Any Woman He Wanted Page 5

  “It’s been a long time, Mike. Four years. I’ve felt like a dog. Hell, I remember when you were shot after you cleaned out Luxtro, and were giving yourself up to the police. You called me to come and get you. I felt like hell, Mike. You’d been good to me and the kids and I had to turn you in. But like you told me that day, it was my job.”

  “I remember what I really told you that day was you talk too much.”

  He laughed again, an odd, unaccustomed sound and thrust his hand in his pocket. He brought out four crumpled five-dollar bills.

  “Mike. This is from Grace and me. By God, this is from Grace and me and the kids. The last twenty bucks. Grace’s been saving dough out of her grocery allowance. I want to thank you, Mike, for being so damned patient with us.”

  He thrust the crumpled bills out toward me and when I didn’t take them, he laid them out on my desk, smoothing them with his palm.

  “We’re all even, Mike. And it only took four years. Go on, Mike. Take it. Grace’d flog me if you didn’t. You know you’re a hero to her. When you cleaned out the Luxtro mob, she wouldn’t even believe you’d ever been on the take—she wanted to go down and tear that hearing apart.”

  I took the money, stuffed it in my jacket pocket. I had to shut him up somehow.

  But not Ernie. “Hell, boy, this is just part of it. Grace says I got to bring you home to dinner tonight”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve already got a date.”

  “Some blonde? Break it”

  “Blondes aren’t that plentiful any more.”

  “Mike. Grace won’t take no for an answer. This is a big moment in the Gault house. Another debt paid off. She and the kids have planned a celebration.”

  6

  Grace Gault and the three kids were waiting for us in the four-room apartment on Eighth Street just off Third Avenue. Grace introduced me to each of the kids. They shook hands and giggled. They were nice, if you like kids, but I was uncomfortable because I couldn’t think of anything to say to them.

  After a while my strangeness didn’t matter. Grace chattered until dinner was ready and then talked all the way through it. She served a pot roast, with plenty of potatoes and gravy, and you could tell it was a feast. After dinner, Grace went off to put the kids in bed. Ernie and I sat in the front room, not saying anything. The silence was fine. He asked me if I wanted the TV on and I shook my head.

  Ernie sighed. “Thank God. If cops really acted the way they do in that box—” he shook his head and laughed.

  I looked around, wondering how soon I could get away. The dinner had been fine, but I hated the thought of another three hours of talk about kids, costs and the neighborhood. Just as I was ready to bolt Grace came back, straightening her apron.

  “I had to listen to their prayers,” she said.

  She was a stout woman, with dark blonde hair, a clear complexion, deep blue eyes and a look of contentment about her. She had nice ankles. I wondered mildly if either she or Ernie knew how nice her ankles were—and would it have mattered if they did.

  “I’d better get along,” I said, but neither of them even heard me.

  Grace sat on the divan, smiling at me. “Guess whom I saw today, Mike?”

  “Rock Hudson?”

  She laughed. “Peggy Walker.”

  I felt the tightening in my throat. For an instant I couldn’t talk.

  When I finally made it, I kept my voice even. “That so?”

  I stared at the backs of my hands. I felt the old illness, the old bullet wound, the old need. The bullet wound alone had healed.

  “She and I should form a Mike Ballard admiration club,” Grace said. “Ernie, did you know that Mike saved Peggy’s Earl—right out of the death house?”

  “Honey, I know all about it,” Ernie said.

  “She looks fine, Mike,” Grace said.

  “Have they moved back here to town?”

  “Oh, no. She and Earl moved away. Four years ago. Right after you got him out of prison. He’s a salesman again. They’re getting along fine. She just happened to be in town on some kind of business. I just ran into her. She looks lovely, just lovely.”

  “I’m sure of it” I stared at Grace, wondering if there was any way to shut her up.

  “She looks older,” Grace was saying. “She has a streak of gray in her hair, Mike. Right across from her widow’s peak. But no wonder, I say, all she went through while Earl was in the death house. It’s a wonder she isn’t completely gray.”

  I stared. Grace was a nice woman. It would be a sin if someone shot her. About an inch above her eyebrows.

