The Transgressors (8 page)

“Well…I suppose you could get me a gun.”

“A—a gun? But—”

“But you won’t, will you? Even that’s too much for you. How did you manage to live this long, Mr. Carrington? Why did you want to?”

She turned on her side, turning her back to him.

Carrington grimaced with an attempt to smile. He tried to say something, to protest, to explain, but he could find nothing to say. He made another futile try, rising shakily, taking a half-step toward her bed. Then, his shoulders unaccustomedly squared, he pivoted and strode out of the room.

A
ugust Pellino’s house was an old-fashioned, two-story brick in a good but by no means exclusive section of Fort Worth. It had a deep, wide lawn, with a croquet layout and a two-seat platform swing. August spent much time on the lawn; clipping the grass, sipping beer in the swing, or playing croquet. He was frequently joined in this last pastime by neighborhood children, who addressed him familiarly by his first name and whom he invariably stuffed with delicacies from his wife’s kitchen.

Mrs. Pellino spoke little English, and she and her husband were seldom seen together except when they attended church. People guessed that he was probably a very lonely man. He owned a small string of service stations, but they seemed pretty well to run themselves. Now and then he had out-of-town visitors—simple, comfortable men like himself. But their stay was always brief, and August was soon alone on his lawn again.

Because of the visitors’ coloring and other physical characteristics, it was generally assumed that they were his wife’s relatives. For August’s appearance held little hint of his heredity. His close-cropped hair was so blond that it seemed gray; and his massive neck flowed down into a body like a beer barrel. Built as he was, and with his huge red face and whitish hair, he looked to be sixty. Actually, he was twenty years younger.

About as slow-moving as a jet plane, that was the real August Pellino (alias Fat Gus Parkini, alias Augie the Hog). About as harmless and good-natured as a rattlesnake.

August liked children; there was no pretense about that. But if he had not liked them he would have seemed to; managed a thoroughly convincing masquerade. August always did whatever was necessary, and he did it well. His record for performance, regardless of its nature, was well-nigh perfect.

August was proud of his reputation, proud of his ability to obtain financing and well-heeled entrepreneurs for almost any scheme he cared to propose. But the responsibilities that went with such a reputation were always in the forefront of his mind, and he was always nagged by the prospect of failure.

He needed to have just one, only one, and the near-perfect record would be meaningless. Never mind the past. The past was past. The present was all that counted. As the instigator of an enterprise, August guaranteed its success. If his associates lost money on it, or were embarrassed or endangered by it, it was August’s responsibility.

That was the inflexible code. He had enforced it with others, and he could not quarrel with it. But that made the ever-present threat no easier to bear. And when it began to gather substance, as it seemed to be now, when it came out of the hazy realm of potentiality and became an imminent possibility.…

With a sudden savage movement, August took a straight-down swing at a croquet ball, then grinned angrily as the ball split in half and the mallet handle broke in three places. He heard the slam of a car door, looked up. A cab was just wheeling away from the curb—
a goddamned circus wagon coming to his house!
—and George Carrington was moving purposely toward the gate.

Still grinning, a fat, hard hand extended, August walked toward him.

“Well, George,” he said, taking firm possession of Carrington’s hand, holding onto it as he urged him up the walk. “I guess I’m slipping in my old age. Didn’t remember at all that I’d asked you to come out here.”

“Oh? Uh, well you really didn’t, Mr. Pellino. I—”

“Just decided to come on your own, huh? Well, that’s just fine, George. We’ll go right on in the house, someplace where it’s nice and private, and have ourselves a little talk.”

Carrington made a polite attempt to hang back. He said that he’d have to be rushing right off, and there was really no point to going inside. “It’s about Mrs. McBride, Mr. Pellino. About her husband’s murder, that is. I mean, she thinks it’s murder.”

“Murder? You mean suicide, don’t you?”

“I—I’m afraid not,” said Carrington, and he hastily babbled his reasons, Donna’s reasons, why he did not. “Think it’s up to us to lend a hand, Mr. Pellino. Tab the killer for her, you know.”

“But how could we do that, George? How would us businessmen know who the killer is?”

“Well, I—I just thought that, uh, perhaps—”

“Uh-huh. I think I know what you thought. I think you think too much, George. We’ll have to have a nice long talk about it.”

