Dead Low Tide (16 page)

She trotted in and plumped herself on the couch and bounced a few times, and said, “I suppose you’ll ask all the same questions over again. Who are you, anyway?”

It was a problem. I didn’t want her to run away screaming. But I couldn’t delay too long. “Andrew McClintock.”

“Oh, goodness! I read and heard all about you. It was extremely stupid of them to put you in jail, Mr. McClintock. I’m a good judge of character. I can tell from the shape of your head that you could never kill anybody.”

“Thank you.”

“If I’d known your name, I could have saved that police person some trouble. I described you in great detail and finally he grunted and scribbled in his silly little notebook. I always say if anybody wants me to know their name, they’ll tell me. Of course, I knew Miss Hallowell by sight. Why in
the world Wilburt can’t get some new books in that loan library I’ll never know.”

“When was Miss Hallowell here?”

“Understand now, Mr. McClintock, I don’t keep tabs on people coming and going. She was here yesterday. Sunday, it was, and I guess she was here about four in the afternoon, or maybe later. Then she went away, and that man came and he was here longer than I care to have men here in a room with a single girl. I’m not old fashioned, but I say there’s a limit, and decency is decency wherever you find it. Once I get my mind made up to ask a girl to go, I do it, and that is what I was thinking on yesterday when that man was here. He left along about dark, and Miss Hallowell was back here again but she didn’t stay long, and that was very late. I’d say. I went to bed and then, about an hour later, I heard Miss Kenney go down the stairs and unlock the door and I heard a man’s voice down there with her, and I guess he must have gone around the side of the house and chunked a pebble on her window or something. She came back up the stairs with him, both of them walking quiet. Right then and there I made up my mind to talk to her, and tell her to get out. I lay there so mad I couldn’t get to sleep and he stayed maybe ten minutes and then went real quiet back down the stairs and let himself out. I got up and went to make sure the door was latched and it was locked like it should be. I heard her in her room, making a mewly little noise like she was crying, and any normal time I’d ask a body what the trouble is, but, as I said, I’d just about give up on that girl. I was real pleased for her when she gave up that waiting table work and got a decent job in Mr. Long’s office, but I tell you, that kind of girl brings trouble wherever she works. Oh, I’m not saying she isn’t nice enough to
speak to. So polite and nice butter wouldn’t melt. But I always say these tropics can do something to nice girls to make them forget their upbringing, and forget plain decency.”

She looked at me almost triumphantly and bounced up and down a little on the couch. “Do you know who the man was? The one who was here for about ten minutes?”

“Well, I certainly
hope
it was the same one who’s been coming to see her, even if he is strange acting.”

“What does he look like?”

“Now, it’s funny, but I never have got a real good look at him. Not to talk to. I’d say he’s about as tall as you. With a soft voice. And he wears a hat, and you don’t see so many young men wearing hats down here. And he has kind of—well, a kind of poor look. Run-down-at-the-heels kind of look. But I swear I never had a real good chance to stare him right in the face.”

“Did he come here in a car?”

“Now, you know, that’s the same thing that policeman kept asking me. I know he came in a car a couple of times, and I know that once it was a little black shiny car with a cloth top, and it looked new, but it still had a sort of old-fashioned look. You know, with those wire wheels and all. And he came in another car usually, that looked more like him.”

“Like him?”

“A sort of gray dusty kind of thing, the kind of car you wouldn’t look at twice. I know I didn’t.”

“That’s all you could tell the police about him.”

“That’s every word of it, young man.”

“Miss Kenney was trying to get another job while she was working at the restaurant?”

“Yes, but you know, that’s a funny thing. That agency man, he’d keep calling her up and he’d have a job for her, but she just wasn’t interested at all, until this chance to work for Mr. Long came along. Then she seemed excited and upset about getting the job. Nervous, like. I suppose she was out of practice. It gave me the shivers to see them taking her out of here. My goodness, her face was empty as a bed sheet. She’d halfway walk when they pushed on her a little. I can’t help feeling sorry for the poor thing, taken sick that way, even if I was all set in my mind to ask her to look for another room. I pick up the rooms myself, and it’s no pleasure to have to clean up after a body who leaves sand and sand spurs on my hooked rug, and his pants cuffs and shoes always wet like he had to wade to get here, so he dripped, and mud caking off his shoes. I swear to Betsy, that man must live in a swamp. And I must say, it surprised me to see that nice Miss Hollowell coming to see Joy Kenney. Joy!” She sniffed. “Funny idea to name a girl that.” She leaned forward. “But, then again, I understand that Miss Hallowell is divorced.
She
can’t be any better than she has to be either. How does she get away calling herself Miss?”

