Start Screaming Murder

Chapter Fifteen

I went around the desk and sat down. I needed a few seconds.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Steve.”

“You knew him, of course?”

“Certainly.”

“He isn’t pretty now.”

“Poor little guy never was.”

“You want to come over to headquarters and talk about him?”

“No flies in this office,” I said.

“This is official, Ed.”

“Okay.” I stood up. “What are we waiting for?”

We went downstairs and got in a cruiser that was parked at the curb. We drew the usual curious glances from passersby.

The uniformed cop acted as chauffeur. Ivey got in the back seat with me, taking off his floppy panama hat and mopping his peeled-egg pate. He looked like somebody’s uncle, with or without the hat.

We rode the few blocks to headquarters, and I walked with Ivey to his office.

He got a drink at the water cooler in the corner of the office and hung the hat on a nearby hook.

“Have a chair,” he said, going behind his desk.

He waited until I’d seated myself in the heavy wooden chair at the end of the desk.

“Ed, what’s going on amongst the little people in this town, the midget and dwarf citizens who colonized here in the days of the carnies?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“I think you do. Tina La Flor tried to contact you. She disappeared. Gaspar the Great called you from a bar last night. It’s the last trace we have of him alive. He’s found dead several hours later. You get our point of view?”

“Sure. You want some answers, and I don’t blame you.”

He studied me for a moment. I met his gaze blandly. I was feeling differently inside. It had been no great trick, with Gaspar the Great dead, to trace his movements and find that he’d called me. I wondered if Ivey planned next to hit me with the connection between Gaspar’s tip to me and the Aeron shooting. A corpse named Smith and one named Gaspar were isolated items in the files, bearing no relationship — unless Ivey knew why Gaspar had called me. Then the implication would jump right out of the files and slap him in the face.

I never like to get loose with the truth when talking with a cop. But I was prepared for Ivey’s next question.

“What was on Gaspar’s mind, Ed?”

“Tina La Flor,” I said. “He wanted to know if I’d turned up any trace of her.”

“Why did he think you might have?”

I shrugged. “I did a few steps of legwork after you came to my place.”

“And did you turn up her whereabouts?”

“No,” I said. “I’d have called you. I told Gaspar I wasn’t on the case, that my interest had been personal. I suggested that you’d be a better source.”

“You asked him what his interest was, I’m sure.”

I nodded. “He said Tina was an old friend. He didn’t give me any more than that.”

“Then he hung up and that’s the last you heard from him?”

“Yes.”

“Ed,” he said coldly. “You’re a liar.”

“Have I ever lied to you before?”

“No. I’ve always considered you a sort of unofficial adjunct to this department.”

“Let’s keep that status very much quo,” I suggested.

“I hope we can. I’ve a feeling that something big and dark is going on in your end of town, and you’re in it up to your neck.” His eyes pinched at the corners. “So deeply in it that you’ve lied to me about Gaspar and Tina as well. I don’t want to see you get hurt, Ed. I’d hate to be the one to hurt you.”

“You’d do it thoroughly.”

“As thoroughly as possible,” he said. “I’m no whiz of a detective, but as long as I’m in this office I intend to work at my trade. You’d better think more than twice, Ed, before you flounder into the undertow.”

I was glad he didn’t know the grip the undertow had on me already.

I stood up. “I’m free to go?”

“You know you are,” he said, his face reddening with anger. “How long could I hold you with what I’ve got?”

“Long enough for me to call a lawyer.”

“Get out of here!”

I got out, quickly and quietly.

With Ivey a closed door away from me, I wandered into the squad room. There, I picked up additional details on the murder of the dwarf Gaspar.

It appeared that the little fellow had been killed in his hotel room by a person he knew. Nothing in the room had been disturbed. A smudge of blood had been found on the window sill. His lifeless body had been pushed out the window into the alley below. The murderer had taken the fire escape out of the hotel. In the alley, the afterthought of an idea had struck him, and he’d shoved the lifeless, misshapen body into a nearby garbage can. The murder had taken place in the early hours of morning.

Doing an unobtrusive fadeout from headquarters, I caught a cab to the lot where my car was parked. Motionless exposure to the Florida sun had heated the interior until the seat and steering wheel were blistering to the touch. Movement of turgid air through the open windows helped a little as I got the heap rolling and moved with traffic into Ybor City.

