It's a Sin to Kill Read online

  “Then where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Ames said.

  Chapter Two

  HE LOOKED up at the girl. The girl looked down at him. The silence between them lengthened. The drip of the condensation from the roof of the cabin grew more pronounced. Somewhere along the rim of the basin an outboard motor coughed anemically a few times, then settled down into a high-pitched whine.

  “Oh,” the maid said. “I see.”

  It was obvious she didn’t. She clutched her housecoat tighter and switched off the now useless flashlight. In the growing light of morning she looked frightened.

  “Oh,” she repeated. “I see.”

  She hurried back down the pier toward the house, glancing over her shoulder from time to time as if she were afraid that Ames was following.

  Ames returned his cap to his head. He felt like a damn fool. When he saw the Camden dame again, he’d tell her plenty. There were men on the other piers now. Several of them had seen him. It would be only a matter of minutes before everyone along the waterfront would know he had spent the night just past aboard the Sea Bird.

  If he’d had the game he didn’t remember it. But he’d sure as hell have the name. And when Mary Lou heard about it she’d pack her bags and leave.

  He walked back through the smaller cabin to the master cabin in which he’d awakened. The cabin smelled strongly of perfume. The dryness in Ames’s mouth extended to his throat. His throat contracted. He was frightened and didn’t know why.

  He picked the rolling bottle from the floor in the hope there was still a drink in it. There wasn’t, but there were a half-dozen unopened rum and whiskey bottles in an open built-in liquor cabinet at the foot of the bunk.

  Ames hadn’t noticed the cabinet before. One thing was for sure. The blonde Mrs. Camden believed in sinning deluxe. The corners of Ames’s mouth turned down. He hoped he’d had a good time. He wished he remembered it.

  He cracked the seal of a rum bottle with his thumb nail and allowed a quarter of a pint of rum to trickle down his throat. The rum wet the dryness and eased the constriction. Ames screwed the cap back on the bottle and returned it to the cabinet. The thing was done. There was no use poor-mouthing about it. The thing for him to do was get to Mary Lou and try to explain that he hadn’t meant it to happen.

  He picked his skivy from the chair and pulled it over his head. There was a brown splotch on the garment he didn’t remember being there. Fish blood probably, Ames thought.

  He rebuckled his belt and sat on the chair to slip his feet into his sneakers and a wad of something in the hip pocket of his dungarees pressed into his flesh. He fished it out and looked at it. It was a thick wad of bills folded once. The top note was a fifty dollar bill. So were the bills under it. Ames wet his second finger on his tongue and began to count. He counted to two thousand dollars and stopped. His mouth was dry again. He hadn’t enough saliva to wet his finger. Still, over half the bills remained to be counted.

  His hand shaking slightly, he refolded the wad of bills and returned it to his hip pocket. The blonde Mrs. Camden had a lot to explain. He debated taking another drink. He decided against it. He hadn’t eaten since supper the night before. The one drink he’d taken was roaring in his head.

  He stooped and tied his sneakers. The laces of his right one were gummed with some sticky substance. So was the deep maroon carpet on which he was standing. Ames wiped his fingers on his skivy and strode back to the canopy covered cockpit. Before he attempted to make his peace with Mary Lou, he wanted to talk to Mrs. Camden — now.

  The stern of the cruiser was ten feet from the pier. He gave the forward rope slack then pulled on the aft ropes until he could scramble up on the wood. One of the fishermen on the next pier recognized and hailed him.

  “Hi, there, Captain Ames.”

  “Hi,” Ames said and walked rapidly down the pier to the palm tree studded lawn of the rambling Camden beach house.

  The front door opening off a flagstone patio was closed. Ames walked around to the back of the house. There was a second smaller patio, screened by purple bougainvillea and yellow allamanda. He could hear the French girl speaking. She sounded excited. Ames rang the bell then rapped impatiently on the wood of the kitchen door.

  A small gray-haired man crossed the kitchen and looked at him through the screen.

