The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction

by Maxim Jakubowski

  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 c
orridor 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 t
his 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.”