by Hugh B. Cave
“I wouldn’t know,” he shrugged, “whether Carmen was hurt or not. How long have you known Carmen Molina, anyway?”
“Ages.”
“Pretty good at handling a plane, is she?”
“She’s the best woman pilot in South America.”
“You gals sure do get around,” Kimm murmured. But he didn’t feel facetious. Under the mask he felt mean. His thoughts were storm-clouds.
Gleeson set the ship down and brought it to a stop while Kimm was struggling with those same storm-clouds. The girl balked, then. Stubborn, she shook Kimm’s hand off her arm and told the surrounding darkness, in a shrill howl, that she did not intend to go to New York with Abel Kimm or anyone else. Furthermore, Kimm was a blackguard and a liar and she would have him arrested, tried, convicted and hung for abduction and persecution.
Kimm put a hand over her mouth, gathered her in his arms and gingerly stepped into the dinghy. He had his troubles with her while Gleeson rowed them ashore. Gleeson thought it very funny. He grinned and made sarcastic remarks. The pier, Kimm noted, was deserted and damned dark.
He clambered out of the boat and set the girl on her feet, removed his hand from her mouth and let her get a breath. He needed a breath himself and would have liked a drink to go with it. He wondered how best to get Fern Macomber, temper and all, from Key West to New York, which seemed a million miles away; and then abruptly he stopped wondering about this and made a dive for his gun.
He was too late for it, but not too late to shove the girl aside and blast a fist into the teeth of the first man who rushed him.
They were strong teeth. They ripped his knuckles to the bone. A lunging shape dived for Kimm’s legs and upset him; then the crowding darkness was alive with legs, arms and ambitious mutterings.
Kimm battled to his feet again and laid about him. He couldn’t see much. A slashing heel had gouged his forehead, opened a gash, and warm blood trickled down into one eye.
He heard the girl yelling at full lung capacity and wished she would shut up. Then, with his hands full, he saw Gleeson clambering up from the dinghy.
Gleeson brought an oar with him and used it. For a man who subsisted on bottled nourishment and appeared to get most of his exercise with his feet up, he was good. With the oar gripped in both hands, he let out a roar and ploughed to Kimm’s side.
He almost made it. He caused as much damage, anyway, as a minor hurricane before the butt of a gun smashed him and sent him reeling. Then another gun bored into the small of Kimm’s back, and a noisy, familiar voice snarled in his ear, “Hold it, you damn octopus!” The “or else” wasn’t added, but was present in implication.
Kimm reluctantly released a handful of human face and heaved a sigh. He’d been enjoying himself. He lowered his hands and was grabbed from behind, yanked over an outstretched foot. He looked up into the scowling face of a Joe Bayha thug—the one he had tossed over his shoulder in the presence of the girl who called herself Carmen Molina. His name, Kimm remembered, was Dutchy Schmidt.
“For a little guy,” Dutchy growled, “you do right well. Get up.”
Kimm stretched his aching frame erect. He wondered at the sudden soothing silence around him, and realized Miss Fern Macomber had stopped shrieking. For that he was grateful. All the same, a couple of Dutchy’s pals were having their hands full with the girl. She was a lot like her father, Kimm thought. A fighter.
They quieted her, and Dutchy said matter-of-factly, “O. K., let’s go.” He removed Kimm’s gun and shoved him forward. No one appeared to be interested any more in Gleeson, who lay sprawled on the pier.
Kimm sucked his bleeding knuckles and walked no faster than he had to. He felt low. He thought probably the world was full of violent persons bent on preventing him from getting Fern Macomber to New York. What he needed, he decided, was a drink.
“You got a drink?” he asked Dutchy. “I could use one.”
Dutchy, behind him, said darkly, “You’ll get a drink, and then some.”
Kimm decided it was no use. He walked the rest of the way in sullen silence.
It was not far. The way led along the waterfront a short distance, through abysmal darkness, then along a short, inky lane to a house. The house was old. It smelled old and it smelled empty. One of Dutchy’s pals held open a heavy door, and the others filed past, Kimm and Dutchy ending the procession. The door clicked shut, and someone touched a match to the wick of an oil lamp.
