Читать книгу Long Fall from Heaven - George Wier - Страница 11

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Jack Pense was murdered in a warehouse that belonged to the DeMour family. The DeMours were Old Island Money like the Moodys and the Kempners and the Sealys. In Galveston old money was quiet money—money that kept its own counsel in the shuttered mansions in the city’s historic East End and in a few walnut-paneled boardrooms in the unprepossessing buildings within a couple of blocks of Broadway. Old Money in Galveston was Big Money. Micah knew that back in the fifties the Moody Bank, headquartered in its sedate five-story brick building on Market Street, held a mortgage on every Hilton hotel on the face of this round green Earth. Yet the vast majority of Americans had never even heard the name. People in Galveston liked it that way, that Old Money was both big and quiet. No one would be pleased that the killing occurred at the DeMour warehouse. It would bring light and attention where none were wanted.

It took only one look at Jack Pense’s body for Micah to know what had happened. “Man, oh man,” Rusty Taylor said. “Why would somebody do that? Could’ve been me, you know.” Rusty was the rounds guard. He drove a little Daihatsu pickup truck from site to site, checking on things, making sure there were no open doors or bashed-in windows. Cueball had a definite policy about checking on his stationary guards. The rounds guard had to verify by sight the safety of every stationary guard on each round, which was how Rusty had found Jack’s body.

“I know it could have been you, Rusty,” Micah said, “but it wasn’t. Go get yourself a cup of coffee. You’re going to be awake for the next five or six hours at least.”

“For what?” Rusty asked.

Micah turned and looked at the man and decided not to be sarcastic, which had become increasingly difficult as the years drifted on by. “You’re going to have to answer the same set of questions fifty times, is why.”

“Oh,” Rusty said. But before he turned away he asked the question again, only differently. “Why would anybody breaking in to rob the place, kill the security guard after tying him up? Doesn’t make any sense is all.”

“Because whoever did it knew him.”

Rusty shivered. “Oh,” he said, and walked away.

Micah Lanscomb turned and regarded the mortal remains of Jack Pense.

Jack’s face was a mass of bruises and contusions. It barely resembled him. He had been pummeled with either a tire iron or a stick of some kind. That would be the coroner’s job to figure out. Jack’s chest, what Micah could see of it through his torn shirt, was one massive bruise. The instrument of torture was not apparent at the scene.

The body was hours cold. Micah did a quick estimate and placed Jack’s death sometime between three and four a.m. Between the autopsy findings and Rusty’s shift report, that figure would likely be narrowed down.

Micah turned away from Jack Pense’s body. His eyes came to rest on a desk by the loading dock. This was where Jack filled out his own shift report every night. It was where he drank his coffee, where he set out from on his rounds of the warehouse on those nights when his back wasn’t giving him fits and he felt good enough to stretch his legs. In the dead of night when the place was all quiet, you could hear every sound made in the building from Jack’s desk.

Jack’s thermos was there next to the phone. Micah lifted a handkerchief out of his shirt pocket, spread it across his hand and lifted the thermos. With the other hand he brought up a corner of the cloth, covered the lid and twisted it open.

Micah sniffed then smiled.

“Good old Jack,” he said and took a drink.

The coffee, laced as it was with a healthy dose of Irish Cream, went down just fine, even though it was now lukewarm. For good measure, he downed the rest of it in one long chug.

Micah turned and looked back toward the body.

“God bless you, Jackie Pense,” he said. “Thanks for the drink. Now rest in peace, old son.”

• • •

Micah placed the 911 call. After he hung up, he knew he had five minutes, tops, to make a quick inspection of the warehouse to determine if anything had been rifled, broken into, or stolen. He knew that dock employees would begin arriving at any time. He left the lifeless body of Jack Pense where Rusty had found him and made a slow transit around the warehouse.

He was dwarfed by pallets of freight stacked up to forty feet, shrink-wrapped like ancient Egyptian mummies—truck and tractor parts, whole loads of lawnmowers just in from Japan and Malaysia. They made for aisle after aisle of hard consumables and big-boy toys.

At the end of the aisle a flight of narrow wooden stairs led upward into the gloom. A door stood open at the top, revealing a deep well of darkness beyond.

“Now that’s not right,” Micah said aloud. He felt a chill then.

He had no more than a few minutes before the cops would arrive. If he hustled, maybe he’d have enough time to check it out and report to Cueball before they came.