The Doomsters

27

NOISES FROM OUTSIDE, random voices and the scrape of boots, pulled me out of my thoughts and to the door. A guerrilla formation of men carrying rifles and shotguns went by in the street.

A second, smaller group was fanning out across the vacant lots toward the creekbed, probing the tree-clotted darkness with their flashlights.

The man directing the second group wore some kind of uniform. I saw when I got close to him that he was a city police sergeant.

“What’s up, Sergeant?”

“Manhunt. We got a lunatic at large in case you don’t know it.”

“I know it.”

“If you’re with the posse, you’re supposed to be searching farther up the creek.”

“I’m a private detective working on this case. What makes you think that Hallman’s on this side of the highway?”

“The carhop at the Barn says he came through the culvert. He came up the creek from the beach, and the chances are he’s following it right on up. He may be long gone by now, though. She was slow in passing the word to us.”

“Where does the creekbed lead to?”

“Across town.” He pointed east with his flashlight. “All the way to the mountains, if you stay with it. But he won’t get that far, not with seventy riflemen tracking him.”

“If he’s gone off across town, why search around here?”

“We can’t take chances with him. He may be lying doggo. We don’t have the trained men to go through all the houses and yards, so we’re concentrating on the creek.” His light came up to my face for a second. “You want to pitch in and help?”

“Not right now.” With seventy hunters after a single buck, conditions would be crowded. “I left my red hat home.”

“Then you’re taking up my time, fellow.”

The sergeant moved off among the trees. I walked to the end of the block and crossed the highway, six lanes wide at this point.

The Red Barn was a many-windowed building which stood in the center of a blacktop lot on the corner. Its squat pentagonal structure was accentuated by neon tubing along the eaves and corners. Inside this brilliant red cage, a tall-hatted short-order cook kept several waitresses running between his counter and the cars in the lot. The waitresses wore red uniforms and little red caps which made them look like bellhops in skirts. The blended odors of gasoline fumes and frying grease changed in my nostrils to a foolish old hot-rod sorrow, nostalgia for other drive-ins along roads I knew in prewar places before people started dying on me.

It seemed that my life had dwindled down to a series of one-night stands in desolate places. Watch it, I said to myself; self-pity is the last refuge of little minds and aging professional hardnoses. I knew the desolation was my own. Brightness had fallen from my interior air.

A boy and a girl in a hand-painted lavender Chevrolet coupé made me feel better, for some reason. They were sitting close, like a body with two ducktailed heads, taking alternate sips of malted milk from the same straw, germ-free with love. Near them in a rusty Hudson a man in a workshirt, his dark and hefty wife, three or four children whose eyes were brilliant and bleary with drive-in-movie memories, were eating mustard-dripping hot dogs with the rapt solemnity of communicants.

Among the half-dozen other cars, one in particular interested me. It was a fairly new Plymouth two-door with Purissima Record lettered across the door. I walked over for a closer look.

A molded prewar Ford with a shackled rear end and too much engine came off the highway on banshee tires and pulled up beside the Plymouth. The two boys in the front seat looked me over with bold and planless eyes and forgot about me. I was a pedestrian, earth-borne. While they were waiting for a carhop, they occupied themselves with combing and rearranging their elaborate hair-structures. This process took a long time, and continued after one of the waitresses came up to the side of their car. She was a little blonde, pert-breasted in her tight uniform.

“Drive much?” she said to the boys. “I saw you come into the lot. You want to kill it before it multiplies.”

“A lecture,” the boy at the wheel said.

The other boy leaned toward her. “It said on the radio Gwen saw the killer.”

“That’s right, she’s talking to the reporter now.”

“Did he pull a gun on her?”

“Nothing like that. She didn’t even know he was the killer.”

“What did he do?” the driver said. He sounded very eager, as if he was seeking some remarkable example to emulate.

“Nothing. He was poking around in the garbage pails. When he saw her, he took off. Listen, kids, I’m busy. What’ll it be?”

“You got a big George, George?” the driver asked his passenger.

“Yeah, I’m loaded. We’ll have the usual, barbecued baby and double martinis. On second thought, make it a couple of cokes.”

“Sure, kids, have yourselves a blast.” She came around the Plymouth to me. “What can I do for you, sir?”

I realized I was hungry. “Bring me a hamburger, please.”

“Deluxe, Stackburger, or Monarch? Monarchburger is the seventy-five-center. It’s bigger, and you get free potatoes with it.”

“Free potatoes sounds good.”

“You can eat it inside if you want.”

“Is Gwen inside? I want to talk to her.”

“I wondered if you were plainclothes. Gwen’s out behind with Gene Slovekin from the paper. He wanted to take her picture.”

She indicated an open gate in the grapestake fence that surrounded the rear of the lot. There were several forty-gallon cans beside the gate. I looked into the nearest one. It was half full of a greasy tangle of food and other waste. Carl Hallman was hard-pressed.

On the other side of the gate, a footpath led along the bank of the creek. The dry bed of the creek was lined with concrete here, and narrowed down to a culvert which ran under the highway. This was high enough for a man to walk upright through it.

Slovekin and the carhop were coming back along the path toward me. She was thirtyish and plump; her body looked like a ripe tomato in her red uniform. Slovekin was carrying a camera with a flashbulb attachment. His tie was twisted, and he walked as if he was tired. I waited for them beside the gate.

“Hello, Slovekin.”

“Hello, Archer. This is a mad scramble.”

The carhop turned to him. “If you’re finished with me, Mr. Slovekin, I got to get back to work. The manager’ll be docking me, and I got a kid in school.”

“I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions,” I said.

“Gee, I dunno about that.”

