“Boo Waxwell picked her up at the motel. Arthur went to Waxwell’s place at Goodland and found her there. Boo beat him badly. I jounced Crane Watts around first. I used his name to open Waxwell up. I invented the yarn that Arthur had gone to Watts and told him he’d seen Wilma at Waxwell’s. I said I was trying to set up a similar kind of operation to the way you cleaned Arthur out, and needed the woman. He claimed, wide-eyed, it was a little ol’ waitress friend from Miami. But Arthur remembers Wilma wearing the watch he thought she’d sold in Miami. He wouldn’t invent that. And, of course, he has all his new toys.”
Stebber nodded slowly. “Her usual type. A little more complex, probably. Whenever she tamed them, that finished it for her. I tried to keep him away from Arthur’s beach house while we were still building the con. Hard man to control. Yes. Of course. It fits. She wouldn’t have waved the money at him. He smelled it somehow.”
Debra knocked and appeared with a blue extension phone. “Crane Watts,” she said. “Do you want to take it in here, darling?”
“Or take it at all? Please.” She stooped lithely, plugged it into a baseboard jack receptacle, brought it to him and drifted out.
In full heat and radiance he said, “How nice to hear from you, Crane, my boy! … Start from the beginning. Slow down, boy.… Yes … I see … Please, no assumptions. Confine yourself to the facts.”
Watts talked for a long time without interruption. Stebber made a sad face at me. Finally he said, “That’s enough. Do pull yourself together. No person named McGee or named anything else has tried to contact me on that matter. Why should you think in terms of an official investigation? As a lawyer you must know it was a legal business matter. This McGee is probably some sharpshooter who found out Arthur had lost some money in an unwise investment and is trying to shake some of it loose. Tell Waxwell too that neither of you should be so agitated. Please don’t phone me again. I retained you for legal work. It’s finished. So is our association.”
He listened for a short time and said, “The status of your career could not mean less to me, Watts. Please don’t bother me again.”
As he returned the phone to the cradle I could hear the frantic tiny buzzing of Crane’s agitated voice. Frowning, Stebber said, “Strange that Waxwell should be so eager to bully my phone number out of Watts. He says he gave him the number but not the code—as if he expected congratulations. I would think, if your guess is right, I’d be the last person he’d …”
Changing the pitch and resonance of my voice, I said, “Ol’ Boo make that lawyer boy itchy.”
It astounded and delighted him out of all proportion to the accomplishment. Patience and a good tape recorder can make a respectable mimic out of anyone.
“Maybe someday we could find a project to our mutual advantage,” he said.
“I can think of one right now. Decoy Waxwell up here and keep him here for one full day and I send you ten percent of all we recover.”
“No thanks. I don’t think the man is entirely sane. And he goes by hunch. I wouldn’t risk it. Decoy him with a woman, McGee. The McCall girl could keep him occupied long enough.”
“Let’s say she’s squeamish, Stebber. Loan me Debra for the same cut. Ten percent.”
“I wouldn’t consider it for one …” He stopped suddenly. His shy glance was more obscene than any wink or leer could have been. “If you could have her back in three days. And … if you could leave Miss McCall here with me. As a guarantee of good faith.”
“How bulky would the money be?”
“New hundreds in Federal Reserve wrappers. Thirteen packets, one hundred bills thick. Perhaps not quite enough to fill a fair-sized shoebox. You didn’t answer my question about Miss … Chookie.”
“Given a choice, given time to think, I imagine she’d pick Boo Waxwell.”
“Why give her a choice, dear boy? You’d find Debra charming company. And I can assure you few men make the impact on her you’ve already made. And when you get Miss Chookie McCall back, you’d find her quite anxious to be agreeable, and not at all contentious. Truly effective disciplines, McGee, leave the loveliness untouched and the soul just an interestingly bit queasy and apprehensive. It’s a superimposed useful anxiety.”
“Speaking for Miss McCall, no thanks.”
