by Unknown
Now the music was silenced. A man and woman stood together just outside the screen door of the bungalow, on the small, hot flagstone terrace. I noticed the screen door behind them was one of those fancy jobs with a huge, white silhouette of a flamingo on it.
The man and woman were watching me warily, thinking, no doubt, that Allene and I were a pair of drunks out celebrating.
There was just one word for the girl standing on the terrace: sleek. She was wearing a white play suit that was startling against her dark tan. She had a sultry-looking face, with wide, red lips. Her hair was midnight black, cut with bangs. She was holding her hands at her sides in a sort of theatrical way, the way models do, pointing very slightly outward.
The man beside her was tall and athletic, dressed in an expensive T-shirt that was a riot of colors, cream-colored slacks, and tan sandals. His arms and face were freckled, his hair a crinkly, close-cropped, light blond mass on his head.
He and the girl watched as I took the bottle from Allene’s lips. Allene sat up, mumbling a groan. Her lids fluttered. “I’m all right,” she said weakly, shaking her head.
I got out of the car. The strapping young blond experienced a tightening in his face. To put him at ease, I said, “The lady simply fainted.”
“That’s too bad,” the girl in the white play suit said. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
“Phyllis!” the man said, obviously annoyed.
“Oh, they’re all right, Baxter!” she said crossly.
Then to me: “We saw you carrying the girl to the car. We thought you might be drunk!” She giggled and made dainty, studied gestures with her hands. They were graceful long hands. She probably realized it. She probably made use of them with every word she said.
“Do you know the man next door?” I asked.
“Buddy? Sure,” Baxter said. “But Phyllis and I haven’t seen him around since we came in from our sail, if you’re looking for him—”
“I’m not looking for him,” I cut in. “Have you got a phone?”
Baxter frowned. “Yes, here in the living room.”
“I’d like to use it.”
Baxter looked annoyed. Phyllis told me to go ahead. They followed as far as the doorway, stood there while I phoned. Maybe Baxter was afraid I’d carry off the ivory bookends on the table near the phone.
The Gulf beaches are not incorporated in the City of St. Petersburg, which allows the beaches to sell alcoholic beverages on Sunday and a later curfew for their nightspots. So I put in a call to Sheriff Ben Aiken. What I told him jarred a few morose curses out of him, and he said he’d be right out.
When I turned from the phone, Phyllis’ hands were fluttering about her throat. Baxter’s face looked tight—and somehow mean.
“Buddy Tomlinson is dead?” Phyllis said, as if it was simply too, too horrible for her to realize.
I was in no mood for details, and simply nodded. I went back out to the car and sat down on the running board on the shady side and lighted a cigarette. “Can I have one?” Allene said. I gave it to her.
“What will they do with him, Lloyd?”
“Take him to an undertaking parlor. I think Doc Robison has got the corner on that trade for the county.”
“I wonder who killed him?”
“I wouldn’t know.” I didn’t particularly care. I sat and smoked chain fashion, and at last Ben Aiken arrived.
There were two other men with Ben, but they were just faces. He was the whole show. He was a big, fat man, with a lot of gut hanging over his belt. His pants were even baggier than mine and his shirt was pasted to his big, sloping shoulders with sweat. He had a large, florid face with a tiny button nose in the middle of it, and a sweating bald head.
I sat there in the open door of the car, watching the house. I couldn’t see much, but I could hear Ben and the other two men working inside. Shortly the county coroner drove up. He was swallowed by Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow.
After a while, Ben Aiken came out. He came over to the car, questioned Allene and me. I told him the short, simple story of my finding Buddy Tomlinson. To keep myself clean, I told him why Allene had hired me. She was sitting on the car seat behind me, at a higher level, of course. When I brought her step-mother’s name into it, the toe of her shoe bit in my spine.
