Wake Up to Murder Read online

  Lieutenant David got up from the bed. “No I wouldn’t think of such a thing.” He looked down at me. “Okay. That’s all, Charters.”

  He turned on his heel and walked out of the room. One by one, his squad followed him. Even Hap Arnold. Leaving me sitting on the bed. Alone. No one paying any attention to me. As if I didn’t exist.

  I sat there for a long time, listening to the voices in the living room, thinking of what Lieutenant David had said about May. It could be.

  I felt uncomfortable on the bed. I walked out into the hall and down the stairs. No one stopped me.

  The drive was filled with police cars, now. A group of officers were rigging a portable searchlight on the edge of the bay. Still others were clomping through a tangle of mangrove that formed a sort of a natural groin on one side of the property.

  My Ford was where I’d left it. I got in and drove slowly up the drive, two wheels on the grass. I passed a half-dozen police cars and as many uniformed policemen. A few of the policemen looked at me curiously.

  I turned south on the highway toward the causeway. As I did, the driver of a small car parked on the shoulder of the road turned on his headlights. I watched the car in my rear vision mirror. The driver waited until there were two cars between us, then swung out on the highway.

  When I turned east on the causeway, the car was still tailing me. It could be a police car. It could be some of Tony’s friends, some of Cade Kiefer’s boys.

  I drove on, blindly. If what Lieutenant David had said about May was true, if May had gone with Mr. Kendall of her own free will, I didn’t care what happened. All I wanted was to crawl into some hole and die.

  10

  THERE were more cars in front of the Sandbar now. My throat had never been so dry. I considered stopping for a beer. I didn’t. I had a feeling it would gag me.

  I drove on up our street and into our drive. I braked just outside the porte, turned out the car lights and sat a long time, looking at the house across the street.

  Lieutenant David had said:

  ‘The woman next door wouldn’t talk, but the dame across the street did.’

  That would be Nell Cass. She and May had never been overfriendly. A former captain in the WAC, the Cass dame lived alone. With a cat named Cleopatra and one named Anthony. She didn’t fit into the street. Most of the other couples had children. And none of us had much money. We borrowed garden tools back and forth, and joked.

  Not the Cass dame. She didn’t even try to be friendly. She was all the time chasing the kids. She never had any callers and May said she lived vicariously in the lives of her two cats. Which couldn’t be too much fun, Cleopatra being spayed and Anthony a whatever they call gelded tomcats.

  Still, we’d never quarreled with her. We had no kids to get on her lawn. She liked us the best of her neighbors. She even nodded once in a while when we said, “Good evening.” She had no reason to lie to Lieutenant David. If Nell Cass said a black Cadillac had frequently parked on our drive and a man answering Mr. Kendall’s description had called on May while I was at work, the chances are it was so.

  I looked across the lawn at the Shelly back door. There was no use talking to Gwen. May and Gwen were closer than sisters. Either would lie for the other any hour of the day or night. If Gwen thought it would help May she would swear on a stack of Bibles that May was still a virgin, even after ten years of marriage. No. There was no use talking to Gwen.

  I got out of the car and went into the house. It was hot with the windows closed. I lit a light and looked at the living room. I’d never realized how shabby it was, how cheap our furniture looked and how little there was of it. May had done her best, but I hadn’t been able to give her much to do with.

  My kidneys were still bothering me from the beating I’d taken on the stairs. I used the bathroom and walked into our bedroom. May’s housedress was still lying over the chair. Her cotton panties were still on the floor where she’d stepped out of them. The room looked and smelled like May.

  I fluffed a pillow against the wall and lay down on the bed.

  ‘I love you, Jim,’ she’d told me. ‘And I want you always to remember that as far as I’m concerned you are all that matters.’

  Like hell.

  Or was I thinking dirty? Was I letting the mirror room and the pictures on Kendall’s wall get me? May had never been cheap or coarse, not even with me. I’d never known her to deny me, even when I was fuddled with beer. But somehow she always had managed to keep that part of our life on a high plane.

