The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

1. Out of the Jug

Morning was slow in coming. I’d waited for it a long time. Three years the man said. And three years I had done without any nonsense about parole or executive clemency.

I was washed and dressed and waiting when the rising siren blew. As McKenny, the screw on our tier, clomped down the steel catwalk to pull the master switch, he paused in front of my cell and grinned:

“This is the day, eh, Charlie?”

The lump in my throat was so big all I could do was nod.

Breakfast wasn’t much better. The pock marks in the plaster of the mess hall bothered me. I knew them for what they were. If it hadn’t been for Swede, I could be dead instead of going out this morning. I could be with Mickey and Saltz. I could be down in solitary with the other ringleaders of the riot. I could even be with Swede.

The thought cost me my appetite. When we finally filed out of the mess hall a front-of-the-prison guard asked if my name was Charlie White. When I said it was, he led the way to a small room in the administration building. The clothes I’d signed for the day before were hanging on a wire hanger.

“When you’re dressed,” he said, “turn the things you’re wearing now over to the supply clerk. Then go straight down the hall to the warden’s office.” He laughed. “That is, unless you want to keep your denim as a souvenir.”

I said, “No, thank you. I don’t want any souvenirs. All I want of this is a faint recollection.”

“Then stay out of trouble,” he told me.

The warden had my dossier on his desk. He looked from it to me and said, “I’d planned to talk to you, White. You’re several cuts above the average man we get here and I don’t want to see you back. But right now you’re so filled with self-pity and feeling, so pushed around that nothing I could say would do a bit of good.”

He laid a typed receipt, a sealed envelope, a small sheaf of bills, and some silver on the corner of his desk. “So if you’ll sign a receipt for the one hundred and twenty-six dollars and fifty cents that is credited to your account, I’ll keep my mouth shut and let someone else do the talking.”

That would probably be Father Reilly. The priest had given me the only news I’d had of Beth. I knew she was clerking in a store in Palmetto City. I knew she knew about Zo. But if Beth had filed suit for divorce, I hadn’t been served with the papers.

“Goodbye and good luck, White,” the warden concluded the interview.

I started to crack, “Thanks for nothing,” but something stopped me. Perhaps it was the fact I had plenty for which to thank him. The warden had leaned over backwards to see that the attempted break hadn’t earned me any bad time.

The same guard took me in tow again. But we weren’t headed for the chaplain’s office. It was the first time I had been in a death house. I didn’t like it.

Swede was sitting on the edge of a desk in a small windowless conference room. He looked much the same as he always had except his tan was gone, the lines in his face were deeper, and his eyes seemed even bluer.

The guard said I had ten minutes, and closed and locked the door. The lump in my throat grew still larger. Ten minutes wasn’t long enough to even start thanking the old man for what he’d done for me. I’d have been in the attempted break up to my eyes if Swede hadn’t landed a hard right on my jaw that had belted me back on my cot unconscious.

When I’d come to again, Mickey and Saltz were dead, and Swede had picked up the big tab for caving in a guard’s head.

“Stay out of this, kid,” he’d warned me, “You only got six months to go. I got life and ninety-nine years.”

Swede sucked hard at his cigarette as if with time running out on him he wanted to enjoy every puff to the maximum. “Ten minutes,” he said, “isn’t long. So let me do the talking, kid. Would you say I was a Holy Joe?”

The lump in my throat let go and I laughed nervously.

“Then keep that in mind,” Swede said. “You and me are a lot alike, Charlie. We both like the water. We’ve both made a good living on and out of it. But were we content with that? No.” He gestured with his cigarette.

“That’s why I asked the warden if I could talk to you. A man does a lot of thinking when he gets in one of these quick-fry joints. And it all boils down to this: A man hauls in the fish he baits for and at the depth at which he fishes.”

He lighted a cigarette from the butt of the one he was smoking. “In the old days it was different. A man had to depend on himself and there was a lot of wide open space for him to do it in. But times have changed. After years of sailing by guess, society has set out certain buoys and markers.” He asked if I had a silver dollar. There was one in the silver the warden had given me. Swede traced the lettering on the head side with a finger. “E Pluribus Unum. Know what that means, Charlie?”

I said, “Something about one for all or all for one.”

Swede shook his head. “No. It means one out of many. And that’s you and me, Charlie. And the screw who brought you here. And the warden. And the guy who’s going to fry me tonight. We’re all just one out of many. And you’ve got to swim with the school and keep its rules or – Well, look what’s happened to me. Look what happened to you when you tried to sail on your own.

“As rackets go, you had a good one. But let’s add up the score. On the debit side it cost you your wife, your boat, and got you three years in the can. On the profit side you had a dozen roaring good drunks in Habana, a fancy dame, and the false knowledge that you were smarter than your fellow fishing-boat captains. There were no lulls in your business. You brought in a good load every time. Okay. How much dough have you got?”

I told him. “One hundred and twenty-six dollars and fifty cents.”

Swede hooted. “For three years of your time. There are guys netting mullet out of Naples, and Palmetto City for that matter, who are making that much in one night. But netting mullet is hard work. So is fishing the grouper banks. And you and me had to be wise guys. You hear from your wife yet?”

I said I had not.

“Well,” Swede admitted. “I don’t know why you should. A man can starve a dame. He can cuss her. He can beat her every night and twice on Sunday and she’ll still think he’s her personal Marshall plan in a silver champagne bucket. But only if she knows she’s the only woman in his life.”

He went on before I could speak.

“But are you willing to admit you made a mistake and cut bait or fish? No. You’re so rotten filled with self-pity and hate, it’s a shame.” He snuffed out his cigarette. “I know how you feel, Charlie. I’ve got a temper, too. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.” He read my mind. “But don’t do it. Killing your former partner because he ran out on you when the law stepped in, will only bring you back here. And I mean here.”

Swede lighted a third cigarette. “Look. When you came back from that mess over there in ’45 or ’46 you’d been living in a bloody tide for four years. Life meant nothing. A thousand lives meant nothing. We had a similar red tide in the Gulf while you were gone. Fish died by the tens of millions. The shores and tide flats were heaped so high with dead fish they stunk. Everyone swore things would never be the same again.

“But they are. The water gradually cleared and the fish began to spawn again. Nature is building back. And that’s what you’ve got to do, Charlie. Forget this. You’re in clean water again. If you’re smart, you’ll stay there. Get a job fishing on shares. Swab out a charter boat if you have to. Then when you get something to offer her, find your wife. Get down on your knees if you have to and beg her to forgive you and come home.”

I said that sounded like good advice.

Swede looked at me a long minute, then snuffed out his cigarette. “But you aren’t going to take a damn word of it. Okay, kid. It’s your funeral.”

The guard opened the door. “That’s it.”

“I’ve been wasting my time,” Swede told him. He walked out of the room without offering to shake hands. “I won’t bother to say goodbye. It’s just auf Wiedersehen, Charlie. I’ll try to save a quart and a blonde for you down there.”

I walked back through the yard with the guard and out the front door of the prison. It was the same sun on the outside of the wall but it was brighter somehow. It almost blinded me. I stood on the steps for a moment looking at the cars in the parking lot and flipping a mental coin.

If Beth was waiting for me, I’d follow Swede’s advice. If she wasn’t, I was off to the races. I’d identify, locate, and kill Señor Peso if I had to call for the quart and the blonde that Swede had promised to save.

Señor Peso was obviously a nom de plume and a cover. It sounded like a gag. The prosecutor had made much of that fact at my trial. But it was the only name I had.

