The Baby Blue Rip-Off (A Mallory Mystery) Page 4

I knew there’d be a catch. We got examined, but I paid.

  Which I did, at the desk, after getting back into my pants. As I was putting my lightened billfold back in my hip pocket, Lou Brown walked into the lobby. The deputy was as pale as ever and looked vaguely upset.

  “Buy you some coffee, Mallory?”

  I said okay and followed him into the hospital coffee shop. It was about 8:55 and they closed at nine, so we got dirty looks from the waitress to go with the coffee. I ordered a sandwich, too, and got a look so dirty I almost lost my appetite.

  But the coffee was hot and good, and it came right away. Lou sipped his and said, “How you feeling, Mallory?”

  “I’ve had better nights.”

  “Me too. This is the first murder I ever worked.”

  So that was why he seemed upset.

  I said, “How long you been a deputy, Lou?”

  “About eight months.”

  There generally aren’t more than one or two murders a year in a small town like Port City, and when there is one, it’s the city police who handle it. This particular murder fell in the sheriff’s domain because it had occurred outside the city limits and was therefore county business.

  “Well, Lou, in your job, you got to expect to come onto a crime of violence now and then.”

  “Oh, it’s not that. I seen blood before. We’ve had plenty of accidents to cover, and hell, I was an MP in the service—saw some rough goddamn things. But never this. Never an old woman beat up and killed.”

  “Is it pretty definite she was beaten?”

  “I don’t know. Too early for any official word. But it looked that way to me.”

  I nodded. “That was my impression, too. She wasn’t bloody or bruised, but her hair and clothes were all mussed up, and I just had the feeling she’d been slapped around before she died.”

  “Heart attack, probably. You know, Mal, when I was taking those pictures of her, I kind of studied her, tied there in the chair, and I could almost see what happened to her. Guys asking her where she kept some damn thing and slapping her to make her tell, and her heart just gives way. Crazy thing is, these goddamn guys probably never intended killing her, just meant to tie her up and sack the place. Damn.”

  “Damn,” I agreed. “What’s up, Lou? Why aren’t you still with Brennan?”

  “Through for the night. Heading home. Brennan just said to stop here on my way and see how you were.”

  “I’m touched at his concern.”

  Brown grinned. “Yeah, what’s the deal? Do you two hate each other, or what?”

  “We’re not sure ourselves.”

  “The way you were yelling at each other back at that house, I’d think you hated each other’s guts. Then after a while there, you were talking real civil.”

  “Well, I got a certain amount of respect for Brennan. Within his limitations, he’s a good sheriff. Except when he’s looking out for the interests of his political buddies and various other string-pullers around town.”

  “I kind of gathered there was some friction between you two because of his son John. I remember how thick you guys were back in high school.”

  “John and me went back even before that, to junior high. Even then I was always smart-mouthing Brennan, and Brennan never did like that. Not that I blame him.”

  “You and John went in the army together, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right. The Buddy Plan, or whatever the hell it was called. And John died, and I lived, and Brennan’s resented me ever since.”

  “That simple, huh.”

  “Well, not really. After I got out, I was one of the Vietnam vets against the war. Pretty active. Brennan got wind of that, and I’ve been a traitor ever since. He thinks this is still the sixties and I’m a hippie who thinks cops are ‘pigs’ or something. It’s sad, really.”

  “Weren’t you a cop yourself at one time?”

  “Yeah, a very short time,” I said, and told him how I’d been on the force for around six months in a small California town a few years ago. And that I’d worked for Per Mar, a security outfit in the nearby Quad Cities, for a while. Then we got sidetracked, with me mentioning how for the better part of five years I’d been outside Port City, doing this and that, finally coming back to roost and taking a shot at writing; and Lou mentioned he’d been gone for several years, too, working in a factory in Ohio. Anyway, we got sidetracked, and it was along about this time that the waitress told us to leave because it was fifteen minutes past the coffee shop’s closing and she had a right to go home like anybody else.

