Herne the Hunter 22 Read online

  Herne folded the newspaper and tapped it against his thigh. Someone had gone into the house after he and Cassie had left, removed Bellour’s body and dumped it in the bay. Either the killer had come back or someone else had found the dead man and not wanted the death to be thought of as anything other than a violent crime that had taken place out on the streets.

  Who might have gone to the Bellour house in his wake?

  Who knew that he was going there in the first place?

  He tossed the paper back to the astonished boy and hurried off in the direction of Portsmouth Square.

  The blinds were still pulled down over the plate glass window at the front of the store and the door was locked, the closed sign still in place. Herne didn’t even bother trying the lock.

  The rear door was open and he walked through and almost bumped smack into the back of a short, stocky man wearing a plaid overcoat and a bowler hat.

  The man shouted and turned and at the same moment a uniformed policeman came through from the front of the store.

  Herne apologized and turned away but he wasn’t going to get out that easily.

  The man under the bowler hat was the police officer in charge of the investigation into Bellour’s death. He spoke with the remains of a Scottish accent and his breath smelt equally of bourbon and peppermint. He set himself between Herne and the street and quizzed him closely about what he was doing walking into the back entrance of a place whose owner had just been fished out of the water with his throat slit from one ear to the other.

  Herne said that he’d been into the place the previous day to see about getting a picture made that he could take back to his family in Wyoming. The owner hadn’t been there and he’d been told to come back the next day, which was what he was doing. The front had been shut so he’d tried the back. He didn’t know anything about the owner being killed. He hardly ever read the papers.

  To be honest, he shrugged, he had more than a little difficulty with reading.

  The policeman looked at him carefully, weighing his words against his appearance and the look of the Colt .45 holstered at his side. He didn’t look anyone’s fool—not a city man, of course, but not a fool either.

  Finally he asked Herne for the address he was using in the city and nodded when he was told the name of the hotel.

  ‘Staying long in San Francisco?’

  ‘Not long now.’

  ‘But I daresay you’ll be around for the next day or two?’

  Herne nodded, assured him that he would. There was nothing else to add. He walked slowly away, making sure that no one was paying any attention to where he was going.

  As soon as he was sure he was in the clear, he set off for the cheap hotel where he’d left Evelyn and Jerry the night before. The night clerk had been replaced by a fat man with the face of a twelve year old boy and an incongruous pipe curling down from the corner of his young mouth.

  The clerk eyed Herne up and down and reached around for a key, figuring he’d just got into town and was looking for a bed.

  Herne looked at the key and shook his head. ‘There’s a couple in room nineteen.’

  ‘Not any more there ain’t.’ The clerk took his pipe from his mouth as he talked, staring down at the bowl now and preparing to poke it with the stem of a burnt-out match.

  ‘Last night …’

  ‘Last night there was trouble up there. Guns bein’ fired off an’ all sorts apparently. Feller up there did serious damage to one of the staff an’ threatened to shoot innocent passers-by who’d run in to see what was happening. We couldn’t let them stay here after that.’

  He succeeded in tamping down his tobacco, struck a fresh match and sucked hard two or three times until he was satisfied it was burning again.

  ‘Friends of yours?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Funny kind of friends.’ He stared at Herne quizzically and Herne wondered how much he’d been told about the appearance of the man who’d been causing ail the trouble.

  ‘Know where they’ve gone?’

  ‘Search me, feller. But you can bet they won’t’ve strayed more’n two or three blocks of here. They ain’t got the money for nothin’ better an’ unless they’re goin’ to sleep rough down on the docks, there ain’t a lot else to choose from. Not in this town.’

  Herne nodded, grunted thanks and left him to his pipe.

  His feet were sore and his temper short when he found them and then it was as much by luck as anything else. That and Jerry’s tendency to poke his head round the wrong door at the wrong time.

  Herne had finished asking the woman scrubbing the lobby of the El Camino Real about any couple who’d moved in fresh that morning and taken her assurances that they hadn’t had a new customer inside the last week never mind the last twenty-four hours, when the entrance door swung back and there was Jerry with a loaf of bread in one hand and a bag of fruit in the other.

  He saw Herne and yelped, dropping the fruit and hurling the bread. Herne ducked under it easily and set off after him. Jerry skidded on the stones outside, recovered his balance and tried to sprint for cover.

  Herne got to within four feet and dived.

  His arms wrapped themselves around Jerry’s legs and the two of them crashed to the ground. Herne landed on his shoulder and rolled to the right, pushing himself up with one hand and one foot. Jerry was still kneeling and winded.

  Herne grabbed the back of his shirt collar and lifted him to his feet.

  Jerry looked hangdog away. ‘Evelyn’s gonna kill me for this.’

  She was waiting in the back room on the first floor. It was even more of a dump than the place they’d been thrown out of and the half dozen of Bellour’s portraits looked out of place stacked against the walls. What lay on the bed, scattered this way and that, seemed more at home.

  Herne obviously hadn’t found Bellour’s entire collection of dirty pictures.

