The Bind

by Stanley Ellin

  He handed the glasses to Magnes, who passed them along to the man at the tiller. “That’s her,” Jake said.

  The man sighted with the glasses. Then he opened the bait box at his feet, put the glasses into it and took out a movie camera. He attached a Zoomar lens to it, sighted again, and ran off a few feet of film. “Got her good,” he said, and Jake said: “Now all you have to do is stay with her.”

  On the plane back to Opa-Locka, he said to Magnes: “Tomorrow we hit Dobbs. That man of yours who ferries me to the Argyle said he has a friend who knows his way around the Route Ninety-four section of the swamps. I’ll be seeing him tonight and booking a trip for tomorrow. Will you be in around eleven or so tonight?”

  “I’ll be in all night. I got a lot of resting to make up for.”

  “Then after he drops me off at the hotel I’ll have him phone you about what arrangements we made. About when and where to meet me.”

  “Do I have to? Look, Dekker, I already seen all the swamps I want to see. And if Dobbs don’t want to play ball with you, he won’t play ball with me either.”

  “He’ll play ball with me. But you got friendly with the old guy who lives next door to him in Crosscut. We might need him to steer us to this hammock, if Dobbs is laying low there when we show up. So stay home and wait for a call. And remember, you’re laying it on Thoren this way. You’re helping kick apart that whole job he did, signing up for the insurance and faking the accident.”

  “True,” said Magnes. “And the name is not Thoren. It’s Stresemann.”

  56

  The speedboat showed up at Daystar promptly at ten. Jake waited until it quietly slid away from the dock and was aimed in the direction of the Venetian Causeway, then laid a restraining hand on the skipper’s shoulder. “Don’t turn on the speed yet. I want to talk to you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I want to book your friend for that trip I told you about. Dobbs Hammock, somewhere around Crosscut.”

  “When?”

  “First thing in the morning. What do you do after you drop me off at the hotel? Go back to the marina?”

  “Yep. Watch TV if there’s a cowboy picture on. Maybe play gin with the night watchman. It’s a good place to kill time.”

  “Then as soon as you get back there, phone Magnes and tell him about it. I want you to meet him somewhere along the bay and bring him to the Argyle in the morning. Your friend from the boondocks has a car, doesn’t he?”

  “Beat-up old jalopy. Not much for comfort.”

  “We won’t worry about the comfort. He’ll pick up Magnes and me at the hotel and take us out to wherever he keeps his swamp buggy. When I turn up the guy I’m looking for, your friend’ll drive us from there to Opa-Locka airport. That’s the whole deal. What time does it get light in the morning?”

  The skipper ruminated briefly. “Sunup’ll be about six. Say a quarter to six.”

  “Then have Magnes and your friend meet me on that dock at the hotel at quarter to six. Pass that along to both of them tonight. Now you can get this thing moving. Let’s make speed.”

  They made thunderous speed from there to the Argyle’s dock, but this time it was not deserted. A small group was gathered on it, the men in dinner jackets, the women in evening gowns, taking in the nighttime view of the bay. When Jake stepped ashore all of them glanced at him and then stared openly at the skipper’s patchwork, lacquered face. He ironically saluted them before he swung the boat away from the dock.

  And unlike the night before, the hotel lobby at this earlier hour was well-filled, the Midwestern twang predominating over the hubbub in it. Jake worked his way around the crowd, toward the bank of elevators. As he passed the registration counter, the clerk who had signed him into the hotel took notice of him. The man did an almost comical double-take. “Mr. Majeski?” he said. He didn’t sound too sure of it.

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “Well, I suppose—” The man’s face now registered open bewilderment. “But then you’re all right? There wasn’t any accident?”

  Jake moved up against the counter. “Who said there was?”

  “Why, the police officer who called for Mrs. Majeski about an hour ago. He told me you’d been badly hurt in a car accident, and he had been sent to take her to the hospital.”

