Any Woman He Wanted Read online

  I followed him across the foyer into the sun room that Tom Flynn and I had crossed so cautiously the last time I was here. The room did not look the same—it was no longer unused. The cute black-haired chick was sprawled out on the divan in yellow halter and slacks. She had one knee up, the other foot resting on it. Bright cosmetic bottles littered the floor beside the divan.

  She was painting her toenails.

  “Hi,” she said. “You hunk of man. You beautiful hunk of man. Can I paint your toenails—or something?”

  Her voice had an odd, loose quality and there was a light to match in her dark eyes. And again it itched at me that I might have seen her somewhere before meeting her here. Maybe in some expensive cathouse somewhere.

  “Shut up, Jackie,” Jerry said. “Don’t mind her, Mike. There’s just one thing Jackie wants. A year’s subscription to any man who might be willing.”

  I glanced at her, and winked. “I’m flattered, but a year is a long time.”

  The man in the big chair laughed. He was Morgan Carmichael. “Some years are,” he said. “You really have a way with women, don’t you, Ballard?”

  “Some of us do,” I said. I felt myself getting tense.

  But he wouldn’t let it go at that. “Oh, but you have a special way. Women look at you, just once, and they have you on their little brains forever. Give you much trouble, Ballard?”

  I stared at him and felt my hands clench into fists. He met my gaze for a moment and then his eyes moved away.

  Jerry was leaning against a club chair, legs crossed at the ankles. I asked, “Is Carolyn seeing anyone, Jerry?”

  He shrugged. “She’ll probably talk to you.” He glanced at Morgan, and his mouth twisted slightly “Anything particular you want to see her about?”

  “Come off it, Jerry. I guess Tom didn’t mean much to you—”

  “For God’s sake, Mike. Did he mean much to anybody? Did he mean much to you?”

  “Maybe he meant something to Carolyn. She married him.”

  He straightened. The smile around his mouth deepened. “Want to tell me how much loot you drag in per year in the cop racket, Mike? I’ll present your case to the young widow. Sorry though—but, you weren’t quite the first to come calling.”

  Maybe I could have taken it some other time, some other place. But tonight everything about the people in this room bugged me—I still did not quite know why I had come.

  I said softly, “Talk out of the other side of your mouth to me, kid. Or I’ll paddle some sense into your head.”

  Morgan Carmichael emitted another burst of laughter. “And he’ll do it too, Jerry.”

  Jackie swung her legs to the floor, sitting up. “Wait till I get the top back on this bottle. I don’t want to miss a thing.”

  “Get back in your kennel,” Jerry said to her. He nodded toward the foyer.

  His face was starkly white. “I’ll tell Carolyn you’re down here.” I nodded, followed him out to the foyer. Carmichael laughed again—there was no sound from Jackie. I didn’t look at them. Jerry stopped outside the closed door of the sun room. “I still like you, Mike,” he said. “I always have. But don’t ever put your hand on me again. Not even in fun. Clear?” I shrugged. “No comment. Tell Carolyn I won’t stay five minutes. But I would like to see her.”

  The man with Carolyn stood up as I entered. I barely saw him. Carolyn wore a lavender housecoat and rested a damp cloth across her forehead.

  She peeled the cloth away and sat up.

  I had sensed no grief, no sense of loss in the people I had just left. Here sorrow hung like a pall. Carolyn’s face was bloodless, her eyes looked stricken.

  “Mike. I’m so grateful you came.”

  Even with the grief like a veil over her, Carolyn was lovely, lovelier than she had been as a girl—for she was a woman now. Sorrow became her. She was slender, even with the indrawn quality the shadows under her deep-set eyes and high cheekbones gave her.

  “I was hoping there might be something I could do to help, Carolyn.” Surprisingly, I felt the old strong longing that I’d thought time-diluted.

  Fred Carmichael moved away from the wing chair near the window and walked to the lounge. That was when I first really saw him. He stood behind Carolyn and put his arm about her shoulders. I tried not to see the way she reached up and touched his hand with caressing fingers.

