by Gil Brewer
“Well, it’s not so—exactly.”
I moved past him toward the door.
“Sir?”
I turned to him.
“Sir, Inez and Jinny were good friends.” He swallowed. He had been going to say something else.
“Look,” I told him. “If you know something you’re not telling me, why not loosen up? We’ll find everything out sooner or later.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Okay,” I said. I watched him a moment. He was staring at the floor again. I left him that way, and went downstairs. The Robersons were standing in the hall.
“Is everything all right?” Mrs. Roberson asked.
“Sure. Say, he’s really hepped up about college, isn’t he?”
“He’d better be,” Mr. Roberson said. “I couldn’t afford to send him. He couldn’t have gone, if it wasn’t for that scholarship.” He turned and smiled at his wife.
“He’s worked hard,” Mrs. Roberson said. “Real hard.”
I smiled and lamely excused my way past them, out onto the front porch. I took some deep breaths of the hot, muggy air, and started for the convertible.
Chapter Twelve
I CHECKED the next name on the list Inez had given me. Talbot Swanson, Jungle Acres. Jungle Acres fronted on Boca Ciega Bay, a development planned in the boom of the twenties, the streets and sidewalks and lots laid down without ever trimming so much as a vine from the place. After the boom days were gone, people began building in there and they cut only those trees necessary to the erection of buildings.
The streets were narrow, winding, blind. Turning off the main road was like driving into a black tunnel. In the old days I’d done a lot of prowl-car work in this vicinity and knew the territory fairly well. It was a nest of rocking Model A Fords at midnight, back then. I recalled how you could drive in quietly and see feet sticking from windows, toes wriggling. That had changed; the inhabitants had put up a kick and it was patrolled regularly.
Still you could expect about anything in Jungle Acres.
I drove on down a pink cement street between walls of dark, thriving vegetation. Night insects spun crazily through the car’s headlights. Frogs thumped and a bird flew by savagely, wings pumping just over the car’s hood.
I checked street signs and finally spotted Grande Venice Tourning, and went down that to the left, then located the Parisienne Heights section of Jungle Acres. Most of this section of Florida is about a foot above sea level. Parisienne Heights was perhaps twelve and a half inches above the Gulf, or Boca Ciega.
The street ended. There was a small neat sign painted on a rustic piece of log, the single word glowing. I checked and the letters were formed with the red, luminous tape you buy for car bumpers. SWANSON. There was a narrow drive winding back through trees. I took it.
I could smell the nearness of the bay. Vines clutched at the car’s fenders and chunks of moss dropped on my head and onto the seat beside me. I couldn’t see the sky, but I could hear music. Then, abruptly, I came out into a clearing and saw the house down there, up above the bay.
I parked the Merc just beyond some trained stunted oaks on the open grounds. Racketing music throbbed across the lawn, and somebody was banging drums. Several cars were parked around, gleaming and glinting.
As I came nearer, I saw that the screened porch was dark, except for very dull blue lighting, the occasional flash of a match, the dim orange glow by a record-player, and flaming feminine laughter. Just inside the house, shadowed against dim, faraway lamplight, somebody was playing a set of trap drums, accompanying a jazz record. When I reached the porch door, I saw it was a woman at the drums. Glass tinkled and clanked and liquid splashed and moans and hisses and rustlings came from the darkness, between the clang of snare and too much cymbal.
“Come on in, have a drink, you old soak. Say, who are you, anyway?”
“Tal? Tal? Tal?”
“Shuddup, bag!”
“I want it!” a girl whispered.
“Tal! Who is it?” someone asked.
“I don’t know. Who are you?”
“Is your—” I said.
“Talbot? Is you is or is you ain’t?”
“Move a little, baby, c’mon….”
“For cryin’ out loud, be quiet a minute, will you? Mom, lay off the drums, will you?”
“Who is it, Tal?”
You couldn’t see a thing in there, not really.
“Easy, God.”
