Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (12 page)

My first reaction was one of unreasoning anger. At her for having scared me, at myself for having been scared. The sudden explosion of the pool lights caught her standing in water to her waist. She couldn’t have been surprised, because I’d turned on the house lights the moment I’d come in, but she affected a startled look nonetheless, and immediately dove beneath the surface, the shimmering suntanned length of her wavering in underwater illumination as she swam toward the deep end. I unlocked the sliding glass doors, yanked one of them open, and stepped out onto the baked clay tiles. Sunny was still underwater. In a
moment her head broke the surface, long blonde hair plastered to the sides of her face, mouth opening wide around a gasp for breath.

“Hi,” she said. She was treading water now, only her shoulders, neck, and head visible. “Could you turn out the pool lights, please? I didn’t bring a suit.”

“I see that.”

She smiled and dove beneath the surface again. Strands of underwater light ensnared her submerged body as she swam toward the shallow end again, her long blonde hair floating about her head in a tangle of liquid golden snakes. The surface broke like shattering glass as she came up for breath again, her arms emerging first, stretched above her head as though she were diving in reverse into the air itself, and then the blonde hair and the exquisite face, her body arcing upward out of the water and then sinking again as if in slow motion, ripples of light spreading out from it in widening circles. Standing in water to her waist now, she began wading toward the steps. I went into the house and snapped out the lights.

She was coming up the steps when I went outside again. Like an actress discovering a key light, or a maiden worshipping the moon, she raised her arms over her head and slowly turned her extended hands in the wash of moonlight, palms upward, as though she were allowing silver coins to cascade through her fingers.

My partner Frank maintains, though it is not on his list of ten rules, that a partially clad woman is infinitely more exciting than an entirely nude one. Perhaps he is right. I know only that Sunny McKinney naked was more spectacularly beautiful than any living creature had a right to be. I glanced quickly to the right and to the left. There were people living on either side of me, but the owner from whom I was renting was known in the neighborhood
as “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” a sobriquet applied after she had planted more trees, bushes, shrubs, and vines on her property than could be found on the entire six acres of Calusa’s Agnes Lorrimer Memorial Gardens. Even the far side of the pool was shielded from the bayou beyond by low-growing mangroves and taller Australian pines. There was no one but me to witness Sunny’s silent paean to the moon, and she herself seemed totally unconcerned by my presence. Her clothes, I noticed, were piled haphazardly on one of the lounge chairs. A pair of blue clogs rested on the tiles near the chair, alongside a purple leather shoulder bag.

“You wouldn’t have a towel, would you?” she asked, sweeping her wet hair back from her face. “Sorry about using your pool. It got so hot waiting for you.”

“I’ll get one,” I said, and went back into the house.

When I came outside again, she was lying full length on her back on the other lounge chair, her eyes closed, her hands clasped behind her head, her legs slightly parted. She looked very blonde.

She opened her eyes.

“I’m almost dry already,” she said.

I handed her the towel.

She patted herself here and there with it, and then dropped it onto the tiles. It was very difficult to keep my gaze fastened on her face. She seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. A small, wicked smile played about her lips.

“Is that your Porsche outside?” I asked.

“The red one, yeah. Well, the M.K.’s, actually—red and black, those are our colors. I didn’t want to block your driveway.”

“You parked it outside the wrong house.”

“I was looking for the address. You don’t have one on your mailbox.”

“I keep meaning to put one on.”

“You can buy those stick-on numbers at a hardware store,” she said. “You just peel off the backs.”

“I’ll have to do that.”

“They glow in the dark, some of them.”

It occurred to me that I was having this conversation with a woman who was totally naked.

“Maybe I ought to get you a robe,” I said.

“What for?” she said.

I didn’t answer. I went back into the house and into my bedroom. In the closet there, I found a robe that belonged to Dale, decided against taking it out to Sunny, and brought her instead a Japanese-style kimono that was mine, white and sashed and scrawled front and back with black Japanese calligraphy. She was standing naked in front of the television set when I came back into the living room, her eyes glued to the screen, her body flickering with blue electronic light.

