The Road's End, page 5
The neat gray man plucked a stray white hair from the lapel of his jacket. He looked at my chin, at my middle, at the crown of my head-everywhere except at my eyes. "Got any idea who did it for you?" he asked at length. "No," I said. "Not yet."
He was startled. "Whaddya mean, not yet?"
"The doctor says I may get my memory back any time," I told him. "Maybe even tomorrow."
"That's real interesting." He said it as though it was interesting-to him. The pair of them was beginning to get on my nerves, though I didn't quite know why. They were acting too much as though I were their specimen bug on a pin, just alive enough to make certain movements when prodded. I was deciding to try that long walk around Brutal when Mack Fisher's voice sounded menacingly behind me.
"What the hell you doing in my county, Clef?"
Fisher limped past me and almost stepped on the gray, man's shoes. He glared into the evasive eyes. "You know I don't let hoodlums hang around my county, bum!" The gray man, Clef, waved his hands placatingly, but his face and voice were nasty. "Now, Sheriff, that's not the way to talk. This is the U.S.A. It's a free country, haven't you heard?"
"Nuts!" Fisher barked into Clef's face. "What're you doing in my county?"
"Came to see him," Clef muttered, moving his head in my direction. Brutal moved in alongside Clef and nearly stepped on Fisher's shoes. Fisher glared up into Brutal's impassive face, then over at me.
"What're you talking with them about?"
"Search me," I said, shrugging. "If I know these characters, I sure don't know about it now. They just came out of the alley at me."
Fisher swiveled back at Clef. "The alley? Coming out of the alley door from the bar?"
"Sure," Clef admitted guilelessly. "We went in to see Danny. Went into the back office. His partner, this Jeff fellow, he was there. He told us all about Danny losing his memory. Then he let us out through the alley. Didn't want his customers to see him keeping rough company, I guess."
Fisher sneered at him. "You and Danny cooking up a deal to open one of your joints in this town, is that it?"
Clef sneered back at him. "We had business, that's all." He glanced over at me inquiringly. "But now that you've lost your memory, Danny, I guess the deal's all off, huh?"
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," I told him, feeling confused and sore all over again.
Brutal looked my way and opened his big mouth and I spoke for the first time, with a voice like a rough rasp.
"Dat's rough, kid. Not even membrin' killin' dat Elsie skirt. Coulda been fun, huh? Kill 'er slow or fast, huh?" Heat rushed into my brain and chased my sense out.
I leaped at Brutal. I slammed my fist into his middle with all my strength. My fist bounced off a wall of muscle, throbbing with pain. The punch knocked Brutal back just one step. Surprise flooded his face. Then he laughed hollowly, and came at me with one huge hand folded into a massive fist.
Mack Fisher whipped a gun out of a shoulder holster under his jacket before Brutal reached me. Brutal stopped dead in his tracks and I reeled with the punch that hadn't hit me. Brutal was enough to scare anyone. He scared me.
Fisher kept the gun on Brutal but spoke to Clef, biting the words out through slitted lips. "Get the hell out of this county before I toss you both in a cell for assaulting a citizen!"
"But Ginger hit him!" Clef yelled indignantly.
"How would you like sixty days!"
Clef spat on the sidewalk beside Fisher's shoes and brushed past him with his white head down like a charging bull. "Come on!" he ordered Brutal as he got into a black Buick sedan parked by the curb.
Brutal hesitated a second, eying Fisher's gun and apparently toying with the notion of taking it away from him. He glared past it at me.
"I'll get you later, punk!" Then he followed Clef. Fisher put his gun away as Clef started the car. He put his hands on his hips, not taking his eyes from Clef.
"Clef," he said evenly, "I know you've got one place opened somewheres in this county again. When I find it this time, I'll take good care of where you and your boys spend the next twenty years."
"I've got news for you, too," Clef snapped back. "Election day's coming up. I've got money that says you won't be wearing that badge the day after election."
Fisher's sullen eyes followed the Buick as it pulled away.
I interrupted his thoughts. "Just who in hell are they?"
