Wild (8 page)

“W
HAT ARE YOU
trying to say?”

Asa Crafford stood in the doorway, scowling. She wore a filmy black shorty nightgown with huge red bows at the hips. It didn’t look slept in and she didn’t look sleepy. A light glowed behind her in the hallway, but otherwise the house was dark. I held Ivor Hendrix on her feet at my side. She kept nodding in agreement with what I said.

“I don’t have time to explain,” I said. “You’ll just have to forget your feelings for a while. I want you to take care of your sister. She’s plastered.”

Asa Crafford looked disdainfully at her sister, and flipped the long fold of black hair away from her cheek. Then she looked at me.

“Is this your doing?”

“You know better than that.”

“Do I?”

I walked Ivor up to her. “Take her,” I said. “I don’t have time to argue. She has no place to go right now. She needs help.”

Ivor Hendrix nodded, her eyes half closed.

Her sister did not move, except to breathe. Then she said, “What’ve you been doing to her?”

“Nothing.”

“You expect me to believe that? Look at her.”

I looked at Asa Crafford. “Where’s your husband?”

“In bed.”

“Well, I’ll get him the hell out of bed, if you don’t hurry up and help.”

She laughed through her nose. “He’d be a great help, he would. He’d just love this.”

I didn’t say anything. I moved Ivor Hendrix into her sister’s arms. “Like I said,” I told her, “I don’t have time to argue now.”

“You come back here!”

I started down off the porch, turned and looked at them. Asa Crafford had her arms full.

I said, “Put her to bed. Is that too much to ask?”

“Is that where you put her?”

I went down into the drive and over to the car.

“Damn you,” Asa Crafford called. “Didn’t you hear me?”

I got in under the wheel, slammed the door, and drove away.

I suddenly felt dead tired as I hit the street. My head was beginning to ache dully again. I stopped at the first public phone booth I saw and called Hoagy Stills again.

His wife came on. I told her I was sorry about what had happened before. She sulked and said Hoagy was getting ready to go on duty now. Finally she agreed to let him come to the phone.

“You sure have protection,” I said.

“Okay. What is it now?”

I told him about the .32 automatic, but not
where
I’d found it. “Wondered if you’d run a check on it for me? It’s been fired and it hasn’t been cleaned.”

“I see,” Hoagy said.

“Can I catch you before you go on?”

“I’m just leaving.”

“Hang on and I’ll be right over.”

“A .32, you said?”

“Right. Will you wait?”

“Look, Lee. I’m late, now. I haven’t slept.” He cleared his throat. “Why not come down to the lab?”

I hesitated. “Rather see you before you go on. I’m not fixed for much time.”

He finally agreed. I drove to his address on Palmetto Court. He lived in a small stucco house with aluminum awnings, and a front lawn that badly needed mowing. His car, an old Packard, was parked in the drive. The porch light was on, and he was standing behind the screen door.

“Be quiet,” he said. “Janie’s in bed, trying to sleep.” He stepped onto the porch, looked at me, and frowned. He stood five-six, heavy-set, with a face like a side of beef, small-featured. Behind the tiny blue eyes was a quick brain that had made him one of the best ballistics men anywhere. He wore a short-sleeved white sports shirt, and looked fresh-shaved and showered and as if he’d just got out of bed. “Now, what’s all this about?” he said.

“I can’t tell you what it’s about. Not right now.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

He looked at me. “What’s this about a gun?”

I hauled out the automatic. “Thought maybe you’d check this out for me.”

“Like how, for instance?”

“You know your job.”

“Where’d you come by it?”

“I’d rather not say—not right now, Hoagy.”

He stared at me, blinking quietly.

“Who’s to know?” I said.

“I can’t go around—” he said.

“All I want you to do is see if you can run down the owner of this gun, find out anything else you can. It’s a long shot. You’ve pulled things out of the hat before.”

“A long shot how, for instance?”

“Come on, Hoagy.”

“Let’s have it.”

I gave him the gun. He looked at it, checked the clip. “Two left,” he said. “Hasn’t been fired in quite a time, Lee.”

“But it
has
been fired.”

“What’s it have to do with?”

“Just do me a favor, will you, man? For cripes’ sake, check it out against whatever you have, will you? Stolen guns, give it the works.”

“Why not come down to the lab? I’m on duty all alone. The place is dead.”

“I’d like nothing better. I can’t.”

“Will you give me a tip what it’s all about?”

“No.”

