The Transgressors (11 page)

“P-please,” she gasped, writhing. “G-Gossie…w’y you do thees?”

Pellino’s hands twisted cruelly. He told her she had better figure it out, and do it fast.

“I mean it, sister! You go on playin’ dumb, and I’ll pull them tits right off of you.”

“B-but I do not—I cannot—”

“Okay,” Pellino gritted. “Maybe you can grow a new pair.”

She moaned, half-screamed. She surged upward from the bed, and then fell back upon the bed. Her eyelids fluttered and drifted shut. Her lips moved inaudibly.

“Snap out of it”—he bent over her. “Let’s hear—”

Then, he jerked away from her, wiping the spittle from his face.

Her perpetually pleasant smile was gone now, replaced by the hard lines of hatred. Gone, too, was the puzzled blankness of her eyes, where hatred now glittered.

She put her right thumb in her mouth, up to the first joint. She withdrew it suddenly, flicking it at him. She said nothing. She did not need to.

Without speaking, she had told him the truth.

“I’m going out of town, now,” he said. “Leaving as soon as I pack a bag. You want to pass the word to your kin, it’s all right with me.”

“I will tell them to kill you!”

“They won’t do it. Not for you, anyhow.” He nodded indifferently; a man stating the axiomatic with a casualness that was utterly convincing. “They needed you. Now, they don’t. And I figure they got about as much use for a two-timer as I have.”

He let the words sink in: the fact that she was inextricably bound to him, and that after him there would be no one. It was incredible, terrifying—how could her own kinsmen have done this to her?—but there it was. Treachery would be repaid with treachery.

“Gossie,” she tried to smile. “I did not mean it, Gos. They misled me, made me think I was helping you.”

“We’ll see,” Pellino told her. “We’ll talk about it when I get back. Maybe we’ll have us a nice little party, huh? You know—party? Just the two of us.”

“Oh, yes, Gossie!” She clutched eagerly for his hand, and found it withdrawn. “A ver’ nice party.”

“Good,” said Pellino. “You can kind of be preparing for it while I’m away. Lay in a supply of liniment, bandages, and stuff. You’re going to need them.”

Then he got up, went through the door, and closed it quietly behind him.

F
or the tenth time in almost as many minutes, Tom Lord paused in his nervous pacing of the floor and looked at his watch. It was afternoon, now, nearly midafternoon. It had been hours since Joyce’s last call, when he had literally invited her to do her damndest. Yet nothing had happened. No visit from the sheriff. Nothing.

He wandered out into the kitchen, and peered vaguely out the window. He got a drink of water at the sink; then, hardly aware of what he was doing, he chased it with a shot of bourbon from the cupboard. Aimlessly, he crossed to the refrigerator and inspected its contents. The sight of the food brought a frown to his face, and he listened worriedly for some sound from the upstairs.

“No telling when she ate last,” he muttered aloud. “No food and a hell of a big hypo.…”

She needed to snap out of it, he decided. She needed some grub in her.

Or maybe,
he chuckled grimly,
I need to be doing something. Maybe I’ve really been begging for trouble all along, and I just can’t wait for it to hit me.

He laughed at the thought. The laugh ended abruptly; an incipient monster strangled in its fetal stage. Quickly, he threw down another big drink of the bourbon, shuddering at its sudden, flaming impact. Then he busied himself with the food. He put bread into the toaster. He put milk, eggs, whisky and sugar into a bowl, and flicked on the electric mixer. Some ten minutes later, he pushed open the bedroom door, set the tray down on a chair, and brought Donna McBride into wakefulness.

It wasn’t difficult. The drug had worn off, and her sleep was natural. He propped pillows behind her back, winked encouragingly, and put the tray on her lap.

He ordered her to eat. Obediently, responding to the authority in his voice, she began to.

The toast disappeared rapidly. She couldn’t remember when anything had tasted so good to her. She took a sip of the milkish-looking drink, frowned slightly at its taste, then, shrugging inwardly, took a large swallow. It
was
good. It tasted good, and it made her feel good—all warm and nice, and sort of ticklish. And if it did have a little alcohol in it—and she was by no means sure that it did—well, it was only medicine if a doctor gave it to you.

