Death Trap Read online

  The atmosphere changed quickly. I was annoyed at myself for trying to take the easiest way out. The odds were good that at least one of the men on that porch had worked on the road job. Labor remembers the bosses.

  “And now you write stories,” Garson said softly.

  “Well, I just—”

  He got up, tucked his thumbs in his belt and came rolling toward me with all the trite stylized belligerence of the barroom hero. His friend got up from the couch. The southerner pushed himself free of the railing and drifted along with them.

  “What do you want to talk to my little girl about, MacReedy?”

  “I told you I wanted her story on the Landy case. You brought up the magazine angle.”

  “And you let me keep thinking I was right, wise guy. What are you after?”

  “The truth, Mr. Garson. Your daughter may know something that will help.”

  “Help your girl friend’s brother? Help that sex fiend killer? You ought to be run the hell out of town.”

  He was moving closer, gaining courage from his friends. A bluff couldn’t hurt anything. “We’ve already got enough new information so that Tennant is reopening the case, Garson.”

  “Nuts!”

  “I’m telling you the tru—”

  I barely saw the sucker punch coming. I ducked it in time. I backed down the steps and into the yard. They came down the steps and the two friends drifted out onto the flank. I turned and moved quickly, crossed the road and started to get into my car. I knew the trouble he could cause if I hurt anybody on his property. One of them had come after me, running in deadly silence. He yanked me around by the arm, swinging at the same instant. It was the southerner. The blow hit me high on the cheek bone, driving me back against the wagon and lighting up the night sky for an instant. He trusted that punch too much. He tried it again. I slapped his arm down and to the side and heard his quick suck of breath as his hand hit the frame of the wagon between the windows. I pushed him away to gain room, and hit him in the pit of the stomach. He doubled over and I slapped the side of his head as hard as I could. It made a noise like a pistol shot and knocked him down. The thin intensity of his yell came from the bursting pain of a ruptured eardrum.

  The other two moved in on me, one from each side. I took a fist on the throat and felt as though I might strangle. Garson’s co-ordination was poor, his belly swollen with ten thousand beers. I put arm, shoulder, back and hip into one right hook that couldn’t have traveled over ten inches. It made a sound like tossing a shovel load of wet concrete into a wooden bin. He went back four steps and sat down heavily, making gagging noises and holding his belly. There was no more to do. I could have, and should have, stopped right there. But my throat ached and my left cheek bone felt like flame. I felt as swollen with anger as the hump of one of the black bulls of Miura. As the third man tried to run, I kicked his feet out from under him. He went down and scrambled up, turning, his face in silhouette against the car headlights. I caught him with one clean blow, an overhand right against the jaw shelf that sprung his mouth open and emptied his eyes and felt as though it drove my knuckles up into my wrist. I had sense enough to catch him as he toppled forward, or he would have smashed his face against the asphalt.

  I got into my car. The southerner was stirring. Garson had labored up onto one knee.

  “Stay away from my kid,” he gasped. “You stay away from her.”

  I started the motor and drove away. I fingered my cheek bone. It was puffing, but it wasn’t split. Each time I swallowed, my throat rasped with pain, but it seemed to be diminishing.

  The Big Time Burger was ten minutes away. A white building set in a large lot. Spotlights were focused on a huge replica of a hamburger “all the way” that revolved slowly on a pedestal on the roof with the poisonous yellow of mustard, a sick red of tomato. The big lot was more than half full, the carhops busy. They wore tight, red, shiny, bullfighter pants, short white coats with gilt buttons, pert black hats with patent leather bills. There was a racked mike beside each parking space to use to place your order. Until the button was pressed on the mike it served as a speaker, rocking and rolling in a tin voice.

  The girl who brought my beer was not at her best in skin-tight pants. She hooked the tray on the window, reached for my dollar.

  “You know the Quarto boy?”

  “Quarto?”

  “He runs a yellow cut-down Ford with a fish-tail rear.”

  “Oh, those damn kids. They don’t come to my station no more. They’re over on the other side. Three hours of trouble and then a dime tip. Angie ought to run ’em off the place for good, but he’s got no guts. One night some of them were busting bottles and Angie went out and they showed him a switch blade and he went and hid in the kitchen for an hour. They don’t scare me. I just said, ‘Kids, you eat at my station and keep stiffing me with them dime tips and maybe I can think up something real fancy to do to your food before you ever even get a look at it.’ ”

  “I suppose the Paulson girl used to come here.”

