The buried motive, p.4
The Buried Motive, page 4
I ate it, anyway, trying to size up the joint while I did so. There were all kinds and types: thin guys, fat guys, tall guys, short guys, octoroons, Mexicans, Indians, and guys from Detroit. It was a real international hodgepodge. I ordered my coffee and then started to circulate around the joint, tapping up the customers as to whether they’d seen my boy Bramley Rashor anywhere nearby, or if they knew anything at all about Royal Blaine.
None of them did. Most of them gave me a sort of drop-dead look when I broke in on their real cool conversations—mostly about rigs and loads and fuel pipes and gas lines. But generally they were a pretty congenial bunch of working stiffs. I got back to my place at the counter in time to see the last wisp of steam disappear from my cup of Joe.
I ordered another. I got my picture of Bramley Rashor out and looked at it, and then I took my newspaper up and looked at the picture of Royal Blaine.
“Knew him well,” a voice said next to me. I turned my head. A big blond Swedish guy with a red stupid face and red ears and a leather jacket was sitting next to me staring at me. He’d just come in, and I hadn’t interviewed him. Actually, he was half sitting on me he was so big, and resting his chest and half his stomach on his own dinner plate. It didn’t matter. He was talking to me, and he was saying he knew Blaine.
“Oh?” I said, trying to make it sound intelligent.
“Blaine. Fellow that was killed.”
“Where? I mean, where did you know him?”
“Used to come in here,” the big Swede said. “Funny guy. Wore a funny hat. Talked with a New York accent, like you hear on the TV all the time. Claimed he was a big magazine writer. Figured he was a stuffed shirt.”
I grinned, keeping it casual. I was playing it all as a fairly amusing joke. “Well, who killed him?” I asked, never one to avoid unpleasant subjects. It was just the question a dumb cluck would ask. Me.
The driver leaned around and looked at me. “He didn’t say. But me, I bet it was that dame.”
I tried to keep the gleam out of my eye. “What dame?”
“The dame he used to see in here ever so often. Funny name. She used to come in here and fool around with the jukebox. Chandra something or others” He squinted to try to get the name back in focus. “Chandra Rudley. That’s the one.”
“What’d she look like?”
He stared at me. “You trying to get bumped off, too?”
“Why not?” I asked him, poking him in the rib and grinning. “Then I wouldn’t have to pay my income tax.”
He thought about that half a minute and chewed on his potatoes. Finally it got through, and he exploded into laughter. Half his mouthful of potatoes went on the thin girl’s derrière as she trotted by.
“Okay,” he said finally, after getting his breath and another mouthful of potatoes, “she’s got these green eyes and brunette hair in a crew cut almost, and a lot of stuff here that’s all in the right place, and a pinched looking face, and legs that didn’t come off no couch.”
I laughed. I had to. He thought he was a wit. You butter up these guys who think they’re witty by laughing at them. If you don’t, they’ll knock you silly. Who wants lumps for principles?
“Why’d she want to kill him?” I asked in a friendly tone.
He let his shoulders go up and down. “Dunno. Maybe she couldn’t keep up with him. Or mebbe she didn’t like that damned stogie he always smoked.” He thought that was funny, too. People began turning around and looking at us.
Then laughing boy leaned over and whispered in my ear. “I saw them meet once. Had my rig jacked up for a flat down the road at Al’s, see, and I seen the two of them in that deserted garage out back. They was sitting there talking. That’s all I seen.”
“Why, it sounds like a good clue,” I said, playing Sherlock Holmes.
“I got to run on to Denver so I can’t help you, Mack, but I’d sure like to do some snooping along with you.”
I pulled out my picture of Rashor. “Ever see this guy?” I asked the fabulous Swede.
He stared at it, turning it about and puzzling over it. “Nope.” He handed it back.
I put it away. “You say the girl’s name is Chandra Rudley?”
“Right. Like I say, she and this Blaine guy kind of seemed to hit it off. I’d say she was a clue.” He winked at me and then got up off his stool and grabbed his check. He put his big hand on my shoulder and said: “Good luck, Mack.”