Swede lost. Beth wasn’t waiting – but Zo was. I walked over to the yellow jeepster she was driving and her voice reached out and caressed me.

“Hello, honey. Am I glad to see you.” Zo lifted her lips to be kissed. “I’ve been waiting out here since daybreak.”

Her lips were clinging. Her fingers dug into my back. After three years in a cell, it was like kissing a jet plane. I said:

“You shouldn’t kiss strange men like that. You won’t go to heaven.”

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Who wants to go to heaven? And since when are you a stranger?” She slid over on the seat. “Get in, honey. You drive.”

I said, “What? Without a driver’s license? You want me to break the law?”

She thought that was very funny. “Okay. I’ll drive.” When I still didn’t get into the jeepster, she fished in her purse for the Havana bank pass book that had been in her possession when the law had swooped down on me. “And don’t jump to false conclusions. No one let you down. The big shot couldn’t show up at your trial. It would have jeopardized the whole setup.” She handed me the pass book.

I had lied to Swede. I wasn’t broke. I was filthy. And I was still important to the gang. Every month I had spent in a cell, someone, Señor Peso presumably, had deposited one thousand dollars to my account. The last figure showed $36,124.00.

Zo asked, “Feel better?”

The Devil came up behind me and pushed. To hell with Beth. To hell with everything, I thought. To hell with trying to kill Señor Peso. In his way the guy had played square with me. Why should I try to goose into his grave an egg who laid so many golden pesos?

I got into the jeepster and Zo pulled out of the parking lot and headed south on Florida 16 into Starke. I asked her where we were headed. She said:

“Over to the West Coast. I’ve engaged a double cabin on a little cove just above Dead Man’s Bay. But we won’t be there long. One of the boys will put in with a converted Tarpon Springs sponge boat in the next few days and take us on to Havana and Shrimp Cay. That all right with you?”

Her head was bare. She was wearing a strapless sun dress that made her shoulders look like they were made of rich cream. Heat and palm trees, the slap of blue waves, and Zo. It sounded good to me.

“Yeah. Sure. That’s fine,” I told her.

She pulled to the side of the road and handed me an opened bottle of rum. Then, the same devil who was pushing me lighting twin candles in her eyes, she kissed me, hard. “Okay. Until then. You drink and dream, I’ll drive . . .”

It was afternoon when we reached the cabin. We’d stopped twice to eat. Once in Gainesville and once in Cross City. I’d also picked up another bottle of rum. After being away from it so long, it hit me almost as hard as Zo’s kisses.

The cabin, when we reached it, was a pleasant blur in a stand of slash pine on an isolated section of the shore. A rutted sand road led back to it. As nearly as I could tell, the nearest house was a mile away. The gulf looked the same as it always had, blue and endless and inviting.

It gave me an idea. If I wanted to stay with the party, I had to get some coffee in and some water on me. I told Zo, “I’m going to dunk the body. Put some coffee on, will you, babe?”

She laughed. “You’re out of training, honey. But go ahead. You do just that. I figured you might want to swim and you’ll find some trunks in the bedroom closet.”

She got busy at the stove and I staggered on into the bedroom. Zo had told me we’d be alone, but as I closed the bedroom door I could have sworn I heard someone say:

“You got him, eh?”

I opened the door and asked her, “Who was that?”

At the time it didn’t seem important. I closed the door again and tried to hang up my coat but I was so high I hung it upside down and an envelope fell out and skittered across the floor. I recognized it as the envelope the warden had given me along with my discharge papers and what money I had coming. Sitting on the bed I tore it open, and two tens and a five dollar bill fell out. Forcing my eyes to focus, I read:

It was the type of letter Beth would write. Beth loved me and she was waiting. And here I was all mixed up with Zo again. I was still so long that Zo called:

“What’s the matter? You aren’t sick, are you, honey?”

I told her the truth. “Yeah. Plenty.” I got a grip on the rum and tried to do some straight thinking. With Beth out of my life forever, nothing would ever be right again. The money and excitement and Zo were poor substitutes for what I really wanted. Beth was my wife. She was my life. I loved her.

I fished my coat from the door and staggered back into the living room. “So I’m a heel,” I told Zo. “I’m sorry. But you and I are washed up as of now. I’m going back to Palmetto City and my wife.”

She wanted to know if I was kidding.

I said I was never more serious.

She wasn’t so pretty now. Her black eyes narrowing to slits, she spat, “You’re either drunk or crazy. How much can you make commercial fishing or running a charter boat?”

I said, “Even so. I’m going back to Palmetto City and Beth and get a job and open the old house and raise five or six redheaded kids and be disgustingly honest.”

Her eyes opening wide, she screamed, “No. Don’t!”

I thought she was screaming at me. She wasn’t. The blow came from one side and behind me. I turned in time to see a blur of white face through the fog of pain that was reaching up to engulf me. Then the leaded butt of a gaff hook used as a club landed a second time, and I floated out into space on a red tide.

Just as I passed the last buoy marking the channel of consciousness I thought I heard the flat slap of a pistol. Then a black roller swept me under.

2. Sprouting Wings

The tarpon was huge, two hundred pounds or more, the largest I’d ever hooked. He broke water a dozen times while I was playing him. I was bathed in sweat. My arms and shoulders felt like they had been pounded with a mallet by the time I got him within ten feet of the boat. Then he really went crazy.

With a series of high-powered jolts like the current they were going to shoot into Swede, he lashed into a flurry of frenzy that almost tore the rod out of my hands. I eased the star drag too late. He didn’t want any part of where he was and streaked off into the blue, snapping the wire leader as if it had been string.

I looked over the edge of the cruiser to see what had frightened him. A twenty-foot shark looked back. I was still trying to figure out who had tied the shark under my boat, when he tried to climb into the cockpit with me and I beat at him frantically with my fists.

It was the sharpness of the pain that knifed the fog away. With the first of returning consciousness I lay, gasping, looking up into the dark, thinking what a screwy dream it had been.

The tied shark was an old gag. All of the guides on the waterfront had used it at one time or another to give their charter passengers a thrill. A six-foot shark tied under a cruiser could make a two-pound trout fight like a fifty-pound blue marlin.

Then, one by one the shattered pieces of reality began to fall into place like the curlicues of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

I was lying on the floor of the cabin on the shore of Dead Man’s Bay. I’d just read the letter from Beth and told Zo I was going back to my wife when an unidentified party, presumably male, had popped out of nowhere and beaten me half to death with the loaded butt of a gaff hook.

It didn’t make sense to me. I had no illusions about Zo. She’d never sprout any wings. I hadn’t asked her how she’d lived during the three years I’d been in prison. It hadn’t mattered. A jealous boyfriend was the obvious answer. But why in the name of time should he pop up and try to beat in my brains when I’d just announced I was going back to my wife?

Then I thought of the voice I’d heard when I’d gone into the bedroom.

“You got him, eh?”

Zo had denied there was a voice. But there obviously had been. In the light of what had happened, it began to look like she had contracted to deliver me to the cabin on Dead Man’s Bay like so much beef.

On the other hand, she had screamed, “No. Don’t!” just prior to the first blow.

I gave up trying to think and got to my feet. The interior of the cabin was as black as a fish wholesaler’s heart. I tried to find the light switch and, failing, struck a match instead.

According to the alarm clock on the mantel I had been out for hours. It only lacked a few minutes of midnight. The rum bottle was standing on the table. I rinsed my mouth with a drink. Then, striking another match, I walked on into the bedroom – and wished I hadn’t.

