Kill Me Tomorrow (23 page)

I knew—well, all that and more, for it all followed from Professor Elliott Irwin's telling me that No. 6 was D—or: the Reverend Stanley Archibald. Oddly, in my mind I could almost hear him saying syrupily, “‘Also unto thee, O Lord,
belongeth
mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.' Psalms: Sixty, Two-twelve.”

But I remembered his quoting something else about, “Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak,” and I took my hand off the phone and lifted it up before mine eyes and made it into a rather formidable fist and smiled upon it. For I had—according, at least, to Reverend Archie—a Commandment from the Lord. And I meant to keep that Commandment. Meant to keep it despite the slings and arrows and bullets of the evildoers, despite even the much more formidable fist of Bludgett. Verily, I had my work cut out for me.

Beyond the drawn blinds white incandescence flared, thunder cracked, banged against the walls and in my ears. After it the rumble of much more distant thunder rolled, fluttered upon the air.

My copy of the tape Fred Jenkins had made—and died for—was in an envelope in the Mountain Shadows safe. I wanted to hear it again, for a lot of reasons. I went out and headed for the lobby desk, walking through rain becoming heavier now, letting the thoughts form, get fixed in my mind.

When I'd first talked privately with Reverend Archibald a bit more than twenty-four hours ago, he had of course been lying to me. It followed from simple premise to QED that Mrs. Blessing had been lying, and Henry Yarrow had been lying, and I knew finally why Gilberto Reyes had been murdered, who had ordered his murder and why. It wasn't important, at least not now, that Ace and Fleepo had done the actual killing. The whole thing—almost the whole thing—was starting to become clear.

When I'd listened to the Jenkins tape this morning part of the answer had been banging away at my ears, obvious, unmistakable, if I'd had the sense to realize it. An answer not in those last six minutes but in the three-quarters of an hour before then. I was a little late getting it—but better late, goddammit, I thought, than never.

Jenkins recorded only when there was something of interest, a phone call, the arrival of somebody at the house—no point in recording silence. In other words, on that fifty-one minutes of tape was a record of everything said between, roughly, two or three
P
.
M
. Friday afternoon until a little after two
A
.
M
. this morning when the transmitter had been spotted.

I had been so intent upon listening for talk of murder, a damaging revelation, even a voice I might recognize, that I had completely failed to note the most important thing on the first forty-five minutes of that tape. Or, rather, the important thing which was
not
on it: Me.

The words I had spoken last night to Henry Yarrow, in his home, were
not
on the tape. Interestingly, too, Professor Irwin had told me three of his comparisons matched and
only
three. Yet No. 1 on my comparison tape, made this morning at the Villas, had been Henry Yarrow. Thus Yarrow's voice was not on the Jenkins tape, either.

As I trotted past the pool the sky above me was black. Before I reached the glass doors of the lobby fat drops of rain were churning the pool's surface and splattering heavily on cement. At the desk I gave the clerk my claim check and asked him to get the envelope I'd left in the safe. He did, but before handing it to me checked my box and plucked a slip of paper from it.

“Did you get your call, Mr. Scott?” he asked. “From the lady who phoned?”

“What lady?”

“She didn't leave her name. I mentioned it because she spoke to me personally, asked if I knew where she might reach you—apparently she had already phoned your room. She requested that we have you paged.”

I couldn't think of any ladies who might have called and paged me except Lucrezia and—maybe—my “old gray-headed” Mary Blessing, widow with the hotly hypnotic thighs.

“Is the message from her?” I indicated the slip of paper in his hand.

He shook his head. “This was from a gentleman who phoned, oh … perhaps three-quarters of an hour after we paged you.”

I read the note. “Shell, call Tony. Very urgent. Call this number.” But the number was not Tony Brizante's.

I turned away from the desk, then stopped. I was getting a very funny feeling. The time of the message had been logged as seven-thirty-six
P
.
M
. It was ten minutes past eight now. According to what the clerk had said, I must have been paged only a few minutes before seven
P
.
M
. That would have been when I was trying to set things up for my episode with Bludgett—probably while still speaking with Dr. Fretsindler in his room.

