A talent for killing, p.13
A Talent for Killing, page 13
Bull awoke from a light sleep at a few minutes after one. Kane had entered the motel room. He seemed to have trouble moving around, like he’d had too much to drink. Bull listened to the fumbling as he undressed, water running in the basin and the toilet flushing. And, not much later, he heard Kane settle into the bed and the light, breathy snore when Kane was sleeping. Bull went back to sleep.
Bull awoke quickly. What had awakened him was a loud groan. The time on the clock was 3:09. After the groan, he heard Kane ask, “Why?”
There were a few seconds of silence and then Kane said, “Go away, leave me alone.”
Dreaming. That was what Bull decided it was. And he’d stretched out once more and fitted his head into the pillow when he heard the knocking at Kane’s door.
Something after all.
Bull kicked his legs over the side of the bed and leaned close to the receiver. He shook a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it and waited.
The girl said, “You don’t look in very good shape, John.”
“I’m not. I feel like I tried to drink a whole river of booze. But I had to if I wanted to get close to Franco.”
Dull footsteps. The girl said, “Where’re you going?”
“To run some cold water over my face. Or, if I’m lucky, to drown myself in the basin.” The bathroom door closed behind him.
Sound of a zipper, cloth rustling and the muted tap of her shoes hitting the carpet. When the bathroom door opened, there was a gurgle of the toilet for a few seconds and then Kane said, “The bruises haven’t gone away yet.”
“I think they’ll be with me for a long time.”
Footsteps and the sound of the bed giving under Kane’s weight. “You come here for any special reason, Karen?”
“I thought you’d know … when you saw me like this.”
“I am not a thing,” Kane said.
“What?”
“I’m not a dildo for lonely ladies.”
“You saw him,” the girl said. “The way Barton is now.”
“Go love him,” Kane said.
“I did, until somebody blew away half of his face.”
“Love him or stop loving him,” Kane said.
“That’s easy for you to say. You didn’t know Barton Riker the way I did. Before it happened he was as much a man as you are. All the things a man ought to be.”
In his motel room, Bull wrote Barton Riker on a pad next to the receiver. He didn’t need to add a question mark.
“Go tell that to his ghost,” Kane said.
“I do. I love him. I still love him. But I’m a woman just like any woman and I need … I need. Before you there wasn’t anybody. Before you …” Her voice was husky, pleading.
Kane said, “Oh, God.”
The bed squeaked under his shifting weight. The girl was crying.
Kissing and the crying stopped. A gasp from the girl and the bed began to stir under their movement. The girl was saying, over and over, “Love me, love me, love me. …”
Bull went into the bathroom. Urinating, he listened to their strong bed movement. He heard it while he stood and looked at his face in the bathroom mirror. The cold flint eyes stared back at him.
What is the Chinese philosopher’s question? Am I a man dreaming that I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man dreaming that I am a butterfly?
The two water tumblers were on the cover of the toilet. Hers showed the mark of her lipstick. Bull pushed that one away, rinsed his and carried it into the bedroom. He got the pint of I. W. Harper from the dresser and poured himself a shot. His ear near the receiver while he drank, he heard a shift in the motion and thought, in the short rows, there was something like the cry of a bird and Kane said, “Oh, God damn,” and the movement stopped.
In the silence, waiting to see if there would be pillow talk, Bull said to himself, “I am not a God damn butterfly. What kind of fucking nonsense is that?”
“I’ve pretended to take a contract,” Kane said.
The voices were low now, the intensity gone. Bull leaned forward and turned up the volume.
“The contract is on Hardy Winston,” Kane added.
“But you’re not …?”
“Of course not,” Kane said. “It’s a matter of acting like I’m looking for the right time and place. That will buy us some time.” A pause, a scratch and the flare of a match. “As long as they think I’m going to make the hit, they won’t bring in anybody from outside to try it.”
“If they try it, they’ll find Barton,” the girl said.
“I doubt it. They want the job done away from town. Somewhere else. So it’ll look like a mugging that went bad. The last thing they want is for it to happen at Winston’s house.”
Bull wrote down Hardy Winston. Then he wrote below that Barton Riker there?
The girl said, yawning, “I feel so much better. I almost feel human again.”
Kane said, “Anytime, lady.”
“And I do thank you, John, for understanding.”
“Don’t thank me,” Kane said. “Leave the money on the table on your way out and please be generous.”
The girl left about daylight. Long before that, Bull turned the volume down and slept. It was a restless sleep. He could hear their breathing, the snoring, and the tossing and turning. At times, like a nightmare, it seemed to him that all three of them slept together in the same huge, restless bed.
At the Ansonville Telegram-Star, Bull hunched over the counter in the Want Ads section, writing on the pad that the gray-haired lady had furnished him.
Newcomer to city interested in good business proposition. Have medium amount of capital available for investment.
There was space left at the bottom of the form for the newspaper to assign it a box number. At the top of the form, Bull wrote: Orin B. Travis, Days Inn Motel.
“So you thinking of going into business here, Mr. Travis?” The tip of her pencil tapped each word, counting, and he watched while she figured what he owed on the basis of a week of daily runs.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It depends upon the kind of response I get.”
