Wake Up to Murder Page 6

  He was home. There were lights in several of the rooms. There were cars in the two stalls of the garage and a black Cadillac parked in the drive. I set the handbrake on the Ford and sat looking at the house. If Kendall couldn’t or wouldn’t help me, I was sunk.

  “Well, here goes nothing,” I told May.

  I glanced at her. She was clutching her purse so tightly that her knuckles were white in the faint light of the moon.

  “I — I’ll wait in the car until you see if he’s home,” she said.

  I crossed the drive and punched the bell beside a door.

  May called from the car, “I think that’s the service entry. You’d better go around to the front, Jim.”

  I followed the drive around the house. A green expanse of lawn led down to the water. Kendall had spent a lot of money on it, but it wasn’t much better than mine.

  May had been right about the doors. The one in front was more ornate. I pushed the button beside it. Being fired still rankled. I’d worked hard for Mr. Kendall. There had been absolutely no reason for him to fire me.

  I pushed the button again. Harder this time. Poor folks had bells or buzzers. Rich men like Kendall had musical chimes. I hoped I called him away from something he didn’t want to leave.

  I could hear the chimes tinkling inside, but no one came to the door. I walked out on the lawn and looked up through the glass side of the living room. Mr. Kendall was sitting in a big red plastic chair. With his back to me. All I could see was his black hair and one arm dangling over the side of the chair. There was a bottle of Scotch on the carpet a few inches from his hand.

  I went back and rang the chimes again. When he still didn’t answer, I walked back to the car and told May:

  “It looks like Mr. Kendall has joined the lodge.”

  May asked me what I meant.

  I said, “I think he’s stinking. I can see the back of his head over the top of a red chair, but he doesn’t answer the bell. Shall I wake him up or not?”

  May got out of the car. “What else can we do, Jim? Go to the police?”

  I shook my head at her. “No. They wouldn’t believe such a fantastic story. Bill David would laugh at me.” I looked at the white boles of the royal palms rising out of the lawn. “Besides, if I’m right about this, every minute counts.”

  May stood, holding onto the door of the Ford. “Then wake him up. Force the door if you have to.”

  I walked back to the front door. It wasn’t necessary to force it. The screen door was unlocked. I opened it and walked in. And wasn’t anywhere, except at the bottom of an unroofed well, with semi-circular stairs leading up to another level. I walked up the right-hand stairs to a roofed veranda or gallery and had my choice of two opaque glass doors. I opened the one on the right, but due to the overhang I still wasn’t in the glass-walled living room where I’d seen Mr. Kendall. I was standing in a wide center hall with a half-dozen doors and arches to choose from this time.

  It was the goddamndest place I’d ever seen. If this was modern, I agreed with May. I like our GI house better. A guy would need an overlay map and a lensatic compass to find a bathroom in this joint.

  I called, “Mr. Kendall. This is Charters.”

  No one answered. I walked through one of the doors. I still wasn’t in the living room. But I’d heard of this room before. One of the electricians who’d worked on the house had told us all about it one night down at Kelly’s.

  The only furniture was an oversized bed. In the exact middle of the room. With no head or footboards. Three of the walls were mirrors. So was the floor and ceiling. Whichever way I looked I saw a dozen reflections of me. Like I was two dozen guys. Seen from the bed the effect must have been startling.

  The electrician at Kelly’s had called it Kendall’s studroom.

  I looked at the fourth wall. It was covered with pictures of women. All of the women were nude. None of them were exactly art studies. The pictures had been taken while the women were drunk, obviously. And Kendall had hung them on his wall as trophies.

  I saw several women whom I recognized, two of them married and in the upper brackets. There was also a picture of Lou, her pretty face distorted with passion, her white body arched in desire.

  “I thought you didn’t like the guy,” I told her picture. “I thought you told him to go to hell on the corner of Fourth and Center.”