“Let me talk to your switchboard operator,” I said.

She told me she had logged the call from the lady who'd spoken to the desk clerk at sixty-fifty
P
.
M
., then added, “There were three
other
calls for you about that time, Mr. Scott. All four within ten minutes or so. I remember because I
knew
you weren't in your room, but I had to keep ringing it anyway. I was ringing your room for the third time while you were still being paged from the call before—”

I interrupted. “The one call that was completed, to the desk here. If it was a toll call, the woman would have had to give her number to the operator. I want that number.”

It didn't take long. The six-fifty
P
.
M
. call had been from Sunrise Villas. The number was Tony Brizante's. And Tony's phone was probably—almost certainly by now—tapped.

I shoved the note and envelope with the tape into my coat pocket, mumbled some kind of thanks and was gone, running.

The rain was coming down like water squirted from a hose. I ran through it, slipped once but kept my balance, dug for my key as I reached the door of my suite. Inside, dripping on the carpet, I grabbed the phone and had the operator get for me the number on the soaking-wet slip still in my hand.

Tony didn't answer. It was a woman. “Who is this?”

“Shell Scott. I got a message—”

“Oh, yes. One minute. You wait. Please.”

I could hear the sound as she put the receiver down. Silence. A minute. A minute and a half. My throat was getting tight. And dry.

Then: “Shell?”

“Yes, Tony?”

“It is Tony. I called you, they said—”

“Never mind. I got your message. What's the matter?”

“It's Lucrezia. Lu, she's gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“Just—gone. She left, took my car. I didn't think she would leave. I had told her,
Lu, stay in the house
—”

He sounded like a man about to crack up. “Tony, cool it. Slow down. What the hell happened?”

“I was next door, I mean here where I am now—after our talk I did not want to use the phone in the house. I think, then, Lucrezia phoned somebody, maybe you. Mama said she heard Lu talking, but not what she said. When I got back to the house Lu had gone, taking the car.”

“That doesn't mean she's—”

“Wait. I was concerned, but not so frightened. I kept expecting her to come home. But—” He paused, and I could hear him breathing raggedly. “About an hour ago the Highway Patrol called me. They said on the road between here and Scottsdale they had found my car.”

“Found it? It wasn't … wrecked, was it?”

“Not turned over or crashed. It was off the road, angled off. The left fender in the front was crushed, bent in.”

“Tony. Lucrezia, was she—”

“The car was empty. She was gone.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

Words began pouring from him, but they made little sense to me, partly because half of them were in Italian. I was probably nearly as shaken as he was, but I said, “Tony, dammit, slow down. A lot of things have happened that you don't know about. I may be able to help—if you'll talk so I can understand you.”

“But she—” He cut it off. There was a short silence. When he spoke his voice was lower, steadier. “Yes. I will tell it to you just the way it came about. Late this afternoon, Lucrezia and I went to see Mrs. Reyes—for sympathy, from friendship. We did not go alone. Sergeant Striker drove us. Afterwards, when we were going up Palma Drive toward Claridge, where we turn to come home, there was a man walking from a house to his car in front. Lu said, ‘Dad, there's Mr. Yarrow.' I looked and it was him, yes, but it was a different car. And it was not the house where I saw him go Tuesday morning. I told Lu this, saying he must be visiting somebody, but she asked many questions, and had the sergeant slow down, almost stop, when we came to the house where I had seen Mr. Yarrow go before. It was nearly two blocks farther.”

“Yeah, that's the place where the meeting was, the one Jenkins bugged. It's the place Fred bugged because that's the house you pointed out to him.”

“I don't understand.”

“It would take too long to explain, Tony. Go on.”

“We came home. I still did not know if it was important, but I felt I should talk to you about it, maybe it would mean something to you. So I came next door here and phoned.”

“Did you tell Lucrezia what you were going to do?”

“No, just that I would be back soon. I called three times in maybe ten minutes but didn't reach you, and when I returned Lucrezia had gone—as I said. On the table by the phone was our local paper, the Sunrise Villas
News
, and in it is the story of the shooting at you last night, there at Mr. Yarrow's home. Lu, it must have been, had made a pencil line under the address given.”