  I sat up and lighted a cigarette. So Kendall had a picture of her. Anyone willing to spend a buck could buy one from the Times. When a woman gave a man her picture she usually wrote something on it. If only ‘Best Regards.’ And she signed her name. Kendall’s picture had been blank.

  I got up and walked the room.

  I’d been the one who’d suggested going out to Mr. Kendall’s. May hadn’t wanted me to, but when I’d persisted she had insisted on going with me. She had been willing to face him and anything he might be able to say.

  I sat in front of her dressing table and pulled out the middle drawer, in which she kept the current bills and unanswered correspondence. On the top of the pile there was a new payment book from the Sunshine Jewelry Company. I opened it. On Wednesday of the week before, May had paid fifteen dollars down and had agreed to pay a dollar a week on a name brand self-winding wrist watch costing eighty-four dollars. A man’s watch. On Wednesday past, my birthday, the day Mr. Kendall had fired me, she’d paid the first dollar due.

  I saw the box then. It was wrapped in white tissue paper, tied with red ribbon and there was a little white card stuck under the ribbon. On the card, May had written:

  To My Beloved Husband

  I pushed the drawer shut gently. May had bought me the watch I’d wanted for a year. For my birthday. She’d saved up fifteen dollars, God knew how. Pinching pennies probably. Walking ten blocks to the chain store for shortening, because she could buy it a few cents cheaper. Doing without the little things a woman needs. Making her old lipstick do. Buying a cheaper brand of powder. And she’d obligated herself to do the same for seventy-seven more weeks. Because she loved me. And I’d let my own dirty mind and Lieutenant David sell me a bill of goods.

  I walked back through the house to my car. To hell with Bill David. To hell with Cade Kiefer. Matt Kendall had May. It was just as I had figured it at first. Kendall had a guilty conscience, a big one. He’d somehow managed to kill Tony Mantin, and May and I had blundered in while he had been getting ready to blow. He’d played hide and seek with me and when May had walked in the front door, he’d grabbed her. It had been Kendall I’d fought with on the stairs. It had been Kendall who had knocked me out and carried me out on the lawn. The shovel was the sort of touch a warped mind like his would think of.

  He’d known what the police would think. He’d known that Bill David would jump to the conclusion that I’d played the heavy husband. Leaving me suspected of his murder, while he took off with May. Where?

  As I slammed the door of the breezeway, Bob Shelley materialized out of the moonlight.

  “For God’s sake, Jim,” he said. “What’s this we just heard on the ten o’clock newscast? That the police think Mr. Kendall and May are dead and that you are under suspicion of having killed them.”

  I slipped in back of the wheel of the Ford. “The cops talked to you folks?” I asked him.

  Gwen spoke out of the dark behind Bob. “Yes. Less than an hour ago. They tried to get me to admit that May had been having an affair with Mr. Kendall.”

  I asked her, “And you told them — ?”

  “That they were crazy.” Gwen was crying so hard she could hardly talk. “It isn’t true, is it, Jim? I mean that May — that you — ?”

  “No,” I said flatly. “That stuff on the radio is just a lot of crap. The police aren’t even sure that anyone is dead. That’s how come I’m here instead of down at the station. How long has this been going on, Gwen
?”

  Gwen sobbed, “It hasn’t been going on. Sure. Mr. Kendall was out here. Almost every afternoon this past month. May didn’t know what to do. If she told you you’d get sore and there’d be a fight and you’d lose your job. Just like you did, anyway. But she thought maybe if she could tough it out, Mr. Kendall would get discouraged and quit bothering her. And, believe me, Jim. He didn’t get to first base. All he got was laughed at. May thinks the sun rises and sets in that six feet of yours.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  Bob asked, “But if the police suspect you of killing them, Jim, what are you doing free?”

  I told him. “David is giving me rope. Enough to hang myself, he hopes.”

  I backed the Ford out the drive and damn near knocked over the mailbox. As I got straightened away and headed back up the street, a pair of headlights flicked on and followed. I hadn’t lost my tail. If they hoped I would lead them to May and Mr. Kendall, I hoped so, too. The hell of it was, I hadn’t the least idea where Kendall might have gone.

