Carmody went up the steps to the main entrance and saw beyond the right corner of the columned colonial veranda a series of small cottages, built in replica of the larger building, perched on a rocky bluff overlooking another arm of the sea beyond the point that sheltered the inlet. There came a clatter of silver and glassware from the cool blue dining room to his left, and he saw women who looked practically naked in their sunsuits and men in shirts and neckties and coats. Carmody headed for the desk and as he passed one of the lounge chairs, Markham Dunning lurched up and called his name.
“Mr. Dunning,” Carmody said, halting.
Dunning put out a hand and Carmody shook flaccid fingers and with the other hand Dunning tried to steady himself on the back of the lounge chair. He missed and staggered and Carmody caught his elbow and said: “You’d better sit down a moment, Mr. Dunning. Are you ill?”
“It’s something that bothers me now and then. I thought you had forgotten our appointment, young man.”
“I did, in a way. I forgot to bring my scores.”
The man smiled. It was more of a grimace, a muscular spasm in his lean aristocratic face. “That may be just as well. I find I may have to leave for town myself, this afternoon. You could mail the scores to my office there. On Fifth Avenue. I’ve telephoned my collaborator about your work. George Tighe. Know him?”
“I’ve heard of him, of course.”
“He is as anxious as I am to consider your music.”
“You may be over-rating me, Mr. Dunning.”
“I think not. And now, if you will excuse me—”
Carmody stood still and watched the tall, thin man move away across the lobby. It seemed to Carmody that the man’s leonine head was bowed as if in fear or illness. It was fear, he decided, remembering the wild distraction that lurked in Dunning’s eyes. He shook his head and decided it did not concern him, and then went over to the desk clerk and asked for Monte Bachore’s room number.
The desk clerk said: “Are you a guest here, sir?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Is Mr. Bachore expecting you, sir?”
“I just asked a simple question,” Carmody said.
“We do not like to disturb our guests. I’ll call and announce you, if you will wait over there, please.”
“I’ll wait here,” Carmody said. “Don’t you like the way I’m dressed?”
“That has nothing to do with it. Let’s not have a disturbance, sir.”
“No, let’s not.”
“I’ll call Mr. Bachore at once. Your name, please?”
“William Howard Carmody.”
Carmody thought the clerk’s eyes widened a little but then the man’s face was a polite, distant mask again and he made the call while Carmody watched him. The clerk seemed disappointed when he turned back and shrugged neatly tailored shoulders.
“You’re to go right up. Suite 5-A.”
“Thank you.”
Carmody turned and walked away across the lobby and when he was halfway to the stairs he looked back and saw the clerk talking urgently into the telephone again. He went on up the steps and followed a fat woman in ridiculous lavender slacks that made her flesh seem like quivering gelatine encased in nylon. The door to 5-A was open and the fat woman walked past and Carmody halted for a moment and looked down at his hands. He saw they were shaking a little. He sucked in a deep breath and told himself there was no real reason to be afraid of Monte Bachore and then he went inside.
“Ah, Bill. It’s been a long time!”
Monte Bachore was a tight barrel of a man with a round ingenuous face and dark black hair that grew in a straight line across his forehead and a small, spade-shaped black beard. He was smiling. He put out his hand and Carmody ignored it and walked past him into the big room that overlooked the yacht basin. A table had been set up by the open terrace window and breakfast things in silver chafing dishes stood on a sideboard. Carmody looked into the bedroom and saw it was empty and turned to see Monte grinning at him, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his white silk pajamas.
“If you haven’t had breakfast,” Monte said, “you’re just in time for sausage and eggs.”
“Thanks,” Carmody said.
“Sit down, Bill. Don’t act foolishly. Not until you hear what I have to say, anyway.”
Carmody stared at him. “When did you grow the beard, Monte?”
The man laughed loudly. “You like it, kid? It gives me that certain look, doesn’t it? A man like me, mixing with people like these here, has got to look different. Distinguished, like. The dolls go for it, too.”
