The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 16

Rachie Cameron had entered the house the same way I had. Silently.

As I turned from Cameron, I stopped moving. Rachie was framed in the living-room archway. She was cool and lovely in white linen. Her short black hair was mussed as if she’d been riding in an open car.

“Greetings, ugly man.”

“Where’s the boy friend?”

“I haven’t had one handy,” she said, answering the question in my mind as to whether or not she was alone. “Except you.”

She took a few careless steps toward me. She was carrying a small handbag. She tossed it on a chair, raised her arms, stretched. “I’m not mad at you any longer, ugly man.”

“That’s good,” I said. “But since my age and constitution were questionable the last time we met, I could remind you that I’m a little older.”

“Not much.” She looked at her father, wrinkled her nose. “He smells. Let’s go back to the playroom and have a drink.”

“Sorry,” I said.

She tilted her head. “Why are you so hard to get acquainted?”

“I’m not,” I said. “Just working.”

“And look what all that work has got you. Swarms of policemen on the lookout for you.”

“Then you can see how limited my time is,” I said.

She stood quite close to me. Her lazy eyes searched the crevices and lumps of my face. “Will you kill if they corner you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“They don’t have to corner you at all,” she said. “You could go away.”

“I forgot to buy a plane ticket.”

“Why bother with noisy airports. I’ve got a perfectly lovely car.”

Her arms slipped about my neck. I reached up and gripped her wrists.

“Honey,” I said, “I think I’d be safer taking my chances with all those armed cops.”

“Now you’re being mean to me again!” Her voice was petulant. She couldn’t stand being denied anything. I expected her to stamp her foot in undisciplined, unbridled rage.

“Too bad some of the young swains of this town haven’t learned the combination long ago,” I said.

“What combination?”

“Skip it,” I said.

She stood on tiptoe. “Afraid to kiss me?”

“I’m afraid of everything about you.”

I jerked her arms loose.

“Oh, you damned beast!” she seethed, rubbing her wrists. Without warning, she turned suddenly and ran. I lunged after her.

She darted into the hallway, down it to a door. The slammed door almost broke my nose. She was as quick as agitated mercury, throwing the bolt inside.

I put my shoulder against the door. It held. She was very quiet in the room. Then, my ear against the door, I heard a clicking. The clicking of a telephone dial. Her muffled voice: “Operator, this is an emergency. Get me the police.”

For a second, the way I felt toward Rachie Cameron made me as cold as a dead man.

Like any islands, Davis Islands are surrounded by water. A simple matter to seal it off. Steve Ivey himself couldn’t have arranged a better setup for trapping me.

I took a step back from the door and made a pile driver of my leg. My heel struck the door at the lock. Wood splintered and metal twanged. The door was a flashing movement on its hinges. It crashed against the wall.

Rachie jerked around. “Davis Islands, operator,” she yelped. “Cameron residence—”

She tried to duck past me. I grabbed a handful of the linen dress. With the other hand I caught the phone cord and tore it out by the roots.

She fought like a savage little animal that should be caged in a pigsty, clawing, kicking, spewing shocking words from her sweet-looking face.

I heard the shoulder of the linen dress rip. I didn’t have time to be courteous. I picked her up bodily and threw her into the closet, turned the latch.

Filled with the dead heat as it was, the night air outside felt good on my face. Behind me, the house appeared serene. A rubber-necking tourist passing the estate might have envied the occupants.

As I neared the short bridge to the mainland, a police car, red light blinking, swung off the mainland boulevard. It came across the bridge fast, and like any good motorist, I pulled over and stopped until the police car was past.

I slipped back into Ybor City, parked the car in an alley, and used the rear door to the small office of the beer tavern. The round-faced, ever-cheerful owner was at his cluttered desk-table working laboriously on some bills.

“ ’Ay-lo, Ed. The car vamoose okay?”

“Fine,” I said. I dropped the keys on the desk.

“Keep,” he said, “I use car ver’ leetle. ’Ave next set.”

He took a spare set of keys out of the table drawer to show me his “next” set.

“You’ll be paid for use of the car,” I said.

“Okay. I know. You wailcome to car, but dinero nice to get. I know you pay. You know, hombre in Ybor City looking for you.”

“Who?”

“Beeg beembo. How you say — Keeng?” He made violent motions with his hands, got a headlock on an imaginary foe, and threw him.

“Prince?” I suggested. “Prince Kuriacha?”

“You so right,” he said, a pleased smile wreathing his face.

“Where is he now?”

A shrug of the round, plump shoulders.

“Do you know what he wanted?”

“No. Ees serious?”

“Could be.”

“Nobody tell. Nobody see you.”

“Thanks.”

“He ver’ famous man. No come in my place bayfore. I see him in reeng two, thray time. Mucho time ago. He say he send beeg fotografía weeth his name sign. I hang eet over bar. Haylp bees-ness.”

“You’ll have to order beer by the tanker load.”

He grinned warmly, shyly. “My leg, eet’s being pulled.”

The sudden move on Kuriacha’s part made me want to see him as badly as he seemed to want to see me. I went out looking for him. If he was still in Ybor City that night, we kept missing each other, like people trying to catch up with each other in a revolving door.

Nobody could tell me very much about him that I didn’t already know. Kuriacha was not his real name, though he had used it so many years it had become real enough by adoption. He’d mentioned to me once that California was his background. He’d started wrestling out there and moved into the big time before he ever came East. The cross-breeding that has taken place in certain areas of the West Coast was what gave the Prince his decidedly Oriental appearance.

It was very late when I tried phoning Kuriacha’s hotel. His room did not answer.

I took my tired feet up the steps of a cheap hotel and got a room. While I could trust the desk clerk, it was not as safe as the home that had sheltered me for the weekend.

I locked the door and put the .38 handy on the rickety bedside table. While I was undressing, I sipped away at a pint can of cold beer I’d brought in with me.

Later, lying on the lumpy bed that creaked a protest every time I flickered a muscle, I watched the winking glow of a neon sign across the street. On and off. Off and on. Senseless, mindless. Like the slaughter of three people on Caloosa Point.

I was plenty long in thought right then. The dirty little room seemed to have a loneliness all its own.

I thought of Nick and Helen, of the poor devil on Davis Islands and his daughter, of what Sime Younkers might have told me if I’d reached him sooner.

I wondered what the home office was thinking about me and when they would send a man down.

I realized I was on the point of feeling sorry for myself, and I forced a little laugh at Ed Rivers. Pretty grim, but still a laugh.

I knew a lot more now than when I’d started. I’d recognized the how in the case when I’d eliminated the elder Yamashitas from the motive. I still lacked that stuff Steve Ivey called concrete evidence, but I was more certain than ever that Ichiro’s death had been the primary aim, everything else a murderously logical aftermath.

So much for the how and wherefore.

Off and on went the neon light, a silent measure of time as my thoughts clicked away. I balanced every word, action, fact.

And suddenly a prickling sensation flew all over me.

I could almost glimpse the who. I suspected, but I couldn’t be sure.

I wouldn’t be sure until I had found Luisa Shaw.