"Clef's a big-time gambler. His bodyguard's just a thug. The syndicate's been trying to muscle in on this county for years." He eyed me with his old suspicion. "I've kept them on the hide-and-run so far. I want to keep this county's gambling strictly small-time. That way it doesn't begin tying strings to county politics!"
"I wonder," I mused, "if I did have some sort of deal with them. This new life of mine is getting more complicated by the minute."
Fisher tried piercing my eyes with his again. "I don't know how to take you, Danny. If your amnesia's an act, it's a damn good one."
I shrugged. "That's your problem. I've got plenty of my own."
I turned away and headed on toward the bar. Fisher limped up beside me.
"I've arranged for the funeral," he said. "It'll be tomorrow morning around nine o'clock. Bring the Brills over to the Municipal Building and we'll go on from there."
"Thanks. I'll take care of the expenses afterwards."
"Sure enough."
We reached the bar entrance. "See you tomorrow," he said. He limped away. I took a deep breath and went inside.
It was dim and cool inside. A small bar, and a few round tables with chairs. A few men customers. Jeff was behind the bar with a short, fat, low-browed character with a vacant smile. Jeff introduced him as Salty Karlog, our bar help.
Salty pumped my hand. "Real glad to have ya back, Danny," he said, sounding as if he meant it.
"So you still can't remember anything, huh?" Jeff said, shaking his head sadly.
"Not a thing," I told him. I sat on one of the bar stools, facing them. "So I'm just going to start asking everybody questions. Try to figure out where I am and what I'm doing, you know. For instance," I looked at Jeff and tried to make my question casual, "where do you live, Jeff?"
"Out on Merion Road. It's a couple miles outside town, off the main road."
"You go over the bridge to get there?"
"Sure," he said, and then he looked at me suspiciously. "Why?"
"Just asking. Where do you live, Salty?"
"Me? At Mrs. Isaacs' boardinghouse."
"Here in town?"
"Yeah. Gee, Danny, don't you remember anything?"
"Nope," I said, getting off the stool. "Well, Jeff, better begin showing me around, so I can take over when you leave tonight."
Jeff took me upstairs first. It was just a big, bare room with some chairs at one end. A tall, skinny, pale-faced man in his early forties sat behind a table near the top of the stairs. He was alone, playing solitaire.
"This is Burt Kane," Jeff said. "He has the blackjack game."
Kane didn't get up. He gave me his limp hand for an instant, then took it back.
"Sorry about what happened to you, Danny," he croaked. "Guess one of the other two thousand guys in Elsie's life went a little nuts."
"That the way you figure it?" I asked, sitting on the edge of his table.
"Sure. What else? That little dame was a bitch."
"You sound bitter."
"Me? Oh, sure, I was one of the two thousand. Only for long enough to lose my other girl, though."
"Was she worth it?" I asked him.
"Not to me she wasn't. A teaser. I even got her up in my room at the hotel, with a bottle. We killed the bottle and all I got out of it was a feel."
His face took on some life.
"It was a good feel, though," he said. "She was a luscious little dish. I miss her."
"Have any ideas on who killed her?" I asked him.
"No ideas," he said, and he went on with his solitaire. Then he looked up again. "You know," he said, "I don't think she was worth that much to anybody. To kill her, I mean. Except maybe that nice little kid Fisher's got as a deputy. Every time she didn't have anybody else in her hands, he always seemed to be around. Like a pet dog."
I filed that thought for future reference.
"Looks like business is lousy," I said to him, motioning at the empty room.
"No. They'll begin trickling in soon. Most business is late business. We do all right."
"Oh?" I said. "How about you? How do we work it with you?"
"He splits with us," Jeff said. "He gives us half his winnings for the concession here."
"I see," I said. "And the boys that shoot craps at the other end of the room give us a half buck from each pot, right?"
"That's right," Jeff said.
"We must be making a mint."
"We don't do that well," Jeff said. He sounded defensive. I looked at him. He looked defensive.
"Come on," he said, "I'll show you about the liquor."
"O.K." I started to follow him, then stopped.
