Bitter Gold Hearts

  “Looks like.” The man who had cautioned me not to gawk was looking back, the gleam in his eyes a conflagra­tion. “Never saw them before.” He walked into a pillar.

  The part of the house where we met the kingpin was less luxurious. It was, in fact, your basic filthy, miserable dungeon — except it was located on the ground level. The kingpin himself was a pallid, doughy fat man in a wheel-chair who didn’t look like he could whip potatoes until you met his eyes. I had seen eyes like those only a few times, on some very old and hungry vampires. They were the eyes of Death.

  “Mr. Garrett?”

  The voice went with the eyes, deep and dank and cold, with hints of awful things crawling around its underside.

  “Yes.”

  “I believe I owe you a considerable debt.”

  “Not at all. I —”

  “In your fumbling and poking after whatever it is you’re seeking, you presented me with an opportunity to rid myself of a vicious pest. I seized the chance, trampling your interests in my rush, a presumption you’ll have found close to intolerable. But you’ve been gracious about it. You participated in the operation which delivered me despite having little hope you would get what you were after. So I believe I am in your debt.”

  Were it not for his voice from beyond the grave, I might have been amused by his pedantic manner. When I didn’t respond, he continued, “Mr. Dotes didn’t make much sense when he tried to explain what you’re doing.

  If you can satisfy me that your interests don’t conflict with mine, I’ll do what I can to help you.”

  I wanted to demur, quietly, still preferring to avoid any chance of becoming identified with him. But Morley gouged me gently, and the fact was, he had two of the people I most wanted to question. I explained as con­cisely as I could, carefully sliding around the matter of two hundred thousand marks gold floating free.

  Sadler continued, “One of Gorgeous’s enterprises was the fencing of goods stolen from the warehouses along the waterfront, sir.”

  “Yes. Continue, Mr. Garrett.”

  “Basically, I need to question Gorgeous and Skredli so I can define their sector of the web of intrigue.” Does that top you, you villainous slug? “I need to ask them who told them to kill Amiranda Crest and the younger Karl daPena.”

  “I knew Molahlu Crest when I was a young man. You might say I was one of his protégés.” He crooked a finger. Sadler went to him, bent down. They whispered. After Sadler backed off, Chodo asked, “The questions you want answered are the ones Raver Styx will ask with a great deal less delicacy?”

  “No doubt.”

  “Then not only must I pay my debt to you, I must move to avert the attention of the mighty. But I have erred, and today I demonstrated my fallibility to myself in no uncertain fashion. I’m able to give you only the lesser part of what you want. 1 overestimated Mr. Staley’s endurance and he’s no longer with us. He couldn’t take it.”

  I sighed. I should have expected the grave to slam another door in my face. “He wasn’t in very good shape the last time I saw him.”

  “Perhaps his injuries were more extensive than they appeared. Whatever, I learned very little of value. But the other, the ogre breed, has survived and is amenable. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem to know much.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  Morley gouged me. “Donni Pell, Garrett.”

  “What?”

  Chodo raised a plump, almost white caterpillar of an eyebrow. He was as good at it as I was.

  “You said the hooker was the key, Garrett. And you don’t even know where to start looking.”

  “Who is Donni Pell?” Chodo asked.

  “The she-spider in this web.” I gave Morley a dirty look. “She used to work for Lettie Faren, but ran out on her the day Junior was snatched. She could be related to Lettie. Human, but supposedly with a thing for ogres.” I ran through the whole thing, how every way I turned the name Donni Pell popped up. I finished, “She could be masquerading as a boy but using the same name.”

  Chodo grunted. He stared at the nails on one plump pink hand. “Mr. Sadler.”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Find the whore. Deliver her to Mr. Garrett’s residence.”

  “Yes sir.” Sadler left us.

  “If she’s in the city, she’ll be found, Mr. Garrett,” Chodo told me. “Mr. Sadler and Mr. Crask are nothing if not efficient.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “I suppose it’s time I took you to my ogrish houseguest. Come.” He spun his wheelchair and rolled. Morley and I followed.

