Lady, Go Die! (3 page)

“Hammer,” I said.

“Mr. Hammer,” a mid-range, unctuous voice intoned, “this is Chief of Police Bernard Beales.”

Well, whoop de do.

“Chief Beales,” I said. “A pleasure.”

“Is it, Mr. Hammer?”

“Yeah, and I’m glad you called. Are you aware your deputy chief and two of his pals were beating up a poor little local guy they call Poochie? Right out in public? I had to put a stop to it. Of course, I didn’t know they were cops. They were acting more like a goon squad.”

“I see. Is that how you’re going to play it?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Do I have to come over to the hotel and have you brought in, Mr. Hammer?”

“No. In fact, I wouldn’t advise that. But I’ll be glad to come by some time in the morning and straighten this matter out myself.”

“You would give yourself up?”

“Why, is there a charge leveled against me?”

“No. Not at this time.”

“Fine. Then let’s talk about it in the morning. I had kind of a busy evening.”

“First thing in the morning, then.”

“No, Chiefie.
Some time
in the morning. I’m on vacation. I want to have a nice breakfast and who knows? I might want to take a constitutional along your lovely beach. Surely you want to let me know, as a tourist and the backbone of local economy, that I can come to Sidon and be confident of having a nice getaway.”

“Some time tomorrow morning then,” he huffed, and hung up.

But I said, “Nighty night, Chiefie,” just the same.

Time to beat the sheets. I’d had enough vacation fun for one evening.

Poochie’s shack was a dilapidated affair, rudely constructed from boards drifted in off the tide, that probably never survived a winter without being blown down at least twice. Coming down from a dune, you could see its weathered tin roof displaying faded ads for hot dogs and soft drinks. Trailing after the little guy, Velda and I were pooped by the time we reached his place—we parked the car a good mile away and had to walk the remainder of the distance in ankle-deep sand.

We’d been up around an hour and a half. Back in my hotel room, Poochie had woken with a start and a cry that shook me from a deep sleep and a dream that was a hell of a lot better than sharing a room with a battered beachcomber. But he had settled down quick. He seemed to know that I’d rescued him, and accepted me as his new friend Mike, unquestioningly. I called Velda and she brought around his washed and still a little damp clothes. He grinned at her goofily and just as unquestioningly accepted her as his new friend Velda.

Poochie wolfed down scrambled eggs and bacon and hash browns at a café across the street next to the Sidon Palace, the
movie house. Velda and I had the same fare and were damn near as hungry as our guest. I was amazed by his recuperative powers—his face was splotched yellow and purple and his eyes and lips remained puffy, but his manner was happy-go-lucky.

There had been no conversation at breakfast about last night. For Poochie, right now was all there was. He was sitting in a booth with his new pals Mike and Velda, gobbling down good grub, and what had been or would be was irrelevant. Not the worst outlook in the world.

I said we wanted to take him back to his shack, and he said swell, but he needed to pick up some hamburger at the grocery store. We did that, Velda spotting him a buck when Poochie’s pockets turned out to be empty. No surprise.

We drove a mile or so till he motioned us to pull over, like a kid who needed a john, and soon we were hiking it in the sand.

In a simple pleated navy skirt and light blue blouse with a sweater slung round her shoulders, my dark-haired secretary looked sexier than any bikini babe this beach had ever seen. Me, I looked like a city slicker in my rumpled suit, even without a tie and with my hat off. But after last night, I needed to go out heeled, and I needed the suitcoat to conceal the .45 in its shoulder sling.

The morning was bright and cool, the ocean breeze refreshing on your face, sun reflecting off shimmering sand, gulls swooping and squawking, the tide lapping, blue ocean glittering, the air salty and fresh, the beach scattered with driftwood and shells, clam, oyster, periwinkle. Good pickings for a beachcomber like Poochie.

Just outside the shack, Velda and I sat down on two old crates while Poochie ducked inside. In an eye blink the little guy came
back out carrying a couple of cats. Scraggly, wild things, they were, but they swarmed all over him in the friendliest way, licking his face and rubbing themselves against his neck. He spread out the pound of hamburger on its butcher paper for them and they dug in together.

