Читать книгу F.B.I. Showdown: A Classic Suspense Novel - Gordon Landsborough - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

WITNESS TO MURDER

You can take your pick where you begin. Either in the prison farm at Halifax, North Carolina, with Egghead Schiller and Johnny Delcros and friends working around the State gas chamber (they don’t electrocute murderers in the Old North State; they stick them in a room containing one easy chair and an unnecessary table, and release gas in on the sedative-filled candidate for Heaven, Hell, or wherever killers go).

Or we could start with little Hymie Kolfinkle, who took a picture of a man frying in oil.

Maybe we’ll start with Hymie.

It’s funny about men like Hymie, the newsreel cameraman. A man entirely undistinguished, and yet this fat little man triggered off a series of happenings that mushroomed to the size of the Bikini explosion, and had nearly as great a repercussion on the American continent.

He didn’t come much more than shoulder high on most men, little Hymie, and he had a big wife. In the first years after marriage she used to make life hell by threatening to go back to mom; and in these last many years she just wouldn’t go back. He was a very depressed man.

That late May afternoon he was sitting high up on the Crombie Range, where the leaves on the trees still retained their green freshness, and the grass in the ditches was tall and succulent, unlike on the plains below, already going sear and yellow under this near-tropical sun.

He was looking into the descending sun through the orange visor on his stationary car, and he was wishing he had the guts to put an end to his life. He used to like to think of such a thing; in fact, it was nearly the only thought that made him cheerful.

He liked to picture the shock it would give his wife when she saw him brought home and realised to what a state her nagging had reduced him. Yeah, and the neighbours would talk together indignantly and would maybe not speak to her for weeks, and that would surely burn her up.

After a while Hymie sighed and started the car. Sitting there did no good except make him late for reaching the town where he was to spend the night.

Hymie was Number Nine on the list of cameramen with the company. They had nine operators.... He got the little jobs, like the coverage of a newly appointed small-town mayor, or pictures of some new-born lambs to go with the Easter pictures, or one-and-a-half minutes of a woman speaker from Boston addressing the local Women’s Guild. That sort of job particularly depressed him. Always those women speakers from Boston reminded him of the wife he was trying to run away from.

The other eight cameramen got sent on the choice assignments, to Florida in the winter season to show jaded northerners how the other half lived, to Sun Valley and other mountain resorts, and to all the big, exciting disasters, natural and manmade, that daily assault the American headlines.

“Me,” he thought, turning slowly down from the blessed coolness, “me, I get the dirt.” And he felt very low and unhappy at the thought of it.

And yet little Hymie Kolfinkle got the biggest scoop of any cameraman, though he didn’t realise it himself at the time.

He was about eight miles from that lusty, growing town of Warren Bridge when he ran into a fast-moving convoy of cars. He had come down the last of the gradients from the Crombie Range, and was about to pull into the main road to Warren Bridge when a big, expensive car, fronted by a chromium grin that screamed of dough in the owner’s bank, flashed along towards him, braked hard, and then turned towards the Crombie Hills. Following close behind came somewhere around twenty or thirty other cars, nearly all big and expensive-looking.

Hymie noticed that all were filled to the last seat and the occupants all seemed to be men. And clearly, the way they played follow-my-leader, they were all together in this expedition.

They were cutting the corner so fine, after the first few cars, that Hymie had to sit and wait, without being able to pull on to the main road. He felt so depressed he couldn’t feel worse at being held up by the arrogant cornering of the convoy, and he just sat there and watched apathetically....

All the same, he received a curious impression from the occupants of the cars, though he never heard a sound from any of the people in them.

He had a feeling of intense if suppressed excitement. Of emotion at fever-heat.

It was a similar sort of feeling you got at election time, and again when men left their wives and got together for some convention in a city where no one knew them.

Hymie tried to think of some convention that might be on at the moment around this part of North Carolina, but failed. He didn’t know this part of the country very well. He wondered what they were up to, and thought that maybe they were going to some place where there would be food and drink and someone to talk to. Hymie liked food and drink, but when he was depressed, as now, he liked even better to have someone to listen to his confidences about his wife.

It was on the impulse of the moment, then, that when the last car swooshed round the corner on tyres that skidded a little in the crunching gravel thrown up at the side of the road, Hymie suddenly pulled the wheel completely round and tailed on at the rear.