Someone laughed.
“Easy, God!”
I stood there and looked at the hair-in-face, slightly reeling fellow who was trying to ask me who I was.
“Listen, witch,” somebody said to somebody. “You pull that again, I’ll clobber ya!”
“Will you! Will you, honest? Promise?”
“Look,” Talbot Swanson said. “What you want?”
“I’d like to talk with you,” I said. “I’m from the police.”
He straightened carefully. “That so?”
Everybody went quiet. A girl sighed in a long and continuous tremolo. The drums ceased. The jazz record stopped playing.
I watched the woman stand up behind the set o traps. She picked her way around them and came stiff ly forward, and a light went on. Not a bright light, just bright enough to show huddled shapes and pale strained faces and loud grins.
The woman came to the door. She stood beside Talbot Swanson and scratched her thigh with a drumstick. She was a very pretty woman, wearing a tight black dress with white buttons down the front from throat to flaring hem. She had blonde hair bunched into a tail behind her head, and she was rather drunk. She leered at me.
“Whoever complained this time?” she said.
“Nobody,” I told her.
“We’re out here, far enough away from people so we can make a little noise, certainly,” she said. “We aren’t disturbing a soul. Not a soul.”
I wondered if there were any souls left around to disturb?
“I mean it,” she said. “I really don’t get this.”
A tall, thin fellow came through the house carrying two glasses. He veered carefully across the porch and up behind the woman. Holding the glasses away, he leaned over and kissed the woman moistly on the back of the neck. She whirled.
“Roy!” she scolded.
“Who’s he?” Roy said. He drank from one of the glasses.
“We’re just having a little get-together,” the woman said, turning to me again. There was a slight whisky bloat to her face, which was not unpleasant to look at. Her eyes were heavy and her mouth was very thin-lipped, the lipstick smeared up over the lip line. I could see that now. Still, she was a good-looking woman.
Somebody put on another record. I had been dismissed as inconsequential.
“Are you Roy Patterson?” I said to the one with the glasses in his hands.
He nodded and sipped again.
The woman began to get nervous. “Would you care for a drink?” she said. When she looked at me, she narrowed her eyes a little and let her lower lip dangle redly. Now she was jabbing her hip with both drumsticks, holding them in one hand. They made quite a dent, and it was a perfectly curved hip. You could see the tightly arched line of her pants beneath her dress, the flesh of her hip bulging beyond the rim slightly. She talked loudly above the sound of the record.
“Could I talk with you two?” I said, indicating Talbot and Patterson.
“What’s this all about?” the woman said.
I sighed and looked at her.
“I’m Talbot’s mother,” she said. “I want to know what this is all about right now.”
I told her a little of it. After that she changed for a moment.
“You think my son can help you?”
“I hope so.”
“And Mr. Patterson?”
Roy Patterson grinned at her. He liked that very much. He moved closer to her, staring straight into her eyes. She tried to look away but couldn’t. She gave a short laugh and Roy Patterson began to nod at
her with raised eyebrows.
She said, still looking at Patterson, “Why don’t you two step outside and talk to the man?”
Talbot Swanson shoved the screen door open.
“I’ll be back,” Roy Patterson said to her.
Her throat moved under her chin with sudden swallowing. Her hand touched his shoulder as he stepped toward the door….
They were both cocky and wound up tight.
“My old lady’s going to raise hell,” Talbot said.
“What about your father?” Patterson said.
“He’s out cold,” Talbot said. “They brought him home in a taxi. Drunk as hell. Stinking.” He turned to me. “Mom and Dad been doing some drinking,” he said. “Sometimes they do, you know how it is? But my father passed out downtown at his club. Mom wanted me to have a little party. She likes parties. She can drink Dad under the table. She likes to play the drums.”
“You know Jinny Foster?”
“What’s it to you?”
There had been an abrupt change in his tone. From that of a kid to that of a man. This Mom and Dad business was being played a little too hard.
