Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  “Let’s make this short and sweet, Mr. Hope,” he said, “I’m a busy man.” His voice was sassafras and molasses with a dash of castor oil thrown in for body and flavor. His eyebrows, I noticed, resembled the squashed bugs on the wallpaper. He was either growing a scraggly pepper-and-salt beard, or else he simply hadn’t bothered to shave for the past several days. He cleared his throat, brought up a great dollop of gloppy brown juice, and fired at the chamber pot again. This time he scored a perfect ten, and grinned in satisfaction. His teeth were the color of cow dung. “State your case,” he said.

  I told him that so far as we’d been able to determine, Jack McKinney had left no will. I told him that according to Florida’s intestate-succession statutes, whatever estate he’d left would go to his mother. I told him, however, that a police check in Calusa, Bradenton, and Sarasota had turned up no bank accounts and that the only assets in McKinney’s estate were his personal belongings and a three-year-old Ford Mustang automobile. I started to tell him that considering the—

  “What about that thirty-six thousand?” Loomis said. “The cash he was supposed to come up with at the closing?”

  “Assuming he was actually in possession of that amount,” I said. “It has not yet been found.”

  “Who looked for it?” Loomis said.

  “I just told you. The police.”

  “Where?”

  “In his apartment. And, as I told you, they ran a routine check on all the banks in—”

  “Did they try the banks here in Ananburg? Or Manakawa? Or Venice? Or—”

  “Well,” I said, “how about the banks in New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles? It doesn’t seem likely that McKinney would have kept his money where it wouldn’t be convenient for withdrawal. Ananburg and—”

  “You don’t know that for a fact,” he said. He pronounced the word “fack.”

  “In any case,” I said, “assuming for the moment that the only estate—”

  “I don’t assume nothin’ till it’s a proven fact,” Loomis said. Again the word came out as “fack.”

  I was tempted to tell him to go fack himself. Instead, and patiently, I said, “Well, if we can show—to your satisfaction, of course—that in essence there’s no estate, would you be willing—”

  “I won’t be satisfied till you’ve turned over every grain of sand in Florida,” he said. “The man signed a piece of paper said he had thirty-six thousand dollars in cash waiting on the closing. That piece of paper is a fact, Mr. Hope, signed by both parties, and it tells me there is an estate of at least thirty-six thousand dollars. I don’t know what you’re tryin’ to pull now, but it looks to me—”

  “No one’s trying to ‘pull’ anything,” I said, “and I resent the accusation. We’re convinced there’s no substantial estate. Assuming we can convince—”

  “Here we go assumin’ again,” Loomis said.

  “Assuming we can convince you of that, we’re prepared to make an offer in settlement—”

  “An’ what might that be, Mr. Hope?”

  “Your client keeps the farm, of course, and the bank releases to him the four thousand dollars it’s holding in escrow. We will also turn over the automobile and all of McKinney’s personal belongings.”

  “How about damages?” Loomis said. “My client coulda sold that farm to any number of people. If there hadn’ta been that piece of paper he signed with McKinney—”

  “He can still sell the farm. He’ll still own it.”

  “Buyers don’t wait on welshers, Mr. Hope.”

  “I would hardly think that getting killed is the same thing as welshing. In any case, that’s our offer, and it seems to me a fair one.”

  “How’d you like us to sue the estate, Mr. Hope?” Loomis said. “Find out just where you’re hidin’ that thirty-six thousand?”

  “That’s your prerogative, of course,” I said. “It might be a long and complicated action, however, and your client might end up spending more than the four thousand we’re willing to forfeit.”

  “I don’t like negotiatin’ with gunslicks,” Loomis said.

  “Why don’t you discuss it with Mr. Burrill?” I said.

  “I can tell you now what his answer’ll be.”

  “You never know.”

  “What school did you go to?” Loomis asked.

  “Northwestern.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Up there someplace,” I said. “Talk it over with Mr. Burrill, won’t you?”

