Wake Up to Murder (7 page)

May saw me looking at her. “Well,” she said, over her shoulder. “I didn’t think you’d be interested.” She stepped into the silk panties. Sitting on the dressing stool, she ran a comb through her hair.

“I love you, May,” I said.

May powdered her nose and renewed her lipstick. Then standing up, she reached a pale yellow linen dress from the closet and slipped it over her head. “So you say. Now,” she said.

She had a right to ride me. I didn’t say anything.

May ran the comb through her hair again and turned to face me. “Do I look all right?”

I told her the truth. “You look swell. And maybe you don’t believe me now. I don’t blame you if you don’t. But I meant what I said. I love you.”

The slightly sullen look left May’s face. Her lower lip trembled slightly. She came over to where I was standing by the bed and put her small hands on my shoulders. “I love you, Jim,” she said, quietly. “And I want you always to remember that as far as I’m concerned you are all that matters.”

I kissed the tip of her nose. Then, before I got too sentimental and maybe made an ass of myself, I said, “Let’s take the ten Gs with us. Maybe the real big shot can find some way to use them to buy me clear of this.”

May took the brown manila envelope from between the box spring and the mattress and put it in her white plastic purse. “You back the car out,” she said. “I’ll close the windows.”

I backed the car out of the porte, first making certain Mantin wasn’t in the yard or on the drive. Then I sat waiting for May, thinking of what she had said.

‘
I want you always to remember that
as far as I’m concerned, you are all that matters.’

Now why had May said that? During our ten years of marriage I’d always taken May for granted. I had a feeling of wheels revolving inside of wheels. There was more, much more, to this thing than had come out so far. May said some man had called her and said that I was checked into the Glades Hotel with Lou. But she hadn’t named the man.

May slammed the breezeway door and got into the car beside me.

I drove slowly down the drive. “Who was the man who called you last night, May? The one who told you about me and Lou?”

May fixed the front dip of her hair, using the rear view mirror and the faint light from the dash. “He didn’t give his name. But, please. Let’s not talk about her. Let’s try to forget it ever happened.”

I said, “That’s fine with me.”

The street was quiet with early evening. The Ginnis kid had left his tricycle on the hard pavement again. Someone, not knowing the street, might easily run over it. I stopped the car and got out and put the tricycle up on Pat’s lawn. Then I got back in the car.

“How many of the neighbors know I was drunk last night,” I asked.

May said, “Only Gwen and Bob. We told the others something important had come up. That you had to go to Tampa for Mr. Kendall and we’d have the party some other night.”

I patted her knee. “Good girl.”

There were a few cars in front of the Sandbar. I turned west toward the causeway. A little later there would be a lot of traffic, but at this time of evening travel was light. The tide was out. I could smell the flats two blocks away. The tree frogs and cicadas were beginning to tune up. I realized my hand was still resting on May’s leg. I patted her. Absently. From force of habit. Without thinking.

May pressed my hand against her knee. Her voice was small but fierce, as she asked, “Was she as good as I am, Jim?”

I was thinking of what I’d tell Kendall. I glanced sideways at her, puzzled. “Who?”

“Lou,” May said. “I mean in bed.”

“No,” I told her. Women.

HERE, out on the beach, away from the city, on the long mile-wide spit of sand between the Gulf and the Bay, it was cooler. An onshore wind was blowing. The fronds of the tall palms lining the road fanned the dark night sky. A south moon under was rising.

I turned right on the winding Gulf road toward Ponce de Leon Beach, where Kendall lived.

The farther behind me I left the Centre Avenue Causeway, the swankier the sections became. You had to have real money to live here.

We passed the Ole Swimming Hole, the Sundown and the Bath Club. I winced as we passed the Bath Club.
‘What do you think I am?’
I’d asked. ‘
A sixty-two-dollars-and-fifty-cents-a-week
lawyer’s runner?’ Then I’d fallen flat on my face. In front of guys who really amounted to something.

May sat close to me on the seat. I could tell by the way she was breathing that she was as frightened as I was. A guy could talk big. It was one of my failings. But we didn’t even live in the same world as men like Cade Kiefer and Mantin. The law to them was something that someone had passed to keep the sheep in line, so they could shear them more easily. And when a sheep got out of line, well — who cared what happened to one sheep?

