Always Leave ’Em Dying (10 page)

All of them were there except Nurse Dixon. But I saw the entire picture through a huge transparent face that filled the sky, an ugly, bony face, cheekbones thrusting through tight-stretched skin, and a great black mole crawling over it like a soft round slug. It was a liquid face, shimmering and melting, forming and re-forming, always there before me.

I started to run, not to get away from the others, who followed and surrounded me, but to get away from that face. Then I felt my body roll, turn on the ground, and woke relieved to know that it had been a dream.

I awoke, sun overhead slanting down through branches of the trees above me and searing my face. I lay in the clearing, mud encrusted on me, body stiff and cramped. I moved, feeling the tug of stiff, still tired muscles, and knew that I had been dreaming, was not dreaming now, but the face was still before me. It melted and sagged and shimmered in front of my eyes. I could see stiff black hairs jutting from the ugly mole. The face seemed to balloon to preposterous size, then it shrank and, finally, it was still.

In that moment of waking, my mind wouldn't function, and for a long minute I stared at the face of Nurse Dixon. It was motionless now, not shimmering or transparent, but solid and real, and I could see the sharp blood-drained features, pointed chin, dirt-filled eyes. It was as though the sockets in her skull had been filled with mud that had hardened and dried.

I was on my stomach, head turned toward her. She lay propped against the side of the shallow grave, half out of it. One hand was pressed beneath her body, now rigid in death, almost as if she had been trying to climb free of the ground and had been frozen in the moment of escape.

Then came the memory of those last moments of consciousness, the memory of my confused thoughts when I'd seen Dixon's face. I'd thrust her from me, then, finally, grasped her shoulders again to stare uncomprehending at the lifeless features, left her resting half out of the grave while I crawled a few feet away. I'd known then that I had followed Wolfe here and listened while he buried her; and after that I'd seen her when she'd burst into his office at Greenhaven. A minute or two later I had killed Wolfe. I knew I had killed him. I'd known it as I succumbed to weariness and the need for sleep. I knew it now.

Suddenly I was conscious only of my weakness and a gnawing hunger. The sun had started down the western sky; I'd slept for at least twelve hours. I got slowly to my feet, knees watery, and stood straight. With my back to the stiff corpse of Miss Dixon, I stretched, worked the rest of the ache from my body. Then I toppled the late Miss Dixon back into her grave, covered her up, and got the hell out of there.

While walking, I thought of Dr. Wolfe and Miss Dixon—logically now, not as a dead man gadding about and a dead woman who appeared before me after burial—and I soon had several facts that led to some logical conclusions. One was that there must be a third person, somebody still alive, a man or woman who could answer questions. And that third person must have known, and would know now, where Wolfe had been around eleven-thirty or so last night when I'd followed him through the rain; would know what Wolfe had done and maybe why.

My Cad would be hotter than a stripteaser's tassel by now, so I kept walking until I reached an isolated service station. In the washroom, I cleaned up the best I could, then waited for the attendant to start servicing a car and went inside. The cops had taken everything from my pockets, including money, but I found the station's private phone under a counter and got the operator and then the number I wanted at the Los Angeles City Hall.

When a woman's voice answered, I said gruffly, "This is Sergeant Benton. Who've I got?"

"June. Hi, Tom. What you want?"

I knew June, and she knew me slightly. I tried to make my voice even gruffer. "I'm out in Raleigh now, June. Got a lead on some heists to a place called Greenhaven—you know, where Scott flipped his wig."

"Yeah. So what?"

"So get me all the phone calls out of Greenhaven from eight o'clock last night, say, to around 2 a.m. I'll need to know what phones they came from, too."

"Want me to call you back?"

"I won't be here. Call you in half an hour, OK?"

"Sure, Tom. I'll try to get it by then. Greenhaven, huh?"

"Yeah. Uh, what you think of that Scott? Funny, huh?"

"It figured. I always thought he was a little goofy." She laughed. "He sure tore it this time, though, didn't he, Tom?"

"Yeah," I said. "He sure tore it." I hung up and left.