  “I still think there’s more money in that estate than you’re lettin’ on,” Loomis said.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “Good day, Mr. Loomis.”

  He was turning to spit at the chamber pot again as I left the office.

  The rains came—from the novel and the movie of the same name. Torrents of water spilled from the roiling sky like silver vertical tracer bullets, riddling the road and drilling the roof of the Ghia. I drove very slowly and carefully through the spreading puddles of water on the road, braking whenever I approached what appeared to be a raging river rushing across the asphalt from one side to the other. It was going to be what down here they called a “frog-strangler.”

  The windshield wipers on the Ghia had never worked properly, and they weren’t working well now. The glass on the inside was fogging up as well, and when I cranked down the window on my left, I was immediately rewarded with a great spatter of rain that caused me to crank it up again at once. The rain down here in Florida was fiercer than I’d ever seen it anywhere else. It seemed unleashed by a vengeful God determined to punish those of us who were foolish enough to linger here during the summer months. The Ghia sounded like a Caribbean band of steel drummers, huge raindrops pounding on the hood and beating against the windshield where the wipers valiantly tried to clear an arced area of visibility. I wiped condensation from the inside of the windshield and hunched tighter over the wheel in an attempt to see the road ahead more clearly than I was seeing it. With all the windows closed, the interior of the car was suffocatingly hot.

  The seersucker suit I’d put on before leaving the house this morning was clinging limply to my frame, and my shirt was sticking to my chest and armpits. A rule at Summerville and Hope (for which Frank and I had no one to blame but ourselves) made it mandatory for all male employees to wear jackets and ties to work. The women had it a bit easier. After long debate, we had ruled out the necessity for panty hose or nylons during the summer months. Cynthia Huellen, our receptionist and general factotum, came to work barelegged as often as not. Our various secretaries, perhaps because they felt themselves higher up in the pecking order, still dressed a bit more formally except in the winter, when slacks ran rampant all over the place. Today I would have preferred shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt. Instead, I sweltered inside my straitjacket suit and my hangman’s-knot tie as I drove past the Burrill farm—the bean of contention, so to speak—marked with his name on a brown mailbox, and then the state park, and then the McKinney ranch, and finally found myself on the outskirts of civilization. It took me twenty minutes from the intersection of Timucuan Point and US 41 to get to my office downtown. It was almost five o’clock when I got there.

  Cynthia told me that Frank had gone to a late closing, and was planning to meet a client for a drink after that. She did not mention what was on the desk in my office. What was on the desk was a note in her handwriting. It read:

  The note was clipped to a typewritten sheet. I folded the note back and read:

  THE TEN RULES

  Always treat a lady like a hooker.

  Always treat a hooker like a lady.

  Never send a lady anything perishable.

  Never send a hooker anything durable.

  Never try to buy a lady into bed.

  Never try to talk a hooker into bed.

  Always tell a lady you love her.

  Never tell a hooker anything.

  Never believe a lady who tells you she’s a lady.

  Never believe anything a hooker te
lls you.

  I pondered this grave advice for all of thirty seconds, and then leafed through the batch of pink slips Cynthia had left in my in-basket. Sighing heavily, I began returning the calls I’d had while I was out on the prairies. I was still returning them when Cynthia came in at five-thirty to say good night. The rain had stopped by then, but the heat still lingered. Calusa was like no other city that I knew. The rain here did nothing to dissipate the heat. The rain came, the rain went, but the heat lingered. If anything, it seemed hotter after the rain. I was reaching for the phone again, hoping I’d still catch someone at his office, when it rang, startling me. I picked up the receiver.

  “Summerville and Hope,” I said.

  “Matthew?”

  Dale’s voice. My heart leaped.

  “Hey, hi,” I said.

  “I was hoping you’d still be there,” she said.

  “I’m still here.”