When I looked up at Poochie, he was facing the ocean, breathing the salt air, a battered little guy who owned the world. “Ain’t it good here, Mike?”

“Swell.”

And it was, as far as it went. But what he called home was a barrel to hold fish heads, three crude fishing poles set against the side of the shack, an ancient wheelbarrow to gather shells, two cats for company, and a broken-down shanty to keep the rain off his head.

“Come on inside,” he said brightly. “I got lots of things I want to show you.”

We followed him in, ducking our heads as we went. He put a match to an oil lamp and the pale orange light threw flickering shadows on the wall. A homemade table sat in the middle, around which were four more crates for chairs. Why he bothered with four, I don’t know. I doubt if he ever had company. A single bunk was built against the far wall, covered with somebody’s cast-off quilt. Behind the table a stove of iron pipes was overlaid on some bricks with a firewood bin next to it. For utensils there were two pots, some reclaimed and polished cans, several old knives and forks, and a wooden salad spoon.

What interested me most was the half-carved shell on the makeshift table. Beside it was a well-worn shoemaker’s leather
knife. I picked up the shell and ran my hands over the picture carved there. It was beautiful—a manger scene with an angel in the background. The dog-eared Christmas card it was copied from lay under the knife.

He was grinning. Where his teeth weren’t yellow, they were black. “Like it, Mike?”

“You said it,” I grinned at him. “Where did you learn to do this?”

“In school.” He said it proudly.

“No kidding?” I couldn’t believe he’d stayed in school long enough to develop this kind of skill. The detail work was fantastic.

“Yup. That’s where I went when I was little. I remember it real good. I can hardly remember anything else about being a kid except the school. They were good to me there and a priest showed me how to carve wood. I did bad in all my studies, Mike, but not carving. That priest said I had a real talent. Then he got me a shell one day and I carved that. I got plenty of ’em. Look!”

He pointed to the walls and I whistled under my breath. They were arrayed on a two-by-four running around three walls, beautiful examples of what a simple mind could do if it concentrated.

He pointed to some beat-up cabinets below the crude shelving; they probably had been scavenged from the galley of some old boat. “I got lots more. Down here is my private collection.”

Velda whispered to me: “Idiot savant.”

Why did everybody keep saying that! I
knew
this guy was an idiot.

But like Doc Moody said, an idiot with a touch of genius. Each shell was a masterpiece of craftsmanship. Some were carved into animals, others were seascapes, all worked into the rounded exterior of a shell. The pale light of the lantern hardly brought
out the exquisite pink and cream tones. I knew people in the city who would pay top dollar for these.

I asked, “Ever sell any, Poochie?”

“Sure, I sell ’em. The stuff I keep on that one shelf, those are for sale.” He pointed. “That’s how I get all my money.”

His little shack wasn’t exactly a showroom. “How much do you get, Poochie? And who buys them?”

“Oh, a nice man from the city comes by and gives me a whole dollar a piece for ’em. That’s pretty darn good, ain’t it, Mike?”

“That’s good, all right, but don’t you sell any more until I see the guy that buys them.”

“Why... sure, Mike. He’ll be here in a few days.”

“Great. Let me act as your agent. All great artists need agents.”

“You think I’m a great artist, Mike?”

“I sure do. How often does he come around, this guy?”

“Always around this time every month he comes.”

I would kick the crap out of the bastard for taking advantage of Poochie like that. A buck a piece and he was probably raking in a hundred per, anyway.

“I’ll negotiate a new price.”

Velda was walking around the little room, looking at the individual shells on the shelf, breathless at the sheer beauty of them.

I got up and put a hand on her shoulder. “I want to take a walk up the beach. Care to come?”

She shook her head, the dark tresses bouncing. “No. You go ahead. I’ve had my fill of walking on sand for a while. I’ll just stick around here and enjoy the view.”

Soon we were back on the beach where she had kicked off her
sandals and was lifting her skirt to wade in the tide, her gaze on the expanse of blue that a world away joined the other expanse of blue above. The wind was making lovely dark streaming tendrils of her long raven hair, as if she were underwater. Who needed mermaids?