She drank the last of the glass, a delicate flush spreading over her face. At any minute, she felt, she was going to burst out giggling. Yet, as the urge grew, her habitual reserve, the inbred primness, reasserted itself.

“Doctor,” she said severely, “you put whisky in that drink, didn’t you? Quite a lot of it.”

“Whisky!”
Lord registered pained astonishment. “Whisky? Oh, that I should live to see this moment!”

“Now, you stop that!” she said. “Stop it right now. I appreciate your help, Doctor, but I’m afraid I don’t care for your professional behavior. Why, I shouldn’t even be here like—like this—without your nurse present.”

“Nurse?” Lord elevated his brows. “But I ain’t got no nurse, ma’am. Wouldn’t hardly be no point to it, seein’ as how I ain’t a doctor.”

“Not a—!” She broke off, very conscious suddenly of the sheer nightgown, burningly aware that it must have been he who had transposed her into it from her own clothes. “B-but you said—” But he hadn’t said it; only something about being a reasonable facsimile of a doctor. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“Fella you was lookin’ for. Tom Lord.”

“Tom L-Lord!” She stared at him angrily. “Why didn’t you tell me so in the beginning?”

“Reckon you might be able to think of a reason yourself. What are you kickin’ about, anyway? Ain’t many gals I’d put to bed in my mama’s own nightshirt.”

Donna spluttered. On the point of exploding with fury, she caught herself, and studied him curiously. What was the matter with him, anyhow? Why was he acting like this? He could have appeased her, lied to her, carried on the masquerade of being a doctor. Instead, he seemed determined to aggravate and insult her.

“Mr. Lord,” she said. “Are you…are you all right?”

“You mean am I crazy?” Lord studied the question soberly. “I don’t know,” he said, after a moment. “Could be, I guess. Or it could be I just don’t like to wait for things to happen to me.”

“Wait? What—”

“Uh-huh. I don’t like to wait, but I ain’t got the guts to bring things to an outright showdown. Kind of a two-way pull, you know, or maybe, three-way or four-way. I don’t like nothin’ like it is, and I don’t really want to change it. So I just keep circlin’ the target, wherever the hell it is. I just gnaw around the edges without ever gettin’ close to center.”

Donna looked at him, her own problems and her anger with him forgotten for the moment. Then, as she felt a sudden compelling weakness flood over her, she gave her head an irritable little shake. This wouldn’t do at all. She had come here for information, not to lie in bed and listen to a lot of foolishness.

“Mr. Lord,” she said crisply. “I’d like to dress. Do you hear me, Mr. Lord?”

He lost his dreamy, thoughtful look; the oddly dancing lights came back into his eyes. He said that sure, he heard her, and she was to go right ahead and dress. “O’ course,” he added, “you’re liable to doze off a-fore you get your panties on.”

“Mr. Lord!” she snapped. “I said I wanted to dress. I want you to leave the room!”

“What for?” Lord drawled. “Ain’t gonna see nothin’ I ain’t already seen. Not unless you’ve growed something new since I put you to bed.”

She looked at him helplessly, sank weakly back into the pillows. She wanted to cry, and oddly enough, to laugh, and she could only succumb to the drowsiness.

“A fine thing,” she said. “You were supposed to be my husband’s friend, and—”

“Me?
His
friend!” Lord exclaimed; and then, thoughtfully, “Well, maybe I was. Don’t reckon there’s anyone else that’d think so, but…”

“He thought you were, b-but look how you act. I came to you for help, and all you can do is joke and t-talk dirty, and—” Her voice broke.

Lord’s face contorted, and suddenly he was down on his knees at her side. Hugging her to him fiercely. “Aah, no, honey,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean it that way. I just…I was always a little odd, remember? You remember, don’t you? Even when I was a toddler, and you used to…”

He broke off, came out of her drowsily unconscious embrace with something that was close to desperation. He stood looking down at her, slowly getting control of himself.

He would have to talk to her, eventually. Sooner or later, he would have to face up to the gun she carried. But not now, thank God. Not now. For she had gone to sleep, at last. Gone, as the other one had gone, into a world beyond his reach. And not a moment too soon either.

A car had pulled into the driveway. A rattly old car with a familiar piston slap.

Sheriff Dave Bradley had arrived.

