Violence Is My Business Page 2

  Lonegran spat, “Don’t go telling me how to conduct an investigation in my own territory, Captain Masters.”

  “Well, hell. You’ve been trying to tell Drum how to conduct one—in his business.”

  “Yeah? Drum’s business is going to be the State Board’s business. I’m bringing his license up for review.”

  Captain Masters nodded. “Yeah, you can do that, Rog.”

  “But you don’t think I ought to?” Lonegran sneered.

  “I wouldn’t. Not on what you’ve got. You don’t have a thing.”

  “Listen, a man’s been killed.”

  “Drum told you. He hasn’t been killed. He killed himself. If you had a crime on your hands, and if a grand jury met on it and called it a crime, then you could have Drum’s records subpoenaed.”

  Lonegran looked at his deputies for support. They didn’t live where he lived. They didn’t belong to his personal world of violence. They were citizens of the county on part-time voluntary duty. They wouldn’t meet his eyes. Doggedly he persisted:

  “The way I see it, Drum or his man found something on the doc. I don’t know what. They figured it was worth more to them telling the doc than giving a report to their client. I call that blackmail. They must have tried it and it must have backfired. You saw what the doc did.”

  Captain Masters’ eyes showed a flicker of interest. He looked at me coldly. I gave it back to him that way and he turned to Lonegran. “You have some proof of this?”

  “Hell no, but the doc killed himself and they were snooping on him and they’re peepers, ain’t they?”

  “Ah, for crying out loud, Rog,” Captain Masters said in exasperation.

  That did something to Lonegran’s eyes. It made the good one close like the bad one, the one with the squint. It dug the failure-lines around his mouth in deeper. He finally said, “All right, get out of here. All of you. You too, Matt. Just clear out of here.”

  I left with Jerry and Captain Masters. Outside it was colder than before, but the stars had come out. An ambulance from the state hospital was just taking Duncan Lord’s body away. Only a few of the more morbid college kids were still hanging around. From the other side of the campus you could hear music. The big dance in the college gymnasium had been called off, of course, but that didn’t stop some of the local combos from playing at the fraternity lodges.

  Captain Masters walked us to our car. “Lonegran will follow through on his hunch, you know,” he said.

  “I kind of thought he would. And I want to thank you, Captain. He could have given us a rough time in there.”

  “Well,” Masters said slowly, as if it was something he had to say, “maybe you won’t believe this, but Lonegran’s all right. When he gets riled he’s unpredictable, but otherwise he’s all right. A good peace officer.”

  “Then he gets riled too easy.”

  We got into the car for the second time. “Drop you somewhere, Captain?”

  “No thanks. I have my own car. But I wouldn’t hang around town if I were you, not tonight anyhow. Give him a chance to cool off.”

  I looked at Jerry. “Suits me, I guess,” he said.

  “And one more thing, men,” Masters said. “I’ve known Sheriff Lonegran a long time. I got him mad at me by going out on a limb for you.”

  “It wasn’t a limb, Captain,” I said.

  “Well, good. Let’s make damn sure it wasn’t, Drum. Because if it was we’ll find out, and if we find out I’m going to take that license of yours and tear it into pieces and make you eat them.”

  He walked off into the darkness. We drove away without speaking. On the long drive back to Washington, Jerry was moodily silent.

  CHAPTER THREE

  PHEW, what a business!” Jerry said as he came into the office the next morning. He had a purple welt on the side of his jaw and was carrying the portable tape recorder which was part of our office equipment. “A guy has to be crazy.”

  “So we’re crazy. That the Lord report?”

  Jerry nodded, putting the tape recorder down on the desk, opening it and plugging it in. He did it very efficiently, setting up the tape reels and getting the recorder ready for play-back. Jerry did everything efficiently: he had a natural economy of motion and effort, handling himself nice an athlete. I was proud of the way he had handled himself yesterday, and had told him so on the way back to Washington. He hadn’t answered me. I had respected his mood, and dropped the subject. I thought he’d fallen hard for Laurie Lord.