  It was no longer a matter of wanting to see Kendall. I had to see him now. Another wheel had been added. Lou having a fight with Kendall, going out to the beach alone, and me bumping into her at The Plantation was just not possible. The long arm of coincidence just didn’t reach that far. Lou had been paid to go to bed with me. What I wanted to know was why.

  I crossed the mirror floor to another door and opened it. It led into a combination dressing room and bath. I walked through them into a powder room, then into the room I wanted.

  The living room was huge, perhaps thirty feet wide by half again as long. The entire east wall was glass. I could see the moonlight shining on the bay, and beyond the bay the lights of Sun City.

  The room looked bare to me. The furniture was in keeping with the outside of the house. Ultra modern and very uncomfortable-looking. Except the chair of red plastic in which Kendall was sitting. He’d moved it since I’d seen him last. He’d swung it around so the chair was facing the window. I still couldn’t see any more than the back and top of his head. His arm and the bottle of Scotch were out of sight now, too.

  “Hey, you, Kendall,” I called.

  He gave no sign of hearing me.

  I crossed the parquet floor, and spatted the back of his head with my hand to snap him out of it. With a short arm motion. Harder than I had intended to.

  His head shot forward sharply. The balanced body bent at the waist and followed his head, twisting as it fell, so that it landed on its back, looking up at me.

  With a codfish smile on its lined face.

  I felt like I had once when I was a kid and the old man had been running a bait camp down on Palmetto Point. I’d sneaked out into the kitchen in the dark meaning to gobble some chicken left over from supper. And in the dark and my hurry, I’d gotten hold of a dish of rotten meat, covered with slime, that the old man had asked Ma to save to use as bait for stone crabs.

  The roof of my mouth puckered. I wanted to be sick and couldn’t. I heard the bottle of Scotch thud against the glass wall, then fall to the door and smash. Hearing it faintly, as from a great distance.

  My vision was distorted. It was difficult for me to breathe. My shirt collar was too tight. I tugged at it and found it was already unbuttoned.

  Such a thing couldn’t be. I’d talked to him on the phone not half an hour before. The little guy couldn’t be here. If he was here he couldn’t be dead. But he was. The man I’d knocked out of the chair hadn’t been Mr. Kendall. It was Tony Mantin.

  The front of his expensive white silk suit was stained with blood. He was lying on his back, all expression wiped from his face. Looking just like he had when he’d told me:

  ’I’ve taken a liking to you, Charters. You’re smart. But you’ve still got what they call the milk of human kindness. More, you’ve got what it takes on the ball.’

  With the important exception that Mantin was dead now, had been dead for some minutes. I could tell by the blood on his coat. It had begun to thicken.

  I backed a step away from him.

  “Kendall!” I yelled. “Mr. Kendall!”

  It was like shouting in a morgue. A faint echo was the only answer. ‘Dalli’ my own voice mocked me.

  I lit a cigarette with my fingers that shook so badly I fired the cigarette in the middle and had to snuff it and light another.

  Then I saw the gun on the floor. Between the shattered bottle of Scotch and the glass wall. It was a special job. From where I was standing, it looked like a Colt .38 hung on a .45 frame. With yellowed-ivory grips and a silver-plated barrel. I crossed the floor and picked it up. Then laid it back where I’d found it. Qui
ck. As if it was something hot. It was. As far as I was concerned.

  The police would have to come in this now and I’d already made one bad mistake.

  “Who’s the guy?” Lieutenant Bill David would ask me.

  I’d say, “He told me his name was Mantin.”

  Then David would say, “What did you quarrel about?”

  I’d say, “We didn’t quarrel.”

  “You didn’t kill him, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Who did?”

  I’d have to say, “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t the least idea?”

  “No.”

  “He was dead when you walked into the room?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then how come,” Lieutenant David would ask, “your fingerprints are on the gun?”

  And I’d have to answer, “I picked it up. Instinctively.”

  Me and Pearl Mantinover.

