Wake Up to Murder (12 page)

As I helped Lou into the Ford, she said, “Looks like we might have a blow.”

I looked down the street. Automatically, from force of habit, not really giving a damn. Towards the main post office, to see if the small-craft warning flag was flying. I couldn’t tell. There wasn’t enough moonlight for me to see the flagstaff.

I walked around the back of the car to get at the wheel and Shep King stepped out from behind the smooth white bole of a royal palm.

“Hi, Jim,” he said, quietly.

I froze with my back to the door of the Ford. Shep was to Cass Hardy what Tony Mantin had been to Cade Kiefer. On a lower scale. A former commercial fisherman who’d gotten tired of netting mullet for a living, Shep was Hardy’s strong-arm boy. Beatings were his job. With a little knife work and an occasional warning to leave town thrown in.

I forced myself to be casual. “Hi. What’s with you, Shep?”

He took his cigar from his mouth. “Oh, this and that. What’s this we hear on the radio, Jim?”

I said, “You hear a lot of things on the radio. Which program are you talking about?”

Shep returned his cigar to his mouth. “Don’t try to pull that on me, Charters. On you, wiseness isn’t becoming. Is it true you killed your wife and Matt Kendall?”

I laughed. It came out sickly. “Don’t believe it,” I said. “Do you think I’d be free on Fourth Street if I had?”

“It could be,” Shep said. He knew Lieutenant David. “You never can tell which way that piney-woods cracker will jump. He looks at everything slanch-wise. A great hand, Bill David, for getting someone else to cut his bait for him.” Shep looked over his shoulder at the line of cars parked along the curb. “You got a police tail on you?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. I knew what was coming. “Sure,” I told him. “Ever since I left the beach.”

Shep looked from the line of parked cars to me. “I don’t believe you,” he said, finally. “If Bill David had a tail on you, you wouldn’t know it. Anyway, I’m going to take a chance. Go on. Get in the car with your broad. I’ll get in back. Cass wants to talk to you.”

I shook my head at him. “No.”

Shep’s cigar glowed red as he sucked it. “And don’t give me any trouble.”

Lou slid over on the seat and looked out the window. “What’s going on here?”

“You keep out of this,” Shep told her.

I stalled for time. “What’s Cass want to talk to me about?”

“You don’t know?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll let him tell you,” Shep said. He pushed me against the car door. “Go on. Get back of that wheel.”

“Hit him, Jim,” Lou said, tersely.

I did. Bringing my fist up from the hub cap. Aiming at the cigar. Burning my knuckles on the ash, but pushing the tobacco down Shep’s throat. He stepped back, coughing and gagging. I wrenched the car door open, but before I could slide in back of the wheel, Shep, still spitting tobacco, grabbed me by the shoulder.

“You bastard. You dumb bastard,” he rasped. “I’ll kill you for that.”

As he spoke, he foul-punched me. I twisted enough to take most of the blow on my hip bone, at the same time raking my shoe down his shin.

He gritted his teeth and took it. Then he swung me around against the bole of the palm tree so what little light there was would be in his favor, and began punching with both hands.

I’d already had one beating. I couldn’t take another. Every place he hit me I’d been hit before. I clinched to protect myself and wrestled him around the tree to the walk. Thinking any minute Hap Arnold and Bill David would walk up and tap us on the shoulders. Hoping that they would.

They didn’t.

Shep breathed stale beer in my face. He was thin but strong. The muscles in his arms were like the steel cables on an illegal donkey-netting outfit. He spread his elbows and broke free.

I followed him, punching as hard as I could, trying not to let him get set. Shep went down. And got up. A small crowd began to form on the walk, most of them elderly tourists on their way home from the square dance on the pier. One of them, a woman, said, “Disgusting. They’re probably both drunk. Someone ought to call the police.”

Lou got out of the car. “You mind your own business,” Lou told her. Then she screamed, deep in her throat. “Look out, Jim. He’s got a knife.”

I saw the knife as she called. At least the hilt of it. Shep was standing with his legs apart, drawing the knife from a scabbard slung just under the neck of his coat. In back. I’d heard of guys wearing them there, but it was the first time I’d ever seen it.

I stepped in before I lost my nerve, caught his elbow in my palm and heaved. Shep screamed as something snapped. Then I crossed a left to his jaw that swung him around and into a lady tourist.

