Start Screaming Murder

Chapter One

She was hiding in my apartment when I got back there that night. She didn’t use the windows or doors. She had her own way of getting in — and her own brand of trouble.

The evening had started with a minor annoyance. At 10:03 a burglar alarm went off in a Franklin Street jewelry store. Four cops, courtesy the city of Tampa, Florida, checked the corners and cracks and found nobody in the place.

I was called because I’m the agent in charge of the southeastern office of Nationwide Detective Agency. Part of our bread comes from installing and servicing burglar alarms.

The system was independent of city electricity, operating on a six-cell, series-wired dry pack. A defect in one of the cells had gummed up the works. I’d brought my kit along. I replaced the cell, chinned briefly with the city cops, pushed my way through the rubber-neckers on the sidewalk, and headed for home.

I was hot, tired and thirsty as I ran the car into the long, ramshackle shed behind the beatup apartment building on the edge of Ybor City, Tampa’s old-worldish Latin quarter.

I started down the scabby, brick side of the building. I didn’t know he was there until he brought the sap down right where my brown mat is thinning on the crown of my head.

Six feet, a hundred and ninety pounds, and forty-odd years of Ed Rivers pitched face foremost on the dirty crushed shell of the alley.

The loose-shell paving ground my cheek. I fought off unconsciousness, snarling for breath. I heard him breathing, quick and hard. His hands pummeled my body, trying to find my pockets. He passed up the wallet. When my keys rattled, his hand quickened.

The first spectacular burst of fireworks cleared out of my head. I reared around and shot the heel of my shoe straight at his groin. It connected, like my shoe had connected with tough, tight-stretched cowhide.

He grunted softly and rocked back. The sap came whistling at me again.

His first blow had been without personal feeling. He was sore now. The purpose of the blackjack was to lay my brains in the alley like scrambled eggs in a steaming pan.

I pitched to one side. The plaited leather over the coil spring handle of the sap nipped my ear. The weapon slapped across my shoulder. My left arm went numb, as if it had been detached from me.

I got a quick impression of a guy who topped me by four inches and twenty-five pounds. Wearing greasy ducks, T-shirt, and a dirty yachting cap, he was solid as a prairie steer.

I saw the glint of his teeth, the redness of his eyes. He was swinging the sap again, a short curse in his mouth. I went in under the blackjack. When I felt him slam against the building I knew my numb shoulder had connected. His curse was smothered by the air tearing out of him.

His first deadly speed was braked a little. He grabbed for my throat with his left hand, trying to get my head in sapping position. I hit him in the face with my right hand, heard the back of his head hit the brick. His knees caved for a second.

If he hadn’t had the advantage of that first dirty blow, I’d have got him right then. He knew it. As I went in, he lost his head and began swinging the sap wildly, lashing me across the back and buttocks.

Grogginess had my timing off. The sap was plenty rough. I had to get away from the punishment pouring across my ribs.

I rolled back, and he thought he had me. In the wan light filtering from the street, I saw his face. His lips and chin were wet with spit. The red hunger in his eyes was like a flame.

I let the eagerness of the blackjack bring him nice and close. Just as the sap poised, I brought my right fist straight in from center field. For an instant, he didn’t have a nose, just a big, flat, bloody mess for a face. He bounced like a crazy cue ball in a bank shot. He did a cross between a jitterbug step and Virginia reel, halfway across the alley.

Most men would have gone down and stayed for awhile. This guy didn’t. He caromed off the building and started out of the alley. He moved like a drunk who wakes up to find the building on fire.

He turned the bloody moon of face toward me, throwing quick glances. Every time I stretched my legs, his stretched a little further. As he rounded the corner, he was gaining momentum with every slap of his feet.

I slowed down, staggered to a halt. Sucking at air, my mouth open, I knew I couldn’t catch him. Right then, it wouldn’t have been smart to start searching for him. There were too many other alleys and dark places — for me to try with one arm and half my senses.

I put my hand against the building to keep the world from rocking too much. Reaction hit the bottom of my stomach. I stood swaying, waiting for the sickness to pass.

