Start Screaming Murder

Chapter Four

It was a long, hot afternoon. I was doing it the hard way, Bucks wasn’t in the phone book or city directory. No gas or light bills had been issued to him. Without a lead in those directions, I called on a one-time carny owner I knew and got a list of six names. The third name was a skinny tattoo artist who gave me an address.

The gloomy old house was presided over by a landlady who smelled like soured suet. Bucks no longer lived there. But she told me of a bar where he used to hang out.

At the bar I got a second address, where I picked up the name of another bar. So it goes.

At the bar, it turned out I’d missed Bucks by less than an hour. The bartender said Bucks had been in a real funk, his face showing the results of a clobbering, the inner man seething with the memory of it. He’d been drinking. Not heavily. Just enough to keep a mean edge whetted. He’d made a statement about calling at a doll house.

“Whatever the hell that means,” the bartender said with a shrug. I thanked him, and he said, “Any time, Ed.”

I began to dig the doll house remark, and I wondered if Bucks was already out there. Thinking about it caused a prickle to chase over my skin.

The cottage was on a street off Nebraska Avenue. It sparkled with a coat of fresh, white paint. A modest frame house with green shutters and high-peaked gables, it was snug behind sheltering hedges and palms.

With my car half a block away, I walked past the cottage. The sun was spewing to a fiery death in the Gulf, with the twilight promising no relief from the heat. Several nearby houses showed lights. This one didn’t, but I hadn’t expected him to turn on a light, if he was in there.

I did a quick survey. The street was quiet. Ducking down the side yard, I went to the rear door of the cottage. I used the steel on my keyring and was inside in a few seconds. I closed the door gently.

The interior was silent, a vacuum of heat sucking at blood and brains.

In the hot gloom, I experienced the weird feeling of having magically become two or three times my normal size. The furnishings did it. The custom-made kitchen equipment was no higher than eighteen inches. In the dining room, I barked my knee on the corner of the table. It had a matching buffet, china closet, and tiny captain’s chairs to match. I couldn’t have wedged my bulk on the specially built couch and chairs in the living room. The TV screen looked outsized in a cabinet that snugged it and a hi-fi set close to the luxuriant carpet. The bedroom furniture had been modeled for a fairy princess.

There were low bookcases and tiny tables holding potted greenery, curtains as frothy as sea foam. I was a Gulliver on a modern travel, moving through the world a tiny woman had made for herself. This was Tina La Flor’s refuge, her sanctuary.

In the darkening hallway, I wiped my face and considered my next move. My throat was parched. The thought of a cold beer was torture. My guts growled for Cuban sausage and garbanzo soup. But my instincts gambled that Bucks Jordan hadn’t been here yet. There was no sign of his entry. It was still daylight.

I decided to wait.

In the heat of the closed house, sweat crawled like bugs through the mat on my chest, stained the waistband of my pants, ran down my calves to puddle in my socks.

When it was full dark, he came. I was warned by a scratching on a rear window. I heard a brittle snapping of metal, the sliding of the window. A breath of air slipped into the cottage.

A corner street light was on, and in the murk I saw his shadow creep into the dining room.

He picked up one of the captain’s chairs with two fingers, laughed, and threw it on the floor. (With his presence added, the normal-sized house seemed enormous, the tiny furnishings pathetic.)

He padded to the living room. He had a pint bottle in his hip pocket. He pulled it out, slugged it, and recapped it.

He sat down on the carpet, because none of the furniture would hold him, and parked the bottle beside him.

He was facing full toward the entry foyer, and I guessed he was thinking of that moment when she’d step into the room and turn on a light.

“Bucks,” I said, “you’ve made a bad mistake.”

I clicked on the dining room light as I spoke. He stopped breathing, literally. For a second he was paralyzed, unable to turn his head. It was exaggerated, like a bit out of an old-time movie that used to bring laughter. But he wasn’t comical, not to me. He was the kind who went berserk if he got scared enough. Berserk men can kill, even those a lot smaller than this big slab of beef.

As my shadow belted the waist of the room, he jerked around to a half crouch. His face made me feel a little better about the brawl last night. His nose was a big, purple sausage and there were little yellowish-purple half-moons under each eye.

When he saw who was in the house with him, his eyes went crazy.

His right hand dipped under his shirt and jerked the blackjack from the waistband of his pants.

“You lay off me,” he howled. “I ain’t scared of you. You lay off...”

He made a great try for the foyer. My weight hit him. We slammed down and a tiny end-table made sounds like crunching eggshells.