The transcontinental Swede went over to the cashier and paid his check. The last I saw of him he was pushing his way through the front door, and waving at me over his shoulder. The floor must have eased up about two inches once he’d cleared the building.
I got down some more java to lay my grease and weed meal quietly, and headed out into the darkness. Chandra Rudley.
Al’s Service Station was down the road and I stumbled along by the irrigation ditch through the pitch black until I came to the gravel driveway. There was a light on inside, and Al was sitting there, reading a newspaper. He was a freckle-faced guy with a faint smile. When I told him I wanted to use his phone, he pointed outside to a booth, and I went out again, and into it. I pulled the phone book off the hook and leafed through it. I found the name Chandra Rudley listed and I dialed. A husky, slow-talking voice answered.
“Miss Rudley?”
“That’s right.” Her voice became wary. “Who is this, please?” She was within a hair’s-breadth of hanging up.
“I’m an attorney. I represent the late Royal Blaine. I’d like to talk to you if I can.”
You could have cut the silence with a rubber hose. “All right,” she said finally. “Where are you now?”
“Out on the highway at Al’s Garage. I could meet you in back here. Mr. Blaine said he once spoke to you there.”
I heard her breathe in deeply. “Yes. Of course.” Then, as if she were smiling hopelessly, she said, “Right away?”
“I’ll be there when you come.”
“Say twenty minutes?”
“Sure, Miss Rudley.”
I had one of those pencil flashlights and I got it out and poked it around in the darkness out back of Al’s garage. There was another big building, deserted and open, about fifty yards to the rear of the gas station. I figured that was where the girl had met Blaine.
I headed across the stubbly field and made out the open doors and walked in. My footsteps echoed eerily, and I could feel the emptiness of the place about me as I moved. It was too damned similar to being ushered into a tomb. The ceiling was high and the walls spaced far apart. The sounds my feet made bounced back and forth, setting up vibrations that were unnerving. My breathing came back at me, like the rush of a gale in the trees, I poked the thin needle-like blade of light into the darkness, and made my way over toward a workbench that was deserted now, but still had the faded smudges of dried grease and oil on it.
I lit a cigarette and turned off my flash and smoked and let the night press in on me.
In twenty minutes I heard the crunching sound of heels coming out of the darkness. The steps were fast; I judged they were a woman’s heels. I was right. Pretty soon I could see the silhouette of a woman’s body standing in the vast open expanse of the garage’s front. I punched on the pencil flashlight and said:
“That you, Miss Rudley?”
She moved into the darkness toward me. “That’s right, Mr.—Mr…?”
“Madigan,” I said flatly. “Cash Madigan.” As she hesitated, I waved the pencil beam around me. “Right over here, Miss Rudley. If you don’t mind, I like to have my back to the wall. Especially in the dark.” I laughed. “Habit I got into over in Korea.”
“All right,” she said patiently. “Do you have a cigarette?”
She came up to me then, standing about two feet away, and I could smell this faint sachet of violet wafting out from her. Lots of times you get a good idea about a person from the smell. She smelled fresh. She smelled clean and honest and straight. As I hesitated, thinking, she said again: “How about that pill?”
Her voice crawled all over me. I flipped the match alive with my thumbnail, surprising the hell out of myself, and the flame poked a hole in the darkness and her face was framed in it and I gave a gasp.
She had full red lips and a nose that was perfect because you didn’t notice it at all, and luminous eyes the color of which I couldn’t tell in that flickering match light, and hair that was curly and cut short in the Italian movie style, and the rest of her in the darkness was just about what you’d expect attached to such a fine beginning. I almost let the match burn me down to the elbow before I got alive enough to poke a cigarette at her. We got our weeds going and stood there next to each other, and I couldn’t help wondering what this stoolie Blaine had in common with a doll like Chandra Rudley. Unhappily, I could guess.
“You said something about Mr. Blaine?” she asked gently, after I’d lifted her up on the work bench and we both sat there side by side, letting our legs hang over the edge.
I worked at my weed and thought it over. I’d better give her the standard pitch and see what happened. I did just that. I told her Blaine was my client, and how I had to find out all I could about him so I could take care of his estate.
