by Unknown
“Ben Aiken’s glad we’re going to cooperate,” Fayette said.
“That’s good. He give you much?”
Henry Fayette nodded, his frown deep and sour. He jabbed at his desk blotter with his letter opener. “This Buddy Tomlinson was quite a guy. Convicted once in Miami on a larceny charge. Charged once with blackmail in Baltimore, Maryland, but got off for lack of evidence. Nabbed once in Brownsville, Texas, for being mixed in the marijuana racket, but beat that rap too. Miami had his whole previous record.
“Tomlinson came to St. Petersburg almost a year ago in company with an unknown woman who can’t be located. There’s nothing on the St. Pete blotter against him except a charge of driving intoxicated, for which he was fined.
“He was killed between twelve midnight and one o’clock last night, which means that he lay in his bungalow during that time without being found. The murder gun has not been located, but Aiken has got him an important witness. Guy by the name of Baxter B. Osgood. He the one you met over there?”
I nodded. “Osgood owns a beer garden on the beach. He lives in the bungalow next to Tomlinson’s. An athletic, freckled, blond guy. He could be plenty mean, I guess.”
The old man traced a pattern on the desk blotter with the opener. “Osgood says he was awakened last night about twelve thirty. Says he dreamed a backfire woke him, now realizes it must have been the shot in Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow. Osgood says his bedroom window faces the Tomlinson house, and that from that window he saw a woman leaving Tomlinson’s bungalow. There was a bright moon. You know that moon at the beach, turning night into day. Osgood recognized the woman by the red swagger coat she was wearing, and her hat. The hat had a couple of tall feathers sticking up out of it.”
Fayette flung the opener on the desk; his face was gray. “Dammit, I told you she was an old friend of mine.” Accusation flamed on the old man’s face, then he shook his head as if clearing it. “I’m upset. I can’t blame you. I got no reason to blame you, Lloyd.”
“You mean the woman Baxter Osgood recognized leaving the Tomlinson bungalow is Emagine Buford?”
Fayette nodded. In his quiet, flat voice he said, “Ben Aiken’s jailed her—charged her with first-degree murder.”
I whistled softly. It didn’t help the old man’s feelings any.
It was pretty late in the day to do anything much, but Fayette insisted on driving over to St. Pete, to talk to Emagine Buford. We took my coupe. The thing I wanted out of this case was those letters of Phyllis Darnell’s. That’s what we’d get paid for. But the letters were somewhere in the pattern of Buddy Tomlinson’s death, and I knew we were going to have to sift through that pattern to find them. I didn’t like a damn thing about the case.
It’s only half an hour’s drive from Tampa to St. Pete by way of Gandy Bridge, and it was still daylight when we got in the Sunshine City, though the sun had dropped in the Gulf, leaving behind it vast streamers of crimson and gold in the western sky.
We wasted fifteen minutes talking over the case with the St. Pete men. Then we went back to Emagine Buford’s cell.
She had been crying, and her face was swollen, but even so you could see that she had been a raving beauty in her day. As Allene had said of her step-mother, Emagine was well preserved, slim, with a small, unlined face, and hair dyed to a nice shade just darker than auburn. She didn’t look a day over a young forty.
She managed a smile when the old man entered her cell. “It’s unfortunate that you have to visit me here, Henry.”
Fayette said, “We want to help you. This is Lloyd Carter. Mrs. Buford, Lloyd.”
We each said it was a pleasure, and Emagine sank on the edge of her cot. She looked at the old man with hope and trust. They talked for two minutes. She wasn’t able to tell us a thing more than the county men had. She had been home asleep, she claimed, when Buddy Tomlinson had been murdered. She hadn’t seen him since the night before his death. She spoke of him with a mixed tenderness and hot, new-born hatred.
The old man told her that we’d do our best, and we left her.
That was that, for my money. Outside headquarters, Fayette mopped his face with a big red bandanna and said we might as well eat.
We went to eat.