Zo was lying on the bed, her eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. But they weren’t seeing anything. I struck another match and looked closer. She was cold. The flat slap of a pistol I had heard had been meant for her. She had been dead as long as I had been unconscious.

I lighted a third match and looked around the room. The sense of unreality persisted. A chair had been tipped just so. A shattered rum bottle lay by the side of the bed. Another had drained out its contents on the rug.

Catching sight of a dark object in her hand, I bent over the bed and looked at it. It was the leaded gaff hook with which I had been slugged.

I walked out into the other room and found my coat. The pistol with which she had been killed was in my right-hand coat pocket.

I could see the scene as described by the papers. A recently released con and his moll had rented the cabin to celebrate his release. A drunken brawl had ensued and during it I had killed her.

There was a metallic “pong” as the alarm clock on the mantel passed the hour. A hundred and some odd miles away, in Raiford, Swede was taking the big jump. He knew all the answers now.

“Here. And I mean right here,” he had told me.

Swede had been right about a lot of things. If only I’d listened to him. If only I’d opened the letter from Beth before I had met Zo.

The match burned down and burned my fingers. I didn’t feel it. This was murder and I was tagged. I walked out the door and stood on the screened-in porch. The night was black but filled with stars. The tide was out and the sweet-sour smell of the tide flats filled the air. I’d never wanted so much to live or felt I had so much to live for. I thought of what I’d told Zo.

“Even so. I’m going back to Palmetto City and Beth and get a job and open the old house and raise five or six red-headed kids and be disgustingly honest.”

That was a laugh. The only place I was going was back to Raiford. A half-dozen guards had seen me get into the jeepster. The waitresses at both Gainesville and Cross City would testify that they had seen us together and I had been drinking heavily.

The jeepster was still in front of the cabin. The smart thing for me to do would be to drive to the nearest phone and call the state patrol and get it over. No one would believe my story. I couldn’t describe the guy I’d seen. He was as vague as my testimony concerning Señor Peso.

The big veins in my temple began to pound. Señor Peso. The guy was beginning to haunt me. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d still be operating the Beth II out of Bill’s Boat Basin as a deep-sea charter cruiser. It had been his voice on the phone the time I’d been behind in my payments that had started off all of the fireworks.

“This is Señor Peso, Captain White. How would you like to make a quick five thousand dollars?”

How would I like to drop a mullet net around ten ton of pompano? All I had to do for the money was meet the Andros Ancropolis, a converted sponge boat, eighty miles out in the gulf and bring in a few small waterproof packages that fit easily in my bait well. I didn’t know what was in them. I was afraid to ask. I needed that five thousand bad.

That had been the beginning. A trip to Veracruz had followed. Then one to Pinar del Rio. Then one to Havana where I’d met Zo. After that I was in so deep it hadn’t mattered. I met who I was ordered to meet, took what I was ordered to get, and brought it back to various points ranging from drops in the Ten Thousand Islands as far north at Palmetto City with a few trips up the bay to Tampa.

I only made one restriction. I refused to run wetbacks. I hadn’t spent three years of my life in the navy fighting for the so-called American way of life only to turn around and smuggle in for pay the very guys who were trying to destroy it.

After the one proposition along that line, Señor Peso hadn’t mentioned the subject again. All of the Coast Guard boys knew me. The older officers had known my father. I never had any trouble getting clearance papers. No one ever stopped me. Until that last time.

Then only my good service record, a purple heart, all the cash I had in the bank, the confiscation of my new boat, and me pleading guilty to assault with a deadly weapon during the fracas that followed the boarding, had saved me from a long Federal rap. That trip, my bait well had been filthy with forty grand worth of Swiss watches and French perfumes on which no duty had been paid.

But I still hadn’t ever met Señor Peso. All my instructions had come by phone. My money came in the mail, in cash. And once the law had laid its arm on me, he had run out on me cold. When the prosecution had asked me for whom I was running the stuff, all I could offer was a mythical Señor Peso. It was a wonder I hadn’t gotten life.

Not that it mattered now. Zo was dead and I was tagged. And if he hadn’t come forward before, I couldn’t expect Señor Peso to come out in the open now. Staring up at the stars, I remembered the dead girl’s words at the prison.

“And don’t jump to false conclusions. No one let you down. The big shot couldn’t show up at your trial. It would have jeopardized the whole setup.”

It sounded logical. He’d made good to the tune of $36,000.00. Zo with her talk of Havana and a converted sponger putting in had obviously been under instructions that – if they had been carried out – would have proven profitable to me. No. I couldn’t blame Señor Peso for this. This was a personal affair between the dead girl and myself and the man who had killed her.

The night was cool. I put on my coat and lighted a cigarette just as a pair of headlights turned off the highway a quarter of a mile away and bounced down the rutted sand road toward the cabin. I kicked the screen door open and walked out and stood with my hand on the butt of the gun in my pocket, in the shadow of a big slash pine fifty feet from the wooden porch.

The car was blue and white, a state patrol car, with two uniformed troopers in it. They skirted the yellow jeepster and parked in front of the porch.

Getting out, one of them said, “It looks quiet enough to me. Probably a false alarm.”

“Probably,” his partner agreed. He flicked the car’s searchlight around among the trees, missing me by inches. Then he pointed it at the shoreline. “Lonely sort of place, though.” He was a bit impatient with his partner. “Well, go ahead. Bang on the door. Wake ’em up and ask ’em if anyone screamed.”

His partner banged the screen door. “State Police.”

When no one answered, he opened the screen and walked in, sweeping a path before him with his flashlight. A moment later I heard him whistle. Then the lights in the bedroom came on and he shouted to his partner:

“Hey. Come in here, Jim. That fisherman who called the barracks wasn’t whoofing. Some dame was screaming all right. But she isn’t screaming now. She’s dead.”

So much was clear. The man who had killed Zo had waited as long as he could, hoping her body would be discovered. When it wasn’t, he’d called the State Patrol. He really wanted to pin this thing on me and he didn’t want me to get too far away before the law stepped in.

I hoped the trooper would leave his keys in the car. He didn’t. Sliding out from behind the wheel, he clipped his keys on his belt before drawing his gun and striding into the cabin.

I inched over toward the jeepster. A few minutes before I’d been considering calling the State Patrol and turning myself in. Now I was damned if I would. I didn’t want to go back to Raiford. I didn’t want to die. At least not without seeing Beth and telling her I was sorry.

The ignition key was still in the jeep. Keeping it between me and the cabin, I walked the length of the patrol car, raised the hood as quietly as I could and yanked out a handful of wires. Then I walked back and climbed in the jeepster, crossed my fingers and kicked it over. Over the roar of the motor, I heard one of the troopers say:

“What the hell?”

Then I’d spun the jeepster in a sharp U-turn that threw up a screen of sand and was bouncing down the rutted road with both troopers shouting after me and spraying the back of the car and the windshield with lead.

I made the highway without being hit and into a little town on the north bank of a river. I had, at the most, a five- or ten-minute start. I’d put the patrol car temporarily out of action, but their two-way radio was still working. It would only be a matter of minutes before roadblocks would be set up and every law-enforcement officer in Dixie, Bronson, Alachua, Marion and Citrus counties would be alerted for a killer driving a new yellow jeepster.

A tired-looking tourist driving a mud-splattered ’48 with Iowa license plates was just pulling out of the town’s only filling station as I passed it. I drove on to the edge of town and the bridge across the river. There was a small gap between the black-and-white guard rail and the bridge.

