Start Screaming Murder

Chapter Seventeen

I wasn’t too surprised. I’d known it was big. “A half million,” I said, “in what?”

“What do you mean, in what?”

“Jewels? Bonds?”

“Plain old American cash, Ed. Five hundred one-thousand dollar bills not much larger in a tight package than a couple of pocket-sized books.”

“Whose money was it?”

She stared at the floor and said bleakly, “Bucks said it was anybody’s. Up for grabs. Belonged to anyone who got it and kept it.”

“You know better than that, Tina. That kind of money always belongs to someone.”

“Sure,” she said as if she hated herself. “Bucks was telling me what I wanted to hear, roping me into the deal. He was making it easy for me to rationalize and kid myself. He said the money was part of a crooked deal and we had as much right to it as the next person.”

“Did he know what the deal was?”

“He had an idea. He came aboard the Sprite once without D. D. hearing him. She staggered out of the cabin, blind drunk, and made a crack to her father before she realized Bucks was there. If the liquor held out, she said, she’d remain a happy assassin until it was over. Alex Lessard told her to shut up. Then he tried to pass off the remark as drunken talk. But Bucks got the idea they were planning to kill somebody.”

“With Jack Scanlon,” I said, “as the imported trigger man.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Ed.”

“It fits him like his skin. Did Bucks know the identity of the target?”

Her pigtails swished about her slender neck as Tina shook her head. “No. He didn’t know about the money, either, at that time. Later he and Scanlon were drinking in a waterfront bar. Scanlon got in a boastful mood. He made a slip about the money.”

“I still can’t figure you in,” I said. “Why didn’t Bucks take the money himself? Why a partner and a split of the take?”

“The money was in a package, inside Alex Lessard’s own stateroom. The cabin was never unlocked, even when he was inside asleep. The only way to slip into the cabin was from outside.”

“Outside?”

“The water,” Tina said. “From the water.”

I glommed onto the idea. “Through the porthole.”

“Yes. Lessard left it open in this climate for obvious reasons. No one would have viewed it as a hazard. For a normal-sized person to get through it was out of the question. I nearly broke my shoulders when Bucks helped me in, small as I am.”

“He took you out by boat?”

Tina nodded. “He had a small, lightweight plywood boat stashed in a mangrove stand not far from the bait camp out there. He eased us out, not taking the oars from the water as we neared the Sprite.”

She was stilled for a moment as she remembered the quiet, the darkness, the rasp of water against the hull of the schooner riding at anchor.

She drew a thin breath. “When we got out there, we heard their voices. The Scanlons and. Lessards. They were up on the foredeck, drinking and making idle chit-chat.

“Bucks gripped the rim of the porthole and steadied the plywood rowboat. I was wearing tight jeans and a slipover knitted shirt, no shoes. With his free hand, he latched onto my belt and helped me inside the cabin.

“We didn’t have any trouble — at first. I’d brought a small flashlight with me, one of those the size and shape of a cigarette lighter. I found the package under Lessard’s bunk. Before I left the cabin, I tore a corner and made sure the package contained money.

“Bucks helped me out of the cabin and we headed for shore. Then suddenly, I heard Jack Scanlon call out, ‘Lessard! Bucks Jordan’s prowling around out there.’

“There was a moment of absolute silence on the schooner. Lessard yelled, ‘Jordan, is that you? What are you doing?’

“Bucks hissed at me not to say a word. Believe me, Ed, I wasn’t about to. I was crouched on the bottom of that plywood job by that time.

“Next, I heard D. D. say, ‘You’d better check the cabin!’ Footsteps, Lessard’s I guess, ran across the deck of the Sprite. A few minutes after that, we heard them scrambling into one of the schooner’s small boats. We were a good distance off by then, the sounds drifting to us over the water.

“Bucks was rowing like crazy. One of them in the other boat had a powerful flashlight. I thought our gooses right then were parboiled, baked and fried.

“We reached the mangroves before the light caught us. We plowed our way in, not minding snakes or anything else. I was shaking like I had pneumonia.

“We hid there while they searched. Scanlon came so close one time I thought he was going to step on me. Finally they decided our head start had given us a chance to get out. They moved in other directions, still searching, and Bucks and I had the chance to get out.

“He was scared silly, the chicken in him really spreading its wings. He wanted the money then and there, but I had it stuck under my shirt. I was afraid he’d take off without me. So I told him I’d yell if he tried anything funny.

“I couldn’t keep up with him, and he didn’t want to hang back. He kept hissing at me to come on, come on.

“He reached the old asphalt road where the car was parked ahead of me. One of them, Lessard or Scanlon, had come out of the mangrove a hundred yards away. He’d seen the parked car’s shadow in the heavy flashlight beam.

“He pot-shotted at Bucks, and all Bucks wanted was to get out of there. He scratched off.”

“Leave you?” I asked.

“He’d have left his own mother to a cut-throat pirate crew at that moment, Ed.” Her lips twisted in her pale face. “Scanlon and Lessard legged it to the bait camp to get a car. I started walking. When I reached a main thoroughfare, I had my first bit of luck for the evening. A taxi stopped, about the third one I yelled at. It was empty, after taking a fare up the bayshore.

“I went home, bathed, changed clothes, had a drink to try and drown the shakes, and then Bucks showed up. We opened the package... That’s when he really blew his stack and yelled double-cross.”

