Wake Up to Murder Page 7

  I might have saved my breath. I could taste the sweetness of blood in my mouth. I couldn’t take much more of this. I tried to clinch to save my head. He kneed me savagely in the groin. I screamed and tried to give ground. And couldn’t. I was at the bottom of the well. He was two steps above me. He stopped slashing with the gun and used his feet.

  I tried to throw myself sideways and slipped. My head hit something a glancing blow as I fell. I realized he was kicking me. I tried to crawl away from the pain. It followed me.

  Funny. I mean a man’s mind how it works. In a book or a movie I would have been noble. I would have thought of May and been glad I’d kept up my GI insurance. I didn’t. There in the middle of the well, lying flat on my back, all I thought of was:

  “Christ, I wish he’d stop kicking me.”

  The intense pain was gone. I was hot, I was wet. I ached. Sand flies and mosquitoes covered my face and hands. I swallowed and tasted whiskey. My clothes reeked of it. I wasn’t far from water. I could hear it lapping gently on a beach.

  I opened my eyes. I was lying in a tangle of long grass a few feet from the edge of the bay. I rested my chin on the back of one hand. Across the water, purple and mysterious in the moonlight, glowed the lights of Sun City. There was no mistaking them. There was the Municipal Pier. There was the airport. There were the lights on the causeway, leading to the beach.

  I sat up and looked behind me. I was still on Mr. Kendall’s property, on the lawn in front of the house. There were lights in the living room again, over the front door, in the unroofed well.

  I bleated, “May!”

  My voice was thick with phlegm and blood. I spit it out and called again. The only answer was the lap of the incoming tide.

  I’d never been so tired. Every muscle in my body ached. I got to my feet and realized I was clutching a tool of some kind. I leaned on the long wooden handle, looking at the house.

  My Ford was still on the drive, but the black Cadillac was gone. I limped toward the house, using the tool as a staff. So I’d taken a beating. It wasn’t the first one I’d taken. It probably wouldn’t be the last. The important thing was May.

  I called again, “May!”

  The onshore wind had risen. It whipped the word out of my mouth and carried it over the bay. I limped to the ford and looked in. May wasn’t in the car.

  I walked back to the front of the house and opened the screen door. There was a splotch of blood on the flagging and a few spots on the stairs. Probably all mine. I doubt if I had done much damage to the party who had attacked me. It had come too suddenly. I’d been too confused.

  I looked at the tool in my hand. It was a long-handled garden shovel. I carried it up the stairs with me as a weapon and pushed through the opaque and mirror doors into the living room.

  The red plastic chair was still by the window. But the pearl-handled gun was gone. So was Tony Mantin’s body. There wasn’t even any blood on the floor.

  I backed out into the hall. The house felt different somehow — empty. There was no need to search it again. I knew. May wasn’t in the house. Whoever had slugged me unconscious and dragged me out on the lawn had taken May with him.

  I hobbled back downstairs to the star-roofed well. Where my flesh didn’t ache, it crawled. The whole thing had an air of unreality about it. It was one of those things that could never happen, but it had.

  I’d come looking for Kendall. Now this.

  I had to get to the police. The police had to help me. They had to help me find May.

  I limped out under the light. Some of the bugs swarming around it left the light and investigated the clotted blood on my face. I brushed them away. Then, still using the handle of the shovel as a staff, I walked toward my car as rapidly as I could. Every moment might count.

  The door May had opened was still open. I started to get into the car, stopped as a pair of headlights swung in off the highway. It was a big car, traveling fast.

  It stopped in a shower of crushed stone. A powerful searchlight came on and pinned me against the door of the Ford.

  “Hold it right there,” a voice called.

  A young cop got out and walked toward me, warily, his right hand on his holstered gun. His partner got out and stood beside the police car.

  “Am I glad to see you guys,” I panted. “I was just starting for the station.”

  “Yeah?” the young cop said. “What’s your name, mister?”

  “Charters,” I said. “Jim Charters.”

  “You live here?”