She sounded surprised. “His estate? Did he have any family?”
Blaine had so many broads in New York he’d lived with at one time or other, I couldn’t even begin to name them. I didn’t mention any of these. I made up a sister in Cleveland.
“And why did you get in touch with me, Mr. Madigan?” she asked. I could feel that perfume and that voice sliding over me. It was delicious.
“I want to talk to everybody who ever had any dealings with him in Gotham, Miss Rudley.” I sounded so sincere I almost believed it myself.
“I see.” She drew on the cigarette and snapped it with her fingernail to get the ash off. “You lie so well, Mr. Madigan, that it’s a pleasure taking lessons.”
I pulled in some smoke and let it out and counted to about twenty in Pig Latin before I could say it. “Oh?” That was all I could contribute.
“I knew all about Blaine. He was a lousy little greasy stool-pigeon. He was wanted by the cops and the hoods and everybody. So you’re not telling me any prefabricated story about being his lawyer. If he had a lawyer, the lawyer should go bury himself. It’d take more than a lawyer to straighten out all Roy’s troubles. He was killed because it got too late for him to go on living.”
I sighed. “That cat’s out of the bag. I’m an investigator. I need information about him. Do you have any?”
I heard her smile, which is damned hard to do. “I have some. Is it worth anything like money to you?”
“How much do you mean when you say ‘money’?”
There was a pause. I heard her breathing slowly, steadily. She was mercenary, maybe, and not so straight as a die, maybe, but the feel of her and the nearness of her was crawling all over me; and I was goosebumps from Natchez to Mobile.
“Oh, five thou, maybe. I could be tempted by a figure like that.”
I whistled softly. “I’m down to my last pair of dirty socks and a crumpled old tie today, Miss Rudley. But I’ll contact the powers that be. Perhaps in the future we could arrange some kind of a transaction.”
“Okay,” she said softly, her voice husky and throaty. “Could be we deal. I don’t know if I have anything tremendously important, but it could be.”
I swallowed. “Were you—what was your contact with him? Anything—uh…”
She laughed. “Let’s put that off until we meet again, my friend,” she said. “Don’t you think that would be discreet?”
“Maybe so,” I said. I pulled out my wallet. I got out Bramley Rashor’s picture. “Take a look at this.”
She held it up and I lit a match and she stared at it. I gazed at her, at her close-cropped hair, at her low, flat ears, at her sharp profile, at her lithe slenderness, and I figured she’d hold up under pressure. “Ever see him?”
“No,” she said finally, handing it back to me. “Should I have?”
I put the photo back in its place. “So-so,” I said. “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
“Who is it?”
Everybody kept asking me that. I said, “Everybody keeps asking me that. As soon as I find someone who’s seen him, I’ll tell.”
“Cozy fellow.”
“I try to be.” I stubbed my cigarette out on the surface of the work bench, and Chandra did likewise.
“If you’ll give me five minutes’ lead on you before you come out of here, I’d appreciate it,” she said.
“You brought a car?”
There was a pause. “Maybe. Maybe I came by bus. Maybe I flew—like Peter Pan. Let’s keep it that way. Exciting. Unknown.”
“Okay. Good night.”
She clicked across the cement floor on her heels, and then she scratched along in the stubby grass, and her figure disappeared into the vast cavern of darkness. I lit another cigarette, and smoked it down to the end. That was about five minutes, I figured. I slid down off the workbench and started across the cement floor.
In this business you get to have eyes where you don’t have eyes, and ears where you don’t have ears, and feelings all over you. I stopped dead in the center of the big garage. Maybe the skin of the human body is similar to radar. I felt there was someone in that place with me. Someone who might have entered when I was chatting with Chandra Rudley. I knew suddenly there was someone there with me, and I felt the hackles rise on the nape of my neck. Really stiffen out and rise.
I cursed myself for not being armed. I was one hell of an investigator. I didn’t even pack a rod. All I had was my hands and my wits, and neither one of those commodities seemed to be giving top performance this season.
Come on, I said to myself. Come out of there and show yourself. Who are you? What do you want—besides my blood?
