Start Screaming Murder

Chapter Ten

He drained the contents of the beer pitcher into his glass. “Join me, Ed?”

“If I can buy.”

“Why not?” he said with a grim edge in his voice.

I ordered the beer. He gestured a silent toast and said, “I got a feeling you came in here looking for me.”

“That’s right. Did you find Tina La Flor?”

“Who said I was looking for her? Oh — I know. Mrs. Cardezas.”

I nodded.

“Well, I didn’t find her,” he said. “In fact, I quit looking. I can’t help her out of the kind of trouble she’s in now. The cops’ll find her soon enough, is my guess. What’s your angle, Ed?”

“I have a client.”

“Who wants you to find Tina?” His brows quirked haughtily. “You expect me to sell out the little doll? I am assuredly money hungry. I would put my mother’s navel on display for money. But to sell out...”

“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m not necessarily against her.”

“No?” His dark eyes, set in muddy yellow whites, were cautious. “Who is this client?”

“Maybe a guy on a boat.”

“Boat? What boat?”

“Mean anything to you?”

“Can’t say that it does.”

“You have no idea where Tina is?”

He shook his head. He seemed to have something on his mind. “What is this about a boat, Ed?”

“If it means nothing...”

“Damn it,” he said angrily, his normally guttural voice piping slightly, “it doesn’t, in itself. But Tina’s an old friend. We little people got to stick together. If somebody’s carried her off on a boat, I want something done about it.”

“They haven’t, I don’t think,” I said.

I let him simmer down. Then I said, “I’m also looking for a couple guys. Named Kincaid and Smith. Strangers. Bumped into them?”

“Kincaid and Smith?” He measured his beer with his eyes. “No, haven’t heard of them.”

“I want them,” I said. “Bad.”

He shuddered faintly. “I’d hate to be in their shoes.”

I left him morosely staring into his beer.

The afternoon was nearly gone. From a drugstore phone booth, I checked the telephone answering service.

A woman who gave her name as Mrs. Maria Scanlon had tried three times to reach me that afternoon.

I hung up and stood thinking about that for a few seconds. I dropped a dime in the phone and dialed information. No phone was listed at the address of the Scanlons’ cottage, at least not in their name.

I had to fight rush hour traffic crosstown. I saw no sign of life at the Scanlon cottage when I approached it.

I parked the car, got out, and crossed the sandy yard. The cottage was typical of those jerry-built cracker boxes erected in Florida twenty to thirty years ago. There were five or six rooms enclosed in un-insulated pine siding, with the inevitable screened porch of that era strung along the front. It was graceless, unattractive.

I rattled the screen door. The cottage showed no sign of life. As I was about to turn away, I heard someone inside.

Maria Scanlon appeared on the porch. Her stocky, bovine figure was clothed in a wrinkled, soiled print dress. The drab brown hair bunned at the back of her flat-faced head spilled wisps about her ears and neck.

“Rivers... I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I got the message.”

“Please come in.”

I followed her into a cramped living room. She was one hell of a housekeeper. Ashtrays were full all over the place. Old papers and magazines were stacked in a corner. Propped over that junk was a tangle of cheap fishing gear, burma poles dripping carelessly loose line. On a small table the remains of sandwiches were drawing a swarm of gnats.

I took the chair she indicated. She seated herself on the nearby couch, knees close together, back straight.

Hands folded in her lap, she studied me closely. Her eyes held a hint of an avid, unnerving quality. “May I call you Ed?”

“Sure.”

“I— Would you like a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“Do you mind if I...”

“Go right ahead.”

She jumped up, hurried through the plastered archway to the dining room. On the buffet were a couple of bottles and a dirty glass or two. She shook the dregs from one glass into another and poured herself a drink of a heavy-bodied brandy.

She returned to the living room, sat down, and sipped the brandy. “I haven’t been sleeping well. I— A little brandy helps one to relax, don’t you think?” I waited.

