The Second Talmage Powell Crime Megapack

by Talmage Powell

  The flash of her legs and movement of her hips was something to watch as she went around behind the bar. Leave it to Uncle Dudley to winnow out the best.

  “I’m Amanda,” she said.

  “Well, hello, Amanda. Have you known Uncle Dudley long?”

  She tipped a glance at me, probing, balancing my words and anything that might lurk behind them. “Almost a year. And the situation is something like you’ve guessed. I’m fond of Dudley and he’s fond of me; we travel about and have fun.”

  “Lucky people.”

  “Also, I’m a very good secretary and manager. So it isn’t altogether a case of a wealthy older man buying himself a dumb blonde toy.”

  “I can believe that—and I like your frankness.”

  “Just to get us off on the right foot, Jake-o.”

  I took the drink she held out to me and watched her make herself a small one. A social gesture, not the drink of a real drinker.

  “I wish you’d warned us you were coming. Dudley will be so disappointed.”

  “Isn’t he here?”

  She shook her head. “He went off to Miami earlier today. He’s seeing some people down there on business. He left me here to take care of some details and correspondence before I join him.”

  I felt a pang of disappointment.

  She touched my hand and said softly, “I’m sorry, Jeremy.”

  “Well—” I lifted and dropped my shoulders “—I guess it was a childish notion when you get right down to it—the urge to surprise him.” I tossed off the Scotch.

  She took my glass and set it on the bar. “A very nice notion, I’d call it.”

  We drifted across the room to the door. She offered her hand in a farewell gesture. “I wish I had more time, Jake-o. But Dudley does have the habit of leaving me to pick up the last-minute bits and pieces. My schedule is tighter than strangulation.”

  “Tell him I came by, Amanda.”

  “Of course. He’ll write you immediately, I know.”

  I plodded disconsolately to the car, got in, and was about to turn the ignition key when I realized I’d been ushered out so fast I hadn’t found out where Uncle Dudley was staying in Miami. After all, I was on vacation—why not join him there?

  I got out of the car and walked back to Charnot. I was about to press the bell when I heard Amanda’s voice, sharply raised.

  “Yes, you do owe me an explanation, Dudley! You’ve told me a dozen and one times that if Jeremy ever shows up in person to tell him you’re away, get rid of him. You’ve literally ground it into my brain. Why? Those letters you write are so filled with warmth, I should think you’d want to—”

  A male voice grunted something I didn’t quite catch, but it was enough to break her off.

  “Under the circumstances, it is too my business!” Amanda said.

  The male voice inched up a grim level. “Amanda, I don’t owe you an explanation or a damned thing else. You’re beautiful, but that’s a plentiful commodity. If you like the good life we lead together, get off my back!”

  Her voice dropped to acquiescence while I stood dumb. What was going on? What did Uncle Dudley have to hide from me?

  I grasped the doorknob, turned it, and after the barest hesitation, opened the door.

  Amanda spun to face me so quickly her gossamer-blonde hair brushed about her cheeks and she almost tripped on the expensive luggage, old airline stubs dangling from their handles, that she—or Uncle Dudley—had taken from a nearby closet in the few minutes since I’d left.

  “I should ask you—” I began.

  I glimpsed a frightened flicker in her eyes as her gaze speared past my shoulder, then heard the rustle of his movement. He used a heavy brass lamp, scooped from the table beside the doorway. The blow almost jarred my eyes from their sockets.

  I came out of it with a gremlin soldering my ears together and the taste of burned Scotch in my throat. I crawled, groaning, across the thick russet carpet, grappled with the edge of a chair, and pulled myself up.

  I turned my head and studied the scene groggily. They’d closed the door on the way out. The baggage was gone. The brass lamp lay where it had fallen. I squinted at my watch—I’d been out for about an hour.

  I thought of the old baggage checks on the suitcases and garment bags and it gave me a hunch.

  * * * *

  The small but modern Asheville airport was briskly busy. People queued at the ticket counter, moved around the spacious waiting room, sat reading.