“Someday, perhaps,” he said and went and called the girls. They came walking slowly back into the big room, and I saw Chook wearing an odd expression, Debra looking secretively amused.
They both walked us out to the elevator, all charm and assurance, convincing us we were lovely people who had stopped in for a lovely drink. As the elevator door closed, my final look at them showed their gracious smiles, the smiles of an elegant couple, tastefully appointed, mannerly. And virulent as coral snakes.
Chook stayed lost in her silence and did not explode until we were a half mile away. “Girl talk! Girl talk! do you know what that skinny bitch was doing? She was trying to … to recruit me. Like a gawdam Marine poster. See the world. Learn a trade. Retire in your prime.”
“Recruit you as what?”
“She didn’t say right out. She inspected me like a side of meat and said I was prime. Too bad I was wasting myself in such hard work for so little money. Damn it, I make good money. Men, she said, the right kind of men, could get so expensively intrigued with a big, dark, fierce-looking girl like me. And that man, Trav. He made me feel weak and silly and young, and he made me feel anxious to make him like me. At first. But at the end there, I was thinking how nice it would be to squash him like a bug. They scare me, Trav. In a way I don’t think I’ve been scared since I was a kid, when my grandmother got me so worked up about white slavers, if I saw two men standing on a street corner, I’d cross the street so they couldn’t jab me with a needle and sell me to the Arabs. Trav, if we have to have anything to do with those people, something really awful might happen. My God, Trav, you should see the clothes she’s got. Furs and originals and nine drawers of undies and a shoe rack, I swear to God, with a hundred pair of shoes at least. And all the time she was kind of laughing at me inside, as if I was a dumb oaf of a girl, a nudnik. What happened, Travis?”
“In short form, he confirms the hunch Waxwell killed her. She was carrying her share and his of Arthur’s money. She was to put his end in a Nassau bank account. A hundred and thirty thousand dollars. I think he already had taken a fat slice of the rest of it. Everybody else had been paid off. But he writes her off and the money off. He wants no part of it. He says. Maybe I believe him. I don’t know. He might send somebody down. We have to play it that way.”
“A hundred and thirty thousand!” she exclaimed.
“Less what old Boo has blown, rough guess, eighty-five or ninety left.”
“But that’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t that better than anything you expected?”
“Putting my hands on any part of it, Chook, is going to be better than I expected. And I haven’t done that yet.”
Twelve
It was after nine at night when I parked at the marina and we went aboard the Busted Flush. No light showed. I had the irrational hunch that something had gone wrong. Maybe I had been exposed to too much calculated deviousness for one day. But as I flicked the lounge lights on, there was Arthur slouched on the big yellow couch. He had a tall glass in his hand, dark enough for iced coffee. He gave us a big crooked glassy grin, hoisted the glass in such an enthusiastic salute of welcome that a dollop of it leapt out and splashed his shirt. “Warra sharra numun!” he said.
Chook stood over him, fists on her hips. “Oh boy! You’ve done it real good, huh?”
“Shawara dummen huzzer,” he said, in pleased explanation.
She took the glass out of his hand, sniffed it, set it aside. She turned to me. “As you remember, it doesn’t take much. The poor silly. It was such a strain to be shut up here all this time.” She took his wrist, braced herself. “Upsy-daisy, darling.”
She got him up but with a wide loving grin, he enfolded her in big arms and, utterly slack, bore her over and down w
ith a mighty thud of their combined weights. Chook worked free and stood up, rubbing a bruised haunch. Arthur, still smiling, cheek resting on his forearm, emitted a low buzzing snore.
“At least,” she said. “It’s not what I’m used to. A happy drunk.”
Between us we stood him up, draped him soddenly over my shoulder. I dumped him into the big bed. “Thanks, Trav. I’ll manage from here,” she said, and began to unbutton his shirt, looking up from the task to give me a slightly rueful smile. “Rich warm memories of Frankie Durkin,” she said. “But there the trick was to keep from getting a split mouth or a fat eye before he folded.”
Up on the sundeck I heard the sound of the shower, and a little while later she came climbing up into the night warmth in her robe, bringing two beers.
