Corpus Delectable

Twenty

The pressure of the shoe eased from my fingers. I turned slowly, sat up halfway, supporting myself with my palm against the carpet while my head endured a fresh blast of pain.

I raised my eyes slowly and saw the lawyer standing quietly over me, a small gun in his hand. Small, but quite capable of killing.

“For a bright lawyer with the lust for power and wealth, the cold-blooded drive to tear himself out an education and start at the bottom of the heap in criminal law... for such a lawyer, Eppling,” I said, “you pulled some bloopers. But maybe no human brain is smart enough to deal in murder — unless you’re a totally brainless gunsel who contents himself in going out and knocking off other gunsels in gangland killings.”

“Name me a blooper, Rivers.”

“Sure,” I said. “Always glad to oblige. Where shall I start? With Ben McJunkin? One of those pro killers who should have stayed with the mobs and mob killings. Just any citizen can’t hire a guy like McJunkin, Eppling. How many ordinary working stiffs would even know how to go about hiring a murderer?

“Sigmon might have had some shady connections in Caracas who could have whispered a name in his ear. But neither he nor Ginny knew where to find a hired gun in Tampa. Van or Natalie Clavery? Nonsense. They wouldn’t know where to start looking for a man like McJunkin.

“But you, Eppling... Everybody was ruled out but you. One-time small-peanuts criminal lawyer. A gunman in and out of Tampa for many years. It was a natural for you, Eppling, when you realized Jean Putnam had to be silenced.

“Want another blooper? Okay, serve up Keith Sigmon and Ginny Jameson. Keith could palm her off here as his daughter provided that no one here had ever seen the real Elena. Or — and this is how you cut yourself into a twenty-million-dollar gravy, Eppling — if anyone here who’d ever seen the real Elena would accept Ginny as a proxy.”

“If you’re trying to ring me in the middle of this thing,” Sigmon burst out, “you’re wrong. I never saw Fred Eppling until he met our plane.”

“So you told me,” I said. “But Myrtle Higgins let it slip that Fred Eppling made one trip to Caracas for the señora while the old lady was still alive. Mostly Eppling never had to do more than drop by the house here occasionally. But on that one trip, he would have met Elena, and you as well, Sigmon.

“Your instincts told you that you were two of a kind, greedy and ruthless. Before you could bring in Ginny as Elena, Sigmon, you had to make sure that Eppling, the lawyer handling the estate, would go for the deal. I’m sure we’ll find a record of an overseas call when the cops start digging out and putting all the evidence and minor details together.

“Twenty million dollars was more than enough to go around, and when Eppling agreed to come in, the scheme got off to a flying start.”

“But I never killed anybody,” the old, hard man said. “It was Eppling who hired McJunkin, just as you say, Rivers. When Jean Putnam began to question us, I wanted to grab what was convenient for grabbing and make a run for it. Eppling wouldn’t let me. He insisted that twenty million was too much to lose—”

“Even if I was fond of Jean,” Eppling said quietly.

“Fond of her,” I said, getting slowly to my feet. “Just more fond of twenty million smackers.”

“I’m afraid that’s the case,” Eppling said. “You see... Jean came to me at the outset with her suspicions. Natural, I suppose, since I had been the señora’s lawyer and was handling the estate. I tried to dissuade Jean, convince her that her ideas were groundless. I was unable to do so. I had destroyed everything among the old señora’s personal things that might have pointed to the real Elena.”

“Including that missing portfolio?” I said.

“Including the crummy old briefcase.” Eppling’s lips twisted. “Jean remembered there’d been some snapshots of the old señora’s family in the portfolio. She had reached the point where she wanted to see a picture of Elena. Jean... You see, she gave me no choice, Rivers.”

“And Van Clavery’s confession and promissory note?”

“In my office safe,” Eppling said. “I planned to let them conveniently be found in some odd corner here in the house when things had quieted down.”

“I think we’ve talked enough,” Ginny said.

“Yes,” Eppling said. “Of course. You’re quite right, Ginny.”

“Blackbeard... Blackbeard darling,” sang a drunken little voice in the hallway. “You didn’t keep your promise to come back... Where are you, Blackbeard?”

Hildy’s sunny hair was a bright spot of color in the doorway. Keyed tight, the sound of her voice had brought a quiver and a glance from Eppling.

I went in under the the gun. With a snarl, Eppling swung it down, trying to slug me. The gun glanced off my back muscles as I hit him with my shoulder and carried him backward.

“Sigmon!” the word was jolted from Eppling as we hit the floor.

From the perimeter of my vision, I saw Sigmon’s foot swinging at me. I ducked, grappling with Eppling for the gun.

Hildy started screaming.

Sigmon piled on me and Ginny joined the fray with fingernails reaching for my eyes. I’d half risen, holding Eppling’s wrist. The bunch of us hit the floor in a writhing mass.

I felt Sigmon being yanked off me as the summons of Hildy’s scream was answered. I got an impression of Van Clavery using those tense, wiry muscles behind a small, hard fist. I heard Sigmon crash into a table, make kindling of it, and roll to the floor, an unconscious old man.

Eppling was trying to knee me in the groin and writhe from beneath me while Ginny kicked at my kidneys. Holding onto that gun hand, I took a second to grab her ankle and jerk her feet from under her.

While I had the hand free, I doubled it and stuck it in the side of Eppling’s face. My fist glanced off his cheekbone. He quit trying to rupture me with his knees. I stood, dragging him up with me. With his left he swung a roundhouse. I blocked it, got punching room, and aimed one straight at his nose.

