Murder by the Book (17 page)

“Of course I'm sure,” the girl said. “As soon as I looked at the check I remembered. When they make trouble you look at them.” She seemed to feel this incomplete. She completed it. “For heaven's sake.”

Jefferson said, “Trouble?”

“Right there on the check,” she said, “it says soft. It's underlined. ‘Scrambled eggs soft.' And I told the chef for heaven's sake, and he sent them back because they were too hard. So I knew he was one of the fussy ones and I looked at him so that the next time I could maybe steer him to Harriet's table. Only, he didn't come back. So I know he's not there.”

She gestured toward the five men, still standing in a row, and Jefferson looked, and he was quick enough.

Jasper Bradley did not look amused. He looked, Jefferson thought, mad as hell, and he could guess who Bradley was mad at. His sidekick had loused it up. His sidekick should have eaten, inconspicuously, what they had agreed should be put before him. If Bradley caught up with his sidekick—man named Ashley, hundred to one—he'd make him eat hard-cooked eggs until they came out of his ears. But it wasn't likely Bradley would be in a position to catch up with anyone.

Jefferson decided to let Bradley stew in it for a while, and had him sent back to his cell. He told Deputy Williams to take Miss Farmer somewhere and buy her a nice lunch on the county. Miss Farmer looked at Williams fixedly.

“I sort of told her,” Williams said, “that we'd make up to her what tips she lost by not working this noon.”

“Sort of like how much?” Jefferson said, and Williams told him.

“Go right ahead,” Jefferson said. Williams said, “Now listen, Jeff—”

“O.K.,” Jefferson said. “Make out a voucher for it and the lunch. I'll try to get it by the old man.”

There were a number of papers in Jefferson's “In” basket. He decided to let them go until after lunch. He figured he had earned a break. He also figured he had earned a good lunch, and left word that he would be at the A. & B. Lobster House, if wanted.

13

The A. & B. Lobster House is a large restaurant, largely surrounded by water. From its windows one can look down on shrimp boats and count the hopeful cats waiting at the dock. But, large as it is, the restaurant was crowded that Monday noon. Pam and Jerry waited at the bar for a table. They had said it had better be for three, since a friend might join them.

“Chances are,” Jerry said, as they waited for the barman to work to them, “he's too hipped on this fellow Bradley to waste time on anything else.”

Pam was watching the barman, and merely nodded her head. The barman had filled a glass with ice, and poured a jigger of vodka into it, and now was pouring, over the vodka, a dark brown fluid from a little jug. When he had filled the glass, he squeezed half a lime over it, and dropped the squeezed lime in.

“What,” Pam said, “is that? The brown stuff?”

“Beef bouillon,” the barman told her. “And vodka and lime juice.”

“I'll have one,” Pam said, and made acquaintance with the drink known, somewhat perilously, as a “bull shot.” She reported it very good, and probably nourishing. “Extra-dry martini,” Jerry told the barman. “House of Lords.”

“Got Beefeater,” the barman said.

“Beefeater,” Jerry said.

“He'll be interested,” Pam said. “See, I told you he would.”

From their stools they could see the door. Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson had appeared in it. “Over here,” Pam said, using just as much voice as she needed, and adding, “Mr. Jefferson.”

Jefferson came to join them.

“I was just telling Jerry you'd be interested,” Pam said.

Jefferson looked entirely blank.

“In Mrs. Coleman.”

Jefferson shook his head.

“We left a message,” Jerry said. “About her. And that we'd be here.”

Jefferson said he had had a busy morning. “Bourbon and plain water, Sam.” He said, “Looks like we've got Bradley where we want him.” He sipped. “What about Mrs. Coleman?”

They told him about Mrs. Coleman, complete with theory. They showed him Bill Weigand's telegram. He said it was pretty interesting, but didn't, to Pam, sound particularly interested. He said that, even if it was the right Mrs. Coleman, it didn't have to mean what they thought it meant.

“This is the way it is. We've got a man with a good motive—hell of a lot better motive than this Mrs. Coleman would have. Also, he rigs up a phoney alibi to cover the right time—just the right time. Here's what we've got on—”

They were told their table was ready. They picked up their drinks and walked.