  From behind partly open doors across the lobby came a clatter of cutlery, a beehive hum of voices. Rising over the noise, barely audible, a small, sad voice was singing a French ballad. A bulky, red-faced man in a dinner jacket standing near the counter said, “Oui, oui, ooh la la,” and the group around him, beefy, freshly sunburned men and rigidly corseted women with blue-tinted gray hair done in neat little waves, all laughed.

  Jake said to the clerk: “Did she go with him?”

  “Yes, she did. But if it was a mistake, she should be back by now.” The man turned and flicked an eye over the pigeonholes in the rack behind him. He looked again, more closely. “I don’t understand, Mr. Majeski. She isn’t back. Both your room keys are in your box.”

  Someone pushed up to the counter beside Jake and said irritably to the clerk, “Now looky here, Ramos—” and Jake said softly, “You can see Mr. Ramos is busy, can’t you?” The intruder glanced at Jake, got a full view of his expression, and said placatingly, “Why, sure. I didn’t mean—” He drifted further down the counter to bring his troubles to one of the other clerks.

  Jake said to Ramos: “This police officer wasn’t in uniform, was he?”

  “No. But of course I asked for his identification. He was a detective attached to the Miami Beach force.”

  “What was his name? Did you notice it?”

  Ramos was looking increasingly worried. “I’m afraid not. Actually, there didn’t seem any reason to. And with the amount of work at the desk here this evening—”

  “But you did get a look at him.”

  “Yes. A youngish man. Not too prepossessing, really. Dark complexion. Eyes rather close together, a thin mustache. Not prepossessing at all.”

  “And what did you do when he told you why he was here? Just send him upstairs?”

  Ramos looked shocked. “Oh, no, sir. There’s a routine in such cases. We call the room and announce a visitor will be coming up. And where it’s a lady, we send the housekeeper with the officer. If she’s a bit delicate, might faint—”

  “And that’s what you did in this case?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When you spoke to Mrs. Majeski on the phone, how did she sound? What did she say?”

  “Well, now that you bring it up, that was a bit curious. It almost sounded as if she expected my call. She told me she’d be down at once, but, of course, the hotel doesn’t want—that is—”

  “The hotel doesn’t want people fainting in the lobby. So you did send him upstairs. But with the housekeeper.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ramos leaned over the counter. Almost inaudibly, he said: “Mr. Majeski, is there any reason—”

  “No. But I do have some big-shot friends around here who are great on practical jokes. Better give me my room key.”

  Ramos handed it to him. The worry was gone from his face. His expression was now one of sympathetic disapproval. “This kind of joke is in pretty bad taste, sir. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “No,” Jake said, “I don’t.”

  He pushed open the door to 15C carefully, as if it were going to be snubbed up short on its chain. It wasn’t. It swung halfway open, showing the sitting room brightly lit by the chandelier. The bedroom was fully lit too, as was the bathroom. The black chiffon nightgown was on the bathroom floor along with one bedroom slipper. The other slipper he found under the bed. The bed itself had been turned down. Its coverlet was rumpled, and on it was a comb, long golden hairs caught in its teeth, and two paperback books. One was a mystery, the other was Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.

  He checked the walk-in closet. The two valises and the flight bag were still there, and, from what he could make of it, the dresses they
had contained. The rest of her things were stuffed untidily into dresser drawers. The one item definitely missing was the coat she must have exchanged for her own at the airport. He finally found it rolled up tight and shoved into a wastebasket. He opened it up. It was a cheap cloth coat, badly worn, its lining frayed.

  He picked up the phone and gave the operator Magnes’ number. The throat-clearing he heard over the line when the connection was made might have been Magnes. The voice that followed was not. “Hello. Who is it?” It was a drawl that came out in a hoarse whisper. Not the Deep South drawl. More the speech of the native Floridian from this end of the state. And it sounded apprehensive.

  Jake said: “Is that you, Dobbs?”

  “Me? That’s right. Yes. Is that you, Mr. Dekker?”

  “You know damn well it is. You’ve been waiting for this call, haven’t you? Where’s Magnes?”

  “Well, he—Look, Mr. Dekker, you got to come over here now. I’m supposed to tell you that. Come over here right now.”