I started off with Poochie at my heels.

When we were out of earshot of Velda, I said, “Show me where that lady lives—the one with the yellow hair.”

As we rounded a dune, he pointed between a number of trees that stood in a row, like a tall fence designed to keep one half of the beach away from the other.

“Right up there, Mike. That’s where she lives. You’re not gonna go up there, are you?” He seemed fearful.

“No, Poochie, not now.”

I took in the place from a better angle. It was a magnificent home, built like an old colonial mansion right down to the twenty-foot pillars surrounding the entire structure. Set back a few hundred yards from the ocean, it commanded a superb view from the top of a slight rise. Earth must have been shipped in to make a terrace on either side, as its color was the bright green of lawn grass and not the duller shade of the sand variety.

From the rear of the house that faced the water, a flagstone path curved down to the trees and ended abruptly at a gazebo whose latticework was covered with ivy.

A little warning sign was tacked to the tree nearest the sandy beach. Poochie stayed behind, nervous, as I walked up for a better look. It read:

PRIVATE PROPERTY

E.J. WESLEY

I grinned. Now I knew who the lady with the yellow hair was.

Sharron Wesley.

You probably read about her yourself—the infamous, two-timing ex-chorus tomato that stood charges for murdering her millionaire husband and got off scot-free when an all-male jury paid more attention to her legs than the testimony.

I remembered that case well, though I knew it strictly from the spectator seats. Because of Sharron, two husbands had died. Even before she married Wesley, she had spent a term in the big house for manslaughter of hubby number one: a glorified pimp of a manager that she claimed beat her. Well, he hadn’t been beating her when she smothered him in his sleep. But the tabloids had loved that yellow hair and those long chorus-girl gams that she wasn’t shy about showing off only to jurors—reporters got in on the fun, as well.

Still, what the hell her second husband ever saw in her was more than I could see. There are plenty of good-looking fluffs around Manhattan that don’t smother their hubbies in bed. Of course, Wesley had died due to his bad heart, right? That digitalis overdose was just an accident on curvy Sharron’s part.

And ever since, she had been using his dough to support a revolving door of gigolos and a gambling habit and a general party-girl good time. I knew her a little, and she had tried to make me more than once, but I’d sooner sleep with a snake. Last time I saw her, at the Zero Zero Club, she was crocked to the gills.

According to Pat, the D.A. had plenty to hang her with, but the shyster she had pleading her case did a fine job of screwing up the facts. The scandal sheets went crazy over the angle shots of her legs and the jury was drooling half the time. The judge who sat on the case almost blew his top at the verdict, telling that jury he’d never seen a greater miscarriage of justice in his courtroom, shooing them out in disgust.

If these fancy beach-side digs were any indication, Mrs. Wesley must have inherited her husband’s money intact and decided on this modest playpen instead of her penthouse on Central Park to establish a residence.

Only now she was gone.

A missing person.

And last night Dekkert had damn near crippled a nice simple-minded joe just to squeeze out any morsel of information about her whereabouts. No doubt Dekkert figured that the Wesley dame would have been seen, if she had taken off through town. Her car would be well known in this vicinity. Otherwise, beachcomber Poochie was in a fine spot to see anything and everything that went on at the mansion, even if he didn’t pay particular attention to it.

But why was Dekkert interested?

Sharron had a perfect right to go where she pleased. So what if she took off by boat, or with some out-of-towner in a strange car that wouldn’t raise any notice rolling through sleepy Sidon? She’d been gone a week. And a week wasn’t so long as to warrant an investigation when there were no suspicious circumstances.

Or were there?

The only thing I was sure of was that something foul was in
the ocean breeze and I was going to find out what. I had tangled with Dekkert before and was not about to let him get away with making a punching bag out of an innocent schnook like Poochie.

Velda had fallen asleep on the sand when I got back. She had spread out that light sweater and was nestled down on it, her sweet, sultry face turned to one side. I gave her gentle prods with my toe until she looked up at me sleepily.