It was just after 8:30 when I got back to my apartment house in Tampa. The place had no garages; so if you owned a car, you left it at the curb. I locked the coupe, and walked in the apartment house. I was halfway up the flight of stairs when the door opened in the lower hall and my landlady’s nasal drawl came to me. “Is that you, Mr. Carter?”
I bent over the stair railing, looking down the hall. She was standing in her doorway. “There’s a woman in your apartment,” she said. “Said she had to see you. I let her in to wait.”
She slammed her door.
I went on up the stairs, down the hall, and opened my apartment door. Allene Buford stood up when I entered.
She’d turned on the small lamp over near the corner, and the soft light silhouetted her. I remembered her as I’d first seen her in the old man’s office earlier in the day: not plain, but not beautiful either. Now, with the light behind her like that, a light not bright enough to glare at her or to show up the room in which she was standing, she almost made the grade. She was almost beautiful.
“Are you mad at me, Lloyd?”
“For coming here? I don’t think so.”
“I’m glad,” she said in her calm, colorless voice. She took a turn up and down the room. I closed the door and stood watching her. “I couldn’t stand it in the empty hotel room any longer,” she said. “I thought I hated her, Lloyd, but she was so pitiful when the police came and took her.”
She came over closer to me. “Emagine and I never got along, but when she was gone I sat in the room there in the Morro for a while, remembering the fights we’d had. The things I’d said to her. I couldn’t stand the room any longer. I called one of the St. Petersburg detectives. He didn’t know you, but had a buddy who did. So I got your address and drove over.”
A moment of silence passed.
“Lloyd, will you take me some place?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“Any place there’s some music, a glass of wine, something to eat.”
She caught my arm. “Lloyd, they won’t send her to the electric chair, will they?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what if she didn’t do it?”
“It looks pretty much like she did. Murder is a funny thing. Sometimes cops flounder around a lot on a murder case, because they haven’t got direction. But once they get direction, once they know what they’re looking for and who it’s to be used against, they usually dig up evidence.”
I sensed a shudder rippling over her.
“Let’s go have that glass of wine.”
We went down, got in the coupe, and drove over to Club Habana, a small, quiet place with Cuban music, fair wines, and fairly good food.
I sipped a beer, danced with her, watched her eat her dinner. She ate the spicy Cuban food as if she’d been too nervous and distraught to eat before. Now that she’d let down, she’d discovered she was famished. But that other hunger, that longing in her eyes—it was still there when she’d reached her coffee. It had been there always, I guessed, lonely, without an anchor.
We danced a few more times. We talked for a while. She told me about her home town, her girlhood. “I was walled off,” she laughed, “by high walls of greenbacks.” She reached over and clutched my hand. “I feel much better now, Lloyd. I think I’d better go back to St. Pete. But tomorrow—couldn’t we do something then?”
“I dunno, I—”
“Show me Florida, Lloyd! Not the Florida the tourist sees, but the backways, the way the swamp people live, the farms, and villages.”
“Sometime,” I said.
She didn’t take her hand off mine. She leaned toward me, her mouth parted a little, the soft, blue light of the Cabana glinting faintly on the tips of her teeth. I could see a pulse b
eating in her throat and the almost invisible sheen of perspiration on her forehead. Very softly the band was playing a tender Cuban love song.
I kissed her softly on the lips. She leaned back, said quietly, “Thank you, Lloyd.” Then she gathered her handbag, stood up, and we left the place.
She said she’d take a taxi to St. Pete, and I deposited her in one, and drove on back to my apartment.
The heat was still like a blanket, even though the night was a bit older. I had a cold beer in the kitchen. Cold beer was the only thing I’d ever found to help against the heat, but even that was a losing contest. The beer didn’t keep you cool long enough.
I wondered if I’d ever get used to Tampa heat.
I went in the bedroom. The ice I’d put in the pan on the center table that afternoon had long since melted, but the fan was still running, sending a stream of sluggish hot air over my face. I didn’t lie down. I simply sat on the edge of the bed, trying to get my thoughts straight. I couldn’t go to sleep; so I got up and went back down to the coupe.
I started the motor, let it idle for a minute. Then I pointed the nose toward St. Pete and Coquina Key.