“I thought it might be because you didn’t want the police to recognize you,” Carmody said.
Monte Bachore laughed loudly, as if Carmody had said something quite funny. “Sit down, Bill. Sit down. The cops have no squeal out for me.”
“Or for me, either.”
“No. I’ll take care of you, Bill. You don’t have to worry about anything.” Monte’s smile did not touch his eyes. They were like polished black stones. “How is the music, Bill?”
“I’m working at it.”
“Making money?”
“I’m getting along.”
“For peanuts, I’ll bet. You used to be more ambitious. You were the best pianist I ever had, over in Jersey. The clients liked you. But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? I’ll bet you never think of it any more.”
“I’m trying to forget it” Carmody said carefully.
“You remember when you quit, hey?”
“I didn’t quit. I ran like hell.”
“But you didn’t need to. I covered you, didn’t I?”
Carmody looked at the bland mouth and neatly trimmed black beard. Under Monte Bachore’s roundness was solid muscle and a mind as cunning and feral as that of a lynx. Carmody went over to the serving table and poured himself a cup of coffee and rejoined the other man on the terrace. Monte was spooning scrambled eggs and sausage into a plate. His hands were chubby, the backs of his fingers covered with little pads of dark hair. Carmody drank some of the black coffee, without cream or sugar. Monte ate lustily, shoveling the mixture of eggs and sausage into his small mouth that looked like a pink hole above the thick darkness of his beard, and talked around his food.
“You’re not worried about that thing all those years ago, are you, Bill?”
“I’m wondering why you’re here, Monte.”
“Hell, it’s no secret. I thought your war buddies told you.”
“It seems you did a lot of talking to them, Monte.”
“Nothing important. Just that you’d work with me again, like old times.”
“No, thanks,” Carmody said.
“Chum, you have no choice.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t make me say it, Bill,” Monte said softly.
“I think you’d better. Then we’ll know where we stand. Sam Link and Robbie Ravelle are screwy. I was screwy, too, getting mixed up in their plan for revenge. I decided to pull out, that’s all. My bags are packed. I’m ready to go. I’ve warned Paul to keep an eye on those two, and I’ve washed my hands of the business. It was a mistake from start to finish.”
Monte swabbed at his mouth with a linen napkin. “This is good food. I’ve been having a run of bad luck lately, in case you didn’t know it. I’m staking my last dime on this deal.”
“What deal are you talking about?” Carmody asked him quietly.
“Why, this hotel, naturally.”
“Where do you think you can get in, except as a guest?”
“It’s simple. There are two ballrooms in this building, one on the main floor, the other up on the third. The whole floor up there. One big room. Nobody ever goes up there, either. I figure on opening a few tables, installing some wheels, making these well-heeled vacationers pay for a little fun. Nothing crooked. They’ll get a fair shake. But you know enough about house percentages to see the possibilities.”
Carmody leaned back in his chair. “I think you’re as cra
zy as Robbie. What about the police?”
“I can keep them in corn. No trouble there.”
“And Paul Sloade?”
Monte Bachore grinned. “That’s where you come in, chum. You help persuade him to convince his wife to play ball.”
“How?”
“It’s simple,” Monte said again. “You’ll tell him that you will spread the story around about how he was a rat in prison camp. How long do you think these people will patronize a place like this if they know that story the way Sam Link told it to me? Not for a minute, Bill. He’ll be broke and busted in a month. That’s one side of the coin. The other side is buttered a little for Paul Sloade. He gets a percentage of the house take. See? Everybody gains, nobody loses. And we all move in here and live in clover.”
“Except the suckers at your wheel.”
Monte leaned forward, bellying against the table. His eyes were hard and as deep and forbidding as the black holes of an abandoned mine-shaft. “You don’t know where you stand yet, do you? All right then I’ll give it to you. You ran away from a murder rap when you enlisted in the Army and went to Korea. It’s as plain as that.”