  I thought they had me hanging on the ropes, but I didn’t know my own endurance. Grace talked for another hour, and then Ernie gave her some kind of silent signal, and she began yawning. I had to forgive her, she said. She had been up since six this morning. But I wasn’t to think about leaving. Ernie and I could have a nice long talk after she was in bed.

  When Ernie and I were alone in the living room, I frowned, wondering what he and I were going to have a nice long talk about.

  “Mike, I been wanting to talk to you.”

  “You had a lot of competition tonight”

  He smiled, sucking on a pipe. “Grace is a good girl. A hell of a lot too good for me.”

  “Well, as long as you know it.”

  “Mike, you ought to get married.”

  “My God. That isn’t what we’re going to talk about, is it?”

  “No, pal. It’s a lot more serious than that A lot more urgent”

  I felt my thoughts grow tight. I searched back in my mental catalogue of debts, errors and trespasses, wondering what Ernie was going to preach to me about Ernie was his own type of cop, serious, plodding, conscientious. Lately, I hadn’t been much of any kind of cop at all, but I could never be a cop like Ernie.

  “I’ve got a message for you, Mike. Tom Flynn called me into his office yesterday. Personally. We had a long talk. He asked me to use all my influence and friendship with you to make you accept an assignment with his office.”

  “My God. You too?”

  “What?”

  “The hell with Flynn. You know better than to ask me, Ernie.”

  “No, Mike, I don’t. Yesterday a taxi driver got killed when he tried to collect on numbers. A teen-age girl walked in front of a car—she was so full of dope she didn’t even know where she was. And two punks killed old man Climonte because he wouldn’t pay them protection money. Sure, Climonte lived to die in the hospital. The punks didn’t kill him. Sure, these cheap young hoods do the muscle work, but crime’s gotten to be a big business in this town, Mike, and it’s getting bigger every day. And it’s organized. It’s so damned well organized it’s reaching out into the best families, the best kids in town. They think they can wreck, and destroy and maim, if it gets them what they want. Hell, I thought we had a witness who saw the two killers shoot Climonte in his grocery. We let go of her—nothing to hold her on. When we went to look for her again, she’d never lived at the address she gave us.”

  “I could have told you that.”

  “Sure. You tried to. What you did tell us was that she was on dope, that she was nineteen at least, and lying all the way.”

  “Wasn’t she?”

  “Right down the line. The descriptions she gave us were as phony as she was.”

  “Sure. They planted her in there. She was supposed to sell you a phony bill.”

  “But that was no kid gang job. An organization with brains was behind it. A grown-up syndicate. Listen, Mike. You’ve still got a rep as a crooked cop. Even Tom Flynn knows by now that you’re not—but there’s nobody else in town can work into the syndicate the way you could.”

  I shrugged. Ernie scowled, ready to go on with his oratory, but at that instant the phone rang. He laid his pipe aside, got up and went to answer it.

  Grace came into the front room. Her hair was in rollers. She had used cream to wipe the rouge from her face and mouth. Her skin looked pasty. She wore a thick robe that sh
e gripped in tense fists. She was barefooted. Her eyes were distended. A phone call after ten o’clock at night in this apartment meant just one thing. Trouble.

  Ernie stood listening for a long time with the receiver pressed against his ear. When he replaced it in its cradle and turned around, he looked like a man in shock.

  He crossed the room to the foyer, got his hat. He did not look at Grace.

  He said, “You can come along, Mike. It’s your department this time. Homicide.”

  7

  When Ernie and I got out on Essex Turnpike, a misting rain gave the night a gray sheen. Cars were parked along both sides of the highway and more were coming, like jackals to meat.

  We got out of my Olds, and right away I felt the wrong in the chilled, wet night. I had seldom seen so much police brass in one spot. Captain Neal Burgess stood marking the spot on the highway’s shoulder and halfway down the embankment Chief Waylin was directing things. I glanced around for a black Caddy, found it. Police Commissioner Stewart Mitchell was staying in where it was dry, but he was out here. Only an important death brought the top echelon out on a night like this.