They had reached the steps leading up to the porch. Carrington made a frantic effort to break free. “Really must pop right off, old man. Can’t even stay a mom—
aaah!
” His face went suddenly white with agony, and his knees half-buckled. Pellino gave him a yank, practically flung him up the steps to the porch.

“You could get your fingers broken that way,” he grinned. “Might get them mashed right together, a man out of condition like you are.”

“D-dont!” Carrington gasped. “Really shan’t put up with this, you know. I—
aaah!
”

“That’s your trouble, George. You think too much, and you don’t get enough exercise. Let yourself get all rundown. Guess we’ll have to take care of that, won’t we?”

He yanked again, hurling Carrington into the dark hallway. Motioning for Carrington to precede him, shoving with his thick, bulging arms, he followed him down the hallway and into the kitchen.

A flour smudge on her nose, Mrs. Pellino was rolling out dough at a worktable. She looked up for a moment, glanced blankly at Carrington, and smiled incuriously at her husband. Then she went back to her work, and August pointed to a door on the far side of the room.

“Down there, George. And watch the stairs, huh? Get right on down them. Might fall if I crowd in on you.”

“B-but, really. I—”

“Or maybe you don’t mind falling? Well…”

He started lumberingly across the room. Carrington jerked the open door and went down the long, steep stairs. Above him the door closed, and the basement lights were turned on. Dully, he looked around.

Part of it was used as a wine cellar, lined with bottles in long, slanting bins. The rest formed a comfortably unpretentious recreation room. There was a small bar with three leather stools. There was a long leather divan, and four or five deep leather chairs.

Pellino gripped Carrington by the necktie, nodded toward the lounge. “Look all right, Georgie? Like to sit over there?” he said. And shifting his weight suddenly, he flipped Carrington over his shoulder and sent him flying across the room.

Carrington landed half-off, half-on the lounge, aching, stunned, the breath knocked out of him. Before he could rise, Pellino was on him again, again gripping him by the tie.

“Ain’t very comfortable there, huh, George? Well, let’s see. Suppose we try that chair over there.”

His shoulders weaved again with the shifting of his weight. He stooped and jerked, and Carrington went hurtling through the air a second time. He came down, as he had before, half-on, half-off, the leather target.

He wasn’t comfortable there either, of course. Pellino was sure that he wasn’t. He must try another chair, and another, and another, until all were tried. By then, his whole body was one great ache, and his head was roaring, and his kidneys seemed to have been torn loose from his body. The worst pain, the worst indignity, was to his loins, where he had come down straddling a chair arm. Somehow, he managed to gasp out a request, and Pellino nodded and led him to a sink; stood there watching while he relieved himself. Then the torture was resumed.

He made the circuit of the room twice before Pellino was satisfied. Perhaps he would have made it again, but more was obviously unnecessary. More would have accomplished no more.

There was nothing left in him, nothing of what one needed to live. He had had very little to begin with, and now even that little was gone.

Studying him narrowly, drawing a chair up in front of him, Pellino wondered if he might have gone too far.

“Okay, Georgie?” he said, a trifle anxiously. “Think you got all the crap knocked out of your skull?”

“Eh? Oh, right-o. Quite,” Carrington said.

“Then I’ll cut you in on this McBride thing. Give you a piece off the top…”

“No need, old man. Can’t say that it really interests me.”

“Well”—Pellino took another look at him—“thought you’d be better out of it, myself, but as long as the subject’s come up.…Now, the lid’s probably going to blow off on McBride; don’t know why it hasn’t already. But we’ve got to clamp it back on fast—we, not you; you don’t know nothing. We’ve got to have a cinch, and we’re lining one up. A way of tossing it under the carpet and stomping it down, without a peep or a wiggle. No investigations. No battling back and forth, with a lot of side issues being dragged in. You get me, George? You see why it has to be that way, why we can’t have some private eye or screwball like you messing into it?”

“Oh, quite,” said Carrington vacantly. “Right-o, check, and all that rot.”

“Good,” said Pellino, but he didn’t sound certain that it was. “Like a drink, Georgie? Like to lie down a while?”

Carrington declined with courteous flatness. “Just brush up a bit, if you don’t mind. Lave the old jowls.”