Pointing the jeepster at the gap, I rammed down the gas and hopped out. It hit the gap dead-center and disappeared with a splintering of wood and a screech of metal. A moment later there was a great splash. The ’48 behind me braked to a stop and the tourist stuck his head out the window.

“Holy smoke,” he said. “What happened, fellow? Did your car go out of control?”

“No,” I told him. “I did.” I opened the door on the far side, climbed in beside him, and rammed the nose of the gun that had killed Zo in his ribs. “Look,” I said, “I have a date with a roadblock where this road joins US 19. That is, unless I get there first. How fast will this crate go?”

He looked at the gun in his ribs and swallowed hard. “Well,” he admitted, “I’ve had it up to ninety. And my foot wasn’t all the way to the floor.”

I said, “Then put it there. As of now.”

3. Close Call

It could be the law would figure out I was in Palmetto City. If it did, it wasn’t my fault. I’d left a trail only a snake with Saint Vitus dance could follow. I hadn’t doubled back once but I’d done a lot of twisting and changing of means of transportation. I’d kissed the Iowa tourist goodbye at Inglis after giving him the impression I had a boat waiting for me in Withlacoochee Bay. From there I’d picked up a ride on a fruit truck as far as Dunnellon and US 41. I’d taken a bus from there to Tampa and spent most of the day buying new clothes piecemeal.

When I’d finished buying slacks and a sport coat and a loud gabardine shirt and washing the blood from the back of my head, I looked a lot more like a northern tourist than I did a local boy who’d spent most of his life on the water.

The Tampa papers were filled with the thing. The headline on the evening paper read:

The story was about as I expected. The way the law figured it, Zo and I had staged a drunken party to celebrate my release. During it, we had quarreled and I killed her. I was, variously reported, seen north near Tallahassee, boarding a forty-foot sloop in Withlacoochee Bay, and hopping a south-bound freight at Dunnellon.

But the law was merely confused, not stupid. Once they sifted out the false reports, the net would begin to tighten. And Beth was in Palmetto City. The chances were there was a stake-out right now on the house in which she was living.

I’d taken a plane from Tampa to Palmetto City. But I didn’t dare take a cab from the airport to the return address she had given on her letter. I had been born in the town. I’d lived there most of my life. I knew all the cab drivers. All of them knew me. I also knew the law. Ken Gilly, a kid with whom I had gone to school, was now a lieutenant in charge of the detective bureau.

Getting out of the airport as fast as I could without attracting attention, I strolled past the dark ball park and out to the mole in the bay where, night or day, there were always a dozen or so northern tourists fishing. It was dark on the mole and as good a place to kill time as any.

My plans were all tentative. I wanted to talk to Beth. I wanted to tell her I was sorry things turned out as they had for us. Then I wanted to talk to one or two of the boys who still berthed their fishing cruisers at Bill’s Boat Basin. One of them, Matt Heely, owed me plenty. And I was willing to call it square for a free trip to Shrimp Cay.

It was too late for me to turn honest now. Once there I’d attempt to contact Señor Peso through channels and see what he had in mind when he had sent Zo to re-establish contact with me. If he decided I was too hot to be of any use to him, there was still the thirty-six grand in my Havana bank account. And a man had to be pretty stupid if he couldn’t have one hell of a time drinking himself to death on thirty-six thousand dollars anywhere south of the Tropic of Cancer.

The tide was in. The moon was right. You could have caught fish with dough-balls and a bent pin. At one o’clock I interrupted the excited shoe clerk from Chicago who was pulling in pig-fish, about the size of the ones I usually used as bait for snook, and who was teaching me how to fish, telling him that while it all was very interesting I thought I would turn in.

The return address on Beth’s letter was less than a mile from the mole. It proved to be a small white frame garage apartment on a palm tree- and bougainvillea-tangled alley on the south-east side of town, not far from the store in which she was clerking. It was a hell of a place for the wife of a man who’d made the money I’d made to live in. Shame heated the collar of my sport shirt. Swede had been right about the bloody tide, too. I must have been out of my mind to treat Beth the way I had.

Of course she could be living in the big old house on the island across the deep water channel from the mainland. But she couldn’t live there and work in town. The only way it could be reached was by boat. Unless she had rented the old place to bring in a little additional income, the chances were that nothing but snakes and raccoons and rabbits and field mice had lived on the island for three years.

There was no police car in front or in the alley. Keeping close to the wall, I climbed the stairs and rapped lightly on the door. Either Beth wasn’t asleep or she was sleeping lightly. Almost immediately she asked, “Yes? Who is it?”

I took a deep breath and told her. “Charlie.”

A moment of silence followed. Then slippered feet scuffed across the floor and only a screen door separated us. A single beam of moonlight, flooding in through a hole in the vine that almost covered the porch, spotlighted her white face. I’d forgotten she was so pretty. Even with her cheeks stained with tears and dark lines under her eyes, she was beautiful. And one time she had loved me and I had thrown her away for a mess of Zo.

Pressing her nose against the screen she said, “You shouldn’t have come here, Charlie. The police were here not two hours ago and I promised Ken Gilly I’d call him if you did contact me.”

I said, “Then you know?”

She brushed a lock of red hair away from her forehead. “Yes. I know. It was in the papers.”

I got it off my chest with a rush. “I didn’t do it, Beth. I didn’t kill her. And I didn’t open your letter, I didn’t realize what it was, until after I’d reached the cabin. When I did read it, I told Zo I was coming back to Palmetto and you. And that was when it happened. Someone slugged me and shot Zo.”

She said, “And you expect me to believe that?”

I asked, “Have I ever lied to you, Beth?”

She thought a moment. “No. That’s one thing you’ve never done.” She unhooked the screen. “Come in. Come in before one of the neighbors sees you.”

Inside the room I tried to take her in my arms but she pushed me away.

“No. I want time to think. This may change things for both of us. What do you intend to do now, Charlie?”

I told her.

Beth said, “In other words, if you can evade the law and get out of the country, you’re going right back in the same old racket. You’re going to work for this Señor Peso again.”

I asked her what else I could do.

She told me. “Be a man. If you didn’t kill that girl there must be some way we can prove it.”

I asked her, “How?”

She shook her head. She was standing so close to me that one of her curls brushed my face. It was all I could do to keep from digging both of my hands in her hair and pulling her to me. “I don’t know,” she admitted. Then, woman-like, she persisted, “But there must be some way. Perhaps Mr Clifton could help us.”

He was the guy she worked for. I’d never liked him. Few of the local people did, even if they did trade in his store. A cocky little Yankee, he’d come to Palmetto City twenty years before and built an idea into the biggest business in town. He wouldn’t be undersold. If a fellow merchant ran a loss leader costing from two cent, Clifton would lose five to get the business. And he had.

From a two-by-four dry-goods store he’d branched out into a block-square four-story-high merchandise carnival, handling everything from apples to zithers. If you couldn’t buy it at Clifton’s, it wasn’t for sale.

I asked, “Why should he help us?”

Beth was frank about it. “Mr Clifton’s in love with me. He’s asked me to marry him. He even offered to buy the old house out on the island so I’d have some money and wouldn’t have to work while I made up my mind whether or not to divorce you.”

I said, “Oh, yeah?”

Beth put me back in my place. “You should get sore.”

The strain was beginning to get me. I sat down on the edge of the bed and buried my head in my hands. “Okay, honey,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. I haven’t got a beef. Not with the way I’ve loused up our lives.”

She sat down on the bed beside me. “Kiss me, Charlie.”

I said that after the way I’d treated her I shouldn’t think she’d want me to. Her lips inches from mine, she repeated, “I asked you to kiss me, Charlie.”