  “I’ve been worrying about you.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Head all healed, everything almost back to—”

  “I’m not worrying about your head,” she said.

  There was a long silence on the line.

  “Matthew,” she said, “the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you. I handled it badly, I know. Ending it the way I did. Especially after—”

  “No, no—”

  “Please let me say what I have to say, okay, Matthew, because I’ve got to get it all out in a rush before I start crying. You meant a great deal to me, Matthew, more than you’ll ever know, it wasn’t just sex, the way I said it was, I loved you very dearly, Matthew. And I almost didn’t have the courage to end it, not after you almost got yourself killed over me, but Matthew darling, I had to, what happened with Jim was something out of the blue, there was no way I could avoid loving him, any more than I could have avoided breathing, but Matthew, it was so wrong what I was doing, seeing you and him at the same time, I had to end it, had to let you go, but not by hurting you, and I’m afraid I did hurt you, and I want to apologize because you’ll always be someone very special to me, so please forgive me, Matthew, say you’ll forgive me or I’ll keep thinking of myself as some kind of whore for the rest of my life. Now I am going to cry, oh, Jesus,” she said, and began crying.

  I listened to her tears, not knowing what to say, not wanting this power of forgiveness she had conferred, not wanting to be the one who could absolve her like a parish priest in a shabby frock and cleric’s collar, wanting to tell her instead that she was the finest lady I’d ever met in my life. I almost did say that, but I saw, right there in front of me on my desk, my partner Frank’s second rule—Always treat a hooker like a lady—and the word lady suddenly assumed deprecating proportions after what Dale had said about feeling like a whore. So I listened helplessly to her sobs while I struggled to find the right words that would make it easier for her because she had, after all, called to make it easier for me. And my eye fell on Frank’s seventh rule—Always tell a lady you love her—and I modified it a bit, changing it so that it would provide the proper ending Dale was looking for, the dignified ending that would punctuate our affair with a harmless period and not a hurtful trailing ellipsis.

  “I loved you, too,” I said.

  Past tense.

  And that seemed to do it.

  She stopped crying after a while, and she wished me all the happiness in the world, and I wished her the same. And then she said, “Good-bye, Matthew,” and I said, “Good-bye, Dale,” and we both hung up.

  I did not leave the office until almost seven o’clock. I locked up, and then drove up the street to a little Chinese joint Dale and I sometimes used to go to. I had two martinis before dinner, and then I lingered over the meal, thinking a lot about Dale, reflecting on the loneliness of eating alone, especially when it was Chinese food. A magnificent sunset was staining the sky over the Gulf of Mexico when I came out of the restaurant.

  It was dark when I got home.

  A red Porsche was parked outside the house next door; the widow lady who kept asking me in for fresh orange juice undoubtedly had a visitor. The blue light from her television set glowed behind her drawn living room blinds. Bloom had once told me that a good way to keep burglars away was to leave a little blue light burning whenever the house was empty; from the outside, it looks as if a television set is on. I wondered if the widow lady was entertaining her visitor by the light of a forty-watt blue bulb.

  I unlocked the kitchen door, turned on the kitchen lights and then the living room lights, and then my own television set. I was walking toward the bar to mix myself another drink when I heard a sound outside at the pool—and I froze.

  My mind immediately raced back to that night in Captain Blood’s, and I recalled, at once and in wide-screen Technicolor, Charlie and Jeff leading me through the waltz of the toreadors. It did not help that the television set warmed up in that very instant and erupted into the room with the sound of a woman screaming. I stood rooted to the spot. The woman on the television kept screaming, and then a man’s voice said, “You just keep doing that, lady,” and I thought, No lady, please don’t keep doing that, but the lady kept screaming and outside I heard the sound more clearly now, and it was the sound of someone or something splashing around in my pool.

  A raccoon, I thought.