He frowned again. He took the clip out, walked to the porch light, and worked the action. “Somebody’s tried to file off the serial numbers,” he said. “That much’ll be a cinch.” He snapped the slide, rammed the clip in, dropped the gun into his pocket. “Does Haddock know?”

“No.”

“There are lots of guns,” he said. “What makes you think this is special?”

“Either you will or you won’t. Which is it?”

“Where can I reach you?”

“Home phone.” I gave him the number. “If I’m not there, keep trying. Maybe it’s nothing, but I’ve got a bug.”

“You telling me.”

“Thanks, Hoagy.”

“Have to do with what you asked before?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” he said. “But we’ve got boxes of guns down there, Lee.” He shook his head.

I thanked him again and left.

I headed for home. The police would have to be notified about Vince Gamba’s death. That would be interesting.

I parked the car and went upstairs. There were two of them standing in the hall, lounging by my door. I wouldn’t have to telephone them.

“We been waiting quite a while, Baron,” one of them said. “We didn’t want to go in till you got here.”

I
HAD NEVER
seen them before.

We went inside. They stood looking uncomfortable as I lit a couple of lights. I took my jacket off and hung it over the back of a chair.

“Been damp out,” one said.

“Probably because it’s been raining,” I said.

“Yeah.” He was tall, sandy-haired, wearing a hard-cloth gray suit and a dark blue tie. His eyes seemed to grin, but it was probably strain caused by staring at people. The other one was short, wiry-looking, with a black-haired crew cut. He carried a light tan jacket over one arm. His short-sleeved yellow sports shirt was buttoned without a tie at the neck.

The tall one said, “I’m Rudy Vagas, and this is Lew Steifer. Haddock thought we should drop around.”

“I see,” I said. “Take a load off.”

They looked around the room, stiffly. Vagas sat in the center of the couch, balancing his tall frame on the edge. His gray jacket ballooned open and I saw the shoulder harness.

Steifer said, “I’ll stand up, I guess. I’m sore from sitting in the car all day.” He shot Vagas a quick glance. He wore his gun in a small black leather holster on his belt, left side. The grips were black. It was very neat. Everything about Steifer was neat.

“Well,” I said. I turned the chair around from the big window overlooking the bay, sat down, put my ankle on my knee and jiggled my foot. “Care for a drink?”

Steifer said, “Not now. Thanks.” His face suddenly became embarrassed. He was about to speak. He said, “You know we were here before, don’t you. You were in here. You turned off the lights and beat it through the service door.”

“I wasn’t sure who it was,” I said. “I didn’t want to see anybody just then. There was something I had to take care of.”

Vagas began to hum softly. He cracked his knuckles, looked astonished, then laughed quietly.

“All right,” I said. “I wish you were here on a social call, just to meet me, maybe. But I know it’s not that. Shall we begin?”

Vagas looked at me from the couch. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Smoke.”

He brought out a stubby black pipe, loaded it from a crumpled wad of lead foil that had probably once been a package of tobacco, and lit up.

Nobody spoke. Everybody was waiting.

Finally, Vagas cleared his throat. He was about forty-two and in charge. “Well, we’d like you to tell us all you know about this Carl Hendrix business, Baron.”

“I don’t know very much.”

“You know one hell of a lot more than we do.”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid not. We probably know the same things. Give me a day or two.”

Vagas chewed his pipestem. “Everybody’s irritated.”

“Why should they be irritated?”

Steifer got that embarrassed look again and broke in fast and faintly nasty. “Because,” he said, “we went out there. Even Haddock, he went. I don’t understand your type of humor, Baron. I don’t think anybody does.”

“I don’t get you,” I said.

“What he means,” Vagas said, “is there’s no body. The lock you spoke of was busted. We looked around, but there was no dead body. We can’t even be certain of the smell. It could of been a dead rat or something.”

“You’re kidding.” I knew they weren’t.

“Wish we were,” Vagas said. He clacked his pipestem up and down against his teeth. “We searched out there. Didn’t find a thing. Except somebody’s been living in that trailer recently. And there’s a fresh hole in the roof—looks like it might’ve been a shotgun. Or maybe the dead man who wasn’t there blew his top.” He did not laugh or even smile.

My mouth was open. I closed it and said, “He was there.”

“All right. I believe you. Lew, here, thinks you’re one of these California cowboys trying to play a practical joke of some sort to grab space in the newspapers. I’m trying to level with you. I don’t go along with that. I knew your father pretty well. He was….”

“Let’s leave him out of this, if it’s all right with you?” I said. “It’s me we’re concerned with.”

Vagas lifted his eyebrows and didn’t lower them.

I said as frankly as I knew how, “Didn’t you find anything at all?”

