The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Chapter 2

I went down to the office on Cass Street in downtown Tampa to check the mail and the telephone-answering service. There is an outer office with a cracked leather couch and a couple of matching chairs, a magazine rack, and some dusty magazines. The inner office is larger, holding my desk, filing cabinet, beat-up Underwood.

I got some routine stuff out of the way — reports on burglar-alarm systems which we install and service, a contract from a new jewelry store. From now on, the store, like thousands of others across the country, would bear a small brass plaque on the doorjamb reading PROTECTED BY NATIONWIDE DETECTIVE AGENCY.

My mind wasn’t on the stuff for the mail pouch. I kept thinking of Nick. Always before, there had been a little hope dangled before him.

I sealed the printed manila envelope, stamped it, carried it into the gloomy, hot corridor, and dropped it in the mail chute.

Back in the office, I covered the Underwood, stood and wiped sweat from under my chin.

The phone rang.

I picked it up. “Nationwide. Ed Rivers speaking.”

“Ed—” The voice was little more than a whisper. “Ed, this is Helen.”

I eased down on the edge of the desk chair. “Where are you?”

“At a motel out Grand Central. Nick wants to see you.”

“Give me the address. I’ll be right out. Are you all right?”

“As all right as possible.”

“And Nick?”

“The same way.”

I almost moaned with relief. In the back of my mind had been a fear that I hadn’t admitted. The fear that Nick might have taken the one wrong step, the one big mistake that can never be rectified.

“Ed,” Helen said in that soft, strained voice. “Nick wants to give himself up. He didn’t do it, Ed, but nobody in the world will believe it, except you.”

“Just sit tight,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

She gave me the address and hung up. I hit the street, got a cab, and told the driver to hurry.

Traffic was heavy, snarled on Franklin Street. And of course the drawbridge across the Hillsborough River, which slices Tampa in half, was open for a pleasure boat. The baby yacht had a small cocktail party on the aft deck, the men natty in slacks and knitted shirts, the women cool and lithe-looking in shorts. The boat purred on and the bridge closed.

The cabbie fought the traffic out the artery of Grand Central. I saw the sign and jumped from the cab almost before it had stopped rolling.

I paid the driver and hurried down the walkway that led to the cottages. The motel was an old one, built before the city had swallowed this area so thoroughly. The cottages, made of wood framing and badly needing paint, were clustered about a dusty courtyard.

I reached number seven and knocked. The door opened cautiously. Then it swung wider and I slipped inside.

The two-room cottage was close and hot, with the ancient roller blinds drawn. A single lamp with a crumpled spot in the dime-store shade was burning on a table at the end of the studio couch.

For a few seconds nobody said anything. There was Helen, closing the door and leaning against it, a kind of dumb hope in her eyes and the sooty shadows of strain on her face.

She was a good-looking woman, a rather big woman, the breed with long legs, wide shoulders. The features of her face were prominent and strong, normally vigorous. Her glossy auburn hair was touched with a silver strand here and there. She was wholesomely, healthily female, rather than merely feminine.

Nick was sitting on the couch trying to grin at me. He was a tall, rangy man, big-boned, but the sort who would never go to flesh. He had big, square hands, shoulders, face. It was a gaunt face, with lines of suffering at the base of the nostrils and about the strong, full-lipped mouth. The skin was very fair and pale, drawn on its foundation of bone. Yet the face, topped with short-cut blond hair, still held the ghost of a boyishness, like the faint memory of a boy wide-eyed with the joyous wonder of living. What the boy would have done with his life under different circumstances was a question that would never be answered.

“You made good time, Ed,” Nick said. “Thanks for coming.”

“It won’t get you into any trouble with the police, will it, Ed?” Helen asked.

“No,” I said, taking the chair she offered. “It won’t get me into any trouble.”

Helen went over and sat down beside Nick, her hands folded tightly in her lap. If she noticed the heat in the cottage, she didn’t show it. A faint shiver crossed her shoulders.

“Have the police been to see you about me?” Nick asked.

“Yes. A Lieutenant Steve Ivey.”

“What kind of man is he, Ed?”

“Good man. Efficient man. No razzle-dazzle. Just a good man.”

“Is he looking for anybody else? Besides me?”

“No,” I said.

He studied his hands for a moment. “Once I’m in custody, then, he’ll close the case?”

“I guess he’ll have to.”

The heat was like a silent singing in the closed cottage.

“I see,” Nick said.

“There is nobody else to look for,” I said. “No motive. No slightest shadow of suspicion on anybody else.” After a moment, I added, “I wish there were something else I could say.”

“I know.” He pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Ed,” he said dully, “I’m tired. I know this is no good, this hiding. They’ll find us eventually. I can’t undergo great activity for long periods of time. I can’t run very far, Ed.”

“Nick,” Helen said, and laid her hand on his.

Nick looked at me. “I can’t ask Helen to do any more.”

Helen looked away from his face. They’d been married a long time. But they’d had so little of marriage. They’d got married about three months before Nick had gone overseas.

“But there is something else I can’t do,” Nick said, a faint tremor trying to needle into the huskiness of his voice. “I just can’t walk into a cell and have the door shut behind me without the faintest hope that it will ever open again.”