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. But it wasn’t the way I kissed Zo. It was more like I’d kissed her in front of the altar after the Reverend Paul had finished marrying us and the world was going to be our oyster. She was something sweet and beautiful and fragile. She was good. She was something that had been missing out of my life for a long time.

When I lifted my face, her eyes were shining in the dark and patting my cheek with one hand she kissed me back of her own accord. “It’s going to be all right, honey,” she told me. “I don’t know how we’ll do it. But we will make it right.”

A car purred to a stop in the alley. Heavy feet began to climb the stairs. A moment later there was a light knock on the door.

Standing up in front of me, Beth asked, “Yes?”

“It’s Ken again, Beth,” Gilly told her. “I’m sorry to disturb you but I thought you ought to know. Charlie’s been traced to a men’s store in Tampa where he bought a complete new outfit. We’re setting up roadblocks on the causeway and all roads leading into Palmetto City.”

“Oh,” Beth said. “Oh.”

Ken sounded tired. “I wish the guy hadn’t headed back this way. Heaven knows I don’t want to make the pinch. Charlie’s my friend. But what can I do?”

Beth suggested. “Maybe he didn’t do it, Ken. Maybe he didn’t kill that girl.”

Lieutenant Gilly was skeptical. “Yeah. Maybe. And maybe some day filet of grunt will sell for as much as snapper fingers. Well, Tampa only being sixty miles away, I thought I’d let you know. You want me to post a guard in the alley?”

Beth’s fingers tightened on mine. “No. I don’t think that will be necessary, Ken. Even if Charlie should come here I don’t think he’d hurt me.”

“No,” Gilly agreed. “Well, it’s just as well. I can use every man I have on the roadblocks. But if he should slip through and come here, you let me know now, Beth.”

He clumped on back down the stairs. A moment later the police cruiser purred off into the night. I could feel the cold sweat start on my cheeks. The boys were beginning to haul in the net – and I was in it. It wouldn’t be long now.

Beth sat back on the bed, all business. “No one ever comes in here but me, and I was going to suggest you stay here until after I’d talked to Mr Clifton. Now that’s out. When you don’t show up at the blocks, they’re going to know you got through and someone is bound to suggest the police search this apartment. There’s only one logical place for you to stay.”

I asked her where that was.

She said, “Out at the house. You know it and the island better than anyone else. An army couldn’t find you there if you didn’t want them to. Now, tell me the whole thing from the minute you were released from prison yesterday morning.”

I gave her a play-by-play description. But I still didn’t like the Clifton angle and said so. “You say the guy loves you. You say he’s asked you to divorce me and marry him. Well, what’s his reaction going to be when you tell him I’m in town? He’s going to reach for his phone and call the cops. The guy is a bargain hunter. And it’s a lot cheaper for him to turn me in to be burned than it is for him to pay for a divorce.”

Beth said I wasn’t doing Mr Clifton justice. He was really a very fine and a very honorable man. She shook her curls in my face. “Besides I’m not going to tell him you’re in town. You have to admit he is smart?”

I said I did.

Beth continued. “All I am going to tell him is that I don’t think you killed that girl and ask his advice on how to go about hiring a private detective to prove it.”

It didn’t sound too bad. The guy was smart. And Beth was right about the island. I could hide out on it indefinitely. “Well, okay,” I agreed. “But how are you going to contact me?”

She said she would find some way to do so without making Ken Gilly suspicious. “After all, it’s our house. I have a right to go out there anytime I want to. Maybe I want to put it in shape to be sold.”

I asked her when she’d been out there last.

She said, “Not since shortly after your trial. For a long time I didn’t care what happened to it. Now, if we can straighten out this mess you’re in, we’re going back there to live.”

I got up to go while the going was good and Beth walked to the door with me. “I love you, Charlie.”

I said that went double. I felt some better. I felt a lot better. But we still had a long row to hoe. I didn’t see how anyone could possibly prove I hadn’t killed Zo.

I wanted to stay. I knew Beth wanted me to. But Ken Gilly was nobody’s fool. When I didn’t show at the roadblocks he’d know I had slipped into town before they had been established and would put a stake-out on Beth’s apartment without telling her anything about it.

Beth kissed me at the screen door. “I’ll be out – soon. With good news to report.”

Keeping close to the wall and out of the moonlight, I tiptoed sideways down the stairs to the alley and made my way towards the nearest street. I’d gone perhaps twenty yards from the foot of the stairs when the big guy stepped out from behind the bole of a pineapple palm.

“You there,” he stopped me. “What’s your name? And what are you doing prowling an alley at two o’clock in the morning?”

My first thought was, Ken left a stake-out after all.

I thought fast: I didn’t know the man. He was obviously new to the force, at least since I’d been sent to Raiford. If he took me in, I was dead. I still had the murder gun in my pocket. They’d burn me like they’d burned Swede. My only chance was to bluff and run.

“Why, my name is Olson,” I lied. I tried to feint him off guard by making him look where I was pointing. “I live in that house back there, officer. And I’m on my way downtown to try to locate an all-night drugstore.”

“Oh,” he said. “I see.”

There was a glint of silver in the moonlight. I thought at first he was throwing a gun on me. Then his arm reversed itself and started up in a familiar arc and I knew what he had in his hand. Backing a step, I let it rip air where my belly had been.

Then, stepping in before he could recover his balance, I smashed a hard right to his jaw that smacked him off his feet and his head into an empty garbage can with sufficient force to make it ring like a bell-buoy.

He was out, cold. Striking a match I leaned over him. I still didn’t know him. But whoever he was I doubted if he was an officer of the law. If he was, he was the first cop I’d ever seen who carried a six-inch fish knife.

Then the light in the window of the apartment just over my head came on and some old dame asked nervously:

“What was that? Who’s that out there in the alley?”

I said, “Me-arrh.”

“Oh,” she said. “Bad kitty.”

Then I tiptoed out of there fast before she stopped to think that kitty cats didn’t strike matches.

4. Dead Man’s Bay

The water was warm but the air was cold. The tide had changed and was going out. The pull of it was terrific. It had been three years since I’d done any swimming. I thought when I reached mid-channel that the tide was going to sweep me out into the gulf. As it was, I lost one of my shoes off the length of plank on which I had piled my clothes and which I was pushing ahead of me.

It would have been much easier to steal a boat. But I knew how most bait-camp men were. They hated to lose a boat almost as badly as a wife. A good boat cost two hundred dollars. You could get married for five. And I didn’t want to direct any attention to the island.

The knife man worried me. Who was he? How had he known I would be coming down that alley? Why had he tried to kill me? He wasn’t the man who had killed Zo. That much I knew. It hadn’t been his voice that had said, “You got him, eh?” Nor was he the man who had slugged me with the butt of the gaff hook. He was a much larger man whose muscles strained the shoulders of his coat. If he had swung the gaff, it would have caved in my head.

As the low-lying trees grew to their proper place in the night sky, I felt for bottom and found it. The storms of the last three years hadn’t changed the coast line of the island, not on the lee side at least. The deep water extended to within a few feet of the shore. I waded up on to the sand and slapped and tramped myself dry and warm before I put on my clothes.

Now, I was really home. My rotting nets, unused since before I had gone into the Service, still hung on their long drying racks. A half-dozen hulks and stove-in row-boats lay buried in the sand, including the bare ribs of the fifty-foot bottom that had been my father’s boat. I was glad the old man was dead. I was the first of our family to do time and the disgrace would have broken his heart.