  “Sure. She came a lot of times with that bunch that’s over there now, and then a lot of times with college guys. Those college guys are fine. They want to look big so they tip as big as they can afford. Jane Ann Paulson, she was an okay kid. Never no trouble with her. And you know something? Lots of times that Landy came here. Once he parked right where you are right now, right in that beat-up Ford, and he had the other Paulson girl with him, the old maidy-acting one. I served them myself plenty of times. Always she didn’t want nothing on her burger. Just plain. Her sister used to like them all the way. That was the car he used when he killed Jane Ann. He killed her because he wasn’t getting any from the sister. It drove him off his head. The sister is a teaser. I think any girl does that is lower than dirt. I always say if you let a guy get all hot you got a kind of obligation to play along, don’t you figure it that way?”

  “Thanks a lot. When I’m ready for another beer—”

  “Don’t bother with the squawk box, mister. Just blink your lights and I’ll bring the refill.” She made change and I gave her a quarter extra and she thanked me and went away.

  I got out and walked around to the other side of the building. There were about a dozen cars of noisy kids there. The noise had apparently driven the other trade away from their area. Their closely parked cars formed an island. Constant carhopping was going on. One young girl was doing a clumsily suggestive dance to the strains of rock and roll. She was barefooted and she danced on the roof of a sedan. A group of four boys clapped hands in time to the music. The rest of them were ignoring the girl.

  I picked out the Quarto car and walked over to it. The top was down. There seemed to be ten kids in it.

  “Ginny Garson here?”

  “The man wants Garson.” “Where’s short, dark, and repulsive?” “Hey, Rook! Where’d your beast go? There’s a suntan job wants a hack at the young stuff.” “Hey, she’s over with Smith, playing pooty-tat.” “Mister Suntan, you see the showboat? The gray Cord with what Smith says is nine hand-rubbed coats of lacquer. Three over. Go look in the back seat. But knock first.” “Knock and roll, Mister S.T.” “Ole Smith’ll come up with the hinkups if you interrupt his stuff. She’s on loan-out from Rook. Hey, Rook?” “That merchandise is guaranteed. Never wears out. Don’t you people ever finish a brew? I need a frail with a pail.” I realized they were all half drunk. Long, golden girl-legs hung out in the chill October night. A half seen hand cupped a breast. They were half drunk and playful in the way that half grown lions can be playful. Rub them just a little bit the wrong way and they would have to find out if you had any chicken glands. They would cheerfully and efficiently cut you a little, or open the side of your face with a sharpened edge of a belt buckle. Or crush your groin with mail-order air force boots. While their women squealed because it was exciting. They were capable of forming a line-up on one of their own girls, or, with the callousness of the hen yard, pecking a weakened contemporary to death. They were revolt. They shear
ed off power poles and were found thirty feet from a tanned right arm with a homemade tattoo on the biceps. They died in flaming skids. There was nothing chicken about them. They had been informed about the world. They saw in the papers that everybody grabbed all they could. And there were slander-sheet magazines to tell them the inside dope on how their crooner heroes bounced from bed to bed. They knew the draft would catch them, that both parents and teachers had given up any last weak hope of discipline. Work was for the cubes—the quintessence of a square. The women were easy. There were always angles. They had it made.

  And I could see how Nancy felt apart from this main stream, these social and emotional folkways of her contemporaries. Jane Ann had been a part of the group. Maybe she had been forced into it.

  The Cord gleamed in the night. It was parked heading away from the lights, so the back seat was in darkness. I rapped on the roof of the car and asked for Ginny Garson. There was a slow stirring, a grunt of annoyance. The boy called Smith got out. He had a grotesque Mohican haircut, cold narrow Slavic eyes. He wore khakis and a maroon sweater with the sleeves cut off at the shoulder. His arms were long and heavily muscled, and he held his arms tensed and a little out from his body so the muscles would show.

  “What’s it about, friend?”

  “I want to talk to Ginny for a few minutes.”

  “What’s the rumble?”

