The Death of Lorenzo Jones Page 11

  But Lockwood felt he had a new client in the case.

  Lorenzo Jones.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Lockwood drove Amanda home. She kept raving about the food and the dancing. But Lockwood’s mind was on other things. Could Charlie Waters be Cyrus Wade? That would wrap it up in a neat package of adultery, murder—and torture. Hook hated Wade, and wanted more than just to save Transatlantic the money on the claim.

  He wanted revenge. Revenge for Jones, for Doc—and for those beatings and for the tommy-gun fire.

  Amanda looked at him. “Are you worried about something?” she asked plaintively.

  “Just business. Sorry.” He dropped her off at her home in Larchmont.

  He took the winding Route 1 back through the wilderness of the Bronx, which became the Boston Post Road’s slippery avenue of cobblestones. Garages dotted the roadside.

  A storm was brewing. He sped along the road, his brain racing a million miles an hour. Suddenly, there was that familiar police siren behind him. He pulled over. Jimbo got out of his Plymouth and walked up.

  “I heard you were seeing that aviatrix dame, so I knew you’d be coming back this way. Hook, I’ve got to talk to you about Robin Mobley.”

  “Jesus! She’s all right, isn’t she?”

  “She disappeared. Right before we were to pick her up for the murder of Doc Carruthers,” replied the lieutenant.

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “Hook, we traced that hair-curling iron we found near Doc’s feet, the one that was used to torture him. A peculiar brand. Only five were sold at Macy’s in the past week. Guess who bought one of the five?” He didn’t give Hook a chance to answer. “Robin Mobley. And she didn’t sign her real name.”

  “Then how do you know she bought it?”

  “Handwriting analysis. It was her, no doubt about it. The four other curling irons were bought by out-of-towners. Four ladies from Ohio here on a vacation.”

  “Come on, Jimbo, she couldn’t torture someone. Anyway, I have no idea where she is.”

  “I thought you were bedding her.”

  “No, we’re just friends.”

  “Friends, is it? With a woman? Well, better be careful. She’s a little killer, Hook.”

  “How could she have overpowered Doc?”

  “She found him drunk. When he awoke, he was tied up. She must have killed Jones, too.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “She was a little whore in her home town. We checked it out. That’s why she was living with her aunt, here. They wouldn’t have any teenage whores in her town. She was probably sleeping with Jones. He might have decided to cut it off. I’m surprised, Hook, you don’t know a thing about her background.”

  Lockwood’s head was spinning. “How do you think Robin managed to kill Lorenzo?”

  “We know. We found a prescription for poison made out by Doc Carruthers. It was used by this Mobley whore to poison Lorenzo Jones. When and how, we don’t know. The body’s gone, we may never know. Maybe she gave him candy to eat in that airplane. Then she tortured Doc to find out if he had told about the poison and destroyed any records of it in his office.”

  So—Robin was the one talking to Doc on the phone when Lockwood had snuck back!

  It was starting to rain, a sharp hard rain. Brannigan stepped away from the rolled-down window.

  “Keep your nose clean and your hat dry, Hook. You report it, the minute you see Robin. She’s a fugitive now.”

  Lockwood was down, very down. He went home and drank Canadian. Robin. Her face spun around in his brain like an airplane out of control. He fell asleep, and dreamed his feet were being burned. He smelled the flesh sizzle, and felt the flames as if they were real.

  CHAPTER

  19

  He was falling, falling through space, his whole body throbbing like a giant wound. A drum was beating: Bam! Bam! It smashed into his flesh. It jarred his senses. Bam! Bam! It grew louder and louder until it felt like his brain would explode.

  Ring! Ring! It was the goddamn phone.

  It was Gray. “Lockwood, come down here to the office, right now!”

  Lockwood shook his woozy head. “Okay, just give me a few minutes.” Lockwood groaned. This rat race never ended.

  Hook arrived at the office about a half hour later. Gray was storming around, pacing the floors frantically.

  “Lockwood! About goddamned time you got here. Now tell me, just what the hell is going on around here? Bodies everywhere—the cops are questioning people left and right—and not a word from my own investigator!”

