Long Fall from Heaven. George Wier
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be it.”
The man winked. “I feel exactly the same way. How about bringing me up a bottle of good Canadian whiskey and some ice?”
“Sure ‘nough.”
“I’ll be in the bath. Just set it on the table and we’ll settle up tomorrow. Will that do?”
“Right as rain.”
“You’re a good lad, Mr. Blessing,” he said with a hearty laugh. “May your life be long and prosperous.”
• • •
He dressed with care, donning one of his white dress shirts, a tie of mottled gold and burgundy, and a dark blue double-breasted suit of all-weight worsted wool pinstripe. He turned off all the lights except for one small table lamp and sat beside it enjoying a whiskey over ice. At precisely eight he arose and left the room. Down in the lobby he paused for a moment to take a single white carnation from the bouquet on the grand piano. Out in the street he threaded the carnation’s stem into his lapel. He crossed the street.
An older couple came up to the door of the catwalk just as he approached. He swept the door open for them and stood to one side. As they entered, they smiled gratefully and nodded their thanks. What they saw was a tall, slim, handsome man with brown hair, a shy smile, and a diffident manner, which was exactly what he wanted them to see.
Before he followed, he took one last deep breath of the cool air, relishing the salty, earthy odor of the island. He looked around him. Far out on the Gulf, hundreds of lights glittered where vessels from half the nations of the earth stretched to the horizon, riding the swells, each awaiting its entry to the Houston ship channel. Heavy cars whisked up and down the street, stopping to let out their richly dressed passengers at the casinos and nightclubs that dotted the seawall. The soft strains of Shaw’s Begin the Beguine drifted out above a moonlit beach while palm trees rustled softly in the gentle breeze. Could there be a more glamorous time and place? He thought not. The whole world was mad with war, and the night was alive with promise. He might have a few glasses of champagne. He might strike up an interesting conversation. He might even come across an alluring young woman who wanted to dance. He might...
He smiled happily and walked down the catwalk toward the famed Balinese Room.
[ 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.
[ 8 ]
After standing in on a night shift for Rusty Taylor—who, as Micah had predicted, spent an entire day at the Galveston police station and needed his rest—Micah took a drive down to the seawall in the company truck. It was six and the sun was a golden ball suspended over the Gulf. There was no traffic. It was his favorite time of day. He stopped in for breakfast at a little diner called Nell’s only to find a message waiting for him. He crossed the street and went down one of the narrow stairways to the beach.
He shucked his boots, cut across the sand with them over his shoulder, got to the edge of the surf and started walking east. Bits of detritus—sand dollars, small shells, driftwood—littered the beach. Micah walked until he found Homer Underwood. Homer was a beachcomber and an alcoholic. He was probably a drug addict to boot, but Micah loved the crusty old son-of-a-bitch.
“Hey, Homer. I got a message that you needed to see me. Let me buy you breakfast.”
“Ahhh! Micah! You can just give me a fiver. I’ll get my own breakfast