My left arm started welding itself back to my body, an operation without benefit of pain killer. Sweat broke on my face. I gathered up the left forearm with my right and hugged it to me.

This time I got sick for real.

Five or six minutes later, I hauled myself inside the building. The heat, musty age, and lingering spice of Cuban cooking closed over me. The building had taken no notice of what had happened in the alley. There was an old, quiet creaking tiredness in the swayed floors and walls and ceiling. The gloom was almost inaudibly accented by the sorrowful, muffled whisper of a Spanish guitar in the bowels of the building. The guitar murmured of a man alone in half-darkness with yearnings peculiar to the Latin heart.

A dim bulb was burning in the second floor hall. I saw that the ancient wicker hall table had been pushed close to my door.

I didn’t think anything of the table being there. It roamed the building, as tenants had guests for cards, dominoes, or arroz con pollo.

I fished out my keys and gave them a look. The punk had seemed to want those keys. In fact, he’d been desperate enough to try to sap me to get the keys.

I couldn’t figure it. There was nothing in the apartment worth stealing. If he was after something out of my office in downtown Tampa, it would have been a lot more sensible for him to break in.

I keyed the apartment door open, stepped inside, and turned on a lamp. The apartment was a lot like my office. Not much. There was a daybed for sweat-washed sleep, a TV I didn’t watch often, a kitchenette, a huge old bathroom with gargling plumbing.

I made for the bathroom first. I ran the water until it was cooler than tepid, soaked my head, and washed the grit off my face.

In the medicine-cabinet mirror, the face stared back at me, heavy, bearish, dark-tanned and creased, the thick lids giving the brown eyes a lazy look. Women either get a charge from the face or want to run from it. Men fear it, or trust it to the hilt. It isn’t a face that ever meets a neutral reaction. I’m not always happy about that, but it’s my face and I have to do the best I can with it.

Right now, I was interested in the damage done to the face. It could have been worse. The bits of crushed shell had hamburgered the skin on my cheek, but the skin on my head hadn’t been broken.

I started cold water into the bathtub. While it was running, I soaked a wash cloth and laid it gingerly on the tender swelling on my skull.

Continually working my left arm and shoulder against the subsiding pain and creeping stiffness, I headed toward the kitchen where cold beer waited in the refrigerator.

I opened the refrigerator door — and right then, I wasn’t alone again. I knew it. with that quick tightening around the heart, the squeezed-up feeling at the nape of the neck.

I pitched my head compress into the sink, dropped in a crouch as I spun toward the sibilant softness of another person’s breathing.

For a second, I thought I must be hearing things. There wasn’t another soul in the kitchenette with me.

Then she came walking from the cave of shadows underneath the kitchenette table.

“Ed...” she said. “Take it easy! It’s me — Tina La Flor.”

I wiped my sleeve across my forehead and stared at Tina the Flower.

When I say she was a living doll, I mean it literally. She had a calendar-girl figure, sunny-reddish hair that rippled to her shoulders, green eyes with a tiny up-tilt at the corners, and a face so mistily beautiful that you had to look twice at the porcelain perfection of it to make sure it was real.

And after that second look, along about the third or fourth look, you felt your heart break a little on her account. Because all that perfectly proportioned, out-of-this-world loveliness was a sleek package that stood slightly over three feet high when she cleared the table top and straightened up.

In a doll-sized black dress, nylons sheer as baby cobwebs, and tiny black shoes with spike heels like toothpicks, she lifted a perfect pink hand, no bigger than two of my fingers, and pointed at my face.

“You... run into a door, Ed?”

“Yeah, with two arms and legs and a head full of intentions right out of a sewer.”

She paled slightly, avoided my eyes, and walked into the bed-sittingroom. Watching her made me think of the chick of a slick magazine illustration seen through the wrong end of a telescope.

She came to an indecisive halt in the middle of the room. A shiver crossed her shoulders. With her back toward me, she asked faintly, “You got a drink, Ed?”

“Beer’s all.”

The spun copper of her hair washed across her shoulders as she shook her head. “That stuff’s too puny. Anyhow, I need to watch my figure.”

