A Gunman Close Behind Read online

  I was concentrating on keeping an even distance between the coupe and Shelmerdine’s hoods and, so far, I was doing fine. I was watching the highway, but I could see the girl’s features reflected in the windshield. A hardness had taken possession of them now, the kind of hardness you see in a woman’s face after all the tears have been cried away.

  “No, not his wife, his sister. My sister-in-law survived the shooting, but she’s worse off than Arthur. She walks on crutches now because she doesn’t have a left leg any more, but they injured her mind worse than her body. She saw Arthur shot down before her eyes, and the baby was killed in her arms. She’s twenty-four-years old.”

  Nothing about crookdom surprises or disgusts me anymore; I know it from the soles of its stinking feet to the roots of its lousy hair. There was a time when a thing like the shooting at the Kilvert home would have made me spit—or maybe vomit. But I know the ways of the big-time thieves too well now. A man, his wife, his baby are as nothing to them in their climb towards dirty riches. Nothing at all, not even the ashes and dust the Book says they are.

  There was no more time or opportunity for philosophy. Joanne Kilvert was turned about in her seat again, she suddenly clutched my arm in alarmed urgency.

  “They’re going to shoot!” she cried. “Get down!”

  The little world of the car was an enclosed box, thrumming to the pulse of the engine, rocking to the whirr of the wheels. Outside, the growl of the pursuing sedan was sounding loud. I saw the car in the mirror, pulling out into the centre of the highway, positioning itself with one of the overcoats and fedoras leaning from a window with something in his hand.

  Joanne Kilvert crouched down to the floor, close to the grip that seemed so important to her. I pressed the accelerator down to the floor boards, and the outside world was a liquid blur of racing shadows.

  The mobster with the gun seemed to wait a hell of a time before opening up. But he did eventually.

  Three shots bellowed out, and I put the coupe into a zigzag. One slug spanged into the bodywork of the car somewhere at the back, one ripped the fabric of the hood, and the third must have been a complete miss. Maybe the Shelmerdine hoods were just trying to scare us into stopping, maybe they were trying to hit our tyres.

  I was cursing loudly because my Browning was packed up with my T-shirts in the trunk.

  “These mugs must want you awful bad,” I told Joanne Kilvert.

  Then I doused all the lights and drove blind. I wondered, with a detached and cynical part of my mind, why a police highway patrol was never around when you needed one. Right now, a couple of motorcycle cops would be useful, even if I was overreaching the speed limit and driving without lights.

  Another couple of shots sounded from behind, and the slugs went zipping past the coupe.

  Then I saw the twist in the road, only just in time. Travelling at the rate the coupe was hitting and without lights, that bend came at me out of the blackness. I whirled the wheel to the right quickly, heard the huddled girl squeal as the car lurched and saw a big billboard go flashing past the window on her side of the coupe. We must have been within inches of hitting that wooden billboard.

  I didn’t wait to give my heart a chance to settle down after turning the bend, but kept my foot hard on the gas and burned up the highway.

  Maybe the girl and I had been extra good during the immediate past; we must have done something, one or the other of us, to deserve the break we were given at that moment.

  In the blackness at our backs, something ear-splitting happened. An edgy keening of brakes merged into a splintering crash. Then a silence more frightening than the noise.

  Joanne Kilvert and I turned about to look out of the rear window.

  “They crashed,” she whispered. “They hit the bill-board on the turning.”

  A vivid little cameo was dwindling away into the darkness behind us. The sedan piled up against the billboard, a flicker of flames starting into life at its hood. Figures were scuttling out of the wrecked car. The headlamps were still on, and their light, combined with the erratic glow of the flames, showed the mocking face of the ten-times-larger-than-life wench who grinned from the billboard to advertise somebody’s toothpaste.

  Like a little world of people drifting away into the depths of space, Athelstan Shelmerdine’s torpedo-men and their burning car floated off into the night as I kept my foot down and zoomed up the highway like a high school kid determined to kill himself or somebody else with his first hot-rod.