“Oh, you’ll get a lot of good offers,” she said. “Money’s tight right now.”
Bull placed a twenty on the counter. She gave him his change and a receipt for the payment.
“That could be,” Bull said. “Still, there’s a question or two. Things that bother me about this town.”
“Is that so?”
“Now, mind you, I don’t say they’re true. And I’ve only been in town a day or two.”
“What kind of things?”
“Well … stories about organized crime. How it’s got a good hold here. And about the violence.”
The mouth prim. “I can’t imagine what you’ve heard.”
Bull got out a cigarette and lit it and waited. The pump was in, and it was primed.
“Of course,” she said, “you always hear those stories about any town.”
“It was something about a shooting here in town a while back. I’m not sure I heard the name right. It was Richter or Riker or …”
The pursed mouth relaxed. “Yes, that happened. But as my Frank says, it’s all right if it’s just criminals killing each other.”
“Killing? I thought it was just a shooting. I didn’t hear anything …”
“They never found the body if that’s what you mean. Frank said there was enough blood and bone and all that in the car when they found it … well, enough so you could be sure that the Riker man couldn’t have lived after that. And Frank says they always take the body off somewhere and bury it. And lots of times they pour quick lime over it.”
“They do that?”
“That’s what Frank says.”
“But they never found the body?”
“From what I heard, they didn’t even look very hard. They knew he was dead. Frank says you wouldn’t believe the way these criminals just disappear. One day they’re here and overnight they’re gone. And everybody says that they left for New York or Chicago but they all know better.”
“This Riker fellow, he was in with the mobs?”
Within another eight or ten minutes, carefully directing her back to the information he wanted each time she strayed, Bull stored away almost all he wanted to know about Barton Riker.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Kane entered the Nineties Club a few minutes after two in the afternoon. The bartender, the one who’d been on duty the night Kane and Franco had their run-in, gave him a good buddy wave from behind the bar. So the word was out. He was in and that meant he had the run of the place. Kane nodded at the bartender and headed for the dining room. A sullen waiter met him at the doorway and said that the dining room had closed at two. Kane swung back to the bar.
“A beer,” he said.
‘‘Any special kind?” The bartender used a damp rag to wipe the already clean surface of the bar where Kane sat.
“It all tastes like piss to me,” Kane said.
“Try this one then,” the bartender said. He placed a bottle of Beck’s in front of Kane. He stood and waited until Kane had his first sip. He took Kane’s bland nod as a compliment.
“The kitchen closed?”
Kane said that it was.
“You want something?”
“Prime rib and a salad.”
“How you want it?” the bartender asked.
“The ribs bleeding and the salad with oil and vinegar.”
Rounding the bar and heading for the kitchen, the bartender winked at Kane.
One of the bus boys brought his lunch to him at the bar fifteen minutes later. Kane finished the prime rib under the eyes of the bartender and he was on a second Beck’s when Franco rushed in the front door. He found Kane at the bar and a relaxed smile replaced the tense, worried expression on his face.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Franco said. “Something just went down and …”
Kane whirled his stool around and put his back to the bar. He shook his head at Franco, silencing him. He caught Franco by the topcoat sleeve and pulled him toward a corner table some distance from the bar.
“Don’t talk my business in front of people,” he said.
“Him?” Franco looked at the bartender. “He’s all right.”
“Nobody is all right,” Kane said. “Now tell me about it and keep your voice down.”
Franco leaned close to him. “Word we have is that Hardy Winston is flying to Atlanta later this afternoon.”
“How do you know?”
“I put some cash on the mech who services his plane. He called an hour or so ago, said Winston wanted the plane ready about four.” He looked at his watch. “In about an hour or less.”
“Then it’s on?”
“It’s on.”
“How do I get there?”
“Charter,” Franco said. “It’s waiting now. A Beechcraft. You leave right now and you can be waiting for him when he touches down.”
“His flight plan filed?”
“Not yet, but the mech says he’ll be landing at the DeKalb airport.”
Kane left him and went to the bar. He got his topcoat from the stool next to the one where he’d been sitting. He put it on and got out his cash roll. He took out a ten. The bartender moved down and looked at the ten on the bar and shook his head. “I’m told it’s on the house for you, anything you want.”
Kane pushed the ten toward him. “Then Lord knows who this belongs to.” He heard the bartender’s thank you as he followed Franco out to the parking lot.
He stopped at the motel on the way to the Ansonville airport. Franco parked next to him and waited while he went inside. He got the Sport from inside the television set. He left the Duster parked at the motel and Franco drove him out to the airport.
Twilight in Atlanta. The flight took a bit more than an hour. Kane was met out front by a faceless hood, as Franco said he would, who gave him the keys to a black Impala. Then he’d gotten into a white Continental with another hood and they’d driven away without looking back.
Kane waited an hour in the Impala before Hardy Winston walked out next to a still limping Art and waved at a waiting cab. After the driver packed a couple of suitcases away in the trunk, the cab headed for Atlanta.
