Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  So we sat in silence for what seemed a very long time, and then I asked her to please tell me what I had done wrong. I suppose I was still thinking of my ineffectualness with the two goons at Captain Blood’s, was thinking that if only I had behaved in a more manly fashion, this might not be happening now, I would not now be sitting in an air-conditioned living room listening to a woman telling me she no longer wanted or needed me while outside the pool rippled a sparkling blue under a starless night. She told me I hadn’t done anything wrong, it was just that she’d fallen in love, and I interrupted immediately to say, “I thought you loved me,” and she said, quietly and calmly, “I never told you that, Matthew,” which was the truth; we had never exchanged the words “I love you.”

  This seemed in retrospect a serious oversight, so I told her at once that she knew I loved her, and that I thought she loved me, otherwise what had it all been about these past seventeen months, eighteen months, however the hell long it had been? She said it had all been about sex. I denied that. She repeated it. “Sex, Matthew.” And then she went into a sort of rhapsodic reverie about this new man she’d found, whose name I still didn’t know, and possibly didn’t want to know, telling me about all his virtues and even his faults, of which she was well aware, but they didn’t matter, the faults. She was in love with him, and he’d asked her to marry him, and she’d accepted, and that was that.

  I fell back on the cheap male strategy of trying to work her into bed, figuring that if I could get her in bed just one more time, hold her in my arms, kiss her, make love to her, she would realize what an important relationship she was throwing away. I reminded her of all the good times we’d shared, and of how passionate our lovemaking had been—didn’t she remember that first time at her house on Whisper Key, didn’t she remember all the other times, didn’t she remember Mexico and the few ecstatic days we’d spent down there, didn’t any of it mean anything at all to her? She was very quiet for a very long time, and then she said, “It meant a lot to me, Matthew. I’ll never forget it. But I’m marrying Jim.”

  And with his name out in the open, with his name falling leadenly into my own air-conditioned living room, it all became a reality, and I knew that indeed she had done what she had planned to do from the very start of the night, she had effectively and irrevocably ended it. When the taxi driver honked his horn outside, I was thinking about her taking off that sequined slipper and coming to my defense earlier, when all we had to worry about was assault and battery. She said, “There’s my taxi,” or something like that, and she just shook her head sadly, and went to the door and opened it, and waved out at the driver, and I followed her to the door, and she touched my bruised cheek with her hand and said, “Good-bye, Matthew,” and kissed me on the cheek and said, “I’m sorry,” and then turned swiftly and went running up the walk to the waiting taxi, and I didn’t know whether she’d meant she was sorry I’d been beaten up or sorry she was ending it this way.

  I sat there drinking. I guess I fell asleep right where I was sitting. I feel certain I didn’t pass out, I simply fell asleep.

  The phone woke me up.

  I blinked at the sunlight outside the sliding glass door. It was Tuesday morning, the ninth day of August. I looked at the clock on the wall over the stereo equipment. A few minutes past seven. The phone kept ringing. Dale! I thought. She’s changed her mind!

  I stood up abruptly and felt a sharp pain at the base of my skull. For an instant I didn’t move. The room swam dizzily and then came into sharp focus again. The phone was still ringing insistently. I went into the kitchen and yanked the receiver from the wall hook.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Matthew?” A man’s voice. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “Who’s this?” I said.

  “Morrie Bloom.”

  Detective Morris Bloom of the Calusa Police Department. I figured he had come into work early this morning and seen the uniformed cop’s report, and seen my name on it, and was calling now to find out how I was.

  “How are you?” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. I did not feel okay.

  “I’m sorry to be calling you so early,” he said, “but I’ve been working on this all night, and I waited till what I thought was a respectable hour.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. Seven a.m. did not seem like a respectable hour.

  “Matthew, we caught a homicide at a little past ten o’clock last night,” he said. “Condo out on Stone Crab, multiple stab wounds, kid named Jack McKinney, does the name ring a bell?”

  “Yes,” I said. “A homicide, did you say?”

  “Yeah. Reason I’m calling, we found your business card in his wallet. Was he a client, Matthew?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “What were you handling for him?”

  “A real-estate transaction.”

  “Here in Calusa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Matthew, I know this is an imposition, but I wonder if you could come down here and fill me in on the details? We want to get a fast start on this one, maybe get a few steps ahead of whoever did it.”

  “I just woke up,” I said.

  “How long will it take you to wash and dress?” Bloom asked.

  “Morrie, I’m not feeling too hot this morning—”

  “Jack McKinney feels even worse,” Bloom said. “Can you do me the favor, Matthew?”

  “Give me an hour or so,” I said.

  “I’ll see you,” Bloom said, and hung up.

  His eyes opened wide the moment he saw my face.

  My own eyes had opened just as wide when I’d seen myself in the shaving mirror forty minutes earlier. Or at least as wide as I could open them, considering that they were puffed and discolored and looked a lot like the poisonous men-of-war that sometimes washed up on Calusa’s beaches.

  “What the hell happened to you?” he said.

  I told him all about Charlie and Jeff.