  __XL__

  The first thought that entered my mind when I walked in on Skredli was drowned sparrow. He looked very small, very weak, very bedraggled, and like he’d never been dangerous to anything bigger than a bug. Curiously, I recognized him now. I hadn’t during the excitement in Ogre Town or later in the coach. He was one of the gang who had waylaid me the afternoon of my date with Amiranda, while I was on my way to the chemist for some stink-pretty. Skredli was seated on a rumpled cot. He glanced up but showed no real interest. Ogres tend toward fatalism. Morley held the door for Chodo, then stepped aside. The kingpin backed his chair against the door.

  I studied Skredli, wondering how to get to him. A man has to have hope before he’s vulnerable. This one had no hope left. He was deader than the Dead Man, but his traitorous heart kept pumping and his battered flesh kept aching.

  “The good times always come to an end, don’t they, Skredli? And the better the times are, the bigger the fall when they end. Right?”

  He didn’t respond. I didn’t expect him to.

  “The chance for the good times doesn’t have to be gone forever.”

  His right cheek twitched, once. Ogres and ogre breeds may be indifferent to the fates of their comrades, but they aren’t indifferent to their own.

  “Mr. Chodo has gotten what he wants from you. He doesn’t have any outstanding grievance. Mine isn’t with you at all. So there’s no reason you shouldn’t be let out of here if you give me what I need.”

  I didn’t bother checking to see how Chodo took me putting words into his mouth. It didn’t matter. He would do what he wanted no matter what I said or promised. Skredli glanced up. He didn’t believe me, but he wanted to.

  “The whole scheme is in the dump, Skredli. And you’re down at the bottom. No way to go but up or out. The choice is yours.” I had asked Chodo only one question coming to the cell: did Skredli know Gorgeous was out of it? He did. “Your boss is gone. No reason to stay loyal to him or be afraid of him. Your fate is in your own hands.”

  Morley shifted his weight against the wall, gave me a look that said he thought I was laying it on too thick.

  Skredli grunted. I had no way of telling what that meant. I took it as a go-ahead.

  “I’m Garrett. We had a run-in once before.”

  One bob of the head. I had him. For a moment, though, I feared it had been too easy. Then I reflected that it was the ogrish way. When you’ve got nothing you’ve got nothing to lose.

  “You recall the circumstances?”

  Grunt again.

  “Who put you up to that?”

  “Gorgeous.” That in a dry-throated croak.

  “Why? What for? I’d never had anything to do with either of you.”

  “Business. We had a thing going on in the daPena warehouse and they thought you were going to horn in and spoil it.”

  “Who is they?”

  “Gorgeous.”

  “You said they. Gorgeous and who?”

  He’d reached his next point of decision. He decided to tell a warped truth. “A guy named Donny something who set up the deal.”

  “You mean a hooker named Donni Pell who worked for Lettie Faren and had a thing for ogres. Don’t do that again, Skredli.”

  His shoulders sagged.

  I took a moment to reflect. There was a question of timing that deserved it. Skredli had been in town, leading that pack, after Junior was snatched. But then he’d been a
t that farm the afternoon before Junior walked away, and the next morning he’d led the crew that did in Amiranda. I tabled that for the moment. “I’m interested in that warehouse scheme. All the petty little details.”

  I’d caught him on Donni Pell, so now he was deter­mined to spin me a good tale. “That was one of Donni’s ideas. She was always bringing us things she’d dreamed up from stuff her Johns told her. Some of them we went with, and she got a cut. This one was real sweet. Raver Styx had left town and Donni had a foreman that would let us siphon off ten percent of everything that went through. We took it on a fifty-fifty split with Donni, on account of she was the one keeping the daPena side in line, but the foreman’s cut and expenses had to come out of her half. We moved a lot of stuff. As much as we were doing from the rest of the waterfront, practically. But then Donni warned us that people were getting suspi­cious. Raver Styx’s woman Dount sent the kid to nose around. Then there was you, starting to snoop just when we had decided to close the thing out by cleaning out the warehouse in one hit. So they had me try to discourage you.”

