Collection 1983 - The Hills Of Homicide (v5.0) Read online

  The car swung and smashed into the curb and then over it. We weren’t rolling fast, but I hit the pavement gun in hand and backing up, and saw Loftus coming toward us as Peppy rolled down the hill in the following car. “Get that guy!” I yelled.

  Nick was screaming mad. “It’s a double cross! It’s a—” His gun swung up, and I let him have it right through the chest, squeezing the two shots off as fast as I could pull the trigger of my gun.

  Nick screamed again and his mouth dropped open, and then he spilled out of the car and landed on his face in the dust and dirt of the gutter.

  Another shot boomed behind the car, and I knew it was Loftus cutting loose with his six-shooter. He only shot once.

  For once Toni had been caught flat-footed. My twist of the wheel and leap from the car had caught her unawares, and now she stared, for one fatal instant, as though struck dumb. Then her face twisted into a grimace of hate and female fury, and she grabbed at her purse. Knowing where her gun was, I went into action a split second sooner and knocked it from her hand. She sprang at me, screaming and clawing, but Loftus and a couple of passing miners pulled her off me.

  “Hold her,” I said. “She’s in it, too.”

  “Karen Bitner’s disappeared,” Loftus told me. “Have you seen her?”

  “Caronna’s got her.”

  Diving around the sheriff’s car, I sprang for the seat of Peppy’s convertible, which had been stopped alongside the street. I kicked her wide open and went up the winding road to Caronna’s house with all the stops out. Skidding to a halt in front of the gate, I hit the ground on both feet, and this time I wasn’t caring if there was a warning signal on the gate or not. I jerked it open, heard the bell clang somewhere in the interior, and then I was inside the gate and running for the steps.

  As I went through the gate I heard something crash, and then a scream as of an animal in pain—a hoarse, gasping cry that died away in a sobbing gasp. I took the steps in a bound and went through the door.

  Caronna, his eyes blazing, his shirt ripped half off, was standing in the middle of the room, his powerful, trunklike legs wide spread, his big hands knotted into fists.

  In the corner of the room Castro was lying, and I needed only a glance to see that Richard Henry Castro had tackled a different kind of jungle beast, and had come out on the short end. I could surmise what had happened. Castro must have jumped him, and Caronna had torn the man loose and hurled him into that corner and then jumped right in the middle of him with both feet. If Castro wasn’t ready for the hospital I never saw a man who was, and unless I was mistaken, he was a candidate for the morgue.

  One chair was knocked over, and the broken body of Castro lay on the floor, blood trickling from a corner of his mouth, blood staining the front of his white shirt and slowly turning it to a wide crimson blotch. Yet his eyes were alive as they had never been, and they blazed up to us like those of a trapped and desperate animal brought to its last moment and backing away from the trapper with bared teeth.

  Caronna was the thing that centered on my mind and gripped every sense in my being. Somehow, from the first I had known I would fight that man. Perhaps it began when Shanks had told me I wasn’t man enough for him. That had rankled.

  I stood there looking at Blacky Caronna, a solid block of bone and muscle mounted on a couple of powerful and thick legs, a massive chest and shoulders, and a bull neck that held his blunt, short-haired head thrust forward. He saw me and lunged.

  Did I shoot him? Hell, what man who fights with his hands can think of a gun at such a moment? I dropped mine as Caronna lunged for me, and as I dropped it I hooked short and hard with both hands.

  My feet were firmly anchored. I was set just right and he was coming in. My left smashed a bit high, slicing a deep cut in his cheekbone, and then my right smacked on his chin. I might as well have hit a wall. He grabbed at my coat, thinking perhaps to jerk it down over my shoulders, but I whipped up a right uppercut that clipped him on the chin, and as all my weight was driving toward him, I jerked my chin down on my chest and butted him in the face, blocking his arms with my elbows.