  Jerry Trowbridge was the second try I’d made at a two-man agency. The first, a couple of years ago, had ended tragically in the death of my partner and best friend.* But some of my cases took me out of Washington and even out of the country, and that meant shutting the office and throwing business to the competition which prowled along F Street like ambulance chasers, so when Jerry had come to me asking to learn the ropes, I took him on on a salary-and-percentage basis. The Lord affair was his third case in two months. He’d come through the first two with an expertness that astonished me.

  Jerry was in his early twenties, ten years younger than I am. His father had been my senior partner during my two-year hitch in the F.B.I., and had been shot to death in a kidnaping case we’d worked out of the Miami office of the Bureau. I’d lost track of the family for a while, but Jerry had come out of the Army where he’d been assigned to the C.I.D., had propositioned me about a job and had come to work for me.

  “What I can’t figure,” Jerry said, “is why a guy like Duncan Lord, a guy with a responsible position and even moderately famous, a guy with a swell family and who had a top-flight government job, why a guy like that still has to play around.”

  “Oh, then he was?”

  “Sure he was. Married twenty-five years and he probably never looked at another woman. Mrs. Lord is still a handsome female; too. Then all of a sudden, the last few months …”

  “Playing the field?”

  “Not that I could find. It was one girl, Chet. A classy and expensive call-girl named Bobby Hayst. Anyhow, here’s the way it went” He switched on the tape recorder.

  TO A private detective, it was the most familiar of all sordid stories. Only the cast of characters and a jump into the cold autumn night that ended it made it deviate from the norm. Middle-aging man, pillar of the community type. And a girl young enough to be his daughter, a girl who could put the spring back in his legs and the gleam back in his eyes and the maleness back in his loins to make him think the good years were still ahead of him. The odd part of it was, the good years had still been ahead of Duncan Hadley Lord. He was up for a full professorship and would get it even while taking a leave of absence to work for the government. The night he died had been his last night on William of Orange campus. His latest book, on which his government job was based, was a strong candidate for the Pulitzer Prize. He had called it The Revolution the Russians Really Fear, and it outlined the movements toward economic equality on behalf of the common man under the democratic process throughout the western world.

  But the book hadn’t been important enough to Duncan Hadley Lord. Achievement never is, if somehow you have not learned the difficult art of growing old and accepting it. This Duncan Lord had not learned. His own personal revolution had overshadowed the revolution he had written about, and he had started seeing Bobby Hayst three months ago. His wife had suspected something. She had called me, and because I don’t handle potential divorce cases I had turned the job down. The next day I got a call from Professor McQuade, who had taught me the law I’d had to learn down at William of Orange ten years ago in order to qualify for the F.B.I. An old friend of Mrs. Lord’s family and of Dr. Lord himself, Professor McQuade had urged me to take on the job as a personal favor to him. I still wasn’t happy about it, but then I remembered, the way Professor Lord had patiently drummed torts and criminal law into my skull. Besides, it had seemed the kind of routine, comparatively safe case Jerry could be weaned on, learning investigative technique as he went along, so in the end
I’d taken it on and assigned it to Jerry.

  JERRY camped unseen on Lords doorstep for three weeks. Lord and Bobby Hayst got together once a week, Monday nights. It had been Monday nights because Mrs. Lord was helping in the rehearsal of a college play at William of Orange on Monday nights and usually didn’t get home until after one in the morning.

  Lord would meet Bobby in Richmond and drive with her to a small farm he owned between Richmond and the college. He wasn’t working the farm, but it was a retreat where he could get away and do some writing. A farmer named Fuller was working the land for a percentage of the yield, but he had his own place and didn’t live in the Lord farmhouse.

  His wife was given the excuse that Lord would work late Monday nights too, supposedly driving up to Washington to meet the people he’d be working with on the pending U.S. Information Agency job. Sometimes he stayed overnight. This was because sometimes he’d drive Bobby Hayst back to Washington, and it was a pretty long run. But they never slept together in Bobby Hayst’s apartment. Jerry didn’t even know where the apartment was. Duncan Lord would drop her off on 16th Street, occasionally having breakfast with her in an all-night place. They did their love-making only at the farm, as if it was part of some obscure cabal they alone understood.

