Mermaid on the Rocks

chapter 13

Hank Sims was at the wheel of a promoter’s car, a white Chevrolet convertible with white-walled tires and red leather upholstery. The top was down. It passed out of sight for a moment and stopped in front of the house.

Barbara waited in the living room, checking her hair and makeup, while Eda Lou went to the door to let him in. He sauntered into binocular-range, hands in the back pockets of his tight Levis. He was a burly young man in a full black beard.

“Still wearing that awful disguise, I see,” Barbara observed. “No wonder nobody wants to give you a full time job.”

Sims slouched into the room. “I’m not looking for jobs. I’m self-employed.”

“And it must pay very well,” Barbara said cheerfully. “I see you’re driving a new car.”

“I’ll get some coffee,” Eda Lou said disapprovingly.

The moment the housekeeper was out of the room Sims’s hands came out of his pockets. He took Barbara in his arms and kissed her hard. At first she tried to twist away. That lasted only an instant. Then her arms came up and the embrace became deep and mutual.

He broke off abruptly. “What have you been up to?”

“Nothing too exciting,” she said shakily. “Damn you, anyway. After Kitty walked out I thought you might at least give me a ring once in a while.”

“After who walked out? I walked out, for cause, and that’s how it’s going to be in the action. Goddamn it, when money’s going around the table I want my share.” He put his hand on her breast. “I wanted to call you. I almost did a couple of times but things were too involved.”

He dropped his hand as Eda Lou came in with a tray.

“Coffee.”

Giving Sims a narrow look, she put down the tray and went out.

“Somehow,” he said, looking after her, “I get the feeling that somebody around here doesn’t like me. She’s got colored blood, do you know that? There’s a thing about the half-moons on the fingernails-you can always tell. How you two can be so palsy-I’d go out of my skull.”

“Eda Lou is a very old and very good friend.”

“Yeah. You didn’t put on a bra, I notice. That was foresighted.”

“I hardly ever wear one down here.” She moved a chair to the low table. Leaning forward over the tray, she poured the coffee. “I forget about you. Cream and sugar?”

Sims picked the cognac bottle off the sideboard. “Stick some of this in it.”

“Not a bad suggestion. I believe I’ll join you.”

She poured cognac into both their cups and passed one to him. He watched her for a moment and said abruptly, “Are you really bucking for judge’s wife?”

“That’s one way to put it. He’s another old, dear friend.”

“Christ! How far along is it?”

“Quite far. His work keeps him busy. We’ll be married after court recesses in June.”

“I know how busy he is,” Sims commented. “On the go every minute. Babs, I think about you a lot, especially lately.”

“I know precisely how much you think about me.” She made a circle of her thumb and forefinger. “Not at all. I don’t blame you. Nobody gives you foundation grants. You have to think about yourself, and that’s a big subject.”

“Will you cool it, Babs? I may be a son of a bitch in some ways-”

“In some ways?”

“In all ways if you like that better. You mentioned the car. It’s not mine. I borrowed it from a certain connection. He don’t know I took it. And the way luck has been running for me lately, some orange-picker’s going to bang into me on the way back to Miami and he won’t have any insurance.”

“That old song and dance. Unlucky Hank. What’s so important it can’t wait till after breakfast?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. I want to get some more of this so-called coffee inside me before you kick me out.”

Something moved near the corner of the house. Eda Lou came out of the boathouse carrying a wooden footstool and something else which Shayne was unable to identify. She put the stool on the clamshells under the rear window and stepped up on it. The object in her other hand took shape. It was a bullhorn, probably the kind with a two-way amplifier, which can send voices a long distance across open water and can also pick up ordinary sounds at the same distance, like a gigantic hearing aid.

She put the mouthpiece to her ear and pointed the bell of the horn toward the open window.

“I’m always the one who gets burned,” Sims was saying. “With anybody ordinary, it evens out. Sometimes a thing clicks, sometimes it don’t. If you happen to be born lucky, maybe it clicks for you seven out of ten. With me it’s the other way. Seven times out of ten, year in and year out, I end up with horse turd in my face. Where I’m concerned they suspended the law of averages.”

“Hank, you’re just no damn good, that’s the only trouble with you.”

“But I know it!” he said quickly. “That makes a difference. You wouldn’t keep wondering where I was all the time. You’d know I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. Wouldn’t that give you a kind of security? God knows I make a lousy husband. Ask Kitty.”

“You’re not telling me anything.”

“But I could tell you a couple of ways I’d be an improvement on your ordinary jerk, even if I don’t go to the barber for a trim every second Friday. Even if I don’t think the goddamn jokes in The Reader’s Digest are funny.”

Barbara laughed. “Hank, you make out a very good case.”

“It’s nothing immediate,” Sims said gloomily. “First I have to cut my own marriage ties and get that in writing. Then if you decide not to share Frank’s sunset years-”

Barbara interrupted. “What did you want to show me, bearing in mind that whatever it is, I’m not paying you anything?”

“You’re not too dumb at that,” he said. “I thought maybe I could peddle it for a couple of G’s. But I know me. I’d get it all bollixed up and walk out owing you money.”

He put the cup on the table and said seriously, “We’ve been batting that pingpong ball back and forth, which is O.K. as far as that goes. Knock me. I’ll knock you right back. But in back of this beard I’ve got feelings. I don’t know what it is about you, but goddamn it, it appeals to me.”