  “Did you report it?” he said. He meant to the police. Since he was the police, it hadn’t been necessary for him to elaborate.

  I told him I’d reported it.

  “What was the responding officer’s name?” he asked.

  I told him I didn’t remember.

  “I’ll check the Activity Report spindle,” he said, “make sure it’s followed up.”

  I thanked him.

  “Fucking Wild West down here, huh?” he said, and shook his head.

  I hadn’t seen him since November, when our separate professions had thrown us together on a case he still referred to as “the Beauty and the Beast mess,” but which I always thought of as “the George Harper tragedy.” He seemed to have lost a great deal of weight. Bloom was six feet three inches tall, a heavyset man with the oversize knuckles of a street fighter and a fox face with a nose that had been broken more than once. He had shaggy black eyebrows and dark brown eyes that almost always seemed on the imminent edge of tears—a bad failing for a cop. But the last time I’d seen him, he had to have weighed at least two hundred and thirty pounds, and he didn’t look anywhere near that now.

  “So how are you?” he said. “Otherwise.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Otherwise. And you?”

  “Much better now,” he said.

  “Now?”

  “I got hepatitis just before Passover,” he said. “Jews aren’t supposed to eat shellfish, am I right? It’s in the dietary laws. So what does the good Jew, Morris Bloom, do? He eats shellfish. Clams on the half-shell, to be exact. I been eating them all my life, don’t tell my rabbi. Only this time, bingo—hepatitis. Type A. I was sick as a dog. I wanted to die. Fever every goddamn day for a full month. I lost thirty pounds, can you believe it? I’m thinking of writing a book called The Hepatitis Diet, you think it might sell? How do I look? I look better, don’t I? I weigh an even two hundred now, I could be a fashion model. Who makes more money, fashion models or guys who write diet books? Cops sure don’t,” he said, and grinned. “It’s good to see you, Matthew. I’m sor
ry I called so early—”

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “I wouldn’ta called at all if I’d known about your trouble last night. I’ll have all the blues looking for those punks, we’ll find them, don’t worry. Charlie and Jeff, huh? Sounds like a pair of vaudeville comics. Some comics. They did a nice job on you, Matthew. I’ll have to teach you to fight dirty.”

  “I’d love to learn,” I said.

  “Are you serious? Come down the gym one night, I’ll kick you in the balls a few times. Are you serious?”

  “I’m very serious.”

  “Good, we’ll make a date. About McKinney,” he said. “I just got a call from the coroner’s office, they’ll be sending the written report up later. McKinney was stabbed or slashed fourteen times, somebody did a very nice job on him, I can tell you that. What do you know about him, Matthew? I’d appreciate anything you can tell me. When did you last see him? Because in police work, when we catch a homicide, there’s a rule we follow, we call it the twenty-four P-and-P—does this sort of stuff interest you?”

  “It does.”

  “’Cause some people it doesn’t,” Bloom said. “What it is, P-and-P stands for past and present. The first thing we try to do is track down the past twenty-four hours in the victim’s life, because that way we can work up a timetable on where he went and who he saw and what he did and maybe get a lead that way. That’s the twenty-four past. At the same time, we try to work as fast as we can in the twenty-four hours following the murder—that’s the twenty-four present—because that’s the only time we’ve got a slight edge. The killer hasn’t had time to cover too many tracks, he doesn’t know how much we already know, or even if we’ve found the body yet. Like that. Very important time, those first twenty-four hours. After that, it can get mighty cold mighty fast, Matthew, even down here where you can melt like a snowman. The Twenty-four P-and-P, live and learn, am I right? Did you see McKinney anytime during the past twenty-four hours?”

  “I saw him last Friday at two o’clock.”

  “Okay, tell me about it,” Bloom said. “You won’t mind if I make a few notes, will you?”

  I told him about it.

  Jack McKinney had come into my office sometime in July, recommended by a friend for whom we’d handled a disability claim. McKinney was twenty years old; I’d specifically asked him because he looked much younger, and I wanted to make certain he was legally of age to make a binding contract. In the state of Florida, you’re considered legally capable of making an enforceable contract once you reach the age of eighteen. McKinney showed me his driver’s license to prove that he was indeed twenty, and then he explained that he’d made a handshake deal with a farmer out on Timucuan Point Road to purchase fifteen acres of land midway between Calusa and Ananburg. The farmer’s name was Avery Burrill, and his crop was snapbeans; young Jack McKinney wanted to become a snapbean farmer.

  He told me what the purchase price was—forty thousand dollars—and said he wanted to close the deal as soon as possible, before Burrill changed his mind. Because of the boy’s extreme youth, and because I’d never heard of snapbean farming in this part of the state, I called a man named John Porter, the county extension agent, to get his opinion. Porter informed me that snapbeans were grown mostly on the east coast, in Palm Beach County, and also in South Dade County, in the Homestead area. On the central west coast, here in Calusa, the truck crops were tomatoes, strawberries, escarole, chicory, beets, and some Chinese cabbage—but not snapbeans. He then surprised me by asking if this had anything to do with a man named Avery Burrill.