Dressed, I turned for a last look at the mainland. It was a good mile and a half across the channel. I couldn’t see the running lights of any boats. My passage, so far as I knew, had been unobserved.

I padded, barefoot, up the weed-overgrown path toward the house, hoping I didn’t step on a snake. The path was a jungle of vines. I wiggled my way through them, being careful not to disturb them any more than I had to. I didn’t know how long I would have to stay on the island. And when both his roadblocks and stake-out failed, Gil would undoubtedly make a perfunctory search of the home place.

Then I thought of something both Beth and I had forgotten – food. Unless there were some canned goods in the pantry, food was going to be a problem. But I’d face that when I came to it. As long as I knew I was going to live, I could live on fish and rabbits if I had to.

The house itself was set well back from the shore in a clearing that we had farmed from time to time. Now the ground was sour and overrun with saw palmetto. Even in the waning moonlight I could see the fifteen-foot wide porch across the front was sagging badly in spots, supported only by the thick-trunked red and purple bougainvillea and flame vine that had been old before I was born.

I picked an orange from a tree and tried to suck it but the grove was as sour as the garden. I wondered why Clifton had offered to buy the place from Beth. Probably out of pity or in the hope of buttering her up so she would say yes to his proposal. The old place was out of the world. I mean that literally.

No one but a typical cracker fishing family or a pair of kids as much in love as Beth and I had been would want to live in such a place. And the rest of the island was as bad. It was still as wild as it had been when the wreckers had been a power in Key West and Billy Bowlegs had terrorized gulf shipping.

I walked up the stairs to the porch. Coiled in a pool of moonlight, a ten-button rattlesnake watched me from the shredded canvas of a once-expensive chaise longue I had given Beth when we’d first been married.

I opened the door and went in. The big front room smelled old and musty. By striking a match I found a lamp with some oil in it and lit it. Even as old and decrepit as it was, after three years in a six by eight cell, the house looked good to me. At least here I could breathe. There were some canned goods in the pantry but not much, enough perhaps for three or four meals.

The more I thought about Beth asking Mr Clifton to suggest a good private detective to prove I hadn’t killed Zo, the screwier it sounded. If the guy was really in love with her, he wasn’t going to cut off his prospects by sweeping the legal sand spurs out of her husband’s path to her side.

When she contacted me, I’d suggest she try to arrange passage for us both and meet me somewhere down in the Caribbean. I was pretty certain that Matt Heely would run us down, for a fresh piece of change, if not for the money he owed me. Matt was as bad as I’d been. He made good money but he threw it away with both fists and was always in financial hot water when it came time to pay his insurance or the installments on his boat.

Crossing the kitchen floor, I plowed up a pine splinter with my big toe that made me see stars for a minute. The quarter-inch callouses on my feet were gone. I’d have to have shoes of some kind. Then I thought of the old pair of sneakers I’d discarded just before making my final trip down to Shrimp Cay for the load with which I’d been caught. They should be up in the attic somewhere. Beth was as bad as a magpie. She never threw anything away on the theory that some time she might find a use for it. And this was one of the times.

Holding the lamp in one hand, I padded up the back stairs to the second floor and stopped in front of the door of the bedroom that Beth and I had used. I hadn’t had it on the first floor but here I had an eerie feeling that I was being watched. I opened the door and held the lamp high.

It was the same with the three other bedrooms on the floor. They were all as Beth had left them when she’d left the island, stripped to the bare mattress with the bedding folded neatly and piled at the foot of each bed. It was my nerves, nothing more. I started to light a cigarette as I climbed the stairs to the attic, then decided to conserve my supply. Cigarettes were another thing that Beth and I had forgotten.

The old house had been built by my grandfather when both labor and lumber were cheap. Rumpus rooms hadn’t been thought of, but he’d finished the attic as a ballroom so he and his friends could dance when a party of boats had come out from the mainland or a rare passenger vessel, New Orleans- or Havana-bound, had dropped anchor in the deep channel.

The finished section was thirty by forty feet, paneled in rare woods, with two large dormer windows on each side and two more windows at each end. But it had been a long time since it had been used as a ballroom. The windows had been boarded up and covered with cobwebs for years. Even when I had been a small boy, the attic had become a family catch-all.

I pushed open the heavy door and walked in and a sudden gust of wind blew out the flame of my lamp. Cursing the wind, I walked a few more feet. Then setting the lamp on the bare floor I lifted the hot glass chimney, struck a match and applied it to the wick.

I wasn’t alone in the attic. Sitting in built-in bunks against the wall were perhaps a dozen men, their eyes as flat and expressionless as those of the coiled rattlesnake I had seen on the chaise longue. I’d seen their faces before.

At least I’d seen similar faces in the stews of Marseille, Port Said, Sevastopol, Hamburg, and two dozen other war-torn ports. They were the faces of wanted men. Men wanted in their own countries for treason and murder and fabulous thefts. Men willing to pay a stiff price to escape the noose, the guillotine, the firing squad, and the garrote.

I straightened. “What the hell?”

A thin-faced man with a heavy accent said, “Someone make out that light.”

It was the only word spoken. Another man snatched the lamp from me and extinguished it. I reached for the gun that had killed Zo and remembered it was in the pocket of my coat. And I’d left my coat in the kitchen.

Then the first of a dozen fists found me and beat me to my knees with the deadly precision of men who have nothing left to lose. I fought back to my feet and the ring of fists hemming me in gave way for a moment as I tried to pound my way to the door. Then a foot thudded into me. As I went screaming to the floor, still other feet found my head, my chin.

The huge tarpon was back on my line. Only this time, like a fool, I’d allowed the line to become entangled with my ankles and he’d pulled me over the side of the cruiser and was heading, seemingly, for the bottom of the gulf out in fifty fathoms.

I was cold. I was wet. I was strangling. I was sinking through endless fathoms of black water, towed by the huge fish. It was strange what a man would dream.

Then an alarm bell rang in my head. I wasn’t dreaming. I was drowning. It wasn’t a fish pulling me down. It was a weight. I fumbled at the cord. Then I managed to open my knife and cut it.

The swift descent ended abruptly and I shot surfaceward. Just as my lungs were about to burst I broke water. I gasped a mouthful of air and sunk again, but just under the surface this time.

When my head broke water again, I turned on my back and floated. Perhaps five hundred feet away the running lights of a boat were circling and I could hear the faint throb of an underwater exhaust. I lay with my cheek to the water watching the lights. As they came toward me again I turned on my belly, ready to dive.

Then from the wheel of the boat, Matt Heely said, “Like a stone. Poor Charlie.” He sounded sad.

The boat passed to port. Its stern lights grew small, then disappeared, and I was alone in the night. I tried to raise myself in the water and was partially successful. There were no short lights in sight. That meant I was a long way out in the gulf.

I turned on my back again and floated until my breathing was normal. Then I tried to find shore again and had better luck this time. Almost parallel with the water I could see a faint pinprick of light that didn’t look like a waning star. I swam toward it slowly, floating frequently to rest, hoping it was the light on Quarantine Key.

I had to reach shore. I meant to. I had the whole setup now. I knew who had killed Zo. I knew why she had been sent to meet me. I knew why thirty-six thousand dollars had been credited to my account. I not only knew who had killed her, but why. More, I knew what the men were doing in the attic of the old home place and how they had gotten there.

The sky grew blacker, then faded into a dead gray. All of the stars disappeared. A light onshore wind sprang up and whipped up a froth of white caps. I swam on doggedly. The gray turned to a dirty mauve and then to a bright crimson before breaking into day. I found a drifting, mossy old plank and used it to rest on.

