Say It with Murder

by Edward S. Aarons

  Now the ocean was in view, glimpsed under the rising yellow of the moon beyond the dark silhouettes of the yachts in the anchorage and the blaze of light and activity going on at the hotel. Carmody swung to the right and Martha, walking beside him, breathing easier now, said, “Bill, are we going to your house?”

  “No. That would be too dangerous. The chief will look for us there, first thing.”

  “Then where are we going?”

  “Beachcomber,” he said.

  “Will he help us?”

  “I hope so.”

  Dunning walked beside him. “They’ll start their search immediately. I don’t think the police saw me, however. I could go back to the hotel and learn what’s going on for you.”

  “I don’t think you ought to get mixed up in this,” Carmody said.

  “Nonsense. I want to help you both.”

  A rutted road led around the inlet for a quarter of a mile to the back of Harry’s place. Dunning paused there, where the road swung closest to the boardwalk; his face was troubled and uncertain in the dim light

  “I don’t like to leave either of you,” Dunning said. “Promise you won’t do anything foolish.”

  “I just want to get Martha safely somewhere, that’s all,” Carmody said. “The chief wants to get his hands on her, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let him do that.”

  Dunning said to Martha, “Will you do as Bill says?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can, then.”

  Carmody didn’t linger to watch his tall, spare figure move away toward the hotel. He went with Martha down the rutted road to the back door of the Beachcomber, and then told her to wait outside while he walked through the kitchen. The cook looked up at him and said something about a cigarette and Carmody gave him one and then caught Harry’s eye when the fat man was visible through the doorway at the bar. Harry came back into the kitchen and rubbed his thick whitish-yellow hair and puckered his mouth.

  “Well, now, what is it, Billy-o?”

  “Come outside for a minute,” Carmody said, looking at the cook. Harry stepped out through the back doorway and for a moment Carmody felt panic when he couldn’t discover Martha among the litter of cans and trash behind the restaurant. Then he saw her standing near a corner of the weatherbeaten building and he took Harry with him and told Harry everything that had happened, without omitting anything. The fat man listened and didn’t ask questions, and when Carmody was finished, Harry smoothed his fat hands over his big white apron and looked thoughtful.

  “So you want some help now?”

  “I’m counting on you,” Carmody said. “Just for a few hours, until the chief cools off.”

  “It’s a big risk.”

  “All right,” Carmody said. “Never mind, then.”

  “Wait a minute. I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Just hide Martha in one of your upstairs rooms until I come back. Will you do that?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll see Monte and get it straightened out.”

  “You hope,” Harry said.

  “I think it can be done.”

  “Have you still got that gun?”

  “Yes,” Carmody said.

  “Give it to me.”

  “What for?”

  “I’ll help you on only one condition,” Harry said. “I don’t care if you killed Paul Sloade or not. It’s no skin off my nose, and he was no good, anyway.”

  “Neither of us killed Paul Sloade,” Carmody said.

  “Then I’ll make sure you keep the record clean. I’ll keep your gun for you.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  “I don’t trust anybody with a gun,” Harry said. “Let’s just say it’s a little idiosyncrasy I’ve got. All right?”

  “All right,” Carmody said.

  He gave Harry the gun he had taken from Sam Link. At the same time he felt in his pocket and found the muddy green ballet slipper he had picked up in Martha’s cottage. The newspaper clipping that Martha had given him fell to the sand and he picked it up and started to read it, but the light from the restaurant windows was too dim and he put it back again. There was a flight of outside wooden stairs leading to the second floor where Harry lived, and they followed the fat man up to the landing and inside. Carmody had never been up there before. He was surprised at the quiet good taste exhibited in the small suite of rooms, at the number of books and the extensive library of recordings on shelves flanking a large record player. Harry turned on a lamp and let Martha get oriented in the room and then turned it off again.

  “No use attracting anyone’s attention up here,” he said. “You’ll be perfectly safe as long as you want to stay, Miss Courtney. I can sleep downstairs.”

  Carmody said: “Leave us alone for a minute, Harry.”

  The fat man nodded and went down the outside stairs, his footsteps as light and soundless as a cat’s. Martha sat down in a chair with a soft, almost inaudible sigh. Her face looked defenseless. Their flight through the pine woods and over the dunes had disheveled her only slightly, and he became aware suddenly of the formal dinner suit he wore. He took her face gently in his hands and knelt before her.

  “Martha, listen to me.”

  “Yes, Bill.”

  “Stay here. Trust Harry. I’ll be back soon.”

  “I know you’ll be back.”

  “Everything will be all right,” he said.

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Why won’t it?”

  “Because you’re going about it the wrong way. You’re going to try to straighten it out through Monte Bachore, and everything to do with Monte Bachore is wrong and bad, and it’s not the way it should be done.”