  Evelyn was wearing a fawn sweater with puffed-up sleeves and a mouth that was determinedly turned down at the corners. When she saw Jerry walk into the room with Herne close at his back she sighed and shook her head in disgust.

  ‘You can’t even get somethin’ to eat without—’

  ‘He got the food all right,’ interrupted Herne, ‘he just threw it all over the lobby. You’re lucky this isn’t another hotel you’re being thrown out of.’

  Evelyn scowled at him and rubbed her knuckles against her hip. She hadn’t bothered to make up her lips and her mouth looked close to normal for the first time since Herne had seen her.

  She flopped down in a chair and it came close to giving way under her. ‘What have you come for now? To gloat?’

  Herne made sure he was where he could see Jerry, in case the sandy-haired feller had another rush of courage to the head. He didn’t think it was very likely but he felt he was too close to take unnecessary chances.

  ‘I got some more questions.’

  ‘This time you can pay for the answers.’

  ‘Like Bellour did?’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t hear the news?’ He pointed to the paintings and pictures. ‘I can see you went down to the store before the police got there and took away a few souvenirs of your late boss.’

  ‘He owed us more than that,’ she scowled.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Herne, moving towards her. ‘Enough to kill him with a broken bottle drawn across his throat?’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ She was on her feet and leaning towards him, fear and anger mixed together in her face, tight and intense in her eyes.

  ‘We read about it in the paper,’ put in Jerry, ‘that was all we knew.’

  Evelyn clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and looked at him in disgust.

  ‘If you’d waited that long,’ said Herne, ‘you’d never have got all this stuff out in time. No, you knew where I was going and you followed. Maybe one of you, maybe both. You got there and found no trace of me but there
was Bellour’s body. Maybe you figured if you left it there the law would start asking too many questions close to home. So you tipped him in the bay and let them think it was a robbery that went a little too far. Less chance you’d get questioned. More chance you could sell this junk.’ He glanced round at the bed. ‘That filth!’

  ‘It ain’t true,’ protested Jerry, leaning back against the wall, looking sulky and sorry for himself.

  Herne wondered not for the first time what there was about him that had attracted Evelyn to him in the first place—aside from her admitted attraction to losers.

  ‘You’d better hope it’s true,’ said Herne, ‘’cause if it ain’t there’s one other way of dealin’ the cards that I can see an’ that leaves you with a worse hand than before.’

  ‘What’s that, smart-ass?’ asked Evelyn sourly.

  ‘You’d already been to see him that night. You fought, argued, he got his throat cut and you left him to bleed to death. You already knew he was there on the carpet when you sent me over.’

  ‘That don’t make any sense!’ Evelyn screamed back at him, her hands raking the air.

  ‘Maybe not. But I was just talking to a policeman with a bowler hat and a Scottish accent who’d like to try it for size.’

  She shook her head and collapsed back in the chair.

  ‘Best tell him what he wants, honey,’ began Jerry.

  ‘You shut up!’ she yelled and dug her nails into the fraying upholstery at the side of the chair.

  She stared at the threadbare rug and the life seemed to fade out of her.

  ‘What d’you want?’ she asked Herne, not looking at him, her voice barely audible.

  ‘I want the truth about last night. That’ll do for a start.’

  ‘Okay.’ She breathed deep and waited. ‘Part of it was like you said. We went along to Bellour’s house after you. We’d have gone sooner but there was so many people runnin’ round that crummy hotel squawking and carryin’ on, we was lucky to get out at all. By the time we got there, you must’ve left. The back door was open and we got halfway in when we heard someone else comin’ in the front.’

  Herne looked at her with added interest and as if sensing this she drew herself up and looked at him direct, life returning to her voice.

  ‘We laid low and watched what happened. We hadn’t been there five minutes when these two fellers came out the back carryin’ this body. It was Bellour right enough. They slung him in the back of a wagon an’ headed off towards the bay. That was all we saw of ’em. We went in and found half of Bellour’s blood on the carpet in front of the fire. A mess of ashes like someone had been trying hard to get rid of something they didn’t want anyone to see. First we thought his whole stock had been cleared out, but we found those locked away.’ She was looking over at the bed, shaking her head. ‘You know how much money you burned up in that grate? You got any idea?’

  ‘I know I’d’ve burnt that heap there if I’d found ’em.’

  ‘There’s thousands of dollars in blackened paper an’ ash wasted in that house. Thousands of dollars!’

  Herne scooped up a pile of pictures from the bed and held them up towards her. ‘Don’t it matter to you that you’re making money out of this heap of shit?’

  ‘Why should it? If I don’t sell it, someone else will. If Bellour hadn’t peddled that muck, someone else would have.’

  ‘But you’re a woman, God damn it!’

  ‘Sure,’ she laughed bitterly. ‘Sure an’ what are you? Who d’you think it is pays for that stuff? Men like you.’

  ‘Not like me.’

  ‘All men are like you. All men are the same.’ She pushed herself up out of the chair and went to the window and looked down onto the street. ‘That’s not right,’ she said, talking for her own sake as much as anyone else’s, ‘there’s two kinds of men, those with guns in their hands who know how to use ’em and those who don’t. I always end up with those who don’t.’