The room was big, big as a barn, its windows shuttered. A dozen lamps would not have rid its corners of shadows. What little furniture it contained was a weird mixture of French, Spanish and English. The high dark walls were hand-planed boards, shiplapped and unplastered.
Kimm wished he were at liberty to look the place over. He tried it and was yanked back. Dutchy shoved him into a chair and stood over him, watched him with one eye while barking crisp orders to the others, in Spanish.
The big pistol in Dutchy’s fist was as old, almost, as the house. One of its slugs would have blown a hole in a brick wall. Kimm eyed it in silence, weighed his chances of revolt and decided to wait.
He watched while Dutchy’s pals backed Fern Macomber into a chair and made her fast with ropes. She didn’t protest. She couldn’t. A bright red bandanna, not too clean, had been knotted around her mouth.
This done, the gentlemen of Joe Bayha took their departure, and Kimm wondered what was next on the program. He scowled at Dutchy. The latter sat down, aimed his gun at Kimm’s stomach and said unpleasantly, “I don’t want no trouble from you, Kimm. Just keep quiet.”
Kimm was quiet. The whole house was quiet, except for the occasional creaking of a loose shutter somewhere high up in darkness. Fern Macomber glared at Kimm, her eyes laden with hate. She blamed him, he supposed, for what had happened. She was probably right.
“Would you mind explaining—” Kimm said, and was silent because the gun in Dutchy’s fist warned him silence was safer. He sighed, stretched his legs out and tried to get comfortable. His head ached.
About half an hour passed; then a knock on the door broke it up. Dutchy went to the door and said through it, “Yeah?” and got an answer which to Kimm was inaudible. He opened the door.
Miguel Reurto walked in.
Fern gasped through her gag.
Reurto closed the door behind him and looked at Kimm. He bared his teeth in a mirthless smile, nodded to Dutchy and said briefly, “Good.” Then he saw Fern Macomber.
It seemed to Kimm, who was watching the South American’s face, that Miguel Reurto did some rapid thinking in the next few seconds. It seemed to Kimm that the man’s eyes clouded, he sucked the situation up in one noisy breath and made a snap decision concerning it. Because Reurto, face to face with Fern Macomber, hesitated just long enough to label his next act a phony; then he lurched forward, tore the red bandanna from the girl’s mouth and set her free. And then, whirling on Dutchy, he loosed a torrent of abuse.
“I didn’t order this!” he raved. “You stupid, blundering fool, I told you to protect Miss Macomber, not abuse her! What’s the meaning of this?”
Had the girl been watching, Dutchy’s look of utter astonishment would have given the play away. But she wasn’t
watching Dutchy. Her gaze was all for Reurto. Her hero!
Kimm groaned.
Dutchy muttered, “What the hell, boss, you said—”
“You know very well what I said! I told you to explain all this to Miss Macomber!” Reurto turned again, darkly scowling, and took the girl in his arms. His scowl softened. So did his voice. “I’m sorry, darling,” he murmured. “Terribly, terribly sorry. I do owe you an explanation, don’t I?”
Kimm felt terribly, terribly sick. He said crookedly, “You might explain the Milly Mae business first, Fancy Face.” And that was a mistake.
Reurto released the girl and walked over to Kimm. He did this slowly, with a glance at Dutchy to make sure he was not putting himself between Kimm and Dutchy’s gun. Maintaining this advantage, he lifted
Kimm from the chair and planted a fist squarely in Kimm’s face. Kimm struck the wall with a thud and fell against a chair. He could have got up, but didn’t. He liked it there. The light was less revealing.
Reurto said to Fern Macomber, “It is true, my dear, that I deceived you on board Bayha’s schooner. I had to make you believe I was aboard, sick. Your life was in danger here, and I had to get you away while removing the menace. Brave heart that you are, you wouldn’t have gone if you had known the truth.” His voice was a caress. It made Kimm sick, but Fern seemed to like it.
Julius Macomber’s daughter clung to him, sobbing a little. She said, “It isn’t true that you’re plotting against my father. It isn’t true, is it?”
“But of course not, my sweet!”
“I knew it wasn’t.”