  The girl got out of the car. She wasn’t tall. The sweater emphasized the ripeness and heaviness of her breasts. She wore tailored gray flannel slacks that went well with her yellow sweater. Her dark hair was worn in a mussy boyish cut. She looked up at me, her expression sulky, unpleasant, rebellious. She wore pale lipstick with heavy eye make-up. Except for her nose, her features were fairly good. An infatuated male might have thought the nose cute. It was small and pugged and tipped back so that her nostrils were too evident. It gave her something of the look of a pig.

  “So what is it?”

  “I want to talk to you alone for a few minutes.”

  “Say it in front of Smith.”

  “This isn’t trouble, Ginny. I’m not law. It’s a couple of questions. Let’s say it’s about where certain clothes came from. You remember who they belonged to, I guess. Now do you want to have a talk? My car’s around on the other side.”

  “Clothes?” she said with exaggerated innocence. “What’s with clothes?”

  “Nobody wants them back. I just want to talk to you about them.”

  Smith put his arm around her. They stared at me with a hard and tolerant amusement. “You got a new way to get your kicks, chief?” Smith asked. “Go feel a woolly sweater. I know a guy goes for shoes. He’s got a crate full of them.”

  I talked directly to Ginny, ignoring him. “There was money too. But they didn’t find it until later.”

  I saw the quick gleam of interest in her eyes. She bit her underlip.

  Smith tugged at her. “Honey, this type is a real conversationalist. Come on. Does talking send you any place?”

  “Shut up a minute,” she said. Smith let go of her and looked annoyed. “What are you after?” she asked me.

  “Just some talk. I’m not law and I’m not a reporter. You don’t have to pose on a tractor.”

  “Is there any money in this talk?”

  “There could be, if it goes right.”

  “For God’s sake,” Smith said disgustedly.

  “How much? I’m short this week.”

  “Twenty, if you really talk, Ginny. My car’s around on the other side.”

  “You said that,” Smith said.

  She turned to him. “You mind too much, honey?”

  He looked at her. He spat a casual six inches from my foot. “Take your time, baby. Take all the time there is. Take forever.” He turned his back and headed toward another car.

  “Darn it,” Ginny said bitterly. “Well, let’s get it over with.”

  We went around to my car. She wobbled and clenched her hips with each step, and kept her young breasts out-thrust. I opened the door for her and she plumped in. I went around and got in beside her.

  “Get me a Miller’s,” she said. “You owe me something.”

  I flicked the lights. The girl came out with the bottle. I ordered a Miller’s. She peered in at Ginny, then gave me a look of scorn and disgust.

  When the carhop walked away Ginny said, “So what about the clothes?”

  “Jane Ann’s.”

  “So she said if anything happened to her, I was to keep them. We both fit into them.”

  “Did she say anything was going to happen to her?”

  She didn’t answer until the waitress had left the beer and taken the money for it and walked away. Ginny didn’t want the glass. Just the bottle. She tilted it up. “Let’s get something straight. Nobody can prove she didn’t say that, and nobody can prove they ever were her clothes and besides, before I’d turn them over to that priss sister of hers, I’d cut ’em all up with a razor. So where are you?”

  “You’re a rough kid, Ginny.”

  “I get along fine. What’s your angle? Want some cut-up clothes?”

  “You keep them, Ginny. Too bad you didn’t have a key to her locker. You could have cleaned that out too.”

  “Say, whatever happened to that stuff? I waited for the sweaters to show up on Lady Iceberg, but they never did.”

  “Mr. Paulson gave them to the Salvation Army.”

  “There’s a type for you. That butcher. You know, if my old man ever tried to bust me around the way he did Jane Ann, he’d wake up some morning with a pair of air-conditioned tonsils. Every once in a while I’d see the black and blues where he thumped her. I’d ask her why she took it. She said it didn’t bother her. She said she’d never let out one yelp, and that always made him madder. Look—whatever you’re after, you better get to it. I got to go group up again.”

  “Ginny, are you satisfied that Landy did it?”

  “So that’s it!”

  “That’s it.”

  “We’ve been kicking it around a lot. Rook says that Landy was too chicken. But everybody else thinks it was his big brain. Like racing a motor until you burn it out. His eyes were funny. Nobody figures he was getting any kicks from Nancy. Maybe sometimes she let him help her make fudge or weed the flowers. But it’s all just talk. I guess he did it.”