  We didn’t speak for a good five minutes. Then I put the headlights on again, and Joanne Kilvert said: “That’s Plymouth ahead.”

  She was pointing to a string of lights on the horizon. The observation came in a matter-of-fact and deadpan way on the heels of what had just happened. She spoke like a guide pointing out the scenery rather than in the way of a woman who had lately been shot at.

  I told myself that this slight, rain-bedraggled kid had guts. At that time I didn’t know the half of it.

  “That long story you mentioned, let me hear it,” I said. “Those mugs are out of commission. You can tell me as we carry on to South Bend.”

  She sat up in her seat, settled herself in with admirable coolness, considering what had just occurred, and began to preen rebel strands of hair with her fingers.

  “I’m sorry I got you into this,” she began, and I marvelled in silence at the composure that now settled on her. No more trembling, in spite of her sodden clothes, no wide eyes and quivering mouth. She had self-control and guts all right, now that the immediate danger of the black coats and fedoras was over.

  “Trouble is what I like, Miss Kilvert,” I said. “Unfortunately, this is one time trouble caught me on the hop. I’m returning from a vacation, and my heater is with my sport clothes in the trunk. I didn’t figure I’d need it passing through Indiana.”

  She smiled, vanquishing those hard lines that had shown on her face. I was glad they could be washed off with a single application of a smile. Hard lines on the face are for guys who live within smelling distance of the grubbier side of our civilisation—guys like me—for pretty girls still young enough to have voted in only one Presidential Election.

  “Perhaps it was fate, meeting up with you,” Joanne Kilvert went on. “I mean, I might have been given a ride by anybody who wouldn’t have a notion what to do when those men showed up.” She was talking like a comic-strip heroine who was used to being chased and fired on as a matter of course.

  I wasn’t kidded. I remembered a scared little girl, anybody’s kid-sister from anywhere at all, standing under a tree.

  “They had you scared, girlie,” I remarked. “I give you credit for having guts; many a woman would still be in hysterics after that experience, and many another would keep ’em up clear to South Bend. Give with the story.”

  “I’ve had to have guts, the way I’ve been living for the past three months, Mr. Lantry.” The hint of those hard lines crept into her soft features again.

  The lights of Plymouth grew bigger before us.

  She gave with the story.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Joanne Kilvert had guts. The story she told me as we drove through Plymouth and on out towards South Bend proved that.

  She got those transient lines of bitterness on her face the same way I got mine—living within smelling distance of the underworld. By the time South Bend showed up as a myriad scattering of lights on the far horizon, I had a great respect for the slight, dark-haired girl.

  “My brother knew only too well who was behind the trade-union pushing in the Chicago region,” she said. “It was the Shelmerdine organisation. Almost everybody knows that: the union men who are forced into giving a cut of their funds for protection, the politicians, the newspapers, and the police. They all know, but they won’t act. Athelstan Shelmerdine isn’t just a man—he’s a—a beast. You know how newspaper cartoonists draw something evil as an octopus with legs gripping a lot of people at the same time?”

  I nodded.
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  “Well, that’s what Athelstan Shelmerdine is. He’s a monster. He has his tentacles stretching out all over the Middle West. He owns places and people at all levels; he can intimidate people into being his property, or he can buy them. When anyone offers resistance, or even looks dangerous, he can have them put out of the way.…”

  She paused. I suppose she was thinking of her brother, his wife, and their baby. I took one hand off the wheel, fumbled in my pocket, and found my packet of cigarettes and my lighter, then gave her a cigarette and took one myself.

  She puffed the cigarette into life gratefully.

  “My brother was sick and tired of the undercover deals in his union. He was a fighter, Mr. Lantry. They gave him a medal for killing North Koreans when he was only a youngster. He thought he had a right to live in a clean and decent United States, and he went out to fight corruption almost on his own, but he wasn’t looking for another medal. All he wanted was a decent life for his family and himself. One or two of his supporters lost heart after a crowd of hoodlums beat them up. Arthur was beaten up too, but that only made him more determined. He began mentioning names. He produced a pamphlet on gangster interference in trade unionism, and laid charges against big people who were corrupt to the core. You know what happened to him.”