Kimm was glad that his thoughts could not get up and walk around the room. The smell of them would have been unbearable. He eyed the gun in Dutchy’s fist. He was wondering if, with luck, he could get to it. He decided to try it and, as a preliminary, inched his left hand along the floor and gripped the leg of a chair. And then the door opened.
Dutchy whirled to look at the door, and Miguel Reurto cried shrilly, in a voice not at all masculine, “Look out!”
For a moment Reurto’s warning was the only sound in the room except the noisy rasp of a breath drawn by Dutchy. Obviously, Dutchy did not quite know what to do about the person who stood in the doorway. The intruder was a woman.
She was the beautiful woman who had called herself Carmen Molina.
Kimm plucked the chair off the floor and went into action.
He was magnificent. He thought later it was a crying shame that no one in the neighborhood had turned a motion-picture camera on him, in order to record for posterity the events of the next few moments. Diminutive but ambitious, Kimm swung the chair at Dutchy Schmidt’s head and scored with it. The blow pitched Dutchy into the woman who called herself Carmen Molina, and both went down.
Kimm leaped for Reurto. Reurto, suddenly white of face, stepped behind Fern Macomber and went for a gun. The gun was under his coat, in a specially designed pocket close to the snug waist-band of his trousers, and he had trouble getting it out. He had so much trouble that Kimm was on him, having shouldered the girl aside, before the gun came clear.
Kimm blasted a fist to the South American’s face and followed through with another, then hurled himself bodily at the man’s legs and knocked him sprawling. He ducked, then, because someone was shooting from the doorway. He crabbed sideways, came up with Reurto’s gun, aimed at a pair of silk clad legs, and squeezed the trigger—and discovered the safety catch was still on: He cursed Reurto for being so damn careless, threw the gun and watched it bounce off the chin of the woman who called herself Carmen Molina.
She dropped her own gun, with which she’d been frantically trying to hit something. She made a noise like a kicked cat and turned to run.
Gleeson, the Great Unwashed, came over the threshold at that moment and caught her in his arms. He seemed surprised. His wide-eyed expression said plain as day, “Well, think of this! Pennies from heaven!”
“Hold her,” Kimm snapped.
The big, barny room was quiet again. Well, almost. Reurto moaned on the floor, pawing at his face. Carmen Molina struggled in Gleeson’s grasp and tried to bite him. The air reeked of smoke.
Kimm said, “Well, well.”
He wondered if things like this happened often in Key West, and if so, why the Chamber of Commerce didn’t advertise them. Scowling a little, he stepped past the petrified form of Fern Macomber and looked down at Reurto. “Oh-oh,” Kimm said. “She hit you.”
“Get a doctor!” Fancy Face wailed. “For Gawd’s sake, get me a doctor!”
Kimm looked at the wound and decided it was nothing to worry about, even if he felt like worrying. He worked his hands under Reurto’s arms and wrestled the man into a chair. “A lawyer would do you more good,” Kimm said. “That’s what you’ll be needing, fella. A smart lawyer. One of the slick, crooked kind who take pity on slick, crooked birds like you—for a price.” He hipped his hands and struck an attitude. “On the other hand, a murder rap is hard to beat,” he finished.
Reurto flinched. Fern Macomber took a faltering step toward Kimm and stopped. The girl in Gleeson’s arms shrilled, “I hope they do pin a murder rap on you, you heel!”
“Oh,” Kimm said softly. “You meant to hit him?”
“I meant to hit you.”
“I’m having the damnedest time,” Kimm said, “trying to dope you out.” He scowled at her and still thought she was beautiful, but her beauty now was a little too violent for his liking. “The boy friend was crossing you, hey?”
“I’ll tear his eyes out!”
“That,” Kimm said severely to Reurto, “is what you get for crossing a woman. Rather, it’s what you get for letting her know you’re crossing her—by setting thugs on her. You weren’t smart. Two or three times in this game, fella, you weren’t smart. Now look at you.”
Reurto showed his teeth in a snarl. “You’ll regret this, Kimm!”
“As I get it,” Kimm said, “you and your girl friend here planned this together. Your part of it was to play up to Miss Macomber and get her to write some letters—or maybe you wrote them for her. The letters went Washington and put Julius Macomber in a hole. All you had to do, then, was keep Macomber’s daughter under your thumb until the explosion.” He wagged a finger under Reurto’s nose. “Was this your own idea, Handsome, or did it spring from the fertile brain of P.