"By the way, Burt," I asked Kane, "where were you yesterday, around five and six in the evening?"
"Me? I was here. Why?"
"When do you eat? And where?"
"Any time I feel like it. I go to the diner down the street, whenever I get a lull up here." He looked wary. "That's when Jim Brill got killed, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I said. "Where were you, Jeff?"
"I was driving back here from leaving you off at your house. What're doing? Playing cop?"
"No. Just asking a few questions. You left me off before four. How come it took you so long to get here?"
"I stopped off at my house to pick up a few things," he said angrily. "Don't get me mad, Danny."
"O.K., sorry." I turned back to Burt Kane. "Were you here when I closed up and left the night I disappeared?"
"No, Danny. I left just a little after midnight. Me and Salty went out together. You had all the lights turned out but there was something you still had to do in the office."
"Thanks. Burt, do you know who I was tangled up with before Elsie Daniels?"
Burt said, "No," softly. He didn't look up from his cards.
Jeff and I went down the stairs. He showed me the small office, through a door at one end of the bar. It contained a desk, chair, and sofa. A big squat safe contained some money and our books. Jeff showed me the combination. There was a gun in the desk, a Luger.
It took more than an hour for Jeff and Salty to show me where the liquor stock was placed, and teach me how to mix the drinks customers usually asked for. Then Jeff left for home. I was on my own.
CHAPTER TEN
I closed the bar a bit before midnight. Burt Kane came down after Salty left and gave me our cut of his night's take. He asked if I wanted him to hang around. When I told him not to, he said good night and left. I took his money and the day's receipts into the office. I counted it up, made the entries in the books, and put both money and books into the safe. I gave the combination dial a last twirl and headed out.
I locked the door to the bar and went down the pavement to my car. I was opening the car door when I heard shoe leather scrape over concrete in the alley behind me. My jittery nerves spasmed. I threw myself downward onto the front seat of my car, twisting violently and grabbing for the gun in my jacket pocket as I fell.
I landed on my back, bouncing, drawing the gun and snucking off its safety catch simultaneously with the flat, ugly report of a gun from the alley. A bullet fanned dangerously close. The gun in my hand pumped three times, sending whining bullets ricocheting into the mouth of the alley. A man yelled with pain. I leaped out of the car and chased the heavy sound of running shoes.
By the time I reached the alley, he had disappeared out the other end. I ran through the alley and came out on the next street, my gun ready. Halfway down the dimly lighted street a car took off from the curb and roared away, its gears crunching into high. Before I could shoot at it, the car swerved around a corner and was gone. It had been too dark to check the make of the car. I wasn't even sure whether it was a coupe or sedan, just what it was painted a dark color.
I went back down the alley to the other end. I got a flashlight from my car, noting the bullet hole in the car's canvas top. I began looking around the mouth of the alley. There it was, waist-high against the stone wall of the tailor shop across the alley from my bar-a blood smear, still wet. I'd hit whoever it was that shot at me. He'd fallen against the wall, or brushed against it when he started running.
I re-entered the bar and phoned Mack Fisher's office. No one answered. I looked him up in the phone book, found his home address, on Harper Road outside town, and his phone number. Fisher answered the phone, sounding sleepy. He became wide awake after I started telling him what happened.
"Whoever it was," I told him, "he's been shot. How bad I don't know… That should make him easy to identify."
"Unless," Fisher pointed out, "you only nicked him on the arm, say. Then the sleeve of his shirt or jacket will hide it."
"You might try," I said acidly, "rolling up a few sleeves."
"Yeah. I can see myself asking half of Bridesport and environs to roll up its sleeves. Well, well see. I'm coming into town to look around."
"And I'm going home to catch some sleep," I said.
"Watch yourself."
"I'm doing that. And now your town killer knows I am."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I started the Chevy and drove it out of town, glancing nervously up every dark side road that I sped past. My hand on the wheel trembled with inner weakness and my stomach crawled the same way it does when I'm hungry. I was scared.
