A Night for Screaming Page 8

  And she flung the bottle at me, hurling it across the front of the car with all her strength. She stood there raging with laughter. “You’re all tramps,” she screamed. “All bums. All of you out here.”

  She stopped laughing and looked around wildly, searching for something, somebody in that crowd of men. She didn’t find it, and this made her laugh even louder, wilder.

  By that time, two housemen had come across the yard. One of them was trying to get Mrs. Cassel to get out of the car and the other was shouting at us. “Get out of here. Go on, get back to your barracks.”

  Mrs. Cassel screeched with laughter. “Yeaah. Get out of here. Circus over. Go on. Get out of here. Trash.”

  The houseman spotted Potter and Handecker in the mob. “What’s the matter with you two men, Potter? Handecker? Can’t you handle these men? You like for me to tell Mr. Barton M. Cassel you can’t handle these men?”

  Handecker went into action. His voice cracked like whips across the backs of the retreating men. Potter began pushing and herding the men back toward the barracks. They had them lined up and marching by the time they reached the rear gate. The prisoners were still yelling at the tops of their voices for Eve Cassel to come down there and open her circus.

  I thought of something and glanced around. Every man that worked on the Great Plains Empire was in that barnyard at the moment except one.

  Evans Howell was nowhere to be seen.

  I came up out of a nightmare with somebody’s hand gripping my shoulder, shaking me.

  In my nightmare I was being interrogated in a room alone with Fred Palmer. I was on my knees, already paralyzed by his expert questioning. I knew my kidneys were ruptured, a disc was cracked in my spine and the side of his hand across my neck had stunned me so I could not move my arms or legs. But I was still conscious, I could still feel every new agony when he struck me in every vital zone of my body.

  I opened my eyes, protesting. The only light was from the two twenty-five watt bulbs that burned all night at each end of the barracks.

  I recognized the face of Bub Turner, the barracks-master, the man in charge of doling out water in the men’s room.

  “Hey, Walker. Hey. Get up.”

  “What’s the matter? What you want? What time is it?”

  “About two. They want to see you.”

  “Who?” I sat up.

  “Mr. Handecker. Mr. Potter. Out front of the barracks.”

  I swallowed at the sudden hot water that formed around my tongue, the taste of gall. I nodded, and stood up, slipping into my slacks.

  They were waiting in the dark, about ten feet from the barracks entrance. The wan shaft of the twenty-five watt bulb reached almost to their feet on the crusted ground.

  They stood on each side of me when I reached the end of the light shaft and stopped.

  “Walker,” Handecker said. “We want to talk to you.”

  “You look like trouble, Walker,” Potter said.

  “You went up to see Mr. Evans Howell tonight,” Handecker said.

  “You didn’t ask us,” Potter said.

  “He sent for me.”

  “Still, man, you got to know better than that.”

  “When you go see anybody up front, you tell us first.”

  “What did he say to you?” Handecker said.

  I shrugged.

  “Did you say anything to him?” Potter said.

  “About what?”

  “Like get smart, man. We don’t want no trouble. Like the fun we try to help these poor guys have.”

  “Cards? Craps?” I said it innocently.

  “Yeah,” Handecker said, losing his temper. “Like cards. Like craps. Like Old Man Hogan. Like the Mexican kid. Like anything.”

  “What’d you tell him?” Potter said.

  “You ain’t going up there no more,” Handecker said.

  “Why not?” I set myself on the balls of my feet, reading their slow-burner minds.

  “Because next time you’re gonna be smarter.” Handecker spoke with a grunt, setting himself to swing.

  I moved backwards before Potter could jump me or Handecker could swing that big fist. They laughed in the darkness, liking this. I wasn’t going to stand still for it.

  As they set themselves again, I figured it was Handecker who’d be most enraged. And the madder a man was, the poorer fighter he was. For that moment I let Potter move as he liked, knowing he would wait for Handecker to clout me first.