  “Over here, Ballard.” A uniformed cop motioned to Ernie and me. “The car’s down in the ditch.”

  I nodded, hunching my shoulders against the chilling rain.

  I glanced around. Criss-cross headlights webbed the mist. The cop who had called to us was holding things down at a wide curve in the road. He motioned us toward the big, blue convertible squatting tails up in a boggy sump off the pavement. The convertible hadn’t made the curve, had chewed deep ruts across the shoulders and down the embankment.

  More than a dozen uniformed cops were sloshing around in the mud and stagnant water, keeping the people back. They were even refusing to allow reporters anywhere near the overturned car.

  Chief Waylin stopped Ernie and me on the incline. His face was grayer than the night. “Just a minute, Ballard. Ernie. No sense getting down in that bog. They’re moving the body out of the car now.”

  We stopped beside Waylin, watching. I saw Doc Yerrgsted standing knee-deep in the water, directing the removal. Three interns, hospital whites muddy to the hips, worked the body from beneath the steering wheel and staggered out of the muck. A state trooper tossed a tarpaulin on the muddy embankment beside the deep-plowed ruts and the interns stretched the remains out on that.

  “Okay. There it is, Doc,” one of the boys in white said. I stood looking down at the dead man.

  He was Tom Flynn. I felt as though someone had struck me with a fist full in the face. There it was. The body. The corpse. The stiff.

  Ernie said something to me, but I didn’t answer. I didn’t even hear what he said.

  I heard Chief Waylin and Captain Burgess talking beside me, but the words they were saying didn’t reach me.

  Doc Yerrgsted knelt beside Flynn’s body and pressed the eyelids shut.

  That was all he did. He stood up, peered through the lighted mists at Waylin. “I’m through here, Chief.” He picked up his medical kit. ‘Anybody wants me, I’ll be in my office.”

  “Sure, Doc. Thanks.”

  “Just send me my check.” Yerrgsted shrugged his raincoat higher on his shoulders and moved up the embankment toward the roadway. He looked straight at me. His face was gray. He did not speak.

  I watched an intern bring a sheet from the ambulance and stretch it over Flynn’s body.

  “How’d it happen, Chief?” A reporter pushed through the line of cops. He stopped where Waylin stood.

  “We don’t know yet. Doc said he was drunk. The investigating officer said he was driving over ninety. Probably hit the shoulder, couldn’t control the car.”

  Another reporter came down the embankment. “No matter who they are, they never learn.”

  “Well, we don’t know yet,” Waylin said. “Flynn was one of the finest men this town ever had. We’ll have a fuller picture in the morning.”

  I stepped away from them and started down the embankment.

  Waylin said, “Ballard.”

  I didn’t stop. Abruptly, out of the mist, two young cops stepped in front of me, blocking my way.

  “There’s nothing you can do, Ballard,” Waylin said from behind me.

  I didn’t bother looking at him. I just stared at the two who were barring my way.

  One of them tried to smile. “We’re just following orders.”

  I said nothing. I kept walking. The two stepped back. Burgess spoke my name from up the embankment beside Waylin. He came striding down the incline to where the two patrolmen stood. He said something to them, his voice low but crisply accented.

  One of the two said, “We’re sorry, Captain. We tried to stop him.”

  I hunkered down beside the body on the tarpaulin and turned back the cover. I heard Waylin shouting at the ambulance attendants to get a litter down there and move the body into town. I did not look up.

  When I turned the cover back, the light rain pattered on the dead face, running off the rigid cheeks in long streaks.

  I took a deep breath. The smell of whiskey was strong near the corpse.

  I slid my hand under Flynn’s head, lifted it. I bent closer. The odor of liquor was weaker around his face. I let the head back gently to the ground and withdrew my hand. My palm was wet, sticky and smeared with blood.

  I clenched my fingers over the blood and stood up, facing one of the uniformed men holding a flashlight

  “You investigate this?”

  “We’ll get a report from Hogan, Mike,” Burgess said.

  “Did you?” I ignored Burgess, stared at young Hogan.

  “Yes, sir. Clemmons and I were the first ones out here.”