  Interesting. Not worried about me and my reputation for getting into kidnap cases? “When we hit the place in Ogre Town, we saw a guy leaving. A Bruno off the Hill. Who was he?”

  “I never heard his name. A guy Donni knew. He worked for the guy who was taking the stuff from the warehouse. The guy was worried. He hired some other guy to keep track of you and you grabbed him, he thought. He wanted us to do something about you. There was a big panic about covering tracks because Raver Styx had been seen in Leifmold and could turn up anytime.”

  I turned to Morley. “Pokey?”

  “Probably.”

  “What became of him?”

  “I turned him loose. He went home and sat tight. He knew I was watching.”

  “Uhm. Skredli. Who did the Bruno work for?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even think Gorgeous knew. Donni or the Bruno delivered all the messages.”

  “A cautious man. And wisely so, considering who he was stealing from. But the goods had to be transferred somehow.”

  “We had our own warehouse, partly legit. The Bruno hired teamsters to pick up the stuff there.”

  There was an opportunity for some legwork if I de­cided I really wanted to know where the Stormwarden’s goods had gone. I wondered if I ought to ask what goods a Stormwarden dealt in that were so attractive to thieves, but decided ignorance might prove beneficial at a later date. I needed who’s and whys but not many what’s.

  “Let’s talk about the younger Karl daPena. One night as he was going out the back door of Lettie Faren’s place, somebody popped a bag over his head, choked him, and threw him into a carriage. And after that the story gets confusing.”

  Skredli had come around to where I wanted him. He was able to volunteer information without upsetting what­ever minuscule conscience resides in an ogrish heart.

  “That whole mess started out as a fake. The kid wanted to run out on his old lady and rip her off at the same time. He fixed it up with Donni to make it look like a snatch and he’d split the payoff with her and start travel­ing. Donni was going to split her half with us for making it look good. It wasn’t the kind of thing Gorgeous usually got into, but it looked like money for nothing, so he sent for the old gang and we did it.” “Only it didn’t come off that way. What happened?” “I don’t know. Honest. The same night after you and me go around in the street, Gorgeous calls me in and says there’s a big change of plans. I seen Donni leaving, so I know where the change came from. Anyway, he told me 1 had to go out where the kid was hid out and turn it into the real thing. And when the payoff came through, we was supposed to be a whole lot better off than with the old plan. We was going to leave the kid twisting in the wind.”

  “Uhm.” I thought a moment. “What about Donni’s cut of the fatter pot?”

  “We got that whole wad. All the kid’s share.” Something told me Donni Pell had gotten her share somewhere else.

  “So that’s that? You just went out, got the money, and headed north?” My tone warned him. “No. You know that, don’t you?” “You had to kill a girl to get that extra chunk.” “Gorgeous said it had to be done. I didn’t like it.” “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Look, no matter what you do, I’m going to tell you that a lot. Because I don’t know. I wasn’t his partner. Gorgeous told me to do things and I did them and he paid me good. And part of what he paid me for was not asking questions. You want to know who wanted something done and why, you got to find Donni Pell and ask her.”

  “What you say is probably true, but you have eyes and ears and a brain. You saw things and heard things and you thought about them. Why do you think the girl had to die?”

  “Maybe she knew too much about something. She knew the kidnap was a fake because she was supposed to run off with the kid and the money. Maybe she found out the fake turned real. Maybe she just did something to make Donni want to get her. Maybe it was just because she was set to take the frame for the kidnapping and Gorgeous didn’t want her turning up saying it wasn’t so. I know we was supposed to make her disappear forever. Only when we showed up to do it she had some son of a bitch with her and he turned out to be a goddamned one-man army. And by the time we got him down, there was traffic coming and we had to throw them in the bushes and make it look like nothing happened. When we got back, we found out that big ape wasn’t dead at all. He’d grabbed the girl and took off through the woods. I never thought he’d get far, cut like he was. And he left us with a lot of cleaning up to —”

  “That’s enough of that. Tell me about the payoff. Where. When. How.”