It had been Quarantine Light I had seen. I passed to starboard of it on an incoming tide, unobserved. The same thing happened with the Coast Guard plane making its routine morning flight. I was just another speck in an endless carpet of water.

Then the water turned a pale green and I knew I was on the outer bar. I waded a few hundred yards, then sat neck-deep on the edge of blue water for perhaps half an hour before striking out again to cover the last half-mile.

I came ashore a few hundred yards above the former luxury hotel on the beach that the government had bought and turned first into a rehabilitation center and then into a veteran’s hospital. An early-rising former GI hunting for shells along the beach looked at me curiously, then decided I was a fellow patient.

“Out for an early morning swim, eh?”

I said that was right and asked him if he had a cigarette. He had and gave me one. I sucked the smoke into my lungs gratefully. Nothing had ever tasted quite so good except the cigarette I had smoked after I’d finished my part of the demolition work on Saipan.

It was perhaps six o’clock. There was no one but myself and the former GI on the beach. That much was fortunate. The law was still looking for me. And all I had on was a pair of shorts. I’d kicked off my pants and ripped off my shirt perhaps five miles out.

My new friend looked at my battered face and grinned, and I knew what he was thinking. As soon as they get a little dough together, a lot of the boys out at the hospital swarm into town and raise hell in an attempt to forget that they will never be the men that they once were. I touched my face. It was tender to the touch but the long immersion in salt water had cauterized the cuts. And if it looked like the rest of my body, it was a sight in technicolor.

His grin widened. “Kinda pitched one, eh?”

I said, “That’s right. And am I going to get hell. You don’t know where I can borrow some clothes, do you, buddy, just long enough to sneak by the desk?”

That was right up his alley. He’d held up a few bars himself. “Why not cop a suit from the old ward-room?” he asked. He nodded at an open ground-floor door. “You know. In where the orderlies hang up their civies when they change into whites.”

I patted him on the back. “Thanks. That’s an idea, fellow.”

There was a clatter of dishes in the kitchen as the help brought up breakfast, but I was alone in the locker-room. I picked out a white sport shirt and a gray gabardine suit and a pair of two-toned sport shoes that didn’t fit too badly. A broad-brimmed panama hat that I could pull down over my eyes and so hide most of my face completed the ensemble. The name of the guy who owned the clothes was Phillips. His hospital pass was in a glassine case in the outer breast pocket of the coat. Making a mental note to reimburse him for the loan if I lived through the fireworks I intended to touch off, I walked down a long corridor and out the front door of the hospital.

A sleepy guard barely glanced at the pass.

“A long night, eh, fellow?” he yawned.

I agreed it had been a long night.

5. Señor Peso

Clifton’s was always crowded, from eight o’clock in the morning until midnight. It was around ten when I got there. According to the headlines of the paper on the news rack next to the cigarette counter, I was still driving the cops nuts.

I hadn’t attempted to crash the roadblocks set up on either side of Tampa. I hadn’t been seen in Palmetto City. The general public had been alerted to watch for me. I was known to be armed, and dangerous. I was described as pale, six feet tall, weighing in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds and wearing blue slacks, a checked sport coat, and white shoes. I was probably bareheaded as I was never known to wear a hat.

I turned the pages of the paper. Swede was on page four, in a one-column two-inch box. All it said about him was that Swen (Swede) Olson, former fishing guide and convicted murderer, had been executed at midnight for killing a prison guard during an abortive attempted break. Swede’s troubles were over. I though of what he’d told me in the death house.

A man hauls in the fish he baits for and at the level at which he fishes.

If that wasn’t good logic, I’d eat it.

The snip back of the cigarette counter asked if I wanted to buy the paper or rent it. I laid twenty-seven cents of Phillips’ change on the counter.

“Tut, tut. What if Mr Clifton should hear you? Remember the customer is always right. But just to show you my heart is in the right place I’ll take the paper and a deck of cigs.”

She slammed the cigarettes on the counter. My picture was on the front page of the paper next to a picture of Beth. She’d looked straight into my face but hadn’t recognized me.

I cracked the cellophane wrapper, then tapped the picture of Beth. “Now could I have some information. Where can I find this girl? I was told she worked at the cigarette counter.”

The snip snapped, “She did. But right now you’ll probably find her in Mr Clifton’s office.” She patted her blonde hair. “Not that I can see what he sees in her.”

I walked back through an aisle lined with tables cluttered with merchandise to the elevator and asked to be taken to the fourth floor. No one, including the elevator operator, gave me a second look.

The office was large and modern. Behind a half-glass partition I could hear a man, presumably Clifton, saying, “But, my dear girl, I’d like to help you. You know that. But I can’t see what good hiring a private detective would do. I’ve been talking to Lieutenant Gilly since you first mentioned the matter this morning and he says there isn’t a doubt but what White killed that girl in the cabin on Dead Man’s Bay.”

Beth stuck to her guns. “I don’t believe it.”

I opened the door and walked in.

A dapper little man, perhaps five feet four, with wide-spread intelligent eyes, a high forehead and hair so black it looked like it had been dyed, Clifton waved me out of the office. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “But whatever it is, I’m too busy to see you right now. Please come back later.”

I closed the door and leaned against it.

Beth recognized me and dug a fist into her mouth to keep from screaming. “Charlie,” she said finally. “What are you doing here?”

I drew a chair up to the desk and sat down. “Well, it got a little hot out on the island. In fact, quite a few things have happened since I saw you last night. And as you said maybe Mr Clifton would help us, I thought I’d come and see what he could do.”

The little guy looked at me like I was something obnoxious. “Nothing. I can do absolutely nothing,” he said. “As I was just telling Beth –” he corrected himself – “Mrs White, Lieutenant Gilly says there is no doubt about your guilt and I can’t afford to be involved in such a sordid matter.”

Beth said, “What do you mean, ‘things got a little hot out on the island’?”

I lighted a cigarette and told the story just as it had happened. When I had finished, Clifton said:

“But that’s preposterous. Who were these men in your attic?”

I said I imagined they were wetbacks that Señor Peso had paid Matt Heely or one of the other boys working for him to smuggle in from Cuba or Mexico.

“The old house,” I pointed out, “is ideally situated. A boat can bring them in. A boat can distribute them along the coast in the guise of tourists and the law never be the wiser unless one of them should be picked up accidentally. Even then, I imagine by the time they leave the house they’re well equipped with fake papers. As I see it, they’re just another item of profit with Señor Peso.”

Clifton made a gesture of distaste. “That name.” He lighted a cigarette and smoked it in short, quick puffs. “And you say at the end of the attack that this Matt Heely took you out into the gulf in his fishing cruiser, weighted your ankles and dropped you in?”

I said that was correct.

Now he was openly skeptical. “I don’t believe it. Even if you had managed to cut the cord you couldn’t have swam that far.”

Beth said, “That wasn’t far for Charlie. He was on a water demolition team during the war. You know. One of the boys with goggles and rubber flippers who swam in the night before the first assault wave hit a beach and blew up all the obstacles they could.”

Clifton eyed me with fresh respect. “I don’t know what to think or what to say,” he said finally. “Just what is it you want of me, White?”

I said, “You have a cruiser down at the yacht basin. I want you and Beth to come out to the island with me and check my story. In other words I want a friend in court before I turn myself in. A responsible businessman who can back at least a portion of my story.”

He thought a moment. “You think this Matt Heely could be Señor Peso?”