  “Sure, I know. The little man against the big combine. A lot of men tried what your brother tried, girlie. They had guts, but that’s not enough when you’re up against rotten and bribed officials. You need official support, and you need to know that the official who’s giving you the support is not buying his highballs and showing his girl a good time with money your enemies put in his pocket.”

  “I was trained as a secretary,” went on Joanne Kilvert. “I suppose I must have some of the same spirit Arthur had—I like to think I have. After my brother and his child were killed that day, by thugs who made a clear getaway, I was determined to do what I could about it. I knew Shelmerdine was behind the whole business and I knew, if I could only get something on him to place before the Crime Commission in Chicago, I might help to break him. He has a lot of front organisations: legitimate business concerns which cover his other activities. I managed to obtain a job with one of them, but I used a false name. Then, about three months back, Shelmerdine’s personal secretary left him and I was recommended for the job. Maybe you can call it providential. I quit the real estate agency which Shelmerdine owns as one of his above-board concerns and went to work out at his mansion. It’s a big place just outside a town called Rollinsville—might as well call it Shelmerdinesville, because he seems to own the whole place.”

  I grunted. I knew something of Shelmerdine by hearsay, he seemed to own sections of land and everyone in them like a cattle-baron of the Old West. It wasn’t hard to think of him as an old-time patrone, making everyone act when he hollered and running them off their holdings when they dared to raise a holler for themselves.

  “This mansion of his,” continued Joanne Kilvert, “is a fine old place in its own grounds. Shelmerdine lives like a king, but I always thought of him as a beast in a cave. It’s a beautifully furnished cave where everything is veneered over. Shelmerdine has a wife, a quiet and pretty little woman who never asks any questions, and a small son of about six years. He’s a family man. A big businessman who loves to spend all the time he can with his wife and child. I used to watch him play with the child on the lawn, and I’d think of my brother and his child, buried in the ground, and my crippled sister-in-law.”

  She took a long pull on the cigarette and I watched the lights of distant South Bend growing bigger.

  A city, seen from a distance at night, is a fairyland of lights. It’s hard to think that, among the lights, people are living out their lives; people are being born and other people are dying. It’s hard to imagine that the far cluster of lights are a spangled cloak for the squalid things of the city; dirt, disease, strife, and crime.

  Joanne Kilvert went on: “Everything at Shelmerdine’s place was on the up-and-up. He rarely left home, and conducted his businesses from there. Every letter I took down and typed was a legitimate business one, touching the affairs of Shelmerdine Enterprises Incorporated. No one ever used gangster talk, no one ever produced a gun. There was no poker playing in smoky rooms, no whisky bottles strewn about the place. There were no gangsters’ molls, and nobody ever tried to paw me. I had my own suite of rooms and I was treated with respect and paid well. There were no mobster types about the place, but there was no disguising what the two chauffeurs, the gardener and his helper, and even the butler, with what he thought was an English accent, really were. There were also a couple of uniformed men who prowled about the grounds to keep out intruders. There was a very studied and very obvious gloss of respectability about the place, Mr. Lantry, but I wasn’t fooled.”

  She paused to stub out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray on the dashboard.

  “I know the kind of set-up,” I told her. “I’ve been in some joints that were built with dirty money myself. I bet you could smell the rotgut booze Shelmerdine peddled in the twenties. Maybe, if you were extra-sensitive, you caught the echo of a machine-gun coming from a Chicago back-alley thirty years in the past every time you glanced at Shelmerdine’s art treasures.”

  “No,” she answered. “I wasn’t interested in how Athelstan Shelmerdine made his money. I was only concerned with what he had done to people near to me.”

  “And hundreds of other people, all of them near to somebody,” I said.