  Through a rift in the crowd I caught the glint of sunlight on bright blonde hair. I moved aside, people off an incoming flight brushing past on their way to the baggage room.

  Amanda and a strange man were standing on the further side of the waiting room near the tall windows that gave a view of the landing field and the jumble of mountains beyond.

  Somewhat aloofly, Amanda was gazing at the scenery outside. The man kept glancing at the bank of time-zone clocks on the northern wall. He was clearly fidgeting for a flight due to be announced shortly.

  He was tall, thin, and slightly stooped, with the look of a mournful hound dog. His hair was grey and thin on his narrow skull. He was wearing expensive blue slacks and a mottled sports jacket, but he looked a little like the boondocks despite the cut of the clothing.

  He said something. Amanda nodded without looking at him. He moved across the lobby and I eased over to let the flow of people shield me from his sight. When he reached the open archway leading to the ticket booths, he turned right, out of sight.

  I followed quickly. Around the ell, a door was swinging shut. It carried a simple message: men.

  I pushed inside. He was alone, standing at one of the washbasins lifting a pellet from a pillbox and chasing it down with water from a paper cup.

  As he lifted his head, my image spread across the mirror behind him. His movement stopped as if his chin had hit an abutment. He clutched the edge of the washbasin, his already grey face a shade more ashen.

  “Hi,” I said. “It’s me—Jeremy. And since Amanda knows you as Dudley Gillam, you must be my uncle.”

  His head dropped.

  “Who are you, actually?” I asked. “Could it be—” I caught my breath. “Who was buried in Yuma those years ago? Hardtimes Calhoun? Or Dudley Gillam, with a death certificate made out in the name of Calhoun?”

  He turned to face me, his mouth twitching. “I swear to you, he died of natural causes, Jeremy. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on your uncle’s head. He was the best friend I ever had.”

  There was a stretch of silence, broken only by the hiss of a leaky latrine.

  “I guess it took some thinking about, that morning you found Dudley Gillam dead in the camper.” I said. “First the idea, then wrestling with it, then giving in. You knew he had only one relative, a nephew named Jeremy Fisher. You knew all about Jeremy from Uncle Dudley. Dudley was a no-ties wanderer, and there didn’t seem to be a single obstacle in your way. All you had to do was bury him as Hardtimes Calhoun in a town where no one knew either of you and take his place. Once you mastered his simple signature, his pension checks, his bank account, all his earthly possessions were yours. You could keep on writing the never-seen nephew the kind of letters Dudley had always written. Keep one jump ahead of the nephew and you were safe for life. Am I getting it fairly close?”

  He raised bloodshot eyes. “Almost dead on the nail head, Jeremy.”

  “What then, Hardtimes? Where did the money start coming from—the big money?”

  “Piece of life, part of living,” Hardtimes said. “I guess I buried the hard times right there in Yuma. I’d had nothing but hard times from my cradle until I dug that grave, but when I wheeled out of Yuma in that camper pickup I left it all behind. I felt like a new man—like a cocksure Dudley Gillam—and I acted like a new man.”

  He turned. It wasn’t a suspicious movement. The single thing he dreaded, the only thing he had had to fear, had happened. He ran water, pulled down a paper towel, and wiped his grey face.
<
br />   “In the old existence everything turned to mud,” he said. “But once I had buried myself, I began encountering all the luck I’d missed in a lifetime.”

  He tossed the damp towel into a container. “Dudley had three thousand dollars in a savings account, his sole estate except for his pension checks and that camper. I ran the three to twenty thousand in a run at a craps table in Las Vegas. Drifted to Phoenix and won a hundred and fifty acres of land from a fellow in a stud game. It turned out to be worthless desert—but three months later a fellow from the government turned up. He had traced me, as Dudley Gillam, through my forwarding addresses. It scared the pants off me at first. But he was a purchasing agent, and Uncle Sam bought the desert land as a solar-energy pilot site.”

  “How much?”

  “A thousand dollars an acre. He was tickled to get it so cheap.”

  “But even a hundred and fifty thousand doesn’t guarantee a lifetime at playgrounds like the Great Smokies Chilton and Miami.”