  “Who are you?” Ames asked.

  The gray-haired man looked frightened. He said, “Go away, please.”

  Ames rested his weight on one hand. “I asked you a question. Who are you?”

  The man wet his lips by gnawing at them. “I’m Phillips.”

  “Mrs. Camden’s butler?”

  “Yes.”

  Ames realized he was breathing heavily, as if he had run a long way. It was an effort for him to speak. He said, “Tell Mrs. Camden I want to see her. And don’t give me any crap about her not being in the house. I know better.”

  The man on the far side of the screen had trouble swallowing the lump in his throat.

  “Don’t just stand there,” Ames said. He felt as if he were shouting. He was. “You heard me. Tell Mrs. Camden that Charlie Ames wants to see her.”

  The man who’d said his name was Phillips shook his head. “I — can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “She isn’t here.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “We’re positive,” Phillips said. “Celeste and I have just finished looking in every room.”

  Ames’s knees felt suddenly weak. He leaned against the jamb of the door. “Don’t give me that.”

  Phillips shook his head. “I’m not giving you anything. Mrs. Camden isn’t here. Now go away. Please.”

  The black-haired girl came and stood beside Phillips. Tears were trickling down her cheeks but she was holding an efficient-looking small calibered automatic pistol as if she knew how to use it. She spat a stream of French at Ames. Ames looked at Phillips.

  “What did she say?”

  “She said if you don’t go away she’ll shoot.”

  Ames began to protest “But — ”

  Celeste shot a hole in the screen and the steel jacketed slug shattered an ornate urn on the edge of the patio. Ames looked at the urn, turned on his heel and walked up the drive to the road.

  The Sally was berthed less than five hundred yards away but he could make better time on the road than he could by climbing fences and scrambling under piers.

  Morning was full now. The thin stream of cars on the beach road began to thicken. The land itself was merely a quarter of a mile wide spit of sand with the bay on one side and the Gulf on the other. Most of the land on the bay side had been dredged out of the bay.

  The pocket of swank homes ended and the hotels and motels began. Porters polished brass and raked the seaweed off the beach. Early rising tourists, their bodies strangely white, yawned out of their fifteen dollar a night motels and plowed doggedly through the white sand to the water.

  Look, Maw, Ames thought grimly, I’m in the Gulf of Mexico.

  The Fisherman’s Lunch, The Spot and Harry’s Bar were all doing a good business. On the platform of Rupert’s Fish House, Matt Doyle and Tom Mercer were weighing in a nice catch of red snappers.

  Both men waved to Ames.

  “Hi, Charlie.”

  Ames lifted his right hand. “Hi.”

  The single word rasped in his throat. He looked at the fingers of his raised hand, then down at the streaks on his skivy. The streaks matched the brown spot he’d noticed in the cabin of the cruiser. Brown in artificial light, that was. In broad daylight, both the spot and the streaks where he’d wiped his fingers were red.

  When he reached the basin in which the Sally was berthed, he cut in between Murphy’s drugstore and the ship ways next door and walked out on the sagging planking. The Sally was straining at her ropes. There was no light aboard. The thirty-two foot cabin cruiser looked small and cramped and shabby and incredibly old in comparison to the Sea Bird.

  To reach
the Sally, Ames had to pass a half-dozen other charter boats. Those captains with a charter party were readying their gear. Several of them glanced up, self-conscious, but none of his fellow captains spoke. He’d been right about the news spreading. They knew where he’d spent the night.

  He jumped down into the cockpit of the Sally, opened the cabin door and forgot to duck low enough, as usual, and banged his forehead against the lintel. The blow knocked the cap from his head. The pain felt good. Still wearing a low-cut green evening gown, Mary Lou was sitting on the edge of her bunk drinking coffee out of a thick white crockery cup. A slim brunette in her late twenties, she looked at Ames over the rim of the mug in her hand but didn’t speak.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Ames said.

  He was. If he couldn’t square himself with Mary Lou, nothing would ever be right again. There were lots of women in the world but only one Mary Lou.

