An Occasional Rat

2

I closed the office door, and raging anger took the place of the hard lump of grief in my throat. Trembling, I shuffled closer to the man who had been my best friend. Crazy things registered in my seething mind; the way his eyes seemed to be staring straight into eternity; the ticking of the watch on my wrist. I looked at the watch. Seven thirty three, and the second hand kept crawling around. Time kept moving; the blurred sounds of traffic down on the street drifted up to the office. I was aware of it all — but Conk wasn’t.

I brushed my hand across my eyes, looked about the office. Conk was lying in the midst of the wreckage of our files. Papers rustled over the floor. It had been a thorough search — too thorough perhaps to have been successful. Every place we kept papers had been exhausted in a quick but efficient search. Even the pockets of Conk’s short-stout gray suit had been turned wrong side out.

I picked up Howard Conklin’s battered straw hat, which had rolled a few feet from his body. Before his wife had died a couple years ago. Conk used to bide a five spot under the band of his hat every now and then, beer money. It had been a silent joke between Conk’s wife and myself, for she knew of his hiding place. Yet she never revealed it, letting him have the pleasure of thinking right to the end that he was snitching a fin for drinks like a small boy swiping a piece of pie. She’d been that kind of woman.

Sweat-stained, sharply creased, a paper folded several times was nestled under the hat band. Blurred in spots and interspersed with (rude doodles, a few short items of memoranda had been jotted sloppily:

“Find Burt Morgan first.” Then doodles, while Conk had been thinking. “After Burt Morgan, logical to contact John Rayfield.” A string of dollar marks. Then: “What was the real cause of the fight between Burt Morgan and York Rayfield — John Rayfield’s son — in a bar five years ago? May have bearing on case. No one seems to know why they were scrapping.”

The hat slipped from my fingers. I folded the paper, put it in my inside coat pocket. I looked at Conk’s slightly parted lips and a chill rippled over me. With Rayfield, his son York, and Burt Morgan all mentioned on that paper, I knew my hunch had been right. This was big; too big for Conk. Too big and too crazy for me. Conk had memoed: “Find Burt Morgan first.”

But Burt Morgan had been dead for five years...

I was reaching stiffly for the phone when the door opened. Lieutenant George Bailey was already here. His face ash gray, he crossed the room, said heavily: “I got a call not ten minutes ago, Ham. But I didn’t think you’d ever do it.”

“I’d ever do it...!”

Gone now were his comradely insults, his jovial reference to me as a dirty bum. “Folks said Conk was knocking down on you while you were gone. It that the kind of evidence you found?” He indicated the littered floor.

Around the dryness in my throat, I said thickly, “I always knew Conk was as honest...”

“And I guess it hurt like hell when you found he wasn’t,” Bailey said heavily. As he moved closer, the toe of his blocky black shoe bumped the overturned waste-basket. Without taking his eyes off me, George stopped, reached in the receptacle. When his hand came out, he was holding a gun by the tip of the barrel in his fingertips to keep fingerprints intact. I knew the gun was the murder weapon, and it was mine.

Then Bailey pulled his own gun. “I’m sorry as hell, Ham. But friendship can’t count now. I guess... I got to take you in for murder.”

My fingers dug against the top of the desk. “I wouldn’t be this crude, George,” I said hoarsely.

His eyes wavered. Etched on his face were lines of pain and distaste for his task. “I wish I could believe that you’d not mess around the scene of a crime, Ham... if you did commit it. But who knows what a man will do when he’s insane from anger? If you found that Conk, your closest friend, had been rooking you all this lime...” His voice trailed off and after a throbbing moment he added: “I got to take you in, Ham. Or turn in my shield. I must believe what I don’t want to believe — that Conk came back to the office. You’d been going through the files. There was an argument, and you jerked your gun out of your desk drawer.”

That sort of testimony from a cop, no matter how unwillingly given, would cook me — but good. I had returned from the hell of war only to find the blood of my best friend staining my own doorstep.

In a blur of motion I swept up the inkwell in my sweat-slick palm, dropping to one side of the desk. It was an invitation to suicide Biley’s gun blasted and the bullet tore padding from the left shoulder of my coat. Before he could fire again, the inkwell had smashed him between the eyes. Ink blinded him, and blood and ink mixed in swiftly-running ribbons down his heavy face.

