Dead Low Tide (12 page)

“The motive was good.”

“And the performance was unspeakable. Anyway, I’ve now decided, no matter how good you looked for a while, that you are not the pigeon.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Just on this basis. I’m always aware of people. Always watching and thinking and figuring. And, my friend, I come to the semireluctant conclusion that you are just not that stupid. I’m not talking about your ability or lack of ability to kill anybody. In that I am not interested. I merely say that if and when you do, it will be a much more workman-like job. Of course, I
do
have one more point which, to me, is damn near enough to clear you, but it isn’t legal evidence.”

“What’s that?”

“I was privileged to listen to some amateur dramatics this morning. Mary Eleanor applied the clincher. She tearfully told me how you forced your bestial attentions on her, and she is just a little bitty girl, and she submitted to your animal violence. And thereafter you bent her to your will saying you would expose the vile relationship should she strike out for freedom.”

I stared at him. “The hell you say!”

“Oh, yes, indeed. Mary El is fast on her feet when she senses that she might get wound up in something unpleasant. And it was a quick fast way out of a spot where it might look as if she aided and abetted in the demise of hubby. But that routine of hers cleared you in my mind.”

“How?”

“I think that everything that wears pants and travels even close to Mary Eleanor’s group has been aware for lo these many years that she is—Shall we say, eminently and startlingly available. Maybe you and John were the only two guys in town who didn’t know that. She is, ah, classic word, insatiable, irritating, and not cautious enough for my taste, in addition to being constructed a bit like a wire coat hanger. The male contingent, wary of John’s muscles, has contributed most of the element of caution. I confess that I was enticed some time back. I quit with a mixture of self-disgust and terror. When did you start with her?”

“I didn’t.”

“What? I heard the tape. You admitted you were taking her out, and that she came to your place. What else in the wide world could have been on your dim little minds? Political science? Canasta?”

“She came to me and asked me to help her. She wanted to have somebody find out what was wrong with John. She said he was moody, silent, and even weepy. So, damn it, I had a weird conversation with John last Thursday morning, and he talked as if he wasn’t going to be around long. I thought maybe he was sick. So I reported that to Mary Eleanor. It seemed to upset her, but not as much as I thought it would. Now it looks as if he thought he wouldn’t be around long because somebody was going to kill him and he knew it. No passes were exchanged until yesterday, and then she made a pass that was a real dilly. My God, I felt like the baby that picked up the fly paper.”

“Unfortunately, I know what you mean. I didn’t have your moral courage.”

“So John knew somebody was going to kill him, and where the hell does that leave me? That’s why he had the contract made out. So he’d be sure of somebody being willing and eager to finish Key Estates according to his plan, rather than having the whole thing sold to somebody who’d do something different with it.”

“Who can you sell that to? Besides me, I mean.”

“Christy knows just how it was. She had a play by play as it was happening.”

“Damn it, Andy, it doesn’t make enough sense. John knew somebody was going to kill him, so he went out there and made it easy. And the mysterious somebody goes and takes your gun thing to do it with.”

“Maybe they would have taken anything handy. Anything you could kill with. A gig or fish knife or gaff.”

“True.”

“With a feeble attempt to make it look like suicide.”

“If you’re selling that, friend, you are not going to run into many buyers. You’ve got to have more—a lot more. And a lawyer. Hell, I’ll bend the public’s ear a little, but they are going to be in no mood to listen to me.”

“You heard the tapes. What was that Tampa thing on August something or other?”

“The twenty-third. Mary Eleanor told them you forced her to meet you up there.”

“I didn’t see her at all.”

“They found out from the maid she was away overnight, and they checked with Brogan and found you were away overnight the same night. Can you give me something to go on? Give me some way I can prove you didn’t meet her up there?”

“I didn’t know I was going to have to stay over. I hadn’t made any reservations, and I couldn’t get a room at the Tampa Terrace. It was so damn hot that I thought I’d better get where it would be cooler, so I drove out the causeway to Clearwater, about twenty miles. Let’s see, now. I had a couple of drinks and dinner at the Belmonte after I registered in at a Clearwater Beach court called, let me see—Blue Vista Courts. That was it. Right on the Gulf. They’ll have the register card. I bought a toothbrush and a razor. In the morning I drove back to Tampa, made my calls, and drove back here.”