  The portholes were small. It was dark in the small cabin. It smelled of flesh and sleep and freshly boiled coffee and fish. The girl on the bunk continued to regard him with hurt gray eyes.

  Ames debated trying to kiss her. He decided it wouldn’t be wise. Mary Lou most likely would hit him with the mug she was holding. He pumped up the Coleman pressure lantern and lighted it. The bright glare lighted the cabin but failed to dispel the feeling of grayness.

  Ames looked back at Mary Lou. “I don’t suppose you slept.”

  “Some,” she admitted. “Not much.” She studied his face and cried silently. “You might have wiped off the lipstick.”

  Ames sat on the opposite bunk. The pad felt thin, hard, familiar. “I tried to. Look, honey.” He put his hand on her knee and Mary Lou slapped it away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Okay,” Ames said. “You know where I’ve been?”

  “How could I help knowing? It’s all up and down the basin.”

  Ames swallowed the lump in his throat. “I didn’t mean it to happen. I don’t know it did.”

  Mary Lou set her mug of coffee on the edge of the galley stove without rising from the bunk. “What do you mean by that?”

  Ames’s growing panic continued to mount. He had a feeling of wanting to run, looking back over his shoulder as Mrs. Camden’s French maid had done on the Camden pier. He gripped the edge of the bunk until his fingers ached. “Just what I said. I don’t remember a goddamn thing except drinking coffee with her in the cockpit of the Sally.”

  “That’s your story.”

  “Yeah.” The word was more an expulsion of air than a sound. “I’d just come in from catching my bait. I was making a pot of coffee when she came out on the pier and asked me how much I’d charge to skipper the Sea Bird down to the Keys then up to Baltimore.”

  “Mrs. Camden?”

  “Yeah. I said I’d have to think it over. Then she asked if she smelled coffee. I said she did. She asked if she could have a cup. I invited her to come aboard and I gave her a cup of coffee. And that’s the last I remember.”

  Mary Lou’s eyes continued to look sullen. “Ha.”

  “I mean it,” Ames insisted. His breathless earnestness gave force to his words. “When I stop loving you like I do, when I start stepping out on you, honey, I — ” He tried to go on and couldn’t.

  “You’ll what?” Mary Lou asked.

  “I just couldn’t.”

  “But you did.”

  “No,” Ames said. He modified his denial. “At least I don’t remember it.”

  “All you remember is drinking a cup of coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  The corner of Mary Lou’s lips turned down as she stood up. She caught the long skirt by the hem, pulled her evening gown over her head and tossed it on the bunk on which she’d been sitting. She was wearing a strapless divided lace bra. She exchanged it for a stout cotton one. She took a street dress from the small locker that served as a joint clothes closet and put it on. Then, while Ames watched her in silence, she shook out her shoulder-length page boy bob and combed it. She opened her purse and powdered her nose and renewed her lips. Her lips renewed to her satisfaction, she dropped her lipstick back in her purse, snapped it with a sharp click of finality, tucked her purse under her arm and started for the door.

  Ames asked, “Where are you going?”

  A new freshet of tears carved small channels in the powder Mary Lou had just applied. “I don’t know,” she said. She continued to cry silently. “But I’m not staying here. It’s bad enough, this happening, without you lying to me.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Ames caught her skirt and Mary Lou slapped him.

  “Keep your hands off me. I suppose you got lipstick on your face and skivy drinking coffee.” There was a small jar of helene camden cleansing cream on the shelf that served Mary Lou as a dressing table. She snatched the jar from the shelf and smashed it on the deck. “The blonde bitch would use indelible lipstick!”

  A gob of cold scream from the shattered jar splattered the leg of Ames’s dungarees. He picked it off, wiped his fingers on his skivy and returned his hands to the edge of the bunk. He was afraid and didn’t know why. The lump in his throat was growing with his panic. He had to force the words past the lump. “On my face, it’s lipstick. On my skivy, it’s blood.”