“Oh, Japanese, good,” she said, and took the kimono, but made no move to put it on. Instead, she kept watching the television screen. “Have you got anything to drink?” she asked.

She was twenty-three years old and very much a woman, legally and physically, but I couldn’t shake the thought that I’d be impairing the morals of a minor if I mixed her a drink. On the television screen, a cop was explaining in detail how he’d been able to reach the screaming lady before she’d had her throat slit.

“What would you like?” I asked.

“Gin, if you have any. With a twist.”

“Ice?”

“Please.”

On the television screen, they were showing previews of next week’s exciting show. “Do we need this?” I asked. Sunny shrugged. I snapped off the set, and went to the bar. When I turned to her
again, the drink in my hand, she was still naked, walking around the living room, examining the place like a county appraiser.

“I wish you’d put on that kimono,” I said, and handed her the drink.

“Oh, relax,” she said, “I won’t bite you. This is nice. You do it yourself?”

“It came furnished.”

“Nice,” she said, and nodded. “Aren’t you having one?”

“In a minute.”

I went back to the bar and mixed myself what my partner Frank calls a mother-in-law martini: straight up, very dry, and very cold.

“Cheers,” Sunny said.

“Cheers,” I said.

“Mm, good,” she said. “Tanqueray?”

“Beefeater,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

“Why don’t you put on that kimono, okay?”

“I hate clothes,” she said, but she put her drink down on an end table near the imitation Barcelona chair, and then picked up the kimono and shrugged into it. “Nice fit,” she said. “Your girlfriend’s?”

“Mine.”

“Nice,” she said, and tied the sash.

The kimono seemed slashed in a wider V than I remembered. It also seemed far too short on her. She picked up her drink, sat carelessly—recklessly, in fact—in the Barcelona chair, and said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here.”

“It crossed my mind. How’d you find me?”

“Your number’s in the phone book. Your address too. I tried to call first, but there was no answer.” She shrugged. “I figured I’d take a chance. It’s not a very long drive.”

I nodded. She smiled.

“Aren’t you glad I’m here?” she said, and took a long swallow of her drink.

“
Why
are you here?” I asked.

“I want to talk to you,” she said. “About Jack.”

“Your brother or your boyfriend?”

“My boyfriend is
Jackie
,” she said. “My brother is
Jack
.” She shook her head. “Or
was
, I suppose would be right. No
more
Jack, is there?” She shook her head again. “How’d
you
know about him?
Jackie
, I mean.”

“I met him this afternoon. Out at the ranch. I understand you were with him the night your brother was killed.”

“Yeah. Boy, was
that
ever embarrassing! Having to tell that to the cops.”

The way she was sitting, I wouldn’t have thought she’d be embarrassed by anything. I suddenly thought of my partner Frank’s dictum on partially clothed women. I looked away. Sunny smiled, as though she had caught me doing something she never would have imagined of a doddering, dithering old man.

“Men sure are funny,” she said. “I really
did
come here to talk, you know.”

“So talk,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Haven’t you been wondering where Jack got that forty thousand dollars?”

“Do
you
know where he got it?”

“I’ve got a few ideas. Mm, this is good,” she said, and gestured with the glass. “Mother disapproves of my drinking, you know. Mother
also
disapproves of my boyfriend.
And
my language.
Fuck
Mother,” she said. “Or have you already thought of that?”

“Where do
you
think your brother got that money?” I asked. “Assuming he had it at all.”

“Oh, I think he had it, all right,” she said. “Where do
you
think he got it?”

“I thought inheritance at first, but that doesn’t seem to be—”

“No, my father didn’t leave him a dime. Me, neither. Everything went to Mother.” She drained her glass and said, “I wouldn’t mind some more of this.”

I took the glass from her hand. She smiled again, for no reason that I could detect. I refilled it and carried it back to her.

“Thanks,” she said. Sipping at the gin, she said, “What do the police think? About where he got the money?”

“You understand, don’t you, that they haven’t yet
found
any money. For all we know, the forty thousand never even existed.”