Aiken got nothing more out of her. He questioned the couple from next door. Phyllis’ last name was Darnell. She had been married, she said, but was a divorcée. Baxter’s full name was Baxter B. Osgood. Yes, he and Phyllis both had known Tomlinson. No, they hadn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon when they’d all been drinking at the Pelican Bar and Grill, half a mile down the beach. He and Phyllis had had a morning date to go sailing. They’d sailed and swum and come back here just before Allene and I rolled up.
When he’d finished with them, Ben motioned me off to one side. “You got any ideas on this thing, Lloyd?”
“No, I’m off it. I was supposed to warn Buddy Tomlinson off Emagine Buford. Now Buddy doesn’t need it.”
“You think the gal is holding anything back?” He cut a side glance at the car where Allene was still sitting stiffly.
“If she’s holding out on you, she’s holding out on me, too.”
Ben sighed and mopped his face. “May be one of them long drawn cases. I got to trace this Buddy Tomlinson backward, find out who he was, where he’s been keeping himself, in whose company, and so on. I might find a motive somewhere along the line.
“Funny kind of kill. You didn’t get a good look in there, did you, Lloyd?”
I hadn’t. But I didn’t say anything. I just stood passive and let Ben get it off his chest. I knew that in talking it in his confidential whisper, he was setting the details in his mind.
“Nothing in the whole bungalow had been hurt—except Tomlinson. You saw the wound in his face, Lloyd. He was shot in close. The side of his right palm was mutilated. Looked like somebody was threatening him with a gun. He made a grab for it and the shooting started.”
“What does that give you?”
“Nothing much. It must mean he was shot with a revolver. Don’t need to tell a man like you that an automatic won’t fire with pressure on the killing end of it. Ejector won’t work, gun won’t cock, gun jams up. We’re hunting the slug. From Tomlinson’s cheek looks like a thirty-eight. So maybe when I find out where he’s been keeping himself, who he’s been seeing, I might find out somebody who owns a revolver like that.”
“You need me for anything else, Ben?”
“I guess not.”
“Then I’m going back to Tampa. I’ll drop the girl in St. Pete. She’ll probably want to talk with her step-mother.”
“She won’t have much privacy.” Ben grinned. “There’s a phone in Tomlinson’s bungalow and I’m gonna have city Homicide look in on Mrs. Emagine Buford.” He mopped his face some more. “Hell to work in this heat. I’ll see you around, Lloyd.”
I got in the car and drove off. The last I saw of the scene, Baxter Osgood and Phyllis Darnell were still standing on Osgood’s flagstone terrace, watching Ben Aiken waddle his way into the Tomlinson bungalow. Somehow, they looked scared.
I drove Allene to the Morro Hotel, in the northeast section of St. Pete. The drive along Tampa Bay was wide, beautiful, lined with fine houses and hotels. A few boats were out sailing on the bay, the small, white triangles of their sails tilted over in the light breeze.
The Morro was built like an old Spanish castle. When I braked before it, I saw a black car at the curb. Allene saw it, caught her lip between her teeth. She turned her face to me as she got out of the car. “I’d like to see you again sometime,” she said.
I looked at her for a minute. “I’ll phone you this weekend.”
She closed the car door, went running up the wide, palm-lined walk. She was staying here at the Morro with her step-mother, but I didn’t know the phone number and I decided I didn’t like to thumb through the phone books. It was just as well. I was twenty years her senior.
I
drove back to Tampa and went to the office. The old man wasn’t there and I mumbled talk with the girl behind the reception desk until he came in. He went into his private office and I told Fayette everything that had happened. His chiseled, rawboned face looked gaunt. He sank behind his desk. “What’d you find out about Tomlinson?”
“Nothing, except that now he’s just a dead pretty boy. It ain’t our case. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I caught a bus and rode up through the squalor of lower Nebraska to my apartment. I bought a twenty-five-pound block of ice at the ice house on the corner, carried it up to my apartment. I put the ice in a dishpan, set the dishpan on a center table in the bedroom. I plugged in the electric fan and set it behind the pan, so that the air was blowing over the ice, over the bed.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. The air was cool and good for a second or two, until I got used to it. I reached under my left armpit and pulled out the knife. It was long, keen, and gleaming with a six-and-a-quarter-inch blade. I knew what was bothering me, now.