  “Not a chance. I’m not going anywhere until my wife is back where she belongs. Now put Magnes on the phone. Or better yet, if Gela’s there, put him on.”

  Dobbs’ voice became anguished. “Mr. Dekker, I’m here all by my lonesome, and you have got to be here when Mr. Gela calls in because that’s what he says to do. And I swear I ain’t looking for trouble with you, but I have to do what he says. And he says don’t you do nothing foolish, and it’ll all be settled right away.”

  “Where’s my wife now? With Gela?”

  “That’s right. And that other feller’s with them too. I tell you the truth, I didn’t want any part of this, but you don’t fool around with people like them. So you come over here, and everything’ll be fixed up quick. Mr. Gela already called in twice. He’s waiting for you to get here, and he’s getting hot at me like it’s my fault you don’t. The quicker you do, the better for everybody. Especially your wife.”

  “I’ll be there,” Jake said.

  57

  He traveled back to the house on Daystar by cab. There, he took Aiello’s automatic out of the closet, loaded it, and thrust it into his belt. From what he saw in the mirror, it did not make too obtrusive a bulge when he buttoned his jacket over it.

  When he crossed the bridge to the Beach in the Jaguar, he saw that for the first time in more than a week, no car fell in behind him. He parked a block away from Magnes’ hotel. From across the street he could make out some people in the lobby sitting in orderly ranks, undoubtedly watching the TV set there. He scouted the side street along the hotel, found a service door, and went up to the roof on foot. He crossed the roof as noiselessly as he could and positioned himself beside Magnes’ door, his back against the wall, where he would be out of sight and range of anyone opening the door. He rapped on the door with the gun barrel.

  It was pulled open almost at once, and a skeletal figure stood outlined there, peering into the darkness of the roof. “Mr. Dekker? That you?”

  Jake swung around, planted his hand against the outthrust face, and shoved hard. The man was catapulted backward into the room, hit the armchair there, and went sprawling. Jake thrust his shoulder against the door with enough force to slam it against the inside wall of the room, but no one was behind it. He stepped into the room and shut the door.

  The man slowly getting to his feet could only be Earl Dobbs. He was tall and cadaverously thin, with outsized hands and feet emphasizing the narrow dimensions of him. He wore a fine silk suit, badly rumpled and stained; its jacket hung slack from his shoulders as it might from a too-small hanger. He was pale-eyed, sharp-featured, lank-haired, and unhappy-looking. “Now, Mr. Dekker—”

  Jake leveled the gun at him. “Where’s Magnes?”

  Dobbs’ eyes involuntarily flickered in the direction of the bathroom door. “Now, Mr. Dekker, I can’t blame you for being riled up, but there ain’t any sense taking it out on me.”

  “Open that door.”

  Dobbs backed toward it. “I purely wish you wouldn’t point that thing at me. You know you don’t figure to go shooting me, the way things are, but there’s all kinds of accidents can happen with a gun.”

  “Open it.”

  Dobbs opened it. From where Jake stood, the bathtub was in clear view, taking up most of the space in the closet-sized room. It was a large, old-fashioned tub set on claw feet and was almost full of water. It was long enough for Magnes’ naked body to recline at full length just below the surface. The face stared blindly at the ceiling, the dental plate for the lower jaw was thrust halfway out of the gaping mouth. Jake motioned with the gun, and Dobbs hastily pulled the door shut. “Now, Mr. Dekker—”

  Jake said: “You’re a brave man, aren’t you, Earl? Turn you loose in an old folks’ home, and I bet you’d be a real hero.”

  “You got it wrong, Mr. Dekker. I didn’t do that. I would never do a thing like that. I tell you I got a heart for old people. That was Mr. Gela done that. And the other one.”

  “Aiello?”

  “That’s the one. They done it. And not even on purpose. All they wanted for him to do was tell where your wife was around here, and they had to keep ducking him and ducking him until he would. He was sure one stubborn old man. And he wasn’t drownded. It was his heart give out right after they made him telephone to your wife. So you can’t even rightly say they done it.”

