Start Screaming Murder

Chapter Eleven

A look of relief had spread over her face. It died by slow degrees, as she read meaning in my silence.

“You mean you won’t do it?” she asked in disbelief.

“That’s right.”

“But — you’re a detective. For hire. You must go.”

“I don’t must anything, lady.”

“Listen, I’ve depended on this!” Her plain face began to grow ugly.

“There are other ways of getting the jewels.”

“No!”

“Go yourself,” I said.

“And leave Jack here alone?” She was stunned, then angry. The ugliness spread.

“Take him with you.”

“And have him find out...” she bit the words off.

“How much there is?” I finished for her. “If he knew, he’d take it all in one grab, right?”

“That’s none of your business,” she said, controlling herself, remembering that she needed me. “Why won’t you go?”

“I’m busy here,” I said.

I stood up. She rose also. She grabbed my arm. “You don’t like me!” she cried, her voice shrilling to a selfish peak.

Her face was sweaty and flushed. For a second I glimpsed an ugly brat, ugly inside as well as out, a slimy little stinker spoiled rotten by parents attempting to fill the gaps in her life, gaps made by her own appearance and personality.

In defeat, her parents had finally let her go with Scanlon and disowned her, perhaps hoping it would bring her to her senses. She might as well get it through her head that the rest of the world wasn’t going to be as long-suffering as parents.

I jerked free of her. The rebuff outraged her. With a dirty word in her mouth, she tried to scratch my face.

I shoved her back on the couch. She flopped like a sack of sand and lay with her eyes burning on me. She was gasping for breath. Sweat clustered in heavy drops on her forehead.

“Damn you,” she whispered. “You’re cruel and evil. I tried to understand you. And now I do. You killed Bucks Jordan. I’ll tell the police...”

I bent over her and said, “You tell the police one single lie and I’ll break your fat, stupid neck.”

She cowered away, as if she would go crawling over the end of the couch like a creeping slug.

I straightened. And saw Jack Scanlon standing in the doorway.

I wondered how much he’d heard and seen and what interpretation he would give it. I didn’t move, and neither did he for about a full minute. Maria got off the couch as if she were barefoot and stepping on broken glass. “Jack...” she said.

“Save it,” he said. Rays of the sinking sun streamed across the screened porch to limn his rangy, rawboned tallness and to glint on his black hair. The result was to put the rugged, lazy, lean features of his face in shadows.

“Seems like every time I see you, Rivers,” he said, “you’re talking to my wife.” He moved into the room. His eyes moved lazily between Maria and me. “How about that?” he laughed without humor. “Big ugly man; dumpy, ugly woman. Just a couple of lonely souls trying to cheer each other up. Well, what about that! Maria, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

She moved toward him cautiously. “Jack, it isn’t...”

“Rivers,” he said, ignoring her pointedly, “if the heifer’s in heat, don’t mind me.”

“Oh, God, Jack!” she cried in such ragged agony that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.

“Big man,” Scanlon continued to scathe me. “Big private cop. Why don’t you act big, big man?”

“Jack...” Her face was streaming moisture now, partly sweat, partly tears.

He shoved her away from him.

“It’s my house, big man. Move, that’s all. Just flick a muscle at me. I’ll gut-shoot you, big man. Then call the cops. Like that. Tell them I caught a man in my house, with my wife. Maria’ll tell them exactly what I say for her to tell them, all the things you bust in here and done to her.”

Maria was standing tight against the wall where he’d pushed her. She turned her wet face toward me. “Please leave,” she said hoarsely.

“I didn’t tell him to leave yet,” Scanlon said. He was enjoying himself, hugely, twistedly. In him, pleasure had taken the form of a perversion.

“Ain’t every day a man walks in and finds his wife with a big, ugly man,” he went on. He dropped a glance at her. “One thing, Rivers, you sure as hell must be hard up.”

I began to tremble with the effort to control myself. I started for the door. He moved toward me. “Did I say you could leave, big man?” Somebody should have told him better. He mistook the whiteness of my face. He was too sure of himself, and it gave me all the advantage.

