Dead Low Tide, page 13
She looked at me almost triumphantly and bounced up and down a little on the couch. “Do you know who the man was? The one who was here for about ten minutes?”
“Well, I certainly hope it was the same one who’s been coming to see her, even if he is strange acting.”
“What does he look like?”
“Now, it’s funny, but I never have got a real good look at him. Not to talk to. I’d say he’s about as tall as you. With a soft voice. And he wears a hat, and you don’t see so many young men wearing hats down here. And he has kind of—well, a kind of poor look. Run-down-at-the-heels kind of look. But I swear I never had a real good chance to stare him right in the face.”
“Did he come here in a car?”
“Now, you know, that’s the same thing that policeman kept asking me. I know he came in a car a couple of times, and I know that once it was a little black shiny car with a cloth top, and it looked new, but it still had a sort of old-fashioned look. You know, with those wire wheels and all. And he came in another car usually, that looked more like him.”
“Like him?”
“A sort of gray dusty kind of thing, the kind of car you wouldn’t look at twice. I know I didn’t.”
“That’s all you could tell the police about him.”
“That’s every word of it, young man.”
“Miss Kenney was trying to get another job while she was working at the restaurant?”
“Yes, but you know, that’s a funny thing. That agency man, he’d keep calling her up and he’d have a job for her, but she just wasn’t interested at all, until this chance to work for Mr. Long came along. Then she seemed excited and upset about getting the job. Nervous, like. I suppose she was out of practice. It gave me the shivers to see them taking her out of here. My goodness, her face was empty as a bed sheet. She’d halfway walk when they pushed on her a little. I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor thing, taken sick that way, even if I was all set in my mind to ask her to look for another room. I pick up the rooms myself, and it’s no pleasure to have to clean up after a body who leaves sand and sand spurs on my hooked rug, and his pants cuffs and shoes always wet like he had to wade to get here, so he dripped, and mud caking off his shoes. I swear to Betsy, that man must live in a swamp. And I must say, it surprised me to see that nice Miss Hollowell coming to see Joy Kenney. Joy!” She sniffed. “Funny idea to name a girl that.” She leaned forward. “But, then again, I understand that Miss Hallowell is divorced. She can’t be any better than she has to be either. How does she get away calling herself Miss?”
“She’s dead. They took her out of the bay this morning.”
She leaned back on the couch, her eyes wide. “And me, with the radio turned off all day long because it just seemed too hot to listen! Oh, the poor, poor dear! How in the world did it happen?”
I stood up. “Somebody strangled her and threw her in.”
“My goodness to Betsy, it’s getting terrible around here. And I’ve been after him and after him to fix that lock on the back door. Why, if this keeps up, a body won’t be safe walking the streets!”
All of a sudden I had to get out of the hot musty room, away from her little sharp fox eyes, away from her slightly sickly innuendoes.
“Thank you for the information.”
“That’s perfectly all right, and if you can, young man, you find out what in the world I’m supposed to do with Miss Kenney’s things. I don’t want her back here. Do you think it would be all right to pack them up in her suitcases? Then I could rent the room out. It’s never any trouble to rent a room when you keep a nice clean house with everything spick and span.”
“You better use your own judgment on that.”
Before I reached the porch steps, she closed the front door, and I heard the lock snap. I got into the car and looked at the house and saw her going from window to window, fiddling with the latches.
The local hospital is inadequate. It seems as if everybody and his brother have been moving to Florida and bringing the kids. It’s getting so you have to line up for everything. Schools, roads, lunch, room to fish off a bridge. It shocks you a little when you go inland about five miles and find it looking as though Señor de Leon hadn’t taken his trip yet.
I hung around the front desk after being told, in chilly fashion, that Dr. Graman was inside, and that Miss Kenney was a patient. We’ve made quite a deal out of sickness and death. Now they’re something that comes with a rustle of starch, a quick needle in the arm, a brisk smell of disinfectant, and hushed voices. And if you discourage everybody by dying, then you get a big party, with bronze handles and organ music and lavender delivery trucks from the florists. But the hole they drop you in seems to be just as deep. And you are no more aware of the ceremony than was your remote ancestor—the one they had to drag farther away from the cave after a while.
Thinking of death was like drilling a raw nerve. Goodby to my girl. And I stood there with the reliable heart sucking and pumping the warm red blood, the little valves working like IBM, the temperature control system supplying just enough surface evaporation to keep the organism right to a tenth of a degree, all the glands and ducts adding their two bits to the process on automatic request. The machine was working dandy, and my girl’s machine had quit. I stood there oxygenating my blood stream, rebuilding tissues, picking up images through the wet eye lenses, burning stored calories, catching sounds on the taut ear diaphragms, and my girl had gone out of business. Out of the business of living. A lot of cheap sea gulls and cut-rate pelicans and shoddy Pekinese and second-grade human beings were still warm and functioning, but my Christy was flaccid and cold and unaware. I thought there’d better be that golden street and those golden slippers. They went with the bearded God of childhood, but they better be there. There better be that sweet chariot, and a gate and a book they could look her up in and say come in. Maybe she’d sit in the anteroom, and say, “Thanks. I’m just waiting.”
