Home is the Sailor (12 page)

“Neither,” Harris said. “He’s dead.”

I timed it to say it with Wally. “Dead?”

Cooper nodded. “At least, that’s the assumption. He’s been missing for two days. And this morning two surf fishermen found what was left of his car at the foot of a cliff about ten miles up the road from here.”

I said, “I’m a son-of-a-gun.”

Wally shook his head. “I had an idea something like that might happen.”

The man with Cooper and Harris leaned one elbow on the wood. “What do you mean by that, bartender?”

Wally explained. “On account of the condition he was in when he was in here the other night. I’d been checking the books with Miss Mason — Mrs. Nelson now — see? And when I came back to the bar around two-ten, maybe two-fifteen, Mrs. Meek is hopping mad, bawling even, because Wolkowysk is in here stinking drunk and won’t let her close up the bar.”

“What’s your name, bartender?” the man asked.

“Wally. Wally Connors. Why?”

“Let’s just say I’m interested. You got a record, Connors? You on the book anywhere?”

Wally was indignant. “Not me, mister. And I’m in good standing with the union.” He insisted on showing the man his paid-up card.

The man didn’t seem much interested. “Let’s get back to Wolkowysk. What made you think something might happen to him?”

“I told you,” Wally said. “Because he was so drunk. I said to myself, If that guy is driving — oh, brother.”

“I thought that according to California law you aren’t supposed to sell to intoxicated men.”

“We don’t. As soon as I see the condition he’s in, I raise hell with Mrs. Meek. But she said she only sold him three drinks and she thought he must have taken goof balls with them.”

“That checks,” the man told Cooper. “How was Wolkowysk acting when you came in, Connors?”

Wally spread his fat palms on the bar. “Confidentially, between us, not like a gentleman should.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Wally confided, “He was making not proper suggestions to Mrs. Meek. Offering her money to go out in his car with him.”

I began to get a better picture of what had happened. Wolkowysk had built up his yen on Mamie, then taken it out on Corliss. I was glad I’d killed the bastard.

Wally continued indignantly. “I tell him nice, see, it’s after two o’clock and will he please leave so I can close the bar. And he stops picking on Mrs. Meek and begins to cuss me.” Wally grew even more indignant. “Not only in English. In Polish or Russian, even.”

“Then what happened?”

Wally straightened to his full six feet of blubber. “I stand his talk as long as I can. Patient, a gentleman, see? The customer is always right. Then I get a bellyful and I grab him by his collar and his trousers and I throw him out on his ass. Why? Did I do wrong?”

The soft-spoken man laughed. “No. That was about all you could do. What time was this, Connors?”

“Like I say, after two. Maybe two-fifteen.”

“You saw him get in his car?”

“No. I don’t pay any attention. I locked the front door, told Mrs. Meek good night, and went to bed.”

“How about you, Nelson?” Harris asked. “Did you see Wolkowysk Wednesday night?”

I looked at Harris over a fresh-poured glass of rum. “Why should I have seen him?”

“They’re saying along the highway that Wolkowysk was sweet on your girl.”

“My wife.”

“Your wife, then.”

A drop of sweat zigzagged down my spine. I wondered where I’d slipped up.
If
I had. “Why, yes. Come to think of it,” I admitted. “I did see him. Earlier in the evening. After I got back from posting bail in that Corado affair. He was at the end of the bar with three other men.”

Sheriff Cooper said, “You didn’t tell me that last night.”

I grinned at him. “I was drunk. Remember?”

“You spoke to Wolkowysk?”

I told him the truth. “No. I wasn’t even sure it was him. He looked like I remembered the bartender at the Beachcomber looked, but I’d been pretty high there, too. Even if I had been certain it was him, I doubt if I’d have spoken.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I had talked to him and the Corado affair does come to trial, some vote-hunting D.A. would probably have accused me of bribing him to color his testimony in my favor.”

“Where do you come in on this sailor?” the soft spoken man asked me.

I sipped at the rum in my glass. “That’s a long story.”

He leaned against the bar. “Go ahead. Tell it, mate. I’ve got all the time in the world.”

My head ached. My collar was too tight. He was law of some kind, important law. It was in his voice, his bearing. His eyes were shrewd, evaluating. He smelled like a fed to me.

“You have a right to question me?”

He said, “I have.” It was a flat statement.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Then I gave him as much as I thought was safe, as much as he could find out elsewhere.

