Wake Up to Murder Read online

  Lou was sitting sideways on the seat. So close that I could almost hear her heart beating.

  “For God’s sake, Lou, what’s the big idea?”

  Lou refused to be pushed. “I’ll tell you. Thinking it over, I think your May has made a fool of you. And I think the smartest thing for you to do, now that you’ve shaken the law, is to check into some motel and lie low for a couple of days, while Lieutenant David and Cade Kiefer and Cass Hardy and Matt Kendall fight it out.”

  “While God knows what’s happening to May.”

  Lou kissed me, talking into my mouth. “Very few women ever die from it.”

  “Stop. Please, Lou,” I begged her.

  She found my hand. “You don’t want to check into a motel with me?”

  I told her the truth. “Yes, I do.”

  She sighed gently. “Please love me, Jim.” She slipped her arms around me.

  I was kissing back as feverishly as Lou was kissing me. In torment. It could be Lou was right about May. What she said made sense. Kendall wasn’t the sort to waste a month. May had been frightened at the thought of going out to his house. Why? Because she was afraid I’d find out she’d been having an affair with Kendall? Come to think of it, why hadn’t she screamed? And why had May said:

  ‘I want you always to remember that as far as I’m concerned, you are all that matters.’

  That could be a statement of fact. It could be a guilty conscience. What difference did it make? What difference did anything make?

  Lou’s hands locked in back of my head, pulling me down to her, drowning me in passion.

  This, at least, was real. What else had I to look forward to? If Cade Kiefer’s boys found me, they’d kill me. Shep King had already tried. If Lieutenant David found me first, he’d throw me in jail for a murder I couldn’t prove I hadn’t committed. And a woman, a pretty little liar by the name of Pearl Mantinover, had started the whole thing. Maybe all women were liars.

  “Love me,” Lou whispered. “Now.”

  To hell with trying to be decent. I pushed Lou back on the seat. As I did, May’s white face came between us, stained with tears she couldn’t control. I heard her say:

  ‘It was your birthday.’

  Matter of fact. Not trying to tell me a thing.

  ‘Matt Kendall had fired you. You were worried. You came home to me. With a smile on your face. For my sake. And because I wanted to surprise you I didn’t even say “Happy birthday”. I gave you tough liver and potatoes for supper. Then when you tried to make love to me I pushed you away. I wish I hadn’t now.’

  I sat up, back of the wheel again.

  Lou clawed at her dress. “What’s the matter?” she panted. “Is someone coming?”

  The onshore wind was blowing in the window of the car. I took a deep breath and filled my lungs with it. It was surprisingly sweet and clean. With just enough salt in it to taste like a woman’s tears.

  “No. Not that I know of,” I said.

  I looked at Lou a long time. Then I found my hat and put it on my head. I pushed the starter button.

  Lou sat up on the seat. Her pretty face was sullen.

  “Where are you going?” she asked me.

  I told her. “Eddie’s. You know. Where the charter-boat captains hang out. Maybe one of them can tell me where I can find Matt Kendall and my wife.”

  15

  JUDGING from the number of cars parked in front of the big neon sign, reading, All the Lobster You Can Eat, $1.50, Eddie was getting a big play. Most of the cars had out-of-town license plates.

  “You want to come in with me?” I asked Lou.

  She was still sore. “No, thank you. If you don’t mind, I’ll wait in the car.”

  I said, “I’m sorry, Lou. But that’s the way it is.”

  Lou looked out the car window, refusing to meet my eyes. A funny girl, Lou.

  I crossed the parking lot to the low white masonry building. The dining room overlooking the Bay was filled with tourists, most of them making the acquaintance of hush puppies for the first time.

  I looked down the bar, disappointed. Even the few white caps I had seen didn’t belong to fishing boat captains. Two of them were on tourists who’d bought them to be smart. The other was perched on the back of the head of an old sponge boat captain from Tarpon Springs.

  “How hot?” I asked Eddie.

  He said, “Well, first, there’s the radio. Then Cass Hardy inquires for you. And after him come a couple of guys who can only be highclass guns. Maybe pals of this Tony Mantin.”