  “The car turn over?”

  “No, sir. It went straight down into the ditch. We figure he was doing better than ninety. These new jobs pack a lot of power.”

  “What kind of skid marks did he put down?”

  “None. Ain’t no sign he tried to put on brakes. Road is clean. He just got to this curve in this rain without slowing down. Without even trying to slow down. Not like a guy that didn’t make a curve. Like a guy who didn’t even know there was a curve—or didn’t give a damn.”

  “Was he dead when you got to him?”

  “Yes, sir. He must have crushed himself against the steering wheel. That’s what the ambulance doctor said. Said he did all his bleeding inside.”

  “What did the M.E. say?”

  “He didn’t say anything. Just pronounced Mr. Flynn dead and took off. You saw him go.”

  “Was Flynn sitting up behind the wheel when you found him?”

  “Yes, sir. Slumped over the wheel. Smell of whiskey was terrible in that closed car. We figure he never knew what hit him.”

  I kept my blood-smeared right fist clenched, shoved it into my jacket pocket

  The ambulance men moved a wheel-litter past me.

  Waylin said, “All right, you people. Stand back. Take Mr. Flynn’s body to the morgue.”

  One of the interns glanced around at Waylin, frowning. Then he shrugged. The attendants lifted the body to the stretcher and panted up the incline to the ambulance. Cops started clearing cars away so a wrecker could come in and hoist Flynn’s Chrysler out of the bog.

  Ernie came down the incline to me. “Going to stay until they check the car, Mike?”

  I shook my head. “I’d stay if I thought they’d find a steering failure, or a stuck accelerator. But they won’t.”

  Chief Waylin, Burgess and Ernie trailed me up the incline. I thought they would leave us at the roadway, but they followed us along the lane of parked cars to my Olds.

  I got in under the wheel without looking at the chief or the captain. Waylin said, “Get in the back seat, Ernie, you and Neal.” He got into the front seat beside me. He closed the door. He shivered. “Start your engine and run your heater, Mike.”

  I started the motor, turned on the heater.

  “What do you think, Mike?” Waylin said.

  “I th
ink just the same thing you do, Clyde. Somebody killed Tom Flynn.”

  Waylin looked astonished. “Murder? How? In a car going eighty miles an hour?”

  I held my breath until my lungs felt hot. “When the call came to Ernie’s place, they were calling it murder.”

  “My God,” Neal Burgess said. “That was just a mix-up at headquarters. You know how they foul things up like that on a first report. By the way, Clyde, now that Mike mentions it, I think they reported a homicide when they called me.”

  “They reported a murder.” Ernie’s voice was low.

  Waylin tried to laugh. “It was murder, all right. Murder the way that man hit that bottle. Murder the way he came off that highway. Either Flynn was drunk, or he tried to kill himself.”

  “You think he tried to kill himself?” I asked.

  “What else? And he made it. Drinking. Driving too fast. Never even touched his brakes. And he’s dead. A fine man. But we all make at least one mistake.”

  I sat there a long time watching the wrecker falter up that incline. “I can’t see a short drop like that killing a man. Even at ninety.”

  “Why, that car rolling over would beat him to death. Very likely, crush him.”

  “Only the car didn’t roll over. I asked that. That car went straight down that incline in deep ruts and into a ditch.”

  Waylin sat still for some moments. Finally, he said, “Mike, maybe there are a few things you don’t know about Tom Flynn.”

  I stared straight ahead through the windshield, waiting.

  “If you knew as much as I do about Tom Flynn, Mike,” Waylin said, “you’d agree that he committed suicide in that car.”

  “A man with a future like his?”

  “What future? His future was all behind him. This is between us, but we’ve been getting bad reports on him, Mike. He was in trouble. Taking bribes, offering bribes. There’s been talk lately about an investigation of his office. If some of his malpractice had come to light, he’d have been ruined. You know the Flynn name. A scandal would be something Tom Flynn couldn’t face. When the threat of exposure came, he knew he was finished and took the easy way out. Fast car. Rain-slicked highway. A bad curve. And liquor to kill the pain.”