  Then I thought of Mabel. She’d been Kendall’s secretary for years. She knew more about him than anyone else in the city. If he had a hideout somewhere, she should know where it was. The question was, would she tell me?

  Mabel’s last name was Bliss. She lived with her mother in an old frame house down on the point, not far from the ferry. The subdivision was a relic from the boom days of ’25. Unpaid-for red-brick streets and curbs and even water hydrants wound through a wilderness of saw palmetto and moss-hung live oak, for miles.

  I parked in front of the house and walked through a lane of bug-infested oleanders to wide termite-eaten stairs, and up the stairs to a sagging wooden porch.

  Mabel’s mother came to the door. She was an old lady with white hair and a pleasant, if somewhat toothless smile.

  “Yes?” she asked me.

  I said, “Might I please speak to Mabel?”

  Somewhere inside the house, Mabel heard my voice. And she’d heard the newscast, too. She screamed:

  “Shut the door, Ma. Quick. He’s crazy. That’s Jim Charters. The man who just killed Mr. Kendall.” Mabel sounded hysterical. “He probably wants to kill me, too.”

  The old lady slammed the door in my face. So hard the whole house trembled. Through a window opening on the porch I heard the whirr and click of a dial phone. Mabel, undoubtedly, was phoning the police. I looked up the street. She could have saved a nickel by sticking her head out the window and screaming. My tail was parked a quarter of a block away. At the distance, in the moonlight, it could have been Hap Arnold, or David himself, for that matter.

  I walked back through the lane of oleanders to my car. There were two things I could do. I could spook. I could let myself go and be as hysterical as Mabel. Or I could hang onto my feelings and reason this thing out.

  Mr. Kendall wasn’t a man who would act entirely on impulse. He was smart. He’d known, he must have known, that on the woman angle alone, sooner or later, he was bound to come a cropper. He couldn’t go on studding in other men’s stables forever. In time, some husband was bound to blow the whistle on him.

  It seemed almost certain he had left himself an out, if it were only a hideaway, where he could lie low until the scandal had blown over. Now there was the Tony Meares, Pearl Mantinover deal. Now he had more than a wronged husband to worry about. Cade Kiefer was certain to feel bad about losing Tony’s services. Very bad. It seemed plausible to me that if Mr. Kendall had prepared a hideout, now was the time for him to use it. If only as a springboard in his attempt to get out of the state and the country.

  So he had a hideout. Where was it? I wasn’t smart. He was. And I knew of places along the coast and on the islands just off-shore where a man could hide for years.

  I drove back toward the center of town. It was just possible that one of Kendall’s women might know of some such prepared hideout. The only one of his women I knew personally was Lou. If I remembered correctly, Lou had said something about living at the Flamingo Hotel.

  It was an old unpretentious hotel about six blocks out of the business center. I parked on the far side of the street and sat looking at the place. Back in the days of the Old Orange Belt Railway, the Flamingo had been The Hotel. Now it was only a big white frame relic with a lot of useless gingerbread and space wasted on unscreened balconies.

  One thing was for sure, Lou paid her own rent. Lou was a funny girl. With her looks and her body and her willingness to use it on any and all occasions, she could be living in a four-room suite in the best hotel in town, but she wasn’t.

  I crossed the street and walked into the lobby. A few discouraged looking palms formed unnecessary shade from a huge cut-glass chandelier with half of its bulbs missing. There were a dozen or so tourists and traveling men sprawled on the worn leather chairs. Back on the desk, an elderly night clerk was checking the entries at the dog track against the record of their past performances. There was a big slotted key and mail rack behind him. I leaned both palms on the deck and said:

  “Pardon me. Do you happen to know if the day clerk gave Miss Tarrent the note I left for her?”

  He turned around and felt in box 301. “Yeah. I guess he did,” the clerk said. “Lou probably picked it up when she came in.”

  He went back to his dogs. I stood for a moment, looking at the covers of the magazines in the rack next to the cigar counter. Then I rode the creaking elevator up to the fourth floor. No one asked where I was going. No one cared. It was that kind of a hotel.