  I drank the drink he poured. “How about the law?”

  Eddie scratched his belly where it bulged over his belt. “Lieutenant David and Hap Arnold look in. But they don’t mention names. I figure you’re lucky if they get to you first. What’s it all about, Charters? How come an easygoing guy like you blows his top?”

  I laid a five on the wood to pay for the drink. “We won’t go into that right now. Where’s everyone? Caldwell, and Yates, and Markham. And Davis, and Terry, and Mark?”

  “Gone to the cock fights,” Eddie told me. “You know. Over at Old Harbor. You should know. You made almost five hundred over there last night.” He pushed the five back at me. “I said it was on the house. Now, like a good fellow, please — slip your hook. Shove off. Anything tourists can’t abide is a guy getting killed while they’re eating. It spoils their appetites.”

  The cock fights. Of course. No wonder I’d remembered hearing a rooster crow. I hadn’t missed a thing on my binge.

  I put the five back in my pocket. “Thanks. Just one thing more, Eddie?”

  “What?” he asked flatly.

  I said, “Do you know if Matt Kendall has a boat and, if he has, where he berths it?”

  Eddie shook his head. “No. Kendall has no boat that I know of. Of course I could be mistaken. If Terry was here, he could tell you. In fact, he has a copy of the Coast Guard listing of every bottom over sixteen feet in the entire Bay area.”

  “And Terry went to the cock fights?”

  “That’s right.”

  I walked out without looking back.

  “Well?” Lou asked.

  I climbed in the car and gripped the steering wheel, hard, so Lou couldn’t see how my hands were shaking. I said, “You’d better let me call you a cab and go back to your hotel.”

  Looking at me shrewdly, Lou said, “Now what?”

  I told her. “Cade Kiefer’s boys are looking for me. Also Cass Hardy and David.”

  Lou’s voice was fierce. “I told you. Now will you stop acting like a fool? Now will you listen to me?”

  “And check into some hotel with you?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head at her. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  I said, “I’ve got to find May.”

  “May, May, May,” Lou panted. “You fool. You utter fool. You dumb fool. Right this minute, while you’re beating out your brains, few as they are, risking your life to rescue her, your wife is with Matt Kendall. And loving it.”

  I slapped her. Hard, across the mouth. “That isn’t so. May is good. She loves me. She wouldn’t shame me that way. How come you’re so eager to low-rate May? How come you’re so eager to have me drop out of sight with you? Don’t tell me I’m that good.”

  Lou began to cry softly.

  I reached across her and opened the door on her side of the car. “Okay. This is where you get out. Would I insult you if I offered to pay for the cab?”

  Lou looked at me through her fingers. “Yes. Where are you going from here?”

  I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “If I can make it, Old Harbor and the cock fights.”

  “Cock fights this time of night?”

  “The last main is four o’clock in the morning.”

  Lou wiped her eyes on the hem of her slip. “Why? I mean why are you going there?”

  I said, “To talk to Captain Terry. If Kendall has a boat, Terry will know. He’ll also know where the boat is berthed
.”

  Still wiping her eyes with one hand, Lou closed the door I’d opened. “I’m going with you.”

  I looked down at her lap. All she had on under her dress was the slip. And she was using the slip to wipe her eyes. “You never give up, do you, Lou?”

  Lou looked at me, hard and sullen-eyed. “What do you mean by that?”

  I didn’t have time to argue with her. “Okay. Ride along if you want.” I pushed the starter button. “But there may be some wind on Bay Road. There probably will be. So if I were you, I’d cover up before you catch cold.”

  Lou made herself decent with an angry gesture. I eased the car out on the highway. After that, neither of us spoke. Lou rode looking out the window on her side, at nothing. Watching the night flash by.

  I drove, wondering why she was so determined to stay with me. The lad who had taught the class in abnormal and criminal psychology had told us a name for girls like Lou. He’d called them nympholepts. He said they were more than over-sexed, that nympholepsy was a mental as well as physical condition. He said sex acted on them the way alcohol acted on an addict, and that under excessive stimulation you could expect anything from them. Morbid, hysterical misinterpretations, infantile regression, even acts of violence. I glanced sideways at Lou. I hoped she didn’t blow her top.