  “It’s the only way left open to us,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “In an hour or two it will cool off. Right now, that Hallowell would shoot me on sight.”

  “Be careful, Bill.”

  He took his hands away and kissed her. Her lips were cool. “Martha, you said something to Dunning back in the cottage—something about knowing how he felt about Irene. What did you mean by that?”

  She was surprised. “Mark used to be in love with her. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No.”

  “It was a long time ago. I was only a little girl then, and Mark was just getting his start in theatrical productions, I guess. I know he was very poor, anyway. Even I was aware of it.”

  “He’s very successful now.”

  “Yes. But he made it too late. He was too proud and too ambitious to ask Irene to marry him, because he was too conscious of her money and didn’t want it to look as if he were trying to marry her because of it.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “Can you? I think it was stupid. He loved Irene and let his pride keep him from having her.”

  “Did Irene love him?”

  “I don’t know. I think he was finally planning to ask her to marry him, but then Paul Sloade came along and it was too late and—” Martha paused and looked at Carmody with wide, shocked eyes. “Oh, no. It couldn’t be. Not Mark.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Carmody straightened. In the moonlight Martha looked sweet and helpless and more beautiful than he had ever thought her. He felt again the quick impatient pulse of wanting her and turned away. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Bill. Did you look at the clipping?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Look at it,” she said.

  He took the newspaper clipping from his pocket and dropped Lila’s ballet dipper and picked it up and held it in his hand while he went to the window and read the news story in the moonlight. It was dated a month after he had enlisted in the Army, and it was only a brief item, describing the accidental highway death of Louis G. Cannon, age 41, of the Shoreham Apartments in East Manhatt
an. The accident had occurred on the George Washington Bridge at the height of the home-going traffic rush, and there had been plenty of witnesses to describe the drunken, weaving driving of the deceased.

  Lou Cannon, according to the news story, had died instantly behind the wheel of his car.

  13

  IT WAS only a little after ten o’clock. Carmody moved along the edge of the grass-grown dunes, walking toward his beach house. The wind that blew along the edge of the sea seemed antiseptic in its raw fresh cleanliness, and the thunder of the breakers came to him like the bass notes of a modern symphony. There was nobody else on the beach. There were no cars parked on the dunes behind the leaning, box-like silhouette of his rented house. He crouched for a few long minutes, waiting and listening, but he saw nothing to alarm him. When he was satisfied that it was safe and that Hallowell wasn’t there, he got up and walked up the steps to the ramshackle front porch.

  When he heard the soft hiss of a footstep in the sand behind him he spun around on the instant, every muscle tense. He could see nothing on the beach, but he knew it had not been his imagination.

  “Who is it?” he called softly.

  There was no answer.

  Markham Dunning stepped out of the shadows around the corner of the house. He held his hands palms outward, as if to stave off Carmody’s attack.

  “It’s only I,” Dunning said.

  Carmody expelled an explosive breath “What are you doing here? I thought you were going back to the hotel.”

  “I started to, and then I thought I’d wait for you, and I saw you head back here.” Dunning’s smile was apologetic. “I admit I became curious.”

  “Curious?”

  “To see what you were up to.”

  “I’m looking for Lila,” Carmody said.

  “I don’t think anyone is here.”

  Carmody saw that Dunning wanted to say something more to him, and he stood on the sagging porch and waited. The moonlight made a molten river of gold on the ocean, and the lulling monotone of the surf came to him on the warm wind. A loose shutter thumped somewhere in the back of the house.

  A trick of the wind brought a few strains of dance music from the hotel orchestra, half a mile away. Carmody thought of all the things he wanted to do and all the questions he had to ask, and he struggled with his patience.

  “What is it, Mark? What’s on your mind?”

  “Well, I’m concerned about Martha, of course. Do you think she is safe?”

  “For the moment, yes.”

  “Do you think she might have killed Paul?”

  Carmody’s mouth fell open and his astonishment made him silent. Mark Dunning put his hands in his jacket pockets with his thumbs sticking out and hunched his narrow shoulders as if against a sudden chill.

  “It must be considered, if we’re to be practical about all this,” Dunning said. “Don’t misunderstand me. I do not pretend to judge the right and wrong of Paul Sloade’s death. But you probably don’t know how things were around here, just before Paul married Irene. He paid his court to both sisters, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Oh, yes. He managed to mislead them both. He had a way with women, I must confess, that I almost admired. Martha and Irene had a violent quarrel over him. It’s common knowledge.”

  “How common?” Carmody asked.

  Dunning shrugged. “The hotel staff knows about it. Of course, Paul Sloade chose Irene because of the hotel, since Martha had no control over the principal of her funds. Ever since then the sisters have been somewhat estranged.”

  “Martha didn’t kill him,” Carmody said.

  “No. But the police may seriously consider it.”

  “And what do you consider?” Carmody asked.

