The first one was dressed in a gray suit. The other one looked like a clown. The guy in the suit was short, slender, and ferret-faced, and was wearing a fedora. The other one was wearing slacks and a loud sports shirt, and had curly red hair. The lean one was calm as a lake. The clown was jumpy, wired. The lean one pointed toward the office and they went back inside.
Neither one of them was Henry Dahlmus.
I pointed to myself and then to the grid of supports under the lodge, and indicated I wanted to go under there, come up on the other side of the office, and kick in the door. Redd would wait at the bottom of the steps leading to the walkway around the lodge and charge the door when he heard me kick it open.
Redd shook his head. Those weren’t his instructions.
I pointed down at Lefton and then toward the two men in the office. He got my meaning. I offered a compromise. As soon as I hit the door, Redd could call Culhane and tell him to come in like the cavalry.
I didn’t give Redd a chance to argue. I rolled through the weeds and made a run for the underbelly of the lodge. When I got there, I crawled through the crisscross of four-by-fours. A rat ran soundlessly away from me along one of the supports. I brushed spiderwebs away from my face. To my right, out in the bay somewhere, a fish jumped. I hesitated, waiting for a reaction from the pair above me. I heard the wired one say, “Just a fuckin’ fish.” And a moment later, “I don’t think anybody’s comin’ down here.”
No answer. I waited a little longer, then climbed carefully up the supports to the deck of the lodge and looked over. The door on my side of the office was closed. I climbed over the railing and fell against the outside wall of the office, drew my Luger, and wondered where Redd was. Then I counted to three and jumped into Lefton’s office.
The two thugs were startled as I burst into the room. The lean, rat-faced little man with receding black hair had the smallest eyes I’ve ever seen on a human being. The wired clown in the noisy shirt and baggy pants was as nervous as a jumping bean.
He had a. 38 in his hand.
It was a Mexican standoff. Rat Face just stood like a spectator.
Nobody did anything.
“Where’s Dahlmus?” I said to Rat Face, ignoring the clown who was holding his pistol in both hands and aiming it at me.
Still no comment.
The clown giggled some more. His pupils were as wide as dollar pancakes, his hands shaking with anticipation. His trigger finger started twitching. I ignored the quiet one and turned on the clown. He was sweating. He bounced to my right and aimed straight at my face just as Big Redd moved silently through the door behind him, bowie knife in hand. Before the redhead could get his shot off, Redd said, “Hey.”
The gunman whirled and as he did, Redd’s knife flashed in a downward arc. The astonished gangster saw his own hand, still holding the gun, fall to the floor. Before he could scream, Redd stepped up and jammed the knife in an upward arc under his ribs to the hilt. Air rushed out of the wired freak. Redd slammed his foot into the dying man’s chest and shoved him across the room. He crashed over Lefton’s desk and ended in a heap in the corner. It all happened in the space of four or five seconds.
I swung the gun back on the lean one, who was so startled by the swiftness of Redd’s attack he was rooted on the spot. He stared at the severed hand on the floor, with his mouth half open.
“He was squeezing the trigger on you,” Redd said, nodding toward the dead man. He walked over, cleaned the knife on the dead man’s shirt, and sheathed it. He pointed a forefinger back and forth between his own eyes and then at the corpse in the corner.
“Wired,” he said. “You can’t hesitate.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Call the captain to come on down.” And to Rat Face, “Get rid of your heater or the same thing’ll happen to you.”
He opened his suit jacket, reached under his arm with two fingers, jiggled a. 45 loose from its shoulder holster, and dropped it on the floor.
“Turn around and grab that wall.”
Redd’s walkie-talkie crackled to life. “Clear,” he said. “One dead, one under control. They killed Charlie Lefton.”
“What’s your name?” I asked Rat Face.
“Earl,” he blurted, turning and leaning forward on both hands. He knew the drill. I frisked him, lifting his wallet and a push-button knife. I backed up about five feet and reached out with my foot and dragged a chair over, picked up his gun and threw it on the desk. I sat down backward on the chair and let my gun hand rest on the back of the chair while I rifled through his wallet with my left. His license said his name was Earl Hirshman, that he was from Boston, thirty-two years old, five-seven, and weighed a hundred and thirty-five pounds. An ID identified him as a deputy sheriff in Pacifico County. A business card identified him as an “associate” with the law firm of Brophy, Myers, and Ragsdale. An associate, I assumed, was a private eye with a licensed gun. He had two one-hundred-dollar bills and four ones in the money pocket of the wallet.
I replaced the items, dropped the wallet on the table by my elbow, and pressed the button on the knife. A six-inch blade shot out. Both sides of the blade were honed to a razor’s edge and the point was as sharp as a needle’s. I put the point on the table and pressed the blade back into the handle and laid it beside the wallet.
“Okay, Earl, turn around, sit down, and rest your hands on top of your head.”
He did as he was told.
“Very good,” I said. “We’re going to play one question. I’d ask you two but I doubt you and your dead pal there know why you were sent to kill Charlie Lefton. So I’m just going to ask you the one question. Who’s paying the bills for this?”
His answer was a blank stare.
“We’ll pull down the shades and swing that overhead light in your face when the captain gets here,” I said to Earl. “Then he’ll do whatever he does to get the conversation going.”
Nothing. He had about as much expression on his face as a tree trunk.
“I feel compelled to tell you that Culhane and Lefton served in the Marines together,” I said. “They were both wounded, but Lefton managed to carry Culhane back to the medics. Think about that while we wait for him to get here.”
The story was partly true. Lefton had carried my boss, Moriarity, to safety, not Culhane.
Nothing changed in his expression but his tongue sneaked out and dampened his lips.
Outside, the headlights of Culhane’s car flooded the road as he roared up to the fishing camp. A second car pulled in behind him. Culhane jumped out of the car and ran toward us. Then he saw Charlie Lefton lying on the dock. Redd had stopped to pull him out. Culhane’s lips began to twitch with anger. He turned around, said something to Rusty which I couldn’t hear, and Rusty opened the trunk of the Packard and brought him back a blanket. Culhane spread it over Lefton’s body, took one of Lefton’s hands from under the blanket, held it, and said something to Charlie Lefton’s corpse.
He looked up at the office as an insane expression crossed his face. He stood, came up on the motel walk, and slammed through the door. He looked at Hirshman, then at me. Then he saw the severed hand and the body in the corner.
“A little slow, huh?” he said to Redd, who answered him by holding up a thumb and forefinger about a quarter-inch apart.
“Dahlmus?” Culhane asked.
I shrugged. “He’s not here.”
Two other cops joined us. Culhane told one of them to go to one of the rooms and bring back a blanket. He covered the dead man after relieving him of his wallet.
“Name’s Leo Groover,” Culhane said. “Baltimore.”
He threw the wallet on the table with the rest of the assorted weapons and IDs. Then he walked over, grabbed a handful of Hirshman’s shirt, dragged him to his feet, and hit him with a right cross that hurt my jaw. Hirshman flew halfway across the room and ended up on his back. He spit blood and looked up at Culhane with fear in his eyes.