A short, bitter laugh came from her. “We got about twenty-four hundred dollars for our trouble. The outside bills were thousands, all right, but the rest were singles, little peanut one-dollar bills.

“The way he was storming, I saw he was past the point of reason. I knew he’d stop making verbal threats any minute and start trying to use physical violence to get at what he thought was the truth.

“I ducked in the kitchen and out the back door. He stumbled around in the darkness mouthing that he would find me and break my neck.

“My car, the one with the special brake gadget, was parked in the driveway. He struck matches, looking inside of it. When his widening search carried him across the yard, I slipped in the car.

“He heard the car start and almost reached it before I got out of the driveway. When I rounded a corner, I saw his headlights coming after me. I was out of my mind with fear, afraid of the police, the people on that boat, Bucks. Bucks was the most immediate fear.”

“So you came to my place,” I said.

“I had to have help,” she said miserably, “or thought I did. Now I wish... But I just didn’t have the nerve to let Bucks get hold of me.

“I thought I’d given him the slip a few blocks back. I parked my car in the far end of the parking shed at your building.

“Bucks spotted me going in. I heard him coming up after me. That wicker table was in the hallway... Your transom was open...” Her voice filtered to nothing.

“When you left my place,” I said, “you took your car and came here?”

“Yes... The car’s down the street, closed in a neighbor’s garage. The night we went to the Sprite Bucks used a rented car. Ed... I haven’t been very brave in any of this.”

“No, I guess you haven’t, Tina. Have you made any plans?”

“Plans?” Her laugh was brittle, her green eyes far too bright. “I’ve cowered here and hoped blindly... that you’d come out okay... that you’d work it out.”

As she looked at me, her face grayed a shade further. She was past the point of tears now. Her lips were bloodless and wrinkled. Her face seemed to collapse at the edges and grow wizened, the face of a tired, old woman, a woman so old that living had become a mere memory.

“Ed...” My name was a strangled sound on her lips. “I don’t expect you to excuse me. I don’t blame you for hating me. But if you understood... just a little... if you were inside of me, looking at the world from everybody else’s navel...

“When I was a kid, I used to wonder what was so terrible about me that even my parents didn’t want me. I outgrew that, to an extent. But I was tired, Ed, of being a person wrapped in a package this size. I was tired of the people staring and making cracks, tired of earning a living by being a freak.

“When Bucks came and told me about all the money, I didn’t want to listen. But he knew how I felt. He’d been in carny life. He sensed the feelings of a freak.

“I didn’t care about the money, Ed. I wanted what the money represented in freedom and independence. Instead of coming in the stage door, I wanted to sit out front with enough money to command a respect and attention I’d never had.”

“You had those things, Tina, with a lot of people.”

“Yes — I know. I know now. With the people who counted, the Ed Riverses, the Cardezas, the waiters and the boys in the bands where I worked. But it was the others who counted too much, Ed. The boors and wise-crackers. Now... what now, Ed?”

“You’ll stay here, under wraps, until I have a chance to square myself,” I said.

“You trust me not to take a powder?”

“Got any place else to go?”

“You know I haven’t. They’ll spot me in an hour if I get in the open.”

“Then it seems to be safe to trust you,” I said. “Later, you’re slated for the police.”

“I know. I’ll keep the appointment.”

At the kitchen door, I paused. Her contrition was genuine. She sat woebegone, forlorn.

“Go wash your face,” I said, and my voice was rough, because I was, after all, supposed to be mean-mad at her.

I spared myself any further possible experiences with Mama Cardezas and little Miguel by stepping out the back door and going around the house.

The neighborhood was quiet except for the usual. Kids playing in the hot darkness, hide-and-seek by this time. A girl’s laughter as a boy courted her on a ramshackle front porch across the street. A trio of amateur calypso singers down the block singing the tale of a banana loader who got a tarantula on him.

I got in my car. The whirring of the starter cut into the final portion of the song.

I turned at the next corner, heading for the bayshore without learning if the poor guy died of tarantula bite before his true love arrived with a final kiss.

I hit the downtown traffic lights perfectly and made good time, crossing the river and wheeling up the bay with the dead jellyfish taint of the tide-flats filtering into the car.

I left the car on a side street a quarter of a mile from the Carton estate. Walking rapidly, I turned in the driveway and kept to shadows as I neared the gloomy hulk of house.

One room in the place seemed to be lighted, downstairs, front corner. The stand of once-beautiful pines off the driveway towered now over a field of thickets and palmetto. I prowled the field until I found what I was looking for, a stout pine knurl about as long as my arm. Lying on the ground where it had blown from a tree, it had seasoned out. The resin, baking out, had given the club a stony hardness.

I freed the club from its nest in a tangle of briars, hefted it in my right hand.

I moved to the driveway and pitched a handful of pine bark against the side of the house. The place remained silent, that single light glowing behind old lace curtains that billowed gently in the open window.

I squatted and searched with my fingers until I found a broken piece of concrete at the edge of the drive. I tossed the missile into the untrimmed shrubs that drooped beneath the lighted window.

This time there was reaction from the house.

I knew Mrs. Carton had opened the front door when I heard the sharp question from the veranda. “Who’s there!”

I threw a chunk of pine bark into the thicket at my left.

“Nino!” Emily Carton commanded in a suddenly crisp, savage voice. “Out there... Get him, Nino!”