“I have part ownership of a property a land company’s offering to pay one million dollars for, that’s what there is about me. I know what makes you tick, beard or no beard, and I hear you ticking.”

“Baby!” Sims exclaimed. “One million bucks! This is news to me. You mean to tell me you have a buyer for Gaspar?”

She gave a silvery laugh. “The reason you don’t own a white convertible of your own is that you’re such a lousy liar.”

He pulled up his blue knitted sports shirt absentmindedly and scratched his stomach. “One, comma, zero zero zero, comma, zero, zero zero. One million bucks. I honestly didn’t hear one word about it. Who would tell me?” Reaching back into his hip pocket, he pulled out an envelope and rapped it on his knee. “I don’t have the funds to hire a private eye. Kitty wants me to give her one of those no-contest decrees. Be polite and get the hell out. You know the bitch-she can’t understand why I want to be nasty when she’s being so civilized, not asking for alimony. Hell! I’m the aggrieved party. I’m the one who ought to get the alimony! She laid your old man, and got paid off with a big one-fifth of his property. One-fourth now. And you tell me that may be worth something in the way of real dough.”

“Hank, men don’t get alimony.”

“That’s going to be changed! She’s got a good job. It begins to dawn on me that I may be unemployable. I know the courts won’t see it my way-they’ve been paying off the wives for too many years. This has to be under the table. Before I sign any papers she’s going to give me a three-year contract. I’ll be her personal-affairs consultant, I’ve got it all worked out. Monthly payments for thirty-six months.”

“Why tell me?”

Opening the envelope, Sims whipped out several sheets of stiff white paper, folded in three. “Just giving you the background. I’ve been tailing the kid. What a crummy thing to do, really. But I had to. It never occurred to me to get any photographs of her in bed with your old man. All right. She’s been going to a certain room in the St. Albans Hotel on the Beach.” He unfolded the papers and slapped them on the table. “And that room is registered to a certain fiance of yours named Francis X. Shanahan, believe it or not, and why should I care if you don’t believe it?”

“Frank-”

“Baby, I checked and I double-checked. I’m like you-I didn’t think it made sense. I thought at first he was loaning a friend of his the key. But when I saw him go into that room on three separate occasions when my wife was inside.” He stabbed at his eyes with his spread fingers. “With these two eyes. He’s a hustler, we know that. Kitty likewise. Well, nobody’s going to hustle me if I can help it. Maybe it isn’t sex. Maybe she’s helping him with his legal research. But it sure looks like sex, and all I’m interested in is the way it looks.”

“Hank, it’s fantastic.”

“I knew you’d say that, which is why I brought along these affidavits.” He shuffled them apart so he could read the signatures. “Robert Truehauf, bellman. Emory J. Sedge, assistant night manager. Helena Csern-Czerniewicz. I can’t pronounce it. Maid. All notarized. Testifying to the occupancy of said premises on said dates and so on-I put it in my version of legal language, probably got it all wrong.”

He poked one of the sheets in front of Barbara and jabbed it with his forefinger. “One time it was all night, anyway till the night man went off shift. All there in black and white. Do you know what you’re looking at, baby doll? You see words. I see dollar signs.”

Shayne, in the tree house, took out an envelope and a pencil and made a quick note.

Barbara snatched the affidavits and threw them at Sims. The corner of one of the stiff pieces hit him in the eye.

“You’re a dirty, crawling person.”

“Dirty?” he said, gathering his sheets and returning them to the envelope. “Crawling? And did I ever have any chance to be different?”

Barbara gave a sudden shriek of laughter which ended in a sob.

“Hell, Babs,” the bearded man said in embarrassment, “I didn’t know it would hit you that hard. I go on the theory that when I’m dying of cancer I want the doctor to tell me. What’s so surprising? You knew he’s a tomcat. He’s always been a tomcat. He’ll always be a tomcat, as long as he has the strength.”

“Shut up! Get out!”

“I’m on my way. I didn’t do this the way I rehearsed it, which is what generally happens. Hell, honey, I know you won’t agree with me now, but I’m doing you a favor. Why be a tackling dummy all your life? If you want somebody’s hairy chest to cry on, mine’s available.”

She threw a coffee cup at him.

“I’m better than nothing!” he shouted. “That’s all I’m saying!”

She went at him with both fists. He tripped on the bunched edge of the carpet and went down. Snatching up the cognac bottle, she hurled it at him. Shayne heard the crash, but she must have missed his head because he came to one knee a moment later and seized her around the waist.

Eda Lou, alarmed, was getting down from her stool to help. But the battle seemed to be over, or at least its nature had changed. Barbara was holding Hank’s shaggy head against her stomach.

“Hank?” she said faintly. “What are you doing?”

Eda Lou changed her mind and came back to the stool. She listened at the mouthpiece for a moment, then stepped up on the stool, reversed the amplifier and put the bell mouth against the screen.

“SIMS, YOU CRUD, QUIT THAT AND GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!” she bellowed.

Shayne had the rheostat all the way up, straining to catch the strangled exchange of dialogue. The sudden roar of the bullhorn almost blew off the top of his head. Barbara and Hank froze.

Shayne’s hand shot toward the rheostat, and at that moment an alien noise, very close, penetrated the static in the earphones. He started to turn, but before he could bring his head all the way around he was hit, very hard, from behind.