  Room 301 was in front, on the right-hand side of the hall. I could hear water running on the other side of the door. I ran my knuckles across the wood.

  “Who is it?” Lou called.

  I told her, “Mr. Doakes.”

  11

  THE sound of running water stopped. A moment of silence followed. Then a key turned in the lock and Lou opened the door.

  Beads of water glistened on her satin flesh. She stood holding a bath towel to her chest. Her green-gray eyes were sullen.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  I exhaled slowly. At least she hadn’t screamed. The chances were Lou hadn’t heard the newscast. She didn’t know May and Mr. Kendall were missing. She didn’t know what a dirty dog I was suspected of being.

  I said, “I want to talk to you.”

  She stepped back from the door. I closed and locked the door behind me. Lou looked at me a long moment, then turned and walked into the bathroom. When she came out again, she’d put on a light cotton housecoat and was having trouble with the zipper. A piece of goods was caught in the track. I pushed her hands away, cleared the track, and zipped up the front.

  “Thank you,” she said, primly.

  “Think nothing of it,” I said. “I’m an old hand with stuck zippers.” I sat on the edge of the bed and hung my hat on one knee. “How sore at me are you, Lou?”

  Her hair was still damp from her shower. She lifted crisp curls away from her neck, refusing to meet my eyes. “Well, you hurt my feelings.”

  I said, “Look, Lou. I don’t want to fight with you. God knows that’s not what I’m here for.” I didn’t have to lie. “I’ve always thought you were pretty nice. I still do. But our getting together like we did wasn’t like you told me, was it? It wasn’t accidental. I didn’t just happen to bump into you. Mr. Kendall engineered the whole thing. Didn’t he?”

  Lou chewed at her lower lip. Then, suddenly, she nodded. “Yes. And I’ve felt rotten about it ever since. It was the first time I’d ever done such a thing. I mean, take money to check into a hotel with a man. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I do. Why taking money makes it different I don’t know. But it does. And I do know you aren’t that kind of a girl.”

  I thought for a minute she was going to cry. “Thank you, Jim,” Lou said. She sat on the bed beside me. “I like you, too. That’s why I felt like hell when I sobered up and realized what I’d done.”

  Lou laid her hand on mine. Her fingers
were soft and small. Like May’s. I had to inhale deeply to keep from going to pieces completely. Thinking about May. May was somewhere with Kendall. Kendall had May somewhere.

  Lou was puzzled. “Why, you’re trembling, Jim,” she said.

  I said, tight-lipped. “We’ll come to that. How much did Kendall give you, kid?”

  Lou said, “Fifty dollars.”

  “Please,” I said quietly. “Tell me just how it happened. And don’t leave out anything. Believe me, it’s very important.”

  “You mean, from the beginning of my date with Mr. Kendall?”

  “From the beginning.”

  Lou thought a moment. “Well, when we left the County Building we drove over to Steve’s and had a steak. And the evening started to go wrong right there.”

  “How do you mean wrong?”

  “Well, Cass Hardy stopped at our table and asked if he could speak to Mr. Kendall. They talked at the bar for a long time. And when Mr. Kendall came back to the table, he was either worried or frightened.” Lou played with the zipper on her housecoat. Unzipping it partly, then zipping it shut again. “He drank more than he ate. And every time I opened my mouth, he told me for God’s sake to shut up and let him think.”

  The whole fantastic nightmare was beginning to make sense. Cass Hardy was the local big shot. During the summer, with the exception of a few slot machines and, of course, bolita, there was little gambling in Sun City. The city fathers and the church crowd could point with pride. But during the winter everything went. The tourists had to be entertained. And Cass and his boys made enough off the snowbirds to keep them on the plush for the year. At least they had until Joe Summers moved in. And Joe had done right well. He’d had Cass on the run. Until, unfortunately for Joe, he and Pearl had quarreled. And, as the state had contended and proven, Pearl had used a .38 on him.

  “Then what?” I asked Lou.

  “Then we drove to the beach,” she told me. “We had a lot of drinks in a lot of places. Then we went to the Pelican Club. And there you were.”