When he reached for me, a grin on his face, I snapped his arm up, spun him, grabbed a handful of that black hair, and threw him flat on the floor.

He lay dazed, the wind knocked out of him.

“I ought to kick your teeth in,” I said.

Maria caught my arm, throwing her weight against me. The suddenness of it sent me staggering a few feet from Scanlon.

“Don’t you touch him!” she said viciously.

I pushed her back. She stayed between Scanlon and me.

“It appeared to him,” she said, “that he’d walked in on a man roughing up his wife. An eruption took place inside of him.”

“Sure,” I said sarcastically.

“Don’t you use that tone! Whatever Jack said to me was spoken in heat.”

“Of the eruption,” I said.

Scanlon got to his feet behind her, his eyes hating me, his face no longer pleasant. Unpleasant for keeps, so far as I was concerned.

He touched her shoulder. “It’s all right, Maria.”

“No, it isn’t. I won’t have anyone throwing you down and threatening to kick you...”

“I said it’s all right!”

She pouted, but kept her mouth shut. The pressure of his hand on her shoulder forced her to one side.

“Okay, Rivers, what’s it all about?”

I caught the glint of despair in her eyes as she suspected I was going to mention the last of her resources lying in a New Orleans strongbox.

With a heavy, mechanical motion, she moved to the couch and dropped on its edge in a slumped, sitting position.

“I’m still looking for Kincaid and Smith,” I said.

“You expect to find them here?”

“I thought she might tell me something about them. More correctly, I thought you might, but you weren’t here when I came.”

Her head turned as she ventured a glance at me.

“She don’t know them.”

“You do?”

He shrugged. “No more than you — or her. They worked the boat. Alex introduced us. They got off the boat.”

“You never saw them before they came here?”

“No.”

“Where are they staying?”

“How should I know?” He shrugged.

“Why’d you come here?”

“You go to hell, Rivers.”

“I’ve ways of finding out.”

“Go ahead and use your ways. I got nothing to hide — except of course thirty-three dead men buried under the house. Go right ahead and dig them up.”

“You met Alex Lessard in Latin America,” I said.

“Well, you got to meet your future friends someplace.”

“You were kicked out of one of the countries down there after a revolution misfired.”

His lips grinned. His eyes didn’t. “I see you’ve already been using your ways. So what if I was? That’s in the past. I’m a respectable man now, complete with wife.”

“Was Lessard in the same deal?”

He threw back his head and laughed. “You got a good imagination. Lessard was wildcatting for oil when I met him. It didn’t pan out. He lost his own shirt, plus the pants of a couple of backers. Being two Americans in the same neck of the woods, we got to be friends, even if our interests was different.”

“Just a couple of Boy Scouts camping in a strange woods,” I said.

“Now look, Rivers... ah, the hell with you. When Alex planned this trip, he got in touch. If he was going to be in the States, I wanted to see him. I got a right, ain’t I? To see an old friend? So Maria and I came here to meet the boat.”

“No longer Boy Scouts,” I said. “Now you’re some tired tourists basking in the Florida sun.”

His eyes darkened. Then he lifted his shoulders in that quick shrug. “You can’t bait me, Rivers. You got it all now, wrapped up and complete.”

“Okay,” I said. “But take one bit of advice.”

“For free?”

“No charge whatever. Don’t be in a hurry to leave Tampa.”

“Says who?”

“Me.”

“Yeah? For how long?”

“Until I tell you that you can leave.”

He watched me stonily as I walked out of the cottage.

From the Scanlon cottage, I drove the short distance to the bait camp. The lean, sun-cured proprietor helped a middle-aged tourist couple out of a boat they’d brought in from an afternoon of fishing. The man was a pudgy cigar smoker who looked slightly ridiculous in a Hawaiian shirt and Bermudas. His rotund little wife wore a coolie hat and sun glasses along with her cotton dress and straw guaraches. They chatted about their afternoon of fishing. I supposed they’d return to some little town where she’d recount her experiences to the Thursday Literary Club.