  “No.” I started to tell him about May. Before I could, he said:

  “You know anything about a shooting here?”

  I yelled at him. “For God’s sake, listen to me. My wife — ”

  He cut me short again. “What’s that in your hand?”

  I said, “It’s a long-handled shovel.”

  “So I see,” he said. “What you doing with a shovel?”

  I looked at the tool in my hand, really seeing it for the first time.

  What was I doing with a shovel?

  9

  KENDALL’S stud-room was a hell of a place to hold a third degree. Every time a detective broke the circle around me, I saw a naked woman. The room seemed filled with cops. They scowled at me from all sides of the oversized bed. They looked up from the floor and down from the ceiling.

  At that, it wasn’t exactly a third degree. Not so far. There was no bright light shining in my eyes. No one was pounding on me. They’d let me wash the blood from my face. One of the boys in Lieutenant Bill David’s squad brought a first-aid kit from the squad car and patched up the worst of my cuts.

  I wished I knew Lieutenant David better than I did. I looked at him through the sweat that filmed my eyes. He wasn’t big, he wasn’t little. A cracker from the piney woods country, he’d been on the Sun City force for twenty years, the last five of them as head of Homicide. His sparse hair was colorless. The lines of his face were almost as deep as those in Mantin’s. He had a habit of chewing his words before he let them leave his mouth. Then they came out in a deceptively soft drawl.

  He saw me looking at him and drawled, “How you feeling, Charters?”

  “Lousy,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t matter. What does matter is finding May.”

  David was wearing a shabby black felt hat. He wore it summer and winter. It was one of the gags around town that it was the only hat he’d ever had. He pushed it on the back of his head. “We’ll come to her in just a minute,” he said. “Right now, let’s go over that last point again. Just why did you and your wife come out here to Mr. Kendall’s?”

  I explained, “To ask his advice about the money.”

  “What money?”

  “I’ve told you twenty times. The ten thousand dollars Tony Mantin gave me.”

  “Oh, yes,” Lieutenant David said. “The ten thousand dollars Mantin, whose name isn’t Mantin, gave you yesterday morning to do you’re not just certain what.” He paused and looked at me curiously.

  Put that way it sounded idiotic. But it was the truth. I said, “That’s right. The way I’ve reasoned it out, he gave me the money because I told him I thought I could save Pearl Mantinover from the chair.”

  Lieutenant David was interested. “You can do that?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I can’t.”

  “Then why did you tell him you could?”

  “I was big-mouth drunk.”

  Hap Arnold, one of David’s plainclothesmen, stepped in a little closer to the bed. “What the hell,” he said. “Let me soften him up a bit, Bill, and maybe he’ll begin to make sense.” Arnold massaged his right fist with the palm of his left hand.

  Lieutenant David shook his head at him. “Uh uh. Charters wants to cooperate. Don’t you?”

  I’d never wanted anything more in my life. “I’m trying to,” I said.

  Lieutenant David smiled at me. With his lips only. His eyes were the color of bronzed fish-hooks, with about as much expression. “Fine,” he drawled.
“Fine. Now tell me this. If you knew you couldn’t do what you’d shot off your mouth about, why didn’t you refuse the money when Tony Meares walked into your room at the Glades Hotel yesterday morning.”

  I lost my head and shouted at him. “I told you. I was still drunk.”

  “You were alone in the room?”

  “No.”

  “Who was the girl?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “You were cheating on your wife, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kinda getting even like.” The remark didn’t make sense. Before I could question it, David continued. “Meares gave you ten thousand dollars in cash?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And your wife had this ten thousand dollars in her purse when you drove out here to call on Mr. Kendall?”

  I repeated, “That’s right.”

  Bill David summed up what I’d told him. “When you got here Mr. Kendall wasn’t home. But, leaving your wife downstairs, you walked in anyway.” He jerked his thumb toward the living room. “You found Tony Meares in there, dead. Then all the lights in the place went out. Someone attacked you on the stairs. And when you come to, you were lying on the shore of the bay, reeking of whiskey, with a shovel in your hand, and both Meares’ body and your wife were missing.”

