The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 13

The street did not exemplify the best in the American way of life. It was narrow and dark, with trash littering the gutters. Old buildings of brick and wood, scabbed with the dirty remains of old paint, cowered in rows broken by shanties and empty, wood-grown fields.

I parked the rented buggy and took a walk. My heels were loud on the uneven brick paving of the sidewalk. A tired, harassed-looking storekeeper watched me pass from the doorway of his hole in the wall. A few shadowy figures shuffled along the sidewalk. In Ybor City there is at least contrast, famous restaurants around the corner from squalor. In Ybor City there is that undercurrent, that animal zest for the living, like the hot pulsing of Latin blood, that you’ll find nowhere else. Here, there was no contrast, no zest.

I checked building numbers, reached the end of the block, and stopped. I stood wiping my face with my handkerchief. The number the woman had given me didn’t exist.

I moved back along the sidewalk and, about the middle of the block, I saw the shack. It was a small, boxlike shadow in the lighter shadows of night. Set at the rear of a vacant lot where scraggly palmetto struggled for life against rusty chunks of tin and other junk, the shack was half obscured by the rotting brick building that fronted the sidewalk. Coming down the sidewalk, I’d missed it. From this angle, I saw it.

I turned off the sidewalk. A tangled mass of junk wire caught my ankles and almost tripped me as I crossed the lot.

The shack was dark and silent. It had to be the one. The number no longer remained on the post of the sagging porch. My flicking pencil flashlight revealed the tacks that had once held the tin number. The number would have fitted between the numbers of the buildings fronting the sidewalk on either side of the vacant lot.

I moved up the short wooden steps. The porch creaked under my weight.

The doorknob was loose enough to rattle when I touched it. But it finally caught the catch and the door swung open, hinges complaining softly.

The heat inside the shack was so intense it was a kind of silent crackling. I closed the door and stood a moment.

The surge and roar of life in Tampa might have been on another planet. The only primary indication that anyone had lived in the shack recently was the smell of something rotting in the kitchen.

I played the beam of the pencil flash around. A broken-down wicker set was in this outer room. A threadbare Palm Beach coat, greasy and stiff with grime, lay across the arm of a chair.

I picked the coat up. It was a twin to the one Sime had been wearing when he’d let himself into my office. Or the same coat.

I fished through the pockets. I got no bites. The pocket yielded a lot of tobacco crumbs, a mashed package with a couple of cigarettes in it, and some matchbooks advertising a soft drink.

I dropped the coat on the chair. The shack, I guessed, consisted of three rooms — this one, a kitchen, a bedroom.

A lot of sand had been tracked into the shack. It rasped softly between my shoe soles and the bare planks of the floor.

The door of the bedroom stood open. The pencil flash picked up an old chest of drawers and an iron three-quarter bed. The bed linens consisted of a wrinkled sheet and a lumpy-looking pillow with the impression of somebody’s head in it.

I took a couple of steps in the bedroom. My angle of vision widened.

Sime Younkers was lying dead on the floor beyond the bed.

He was sprawled on his side, his under arm sticking out awkwardly behind him. One knee was drawn up a little. His mouth was open, the lips as slick and dry as cellophane, though a dark spot showed where spittle had run out of his mouth onto the floor. His eyes bulged with that glassy glare that comes only from the first glimpse into the bottomless depths of eternity.

He had been struck hard on the back of the head. Gnats were gathering, a small black-swarming cloud over the clotted blood.

I went beside him, shooed the gnats away with a wave of my hand, and tried the pockets of his pants. He owned forty-odd cents in change, a small ring of keys, and a cracked leather wallet.

I examined the wallet and the fishing got better. The wallet contained a crisp new fifty-dollar bill, plus an outdated driver’s license, a photostat of his old private-agency license, and four of his old calling cards, little frames of soil around their edges.

On the back of one of the cards, Sime had at some time or other jotted an address.

A Davis Islands address.

Victor Cameron’s.

I kept the calling card with the address on it and put the rest of Sime Younkers’ earthly estate back in his pockets.

I checked the rest of the shack and went outside. As I stepped from the porch I heard the slap of palmetto against a leg.

I started to turn. I never made it. I believe a blackjack was used. It laid itself hard against my skull. My knees knocked together and I pitched on my face.

The pain was like a knife piercing me from ear to ear.