“Rockaby baby,” she said. “Tomorrow he’ll be a disaster area.” She sat beside me. “And what now, Captain?”
“Confusion. I was thinking that, at the right distance, in the right garments, you might pass as Vivian Watts, tennis player. And if Viv left a message for old Boo to join her in assignation at some far place, it might intrigue him. But it won’t fit together. The odds are she despises Waxwell and he knows it. Then it struck me that she could properly blame Waxwell for her husband’s downhill slide. And she might leap at the chance to give him a bruise if there was a chance of a piece of money to square all overdue accounts and have enough left over to move along to a place where Crane Watts could start all over again. That means sounding her out. Quietly and soon. But with something specific. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.”
“Hmm. And Waxwell would think it fishy if she made a play. But he does have … a certain interest in her?”
“Avid.”
“What if he found out somehow that she had left her husband and gone off someplace alone to think things out, all alone in some hideaway place, away from people. A place hard to get to. She wouldn’t be there, of course, but it would take him a long time to get there and find out and get back.”
“And when he got back and found out he’d been cleaned out, who would he go after first, Chook? That isn’t a happy thought.”
“See what you mean. But what if she and her husband got all set to take off, so then you could give them some of the money and they’d be gone before he got back?”
“And if I can’t find the money?”
“Then he wouldn’t have much to be sore about, would he?”
“And she could say that she started off and changed her mind and came back to her husband. If he asks. You have a talent for this, Miss Chookie.”
“Thanks a lot. Trav, I don’t see how you can expect to find it, even if you had a whole day.”
“I have an idea about that. Remember the story of Bluebeard?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ll tell you if it works.”
“And you have to think of a place she might be likely to go. And some way of getting the word to Boone Waxwell. And you have to talk her into it in the first place.”
“I think she’s desperate. I think she’s ready to try anything. And she would be the logical one to ask about a place she might go. Meanwhile, playing it by ear, we’ve got ourselves located on the wrong square on this board maybe. Maybe not. Hell, I guess not. With the car, and with the little boat at Naples, maybe right on the edge of the board is the best square to occupy.”
“And you’ll use Arthur somehow, dear? Some safe way?”
“I promise.”
She patted my arm. “Thank you very much. Do men’s work. Leave the lady home to give tearful thanks at the safe return.”
“I can’t take him with me tomorrow. Or you. Not for the morning mission.”
“What is it?”
“I want to see if the Bluebeard idea is any good before I take the Viv idea any further.”
Tuesday morning at nine thirty, from a gas station a quarter mile from the junior high school, I phoned the administration office and asked to speak to Cindy Ingerfeldt. A woman with a tart, skeptical voice said, “This is the next to the last day of exams. I can check to see if she is taking an examination or if she is in a study period, but I shall have to know who you are and the purpose of the call.”
“The name is Hooper, ma’m. Field investigator for State Beverage Control. I’ll have to ask you to keep that confidential. The girl could have some useful information. Could you give me a rundown on her, what kind of a kid she is?”
“I … I don’t imagine you’ll find her cooperative. Cindy is quite mature for her age. A very indifferent student. She’s just marking time here, as so many of them are. I take it her home life is not too pleasant. She’s not a popular child. She keeps to herself. She’s tidy about her person, and would be really quite pretty if she lost some weight. Mr. Hooper, if you want to interrogate the child, you could come here and I could turn over a private office to you.”
“I’d rather not do it that way, ma’m. Word could get back to some pretty rough people. I wouldn’t want to cause her that kind of trouble. That’s why I ask you kindly to keep this to yourself.”
“Oh dear. Is the child … involved in anything?”
“Nothing like that, ma’m. You know, if you really want to cooperate, rather than me trying to get anything out of her over the phone, I’d appreciate it if you could just make some reason to send her down the road to the Texaco Station. I won’t take much of her time, and send her right back.”