I said, “Matt could be. He’s smart enough.” I snuffed out my cigarette. “If I’m right it was Señor Peso who killed Zo and pinned her death onto me. It was Señor Peso who hired a knife man to wait outside Beth’s apartment last night. It was Señor Peso who ordered me dropped in the gulf.”

He protested, “But why?”

I said that would probably come out when we found out who he was. He sat silent a long moment drumming with his fingers on his desk. Then Beth turned her smile on him and said:

“Please.”

She really had the guy wrapped around her little finger. He was so nuts about her it oozed out all of his pores.

“Well, all right,” he said finally. “But let’s have an understanding, White. If we do go out to the island and find nothing in the old house to substantiate your fantastic story, you will turn yourself in to Lieutenant Gilly as soon as we return to the mainland and allow the law to take its course. Is that understood?”

I said it was.

He said, “Then you go ahead to the yacht basin. Mrs White and I will follow.”

I passed a half a dozen cops on my way down to the basin. One or two of them glanced at me casually but none of them attempted to stop me.

His boat was a thirty-eight-footer, double cabin, with a flying bridge. He knew how to handle it, too. If he hadn’t been a successful merchandiser, he’d have made a good fishing-boat captain. What’s more he knew the bottom of the channel like the lines in his well-kept hand. Easing the nose of the cruiser in between the rotting pilings of what once had been a pier, he made it possible for Beth to step ashore without even getting her feet wet. I helped him tie up to a piling, then followed him ashore.

Seen in broad daylight the old house looked better than it had in the moonlight. There was nothing wrong with it or the path or the clearing that a few dollars and elbow grease wouldn’t make right again.

The first place I went was the kitchen. But the coat I’d left on a chair was gone, and with it the gun that had killed Zo.

Clifton was impatient. “Well, let’s get on with it,” he said. “Let’s see this fabulous attic.”

As I led the way up the stairs, he asked if I was armed. When I said I wasn’t he said:

“Then it’s a good thing that I brought a gun with me.” He was openly skeptical. “Heaven knows I wouldn’t want to face an attic filled with wetback desperadoes without a gun.”

I paused on the second floor for a deep breath, then walked up the attic stairs and threw the heavy door open. The floor was thick with dust. There were no built-in bunks against the wall. The walls were lined solidly with the antique furniture that various Whites had discarded over a period of a hundred years.

Beth began to cry.

Clifton was silent a moment. Then drawing his gun, he motioned me back down stairs to the second floor. “I was afraid it would be like this,” he admitted. “But what in the name of time did you hope to gain by telling us such a fantastic story?”

I asked him why the gun.

“You’re not mentally right,” he said. “You can’t be.”

I lighted a cigarette and leaned against the jamb of one of the closed bedroom doors. “That can be,” I admitted. “Heaven knows I’ve made a mess of my life. But tell me this, Señor Peso. Did you ever see a Florida attic that had been closed up for three years that wasn’t covered with cobwebs?”

His voice shrill, he asked, “What was that you just called me?”

I said, “Answer my question. No. You never did. You could get the men who were in here last night out of the attic and onto the mainland. You could rip out the bunks and move the old furniture back. You could cover the floor with dust. But you couldn’t replace the cobwebs. That’s something only a spider can do.”

He wet his lips with the tip of his tongue. “You’re crazy. You’re out of your mind.”

I said, “We’ll leave that up to the law. And while the law is at it, I want them to check your whereabouts at the time that Zo was killed. I doubt you have an alibi. You can’t have. Because you were the guy who shot her and dusted me with a gaff hook.”

His voice grew even shriller. “And just why should I do such a thing? What was my motive?”

I nodded at Beth. “My wife. She was the one thing you couldn’t get at a bargain. You couldn’t buy her. But you could buy me. That’s why you sent Zo to meet me. That’s why you deposited the thirty-six grand to my account. That’s why you had Zo steam me up about heading straight for Cuba and Shrimp Cay. That’s why you were at the cabin, to make certain she had me in tow.

“And everything went just fine until I read Beth’s letter and told Zo it was no dice, that I was heading back to Palmetto City and Beth. It was you to whom Zo cried out just before you shot her. Shot her because you saw another way to accomplish your purpose. With me back in a cell at Raiford waiting to be burned for murder, I couldn’t very well return to Beth. And, in time, you knew you’d get what you wanted.”

He laughed. “A jury would howl at that story.”

I said, “Okay. Let’s test it. Let’s go back to the mainland. I’ll tell my story and you tell yours.”

He shook his head. “No. I’m afraid we can’t do that. I’m a prominent man in Palmetto City and my business enemies would be certain to try to make capital of this.”

I said, “You mean you’re afraid that the Feds might look at your invoices and begin to wonder where you’re getting some of your goods that you’re able to sell for less than your fellow merchants pay for it wholesale. Hell. It’s been right in front of my nose all the time. No one but you could be Señor Peso.”

The little man sighed. Then looking at Beth he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” she asked him.

He said, “That I can’t allow such a scurrilous story as this to be bruited about. I’m very sorry, my dear. I’d hoped to make you very happy. But now –” He thumbed the safety of his gun.

I said, “It won’t wash, Clifton. One dame on a gun is enough. Besides, just how do you intend to explain our bodies?”

His eyes overly bright, he said, “That’s simple. I’ll tell the police the fantastic story you told me. Then I’ll tell them when I called you a liar, you saw that you were trapped and shot your wife and committed suicide.”

It was still as death in the old second-floor hallway. A chorus of dust particles were dancing in the sunlight streaming in the front window. Clifton lifted the gun in his hand and the door of the bedroom behind me opened and Ken Gilly stepped out in the hall saying:

“I wouldn’t, Mr Clifton. With all your dough, you’ve got a much better chance hiring a high-priced lawyer.” Ken cocked the big gun in his own hand. “Of course if you insist.”

Around us the doors of the other bedrooms opened. There was an officer in each one, one of them a police stenographer who was still scrawling curlicues on his pad.

Clifton wasn’t a fool. He dropped his gun. “You win,” he said looking at me. “You’re smarter than I gave you credit for being.” He looked at Ken. “Well, let’s get back to the mainland so I can contact my lawyers.” His smile was thin. “But you haven’t a damn thing on me but some foolish conversation.”

Putting his gun away, Ken rubbed thoughtfully at the knuckles he had bruised beating at least a portion of the truth out of Matt Heely after I had gone to him with my story, directly from the hospital.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said slowly. “A little of this, a little of that. A guy talks here. A guy talks there. And the first thing you know, it builds into a conviction.” He waved his hand at the stairs. “Take Mr Clifton away, boys. We’re going to give him a bargain, board and lodging free for nothing.”

When they had gone, Ken turned to me, offered me his hand.

“Welcome, Charlie.” He brushed my nose with the tip of one finger. “But keep that clean now, fellow. Hear me?”

I said I did and intended to.

Then he was gone and Beth and I were alone and she was in my arms.

“I love you, love you so, Charlie,” she whispered.

Swede had been right about a lot of things. He’d told me:

“A man can starve a dame. He can cuss her. He can beat her every night and twice on Sunday and she’ll still think he’s her personal Marshall plan in a silver champagne bucket. But only if she knows she’s the only woman in his life.”

I hadn’t known how really big a lump in the throat could be. All I could say was her name. But that was all right with Beth. She understood. The bloody tide was over for both of us. There was nothing ahead but clear sailing in clean water.

She lifted her face to mine. “Hey, you, Mister Man. Remember me? How’s about a kiss?”

And that was all right with me, too.