The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 15

By Monday afternoon, other news had crowded me right out of the papers. I shed no tears over that. They’d had their fun, rehashing events from a triple murder to the killing of an ex-private detective and the burning of his body almost beyond recognition, this latter event apparently being the work of a second private detective who was trying to spring a client charged with the triple slaying.

During the weekend I had to buy fresh clothes. I knew the apartment would be staked out. Feeling much better, at least in the physical sense, I thanked the family that had given me protection and a rest cure for the weekend, and came out on the teeming street just before sundown.

At a corner beanery I was eating garbanzo soup with cold beer on the side, when I learned that Prince Kuriacha had connections of his own in Ybor City. The affluent former heavyweight king of wrestlers had dropped the word that he wanted to see me.

His address reached me via the waiter who brought deep-fried grouper and a spicy Cuban slaw to follow the soup.

The Prince was staying at a plush hotel downtown. I called him from a drugstore phone booth.

His room phone rang about four times. It seemed he was out, probably at dinner. Then the phone clicked and the natty, hairless gorilla rasped a hello.

“I hear you want to see me,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“A fellow in Ybor City told me. You know who this is, of course.”

“Sure, I know.”

“What do you have? I assume it’s about the Yamashitas.”

“That’s right.”

A frown creased itself between my eyes. He sounded hesitant, cautious.

“Kuriacha, are you alone?”

He was silent a moment. Then, “Been a long time, all right. Glad you called.”

“Okay,” I said, “so you can’t spill it over the phone.”

“That’s right. Sure like to see you, talk over old times. Where are you stopping off?”

“No abode at the moment,” I said. “Are you in any danger from whoever is there?”

“Hah!” It was an indication that he could take care of himself. “Where are you?”

“I’ll call you later,” I said.

While I was in the phone booth, I got rid of my immediate calling by ringing Helen Martin and then Tillie Rollo. Nothing new at either spot. Helen was holding up. Tillie had uncovered no trace of Luisa Shaw.

“Relax,” I told Tillie. “You sound like you’ve built a brittle nervous edge.”

“And why not? After all, you’re a wanted man. I don’t want any more truck with this thing.”

“We made a bargain,” I reminded her.

“Before this thing kept ballooning to such proportions.”

“You find Luisa Shaw,” I said, “and we’ll prick that balloon. You’ll still be able to preside over that ultra-exclusive social set in some little town with its single country club.”

“Ed—”

“I wouldn’t hurry up plans about trying to find that town, if I were you, until matters are settled here.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“If you want to put it that way. Luisa Shaw is the key to this thing, Tillie, and I’ll take some pretty strong measures to find her.”

“I wish I’d never seen the slimy little slut!” Tillie decided as she broke the connection.

The street lights had been turned on when I came out of the drugstore. There was a soft, smothering quality in the early darkness. The air was dead. The bricks, wood, and paving of Ybor City emanated heat like the giant element of an old stove.

Now that I was outside, the best way to move would be quietly and not furtively. Deny the pressure inside. Steer away from the knowledge that Ivey’s organization would net me sooner or later. Crouch down behind my eyes and do whatever could be done in whatever time I had left.

The rented car was in a shacky garage behind an old stucco rooming house. Let the Tampa cops wear out their eyeballs looking for it. I didn’t go near it. Instead, I borrowed a heap from the owner of a small beer tavern. A rotund little man I’d known for years, he expressed concern about the police in his garbled Spanish-English.

“You don’t know the car is gone,” I said. “But don’t report it stolen right away quick.”

A Latin light came to his eyes, compounded of love of conspiracy and adventure.

“You un great — how-you-say-in-inglés — thinker, Ed. You do me mucho favors, past times. Keys on mesa. My back I turn to you.”

I picked up the keys from the cluttered table he used for a desk. Then I left the small back-room office.

I threaded through the lights and traffic in downtown Tampa, crossed the river, and took the link to Davis Islands.

I parked the buggy on the palm-lined street, and walked up the driveway to the Cameron house.

From the shadows of the shrubs, I watched the house for a while. The living-room windows framed light downstairs. The remainder of the house was dark. From time to time I saw Victor Cameron cross the window. Each time he had a glass in his hand. No sound came from the house. He wasn’t watching television, reading, or listening to a hi-fi or radio. He was prowling like a creature whose torment would not permit it to remain still. Drinking, but unable to get drunk.

I scouted the house to make doubly sure he was alone. The rear was dark. The surface of the pool where I’d first met Rachie lay like a sheet of dark-blue, unwrinkled plastic.

