by Ed McBain
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” she said, smiling prettily.
“Not at all,” I returned, unsmiling. I stepped into the booth as soon as she cleared it, and took the receiver from the hook while I fished for a dime in my pocket.
It was hot in the booth and the big job had left the smell of cheap perfume mingled with sweat behind her. I shifted the receiver to my right hand and fished in my other pocket with my left.
I began to have a sneaking suspicion. I put the receiver down and dug into my back pockets with both hands.
Goddamn! Of all the goddamn!
Frantically, I searched through all my pockets again. I didn’t have so much as a penny with me. I slammed the receiver down onto the hook and pulled open the doors. Sporty Richmond, they call me. Always ready to buy a drink at the drop of a hat. Free and easy with his money.
And hasn’t got a goddamn dime to make a goddamn phone call.
Jesus! I started down toward the outboard, and then remembered the guy in the commissary again. What the hell, it was worth a try.
He was busy stacking cans this time. One on top of the other. Baked beans, they were, and I watched him pile them as carefully as he had the gum.
Discreetly, I coughed behind my hand. He almost dropped one of the cans, then turned to me with an annoyed look on his face.
“You again?” he asked.
“Uh … yes,” I said.
“Well, what is it this time?”
“I was wondering … uh …”
“Yeah?” He squinted at me from beneath his eyeshade, his face a bilious green.
“Can you lend me a dime?” I blurted.
“What!” His brows shot up in astonishment, and his eyes opened wide.
“A dime. I left my change back on Little Harbor, and I want to make an important phone call.”
He turned his back to me and started piling his cans again.
“Better go back for it, Sonny,” he said. “Ain’t far to Little Harbor.”
“Look,” I said, “this is rather important.”
He turned again and looked at me carefully, his eyes narrow under the shade. Without saying a word, he pointed to a sign on the wall. It was printed in neat block letters, and it read:
WE HATE TO SAY NO,
SO DON’T ASK FOR CREDIT!
I started to protest, took another look at the formidable lettering on the sign, let out my breath and ran down toward the dock.
I hopped into the boat, pulled the cord, and sped back to Little Harbor. It was ridiculous, of course, being caught without a dime. And having to ask that suspicious bastard for one. From here on in, I’d buy all my supplies on the mainland, and the hell with him and his celluloid hat.
A dime! A lousy dime. What if a guy’s life depended on a dime? What if …
I stopped thinking about it because it was getting me good and sore. When I finally reached Little Harbor, I was considerably cooled down. I pulled the boat alongside the dock nicely, tied her up, and started for my cabin. When I passed the table outside the cooktent, I noticed that my note was still there.
Apparently, Lois hadn’t come back from her walk yet. That suited me fine. I had to make that phone call, and I didn’t want to get sidetracked into a bed.
Lois was at the cabin waiting for me. She was in bed, too.
But her skull had been smashed in with a rock that lay alongside her on the pillow, covered with blood.
I stood stock still in the doorway, the creak of the springs still in my ears, still hovering on the air from when I opened the door. She was still wearing the shorts and halter, and one strap was dangling loose from her shoulder. She looked completely relaxed, with her hands at her sides, and her legs close together, as if they’d been lifted gently from the floor while she was asleep.
Her hair was spread out over the pillow, black mingled with bright red. I couldn’t look at her face.
I wet my lips, and my eyes went over the room slowly. It was just the way I’d left it. A pair of swimming trunks were folded over the back of the chair. The drawer on the end table was open, and my suitcase rested near the foot of the bed, the top still open.
I walked closer to the bed, still keeping my eyes off her face. I looked down at her right hand, saw a pencil stub between her fingers, the same pencil I’d used to write my note to her, the note she’d never read now.
But what was she doing with a pencil? What do people do with pencils, idiot, I asked myself? They write. Well, what had she been writing?
I gave the room another quick frisk with my eyes. Whatever Lois had been writing was gone.
I walked out of the cabin slowly, straight down to the dock. This time I wasn’t going to Glen to get the ranger. This time I was staying right here with the body. This time.…
A kid paddled by in a canoe, and I waved him over. He pulled up cautiously, possibly because he’d seen the look on my face.
“What’s the matter, mister?” he asked.
“There’s been some trouble,” I told him in a calm voice. “A girl’s been hurt.”
He said “Yeah?” with the tone of someone who’s been let in on a military secret.
I nodded. “Will you go to Glen and ask the ranger to come right over? It’s important.”
“Sure, mister,” he said, starting to backpaddle away from the dock. “Is she hurt bad?”
“Very bad,” I said.
“I’ll get him,” the kid promised.
I watched the canoe skitter over the water, then fade in the distance. I lighted a cigarette and sat on the edge of the dock, alternating my vigil between the cabin where Lois lay dead and bleeding, and the water.
So this is how it ends, I thought. You’re tired of a girl one minute, and the next minute she’s dead. Just like that. You can get guilt complexes that way. I wish you’d go away and leave me alone. Bang, you’re dead.
An ugly way to die, too. There should be a law about pretty girls being killed in ugly ways. A pretty girl should be killed clean, with a little hole over the left breast, a clean hole, like the hole an ice pick …
I pulled myself up short. I was beginning to think nonsense. Where the hell was the ranger?