I told him how I had been paid off after three years in the islands, how I’d intended to head out Minnesota way but had gone on a drunk instead and wound up at the Beachcomber, where I had got into a crap game and a brawl with a Mexican Fancy Dan.

“You damn near killed him,” Harris said. “Those fists of yours are lethal weapons, Nelson.”

I ignored Harris. “After the fight I was sitting in a booth when Corliss — that’s the new Mrs. Nelson — came in on some business of her own and spotted me. She sensed how drunk I was. She figured I probably had a roll on me, a roll that I’d worked hard for. She knew I’d be clipped if I stayed where I was in my condition. So she played the good Samaritan. She waltzed me out of there, drove me down here in her own car, and had Wally put me to bed in a vacant cabin so I could sleep it off without some tart taking me.”

Wally nodded. “That’s right. Corliss is all the time doing nice things like that for sailors.”

“Why?” the soft-spoken man asked him.

Wally shrugged. “Who can understand a woman? Can I? Can you? Maybe because her first husband was a sailor. A lieutenant commander, I understand. He went down with his submarine. It could be a memory, like, to him.”

“I see,” the man said. He looked back at me. “This Beachcomber is a dive?”

“I guess you would call it that.”

“Then how come your wife happened to drop in?”

Wally leaned his fat palms on the bar. “Excuse I should say it, mister.” He made certain there were no customers in the bar. “But that Wolkowysk was a sonofabitch. And Mrs. Nelson didn’t just happen to drop into the Beachcomber. She went there to give Wolkowysk hell.”

“What about?”

“On account of he was telling it all up and down the highway,” he leaned over the bar and lowered his voice, “that she would do it for twenty dollars. Another guy had dropped in just that evening. And Corliss was sore as hell. When she left here she told me she was going to have a showdown with Wolkowysk and if he didn’t promise to keep his dirty tongue off her she was going to Sheriff Cooper and have him put under peace bond or something.”

The man asked, “What was Wolkowysk’s grudge against Mrs. Nelson? Why should he want to embarrass her?”

Wally told him. “On account of she went out with him once. To a dance in Manhattan Beach. For the cancer fund, see. And Wolkowysk got fresh coming home and she told him where to get off.”

The man with Cooper and Harris drummed on the bar, then looked back at me. “And that’s all you know about Wolkowysk?”

I lied, “That’s all I know about Wolkowysk. Look. Who are you, fellow?”

He took his shield from his pocket and laid it on the wood. It read, “U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“The name,” he said, “is Green. Lyle Green. Working out of the Los Angeles office at the moment.”

Wally’s eyes bugged. “Wadda you know about that? But why all the interest in Jerry Wolkowysk? So he had an accident. Why should the F.B.I. be interested in him? I thought he was just another petty punk. You know, like some bartenders are.”

Harris horned in, trying to be important. “Ha. His name wasn’t even Wolkowysk. It was Lippy Saltz. You know. That Chicago gambler who is mixed up in that Phillip E. Palmer business. The F.B.I. wanted him bad. For murder. They got proof now he scragged Palmer, using that red-haired stripper — what’s her name, Sophia Palanka — as his come-on. Then him and her sail for Europe just as cool as you please, using Palmer’s passport.”

Green gave him a sour look.

Wally repeated, “Well, wadda ya know? I been reading all about it in the papers. How the guy’s body is found near Gary when all the time his family and the U. S. State Department, Atcheson even, think that Uncle Joe has lowered the boom on him. They do it for his money, eh?”

Green said, “A quarter of a million dollars.”

I loosened the top button of my shirt. I poured myself a drink and drank it. The rum was so much water. Out of all the guys in the world who needed killing, I had to pick one who was wanted by the F.B.I.

Green lighted a cigarette. “A nasty affair all around. And not turning out at all as we had hoped. We were practically breathing down Saltz’s neck. Now all we have is his wrecked car. We don’t even know he’s dead.”

“How come?” Wally asked.

Sheriff Cooper said, “There was no body in the car.”

I took a deep breath and held it. Corliss and I were in the clear. No one could prove anything. One of two things had happened: The tide had sucked Wolkowysk’s body out of the car, or it had spilled out during the fall and been pounded to pulp on the rocks.

I poured another drink and the neck of the bottle rattled against the glass.

Harris touched my elbow. “What are you so nervous about, Nelson?”

I pushed back off the stool and faced him. “Why don’t you leave me alone?”