  “It’s a good thing I’ve friends like you and Fred, Mike—or I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “We’ll do anything we can for you, Carolyn,” Carmichael said. He was a big man, taller than his son, bigger in the shoulders and chest. He was in his middle forties, but he was flat in the belly, trim in the hips. The tailored suit didn’t hurt him any, or the imported linen shirt, or the close-cropped iron-gray hair. He was a handsome man, even with the broken nose and the faint scar tissue that quirked his right brow slightly so that no matter what he intended, he always looked slightly supercilious. “I don’t know you as well as I’d like, Detective Ballard, but I’ve always admired you. A strong man. I admire strong men.”

  “I know that you used your influence to keep me on the police force four years ago,” I said.

  “You belonged there. Every man makes mistakes. Few of us ever rectify them quite as completely as you did when you wiped out the Luxtro mob.”

  “I was in love with Mike once, Fred,” Carolyn said softly.

  “I know, my dear.” Carmichael still had his hand on her shoulder. I began getting a subtle feeling that he was trying to get some message across to me.

  “It was a long time ago,” Carolyn said. “Sometimes it seems to me, whenever I think of any happiness at all, that it was always a long time ago.”

  “This is a bad time, Carolyn.” Carmichael’s thick hand caressed her shoulder. “You’ll be happy again.”

  Suddenly I was very tired of this house, these people. The very air seemed stagnant here, still and purposeless. The thought of the Greek’s bar seemed pretty good. I had not said any of the things I had come to say— nothing I thought or felt seemed to fit, quite. It was as if death existed here only as a reaction, a feeling, a mental state—not as a fact.

  “I’d better leave now,” I said. “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I was about Tom.”

  Carolyn stood up. Her eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. She touched at them with her handkerchief. “I—I’ll walk downstairs with you, Mike. Do you mind, Fred?”

  “Of course not. I’ll come with you. I tell you, Ballard, I appreciate your coming like this. It’s helped Carolyn. By God, it really has.”

  Carolyn had moved across the room. She took my hand, pressing it.

  “I never knew I’d miss him so terribly, Mike.”

  “Tom was a great man.” Carmichael had followed her and touched her shoulder again. I tried to remind myself that it was a gesture of sympathy. “Essex City has lost a valuable citizen. We’ve all suffered a great loss with you, Carolyn.”

  I wished three things—that Carmichael would take his hands off her and shut up, and that he would leave us alone. He trailed us to the door.

  Carolyn still held my hand. “Mike. They—won’t let me see him. They won’t let me see Tom’s body.”

  “I’m sure you understand, Ballard,” Carmichael said. “I’ve tried to tell her. The wreck—ghastly—Tom wouldn’t want the woman he loved remembering him so. Or his friends either. Right, Ballard?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I saw him at the scene of the crash. He just looked dead to me.”

  Carolyn’s fingers tightened briefly on my hand. She said nothing. Neither did Carmichael.

  Jerry and young Morgan Carmichael were waiting in the front hall. Jerry had heard me say I had seen Tom Flynn’s body at the wreck. He laughed in my face. “I heard Tom was supposed to have been driving while drunk, Mike.”

  “That was in the report,” I said.

  “Hell, how dumb can you be? What is there about being a cop that attracts the worst of men to the force?”


  “Jerry!” Carolyn’s voice was sharp.

  “What the hell, sis? How dumb can those cops be? Everybody in town knows Tom Flynn never took a drink in his life.”

  Carmichael’s voice was very soft “Maybe that’s why drink hit him so hard this time. He wasn’t used to it.”

  Jerry laughed again. “Sure. Tell it that way. It’ll sound great to everyone who didn’t know Tom. It won’t even damage his memory much. But it won’t bring him back to life, either.”

  Carolyn stared at him, her eyes helpless. “Jerry, you’ve got to stop talking like that.”

  “You’re in very poor taste, young fellow,” Carmichael said.

  “Why?” Jerry moved his gaze from Fred to Carolyn. “Why? Even the cops ought to stick close to the truth when a man like Tom is killed. Everybody knows he never drank.”