My stabbing hand missed, and the sap clipped me on the side of the jaw. I went a little nuts myself, pinned him, and started hitting him in the face. The third or fourth punch caught that swollen nose. A wail came from him. He tore himself free, scrambling toward the dining room. He’d lost the sap. It rolled under my foot, almost pitching me.

I closed on him. He came around swinging the dining-room table. I ducked. The table shattered against the wall.

Before he could regain his balance, I piled into him. His buttocks crashed against the china cabinet and it made glassy tinkling noises.

He was cornered now. He made sledge-hammers of those two big hands and fought back blindly. If he’d held onto his reason, he might have turned the trick. As it was, he was wide open. I hit him until I was sickened, of having to do it, of him making me do it, of myself, because I could think of no other way of controlling him.

Then his knees sagged. He hung as if invisible wires were keeping him from pitching forward. His face was a bloody wreck.

The carpet met his knees. He held to the edge of the buffet to keep from going all the way down.

“Bucks, you’re never to bother her again, you understand?”

His head hung forward.

“Be smart and stay healthy,” I said. “Don’t ever come near Tina La Flor — and I’ll forget you exist.”

He went crawling toward the living room and the bottle. I wondered if he was crying. The sounds coming from him might have been due to that, or the difficulty he was having in getting air through his blood-clotted throat.

“You got it, Bucks?”

He moaned softly, a sound that shouldn’t have belonged to a man. “Please, Rivers...”

“You got it?”

“Yeah,” he choked. “Only leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”

“Just the way you’re going to leave the little doll alone. It’s a bargain you’d better keep, Bucks.”

“Okay,” he said. “You know I will.” He groped for his bottle.

“Do your drinking some place else, Bucks. She’ll be coming back. I’ll bring her. She’d better not find you here.”

Bowed over, he put his hands over his face and sobbed. “She won’t. Only leave me alone, can’t you?”

I turned and walked out the back door. My clothes were stuck to me with sweat. But it wasn’t the sweat or slight difference in temperature outside that caused me to stop and shudder.

I hurried up the street, got in the car, and U-turned. I hit Nebraska and turned toward Ybor City.

A beer would do. Or a pail of ice water.

I wasn’t hungry any longer.

Tina wasn’t in the apartment when I got there. She’d left a note: “Ed, I’m gone to eat. Can’t take any more of that pepper and hot spice stuff you keep in your refrigerator. What do you use for a stomach, a secondhand bomb casing?”

I grinned at the note and dropped it on the table. Except for breakfast, I didn’t eat much in the apartment myself. Tina had been stuck here all day with snack stuff and beer go-withers.

While the tub filled from the cold tap, I stripped down. The final item of apparel was the knife I carry in a sheath at the nape of my neck. It’s strictly for those times when all the emergency lights are screaming red. I dislike the knife, but I’ve owed it my life a few times.

The water temporarily soaked away the heat, along with the tender spots my encounter with Bucks had created.

I was glad it was all over. Tina could go home now and start repairing her lilliputian domain and I could get the bad taste of the whole affair out of my mind.

With fresh clothes on, I felt my appetite returning. It was my turn to leave a note for her: “Stay put until I get back.”

It was nice to relax. I ambled a few blocks to a restaurant and, settled for a steak while the tourists at the next table had their first encounter with Spanish squid with rice.

By the time I started back to the apartment, the subtle change of night had come to Ybor City. The Quarter doesn’t start jumping in the fully American sense; it slithers; it breathes the air of old Spain and stretches voluptuously. The aristocracy gathers in the plush restaurants for two-hour repasts. Tourists jostle on the narrow streets beneath the balconies of iron filigree. In a crowded, smoky club maracas seethe a snaky whisper, and a girl with long, silken black hair and purple-shadowed eyes stands in a dark doorway like a carnivorous flower waiting for prey.

The apartment was still unlocked. I didn’t like that. I turned the lights on, and I liked the emptiness even less.

I decided to go downstairs to see if I could get a lead on the direction she’d taken.

Just as I opened the door, a peeled-egg head showed in the stairwell, a bulbous moon catching the feeble hallway light.

He came up with slow, deliberate movements. He was a big guy with a fleshy, quietly humorous face. His name was Steve Ivey. He was a lieutenant of detectives. He was far from being a flashy man. Maybe he wasn’t even brilliant. But he was a good cop, determined, with an integrity that was bone deep.

He saw me standing in the doorway, paused, and came forward slowly.

“Hello, Ed.”

I returned the greeting.

“Going out?” he asked.

“Just coming in. How goes it?”

“Hot,” he said.