  Out in the hospital lobby, Lou said, “You thinking about playing cop, Mal?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re involved, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Well, you are. Involved in a murder. You were beaten up, and besides, you were a friend of the old lady’s, weren’t you?”

  “Tell me the truth, Lou. Did Brennan put you up to this? To find out my attitude?”

  “No. I’m just curious.”

  I shrugged again. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do. If you and Brennan can take care of this, fine. But I admit I’m pretty pissed off about the whole thing, and wouldn’t mind getting my hands on the SOBs responsible.”

  Lou just nodded.

  “See you, Lou. Come over to my place sometime. I’ll see if I can’t find a beer for you.”

  “I’d like that. I could use a place to get away to.”

  “Love to have you. Is there a problem?”

  “Well, I’m living with my folks, and it’s driving me crazy. I’m trying to find an apartment, but till I do, I’m stuck with the folks, and I love ’em, but they drive me goddamn crazy. A twenty-nine-year-old man does not belong in his parents’ home.”

  “I agree. Only on holidays.”

  “And Christmas is a long ways off.”

  We chatted for a few minutes more, and just as we were starting to part company, Lou said, “Almost forgot the reason I came looking for you. Was supposed to find out how you were, to tell Brennan. What’s your condition, anyway?”

  “Got my ribs messed up a little. Maybe cracked, maybe broken.”

  “Damn. Does it hurt?”

  “Only when I breathe.”

  Lou went off to call Brennan, and I headed out to the parking lot and got in my van.

  For a moment I thought about what Lou had said, about my “being involved.”

  No way. Let Lou and Brennan handle it. Like Brennan said, in the morning I’ll be over it.

  I started up the engine, turned my head, and glanced out the rear van window to back out of the parking space. My eye caught something on the floor. Something white.

  A Styrofoam plate.

  Mrs. Jonsen’s supper.

  8

  My house trailer sits way back from the street in the middle of a big green lawn. On a dark night you can’t even see the trailer—that is, assuming the streetlight directly in front of my place is not shining, and it usually isn’t. One of my neighbors (the guy in the split-level) has his ten-year-old son shoot out the streetlight with a beebee gun so that, come nightfall, my trailer will fall into what the neighborhood thinks is a well-deserved obscurity.

  This was one of those nights. The streetlight wasn’t going, and as I pulled up to the curb, just getting back from the hospital, it was so dark that I thought for a moment somebody had hauled my trailer away.

  I love my trailer.

  It is very old—one of the oldest existing house trailers anywhere—a long, silver, faintly phallic module, plopped down in the center of a big luxurious green lawn like something laid by a dog from outer space. On one side of me is that split-level I told you about; on the other is a two-story with very nice gothic lines—and well kept up, too, I might add. You might wonder what a house trailer is doing on that big luxurious green lawn between those two high-class dwellings. I already explained that East Hill is a study in contrast, but my trailer next to the homes that bookend
it makes the rest of East Hill seem normal.

  The story is this. Several years ago there was a big hole where my big lawn now resides. That hole was a neighborhood eyesore, a dump of sorts, filled with weeds and dead trees and debris, and the city took steps to do something about it. They purchased the hole and sold it to a firm who used it as an experimental landfill project. The hole was then filled with garbage, the garbage having been dunked, like a doughnut, in various chemicals, and some dirt was put over that. Nobody wanted to live on the former hole. Nobody wanted to walk on it, let alone build on it, for fear of sinking into the garbage. Which is why I was able to rent the former hole, cheap, and put my trailer on it.

  Considering the entertainment value, I don’t see what the neighbors are complaining about, really. Many of them spend their spare time watching me and my trailer, perhaps in the hope they’ll see us go sinking down into the hole like the Titanic.

  Anyway, the streetlight was out, most probably due to my neighbor’s little sharpshooter. I climbed out of the van, walked up toward the battered hull I call home, began to unlock the door, and somebody put an arm around my throat.