At the front of the house once more, I eased onto the veranda. I palmed the knob of the front door and found the door unlocked.

The door opened without noise, and the carpet of the entry foyer deadened my footsteps.

I was just inside the living room before he realized he was not alone any longer. He poured a drink from a cut-glass decanter, turned, saw me, and stood absolutely still for a moment.

“Sorry to break in,” I said, “but I didn’t want to risk your slamming the door and reaching a telephone.”

“What do you want?” He tried to get a little of his old-time bluster and command in his tone.

The lighting from a lamp behind him hollowed his face and heightened the gray, tired look of him.

I took Sime Younkers’ dirt-ringed calling card from my pocket and dropped it on the table beside the whisky decanter.

He refused to look at the card. He had still not voluntarily moved a muscle, but a tiny one was quivering in the side of his thick neck.

“Turn it over,” I said.

“Why should I?”

“Because something is written on the back.”

“I’m not at all interested, Rivers.”

“You’d better be,” I said.

“Indeed? Why?”

“Because I’m giving you a chance — to convince me that you had nothing to do with Sime Younkers’ death.”

“You’re presuming too much. I don’t care to take the trouble to talk to you.”

I slapped him across the side of his face with my open hand.

He stood rocking. Not from the force or physical pain of the blow. The quivering crawled from the small area on his neck to the corners of his mouth. The gray mists gathered in greater quantity in his eyes. He bit his lip and suddenly ducked his head, to hide from me, to hide from the knowledge that I was seeking. I thought of a small boy who’s been kicked out of the club after the most terrible discovery of his life has been made — that he’s all bravado.

“You had no reason to do that,” he said in a soft, husky voice. “A few years ago I’d have smashed you with my bare hands for such an insult.”

“Fears can overpower insults, can’t they?”

“I’m not really afraid of you, Rivers. Not physically.”

“I’ll give you every benefit of that doubt. You’re a snob whose snobbery has been undermined. It’s left you with nothing. Now if you won’t pick up that calling card, I’ll tell you about it. It came from the pocket of a dead man. His name was Sime Younkers.”

“The only thing I know about him is what I’ve read in the papers the last couple of days, Rivers.”

“The back of the card calls you a liar,” I said. “Your address is on it.”

“Perhaps you put it there.”

“Don’t be asinine! In my present spot, would I take a chance on coming out here if I wasn’t convinced there was a real connection between you and a man now dead, a man involved in the Yamashita business?”

“You’re trying to frame me.” He sought to bluster. He raised the glass and tossed off the drink. I sensed the fight inside of him, his seething frustration as he tried to fan new life in the top-heavy ego that had carried him through many years.

I put my hands on my hips and stood looking at him a moment. I had a cankerous frustration of my own.

“I wish you wouldn’t be so difficult, Cameron.”

“I really don’t care to see any more of you.” He poured himself another drink. “You’d better leave now.”

I took a step toward him. I knew that a man of his disposition would have a particular horror of cold steel. I didn’t want to do it. But I reached to the nape of my neck and slid the knife from its sheath.

Lamplight glittered on the blade and etched the edge with almost luminosity.

“You... you wouldn’t dare!” Cameron said.

He looked from the blade to my face. The glass slipped from his hand and liquor stained the carpet. The gray of his cheeks faded to dead white. His mouth opened to catch a quick breath.

“You savage!” he whispered.

“I do what has to be done, Cameron. I’m trying to save the life of a man, the future and sanity of his wife, as well as my own skin. If it means coming in your lovely home and scraping the whitewash off you, that’s just too damned bad. I’m not going to ask you again. What business did you have with Sime Younkers?”

Cameron backed from the knife until the table touched him below his hips. “I... retained him. On a matter that had nothing to do with the Yamashitas or Younkers’ death.”

“What was it?”

“A personal thing. I told you. Nothing came of it.”

“I like to know personal things,” I said.

Unconsciously, he beat the meaty edge of his palm against the edge of the table. “I thought Sadao’s son, Ichiro, was stealing from the firm.”

“You hired Sime Younkers to find out?”

“Yes.”

“What did he find?”

“I was wrong. Ichiro was innocent.”

“What caused you to suspect him in the first place?”

“The way he lived. The cost of it.”

“I checked Ichiro’s financial affairs myself, Cameron. You’d better think of something else. Everything was in order.”

A thing drew tight inside of him and snapped. He stopped striking the edge of the table. “I don’t care what you checked! Ichiro was living high. I had reasons for my suspicions. Sime Younkers had a license then, and my action was perfectly legitimate. Certainly you found Ichiro’s affairs in order. He’d spent beyond his means, but someone had let him have some money.”