  “You’re right about that. But I ran into a guy in Fort Worth, a wildcat oil man rigged up in Venezuela. Some minor civil troubles, guerrillas from the mountains, busted him up and he had run short of cash. He’d hopped up to the States to raise some. He needed a partner with a quick hundred thousand to see the drilling to completion.”

  “And,” I said mind-boggled, “you brought in the wells.”

  “Like water out of this faucet,” Hardtimes Calhoun said.

  “How much are you worth now?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess I could sell out my interest for five or six million.”

  I drew in my breath.

  “Now that you know—” His lank body began to pull itself together. He was mastering the hangdog guilt in his eyes. His lips were thinning, hardening. “What next? I owe you three thousand plus the interest on it and some pension checks and the interest on them. The only law I broke was to bury the wrong man—who had died of natural causes, as the Yuma coroner attested. Against my kind of money, you’d never make it in court if you tried to claim more than your just due.”

  The idea of trying to fight his amassed wealth inspired some hard thinking.

  Only he and I knew the truth. He was Dudley Gillam, even to Amanda. He was Dudley Gillam—and I was his sole heir.

  I had a deep-down certainty that he hadn’t drawn a will cutting me out. His subconscious guilt would have forestalled that. And even if there should be a will, it could be destroyed, set aside. When there is enough money there is a way with a will.

  I let a ruefully pleasant smile work to life on my lips. “It’s a different reunion than I’d planned. Uncle Dudley.”

  “You mean—you’re going to accept it?”

  I nodded. “Why not? What good would it do to fight you? I take my hat off to you. In many ways, you’re very much like the man you buried in Yuma.”

  And the man, I thought, I’ll bury in Miami. A neat little accident Maybe an overdose of some of his medication. Or a cramp when he went swimming in the ocean. Or an unfortunate fall down a stairway. Accidents are always happening to geezers his age.

  “You don’t have to duck me any longer. Uncle Dudley.”

  As we strolled out together, I dropped my arm across his shoulders. My touch was light, but he’d soon learn it was the returning touch of hard times—the hardest of all times.

  THE BEACON

  Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, April 1981.

  The candle was the clue, the beacon, the wan glow of a single candle behind an old lace curtain in the decayed ghostliness of a once-splendid home.

  Marley passed the place each evening as he drove in from his disgusting and demeaning job washing dishes in the kitchen of the country club. He didn’t notice the candle right away. The dragging misery of his situation choked off errant impressions, such as the color of a sunset, the notes of a singing bird, or idle speculation about a candle burning behind a window.

  He was in the clutches of a particularly tough parole officer who had set the tenor of their relationship at their very first meeting: “Marley, you are one of my pet dislikes, a lifelong criminal despite everything society has tried to do to rehabilitate you. During your misspent life you have done it all. Passed counterfeit money. Fenced stolen goods. Gone door to door selling bogus termite exterminations to little old widows. Cold-decked suckers in illegal card games. Written rubber checks. Now at the age of…fifty-five, isn’t it?…you’ve drawn a parole after doing time for embezzlement. You’re a neat, trim, spry fellow, hardly gray and with all your original teeth. Take my advice. Don’t even think of once more using that blank, innocent appearance to worm your way into a sucker’s confidence. Or is it asking too much for a change in personality? In any event, if as human beings we are brothers, you’re going to find, until the final hour of your parole, that I’m one hell of a keeper.”

  The loathsome tyrant had taken Marley out to the country club and introduced him to the head chef, an enormous Italian who’d never relaxed the chains of Marley’s parole-slavery from the very first moment.

  The parole officer had made a single allowance, giving permission for Marley to buy and drive, within the county limits, a battered old car. But that was only because city bus-transit routes precluded the country club.

  So each day was a hellish repetition: awaken in a squalid furnished room in the inner city; get through hours in which taverns and the kind of company Marley preferred were prohibited; drive out to the country club through Vanderling Estates, where the aura of so much old wealth and well being rubbed Marley absolutely raw; do the dishes the lordly dudes and their ladies befouled during lunch, dinner and sometimes a private party of an evening. Marley would burn, hearing the echoes of refined pleasure drifting back from the dining room. Occasionally, when the chef and second cook and salad girl and pastry chef had their backs turned, Marley would spit in the stock pot.