We were in the real rich section now, big substantial homes built right on the water. With massive sea-walls to protect the trees and shrubbery, and lawns planted in tons of imported black muck. To keep from thinking about Mantin, I read the names on the ornate gateposts as the headlights of the Ford picked them out. The Sands — Sea Vista — Casa del Col — Gulf View — The Palms.

May asked, “What are you thinking about, Jim?”

I said, “About how if we had money to have a house here, I think we could figure out a much more original name than any I’ve seen so far.”

May squeezed my arm. “I know what we’d call it.”

I asked her what.

She told me, “Us.”

I grinned sideways at her. “Fine. Now all I have to do is make the dough to buy the house.”

“I like the one we have,” May said, simply.

Kendall’s house was a half-mile up the road, on the Bay side, set well back from the highway. It was ultra modern, built in several levels, the living room mainly glass. At least, so they said. I’d never been in the place.

It was a big house for a single man. But Kendall was single in name only. In the three years I’d worked for him, he’d been involved with four different women. That I knew of. And that wasn’t counting the one-night stands or the young girls I’d heard crying in his office. At least three of the women had been married. There’d been a nasty stink about one of them, with an outraged husband named Byfield threatening to shoot Kendall if he didn’t stay away from his wife. But somehow Kendall had hushed it up. He was good at that sort of thing. He was good at a lot of things, including law. He’d made a lot of money at it. Mostly by cutting corners and taking chances that the other attorneys in Sun City didn’t consider ethical and wouldn’t touch.

He was home. There were lights in several of the rooms. There were cars in the two stalls of the garage and a black Cadillac parked in the drive. I set the handbrake on the Ford and sat looking at the house. If Kendall couldn’t or wouldn’t help me, I was sunk.

“Well, here goes nothing,” I told May.

I glanced at her. She was clutching her purse so tightly that her knuckles were white in the faint light of the moon.

“I — I’ll wait in the car until you see if he’s home,” she said.

I crossed the drive and punched the bell beside a door.

May called from the car, “I think that’s the service entry. You’d better go around to the front, Jim.”

I followed the drive around the house. A green expanse of lawn led down to the water. Kendall had spent a lot of money on it, but it wasn’t much better than mine.

May had been right about the doors. The one in front was more ornate. I pushed the button beside it. Being fired still rankled. I’d worked hard for Mr. Kendall. There had been absolutely no reason for him to fire me.

I pushed the button again. Harder this time. Poor folks had bells or buzzers. Rich men like Kendall had musical chimes. I hoped I called him away from something he didn’t want to leave.

I could hear the chimes tinkling inside, but no one came to the door. I walked out on the lawn and looked up through the glass side of the living room. Mr. Kendall was sitting in a big red plastic chair. With his back to me. All I could see was his black hair and one arm dangling over the side of the chair. There was a bottle of Scotch on the carpet a few inches from his hand.

I went back and rang the chimes again. When he still didn’t answer, I walked back to the car and told May:

“It looks like Mr. Kendall has joined the lodge.”

May asked me what I meant.

I said, “I think he’s stinking. I can see the back of his head over the top of a red chair, but he doesn’t answer the bell. Shall I wake him up or not?”

May got out of the car. “What else can we do, Jim? Go to the police?”

I shook my head at her. “No. They wouldn’t believe such a fantastic story. Bill David would laugh at me.” I looked at the white boles of the royal palms rising out of the lawn. “Besides, if I’m right about this, every minute counts.”

May stood, holding onto the door of the Ford. “Then wake him up. Force the door if you have to.”

I walked back to the front door. It wasn’t necessary to force it. The screen door was unlocked. I opened it and walked in. And wasn’t anywhere, except at the bottom of an unroofed well, with semi-circular stairs leading up to another level. I walked up the right-hand stairs to a roofed veranda or gallery and had my choice of two opaque glass doors. I opened the one on the right, but due to the overhang I still wasn’t in the glass-walled living room where I’d seen Mr. Kendall. I was standing in a wide center hall with a half-dozen doors and arches to choose from this time.