K. Esterhood?” “I wish you’d tell me,” Gleeson said, “what the hell to do
with this dame. She’s got more wiggles than a snake.”
“Sock her,” Kimm grunted. “Well, Reurto?”
“But you are insane! You are mad!”
“With a phony accent,” Kimm nodded. “Which proves I’m close to home. All right, R K. Esterhood doped out the play and you pulled it off. But you ran into trouble. Carmen Molina, the real Carmen Molina, was on your island chumming with Fern. She got wind of what you were up to, tried to get to New York to tell Julius where the smell was coming from. Her father and Julius are friends. More than friends. If Julius folded, her father would fold with him, and she meant to prevent it. But you monkeyed with that plane, fella, and she crashed.”
This, Kimm realized, was a guess. It made sense and it slid neatly into its proper niche, but he had nothing with which to hammer it home. The effect of it, therefore, surprised him. Miguel Reurto’s face turned the color of a sheet not washed in Fels Naptha and began twitching.
“All you had to do then,” Kimm said, satisfied, “was get Fern to a place where her father wouldn’t find her. You used Joe Bayha’s boat. You fooled her into thinking you were on board, while you stayed in Key West to meet another vulture, Paul Bibeault. I don’t get that, entirely, unless at this stage of the game you figured to play both ends against the middle and double the take. Esterhood planned the job and no doubt paid a fancy price. So maybe you thought Bibeault would pay, too. No?”
“Look,” Gleeson complained. “She won’t stay socked.” He grinned at Kimm, put the palm of his right hand over the face of the girl who called herself Carmen Molina, and gave her a shove. The shove dumped her into a chair and she cursed him. Kimm turned again to Reurto.
“Which brings us,” Kimm said, “up to the present, to your girl friend here. Is she in this?”
“No!” the girl shrilled. She popped out of the chair despite Gleeson’s unambitious attempt to stop her. Confronting Kimm, she thrust out her chin, which was black and blue now. “I came here,” she snapped, “because I heard he was too damn interested in other women. I used the name Carmen Molina because I’d heard of her and it was the first name came to my mind when I registered, and I didn’t want to use my own. If this slick-haired Romeo is going to jail, count me out!”
“Cute, ain’t she?” Gleeson said. He slouched forward and stroked the girl’s arm. “I could use
someone like you to pour my meals for me. I’m right easy to get along with, honey, and—”
She bit his hand.
“Well,” Kimm said with a glance at Dutchy Schmidt, who was still out, “let’s go.” He leaned over Reurto.
Fern Macomber said, “You leave him alone!”
She had a gun. Dutchy Schmidt’s gun. It looked like a cannon in her small brown hand, but she held it in front of her and managed somehow to keep it pointed in the general direction of Kimm’s stomach. Kimm stood very still and broke out in sweat, because a gun in the unsteady hand of a rank amateur is bad, very bad. A gun in the hand of a professional goes off when the professional wishes it to go off, but a gun in the hand of an amateur is apt to go off any time.
“Now, listen,” Kimm said.
Fern Macomber was being stubborn. Her colorless face was stiff and her lips were curled hard against her teeth and her heart was pounding. She said, “I don’t care! It can’t all be true, what you’ve said about him. And you’re not going to ruin my life just for a lot of filthy money!”
“Your life?” Kimm said.
“We’re going to be married, and you can’t stop us!”
Kimm opened and closed his hands convulsively and longed to shake the little fool’s teeth loose. He opened his mouth to say this and heard laughter. Loud, shrill laughter. It was like nothing human and he wondered if by some chance the pelicans of Key West were cousins to the loons of Canada. He turned, scowling, and Miguel Reurto’s beautiful girl friend brushed past him.
She was practically doubled up with the mirth that poured out other. Oblivious to the gun, she walked up to Fern Macomber and thrust her left hand under Fern’s face. A ring winked on the third finger and she wiggled the finger to make it more prominent.
“See it?” she said. “It’s probably made of tin, but he gave it to me, honest he did. He gave it to me two years ago when I was sap enough to marry him.”
“W-what?” Fern said.