  The detectives standing around the bed laughed.

  My face felt hot. I raised my right hand shoulder high. “So help me, God. And whoever killed Meares has May.”

  Hap Arnold looked across the bed at Lieutenant David. “Is Kiefer in town, Bill?”

  “So I’ve heard said,” Lieutenant David admitted. “But if Cade is thinking of cutting in here, he’s planting a hard row to hoe.” He added a fresh pinch of fine cut to the chew in his left cheek. His voice was as cold as his eyes. “Now, let’s stop this horsing around and get down to business, Charters. When you broke in here tonight to kill Attorney Kendall — ”

  I stopped him there. “I didn’t break in here to kill anyone. All I wanted was some advice. So Kendall fired me. I knew he was a damn smart lawyer. And I thought maybe he could figure some way to pry me out of my jam with Mantin.”

  “You mean Tony Meares.”

  “Meares, then. He told me his name was Mantin.”

  David sat down on the bed beside me. “How would you like a cigarette?”

  I said, “I’d like one.”

  He took a pack of Camels from his pocket. I put a cigarette in my mouth. He lighted it, saying:

  “Look, fellow. You and I may not exactly be pals, but I’ve seen you around the station and the county building and the courts for some years now. From what I’ve heard about you, you’re known as a pretty square shooter. You do your job. You mind your own business. You hold your liquor well.”

  I winced. “I’m afraid I didn’t hold it very well last night.”

  I wished he didn’t look so much like Mantin when he smiled. “We all slip up now and then,” David said. “How come you tied one on last night, Charters?”

  I thought it over. Telling the whole truth wouldn’t help May. I was damned if I’d shame myself in front of a roomful of men by admitting I’d gotten drunk because I’d suddenly realized I wasn’t going anywhere, that at thirty-five I was a failure. How explain my dreams? Even if I could, they wouldn’t mean a thing to David. I compromised.

  “Well, it was my birthday. And what with Mr. Kendall firing me yesterday afternoon, and us with a lot of payments to meet, things didn’t look too bright.”

  “You and your wife quarreled about you losing your your job?”

  “No.”

  “She didn’t say anything, huh?”

  “Just that we’d get along, somehow.”

  Lieutenant David looked at the circle of watching men. “Who has that picture of Mrs. Charters?”

  “I’ll get it,” a detective said. “I think the tech boys left it in the living room when they finished dusting it.”

  I looked at the pictures on the wall, sick. I wouldn’t believe it of May.

  Even if they showed me her picture. It was a night for remembering. Still, May had cursed someone. She’d called him a foul-minded son-of-a-bitch. And when I’d asked her who and why she’d said:

  ‘You have a right to know. But we won’t go into that right now. I’ll tell you sometime. Later.’

  Tell me what?

  The detective came back in the room and handed Lieutenant David a picture. David looked at it a long time. “You realize,” he drawled, finally, “that your wife is a very beautiful woman, Charters. One of the prettiest women in Sun City. Maybe on the entire west coast of Florida.”

  I had to know. I snatched the picture out of his hands. I’d never been so relieved. It wasn’t like the other pictures on the wall. May was wearing a white evening dress. One she’d made herself, when she’d been elected to office in the Women of the Moose. A cameraman for the Times had taken the picture for the Fraternal Jottings column in the Sunday paper, and because it had been such a good likeness of May, I’d bought a half-dozen prints of it.

  I turned it over. There was no writing on either the front or back of it. “Where did you get this?” I asked Lieutenant David.

  He said, “In Kendall’s dressing room.”

  I handed him the picture. “Okay. So May’s pretty. What about it, Lieutenant?”

  He looked at the bare space on the wall where Lou’s picture had been. His drawl was even more pronounced. “Where’s the other picture of her, Charters? The one that was up there?”

  I said, “You son-of-a-bitch,” and swung on him.

  Lieutenant David caught my wrist in his hand. His lean fingers were like a vice. “Don’t give me that. You knew.”