  “But you have some reservations.”

  “It’s been just dandy talking to you. It’s been a ball.”

  As she put her hand on the door handle and as I opened my mouth to protest, a sedan turned into the lot and a red dome light began to blink. She tensed and watched it. It headed toward the other side of the lot. Car doors chunked and motors made raw sounds of power over the continuous music. Tires yelped. The cars scattered like a flock of chickens when the hawk shadow moves across the dooryard.

  “Unhook the tray and set it on that shelf there and drive out slow,” she ordered.

  I did as she asked. She slid down onto the floor and crouched half under the dash. A spotlight caught the car, hesitated and then flicked away as I drove out sedately and turned back toward town. She got back up onto the seat, drank the rest of her beer, tossed the bottle into the ditch.

  “Trouble?”

  “That was Quillan. I don’t dig it. He’s village. It’s the county cops make the most trouble. People report how Angie sells beer to minors.”

  “Why does he serve you?”

  “Why? You got a ventilated head? Rook and Smith and Powie and the kids would tear his joint up for him. We tore up the Snack Shack one time. Rook had this hairy old jeep. We come out about four in the morning, hooked onto the roof and pulled it right off, honest. From then on we got service, but nobody goes there any more. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Jeez, we didn’t pick an assembly point, like we do when anybody’s hot. We weren’t figuring on this. Go on back and park on the square and somebody will be coming by.”

  “You were saying you weren’
t completely certain that Landy killed her, Ginny.”

  “Was I saying that? I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Who gave her the clothes, Ginny?”

  “Probably her family.”

  “Come off it. You know what kind of clothes her family gave her.”

  “Then I don’t know. She just had them. I don’t know where she got them.”

  I knew she was lying, and I had no real hope of breaking her down. “Suppose we trade, Ginny.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll tell you something you didn’t know about her, and you tell me where the clothes came from.”

  “Why should I want to know anything about her? The kid’s dead. She’s been dead a long time.” She was elaborately casual. “Is it about money like you said?”

  “Well, you see what you think of this. While the trial was on, her father found money hidden in her room, fastened to the back of a dresser drawer. You had to take the drawer out to get to it. Over eight hundred dollars, Ginny.”

  “Hey now!”

  “And that’s something you didn’t know.”

  “Look, I knew she had some money. I don’t know where she got it. She was all the time springing for the whole bunch. But I didn’t know she had that much stashed. Wow!”

  “So where did the clothes come from?”

  “You already got the answer. She bought ’em. Usually I went with her. Sometimes we’d take the bus, but most of the time we’d get a ride over. We bought the stuff in Warrentown. See these here slacks? This is the best flannel you can buy. Forty-five I think these were. Somewhere around there. You know I felt kinda funny wearing her stuff, afterward. But they’d just go to waste. Now it doesn’t bother me.”

  “She paid cash?”

  “All the time. Better than half those sweaters were cashmere. And those add up.”

  “Park here?”

  “Anywhere along here.”

  “You must have asked her where she was getting the money.”

  “I did. Mister, I asked her a hundred times. You can say we didn’t have any secrets from each other. I knew that kid like I know myself. We did everything together. We compared notes on everything. If she had a boy that was real good, she’d hand him along to me and I’d do the same for her. But just that one thing I couldn’t get out of her. Sometimes I’d get really sore. I thought for a while she was stealing from the market, maybe from the cash her old man brought home. She said she wasn’t. She said the way he kept books, you couldn’t even lift a Coke without he knew it. I finally stopped asking the one time she got real mad. She says to me, ‘Damn you, Ginny. I get the money and we spend the money and you wear the stuff too. Isn’t that enough? I got a place to get it. It’s going to keep coming and there isn’t ever going to be any trouble.’ So I stopped asking. By then I guess I had it figured. Like this. She had some guy on the hook. I guess maybe she had the proof on him. Some family-type guy. Maybe some big church wheel. Jane Ann had a good head on her. She wouldn’t try to bleed him dry. She’d try to just keep the money coming. Maybe fifty bucks a crack. And that would explain why she wouldn’t tell me.”