  He grabbed my forearms and hurled me away from him so hard that I hit a chair and it splintered under me. He came in with a rush, ready to give me the boots as he had Castro, but that was an old story for me from lumber camps and waterfronts, and just as he started to jump, I hurled my body at his legs. He tottered and fell over me, kicking out blindly for my face, and one boot grazed my head, but then I rolled over and came up. He was up with me, and we rushed together like a couple of berserk cavemen.

  It was wicked, brutal battling. Through a kind of smoky haze in my mind, caused by crashing punches to my head and chin, I drove into him, swinging with both hands, and he met me halfway. It was fist and thumb, gouging, biting, kneeing. Using elbows and shoulders, butting and kicking. It was barroom, backroom, waterfront style, where anything goes and the man who goes down and doesn’t get up fast enough is through…and he rarely gets up.

  Somebody had said that Caronna had once been a puddler in a steel mill, and he had lost none of his strength. A rocklike fist smashed against my chin, bursting a million lights in my brain. A thumb stabbed at my eye in a clinch, and I butted and gouged my way out of it and then clipped him with a right to the chin as he came in. I struck at his throat with my elbow in close, and then grabbing him by the belt, heaved him from the floor and hurled him back on a table. He kicked me in the chest as I came in, and knocked me into the wall.

  Castro was staring at us from the floor, and as well as if it had been my own mind, I knew what went on in his. He had seen no jungle beasts fighting as we fought then, for no jungle beast has ever achieved the refinements of cruelty that man has learned to inject into his fighting. A beast fights to win, and men fight and hate while they fight.

  My coat and shirt were gone. Blood streaked my body. I could feel a stiffness in the side of my face, and I knew my eye was swelling shut. There was no time to rest, no rounds, no stopping. I stepped in on the balls of my feet and hooked hard to his chin. He blinked and slammed a right at me that I ducked but I caught a sweeping left that rocked me. Weaving to escape his bludgeoning fists, I got in close and whipped both hands to the body, and then a hard right. I forced him back against the desk and jamming my left forearm against his throat, I slammed three right hands into his body before he threw me off and charged at me like a mad bull. I stabbed a left at his face and he took it coming in as though I’d hit him with a feather duster. My right missed and he hit me in the belly with one that knocked every bit of wind out of me.

  He hurled me to the floor and jumped for me with both feet, but I jerked up my knees and kicked out hard with both feet. They caught him midway of his jump and put him off balance, and he fell beside me. I rolled over, grabbing at his throat, but he threw a right from where he lay that clipped me, and then I ground the side of his face into the floor by crushing my elbow against his cheek.

  We broke free and lunged to our feet, but he caught me with a looping right that staggered me. I backed up, working away from him, fighting to get my breath. My mouth hung open and I was breathing in great gasps, and he came around the wreck of the table, coming for me.

  The cut on his cheekbone was wider now and blood trickled from it, staining the whole side of his face and shoulder. His lips were puffed and bloody, and his nose looked out of line.

  He came into me then, but I had my wind and I was set. I jabbed with a left and moved away. He pushed on in, bobbing his head to make my left miss, so I shortened it to a hook and stepped in with both hands. They caught him solidly, and he stopped dead in his tracks. I pulled the trigger on my hard one, and his knees crumpled. But he didn’t go down. He shook his head and started for me, his eyes glazed. My left hook came over with everything I had on it, and his cheek looked as if somebody had hit it with an axe.

  He came on in, and I let go with my Sunday punch. Sunday punch, hell. He took it coming in and scarcely blinked, hurt as he was. Fo
r the first time in my life I was scared. I had hit this guy with everything but the desk and he was still coming. He was slower, but he was coming, and his wide face looked as if somebody had worked on it with a meat axe and a curry comb.

  My knees were shaky and I knew that no matter how badly he was hurt, I was on my last legs. He came on in, and I threw a right into his stomach. He gasped and his face looked sick, but he came on. He struck at me, but the power was gone from his punches. I set myself and started to throw them. I threw them as if I was punching the heavy bag and the timekeeper had given me the ten-second signal. I must have thrown both hands into the air after he started to fall, but as he came down, with great presence of mind, I jerked my knee into his chin.

