived around it for a spell. Muriel clutched his arm tighter.

Together, the couple weighed at least four hundred pounds, and it showed in the way the one-by-eights bowed under their feet. Crowell set the lantern down in front of himself. Its upward light shaped a monster out of his face, and out of his wife’s as well. Two griffins in a cave.

“I’m sorry, Angus,” said Muriel. “But I heard you speaking with Melissa on the phone and you were scared.”

“Angus Crowell’s never been scared a day in his life. I was cautious. Sure, she called me. I tried to talk her out of this big confrontation she kept insisting on. But it was no dice. This bitch of a psychologist she’s been seeing’s got her all messed up.”

Crowell swatted himself, flapping his free arm, trying to keep warm, then squatted and held his hand out over the squiggles of heat rising from the lantern. His sopping clothes were having an effect.

“I took care of the psychologist for you,” Muriel added. “What?” His voice lowered to an almost inaudible whisper, as if he were tAlking to his confessor.

“I listened on the extension when that man, Holder, gave his report to you. He said Black was talking to her. I knew if she was treating Melissa she might know something. Something she had no right to know. I drove over and waited at her apartment. I was planning to wait all day and all night if need be, but she came home for lunch. She refused to answer any of my questions. She refused to talk about it at all. That’s when I knew she was hiding something. So I kept her from talking.”

Angus Crowell stared incredulously at his wife. They had been married decades and he was just getting to know her.

“Nice job,” I said. “Everyone thought a man had done it. Women don’t often strangle other women. A nice touch, too, partially disrobing her. But you didn’t quite finish the job, did you? So you bashed her over the head, too.”

“Muriel,” said Angus, angrily. “You idiot. None of that was necessary. Don’t you know anything? I’ve got a load of dynamite in Gurty. Harry’s right here underneath us. I’m going to blow this place to hell. They wouldn’t find him in a million years. Not even if they knew where to look.”

“This must be where it happened,” I said. “Twenty some odd years ago, you and your daughter and Harry were standing right about where we are now. Only Harry never left. When Melissa wanted to talk about it, you tried to make people think she was mentally disturbed. You were so good at it, you convinced everyone. Even Melissa.”

“Shut up.”

“You did it, didn’t you?”

“Look, we had a fight. It might not have been anything, but we had this fight. Harry found out I was misappropriating funds.”

“Let me guess. The guy’s name was Harry Stubbing.” Crowell’s jaw dropped open. “How did you know that?”

“Been doing a little research.”

“Poor old Harry. He thought he knew all about everything. He thought I was just an ignoramus who happened to have a few extra bucks to invest in his company. We went in partners, and then the sonofabitch wanted to buy me out for peanuts. Took me for a fool. Said I was ruining things, that I had no business sense. I guess I showed him. Look what I built Taltro into. Look at it, would you?”

“What’d you do? Kill the guy and then fake a suicide note?”

“You want me to go to jail for something that wasn’t my fault? He started the rumpus. And then he died. I couldn’t show him to anybody. I had to hide him. The suicide note was only a convenience. I went to his office and typed it up. They found it Monday morning. If he’d just disappeared, it might have been years before things got straightened out. I was saving myself a little time, that’s all.”

“Never mind who it hurt. Your sister had something at stake, too, didn’t she?”

“Eh? She thought she was going to marry the jerk. She was too old to get married. I told her that. She was almost forty.”

“She was going to tell me something. She thought there was something fishy about Harry’s death. She suspected you, didn’t she?”

I turned to Muriel. “You were afraid if a detective got onto it, if he spoke to your sister-in-law, spoke to your daughter, he might piece this jigsaw puzzle together. You were afraid Angus might be found out. What did Mary Dawn threaten? To hire me to find Harry’s body? To sick me onto the case to prove Harry Stubbins didn’t commit suicide? She thought she was paranoid about the whole affair until Melissa told her she had something serious to talk about, something that had happened years ago. Maybe it was Melissa’s tone of voice. Maybe she combined it with hints she’d been unconsciously picking up over the years, but she thought she was finally going to find out how Harry died. Didn’t she?”

