The following is a continuation of the April 20, 1949 entry in the Rocky Stone notebooks:
Waiting is a constant thing. It continues on, even after you get what you want, because it always splits off into some other wait, and then another, and then another. Here I waited for Marjorie Gomer and now that I had found her I waited for the man who tried to kill her to arrive. My eyes checked all doorways, and whenever she came near a window I steered her away from it. She didn't know she was still in danger but she was, just as much as she had been in the cemetery. Her assassin knew enough to find her in Chambers and if he knew that much, eventually he'd find out where she was.
We cleaned out her wound and bandaged it up, and in all that time she made no noise, save for a slight gasp when the alcohol touched her damaged skin. Her lips pursed, she stared at me as I sat in a spare chair in the middle of the floor and watched the front door for the man who would eventually pay us a visit. She had changed into a cool sundress and she floated across the floor as she paced. Finally, our eyes met, and when she saw the look on my face, she sighed. “You have to know, don't you?”
“Only if we want to leave this house,” I replied. “If it isn't Max Blank who's after you, who is it?”
Marjorie swallowed some air and thought about how she could begin. The words wouldn't come to her, so she decided to start somewhere else. I watched her disappear behind the door to the kitchen and a few seconds later she emerged, clutching both sides of a thin, rumpled newspaper. She placed it in front of me and sat across, to watch my reaction, to see if I understood.
The headline read “FORMER TOP COP RELEASED”, and below it, a blurry photograph of a tall, husky man leaving a courthouse with two officers at his side. The caption below the picture told all: “After serving six years in the federal penitentiary, former police chief Mike Godatz leaves the Cherota County Courthouse a free man.”
Godatz, the man who arrested her all those years ago.
“Him?” I said. “He's the one that's after you?”
Marjorie nodded sorrowfully. “Mitch and I...we were very young. I had an argument with him and I left. I was tired and I just left. I ended up in a bar someplace out near the city with a group of friends and I met this man. He seemed nice enough and I wanted to score off Mitch and, well...” The waterworks began and she brushed at her eyes. “The man—Mike Godatz—he asked me for a favor. Several. So I tell him to go peddle his papers and next thing I know I'm in a cell...”
She fell apart. She didn't have to continue because I knew the way some of these small-timers operate. Arrest a pretty girl and keep her inside until she'll do anything to get out and I mean anything. So that's the way it was. I slammed my fist on the table and wished it was Godatz's rotten face.
“I couldn't go back to Mitch,” she sobbed. “I couldn't face him. So I disappeared, went to Los Diablos, got as far away as I could.”
“That doesn't explain why he wants you dead.”
“Mitch found out what happened, so he went looking for evidence, anything that would get Godatz in jail. He found twenty-two gals, all with the same story as mine. They convicted him eight years ago. I never thought he'd get out.”
“Did you testify?”
She just shook her head. “I couldn't come back.”
I took my eye off the door for just a second. A tap-tap-tap from the door-knocker and I was out of my chair, reaching for my gun. I didn't think he would be brazen enough to knock. I slid across the floor and got myself into position, and peeled the curtain of the front window back so I could see.
But it wasn't Godatz, it was Gloria Hallward.
She parked my car right in front of the house, and if that didn't give Godatz a clue as to Marjorie's whereabouts, nothing would. Just about as clumsy as you can get, I thought. The sooner she got inside the better, but there was another complication and I didn't know what to do about it. Standing behind her was my old pal Nine Knuckles, and he was poking a gun into her ribs.
Find out what happens next at this very same inter-net location in The Lost Love, Part 15!
0 comments:
Post a Comment