In thirty minutes, I came back and called June again. She reported that there had been only four calls from Greenhaven during the time I'd specified. Two had been from Larchmont 8-4426, which was the chief psychiatrist's number, and two had been from Larchmont 8-4429—Dr. Frank Wolfe's phone. I wrote the times down as June rattled them off, knowing that if she'd guessed I wasn't Benton, there'd be a lot of activity going on as this call was traced.

Calls had gone out from Wolfe's phone at nine-sixteen and nine-forty. They were to the same Davenport number, but there had been no later call—none around the time Wolfe had been digging that grave. I swore to myself; my bright idea hadn't told me a thing. Maybe it hadn't been so bright after all.

I said, "OK, where'd the call from this psychiatrist's phone go?"

"Police department there in Raleigh. Both calls."

"How about the other two?" I was just going through the motions, the way Benton would have, but as I asked the last question I remembered that around nine-twenty or a little later I'd been in my strait jacket—and had damn near been killed. Both calls had been close to that time, one just before and one afterward. I didn't think it meant anything.

"That Davenport number," June said, "is listed for Arthur Trammel."

I was quiet for so long, staring at the phone, that June called me Tom twice before I snapped out of it, thanked her, and hung up. I stood there another minute, my brain vibrating like a tap dancer's fanny, then glanced at the station attendant, who was still puttering outside, and dug out the phone book. There wasn't any car out there now, and the attendant was looking at me, frowning a little. I hoped it was only because I was using his private phone, but I had to use it again, anyway. I was about to become a Trammelite, starting tonight, and I needed some help and information. A number was listed for an Alice Perrine.

I dialed it, and the voice that answered was a soft, husky whisper, so I knew it was Jo, the inventor of cleavage. After a little disconnected dialogue she told me that Hunt had got home in the middle of the night and told her about seeing me. No matter what anybody said, she didn't really think I was a maniac. The papers were full of Shell Scott; Arthur Trammel in particular had said several unkind things about me.

I broke in, "Yeah, I can imagine. Jo, baby, here's my problem—and it's concerned with Trammel. I've got to find out everything I can about him and his cult, the whole operation. But I can't wander around much in daylight, and you and your uncle are about the only people who don't think I've run amuck. Is there some way I can meet you guys? I'd like to have a big chat with Mr. Hunt."

"Where are you?"

"I'm . . . in the sticks right now. Service station." I looked at the guy outside. "And I'm leaving. This egg is eyeballing me too intently at the moment." He was.

"I'll have Uncle pick you up." She laughed throatily. "He doesn't think you're crazy either. Says you aren't even half as crazy as he is."

We settled the location, a couple of blocks from the gas station, and I took off. Twenty minutes later I was crouching a few feet off the road in a clump of scratchy bushes, looking most peculiar, I suppose, when I saw a long black foreign car with white sidewall tires, pounds of chrome, monstrous headlights, and everything but a neon propeller, coming like a locomotive down the highway.

That car could belong to nobody but Randy Hunt, and when tires started screeching a block away as the car slued around, I figured he must be driving. He was.

He didn't get the mechanical monster stopped till it was half a block past me and I started running toward it as he stuck his brilliant bald head out the window and yelled, "Where you at, boy? You here? Hey!"

Then he heard me whipping through the sagebrush and beamed at me. As I ran up he said, "Hop in back, son," and I got inside just in time to hear the grating of gears and feel sudden acceleration pile me voluptuously all over Jo Perrine. Ah, that was a ride. I didn't have any idea where we were going, and I was half convinced we'd never get there alive, but even if we didn't, I'd be really living till I died. Randy was sheer hell on curves.

There was a little conversation, not much. The first thing I said to Jo was "Pardon me," and she said, "It's all right," and then I said, "Woops, pardon," and she said, "You devil," and, finally, she didn't say anything, just laughed softly. We were dear friends by the time I heard tires screeching that same note again and felt the car swinging around in the road.

"Made it," Randy said from the front seat, piling out of the car before a log building that looked like the Cal-Neva Lodge. "Cabin of mine."

I sat there. Jo said, "Well, get out."

"Yeah, sure."

She grinned at me and mumbled something, then crawled over me and out the door. I followed right behind her.

Inside, with the smell of broiling steak in my nostrils, I said, "How come you took off so fast last night, Randy?"