  Mary Lou turned with one hand on the knob of the companionway door. “Blood?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you know it’s blood?”

  “I know blood when I see it. I’ve got it on the laces of my sneakers, too.” Ames gritted his teeth against an impulse to be sick. “The carpet in the cabin of the Sea Bird was soaked with it.”

  Mary Lou leaned against the door. Some of the sullen look left her eyes. “You’re hurt, Charlie?”

  “No.”

  “Then where did the blood come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Mrs. Camden?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “She wasn’t in the cabin when I woke up this morning.”

  “She wasn’t in the cabin?”

  Ames realized he was panting. “No. Just her evening dress and hose and scanties. Inside out. Like she’d peeled them off in a hell of a hurry.” He wanted Mary Lou to believe him. She had to believe him. “But I didn’t, Mary Lou. No matter how drunk a man gets, he remembers a thing like that. And I wasn’t drinking.”

  “There was liquor in the cabin?”

  “Yeah. An empty bottle rolling between the two bunks.

  And a whole cabinet filled with unopened bottles.”

  “Mrs. Camden had gone to the house?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Her maid came out on the pier looking for her. There was a long distance call. From Paris. The maid seemed surprised when I told her Mrs. Camden wasn’t aboard the cruiser. Then, later, when I pulled myself together and went to the house to ask how come, the butler said she wasn’t there, that they’d searched every room in the house for her. And both he and the maid were frightened. And the maid shot at me through the screen door.”

  “She shot at you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Like I told you before, she was frightened.” Ames tried to swallow the lump in his throat and it bobbed up and returned with his Adam’s apple. “And that’s not the worst of it.” He tugged the thick wad of bills from his pocket and tossed it on the bunk on which he had been sitting. “When I put on my dungarees, I found this in my hip pocket.”

  Mary Lou came back and stood by the bunk. The fat wad of bills unfolded and lay flat. A thick silence filled the cabin. The smell of the sea was stronger. There was a gurgling of water. The mooring ropes creaked with the pull of the tide. An outbound fishing boat whistled for the bridge tender to raise the draw span. The rusted barrier lowered. The warning bells on the bridge began to ring.

  “How much is there?” the girl asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ames said. “I cou
nted up to two thousand dollars and I didn’t get half through.”

  Mary Lou picked up the top bill. It was faintly speckled with dried blood. She opened her fingers and the bill fluttered back to the bunk. Her voice was small, “Where did you get all that money, Charlie?”

  Ames released the bunk and used his hands to support his face. His words were muffled by his fingers.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t the least idea. Like I told you, it was in the hip pocket of my dungarees when I came to this morning.”

  Chapter Three

  MARY LOU sat on the bunk and counted the bills. “There are five thousand dollars here.”

  Ames massaged his temples with his fingers. “So?”

  “You don’t know where this money came from?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not lying to me, Charlie?”

  “I swear I’m not.”

  “You found it in a pocket of your dungarees when you woke up this morning?”

  “Yeah. In my right hip pocket.”

  “And you don’t remember anything after drinking a cup of coffee with Mrs. Camden?”

  “Two cups of coffee.”

  “Was she carrying a purse?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did she say anything about money?”

  “Just in connection with me skippering the Sea Bird up to Baltimore.”

  Mary Lou fingered the bills again. “Hmm.”

  Ames returned his fingers to the edge of the bunk. “Then you believe me?”

  “I don’t know,” Mary Lou said. She studied her husband’s deeply tanned face. “You might cheat on me, Charlie, even loving me as you do, or say you do. That’s the way men are. It’s the way men are made, I guess.” Her wet gray eyes continued to search his face. “But I know you’re not a thief. And you’re worried, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Ames admitted. “I am.”

  “How much blood was there in the cabin of the Sea Bird?”

  “Enough. The carpet was soaked with it.”

  “Splattered around? Like there’d been a fight?”

  “No. Just on the carpet.”

  “Do you remember fighting with anyone?”