Home is the Sailor (17 page)

He staggered back into the trooper. I raced for the lip of the cliff. On the edge of it, I looked back. In the light of Flagle’s electric lantern I could see that the trooper had drawn his gun. Flagle was standing with both hands pressed to his stomach. As I watched him, he gasped:

“Don’t just stand there. Shoot him.”

A bullet smacked into the trunk of the gnarled live-oak tree beside which I was standing. I went on over the cliff, too fast, my legs churning, trying to dig in with my heels, starting a series of miniature rock slides as I skidded into space.

I caught at an outcropping of sage. It pulled out by the roots. I caught at some greasewood. It held, twisting me in air, slamming me down on my belly at the edge of a twenty-foot drop.

A dozen flashlights stabbed down the cliff. Sheriff Cooper swore.

“The fool can’t possibly make it. He’ll break his neck. But just in case — you, Harris. Johnson. Highball it back to the cars and get down below there as fast as you can.”

A bullet ricocheted off the rock, too close. I eased my body over the drop, hung on with my fingers, and let go. I landed in a crouch and rolled to break my fall, but I rolled too far, the momentum of my body propelling me down another steep series of slopes to wind up wedged between the cliff and the trunk of a live oak growing out into space.

I lay for a long time, breathless, trying to force myself to move, afraid. Then I realized that while the men on top of the cliff could hear me, they couldn’t see me because of the outcropping. They were shouting at sounds. I could afford to be cautious now.

I lay a moment longer looking down at the speeding cars on U.S. 101. They looked like toys, with Christmastree bulbs for headlights. Beyond them was a necklace of lights formed by the beach houses of Malibu.

I unwedged myself and felt for toe- and handholds. Occasionally I found a chimney or a split where I could use my back. The last three hundred feet were the hardest. I inched down them, clinging to the rock like a fly. I thought twice the wind was going to blow me off. My fingers grew numb with strain. The muscles in my legs began to jerk. Then I was at the foot of the cliff, leaning against the rock, not knowing how much time had passed, not caring much, sick with simultaneous fear and relief.

When I could, I staggered across the highway in a lull between cars to the dubious shelter of a narrow beach. I found a shallow pool in the sand left by the outgoing tide and washed the sweat and blood from my hands and face and hair. The clean uniform I’d put on was powdered with rock dust. Both knees of my pants were torn.

I made myself as decent as I could. Then I limped south down the beach toward the neon sign of a bar. When I reached the bar I cut back to the highway, standing in just enough light to be seen, giving every car headed south the thumb.

The seventh car stopped. An omen? “Where to, mate?” the driver asked.

I said, “How far you going?”

“Dago,” he said.

I said, “Swell,” and got in, keeping my manacled hand in my right coat pocket.

The lad who’d picked me up eased his car into gear. “Passenger or freighter, mate?”

I said, “Freighter.” I was still breathing hard. “How come you stopped for me? You do a hitch in the merchant marine?”

He laughed self-consciously. “You guessed it. In the port captain’s office in Pedro. I had a very dangerous job. I ran an L. C. Smith.”

I wished he would drive faster. I wanted to get back to the Purple Parrot before the law did. I wanted to push him out of the car and take over the wheel. I laughed, politely. “The paper work has to be done.” He said, “Yeah. I guess so.”

He drove a little faster. The tires made a nice sound on the pavement. I let him do the talking.

He said, “Fifty times I bet you I hoofed one-o-one to L.A. I mean during the war. Some folks would pick up sailors or marines. Some would pick up soldiers. But to hell with the merchant marine. Only once I got picked up. Then the guy was a fairy. So the day it all wound up, I said to myself any time I pass a real sailor I hope I should have a flat tire.”

I settled back on the seat. “This is a break, fellow. Thanks. You live in Dago?”

He said, “That’s right. I’m working out at the base. In a civilian capacity.” He grinned sideways at me. “Get in a little rhubarb back there in that joint where I picked you up, mate?”

I grunted, “Yeah,” and let it go at that. To prove what a tough sailor he’d been, he began a long story, with details, about a go-round he’d got into with a grease monkey from Lockheed.