  “Knew what?” I panted.

  “That your wife and your employer were, well, shall we say, over-friendly.”

  I tried to pull my wrist free. “That’s a lie.”

  Lieutenant David shook his head. “Not according to your neighbors. The woman next door wouldn’t talk, but the dame across the street did. And it seems that a black Cadillac sedan driven by a distinguished-looking man, who answers Mr. Kendall’s description, has been parked in your drive quite frequently of late. And always while you weren’t home.”

  “That’s a lie,” I repeated.

  I got my wrist free and smashed a glancing blow to his face. Before I could hit him again, Hap Arnold knocked me off the bed, then picked me up and sat me back on it.

  “Behave,” Arnold said. “Or I’ll slap you silly.”

  Lieutenant David wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. Both his eyes and voice were cold now. “I wouldn’t lie about such a thing, Charters. And acting innocent ain’t going to get you nowhere. So stop stalling and give us the straight of it. Forget your fantastic story of Tony Meares giving you ten thousand dollars to pry the Mantinover dame out of the death house and ’fess up the truth. You learned your wife had been unfaithful to you with Kendall. You brought her out here for a show-down.”

  “Then what happened?” I panted.

  Lieutenant David drawled, “That’s what we want you to tell us. Both your wife and Kendall are missing. There’s blood all over that well affair downstairs. And the first officers to answer the report of a shooting find you with a shovel in your hand and your clothes filthy with marl. You wouldn’t have been burying a couple of bodies, would you?”

  I buried my face in my hands. It couldn’t be true about May. I wouldn’t believe it. May wouldn’t do that to me. May wasn’t that kind of a woman. She was good. She was sweet. She was true.

  I looked at the lewd pictures on the wall. On the other hand, that’s what their husbands thought. Mr. Kendall could give her the furs and cars and diamonds that I had promised her.

  My mind raced on. What if, last night, me acting the way I had, checking into a hotel with Lou, had been the last straw, as far as May was concerned? What if Kendall had been after her for some time?

  Missing body or not, Tony Mantin w
as dead. I knew that. The chances were Kendall had killed him. That meant he was in wrong, serious wrong, with Cade Kiefer. More, once this room got into the papers he was also washed up in Sun City. The logical thing for him to do was get out, go to Mexico, Central or South America, Europe, anywhere. Except the United States. It was no longer big enough to hold him.

  What if he and May had gone together?

  Lieutenant David nudged me with his elbow. “I asked you a question, fellow. You wouldn’t have been burying a body or two, would you?”

  I looked at him through my fingers. “No.”

  He nodded at the blank spot on the wall where Lou’s picture had been. “But you did take a picture of your wife from there?”

  I repeated, “No.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “I am.”

  “You didn’t kill your wife?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t kill Mr. Kendall?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t bury their bodies somewhere along the bay?”

  “No.”

  “You haven’t the least idea where they are?”

  “No.”

  Hap Arnold was disgusted. “Aw, for God’s sake. Let me work him over, Bill. Let me soften him up a bit.”

  Lieutenant David looked shocked. “Don’t even suggest such a thing, Hap. Why, that would be against the law.”

  And that was a laugh. I sat, panting, glowering at David. I’d never hated anyone so much. I knew how he operated. If he thought he could break me, he’d beat me for a week. With anything he could lay his hands on. And when I turned up black and blue in court, he would smile that slow pineywoods cracker smile of his and swear on his mother’s grave that I had fallen down the stairs at the station.

  David continued to be shocked. “Why, of course not. I’m certain if Mr. Charters could tell us anything he would.”

  I could see through his cracker reasoning. Maybe because I was one myself. Some men will break under pressure. Some won’t. He doubted he could break me. It was far more likely I’d clam up.

  From a legal point of view all he had on me was an as yet unproven motive, a few splotches of blood, and a shovel. Combined, they were enough to hold me for investigation, but not enough to indict me. Cane syrup caught more flies than vinegar, anyway.