The sun was going down, but it was still hot and there was plenty of light. The party didn’t go far. There was a wooded draw that came out on to the Crombie Hill Road just where the cultivated fields ended. It was a very lonely, desolate place. As they turned up the rutty dirt road that wound between the sparse, stunted oaks, Hymie thought it was a queer place for a lot of men to go for enjoyment. Then he thought maybe they were going pigeon-shooting and would then have a barbecue in the cool of the evening, and that seemed reasonable except for the fact that soon there wouldn’t be light enough to see any pigeons.

Before he had time to think of another solution to the minor mystery, he realized that they were stopping. He also realised that they were in an open space that was like a cup amongst the little, tree-covered hillocks all around, and they were out of sight of the main Crombie Range road.

Some of the cars just stopped anywhere, but most of them pulled into a rough circle around a solitary oak that was rather to one side of the cup-like glade. Then everybody got out, and Hymie, for all his depression, was out as soon as anyone.

He went straight across to a group who were doing something to the baggage compartment at the rear of a big sedan. Hymie heard bottles clink together and said, “Hell, but I got a thirst that makes blotting paper look like—” He couldn’t think what to make blotting paper look like, and anyway no one was listening that long.

Some bottles of cold beer were being handed round and Hymie got his hand there before anyone and was first to start drinking. For a depressed man he wasn’t slow, little middle-aged Hymie.

They were all drinking when a big man came over. He had the fleshy body and ponderous limbs of a Hermann Goering, and he wore plenty of jewellery and a suit that was loud in an expensive way. He seemed to be a leader of this party, for everyone listened as he gave orders.

He growled, “What’n hell, you should be watching the road, not drinking so soon. Keep a look out down the track, so that we’re not surprised by any damned busy-bodies.”

One of the men—they all looked pretty prosperous, Hymie noticed, looked like well-to-do businessmen out on a spree—detached himself for a moment from the neck of his bottle. He made a smacking noise of appreciation and said, “Hell, Frank, you don’t expect anyone buttin’ in here, do you?”

Frank’s eyebrows came suddenly together as he glared back down the track. He growled, “What are these cars, anyway? Find out before we start. For crissake, we can’t have people we don’t know looking on.”

The party turned, Hymie among them, only Hymie wasn’t bothering to stop drinking while he looked. There were plenty more bottles of beer in that luggage compartment, he had noticed, and right now he could do with several himself.

Two cars were jumping up towards them. Frank was glaring down at them as though exasperated. He was saying, “Why do people have to pick on this place tonight? You don’t get a car in a fortnight normally, and tonight....”

Then another man, with a thin nasal, northern twang, interrupted. He said, “Quit worrying, Frank, They’re some of our cars. Heppy got a blowout, coming along Glades, an’ a coupla other cars stopped to give him a hand. One came on after; guess these are the other two.”

Hymie did stop drinking then. He realised abruptly that strangers weren’t wanted in this party, and he had blundered into it under circumstances that had momentarily misled these men.

But as he stared back down the track he was thinking that at any moment now they were going to discover him. They were expecting two cars—what would they say when three came?

Hymie decided to get around as much beer as he could before they started to look for a strange car in their midst, As he drank he saw the two cars come roaring up, and then saw a third back among the trees.

He waited for the exclamation that would prelude his exposure, but surprisingly none came. Then he realised that all the men, including Frank, were momentarily distracted by the bottles in the luggage compartment. The last car was within the circle by the time they straightened up and took another look round.

Frank held a bottle by the neck and spoke again before departing. He had the kind of red rough face that comes from playing golf a lot, and the chins and facial curves that come from talking golf in the clubhouse for long hours after...and drinking along with the talking. He said, “Now look, you just keep watch back there like I said. Start blasting your horns if you see anything. Get me?”

They stopped drinking long enough to assure him they’d got him, and at that he swung his big limbs into motion and went across to the big automobile that had led the party. Hymie, watching along the top of an inverting bottle, saw him call and wave to some other sporting types like himself, and they all came across and pulled a big bundle out of the back of the car.

What followed took place less than thirty yards from where Hymie stood drinking, so that he heard and saw everything quite clearly.

So, when he noticed that the long bundle was a gagged and bound man, he jerked the bottle away from his lips and stared.

