The mortar and pestle on the mantelpiece caught Mr Hotchkiss’ eye. He lifted out the pestle. Eight inches of solid metal, capped with a small knob at one end, a large one at the other. And heavy. Mr Hotchkiss hefted it, considered it, his thoughts racing frantically, until little by little they took on craftily logical form.
Yes. Oh, yes.
He slipped the pestle into the pocket of his robe, keeping a concealing hand over its smaller knob. He want out into the hallway and pressed the bell on Miss Guilfoyle’s door. Her expression, when she appeared, all raised eyebrows and knowing smile, suggested that she was prepared to welcome the apologetic return of her angry cavalier. Her face hardened at the sight of her caller. ‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Hotchkiss. ‘Miss Guilfoyle, I’m aware that I’ve made some difficulties for you. I must speak to you about that right now.’
‘All you have to do, mister—’
‘Right now,’ Mr Hotchkiss said firmly. He aimed a commanding finger at the interior of her apartment. ‘Inside, please. In private.’
‘Look, mister—’
‘Oh, I realize that you are, so to speak, under orders, Miss Guilfoyle,’ said Mr Hotchkiss, ‘but even so—’
‘Me?’ said Miss Guilfoyle incredulously. ‘Under orders?’
‘Well, I did have the impression—’
Miss Guilfoyle motioned him into her living room. ‘Now let’s get something straight,’ she said.
Mr Hotchkiss aimed the finger again, this time at the couch occupying the center of the room. ‘Please sit down. All I ask is that you bear with me for one minute. After that—’
‘One minute?’
‘Less.’
Miss Guilfoyle seated herself firmly, her face stony. She raised her arm and fixed her eyes on a jeweled wristwatch. ‘Exactly one minute,’ she said, ‘and then it’s my turn.’
‘Of course,’ said Mr Hotchkiss as he withdrew the pestle from his pocket and brought it down on her skull as hard as he could. Her arm dropped into her lap, but she remained in the same sitting position. He struck again and again until she fell forward on the floor. He gingerly sounded her pulse to make sure there was no beat at all, and then returned to his apartment, leaving her door wide open.
There had been no blood spilled, as far as he saw, but when he examined the pestle closely he saw that, yes, there were telltale stains on it. He washed them off carefully under the kitchen faucet, then brought to the table the mortar and three of the most leafy coleus. He transplanted them, good moist earth and all, into the mortar, arranging the pestle as a centerpiece sunk deep into the earth, only its small end showing a bit above the surface and the coleus leaves luxuriantly surrounding it.
He placed the mortar back on the mantelpiece and put a few plants from the shelves on either side of it. A little readjustment of the pots on the shelves closed the gaps among them, and all that remained to do was wash out and store away the pots from which the transplanted coleus had been removed
Done.
He was wakened from the most satisfying sleep he had known for weeks by a ringing of the doorbell along with a lusty banging on the door. Ten o’clock. When he opened the door two men were standing there, and there was a uniformed policeman standing at rest in front of Miss Guilfoyle’s door. One of the men held out a wallet toward him to display the badge pinned to it.
‘Police,’ the man informed Mr Hotchkiss succinctly. ‘Lieutenant Noble.’ He motioned at his companion. ‘Detective Gomez. I take it you’re Mr Hotchkiss?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’d like to ask you some questions. Mind if we come in?’
‘Not at all.’ As Mr Hotchkiss led them into the living room, he saw that he had not yet drawn up the shades of the bay windows, thus depriving the coleus of several precious hours of daylight. He drew them up, and Lieutenant Noble surveyed the array of plant life with interest. ‘Well now, looks like the Botanic Gardens, don’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Hotchkiss. ‘But questions, you said. Questions about what? Is something wrong?’
‘You might call it that. Lady across the hall there. Guilfoyle. You know her?’
‘We exchanged a few words once or twice. She only moved in recently.’
‘So the super tells me. Well, she was killed last night. Beat to death.’
‘Good heavens!’ said Mr Hotchkiss.
‘Yeah. People upstairs saw her door wide open on their way down to work, and there she was. Now I’d like you to take a look at this’ – the lieutenant held out a large photograph toward Mr Hotchkiss – ‘and tell me if you know this guy. Ever seen him around?’