  “On the Chamberton Old Road four miles south of where it runs into the Vokuta-Lichfield road, just north of the bridge over Little Cedar Creek. Set for midnight the night before what we was just talking about, but the delivery was two hours late. I guess Gorgeous wasn’t pissed because he never complained.”

  I didn’t know the place. On the map the Chamberton Old Coach Road cuts up through woody hill country four miles west of the route I’d taken when I’d gone out to explore. “Why that spot?”

  “The road runs straight for a mile either way from the bridge. There’s never any traffic at night, but if there was, you’d spot it coming in plenty of time. And you can look off northeast and see the ridge the Lichfield road runs on. I was up there to watch in case there was any tricks. I was supposed to light one signal flare if everything was all right and two if it wasn’t.”

  “Did you expect trouble?”

  “No. We had them by the short hairs. But you don’t take chances with those people.”

  “And the delivery was late?”

  “Yeah. But I guess that was just because the damnfool woman didn’t know what she was doing. Any idiot should know a covered wagon with a four-horse team won’t make time like a buggy or carriage.”

  Oh? “You weren’t there for the actual payoff, then?”

  “No. But Gorgeous said it went down exactly the way it was supposed to.”

  “Which was?”

  “The wagon came down and stopped in the road. Gorgeous and Donni had their coaches off to the side. Gorgeous and Donni had their drivers transfer the mon­eybags, half and half. The woman and her wagon headed on south. Donni stayed put for an hour, then headed south too. Gorgeous came up where I was and gave me my cut and enough to pay off the boys so they could go home after the business in the morning. We didn’t want them coming to TunFaire, getting drunk, and shooting their mouths off.”

  “They knew what was happening?”

  “Not the payoff. But they were in on a killing.”

  “There was no concern about just following the woman?”

  “She wasn’t told what to do about going back till she turned over the ransom.”

  “I see.” Not very bright, this Skredli. “She didn’t have anything to say when she didn’t get the kid after the payoff?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she did. Gorgeous never said.”


  “I guess you came out pretty good on the deal person­ally, eh?”

  “Yeah. Look at me. Living like a lord. Yeah. I got my usual ten percent of Gorgeous’s fifty percent. A big hit to you, maybe, but I did better on the warehouse business, even if it took longer to come in.”

  “You stripped the warehouse, then?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t think it was smart, but Gorgeous said we already had such a big investment we might as well finish it off.”

  “Uhm.” I began to pace, to think. We’d been at it a long time. He’d given me a lot to think about. We were almost there, but I needed that moment to reflect, to reorder my forces.

  “Where is Donni Pell, Skredli?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She was there when we came after you, wasn’t she?”

  He nodded.

  “And she ran out behind us and went for help.”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s going to be interesting, finding out who called out the troops. That was a stupid mistake. Very stupid. Panic thinking. Raver Styx will have his hide. Where’s Donni Pell?”

  “How many times I got to tell you I don’t know? If she’s got the sense of a cockroach, she’s done got her butt out of TunFaire.”

  “If she had that much sense, she would have headed out of town as soon as she had her share of the money. She seems to have a certain low cunning, an ability to manipulate men, and complete confidence in her invul­nerability, but no brains. I’ll take your word. You don’t know where she is. But where might she run? Who would hide her?”

  Skredli shrugged. “One of her Johns, maybe.”

  I’d had that thought already. I suspected Skredli was mined out on the subject. And he was relaxed enough for the next stage.

  “Why did the Stormwarden’s kid have to be killed?”

  “Huh? Killed? I heard he committed suicide.”

  “We’re getting along fine, Skredli. I’m starting to feel kindly toward you. Don’t blow your chance. I know you and Gorgeous and Donni and somebody were in and out of the room where he died. And I knew him well enough to know he couldn’t kill himself that way — if he could ever find guts enough to kill himself at all. I figure you used the choke sack on him and Gorgeous cut him him­self. I think Donni — but what I think doesn’t matter. The thing I can’t figure is why he went within a mile of that woman after what she did to him.”