Jeff Sherratt - The Brimstone Murders

I raced to the courtroom door, grabbed the handle, then stopped. Robbie had a gun. He might be laying in wait for me. He could be lurking just outside in the hall, waiting for me to blindly follow him. I tossed a quick look back at the deputy.

“Get going,” he shouted, as he struggled to his feet. “Follow him, but don’t get shot.”

Yanking the door open, I stuck my head around the edge of the wall, ready to jerk it back at the first sight of a gun barrel pointed in my direction. Down the hall, I saw the stairwell door at the far end slam shut.

“I’m going for help,” I heard the deputy shout behind me. “We’ll have to block the building’s entrances. It’s your fault, goddammit.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said more to myself than to the deputy as I shot though the doorway and made a beeline for the stairwell.

Pausing cautiously for a second, I pulled on the stairwell door. Again, Robbie could be waiting, ready to send a Doubting Thomas like me to meet his maker. But I could wait no longer. I slipped tentatively through the opening, pressing my body tight against the cold, hard wall.

“Robbie, it’s me. I want to help you.” I waited and listened, but heard only the sound of my heart thumping in my chest. “Anybody in here?”

There was no response, just my voice echoing off the concrete walls, bouncing up and down the stairwell.

I had to find him, and I had to find him fast.

Closer to the steps, I quietly listened again. I heard no sound, no running footsteps on the stairs, nothing. He could have dashed to the next floor and charged out into the hallway there. He could be running around flashing the gun, scaring the hell out of everyone, or… he could have shot someone by now. There were a lot of heathens to choose from in the Criminal Courts Building, and I didn’t just mean the lawyers.

If he went up, he couldn’t get out of the building. The cops would catch him sooner or later. I bolted down the steps, three at a time.

I exited on the second floor, ran into the hall and took a quick look in both directions. Everything seemed normal. People going on about their business, no crazed gunman terrorizing the citizens.

After charging down the next flights of stairs and running out into the hall, I stopped for an instant to catch my breath. I was on the ground floor, and again I glanced in all directions-no luck, he wasn’t there.

Then I ducked into the snack bar and asked several people if they had seen a guy wearing jailhouse whites. Nobody had. Damn, I mumbled and continued roaming the marble lined lobby. I asked an elderly lady, who had just emerged from one of the restrooms, if she saw Robbie. The woman had a feather boa wrapped around her neck, partially obscuring the undulating folds of flesh drooping there. With her elbows flapping, she gave me a haughty look and kept on walking, feathers flying.

I heard a man’s raspy voice coming from somewhere down the main corridor. “Hey, buddy, you lookin’ for the dude in the white outfit?”

I turned around. Nobody was there.

“Psst, over here.”

I turned again and saw a guy wearing dark glasses. He held a white cane while leaning against the wall. A tin pail rested at his feet. “Yeah, that’s right, me. Over here, Jake,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

“Do you know something?” I didn’t ask if he saw Robbie.

“Costya a buck.”

“For what?”

“I saw him. The escaped con.”

“You saw him?”

“Sometimes I can see,” he said.

“Nobody else saw him,” I said.

“The good citizens thought he was a janitor. Ya’know, wearing the white coveralls. People don’t notice guys like that. Just ’cause he had L.A. County Jail plastered in big letters on his back don’t mean he mops up the jail.”

“For chrissakes. Where’d he go?”

“Costya a buck,” the blind pretender said again, louder.

I ripped a dollar bill from my wallet. “Okay already, here’s a buck,” I said, flinging the bill into his pail. “Now what about my guy?”

“He charged out of the stairway door,” he said with his boney finger pointing at the stairwell. “Then, he looked around for a couple of seconds, you know, like he didn’t know what to do…” his voice trailed off. He stared straight ahead, his eyes hidden behind his dark glasses.

“Go on. Then what?”

“Costya a buck,” he said, running the words together in a well-practiced manner.

“Christ, am I going to get this on the installment plan?” I gave him another dollar. “Now tell me where he went.”

“He went to the glass doors in front, waited a moment or two, then ran outside and waited on the steps. I followed him…”

I turned and started for the front doors.

“He ain’t there now. He’s gone,” the beggar said to my back.

I turned around. “Yeah, then where is he?”

“Costya a buck.”

I grabbed the guy by his T-shirt. “Dammit, tell me where he went.” I glanced around. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so rough. People were giving me dirty looks. That’s right, folks, I’m Jimmy O’Brien, a lawyer, and I’m beating up a blind guy.

I let go, reached into my wallet, pulled out a five and gave it to him. “Now, I want the whole story, okay.”

“Hey, Clyde, not so rough. Guy’s gotta make a living, y’know,” he said, his face all scrunched up.

“Yeah, maybe so.” I felt a touch of remorse for being a bit hostile. “Now, c’mon, where is he?”

The guy lowered his glasses about a half-inch with the tip of his right index finger. He gave me a squinty-eyed look up from under his stringy, bent eyebrows. “You’re not a cop. I can tell. Your shoes aren’t shined.”

I glanced down. He was right. “C’mon, guy…”

“Hey, I know,” he said. “You and the con are working together. Is that it? You let him take off. What happen, he run out without coughing up the dinero?”

“No, goddammit, it is nothing like that,” I said. “Now tell me where he went.”

“Okay, Mac, okay. He waited outside for about five seconds. All at once, a black Ford passenger van zooms up to the curb. Then the wrecking crew jumps out…”

“Wrecking crew?” I asked.

“Yeah, broken-noses in suits.” He pushed his nose to one side. “Ya’know, leg breakers.”

“Hired thugs?”

“Yeah, two big guys. Well, anyhow, your boy sees them,” he said, pulling off his dark glasses and polishing the lenses with the end of his T-shirt. “I think he knew who they were. Then the suits rushed up and hustled him to the panel truck. They shoved him in the back seat and split.” He put the glasses back on and glanced around, nodding.

“My God, you mean the guys in the suits kidnapped him?”

“Nah, I wouldn’t say that. He didn’t put up no fight or nothin’, he just went with them.”

I had to think. Could the guys in the black van be helping Robbie escape? Could this be a setup? If it was, then it had to be planned out in advance, and that could mean Robbie wasn’t crazy after all. His holy-roller routine could have been an act.

“You didn’t see the thugs pull out weapons, or anything?” I asked.

“Didn’t see no guns, no strong-arm stuff.”

“Did you get the license plate?”

“Nah, it was too far away.”

I rushed out the main door and down the steps and stopped at the curb.

Wait a minute. Have I just been taken?

In the harsh sunlight, the story told by a swindler, a guy as genuine as a Tijuana Rolex, about Robbie being snatched and hauled away in a black van seemed utterly bizarre, like a bad movie. And I fell for it. Cost me seven bucks. But still, as illogical as it seemed, I looked up and down Grand Avenue several times. There were no black vans in sight.