B
radley had brought a deputy with him; gangling, moose-jawed Buck Harris. Lord awaited them in his father’s old office, boots propped up on the desk, hands clasped behind his head.

Bradley was scowling importantly. Buck grinned at Lord uneasily, wishing that he was anywhere but here. Why, ol’ Tom wouldn’t do what that crazy gal claimed he had! It just wasn’t in ol’ Tom to kill a man in cold blood.

“Sure been missin’ you down to the office, Tom,” he said, just as the sheriff started to speak. “Don’t seem like the same place no more without you around.”

“Don’t it?” Lord gave him a flat-eyed look. “Is that a fact, now?”

Buck said that, no, sir, it sure didn’t seem the same—again speaking before the sheriff could. “You remember that hawg thief I nailed out t’ the commission pens. Well, now he’s claimin’ he ain’t guilty.”

“He prob’ly ain’t,” Lord said. “I figure you stole them hawgs yourself.”

“Aw, now…” the big deputy grinned uncertainly. “That ain’t very funny, Tom. Why for would I be stealin’ hogs?”

“Prob’ly because you ain’t got two dimes to rub together; ol’ Dave here grabs everything for himself. An’ you prob’ly wanted to get them big ugly teeth of yours fixed.”

Buck was very sensitive about his teeth; he usually talked with a hand held to his mouth. The hand went there now, his face white with hurt, slow anger building in his eyes. And Tom Lord was hurt for him, winced with him. But this was the way it had to be played. He had cut loose, or rather been cut loose, from something. It was best for all concerned that the cut be clean.

“Don’t pay the ornery cuss no mind, Buck,” said Bradley angrily; and then, “Tom Lord, I’m arrestin’ you for the murder of Aaron McBride.”

“Yeah?” Lord drawled. “Who says I murdered him?”

Bradley told him, and the ex–chief deputy shook his head. “She’s been threatenin’ to do that. Got peeved with me, and this is her way of hittin’ back. I figure she ain’t much of a witness, Dave.”

“What you figure don’t count! Now, you want to come peaceable or you want it t’other way?”

“We-el…” Lord pursed his lips judiciously. “Why don’t we make it the other way? Might be real interestin’.”

Bradley blinked, his mouth gaping open. He looked uncertainly at Buck Harris, and the deputy drew his forty-five. “Might be interestin’ at that,” he said. “You better get movin’, Tom.”

“Huh-uh,” said Lord. “What you fellas better do is call Miss Lakewood again. I figure she’ll probably change her story.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Unless you want to chomp up that pistol with them big teeth o’ yours. Because I’ll sure as hell make you eat it.”

It was too much for Buck Harris, well aware as he was of Tom’s handiness at “scufflin’.” It was more than he could or would take, even with the sheriff ordering him to lay off.

He came around the desk, the gun drawn back for a whipping blow to the skull. The gun came down in a vicious arc, and one of Lord’s booted feet moved lazily into its path, and Buck’s wrist smashed into it. He grunted, almost yelled with the pain. His arm went numb all the way to the shoulder, and the gun flew from his nerveless fingers. Lord caught it with another lazy motion, ejected the shells from it, and flung it back at him.

“Have another try,” he invited. “Three tries an’ you get to eat it.”

There was some method behind this madness, he decided; a subconscious reasoning behind it. Joyce would need time to cool off—if, that is, she would cool off, and by stalling he was giving her time. And Bradley had made it easy for him. Old Dave was stubborn. Told to check on Joyce, he was practically a cinch not to do it.

“Well, Dave…Buck?” Lord looked jovially from one to the other. “Ain’t callin’ off our little game already, are we?”

Bradley mumbled a feebly stern command: Tom had better do as he was told and be quick about it. Buck painfully scooped up his gun from the floor, fumbled cartridges from his belt, and began to refill the chamber.

“We ain’t callin’ it off,” he announced. “Just gonna change the rules a little.”

Lord roared with laughter. It drowned out Bradley’s alarmed orders for Buck to stop—for Tom to stop egging him on. Buck dropped into a crouch, took awkward aim with his left hand. Lord doubled with laughter, slapping his knees, and then suddenly, still bent forward, he sprang.

