"You think pretty well for a woman. Considering the odd circumstances. You're plenty woman, Serena Savage."
"Am I?" She almost glared at me as she flung the words back in my face. "I feel like a fugitive from a laughing academy. When I got into that bait shack, looking for a free handout and anything, I really almost went into a dead faint. I found Constant Smith lying on the floor with a knife sticking out of his back. He was dead. Funny, me not passing out. I never could stand the sight of blood. But there it was. Smith—a knife sticking out of him, one of those knives I saw Artie Sothern cutting bait with once—and even as I stood there, it all came to me in a flash. I've never considered myself any kind of a thinker. No—really I haven't. But it all came back. Madame Roti, all the talk about secret underwater people and the awful business about a hijacking racket of some kind using pretty girls as a lure. It struck me that Harry Healey could have killed Smith in a rage or some kind of crazy mood. But it also occurred to me that the simplest way of covering your tracks would be to involve the man who got away in a murder so that nobody could believe anything he might have said about what he saw. Does that make sense?"
"You mean you think they wanted everybody to think that Artie could have drowned accidentally and that Harry, upset about his death, could have killed Smith? Sure—especially if they were going to stay in business with the same operation. It could add up that way. Especially with a convenient Doc Ponto around to report officially that Mr. Healey has been acting strangely of late. Strikes me, though, it all would have been much simpler if they had scuttled The Naked Lady the very first time they saw it instead of letting it come back pilotless like that and you doing the disappearing act."
She frowned. "I've thought and thought about that too. It really doesn't make sense, does it?"
"No. Why did they drown Artie and then put him back on board like that? A drowned man makes much better sense being found in the water or washing ashore someplace."
She groped for a fresh cigarette. This time I lit it for her and fired one of my own. She passed a fevered hand across her superb brow. Garbo never looked better doing it.
"Maybe they didn't plan it that way. Maybe the ship was carried off by a fresh wind or something . . ."
I snorted. I couldn't help myself. " . . . and went right back to its home dock, maybe twenty miles away, like a homing pigeon or a hunting dog? No dice, Serena. There's a better answer than that someplace. But we'll let it lay for the time being. Get back to Smith and the body."
She nodded and fingered a shred of tobacco from between her red lips. "I panicked then. I ran. Like a thief. There were some bills in a tin box on the table. I took them and got out of there. There's a highway going into Melona about half a mile down the shore from Key Alma. I got a ride into town from a gas truck. The driver was a nice guy. No bum jokes, no passes. Even wanted to stake me to a meal. I wasn't hungry. There had been about eighteen dollars in that tin box. It was enough for a hotel room and a few simple clothes. Then I made a collect phone call to my mother and father in Branford, asking for some money. You know the story. I wanted to make it on my own—my folks are well off. Dad's a peach. Never asks embarrassing questions. They sent me a thousand dollars by return wire. And all the time I was worried sick. I was sure they'd come for me—that they had spies everywhere—the people. The water people. I was sure every breath I was taking might be my last. I was long past caring about what had happened to Artie and Harry and that partner of theirs. I felt like Alice wandering into the looking glass. Funny thing about being afraid. It makes you feel like you're ten years old again. Doesn't it, Ed?"
"All the time. So you were going to go back to civilization, mark the whole episode off as a bad time and start new again. What made you change your mind?"
She got up out of the butterfly chair for the first time since her recital began and stretched her arms. When they came down out of the stretch, she hugged herself. A complete waste of time, person and womanpower. And manpower. I would have enjoyed soothing her.
"Do you believe any of what I've told you, Ed?"
"All of it. I can't afford not to. Not after what happened in my building today. And there is the evidence of the manuscript, no matter how crazy it reads."
Soberly, she nodded again.
"That's what brought me back into the thing. The manuscript. You see, there I was. All dressed up again, with a thousand dollars of my parents' love, ready to go back to New York as you said. I wanted no further connection with those weird goings-on down at Skeleton Key. I wanted to fade back into the wallpaper, you might say. I was dreaming with my eyes wide open. A thing like this, as big as this turned out to be, wouldn't have permitted me to take off on my own. How could it? I didn't know it then but millions of dollars were involved—no, that's not right, billions! And all because of one Harry Healey."