  I waited until Handecker started that thick arm up. I brought up my right arm just enough to ward off the blow and I caught his pants and belt buckle in my left fist, twisting it and jerking upward. He came up on his toes, grunting and I bounced him like that. For a moment his body was between Potter and me.

  Handecker swung with his left but I chopped the side of my hand across his Adam’s apple and his fist fell before it even touched me.

  Potter was trying to get at me around Handecker. Handecker was hanging helpless, unable to breathe. I danced him along with Potter, driving my extended fingers into his solar plexus with such force that he went insane with agony, forgetting the terrible agony in his throat.

  Handecker sagged, sobbing and gasping for breath. Potter paused for a second, shocked that Handecker was hanging there helpless already. Why not? Hadn’t I learned all this in my nightmares? Hadn’t I watched that old master, Fred Palmer, cripple and paralyze men in interrogation rooms for three months? Fred Palmer. Everything a good detective should be.

  As Potter paused, I doubled my fist and drove it full into Handecker’s face, releasing him at the same time. His two-hundred pounds toppled against Potter and Potter cried out, trying to untangle himself before I got to him.

  He didn’t make it.

  As he came up, I chopped him across the side of his neck, and he straightened, sprawling out on the ground. He struck on his face without even breaking his fall.

  I stood there looking down at them a moment. Potter moved his head, mewling. I kicked him in the face and he stopped that. I turned and walked back toward the barracks, feeling good, feeling clean for the first time in a week, feeling cleaner than a shower would make me feel.

  8

  Barton Cassel was leaning against his desk, awaiting me when the houseman showed me into his office.

  For a moment he didn’t move after the houseman closed the thick oak door behind me. He stayed where he was, propped against the desk, ankles crossed, arms folded over his chest, a smile I made no attempt to understand pulling at his mouth.

  He looked me over and I stared at him.

  I know my eyes widened, my mouth drooped slightly at the sight of Barton M. Cassel.

  I know what I’d expected, the sort of picture I’d built up in my mind. I figured him a man in his late forties, his early fifties, graying, arrogant with money, influence and power.

  I wouldn’t even have believed this man was Barton M. Cassel if the houseman hadn’t said, “Here’s Mitch Walker, Mr. Cassel,” and then closed the door behind me, leaving me alone in this office with him.

  “Sit down, Walker.”

  That smile stayed on his wide-lipped mouth, but he unfolded his arms, stood up, went around his desk and dropped into a gleamingly polished brown-leathered judge’s chair. He rested his head against the back and went on studying me when I sat in the straight leather chair across his desk.

  It was quiet in this big room. None of the sounds of the farm or of the house penetrated these walls. There was the gentle purring of an air-conditioning unit somewhere. It was the only sound except the creak of his chair springs when he moved.

  The office was large, at least twenty by twenty, but looking at Cassel you knew he had to have a big room or he’d bump things when he moved around. Cassel was about an even six feet tall, which was my height, but he outweighed my one-seventy by forty pounds at the least, and if there was an ounce of fat on him, it didn’t show

  But the muscled bigness of Cassel didn’t knock me off balance as much as the fact
that he wasn’t a year older than thirty at the most, not more than four or five years older than I was, and yet he was the nearest approach to a feudal lord that I had ever seen. Sure, I had it all set up in my mind, Eve Cassel, married to an older man, bored, chasing after the foreman. God, how wrong could you be? Barton Cassel was a younger man in every way than Evans Howell, he could have snapped Howell in his hands like a matchstick. He was big, vigorous, with the driving kind of energy that never let him sit still.

  “Been hearing about you, Walker,” he said, not changing his expression.

  I sat there waiting for the ax to fall. Either he would fire me, or he’d have me arrested for assaulting his two strawbosses last night. Sitting there, I began to see how much power of life and death he had over human beings in this part of the state. Not only his farm employees, but the people in the surrounding towns depended on his trade and his payrolls.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” I said, refusing to bow on one knee until I had to.