  And then I wondered how a raccoon could possibly have got inside the screened cage that surrounded the pool, and then wondered what I was afraid of, and I knew damn well what I was afraid of; I was afraid of having my brains scrambled yet another time. But I reasoned—correctly, I hoped—that neither Charlie nor Jeff could possibly know where I lived, even though my name and address were listed in the telephone directory, because they didn’t know my name. Well, they knew I was Matthew, they had heard Dale calling me Matthew and had picked up on it, but they didn’t know I was Matthew Hope, and besides, it was ridiculous to believe they would come back after me, since they’d done such a wonderful job the first time around.

  And yet I was still afraid.

  And I told myself, Jesus, you’re not going to hide in a closet the rest of your life, are you? Just because a pair of hoodlums beat you to within an inch of your life? And I thought, But suppose it’s a burglar out there, I’d better call the police. But there hadn’t been any car in my driveway, and the only car parked anywhere nearby was the red Porsche in front of the widow lady’s house. Were burglars driving Porsches these days? And why would a housebreaker be swimming in my pool? And wouldn’t he have run when I turned on the house lights? I decided to turn on the pool lights, but I didn’t do that for a moment because I was still wary, even though the television lady had stopped screaming and the man was only telling her he was going to slit her throat. Then I thought, Come on, Hope, and I walked swiftly to the wall switch and took a deep breath and snapped on the pool lights.

  It wasn’t a raccoon out there, and it wasn’t a burglar, either.

  It was Sunny McKinney, and she was naked.

  My first reaction was one of unreasoning anger. At her for having scared me, at myself for having been scared. The sudden explosion of the pool lights caught her standing in water to her waist. She couldn’t have been surprised, because I’d turned on the house lights the moment I’d come in, but she affected a startled look nonetheless, and immediately dove beneath the surface, the shimmering suntanned length of her wavering in underwater illumination as she swam toward the deep end. I unlocked the sliding glass doors, yanked one of them open, and stepped out onto the baked clay tiles. Sunny was still underwater. In a moment her head broke the surface, long blonde hair plastered to the sides of her face, mouth opening wide around a gasp for breath.

  “Hi,” she said. She was treading water now, only her shoulders, neck, and head visible. “Could you turn out the pool lights, please? I didn’t bring a suit.”

  “I see that.”

  She smiled and dove beneath the surface again. Strands of underwater light ensnared her submerged body as she swam toward the shallow end again, her
long blonde hair floating about her head in a tangle of liquid golden snakes. The surface broke like shattering glass as she came up for breath again, her arms emerging first, stretched above her head as though she were diving in reverse into the air itself, and then the blonde hair and the exquisite face, her body arcing upward out of the water and then sinking again as if in slow motion, ripples of light spreading out from it in widening circles. Standing in water to her waist now, she began wading toward the steps. I went into the house and snapped out the lights.

  She was coming up the steps when I went outside again. Like an actress discovering a key light, or a maiden worshipping the moon, she raised her arms over her head and slowly turned her extended hands in the wash of moonlight, palms upward, as though she were allowing silver coins to cascade through her fingers.

  My partner Frank maintains, though it is not on his list of ten rules, that a partially clad woman is infinitely more exciting than an entirely nude one. Perhaps he is right. I know only that Sunny McKinney naked was more spectacularly beautiful than any living creature had a right to be. I glanced quickly to the right and to the left. There were people living on either side of me, but the owner from whom I was renting was known in the neighborhood as “Sheena, Queen of the Jungle,” a sobriquet applied after she had planted more trees, bushes, shrubs, and vines on her property than could be found on the entire six acres of Calusa’s Agnes Lorrimer Memorial Gardens. Even the far side of the pool was shielded from the bayou beyond by low-growing mangroves and taller Australian pines. There was no one but me to witness Sunny’s silent paean to the moon, and she herself seemed totally unconcerned by my presence. Her clothes, I noticed, were piled haphazardly on one of the lounge chairs. A pair of blue clogs rested on the tiles near the chair, alongside a purple leather shoulder bag.