by Keene, Day
“Anyway, after they knocked you unconscious, they took the cup out of the suitcase.”
“They must have.”
“Why didn’t they take the money you got for the Sally?”
“I don’t know.”
Mary Lou’s lower lip began to quiver again. Her eyes filled with tears. Ames helped her to her feet. “Easy makes it, baby. Everything’s going to be all right. We’re just blowing a couple of blue ones.” He was sorry he’d used the simile as soon as it was out of his mouth. He didn’t like White’s reaction. It took him out of the charter boat captain class and grouped him with Camden and Ferris.
“So?” Gilmore asked.
“I don’t know, John,” White said. “I’ll be damned if I do. So Camden and the French maid were playin’ house and Mrs. Camden got onto the fact that they were holdin’ hands. Camden was in Baltimore when this happened. I checked with the State’s Attorney’s office there. The maid isn’t as big as Mary Lou. She’d have a hell of a time knockin’ anyone out let alone rowin’ ‘em out into the middle of the pass with the tide at the full. Besides, gettin’ back to the dead blonde, Ames admits she boarded the Sally of her own free will and asked for a cup of coffee. Ames says he’d jist come in from gettin’ bait. He admits makin’ the coffee hisself. So how did the drug, if there was any drug, get into the coffee?”
Mary Lou’s lower lip stopped trembling and thrust out in a pout. “You don’t believe me.”
Sheriff White’s voice was gentle. “Let’s put it this way, Mary Lou. So one of your cups was missin’. You say you dove over side and recovered it. You say you put it in this suitcase. If the cup had still been in the suitcase, what would it prove? Twenty-four hours in the water would have washed away any trace of a drug. Can you prove you didn’t throw the cup over side and then recover it in an attempt to make Charlie’s story hold up?”
“N-no. But in that case why isn’t it still in the suitcase?”
“Because the story sounded better this way. It gives credence to your story about bein’ slugged. Can you prove that someone slugged you and threw you in the pass?”
“N-no.” She touched the back of her head. “But — ”
White looked tired. He undoubtedly was. He was, after all, in his early sixties. “You could have hit yourself with almost anythin’, Mary Lou. You’re young. You love Charlie. An’ if a-hittin’ yourse’f on the head a couple of times would save him from the chair, hit would be worth hit to you. Now mind you, I ain’t sayin’ you’re lyin’. It kin be your story is true. But hit’s improbable as hell.”
A deep silence followed. The gulls continued to squawk. An outboard motor pooped a few times then settled down into a high-pitched drone. Several charter boat captains came out into the cockpit of their boats and looked at the little group on the pier.
State’s Attorney Keely inspected the planking around the crooked piling. “I don’t see any sign of blood.”
“It would seem there would be some,” Gilmore said, “if Mrs. Ames was struck as hard as she says she was.”
Ames felt Mary Lou’s body stiffen in his arms. He tried to hush her and couldn’t.
“You’re a bunch of goddamn small-town fools,” she cried. “You’re like all the rest of the local business men. The Chamber of Commerce has you buffaloed. You’re willing to let the tourists walk all over you, just so they keep coming down here. And you’ll let Charlie go to the chair just because you’re afraid of the Camden money.”
Neither Gilmore nor Keely said anything.
Sheriff White’s voice continued gentle. “Now, honey. You’re jist upset. That hain’t no way fo’ a pretty girl like you t’ talk. An’ hit ain’t so. Effen I thought Camden killed his wife or planned to have her kilt, I’d jug him before he could say Baltimore.”
White turned and took his cigar from his mouth as the driver of the parked cruiser hurried out on the pier. There’s another one, Sheriff,” the deputy said. “It just came in on the two-way. Cody said the guy was so excited he could hardly make head or tail out of what the Camden butler was saying but that according to what he could get, there’s another body floating in the slip where the Sea Bird is berthed and the only thing that’s kept the tide from suckin it out to sea is that it’s tangled in a mess of rope.
“Who is it?”