“You killed the square,” Carmody said loudly.
“Shut up. You want to advertise it?”
“I just drove the car. I didn’t know you were going to kill him.”
“That’s right. You and me and Lou Cannon, my bouncer. Did you know Lou was dead?”
Carmody was startled.
“Auto accident. He lingered for three days before he kicked off. He signed a little paper for me.” Monte let a laugh seep through his teeth.
Carmody had a feeling of impending doom. He put his hands on his knees and stared out across the yacht anchorage, looking at the trim little sailboats and hearing the shouts of the people down there on the beach under the bright umbrellas in the sunlight. He saw Martha Courtney walking along the narrow boardwalk across the marshy inner tip of the cove. He recognized her by the ash-blonde blaze in her butter-colored hair, and by the firm stride and the way she carried herself in the clean sunshine down there. Then he looked across the table at Monte Bachore.
Monte laughed again, showing his pink mouth.
“Don’t be alarmed. It’s only a scrap of paper. Since he was dyin’ anyway, Lou Cannon did me a little favor. The square’s death is still down on the police books as unsolved. It stays that way as long as I got Lou’s confession.”
Carmody’s voice was hoarse. “What confession?”
“Lou wrote that he and you killed the square for the square’s money, that’s all. It’s real simple. As for me, I got my alibi long made. The law doesn’t touch me. It doesn’t touch you, either, as long as I keep the letter Lou signed. I also got some affidavits from eye-witnesses who say just you and Lou drove the square home that night from my club.”
“You’re lying.”
“You don’t want to try me on it, do you?” Monte asked gently.
Carmody got up. His thighs hit the table and it slid side-wise and one leg folded and the linen and the dishes and sausages and eggs went crashing to the terrace floor. Monte jumped back from the mess, but kept his hand in his pajama pocket.
“Take it easy, Bill.”
“I ought to kill you,” Carmody breathed.
“You won’t. Because we’re going to work together—on Paul Sloade and the rich wife he married, and on the ballroom upstairs. It’s a perfect setup. You behave, and we get along fine. You step out of line, and I visit the mailbox. Clear?”
Carmody walked out.
5
CARMODY leaned on the stair rail going down to the lobby and felt the trembling that went up from his hand through his arm and into his shoulders. The black coffee he had with Monte Bachore churned acidly in the pit of his stomach. He felt the pressure of time and events long dead closing in on him like the jaws of a trap, and his mind jumped this way and that, looking for an escape. But there was no escape. Monte Bachore had all the answers. There was nothing Carmody could do unless he wanted to risk taking a murder charge that belonged to Monte.
He could hear shouts from the tennis courts, and the roar of a marine engine being tuned up, and the piping whistle of the lifeguard on the private beach. Carmody went down to the foot of the staircase and walked across the lobby. The clerk at the desk looked hard at him. His shoes made a faint squeaking sound as he walked. He stopped a waiter and asked where he could find Paul Sloade and the waiter told him to go to the last cottage in the row that faced the rocky bluff beyond the beach.
He looked for Martha Courtney, but he didn’t see her. You can forget about her now, he thought. Any ideas you had about her are dead and buried. She won’t waste a word on you once she knows what you’re going to do.
The cottages were beyond the tennis court. He walked slowly, the sun in his eyes, and he looked at the people playing tennis or boating or swimming and he felt a great longing to be just like them, without anything in the past hanging from him like a great dead weight, chained around his neck like an albatross. Then he laughed aloud, thinking how he had fooled himself into a sense of security, putting Monte Bachore out of his mind and enlisting and fighting in a war on the other side of the world, ten thousand miles away, while all the time Monte sat back here and grew his beard to look respectable and waited for him to come back. The sound of his own laughter startled him and he saw a girl look up and stare, frowning, as she walked by, and he muttered, “Sorry.”