  With the sweet-sour smell of the tide flats, more of the night just past came back. Of course. I remembered now. I’d met Tony Mantin at the cock fights. He’d been sitting next to me. And I’d shot off my mouth about Madras Blues and Brown-Reds and Law Greys. Like I knew which came first, the chicken or the egg, when, in reality, I couldn’t tell a fighting cock from a barnyard rooster.

  I had most of it now. As luck would have it, I’d won a bundle on a Cuban Dom that no one else thought had a chance. At terrific odds. And Mantin and the two men with him had been impressed. He’d suggested we have a drink together. And we’d gone to the Pelican Club. That had been when Lou and Kendall had seen me in a booth with them, still shooting off my big mouth. Only now about what I could do for Pearl Mantinover.

  I glanced again at Lou. “You say Kendall seemed worried when he saw me in a booth with those three men last night?”

  “He did.”

  “This was after Cass Hardy had talked to him at Steve’s?”

  “About two hours after that.”

  My head began to ache. It didn’t make sense. If Pearl had killed Joe Summers, Kendall couldn’t have mishandled her trial as a favor to Cass Hardy. So why should both he and Cass be worried by Cade Kiefer coming to town?

  Like all other gambling in Palmetto County, cock fighting was against the law and had to be kept fairly quiet as a sop to the church crowd. The Game Club was in an old barn, at the end of a rutted lane a mile in from the highway. I cut my speed to twenty miles an hour to keep from breaking my springs. There were even more cars here than there had been at Eddie’s.

  I paid three dollars apiece for two scraps of colored cardboard that proclaimed us to be members of the club. Even standing outside the barn, I could smell the sawdust and the blood and hear the hoarse cries of the bettors.

  Just inside, I handed Lou her ticket. “You’d better stay here near the entrance,” I told her. I left her clinging to an upright, breathing hard, her lips curled away from her teeth, fascinated by the sight of a Law Grey cutting a Pyle to pieces. Then I went in search of Terry.

  I found him on the far side of the pit, his white cap pushed back on his head and a fistful of bills in his left hand.

  “Hi,” I greeted him.

  Terry glanced at me, then back at the cocks in the pit. “Hi.”

  I said, “This is going to sound screwy as hell to you, but I’ve got to know. Has Matt Kendall got a boat, a cruiser big enough to raise Cuba?”

  Captain Terry shook his head without taking his eyes off the cock on which his money was riding. “No,” he said. “He hasn’t. Why?”

  I said, “The son-of-a-bitch has my wife.”

  “That stuff on the radio was crap then, huh? You didn’t kill them?”

  “No.”

  Terry looked at me briefly, then back at the pit. “Then if I were you, I’d check that hideaway of his. That one up on Lake Seminole.”

  I began to breathe hard again. “I didn’t know he had one on the lake.”

  “I didn’t either,” Terry said, “until about two weeks ago. It’s on the lower end of the lake, right where the river comes in. A log cabin affair, but nice. With a small hangar on it and a private landing field.”

  “You’re positive of this?”

  “I am. I took a party there week before last, after bass. Got a nice mess, too. We hit the lake just before day-dawn. And we’re sitting there in the fog, see? Out on the lake in front of this cabin. And who should come out but Matt Kendall.”

  “He saw you?”

  “No. The fog was still heavy on the lake, but we could see him plain. He came out on the porch and yawned. Then he got in that big car of his and drove off.”

  A shout went up from the crowd.

  “Goddamn,” Terry said.

  I looked at the pit. The bloody Pyle had spurred the Law Grey and was closing in for the kill.

  “Kendall was alone?” I asked Terry.

  He shook my hand off his arm. “No. He was with that cute little thing that works in the sheriff’s office. What’s her name. Lou something. Now leave me alone, will you, fellow? I got fifty bucks riding on this.”