“Come on, Tal,” Patterson said. “The hell with this.”
“You’re going to monkey around with her too much,” Talbot said to Patterson.
Patterson snickered. It reminded me of Inez. I looked up at the sky. It was very deep blue and the stars were real bright. The moon had looped across and was starting down the other side now. The thing was, they had an idea I wasn’t a cop, and they were playing along in their own way. It could scare you if you thought about it much. The place was thick with them—I had seen them in there, peering out of the shadows. It wasn’t good at all. Only I had to keep at it.
Talbot’s mother came off the porch and across toward us. She walked with a fine high-heeled strut. She had her drumsticks with her. She kept jabbing herself with them, her hip, her thigh, her midriff, her cheek. As she reached us, she scratched her head with them and leered.
“Why don’t you have a little drinkee?” she said.
She didn’t think I was a cop, either. I wondered what in hell they did think?
“Go on back, Mom,” Talbot said.
Patterson looked at her and snickered. She avoided Patterson with quiet adroitness. She came around by me, trailing clouds of gin.
“I could tell you anything you’d like to know,” she said.
Patterson snickered.
“Damn it!” Talbot said. “Mom,” he said. “Get the hell back in the damned house!”
“Tal, baby,” his mother said.
Patterson crept up on her and caught the other ends of the drumsticks. They faced each other and pulled and yanked for a second or two.
I took Talbot’s arm and steered him around two cars.
“When did you last see Jinny Foster?” I said.
He looked at me. He was undecided.
“Jinny? Hell, I dunno. The other day.”
I told him very carefully and quietly all that had happened to her, trying to impress it on him.
“Dead, huh? Say, that’s too bad. I’m sorry. I really am sorry about that.”
I looked at him.
“Roy, don’t!” Talbot’s mother said over there in the shadows. “Roy, dear. My, what—Roy! Stop it!”
Talbot sucked breath between his teeth.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d try to help me,” I said.
“Sure, sure—the police, huh?” He kept hitching his shoulders and glancing over in the shadows.
“Roy!” she whispered. It was a raw, heated whisper.
I heard the drumsticks rattle on the ground.
“Damn him!” Talbot said.
Patterson snickered.
Talbot’s mother ran out of the shadows, laughing. She lost a shoe. Patterson ran after her. He picked the shoe up and they reached the side of the house by some bushes. He caught her.
They faced each other, whispering. Her face was abruptly mouth and eyes over there, her body cringing within itself. Then they moved along the side of the house into darkness.
Talbot shrugged and turned to me.
“Did you know Jinny Foster well?” I said.
“You kidding?”
I was so damned mad my stomach hurt. “Just answer the question.”
“You got a search warrant?” He laughed softly and hitched his shoulders. “Yeah I knew her well. Who didn’t? Try and tell me that?”
“You mean she was easy to know?”
“You didn’t have to make a move, cop. She did the asking.”
“I see. Know any reason she might act like that?”
He laughed through his nose with obvious scorn. “She made a big production out of it, Jinny did. Enough to gas you. It was all an act, though—trying to give herself a reason for ants in her pants.”
“What reason?” It was the first time I had ever really wanted to smash a kid in the face. He may have seen how I felt by the expression on my face, but it didn’t faze him.
“What she said, she was madly in love with a guy—went steady with him over a year, real heavy. She said they were going to run away and be married, all that junk. Real heavy. So she saw him get killed—hamburger joint out on the beaches. She was out there, supposed to meet him—her folks didn’t like the guy. He got drunk with some other dame—came barreling into this place driving his old man’s convertible. No brakes—they said, after, that the master cylinder went out. Smashed into the hamburger joint, rolled over three times. He was killed. The dame with him didn’t get a scratch—she was so plastered she just sat there laughing—couldn’t stand up—and him with his head smashed like a pun’kin.”
“And Jinny saw it happen?”
