Читать книгу Long Fall from Heaven - George Wier - Страница 16

[ 7 ]

The beaten and lifeless body of Jack Pense. A grieving woman. An opened office that should have been locked. An opened safe which, according to Vivian DeMour, the last remaining member of the family to carry the name, contained nothing of real importance and never had.

These things troubled Micah Lanscomb, but what made it so much worse was how Jack Pense’s death had clearly affected Cueball Boland. If it affected Cueball, there were clear ramifications for Galveston Island. Not that Cueball was the most important man on the Island. He was, however, one of the two most important personages in Micah Lanscomb’s own personal pantheon, a distinction Cueball shared only with Myrna Boland, a woman Micah would easily lay down his life to protect.

That evening Micah went over to Cueball’s house, a stately old Queen Anne Victorian on Ball Street in the East End. It was their Tuesday night custom to get together for a few drinks after Micah had made the deposit from the day’s pool hall and bar proceeds. They sat on the front porch and sipped Johnnie Walker Black Label and tried to get a handle on things. In the dark fronds of the palm trees, an orchestra of cicadas was tuning up for the long night.

Myrna appeared and poured half a glass of Johnnie Walker for each of them but took the bottle back inside with her, as if to say “You can have this much, boys, but no more.”

When she was gone, Cueball asked, “What are you thinking?”

“You don’t want to know,” Micah said.

“That’s alright. I’ll tell you what you were thinking, seeing as how I know you so well. You’re thinking it was one of my own employees or former employees, aren’t you? You’ve been clutching at the idea like a goddamned south sea islander clutches his kona doll ever since you entered old Dave DeMour’s office.”

“Maybe I have,” Micah said. “Who else could it have been?”

Cueball took a sip of scotch and leaned back in Myrna’s wicker settee. “I got the prints back from Washington two hours ago,” Cueball said. “Those boys work quickly.”

“Well, who the hell do they belong to?”

“To the one person I thought they’d belong to when I heard Jack Pense was found murdered while on duty.”

Micah waited.

“I had the chance to kill the son of bitch who did it twenty years ago up in Dallas. A warehouse, a murder, and a safe. They all point to one man, and the fingerprints confirm it. A con named Harrison Lynch.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Micah said. “So how does he figure into this mess?”

“He’s Jack Pense’s stepbrother.”

“Damn!”

Cueball nodded. “It’s an old island story, full of rumor and supposition, but the accepted version is that Lindy—one of the DeMour daughters and my old friend Vivian’s sister—got herself pregnant around age fifteen. That wasn’t what you’d call socially acceptable back then, and it wasn’t ordinarily discussed. The family tried to keep it a secret but the child was kidnapped and disappeared just as if it were dead. The kid reappeared years later as part of the Pense family, a lesser but still Old Island family who had moved to Houston.”

Cueball paused for a moment, thinking. “The Penses moved to Houston after the patriarch lost his money. Later, he apparently lost his mind and killed himself. Harrison Lynch never even knew he was related to the DeMours until much later. The story goes that Harrison was a mean little shit from the day he was whelped. There was no love lost between him and the Pense family. Jack was a straight arrow and Harrison was always in trouble. Jack got the good grades while Harrison alternated between flunking courses and getting two-week expulsions. Then he went from bad to worse and left town. Somewhere along the way Harrison got in a mess out in West Texas, jumped bond, and finally wound up killing a couple of people, one in Dallas and one in Houston.”

“They sent him up for life, right?” Micah asked.

Cueball shook his head and drained his glass in one long pull. “Not initially. He got two death penalties, but the Supreme Court moratorium on executions automatically commuted his sentences.”

“How long has he been out?” Micah asked, and followed suit with his own glass.

“From the Dreyfus Unit the other side of Houston? Since yesterday morning,” Cueball said.