  Lockwood spilled everything. Everything except Robin’s ring.

  Gray became almost cheerful when Lockwood told him Wade had been sleeping with Cynthia Jones.

  “A little call to this Mr. Wade and the Jones widow should end this case nicely. Good work, Bill! Wade won’t want to face an adultery scandal.”

  “But isn’t that blackmail, Mr. Gray?”

  “You weren’t born yesterday, Lockwood. Sometimes it’s best to take measures—even measures that could, ahem, be construed as blackmail—to make sure that morally degenerate parties do not reap profit from their illegal acts.”

  “Oh brother.”

  “That will be all, Lockwood.” Gray was dialing his phone again, so Lockwood left.

  Back in his office Molly gave Lockwood a back rub. That usually fixed him up, even when he had a hangover. But he felt awful. He had to help Robin, and all he could do was wait for her to contact him.

  He saw it all now: Wade, and maybe Cynthia working with him, had killed Jones, Doc, and Sykes, too. So they could be together and not for the money.

  Robin, she was the fall girl. She had a bad record—sure to come out in court—and the jury would show no mercy.

  They wouldn’t give the electric chair to a woman. But life—a long time for a young girl.

  But Robin hadn’t done it. Wade had planted the evidence. He had a good reason to pin it all on her: Robin had squealed on his habit of feeling her up. And Wade probably had known her background.

  Robin: demure, sweet, innocent Robin was a small-town whore. There must be some angle on that story that Robin could explain.

  “Does that feel okay, Mr. Lockwood?” Molly asked. It did feel better. He looked at pretty little Molly MacMillan. In a few more years… .

  “Molly, what would you do if you were through with a case, but you didn’t feel through?”

  “Why, I can understand that. Feelings. I think feelings are wonderful things, Mr. Lockwood. Don’t you?”

  “Sometimes I hate it that we have feelings,” Lockwood answered sullenly.

  “Don’t ever say that, Mr. Lockwood.”

  “You’re right, Molly.” Lockwood said, smiling and pecking her on the cheek. He rose, put on his jacket, tightened his tie, and left.

  “Keep Mr. Gray happy, Molly. Tell him I went out to celebrate the conclusion of the case.”

  Lockwood didn’t go drinking, he went looking for Robin.

  Where would a woman on the run go? To a Greyhound station? The cops knew she might. They would pick her up there unless Lockwood spotted her first.

  He parked the Cord in the garage and walked to the grimy Greyhound station at Tenth Avenue and 41st.

  At 5:30 P.M. Robin showed. Her disguise as an old lady was pathetic; the cops would be waiting at the boarding gates. He caught her in the corridor.

  “Want to buy a poppy from a veteran?” he queried. The old lady nearly jumped out of her gray wig.

  “Bill! How did you recognize me? Oh, Bill, I have to get out of town. I’m in big trouble. The police think I killed—”

  Lockwood drew her into an alcove near a candy machine. “John Early and Bob Knapp—two dumb cops I know—are waiting at the boarding platform. You can’t get out of town this way. Come with me, granny. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  He grabbed her arm and pulled her along to the subway.

  “But there’re so ma
ny people in the subway.”

  “All the better. We’ll duck in the first train that comes. Get out of that wig—it’s ridiculous.”

  They rode down to Union Square and then took a cab back to his hotel. He sat her down roughly on the bed.

  “Now talk,” he said.

  Between sobs she told him everything. She wasn’t a whore, but she had had trouble in her home town. The sheriff’s son had tried to rape her. He had framed her as a whore to get off the hook, so she and her aunt left town.

  Wade had told her to pick up the deadly prescription. “I didn’t even know what it was,” Robin insisted.

  “My curling iron was missing. I always kept it in a drawer in Wade’s outer office.” Her ring, too, had disappeared. She always took it off when typing for Wade.

  It checked with Lockwood’s idea of what had happened. He believed her, but he wondered if it was only because he desperately wanted to.

  Tenderly, he dried her tears with his handkerchief.