“—that,” Jefferson said, when they were at the table, and told them about that. He said that if Bradley's sidekick hadn't been so particular about the way he got his eggs, Bradley might have got away with it. He said they'd notice that the time Bradley wanted to cover was almost precisely the time Dr. Piersal was killed.

“We've got him cold, the crooked—” Jefferson said, and checked himself, there being a lady present. But he made no effort to keep out of his voice a note of satisfaction which amounted almost to triumph. “And he knows it. You could see that by looking at him. Wouldn't be surprised if, after he thinks it over a while, he doesn't come clean. Particularly as he can involve this sidekick, who loused things up for him.”

He looked to the Norths for approval. They nodded their heads appropriately.

“Of course,” he said, “I'll check it out about Mrs. Coleman. If her daughter did pick her up and take her to Miami, I'll check that out with her daughter.”

He doesn't, Pam thought, want us to feel unappreciated. “Sure,” Jerry said. “But probably you're right.”

“One thing we can wash out,” Jefferson said. “The idea that Dr. Piersal made some mistake in treating Mrs. Upton. Doc Meister did an autopsy this morning and—”

He told them of the findings. He's a nice young man, Pam thought. He's telling us all this so we won't feel left out, frustrated. But she also listened to Jefferson's summary of the pathologist's findings.

“So you see it doesn't tie in,” Jefferson said, when he had finished. “She died of a heart attack. I don't suppose being as sick as she was did her heart any good, but it was the heart killed her. There's the digitalis angle, so could be there's a chance she just got fed up with being sick all the time and—well, there the stuff was, handy. If she hadn't been taking it and it showed up in—in the remains, it would look pretty fishy. But she had been taking it.”

It was apparent that the death of Mrs. Tucker Upton had no connection with that of Dr. Edmund Piersal; that it was one of those coincidences which are so troublesome in the investigation of crime. Jerry said, “Insulin?” and Jefferson went over that again. She'd been on insulin; probably had needed two injections a day. Her husband had given her one Saturday morning before he went to Miami. Presumably she had given herself the second shot some time Saturday evening. Her husband had said she hated to do it, but when she had to, she could nerve herself to it.

“It was,” Pam said, “just a theory. I never did think much of it, really. Probably it's the way you think, this Worthington-Bradley man.”

Jerry could tell from Pam's tone that she was a little disappointed; that she considered this Worthington-Bradley man somewhat anticlimactic. He did not share her disappointment. If it was all wound up, and wound around Worthington-Bradley, they could return to holiday, which had been interrupted by pelicans, with murder superimposed. It was true that Mrs. Coleman remained, but—

The waitress came. Pam was saying, “Yellow tail, please,” when the hostess came to tell Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson that he was wanted on the telephone. Jefferson said, “Damn it,” swallowed the rest of his drink and went. Jerry said, “Pompano,” and the waitress said of course, if he didn't mind waiting a little longer, because the pompano was frozen. “Yellow tail,” Jerry said. “Anyway, either will take quite a little time, won't it?”

“We cook everything to order,” the waitress said.

Jerry looked at their empty glasses. He looked at Pam. She guessed so, only a martini this time—a vodka martini. Jerry stuck to Beefeater. Pam said that policemen were always missing meals, the poor things.

“Probably,” Jerry said, “this Bradley guy has decided to come clean.”

“I still think—” Pam said, and did not continue. She had stopped, Jerry thought, to turn her mind over, because she had noticed something under it. He waited.

“It's all right,” Pam said. “I just remembered something, I think.”

“That thing that was on the tip of your mind?”

She considered that. She said, “I don't think so. This is about the dogs. The other must have been about something else, because the dogs just came up.”

Jerry nodded his head. The tip of Pain's mind had had something on it before the matter of dog races came up.

“She asked about them,” Pam said. “And got a taxi to go to them. That was Friday night, they said. And Dr. Piersal was there the same night. Remember? He told us that, if we'd never seen a dog race, we might enjoy it. That he'd been the night before. That was Saturday, when we were having drinks at the pool bar. She might have seen him there.”