Graman came striding busy-like down the hall and when he saw me a look of mild distaste clouded his pretty face. “Oh, hello there.”
“How is she, Doctor?”
“Completely unresponsive. I tried adrenalin. That will sometimes break the catatonic state when it is the result of emotional shock. I thought for a time it would work. She however merely spoke irrationally for a few seconds and then lapsed back. Dr. Vayse will look in later tonight. It’s more in his line. I’m not even positive of diagnosis, much less prognosis, McClintock.”
“What did she say when she was irrational?”
He stared at me. “Why? Nothing of importance, certainly. Something about a barn and a kitten. They often revert to childhood.”
“Doctor, it might be important. Can you repeat it?”
“Really; I—”
“Please.”
He sighed. “Something like this: ‘You see, I knew kitty had to be in the barn. He liked it there. He always went there. That’s why I looked there first, and he hadn’t even covered her up. She should have been covered up. Shouldn’t she have been covered up? It was just a little thing to do that.’ Does that satisfy you?”
“That’s all she said?”
“You’ll have to forgive me, McClintock. I have other patients.” He went over and moved the wooden peg beside his name to show that he wasn’t in the hospital, and walked out into the night.
After a time I followed him. I was a big operator. I stood by my car wondering what to do next. I was real shrewd. Two women to talk to, and both of them had slid out of reach—one had gone down the greased skid called bourbon, and the other had fallen off some personal precipice. It brought me back to the only tangible thing I had—those pictures. I sat in the car and took the feeble flashlight from the glove compartment and studied them carefully, one by one, looking this time at the setting rather than the characters. It gave me one corner of a night stand, a bit of wall that seemed to be plaster, a small hunk of lamp shade. The man wore a wristwatch. It was quite clear in one picture. Clear enough so a jeweler could tell the make. I put them back in the envelope and sat in the dark and smoked.
Thirteen
AFTER WHAT SEEMED to be a long time, my brain began to work in a slightly more logical fashion. The pictures had been taken for a purpose. That purpose was undoubtedly profit. It would do no good to try to squeeze money out of John Long with any threat to show the pictures to the wrong people. But the complete set, or even any one of them, was a wonderful crowbar with which to extract funds from Mary Eleanor. A shrewd operator would give her one set of prints, as food for thought. Mary Eleanor had foolishly let the pictures get away from her. Keeping them was perhaps an evidence of her disease.
O.K. so far. Now then, Mary Eleanor had certainly been in no doubt as to the identity of her partner. So what would be served by the blackmailer’s cutting the partner’s face out of the pictures? That didn’t make sense. It didn’t make a bit of sense. And it didn’t make any sense to think of Mary Eleanor cutting those heads out of the pictures. She wouldn’t want to put them in lockets.
I began to feel a faint surge of excitement. O.K. I’m John Long. Maybe I’ve had a vague idea for some time that friend wife is a shade on the tramp side. She takes too many trips alone. I’m not the sort of guy who would catch on very fast, but I’ve begun to have my doubts. So I keep my eyes open. And I sort of poke around when I get a chance. Maybe the next time she goes away, I really give her room a good search. She had the pictures hidden well, but I found them. And I sat on the bed and I looked at my wife and I put the pictures down carefully and went in the bathroom and threw up and came back and looked at them some more. She was away, and it was a good thing because if she had been handy I would have killed her with my hands right then and there. But I am the kind of guy who goes at things doggedly and thoroughly. It took me a lot of years to get around to doing Key Estates, and I made myself wait until I could do it well. I sat and looked at the pictures of the thing I had called wife. And I looked at the man. I had never seen him before. That bothered me. And it meant he was probably from out of town. I wondered whether to put the pictures back where I had found them, and wait. But that meant I might never get my hands on him. So I went over to the bureau and took her scissors and cut the heads out of the pictures. His head. I’ve got too much pride to show the whole picture around. These were mailed from Miami. I can take these crudely cut out heads and I can send them to a firm of private investigators in Miami and I can ask them to find out who the man is—and where he is. But that means I can’t leave the mutilated pictures here. So I’ll take them and lock them in my desk at the office. Let her look for them and sweat. I’m over my first anger and outrage now, and I can wait, and in my own good time I’ll kill them both quite dead because of what looking at these pictures has just done to me.
