Start Screaming Murder

Chapter Twelve

Dinner over, D. D. cleared the table and brought a bottle of brandy and two glasses from the galley.

“I think I’ll have a swim,” she said. “Join me, Ed?”

“I doubt that Mr. Rivers came here to swim,” Lessard said.

D. D. went into the cabin. Lessard poured brandy. D. D. came out, her bathing suit and hair bold splashes of white in the early darkness. She went forward with a wave of her hand. A few seconds later, the sound of her plunge in the water came to us.

The Gulf breeze spared Lessard the bother of squirting insect repellent. Even in sitting, he was in an attitude of intensity. He listened to the forward splash. “When she was a small girl, her mother always warned her not to swim until an hour after she’d eaten,” he said.

“Her mother must have been a beautiful woman.”

“Yes,” Lessard said, hissing the “s” heavily. Light flared over the chiseled sharpness of his features as he lighted a cigarette. “Shall we get down to business, Rivers?”

“Why not?”

“You’re still looking for Kincaid and Smith.”

“Right.”

“I wish you’d update me,” he said. “I honestly don’t know what’s going on.” His cigarette coal arced bright as he threw up his hands. “First you come out here looking for Bucks Jordan. Someone kills him. Then you reappear to question my daughter. Sounds quite serious.”

“No picnic. Not for Bucks.”

He was thoughtful for a moment. “D. D. was not too drunk to remember the details of your visit.”

“I really came out to see you.”

“Sorry I missed you. But thanks for going in after her when she fell overboard. She — usually she isn’t so quickly cooled off when she goes on a... well, rampage. Perhaps the fault is mine. I haven’t lived the sort of life conducive to the proper rearing of a daughter. But you surely can’t believe she had anything serious to do with a man like Bucks Jordan.”

“I’m trying to find out.”

“Someone has been telling you tales out of school. If D. D. flirted a trifle with him, it was out of boredom. And because he was such an asinine fool. Believe me, we hardly knew the man. I’ve explained all that. Now I think you owe me an explanation or two.”

“Fire away.”

“Why do you keep coming here?”

“I’m working.”

“Who is your client?”

“You got a good technique,” I said. “You fire your questions.”

“You think Jordan’s death has some connection with this boat, don’t you?”

“To be honest, yes.”

“Then go to the police.”

“I’ll work in my own way, Lessard.”

“Perhaps I’ll go to them myself.”

“And tell them what?”

“That I put into this port with the proper clearance. That Jordan worked for me briefly and quit. That I never saw him before I came to Tampa and know nothing about him. That you will not believe the truth but persist in improper invasion of privacy.”

The velvet gloves were coming off now. He leaned forward. “In appearance, you’re not above suspicion yourself, Rivers. You’re no fresh-faced schoolboy in a clean Peter Pan collar.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m beginning to take you seriously,” he said. It was softly spoken, but it was a warning and a threat. “I’m wondering what you’re up to, why you haven’t gone to the police. I’ve heard of private detectives who are not above blackmail and extortion.”

“I’m not one of those,” I said.

“You act like it. You act as if you’re trying to build suspicion against us while keeping it secret from the police. If you hope to scare us into paying you money simply because a man now deceased worked on this boat...”

“It isn’t only Jordan.”

“No?”

“There are Kincaid and Smith.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Maybe you do, and maybe you don’t,” I said. “For now, I’ll give you benefit of the doubt.”

He jumped to his feet, his body quivering. “What a presumption — that you have the right to judge me!”

“Temper, father,” D. D. said. She’d come aboard without our hearing. She stood beside the cabin, her body gleaming wetly in the near darkness.

“Go and swim some more,” Lessard said angrily.

“I’d prefer a drink. This staying sober is for the birds.” She raised her arms. Her body writhed in a stretch. She came sauntering toward me. “Ed, it’s been a deadly dull day. I’d like a night on the mainland. What are you doing tonight?”

“D. D.!” Lessard practically screamed. The harried look of him intensified.

She laughed, flicked his chin with her forefinger, and strolled into the cabin.

“Maybe I’ll take her up on the proposition,” I said.

For a second I thought Lessard was going to hit me.

“She might be a more reasonable talker than her old man,” I said.

“Reasonable? I’ve told you everything. Willingly. Honestly.”

“You’ve told me nothing,” I said, “that isn’t designed to hide the truth.”

I stood up. We faced each other.

“Listen, Lessard, Kincaid and Smith right now are hunting whatever it was that was taken from this boat. Bucks Jordan was killed after the theft was made. It all ties together. You brought something in here you shouldn’t have. It disappeared, and hell broke loose.”

He chain-lit a cigarette from his previous one. “So that’s how you think it is?”

“That’s the way it looks.”

“Oh, hell,” D. D. said from the cabin doorway, “tell him the truth, Alex. He’s not going to rest until you do.”

“D. D.,” he said thinly, “I’d very much appreciate your staying...”

She came toward us with a drink in her hand. “He doesn’t want to violate a confidence, Ed. And he has a thorough dislike,” her eyes cut to her father, “for the authorities. Past experiences, y’know.”

Their gazes held. Then Lessard jerked around, turning his back on her. He moved to the rail and stared in remote silence at the open water.

D. D. raised her hand and rubbed the stubble on my cheek with her open palm. She stood with her body loosely arched toward me.

“Like a little drinkee, Ed?”

“D. D...” Lessard half groaned in exasperation, his back remaining toward us.

“Yeah,” I said, “of some of this truth that’s about to spill all over the place.”

“Oh, that. Well, Kincaid and Smith were not mere deckhands at all.”

“Really.”