“Mr. Rivers... Ed... I’ve been upset about our last meeting. You seemed suspicious of me. You seemed to think that an object of some kind had disappeared from the Sprite and that I knew what it was. I don’t know anything about the Sprite, really. I had to explain that.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want you feeling suspicious of me. There is — I want you to do something for me.” She killed the brandy. “You’re a private detective, and I want to retain you for a job. I can’t do that if you think all manner of wrong things about me, can I?

“So far as the schooner is concerned, I never saw the boat or the people who own her until Jack introduced us.”

“Where’d he meet them?”

“I think it was somewhere in Latin America, a long while before I met him. One day he told me that the Lessards were cruising here. We would meet them, have a vacation. So we left New Orleans and came here.” She studied the glass, then raised her eyes to me. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Not yet.”

“Kincaid and Smith?”

“I met them. We had a talk.”

She looked toward the brandy, but she didn’t get up. “Is Jack in trouble, Ed?”

“I don’t know. Is he?”

Her underlip curled over her teeth. She bit down slightly. After a little, she said, “Alex and D. D. — I understand them. Alex is a man of many frustrations. Nothing he has ever done turned out quite right. He’s one of those people who’re always off balance in the world, and he seethes with the continuous effort to get in the rhythm of living.” Her eyes drifted toward the empty window, the darkening sky beyond. “There are so many like him...”

“And D. D.?”

“She lives in a lonely world of icebergs.” Maria Scanlon’s brows quirked. Briefly, she was pleased with herself. It was my guess that she was telling herself that her remark had been dreadfully astute, one she must remember. “D. D.’s moral lapses are made consciously, Ed. The efforts of a person striking at the emptiness of her life.”

“You seem to know a lot about the Lessards,” I said, “to have just met them.”

“I don’t need to be around people forever to sum them up,” she said quietly.

“Then the loose way the Lessards seem to live is not their fault?”

“Oh, no. There’s a spark of brilliance in both Alex and his daughter. If society had provided the right conditions, their talents would have borne fruit.”

She enjoyed clichés. I wondered how many textbooks she had read.

I leaned toward her. “But you’re afraid of them.”

“No...”

“Not for yourself. For Jack, maybe.”

She didn’t answer that.

“Jack has been behaving quite well,” she said finally. “But if something has disappeared from the Sprite...”

“You’re afraid they’ll think Jack took it.”

“Not the Lessards.”

“Kincaid and Smith?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” She folded her arms and hugged herself. Her heavy bosom squeezed up like overly heavy twin udders. She got up, obeying the call of the brandy bottle.

I waited.

She gave the brandy bottle a heavier tap. I wondered how much of that stuff she could take in without showing it. Probably more than most men.

“Kincaid and Smith been around?” I asked.

“Yes. Several times. I thought nothing of it. After all, they were Alex Lessard’s employees. But in the light of what you said when we last met... I really have worried about it.”

“They’ve got Jack into something?”

She looked at me levelly. “Not yet. I’m sure of it. But if they sneaked something aboard that boat and have lost it... Jack’s inclined toward what he calls deals. They attract him. Of course it’s because he knew such poverty in early life. He was ambitious. He wanted decent things, like everybody else. They were denied him, and he developed this... this urge to take shortcuts.”

“You think Kincaid and Smith might ring your husband in?”

“If they need help — and I can’t let that happen.”

“What can you do?” I asked.

“Keep circumstances in proper arrangement.”

“That’s a pretty tall order, Mrs. Scanlon. Even some good statesmen have tried.”

“But my area is smaller. One man. Not a state or a nation, I... I know what is needed.”

“What is that?”

“Money.”

The word brought a short silence.

I began to suspect the bait with which she’d hooked Scanlon. “How much did you have?”

“I... my parents — they didn’t understand. They cut me off when I married Jack, the narrow-minded... I wish they were dead!” She wiped the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. “I had a few thousand, my own. An inheritance from a grandparent, my maternal grandmother.”

“It’s gone?”

She eased to the edge of the couch. “Almost, but I can get more.”

“That’s where I come in? The job you wanted done?”

She nodded. “My grandmother’s jewelry is in a safety deposit box in a New Orleans bank. As a private detective you’re bonded, aren’t you?”

I nodded.

“Then it’s simple,” she said. “You’ll go to New Orleans and bring the jewels to me.”