"You're getting to the main feature, at last?"
"Yes. There was a knock at my hotel room door and I answered it, as frightened as I was. It was Harry Healey, looking sad and used-up and tired. He wasn't mad. He hadn't come to wring my neck. He simply wanted a place to hide and think before the police asked him a thousand questions. You see, he'd gotten back to the shack and found Smith's body after leaving Doc Ponto. He found the rifled tin box too and I'd left tracks all over the shack for him to find. My wet footprints and fingerprints were all over the place. I'd even managed to drop a few loose blond hairs crouching near Smith's body. Oh, he could have thought that Smith was killed for the money in the box, but with what had been happening to Healey-Sothern lately, he didn't think so. It was no trick at all to follow my trail down the highway to Melona. After all, a long-legged blonde in a sarong isn't exactly nondescript. He was upset, as I said, not vindictive, and once we swapped stories he realized I was telling the truth and we both had stumbled onto something big. We didn't know what—just that it was big. He expected the local law to come looking for him as the killer of Smith, but that day he didn't care. He was whipped and beaten and miserable about Artie. So I let him stay. Funny thing about people in the same kind of trouble, Ed. We kind of drifted together that night. Both of us so glad to be alive I guess instead of down in the cold water. We made love—and somehow that made things a little better."
"I'm with you. It always makes things a little better. But I'm the jealous, imaginative type. Spare me the details. What's the next step in the story?"
She sighed, shaking her head.
"It got worse. The morning papers told how Doc Ponto was run over by a high-powered sports car on Melona's main drag. A tragic accident—and the local law actually believed that Harry Healey was a target, too. With Artie's drowning listed as an accident, too, and Smith's dead body turning up, the cops actually let it out that they believed that Harry had gone out of his mind and was off somewhere on a personal vendetta of some kind trying to hunt down Smith's murderer. Can you top that for logic? When Healey read that, he was convinced that the cops were somehow in cahoots with the strange people who had ruined his life and his business. It was then that he told me that the both of us were going to play dumb and dead until he could think of a good plan to help blow the whole thing sky-high. To bring it out in the open. You see, it was Harry's notion that an organized bunch of racketeers had dreamed up a smart way to hijack all the yachts and rich men's boats that cruise the Florida waters. Sort of a modern piracy set-up. After all, the ocean can hide a lot of things. He didn't buy the notion of an underwater society at all. In spite of what I told him. He was too level-headed, he said, for that."
"And, of course, he wanted to square the death of Artie, personally, I suppose. A man like him would."
"Yes. And for Doc Ponto, too. Harry didn't think of that death as an accident, not for a second. He didn't give a damn about Constant Smith. Smith would have betrayed his own mother for a quarter."
"Okay," I said. "I followed you loud and clear. Now bring it all up to date. When did you and Harry come to the parting of the ways and when did he get around to
writing the manuscript?"
Serena Savage shook herself briefly and then calmly stared me in the eye. The shadowy smile barely touched her lips. For a long moment she considered what she was going to say.
And then she said it.
"This is the part that will be hardest to believe, Ed. Maybe because it's the simplest. The plain unvarnished truth. Harry Healey walked out of the door that same afternoon, to call Washington, he told me. He never came back. A week later he was still gone and there was nothing I could do about it. In the meantime, some five days after he had gone, the manuscript was mailed to me at the hotel. I was all alone. Nobody had come looking for me, not a policeman eyed me suspiciously. So I took the manuscript and came back to New York, stopping off in Washington to place it in the hands of the F.B.I. They didn't tell me whether they believed me or not. They didn't even tell me what to do. Or ask me too many questions. They simply said go on about your business and if we need you again, we'll get in touch with you. That was last summer and I haven't heard a word from them since. Or from Harry Healey. He could be dead, for all I know."