“You didn’t come here to discuss the weather.”

“I’m looking for somebody. A little doll named Tina La Flor. You know her.”

“Sure.”

“She came out of this building a couple hours ago.”

“What makes you think that?” I fished with a bland face. His was just as bland.

“Well, we put out a call on her. The beat cop over here remembers he saw her a couple hours ago. Coming out of the building. Can’t help but spot and remember a little doll like that.”

“I guess not. But why me? There are a lot of people in the building. She might have been visiting any of them.”

Ivey made a pad of his handkerchief and wiped his bald dome. “That’s true. But I got a hunch she came here because she needed help. Private-cop help. And there’s only one private cop in the building.”

“She isn’t here now,” I said. “You want to come in and look around?”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“What did she tell you two hours ago?”

“She didn’t tell me anything, Steve. I wasn’t here.” It was clear that Ivey didn’t, as yet, know Tina had come to the apartment last night. His only connection of her to me was her departure for dinner. I didn’t see any sense in tying knots until I found out which way the rope was dangling.

“Mind telling me where you were?”

“Yes, I do mind,” I said. “I didn’t see Tina La Flor this afternoon, and that’s the truth.”

Ivey placidly lighted a cigar. “You’re up to something, Rivers. When you get that dumb-ape look, it means you’ve turned on that computer under your skull. What’s with Tina La Flor?”

“I’ve told you...”

“How’d you get those marks on your cheek?”

“I had to go downtown last night and check a shorted burglar alarm. When I got back, a mugger jumped me.”

“You didn’t report it.”

“He didn’t get anything. I chased him.”

“You should have reported him.”

“I didn’t get a look at him. It was too dark.”

“Okay,” Ivey shrugged, “if that’s the way you citizens want it. If Tina La Flor shows up, will you let me know?”

“Maybe. Why would she come here?”

“Probably to retain you. Over in her neighborhood a little while ago some kids at after-dinner play noticed an open window in Tina La Flor’s cottage. You know how kids are. The place was dark, and they decided to sneak in and have a look at all that miniature furniture they’d heard their parents talk about.

“But the cottage wasn’t empty, Ed. A big guy, all bloody, was lying in the living room. One of the kids, a little girl, she got hysterical just from the sight of it and the family doctor had to put her under sedation.”

Grisly sweat crawled down my chest. “Somebody beat the guy up?”

“Somebody killed the guy,” Ivey said. “He’d taken a beating. The blow that seems to have finished him came from a blackjack we found near the body.”

The butterflies in my belly turned to writhing snakes. “Know who he is?”

“Fellow named Bucks Jordan,” Ivey said. “A quick routine on him turned up a record. Vicious, dirty, petty stuff. Beating up a woman, attempted extortion. He worked a carny for awhile — along with Tina Fa Flor.”

“Coincidence,” I said. “You can connect two thirds of the ex-carny people in this town through past show employment.”

“Wasn’t coincidence that he was found in her cottage,” Ivey said doggedly.

“But you can’t think that a little dame like her could slug a...”

“I’m thinking she could hire it done,” Ivey said, “whatever the reasons. And when it was done too thoroughly and she saw she had a fresh corpse on her hands, I’m thinking she’d figure she needed some help and needed it desperately.”

“Which brings you to me.” I wondered if my lips looked as stiff as they felt.

“Which brought her to you,” Ivey corrected. “Now you know. You’ll contact me if she shows up?”

“I’ll keep in touch,” I said.

I stood in the hallway until Ivey disappeared in the stairwell. Then I went in the apartment, closed the door, and fell back against it.

Someone had entered the cottage, found Bucks’ own blackjack, and used it for a final blow.

That’s the way it had to be. I knew he’d been alive when I left.

And yet — the question seeped smotheringly through my mind.

No, I told myself, I didn’t kill him. He was alive.

Then who knew he was there? Who killed him?

I went to the kitchenette and broke out a beer. It tasted like ipecac.

One part of me raged to another part: Damn it, I know I. didn’t kill Bucks Jordan.

And the other part whispered back: Even if you didn’t try and tell it to Ivey.

The phone screamed.

I went in the bed-sittingroom and picked the phone up.

“Ed?”

“Tina — where the devil are you?”

“Why’d you do it, Ed?”

“You think that I...”

“I heard, just now, on a newscast... Ed, I didn’t want you to get him off my neck with such permanence. But don’t worry,” she sobbed. “I won’t say a thing, even if they catch me.”

“Tina...”

“I won’t let you down, Ed.”

“Tina!”

She hung up.