Home is the Sailor (16 page)

I tried to breathe normally. “If I did, I don’t remember it. All I remember is quarreling with her.”

“What did you quarrel about?”

I gave him the last part. “She wanted to call it quits. She told me to get out of her life.”

Meek ran his coated tongue over his thin upper lip. “I seen you. I seen you through the blinds, trying to make her do it. You tried to force her and Corliss had to kick you in the face with her bare feet.”

All the men in the bar looked at me as if I was dirt. I tried to find one friendly face. I couldn’t. Then I saw Green, the man from the F.B.I. He was sitting on a stool at the far end of the bar, where Wolkowysk had sat. He looked detached, unbiased, just listening.

Flagle asked, “What else did Mrs. Nelson say?”

I told him the truth. “She said she wouldn’t be talked to the way I’d been talking to her. She told me to take the car, take anything I wanted, but get out.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I loved her.”

“Love her,” Wally sneered.

Flagle said, “You say she said she wouldn’t stand for the way you had been talking to her. How had you been talking to her?”

I felt the way I had while I’d waited for Corliss to come back from San Diego. I felt trapped. “I called her a tart.”

“Why?”

“Because she acted like one.”

Flagle took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “I see. And after you’d called her that she told you to take her five-thousand-dollar Cadillac and anything else you wanted and get out.”

It sounded silly when he said it.

“I suppose she forced her ring on you, too?”

“She asked if I wanted it back.”

“How about the eleven thousand dollars you had in your pocket when you were arrested?”

“The money was mine.”

Flagle lifted one eyebrow, amused. “Where did you get eleven thousand dollars?”

I told him. “I had twelve thousand on me when I came ashore. I’d saved my pay for three years.”

“Why?”

“I intended to buy a farm. Near Hibbing Minnesota. Where I was born. I was going to get married and settle down.”

Flagle drew his hand across his mouth. He didn’t need to say it. I knew what he was thinking. Now he’d heard it all. He turned away from me. “Well, let’s get on with it. I want to see the unit they occupied.”

The bar and the restaurant were closed, but Meek was still renting cottages. A middle-aged couple was standing outside of Cottage Number 4 beside a green Chrysler with Illinois license plates. As we started across the court I heard the woman whisper, “Go on, Joe. Tell them what we saw when we drove in last night.”

“No,” the man said flatly.

Inside the cottage, Flagle fingered through the dresses in the closet. “You’re certain nothing is missing, Mrs. Gilly?”

“Positive,” Cora said. “Well, almost positive.” She stroked one of Corliss’ evening gowns. “Mrs. Nelson didn’t go away willingly. I know that much. No woman would just walk out and leave all these beautiful clothes.”

“No,” Flagle agreed with her. “At least, it’s very unlikely.”

A bright bit of metal under the edge of the bed caught my eye. I stood leaning against the wall, wondering what it was.

Sheriff Cooper took a fat manila envelope from his pocket and handed it to Flagle. “These are the papers we took from the safe, Mr. Prosecutor. Connors had the combination.”

“Was there any money in the safe?” Flagle asked him.

“Seven hundred and eighty dollars,” Cooper said.

Wally had accompanied us to the cottage. Flagle asked him if I had the combination to the safe. Wally shook his head. “Uh-uh. Just me and Mrs. Nelson.”

“He didn’t have access to the safe at any time?”

“No, sir.”

Flagle sorted through the papers in the manila envelope. They were mainly statements of record, a deed to the court, fire and wind and liability insurance policies, and receipted bills. “No will, eh?”

“I couldn’t find one,” Sheriff Cooper said.

Captain Marks said, “I doubt Nelson was thinking that far ahead. As I see it, the money is secondary. Nelson had a good thing. He knew it. He wanted to hang onto it. And when the girl told him she was through, he lost his head.”

Finished with the papers in the envelope, Flagle dumped the contents of Corliss’ white purse on the dresser and pushed the various items around on the glass. Pleased, he straightened out and held up a crumpled rectangle of white paper. “This is it.”

Captain Marks got up to look at it. It was a safe-deposit bank form. The kind you have to fill out when you want to get in your box. Corliss had dated it wrong, scratched out the date, then, evidently, crumpled it into her purse and filled out another form.