  “He began to trust me with a great deal of work out of the usual run of a secretary’s job. Pretty soon, I had the run of his office and the keys to his safe. I only saw the business side of Shelmerdine’s life, of course, and he was always the perfect gentleman. Once in a while, men he called ‘business associates’ would call and he’d have private conversations with them. They always looked like businessmen on the surface, but I could sense what they were under the business suits.”

  I smiled to myself. I would have used the word “smell.”

  “I got my chance when Shelmerdine was off on one of his business trips,” she continued. “I was alone in the office and I searched the safe. There was a compartment which I never had occasion to open, but I found the key to it on the key-ring and found it chock-full of papers. They concerned Shelmerdine’s other business deals—his real business. They touched on everything: dope, drugs, vice, trade union protection; there were names and dates that would pull down Shelmerdine and a lot of other people if I could only give those papers to the Crime Commission. I had the means of wrecking Shelmerdine and his whole organisation in my hands. I locked the papers up again. I had to think it out and plan my moves.

  “I knew Shelmerdine would soon be back, but he was to go on a longer trip later today, that is—if I waited, I would stand a better chance of getting clear. I packed my grip a full week before—perhaps I betrayed myself in some way, I don’t know. Anyway, Ike Tescachelli, the senior chauffeur, began to watch me in a way I didn’t like. I thought perhaps he had found out about my true identity and was suspicious; then again, he might simply have been looking out for a chance to get fresh when the big boss was away.”

  I remembered the Italian-looking hood who spoke to me at the mouth of the dirt road.

  “Ike Tescachelli, is he the one with the small moustache?” I asked.

  “Yes. He usually stays close to Shelmerdine and drives him around, but Greg Cortines, the second chauffeur, went with him on this trip. Tescachelli had his eye on me for two or three days and I was worried. As soon as Shelmerdine set off on his trip, I opened the safe and took the papers. I stuffed them into my grip and I was ready to run for it. I had already checked the bus timetable and knew I could get a bus into South Bend once I was on the main highway, and I could take a train or bus to Chicago from South Bend.

  “I had a story ready in case anyone questioned me, and I slipped out of a side door. I was about to leave the grounds of the house by a small gate leading into a back road when one o
f the gardeners appeared and asked me where I was going. I told him I was taking a walk into Rollinsville to have the clasp of my grip repaired and he seemed to believe me. I was clear of the house when I realised the awful mistake I had made. In my haste, I left the key in the lock of the safe after locking it. It might go unnoticed until Shelmerdine returned, but it was sure to give away the fact that I had tampered with the safe—and I’d been seen leaving with a grip.”

  She paused for a moment to catch her breath, as though at the recollection of that chilling moment when she realised how she had betrayed herself.

  The coupe passed a South Bend city limits sign; the glare of the city was closer now and it brought a certain warmth. It was like coming to a place of friendly men after being in the dark outlands for too long.

  “I panicked, Mr. Lantry,” went on the girl. “I ran for it, trying to get to the highway as quickly as I could. I didn’t know my way around very well and I took a couple of wrong turnings. By the time I did reach the highway, I was just in time to see the bus I wanted sailing away into the distance. I was terribly scared. I just kept walking. Then an old farmer in an old-fashioned truck picked me up and gave me a lift to the other side of Peru and I kept on walking after that, even when the rain started.”

  “Then I picked you up, huh,” I grunted, “and you still have those documents in the grip? No, that’s a silly question. It’s obvious that you have; you’ve been clinging to your baggage as though it’ll leave you a fortune when it dies.”

  I watched South Bend growing bigger before us and I was worried.

  I couldn’t leave this little chick to run about the countryside with Athelstan Shelmerdine’s strong-arms on her tail.

  “You intend to hand the papers to the Crime Commission in Chicago?” I asked. She nodded and I fell to musing out loud. “And Shelmerdine pulls almost every string that’s pullable in Chicago; if his outfit knows you’re in the Windy City, they’ll serve up the table d’hôtel pretty damn quick—with you as the dish. Where will you go, once you’ve succeeded in putting the papers in the hands of the crime-chasers, I mean?”