As he staggered back, I closed in. My stomach knotted in anticipation of a bullet. I hit him hard on the cheek; his feet tangled; he reeled back toward the window. Twisting his gun with one hand, I hit him again. His head slammed back against the steel window sashing. He went limp, slid slowly to the floor.

It had taken only seconds. I stood breathing hard a moment, dropped Bailey’s gun in my pocket, and dragged him to the closet across the office. The tiny cubicle wasn’t large enough to hold him outstretched, but I made him as comfortable as possible, closed the door on him and locked it.

I left the office. Thinking that someone might have heard Bailey’s shot, I went to the rear of the corridor, down the service stairs. I emerged in the alley hack of the building, walked down it with my shoulders hunched. I had a big night before me, and thinking of it, the skin crawled unpleasantly along my spine. It was as plain as the nose on the face of a transparent ghost — Howard Conklin had discovered something from Burt Morgan’s past which was worth sugar. Conk had tried to cash it in. It had been dynamite.

Morgan had been before my time in St. Pete. Five years ago he had washed off his boat in Boca Ceiga Bay — yet Conk had been hunting him. The rest of the affair was just as crazy. But there was one tangible item I could put my finger on — John Rayfield.

Twilight was turning to darkness as I stepped out of the cab in front of Rayfield’s house. I paid the driver, went up the walk, squinting in the heavy gloom.

I wiped sweat from my palm on my trouser leg, curled my fingers about the front door knob. I turned it slowly.

There was no one in the hallway, no sound in the house, and I eased inside. Rayfield’s study door was open a few inches. A light was on in there. The luxurious pastel carpet deadened the sounds of my footsteps.

He was hunched over his desk, scanning papers, and he didn’t notice me in the doorway for a few seconds. Then as if sensing my presence, his head jerked up. His eyes were startled as he saw me, and he gripped the edge of the desk as if to spring erect.

I stepped in the room, closed the door. My right hand was in my coat pocket, touching the gun I’d taken from Bailey.

“I told the butler you weren’t to come back in here,” he began.

“Don’t blame the butler, Rayfield. I didn’t ring.”

He looked at my hand in my pocket, my face, and his eyes hardened. He sat down slowly. “What do you want?”

I reached in my trousers pocket with my free hand. I tossed the hundred dollar bill he had forced on me on his desk.

“I’m turning down your invitation to stay out of the case, Rayfield.”

He looked at the bill, his lips tightening, then up at me.

“You’re making a mistake. People don’t buck me long.”

“I know,” I said. “You’ve got a bunch of tough guys on your payroll. But none of them are here now.” I sat on the edge of his desk. “I’m not here to strong arm you, Rayfield. I just want a friendly talk about Burt Morgan.”

He came alive then, his eyes, the high color in his narrow, sharply-featured face; the skin across his knuckles went white under sudden tension. It made the room suddenly close and unpleasant, reminding me what I was letting myself in for by tangling with Rayfield.

He tried to sound casual. “What do you know about Burt Morgan?”

“Nothing more than common knowledge. I know that he was on his way from Gulfport to Pass-A-Grille, alone in his boat, when a sudden squall blew up and washed him overboard in the middle of Boca Ceiga Bay a little over five years ago.”

John Rayfield rose. At the window he turned to look at me again, caught me watching him warily.

“I know also,” I said, “that you and Burl Morgan were once business partners.”

He nodded slowly. I wondered if he knew that Howard Conklin was lying dead on the floor of my office at this moment unless Bailey had got loose and taken Conk’s body away. I watched anger, indecision flit over Rayfield’s lean face. Then he said abruptly, “I don’t want you picking up hearsay, Frazee.”

“That’s fine.”

“During the land boom,” he went on, “Burt Morgan and I made a pile of money. We dissolved the partnership shortly before the crash. I had sense enough to see the crash coming and pulled out. Morgan didn’t.”

“He went broke?”

“Practically, I didn’t see much of him after that for awhile. Sometime later it looked as though Morgan was getting on his feet again. He sold a chunk of beach property to Roxlin Hotels — the big Northern chain — and made a pile of cash. I don’t know the details, but it seemed he lost the money he made on that deal. Morgan was broke when he was washed off his boat in the bay.”

“You tell a nice tale, Rayfield. But there’s one little hole. Where did Morgan get the money to buy the beach property that he resold to Roxlin Hotels?”