I sensed quick movements. I felt hands grasp me under the armpits. I was being pulled, wrestled, and dragged.

A hinge creaked.

More pulling and dragging.

There was the rasp of sand between a shoe sole and the bare boards of the floor.

The steps moved away from me, decisive, rapid.

I tried to fight my way out of it. The pain was too intolerable. I raised one hand gropingly toward my head before I fainted.

The pain was gone for a passage of time. Then it came creeping back. It brought with it a new factor, a new sensation, a fresh torture. As my senses struggled toward a functioning state, I imagined that I lay helpless on a beach as white as bleached bones. It was blistering to the touch, while a sun that glaringly filled the whole of the Florida sky drew all the grease and life out of my flesh.

I groaned and tried to push away from the heat. The need to clear my head, to move, became a raging demand inside of me.

The heat was wrapping me more tightly. I could hear the voice of it, a continuous, snapping sound.

I rolled onto my back and opened my eyes. It was true — the merciless sun was everywhere. A chip of it came falling toward me, a small flame floating earthward with the glaring light its background.

Then I began to remember. I’d been slugged, dragged into the shack.

Now the shack was on fire.

It was a strangely impersonal thought for the first fraction of a second, like wondering what you’ll eat for lunch when you’re not hungry.

Then the import of it came to me. The emergency relays and controls sprang into action inside of me. I crabbed around toward the front door as another piece of old paper fell from the ceiling and burned toward me.

The front door was ringed in flame. The flame was rolling across the ceiling, billowing around every wall, threatening to close every avenue of escape in seconds.

I lunged into the kitchen. My eyes were stinging and watering until I couldn’t see. My lungs and nostrils felt as if they were filled with acid.

I found a doorknob with my groping fingers. It turned, but the door wouldn’t open. The door was latched. I didn’t have the strength to smash the door open. I found the latch, a dime-store hook latch, and flipped it.

I fell out of the kitchen into the greasy green of low-growing palmetto. I rested there a moment on my hands and knees, gagging the smoke from my lungs.

In the shack behind me glass went brittle and broke in the heat. Out on the street somebody gave a yell.

I crawled across the palmetto patch, reached the back side of a building, and used a drain pipe to pull myself upright.

I stood in the shadows of the building, a trembling in my knees. I looked across at the shack. Flames from it were leaping two or three stories high now. A citizen might as well call a fire department in Canada for all the good it would do the shack.

On the street, the sounds of excitement got louder. People began to filter across the vacant lot toward the shack to take in the spectacle.

I moved along the back of the building, down the side away from the shack.

I crossed the street and went down the sidewalk. At a point opposite the parked car, I recrossed and got in.

A fresh wave of pain came over me. I sat gripping the steering wheel until it subsided.

The next parking place for the car was in front of Helen Martin’s rooming house. I was so woozy I didn’t believe I could make it on through the tangle of Tampa to my side of town.

My vision was dancing with black polka dots when I knocked on her door.

She answered quickly. Her face captured a moment of shock as she saw my condition. Then she took my arm.

“You’d better come inside and get something under you besides those shaky pins,” she said. She helped me to a chair.

“I’ll get a doctor,” she said.

“No, I’m not seriously hurt. Mainly, I’m sick to my stomach from reaction. If you’ll get that ammonia I used on you today and some cold water for my head...”

She was already in action. I sipped the spirits of ammonia and water and felt the fine shock of a cold compress on the back of my head.

“The skin isn’t broken,” she said. “But you’ve got a prize-winner of a knot. What did it?”

“Blackjack.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you— But it’s thoughtless of me to ask questions right now. What you need is a comfortable spot for collapsing for a good night’s sleep.”

She didn’t have to twist my arm. I know that when a lady and gentleman are forced by circumstances to share the same roof, with only one bedroom available, it’s considered proper for the lady to have the bed and the gentleman to arrange himself in another room on a couch or chair.

My consideration right then was for a place I could get prone and yield my muscles to their tiredness.

I let Helen help me into the bedroom. She turned back the covers on the large old bed. Next she kneeled and undid my shoelaces, knowing I’d find it difficult to bend over that far. Then she slipped out of the room and closed the door.

I fought the pull of the bed long enough to peel down to my shorts. I draped my clothes over the chair near the bed and crawled between the sheets.

I lay on my stomach and stretched out.

With that, I died for a few hours.