He nodded. “Made a big production out of it. Loved him, didn’t give a damn what happened to her after that—all that sort of junk. Like in the movies, you know, dry-eyed and gay and don’t give a damn?” He stepped up close to me and looked at me steadily, as bold as hell. “Listen,” he said. “I want you to leave here, see? You’re busting up a private party and I don’t like it. So get the lead out.”
I hauled the letter from my pocket, took it out of the envelope and waved it in front of his eyes. I held it still.
“You wrote this,” I said. “You’re in a tight spot, Swanson. I don’t like any part of you.”
He grabbed the letter from me. I grabbed it back and looked at him.
“That little—” he said. “I told her to—”
Patterson had heard what I’d said about Jinny before and it hadn’t touched him at all. Swanson, here, looked nasty enough to do anything, but I couldn’t reach any of these people. I was right where I had started.
Talbot’s mother came along the side of the house, carrying her shoe. She straightened her dress and brushed her skirt, then lifted one long leg and put her shoe on. Then she held her dress up a little and leaned, twisting back to see how the seams in her stockings were. One was crooked. She hauled her skirt up, working with her palms on her leg, fixing the stocking. Then she moved toward us. She seemed a lot more sober now.
“All right, Tal,” she said. “In the house. Break up the party. It’s all over. Everybody goes home.”
“What?”
“That’s what I said. Shall I repeat it?”
I saw Roy Patterson lurch around the side of the house. He paused and looked over this way, his face flashing whitely, then he went over to the porch entrance and on inside. The screen door slammed.
“I’m sorry, Officer,” Mrs. Swanson said. “Things seem to have gotten out of hand.” She coughed gently through her fingers.
“Go away, Mom.”
Talbot was looking at me steadily. He hadn’t once taken his eyes off me, and there was no hint of any expression on his face.
Mrs. Swanson lifted her eyebrows at me and sighed. Children were such a problem, honestly.
“You have anything you’d like to tell me?” I said to Talbot. “I’m giving you that chance, sonny.”
“Tell you?” he said softly. “No, I have nothing to tell you.” His voice was like a hand waved through the soft summer air. He turned to his mother. “You think I’m busting up the party, you’re nuts.”
“That’ll be just about enough of that,” she said.
“That right?”
“You heard me, Tal.”
“You want me to show you?” he said softly to her.
“You be careful now, Tal—”
“I’ll be careful—just see if I won’t be careful.”
I turned and walked away from there. It was hopeless, and suddenly I felt a little relieved that I was coming away with a whole skin. There was that tight edge of trouble in the air. I had to do some thinking. If I were really a cop, I’d have been able to do plenty. As it was, I was stopped.
“Well,” I heard her say. “I guess that’s that.”
“You aren’t kidding,” Talbot said.
I felt real nice inside after meeting those folks. I walked on down to where I’d parked the car in a kind of daze, carrying the letter in my hand. Finally I put the letter into my pocket again. At her age, Jinny Foster could have been deeply affected by seeing the man she loved killed, as she had. It must have been a rotten experience for her—it could easily have changed her—though I couldn’t believe she turned out as badly as Swanson indicated.
As I opened the door on the Merc, I turned and looked back there. Talbot Swanson stood alone out on the grass in front of the screened porch, watching me. When he saw me look back, he turned quickly and ran into the house. The screen door cracked shut like a shot.
• • •
I drove through Jungle Acres slowly. I took the street leading from the first corner past the Swanson place, and I knew I’d come out by a small hotel, nearer the main road toward town.
Approaching the hotel, I saw it was shut down. Scaffolding had been put up for repair work. I remembered that a hurricane had done a lot of damage to the place the year before. They were just getting around to fixing it.
Driving slowly, I got out a cigarette, still thinking about Jinny and how it had been with her; keeping it all to herself. Her parents obviously knew nothing of what had happened, what she’d been through. Young love can be crazily insane and very real. Only it could be that Swanson was coating the cake with frosting that was too thick.