“How the hell should I know?” He leaned across the desk toward me. “You shouldn’t forget that you’re a guest in my house, Frazee.”

“I’m not forgetting — anything. I’m thinking that something smelled in that deal with Roxlin Hotels. I’m thinking that Howard Conklin got a whiff of the odor.”

He controlled his rage with an effort. “Have a drink, Frazee, and be on your way!”

“No thanks. I can drink later. I’ll be on my way when you tell me who that prowler was in your house last night?”

I thought for a moment he was going to jump me, but he sat down quietly and said, “That’s none of your business.”

“Was it Howard Conklin?” I said. “Was Conk prowling around, trying to get some dope on your past dealings with Burt Morgan?”

His voice throbbed. “You’re all wet, Frazee. Glad you stopped in. Phone me sometime.”

“But I’m not leaving until I learn...”

A latch clicked behind me and York Rayfield tautly nervous voice said, “You’re leaving now, Frazee.”

I turned slowly. York was standing in the doorway. He had his father’s sinewy slimness and slight, shrewd face. But there was something lacking in York’s features which his father’s contained — a cautiousness, a ruthlessness tempered with deliberation. York’s petulant, spoiled mouth quivered with his quick, explosive anger. He came toward me, the gun in his hand centering at a spot between my eyes. It gave me a distinctly unpleasant feeling, for I knew York was the type to shoot first and consider the wisdom of the action later.

“I’m not as subtle as my father, Frazee,” he said. “I’ve been listening in the next room. We like you — but you’ve worn out your welcome. Now gel the hell out of here.”

I heard the desk drawer slide open and knew that John Ray field had reached for a gun. The gun in my own pocket felt very inadequate now.

Sweat popping from my pores made my skin feel sticky. With as much grace as possible, I shrugged, looked from the gun in John’s hand to the weapon in the hand of his son. They said nothing, and the room was very still. I tried a mocking little how that didn’t quite come off and left the room.

York followed me to the door. “Don’t get ideas about coming back here, Frazee, until you’re invited!” He slammed the door in my face, and I stood in the hall fighting down blind rage, convincing myself that discretion really is the better part of valor. I was working for Conk now, and to save my own hide. To work effectively I had to keep a whole skin and stay out of the hands of the police.

I went down the hall, closed the front door softly behind me. Turning left on the sidewalk, I glanced back at the house. And my heart bounced right up in my throat, as I barely caught the shifting shadow at the rear corner of the house in my vision. It was a shadow denser than the shadows of night, and after that one instant that it had been in my gaze, I wasn’t sure that it was even there.

Without breaking stride, I walked on up the sidewalk. I reached a hedge at the next lot, dropped behind it. I wormed my way around until I was crouched in the shadow of the hedge at the corner of Rayfield’s lawn.

I saw the dark form again, dimly, like a piece of the pineapple palm at the back corner of the house detaching itself.

With night a cool breeze had begun to ripple overland off the Gulf. But I was sweating. That skulking form ahead of me in the night had no reason to be there. I was certain that it was not John Rayfield or his son York.

Army training in scouting stood me in good stead. And the memory of Conk with the life blasted from him and the police on my neck as soon as Bailey broke out of my office and put in an alarm didn’t hurt any. I felt capable of hiding in the shadow of a blade of grass.

Inching my way forward I neared the palm, until its fronds stood out distinctly against the dark blue night sky. I edged to the palm. And the prowler was gone.

I heard the soft thud of a footstep behind me, whirled, off balance as the dark figure hit me. I had felt capable — but my adversary had gone me one better. While I’d been scouting him, he’d wormed his way behind me in the cloak of darkness.

We fell, he on top, thrashing. He was set, organized, and it gave him an advantage. He hit me twice with a gun barrel before I could get my fists clenched.

I heard a hoarse whisper several feet away in the darkness: “No, Burt!” But the gun barrel crashed down on top of my head and all the strength drained from me.

Against the pattern of stars and pain whirling in my bursting brain, I thought: “He got the drop on me because there were two prowlers in the night, one of which I never saw. Burt the dead man who has just knocked me coocoo. The other, the one who whispered and whom I saw from the street, is much too blonde and lovely to be doing this sort of thing, Millie Morge.”

I felt very sad that Millie was mixed in this. But it was too much trouble to think or feel. I shouted against the pain in my head, but actually emitted only a retching, gasping groan. Then I went to sleep.