He rocketed out of the chair, his hard shoulders hurtling into Harris at the level of his boot tops. Buck’s legs flew from under him, the gun again flew from his hand, and his big body crashed against the floor.

Bradley helped him to his feet; snatched up the gun and held onto it.

“Now, I’m gonna call that gal,” he panted angrily, swinging the gun from one man to the other, “an’ there better not be no trouble while I’m doin’ it. I’m the boss here.…Hello, Miss Lakewood? This is Dave Bradley. I’m over here t’ Tom Lord’s house, an’—”

He broke off, listening, an angry but obviously relieved scowl wrinkling his face. He said, “But dang it! Why did you—”

He paused again as a crackling, apologetically defiant stream of words torrented over the wire. Finally, when she apparently stopped for breath, he gave her a grimly firm reproof. “Don’t know whether you were lyin’ the first time or now, ma’am. But it’s a plain bad thing, however it is. Got plenty of reason t’haul you in an’ file charges…Well, all right, then. I’ll let it go this time. But you sure better watch your step from now on.”

He slammed up the receiver.

He jerked his head toward Buck Harris, and Harris wobbled after him toward the door, a spattering trickle of blood trailing behind him.

Bradley went on through the door. Buck paused on the threshold, and slowly turned around.

He looked like a tortured puppy. He looked like a rabid dog. He looked all the hideous things that only a sensitive man can who has seen his friendship flouted and his trust betrayed.

Lord could not meet the look. Savagely, his eyes averted, he filed another indictment in the endless litigation of
Lord vs Lord.
Tom Lord—in Tom Lord’s opinion—was a goddamned liar. He behaved as he did, not out of any necessity or compulsion, but simply because he was a no-good bastard, and his incessant rationalizations to the contrary were so much crap. There was no excuse for what he’d done. He’d simply felt like kicking asses, and poor old Buck had been handy.

“Buck,” he said, still looking away from that terrible face. “I’m sorry. You want to pistol-whip me all over the courthouse steps, I’m givin’ you the privilege.”

A drop of blood oozed over Buck’s overhung upper lip, and down onto his teeth. He brushed at it with a frayed shirtsleeve, silently staring at the result. And then, with an almost polite little nod, he turned and left.

Lord sighed, on a note of exhaustion. Absently, he lighted a cigar, stood outside of himself as he puffed it; curiously considering the man at the desk.

Looked about like anyone else out here. Talked like them. Acted like them.
Was
like them except for what went on inside of him. And yet that, the last, was the most important thing of all, the only important thing when you got right down to cases. It was him, not what showed up on the surface. It was what made him love or hate, die or give death. Yet no one was aware of it; no one could diagram its workings or predict their results. Certainly he, the man it inclined and impelled, could not. The machinery had become too complex; too many moments had been added to its sum.

It was easy to believe, of course, that the irking contradictions of his own life justified almost anything he did. He’d had it tough all the way down the line. Obviously—obviously, to his own way of thinking—he was a classic case of the square plug in the round hole, and he should be excused where others should not. And, hell. How stupid and blind did you have to be to think that way? Everyone was unique particularly, but no one generally. Every man’s life was a different road, but all paralleled one another. Everyone was a son of a bitch, everyone an angel, everyone both. A man couldn’t go very wrong, probably in treating everyone like a good guy. At worst, he probably wouldn’t catch the dirty end of the stick more than fifty per cent of the time—which was about the best he could do now.

Tom Lord roused himself, and arose from the desk.

He had to get moving. He had to get the hell out of here; to stave off or, perhaps, hasten the tide of events which already threatened to engulf him. He had to go from here to there, from where he was to where he was not, inevitably taking with him, of course, the circumstances which necessitated the move.

Tom Lord and Tom Lord had to be on their way, and philosophizing must wait until another time. There were things to be done—ah, so many things—before they left. And there was no time for the merely crucial.

Donna McBride was sleeping peacefully, and obviously would be for hours to come. He took her pulse, listened to her heartbeat. Gently, he pulled back her eyelids, and gently released them. She was all right. Nothing wrong with her that a good rest wouldn’t cure.

It was around midnight when he left the house. Some six blocks away, as he was nearing the old-town business district, he deliberately stalled the car beneath a street light.