  Carmichael stared at Jerry a moment. His voice was low “Don’t you think your sister is suffering enough, young man?”

  Jerry laughed again. “I think she just got a reprieve from prison. That’s what I think—if she just had sense enough to realize it.”

  Fred Carmichael’s face was white, fists clenched and he was almost upon Jerry before he could stop himself. He got his temper under control just in time.

  Jerry stood smiling at him.

  Carolyn, shaking her head, took my arm.

  At the door she said, “I wanted to ask you something, Mike.”

  “Sure.”

  “The funeral. Tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be alone, unless—would you come with me?”

  I glanced over the top of her head, wondering why she needed me with big Fred Carmichael in the house apparently ready to plug up gaps in her life. But I didn’t argue with her. I told her I would be there. She pressed my hand and I went out the door and crossed the yard to my car. The rain was whipping in now, harder than ever.

  11

  I was unarmed. I yelled at them that I didn’t have a gun. They laughed. They would have died laughing, but they were too busy trying to kill me. There were six of them and they were taller than the buildings, and all had guns and behind them stood Luxtro like a human skyscraper, yelling at them to shoot and keep shooting before I could get away. I looked around. A moment before I’d been on a wide highway, but now the boulevard was a garbage-littered alley, and the buildings of the alley were closing in on me and there was nowhere to run....

  I woke up, sweating and shaking.

  Somebody was pounding on my door.

  I reached out and turned on a light beside the bed. The nightlight was weak. The room was thick with shadows, and I had not shaken off the dream when I could hear somebody calling my name at the door.

  “Mike—Mike! Wake up!”

  I glanced at the electric clock on the bed table as I swung my feet off to the floor. The hands pointed to three in the morning. I had been asleep for an hour.

  “All right,” I looked around for a bathrobe, failed to find it and crossed the apartment in my shorts.

  Ernie Gault stood outside the door. He wore a rain slicker. His hound-trouble face was sicker than ever.

  “Sorry to wake you up, Mike.”

  “Thank God you did.”

  He frowned. “Could you get dressed, Mike? It’s pretty urgent.”

  “Homicide?”

  He shrugged. “Would I wake you up for anything else?” He followed me into my bedroom, watched me step into my trousers and shrug on a shirt.

  Trying to keep it light, he said, “Why can’t people knock each other off during the day shift, huh?”

  But his voice shook.

  There were a half-dozen cops at Ed Clemmons’ place out on Pine Street by the time Ernie and I got there. Normally, Pine was a quiet neighborhood, bargain-priced homes with green-stamp lawns, cheap roofing—a place where young couples bought when they were just starting out, or older couples who couldn’t make the fast pace. But now lights blazed in every window for two blocks, and neighbors shivered on their front stoops or stood crowded in doorways. But they kept their distance. These people knew that trouble could be contagious.

  Ernie and I got out of the police Plymouth and walked along the short driveway to the one-car garage Ed had turned into a gunroom and workshop. When we got nearer, I could hear a woman sobbing.

  “Must be Ed’s wife,” Ernie said.

  Norma Clemmons was on the verge of hysterics and the ambulance doctor was giving her a hypo as Ernie and I walked in. When she saw us, she cried out, “Mike—Ernie—”

  Ernie went over to touch her shoulder. “Try to take it easy, Norma. I know it’s a hell of a thing.”

  Her mouth quivered. “Ed’s dead, Ernie—”

  Young Ed Clemmons was sprawled out on the garage floor. He looked as if a gun had exploded inches from his face.

  They were getting ready to move his body, but paused to see if I had any suggestions. I shook my head, told them to get it out of there. They lifted his body on the wheel-litter. Ed was still wearing his police uniform.

  “How did it happen?” I asked.

  A young patrolman spoke from the doorway. “Ed shot himself.”

  I turned. “Oh?”

  “He was cleaning one of his guns.” The cop nodded toward the collection on the wall of the garage, next to Ed’s tools.