“Well, he gave that farmer four thousand down, didn’t he?” she asked. “That’s what Mother said, anyway.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily—”

“
What
kind of gin did you say this was? It tastes expensive.”

“It is,” I said.

“I love expensive things,” she said. “So what do the police think?”

“I don’t know what they think now,” I said. “Earlier on, they mentioned narcotics, but—”

“Narcotics?” she said, and laughed. “My brother once caught me smoking a joint, and he spanked me so hard I couldn’t sit for a week.” She seemed reflective for a moment, recalling the incident. “No,” she said, “dope is definitely out of the question. You wouldn’t have any, by the way, would you? Grass, I mean?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“I should have brought some with me. I’m always afraid to carry it in the car, though. I’m afraid I’ll pass a red light, and next thing you know I’ll be in jail for intent to sell, or whatever they call it. No, Jack didn’t get that money through—what did they think? That he was trafficking?”

“We didn’t go into it very deeply.”

“Good thing, it’s a dead end. Typical brilliant thought for a Mickey Mouse police department. I can just see Bloom putting it all together, can’t you? This is Florida, so how
else
would a kid like Jack come into forty thousand dollars? Dope, naturally.” She shook her head. “You can tell your friend Bloom my brother wasn’t involved in dope. No way.”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” I said. “In fact, if you have any
real
notion of where your brother got that money—”

“I don’t like talking to cops, and I
especially
don’t like talking to Detective Bloom,” she said. “The way he went after me and Jackie, you’d have thought we were both ax murderers or something. All we did was
sleep
together, is that a crime? But Bloom—”

“A crime
was
committed,” I said. “Your brother was murdered. Detective Bloom was—”

“Detective Bloom was getting some weird kind of kick out of it.”

“I doubt that very much.”

“Yeah? Then why’d he want to know
where
we were doing it, and at what
time
exactly, and everything but what I was wearing? Your friend’s some kind of closet sex freak,” she said, and smiled again.

“My friend is a cop,” I said flatly, “who was doing his job.”

“If he’s doing his job so great,” she said, “then why hasn’t he found out where my brother got that money? You think it just
might
occur to him that if forty thousand dollars is involved—”

“It
has
occurred to him. And if you
know
where your brother—”

“I
don’t
know. I didn’t
say
I knew. I said I had a few ideas, is all.”

“Then tell them to the police.”

“No. You were my brother’s lawyer, right? And from what Mother tells me, you’re representing
her
now, right?”

“Yes.”

“So who better to talk to?” she said, and shrugged.

“Whatever you tell me, I’ll repeat it to Bloom,” I said. “If it has any bearing at all on the crime—”

“Are you really as square as you seem?” she asked, smiling again. “Anybody else I know would’ve been very happy to see me marching around here starkers.”

I made no comment.

“I
was
starkers, you do remember that, don’t you?”

“I remember.”

“’Cause memory is the first thing to go, I’m told. Would you mind filling this glass again?”

“Why?” I said.

“I told you. It’s nice gin.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to finish the bottle.”

“I can drink you under the table any night of the week,” she said. “I was raised on a
ranch
, mister. I’ve spent more time with cowboys...” She let the sentence trail. She extended the glass to me. “Please?” she said, pouting. “Pretty please?”

I took the glass and poured a little gin into it. She watched me.

“Don’t be so generous,” she said.

I poured a bit more, and then carried the glass back to her.

“Thanks.” She held the glass up to the light. “Are you sure you can spare this?” she said, and shook her head, and drank. “So here’s what
I
think,” she said. “I think my brother was a thief.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What does that mean, ‘uh-huh’? Does that mean you find the idea inconceivable?”

Judging from the way she stumbled on the word “inconceivable,” it occurred to me that her speech, although not yet quite slurred, was getting a bit sloppy, and I suddenly wondered how often and how heavily Miss Sylvia McKinney hit the sauce. Her glass was almost empty again. I did not want a drunken twenty-three-year-old on my hands. Or did I?