“Could you have smuggled a girl into your room?”

“Without any trouble, I’m afraid.”

“But Mary Eleanor has no way of knowing you stayed in Clearwater?”

“No way at all. I mentioned it to Christy. She’d have no reason to tell anybody. It isn’t what you’d call an earth-shaking hunk of information.”

He was silent for a few moments. “Well, that gives me two things to work on. One, to show that she couldn’t have been with you. Two, to find out where the hell she did go, and who she met.”

“Because whoever she met might have killed John.”

“Why? Having him around never exactly slowed her up.”

“I don’t know. It’s a hunch. Money, maybe.”

“Money from who? And why?”

“Marry Mary Eleanor right now, and you’d marry a nice thing.”

“She won’t marry anybody. She did once, and it cramped her style.”

“O.K., so I’m not making sense.”

“Anything else I could work on?”

“Work on Steve Marinak. I could use him. I’m sore at him, but that doesn’t make any difference. He’s a good trial lawyer, they tell me.”

“He is that. Right now he thinks you’re a fiend.”

“Then if you can make anything out of that Clearwater angle, use it to prove to him that she lied. And if she’d lie about that, maybe he’ll figure she lied about the rest.”

“O.K. I’ll try it.” He stood up.

“Why are you going to bat, Jack?”

He smiled. “Not for you, ducky. For the news values involved. I just want to keep this story running. It ends too quick if they elect you.” He went to the door and whooped for the jailer. He turned, and said, “Any other little thing?”

I thought of the envelope and the fractured lock. I said, “I’d like to see Christy. Think you can work that?”

“It might be rough. Can try, though.”

“Thanks. And thanks for bringing the stuff.”

I heard him walk down the corridor, heard him laugh at something the jailer said. The long sticky-hot hours went by. I read everything in the magazines, even the ads. The jailer brought me a tired lunch bought with my money. Somebody had a radio going—hillbilly hymns. Traffic moved on the main drag as though it had been drugged. Some damn kid kept ringing a bicycle bell for no apparent reason. A stupid fly kept sitting on me.

It was two-thirty when the jailer got me and led me downstairs to a small office. It had windows like mine and contained a table and six chairs. Christy sat at one of the chairs, her shoulders hunched, frowning as she dragged on a cigarette. She stood up quickly as I came in.

The jailer said, “Fifteen minutes,” and closed the door and
left us alone in there. It was just a little too neat and too cooperative.

I held Christy in my arms and she started crying, saying, “Oh, God, Andy. I messed everything up. I messed everything up.”

“Honey, I can only hold onto you with one arm, because they took my belt and I have to hold my pants up.”

She started to giggle through the tears and it had a thin little hysterical sound in it. I said, “Whoa, baby. You did what you thought was best. I’m not mad.” And I put my lips close to her ear, and said, “I hope you have a pencil and paper.”

She caught on, went to her purse, and opened it. She had an address book and one of those pint-sized ballpoint pens. I took them, and said heartily, “Well, tell me how things are.”

She began to prattle on about how Elly felt and how Ardy Fowler felt and how they and nearly everybody else out there were pulling for me and saying it was all some kind of a dirty frame-up. I showed her what I had written. It said, “M.E.L. gave me keys, requested I search J.L.’s desk for brown 8 by 11 envelope stolen from her, addressed to her. Desk lock broken. Don’t know who.”

She nodded, and I said, “Well, it’s nice to know somebody is pulling for me.”

I motioned to her to keep talking, which she did. And I wrote, “Outside door O.K. Maybe new girl. Remember something funny there?” She was talking and reading over my shoulder and she squeezed my shoulder to indicate she understood what I meant.

“Snuggle up to her,” I wrote. “Pry around.”

I looked up at her and she nodded as she kept on talking. I tore the page out of her book and ate it. That faint hint of coldness in Jack Ryer had made me decide that it would be a lot better to trust Christy with this new factor.

I kissed her and she clung and said she was sorry all over again and I told her to hush up, and finally got her smiling. Tentatively, but at least smiling. A nice big bundle of girl. Big and brown and warm. Her eyes were a little puffy, but she looked good in her white skirt and green blouse, so I kissed her again, and the man knocked on the door and came in.