  8

  I STOOD sucking hot smoke into my lungs, looking down at Mantin. According to Tom Benner he was bad. He was the number one trouble-shooter for the tri-state rackets and gambling combine that did a multi-million dollar business. He was a paid killer. He’d been to Cade Kiefer what I’d been to Mr. Kendall, in a way. Only Kiefer hadn’t said, Go here — go there. Get me a ham sandwich. Tell Pearl Mantinover that her appeal has been denied.

  He said: ‘Put that guy out of circulation, Tony. Get that troublemaker. Close that yokel’s mouth.’

  And Mantin did.

  Still, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He’d had human feelings, a lot of them. The longer I looked at his face, looking under that mask that years had stamped on the face he’d been born with, the more he looked like Pearl Mantinover, I decided he was Pearl’s brother, an older brother. And he’d probably been a pretty good Joe to start with. Until life had gotten in his way. He’d still had a heart — for his own. Whatever Pearl had been to him, he’d been willing to lay ten thousand dollars on the line to save her.

  ‘And there’s more if you need it, Jim. As much again.’

  It was a funny feeling. I felt like I’d failed the guy. Mantin had liked me, too. Now he was dead. His stock in trade had caught up with him.

  It was fairly obvious what had happened. When he’d talked to me on the phone, Mantin had been under the false impression that I’d discussed the matter with Kendall and Kendall had advised me to give him back his money and play ball with the local boys. By-passing me for the time being, Mantin had gone directly to Kendall. They’d argued. And Mr. Kendall had killed him. In self-defense. Because he had a guilty conscience. Because he’d thrown Pearl to the wolves.

  I walked back through the powder room into the bathroom and through the bathroom into the dressing room, then into the room of mirrors.

  The room sickened me more than it had the first time. The police would see it now. Reporters would come with the police. The reporters would play the room up — big. They’d spread it all over the front page of both the morning and the evening newspapers. And a lot of so-called respectable married women, who wouldn’t say ‘spit’ in public, would walk through the next few weeks with their fingers crossed, until they were certain they were in the clear.

  On impulse, I ripped Lou’s picture off the wall, tore it into little pieces and flushed the pieces into the septic tank. It didn’t belong in the company it was. Lou was like Tony Mantin. In her heart, she was good. Only her body was bad.

  My reflections walked across the floor with me. A dozen hands helped me open the door into the hall. I called, “Mr. Kendall.”

  There wasn’t even an echo. I thought of a new angle. It could be Mantin had killed Mr. Kendall before he’d sat down in the red chair to die. It could be I was calling a dead man. I crossed the hall and searched the rooms on the other side. None of them looked disturbed. Kendall wasn’t in any of them. I slipped a screen from a sunroom on the north-west corner of the architectural monstrosity and looked out and down.

  May was still standing by the car, one small white hand on the open door of the Ford.

  “May,” I called.

  Her face white in the moonlight, she looked up at me. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I’ve been so frightened. What took you so long, Jim?”

  “I can’t find Kendall,” I said. “But Mantin’s in the front room, dead.”

  “Dead?” May gasped. “Dead?”

  “Shot through the chest.”

  “Who killed him?”

  I said, “I don’t know. But this being Kendall’s house, I imagine Kendall killed him.”

  “Come down,” May said. “Please. Let’s go home.” I shook my head at her. “We can’t. I’ve got to call the police.”

  “Why?”

  I told her. “I didn’t know I was going to find a dead man. And my fingerprints are on everything I’ve touched. Both doorbells. The screen door. The front rail. Doorknobs all over the joint. Even on the gun beside the body. If I run now, Kendall can blame Mantin’s death on me. And he’s just rat enough to do it.”

  “I’m coming up there,” May said.

  She disappeared under the overhang. I walked back the wide middle hall toward the front of the house. I could see now why I hadn’t been able to recognize the living-room door. It was another huge mirror set flush with the wall. Kendall was certainly nuts about seeing his own reflection. So he was a good-looking man. He wasn’t that good-looking.