The two of us were in the living room seated before a big stone fireplace. The room was huge, with unadorned pine walls and a bare floor made of some kind of dark wood liberally dotted with knotholes. The only thing on the floor except furniture was a white bearskin rug before the fireplace.

Randy was resplendent in white flannels, a sport shirt the approximate color of an artist's palette, and a jacket closer to violet than anything else I could think of. Jo had gone into the kitchen and was preparing to stave off my starvation.

He said, "After you talked to me I got to thinkin' about Olive there all alone expectin' me. And I just got up and left. Had my car in the parking lot half a block down the street there, and took off."

"See Miss Dixon?"

"Nope. You see her?" I nodded. "How is she?"

"The last time I saw her she was dead."

He leaned forward, face serious. "What'd you say?"

"She was murdered. I saw her, with the top of her head caved in, and she was very dead." It was quiet for a few seconds, then I added, "Randy, you're about the only person I can talk to who might have info I want. And I think you've got an idea of my status right now."

"Just from the papers, son. That's enough, of course. I don't believe 'em," he said.

"Thanks. I can explain most of it. I think." I told him what had happened to me after I'd left him in his room, hitting the high spots.

When I finished he said, "Then you did shoot Wolfe, like it says?"

"I shot him. Not like it probably says, but because he meant to kill me. Right now, Randy, I need any information about Trammel and his operations you can give me."

He frowned. "Well, I don't know too much. Olive's what you'd call a real Trammelite, though. She knows the whole affair down there. But I'll tell you what I've seen."

He enlarged upon his original meeting with Olive. He'd gone to one of the Trammelite meetings more out of curiosity than for any other reason, just looking for something different to do. "And that was it for sure," he went on. "Never seen nothing quite like it. Regular revival meetin', son, and I tell you, they certainly revive a man. That Trammel's got a way with words like nobody I ever heard before. Why, people was rollin' around in the aisles and yelpin'. Almost done a little rollin' myself."

"What's the pitch, Randy? I've never heard him in action. He found a new way to get to heaven, or what?"

"Well, I don't rightly know, son. You got to experience it to understand it. And maybe it's different for different people. Way it hit me, he talks so much about sin, and how many ways there are to do it, and how terrible it is to do it any way at all, that he gets you thinkin' about it. But some of it sounds so good, even from him, that your thoughts sometimes kind of run away with you. You forget how bad he says it is, and start recollectin' how good it was."

He looked about to cackle and I grinned at him. "I know the type, Randy. He's good, huh?"

"Stands up there on his stage, and the way he gets to going, you wouldn't be a bit surprised if fire and smoke was to shoot out of his mouth. Hear him tell it, every soul in the crowd's bound for hell." He shrugged. "Well, I was in a seat alongside Olive that first time, and she was sort of squirmin' about while he spoke away, and she and me got to talkin' together. So, when the tent affair was over, the both of us went to what they call the Truth Room."

"I've seen it. That's the low black building, huh?"

"That's right. Off a little ways back of the tent. Olive and me was in this Truth Room later, sitting together, and—well, it was even more revivin' than the first one. I got all steamed up like a pants presser, to tell you the truth. And of course the lights was out. From that night on we sort of started goin' around together."

I squinted at him. "Randy, what the hell kind of an operation has Trammel got? You say the lights were out?"

"Yep. See, he gets into his speech and the lights go out slowlike, so you can concentrate on the full impact of his truth, he says, or some fool thing like that. Tell you the truth, I didn't pay too much attention at that point to what the man was sayin'."

Something he'd said had puzzled me. I asked him, "How long is the first big meeting in the tent?"

"Starts at eight and lasts about an hour."

"What about this Truth Room thing he does after that? How long does that one take?"

"Don't rightly know. Another hour, I suppose."

That would be, roughly, from 9 to 10 p.m., during the time Wolfe had called Trammel's number. If Trammel had been busy imparting truths, I wondered who the hell Wolfe had talked to.

Jo, her short blond hair helter-skelter, came in with a tray of food and a stack of newspapers, put the tray in my lap and newspapers at my feet, then sat cross-legged on the bearskin rug. I dug into the steak while Randy added odds and ends as he thought of them. When I'd polished off the food, Jo took the tray into the kitchen.