I studied his face carefully. “Rachie?”

“If you must know, yes. Now all the skeletons are out in the open.”

“Rachie get the money from you?”

“Money doesn’t mean much to Rachie. Rachie’s mother was not exactly a pauper when she died.”

“Ichiro pay Rachie back?”

Cameron stared at me. “Smart as you think you are, Rivers,” he said bitterly, “you’re built on the bedrock of naïve puritanism.”

“So I’ve been told. Thanks. Now I dig you.”

“I wonder if you do really?” he said in a hollow voice. He blundered toward a chair and sat down, his hands dangling limp over the arms of the chair.

“She got a charge out of buying him,” Cameron said in that same voice, “the same way some pathologically cruel people enjoy buying an animal.”

He sat gazing haggardly at the carpet, perhaps seeing her face as it had been years ago, when the misty sweetness of childhood hid the thing waiting to grow inside of her.

“Did you go to the Yamashita summerhouse the day they were killed, Cameron?”

“No,” he said, without turning his head.

“Did Rachie?”

“I don’t know,” he said dully. A short, bitter laugh ripped out of him. “The whole truth, Rivers, that’s what I’m telling now. I honestly don’t know if she went out there. Even if she did, it would have been with Ichiro. She’d have no reason to kill the whole family.”

“There was another woman out there,” I said.

He looked up. His eyes came into focus. “Another woman?”

“Her name is — or was — Luisa Shaw. Pert, blonde, very good looking. Do you know her?”

“I... no.”

“Your hesitation is showing.”

“I’ve heard the name.”

“When?”

“About a week before the murders.”

“Where?”

“Here,” Cameron said bleakly, “in my own house. Ichiro and Rachie came in. They didn’t know I was home, could overhear. She was asking him about Luisa Shaw. She — made a comparison between herself and Luisa.”

“Do you know what Luisa is?”

Cameron peered at images hidden in the carpet again. “Yes.”

“Did Rachie sound jealous of Luisa Shaw in her talk with Ichiro that day?”

“No. She sounded as if she were getting a kick out of talking about herself and Luisa to the man who knew them both.”

“She might have developed a jealousy,” I said. “She might have been hiding it that day.”

“I don’t know.”

“She might have gone out to the Yamashita house when Luisa and Ichiro were there,” I said. “She might have flown into an insane rage.”

“And — killed them?”

“Ichiro, then the parents when they arrived before she could get away.”

Short, crazy dribbles of laughter, increasing in tempo, came from Cameron’s lips. “Rachie do that?”

“Rachie do that,” I echoed.

The laughter went out of him. He wiped his hand across his lips. He glanced toward the table. He was already saturated with whisky, but he got up and gulped another drink.

“You just don’t know her, Rivers,” he said, pouring another slug. “Rachie might even find an insane pleasure in the glimpse of blood, but she’d never risk her own skin. That’s one thing about these people called beat. Their own dainty hides and unweaned egos have become so precious they cannot be exposed to the slightest of the world’s thorns. Nothing must mar the preciousness. Nothing else matters except the preciousness, even if it must hide in fantasy or oblivion.”

He threw the fresh drink down his throat. “Rivers,” he snarled suddenly, “I’m beginning to get drunk, good and stinking drunk. Why the hell don’t you leave me alone? You and your damned knife. So I didn’t like it. I’ve never liked it. I never will like the thought of a knife. You’ve made me spit her out before you. My daughter. Now why don’t you get out of here? Haven’t I had plenty on my back?”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess you have.”

“Damn right I have. My friends killed. All the details of the aftermath falling on me. Not just a funeral. Oh, no. I got to make all the arrangements for three of them. All at once. You ever do a grim job like that, Rivers?”

“I’ve been spared that kind of ordeal,” I said.

He picked up decanter and glass and poured another three ounces of whisky into his suffering blood stream.

He gagged a little on it this time. For a second his eyes crossed.

He fumbled for the table top to hold himself. “But I’ll bet you could do it, Rivers. Bury three people — never turn a hair — you damned savage...”

I’d figured to lock him in a closet when I left to keep him from phoning the police too quickly about my visit. I was spared the trouble.

His elbow collapsed. The hand on the table top, supporting him, slipped. He staggered against the table. It turned over. The expensive whisky ran out on the carpet.

I caught Cameron to keep him from falling. I helped him toward a candy-striped divan and laid him down. He made a soft, meaningless mumble in his throat. His eyes were closed. The mumble stopped.

He passed out. His shallow, rapid breathing made small spit bubbles at the corner of his loose mouth.