"For all you know." I frowned. I couldn't help it. "Six months ago all this happened, and suddenly Dandy Jaxon is on the scene with Arvis Healey, Harry's daughter, and a little guy named Jesus Killy is dead. Wow. Lady, you sure dumped a jigsaw puzzle into my lap. I don't know what the hell to say or think."
She stared at me. Disbelief was in her eyes.
"But the Government—I don't know who—sent you the manuscript to read? Why? Why now, after all this time has passed? Something must have come up . . ."
"Oh, no," I laughed curtly. "You tell me. You got in touch with me and you know all about Arvis and Dandy and Killy. What gives, Serena fair? Why did everyone come out of the woodwork after all this time?"
"I can't answer that," she murmured. "Honest, I can't."
"No good. Try again. Where do you know these people from? How did you know Jaxon spells his name that way—not with a c k s as you said he always introduced himself."
She looked worried, her eyes going to the door behind her. The green eyes danced. A slow rhumba of fear.
"All right. Arvis Healey hired Dandy Jaxon and Jesus Killy in Miami to help her find her father. They're private detectives—what happened after that I don't know. I didn't know Arvis was in town until you told me about her tonight."
I pyramided my hands. It always helps you keep cool when you know people are lying to you.
"Again, no good. You'll have to do better than that. And why are you suddenly being evasive after spilling like a floodgate? Aren't we on the same side anymore?"
"Ed . . ."
"I like the way you say my name but it won't buy you me being stupid. Give. Don't hold back. If you're worried about Dandy Jaxon, I'll be your protection. I eat clowns like him for breakfast."
"You don't understand . . ." She was all trembly now, like an ingenue in an old Victorian play. "Arvis is an intelligent girl. A fine smart girl. She didn't have enough money to get Jaxon and Killy to spend all their time looking for her father. So she convinced them that Harry's story held the key to a treasure that would make them all rich. You understand? I heard about it when Arvis looked me up last summer and I told her about the manuscript. Arvis knew about me because somewhere along the line she had found a line or two about me in some of Harry's notes which were turned over to her by the Melona authorities after it seemed likely that Harry was dead. So few people had ever known he had a daughter."
"So what's worrying you, Serena? Afraid I wouldn't believe you? I believe you. I can see a girl like Arvis pulling a smart stunt like that with a money-hungry goon like Jaxon. She impressed me that way. So what's so awful?"
Serena Savage laughed harshly.
"I knew you didn't understand my story. None of it. Don't you see? There is an underwater society, there is some mammoth plot of some kind—and if we all don't watch our steps . . . they're going to take over the world. This world, your world, everybody's world—as we know it!"
There was a clock somewhere above the mantelpiece of the imitation fireplace. One of those ormolu jobs that look so damn phony. Copper and gold and time on your hands in an incredibly old-fashioned way. I imagined I heard it ticking, but that was simply the curious effect of Serena Savage's unlevelheaded pronunciamento of doom. Ormolus are pseudo-gold and so are green-eyed liars.
"Hogwash," I said, "with or without salt water. It's just another get-rich-quick scheme, a fast-buck enterprise predicated on the trappings and fixtures of show business. I'm from Missouri by nature, lady, even if I was born in Bellevue Hospital. Hang onto your nail polish and maybe we'll make some sense out of this yet."
She gaped at me, shaking her head. "You really believe what you just said, don't you? In all your primitive, cocksure glory!"
"Yes," I admitted. "I do. What do you want me to do? Plunk down my four bits and buy every mad-scientist yarn I hear?"
"No, but I expect you to appreciate facts and realize—oh, what's the use? What can I expect from a man who earns his living as a private detective? What kind of intellect does it take to perform that kind of a job?"
Before I could offer any of my usual brand of brilliant repartee to a remark well calculated to make me put my teeth together, there was an interruption.
Harry Healey walked out of the bedroom toward the rear and spread his hands helplessly. It had to be Harry Healey. He filled the bill like typecasting for a seaman-hero.