  I was not expecting that.

  I was not expecting to be attacked a second time in just a few hours. The bastards could have had the decency to wait till tomorrow, at least. But decency they were short of.

  The guy with his arm around my throat told me to come around behind the trailer with him, where we couldn’t be seen from the street. I did that.

  There were more people than just the one. So far they had stayed behind me, but I heard them walking, breathing, felt them there. Maybe just two of them this time. But more than one.

  Once in back of the trailer, I was given a forearm across my shoulder blades that sent me flopping on the ground like a professional wrestler faking a fall. If he’d hit me much harder, I just might’ve made my neighbors happy and gone sinking down to garbage level.

  Somebody stepped on the back of my neck. I ate dirt for a while. It didn’t taste good.

  “Mallory,” a voice said.

  It was a harsh, whispering voice; I didn’t recognize it, exactly, but felt sure it was one of those I’d heard at Mrs. Jonsen’s.

  “We wanted you to know something,” the voice went on. “We wanted you to know we know you. We know who you are and where you are, and we don’t want to see you again.”

  I lifted my face a shade—not far, considering the foot was still on the back of my neck. I said, “Can I say something?” My voice was rather muffled, since I had a mouthful of dirt.

  “Go ahead.”

  “You guys are real morons coming around here.”

  Another voice. “We let you say something, and that’s what you say? Jesus.”

  “Kick him in the ass.”

  Somebody kicked me in the ass. The shoe connected with my tail bone and rearranged my spine a little.

  “We figure you don’t know who we are, Mallory. If we thought you knew who we are, we’d blow your goddamn head off. Do you know that?”

  I didn’t say anything. Nobody can say I never learn my lesson.

  “We’re responsible people, Mallory. We aren’t crazy. We didn’t mean to kill that old woman. We were just ripping her off, is all we were doing. And anyway, she was old, man. Maybe she’d’ve died of a heart attack about then, anyway. Without our help. Who knows.”

  The other voice said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Just a second. Mallory... Mallory, be a good boy. Stay away from us.”

  “He doesn’t know who we are; come on, let’s get outa here.”

  “Mallory, don’t try to find us. Don’t come looking to figure out who we are. Don’t try to be a hero again, like you did back at the old lady’s place. Or you know what?”

  He seemed to want me to speak, so I said, “What?”

  “Or we’ll kill you. That’s what. Kill you.”

  “Yeah, we’ll kill you, asshole.”

  And here’s the good part: they kicked me.

  In the ribs.

  9

  The next morning was hot. That brief flash of October in the middle of July had gone away somewhere, and I woke up to sweat-dampened sheets and got the air conditioner going even before I brushed my teeth.

  It didn’t take long to cool down the little trailer. My quarters were small, but very nice; the previous owner of the old trailer had been as attached to the thing as I was and had taken the time and expense to remodel the interior, putting in dark paneling and a fairly modern kitchenette. The living room was crowded by the possessions that make life bearable: a nineteen-inch Sony TV, stereo tape components, brick-and-board bookcase full of paperbacks, and walls bearing posters from several of my favorite movies: Vertigo, American Graffiti, Chinatown, Goldfinger, Caddyshack, and so on. I used to have the Penthouse Pet of the Year on one wall, life-size, but too many discussions about my possible status as a sexist were, shall we say, aroused by her presence.

  By the time I had some clothes on, my ribs had started to flare up. I won’t bother trying to describe the pain. It hurt. I didn’t cry, but I thought about it.

  At ten o’clock I was in the hospital coffee shop having breakfast; at ten-thirty I was getting X-rayed; and at eleven-thirty I was being told my ribs (two of them, on the right) were cracked, not broken—which was good news—and was strapped into a harness—which wasn’t. If a girdle and a truss got together and had a kid, that harness would’ve been it. By noon I was pulling my van up in front of the courthouse, across the street from which is the jail. Brennan’s offices are in the front part of the jailhouse, a big light-stone, two-story building that didn’t look like a jail, really, except for the barred and caged windows and electrically fenced-in backyard, where the prisoners got their daily exercise.