He had chosen the spot carefully. There were no houses for more than a block and a half behind him, and the car back there would have no legitimate reason for stopping. So it came on, moving at the discreet fifteen miles per hour which local ordinances demanded. It passed him, necessarily very close because of the intersection, and Lord got a glimpse of the driver.

Without appearing to, he kept an eye on the vehicle; watched as it turned in at the curb in front of a drugstore. Then, after stalling a minute or two longer, and repairing the car’s fictitious difficulty, he slammed down the hood and drove on.

He was hardly a block past the drugstore when the other car hastily backed away from the curb, its driver momentarily sticking his head out the window. It trailed him at what the man apparently thought was a safe distance. And the gears of Lord’s memory meshed, and a bell rang.

So he hadn’t been dreaming. There had been a man there at Joyce’s house, the same one who was following him; and in the light of his present actions, his presence at Joyce’s house had a sinister aspect.

Joyce didn’t “work” any more, but she had plenty of money. And this man—a nonresident—was on familiar terms with her.

Joyce had wanted him, Lord, out of town. It had been extremely important to her. And he, Lord, was obviously important to this man.

Lord’s heart quickened; the deadness fell away from him, and his eyes sparkled with interest.
Now, why?
he mused.
Now, where the hell have I seen that mug before
—

The word
mug
did the trick. The gears of memory whirred again, and a clanging bell announced a jackpot.

Back when the boom began to build, he’d made Bradley see the danger of a gangster influx, and Bradley had consented to the setting up of an identification department. He wouldn’t authorize any money for it, of course, since the taxpayers had none to waste on “frills.” He was also very watchful of any time which any of his men might devote to it. About the only one willing to help was Buck Harris, a man who was patently as useless to such an enterprise as tits on a stud horse. So Lord had warded off his persistent offers of assistance, and done what had to be or could be done himself. The result naturally left something to be desired. One man couldn’t swing the whole load, and the other police organizations grew weary of being forever begged and borrowed from. Still, it was an R & I department of sorts; and its mug-book library was reasonably complete in the category of career criminals. And among these last was the man following him:

August Pellino (Fat Gus, Augie the Hog); eighteen arrests, one conviction: six months. Susp. murder, extortion, narcotics, prostitution. Presumably inactive at present. Known associates, Salvatore Onate, ditto-ditto; Carlos Moroni, ditto-ditto; Victor Anglese, ditto-ditto, et cetera, et cetera.

Another bell began to ring; they were ringing all over the place tonight. Lord turned onto the highway, and then off of it, and saw happily that he was still followed.

Highlands and gangsters. Highlands and Gus Pellino.

McBride had been killed. Then Highlands’ president—what was his name, Harrington?—had got it. In less than a month, two peculiar deaths right together. And Joyce had fought to get him out of town, seemingly at Pellino’s urging. And now Pellino was tailing him.

Well?

Lord shrugged. He couldn’t see the whole picture, only its shadowy outlines. But even those were highly revealing.

Tom Lord, for some reason, had to be gotten out of the way, and since he would not cooperate in the getting out, his exodus would have to be compelled. He couldn’t be killed; at least, he couldn’t be murdered. Otherwise, he would have been dead long ago. But he did have to be removed from the scene. And just how Gus Pellino planned to manage that removal, what plans he had, were a mystery.

Lord drove at as even a pace as the road would allow, grinning wryly at his occasional glances into the rear-view mirror. Pellino was keeping about a quarter-mile between them. Now and then he cut off his lights for a few minutes; seeking to give the impression, apparently, that one car turned off the road and after an interval, another turned on.

“A real smart fella,” Lord murmured, chuckling. “Ought to learn me a lot when I get around to talkin’ to him.”

Two hours slipped by. In the moonlight’s dusky darkness, they passed the abandoned wildcat where Aaron McBride had died. And Tom Lord, though not seeing it—only aware that it was off there in the loneliness to his right—ceased to smile, and the night seemed suddenly colder.

He turned on the heater.

He lighted a cigar, and took a drink from a half-pint bottle in the glove compartment. And his eyes looked broodingly into the rear-view mirror.

It wouldn’t be any trick at all to collar Pellino now. Pellino was doubtless a real handy boy around the big towns, but out here he probably stumbled over his own feet. Set a little trap for him, and he’d run over himself to get into it. Still…