  She spun round and stared at Herne hard.

  ‘Anything else we can do for you, mister?’

  For answer he turned and flicked the pictures one over the other, checking quickly to see if any were of Cassie.

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested in that stuff.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘It don’t look like it.’

  Cassie wasn’t there. He felt like putting a match to these as well, but he knew that what the woman had said was right and that if he got rid of them there would be others to take their place.

  ‘You finished with us?’ said Evelyn sourly.

  Jerry was still leaning against the wall, as though while Herne was in the room he was afraid to as much as move.

  ‘Almost,’ Herne replied.

  ‘Get it over with.’

  ‘These two men you say carried out Bellour’s body.’

  ‘I don’t just say, they were there. You think we made ’em up or something?’

  ‘Okay, these two, you recognize ’em?’

  ‘I never saw them before.’

  ‘You?’ asked Herne, looking at Jerry.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘But you know what they looked like?’

  ‘It was dark,’ said Evelyn. ‘It was night, remember.’

  ‘Not that dark. You must’ve seen something.’

  She hesitated, plucking at the threads coming loose from the top of the chair. ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘Me not talking to the police. Telling them you were there. Where they can find you now.’

  ‘How do we know you ain’t goin’ to do that anyway?’ said Jerry.

  ‘You’ll just have to trust me.’

  Evelyn snorted and snapped off a thread between her fingers. She didn’t like it but she knew they didn’t have any choice.

  ‘One of them was big, built like a house. He could have been Chinese or something.’

  ‘The other small?’

  ‘Sure. A little feller. Half his size. They had trouble balancing Bellour between them. Maybe he was starting to go stiff.’

  Herne had heard all he needed to know.

  ‘You know them?’ Evelyn asked, but she didn’t really expect him to answer.

  Herne paused in the doorway. ‘Be good to one another.’

  When the door closed he heard the wrangling start going down. All the way along the corridor and down the stairs he could smell the sourness of damp bedding and stale air and people forced to feed on one another’s weakness. Out front the street didn’t seem to offer a whole lot better.

  Eleven

  He wasn’t in any mood for back doors.

  When Quinlan flipped open the spy panel and peered out, the barrel of Herne’s Colt poked between the Irishman’s eyes.

  ‘You got five seconds to open this door or you’re a dead man.’

  It took three and a half.

  Quinlan stood well back with his hands in the air and an expression of impish glee on his face that Herne failed to understand.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Quinlan, ‘if we’d known you were plannin’ on giving us the pleasure of your company we wouldn’t have gone to such trouble to find you ourselves.’

  ‘Happy to oblige,’ snarled Herne through his teeth. ‘Now take me to your boss and remember that if you try any tricks on the way, this gun isn’t going to miss.’

  Quinlan winked and led the way across the main gaming room towards Daniels’ office. They were on the stairs below the roulette wheel when the office door opened and Daniels came out. He looked a lot less worried than he might have done. His eyes were steady as he gazed down at Herne and there wasn’t a crease in his dark suit or a scuff mark on his shoes. A tie pin glistened on his chest. He looked like a man who’d just won ten thousand dollars and knew that that was only the beginning.

  ‘Mr. Herne, who’d have thought you’d have come back so soon—and of your own accord?’

  ‘Never mind the smart talk, Daniels. You won’t be looking so cool and pleased with yourself when you’ve heard what I’ve got
to say.’

  ‘Really, Mr. Herne? Well, if you insist. Although if I were in your shoes I wouldn’t be so confident.’

  Herne gestured to Quinlan to continue up the stairs and stand at the far side of the roulette table. Daniels watched with an amused detachment which was getting Herne worried. The gambler had more than aces up his sleeve and as yet Herne didn’t know what.

  Then he did.

  She came out of the office, a drink in her hand, a cigarette posed at the corner of her mouth. Veronica Russell was wearing a lime green gown that her dressmaker had sewn onto her body just before she left the house. Her dark hair was swept up in a chignon and held in place with a diamond clip in the shape of a moon.

  She looked very beautiful and very dangerous.

  ‘Veronica here has a story to tell, don’t you, my dear? How you came back to the Russell house in the middle of the night with blood on your hands and clothes and her younger sister drugged and helpless in your care. How you told her you’d broken into Ray Bellour’s house because of your infatuation with Cassie, quarreled with Bellour and slashed his throat with a broken bottle.’

  Herne didn’t know whether to laugh aloud at the absurdity of the story, or simply shout Daniels down. But then he looked into the dark of Veronica’s eyes and something that he thought he saw there chilled him. If she told that story to the law and he only had his own word to stand against her, who were they likely to believe?

  Daniels hadn’t finished. ‘The policeman in charge of the case is a man named Wallace. He’s good at his work. He doesn’t like stray ends. He’s also a good friend of mine. How else do you think I keep this place open without being raided and my customers harassed? Wallace does well out of me—very well. If I hand him Bellour’s killer all neatly tied up, he’ll have the rope round your neck so fast it’s doubtful you’ll know what’s happening.’