The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
He extended his left arm, bridging his cue stick, and I said, “Just make sure you won’t end up behind the black ball, Carlin, the eight ball.”
He jerked a dark look over his shoulder, then straightened and turned, fingering the heavy end of the stick. “Well, blast me! It’s the old-timer. Old friend Constable Jenks.”
“Have some bad blood trouble over your way, Carlin?”
“Now, whatever would give you an idea like that, Mister Lawman?”
“Just figured you’d had to make tracks to stay out of Chad Bayou for this long.”
Half a dozen loungers in the place had perked up. They drifted over to lounge against the wall and take in the scene with a stirring of interest and curiosity.
“Stayed out once for sixty-days,” Carlin said. “Ain’t forgot that, old-timer.”
“We aired the cell after you were gone, Carlin.”
His eyes went a shade darker in their heavy sockets. Then he winked at one of the bystanders. “Real comic you got for a local fuzz. Real funny, ain’t he?”
One of the loungers laughed, uncertainly. Carlin shot him a look and the laugh broke off in mid-note.
“Only I ain’t letting him set me up.” Carlin swung his gaze back to me. “Just shoot your mouth off all you like, old gray fuzz. You ain’t egging me into giving you an excuse to invite me back into your lousy pokey. I’m a free citizen and I know my rights. That’s a public street out there and this is a public place. Now get yourself a cue stick and stand the hell out of my way.”
“Where you staying, Carlin?”
“The Bide-A-Wee Tourist Cabins on the edge of town. I registered right and paid for my flop. Don’t get any ideas about vagrancy charges, high mucky-muck policeman. I got money. Here. Look.” He fished a small roll of bills from his jeans and jammed them under my nose. “You want to count it, oh mighty chief of the gestapo? You got my permission.”
I raised my hand and pushed his aside with my fingertips. “All right, Carlin. I don’t need to count it, seeing as how there’s nothing visible except a few singles. I wouldn’t be surprised if you lifted it off a cousin or uncle and had to run like hell. In any event, I don’t imagine you’ve got enough there to last you long — and I’d suggest looking for some honest work before you go broke in Grande Isle.”
“I’ll be right over and apply for the job of deputy constable, old-timer.”
He thought that was rich, and I left him standing there laughing and slapping his thigh.
Late the next afternoon, as I pieced it together later during the investigation, Jeff Moseby showed up in the Little Andy. A lanky swamp cypress logger, Jeff had recently lost the first two fingers on his right hand in a sawmilling accident. Today, he’d had outpatient treatment and re-bandaging of the finger stumps at the parish hospital. With a wave of his bandage, he offered to stand a round of beer for the half-dozen loafers in the Little Andy. The group included Carlin Soulard.
Jeff was fond of describing his accident in bloody detail, and today he had a spin-off bit of news.
“Mrs. Deveau was doing her day at the hospital. She wrapped the fingers when the doctor was through. Made me a real interesting proposition, too.”
Buster Toutain smacked the lips in his big, greasy-looking face. “She’s still quite a piece, I bet. Play your cards right, Jeff-boy, and she might open the wall safe in her house for you. I hear it’s loaded with a million dollars and a quart jar of diamonds. Just give her what she—”
Jeff’s good hand shot across the pine plank table and grabbed the wrinkled collar of Buster’s poplin shirt. “You hear a lot of crud, because that’s all you listen for, Buster. You could wash your mind in a sewer and it would come out twice as clean. You don’t talk like that about Mrs. Deveau when I’m around, understand?”
Buster sensed that most of the men at the table were in solid agreement with Jeff. Valerie Deveau was that little part of itself that Grande Isle didn’t care to have dirtied.
“I didn’t mean nothing,” Buster muttered, straightening his collar as Jeff slowly released him.
“The hell you didn’t — and one of these days cruddy talk is going to land you in trouble.” Jeff’s eyes swept the group about the table. “Fact is, Mrs. Deveau and me got talking about how hard it is to get help these days and how tough and dangerous swamp logging is. Nobody out there nowadays but her and the caretaker. Plenty of good land lying fallow, she says. Told me if I wanted to put in a cane crop I’d keep the long end of the shares, her not needing money in particular.”
Jeff paused to eye his bandaged hand. “I might just do it. Get me a small crew and quit making cypress stumps before I lose more than a pair of fingers.”
Carlin Soulard took it all in. During the evening, when Buster was oiled with beer, Carlin drew him out about Valerie Deveau’s life style and the wall safe in her house. Then Carlin returned to his grubby room in the ramshackle Bide-A-Wee Tourist Cabins and did some long thinking. About daybreak, he slipped unseen out of Grande Isle on his battered motorbike. He hid the cycle in the weeds behind an old billboard on the county road and hiked across Deveau land until he had a wide, clear view of the house from the concealment of a thicket.
Carlin lay sweating as the sun climbed higher in the cloudless summer sky. At first he brushed off the swarms of insects that came to feed on him, then simply endured them while a growing thirst began to burn his throat. In a state of mild torment, he fueled a personal hatred for Valerie Deveau. It would make the robbery easier, and if he had to kill her, he could do so.
He watched the caretaker ride a power mower over the vast side yard. A stalwart, work-hardened, middle-aged figure, he broke the chore twice to walk to an outside faucet located against the north wing of the house and take long slow swallows of cool water. Cursing the man under his breath, Carlin held his impatience in check. He buoyed himself with the thought of the right moment, when she would be alone, when the safe would be open. Allowing for the exaggerations of gossip, Carlin was convinced that the wall safe would at the least contain the plantation’s cash on hand, several thousand dollars. Even several hundred was more than he had any prospects of seeing in a lump during the rest of his life.
At last he saw her come out on the veranda with its tall, slender white columns. She called to the caretaker, who was finishing up the side yard. He got off the riding mower and walked across to stand in the shadow of the veranda. They talked for a moment, and the man returned to the mower and rode it out of sight around the rear corner of the house. She turned and went back inside.
With a ripple of tension passing through his muscles, Carlin crawled through the thicket, shaving the distance between himself and the grounds. He heard a car’s engine surge to life and a few moments later a big blue station wagon nosed along the driveway, the caretaker at the wheel, alone in the car.
Carlin watched the station wagon follow the long curve of the driveway past the sheltering rows of tall Australian pines. Swiveling his head, he watched a distant humpback in the county road that was visible from his hiding place. In three or four minutes, the station wagon moved over the low rise and then was out of sight. Clearly, Mrs. Deveau had sent the caretaker to Grande Isle on an errand.
Crouching, Carlin snaked his way out of the thicket, ran across the side yard, and pressed his back against the side of the house. Breath was shallowing out now, eyes and ears straining.
He heard the soft, rattling slam of the back screen door. Running to the rear corner, he saw her walking toward the grove of live oaks a hundred yards away. She was carrying a basket of flowers, and he guessed she had been in the kitchen cutting and arranging them.