“I’ll order a jug from the package store.”

“No, I really don’t need the drink.”

“I’ll be glad to...”

“I know. But I wouldn’t take a drink now if I had it. For a second there... Why don’t you go ahead and have your beer?”

While I opened and poured beer, I thought of the attack in the alley and Tina’s presence here. I began to explore the realm of ideas.

Studying her out of the corner of my eyes, I wondered what kind of trouble she was in. There are a lot of midgets in this country, so many of the proud, smart Little People that they hold periodic national conventions and elect their own president.

Tampa developed into a kind of home base for many of them years ago when the carnivals began winter-quartering in the area. The Little People are mainly big citizens. Few of them get into trouble, but I suspected I knew one who had a bigger package of woe on her tiny shoulders than most of us normal-sized human beings are ever faced with.

I carried the beer into the bed-sittingroom. Tina had perched on the end of the couch. I hadn’t seen her in several months. I’d got to know her pretty well when she headlined the show at the Latin Club. They’d billed her as the “World’s Tiniest and Most Beautiful Chanteuse,” which was a pleasant and fairly accurate honesty. I don’t go in much for nightclubbing, but the Latin, under the old management had the best food and draft in town, which attracted some interesting conversationalists.

I stood in front of Tina and looked meaningfully from her to the open transom over my door. “It’s a wonder,” I said, “that you didn’t break a leg, climbing that old wicker hall table, shinnying over the transom and dropping inside the apartment. He sure must have been hot on your heels.”

“He was, Ed,” she said, like she’d tasted a bitter green apple.

“So he couldn’t get in without rousing the whole house, and you didn’t dare go back out where there wouldn’t be a locked door between you.”

“Something like that,” she said in a small voice.

“And then he lays for me — to get a key to this door.”

She bit her lips. “I swear, Ed, I thought he’d go away. I didn’t know he’d try to knock your brains out.”

“Why’d you pick on me, Tina?”.

“I was coming to see you. You’re a private cop. You work for hire. I needed to hire. Simple enough?”

“So far,” I said. “Where does the man figure?”

“He was the job.”

I pulled up a chair and took a sip of the beer. “I don’t see how we could be talking about different guys, but let’s make sure. He was a big fellow, wearing greasy ducks, old yachting cap. Looks like a carny or a seaman on a freighter steaming out of Port Tampa.”

“That’s him,” she said. The shudder touched her again.

“Who is he?”

“Bucks Jordan. I used to know him on a carny circuit. He ran a kewpie-doll concession.”

“What’d you do to him?”

“Nothing, Ed. I swear it.”

“Then why is he after you?”

A brittle hardness came to her green eyes. “Geez! You ain’t a rube. You wasn’t born yesterday!”

No, but my mind wouldn’t grasp it that quickly. “A masher?”

“You said it.”

I nearly dropped the beer. “Tina, a full grown man and a little doll like you...” I didn’t mean to say it. Maybe it was in my face without my saying it.

She pressed back against the daybed bolster. A poisonous change took place inside of her, born of a knowledge she carried night and day through all her years. She reminded me of a cornered kitten, back arched and ready to start spitting against torture.

“Tina,” I said, “I didn’t mean...”

“The hell you didn’t!” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Maybe you didn’t want to mean it, but you couldn’t help yourself. You stinking, lousy race of giants! You big hogs staring at the little freak...”

Her breaking voice quit on her. Tears in her eyes, she sat with her hands balled into tiny fists as if she wanted to slug the world of normal-sized tables and chairs and lunch counters and stair steps and wash basins and telephone booths.

I sensed the ghosts in the room right then. The big fat business man getting a laugh out of his pals: “Baby, why don’t I put you in my briefcase and sneak you down to the office; my wife would never know.” The simpering matron: “My, isn’t she the perfect little thing!” The child, around a mouthful of carny cotton candy: “Look, mama, she’s no bigger than my dolly. I wish my dolly could sing and dance.”

Few were intentionally vicious or cruel. They stared, and they were reassured. They were Big People, and their bigness was added to. And they didn’t stop to think that her feelings and emotions were as big as their own.