My aim was good. His eyes rolled up. His knees folded, and he dangled from my grip by his gun wrist.

I let him slide to the floor and picked up the small gun where it had fallen from his fingers.

“Ginny,” I said.

She drew to a stop short of the door where sunny Hildy stood. She turned slowly, saw the gun, the wreckage in the room. She went gropingly to a chair, sat down, pressed her knees tightly together, and stared at nothing, at sheer emptiness. At her future, possibly.

“Catch,” I said to Clavery, pitching him Eppling’s small gun.

“I don’t think there’s time for a long explanation right now. So get this. Keep this trio covered. She’s not Elena Sigmon. She’s Ginny Jameson. It was a twenty-million-dollar hoax that didn’t quite pan out, even though Eppling hired Ben McJunkin as a long-reaching weapon. Get the cops and tell them to get with Caracas while they start a third-degree on these creeps. I’ll report in at headquarters as soon as possible, but they can tie up the Putnam-Thackery case, now that they knew where to start the knots.”

“Rivers—”

“Later,” I said. “Your note and confession are in Eppling’s safe.”

“How could Fred have—”

“For a slice of a twenty-million-dollar estate,” I said. “Now for cripe’s sake, can you do as I ask?”

“Of course,” he said quietly. The gun was steady, quite deadly in his high-strung, capable hand.

The ruckus had proved too much for Hildy. She had made herself scarce. I’d probably never have the chance to apologize for the destructive thoughts I’d had in regards to her very nice little rump.

A bigger, more lush, far more female woman than Hildy opened her door to me a short time later. She stood there looking at me, the light behind her spilling through the mane of dark-blond hair.

“Aren’t you going to ask me in, Myrtle?”

“I’m really tired, Ed. Like I told you... a good book is my present limit, as fetching as your costume is.”

“I want Ben McJunkin, Myrtle.”

“What makes you think—”

“It all adds up.” I pushed into the small living room of her apartment and looked at the open suitcases she’d been packing. An emptiness began to fan out inside of me. “Packing your books too?”

“Ed...”

“No,” I said. “Let’s not talk about it. I understand now. You almost fainted when I returned from the San Salvador Hotel. But not from relief. It was because my return meant I might have killed him. You did it all for him, didn’t you? Sticking close. As close as a bedsheet, if necessary, to keep tabs on his enemy, to help him in any way you could. When did you first meet him, Myrtle?”

“A long time ago... in an emergency ward... I was on duty. They brought him in one night. A colored fellow had cut him all to pieces, but he refused to die... He was too tough, too much a man to die like that.”

She walked to the window and watched the star-shells burst over the river. “I don’t suppose anyone would understand,” she said after a moment. “He never married me. He was restless and would be gone a large part of the time. But he always came back. Nothing else was more important. From the time he met a green kid wearing her first nurse’s uniform, he always came back.”

“For whatever he needed,” I said. “If it was medical attention he had a fine trained nurse — while the cops checked all the doctors for a wounded man.”

“Is that what put you onto me?” she asked quietly.

“Your hurry to leave my apartment tonight and get to him clinched it,” I said. “There were other things. The size of the garments in McJunkin’s hotel room. The fact that Jean Putnam kept a diary, a fact a co-worker of Jean’s would know and could relay to McJunkin.

“I know now it was you, Myrtle, trying to call him right after I slipped into his room. You weren’t able to warn him; so you tipped his principal, Fred Eppling, that I’d located McJunkin’s address. Only you could have done that, Myrtle. Only you knew I’d discovered where McJunkin was staying. I’m sure you thought Eppling would head McJunkin off, warn him. Instead, Eppling had no choice but to start shooting at me through McJunkin’s window.

“Then there was a statement you made in my apartment, Myrtle, when I told you the fingerprint on my doorknob belonged to a man named McJunkin. Almost immediately, you used the full name. Ben McJunkin. It went over my head at the time. When the parts shaped up, I remembered.”

She had the attitude of listening for a cry from some great distance or a whisper in the nearby darkness. After a long, long moment, she seemed to remember I was there. She made a little motion toward the open suitcases. “All my things, Ed. None of his.”

“Where is he, Myrtle?”

She looked through the window to the endless dark skies. The Gasparilla stars had all quit falling. The party was over. The skies were totally black.

“Where?” she said. She looked at the floor. I followed her glance, saw the still-damp places where she had tried to scrub the traces of blood from the carpet.

I turned my head to look at the bedroom door. My hand dropped to the gun beneath the blue pirate’s sash.

“No, Ed...” she said in a tone beyond grief. “You can open the door. You won’t need the gun. He managed to get here, but he was beyond help. You killed him, Ed... back there at the San Salvador Hotel.”

I looked at her, and I believed her. I felt empty and slightly defeated. My lips were very dry. I touched them with the wetness of my tongue, and said “Ben McJunkin, Myrtle... when you could have had any man. After all these years, still Ben McJunkin... Why?”

She looked past me, thinking of the years, picking out and recalling the individual hours that lived in her memory. For the barest fraction of a second, Myrtle Higgins wasn’t incomplete. The power of her feeling changed her. And I glimpsed beyond the two dimensional physical surface that she had always presented to me or any other man — except one.

I would remember what I had seen for a long time.

The longhairs with degrees papering their walls can study it a lifetime and write a library of books about it. They’ll never have her knowledge of it. To Myrtle Higgins it was very simple. Right or wrong, for good or for evil, she expressed it all and told the whole tale in three words.

“I loved him,” she said.