  Jerry Loftus came into the room as I staggered back, staring down at Caronna. “I could have stopped it,” he said, “but I—”

  “Why the hell didn’t you?” I gasped.

  “What? Am I supposed to be off my trail?” He glared at me, but his eyes twinkled at the corners. “Best scrap I ever saw, an’ you ask me why I didn’t stop it!”

  “You’d better get cuffs on that guy,” I said, disgusted. “If he gets up again I’m going right out that window!”

  We found Karen in another room, tied up in a neat bundle, which, incidentally, she is at any time. When I turned her loose, she kissed me, and while I’d been looking forward to that, for the first time in my life I failed to appreciate a kiss from a pretty woman. Both my lips were split and swollen. She looked at my face with a kind of horror that I could appreciate, having seen Caronna.

  * * *

  HOURS LATER, SEATED in the café over coffee, Johnny Holben and Loftus came in to join us. Holben stared at me. Even with my face washed and patched up, I looked like something found dead in the water.

  “All right,” Loftus said doubtfully, “this is your show. We’ve got Caronna no matter how this goes, due to an old killing back east. That’s what he was so worried about. Somebody started an investigation of an income-tax evasion and everybody started to talk, and before it was over, three old murders had been accounted for, and one of them was Caronna’s.

  “However, while we don’t know now whether Castro will live or not with that rib through his lung, you say he was the one who killed Bitner.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “He did kill him.”

  “He never came up that trail past my place,” Holben said.

  “But there isn’t any other way up, is there?” Karen asked.

  “No, not a one,” Loftus said. “In the thirty years since I came west with a herd of cattle to settle in this country, I’ve been all over that mesa, every inch of it, and there’s no trail but the one past Holben’s cabin.”

  “Your word is good enough for me,” I said, “but the fact is, Castro did not come by any trail when he murdered Old Jack Bitner. How it was done I had no idea until I visited Castro’s show. You must remember that he specializes in odd animals, in the strange and the unusual.

  “Crime and criminal practices have been a hobby with me for years. In all the reading and traveling I’ve done, I’ve collected lots of odd facts about the ways of criminals in our own and a lot of other countries. Usually, methods are very much in pattern. The average criminal, no matter how he may think of himself, is a first-class dope.

  “If he had imagination, he wouldn’t be a criminal in the first place. When one does encounter the exception, it is usually in the field of murder. Castro was an exception.

  “He was a man who spent money and who liked to spend money, and he was getting old enough so that the jungles held no more lure. He wanted money, and he wanted it fast. There was some old family trouble, of no importance to us, that left a decided dislike between Castro and his uncle. He knew he could never inherit in any legitimate way.

  “He got his method from India, a place where he had traveled a good deal. When I saw his animals, something clicked into place in my mind, and then something else. I knew then he had scaled the wall under Bitner’s window.”

  “That’s a sheer cliff,” Loftus protested.

  “Sure, and nothing human could climb it without help, but Richard Henry Castro went up that cliff, and he had help.”

  “You mean, there was somebody in it with him?”

  “Nothing human. When I saw his show, I tied it in with a track I saw on the ledge outside Bitner’s window. The trouble was that while I knew how it was done, and that his show had been stopped on the highway opposite the mesa, I had no proof. If Castro sat tight, even though I knew how it was done, it was going to be hard to prove.

  “One of the great advantages the law has over the criminal is the criminal’s mind. He is always afraid of being caught. He can never be sure he hasn’t slipped up; he never knows how much you know. My problem was to get Castro worried, and his method was one so foreign to this country that he never dreamed anyone would guess. I had to worry him, so in leaving I made a remark to him in Malayan, telling him that he had made a mistake.

  “Once he knew I had been in the Far East, he would be worried. Also, he knew that Caronna had seen him.”

  “Caronna saw him?” Loftus demanded.

