Ross Thomas: No Questions Asked

I passed Moby’s Dock and kept on walking. When I reached the place where the pier poked out over the ocean I stopped and looked around. All that I could see was a lot of rain. I took the heavy fishing line from my pocket and looked at my watch. It was one minute until three. I counted slowly to sixty, tied one end of the fishing line around a white handkerchief, and then lowered it over the side of the pier. I kept on lowering it until I felt a tug. From the way that the line jerked I thought I could feel someone tying something to the other end of the line. Finally, there was another hard jerk and I started hauling the line back up. There was something on the end of it, something that weighed at least forty pounds.

I hauled the line all the way up. It was tied around a heavy green plastic garbage bag. I untied the line and used the flashlight to look inside the bag. Inside was the Pliny. I bent down and tied the line around the handle of the cheap attaché case, and started lowering the case over the side. When there was another sharp tug, I stopped lowering it.

I waited a moment, leaned over the metal railing, and switched the flashlight on. A white face looked up at me through the rain. The white face belonged to someone who was crouched over in a small boat. A skiff. Next to the crouching someone was the open attaché case. The money was being counted. It was also getting rained on. The mouth in the white face opened as if it wanted to say something, but I switched off the flashlight, and started hurrying away toward the entrance to the pier. I had seen enough. I had recognized the white face. It had belonged to a woman and the woman was Virginia Neighbors who had once been secretary and a little more, perhaps a lot more, to the late Jack Marsh.

I had peeked when I shouldn’t have and now I knew for certain who else had been in on the theft of the Pliny with Jack Marsh. It was interesting information and I wanted to get to a phone and tell the police all about where they might find Virginia Neighbors and one hundred thousand dollars in ransom money.

I hurried along the pier, the green garbage bag containing the Pliny in my left hand, my right hand still in the raincoat pocket, wrapped around the butt of the .38 revolver. The rain was falling harder now and it seemed colder as it trickled down the back of my neck.

He stepped out of the rain and the shadows and said, “That’s far enough.”

I stopped. I stopped because of the gun that he held in his big hand. The big hand belonged to Max Spivey. He moved toward me slowly and stretched out his left hand, the one that wasn’t busy with the gun.

“I’ll take the book,” he said.

“It’s not worth much stolen,” I said.

“By tomorrow it won’t be stolen.”

“How’re you going to explain me?”

“You got shot and whoever shot you got away with the money after they turned over the book.”

“She made the calls, didn’t she, all those calls with the funny deep voice?”

“Virginia? Yeah, she made them. With direct dialing you can make all sorts of calls. The book, St. Ives. Just hand it over real slow.”

I moved my left hand back just a bit and then brought it quickly forward in an underhand pitch. I released the garbage bag and it sailed toward Spivey, if forty pounds of book can sail. It wasn’t a hard pitch and Spivey had plenty of time to duck. He ducked down and to the right and pulled the trigger of his pistol and there was that bang and then a kind of a thunk and the garbage bag fell at his feet. In trying to shoot me, Spivey had shot the book instead.

I had no time left so I shot Max Spivey through Jack Marsh’s raincoat pocket. The bullet slammed into his left leg and he stumbled, but he didn’t go down. He pointed his pistol at me again so I decided to shoot him again. I tried to aim at his left leg, but I’m not a very good shot. The second bullet must have gone into his stomach because he dropped his pistol and clutched at his middle and then went down on his knees and looked up at me with shock and a lot of disbelief.

“The gun,” he said. “Jesus, it hurts. The gun. I wasn’t counting on you for a gun.”

“No, I guess not,” I said and knelt down beside him.

“You said in Washington — you said you wouldn’t shoot anybody over money.”

“I must have lied,” I said.

Max Spivey looked at me and his mouth worked as if he wanted to say something else. Instead he fell over on his side and drew his legs up and screamed. He kept on screaming as I got up and trotted off into the rain.

At the end of the pier I found a telephone booth and called the police. Then I went down some steps that led to the beach. I walked out on the wet sand toward the ocean. The small boat was drawn up on the sand and two figures were standing by it. One of the figures was dressed all in black. It was Johnny Guerriero in a wet suit. The other figure was Virginia Neighbors. She was standing by the boat, wearing a dark raincoat, and clutching the attaché case.

“How’d it go?” I said to Guerriero.

“Just like you said. When I popped up alongside the boat and pointed the gun at her she almost fainted.”

“You son of a bitch,” Virginia Neighbors said. I wasn’t sure whether she was talking to Guerriero or me.

“We heard some shots,” Guerriero said.

“That was me.”

“Was it Spivey?” Virginia Neighbors said. “Did you shoot Spivey?”

“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t want to, but there wasn’t much choice.”

She stared at me and the rain that streaked her face failed to conceal the bitterness. “He said you wouldn’t use a gun. He said you told him in Washington that you wouldn’t use a gun.”

“I’ll have to tell you what I told him,” I said.

“What?”

“I lied.”

I reached out and took the attaché case from Virginia Neighbors. “Let’s go,” I said. I turned and started back toward the beginning of the pier. In the distance I could hear Max Spivey screaming. He kept on screaming until the ambulance came and took him away.

The chili was dripping all over the detective-lieutenant’s fingers and he was trying to wipe them off with the wax paper and he was making a mess of it.

“The best goddamned hamburgers in town,” he said, “and for napkins they serve wax paper.”

“They are good,” I said, taking another bite of mine.

The detective-lieutenant was Mason Patrika and he had been a friend of Fastnaught’s. I had spent the entire morning, four very unpleasant hours, with the Los Angeles police and at one o’clock Patrika had appeared and offered to buy me the best hamburger in Los Angeles. We were sitting in his car at a drive-in type place called Tommy’s on Beverly Boulevard. We were eating hamburgers and drinking Cokes and Patrika was telling me what the police had found out about Max Spivey.

“We didn’t get anything out of him, you know,” he said.

“So I understand.”

“He screamed and screamed all the way to the hospital and just when he got there he stopped screaming and died. But the woman, what’s her name, Neighbors, yeah, Virginia Neighbors, well, she talked and for all I know, she’s still talking. She said Fastnaught got out here and started digging in pretty good, I mean he was getting close and so Spivey called him and set up a meeting and when Spivey got there, he picked up a bottle of booze and cracked old Fastnaught over the head with it and then used a piece of wire to choke him with, but you say you knew that.”

“It had to be Spivey,” I said. “But I didn’t know who it was at the time.”

“Well, they picked up a print from underneath where you flush the toilet. It was Spivey’s. After he got through choking Fastnaught he must have used the John to piss or maybe throw up in. Who knows? Sometimes they do that, you know, throw up.”