The Fairfax Incident by Terrence McCauley

Author:Terrence McCauley [McCauley, Terrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polis Books
Published: 2018-02-23T16:31:13+00:00

Chapter 14

I’d already seen all I could see at the apartment, so I headed back to my place. Even though I had people gunning for me, I decided to skip the taxi and take my chances with the good citizens of the shantytown that had sprung up in Central Park since the Crash. Most of the poor bastards didn’t have enough money to buy food, much less submachine guns.

Taking a cab would’ve been smarter but I needed air, and even the smell from the smoldering cook fires of Hooverville helped clear my mind.

It helped keep my anger in check.

Because I was damned angry.

Angry because I hated seeing Dr. Blythe lying dead like that. I hated thinking of the way he’d probably died, too. Dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, brought into the study he loved, and probably tortured before he’d died. Maybe it had been a coronary after all, but it wouldn’t have been peaceful.

I didn’t have a shred of evidence to go on, but I figured the same people who’d killed Blythe were probably the same sons of bitches who had tried to kill me in the Fairfax offices. After they’d missed me, they probably made a beeline for the doctor, hoping he would tell them what Fairfax kept in his safe. That meant they must’ve known we’d talked, but I didn’t know how they could’ve known that. I was pretty good at spotting a tail, at least when I knew I was being followed, and I was sure no one had followed me to the club. Blondie had run off into the crowd, but he was lousy at following people. If he, or anyone else, had been watching me, I would’ve known, wouldn’t I?

Wouldn’t I?

That question nagged at me as I walked through the park. Had I missed a tail, just like I hadn’t realized I was being followed until someone took a shot at me? Until I spotted Blondie outside Nat’s? Had I been so soft that I’d led the man’s killers right to his doorstep?

No, I hadn’t. I may have lost a step or two in private service, but I hadn’t slipped up that much. And we had met at Blythe’s club, not his apartment. Hell, I didn’t even know where he lived until Hauser gave me the address.

That meant someone else had done their homework on Blythe. They knew where he lived, and went to his place to get the truth out of him. But I doubted the doctor had even known about the safe. If he’d known about it, he would’ve told me.

Miss Swenson was already feeding them all the information they needed, and hadn’t told them about the safe until that day. Thinking Blythe might be able to tell them about its contents had been a desperate move. An amateur move, but a deadly one just the same.

Until now, I figured they’d played some kind of role in getting Fairfax to kill himself. But Blythe’s death changed all that. Trying to shoot me on the street and killing Blythe showed me these people weren’t afraid to kill.

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