My mind moved faster than the tires sucking at scorched pavement. I was certain of the linkage between the murders of Bucks Jordan and Gaspar the Great. Kincaid and Smith were the bond between the two. They’d been after Bucks, and after Gaspar’s tip to me about the location of the pair, the dwarf had been killed.

It seemed reasonable to assume that both had been permanently put away because they were dangerous to a person, or persons. The delay in killing Gaspar simply meant that he hadn’t been regarded as a danger right away, not until my appearance had shook him up a lot worse than I’d known.

I wondered if he’d sent me to the Aeron on the gamble that I’d get killed facing both Kincaid and Smith.

With Bucks Jordan’s death ever-present in his mind and my survival of the shooting scrape, Gaspar had run out of nerve. And out of life.

And he could have told me many things...

I found a parking place on the narrow street and wedged the car in. The sidewalk ahead was massed with a gay crowd that gave bursts of applause for the guitar-laden trio in the window of a department store who played lively songs and told livelier stories in Spanish.

I crossed the street and entered a narrow restaurant. A beautiful girl with olive skin and hair blacker than black was at the cash register.

“Is Rafael in?”

“To you, si. Señor Batione is in back.”

I thanked her and soaked up the air conditioning as I moved past the tables to the door in the left rear of the place. The door opened on a short corridor which dead-ended in another door.

I knocked on the dead-end and the door opened noiselessly. A second girl, sister to the one in front, glanced over her shoulder and spoke to the interior of the office. “It is Ed Rivers.”

She must have received a nod, for she stood aside gracefully for me to enter.

Both the girls were daughters of the massive, sleepy looking man reclining on a white leather couch that filled the far wall of the luxurious office.

His smiled showed gold-filled teeth. He raised his short-fingered, fat hand in greeting.

“Qué tal?”

“Fair to middling,” I said.

His daughter turned a deep leather chair slightly so that I could face her father.

“Cigar, Señor Rivers, or a drink?”

I shook my head and thanked her. With a graceful turn of her body, she crossed the office, seated herself at a desk, and resumed typing on a large, electric machine.

I eased into the chair the girl had offered. Rafael Batione sighed. “The heat, it bothers you as it does me, Ed.” There was a lot of him to bother, about three hundred and fifty pounds. In cotton slacks and short-sleeved shirt, he lay as if he never intended to move from the air conditioning. “But it is not the heat of the climate that brings you here.”

“An occurrence in Cuba,” I said.

“I see.”

I listened for a moment to the clatter of the typewriter a world away from Batione’s seeming indolence. Miami is the publicized window on Latin America. There are a few men in Ybor City who are more than content to keep it that way, who worked to keep attention on the window. Rafael Batione was one of those men.

“You know the R. D. Carton case?” I asked.

He began to sit up slowly, spilling his feet to the thick carpet, pushing with his hands. His eyes, buried in masses of soft flesh, centered on my face.

“You know that his widow is here,” I went on. “And you must know also that there is in Tampa Bay a schooner called the Sprite with a Peruvian registry.”

“Is there a connection, Ed?”

“That’s what I want to find out. Something disappeared off that boat. It triggered the deaths of two men.”

The mention of death failed to make the slightest break in the rhythm of the distant sounding typewriter.

“I come to you,” I said, “because I’m beginning to wonder what scheme is being hatched.”

“There is none, in Ybor City. If there is a scheme, it was not hatched here. What do you think was taken from the boat?”

“I’m not at all sure, now. I’d thought it might be papers, a plan.”

“This was not the destination for any such thing, Ed.” He stood up. In that position, he lost the soft, sloppy look. He took on the appearance of a wrestler capable of clubbing an opponent senseless with the heel of his hand. “You have my word,” he said quietly.

“And I accept it. Gracias.”

“We do not deal in murder, Ed. Our concern is for the homeless refugee, the helpless peon who chops cane or digs in the mines twelve hours a day for twenty cents, the child carrying a gun in a dictator’s state militia.”

“Mistakes can be made,” I suggested.

“Not in our business,” he said.