“Don’t sneer, darling. It doesn’t become you.” She tipped her glass and took a swallow. “We were berthed in Callao, opening our last can of beans when Kincaid and Smith approached us. They showed us their papers. They were American citizens. They wanted to get back to the States.”

“Private-like,” I said.

“You mean, there are airplanes and regular boats running?”

“I mean something like that.”

“And why didn’t they take one of them?” she asked with a laugh. “You know, it didn’t occur to us to ask them. When you slip the can opener in those final beans it rather cuts the bonds of being choosy.”

“They must have made some explanation,” I said. “You don’t risk yourself, a considerable length of time, and a schooner such as this one blindly.”

“They gave us a very believable explanation — voluntarily. They’d had some trouble, they said, and were not able to leave the country by the regular routes and modes.

“They offered to provision the Sprite, work their watches, and give us a thousand dollars in cash when we dropped anchor in Tampa.

“Alex and I saw it as a stroke of luck. We’d been wanting to get out of there ourselves, and back to where folks spoke English.

“We accepted their offer. They sneaked aboard at night, bringing a couple of foot lockers of personal belongings.

“We put out of Callao with scanty supplies, ostensibly for a couple of days fishing. We made port twice, further north, and finished provisioning. Then a jolly ride until the towers of Tampa appeared on the horizon. Kincaid and Smith gave us our money and everybody was happy.”

“Except Bucks Jordan.”

“That,” D. D. said, “is not in our bailiwick.”

“Why were they coming here? Why, specifically, Tampa?”

“How would I know?”

“You had a lot of days on deck with them, long, lazy days. Good talking days.”

“They didn’t talk much.”

“Not even to you?”

“Well,” she laughed, “I wasn’t interested in their life history. Nor in their business. Kincaid mentioned once that he had relatives in Jacksonville. Tampa seemed a convenient spot for them to catch a plane and fly to Jax. Save us the long haul around the Florida peninsula, taking the canal and coming up the eastern shore of Mexico as we did.”

“I hope no aged, starving grandmother is waiting for them in Jacksonville,” I said.

“Don’t you believe me, Ed?”

I honestly didn’t know. She made it sound like the absolute truth — but that didn’t rule out its being a complete pack of lies. She was capable of either.

“What were they carrying?”

“Two foot lockers,” she said. “We didn’t X-ray them or do a customs inspection.”

She stood there regarding me coolly. “That’s it, Ed. Buy it or junk it. We don’t feel we’ve done anything wrong. But we did help them leave under questionable circumstances.”

“If you really want to find Kincaid and Smith,” Lessard said, turning from the rail, “try Jacksonville.”

“On your say-so?”

“Don’t be such a bear, Ed,” D. D. said. “I’d go with you. You could keep your eye on me every minute.”

Sure, I thought, until Lessard had time to do whatever was necessary here.

The thought must have reflected on my face.

“My, my,” D. D. said, “aren’t we suspicious!”

“I’ll think it over,” I told her. “Thanks for the dinner, Lessard.”

I went forward, climbing over the side, and began manhandling the flat-bottom toward the lights on shore.

I heard the sound of her cleave the water. She came up a few feet from the flat-bottom, her face and hair a white sculptured image rising out of the dark water.

Playfully, she splashed water toward me. The shower of drops lived with a brief phosphorescent glow. A few of them reached me, falling warmly on my face and chest.

“Think quickly, Ed,” she called softly. “Jax would be a lot of fun.”

Then she treaded water as the flat-bottom moved away from her.

I went home, stripped to my waist, toweled the sweat off my chest, and opened a can of beer. It was so cold it hurt my teeth.

I called Western Union and sent a telegram to New Orleans. It requested the agency man there to find out if any New Orleans bank had a safety deposit box registered to Maria Blake, or Maria Blake Scanlon, or Maria Scanlon. If she had a box, I’d assume it wasn’t empty, but held the jewels, as she’d said.

I didn’t feel easy about the telegram, and wouldn’t have sent it if I could have avoided it. I wasn’t worried about difficulties the New Orleans office might encounter. I knew I’d get the information.

It was the thought of the Home Office that had me bugged. Routine reports from New Orleans were going to raise the question as to what I was doing in Tampa, what was going on here.

If I got out of this thing, I’d have an explanation the Home Office would understand and accept. If not, an explanation wouldn’t be very important.

Bogged in the morass of the moment, I already seemed to have more than I could handle. I didn’t know how close Ivey and the Tampa police were to me — and the murderer of Bucks Jordan was no doubt thinking of his own future, not knowing how close I was to him.

Pressure or action from the Home Office right now might easily mean the coup de grâce for me.

I carried the empty beer can to the kitchenette garbage pail. As if the clink of the can were a signal, the phone rang. I returned to the phone, picked it up.

I said hello, and was asked if this was Ed Rivers, and I said that it was.

“You asked me about a couple parties,” he said, his voice almost smothered by the sounds of juke box music and laughter in the background. Even so, I recognized the gravelly little voice. It belonged to Gaspar the Great.

“Where are you calling from, Gaspar?”

“Never mind that. A bar. It doesn’t matter which one.”

“You sound shook, pal.”

“No,” he denied. Too quickly. “I’m just trying to do you a favor, that’s all. If you want those two parties, why don’t you try room 212 at the Aeron Hotel?”

“Thanks, Gaspar.”

“Ed... I’m putting a lot of trust in you.”

“They’ll never know who told me,” I said. “You can depend on that.”

“I will. I have to now, don’t I?”

“Gaspar...” I said his name quickly, but the connection was already broken, leaving me with the question of how he’d known where Kincaid and Smith were located.