“She’s dead. They took her out of the bay this morning.”

She leaned back on the couch, her eyes wide. “And me, with the radio turned off all day long because it just seemed too hot to listen! Oh, the poor, poor dear! How in the world did it happen?”

I stood up. “Somebody strangled her and threw her in.”

“My goodness to Betsy, it’s getting terrible around here. And I’ve been after him and after him to fix that lock on the back door. Why, if this keeps up, a body won’t be safe walking the streets!”

All of a sudden I had to get out of the hot musty room, away from her little sharp fox eyes, away from her slightly sickly innuendoes.

“Thank you for the information.”

“That’s perfectly all right, and if you can, young man, you find out what in the world I’m supposed to do with Miss Kenney’s things. I don’t want her back here. Do you think it would be all right to pack them up in her suitcases? Then I could rent the room out. It’s never any trouble to rent a room when you keep a nice clean house with everything spick and span.”

“You better use your own judgment on that.”

Before I reached the porch steps, she closed the front door, and I heard the lock snap. I got into the car and looked at the house and saw her going from window to window, fiddling with the latches.

The local hospital is inadequate. It seems as if everybody and his brother have been moving to Florida and bringing the kids. It’s getting so you have to line up for everything. Schools, roads, lunch, room to fish off a bridge. It shocks you a little when you go inland about five miles and find it looking as though Señor de Leon hadn’t taken his trip yet.

I hung around the front desk after being told, in chilly fashion, that Dr. Graman was inside, and that Miss Kenney was a patient. We’ve made quite a deal out of sickness and death. Now they’re something that comes with a rustle of starch, a quick needle in the arm, a brisk smell of disinfectant, and hushed voices. And if you discourage everybody by dying, then you get a big party, with bronze handles and organ music and lavender delivery trucks from the florists. But the hole they drop you in seems to be just as deep. And
you are no more aware of the ceremony than was your remote ancestor—the one they had to drag farther away from the cave after a while.

Thinking of death was like drilling a raw nerve. Goodby to my girl. And I stood there with the reliable heart sucking and pumping the warm red blood, the little valves working like IBM, the temperature control system supplying just enough surface evaporation to keep the organism right to a tenth of a degree, all the glands and ducts adding their two bits to the process on automatic request. The machine was working dandy, and my girl’s machine had quit. I stood there oxygenating my blood stream, rebuilding tissues, picking up images through the wet eye lenses, burning stored calories, catching sounds on the taut ear diaphragms, and my girl had gone out of business. Out of the business of living. A lot of cheap sea gulls and cut-rate pelicans and shoddy Pekinese and second-grade human beings were still warm and functioning, but my Christy was flaccid and cold and unaware. I thought there’d better be that golden street and those golden slippers. They went with the bearded God of childhood, but they better be there. There better be that sweet chariot, and a gate and a book they could look her up in and say come in. Maybe she’d sit in the anteroom, and say, “Thanks. I’m just waiting.”

Graman came striding busy-like down the hall and when he saw me a look of mild distaste clouded his pretty face. “Oh, hello there.”

“How is she, Doctor?”

“Completely unresponsive. I tried adrenalin. That will sometimes break the catatonic state when it is the result of emotional shock. I thought for a time it would work. She however merely spoke irrationally for a few seconds and then
lapsed back. Dr. Vayse will look in later tonight. It’s more in his line. I’m not even positive of diagnosis, much less prognosis, McClintock.”

“What did she say when she was irrational?”

He stared at me. “Why? Nothing of importance, certainly. Something about a barn and a kitten. They often revert to childhood.”

“Doctor, it might be important. Can you repeat it?”

“Really; I—”

“Please.”