There was no mistaking that face decorated by that grotesque mustache. ‘But that was the man—’ Mr Hotchkiss said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, he was right out there in the hall last night. Actually, this morning. About four o’clock.’
‘And you saw him? How did that happen?’
‘I don’t sleep well sometimes – I suffer from insomnia – and last night was one of my bad nights. I was up and doing when I heard a noise in the hallway. That’s very unusual here at that hour.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I opened my door and saw this man facing Miss Guilfoyle at her open door.’
‘In a bad mood maybe? Angry? Threatening?’
‘Well, that didn’t become evident until I approached them. When he saw me he became enraged. He said something to Miss Guilfoyle about talking too freely to people. Then he pushed her right through the doorway. Hard.’
‘And?’
‘When I tried to intercede he did the same to me. He was really very powerful. He pushed me right down the hall through my door and slammed it on me. But since Miss Guilfoyle hadn’t asked for my help—’
‘She didn’t seem scared?’
‘No, angry rather. So I let it go at that. If I had known—’
‘Well,’ said Lieutenant Noble, ‘you did what you could. More than most, matter of fact. Anyhow, we already nailed the guy. Wasn’t hard. She had only a couple of addresses in her book and this picture on her dresser. But so far he’s denying everything. He’d be a tough nut to crack too. Big businessman, high society wife, that kind of stuff. Now it looks like you wrapped him up for us. You understand you’ll have to testify about all this, don’t you? And it happened exactly the way you said?’
‘Exactly,’ Mr Hotchkiss said.
‘Good. I have to run along now, but Gomez here’ll stand by. You get yourself dressed, have your coffee, whatever, and then he’ll drive you down to the DA.’ Lieutenant Noble turned his attention to the plant life around him, openly admiring it. ‘My wife had one like that,’ he said, ‘then some damn bugs moved in on it and she had to get rid of it.’
‘Sometimes it’s the only thing you can do,’ said Mr Hotchkiss.
Generation Gap
She had been named Elizabeth, but it very soon became Bitsy, and Bitsy it stayed even after she got her growth. Which was a drag, but not so much of a drag that you couldn’t live with it. Matter of fact, this was how just about everything in the whole world shaped up: a drag, but not so much of a drag that you couldn’t live with it. And when you really started to go down, down, down, there was always The Sound – the delicious blast of it on transistor or stereo – to help pick you up again. Life, let’s face it, was at its best when it was strictly audio.
At sixteen, Bitsy just about had her growth. An Aquarius, tall, skinny, and, from the front at least, straight up and down. From the back – well, a few of the boys in school had already let her know that, walking away from them in those jeans, man, she really turned them on. Also, she had that straight blonde hair coming almost down to the handworked leather belt, and those big pale blue eyes – made all the bigger when she laid on the eyeliner and eyelash darkener – and a cute nose, and what with one thing and another she was, as she admitted to herself, definitely on the up side. That is, allowing for some minor skin trouble now and then.
Of cour
se, it still didn’t put her in a class with Sis, a ripe twenty, front and back. And, add to the injustice of it, Sis was born with brains enough for two which, as Pa kept pointing out, was a lucky thing because Bitsy herself didn’t have brains enough for one. Big joke. But one had to face the facts. There was Sis, out of high school and right into that filing and typing job at the Fort Myers Citizens Bank, and here was Bitsy who could just about make it through roll call in school before the fog set in.
What made Sis bearable at all, really, was that she still had one foot on the right side of the generation gap. There were signs she was already starting to go uptight like Ma and Pa, but she sometimes did remember how it had been for her four years ago and sometimes even acted like a True Friend. Take hitchhiking. Ma and Pa were death on hitchhiking. Somehow they had got it into their pointy little heads that the world was full of evil men just itching to hand lollipops to little girls and then rip them off. But until she had put together enough money to get her own car, Sis had hitchhiked, and while Ma and Pa had never known about it, Bitsy had. And now Bitsy hitchhiked, and Sis knew about it, and, True Friend, kept her mouth shut about it.
Well, except for one time.