And would it be the same joker I’d called when I found Johnny’s body? Only this time there was a body and it was in my cabin on my bed, and its face was a bloody mask.
My cabin, my bed. I began to think over the implications of that. It wouldn’t look too good, not too good at all.
But hell, I could prove I’d been on Glen. The old chewing-gum stacker would at least vouch for that much. Or would the old bastard? Sure he would.
I tried to figure it all out, marveling at the lack of emotion in me. Maybe you get used to finding bodies. Maybe you get progressively better at it, like bowling, or tiddly-winks. Maybe when you’ve found your tenth or eleventh body, you can go right on doing what you had been doing. Finish polishing your shoes, or go right ahead with your supper.
Like the old man in Panama’s whore house district, I thought. Just like him. I’d seen him during the war, sitting at a table while the prostitutes shouted their wares from doors all around him; sitting at a table in a little alley, eating spaghetti.
After my tenth body, I’d sit right down and have a bowl full of spaghetti with the sauce as red as the blood that was being spilled.
And suddenly the revulsion hit me in the pit of my stomach, and my cigarette tasted flat and nauseating. I flipped it out over the water, feeling like puking again.
Why would anyone want to kill Lois?
And that brought me back to the original sixty-four dollar question: why would anyone want to kill Johnny?
In my mind, the two murders were intricately linked. It never once occurred to me that the murders could have been distinct and separate entities, committed by two completely disassociated people. As sure as I knew my own name, I knew that Lois’ murder was linked to Johnny’s. But who?
What was it the police always looked for? Cherchez la femme. Sur
e, but that wasn’t what I meant.
The means, the motive, and the opportunity. That was it.
The means: an ice pick for Johnny, and a rock for Lois. Both weapons of convenience, weapons a person might pick up in the heat of an argument. Not exactly, I corrected myself. A rock isn’t exactly at home in a cabin. Whoever had killed Lois had brought that rock in with him. Why a rock, and not a club, or a hammer? I shrugged. A rock can be hidden. You can’t very well hide a sledgehammer.
The motive. Sure, the motive. That was the big thing. I was back again on the “Why Would Anyone Want To Kill” treadmill. All right, why would anyone want to kill Lois?
Supposition One: she was sleeping with a guy called Steve Richmond. Whoever killed her didn’t want her to sleep with him. No, Supposition One was not such a good one. Why not kill Steve Richmond rather than Lois? After all, he was the guy sleeping with her.
I remembered the shots that had whistled by my head the night I searched Johnny’s cabin. Maybe the idea was to kill Steve Richmond. Maybe Lois found out who’d taken those pot shots at me. Maybe that’s what she’d been trying to write.
Maybe Supposition One wasn’t such a bad one after all. Assuming then that jealousy was the motive and—no, that wouldn’t do at all. I’d been shot at long before Lois moved into my cabin. So what? Maybe someone had seen us that first morning in the cooktent. That was possible.
But then why kill Johnny?
Right back where I started.
Three facts remained. One: Johnny was killed and his body moved. I was willing to accept this as fact in my own mind, even if I couldn’t prove he’d been killed yet. Two: Lois was killed with a pencil in her hand. Three: someone had attempted to kill me when I searched Johnny’s cabin.
Fine. Now put them all together and what do you get? Zero. Big, fat, empty, open zero.
I heard the high whine of a speedboat and looked up quickly. I could see the kid I’d sent to Glen in the bow of the boat, and he had the ranger with him.
As they pulled closer to the site, I recognized the ranger as the same one I’d called the day I’d found Johnny’s body.
He pulled the speedboat alongside the dock, and I heard the kid tell him, “There’s the guy,” pointing at me.
The ranger stepped out of the boat and climbed onto the dock. He lifted his head then and looked over at me. His eyebrows, black and shaggy, lifted high on his forehead when he saw me.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “You again!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Hello,” I said.
“What is it this time?” the ranger said, walking up to me with long, easy strides.
“I’m afraid someone’s been killed,” I said calmly.
“Another one?” He tilted his hat back on his head and began chuckling softly. “You know, my friend, this is getting kind of bothersome.”
“Think how the murder victims must feel,” I said drily.
The smile left his face, to be replaced by a look of exasperation. “Look, pal,” he said, “I’ve got plenty to do without running out here every ten minutes. If it isn’t you with your goddamn bodies, it’s that fat babe on Uncas who keeps insisting there’s a beaver under her cabin. A beaver, goddammit! Can you imagine that?”
“Come along with me, pal,” I said.
His face showed exasperation again as he followed me up the path.
“The cooktent again?” he asked.
“No. This time it’s in the cabin. My cabin.”
He chuckled softly and shook his head. “Beavers and bodies! Christ!”
I stopped in front of my cabin and motioned him to the door. As he passed me, I noticed he had another cheesecake magazine stuck in his back pocket. He was still shaking his head when he opened the door, but he stopped shaking it damn fast.
“Ho-ly Jee-sus!” he said.
I stepped into the cabin beside him and looked at the mutilated figure on the bed. The ranger walked closer to the bed and stood staring down at the body.