He saw them drag the prisoner upright, and there was an unnecessary roughness in the way they handled him. Again Hymie had that feeling of excitement—an excitement that had a touch of mob-hysteria about it. And then he knew that these men were up to something big and bad and against the law, and he stopped drinking because he didn’t like being mixed up in illegal activity. He had also begun to get an idea of what was going to follow, or he thought he had....

Frank was the centre of the group. He was doing a lot of shouting and working himself up into an anger. Hymie, who was small, was in consequence an observer and not a doer of things, and he knew the signs because he had seen them many times before. Frank was wanting to do something that most men can’t do in cold blood, so he was working himself into a fury in which he’d be able to do anything that his bullying, sadistic soul demanded.

Hymie looked around at the rest of the party and thought that there was probably not much to choose between any of them and Frank. Probably it was this common denominator of sadism that had brought them together in the first place.

They took the bonds off the prisoner, except for the ones that tied his wrists together. Then they shoved him roughly from behind and made him walk across to the solitary oak in the glade. Hymie looked up and saw a right good lynching branch there, and the idea came to him that though the light wasn’t the best right now, he’d maybe get some good pictures of what would follow.

He walked across to his car. He didn’t sidle across, didn’t make any furtive little movements that could have made men suspicious. The idea just came to him to get some pictures, so he stumbled across the open ground and got his smallest camera out and no one took any notice of him.

That was the incredible part of the whole business, how Hymie got his pictures with everyone there to see him taking them, and nobody getting het up or anything.

The truth, of course, was everybody assumed that Hymie must be all right to be there, and when he sat himself on top of his car nobody looked at him because of the absorbing tragedy that had begun under the oak tree away from the cameraman.

So he sat and from time to time took shots of the murder of a man by this blood-lusting mob.

Frank was doing most of the pushing and talking, but a few of his friends weren’t much behind. One of them, a man not much bigger than Hymie, but without Hymie’s fat weight, tore the tape off the man’s mouth and then hit him on the side of his chin. Hymie saw something white fly out of the prisoner’s mouth and guessed they were dentures.

The little man was shouting excitedly. “Now talk, you son of a—! Now let’s hear what you got to say!”

But the man couldn’t do any talking for the moment. He stood there in the last rays of sunshine, and the way his pursed up mouth moved around Hymie guessed he was tasting blood from the blow.

The prisoner had turned, so that now Hymie could see him clearly, and he got some excellent pictures of him standing there.

He was a pretty tall man, though a stoop robbed him of height. He was very spare and middle-aged, and he didn’t have much hair except just above his ears. The way he screwed up his eyes, Hymie thought that he probably wore glasses normally. Without his teeth he looked to have a very small face, but most people do look like that without plates to lengthen their faces.

He stood and faced his aggressors, and his sunken features showed no trace of fear. Frank was working himself into a passion of rage.

“Goddamn him,” Hymie heard him shouting. “Lynching’s too good for the buzzard. So why don’t we do what the Ku-Klux-Klan would have done to him? What say we burn him, eh?”

He was bawling his head off, getting himself excited and trying to work up the passion of the crowd at the same time. And they didn’t need much stirring. They had come here for a lynching, so they were mostly much of a mind, and burning a man seemed a more interesting variation on the theme.

A lot of men started shouting along with Frank, and they all put a growling note into their voices so that it sounded very stark and jarring up in those foothills with the peace of evening closing in around them.

Hymie had an idea that a few of the men said something against burning the prisoner, but they didn’t shout so loud as Frank and they shut up very soon, as if they weren’t too minded what happened, anyway.

The little fellow who did a lot of sonofabitching came up with a rope and started to tie the prisoner to the oak. Then someone else started to collect dry sticks, but Frank roughly told him, “Don’t be a dope! We got better ideas than that,” and went away and then came back with a can of gasoline.

The prisoner was doing some talking now, as if realizing which way the mob was heading, but Frank kept shouting for him to shut his goddamned face, and that kept most of the crowd from hearing what the fellow was trying to say. Frank was red-faced and excited. This was the moment he had been leading up to, but he didn’t show the pleasure that the scene gave him because that wasn’t the part he was playing right then. Instead, he had to keep up this fearful rage, this anger that seemed natural upon righteous indignation.

And somehow you don’t enjoy things as much when you have to keep yourself red-eyed with fury all the time.