  It was a fatherly act, but he didn’t merely feel fatherly. Robin’s skirt had hitched up to her creamy knees as she lay weeping on the bed. Again he saw those calves, so slim and sensuously curved. Her hair spilled across his hands as he slipped a pillow under her head. Her eyes looked up at his, greener in the subdued lighting of his bedroom. Her sobbing slowly turned to silence. She sensed their aloneness, his closeness.

  He lowered his lips to her quivering mouth. Hesitantly, their lips met, broke away, and met again. He was leaning over her, but as their kiss continued, stronger and firmer, as their lips opened and they kissed deeply, he found his weight sinking against her youthful body.

  That body responded to him, making slow tentative movements at first, then moving with his body. She pressed her breasts against him. He felt her narrow waist and her thighs with his hands.

  She seemed startled, and her kisses nearly broke off when his hand rubbed gently against her womanhood, but their lips met again; she abandoned herself completely. Her tongue searched his mouth, and her lithe body pressed against his.

  Now he felt the presence of his shirt and trousers as an imposition, and he wanted to remove them, but she pulled him toward her when he tried to rise.

  “I’ll do it,” she said warmly. She began to remove his tie and did a bad job of it.

  He helped her and threw it onto a chair. She was already unbuttoning his shirt and was more effective at that. He started fooling with the clasps of her dress. She made no move to stop him; indeed, she rose a bit when he was having difficulty to allow him easier access. He nearly gasped when he saw how full and shapely her breasts were, more luscious than he had imagined. Some women shouldn’t wear clothes at all, ever. Robin was such a woman.

  He snuggled into her breasts with his face, and she responded by skipping the last button on his shirt and dropping her hands to his lap, where she opened his fly. In a moment she was gasping as her long fingers held him for the first time.

  Her gasps seemed apprehensive. “I had no idea—” she muttered.

  Lockwood slid her dress farther down, only to find a tight corset about her midriff. It looked unassailable.

  Robin stuttered, “No—no—ooh—”

  Lockwood recognized these protestations as only moderately in earnest, for shortly she said, “Yes—please, Bill, get it off me. Here—I—I’ll help—” She, too, began to pull the drawstrings and bows at the spine of the garment.

  Lockwood let her take care of her restrictive bindings, never taking his eyes off her and the quiver of those luscious breasts as she worked on the corset. He dropped his pants to the floor.

  Robin was flushed, embarrassed at the same time that her body urged her onto the passion it must have. The corset was off. Her silk panties were whisked down, and she kicked them off and lay back. Her mound of Venus was covered with blond curls.

  She looked at the bulge in his boxer shorts. She pleaded, “Bill, I—I—Go easy, will you? I—I’m frightened. I—never—”

  He slowed himself. Her confession of virginity made him more anxious to mount her, yet he was determined to take it easy.

  There wasn’t much blood, just enough to tell Lockwood that this beauty was until that moment cherry.

  As he felt the relief of her enveloping him, he also felt an awesome reassurance that all along she had been telling him the truth about herself. He moaned as she started rocking under him. He pushed even deeper, anxious to come but more determined to hold his pleasure until the last possible moment. She groaned. Tears streamed down her face, but pleasure pushed those tears back, and soon she gave way to rippling shudders and tiny yelps of pleasure. They rocked together, her hips refusing to allow him to pull away for even the briefest second from her gentle prison.

  Their movements synchronized, and their breathing matched.. They moved as lovers lost in ecstasy, beyond all earthly concerns. They were one, they burst into sensual exhultation.

  Robin moaned in pleasure as she grasped him in hard little jerks. He kissed her lips, her forehead, her closed eyelids, and her cheeks. She still held him inside her and refused to let him leave. Her body quivered for minutes after their last explosion was over.

  Arm in arm, they walked deep into Central Park that night. The night was chilly, but they wanted to be in the dark and look at the stars. Lockwood put his suit jacket over Robin’s shoulders and walked in his shirtsleeves. They stopped on the elegant wooden bow bridge from which they watched the nearly full moon rise over the lake.

  As the ducks quacked below their feet under the bridge, they held each other.

  “I never believed it could be like this, Bill.”