Without turning, he asked, “Know her?”
“Sure,” I said.
He seemed to digest this for several seconds. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully then, and said, “Nice piece.”
Probingly, he reached out his hand and touched her breast where the strap of the halter had fallen away. “Very nice piec …”
I yanked his arm away, and he turned on me with a look of hurt surprise on his face.
“Keep your paws off her,” I said. “You’re turning my goddamn stomach.”
“Relax, pal,” the ranger answered, smiling. “She’s dead, you know.”
“You won’t be so healthy yourself in a few minutes,” I warned, my hand still on his arm.
He stared at me icily, the smile reappearing on his lips. “Tough guy, ain’t you?” he asked, challenge in his voice.
“Look, pal,” I said, “I don’t want trouble from you. I want you to get the police, that’s all. If you’ve got any beefs after that, we can settle them then.”
“She’s dead, you know,” he said defensively, as if it were perfectly all right to maul dead girls, as if he pawed dead girls every day of the week. The thought sickened me.
“Go get the police,” I said steadily. “I’ll wait here.”
“No need to get sore,” he said sullenly. He started for the door and then turned. “She your girl or something?”
“Get the police,” I repeated.
He started to say something, changed his mind, shrugged, and walked out. I followed him, sitting down on the step of the cabin. The kid I’d sent to get the ranger had been standing outside all along. His face was white now as he followed the ranger down to the speedboat.
I lighted a cigarette as they pulled away, thinking of the police, and wondering what they’d think about all this.
The Bolton police arrived first. They pulled up in a big launch, and two men stepped ashore. I got up and started down toward the dock.
“Need me any more?” the ranger asked the taller of the two men.
“You can go,” the man answered. “We’ll call you if we need you.”
The two men met me halfway up the path. The badges they wore said “Deputy Sheriff.”
“You the fellow found the body?” the tall one asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Where is it?”
“In my cabin.” I pointed up the path and they swept by me, heading for the cabin. I followed close behind them and stepped into the cabin with them.
The tall guy stopped by the bed, and the short one pulled up alongside him.
“She’s dead all right,” the tall one said.
The short one passed a nervous hand over his moustache and nodded.
“What’s your name?” the tall one snapped.
“Steve Richmond,” I answered.
“I’m Deputy Sheriff Manners, and this is Deputy Sheriff Ogden. I’ve already put in a call to the sheriff’s office in Lake George. He should be along shortly.”
I nodded briefly.
“He’ll probably want to call in the state police on this one. Ain’t often we get a murder up here.”
I nodded again.
He looked over at Lois’ body again, and then shook his head sadly. “Young girl. Too bad.” He let out his breath quickly, as if dismissing any sentiment he may have felt and suddenly turned all business. “Mind answering a few questions while we’re waitin’ for the sheriff?”
“Not at all,” I said.
“You better take this down, Shorty,” he said to Ogden. Ogden dug a black leather notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open. He wet the end of a pencil with his tongue and poised the pencil over the pad.
“What’s the girl’s name?” Manners asked.
“Lois.”
“Lois what?”
I tried to remember whether or not Lois had ever told me her last name. “I … I don’t know,” I admitted.
Manners cleared his throat and glanced significantly at Shorty Ogden. Ogden scribb
led furiously on the pad.
“What was your relation to the dead girl?”
“A friend.”
“What was she doing in your cabin?”
“I …”
Shorty looked up from his pad, and Manners waited for my answer.
“She’s been living with me,” I said softly.
“And you don’t know her last name?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Kind of funny, ain’t it?”
“I never bothered to ask her, that’s all.”
Manners grinned a little while Shorty wrote in the pad.
“When’d you find her?”
I thought this over, calculating the time in my mind.
“When’d you find her?” Manners repeated.
“I’m trying to figure,” I said. “Just a second.”
“What’s there to figure?”
“Well, I sent someone for the ranger first and then he went to call you folks, and by the time you got here … I’d say it was about an hour ago.”
“Don’t you know exactly?”
“No.”
“How’d you happen to find her?”
“I just walked in, and there she was.”
“On your bed?”
“Yes.”
“Did you touch anything here?”
“No.”
“See anyone around when you came up to the cabin?”
“No.”
“Why’d you kill her?” he asked suddenly, his eyes gleaming. It was a good imitation of a private eye I’d seen in a movie once.
“What?” I asked, surprised.
“Why’d you kill her? Come on, why’d you do it?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.
“How long’s she been shackin’ with you?” Shorty asked.
“Three days,” I answered.
“Argue much?” This from Manners.
“Not at all.”
“Sure?” This from Shorty.
“Sure I’m sure. What is this, a lineup? I reported this murder, remember?”
“Sure,” Manners said. “But that don’t necessarily exclude you.”
The roar of a throttle thundered into the cabin, stopping all conversation.
“That must be the sheriff,” Shorty said.
Together we walked out and watched the big launch tie up at the end of the dock, its stern swinging free in the water. A solidly built man with keen blue eyes set in a leathery face stepped out of the boat and walked up the dock, his eyes flashing over the site as he came toward us.