“That’s what Cody couldn’t get. He said Phillips talked so fast and was so excited that he had a hell of a time getting his name and address out of him. Then by the time he’d asked who was dead, the butler had hung up.”
The eyes of the group on the pier lifted in unison and looked up the awakening bay and basin. There was a small knot of people on the Camden pier but it was too far away and the morning mist was too heavy for any of them to stand out as individuals.
Keely took off his hat and patted his forehead with his breast pocket handkerchief. “I knew I should have gone home.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to be in court at nine o’clock.”
“What time is it?”
“Four minutes after six.”
White returned his cigar to his mouth. “Well, let’s go see. You go first, Charlie.”
Ames walked back down the pier. Mary Lou walked beside him, dabbing at her eyes from time to time with the backs of her hands, sobs still shaking her shoulders. “It happened just as I told it, Charlie.”
“I know,” Ames said.
Ben Sheldon was standing in the doorway of the sleeping quarters adjoining his office. His feet were bare. His only garment was a pair of wrinkled pajama pants. His eyes were puffed with sleep. His fat belly hung over the draw string of his pajama pants.
“What you doin’ out heah this early, Bob?” he asked White.
White jerked his thumb up the basin. “Hit would seem someone else is daid up t’ the Camden place.” He started to get into the cruiser and looked over his shoulder at the fat man. “You hear any commotion out on the pier last night, Ben?”
“No. Not ary.”
“You didn’t hear a woman scream?”
The chandler shook his head. “No. I didn’t hear a thing, Bob.”
Sheriff White settled himself in the back seat of the car and looked sideways at Mary Lou.
She stopped crying and said fiercely, “I didn’t have time to scream.”
“Drive to the Camden place,” White told the driver.
It was full morning now. The mist was lifting. The sun rising out of the mangrove swamp on the far side of the bay was drying the condensation on the Camden lawn and streaking the private pier with yellow.
The usual morbid crowd had gathered. Sheriff White sat a moment after the police car had stopped, picking out individuals on the pier. He could see Camden and Ferris and Phillips. Mixed in with the local people he knew were a dozen or more tourists, the men in bathing trunks, the women in bathing or play suits. A fat woman with flabby white legs, wearing tight yellow shorts and a halter, was leaning over the hand rail looking at something in the water.
“You know,” White told Keely. “The beach used to be a nice place to live until the tourists and the moneyed snow birds loused it up. Now it’s one damn thing after another.” He got out and held the door open for Ames. “Okay. Let’s go, Charlie.”
The kettle drums of fatigue were beginning to play a tympanic solo in Ames’s head. He hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. He’d been under a constant strain. He’d been questioned incessantly. He’d been moved from one place to another and then back to the place he’d been first. “Okay. Let’s go, Charlie” had become his theme song. Now, with a new angle on which to work, with a possible solution in sight, Sheriff White had decided not to believe Mary Lou.
The muscles in Ames’s neck corded. The large veins in his temples began to throb. His jaw thrust out at a stubborn angle. To hell with them, he thought. To hell with all of them! Cocking his white captain’s cap at as jaunty an angle as he could manage, with Mary Lou at his side, swaggering slightly as he walked, Ames preceded White and Keely and Gilmore out on the pie
r.
Chapter Nine
FERRIS TURNED from the rail and nodded begrudging approval as Sheriff White forced his way through the group of curious onlookers staring at the object in the water.
“I must say,” the lawyer said, “you got here promptly. We found the body less than ten minutes ago.”
“I was jist down the road apiece,” White said.
Hal Camden was standing beside the lawyer. He no longer looked like a movie actor. He needed a shave. His eyes were puffed and bloodshot. His expensive silk robe was rumpled. The legs of his pajamas showed under the cuffs of trousers pulled on so hastily he’d forgotten to zip the fly. His over-long hair needed combing. He exuded an aroma of whiskey. “I don’t know why,” he said plaintively, “everything happens to me.”
White ignored him to look over the rail.
Mary Lou gasped, “It’s the maid. It’s the maid who’s dead.”