She “eeked” and stepped back. Shep stood a moment, swaying. Like he was drunk. Then he fell on his face on the walk.

All the women on the walk were screaming now. One of the men tried to take my arm. Lou brushed him aside, led me back to the car and pushed me in. “Slide over,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

She whipped the Ford out and away from the curb. I sat, gasping for breath, wiping the sweat away from my eyes. We were three blocks away, in front of the post office, when the first siren began to wail.

Lou slowed down to the logical speed limit. “Who was that?” she asked me. She was breathing almost as hard as I was.

I said, “His name is Shep King.”

“Why did he attack you?”

“Shep is Cass Hardy’s muscle man. And from where I sit, it begins to look as if Mr. Kendall isn’t the only man in Sun City with a guilty conscience.”

Lou asked me what I meant by that.

I said, “
Somebody
had to kill Joe Summers. If Pearl didn’t, and I’m positive she didn’t, that leaves Cass or possibly Shep as the best candidate. Cass had the most to gain. Joe was cutting into his racket, deep. And in another year or two, Joe would have been top dog, leaving Cass out in the cold.”

Lou took one hand off the wheel and touched my face with her fingertips, getting them wet with perspiration. “In Florida?”

“Then you think Cass Hardy killed Joe Summers?”

“Or paid Shep to kill him.”

“And this Mrs. Landers — ?”

“Was paid to testify as she did.”

It was all perfectly clear to me now. Cass Hardy had killed Joe Summers, or paid to have him killed. Pearl, coming home when she had, had been a break for him. Cass was a shrewd operator, almost as smart in a small way as Cade Kiefer was on a big scale. He’d immediately sensed a perfect cover. He’d slipped the Landers woman a bundle of currency to testify as she had. Then he’d given Kendall a substantial retainer not to upset her testimony. And that had been that. All would have gone as planned, with Pearl taking the rap, if I hadn’t gotten drunk and shot off my big mouth to, of all people, Tony Mantin. Why he hadn’t come to Pearl’s defense before he had was the one thing that I didn’t know.

Lou looked sideways at me. “Why so quiet?”

I said, “Just getting it lined up in my mind. So if we can break the Landers dame, I’ll have it straight. I mean, what to tell Cade Kiefer.”

“Oh,” Lou said. “I see.” She looked in the rear vision mirror. “I also see we’re being followed.”

I leaned out the window and looked back. It was too dark to be certain, but it looked like the same car that had tailed me from the beach. I thought of what Shep King had said and added Lieutenant Bill David to my list of free-wheeling sons-of-bitches.

Shep had said,
‘You never can tell which way that pineywoods cracker will jump. He looks at everything slanch-wise. A great hand, Bill David, for getting someone else to cut his bait for him.’

It was so in my case.

I began to breathe hard again. Instead of believing me, trying to find May and Kendall, David, with his dirty, suspicious mind, thinking bad things about May, believing I’d killed her and Mr. Kendall, was hoping I’d lead him to their bodies. While he sat on his lean bottom, even when Shep King had tried to knife me. So I got killed. So what?

“Who is it?” Lou asked.

“I can’t tell,” I told her. “But I think it’s Hap Arnold and Lieutenant David. Whoever it is, he has tailed me from the beach to Mabel’s, from Mabel’s to your hotel. And, it seems, they’re still with me.”

“Oh,” Lou said. “I see.” She used one hand to lift her hair away from her neck. Even in the dim light from the dash, I could see that her curls were just as wet as they had been when she had stepped from her shower. There was a fine film of perspiration on her face.

“Maybe you’d better go back to your room,” I said. “This may get plenty rough before it’s over. And there’s no use in you getting mixed up in it.”

Lou shook her head. “No. Now I’m in it this far, I’ll stay.”

“Okay. Turn left at the next corner,” I told her.

When they’d remodeled the Rolyat Hotel, the new owners had changed its name to the Casa Mañana Apartments and leaned heavily on the Spanish motif. It hadn’t been difficult to do, what with the big Moorish arches in front and at least a dozen rooms on every floor having wrought iron balconies.

The massive walls were white. The roof was red clay tile. It was a beautiful building in an exotic setting of rare palms and tropical shrubs. There was a skyline cocktail lounge called the Buccaneer Room, two expensive dining halls, a salt water swimming pool, and a nine-hole golf course. At night both the grounds and the pool were illuminated by cleverly concealed spotlights.