I rode only half listening to him, just enough to grunt in the proper places, thinking about Corliss.

“Please. Don’t make me hate you, Swede,” she’d said. “Don’t spoil something that may be very beautiful for both of us. I have a distinct aversion to being forced. When I go to bed with you, if I do, this time it’s for keeps.”

That was for sure. Then there was the business about the iron. Corliss
said
she’d washed and ironed my clothes, but it had been Mamie who had the burn. I might have known. I should have known. There’d been warning buoys and shoal markers all over the place. But I hadn’t been able to see them for all that golden hair.

I knew now why Wally and Meek had laughed at me. They had reason to laugh. I might, or I might not, get away with killing Lippy Saltz, alias Jerry Wolkowysk. But body or no body, Corliss was my baby. Corliss was pinned on me.

I tried to remember the technical term. I couldn’t. But I remembered reading of a similar case where a husband had been convicted of and executed for the murder of his wife without a corpus delicti. The court had accepted what it had called reasonable proof of death.

I drew up the indictment against me.

Corliss and I had quarreled. She’d told me to get out. She’d told me she was through, in front of witnesses. I was known to have a temper. I was out on bail for hitting one man too hard. I had been drunk for four days. We’d left the Purple Parrot together. I’d been arrested five hours later, ninety miles away. With a discharged gun, Corliss’ car, and her bloodstained clothes in my possession. The blood on the clothes and in the back of the car checked with her known blood classification. Corliss had disappeared. If that didn’t add up to reasonable proof of death, there weren’t thirty-two points of the compass.

The lad driving finished his story. “So I hit him. With all I had, see? And brother, I mean I knocked him for a loop.”

He realized he’d done all the talking and coughed, suddenly self-conscious.

“How did you make out in
your
fight, mate?”

“I lost my cap,” I told him.

We passed through Balboa, then Corona Del Mar. The lad driving asked if I wanted to stop for a beer. I could have used one. I said, “No.”

He shrugged and crawled into a shell of silence. As we rounded the bend near Laguna Beach, the headlights of his car picked up the barn of the roadhouse where Lippy Saltz had laid low. He wasn’t being missed. There was a new night man back of the bar. The Beachcomber was still doing business. Men were bellied to the wood, wanting whisky, wanting women. Couples were dancing to the music of the juke box. But Lippy Saltz, alias Jerry Wolkowysk, was fish food. Battered chum. Possibly somewhere out in the Pacific in the belly of a shark, or wedged in the kelp with the crabs working on him, the quarter of a million dollars he’d got in the Palmer affair not doing him a bit of good.

It was suddenly hot in the car. I asked my host if I could roll down the window on my side.

He said, “Of course.”

We were making good time now. Oceanside, Carlsbad, Encinitas grew out of the fog in a blur of haloed lights, then dropped behind us.

I sat straighter in the seat. I doubted if Sheriff Cooper or Captain Marks would reason I’d double back. They’d be more apt to figure that I’d either gone on up the coast or holed up in L.A. But the chances were they’d set up a roadblock in Palm Grove just in case I should head for Mexico.

“Cigarette?” my host asked.

I took one, careful to use my left hand, having a little trouble getting the cigarette out of the pack.

He was sympathetic. “What’s the matter, mate? You bust your other hand in that fight back there?”

“It bothers me,” I admitted. I used the lighter on the dash. “Let me out just this side of those spotlighted palm trees, please.”

He stopped the car a hundred yards above the Purple Parrot. “What’s the idea? I thought you were going to Dago.”

“Did I say so?”

He thought back. “No.”

I opened the door of the car. “I merely asked how far
you
were going. Anyway, thanks. Thanks a lot for the ride.”

He sat looking at the hand he couldn’t see. “You’re welcome, I’m certain,” he said. Then he fed gas to the car too fast, forgetting to shift into low, bucking it down 101, probably thanking his lucky stars, thinking, That guy has a gun in his pocket.

I watched the taillights of his car climb the hill beyond the Purple Parrot. Then I limped down the shoulder of the road.

Cooper hadn’t bothered to leave a stake-out. There were no cars in front of the bar. Even Wally’s beaten-up Ford was gone. The ceiling and the side lights in the bar were out but the night light was on.