A living, breathing, feeling man had been killed.
I slung the knife. It flashed, struck the doorjamb, stood out from the wood, quivering.
I flopped over on the bed and went to sleep.
It was a hell of a hot day.
CHAPTER TWO
KNIFE FOR HIRE
I didn’t sleep long. I woke with a mouthful of cotton, sweat drenching me, a heat-thickened pulse pounding in my head. I ran my tongue around my gums, realized that somebody was knocking on the door. As I went to answer, I plucked the knife from the door jamb, put it back in its sheath under my armpit. I looked at my watch. It was 4:40 in the afternoon.
When I opened the door, Phyllis Darnell had her hand raised to knock again. She’d changed from the white play suit, wearing now a yellow silk dress that really set off her complexion, lazy black eyes, and midnight hair.
“Oh!” she said, as if the opening of the door had startled her. She made vague gestures in the air with her hands. If it hadn’t been for that way she had of using her hands, she’d have been a very beautiful woman.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, Mr. Carter. Are you busy?”
“It depends. I guess you want to hire a detective?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, my looks didn’t bring you here, did they?”
Ice flaked in her eyes. “No, your looks didn’t bring me here. Are you going to ask me in or not?”
“Why not?” I held the door wide. When she came in and I’d closed the door, I said, “You care for beer?”
“No.”
“Well, excuse me a moment. Make yourself at home.”
She followed me out to the kitchen. I opened the icebox, counted the bottles of beer. The girl who’d come in to clean while I’d been out had been thirsty again. I opened a bottle of beer, killed half of it, said, “I’m listening.”
“I really don’t know how to begin, Mr. Carter. I really don’t!” She wrung her hands, real fright coming to life in her eyes. “It’s very awkward.”
“I’ve heard awkward things before. Sit down. Iced tea?”
She shook her head, then nodded. “Yes, I’ll have a glass of tea.”
I put water on to boil.
“How’d you find me, Mrs. Darnell?”
“I asked that sheriff. From the way he talked to you when he arrived at Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow, I knew you were a detective. He told me where you worked, where you lived. You weren’t in your office, neither was your boss, and the girl at the reception desk.”
“Okay, okay. I guess you wanted to talk to me about Tomlinson?”
“I yes—no. I mean, in a way I did.” She glanced about the kitchen as if seeking a way out, a way to stall. “I see the water is simmering, Mr. Carter.”
So it was. I took the battered aluminum pot off the flame, dropped in a tea bag, chipped ice and put it in a glass, and poured the tea over it. I set out cream, sugar, and scratched in the back corner of the icebox for the lone, wilted lemon there. Slicing the lemon, I said, “Why don’t you just tell me straight off? Why beat around the bush? Buddy Tomlinson has been murdered and it’s put you on the spot somehow. You want me to remove you from said spot. All right, what is it?”
The way she whitened beneath her deep tan gave her the appearance of wearing a heavy coat of dark powder. Her hands were trembling. “I—I really don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
I set the tea before her, sat down across the table, and finished my beer. Then I just sat there, not speaking, not moving.
When the silence began to eat away her nerves, she said shrilly, “I lied this morning! I’m married—but I’m not a divorcée. And I had every reason in the world for wanting to kill Buddy Tomlinson!”
She began to cry softly. She took out a wispy handkerchief, made dabs at her eyes.
“I really hate to say this. I really do. You see, Mr. Carter, I have a husband in Augusta, Maine. But we’re not divorced, and never intend to be. I really don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you. Oh, I’ve been a fool! I can hardly explain it to myself.
“I love my husband deeply and I am sure I mean more to him than life itself. I won’t try to excuse myself. But every year I take a vacation, to Florida, the West Coast, South America, or Cuba. My poor, trusting husband! His business keeps him tied to his desk, but he insists that I might as well escape a few weeks of northern winter every year. It’s on these trips that I present myself as an unmarried woman or a divorcée. That way one interests a better class of men than if one admitted being a married woman. Somehow that way it always seemed in my mind to cheapen my husband less.”