It was a little after 11:00 when I rolled down the boulevard on the island. A huge moon bathed Coquina Key in silver light. White surf broke against the beach, and out in the water, moon rays lay in a great elongated splash, a pool all their own. Stars were out by the millions in a sky that was pure black velvet.
I braked in the business section of the Key. It was pretty grubby, most of the buildings of frame wooden construction, a cluster of boat houses down at the inlet, along with some bait houses. Cabanas and cottages were stacked over the area, close together. Everything there was dark, except for a bar, a chicken-in-the-basket place, and Baxter Osgood’s beer garden.
CHAPTER THREE
KILL ONE, SKIP ONE
The beer garden was crowded with people in rumpled sport shirts and slacks and cool cotton dresses. It was hot, smoky, wet and rank with the odor of beer, turgidly alive with sluggish conversation and the rasping of a juke box. I bought a beer at the bar and asked if Baxter Osgood was around.
“I’m right here,” Osgood said, practically at my elbow.
I turned around to look at him. He moved up to the bar beside me, sat down on a stool.
“I saw you come in, Carter.”
“The beer isn’t cold,” I said.
“No? Why don’t you buy someplace else?”
“I couldn’t—not the product I’m in the market for.”
“No?” he said again. “What is it you’re wanting to buy?”
“Letters,” I told him.
He watched the dancing for a few seconds. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know you don’t, Mr. Osgood.”
“How much are you paying for this product?”
“Enough—but not too much.”
He yawned against the back of his hand. “I’ve got to run over to the house for a minute. Like to come along—just for the ride?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll come along, just for the ride.”
We went outside. His car was angle parked at the curb, a blue convertible. We got in, and he drove down the boulevard, turned off on Sunshine Way, braked before his bungalow.
“Every time I look at the house next door,” he said as we got out of the car, “I think of Mr. Tomlinson.”
“Too bad about Mr. Tomlinson, but I understand they’ve got the woman who killed him.”
“I thought you might be interested in it—say in an academic way.”
“Not even in an academic way.”
“Just in letters, huh?”
“You said it.”
He keyed open the front door. The house was like an oven; he turned on lights, opened windows, threw the switch on an attic fan. Cooler night air began to rush through the place.
Osgood walked over to the knee hole desk, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and picked up a box of matches that was on the desk. He turned halfway back toward the desk, dropped the matches on it, and opened the drawer and pulled the gun, all in one liquid motion.
He laughed faintly. The gun was leveled at my middle.
“Well,” I said, “every man is entitled to one mistake.”
“Yes—one.”
He came halfway across the room toward me. “Turn around, Carter.”
I stood still, and he jerked the gun up. His words didn’t bother me—the sudden message in his eyes did. I turned around.
He came up behind me as if to frisk me. He hit me on the crown, where I’m starting to bald. I don’t remember much after that.
I think I tried to get out of the house. Common sense tells me I tried to pull Henry Fayette’s .38 out of the waistband of my pants. Putting it together later as it must have been, I think I crawled as far as the kitchen. There I passed out for a moment, and he must have unlocked the kitchen door and dragged me outside. I tried to stir on the powdery sand of the back yard. He hit me again, on the back of the head.
The next thing I sensed was a slow melting of black nothingness into a quivering curtain of heavy gray fire, if there ever was any such thing, against the walls of my eyeballs. As the black faded, feeling came in to take its place. My head was a pincushion of pain; my heart was laboring; and I was sucking in mouthfuls of cool, clean air. It was very early morning.
Ten or fifteen minutes later I sat up slowly. I was still in Baxter Osgood’s backyard. I stumbled to my feet, staggered to the kitchen door, opened it. The old man’s gun had still been in my waistband. Now it was in my hand. I intended to fix Osgood so he’d never beat another man again. In my state, I was no match for a fever-ridden midget, but that didn’t occur to me. I had a gun, I was on my feet, and Osgood deserved every damn thing I could dish out.
