The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 18

You’re in your living room one evening and you hear a distant, sharp sound in the night. You glance at your wife or husband. Maybe you even get up and turn down the TV.

“Sounded like a shot,” you say. Could have been a car backfire. You listen a moment and if you hear nothing else you end up feeding the volume again on the television set.

So it was the night of Tillie’s death. If anyone heard the shot, it was not with sufficient alarm to cause a call to the police.

We were left alone, me and the man outside. I got out of the house by the simple process of crawling through the dark hallway to the glass-enclosed Florida room, across the play area to the open patio.

Nervous tremors ran through my knees and quickened my hands. I had the .38 ready as I reached the corner of the house.

I saw no sign of him, only the shadows of trimmed shrubs. Keeping low and close to the house, I moved forward. Nothing else stirred in the dead, hot darkness. If he was laying for me, it was with a care and coolness that made me hate to think of the outcome.

I inched from shrub to shrub. I crossed the spot where he must have worked his way to get a clear shot through the window.

Then, from down the street, I heard a car start quietly and move away.

Tillie Rollo was dying. No one could live long with a hole like that in the neck. So I gambled that the man in the car was the right man, and I finished a circuit of the house more boldly.

The sigh-sob bubbling of Tillie’s breath was still audible when I returned to her bedroom.

The lamp was broken from its fall to the floor. I pulled the pencil flashlight from my pocket and put the small beam on her face.

Her skin was slick with sweat. Her teeth gleamed behind her parted lips. Her eyes were fever hot.

“Tillie, can you hear me?”

She lay looking at faraway sights only she could see, smiling her ghastly smile.

“Tillie, if you can still speak—”

“How are you?” she said, in a gurgling whisper. “Tillie—”

“It was nice of you to come. It’s only a little party, really, but I thought I’d better engage the country club. You know everyone, I’m sure. Do have a drink.”

She couldn’t move a muscle, and yet she glided about an imaginary country club in an imaginary little town.

“Oh, hello there. How was Bermuda? We’re planning a short jaunt this winter. It’s wonderful having you back...”

She cautioned the caterer and gave instructions to the orchestra.

The imaginary music started.

She was laughter. She was graciousness and beauty as she danced. She mingled and added that special spark that made the affair an event, not just a party. The society section of tomorrow morning’s newspaper would be topped by a glowing description of the scintillating gathering.

The dream was real for Tillie at last. She had just enough time for the last guest to depart, leaving the queen of society tired but satisfied. Enough time for the rich, indulgent husband to put his arm around her waist and tell her that she was wonderful, darling.

Then Tillie died.

With the pencil flashlight, I looked for the slug that had killed her. I found it at the base of the hardwood-paneled wall. Wrapping it in my handkerchief, I dropped it in my pocket.

I chose the back way out of the house. I’d already made plenty of footprints in the soft greenery of the yard. A few more wouldn’t matter.

I returned to the borrowed heap and drove toward downtown Tampa, where the lights made a diffused pink halo in the night sky.

I kept myself from thinking that another link to Luisa Shaw had been cut. I wouldn’t dwell on the fact that the other man, by sheer ruthlessness and lack of mercy, had stayed one jump ahead of me all the way.

I crossed the river, turned off the boulevard, and drove down the wide, palm-lined street. I didn’t stop for a considerable distance. Then I turned the car around in an intersection, drove back the way I’d come. I parked the car in some heavy shadows, its grillwork pointed toward the city.

Getting out of the car, I crossed the street. At the mouth of the Cameron driveway, I stepped onto the grass. I took up a spot where shrubbery concealed me. I could watch the house and driveway. I could still get across the street, back to the car, quickly.

I began waiting.

The hardest part of it was to keep my mind from bounding around, overactive to make up for the inactivity of my body.

No one came out of the lighted house.

I felt the stirring of a night breeze off the bay. Through a hole in the shrubs, the lights on the mainland boulevard were visible. I watched the cars zipping along over there, little twinkling diamonds in the night.

