“What is it?” Carrie asked sharply.
“This could be trouble,” he said. “The cars have been put out of action. We are marooned here. I don’t know what it all means.”
Carrie sat abruptly on the bed as if she no longer had any strength in her legs.
“What’s happened to the cars?”
“Someone’s taken the plugs. Di-Long left his camera and razor. I’m willing to bet he wouldn’t have left them unless...” Vic stopped, frowning, then he sat on the bed beside Carrie. “I don’t want to frighten you, but this could be serious. I don’t know what it’s all about, but someone has been here... someone who...” He stopped short, realizing he was talking too much.
Carrie stared at him, her face pale.
“Then you don’t think Di-Long stole the guns?”
“Not now. He would never have left his camera or his razor if he had walked out on us. I just don’t know what to think.”
“Then what’s happened to him? What’s happened to Bruno?”
“I don’t know.”
Carrie got abruptly to her feet.
“Let’s get out of here, Vic!” Her voice was a little shrill. “Now! I’m not staying here!”
“We can’t get out of here!” Vic said. “It’s fifteen miles to the highway. The sun’s getting hot. We can’t walk all that way with Junior.”
“I’m not staying here! We’ll walk! Anything but staying here! You carry Junior. I’ll bring his things. I’m not staying here a moment longer!”
Vic stood up, hesitated, then shrugged.
“It’ll be a hell of a walk. Well, all right. Let’s walk then. We should have something to drink. I’ll fill a vacuum flask. In another hour the sun will be fierce.”
“I don’t care... hurry, Vic!”
He went into the kitchen and filled a flask with ice-cold Coke. He put two packs of cigarettes in his shirt pockets. He went into his work-room and took his cheque book and three one-hundred dollar bills he always kept by him for an emergency. These he stuffed into his hip pocket, then he returned to the bedroom.
“You’d better wear your sun hat. I’ll use an umbrella to shade Junior,” he said. “Take your jewels, Carrie. We’ll...”
He broke off as Carrie gave a sudden suppressed scream. She was looking at his feet, all colour drained from her face.
Vic followed her staring gaze down to his white sneakers. The right shoe, along the inner edge, was stained red... the red was unmistakable.
Somewhere during his walk around the estate he had stepped into a puddle of blood.
Chapter Two
To understand what had been happening at Wastelands, it is necessary to go back three months to the day on which Solly Lucas, a Los Angeles attorney, put an automatic pistol to his mouth and blew off the top of his balding head.
Although, as a gangster’s mouthpiece, Solly Lucas had a disreputable reputation, he was considered generally as a very smart cookie with a golden touch for the Stock Market. He was sixty-five years of age when he finished his life. For the past thirty years he had been the mouthpiece and investment fixer for one of the most notorious criminals since Al Capone: a man known as Big Jim Kramer.
Kramer, now close on sixty years of age, had begun his criminal career as bodyguard to Roger Touhy. He had risen slowly and murderously to a gang boss, had been elected a member of Murder Incorporated and had eventually become the iron hand that ruled the Bakery and the Milk Unions: a man who finally amassed a fortune of six million dollars from the rackets and had been smart enough to have paid some of his income tax.
Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation had known that Kramer was a major criminal, a vice-king and the brains behind some of the biggest bank robberies, they had never been able to pin a charge on him. The combination of Kramer’s guile and Lucas’s brilliant legal smoke screens had proved too much for them.
When he had reached his fifty-fifth birthday, Kramer decided to pull out of the rackets. It is never easy for a gang boss to quit the rackets. Usually, the moment he appears to be chickening out, some hood arrives with a gun, and that is the end of the gang boss, but Kramer was no fool. He knew this. He had six million dollars salted away. He parted with two million to buy himself security and future peace. These two million dollars so greased his exit that he was one of the very few important gang bosses who was able to quit the rackets and retire in comfort, security and obscurity.
With four million dollars and Lucas as his investment manager, Kramer had no fears for the future. He bought himself a luxury villa at Paradise City, not far from Los Angeles and settled down to enjoy the social life of retirement.
While he had been a gang boss he had married a night-club singer, Helene Dors, a slim, big-eyed blonde, older than she looked, who accepted Kramer for what he was, not because of his money nor for his power but because she was unfortunate enough to fall in love with him.
But once away from his criminal activities and his associates, Kramer became a surprisingly genial man who played an excellent game of golf, a sound game of bridge, who could drink without making a nuisance of himself and who was accepted by Paradise City’s society — who had no idea of his past activities — as a well-off, retired business man and was generally popular. Paradise City’s society also took to Helene who, although a little overweight now and slightly faded, had still a gay, lyrical voice and could sit at a piano and improvise songs a little risqué, but never vulgar and caused fun on those evenings when the Country Club could get dull.
There were times when Kramer was on his own, when Helene had gone to Los Angeles for a day’s shopping, when rain cancelled a golf date, that he would hanker for the excitement of being a gang boss again. Although he hankered for his lost power, he did nothing about it. He was in the clear and that was something that seldom happened to a man with his criminal past. The F.B.I. had never caught up with him. Solly was turning his money over at an excellent yearly profit. He was, he kept reminding himself, well out of the rackets and a lucky guy.
In spite of his determination to keep out of the rackets, Kramer spent some of his spare time planning a spectacular robbery, a kidnapping or a bank raid. These plans, blueprinted to the final details, helped to pass the time and were to him like chess problems. He could select the Chase National Bank in Los Angeles and conceive a plan where five men could walk into the bank and walk out again with a million dollars. On a wet evening, while Helene was working on her petit point he would work out a blueprint for the kidnapping of the daughter of a Texas billionaire with a ransom of several million dollars. These exercises in crime not only amused him, but kept his mind alert. He had no intention of putting them into practice. Never once did he confide in Helene what he was thinking about in those long hours when he sat silent, staring into the flickering fire. Had she known what was sometimes going through his mind, she would have been horrified.
On the morning that Solly Lucas shot himself, Kramer had had one of his best rounds of golf. He and his partner entered the club bar, and they ordered double gins with a lime chaser.
It was while Kramer was setting down his glass after a thirsty drink that the barman said, “There’s a call for you Mr. Kramer, from L.A.”
Kramer got to his feet, went over to the booth and shut himself in. He lifted the receiver, humming happily under his breath. The humming quickly ceased. The harsh, unsteady voice of Abe Jacobs, Solly Lucas’s chief clerk, told him the news.