“Well … let me check her schedule.” About a full minute later, as I stared through the booth glass at the distant building and the ranks of yellow buses behind it, she came back on the line and said in a conspiratorial way, “She’ll finish her History test at ten. I think the most inconspicuous way would be for me to go and see her in person as she comes out, and I will send her along then. Will that be all right?”
“Just fine, and I certainly do appreciate your cooperation.”
At a few minutes before ten, I moved the car, parked it fifty yards closer to the school, aimed in the direction of the gas station. At a few minutes after ten I saw her in the rear-vision mirror, trudging along toward me, both arms hugging a stack of books to her bosom. She wore a green striped cotton blouse, salmon-colored pants that ended halfway between knee and ankle, white sneakers. When she was near enough, I reached over and swung the door open, saying, “Good morning, Cindy.”
She stared at me, came slowly toward the car, stopped a few feet away. “Oh. You, huh.” She appraised me with those wise old eyes. “What’s on your mind?”
“Get in.”
“Lissen, if Sunday give you any ideas, forget it. I don’t know you, I’m not in the mood, and I got enough problems, mister.”
“I want to fix ol’ Boo’s wagon, Cindy. And he’ll never know you were involved in any way. I just want to ask some questions. Get in and we’ll drive around and I’ll drop you off right here in fifteen minutes.”
“What makes you think I should want to mess Boo up someways?”
“Let’s just say you could be doing your father a favor.”
She pursed her small mouth, gave a half shrug and climbed in. She plunked her books on the seat between us and said, “No driving around. Go like I tell you.”
Her directions were terse and lucid. They took us three blocks over, two blocks to the left, and into a sheltered grove with picnic tables and fireplaces, willows thick around a pond. When I turned the engine off she sighed, undid a button of her blouse, poked two fingers into her bra, squirmed slightly, and pulled out a wilted cigarette and a kitchen match. She popped the match a-flame with a deft thumbnail, drew deeply, exhaled a long gray plume that bounced off the inside of the windshield.
“How’d you get old Mossbutt to leave me loose?”
“I said it was official. Beverage Control investigation. When you go back she’ll want to know. Tell her Mr. Hooper said not to talk about it to anybody.”
“That your name?”
“No.”
“Is it o
fficial?”
“What do you think, Cindy?”
“Prolly not.”
“You’re right. Sunday you gave me the impression you wish Waxwell was out of your life. Was that an act?”
“I don’t know. Guess not. If he wasn’t so damn mean. And not so old. Don’t take me no place. Miami he keeps saying. Sure. I should live so long. The way it goes, shit, I’ve gotta make some kind of move myself, because I hang around, it’s going to be the same, no matter what. A bunch of the kids, they got a chance to bus up and work tobacco in Connecticut this summer. Working hard and being far away, I could get over being so hooked, maybe. Goddam mean old man, he is.”
The last drag drew the fire line down close to her thumb. She snapped the butt out the window, holding her breath, then exhaled, openmouthed. She turned toward me and rested her plump cheek on the seat back. “What d’ya wanna know?”
“Do you know Boo murdered a woman out there at his place last year?”
She hooded her eyes, examined a thumbnail, nibbled the corner of it. “Friend a yours?”
“No. Just the opposite. It didn’t seem to surprise you.”
“I guess I had the feeling something happened. She a midget or something?”
“That’s a funny question.”
“There was some black lace panties I tried to get on. I’m fat but not that fat. I busted them trying. When I asked too many times he popped me on top of the head with his fist so hard I got sick an heaved up.”
“She was a very small woman. I understand he makes you work around the place.”
“Oh Christ, I don’t mind that. He lives like a hog. It’s just he won’t let me keep ahead of it. He lets it go, then it’s twice as much work.”
“Is he always there when you’re cleaning up?”
“When I’m there, he’s there. What he says, I ever come around when he’s gone, or come without him calling me, he’s got something special he’s saving for a big surprise. I’m not fixing to get any surprise from him for sure.”
“All right, when you are cleaning the place, is there any particular part of the house he won’t let you touch?”
Bright Orange for the Shroud Page 17