Angus was shivering like a dog in snow. “Who else knows this? Who else?”

“Sure, I’ll hand over a list of names and you two can drive around and strangle all of them. We’ll put it in the paper and then you’ll have to strangle the whole city. Percy has some prints, but he doesn’t have any suspects. You go through with this, and my friends will see that he checks those prints against your fingers. Both of you. There’s a rope with the state seal on it waiting for your necks. Maybe they’ll get cute and make it a double ceremony.”

“Nonsense, boy

I can handle more things than you know. You, for instance. Fm not going to shoot you. Not necessary. I’m merely going to blow out this lantern and make my way back to the mouth of the mine. I can do it in the dark. I doubt whether you’ll get ten feet. There are a number of false tunnels along the way and it’s very easy in a pitch-dark environment to get completely twisted around. You’ll find more than one hole to fall into, too. All I need is one or two minute’s‘ head start. “What about me?” Muriel asked, in a wee voice. “I’ve got my dynamite. Before you know it, I’ll have the whole mountain down around your ears. If anyone even knew you were in here, they wouldn’t bother to dig. If they started tomorrow, it would take ten years just to find this shaft.”

“What about me?” Muriel repeated.

I said, “So you bury me in here and then what do you do with Melissa?”

“Missy? We’ll figure out something.”

“Sure you will. Me, and then Melissa. That’ll make four murders in a week between the pair of you. Nice, pleasant work, if you can get it. It’ll look real good in your dossier. Founder of your church, president of the Boy Scouts, murderer.”

Crowell glared at me. “Holder warned me you might try to make me mad.”

“You’ve been mad since you were eighteen.”

“Eighteen? What do you know about that?”

“You had a run-in with your father, didn’t you? And then he committed suicide? The pattern is beginning to look familiar.”

“My father was a completely different situation. That old bastard deserved to die.”

“I’ll bet you were just the one to make sure he did.”

“You should have seen the look on his face.”

“You’re a couple of moral idiots.” I said it low and soft, but still it seemed to reverberate throughout the tunnels. Angus Crowell’s breathing stopped and the gun wavered in his fist. For a few seconds he had the look of a man who was about to put a bullet into another man. Shaking his wife off his wet arm, he pushed her from behind and said, “Over there with him.”

“What?”

“You heard me you, stupid, meddling woman. I never would have been caught without your interference. If you’d just stayed out of it. But no. Not you. You bungle everything. Get over there with him.”

“You can’t be serious,” Muriel said, a screeching frog in her throat. It was the sort of shock that comes only once or twice in a lifetime, and is followed closely by swallow-ing a bottle of sleeping pills or a complete emotional and social retreat from the world. I almost felt sorry for her. She was sniveling loudly. He pushed her again and she resisted. The timbers under their feet bounced slowly and made weak cracking noises. She was much stronger than she looked. But then, she had been a physical therapist. Physical therapists had to be strong.

He cuffed her across the face and she stopped resisting. She didn’t come over to where I was standing, but she stopped resisting.

He stooped, picked up the lamp, partially turned around and began sidling out of the dogleg. He didn’t want to turn his back on me, so he walked sideways, crablike. As the light receded, I began to panic. He had pegged it. Without a light I would be worse than helpless. I was beginning to lose perspective already. It would take hours to grope my way out of the tunnels in the pitch black. Maybe days.

I ran at him.

I sprinted to his right, to his blind side. He was cocked halfway around to his left, trying to keep an eye on both me and Muriel at the same time he picked his way across the one-by-eights.

In a split second I had Muriel’s bulky body between him and me. I didn’t need to get real close, just so I hit those boards hard while his weight was still on them. They had been spongy under my hundred and eighty pounds. They had bowed and made slight popping sounds under their combined burden. The three of us should collapse the affair.

The noise was stupendous. The lantern flew out of his hands and rolled in front of him onto the solid tunnel floor.