  He smiled. “Yeah. Saw the look on your face. You expected a man old enough to be my father, eh?” He waved his arm to the large oil painting of a retiring-looking man framed on the oak-paneled wall. “That’s my old man, Walker. You know why I got him framed up there? So all I got to do is look at him, and nobody even starts to walk on me. Nobody. My old man was a living doormat for half the people in this state. Sure, he made some money, but he kissed bottoms to do it. I built this. All this. And I don’t kiss their bottoms. They kiss mine. Where the hell do people get the idea a man has to be forty before he can accomplish anything? You take it from me, Walker, a man can do what he wants to when he’s young—if he wants to; if he’s got the guts and the energy. You can get anything you’ve got the energy to take. That’s all that matters. Not another damned thing. Men smarter than you? You meet them all the time. Only you keep moving and they don’t. So maybe they’re not really smarter than you after all. Hell, I meet guys all the time. Chicago. St. Louis. New York. They look at me and they say, hell, they could accomplish all I have and more. So I laugh and take another drink. You know what I tell them stupid sons? I tell them, ‘So you could do it. And I have done it. That’s the only difference.’ No. It don’t matter. You got the ever-loving energy to do something and you want it bad enough, you’ll do it.” He laughed suddenly. “So much for the Dale Carnegie course for today. I called you in here because I wanted to see you too. You got two of my men in the infirmary.”

  I stared back across that desk. “You want me to get off the place?”

  Even here in this house, in this swank, deep-carpeted, polished office, I got the words I got down in the barracks; that same old question that nobody at Great Plains Empire could answer: “Where would you go?”

  I grinned, because this was the question nobody believed could be answered. I slapped my slacks pocket. “How far would eight bucks take me?”

  He laughed, “You’re a cool customer, eh, Walker? Nobody walks on you, either.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But sometimes I bite at the soles of their feet.”

  He laughed again, swinging back and forth in his judge’s chair. “Yeah. Like Handecker and Potter, eh? You got some bite. Where’d you ever learn such tactics?”

  “Once I worked in the—”

  “Okay.” He held up his hand, halting me. Here it was again, just the way it had been with Evans Howell. Both of them let me know they weren’t deceived, there was trouble behind me. But that was as far as either one wanted to go with it Not only did they refuse to question me, they appeared anxious to know nothing about it “Well, it don’t matter where you learned it. Huh? You’re quite a scrapper. Nobody will deny that”

  “So what do you want me to do?” I said.

  He smiled. “You got eight bucks and you’re willing to walk out, eh?”

  “That’s right”

  He leaned forward, propped his thick arms against the desk top. “Why leave?”

  “Why kid about it? I was in trouble down there, and that’s what you don’t want. I been hearing that since the first day.”

  “Hell, man, don’t worry about me. I can stand a little trouble. Depends on who makes it. Why, Potter and Handecker will be out of the infirmary tonight, back on the job in a day or so, better workers than ever.” He laughed. “They’ll be careful now. I hate a man makes a fool mistake, like overmatching himself, or going into a fight outnumbered like they were.”

  He sat there and laughed about this for a moment, and then he stopped laughing as abruptly as he had started. It wasn’t that he was arrogant about it; he was too busy even to spend more than seconds on laughter.

  “Stick around, Walker,” he said. “You might work into something good around here.”

  “I won’t be here long, anyway—”

  “Well, let’s look at it this way. Evans Howell can handle those stoop-laborers for a day or so until Handecker and Potter get back on the job— if you will help him.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right. Seems to me you owe me that much, don’t you?” He was watching me with his mouth pulled faintly.

  “If you say so.”

  “Oh, I’ll pay you. Same as I pay Handecker and Potter. But Evans will need help out there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for taking it like this.”

  He stood up. “Hell, how should I take it? You look like a pretty smart guy. Had any schooling?”

  “Two years of college.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  I looked at him a moment, shrugged. “Easy. I ran out of money.”