Steifer came in fast. “You know we didn’t.”

Vagas stared at me. “What did we miss?” he said.

Steifer turned to him, frowned, and looked pained at some gross stupidity on his own part. He had flubbed. It was terribly important that he had flubbed, and he wouldn’t forget it for three days.

“The body was in the cement block house,” I said.

Vagas shook his head, tamped his pipe, relit it.

“Was the trailer open?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a bottle of Old Overholt on the drainboard?”

Vagas said, “No. I saw it outside, though—empty.”

“I picked it up and looked at it,” Steifer said. “Like Rudy says, it was empty.”

“Now that we’ve solved that mystery,” Vagas said. “Let’s draw some specific word pictures.” He cleared his throat. “Sheriff Silverman is hot—you should of called him, you know that. It’s under his jurisdiction. Anyway—Chief Garlik’s hot. Haddock’s hot.” He turned to Steifer. “Who isn’t hot?”

Steifer said, “I don’t know.”

Vagas stared at him, then looked at me. “Lew’s wife’s having a baby,” he said.

“That probably acounts for it,” I said. “If it’s Silverman’s territory, how come you guys are here?”

“There’s an agreement,” Vagas said. He looked vaguely at his pipe. “We know you’re just starting in business here, Baron. We know it can be tough. So, all right. Everybody’s friendly. We’re all willing to help each other, and if you’ll just help us, everything’ll work just fine.”

“The hell with it, Rudy,” Steifer said.

“No,” Vagas said. “He’s got to understand. He’s causing confusion without meaning to.” He looked at me. “We know you been buzzing around all afternoon and evening. Right? We don’t know what it’s all about. You reported a dead body. I think there was a dead body. But you’re holding out on us—you’ve got to be.” He hesitated. “Look at it this way. You’re a stranger. In a section you don’t know anything about. And right away, trouble.”

“I haven’t had a chance to talk with you. I told Lowell I wasn’t holding out on you. I said I’d tell him everything I knew.” I paused. “I have a client, and it’s a sort of missing person deal.”

“All right. Did you check with the bureau?”

I sighed. “No.”

“There you are.” His expression became serious. “I’m not trying to be funny, trying to gouge you. Hell, I even thought of setting up my own agency here, once. It could be a good deal. Especially good right here, the way things are getting. It’s ripe for the kind of business you’re in. Good Christ, we can work together. It’s done all the time.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “And other times, a client expects certain things of you. Without such trust, where would I be? The only publicity a guy like myself gets is word of mouth. You make somebody happy, and he tells somebody else. Maybe it’s only finding a stolen dog….”

“Or maybe something more than that?” Vagas said. He kept on looking at me with his eyebrows hooked up “Detectives get shot, too, don’t you see? Or their licenses get taken away. Know something? There was a guy here last summer, from some place in the Midwest. He opened an agency. A real sharpie, and he got off on the wrong foot.”

“Who’s that?” Steifer said.

“Blakely,” Vagas said. “Ned Blakely, remember? Well,” he went on, “Blakely was on something and he knew it. We had two men on him night and day. But, like I say, he was sharp. He gave them the slip. Next morning, he was washed up against the sea wall out to Maderia Beach. His throat was cut from here to here. He hadn’t leveled with us—wouldn’t tell us a thing.” He shrugged. “It’s unsolved, a dead issue. We never got a thing to go on.”

“So I’m a sharpie?”

“I mean we could’ve helped him. If he’d just told us something.”

“Maybe he couldn’t tell you,” I said. “Ever think of that? Since when do you read minds? Maybe he was in a tight.”

“What are the police for?” Vagas said.

“Your old man played it smart,” Steifer said.

“All right,” I said. “Push me. My old man was a lummox. He was a great guy, but he believed the book. Sometimes the book isn’t right. You go through life believing every word in the book, that’s all right. You live it your way. It’s not my way.” I stopped talking, and they didn’t speak. I said, “It’s not that I don’t want to come to you. You have facilities, means of operations I’ll never have. But I can’t
always
come to you.”

“James Baron came to us.”

“You’re speaking of two different people.”

“He stayed in business,” Steifer said.

“He was a flunkie,” I said. “He might just as well have been in uniform. He came to you because he believed in the book. That was dandy for him, and dandy for you, in case he ever bumped into anything. It made your job easier. You liked him for it, like hell you did—and that made him happy, like hell it did. Anyway, even if you both were happy, I can exist without having you like me. And, by the way, nobody’s taking away my license without good reason.”

“You plan on staying in business here?”