“Cut it, you two,” Cooper said.

Wally resumed drying glasses. “It was an accident?” he asked Green. “I mean, Saltz’s car going over the cliff.”

“I doubt it,” Green said. “Did Wolkowysk ever bring a woman here?”

Wally thought a moment. “Not that I recall. You still haven’t got a line on this Sophia Palanka, huh?”

Green said dryly, “That’s something I’m not at liberty to disclose. How many women live here permanently?”

“Two. Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Meek.”

“Are they blonde or brunette?”

“Mrs. Nelson is a blonde. Mrs. Meek is a brunette.”

“Neither of them have red hair?”

“No, sir,” Wally said.

“How old are they?”

“They’re both in their early twenties.”

Green looked at me. “I wonder if we could talk to Mrs. Nelson. It can just be that during their one date Wolkowysk told her something that might be of interest to us.”

I said, “If you will wait until Corliss comes back from San Diego, I’m certain she’ll be glad to talk to you.”

Wally felt called upon to explain. “This is the day Mrs. Nelson does our buying from the wholesale houses.”

“I see,” Green said. “Mind if I ask you a few questions, Nelson?”

I said, “Not at all.”

“What’s Mrs. Nelson’s exact age?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Mr. Connors says she’s a blonde.”

“That’s right.”

“If you’ll pardon the question, natural or artificial?”

“Natural.”

“What’s her background?”

I told him what Corliss had told me. “She was raised in a small town in the Midwest. When she was seventeen she married the local rich man’s son. A naval officer. A lieutenant commander named John Mason. He was lost at sea. She used the money he left her to buy this court.”

“Then she was really
Mrs.
Mason before she married you, a widow.”

“That’s right.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Since the night before last.”

“You knew each other before?”

“No.”

“How long have you been stateside?”

“Three days.”

He wasn’t being nasty about it, just amused. “Rather a rapid courtship, wasn’t it?”

“Sailors work fast,” Harris said. “Especially when they spot an easy berth.”

I got off the stool again, hot. “Another crack out of you and I’ll push your teeth so far down your throat—”

“Yeah. I know,” Harris broke in. “It’ll take a Geiger counter to find them.” He rested his hand on the waffled butt of the gun in his holster. “The times that I’ve been told that.”

Sheriff Cooper lost his temper. “Goddamn. I told you two to cut it out. This is a murder investigation.”

My head and throat began to ache again. I felt cold all over. I climbed back on the stool.

Green asked Sheriff Cooper, “What’s Mrs. Nelson’s reputation, Sheriff?”

Cooper formed a circle with his thumb and second finger. “A lady. She runs a clean court and an orderly bar and restaurant. I only wish we had more like her along the highway.”

“How long has she owned the Purple Parrot?”

“Over two years.”

“Three years next week,” Wally corrected him. “I know, because I opened the bar for her. She put an ad in the San Diego paper and I answered it. It said, ‘Wanted, experienced bar and restaurant man capable of taking full charge of first-class tourist-court restaurant and bar on Highway U.S. One-o-one. Drunks please save your time and mine.’ž” He beamed, proud of his feat of memory. “I remember it word for word on account of it’s the best job I ever had. I get a salary plus a percentage of the gross. And like Sheriff Cooper says, Mrs. Nelson is a real lady.”

Green snuffed his cigarette. “How about this Mrs. Meek?”

“She’s nice, too,” Wally said. “Mamie is a good girl and a hard worker.” He confided, “But I don’t think she’s too happy with Meek.”

Green was impatient with him. “How long has she been at the court?”

Wally thought a moment. “The Meeks have been here going on, or a little over, two years. Mrs. Nelson had to fire the two couples we had before them. One pair was just plain lazy. The other were a couple of lushes. Winos yet.”

Cooper asked Green if he wanted to talk to Mrs. Meek.

“Later,” Green said. “I’ll want to talk to both women.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “But right now we’ve got to get on into Palm Grove. I want the technicians’ report on the car.”

Green left with Cooper and Harris tagging at his heels. I sat staring after their backs. My throat still ached. My collar was still too tight. I fumbled at the top button of my shirt and found that it was open. I filled my glass. Then suddenly I didn’t want it. I didn’t like the way Green had looked at me. I didn’t like the thought of his talking to Corliss. She might make one slip. One slip would be all he needed to make him pounce at her, ask her personal, embarrassing questions until she became hysterical and talked.