“I’ll fill you in,” Slovekin said, “if it doesn’t take too long. Thanks, Gwen.”

“You’re more than welcome. Remember you promised I could have a print. I haven’t had my picture taken since God made little green apples.”

She touched the side of her face, delicately, hopefully, and hustled into the building on undulating hips. Slovekin deposited the camera in the back seat of his press car. We got into the front.

“Did she see Hallman enter the culvert?”

“Not actually,” Slovekin said. “She made no attempt to follow him. She thought he was just a bum from the jungle on the other side of the tracks. Gwen didn’t catch onto who he was until the police got here and asked some questions. They came up the creekbed from the beach, incidentally, so he couldn’t have gone that way.”

“What was his condition?”

“Gwen’s observations aren’t worth much. She’s a nice girl, but not very bright. Now that she knows who he is, he was seven feet tall with horns and illuminated revolving eyeballs.” Slovekin moved restlessly, turning the key in the ignition. “That’s about all there is here. Can I drop you anywhere? I’m supposed to cover the movements of the sheriff’s posse.” His intonation satirized the phrase.

“Wear your bulletproof vest. Turning seventy hunters loose in a town is asking for double trouble.”

“I agree. So does Spaulding, my editor. But we report the news, we don’t make it. You got any for me, by any chance?”

“Can I talk off the record?”

“I’d rather have it on. It’s getting late, and I don’t mean late at night. We’ve never had a lynching in Purissima, but it could happen here. There’s something about insanity, it frightens people, makes them irrational, too. Their worst aggressions start popping out.”

“You sound like an expert in mob psychology,” I said.

“I sort of am. It runs in the family. My father was an Austrian Jew. He got out of Vienna one jump ahead of the storm troopers. I also inherited a prejudice in favor of the underdog. So if you know something that will let Hallman off the hook, you better spill it. I can have it on the radio in ten minutes.”

“He didn’t do it.”

“Do you know he didn’t for certain?”

“Not quite. I’d stake my reputation on it, but I have to do better than that. Hallman’s being used as a patsy, and a lot of planning went into it.”

“Who’s behind it?”

“There’s more than one possibility. I can’t give you any names.”

“Not even off the record?”

“What would be the use? I haven’t got enough to prove a case. I don’t have access to the physical evidence, and I can’t depend on the official interpretation of it.”

“You mean it’s been manipulated?”

“Psychologically speaking, anyway. There may have been some actual tampering. I don’t know for sure that the gun that was found in the greenhouse fired the slugs in Jerry Hallman.”

“The sheriff’s men think so.”

“Have they run ballistics tests?”

“Apparently. The fact that it was his mother’s gun has generated a lot of heat downtown. They’re going into ancient history. The rumor’s running around that Hallman killed his mother, too, and possibly his father, and the family money got him off and hushed it up.” He gave me a quick, sharp look. “Could there be anything in that?”

“You sound as if you’re buying it yourself.”

“I wouldn’t say that, but I know some things it could jibe with. I went to see the Senator last spring, just a few days before he died.” He paused to organize his thoughts, and went on more slowly. “I had dug up certain facts about a certain county official whose re-election was coming up in May. Spaulding thought the Senator ought to know these facts, because he’d been supporting this certain official for a good many years. So had the paper, as a matter of fact. The paper generally went along with Senator Hallman’s ideas on county government. Spaulding didn’t want to change that policy without checking with Senator Hallman. He was a big minority stockholder in the paper, and you might say the local elder statesman.”

“If you’re trying to say he was county boss and Ostervelt was one of his boys, why beat around the bush?”

“It wasn’t quite that simple, but that’s the general picture. All right, so you know.” Slovekin was young and full of desire, and his tone became competitive: “What you don’t know is the nature of my facts. I won’t go into detail, but I was in a position to prove that Ostervelt had been taking regular payoff money from houses of prostitution. I showed Senator Hallman my affidavits. He was an old man, and he was shocked. I was afraid for a while that he might have a heart attack then and there. When he calmed down, he said he needed time to think about the problem, perhaps talk it over with Ostervelt himself. I was to come back in a week. Unfortunately, he died before the week was up.”

“All very interesting. Only I don’t see how it fits in with the idea that Carl killed him.”

“It depends on how you look at it. Say Carl did it and Ostervelt pinned it on him, but kept the evidence to himself. It would give Ostervelt all the leverage he needed to keep the Hallman family in line. It would also explain what happened afterwards. Jerry Hallman went to a lot of trouble to quash our investigation. He also threw all his weight behind Ostervelt’s re-election.”

“He might have done that for any number of reasons.”

“Name one.”

“Say he killed his father himself, and Ostervelt knew it.”

“You don’t believe that,” Slovekin stated.

He looked around nervously. The little blonde ankled up to the side of the car with my Monarchburger. I said, when she was out of hearing: “This is supposed to be a progressive county. How does Ostervelt keep his hold on it?”

“He’s been in office a long time, and, as you know, he’s got good political backing, at least until now. He knows where the bodies are buried. You might say he’s buried a couple of them himself.”

“Buried them himself?”

“I was speaking more or less figuratively.” Slovekin’s voice had sunk to a worried whisper. “He’s shot down one or two escaping prisoners – shootings that a lot of the townspeople didn’t think were strictly necessary. The reason I mention it – I wouldn’t want to see you end up with a hole in the back.”

“That’s a hell of a thought, when I’m eating a sandwich.”

“I wish you’d take me seriously, Archer. I didn’t like what happened between you this afternoon.”

“Neither did I.”

Slovekin leaned toward me. “Those names you have in mind that you won’t give me – is Ostervelt one of them?”

“He is now. You can write it down in your little black book.”

“I already have, long ago.”