There might well, Jerry pointed out, have been hundreds of people there. Thousands, for all he knew.

“They bet at them, don't they?” Pam said, and Jerry said that was the main point, usually. “At those something windows,” Pam said. “It would—channel them, wouldn't it? I mean, like through a funnel?”

“It might.”

“She may have come down here quite innocently,” she said. “Not knowing the doctor was here. Then she saw him and—and it all came back. All the hatred, I mean. So …” She looked at Jerry and now it was she who waited.

“She got a knife,” Jerry said. “Knew he would be out at the end of the pier at seven o'clock Sunday morning. Followed him out and he, who was a big man and a strong one, let her—and she weighs a hundred and twenty and's five feet four—let her …”

“I know,” Pam said. “There are holes in it. Here come our drinks.”

Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronald Jefferson tried not to believe it. But there it was, in a chair at the end of his desk, and mad as mad could be. With cause, Jefferson began to be afraid, and his spirits sank. The crooked little so-and-so, Jefferson thought.

The man at the end of the desk, and mad as a man could be, was not the crooked little so-and-so. He was William Howard Alexander. He was not especially little; was inclined to corpulence. He was also inclined to be red in the face, partly from sunburn and partly from anger. He was not a man used to being arrested.

He had been arrested—not by the sheriff's men; there was that—when he took a fishing boat in to a dock on Stock Island and tied it up, and got out of it with his day's catch, which was satisfactory. He had been arrested by the state police who, with the aid of the Coast Guard, had been looking for him since midmorning. He was arrested just after dark Sunday evening. He was arrested, since the fishing boat was not his boat, on the charge of stealing it.

A Coast Guard cutter had picked up the boat—which was called the
Amy Lou
—some distance out in the Gulf but, since it seemed to be heading home, had merely trailed it in. The police were waiting its arrival, along with Captain Mark Dobie, to whom it belonged. When he was told to come along, now, the large and corpulent man appeared at first astonished, and then, almost instantly, enraged.

He asked the state troopers, rather unnecessarily, who the hell they thought they were and then, perhaps more reasonably, who the hell they thought
he
was. Captain Dobie had an answer to that one: “You're the s.o.b. who stole my boat.” The corpulent man had one word for that. He then said, “You don't know who I am,” which was at that moment entirely true. He then told them that they'd damn soon find out who he was. Policemen all over the world are familiar with this approach, and tired of it.

“I'm William Howard Alexander,” the corpulent man said, taking care of that part of it. He then, it appeared, waited for gasps of amazement.

The state police sergeant in charge said, “So what, mister?”

This seemed to amaze William Howard Alexander, who repeated his name, slowly and carefully and expectantly. When the sergeant said, “So all right, you're William Howard Alexander. You expect a band or something?” Alexander promptly blew up again. It then became apparent that he had had several drinks, as a man may well have in a day's fishing. He didn't, he said, know who this little runt was—Captain Dobie wasn't a large man, but he was well-seasoned—or what the hell this was all about, but he'd bought the boat and no lousy little … He went on on this course for several minutes before Dobie hit him, with considerable violence, in the most prominent target, his belly.

They locked William Howard Alexander up at this point, although he told them they'd find out, soon enough, who he was.

They hadn't, not soon enough. His attitude did not move them to haste, and Sunday night is a bad night to find things out in.

It had not been until almost ten Monday morning that a state police lieutenant looked at a message from Miami, and said, “Ouch,” and summoned the sergeant to ask him what the hell he thought he had been up to.

William Howard Alexander was Alexander Enterprises, Inc., and he had, among other things, just bought one of the most flamboyant hotels on Miami Beach. He was in Key West to decide whether he wanted to add The Coral Isles to his chain and his office in Miami—he had offices almost everywhere—had been trying to get in touch with him to report that the Belmoth Shipping Corporation had come through with a counter proposal, asking only a million more than Alexander Enterprises had offered for the fleet. They unlocked Mr. Alexander, who was not noticeably mollified by a night in jail. In the course of refusing to accept their apologies, and between references to a suit for false arrest, he happened to mention “a man said his name was Worthington.”