  Then yesterday, which had been a Friday, Duncan Hadley Lord killed himself.

  Jerry removed the reel of tape and lit a cigarette. “Stinking shame, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t tell us why Lord jumped.”

  Jerry frowned. “No, it doesn’t. That’s true.”

  “You have an address for Bobby Hayst, or a phone number?”

  “No, I wasn’t able to get one.”

  “What about Fuller?”

  “What what about him, Chet?”

  “Nothing, I guess. But something made Lord kill himself. He didn’t just decide he’d been living in sin long enough. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I see what you mean,” Jerry said. For some reason he looked uneasy. I thought his relationship with Laurie Lord would explain that “You mean you want to tag that onto the end of the report?”

  “Yes and no. I don’t even know if there’ll be a report. Have you called Laurie yet?”

  “No. Jesus, Chet. I just don’t know what to say to her.” Jerry did a double-take. “No report?”

  “You figure it out,” I explained. “The guy’s dead. He can’t hurt them now. Maybe they won’t even want to see the report. I’ll put it to them, and we’ll see. Did you do any kind of a make on Fuller?”

  “No.”

  “He was at the farm plenty. He could have seen them. He might have asked for money. Hell, he might even have taken pictures. And maybe we’re going to need that information, Jerry.”

  “Why?”

  “Sheriff Lonegran and the State Board, remember?”

  “I thought Lonegran was just foaming at the mouth.”

  “Maybe. But we’ve got to protect ourselves if we can. There are two angles we’ll have to follow up—Bobby Hayst and this man Fuller. Because if Lonegran gives us trouble with the State Board it would be nice to be able to tell them why Lord killed himself. If Lonegran raises a stink, it would be our word against his, not enough to get the license suspended, maybe, but we could do without that on the records if ever there’s some real trouble. See what I mean?”

  He frowned and he saw. “So what do we do?”

  “Fuller and the Hayst dame. I’ll want to see Bobby Hayst Monday night. I have a little, idea on that one. It isn’t pretty, but neither is what happened to Lord.”

  Jerry gave me a look. “Monday night, huh?” He made a face. “Ouch!”

  “But let’s drive down and pay a visit to Mr. Fuller today. Did you ever buy real estate?”

  “Real estate? No.”

  “As of now, we’re in the market. But first I have a phone call to make.”

  The call was to Ike Wilson, who writes the gossip column for the Washington Star-Courier. I’d once done some leg work for him and undercharged him enough so he’d owe me a couple of favors.

  “A phone number, Ike,” I said.

  “Anything but my namesake’s private line.”

  “Call-girl name of Bobby Hayst?”

  “Stepping out this weekend?” His voice ogled me. “She’s expensive.”

  “Worth it?”

  “So they tell me. The wife doesn’t let me sample the merchandise I write about.” He gave me the number, I thanked him and he said we’d nave to have a drink together sometime soon. Bobby Hayst lived in a first-class apartment hotel near Georgetown.

  “Chet, I’ve been thinking,” Jerry said as I hung up. “I really ought to go down and see Laurie. If you could handle that Fuller thing yourself—”

  “Sure, kid. We could drive down in. the same car, though. Fuller’s place is on the way, isn’t it? I could take the train back from College Station.”

  “You leaving right away?”

  I said I was.

  “Then you better go without me. There are a few things I have to do, but thanks anyway. I’ll drive down in my own heap.”

  THREE and a half hours of hard driving got me to Lord’s farm on the Tidewater Peninsula. It was a bright, and crisply cool autumn afternoon and the smell of drying hay was heavy on the air. It would be the last hay of the season.

  The farmhouse itself stood between Route 60 and a dry stream bed a few hundred feet off the road. It was a white clapboard building slowly succumbing to the damp tidewater weather. The front porch had caved in and loose roof shingles were like scabs on the weed-grown lawn. A big bird flew up and out of the roof as I poked around the porch.