Flagle asked Wally if Corliss had a safe-deposit box in San Diego.

“Yeah. I think she did,” Wally said. “In fact, I know she did. Because once when we had a chance to get a good buy in whisky if we took fifty cases and paid cash, she said she didn’t have that much in her checking account at the moment, but if the salesman would wait she would drive into Dago and get the money from her box. And she did.”

Meek whined from the doorway, “So she got some more this afternoon. And you took it off her, huh, Nelson?”

Wally was fair. “No. I’m not standing up for Nelson, see? But right is right. And I don’t think he took no money off Corliss.”

“Why not?” Flagle asked him.

Wally said, “Because the first night he showed up I take his dough away from him for safekeeping. And he’s loaded. He has fourteen thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five dollars on him.”

“I seem,” Flagle said sourly, “to have chosen the wrong profession.”

My coat was as wet with sweat as it had been the night I killed Wolkowysk. I tried to make them understand. “Look, gentlemen. Something is very wrong here. I don’t think Corliss is dead. If she is, I didn’t kill her. I know.”

“How do you know?” Flagle asked.

“Because I couldn’t do such a thing. No matter how drunk I was. I couldn’t kill a woman.”

“You don’t know what you could or couldn’t do,” Flagle said. “Your type of man doesn’t know the meaning of normalcy, Nelson. You live for thrills, one emotional aphrodisiac piled on top of another. By your own admission you’ve had master’s papers for years, but you prefer to sail as first mate to avoid responsibility. You’ve been a deepsea diver. You’ve hunted diamonds in Africa while other men had to keep their noses to a desk or a workbench. All your life you’ve done just as you pleased. You’ve poked your nose into all the odd corners of the world. You’ve been a soldier of fortune. You’ve risked your life time after time — for a thrill. And this time you went too far.”

Flagle paced the floor of the cottage, then stopped in front of me again.

“Look at it as a jury will see it. Your ship berthed four days ago. You say you bought a bus ticket for Hibbing, Minnesota. You say you intended to buy a farm and get married and settle down. We know you went on a drunk. We know you got in a crap game at the Beachcomber. We know you hit a man named Corado so hard you almost killed him. We know Mrs. Nelson, Mrs. Mason then, took pity on you and brought you here to her own court for safekeeping. You’re big, good-looking, virile. Corliss Mason, a young widow, with all a young woman’s normal passion and desire, became infatuated with you. You wanted a woman, by then a particular woman. But there was only one way you could have the particular woman you wanted. Somehow you persuaded Corliss Mason to marry you. But did you behave as a normal bridegroom might be expected to behave? No. After you got what you wanted, you went right on with your drunk, submitting her to God knows what indignities. You stayed sodden drunk for three days. Then when she realized what a heel you were and told you to get out, you stripped her and abused her. Then you killed her and hid her body.”

“That’s a lie.”

I brought up my manacled hands. The chain caught Flagle under the chin, snapping his head back.

Then Harris took a quick step forward and hit me. Back of my left ear. With a blackjack. Panting, “You bastard. You lousy Swede bastard.”

The blow knocked me to my knees, then flat on the deck. My cap rolled under the bed. The metal object I’d noticed before was less than an inch from my eyes.

Captain Marks’ voice was a great surge of sound beating at me like breakers against a coral reef.

“We’ve had enough trouble with you, Nelson. Start talking. What did you do with your wife’s body?”

I lay looking at the metal object.

Corliss was dead. The assumption was that I’d killed her. The law said we had left the Purple Parrot together, in her car, and neither of us had been seen again until Officers Thomas and Morton had curbed me in San Mateo, roaring drunk, offering to fight every cop in California.

Corliss hadn’t returned to the Purple Parrot. She hadn’t been seen since she had left with me.

Then what was her wedding ring, slightly too large for her finger, doing almost lost in the white loop pile of the new rug we’d bought to replace the one on which Lippy Saltz, alias Jerry Wolkowysk, had died?

I looked at the ring for a long time. It had been on Corliss’ finger, under the engagement ring, while she’d been eating in the bar. I remembered seeing it, distinctly. From time to time Corliss had twisted it around on her finger as she talked.

“As long as you feel the way you do about me, you can’t really love me. So let’s call it quits. Maybe next time we’ll both do better.”

