The Instant Enemy

chapter 20

IN THE RECEPTION HALL, the refugees from the war of the generations had dwindled to half a dozen. A middle-aged male orderly was quietly herding them back to their rooms.

“It’s bedtime, folks,” he said.

Jack Fleischer came in the front door. His eyes, his entire face, were glazed with weariness and alcohol.

“I’d like to see Mrs. Krug,” he said to the orderly.

“I’m sorry, sir. Visiting hours are over.”

“This is important.”

“I can’t help that, sir. I don’t make the decisions around here. The manager’s in Chicago at a convention.”

“Don’t tell me that. I’m a law-enforcement officer.”

Fleischer’s voice was rising. His face was swelling with blood. He fumbled in his pockets and found a badge which he showed to the orderly.

“That makes no difference, sir. I have my orders.”

Without warning, Fleischer hit the orderly with his open hand. The man fell down and got up. Half of his face was red, the other half white. The old people watched in silence. Like actual refugees, they were more afraid of physical force than anything.

I moved up behind Fleischer and put an armlock on him. He was heavy and powerful. It was all I could do to hold him.

“Is he a friend of yours?” the orderly asked me.

“No.”

But in a sense Fleischer belonged to me. I walked him outside and released him. He pulled out an automatic pistol.

“You’re under arrest,” he told me.

“What for? Preventing a riot?”

“Resisting an officer in the performance of his duty.”

He was glaring and sputtering. The gun in his hand looked like a .38, big enough to knock me down for good.

“Come off it, Jack, and put the gun away. You’re out of your county, and there are witnesses.”

The orderly and his charges were watching from the front steps. Jack Fleischer turned his head to look at them. I knocked the gun from his hand and picked it up as he dove for it. On his hands and knees, like a man changing into a dog, he barked at me: “I put you away for this. I’m an officer.”

“Act like one.”

The orderly came toward us. He was just a whitish movement in the corner of my vision. I was watching Fleischer as he got up.

The orderly said to me: “We don’t want trouble. I better call the police, eh?”

“That shouldn’t be necessary. How about it, Fleischer?”

“Hell, I am the police.”

“Not in this bailiwick you’re not. Anyway, I heard that you were retired.”

“Who the hell are you?” Fleischer squinted at me. His eyes gleamed like yellowish quartz in the half light.

“I’m a licensed private detective. My name is Archer.”

“If you want to stay licensed, give me back my gun.” He held out his thick red hand for it.

“We better have a talk first, Jack. And you better apologize to the man you hit.”

Fleischer lifted one corner of his mouth in a snarl of pain. For a spoiled old cop, having to apologize was cruel and unusual punishment.

“Sorry,” he said without looking at the man.

“All right,” the orderly said.

He turned and walked away with formal dignity. The old people on the steps followed him into the building. The door sucked shut behind them.

Fleischer and I moved toward our cars. We faced each other in the space between them, each with his back to his own car.

“My gun,” he reminded me. It was in my pocket.

“First we talk. What are you after, Jack?”

“I’m working on an old case, a fatal accident which happened years ago.”

“If you know it was an accident, why did you open it up again?”

“I never closed it. I don’t like unfinished business.”

He was fencing, talking in generalities. I tried to jolt him. “Did you know Jasper Blevins?”

“No. I never met him,” he said levelly.

“But you knew his wife Laurel.”

“Maybe I did. Not as well as some people think.”

“Why didn’t you get her to identify her husband’s body?”

He didn’t answer for quite a while. Finally he said: “Are you recording this?”

“No.”

“Come away from your car, eh, pal?”

We walked down the driveway. The overarching stone pines were like a darker sky narrowing down on us. Fleischer was more voluble in the almost total darkness.

“I admit I made a mistake fifteen years ago. That’s the only thing I’m going to admit. I’m not going to dig up the garbage and spread it all over my own front porch.”

“What was the mistake, Jack?”

“I trusted that broad.”

“Did Laurel say it wasn’t her husband who died under the train?”

“She said a lot of things. Most of them were lies. She conned me good.”

“You can’t blame her for everything. It was your job to get the body identified.”

“Don’t tell me what my job was. In the thirty years I worked for the sheriff’s department, close to a hundred hoboes died under trains in our county. Some had identification on them, and some didn’t. This one didn’t. How was I to know it was different from the others?”

“What makes it so different, Jack?”

“You know damn well what makes it different.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve told you all I’m going to. I thought we could have a meeting of the minds. But you’re all take and no give.”

“You haven’t given me anything I can use.”

“You haven’t given me anything, period,” he said. “What’s your angle?”

“No angle. I’m working on the Stephen Hackett snatch.”

“The what?” He was stalling.

“Don’t kid me, you know about Hackett. You read about it in the San Francisco paper.”

He made a quarter-turn and faced me in the darkness. “So you’re the one that had me tailed in Frisco. What in hell are you trying to do to me?”

“Nothing personal. Your case and mine are connected. Jasper Blevins’s little boy Davy, the one who got lost in the shuffle, has grown up into a big boy. He took Hackett yesterday.”

I could hear Fleischer draw in his breath quickly, then let it out slowly. “The paper said this Hackett is really loaded.” It was a question.

“He’s loaded all right.”

“And Jasper Blevins’ boy is holding him for ransom?”

“There hasn’t been any talk of ransom, that I know of. I think he’s planning to kill Hackett, if he hasn’t already.”

“Christ! He can’t do that!” Fleischer sounded as if his own life had been threatened.

I said: “Do you know Hackett?”

“I never saw him in my life. But there’s money in it, pal. We should throw in together, you and me.”

I didn’t want Fleischer as a partner. I didn’t trust him. On the other hand, he knew things about the case that were unknown to anyone else alive. And he knew Santa Teresa County.

“Do you remember the Krug ranch, near Centerville?”

“Yeah, I know where it is.”

“Davy Blevins may be holding Stephen Hackett on the ranch.”

“Then let’s get up there,” Fleischer said. “What are we waiting for?”

We went back to our cars. I handed Fleischer his gun. Facing him in the semi-darkness. I had the feeling that I was looking at myself in a bleared distorting mirror.

Neither of us had mentioned the death of Laurel Smith.