  Brennan was brown-bagging it in his office, studying some folders at his desk. It was cool—all the offices were centrally air-conditioned, unlike the jail cells—a pine-paneled cubicle with pictures of ducks on the wall, and some framed newspaper notices of Brennan’s big murder case, where a local woman killed her husband with a pair of scissors and Brennan had caught her red-handed, you should excuse the expression. The woman is now serving sandwiches at Katie’s, up the street, since husband-killing is generally considered justifiable homicide. There was also a color photo in a gold frame on his desk: his son John in uniform.

  Evidently our temporary truce was still on, as Brennan treated me to a Pepsi, tossing me some change and telling me to help myself from the hall machine and bring him one, too. I did, then broke the truce by telling him, for the first time, about my return visit from the rib-kickers the night before.

  “Jesus Christ, man!” he sputtered, getting some Pepsi on himself. He jerked up into a sitting position and, seeing as he’d been leaning back with his feet on his desk, that took some maneuvering. “Why the hell didn’t you call us?”

  “I’d had pain-in-the-ass enough for one evening.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Use your head. What the hell would’ve been the point of bothering you guys again? When they kicked me, I blacked out for a while... a couple minutes, at least. By the time you could’ve got to my place, they’d have been long, long gone.”

  That calmed him down, sounded reasonable to him. He put his feet back up on his desk and said, “Christ. We just can’t have people going around doing things like this.”

  “Kicking me in the ribs, you mean? I agree.”

  “Screw your ribs. I’m talking about looting houses, and now, killing people.” Brennan gestured to a folder on his desk, next to his sack lunch. “Take a look.”

  I did. There were clippings from the Port City Journal dating back to April, the first good weather. Seven other homes had been similarly emptied. I’d remembered the rash of breaking-and-enterings, but for some reason hadn’t tied it up to Mrs. Jonsen’s. Maybe because some aspects of the other robberies didn’t exactly fit the Jonsen one, as Brennan was soon to point out.

  “S
even goddamn house lootings,” Brennan said, “in four goddamn months, and now another one. Only this one don’t exactly fit the MO of the other jobs.”

  “MO? Brennan, don’t tell me you’ve been watching Chips reruns again.”

  “Look, prior to this job, the homes were left untouched... all valuables gone, yes, but none of this vandalism crap. The whole damn Jonsen house was torn up, like some drunken kids out on prom night got together and whooped it up.”

  “Like you said last night, maybe they were looking for the fabled Jonsen money.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a different bunch responsible. Somebody who pulled this, figuring we’d tie it to those others.” He made a face. “Glance at those clippings one more time, Mallory. Notice any common denominator?”

  I skimmed them again. “Sure. All seven times the houses were where people weren’t home. Either out for the evening, or out of town on some trip or something.”

  “Right, and that’s another dissimilarity between the Jonsen job and the other ones.”

  I swigged my Pepsi. “Consider this. Suppose these people had some source of information that dried up. Suppose this job was either based on some new source of information, or was a first effort without that sort of help.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, let’s say this group of rip-off artists had some way they’ve been spotting which houses are going to be vacant. One of them works at the gas or electric company, maybe, as a meter man, say, and has knowledge of who’s going to be out of town for a while, or just overhears plans of going out for the evening when he checks the meter. Or maybe one of them has a girl friend who works as a secretary at a travel agency and knows who’s on vacation. Maybe one of them works at the newspaper and knows who’s having their papers stopped for a while. Or the phone company, and knows who’s having phone service temporarily stopped. A lot of maybes like that.”

  Brennan had been nodding all through what I said. He said, “We’ve considered those. They sound good, until you knock ’em up against this job. Why would these people change their pattern now?”

  I shrugged. “Could be they just thought someone would get wise to their present source of information. Could be that source got fired or laid off from that information-packed inside job.”