  After a while I tromped through weeds toward the hay field. The dry weeds rustled underfoot. I could see a man who had been turning the drying hay in the hayfield with a pitchfork. There seemed to be about five acres of it. The man wasn’t turning hay now because he had stopped to lean on the handle of his pitchfork and watch me.

  I went over there. He was a big, rangy fellow in faded and patched overalls. The overall suspenders covered bare, leathery skin. He was old enough for his Sectoral muscles to have gone flabby, but his bare arms looked powerful and his shoulders were immense.

  “Hello there,” I said. “You Mr. Lord?”

  His small eyes took in my city duds and he moved a chaw of tobacco around to his left cheek and spat a thick brown stream. “Nope. He owns the place. I share a crop.”

  “Mrs. Lord sent me down for a look,” I said. “I might be interested in the place.”

  “To farm hit?”

  “Why, sure.”

  He looked me over suspiciously and spat again. He had a wall of reserve which no one dressed the way I was could breach easily.

  I looked at the pitchfork fondly. “How’s about a whack at it?” I said. “It’s been years.”

  He almost swallowed his tobacco, then his face got suspicious again. “What fer?”

  “Oh, just for old times, I guess. Well?”

  “Raised on a farm, was you?”

  I didn’t answer that one. As a young teenager during the tail end of the depresson I had done some farm work, the kind they would entrust to a kid out of the slums of Baltimore, which was mostly pitching hay.

  Wordless, he let the handle of the pitchfork fall in my direction. I caught it, leaned it against my leg, took off my jacket and dropped it on the ground. Then I bent my back and went to work. I didn’t stop until sweat poured from my face and drenched my shirt I had turned several hundred square feet of hay.

  He reached into his hip pocket. “Want a chaw?” We were friends.

  I declined the tobacco and, still breathing hard, lit a cigarette. “Think I could grow tobacco here?” I asked.

  “Yep. Right good tobacco land. If you had the time to watch hit.”

  “How about the house?”

  “Well, you’d need to put some money in. Got her inside plumbing though. Roof’s shot. So’s the porch. Man don’t need a porch, though, if he
’s got the TV.”

  “Didn’t Mr. Lord use the house at all?” I asked casually.

  His smile was as fleeting as a debt collector’s. “Oh, I reckon he used it once in a while.”

  “Recently?”

  “Why? What difference it make?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “You say Mrs. Lord sent you? His old lady?”

  I knew then that had been a mistake. He wouldn’t talk freely to anyone Mrs. Lord had sent, and he seemed to know something.

  “Not that I know her,” I tried.

  “Well, she sent somebody else too. Down to look and see about repairing the roof, he said. Roof, my eye! He was a dee-tective.”

  “I’ll be darned,” I said.

  He stopped chewing. He said, “Mr. Lord’s dead. Kilt hisself.”

  I just stood there looking at him.

  “Using the house. I’ll say he was using it. Fer a shack job.”

  I bent over for my jacket. As I picked it up my billfold fell out. He stooped very quickly and got it, letting it fall open as he did so. He slapped it closed against his palm and thrust it at me.

  “So that makes two of you,” he said, his voice hurt. “I talk too damn much.” He lifted the pitchfork. The sun gleamed on the clean, oiled tines. “Get off of this farm, mister, before I throw you off.”

  He was still watching me, still holding the pitchfork up and ready, when I got into the car and drove away.

  ON SUNDAY afternoon I called Robby Hayst from my apartment.

  “Hello?”

  “Miss Hayst? This is Chester Drum. A friend gave me your number.”

  She had a cool, contralto, no-nonsense voice. “What friend would that be, Mr. Drum?”

  “Ike Wilson.”

  “Ike’s nice. A little stuffy, but he tries so hard not to show it. I like him.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “You said your name was Chester Drum. That sounds like a real name.”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Thank you, Chester Drum.”

  “I was hoping I could see you.”

  “When? I have a date next weekend.”

  “No. I meant sooner than that.”