  “I just don’t know.”

  “You’d better get back to the hotel. Right now. See what Hallowell is doing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on,” Carmody said.

  Dunning hesitated. “Bill, it’s just that I thought you ought to have all the facts. Don’t get sore at me.”

  “I’m not sore. Just disgusted.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way about it.”

  “Go on,” Carmody said again.

  He waited until Dunning vanished down the moonlit beach, and then he went inside the house. It was empty.

  There was no sign of Lila. He stood in her bedroom and weighed the green satin ballet slipper in his hand, and it seemed to have no weight at all and then it seemed to hold all the deadly answers he sought. Lila had known about Paul’s death. That was why she had been so terrified when he’d found her here before, playing the piano. She had been to Martha’s cottage and lost her slipper there. He tried to summon up all the facts about the dark-haired girl that had come to his attention, and he was surprised at how little there was that he knew about her. Nothing at all. He didn’t even know her last name. He even doubted that Robbie knew any more about her than he did. He felt a quick fear for her safely and then the fear went away and he wondered just why Lila was here and what she was after. She was after something, he thought. She had to be. Everything about her was a series of strange contradictions that hid some other motive for her being here. Who was she?

  He stood in the darkness of the room she shared with Robbie Ravelle and pulled at his lower lip and scowled and lit a cigarette and then crushed it out. He was trying to remember if Major Deegan had had a daughter. Suppose, he told himself, she was here for the same reason we all came here, namely, to gain revenge on Paul Sloade. It’s not impossible, he thought. Suppose she deliberately picked up Robbie and Sam, and came here with them to gain her own purpose? He thought about it and then laughed and told himself it was too fantastic, that he was too keyed up and tense to think logically and clearly about anything. Still, it was imperative that he find Lila, and find her at once, and get some answers out of her concerning what she knew about tonight He walked back along the beach to the lights and music that came from the hotel, and he did not feel safe until he came out of the lonely darkness into the milling crowds of the lobby and the bar.

  Jimmy, the bartender, was busy, and Carmody took a spot at the far end of the bar and waited for three or four minutes until he caught Jimmy’s eye. He looked for Sam Link and Robbie and Monte, but none of them was in sight. Neither did he see Chief Hallowell. When Jimmy came over to him at last, he ordered a rye and soda and said, “Seen Mr. Sloade, Jimmy?”

  “No, sir. Not tonight.”

  “He was here before, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir, this afternoon.”

  “Pretty tight?”

  “You said it.”

  “Talking too much?”

  There was a lot of noise in the bar, the high chattering surf of conversation that was too shrill and too excited, fighting with the music of the orchestra in the downstairs ballroom and the clink of glasses and the whine of the mixers behind the bar. Jimmy had red hair and a cowlick and a thin, smart face and veiled eyes.

  “Was he?” Carmody asked.

  “I’m pretty busy, Mr. Carmody. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What did he say about his wife?”

  “Ah, hell—”

  “I want to know,” Carmody said.

  “He said it was a big joke on everybody. He said he knew who had killed her, which shows he was drunk, because it was an accident, wasn’t it?”

  “Was he alone in the bar here, Jimmy?”

  “I think Mr. Dunning was having a drink, too, but they didn’t speak to each other. Mr. Sloade was pretty blind this afternoon, see? But don’t tell him I mentioned it, will you? I’d get fired.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Carmody said.

  He left a ten-dollar bill on the bar and went out and up the grand staircase to the third floor. There was another bar upstairs, just outside the main entrance to the gambling room, and it was decorated in coral and pastel blues with tanks of tropical fish behind the bar and against the wall. There was an even larger c
rowd here than down below, and Carmody instantly sensed the difference in the atmosphere, the pitch of gaiety on too high a level, the holiday spirit that went beyond the ordinary routine of the hotel as it had been in the past. He straightened his dinner coat and dark tie in the bar mirror and saw the barman wink at him and watched the young designer who had created the decor wring his hands at the sacrilege of having the public put his creations to use. There came through the wide doorways the singing intonations of the croupiers and the clicking of the wheels and the jangling of the slot machines and the occasional murmuring of the crowd when an unusual play was made.

  No police were in sight.

  Carmody went inside and saw Robbie Ravelle looming just within the doorway. The young giant saw him at the same moment and moved instantly toward him, his face working. “Hey, Billyreeba, the boss has been lookin’—”

  “All right,” Carmody said. “Stop breaking my arm.”

  “Had my way, I’d break your neck,” Robbie rumbled. His big face was covered with a faint sheen of sweat, and there was a rolling movement in his silvery eyes. “Everybody’s goin’ nuts around here. Talk about losin’ your pebbles, that Monte Bachore is eatin’ his beard.”

  “Good,” Carmody said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “You are?”

  “Where is he, Robbie?”

  “The office. Come on.”