Ames gripped the rail with his manacled hands. At least, they couldn’t pin the maid’s death on him. He’d been in custody, in the back room of the Palmetto City police station when Miss Montigny had been killed. Perhaps now Sheriff White would believe Mary Lou’s story. It would seem obvious that whoever had drugged him had killed Mrs. Camden and murdered Celeste.
The dead girl, fully clothed in a black silk maid’s uniform complete with a once frothy, now sodden, white apron and a white ruche in her black hair, was lying on her back with both arms extended. Her sightless eyes were open and staring at the morning sun. There was no blood on her face or dress or any external sign of death.
Ames wondered what was holding her up. Then he saw that the small of her back was resting on the line of an anchor buoy used to secure a nine foot marine plywood dinghy. Her body rose and fell with the movement of the boat.
“Who found her?” Sheriff White asked.
“I did,” Camden admitted.
“When?”
“I don’t know the exact time. A few minutes before I had Phillips call the station.”
“What were you doing out here this time of morning?”
Camden rubbed the stubble of beard on his chin with the palm of one hand. “I’d been going over Helene’s personal books with Tom. We’d spent most of the night at it. I went to my room and couldn’t sleep. So I walked out here.” Camden indicated the body. “And that’s what I found.”
Sheriff White looked at Ferris. “You’re Tom?”
“Tom Ferris. Attorney Tom Ferris,” the lawyer said.
“Oh, yes. That’s right. You’re Mrs. Camden’s lawyer. Or should I say counsellor?” White emphasized the word. “What do you know about this?”
A slightly built man, dapper even in pajamas and robe, Ferris stroked his wisp of a mustache. “Nothing. Not a thing, Sheriff. As Mr. Camden just told you, we spent most of the night going over Helene’s personal records. When we finished, I went directly to my room and I believe I must have slept an hour or two before I heard Hal shout.”
“I was never so shocked in my life,” Camden said.
“I kin imagine,” the fat woman in the tight shorts sympathized.
Camden continued. “I thought at first Celeste had stumbled and fallen off the pier.” He indicated the smashed glass of a square case that held a life preserver. “So I smashed that and started to throw the preserver to her. Then I saw she was dead. At least there was no motion, except what the water imparted to the body. So I shouted for help instead and a few moments later Tom and Phillips joined me on the pier. Phillips and I wanted to recover the body but Tom advised us to leave it where it is.”
Ferris continued to stroke his mustache. “That is, I believe, the correct procedure in an instance like this.”
“That’s right,” Sheriff White said. “Did, either of you hear her scream any time during the night?”
Ferris shook his head. “No, sir. But she might have. We were quite engrossed in what we were doing and we were working in the library on the far side of the house.”
“I see.”
Phillips, the butler, cleared his throat. “If I might be so bold, sir.”
Sheriff White transferred his attention to the butler. “Yes — ?”
“I thought I heard a scream, sir. Well, not exactly a scream. More a sound of distress.”
“What time was this?”
“Between two-thirty and three o’clock this morning, sir, shortly after I’d made certain neither Mr. Camden nor Mr. Ferris required my services and had retired to my room.”
“Did you do anything about it?”
“I looked out my window, sir. But when the sound wasn’t repeated, I attributed it to a gull or a night bird of some kind and retired.”
“And that’s all you know about it?”
“Yes, sir.”
White put his fore and second fingers in his mouth and whistled to attract the attention of the deputy still sitting in the police car. When the deputy came out on the pier, White indicated the body. “Get it, will you, Ken? Better borrow a boat from someone. And don’t try to lift it up on the dock. Row it into shore.”
“Yes, sir,” the deputy said.
State’s Attorney Keely rested his elbows on the railing of the pier. “Funny how the body hangs on that rope. You’d think it would slide one way or the other.”
“Wouldn’t you?” White asked. He looked at Coroner Gilmore. “Call in over the two-way for me, will you, John? Ask Cody to send out another car and four or five men.”
Gilmore lighted a cigarette. “Gladly.”
Ames and Mary Lou stood holding hands. She said, “This should prove something.”