That was the time Bitsy had hitched all the way back home alone from that Disneyland weekend with some girl friends and had carelessly let herself be dropped off at the shopping plaza just when Sis was parking in the plaza one jump away. Sis had ordered her in the car and cut loose then and there. ‘Was that messy stud with the pickup the one who got you back to town?’
‘Mmm,’ said Bitsy.
‘Then you listen to me. Are you listening?’
‘Mmm.’
‘There’s plenty of family folks on the road to ride with, and from now on that’s who you ride with, stupid. No more studs like that, you hear?’
‘Mmm,’ said Bitsy. She reached out to switch on the radio, but Sis pushed her hand away from it. Bitsy leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. It wasn’t all that hard to get The Sound in your head without even switching on the radio.
‘Are you still listening?’ Sis said slowly and loudly.
‘Mmm.’
‘Then no more studs, you hear? And another thing. If somebody stops, and you see a six-pack right there on the seat, you stay clear, because it could mean trouble. From now on, family folks only, you hear?’
‘The way you talk,’ Bitsy said tiredly, ‘how can I help hearing?’
Sis often spoke like that to her, a little too slow, a little too loud, the way you’d talk to somebody who was deaf. Or, let’s face it, somebody who was so fuzzy in the brain that she had to have things said to her the way they said it in the Dick and Jane schoolbooks when she was a kid. Run, Dick, run. Careful, Bitsy, careful.
Except you weren’t supposed to show Sis you resented it. If you did, Sis resented your resenting it.
‘You mind your manners when I talk to you,’ Sis now told her.
‘All right, all right,’ said Bitsy. ‘From now on, only family folks.’
Meaning, naturally, uptight old men like Pa. It couldn’t possibly mean getting hitches from cars where there was a family team up front. Nothing on the road went by faster than that kind of a car. Maybe the man at the wheel would like to slow down and lend a hand to a sixteen-year-old Aquarius in tight jeans, but sure as God made little green apples, the lady next to him was not going to buy that package.
Family folks. Like Pa.
She lived up to it too. On trips home from school where she would ask to be dropped off a couple of blocks from the house so Ma wouldn’t catch on, and on jumps out of town to kinfolk in Sarasota and Manatee. Truth to tell, although she had no intention of letting Sis in on it, that messy stud in the pickup had scared her a little, what with all the handwork he was trying out on her thigh and meanwhile whooping it down the highway at seventy an hour. And, as if to show that Sis knew what she was talking about, there had been a six-pack on the seat, all of it gone by the time they pulled into Fort Myers. So it really wasn’t that much of a drag letting the studs go by and keeping an eye out for something in Pa’s class.
She even lived up to it all the way across Florida on the big Thanksgiving trip to Cousin Sheralyn’s in South Miami. Big was the word for that trip, because from the way Pa carried on counting out the bus fare, you’d have to believe he was paying for a trip twice around the world. It gave you something to think about, all right, how he would carry on if he knew that almost all the bus fares he had been laying out for quite a while were going, not to the bus company, but for the essentials of life. Records, hair stuff, face stuff, clothes, fast food. Put it all together it didn’t really add up to all that much, but it was the difference between life and death. Death came when you ran out of your week’s allowance two days after you got it and Sis said no, she wouldn’t lend you even a raggedy dollar bill because you were just as knotheaded about money as about everything else.
So, Ma’s old valise in hand and all that beautiful bus money tucked away in her shoulder bag, Bitsy made it down to Naples as guest of an exterminator-service salesman, a sad case who talked about termite control the whole trip, and then, by way of that straight, wide-open, hundred-mile run along the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades, she was fetched right into the middle of Miami by a bank-president type driving a gilt-edged Cadillac. Not too bad, except that this one kept the radio tuned to news broadcasts all the way, even when, after a while, it was the same news broadcasts all over again.