But he wasn’t in the house. The place was pretty well messed up, with drawers pulled out and stuff strewn over the floors. I decided he’d grabbed a few valuables and skipped. Then I looked out the window, saw his convertible still parked on the edge of the street. I tried to make sense out of it, but didn’t feel up to it.
As the anger burned out of me, I didn’t feel up to anything. I went in his kitchen, started some coffee making. I looked in his refrigerator. Two bottles of beer were in it. I drank both of them.
I followed the beer a few minutes later with two cups of scalding black coffee. I ate a piece of bread and butter, a slice of cheese, and followed that with another cup of coffee.
I went to the living room, opened the front door. My head was still aching and spinning like crazy. I wondered if I had a concussion. The sun was just over the lip of the earth in the east, rising in that burst of orange and crimson you see nowhere but in Florida.
Low in the air, over the edge of the beach, a cluster of gulls were wheeling and screaming.
I did a double take at that group of gulls, stared at them a few seconds, then went stumbling toward the strip of beach as fast as I could go.
Baxter Osgood was lying on his face, the water almost lapping the tips of his upflung hands. He’d been shot in the right temple, and near his hand lay a .38-caliber revolver.
I squatted on my heels beside Osgood’s body and tried to figure the way it had happened. He’d left me in the back yard, entered the house to get something. Somebody had arrived.
He and the somebody had walked down here, and the somebody utterly without warning had shot him, then with panic gnawing, the somebody had wiped the gun, pressed Osgood’s prints on it, and left it where it might have fallen from his hand. I was pretty sure the gun was the same that had killed Buddy Tomlinson.
It was just a hunch, but granting the hunch, and granting that Ben Aiken fell for the suicide picture, Aiken would conclude that Osgood had killed Tomlinson because one of their shady deals went sour, then in panic had killed himself.
There was one other point. The murderer evidently hadn’t known I was in the back yard. My coupe wasn’t at Osgood’s house, but up at his beer joint. Th
ere was no other evidence that I was lying in the back yard unconscious when the murderer had called on Osgood.
I turned Osgood over, remembering the way his bungalow had been searched. I patted his torso, his waist.
The money belt was one of those jobs that blends right in with the body lines. If you weren’t careful, you could search him and miss it. I tore his shirt open, took the belt off him.
Osgood’s belt contained five thousand dollars in money and a few sheets of paper that upon reading I knew were the letters that Phyllis Darnell had written to Buddy Tomlinson.
I went back in the house and phoned Ben Aiken.
An hour after that, a small crowd of people was gathered in a room in St. Pete’s old, sunbaked city hall.
They all looked at me when I entered. I had my head bandaged, three aspirins under my belt, pile drivers still in my skull, and a feeling like a wad of cotton in my throat.
I looked over the silent room. Ben and a city dick were there, along with a stenographer, who was a big, brawny man. Henry Fayette was standing beside the chair that held Emagine Buford, who’d been taken from her cell. Allene Buford stood near the windows, and Phyllis Darnell stood with her back to the wall near Emagine’s chair.
I tossed Phyllis Darnell’s letters on the scarred table. Her gaze rabbited around the room, her hands fluttering to her throat. “Go ahead,” I said, “and pick them up. My boss will render you a bill later. For my money, you’re a dirty little tramp, Mrs. Darnell, but Ben has agreed to keep the letters confidential. Not because of you—because of that poor devil up in Augusta, Maine.”
“Then you know that I didn’t kill Buddy Tomlinson? You really do know!” Phyllis held her hands pressed tight against her throat.
I looked at Allene. She took a step or two toward me. That wad of cotton fluffed out in my throat. “We know who killed Tomlinson and Osgood both, don’t we, Allene?”
She stopped, then began moving again, circling around the room. “Are you joking with me, Lloyd?”
“I wish I was. I wish it more than you know, though maybe not for the reason you think. You knew Tomlinson had a good chance of getting his hands on the Buford money through Emagine, unless something was done about him. You went to his bungalow, maybe planning to kill him, maybe not. But you did kill him. Osgood saw you leaving. You were wearing Emagine’s hat and coat, and he thought it was Emagine at first. But when he heard her story, he was inclined to believe it and guessed it had been you.