The floor disappeared beneath our feet and I scrabbled onto the ledge that ran along the far side of the pit. His wife disappeared immediately and silently. Crowell slid backwards, boards cracking and splitting under him.

He rolled onto his side, reaching out for me. He had realized what I was doing and tried to drag me down with him. He was a day late and a dollar short. He disappeared in a thunder of boards and rocks and pow-dery dust. He whooped all the way down.

He hit like a wet pillow. Though it wasn’t as deep as I thought, about twenty feet, the hole was sheer. Unless a ladder was mounted in the side of the rock wall, neither one of them would be coming up on their own.

Banging my knees on the sides of the pit, I managed to keep my arms and chest on the ledge. Then, when the crashing stopped, I swung first one leg and then the other up onto the ledge. I crawled on my hands and sore knees toward the dying lamp. As soon as I righted it, it burned bright.

Swinging the lantern out in front of me, I could see the hole was fifteen feet across. The remnants of an old wooden ladder were affixed into the rock on the other side. Only the top three or four rungs were still usable. They wouldn’t be climbing out on that.

When I leaned over the side, it took me a few seconds to make out the figure of a man among the splintered boards. It took me another few seconds to realize he was awake and was looking at me. His right hand was combing the darkness. I knew what he was feeling for. I had already searched for it fruit-lessly on top. His wife lay beside him, her eyes fixed and buggy. Her head was angled off sharply, twisted and screwed around like a child’s doll under a tricycle wheel. Her neck had snapped in the fall. She was dead.

“We kind of got things reversed here, don’t we, old timer?” I said.

Crowell did not reply.

“You hurt?” I asked.

“Think I cracked some ribs. My leg might be broken.”

“That kind of puts you between a rock and a hard place, eh?”

“Be a sport, Black. Think what you could do with a hundred thousand dollars.”

“What? You going to pay me to clam up?”

“A hundred grand. How’d that be?”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s a splendid idea. I’ll take your money and I’ll go home with it and next week Holder or some other guraball you hire will slink up behind me with a lead pipe and put stars in my eyes. You must think I’m a dope.”

“You might as well take the money. They’ll never pin Harry’s death on me. I have too many friends. The absolute worst that could happen would be that I’d have to jump bail and leave the country. But I know plenty of places a man can live with my kind of money. Plenty of places where they can’t extradite me.

And that’s the worst that can happen. There are other things. Witnesses can change their minds. Or they can disappear altogether. Evidence can be lost. I’ve pulled strings before and I can pull them again. Jail? Not me. You’d better think again. Now go get some help and yank me out of here.”

There were three of them in the pit. Crowell, his dead wife, and a remarkably complete skeleton: Harry Stubbins. They made quite a trio, though the two dead ones had expired twenty-two years apart.

“You got a watch?”

Crowell bent his arm around and peered at his wrist. “Busted.”

“Too bad.”

“What are you planning to do? Black? Get me some help in here. I can’t get out alone.”

“You can play three-handed pinochle, eh?”

“Black? You talk a tough game, but you won’t do it. You’re no assassin. You’d never be able to live with yourself if you abandoned me down here. I’ve got reports on you, Black. You’re no murderer. You wouldn’t know how.”

“Why don’t you give me some quick lessons?”

“Black?” It was a wail, almost a caterwaul, like a sick stir-crazy cat in the zoo.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve convinced me justice will never be done any other way.”

“Black! Get me out of here!”

Ducking low, I trimmed the lamp so that I wasn’t quite as bright. Crowell thought I was skulking away down the tunnels.

“Black? Black! Are you still here? Get me out of this pit.”

“So you can have me hit?” My soft voice surprised him as I peered into the pit again. “So you can mess up your daughter’s life even more, maybe even kill her? So you can get ahold of your granddaughter? You’re a sick man, Crowell. And you’re powerful. You know how to get things accomplished. I think Seattle and maybe the rest of the world might be better off if you stayed down there a while.”