Anyhow, news broadcasts or not, there she was in the middle of Miami, which turned out to be a lot bigger city than Fort Myers, so that she had to ask directions a few times and haul that suitcase a lot of distance before she wound up at the bus depot and phoned Cousin Sheralyn to come pick her up. Cousin Sheralyn was seventeen and drove the family car sometimes. She was also the one who, the Thanksgiving before when she had been Bitsy’s guest at Fort Myers, had said that once you did the Thomas Edison house and some hunting for shells on Sanibel Island you just about had Fort Myers, and you really had to see Miami to know where the action was, and that was why this whole trip. Now she turned up at the bus depot in the car, and the first thing she said to Bitsy was, ‘Did you really hitchhike it all the way, like you said you would?’
‘Mmm,’ said Bitsy. She showed Cousin Sheralyn all those five-dollar bills in the shoulder bag. ‘Supposed to be bus money. Only now it’s fun money.’
‘Man,’ said Cousin Sheralyn, her eyes opening wide, ‘you really do have something going, don’t you? I wish I had the nerve.’
Then she drove Bitsy to her house, keeping the car radio at full volume so that the two of them would not only hear The Sound but feel it, the way it was meant to be felt, and there was Aunt Willa Mae and Uncle Frank and the two older boy cousins, a couple of clowns really, all of them waiting to dig into the turkey and trimmings.
‘My,’ said Aunt Willa Mae, ‘you get taller every time I see you, Bitsy. I bet you’re taller than Sis now.’
‘Mmm,’ said Bitsy.
‘And how’s your ma?’
‘All right,’ said Bitsy.
‘And your pa?’
‘All right,’ said Bitsy, and that, all formalities attended to nicely, took care of the old folks.
From then on it was one of those holiday times to remember the rest of your life. Miami was where the action was, no argument about it. Mornings, trying to surfboard off the end of Miami Beach with everybody the right age and all high on sun, salt water, and some grass now and then. Afternoons, a lot of driving around, seeing outside and inside those Gold Coast hotels you’d only see in the movies otherwise, and a lot of souvenir hunting, and along Flagler Street into the record shops, all mixed up with a lot of eating any time you felt like it.
Nighttimes, out to one place after another for the dancing and fooling around and more eating. The fooling around, which Sis had also warned Bitsy about in that Dick and Jane style, turned out to be strictly nothing, since both boy cousins were always nearby and both of th
em linebacker types. Bitsy agreed with Cousin Sheralyn that it was a drag being supervised like this, but actually she didn’t mind it all that much. As far as she could see, it certainly saved her the trouble of making some decisions she’d just as soon not make.
Anyhow, as Aunt Willa Mae said, all good things had to come to an end sometime, so Sunday, right after lunch, Bitsy got her stuff together for Cousin Sheralyn to take her to the bus depot. It turned out that what with all the souvenirs and the new-bought decorated T-shirts and beach hats and the pile of new records, Bitsy found that she needed an extra piece of luggage, whereupon Uncle Frank dug up a good strong carton, and into it went all the extras and around it went a strong piece of cord. So, as if to show what kind of wild weekend it had been, when Bitsy went out to the car where Cousin Sheralyn was waiting to take her to the bus depot she was carrying not only the valise but that carton.
Cousin Sheralyn took a look at the carton. ‘You got any money left at all?’ she asked.
Bitsy opened the shoulder bag and showed her what was left. One dollar and two nickels.
‘I thought so,’ said Cousin Sheralyn. ‘Well, I’ll drop you off Eighth Street downtown. That’s the Trail. You can start hitching right there.’
‘Mmm,’ said Bitsy.
‘But don’t you ever let your folks know I didn’t put you on that bus. It’ll get right back to my folks, and I hate to tell you what would happen to me then.’
‘A real drag,’ said Bitsy.
She got off at Eighth Street which didn’t look at all like the Tamiami Trail there, just a busy corner full of Latins walking all around and Spanish signs on all the stores, and as soon as Cousin Sheralyn drove off, she arranged the valise and the carton at her feet near the curb, and when a likely-looking car went by, pointed her finger westward. Plenty went by, and for those on the lookout for family-type folks there seemed to be an assortment in almost every car, and none with any idea of stopping.
A couple of one-man cars did pull up and stop, but in both cases this was stud stuff – Latin stud at that – so Bitsy gave them a head-shake, and then, when they persisted in being friendly out of the car window, she just turned her back on them until they took off.
The Specialty of the House Page 60