Sometime later Kane saw the cab pull into the oval driveway in front of the Regency Hyatt House. From the street, Kane saw the suitcases unloaded before the car behind him started honking at him, forcing him to drive on.
At 590 West, the club high above Stouffers on West Peachtree, Kane sat at a small table overlooking West Peachtree Street. The lights of northeast Atlanta spread out below him. Off in the distance, near Peachtree and 14th, he could see the lights of the Colony Square development and the new Fairmont Hotel.
Jackson Carter arrived while he was still on his first drink. At first, Jackson seemed to be drifting, searching for a table, but his eyes caught Kane’s and Kane nodded. Carter sat down.
The waitress who’d followed Carter over to the table took his order for a vodka martini with a lemon twist. When she moved away, Carter watched the movement of her rump with a keen, hot interest.
“What do you need?”
“Human blood. A quart or so of it. With tissue in it. In Winston’s blood type, if you can find out what it is.”
“Ought to be a way,” Carter said.
“And a place for Winston to hide out for a week or so, until the job is done.”
“The house on Tenth. It’s empty.” Carter brought out a key ring and worked a key off. He slid it across the table toward Kane.
“How soon can you have the blood for me?”
“An hour or an hour and a half. I know this friendly undertaker.” He looked around when the waitress placed the drink in front of him. “The problem is finding out the right blood type.” He took a quick sip of the martini. “Back in a couple of minutes.”
He was gone for ten minutes. He nodded before he sat down. “Got it from his service record. Pays to know a few people here and there.” He sipped the warm martini. “Pick it up in an hour at the corner of Tenth and Peachtree. You know the Chinese place, Eng’s? In the parking lot behind that.”
“Payment?” Kane asked.
“Give him fifty.”
“He trustworthy?”
“I own his ass,” Carter said. “I tell him when to breathe.” He fished the lemon peel from the martini with one finger and chewed it slowly and swallowed it.
The quart of blood and tissue was in a brown bag on the floorboards of the back seat. Kane drove out Peachtree until he found an open service station just past Pershing Point. He told the attendant to fill the tank and check the oil. A quick look at the phone book and he dialed the Regency Hyatt number and asked for Hardy Winston’s room.
Winston answered.
“No names,” Kane said. “I’m your visitor from the other night.”
“Karen’s new friend?”
“That’s the one. You talk to her today?”
“She told me some wild assed story.”
“It’s not that wild. I’ve got to see you and set it up.” Kane felt the hesitation. “Either you believe me or you don’t. It’s that simple.”
He heard the nasal breathing and then a kind of grunt of decision. “I guess I have to.”
“You got a car?”
“Art rented one.”
“Make and color?”
“Brown Mustang. Art’s taste runs to cars that girls will like.”
“You know that string of clubs down from the Hyatt? The Nitery and the Copy Cat, those places?”
“Yeah.”
“Have a few drinks at each. Be seen. And park the Mustang in the motel parking lot across from the Copy Cat.”
“I come alone?”
“Bring your flunky with you if it makes you feel better. But get noticed. Do some big tips. Pinch a butt or two.”
“That ought to be easy,” Winston said. “How long do I do this?”
“Put in an hour or so. Half of it at the Nitery and half at the Copy Cat.” Kane looked at his watch. “It’s ten now. Give yourself a bit of an edge. Leave the Copy Cat and head for the Mustang at about eleven twenty-five.”
“What happens then?”
“We do a charade.”
At eleven twenty-five, Kane pulled the Impala into the narrow lot next to the motel. He turned it around and pointed it back toward the street. He left the engine running. At eleven thirty he heard footsteps coming across the street and into the lot. He recognized the thick shape of Hardy Winston. Next to him, limping, the smaller shape of Art.
Kane got out of the Impala. The Sport was in his coat pocket and the brown bag with the quart of blood and tissue in it in his left hand.
Hardy Winston looked at him and said, “What’s this about a charade?”
“Just that,” Kane said. “I’m going to make some people think I killed you.” He touched Winston’s heavy tweed jacket. “I hope you’re not in love with this. I’m going to ruin it.”
Winston shucked off the jacket. He reached for the thin wallet in the breast pocket. Kane stopped him. “I’ll need that, too. Much cash in it?”
“Four or five hundred.”
“That stays too.” Kane waved a hand toward the Mustang. “Start it up.”
He turned to Art. “You get behind the wheel of the Impala.”
As soon as Art was in the Impala’s driver’s seat, Kane walked over to the Mustang and waited until Winston had the engine going.
He motioned Hardy to the Impala. He placed the tweed jacket on the seat of the Mustang and poured about half of the dark liquid on the coat. The rest of the contents of the bottle he poured on the dashboard, from the center of it toward the passenger side. He replaced the bottle in the bag and placed it at his feet. He lifted the tweed coat and held it at a height that he estimated it would be if Hardy were seated behind the wheel. He took out the Sport, held it about a foot from the back of the coat, and fired two rounds into it, about heart high.
He lifted the bag with the bottle in it and still holding the coat he made his run for the Impala. He got in the back seat and said, “Take a left.” He looked back and saw the Mustang’s door open, the lights, and the dark splashes.