  “At three o’clock in the morning?” I said.

  “He was a nut on guns, all right. Everybody knew that,” the young cop said.

  Ed’s wife cried out again, sobbing. She jumped up and Ernie tried to catch her, but she writhed free of him and ran after the ambulance men who were wheeling Ed’s body out to the ambulance.

  I snagged her in the doorway and we had a real waltz before I could quiet her down. But suddenly she sagged against me as if all the life had gone out of her.

  “Open that door,” I told Ernie. “I’ll take her back in the house.”

  I carried her through the small kitchen, the apology of a dining room, crossed a hall and went into a lighted bedroom. The bedcovers were thrown back violently.

  I put her down on the bed. “Is there anybody who can stay with you?” I said.

  “I’m all right.”

  “Sure you are. I didn’t ask about that”

  Despite the sharpness of my tone, she managed a wan smile. “My mother. I’ll call her.”

  Ernie spoke from behind me. “Give me her number, Norma. I’ll call her.”

  She told Ernie the number and he went into the living room. It was so quiet in the house I could hear him dialing. Norma Clemmons shivered and I pulled the covers over her.

  I asked, “Were you asleep when it happened?”

  She nodded. “Ed was on the late shift. He—was in a prowl car with Carl Hogan. You know Carl Hogan, Mike?”

  I didn’t know many of the later rookies, but I said sure, I knew Carl.

  “Well, Ed came in so late every night that I just went on to bed. I used to wait up for him, but he didn’t want me to. He said—no use everybody staying up all night, just because he had to.”

  “Was he in the habit of cleaning his gun before he came in to bed?”

  She shook her head. “He—never did before.”

  “Well, there’s always got to be a first time.”

  “Mike, I heard something. I didn’t tell anybody else. I was afraid to—”

  “Why were you afraid?”

  She scrubbed at her face with her hands. “I don’t know. But Ed was upset all day. He wouldn’t talk about it. Something was bothering him. I was asleep and I heard this shot—from the garage. I didn’t even stop to think. I just screamed for Ed and I jumped out of bed and ran through the house to the garage—”

  “And when you got out there he was dead.”

  She covered her face with her hands, nodding. “But there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I never told anybody. I was afraid to, like I said. But just after I heard that shot—before I got out of this room—I heard a car drive away out front. It was going fast. You t
hink I should tell anybody about that car, Mike?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Now you’ve told me. It could have been just a neighbor. But I’ll look into it. There’s no point in your saying more about it.”

  But why had it frightened her that the killer had possibly come and gone in a car? Many of them do.

  I rode in a black Ramsey-Angell funeral Cadillac with Carolyn that afternoon at three. We were the first car behind the hearse. Her face looked starkly white against her black dress and hat. The youthful chauffeur kept his eyes straight ahead.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” Carolyn said.

  “I wanted to.”

  “I don’t know what I would have done. Tom has such a large family— yet I felt completely alone. I hope you never feel as alone as I have been, Mike.”

  I watched the small blue fender pennant whip in the wind. “Biggest funeral I ever saw,” I said. “If that means a damned thing.”

  “It doesn’t,” Carolyn said. Her chin tilted. She looked even more gaunt than she had yesterday. “They’re all here. Not only his family, but everybody who ever hated Tom Flynn has shown up today. I never saw so many black suits, and black ties—and black dirty hearts.”

  “It’s a winning combination this year.”

  “Even Jerry. He should be with me today, but I know how he disliked Tom. They lived their lives at opposite poles. But it’s Jerry I’m worried about, now Tom is dead. Tom was a good influence on Jerry, no matter how contemptuously Jerry talked to him—and about him. Jerry’s bitter. He keeps saying that Tom asked for it—and got it. Almost as if he knew all along it was going to happen.”

  “He doesn’t mean that, Carolyn. He only means that Tom was fighting some powerful people and lost. Maybe he figures Tom must have known all along he was going to lose.”

  She nodded. “I suppose he did.”

  “He was doing what he believed in,” I said. “There are worse deaths.”