  I looked across the pit at Lou. She was still holding onto the upright, an odd expression on her face. I made my way through the shouting crowd and touched her arm.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Lou was reluctant to leave. The odd expression didn’t leave her face. Her lips curled away from her teeth and she said, “I’m coming here again. I like this. Watching those birds fight does something to me.”

  It was dark in the parking lot. I walked her back to the car in silence, the only sound the shouting in the barn and the crackle of crushed shell under our feet. As we reached the Ford a great shout went up in the barn.

  “One of the birds must be dead,” Lou said. She said it almost sadly. Almost as an afterthought, she added, “You found the man you wanted to talk to?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I did.”

  “Matt Kendall has a boat?”

  “No.”

  Lou started to get into the car. I turned her around and backed her up against a fender. “Why did you lie to me, Lou?”

  Her eyes went round and innocent. “Lie to you? About what?”

  I said, “Not knowing if Kendall had a hideout, getting me off on the wrong track by suggesting that he had a boat.”

  Her eyes went wider. “Did I do that?”

  It was all I could do to keep from slapping her again. “You know you did. And all the time you knew he had a hideout on Lake Seminole. With a private landing field. And probably a Piper Cub or a Stinson in the hangar.”

  Her voice was small and almost carried away by the wind. “How do you know I knew?”

  “You were seen coming out of it. With Kendall. Just before dawn one morning two weeks ago.”

  “Oh,” Lou said. “I see. Okay. So I lied to you.”

  Lou touched my cheek with her fingertips. “Maybe I liked the sample. Maybe I wanted to spend another night with you.”

  I pushed her hand down to her side. “Don’t give me that crap,” I began. And that was as far as I got.

  Muscular fingers bit into my shoulder and spun me around. His face inches from mine, Cass Hardy said:

  “For a simpleminded cracker, you’re a tough guy to locate, Charters. Yes, sir. You gave us quite a run. What’s the idea of beating up Shep when he tells you, polite, I’d like a little talk with you?”

  I looked over his shoulder at Shep King. Even in the dark, I could see the side of his face was swollen and his right arm in a sling.

  Hardy transferred his hand to my shirt front. “I asked you a question.”

 
I said, “He was polite about it? With a knife?”

  A big man and powerful, Hardy held me so my toes barely touched the shell. “Okay. So Shep lost his head when you got gay with him. But look at it our way. You’ve put us in a bad spot, fellow. Shooting off your mouth like you done to Cade Kiefer’s number one man about being able to prove that Pearl Mantinover was framed into the chair. That makes us look awful bad. Believe me, I didn’t shed any tears when Joe Summers got his. At the rate that bastard was cutting in, he’d have had me playing Kelly pool for nickels in another season.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Hardy continued, “And now with Matt Kendall scrammed or dead and Tony being found in a boat, with three .38 slugs in his liver, we’re really in a spot.”

  “That’s right,” a man’s voice agreed.

  Cass set me back on the shell. Gently. Like his muscles were hurting him. He turned and looked behind him. In slow motion. Shep King already had his good palm ear high.

  There was nothing about the two men to distinguish them from any other two well-dressed tourists. Except a certain indescribable air of cold self-confidence, and the black .45s in their hands.

  “Now, look, fellow,” Cass began.

  “My name is Woods. Jack Woods,” the man who had spoken said, pleasantly. He nodded at the man holding the gun on Shep King. “This is my partner, Phil Gleason.”

  They were bigtime, both of them. As bigtime as Tony Mantin had been. It showed in every move they made.

  Woods smiled. “As you undoubtedly have surmised by now, we are in Mr. Kiefer’s employ. I might add, in the same capacity as the late Tony Meares, or Mantin, if you prefer it.” He looked at me. “You, of course, are Jim Charters. The man to whom Tony gave the ten thousand dollars.”

  I swallowed the lump in my throat. “That’s right.”

  Woods continued to smile. “Fine. Let’s all go talk to Mr. Kiefer.”

  Cass Hardy started a protest and thought better of it. “Sure. Why not?” he said.

  Woods looked at Lou, undecided. He made up his mind. “And I think you’d better come, too, young lady. This little meeting might have an unpleasant aftermath. And if there’s one thing I despise, it’s a witness.”