“It should,” Ames agreed. “The way I see it, whoever drugged me and killed Mrs. Camden killed the maid.”
“Why? Why should they?”
“I don’t know,” Ames admitted. “You’re the sheriff. I’m just a charter boat captain.”
Sheriff White looked at Mary Lou. “Were you aboard the Sally between two-thirty and three o’clock?”
“I was.”
“Awake?”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear a scream?”
Mary Lou shook her head. “No. At least, nothing I recognized as a scream.”
There was a creak of oar locks as Deputy Sheriff Ken Sayers rowed under the pier in a borrowed boat.
Ferris retied the belt of his robe. “If I may be so bold as to ask, what is Ames doing here? I thought he’d be in a cell in Sweetwater by now.”
The curious on the pier crowded a little closer.
“He will by nightfall,” White said. After a slight hesitation, White added, “You see, there’s been another small development. A little over an hour ago, Mrs. Ames came into town with a very interestin’ story about one of her cups bein’ missin’. She says she dove overboard an’ found hit on the bottom of the basin about twenty feet out from the Sally. She says she wrapped it in a towel and put it in a suitcase an’ started to bring hit to me. But before she could git off the pier, someone struck her on the haid with a piece of pipe an’ rolled her into the pass. She says she came to, jist in time to strike out for the hook.”
“The hook?” Ferris puzzled.
“A spit of land extendin’ out apiece on the Gulf side of the bridge.”
“Oh.”
Camden ran his fingers through his too-long hair. “Make sense, Sheriff. It was her husband who killed Helene not Mrs. Ames. Why should anyone want to harm her?”
“Well, her story is that Charlie’s coffee was drugged an’ whoever drugged hit didn’t have time to wash the cup so they threw hit overside.”
“Ridiculous,” Ferris said.
“It don’t stack up too good,” White admitted.
“You found the cup?”
“No. All we found was the suitcase.”
Her borrowed bathing suit was too tight. The bound edges were cutting into her thighs and breasts. It was difficult for her to breathe. Mary Lou was uncomfortable. She was tired. She’d almost drowned and no one but Charlie believed her. �
��You,” she told Sheriff White hotly, “are a stupid old fool! There was a cup. I was struck on the head and rolled into the pass. And Charlie didn’t kill Mrs. Camden. He was drugged and — ”
“I know, honey,” White interrupted her. “An’ the last he remembers is drinkin’ a cup o’ coffee in the cockpit of the Sally.”
Mary Lou buried her wet face on Ames’s chest. He stood helpless, unable even to pat her shoulder. “How’s for letting Mary Lou change her clothes?” he asked White. “That suit’s two sizes too small for her.”
“Any time she’s a mind to,” White said. “There ain’t no charge against her.” He leaned on the rail beside Keely. “Handle her as little as you can, Ken. Mebbe you might best tow her in.”
The deputy knelt in the boat. “That’s what I figured on, but she’s hung up on the rope somehow.” He rolled up his right shirt sleeve. Hanging onto the buoy rope with his other hand, he reached over and under the bobbing body.
“What’s a holdin’ her, Ken?” White asked.
The deputy straightened in the boat, blood and water dripping from his right hand. “Goddamn it to hell!” he swore. “No wonder. There was a knife in her back and the haft was hung up on the rope.”
The body slipped over the rope, revolved slowly and began to sink.
“Grab her!” Sheriff White shouted.
Sayers grabbed the maid by an ankle, then taking a short grip on the oar he began to scull toward shore with one hand.
“The knife still in her?” Keely asked.
Sayers shook his head. “No. It pulled loose when I freed her. I’ll bring her in, then I’ll come back and dive for it.”
Ames was glad Mary Lou was facing the other way. He stood looking over her shoulder at the dead girl in the water. There was something indecent about death. It was so impartially final. The dead lost all right to personal dignity. They were so much clay, to be handled as such. Being towed through the water as she was, the dead girl’s black skirt and lace-edged white petticoat slipped up to her knees, then her thighs, permitting an exposure she would never have permitted had she been alive.