I heard the quick steps, and I hopped gingerly aside, hoping whatever it was would pass me by. But he had cat’s eyes. I felt a heavy body lunge into me, and I felt fists like sledge hammers beat into my chest and stomach and groin. I doubled up and clutched at a head, smashing into eyes, nose and mouth. Then I got myself oriented, after a fashion, and I slashed at the chest and stomach, and tried getting a hammerlock on the body. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. We grunted at our blind desperate job for ten minutes maybe, until a sledgehammer blow took me on the side of the skull just below my right ear in the area called rabbit-punch land. The garage fell in on me. It wasn’t dark anymore. There were stars and the Milky Way, and a moon, and rockets and earth satellites and everything.
Then nothing.
Chapter 4
I was back in Korea. Was I having a brainwash? No. It wasn’t a brainwash. I suddenly came alive and I knew what was happening. It was worse than a brainwash—more genteel, more permanent.
I smelled cow dung and barn droppings; I recognized the interior of the Owen barn. Explosions came, and I ducked instinctively. I knew rifle fire when I heard it. It has a special sound when you’re on the wrong end of it. The stink of cordite gagged me. I was sick with concussion and shock and terror.
I saw Biff Owen thirty feet away from me, lying on his stomach, prone, with a rifle sighted at me. Around me lay a graveyard of empty beer cans, and a couple of unopened ones. Bullets danced all around me, smacking into the wall.
Somehow I’d been dragged from Al’s Garage up to the barn, still unconscious. I was groggy, but I knew one thing: I had to get out of there fast. I moved along the ground on my hips and shoulders in the infantry man’s roll, trying to find a foxhole somewhere. But I was fresh out tonight.
Dirt geysered up in front of me and another can leaped against the wall. I stopped worming. I played possum.
He laughed. Whatever had happened to Biff Owen had left him a sense of humor, anyway. I guess.
“Hey!” I shouted. “It’s me. Cash Madigan. Buddy, I got news for you. That rifle’s loaded.”
“He talks.” Biff Owen laughed again, grabbing up a can and pouring some ale down his throat. “Talk some more, lover boy.” He flung the can at me.
The air exploded again and the wall behind me shook. Then the shooting stopped. There was a glassy silence.
“What’s your gripe, Biff?” I shouted, my voice unnatural and loud in the big barn. “What you got against these beer cans?”
“You walk, you talk, you sleep at night. Is there anything more I could have against any man?”
“You need a head doctor, Biff, and you need him bad. You got something that’ll be the end of you if you don’t try to grab hold of it.”
I heard his voice, rasping snarling. “You’re just like him. They always say I need a head doctor. You and him and Taffy.”
“You do, Biff,” I said, knowing I’d better talk fast and talk good sense. Here was my chance for a pitch. I could make it now, or muff it. If I muffed it, I was through. “You got a beef, and you can’t work it out. Okay, we’ve all got beefs. You tell me yours. But I can’t talk with your damned bullets singeing the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin.”
“What’s there to talk about?” he growled. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Then get it over with. Drill me. You’ve got me where you want me. Kill me. Only I hope you know why you’re doing it.”
“You’re just like him. Isn’t that reason enough?” I saw him fondling the rifle, and I didn’t know whether he was thinking it over, or getting ready to squeeze down on me.
“Who, Biff?”
He laughed. “Him. Who else is there but him? The great high and mighty muck-a-muck. The lord and master.”
I’d thought so. “How am I like your old man, Biff? I’m on the wrong end of a rifle in a dirty barn. How’m I like your old man?”
He licked his lips. He thought a minute. “Let’s say you’re where I wish he was, Madigan.”
“Let me up, Biff. I’ll be your whipping boy over a shot of Old Grandad. But not here.”
His eyes flamed. “You are like him. With Taff, and with Chan. A great big lover boy…”
“It’s business,” I said quickly. So he was soft on Chandra Rudley. And Chandra Rudley had been close to Royal Blaine. Things did fit together. He’d followed Chandra Rudley to her little rendezvous with me. And leaped me when she’d left. “Strictly commercial enterprise, Biff. We were talking about Royal Blaine; I was trying to find out who killed him. It’s that simple.”