The pompous little man, with condescending gestures, told the bait camp owner he could have the afternoon’s catch. Half a dozen grunts — trash fish to the natives.

The couple wended their way under the pines to a block-long Caddy. The proprietor lifted the kicker from the dinghy, carried it down the pier, and grunted it into a steel drum of fresh water, attaching the motor to the rim of the drum. He’d start it and rinse the salty impurities of sea water from it.

“How-do,” he said. “Have some grunts.”

“Thanks, but I’m not that hungry.”

“Turistas,” he said. Then he spat, in the manner of the Latins.

“I’m still looking for a couple of turistas,” I said.

“Kincaid and Smith?”

“Right.”

“They ain’t been back since you was here.”

“Who’s out there now?” I nodded toward the Sprite riding at anchor on the glassy smooth water.

“I dunno. Lessard and his gal young-un, I think. Want a flat-bottom?”

I fished the rental from my wallet.

“Take your pick,” he said. “Snug her when you get back. I’m going to eat my supper.”

Alex Lessard spotted me rowing out and stood at the foredeck rail, a spindly figure until I got close to him. Then the intensity of his face, his stance, was apparent, and the spindliness became wiry strength. His narrow face was unhappy, his brooding gray eyes cold. The last red rays of the sun gave the naked top of his narrow skull a gnarled, seasoned-walnut appearance.

He wore the faded khaki trunks and sneakers that seemed to be his usual attire when he was aboard.

I tied the flat-bottom to the ladder and secured the oars. When I raised up and looked at him, I sensed a decision in his bitter eyes.

“Welcome aboard, Rivers,” he said quietly. “You’re in time for dinner.”

He offered me a hand up, stood aside for me. In white formal attire, he would have been as much at home at a dinner in a South American embassy.

Courteously, he motioned me aft. I wasn’t fooled. I was as welcome here as a leak in the auxiliary engine’s gas tanks.

At the sound of our footsteps, D. D. came on deck. She stopped abruptly when she saw me. She was a dream in shorts and halter, her short ash blonde hair in slight curls misted to her temples and forehead.

She appeared to be cold sober, her eyes hollow, her face touched with paleness from her last prolonged bout with the jug.

“Mr. Rivers is having dinner with us, D. D. Unless you’ve dined already, Mr. Rivers?”

“No,” I told Lessard, “I haven’t.”

“We’re having pre-packaged TV dinners,” D. D. said. “I’ll slip one out of the refrigerator and into the oven for you.”

She disappeared into the cabin. On the afterdeck under a collapsible awning a small folding table and chairs had been set up. Lessard continued his role of graceful host.

“Please sit down, Mr. Rivers.” Would I care for a cigarette. A martini. He stirred vermouth and gin in a chipped crockery pitcher with all the aplomb of a duke presiding over a cut crystal cocktail service.

I decided to play it his way. We had dinner while the sky darkened and a light breeze came out of the Gulf to ripple the awning.

On the surface, it was almost romantic. A schooner that had been everywhere. Two men and a beautiful woman enjoying the last moments of a lazy tropical day. A passing boat might have envied us.

D. D. was quick to smile, quick-witted and charming. Alex Lessard didn’t for a moment fail to keep the pretense going that I was a welcome guest.

He was interesting as a conversationalist. He had been far, seen much. Under the cynical exterior was a keen mind that feared nothing. Maybe his view of life was too big, too complete, so broad that an individual’s living or dying was of no real importance.

Probably his failures had, brick by brick, built his attitude. When life itself is sufficiently reduced in importance, failures here and there mean nothing.

Talking with him gave me a growing certainty of one thing. I’d faced plenty of tough ones in my time, all the way from hoodlums to an old lady who’d kill mercilessly to keep family scandals secret, to a ravening madman who wanted to soak the pain out of his head with my blood. None of them had been any more dangerous than Alex Lessard.