"All right, Noon. You win. It's okay, Serena. I guess we'll have to tell him everything."
Which was fine with me, except he wasn't as helpless as all that.
There was a 9mm Luger in his big right hand.
And it was pointed in my direction, more or less.
The difference in actual inches was still enough to kill me.
"Harry!" Serena blurted in a different kind of voice from the one she had been using on me. "You didn't have to come out and spoil everything. . . ."
"I did have to," Harry Healey said heavily. "Wise up, Serena. Noon's a private detective all right. Just like Dandy Jaxon and Killy. But we'd both be real fools if we thought he was in their class. They're not even in the same league with him. Can't you tell the look of him—the sound of him? The man's a real pro. I intend to treat him like one."
For a long painful moment, Serena Savage and Harry Healey exchanged a glance that had the whole world written in it. Life, death, love—and the right to go on chasing rainbows.
In that interval, I did hear the ticking of the ormolu clock.
INSANITY, INC.
"BUTTON, button," I said sourly, "who's got the button?" I didn't raise my hands the way you're supposed to when someone points a gun at you.
Harry Healey stopped looking at Serena Savage but he didn't lower the Luger either. I didn't hear the clock ticking anymore.
"What's that mean, Noon?"
"You asked me. I'll tell you. You're supposed to be a man who's dead or gone. Serena told me a long long story. I read your own story this morning sometime when it looked like a day like any other day. So now what am I supposed to believe? Who am I supposed to believe? You two look like you've been shacked up for days. Weeks. Months . . . and they only acknowledge the existence of water people in silly places like movie houses. Come on now—what the hell is this all really about?"
He glared at me for that and Serena tried to wither me with a ton of scorn unloading from her green glims. Harry Healey wagged the Luger at me, fingers tightening around the smooth grip.
"You think we're lying, is that it? You think this is some sweet kind of scheme . . ."
"I don't think anything except that there are about fifty things that need explaining."
"Harry," Serena hissed between her teeth. "Don't tell him any more. I've changed my mind. What if he's one of them?"
"Jesus Christ," I snarled. "You going to start that again? What's the matter with you two? Were you born yesterday or do you think I was? Come on—give me credit for a lit
tle sense."
Harry Healey waved Serena's mutters and hisses aside. He eyed me across the distance that separated us. He looked a lot like I had been picturing him. Big, impressive, large hands and shoulders with a weatherbeaten rugged face that was somehow handsome despite the hard times and bad news showing out of it. The sort of man easy to imagine nursing a fatherly feeling for a younger one. A no-nonsense type of the old school who could start a business at Key Alma and make it a going thing. I couldn't figure out if he was also the kind of bird who could invent a fantasy like the manuscript.
"Okay, Noon. You know most of the story now. You call it. You got things bothering you, you ask questions. I'll answer them. Never mind Serena. She'll do what I say."
"I'll count on that. You want questions? I got a zillion of them. For openers, why are you pointing that Luger at me?"
He grinned wryly and lowered it, but he didn't put it away.
"Sorry. I'm jumpy, I guess."
"Fair enough. I can appreciate that. Question two—what are you doing here and how long have you been back with Serena who told me she hadn't laid eyes on you since you disappeared from that hotel—when was it—last May?"
The grin faded and he moved to a large easy chair and sat down in it. He overflowed the thing. Serena made a sound in her throat and then padded out of the room. The Chinese housecoat flashed off shimmering contours. I heard glasses tinkling in the kitchen. Harry Healey smiled at her shapely back fondly before he got back to me.
"I decided to stay undercover—like I was dead—so those damn underwater characters wouldn't bother about me anymore. That way I figured they'd let well enough alone. Hell, they had scratched Serena off their list already. She could have drowned back there off Skeleton Key, for all they knew. But I had already put that story down on paper and sent it to her for safekeeping. I didn't see Serena again until just a month ago when I finally decided things had cooled off enough for me to come back. Besides, I wanted to find out if the damn Government had done anything about my story."
Death Dives Deep Page 6