It looked a lot more like Miami Beach than it did Sun City. The new management charged accordingly. Even in the summer, a one-room efficiency apartment rented for two hundred dollars a month. And during the regular winter season some of the larger apartments brought as high as fifty dollars a day. At least, so I’d been told.

There was a big circular drive in front. Lou parked the Ford under a giant Phoenix palm. I walked around and opened the door for her, with the feeling that everyone was watching me. I’d never felt so out of place. Everywhere I looked I saw women in evening dresses and men in white dinner jackets. Strolling the grounds. Watching the swimmers in the pool. Sitting in chairs on the terrace, listening to the dreamy music from the Buccaneer Room.

“Nice, huh?” Lou asked.

I looked at my rumpled summer-weight suit. It hadn’t cost much to begin with, and taking two beatings in it had not made it look any better. “Yeah,” I said, sourly. “I’ll be lucky if they let me in the front door.”

I walked Lou across the lawn to the tile terrace. To hell with the goddamn snowbirds. I wasn’t competing in a fashion show. I
had
to talk to Mrs. Landers. Somehow I had to persuade her to tell the truth, so I’d have something to take to Cade Kiefer, something that would make him want to find Matt Kendall. Every time my heart beat, Kendall was taking May that much farther away from me, possibly abusing her. What with the mental strain I was under and the two beatings I’d taken, I had a hard time to keep from being sick.

Lou tightened her fingers on my arm. “Steady as it goes.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m all right.”

There was a uniformed doorman standing in the main arch. He bowed graciously to Lou as we walked into the lobby. “It’s nice to see you back, Miss Tarrent.”

“Thank you, Charles,” Lou said.

When we were a few feet past him I asked Lou, “How come the doorman knows you? What does he mean, it’s nice to see you back?”

Lou’s smile was wry. “I splurged once for a few months. Just to see how the other half lives.”

“When was this?” I asked her.

Lou said, “Last summer.”

She angled across the lobby and up the broad stairs to the mezzanine. As we started up the stairs, Lou added:

“I paid two hundred dollars a month for a room. My whole salary went for rent. And every time I turned around — poof — there went five dollars of my savings. It was nice, though.”

I said, “With your looks, you ought to marry some rich man, Lou.”

Lou’s smile was even more wry. Almost cynical. “There are a lot of things in this world we ought to do. But sometimes we get all mixed up, both mentally and physically.” She smoothed her skirt over her hips as she led the way down the hall toward the Landers apartment. “Besides, unless he’s born with money, or has a racket of some kind, by the time the average man has enough money to live in a place like this, all he can do for a young wife is boast about what a man he
used
to be.”

As I recalled the number, Joe Summers and Pearl had lived in Apartment A7, the number probably appealing to him as lucky. As we passed it, I noticed a ‘Fresh Paint’ sign on the knob. The door was cracked for ventilation. I pushed it open and looked in. The carpets were rolled up.

There was a decorator’s scaffold in one corner of the living room.

Lou started down the hall. I stopped her. “Just a minute. I want to be sure I’m right before I talk to Mrs. Landers.”

She stood in the doorway, chewing her lower lip “How do you mean, sure?”

I walked on into the living room. “I want to make a test.” I looked back. Lou was still standing in the doorway. “Come in. And close the door,” I said. “Joe Summers’ ghost won’t hurt you.”

Lou took a deep breath. “No. Of course not.” She stepped into the reception hall and closed the door with the ‘Fresh Paint’ sign on the knob. “What are you going to do, Jim?”

I examined the wall between the living room and the bedroom. It was as thick as I remembered it. The door was solid oak. The bedroom window was open. I walked to it and looked out. It was one of the windows with balconies, the balcony almost overgrown with flowering purple bougainvillea. I walked back to the bedroom door. Lou was still standing in the center of the big sunken living room.

“What are you going to do?” she repeated.

I picked a flat wooden paint mixer from the extension scaffold and handed it to her. “I’m going back in the bedroom and close the door,” I told her. “As soon as the door is closed, I want you to say, ‘No, please don’t shoot me.’ Loud. Then I want you to whack the scaffold with the stick. Six times. With the flat side.”

I showed her how I wanted her to do it. The flat smack of the mixing stick on the wood of the scaffold sounded enough like a shot to be one.