  * * * *

  Each night he passed the candle in the window, never seeing it until the abysmal cruelty of his parole had only one more week to go. Even then, it was not the candle that caught his attention, but a white, ectoplasmic figure moving on the lawn in the moonlit darkness.

  Marley held no truck with spooks, goblins or anything spiritual. But the glimpse of the ghostly figure caught and froze his gaze. He braked his wheezing car, an instinctive thought flashing through his mind. If someone was in trouble, perhaps he could play the Good Samaritan—and receive a suitable reward.

  The apparition was a woman, rather tallish, thin and bony, clad in ankle-length gown, its white blending with her long fall of silvery hair. Her shoulders were slightly stooped, and Marley, unable to distinguish the features from this distance, received an impression of an old and wrinkled face.

  Out of the shadows alongside the house came a heavyset man in the gray uniform of a chauffeur. He intercepted the woman in the middle of the lawn, spoke to her, and she compliantly nodded and walked toward the house. The servant watched until the front entrance had received her; then he returned along the driveway in the direction of lighted quarters over a large double garage.

  Marley saw the window candle at last, and it sparked his always-sharp curiosity. His gaze drifted about the portion of the estate visible to him. Although centered in Vanderling Estates, the place didn’t quite belong, although it once must have been the hallmark of swank for neighbors to try and rival. The house was huge Normandy; the grounds were far flung; but the present-day details added up to a note of desertion and decay. The driveway was potholed; the hedges were raggedly untrimmed; the sweeping lawn was freckled with spots of brown; and the house itself was flecking paint and supporting guttering that was rotting away and hanging loose in spots.

  An old recluse, Marley thought.

  His eyes held on the brass marker beside the delivery entrance. The metal was slightly green with mold, but he could still make out the number: 341 Vanderling Boulevard. And the name: Vanderling.

  No less. Same name as the rigidly rest
ricted, old-family subdivision itself.

  He saw a light flare in an upstairs window. It burned briefly, while the old woman returned to bed. Then the house was once more in stygian gloom—except for the single candle burning behind the tall, arched window downstairs.

  The next evening, in a brief lull between periods of greasy-water-to-the-elbows, Marley mentioned to the chef, “Who’s the old biddy in 341, right down the boulevard?”

  “Wassa mat?”

  “Curious, that’s all. Wondered if she ever comes to the club for dinner. Bet she once did—sweeping like a princess royal.”

  The chef had no imagination or curiosity whatever. “You gotta time to yap-yap-yap, the mop, she’sa waiting.”

  As Marley drove home that night, he slowed the car to a crawl at 341 Vanderling Boulevard. No ghostly figures tonight. Nothing, except the still-life of a gloomy old mansion, the firefly of a candle glowing behind a front window. He wondered how many nights a candle had burned there, and why.

  * * * *

  The next day he arrived at the country club half an hour early. He sauntered over to the ivy-grown pro shop, fifty yards from the old-English motif of the main clubhouse. The gnarled, leathery old man—Lemuel, he was called—was coming from the barn where groundskeeping equipment was housed. In luck, Marley thought. Lemuel had spaded, clipped, mowed, pruned, planted for more years on the golf course than anyone could remember. His and Marley’s paths had crossed occasionally when Lemuel, taking old-employee privileges, would come through the rear door of the kitchen and fill a plate and retire to a stool in the far corner to chomp his meal. Marley rather liked the old cuss because nothing or nobody, including the chef, fazed Lemuel.

  Today, in the shadows of the pro shop, Marley said his most pleasant hello, and Lemuel paused, wiping his creased, weathered face with a huge red bandanna. “How goes the pearl-diving?”

  “Greasy,” Marley said, “like always. How about a Coke?”

  Lemuel flicked surprise through sun-bleached brows. He and Marley had often spoken pleasantly enough, and they shared the unspoken bonds of menial jobs, but this was the first time Marley had extended such an invitation.