I looked in through one of the front windows. Meek was alone in the bar. He was sitting on a stool looking into the bottom of an empty glass as if he wished he could fill it again but didn’t dare.

As I watched him, the phone on the end of the bar rang. Meek climbed down off the stool and answered it. He listened intently a moment. Then, after speaking a few monosyllabic sentences into the mouthpiece, he cradled the phone and stood patting his face and neck with a soiled handkerchief. I was glad to know he had one. It would be something to stuff down his throat after he and I had finished our talk.

I didn’t have much time. If there was a roadblock in Palm Grove, the lad who had picked me up would tell the officers about his seaman hitchhiker who had kept his hand in his coat pocket. The officers at the block would radio Cooper on their two-way. After that it would be a matter of minutes until the highway was filled with sirens.

I gripped the sill with my fingers, debating talking to Mamie first. She should be sober by now. What Mamie knew, she would tell me. I’d have to beat whatever I got out of Meek.

Meek took the decision out of my hands by scuttling out the side door of the bar and crunching across the gravel to the office cottage.

I walked around the back of the bar to come at the cottage from its blind side. The grass on both sides of the path was wet with fog and dew. Here in the pocket at the foot of the hill the night air was hot and humid. The smell of the flowers was almost overpowering. The crickets and the cicadas were a full-scale orchestra.

I cut through between Cottages 4 and 5. The couple in Number 4 was still awake, still arguing in the dark. Her voice was shrilly insistent. His was heavy with fatigue.

As I passed their open window she said, “I still think we ought to have told the officers what we saw when we drove in last night.”

He said something about being on a vacation.

She wanted to know what difference that made.

“All right. All right,” he conceded. “We’ll tell them in the morning. Now for God’s sake shut up and let me get some sleep.”

I started on, then turned back on impulse and tried the screen door of their porch. The screen was unhooked. I opened it and crossed the porch and rapped softly on the closed door of the cottage proper.

“Who’s there?” the man demanded.

I lied, “An officer. Please don’t be alarmed and please don’t light your light. But this is the second time you folks have been overheard discussing something you’re concealing from the law. What is it?”

I hoped I sounded like an officer.

The woman said, “See? I told you.”

He padded across the asphalt tile and opened the door. “O.K. Maybe we should have told you.”

“Told us what?”

He padded back to the bed for his cigarettes.

She said, “What we saw when we drove in last night.”

He came back to the door lighting a cigarette.

I said curtly, “Your names, please?”

She joined him in the doorway, struggling into a dressing gown. “Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lewis of Carbondale, Illinois. We’re on our vacation. And we came all the way from Salt Lake City yesterday.”

He blew smoke past my face. “Seven hundred and thirty-eight miles. That’s the most we ever made in one day.”

I couldn’t see either of their faces. She sounded as if her lips were pursed. “And when Joe and I drove in last night, a little after midnight, we saw something I think you officers ought to know. You
are
investigating a murder?”

I said, “We are. What did you see?”

Mrs. Lewis said, “A naked woman.”

“Where? In what cottage?”

“In Cottage Number One.”

“What was she doing?”

“She was lying on the bed.”

“This naked woman was alive?”

Lewis laughed. “Very much so. It was rare, believe me, Officer. We wondered what kind of joint we’d stumbled into.”

I swallowed my heart. “Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me everything you saw.”

Mrs. Lewis unpursed her lips. “Well, it was midnight. Perhaps a few minutes after midnight when we saw the vacancy sign. Like Joe told you, we’d driven seven hundred and thirty-eight miles and we were beat. So we parked in front of the office unit next door and rang the bell. We rang it several times. Then, when no one came to the door, we walked across the court toward the only other light we could see, hoping to find the manager, too tired to push on. It was then we saw the girl.”

She pursed her lips again. “The blinds were closed but up an inch from the sill, enough so we could see the girl distinctly. We could also see the man.”

“Describe him.”

She said, “I’m afraid I can’t. His back was to us.”

“Was he a big man or a little man?”

“A big man. Rather fat.”

“How was he dressed?”

“He wasn’t. He was as naked as the girl.”