  Jake said: “How did they know my wife was still in town? They saw me take her to the airport, didn’t they?”

  “They surely did. And soon as they knew about it, they phoned up some people in New York to be waiting when she got off the airplane. That lady you had making believe to be your wife told them who she rightfully was real quick. I don’t think they hardly had to get mean with her at all. She just spoke right up.”

  “Old men and women,” Jake said. He thrust the gun into his belt, neatly straightened his jacket over it, then suddenly backhanded Dobbs across the face. The impact flattened the man against the wall. He cried out and covered his face with his crossed arms when Jake raised his hand again. Jake lowered the hand. “For a guy without any guts, Earl, you’ve really got yourself in deep. Where’s my wife now?”

  “Mr. Dekker, I swear I don’t know.”

  “You want to try that bathtub on for size?”

  “They didn’t tell me where they are with her. Mr. Gela only said he’ll keep calling up, and you’d be here sooner or later so he could talk to you. And he said rough as you might want to be on me, he could be just as rough on your wife, and you’d know that. Mr. Dekker, you better know that. Mr. Gela has a mean streak from his neck clear to his tail. And that other one ain’t any better. Only Mr. Gela is worse, because he’s smart too. And he’s got big men backing him up. They all put their heads together, and you just can’t get around them.”

  “What big men? Frank Milan and a lawyer named Katzman?”

  Dobbs kept his arms before his face. “I ain’t supposed to say any names.”

  “I said them. Do you mean Milan and Katzman are cutting in on the blackmail money?”

  “I don’t know about that, Mr. Dekker. All I know is they’re in the company.”

  “What company?”

  “Well, the company that lawyer made up. When Mrs. Thoren gets that insurance money she puts it all in the company, and they take it out. That makes it all lawful and regular.”

  Jake said: “Sure it does. All right, put your arms down. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Not as long as you talk sense.”

  When Jake seated himself on the edge of the table, Dobbs warily lowered his arms. Blood trickled from his lip. He touched it and said reproachfully: “Looks like I’m already hurt.” He fumbled in his pocket, came up with a crumpled and dirty handkerchief and pressed it to the wound. “I can’t even blame you for wanting to take it out on me, Mr. Dekker. I got no hard feelings against you for it.”

  “I said as long as you talk sense. I suppose you’re an officer in this company. The one that’s going to divvy up Mrs. Thoren’s money all
regular.”

  Dobbs heaved his shoulders in a self-deprecating shrug. “Well now, I don’t really rate that big.”

  “How much do you rate? Ten dollars’ worth out of that two hundred thousand?”

  “Well, a lot more than that, Mr. Dekker. A lot closer to ten thousand.”

  “Five percent? You can be bought cheap, can’t you, Earl?”

  “Well now—”

  “Five percent of your own two hundred thousand for doing all the dirty work. You’re the one who found out Thoren was really Stresemann to start with, you’re the one who had to mail him those dog-track tickets, the one who had to get the money from him every month, the one he would have killed if he could. He did try to kill you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir. Almost did over on the hammock, wartime.”

  “I don’t mean then. I mean after the blackmail started.”

  “Then too,” Dobbs said in an aggrieved voice. “He was purely poison, that man. Before Mr. Gela took over he tried to run me down with his car right in front of my rooming house two different times. And he was the one who brung money into it. That day at Bayside Spa, I had him on the rubbing table and remembered who he was, I says without even thinking, ‘You’re Stresemann,’ and for all he turned sheet-white when he heard that, two seconds later he says to me, ‘It’s worth a lot of money for you to forget it.’” Dobbs tapped his chest. “That man put a bullet through me here when I was a runty kid back in the swamps, so it was only God’s goodness I even lived to tell about it. And he gunned down my uncle right there while I was looking, even when he’d laid him out already with a crack on the head. Just aimed right between the eyes while he was laying there and let him have it. And now when I was willing to let bygones be bygones and settle for cash, all he wanted to do was lay me amongst the daisies. Purely poison, that’s all he was.”