No Cure for Death by Max Allan Collins Page A

agreed?”
    “Agreed.”
    “She died in a crash on Colorado Hill. So did your cousin.”
    “And you see that as some kind of, what? Connective tissue? Linking thread?”
    “You might say that.”
    “You’re reading a lot into a simple coincidence.”
    “Coincidence, maybe. Not so simple.”
    He studied me for a moment. Then he said, “What exactly is your interest in all this, Mr. Mallory? Are you a detective, public or private?”
    “I just knew Janet Taber, that’s all.”
    “Then this is not a... an official investigation.”
    “If the cops were asking the right questions, I wouldn’t have to.”
    He frowned; it was a thought-out frown. His facial expressions seemed calculated for the benefit of whoever he was talking to, rather than out of any real feeling or emotion.
    “I hope,” he said, “this conversation begins to gather significance soon, Mr. Mallory. Your ‘urgent business’ is proving to be the delusion of what appears to be a not terribly stable mind.”
    “You’ve come this far....”
    He sighed. “Continue.”
    “Do you know a man named Washington?”
    “No.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Quite sure.”
    “He’s a black man.”
    “How bothersome for him.”
    “He’s big, and he has one eye.”
    “Is that right?”
    “He’s worked for your uncle for ten years.”
    “Has he?”
    “He has.”
    Stefan looked at me, blankly.
    I said, “And he has a sister named Rita.”
    “And how many eyes has she?”
    “What are you up to, Norman?”
    “I’m up to here with you, Mr. Mallory. I believe this conversation is over. Can you find the way out?”
    “Thanks for the beer.”
    I trudged down the long hall and out the door and into the elevator and before two minutes were up I was again with Rita in the Rambler, and two people and one object were never more out of place as were we in the parking lot.
    “Well?” she said.
    I grunted. “He admitted knowing Janet, but only slightly. He claimed he didn’t know she’d been killed in an accident. He also didn’t respond to the name Taber.”
    “What do you make of that?”
    “What do you make of this: he says he doesn’t know you or your brother.”
    “You figure that adds up to something.”
    “It adds up to somebody’s lying.”
    “Who do you believe?”
    “You.”
    That surprised her. “Why me? Why not Norman?”
    “First off, you’re better looking.”
    “Gee, thanks.”
    “Second off, Norman isn’t going back to Port City with me to arrange a meeting with a certain one-eyed gentleman. Right now.”

SIXTEEN
    Rita said, “I don’t know how I let you talk me into this,” and sat staring at the phone on the coffee table in front of her. The faces in the posters on my trailer walls seemed to stare with her.
    I came over, bringing a cold bottle of Pabst and a glass and joined her on the couch. I filled the glass, pressed it into her hands. She sipped from it eagerly. I leaned back and took my time draining the bottle and several long minutes went by and I said, “Go ahead and call.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What don’t you know?”
    “This is such a shitty thing to do to my brother.”
    We’d gone back and forth about this all the way down from the Quad Cities, and though I still hadn’t won her exactly, she at least had agreed to come down with me and put the scene of the seesaw argument on my home ground. Her position was based on the premise that her brother Harold was incapable of committing and/or aiding-abetting a misdeed such as the one I’d outlined concerning Janet Taber. When I presented the bus station incident as counterevidence, she claimed that that
could
have been some other six-four, one-eyed black guy; besides,
her
six-four, one-eyed black brother wouldn’t go ’round sporting a bare socket: he always wore an eyepatch.
    I said, “This is not a shitty thing to do. It’s a good thing to do.”
    “Shove it, Mallory, what does an only child know about it, anyway? And a white one at