When he looked back after her he noticed two blond men who could have been brothers, they looked so much alike. The two men seemed to be walking after him purposefully, circling the tennis court, and Carmody turned away and walked with a quick but not obvious stride toward the private hotel cottages on the bluff.
Carmody had a lead of about fifty feet over the men. He passed the first of the row of cottages and looked back over his shoulder and saw the two men break into a trot in an effort to overtake him without creating any alarm among the lounging guests. Carmody passed three cottages on the edge of the bluff and then saw in the space between the next two, the beginning of a white-painted wooden gallery built on the very edge of the rock drop. One of the blond brothers called something to him and Carmody walked between the cottages and climbed over the white rail. The gallery was only about five feet wide, serving as a community terrace for the last three cottages. The sea crashed and churned angrily on the rocks blow. A woman sunbathing in a deck chair suddenly pulled a towel up to her neck and glared angrily at him. Carmody went past her, stumbling over the leg of her chair, and came to Paul Sloade’s cottage.
The gallery vibrated with the thud of feet as the two blond men broke into a run after him.
The cottages were bigger than he had supposed. There were at least three or four rooms in each unit. French doors opened on the gallery and Carmody saw one of them swing outward and Paul Sloade stepped out, squinting in the harsh sunlight. His dark hair was carefully groomed, with its widow’s peak sharply delineated against the muscular tan of his face. The scar on his jaw glistened dead white. He wore cream-colored slacks and leather sandals and a short-sleeved, knitted yellow sport shirt.
Carmody came up to him and looked back at the two big men following him and said: “Call off your dogs, Paul. This is important.”
Paul Sloade grinned. His teeth were white and strong and even.
“I’ve given orders to keep you off the hotel grounds.”
“I guessed that much. Give me a minute to talk to you.”
“You look scared, Carmody.”
“This is important.”
“You look as if you slept on the beach.”
“I did,” Carmody said.
Sloade grinned again. “With my wife, I bet. I bet you consoled her.”
Carmody swallowed his anger. “Don’t make things worse than they are, Paul. I understand Irene is missing. Aren’t you worried about her?”
“She’ll turn up. She’s probably sleeping it off in your bed, isn’t she?”
Carmody wanted to hit him. He looked back at the two men. “Call them off, Paul.”
The two blond men came thudding up on the wooden gallery and halted, their eyes uncertain at seeing Carmody in conversation with Paul Sloade. They were breathing lightly. Carmody, looking at them, saw in them the Germanic thoroughness of storm troopers. They looked like identical twins, with their thick shoulders, heavy necks, and strong bony faces. One of them licked his lips and said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Sloade. He got in somehow. Jenkins, on the desk, pointed him out to us. Shall we get rid of him?”
“Just a minute,” Sloade said. He was smiling. “What’s on your mind, Carmody?”
“Do you want these robots to hear it?”
“We’ll go inside.” Sloade turned to the two men. “Wait here.”
Both of them spoke in the same tone of voice at the same time. “Yes, sir, Mr. Sloade.”
Carmody followed Paul Sloade off the gallery into the cottage. The sound of screaming, quarreling gulls came from the hidden rocks far below the end of the wooden walk built over the bluff. The sound was cut off as Carmody went into the living room. The furnishings were modern but comfortable, in pastel shades of flamingo red and muted gray. Paul Sloade lifted ironical eyebrows.
“A little different from Camp Five, hey?” Sloade said. “I see Sam Link and Ravelle are here. Have you told them I’m ready for them?”
“I told them, but they’re hard to convince.”
“Those two boys outside are only a beginning. I’ll get an army of them, if I have to,” Sloade said. “They’ll make mincemeat out of any of you who try anything with me, you understand?”
Carmody said: “I just want to tell you—”
“You’re not telling me anything,” Sloade said sharply. “The shoe is on the other foot now. I’m not afraid of you or Link or Ravelle. I can handle all three of you. I’ve made up my mind about that. I thought you were pulling out of it; I thought you were going to tell them to stay away from me.”
Say It with Murder Page 4