“That’s right.”

“Maybe he
wants
to be sharp,” Steifer said.

“I want to be good at my business,” I said. “That’s straight from the cornfields, but it’s still true. It’s all I want, right now. Someday I’d like to have a wife and family. Not for a while. I appreciate what you’re saying.”

“Your father made his business pay.”

“Made it pay? I guess maybe you didn’t know him, after all. You can follow the whole thing on his records. Your names are on them, I saw them. With pen and ink, he was a hot baby. He was interested in everything you guys did, along with everything else. But the minute he walked out of that office door, he was sunk. He had no business. You can see it die, from twenty-five years back. Because word got around, the way it does. If you were in bad trouble, he wasn’t the guy to see. He played with you guys, see? Listen, there are people who need help. They’re strapped to a rack. They’ve given up fighting, or they can’t fight any more. They come to me. They’re my clients. I’m keeping it that way.”

“That’s it, then,” Vagas said.

“Not quite,” I said. “You know how I feel. On the other hand, I told Lowell I wasn’t going to keep anything from him. That’s not the idea.”

Vagas held his pipe with both hands and shook his head. “I don’t get you.”

Steifer made a noise in his throat.

I said, “Are you up to date on this Laketown bank robbery?”

Vagas’ voice was hollow. “How?”

Steifer didn’t move.

I said, “I don’t think the body I found was Carl Hendrix. I think it was Barton Yonkers, the bird that escaped from Raiford recently. I think he robbed the Laketown Union Trust, and I think he came down here with the money and somebody knocked him off for it.”

“Jesus Christ!” Steifer said. “Jesus Christ, Rudy!”

Vagas turned his head slowly and looked at Steifer. Then he looked at me, the eyes grinning. “Why?” he said.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it? Okay, first, the body of the man I found had no arms, his face had been chopped with a hatchet. Somebody had tried to cut his head off, but they either didn’t have the stomach for it, or they didn’t have time. Time definitely is an element in this thing—or it was.”

“How do you mean, ‘was'?”

“I’ll get to that.”

Steifer said, “He’ll get to that. Jesus Christ, Rudy—we’d better take him downtown.”

Vagas didn’t even bother looking at him this time.

I said, “Sure, it sounds fantastic. Whoever got that Laketown loot should have taken off for Paris or someplace. Only they didn’t. Something happened and fouled the whole thing up.”

Steifer was so nervous he was practically dancing standing still. Vagas was excited, too, but it only showed deep in his eyes and in the knuckles of the hand that held the black pipe.

I said, “There might be a reward, since it’s a bank deal. Now, look—a Mrs. Johnson was in the Union Trust at the time of the robbery. She said she saw one of the two men who held the place up, and that he carried a suitcase with the initials ‘K. S. L.’ on it. I found the suitcase. It’s out behind that trailer, in a trash pit, half burned.”

Vagas held up his hand. “What put you on this?”

I told him about the paper currency band.

“The floor was bare when we looked,” he said.

“Somebody got wise, went back there and got rid of the body,” I said. “Along with anything they might have left laying around, overlooked—because of haste.”

“How did they get wise?” Vagas said. He didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’ll tell you: because you tipped him, somehow. You,” he said. “What I been trying to get across.”

“Yeah,” Steifer said.

“Nuts,” I said. “Buzzards would have found that body and cleaned the bones, before you ever got out there. This is the thanks I get.”

“All right,” Vagas said. “It sounds. What else?”

“What the hell else do you want?”

“You been sitting on your backside thinking about this ever since you called Haddock? Don’t make me laugh in your face.” Vagas edged himself half off his narrow perch on the sofa. “What leads you got? Who’s suspect?”

I leaned forward. “This isn’t that kind of a thing,” I said. “The whole state of Florida is suspect.”

“Who’s Carl Hendrix?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Where is he?”

“I wish I knew that. It could be he was the second man along with Yonkers on the robbery. It could be he’s gone fishing for a few days.”

“Who’s your client?”

I had waited for that. I shook my head slowly, watching him. “Tell you something, though. I think you should pick up a guy named Joe Lager. He hangs out on First Street. I saw him in the Oriental Tavern.”

“Lager,” Vagas said. “We know him.”

“What on?”

“Petty thief. Last thing, he was growing weed in three of his friends’ garages, in coffee cans. Okay, we pick him up. What we ask him?”

“That’s up to you,” I said.

“What else?” Vagas said. He was thinking. He stared at me, but his eyes were veiled. He was reading something interesting in the back of his head. He said, “Carl Hendrix’s wife, right?”