It was the goddamndest place I’d ever seen. If this was modern, I agreed with May. I like our GI house better. A guy would need an overlay map and a lensatic compass to find a bathroom in this joint.

I called, “Mr. Kendall. This is Charters.”

No one answered. I walked through one of the doors. I still wasn’t in the living room. But I’d heard of this room before. One of the electricians who’d worked on the house had told us all about it one night down at Kelly’s.

The only furniture was an oversized bed. In the exact middle of the room. With no head or footboards. Three of the walls were mirrors. So was the floor and ceiling. Whichever way I looked I saw a dozen reflections of me. Like I was two dozen guys. Seen from the bed the effect must have been startling.

The electrician at Kelly’s had called it Kendall’s studroom.

I looked at the fourth wall. It was covered with pictures of women. All of the women were nude. None of them were exactly art studies. The pictures had been taken while the women were drunk, obviously. And Kendall had hung them on his wall as trophies.

I saw several women whom I recognized, two of them married and in the upper brackets. There was also a picture of Lou, her pretty face distorted with passion, her white body arched in desire.

“I thought you didn’t like the guy,” I told her picture. “I thought you told him to go to hell on the corner of Fourth and Center.”

It was no longer a matter of wanting to see Kendall. I
had
to see him now. Another wheel had been added. Lou having a fight with Kendall, going out to the beach alone, and me bumping into her at The Plantation was just not possible. The long arm of coincidence just didn’t reach that far. Lou had been paid to go to bed with me. What I wanted to know was why.

I crossed the mirror floor to another door and opened it. It led into a combination dressing room and bath. I walked through them into a powder room, then into the room I wanted.

The living room was huge, perhaps thirty feet wide by half again as long. The entire east wall was glass. I could see the moonlight shining on the bay, and beyond the bay the lights of Sun City.

The room looked bare to me. The furniture was in keeping with the outside of the house. Ultra modern and very uncomfortable-looking. Except the chair of red plastic in which Kendall was sitting. He’d moved it since I’d seen him last. He’d swung it around so the chair was facing the window. I still couldn’t see any more than the back and top of his head. His arm and the bottle of Scotch were out of sight now, too.

“Hey, you, Kendall,” I called.

He gave no sign of hearing me.

I crossed the parquet floor, and spatted the back of his head with my hand to snap him out of it. With a short arm motion. Harder than I had intended to.

His head shot forward sharply. The balanced body bent at the waist and followed his head, twisting as it fell, so that it landed on its back, looking up at me.

With a codfish smile on its lined face.

I felt like I had once when I was a kid and the old man had been running a bait camp down on Palmetto Point. I’d sneaked out into the kitchen in the dark meaning to gobble some chicken left over from supper. And in the dark and my hurry, I’d gotten hold of a dish of rotten meat, covered with slime, that the old man had asked Ma to save to use as bait for stone crabs.

The roof of my mouth puckered. I wanted to be sick and couldn’t. I heard the bottle of Scotch thud against the glass wall, then fall to the door and smash. Hearing it faintly, as from a great distance.

My vision was distorted. It was difficult for me to breathe. My shirt collar was too tight. I tugged at it and found it was already unbuttoned.

Such a thing couldn’t be. I’d talked to him on the phone not half an hour before. The little guy couldn’t be here. If he was here he couldn’t be dead. But he was. The man I’d knocked out of the chair hadn’t been Mr. Kendall. It was Tony Mantin.

The front of his expensive white silk suit was stained with blood. He was lying on his back, all expression wiped from his face. Looking just like he had when he’d told me:

’I’ve taken a liking to you, Charters. You’re smart. But you’ve still got what they call the milk of human kindness. More, you’ve got what it takes on the ball.’

With the important exception that Mantin was dead now, had been dead for some minutes. I could tell by the blood on his coat. It had begun to thicken.

I backed a step away from him.

“Kendall!” I yelled. “Mr. Kendall!”

It was like shouting in a morgue. A faint echo was the only answer.
‘Dalli’
my own voice mocked me.