Her cheeks wet with tears. Between bites of prime ribs au jus. With no mention of Wolkowysk.

My cap had rolled under the bed. I reached for it and picked up the ring at the same time, tucking it under the sweatband of the cap. Showing the ring to Flagle, Marks, or Cooper wouldn’t get me a thing. They
knew
I’d killed Corliss. So it was her wedding ring. I couldn’t prove she’d been wearing it when we’d left the Purple Parrot. But she had. And sometime after she’d driven away with me Corliss had returned to the cottage.

Captain Marks helped me to my feet. “How about it, Nelson? Are you going to talk or do we have to turn on the heat?”

“O.K.,” I lied. “I killed her. I’ll tell you what.”

“What?” Flagle asked flatly.

I bargained. “I’ll trade you a full confession and the body for permission to take a shower and put on a clean uniform.”

Flagle nodded. “That’s a deal. Now you’re being sensible, Nelson. What did you do with the body?”

I held out my manacled hands. “Uh-uh. Not so fast. First the shower and the change of clothes.”

Marks detailed one of his men to guard me. As I soaped myself I studied the purple and green bruises on my thighs, my abdomen, my arms. I hadn’t taken a beating. I’d been worked over. My body looked as if someone had used a tire iron on it, enjoying what she was doing. A bee. A man. What was the difference? Only wings.

Out in the living bay, still cool and detached, Green joined the conversation. “So you’ve cracked your case, gentlemen.”

“That’s right,” Captain Marks said, pleased. He laughed. “A bath for a confession and a body. Nelson must like to be clean.”

“Yes. He must,” Green said.

Flagle asked him if there was anything new on the Lippy Saltz affair.

“No. Not as yet,” Green said. “But I think there may be some developments before the night is over.”

Here in the night-filled hills rising sheer from the coast highway the only sounds were the crackling of brush and the heavy breathing of the long line of men behind me.

“How much farther?” Captain Marks asked.

“Not far now,” I lied. “On top of the next hill, then across a flat space. What do you call them?”

“A plateau?”

“Yeah. That’s right. A plateau.”

Flagle asked, “What gave you the idea of hiding the body in a cave, Nelson?”

I said, “I came here once with a girl.” That much was true. “We had a picnic.”

“I’ll bet you did,” Harris said.

I quit the narrow trail through the greasewood and heather and cut across a rock fall to make the going tougher. Captain Marks had unlocked one of the cuffs before we started to climb. It jangled with every step. I experimented by putting the cuff in my coat pocket, but it was almost impossible to climb with only one hand.

Behind me, Flagle said, “The time element checks. It’s been an hour and forty minutes since we left the Purple Parrot. But where are we?”

“I’ll be damned if I know,” Marks said.

Sheriff Cooper knew his coastline. “Back of Malibu, I think. Yes. I’m positive we are. Judging by the stars, we’ve been angling north and west since we left Topanga Canyon. As I recall, the highway is just the other side of this ridge. At the foot of a steep cliff.”

“Oh, yes,” Flagle grunted. “Of course. Where the highway department had all that trouble with rock falls.”

“That’s the place,” Cooper said.

I climbed on, smelling the sea again. I’d been here once before. With a girl. The spot for which I was headed was a rock ridge in the coastal range slightly higher than its fellows. It was a half mile in through the brush from a small road winding north by northeast from a point halfway through Topanga Canyon. The sheer cliff that Cooper had mentioned rose from the west shoulder of U.S. 101 on the right-hand side of the road as you headed north toward Frisco. By car U.S. 101 was a good seven miles away. Straight down the cliff it was only a little better than two thousand feet.

From the top of the cliff you could see for miles in all directions. While we had eaten our lunch, the girl and I had discussed the possibility of an agile man descending the cliff. She’d said it couldn’t be done. I’d thought that I could do it. I’d know in a few minutes.

We’d been on level ground for some time now. Flagle quickened his steps in suspicion. His fingers bit into my shoulder. “Just a minute, Nelson. There are no caves up here. What are you trying to pull?”

I turned and faced him. The next nearest man, a San Mateo County trooper, was fifteen feet back of Flagle. The other men were strung out behind the trooper, their flashlights and lanterns giant fireflies hobbling up the rock.

I drove my fist into Flagle’s stomach.