  “I quit too. One year. It was all frat parties and drinking and some of the stupidest courses ever conceived in the minds of progressive educators. Fine for kids with nothing to do. I was in a hurry. Well, the hell with that.

  You stick around, Walker. You’ll be glad you did. I can use a man like you. Sure. You stick.”

  He got up, walked around the desk, taking long strides, his face pulled and cold.

  He heeled around suddenly. “Sure. Stick. Howell’s got a lot on his mind lately. Ain’t worth what he used to be to me. Might need a man to replace him, Walker.”

  “I want it clear. Now. Don’t count on me.”

  “Okay. For now. But think it over. You can’t lose, Walker. Stick around.”

  I closed his door behind me, walked along the corridor toward the front door. The hall was like a cool passage leading toward the hell of those fields. I didn’t hurry. A houseman stepped out of nowhere. He’d been lurking, waiting for me.

  “I’ll show you out, Mr. Walker.”

  “Thanks.” I didn’t tell him I could see the front door for myself. Everybody had to earn his keep out here.

  She stepped from the last doorway on the right before we reached the front door.

  “It’s all right, Jerkins. You can go back to the kitchen. I’ll show Mr. Walker out. I want to talk to him a moment.”

  She was wearing another sheer negligee and she had a cocktail glass in her right fist. Her hair was loose about her shoulders, but it glowed with brushing.

  She also was wearing a fat, purple eye.

  She saw me looking at it, and smiled, shrugging. “How you like it?”

  “Matches the rug, anyhow.”

  “It’s what I got for breaking down that fence last night. Kind of a medal.”

  “Oh, you can buy a car to match it. Nobody will ever notice.”

  She laughed. “Nobody will dare to notice anyhow. Nobody except boors like you. Most people around here know I’m Mrs. Barton M. Cassel.”

  “Fat eye and all.”

  “Fat eye and all, Mr. Walker.”

  “It won’t happen again, Mrs. Cassel.”

  “But that’s it. You make a lot of mistakes.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Cassel.”

  “Stop it you stupid jerk. Are you leaving here? Are you still working here?”

  “I’m on my way to work now, ma’m.”

  “I want to ask you something.”r />
  “Do I bow or curtsy?”

  “Try listening. Are you going to see the foreman?”

  “Who, Mrs. Cassel?”

  “All right. Evans Howell. Are you going to see him when you leave here?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I’ve got a message for him. I want you to tell him I want to see him this afternoon. This afternoon. You tell him that.”

  “Do I tell him you want to see him, or do I say Mr. Cassel wants to see him?”

  Her face flushed and something happened in her eyes. Her head tilted. There were a dozen things she almost said, vile and violent things, but she controlled them all. Finally she said in a flat, hard tone. “You tell him Mrs. Cassel wants to see him. You understand?”

  “Sure.”

  Her face was pale now, and there was a stricken look in her eyes. It seemed to me I was looking at a woman getting the brush. Hell hath no fury.

  I turned and walked to the door.

  “Walker.”

  I turned. “Yes, Mrs. Cassel.”

  “Since you figure you’re so smart. You know so much already you might as well deliver the rest of my message to Evans Howell.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell him—” she drew a quick sharp breath. “Tell him he’s smarter than this—or he better be!”

  I found Evans Howell sitting on a camp stool in the shade of one of the buses.

  He whistled when I stepped out of the jeep. “Oh, man,” he said. “You’re in solid.”

  “It was parked outside the house after I talked to Cassel. Chick drove it up from the machinery pool. Told me Cassel said I was to use it.”

  Howell exhaled heavily, pressed his hands against his eyes. “You helping me?”

  “That’s what Cassel said.”

  “Good. I asked him for you.”

  “Thanks.” I stared out at the laborers. “It carries a raise in pay,”

  There was a sudden bitterness in his voice, “Oh, you can do a lot better than this around here,” he said.