  It seemed that Burrill had come to him some three years back, asking pretty much the same questions I was asking now. Burrill’s idea had been to start small, planting his fifteen acres in snapbean bushes, and then selling his product only to local markets. Porter had told him that snapbeans could be grown here, but that they did better in organic soil. Moreover, the reason they were grown primarily on the East Coast was that the technology for harvesting and marketing was there, and here in Calusa he’d have no access to machines and his harvesting costs would double because he’d have to hand-harvest.

  He’d gone on to break down for Burrill what the actual pre-harvesting costs—feed, fertilizer, spraying and dusting, repairs and maintenance, licenses and insurance, and so on—would be, and these came to something like $450 per acre per year. Added to these would be his harvesting and marketing costs—picking and packing, containers, handling, brokerage fees, and so on—which would come to $228 per acre per year, for a total operating cost of $678 a year. Burrill could expect a yield of eighty-five bushels per acre, and he could expect to realize gross receipts of $804 per acre. When he deducted his operating costs of $678 per acre, this would leave only $126 per acre, from which he would have to subtract return to capital, management fees, interest, and whatnot. In short, a snapbean farm in this part of Florida would be a losing proposition, and Porter had told that to Burrill as clearly and succinctly as he knew how. Burrill had gone ahead anyway, and—as predicted—had gone under. And now he was trying to sell his losing proposition to a twenty-year-old kid who didn’t know snapbeans from snapdragons.

  I called McKinney as soon as I had this information.

  I told him exactly what I’d learned, and I advised him against making the purchase. McKinney told me the same thing Burrill had told Porter three years ago: he knew how to make snapbean farming profitable in this part of the country. I gave him the facts and figures. I told him there was no way he could make it work. But he insisted that I call Burrill’s lawyer to confirm the details of the deal, and there was nothing I could do to persuade him otherwise. McKinney had come to my office to sign the contract last Friday. At that time, he brought with him four thousand dollars in cash, the ten-percent deposit required by Burrill. I asked him at that time if he would need a mortgage or other financial assistance to meet the balance due on the closing date. He told me he had the $36,000 in cash and that he would bring it with him to the closing. I suggested that he bring instead either a certified check or a cashier’s check. When I told him we should insist on a week or ten days to inspect the plumbing, heating, and electrical systems in the farmhouse, he told me he would waive such inspection. I’d insisted, however, on an exterminator’s inspection for termites and other pests. Pending the customary title examination and tax search, the closing had been set for the second day of September.

  That was it.

  “Four thousand in cash, huh?” Bloom said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Against a forty-thousand-dollar purchase price.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he said he was going to pay the balance in cash, too?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “On my block, that’s a lot of money, Matthew.”

  “On my block, too.”

  “Where’d a twenty-year-old kid get forty thousand dollars to spend on a farm?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Big money,” Bloom said thoughtfully. “What’s the first thing that comes to your mind, Matthew?”

  “Inheritance,” I said.

  “That’s the difference between a lawyer and a cop,” Bloom said. “First thing comes to my mind is narcotics.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Only because this is Florida, and the kid was murdered. He didn’t say where he got that kind of money, huh?”

  “He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask.”

  “Twenty years old,” Bloom said, “he’s got forty thousand dollars in cash. You know what I had when I was twenty? A suit with two pair of pants, and one pair had a hole in them. Who knows nowadays? How’d he strike you, this kid? What was your impression of him?”

  “He was well dressed, both times I saw him. Jacket and tie, looked very preppy, in fact. Dark hair, brown eyes, well built—looked like an athlete. Or at least someone who used his body a lot and took good care of it.”

  “What address did he give you? Did he give you a hom
e address?”

  “I don’t remember it offhand. It was out on Stone Crab Key. He said he was living in a condo out on Stone Crab.”

  “You know how much that condo was costing him, Matthew? The one where we found him dead last night? He was renting it for twelve hundred clams a—God forgive me, I’ll never mention clams again as long as I live. Twelve hundred a month. The resident manager said he’d been living there since the beginning of June, renting from a guy up in Pittsburgh. That’s already thirty-six hundred he’s laid out since June, not to mention the security deposit. He was pretty rich, this kid, huh?”

  “I would guess so.”

  “I wonder how he got so rich,” Bloom said. “Maybe that’s what the killer was after. The apartment was a shambles, clothes thrown all over the floor, upholstery slashed, bed tossed—looks to me like somebody was searching for something. Maybe it was the thirty-six K, huh? And maybe he found it. The cash McKinney would have needed at the closing. You said it was set for next month sometime, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. September second.”

  “Mm,” Bloom said, and nodded. “Well, I’ll be going out to talk to his mother in just a little while, her name was in his address book. I’ll let you know if the kid came into any big money recently.” He smiled and said, “You think he won the sweepstakes, maybe?”

  My partner Frank said it served me right. My partner Frank said it did not pay to get into fights over women. My partner Frank also said Dale was probably asking for it, the way she was dressed, which almost got my partner Frank into a fight with me, and over a woman at that.