The diamond chain began to stretch.

Finally it was a chain no longer, but individual winking lights that passed at varying intervals. The intervals got longer as night deepened.

The air had cooled a few degrees. Sweat, dried, gave my skin a stiff feeling.

I had been wrong.

It wouldn’t happen tonight. Maybe tomorrow night or the next.

Or never. The whole guess might have been wrong from the beginning. In the light of everything that I’d dug out, the guess was right. But it was still nothing more than a reasonable assumption, and in Ivey’s mind the assumption was reasonable that Nick Martin had killed the Yamashitas.

Suddenly my muscles went tight as a flare of light came from the house — light from the front door as it was opened.

I glimpsed Victor Cameron briefly as he came out of the house. He closed the door, and I turned and padded silently to the sidewalk.

I crossed the street and got in the borrowed buggy. I sat without turning on the motor or the lights.

The waiting this time was brief.

He was driving a Caddy, a cream-colored one with tail fins as big as a Buck Rogers rocket. I silently thanked him for owning a car like that, a standout that would be easy to follow.

The big car turned out of the driveway and nosed toward the city. It had taillights sufficient for a company of fire trucks.

I remained still until the taillights reached the distant intersection. They winked out, going to the left. Toward the mainland.

I let Cameron have a lead. He’d have to stop when he crossed the bridge, before he pulled onto the boulevard. There was only one direction for him to take, unless he turned around and stayed on the island a little longer. I was certain he wouldn’t do that.

Mentally, I clocked the Caddy’s progress. Then I started the borrowed car and went after him.

The twin banks of taillights made a right turn on the mainland boulevard as I crossed the short bridge.

Keeping Cameron in sight was no difficult trick. I knew the synchronization of the traffic lights. I shortened the gap when necessary to keep from catching a red light while he moved through green a block or two ahead.

I dropped farther back when he was out of the main business district. I drove past shanties, junk yards, welding shops.

He entered a narrow street where those inclined to escape the heat of rooms massed with sleeping bodies slept on rusty, iron-filigree balconies.

His destination was a gloomy apartment building on a dusty, brick-paved street on the edge of Ybor City.

The hulking building was four stories tall. The bottom level was occupied by a blaring juke joint, a pawn shop, and a palmist’s establishment garish with signs proclaiming the wondrous powers of Madame Zecora, Gypsy Fortuneteller.

A wide doorway between the juke joint and pawn shop provided entrance to the apartment building.

Cameron stood for a short while when he got out of the Caddy. Then he crossed the street quickly and ducked inside the building.

I sat in the borrowed car and timed him. He was gone about five minutes. He went through a second hesitation as he came out of the building. There were few people outside. The only sign of life the block showed was the crowded gin mill.

His rapid steps returned Cameron to the Caddy. He sat there another ten minutes. Then, as if the strain were telling, he started the car and drove off with a roar of sudden power.

I got out of the car, knowing he hadn’t found what he had come here to find. But he’d known where it was, and this was the place.

A fifteen-watt night light burned in the foyer of the building. A wide stairway, its treads scooped out by millions of shuffling footsteps, led upward. Beside the stairs, a narrow hall ran to the rear of the building. The building had the faint smell of sweat and of chitterlings cooked long ago.

At its birth, half a century or so ago, the building had possessed a certain elegance. There was a balustrade of heavy hardwood, scratched and scarred. The wainscoting was of marble. Stained and cracked, it had pieces missing, revealing the crumbling mortar cement underneath.

At the left was a row of mailboxes. Twelve apartments in the building, if the boxes were to be believed, four to each of the three upper floors.

One of the boxes was particularly dusty. She never got mail here, but the janitor, owner, or whoever looked after the building had dutifully scrawled her name on a slip of paper and stuck it to the box to match all the other boxes.

One greasy little slip of paper in all Tampa that stated simply: L. Shaw, 212.