“You do that,” Pellino said. “Me, I think I’ll take that drink.”

Carrington bathed his face at the sink; combed his mussed, graying brown hair. He straightened out his tie and carefully adjusted his rumpled clothes. Pellino watched him, his small eyes worried and wondering.

Smiling warmly, outwardly himself again, Carrington faced around from the sink.

“Well, must toddle on, I suppose. Thanks for everything, old man.”

“Thank…Oh, yeah, sure, Georgie,” Pellino said; then, “Look, George, tell me something, will you?”

“But, of course. Anything I can.”

“Well, look. What—how did you see the picture when we first showed it to you? You know, back when you opened the door for us and we moved in on you. Didn’t you smell anything, Georgie? Did you figure we were tossing all that bread in your lap just because you were hungry?”

Carrington hesitated, puzzling out the translation of bread and hungry. He laughed his polite little laugh. “Think I may have, old man. Quite understandable, you know.”

“
Understandable,
Georgie?”

“Understandable to me. Sort of thing I’d ’ve done myself if our positions had been reversed. Say I had scads of the old gilt, and I see some nice chap struggling against terrific odds and sinking in the sea of life, et cetera et cetera. Must give him a hand-up, what? Can’t just sit on the jolly life preserver when it’s so simple to toss it to him.”

He smiled brightly, palm extended in a so-there-you-are gesture. Pellino came slowly to his feet, his body trembling with sudden unreasoning fury.

“You dumb son of a bitch,” he snarled. “You scram out of here, get me? Beat it, and don’t you ever come back! You show your stupid pan out here again, and—”

“Oh, I won’t,” Carrington promised. “Scout’s oath, honor bright, and all that rot.”

Taxiing back into the city, Carrington looked out into the gathering night and was completely relaxed and content for the first time in a long, long time. It had been a truly wonderful day, he thought. A truly jolly day. Mrs. McBride had proved to be a terrifically nice person—amazingly understanding and considerate. And how could anyone have been more pleasant than Mr. Pellino? Yet he had actually rather dreaded seeing both!

It just went to show how wrong a chap could be about people. Not too pure in heart himself, p’raps—that must be it, mustn’t it?—so he suspected them. Whereas, on the other hand, if one’s own auricles and ventricles were properly scrubbed, then he had nothing to fear and so on or something.

“My soul it has the strength of ten,” he murmured, “because my—my, uh—hands are clean.” Or was that right? Never could remember those jolly old rhymes. Maybe it was, uh—

Silly. That wasn’t it, of course. How did those silly things pop into a chap’s mind?

The cab drew up at the entrance of a downtown office building. Carrington got out, pressed a five-dollar bill into the driver’s hand, and curled his fingers around it.

“You’re a wonderful man,” he said warmly, “I can see it in your eyes. A truly beautiful and wonderful man.”

“Yeah?” The driver jerked his hand away. “Well, you better line yourself up something else, buddy. I’m workin’ tonight.”

“Oh, right,” said Carrington. “Going to be rather busy myself.”

The cigar-stand clerk, a new man on the job, was locking up for the night. Carrington took a package of mints from the carton on the counter, and refused the change from a ten-dollar bill. “You deserve it,” he said. “You deserve the best of everything.”

The clerk examined the bill suspiciously, saw that it was good, and quickly palmed it. “Look, mister,” he said, “take it kind of easy, huh? I don’t know how you got away from your keeper, but—”

“Oh, I didn’t get away from him,” Carrington said. “Have him with me all the time.”

He rode up to the nineteenth floor, one-half of which was now occupied by Highlands. As he stepped off the elevator, he gave the operator a twenty-dollar bill, the last of his money. The boy accepted it reluctantly, along with Carrington’s assurances of his goodness.

“Let me get you some coffee out of it, anyway, Mr. Carrington. A big carton of black coffee, and maybe a sandwich. That’ll snap you out of it.”

Carrington declined with thanks. “Not at all hungry, laddie. Hardly decent to gorge at such a time, anyway.”

The biggest and best of Highlands’ offices were devoted to the legal and accounting departments. Carrington’s was in the rear, facing the alley; a cubbyhole similar to the one he had occupied in his pre-Pellino days.

Carrington entered it, flung open the French windows, and stepped through them.