He sighed. “Something like this: ‘You see, I knew kitty had to be in the barn. He liked it there. He always went there. That’s why I looked there first, and he hadn’t even covered her up. She should have been covered up. Shouldn’t she have been covered up? It was just a little thing to do that.’ Does that satisfy you?”

“That’s all she said?”

“You’ll have to forgive me, McClintock. I have other patients.” He went over and moved the wooden peg beside his name to show that he wasn’t in the hospital, and walked out into the night.

After a time I followed him. I was a big operator. I stood by my car wondering what to do next. I was real shrewd. Two women to talk to, and both of them had slid out of reach—one had gone down the greased skid called bourbon, and the other had fallen off some personal precipice. It brought me back to the only tangible thing I had—those pictures. I sat in the car and took the feeble flashlight from the glove compartment and studied them carefully, one by one, looking this time at the setting rather than the characters. It
gave me one corner of a night stand, a bit of wall that seemed to be plaster, a small hunk of lamp shade. The man wore a wristwatch. It was quite clear in one picture. Clear enough so a jeweler could tell the make. I put them back in the envelope and sat in the dark and smoked.

AFTER WHAT SEEMED
to be a long time, my brain began to work in a slightly more logical fashion. The pictures had been taken for a purpose. That purpose was undoubtedly profit. It would do no good to try to squeeze money out of John Long with any threat to show the pictures to the wrong people. But the complete set, or even any one of them, was a wonderful crowbar with which to extract funds from Mary Eleanor. A shrewd operator would give her one set of prints, as food for thought. Mary Eleanor had foolishly let the pictures get away from her. Keeping them was perhaps an evidence of her disease.

O.K. so far. Now then, Mary Eleanor had certainly been in no doubt as to the identity of her partner. So what would be served by the blackmailer’s cutting the partner’s face out of the pictures? That didn’t make sense. It didn’t make a bit of sense. And it didn’t make any sense to think of Mary Eleanor
cutting those heads out of the pictures. She wouldn’t want to put them in lockets.

I began to feel a faint surge of excitement. O.K. I’m John Long. Maybe I’ve had a vague idea for some time that friend wife is a shade on the tramp side. She takes too many trips alone. I’m not the sort of guy who would catch on very fast, but I’ve begun to have my doubts. So I keep my eyes open. And I sort of poke around when I get a chance. Maybe the next time she goes away, I really give her room a good search. She had the pictures hidden well, but I found them. And I sat on the bed and I looked at my wife and I put the pictures down carefully and went in the bathroom and threw up and came back and looked at them some more. She was away, and it was a good thing because if she had been handy I would have killed her with my hands right then and there. But I am the kind of guy who goes at things doggedly and thoroughly. It took me a lot of years to get around to doing Key Estates, and I made myself wait until I could do it well. I sat and looked at the pictures of the thing I had called wife. And I looked at the man. I had never seen him before. That bothered me. And it meant he was probably from out of town. I wondered whether to put the pictures back where I had found them, and wait. But that meant I might never get my hands on him. So I went over to the bureau and took her scissors and cut the heads out of the pictures. His head. I’ve got too much pride to show the whole picture around. These were mailed from Miami. I can take these crudely cut out heads and I can send them to a firm of private investigators in Miami and I can ask them to find out who the man is—and where he is. But that means I can’t leave the mutilated pictures here. So I’ll take them and lock them in my desk at the
office. Let her look for them and sweat. I’m over my first anger and outrage now, and I can wait, and in my own good time I’ll kill them both quite dead because of what looking at these pictures has just done to me.

It made very good sense to me, as I sat there in the car. Take it another step. John Long
had
found out who the man was, and where he was. And, having found him, and having quietly investigated his own legal status, he found himself caught right in the middle. If he went ahead, he would be put out of circulation and Key Estates would come to a standstill. And Key Estates had been his baby. Yet, it would take a long time to finish it off, and during that time he had to live with the diseased soul-sick wife-thing. Then up steps that young McClintock, and John Long cussed himself for not having seen earlier how it could be handled so that both the things he had to do were accomplished. First I had thought he was sick and going to die. Next I had thought somebody was going to kill him and he knew it. The third and inevitable answer was that he was going to kill somebody else—and that act would take him out of circulation just as certainly as his own death.