“Got to take you back,” he said.

She asked me if I needed anything, and I said I better have something to read, and she said she could fix that. I watched her swing down the hall toward the stairs, and then I went back up to my hotbox.

Some fat historical novels arrived an hour later. Ten minutes after they arrived I was in the middle of a hot sword fight and the heroine was lashed to a gun carriage, and her dress was torn just enough, like on the dust jacket of the book, so that you could see her truly awe-inspiring breasts. And, aye, she was a torrid, hot-blooded wench, a fit companion for my dark, thrilling handsomeness.

I was slowly but surely driving Baron Von Schteygel toward the ship’s rail when Wargler came in and plumped himself down on my chair, curled his finger along his forehead, and snapped sweat onto my cell floor.

“What were you looking for in John’s desk, son?” he asked.

“Why don’t you go get your tapes and do it right?”

“Ran out of tapes. But there’ll be more coming.”

“I accept your apology. Do you think I broke his desk open?”

“Who else?”

“Go look in that envelope full of my junk. One batch of keys isn’t mine. They’re John Long’s. I busted open the desk because I was too lazy to find the right key. Now go away, pretty please.”

“Where’d you get his keys?”

“I tore them from the little pink helpless hand of a sobbing woman.”

When I looked up from the book again he was still there. After a while he went away. I didn’t miss him a bit. Five minutes later the Baron was in the drink and the triangular fins of the merciless demons of the deep were cutting toward him.

MY FIRST VISITOR
Monday morning came at ten. It was Steve Marinak. He wore what was, for him, a subdued shirt. A little candy-striped number in seersucker. His red face was creased with lines of fatigue and embarrassment.

I was well into my second historical novel. This heroine was even more astonishing in a mammiferous sense. I tossed it aside and didn’t get up. The cell door closed behind him. He trudged over and glared down at me.

“All right. All right. Do you want a lawyer?”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet, Steve.”

“I’ll make it up for you. You want a lawyer.”

“Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t want you.”

“I don’t blame you. O.K., I was a damn fool. I’m supposed to believe in the laws of evidence. So I run with the pack, yelping for your blood. Remember, John was one of my best friends.”

“I sort of liked him myself.” I linked my hands behind my head and smiled blandly up at him.

“Can I be your lawyer?”

“Please?”

“O.K. Please.”

I stuck my hand up and he took it, almost shyly. He said, “Good. Some things you do, you don’t get a chance to settle the account. This time I get a chance.”

“What changed your mind?”

“A chat with Ryer. Hell of a chat. At first you could have heard us as far south as Placida. Finally I stopped yelling and started listening. Then I talked to Mary Eleanor on the phone. You stayed with her in some little old hotel in Tampa and she was too upset to remember how you registered or the name of it, even. And then I phoned the Blue Vista Courts and they read the name on the register for the twenty-third, including the license number of your car. That made the first hole. Jack’s logic widened it: That boy should have been a lawyer.” Steve sat down.

“What do we do now?”

“You tell me every last damn thing you know about this whole thing. Everything. Every bit.”

“Maybe I’d rather stay here. Maybe I’m getting a nice rest.”

He jumped up. “Stop grinning like a damn idiot. Don’t you know these people are all ready to crucify you? Get it in your head that this is serious. The prosecuting attorney has been over the evidence. He’s about ready to approve a first-degree charge. He’s a shrewd guy and it seems to satisfy him, and there isn’t much time, because once these things get set up for trial, it’s damn hard to make anybody back water.”

“Relax. Sit down. I’ll tell you the whole thing.”

It took a long time. He asked questions, interrupting me from time to time. They were pertinent questions. He made me go over conversations. I gave him every last little detail. Then he got up and paced around. He slapped the wall with his palm and paced around some more.

“Here’s one angle. We’ve got to offer an alternative. We can make her look bad, catching her up in that lie. We can make everything slant as though he was afraid she was going to kill him, to get her freedom. That would be something he couldn’t fight. And we can show that she had a chance to find out you don’t lock your house, find that thing hanging in the garage. We can show that she wrapped you all up, and practically put an apple in your mouth. And Ryer told me enough—and I already knew enough anyhow—so we can show her up for the nasty little nympho she is.”