The Broken Doll

Jack Webb

• Publisher: Prologue Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781440541469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

Million dollar heiress is kidnapped by an unusual pair—a blonde and aex-con—who demand ransom or they will make sure death strikes their victim!Electrifying, terrifying, spine-tingling, Red-hot mystery thriller by the incomparable Jack Webb, author of the best-selling mysteries The Big Sin, The Naked Angel, and The Damned Lovely.

Her skin was like the dusky Virgin’s at Tepeyac and she had eyes as softly dark as the glove-gray dove’s. Her name was Teresa Bienvenida, and she had been playing with three small dolls in the shade of a pepper tree before the one-story frame house of her father, Pablo, when the “snatch” was made.

The men who stole her wanted a quarter-of-a-million dollars.

In the 1952 green Oldsmobile sedan with the two kidnapers was a blonde woman. Solid of flesh, brassy, close to forty. Handsome in that hard-polished, tightly drawn fashion, she had been a dancer once, and, like a professional athlete, she didn’t dare let herself go. The intended ransom, like the man called Harry, was for the woman, the very last of the stuff from which dreams are made. Her name was Dolly, but no one had put the “y” on it for a long time. Too long a time if you were to ask her.

Call her Doll.

The driver of the car was Frankie Ortega.

The snatch was made at four thirty o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday, the nineteenth of August. The temperature out in the Royal Heights area was eighty-eight, and the smog was enough to make you weep. Nobody was on the street, and most of the blinds, tattered against sunburned, flimsy curtains, were pulled to cut down the murky, unpleasant glare. All of these things were on the side of Harry and Doll and Frankie Ortega when they chose to deal the first hand.

The same four thirty o’clock in the afternoon, Teresa’s father, Pablo Bienvenida, was in the Do-Drop-Inn just five-and-one-half miles from his home on Napoleon. The fact that he was there was due to the cunning and initiative of the individual who sat across from him in the corner booth and who, in the half-light of the shabby little neighborhood bar, looked more like a brooding, unhappy brown vulture than he did like a human being.

Tom Meigs had started his newspaper work in Chicago three years after “Mademoiselle from Armentières” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning” stopped racking them up on the turntables and the top disk jockey in this fair land was a black and white fox terrier with a perceptive ear cocked toward his master’s voice. Now a top-flight editor on the Harmon chain, Meigs still couldn’t believe in the new era where reporters shared and shared alike, whether the handouts came from the President of the United States or the head of a gambling syndicate. So, with the biggest human interest story of the year having broken in this morning’s editions, Meigs had the subject of that story half full of brandy and cornered in a bar far enough from homebase to keep the story exclusive with the Times-Herald.

Pablo Bienvenida was a fat man with warm, friendly eyes and a shock of black, unruly hair. Now that he was over the astonishment of drinking on the afternoon of a normal working day, he chuckled and said, “I tell you, even after a year of waiting, of knowing, I cannot believe it. How would it look in silver dollars? All in one pile in my backyard? For Teresa to play in like a sandpile.” He roared with laughter at the picture he had made. “A pile of silver dollars greater than a mountain!” He shook his full-moon head, unbelieving.

Meigs grinned. “According to our financial editor, even after taxes, you’re going to start with a million and a quarter.”

The big man showed a dozen strong white animal teeth. “A million dollars and one lousy two-bits. That, my friend, I give to you, the lousy two-bits.”

“Wish you would.” Meigs’s grin expanded. “The quarter to which I was referring is a quarter of a million, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand bucks. If that’s the quarter you want to give me, I accept it.”

“Wow!” said Pablo Bienvenida. “No, excuse it, please, that two-bits I keep for Teresa.”

The amused grin on the newsman’s face turned into a smile. “You’re pretty crazy about your daughter.”

“Crazy?” Pablo leaned across the table and caught Meigs’s wrist in a callused hand. “Listen, my friend, she is my sun and my moon, a saint and an angel. This I ask you, why do you think no other woman has been in my house since her mother died? A woman who might be nice to Pablo. A common woman. Bah! Such a woman for my daughter to see, maybe to want to be like with too much paint on the face, too much movement with the hips, too much cheap jewelry in the ears. Never! Nunca, nunca, nunca!”

Pablo released his wrist and Meigs was surprised how painful the grip had grown. He changed the subject. “This land that was your brother’s, how did he get it?” While he was speaking, Meigs raised his arm and signaled the bartender. This Bienvenida was a natural, a widower wrapped up in a single child, a produce grocer from a Market-Day supermarket who had inherited more than a million bucks from a brother he admittedly hadn’t seen in twenty years. This was the big dream, the uncle from Australia, the something-for-nothing dream, the kind of story that could boost circulation for a week or more if it was properly milked.

“My brother, Enrique,” Pablo began, “was crazy. Not like you say about the way I feel for Teresa, but crazy with an idea. You see, Enrique wanted land. More than money, more than wife and family, more maybe even than heaven, he wanted land. For twenty-five years, he worked for a Mr. Flake in Texas. Not for wages. For board and keep, and each year a piece of land. In his own name, he was going to have a ranch. His own ranch. His own cattle. No gringo for a boss. No gringo cattle to work for someone else. He even had made his own brand, hammered and forged it for himself. From our own name, Mr. Meigs, bien venida. Do you know what that means?”

The newspaperman shook his head.

“It is not easy to say exactly.” Pablo shrugged. “A good coming. No, there is a better word. A good arrival. That is it more nearly. So he made a brand in the shape of a sail. A square sail on a tall mast. The mast of such a ship as brought our people here a long time ago when they came as conquerors.” Pablo paused and sighed, accepting the fresh drink the barkeep had delivered. “It did not matter to Enrique that this Mr. Flake was giving him no-good land, lean land. It was the acres that counted. He wanted a big ranch, a great ranch. Farther than a man could see from the top of a hill. He was a dreamer, my brother.”

“That was crazy?” Meigs glanced up from his scribbled notes.

“I have not made myself clear.” Pablo frowned. “All this land, bad land. Mesquite, cactus, rattlesnakes and jackrabbits. What could he hope to do with such a land?”

“Oil,” Meigs said softly. “A million in oil. More to come. No end to your money. Not till the wells run dry.”

Once again, Pablo sighed. “That was not his luck, Mr. Meigs. Not even his dream. That was my luck. When the oil came, his luck was finished. He died. Forty-six years old. A young man with an old heart.” Pablo snapped his fingers. “Dead, like that.”

“How’s your heart?” Meigs wanted to know.

“Mine?” Pablo laughed and thumped his chest hard. “Don’t forget,” he said, “I have Teresa to keep my heart good.”

The green sedan was away from Royal Heights and on one of the west roads to the beach. Behind the wheel, the shoulders of Frankie Ortega sloped more easy than they had during the first tense twenty minutes. He was still scared, damned scared, but he had confidence in Harry. And he, too, had the dream, the big dream, as stereotyped for him as a class-B movie with lush, exotic setting and bevies of tawny, supple girls, not all together, but one at a time, until he was tired of them, one after the other. The long run, the total escape, the short life and the merry one. Not only generals died in bed; Frankie had some ideas along that line himself. Nor would it be a long time between drinks.

Doll said, “That gag, Harry, it’s hurting the kid.” She was staring at the quiet figure on the floor, crowding their feet, seeing the pain and the silent tears.

“She’ll live,” Harry growled. “This ain’t no picnic.” He had stopped looking over his shoulder now and was staring straight ahead. He did not look at the child, saying instead to Frankie, “We’ll paint the car tonight and change the plates. You got the paint?”

The driver nodded. “Black like you ...