  The lad who’d taught the class in Abnormal and Criminal Psychology had given us a name for that, too. He’d called it a Narcissus complex, explaining that a good many men who were chasers were really emotionally immature, and every time they stayed with a woman they were, psychologically, doing it to themselves. Could be. But it didn’t make sense to me, any more than traumatic amnesia.

  I pushed the mirror door open and walked into the living room. Mantin hadn’t gone away. I tried to find a phone. I couldn’t. If there was a phone in the living room, it was disguised as something else or hidden behind a panel.

  I squatted beside Mantin’s body and looked across it at the gun. Picking up the gun had been a bad mistake. Wiping it clean of all fingerprints would be as bad. Either way I had a lot of explaining to do.

  I lifted my eyes from the gun and sat on my heels a long moment, looking through the glass wall at the lights of Sun City across the bay. That was where I lived. That was where I belonged. Yesterday morning I had gone to work. Nothing to distinguish the morning from any of a hundred others. Now all this had happened.

  I realized, suddenly, that it had been a long time since May had said, ‘I’m coming up there.’

  The downstairs door was open. She’d had plenty of time to climb the stairs in the open well. I got up off my heels, walked out into the hall and opened one of the opaque glass doors.

  May wasn’t on the stairs or at the bottom of the unroofed well. I called, “May!” sharply.

  My voice filled the well. There was no answer. The short hairs on the back of my neck came alive and began to crawl. I walked three steps down the stairs. As my foot touched the fourth stair, the light over the door went out. Then the indirect light in the well. Then the light shining against the opaque glass behind me. Squeezing me in darkness. As if someone was pulling the circuits in the fuse box, one by one.

  I slipped my gun from my pocket and stood with my left foot lower than my right, my back pressed to the wall, trying to see by starlight. I heard a door open in the bottom of the well, but I couldn’t see anyone.

  “You, down there,” I called hoarsely. “Answer, or I’ll shoot!”

  The only sound was the shrill of the cicadas and the tree frogs outside the screen door. I stayed with my back against the wall, trying to spot a deeper blob of black in the blackness of the well. I couldn’t. A cloud had sailed over the moon and there wasn’t enough starlight.

  I was afraid to call again. Sweat beading my face, I unlaced one of my shoes, the simple ritual taking a long time. Then the gun in my hand lifted, ready
to shoot at the fire flash, I tossed the shoe into the well.

  There was a thud of leather on flagging. Nothing more. No one shot at the shoe.

  I waited a long moment. Then I slipped out of my other shoe and crept down the stairs in my socks, afraid for myself, but more afraid for May.

  I tried to see through the dark. I couldn’t. I could look up and see stars, but the bottom of the well was filled with thick, hot night. And fear.

  My hand was so wet with sweat I was afraid I’d drop the gun. I could hear the pound of my heart. My breathing bothered me. It was a dead giveaway. I was breathing entirely too loud. You couldn’t miss it.

  Whoever had been at the bottom of the well wasn’t there any more. He had climbed the lefthand stairs, crossed in front of the opaque doors and was now on the stairs behind me, breathing in my ears.

  I turned on the stairs, too late. The blow smashed my head into the wall. The gun flew out of my hand and over the wrought-iron railing. I heard the butt crash on the flagging below.

  An explosion rocked the well. Lead whined around the wall. The gun barrel in the hand of the man behind me slashed through the darkness again. Across my face this time.

  I fell to my knees on the stairs, wrapping my arms around his legs as I fell. A knee smashed against my chin. I fell backwards, pulling him with me.

  The weight of my body overbalanced him. He saved himself by grabbing at the rail. I fought back to my feet, beating at him in frenzy, panting:

  “Who are you? What have you done with May?”

  He slashed with the gun barrel again. Coldly, methodically. Forcing me back step by step.

  It was like fighting a madman in a nightmare. The only sound was the thud of blows, an occasional grunt of pain and the rasp of hoarse breathing.

  I wanted, desperately, to know who he was. Mr. Kendall? Another one of Cade Kiefer’s men? And what had he done with May?

  “Tell me, goddamn you,” I sobbed. “Who are you? What have you done with May?”