She was looking down at her hands, momentarily quiet in her lap, waiting for me to speak. To condemn her, maybe. I opened another cold beer and didn’t say anything.
“Drink your tea,” I said.
It wasn’t very good tea, but she drank it gratefully. I finished my beer and said, “Buddy Tomlinson was one of those men?”
She nodded mutely.
“You certainly made a mistake about classifying men in his case!”
She shuddered under the sentence as if it was a blow of my hand, but she continued to look silently down.
“How’d you meet Tomlinson?”
“Through Baxter Osgood. They seemed to be close friends. Baxter Osgood owns a small beer garden on Coquina Beach. I was there one night—he introduced me to Buddy.”
“And you were promptly swept off your feet.”
“You aren’t a woman. You didn’t know Buddy Tomlinson,” she said in a stricken voice. “Now he’s dead, and the letters have disappeared.”
“You made the mistake of writing him some mush notes?”
Her face flooded red. “He was in Bradenton for a week. He begged me to write him every day. He was so sweet, so boyish.” Her voice thickened with a violent anger; her hands played on the table top. “Something I said must have caused him to suspect that I wasn’t really divorced.”
“Can you recall what you might have said?”
“I— No. One night—just before he went down to Bradenton—we drank quite a bit. I was drunk when he took me to my hotel. I must have talked of my life in Augusta.”
“Afterwards he wanted money for the letters?”
She nodded again, swallowing in such a way her throat constricted with the action. “I gave him almost five hundred dollars—but he didn’t give me the letters back. I knew then that I was in a deadly game, that my life in Augusta depended on what I did. I hoped to wheedle the letters out of him. Now he’s dead. Can’t you see what might be the results if those letters come to light? My husband’s life ruined, a possible murder charge against me. Mr. Carter, you must help me. I can’t afford to be drawn openly into this kind of mess.”
I opened a third beer. She was in a jam, all right. If those letters had been worth five hundred before Buddy Tomlinson’s death, now they were worth every nickel she could lay her hands on, a
nd somebody evidently knew that. If the police had discovered the letters, they’d have taken her in for questioning by this time. I said, “Any idea who Tomlinson might have boasted to? Who might have known about those letters?”
“No—unless it’s Baxter Osgood. I don’t think he makes all his money out of that beer garden he owns. I think there was something more between him and Buddy than mere friendship.”
“Business deals?”
“Perhaps.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll do what I can to help you. But get one thing straight. This is murder. Contrary to what the public thinks, private dicks don’t like to get mixed in murder. If we have to wade through murder the cost is high.”
“I know,” Phyllis Darnell said. “I’ll pay.”
“I’m not worrying. After all, I’ll have the letters, won’t I?”
I ushered her out, showered, and went over to Mac’s garage, where my coupe had been laid up with a ring job. Greasy, limp from the heat, Mac had just finished the job. He wiped his hands on a piece of waste and told me the old crate was ready to roll. I made arrangements to see him on the fifteenth and drove down to the office.
The old man was locking his private office, getting ready to leave for the day. I told him to unlock again, explained the case.
He unlocked the door, walked across his office saying, “A murder case? I don’t like it, Lloyd. I never liked a murder case.”
“I know.”
“The official boys have everything to work on a murder case, labs, organization, everything. A private agency small as ours ain’t equipped for it.”
“I know.”
I opened his desk drawer, took out the .38 police special that always nestled there. I pulled out a corner of my shirttail, tucked the gun in my waistband, and tucked the shirt back in over the gun. You’d never know it was there. A box of loads was in the corner of the drawer. I dropped a handful of them in my pocket.
The old man was already on the phone, talking long-distance.
I sat down and smoked until he finished.
He pushed back the phone, shadows over his rawboned, gaunt face.