  “Yes, that had to be it. That was the wedge he was using to cut himself in on Castro’s inheritance.”

  “How could Castro inherit?”

  “There’s a man in his show named Johnny Leader, a master penman with a half-dozen convictions for forgery on his record. He was traveling with that show writing visiting cards for people, scrolls, etc. He drew up a will for Castro, and it was substituted at the time of the killing.”

  “Get to the point,” Holben said irritably. “How did he get up that cliff?”

  “This will be hard to believe,” I said, “but he had the rope taken up by a lizard!”

  “By a what?” Holben demanded.

  I grinned. “Look,” I said, “over in India there are certain thieves and second-story workers who enter houses and high buildings in just that way.

  “Castro has two types of monitor lizards over there in his show. The dragon lizards from Komodo are too big and tough for anyone to handle, and nobody wants to. However, the smaller monitor lizards from India, running four to five feet in length, are another story. It is those lizards that the thieves use to gain access to locked houses.

  “A rope is tied around the lizard’s body, and he climbs the wall, steered by jerks on the rope from below. When he gets over a parapet, in a crevice, or over a window sill, the thief jerks hard on the rope and the lizard braces himself to prevent being pulled over, and they are very strong in the legs. Then the thief goes up the wall, hand over hand, walking right up with his feet against the wall.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Loftus said. “Who would ever think of that?”

  “The day you took me up there,” I told him, “I noticed a track that reminded me of the track of a gila monster, but much bigger. The idea of what it meant did not occur to me until I saw those monitor lizards of Castro’s.

  “Now that we know what to look for, we’ll probably find scratches on the cliff and tracks at the base.”

  Karen was looking at me, wide-eyed with respect. “Why, I never realized you knew things like that!”

  “In my business,” I said, “you have to know a little of everything.”

  “I’ll stick to bank robbers an’ rustlers,” Loftus said. “Or highgraders.”

  “You old false alarm!” Holben snorted. “You never arrested a highgrader in your life!”

  We were walking out of the door, and somehow we just naturally started up the hill. Dusk was drawing a blanket of darkness over the burnt red ridges, and the western horizon was blushing before the oncoming shadows.

  When we were on top of the hill again, looking back over the town, Karen looked up at me. “Are your lips still painful?”

  “Not that painful,” I said.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  UNGUARDED MOMENT

  The lead characte
r of unguarded moment is neither a professional criminal nor detective. Arthur Fordyce is very much an “average” man who in an “unguarded moment” is confronted with some terrible acts of crime and violence.

  I have always been aware of the fact that all of us walk a very thin line. When you step out of a doorway whether you turn right or left may change the whole course of your life. We all have “unguarded moments”, maybe not exactly like Fordyce in my story, but there are times when we do things that we hadn’t planned on doing. Suddenly we make a move this way or that, or say something inadvertently that we hadn’t even thought of saying, and it can change the whole course of events.

  It’s very easy for a person to get himself in lots of unplanned trouble. For example, you have lots of time on your hands and you sit a bar having a drink. A girl sits alongside you and is having one too, and all of a sudden her boyfriend or husband comes in and thinks you’re trying to pick her up and gets sore at you and you wind up in a fight when you were an entirely innocent bystander. Maybe you never even spoke to the girl, but the trouble can happen.

  UNGUARDED MOMENT

  * * *

  ARTHUR FORDYCE HAD never done a criminal thing in his life, nor had the idea of doing anything unlawful ever seriously occurred to him.

  The wallet that lay beside his chair was not only full; it was literally stuffed. It lay on the floor near his feet where it had fallen.

  His action was as purely automatic as an action can be. He let his Racing Form slip from his lap and cover the billfold. Then he sat very still, his heart pounding. The fat man who had dropped the wallet was talking to a friend on the far side of the box. As far as Fordyce could see, his own action had gone unobserved.

  It had been a foolish thing to do. Fordyce did not need the money. He had been paid a week’s salary only a short time before and had won forty dollars on the last race.