It made very good sense to me, as I sat there in the car. Take it another step. John Long had found out who the man was, and where he was. And, having found him, and having quietly investigated his own legal status, he found himself caught right in the middle. If he went ahead, he would be put out of circulation and Key Estates would come to a standstill. And Key Estates had been his baby. Yet, it would take a long time to finish it off, and during that time he had to live with the diseased soul-sick wife-thing. Then up steps that young McClintock, and John Long cussed himself for not having seen earlier how it could be handled so that both the things he had to do were accomplished. First I had thought he was sick and going to die. Next I had thought somebody was going to kill him and he knew it. The third and inevitable answer was that he was going to kill somebody else—and that act would take him out of circulation just as certainly as his own death.
The device of trying to put myself inside his mind had worked so well that I decided to try Mary Eleanor’s.
O.K. I am an insatiable tramp. I don’t care what I do or with whom. I was having a fine and dandy time, and then—Joe trapped me. I don’t know how the damn pictures were taken, but they were taken and there’s no mistake about that. It is certainly hideous to see yourself like I am in those pictures. I thought he was kidding, and I laughed at him when he said he had pictures. Then he sent me a set, right through the mail. First I wanted to kill myself, and then I wanted to kill him, and then I knew that he’d grabbed me and I couldn’t get out of it and I had to do just what he told me to do, or, like he said, my dull husband would get a complete set in the mail. And that would be a death sentence. John is slow and stolid, but he has so much pride he would have to kill me to get himself halfway clean again if he ever saw those pictures.
I should have thrown them away, burned them. I know that now. God knows why I kept them around. They were safe, I thought. I guess I liked the danger of having them around. And every few weeks, I’d take them out and look at them again. Once I got over the first nasty impression, I found that it could get me sort of excited, looking at them, so I kept them around.
And then I came home and found they were gone. I was frantic. I wanted to pack up and run. Then I thought maybe the maid had found them. It was a slim chance. But John acted queer—damn queer. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t touch me. So I knew he had them. I knew he had looked at them and I could almost guess what it had done to him. I was horribly frightened of what he would do, and the weeks went by and he didn’t do anything, and I began to get my courage back, thinking that maybe he would never do anything. Then I guessed that he must be trying to find out who Joe is. And the envelope being mailed from Miami and all.
I told Joe about it, and he was angry. He said I should have burned them. John acted so strange. I talked McClintock into finding out what John was thinking. I thought John might give him a hint. I couldn’t understand his doing nothing. And then Andy McClintock told me what John had said. He didn’t know what it meant. I did. It meant he knew who Joe was, meant that he had made up that slow ponderous mind of his, meant that now he was ready, or would soon be ready, to kill us. As soon as McClintock was trained. There was no one to turn to. No one but Joe. I told him right away. He questioned me. He asked me about McClintock. I didn’t know what he was planning. He took that spear thing from McClintock’s house. I don’t know how he got John to meet him out there at Key Estates, or how he managed to surprise him. It was all like a game, somehow. And it didn’t hit me until I heard the words, until I heard Andy say John was dead. He came to me, Joe did, after Andy was arrested. He told me that I had to lie, that I had to protect myself, because I was involved too. And I asked Andy to get the pictures. Where are the pictures? Who has them? Who has looked at them and found out what I am? I can’t help it. I never could help it. But who knows? I wish John were alive. I want him back, now. There is nothing left to do but chase it out of my mind. With bourbon. Stop thinking and feeling and living for a while.
There were still a lot of holes, but it had form now.
I called the mystery man Joe. It made it simpler. He had gone to Taylor Street once in a car that had to be Mary Eleanor’s. It had to be the same man. That made Joy Kenney an accomplice. Two harpies. They’d found a couple to feed on—the Longs. Emotional shock. She hadn’t wanted him to go that far—not as far as murder. She had lucked her way into a job in John’s office. Moving in close to where the money is. I understood more of her tension and her nervousness.
Joe. Man without a head. Shabby, soft-voiced, wearing a hat. Damp pants cuffs and shoes. Sand and sand spurs. An anonymous automobile.
Why shabby? Why anonymous? Hadn’t he made Mary Eleanor pay off?
And that one question gave me a place to go, and gave me something to do.
Harvey Constanto is a pallid, formless, drifting kind of man. He is the kind you put on obscure committees where the real work is done. Nobody ever slaps his shoulder, and if he hears a dirty joke, it is because he is drifting around the fringe of a group that happens to be exchanging same. His smile is uncertain, his manner half apologetic. It is inconceivable that he could have ever wooed and won his brown, loud, boisterous, flirtatious, popular wife, much less bed her down. Yet there are three handsome healthy teenage kids with Harvey’s unmistakable sharp nose. It is insane to think of Harvey being aggressive, yet he started with nothing, and now owns heavy swatches of the best Gulf-front property.
When I rang their bell, Harvey came and peered at me through the screen in his lean near-sighted way, and said, “Oh, Mr. McClintock. How do you do. Won’t you come in? Ah—please come in, won’t you?”
“Thanks.”