“Sixteen-ninety-four North Palma Drive.”

“Yes … Is that important? I paid no attention to numbers, only that it was a different house—”

“Tony, when you first told me about following Yarrow Tuesday morning, you said you saw him turn off Claridge and go into a house about half a block down Palma Drive. When I called on Yarrow last night, I went to a house on Palma nearly
two blocks
from Claridge. I didn't think of that or realize what it meant until a little while ago, unfortunately. But the house where you and Lucrezia saw Yarrow today was the one nearly two blocks from Claridge, right?”

“Yes. But that is where I saw him go. Do you mean when I followed Mr. Yarrow—”

“I mean, Tony, you did
not
follow Mr. Yarrow. I'll explain when there's more time. What else can you tell me?”

“That is all there is. The Highway Patrol phoned, and I told them my daughter had been driving the car. Then I called you, left the message. But I have heard no more—”

“What time did you first call me?”

“We got home a little after six-thirty. I called you the first time … about quarter to seven it must have been.”

“Tony, I know Lucrezia pestered you to tell her what was going on, and you explained most of it to her this morning. But did you mention the possibility of a tap on your phone?”

“No …” He was silent. “My God, if it is my fault—”

“Maybe that angle isn't important, Tony. If it is, the fault's more mine than yours. But let's not jump to conclusions.…” I stopped. He started to speak, but I said, “Let me think, Tony. Just hold on a minute.”

It was clear enough that while Tony was trying to reach me from the house next door, where he was now, Lucrezia must have phoned me once from Tony's house. The timing, all of it fit—but didn't explain much yet. It was difficult for me to think with real clarity, not merely because I was so worried about Lucrezia, but because when Bludgett knocked me off the stage he hadn't done me any good. I'd come to with a sizable headache, and I still had most of it.

Yeah, Bludgett—there were too damned many things to think about all at once. I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes after eight. Forty minutes since Bludgett had roared into the thunderous night. Plenty of time to get in touch with his pals by now, if he'd wanted to. And I rather supposed he might have wanted to. But the only important factor at the moment was Lucrezia. What had happened to her—and
why
. That was the part I couldn't get, because I simply eliminated coincidence and assumed she'd been grabbed by the bastards I now thought of as Lecci and Company. Company like the Reverend, Ace and Fleepo, Weeton.…

Thunder still boomed and rumbled outside. Most of it in the past minutes had been soft and distant, but occasionally there was one of those solid cracks as a bolt struck the earth nearby. I could hear the rain, still coming down hard.

I went back to that
why?

It was almost too much for
me
to believe the boys had grabbed her, and it's a lot easier for me to believe the worst of hoods than it is for most. But it simply didn't make sense. Not even hood-sense. She was Lucrezia Brizante, not Sally Smalk from Corn-Ear, Nebraska. She wasn't a woman they could just snatch, knock around, kill. Unless … Unless she was, somehow, so enormously important to them they were willing to take the big chance—
and
had reason to believe they might get away with it.

Assume Brizante's phone was tapped. So what? What could they have heard? Merely a gal—or, rather, Lucrezia Brizante—trying to phone Shell Scott, having me paged. Why get excited? They couldn't have listened in on anything important. She hadn't talked to me, the calls hadn't been completed.…

I was missing something. In me was building that goddamned nervous feeling, the tension that tells you there's something else—but not
what
else. It felt as if my nerves were prickly worms trying to crawl out through my skin. So the hell with it. I knew where I was going, even if I didn't have all the answers.

Last night I'd plucked Jimmy Ryan's Colt .45 from the limb of a tree; this afternoon I'd taken another Colt automatic from Bludgett. Both of them were now wrapped in a bath towel and tucked away on a shelf in my clothes closet, and—considering where I was going and what I had in mind—I would probably need more armament than merely my .38. What I really needed was a bazooka and a machine gun and immortality, but what the hell. I'd settle for my .38 and two Colt. 45's.