“Don’t come back!” she screamed. “You do and I’ll kill you! Tell Mal when you see him that I’m going to talk my head off! Tell him that! And tell him I won’t take less than double what I asked for before! He can come crawling to me on his hands and knees, he can come begging, and I won’t listen! You dirty—”
Leaving the house by the kitchen door, he started toward his parked car. The two men from the green sedan were standing there in the sunlight, waiting for him.
4
THE FAT one mopped his face and coughed apologetically. The nervous one flipped away a cigarette into the grass, where it lifted a thin plume of blue smoke. The squirrels scolded noisily, the brook babbled, the lake made little lapping sounds on the pebbly shore. A peaceful world. Barney walked toward the two men.
“Forbes?” said the fat man.
“You ought to know by now,” Barney said. The fat man wore a yellow nylon sport shirt with an open collar over a gray gabardine suit. His suede shoes had thick rope soles. He had a shiny saddle nose and small, knowledgeable eyes and a purse of a mouth. “Why the tail job?” Barney asked.
“We do what we’re told. Now we’re calling time on you,” said the young, thin one.
“So?”
“We’ll take you to the railroad station,” said the fat man. “Henry, you take it easy. This man is reasonable. He knew we were tailing, but he didn’t mind. It shows a willingness to cooperate. It shows were not goin’ to have any trouble with him at all.”
“That’s what you think,” Barney said. Both men were armed. Their guns were poorly concealed under their sport coats. They were two-bit hoodlums, picked up in some Broadway backwash, and they were floundering in this mountain environment like fish out of water. “Who hired you?”
“Let’s say we both work for the same party.”
“Hunter?”
“Let’s say you’ve been fired.” The fat man smiled again, apologetically. He wiped his face with his limp handkerchief. “Let’s say our mutual employer doesn’t care to have you snooping for his brother, hey? So you take the 12:12 back to the big city, and I wish I was goin’ with you, Forbes.”
“Let’s say I don’t go,” Barney said.
The young, nervous one snapped: “You want trouble?”
“That’s what I was sent to find.”
“Then you’ve got it. Right here and now.”
“Easy, Henry,” warned the fat man.
“Stop bubbling. I told you from the start, he don’t look right. He was a cop. Wasn’t you, Forbes? A big, tough cop. Now he’s with the law books and the legal lumps. But a cop stays a cop all his life. Like a disease, it is.” Abruptly the nervous one said: “Ah, come on. Let’s go.”
He reached into a pocket for his gun. Barney hit him with a short left, saw him double forward, and chopped at the gun that bloomed in the fat man’s hand. The fat man was surprisingly quick. He slid aside, away from the parked car, and danced back across the grass on tiny, agile feet. The gun he held was a P-38. The warm sunlight was blotted up by its vicious black shape.
“Hold it now. Just hold it. Don’t flip,” said the fat man.
Barney looked at the younger one sitting on the grass, holding his stomach and retching. The man’s face was white and strained. His eyes were black pieces of glass shining up at Barney. He looked at his companion and saw that the fat man had his gun on Barney and he grinned crookedly and struggled to his feet.
“This will be for kicks.”
“Stay back, Henry,” said the fat man.
“Like hell. I owe the snooper a fast dance.”
Henry came in lightly, something metallic shining in his hand. He swung, and Barney ducked, hit him again, threw him toward the fat man. The fat man’s gun went off with an explosive crash. Barney dived over the stumbling Henry and hit the fat man with his shoulder, bowling him over. The gun blasted again at the sky. The fat man squawked in high terror. A few leaves came drifting down from the arched trees overhead. Barney wrenched the P-38 free, rolled away, bounced to his feet. The younger man sat on the grass, sobbing in rage. The fat man sighed, wiped his face with the handkerchief.
“That didn’t go at all well,” he whispered.
“You’re a couple of amateurs,” Barney said. “You’d do better without Henry, here. He’s too eager.”
“I have to teach him,” said the fat man.
Barney went over to Henry and plucked his gun away. Then he walked down to the lake front and threw both weapons as far as he could into the calm, sparkling water. They made twin splashes, far out beyond Alex Kane’s boat landing. He looked up at the screened porch and saw Ferne standing there, leaning eagerly forward. When she saw that he was in one piece, she looked disappointed. He laughed silently and returned to the two hoodlums.
“Who hired you?” he asked again.
They were silent.
He considered them for a moment, wondering if it was worth the effort to make them talk. He had much to do. They were not important, he decided. They stood side by side, looking their mute enmity at him. The next time they met, Barney knew, they would be more dangerous. But maybe there would be no other meeting. Turning, he left them as they were and got into his car and drove away.
There was a public phone booth beside the road back to the Omega Hotel. Barney parked in front of a cedar rail and found enough change to call New York. He gave the number of Peterman, Klassen, Smith, Woolley and Smith, lit a cigarette, and waited. He heard the telephone ringing distantly, and in his mind he saw the sombre, oak-paneled office with its hunting prints, its tiers of law books, the enormous desk, and the elf seated behind the desk. Jeremy Peterman, the senior partner and the only one Barney had met, was a tiny man whose feet never quite touched the floor when he sat behind that huge desk. He was seventy, white-haired, shrewd, a genius at trusts. He had handled Barney, as Barney remembered, with the attitude of someone forced to deal with a rather clumsy aborigine.
He got the receptionist, was advised to wait, told her it was the firm’s money being wasted, and was promptly connected with Peterman. The little man had a surprisingly deep voice.
“Forbes? Why are you calling?”
“I think I’m going to quit,” Barney said.
“What?”
“I’m not needed up here,” Barney said. “Malcolm Hunter has all the help he can use. Everybody from the D.A. on down is anxious to help him. They’re falling all over themselves here in Omega to cover up whatever they think Hunter did. I have the nasty feeling that I’m working on the wrong side of the fence.”
“Nonsense, my boy. Stay with it. Have you discovered anything pertinent?”
“Just what I’ve told you. It adds up, though. I think Alex Kane is dead and I think Malcolm Hunter killed him and I think the whole town knows damned well that Hunter did it.”
“This sort of problem is somewhat out of our line,” Peterman said faintly. “It is not the sort of thing we are accustomed to coping with.”
“Naturally. That’s why you hired me. It’s not quite respectable.”
The telephone hummed. A bee banged against the phone booth door and butted the glass angrily and then gave up. Two fat women in flowered shorts came down the road on wobbling bicycles. Their faces were red and perspired and determined. When they were gone, Barney said: “The whole set-up is a little rank. I’ve been argued with, threatened, cajoled, ordered and invited to take the first train back to New York. I don’t like