Everyone had been drinking heavily in those short minutes after reaching the glade, and it was showing effect. The voices of passion were thickened and slurred, and some of the movements uncertain.

But they got their prisoner tied to the tree, though he began to struggle as if now in panic. It was too late. The little fellow got so excited that he left off tying him and started to beat him about the head, but the rest of the men shouted him off because he kept falling in their way.

Hymie, his back to the last red rays of the sun, kept shooting the scene. No one was watching the back road now.

Frank stood back from the prisoner and then whooshed the gasoline out of his can. It fell in a high arc over the prisoner and the tree trunk, and he kept swinging the can forward and sending further gasoline out over the man.

About the third throw the man started screaming and struggling frantically in his bonds. Hymie, his stomach tightening, guessed that some of the gasoline had gone in his eyes and it was burning.

The screaming seemed to excite the men all the more, and Frank led them in a shouting match against the helpless prisoner.

“Scream, you buzzard—”

“Yeah, listen to yer damn’ croakin’ voice fer the last time—”

“The hell, you bin makin’ a noise all your life, it’s right you should go out makin’ one now!”

They were more than half-drunk and they were baiting their enemy. The fact that he was completely helpless and incapable of protecting himself seemed only to bring out the devil in them. They were without pity at that moment, though many were to waken later and wonder what in hell had made them behave like that.

Then Frank struck a match and threw it forward. It seemed to go out for a second, and in that moment an eddy of night breeze wafted raw gasoline fumes across to where Hymie sat quietly atop the roof of his sedan, operating his camera.

Then there was a sudden, soft-roaring sound and a pillar of red fire leapt into the branches of the old oak tree.

Hymie didn’t stop his camera now, didn’t take it away from that writhing, burning figure that screamed away his last tormented moments on Earth.

And Frank and a few of the ringleaders were close to that pyre, and the red flames lit up their savage, elated faces; and now they did not attempt to disguise the sadism which had actuated them and brought about this tragedy.

The screaming went on, high and awful, Someone shouted, “There ain’t enough gasoline, I reckon,” so Frank stood out for all to see and tossed the part-full can with an underhand throw so that it landed right at the burning man’s feet.

The grass was burning for a square yard or so around, and now more gasoline gurgled out of the can and added to the flames and sent them flaming up around the limbs and body of the writhing, agonised prisoner. Almost immediately after that the screaming stopped and the man stood silent in his bonds and then sagged. And then the bonds burned through and he fell on his face in the burning grass,

Just at that moment the gasoline can blew up, and small gouts of flaming fuel came shooting all around the lynching party. They scattered in alarm, and then, realizing there was no danger, they stopped running and started to laugh loudly to show they hadn’t been seriously scared. It sounded wrong and indecent with that corpse roasting.

Frank started to marshal the party after this; he drove them to their cars and told them to get moving back to town. It seemed they were going to leave the charred body just like that. Someone must have said something on the subject, for Frank immediately turned and with grim humour said, “What the hell, you don’t think the cops are gonna look far when they see who it is, do you? That is, if he can ever be identified. Old Mouthy’s given ’em so much trouble I reckon they’d pin a medal on us if they knew what we’d done.”

Everyone who heard laughed again, and again it held that false, strident note—the note that creeps in when men are out of their depth but are hard at it, trying to kid themselves they’re all right, that nothing’s going to happen to touch them. But Hymie noticed that a lot were pretty quick to get into their cars and drive away. You might have thought that some were suddenly sobering....

Hymie pulled into the column, but he didn’t follow them down the Warren Bridge highway. Where it joined with the Washington Road by the big, new hatchery, he pulled left and headed north through the night. Another car pulled out after him, and it made Hymie sweat because he had just witnessed a murder and this was one of the accomplices driving hard behind. But in time this second car pulled into a farm road, and then Hymie went on through the night alone.

He had changed his mind about staying in Warren Bridge overnight; instead, he would drive to Washington, where he lived, and put up at some hotel if the goshdarned politicians and military hadn’t taken all the beds. He wasn’t expected home until the following day, and he wasn’t going to be with his wife one minute earlier than she was expecting him....

He felt something coming up within him, and he stopped and got out of the car and was sick by the side of the road.

He thought, hell, thinking of his wife on top of what he had just seen was enough to make any man empty his stomach. He drove on and wondered what the boss would say when he came in with that film he’d just shot.