It was the first time since I'd some to life in Carol Brill's bed that I was really scared that way. The fact that I had been expecting someone to take a shot at me, just as he had finally done, hadn't really been knowledge that my emotions had caught. Now all of me knew it. Having a gun of my own gave me only a hollow, unreal courage. I had to face the truth: I hadn't the slightest idea whom to be wary of, and I couldn't always be vigilant. My would-be killer, on the other hand, certainly knew who I was. He could watch me, perhaps stand right beside me and talk cordially-and wait for just the right moment to try killing me again.
I took a sharp curve in the road too fast and slowed the car. What was I running for? Nobody was chasing me. He didn't have to chase me. He could just sit around wherever he wanted and wait for me to come back his way. Wait for me to walk past him, or shake his hand, before he chose the moment to put a bullet in my back.
I shook my head angrily and tried to concentrate on the simple job of pushing the car ahead along the dark ribbon of road. But despite my efforts, my mind slid back into the treacherous morass of confusion. Being born a full-grown adult was too complicated. There were too many people around me. Too many new faces crowded my mind, friends who might be enemies. I couldn't sort them out, evaluate their meanings to me.
My mind veered to two faces in that crowd that I could evaluate in part: Clef and his thug, Brutal. They sure as hell weren't friendly. Brutal had warned he'd get even with me. But that wasn't the sort of thing you shot a man for. Besides, he wasn't the kind that would want to get even any way except with his massive hands. His boss, Clef, was a different matter. Clef had said we had a deal working. Had we? Maybe it had gone sour, or I had gone sour on it, and he wanted to be sure I kept my mouth shut about it.
I couldn't force my thinking any further in that direction in a straight line. All the other faces closed in. I cursed them away and shoved the accelerator to the floor. The car shot forward again, its wheels skidding on the dew-wet road surface. I kept the speed there. I liked it better that way.
It was a crystal-clear night, so I left the car out on the driveway beside the station wagon instead of putting it in the garage. As I climbed wearily out of the front seat I realized how hard the long day had been on me, physically and otherwise. The death of my only man friend, the inquest, the fight with my wife, the new faces, learning a new job, and getting shot at, all in one day, added up to an intolerable weight on my nervous system. I wanted nothing more than to sink into the sweet oblivion of a soft, white bed.
I slammed the car door shut and plodded toward the house. The windows of Pat's bedroom were lighted. So were the windows of the downstairs living room.
A sudden movement in the darkness near the front door caught my eye. My body convulsed, freezing me in my tracks. In an instant I had my gun in my hand, snucking off its safety, pointing it where I had seen the movement. A shadowed figure detached itself from the dark and moved toward me. Light from one of the windows suddenly caught the figure. It was Carol Brill.
I relaxed so abruptly that I almost fell over. Shaking, I fumbled the gun back into my jacket pocket. The stirring air was cold-wet against my face and I realized my skin was bathed in a sheen of perspiration.
Carol was wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe. It must have belonged to my wife, for it reached to her ankles. Carol's tiny figure and young, pointed breasts contrasted with Pat's tall, full-breasted lushness. Somehow, looking at Carol in Pat's robe made me feel Carol belonged to me. Which, I decided on second thought, was ridiculous- especially since Pat herself didn't belong to me.
"What are you doing out here like that?" I asked her. She came nearer and lifted her face to mine. Her face contained much of the sly, grave humor and spunk that had been missing earlier that day. "Waiting for you," she said simply.
"Where's your mother? Where's my wife?"
I spoke brusquely. Her presence there in that clear night made me remember too sharply the feel of her. Or had I only dreamed that night in my delirium?
"Ma's in the room. She's been there most of the time, wantin' to be by herself."
"How about my wife?"
Carol took hold of my hand with her small one. I glanced involuntarily up at the windows of Pat's room.
"Don't worry," Carol said, almost laughing for the first time that day. "She's in her room. We were sittin' downstairs. She went on up when we heard your car comin'." That hurt. The thought that Pat wanted so definitely to avoid me was the day's final crusher. I plodded on toward the house, Carol tagging along beside me, her hand still in mine.