  “I wouldn’t have made love to you if I had realized it was your first time. I hope—”

  “It was the loveliest first time any girl ever had. Hold me.”

  He held her there in the starlight. This gentle creature guilty of murder? Jimbo was nuts.

  CHAPTER

  20

  Sometimes a hotel gets noisy, even the Summerfield, one of the better hotels around Times Square. Early in the morning the maids throw a lot of cleaning supplies about, and the busboys seem to love dropping trays. Even though Lockwood was paying $80 a month, he had learned to expect the hotel’s noise.

  Still, there seemed to be a lot more noise than usual this morning.

  Lockwood heard a loud thump, like a body falling. He opened the door and saw a busboy lying unconscious on the carpet. Diego!

  Robin sat up in bed, her firm breasts spilling out over the white sheets.

  “What is it?” she asked apprehensively.

  Lockwood saw a small, familiar figure in a gray topcoat running down the corridor toward the back stairs. He knew instantly who it was—Half-Pint. But he was more interested in Diego’s health at that moment.

  Lockwood lifted the limp form to a sitting position. Diego moaned and touched his head.

  “Someone was trying to pick your lock, Mr. Lockwood. I tried to grab him, but the guy sapped me with a blackjack or something. The lights went out.”

  Lockwood slipped a fiver into Diego’s hand and patted him on the shoulder.

  “For you, pal. Do me a favor, though. Don’t report this. I’ll take care of it myself.”

  Diego smiled and rubbed his head again. “Mr. Lockwood, I say nothing.”

  Lockwood shut the door. What the hell do I do now? he wondered. Half-Pint’s sneaking up to my door, and I’m sleeping with a fugitive. He pictured Robin with her head shaved, and then he flashed on an image of her strapped into the electric chair, ready to get the juice.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Robin.

  Lockwood went over and kissed her on the forehead. What a wonderful night they’d had! But he was afraid for her now.

  “Put on your granny wig after you shower. We’re going out.” He kissed her soft lips, her cheek.

  “Where? Can’t we just stay in bed all morning?” She grinned in anticipation.

  “I’m going to rent Granny a place in the c
ountry. Way out in the country. Until I figure this whole thing out.”

  Downstairs, the men at the desk started to make cracks about Granny’s age and Lockwood’s sexual proclivities concerning the elderly, till they saw his grim look. He got the Cord and drove Robin up the Henry Hudson Highway to a run-down bungalow colony in upper Westchester. Fifty miles from the Big Apple there were plenty of little anonymous road hotels where middle-aged executives took their cuties to enjoy a weekend. Harvey in the Adjustments department had told Lockwood about this one, The Happy Arms, where the desk clerk was understanding and close-mouthed.

  Robin, now out of her granny disguise, signed in as Rebecca Fiden, Lockwood as her husband. He winked at the clerk, slipped him a few bucks, and mentioned Harv.

  After the grinning desk clerk had opened their cabin door, winked at Lockwood, and walked away, Lockwood kissed her. Stroking her hair, he held her for a minute. “Gotta go, baby. I’ll call you as soon as anything good happens.”

  She clung to him. “Please stay, Bill. I’m afraid.”

  “Nothing will happen to you if you just do what I say. Stay here. Don’t go out. Have the desk boy get you food. I’ll be back.”

  He left her weeping on the bed. Broads, he loved them, but did they always have to break down about everything?

  That taken care of, he drove straight to Amanda, stopping only to call Brannigan to find out if the cop had picked up Half-Pint.

  “No, but I got some other news for you, Hook. Info you’re not going to like.”

  Lockwood groaned. “Shoot.” Brannigan did, unloading a lot of straight dope on him.

  When Lockwood arrived at Amanda’s, she opened the door, wearing only a pink negligee. She quickly pulled him inside.

  “How do you like it?”

  He liked it. It was a see-through number.

  She was glad to see him. Very glad.

  I’m going to get worn out, thought Lockwood, as he sank into the vast Hollywood bed with Amanda. I guess my questions can wait till I get her softened up for them.

  Lockwood wasn’t satisfied with Amanda’s saying she knew Rodney Kepper in only a Platonic way.