“What do you want me to do, Nick?”

“I want you to help me.”

“You know I will.”

“Yes. But right now you’re wondering how, if there is any way to help. You think I did it.”

“I don’t think you meant to do it, Nick.”

“You’re wrong, Ed! I didn’t do it. I liked the Yamashitas, from what little I knew about them. I’m sure they felt the same way about me — us. I used to see them around their summer place there on the Point. The little old man — so quiet and kindly. He always wore a collar and tie, even in hottest weather. The tiny lady was like something off a silk-screen painting, Ed. She was devoted to her husband and home. Sort of old-fashioned. Wouldn’t wear make-up, none at all. Did all her own cooking. We used to pass the time of day, Ed. They were real folks, good folks.”

“And Ichiro?”

“The son,” Nick said, making a complete statement of the two words. “Instinctively, I disliked him. Legally, I guess he was clean. No arrests for reckless driving or public drunkenness, but it didn’t mean he didn’t do those things. Lucky, I guess. Just never got picked up. In my book he was a lecherous whoremonger. A sliminess was inside of him. But that was his business, not a motive for me to kill him.”

The motive was in a bottle of whisky and a deep, deep writhing thing in the darkest recesses of the subconscious. But I didn’t say it.

Nick wiped his palms across his forehead. “I believed like the rest of you, at first, Ed. I thought I’d done it. Drunk. Not knowing what I was doing. Ed — I hope to heaven no other mortal ever has to feel what I was feeling as Helen and I ran away from the Point...

“There they were, the little old man, and Ichiro, and the old-fashioned silk-screen lady. Ichiro was in one of the bedrooms, the old man in the living room, the lady draped across the railing of the front porch. All with their heads knocked in, their bodies hacked. The little lady’s hands were hanging toward the ground and the fingers were solid red — as if in death her fingernails had been made up in a grotesque, insane way. The blood had come running down her arms and dried like that.

“She was the one Helen saw. Helen had been shopping in Tampa. She came running to the house. I was asleep on the couch in the living room. I’d — knocked myself out with alcohol. It took Helen a while to get me to understand. Had I been out of the house? Had I seen anything? You see, Helen had noticed that the samurai sword was missing. She couldn’t help noticing. The sword had been taken from its wall bracket and the empty sheath lay on the floor near me.

“I guess we went a little crazy, Ed. There was no sign of anyone having been out there on that small beach that day. We knew how everything would add up to look. We panicked. Ran. Came here.”

Nick stopped talking. Helen sat squeezing herself very tight inside.

“Like rats in a dead-end hole,” Nick said at last. “We couldn’t plan. We couldn’t think. We grabbed some clothes from the cottage and enough money to keep us going for a few days.

“Helen could slip out after dark to buy us food, but I knew I was licked, even if I wouldn’t admit it to myself right away. I started working up the courage to turn myself in. Then, today, I knew there was one hope, Ed. You.”

I sat and waited, while the heavy sweat ran down the sides of my face.

“You don’t have many friends, Ed,” Nick said.

“I guess I don’t.”

“Because the word means something to you. You give a part of a kind of holy thing inside of you when you call somebody a friend. There aren’t many who know it, who would suspect, looking at you. But I know it, Ed, and for the first time in my life I’m going to trade on friendship.” He looked at me levelly, and said quietly, “Ed, I want you to get me out of this.”

“How?”

“That’s your job.”

“You give me anything in the way of evidence,” I said, “you give me one single grain of salt in your favor and I’ll give you everything I’ve got.”

“Maybe a grain of sand will do just as well,” Nick said. He looked at Helen and nodded. She got up, crossed the room, opened the small closet. She came back to us carrying a pair of house slippers that wore a look of newness. She handed the slippers to Nick.

“This wouldn’t stand for a minute in court,” Nick said. “It wouldn’t reopen a case when the only possible suspect is in custody. There is only my word on one point, Ed. It wouldn’t mean much, under the circumstances, to a single person on this earth, except you.”

He turned the slippers in his hand. “I’ve been nagged by the feeling that there was a way of knowing for sure whether or not I went to the Yamashita cottage and killed them. Can a man do such a thing and not remember? There was something I was overlooking, something that would tell me. I couldn’t pin it down. Until today, when I was putting these slippers on.

“They’re a present from Helen, Ed. She gave them to me just last week. I was wearing them the afternoon the Yamashitas were killed, wearing them for the first time.

“I accepted delivery of the whisky wearing them. I went to sleep and woke up wearing them. Helen took them off me when she came home and helped me under a cold shower. In short, I was wearing these slippers during the whole time of the massacre, Ed. Here. Take them. Turn them over. Look at the soles.”

I did as he asked. The soles were of soft, pliant leather, like suède.

I felt a cold, brittle thing form inside of me. A taste came to my mouth as if my teeth had a metallic edge.

I looked into Nick Martin’s eyes and I would have bet my blood to the final drop that he was telling the truth about the slippers.

Then I looked again at the soles of the slippers. If he had walked the distance from his cottage to the Yamashita summerhouse and back again, the soft leather would have been full of ground-in sand.

The soles of the slippers were as clean as Nick Martin’s courage.