Home is the Sailor (20 page)

I got to my feet. “Thanks a lot for telling me. Now would you tell me one last thing?”

“Possibly.”

“How did you know Corliss was in Room Five-o-one of the Mission Hotel?”

Green smiled. “That was an exceedingly difficult deduction on my part. I followed Connors when he left the Purple Parrot. I was ready to make the pinch, merely waiting to see if more of the crowd would show up, when you blundered in.” Green transferred his attention to Meek. “What do you know about this, fellow?”

“Nothing,” Meek said flatly. “I don’t know a thing. I was just the gardener, see?”

Sheriff Cooper asked where Meek came in.

Green said, “Small fry. Possibly a Chicago acquaintance of Lippy’s sponging up a few crumbs. But I seriously doubt if we can connect him. How’s his wife making out?”

Cooper took off his hat. “Not too good the last time I heard. They think she’s going to make the grade, but it will be a long pull. I guess he knifed her pretty bad, trying to get past her to Nelson.”

Green lighted a cigarette. “Do the Bureau a favor, Sheriff. If Mrs. Meek shouldn’t make it, the charge is obvious. But if she does pull through, book him for assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and see that he’s tucked away for five or ten years. Will you do that, Sheriff?”

“I will,” Cooper said.

“The same goes for Connors. But as he assaulted Nelson here in town, we’ll let the San Diego police take care of him.”

I asked, “How about me?”

Green blew smoke through his nose. “You’re perfectly free to go, as far as we’re concerned. But you can forget any interest you may think you have in the Purple Parrot because of your marriage to Sophia Palanka. That will go to the Palmer estate, as it was obviously bought with Palmer money.”

I said, “That’s fine with me. But how about the almost twelve grand I had on me when the San Mateo cops picked me up? That was my own money. And I can prove I had that much by Ginty.”

“That’s out of my hands,” Green said.

Captain Marks cleared his throat. “If you’ll drop into my office tomorrow morning, Nelson, I’ll see that your personal property is returned.” He took the engagement ring I’d given Corliss from an envelope. “All of it I have with me is the ring. And you can have that now.”

I tried to put the ring on my finger. It wouldn’t even start on. I dropped it in my pants pocket and looked at Sheriff Cooper. “How clean am I with you?”

He asked Mr. and Mrs. Lewis if they wanted to prefer charges against me for using their car.

Lewis was a good guy. He shook his head. “Under the circumstances, no.”

“That’s it, then,” Cooper said. “You intend to ship out?”

I said I hadn’t made up my mind.

He said, “Well, anyway, drop around to Palm Grove in the morning. I think I can persuade Farrell to give you a quick trial. That way we can fine you twenty-five dollars or so for popping Corado and return the five hundred you posted for bail.”

I tried to grin. It came out sort of wry. “I’ll be lousy with dough.” I walked to the door, then turned back and asked what was on my mind. “Just one more thing. What happens to Corliss now?”

“What do you mean what happens to her?” Green asked.

“What happens to her body?”

Green seemed to understand. He said quietly, “You can claim it if you care to, Nelson. Do you?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” I took the engagement ring from my pocket and laid it on his blotter. “Have someone put that on her finger, will you? I lost the other one. With my cap. Somewhere up around Malibu.”

Then I walked out of the office in the deep silence that followed.

The hospital corridor smelled like all hospital corridors at three o’clock in the morning. I tiptoed after the nurse into the dimly lighted ward. At the foot of the bed, she said, “Now, only for a moment, Mr. Nelson. Mrs. Meek is a very sick girl.”

I tiptoed around the screen. Mamie was lying facing the window. With her hair in long twin braids and her face scrubbed clean of make-up she looked about fifteen.

One small white hand was lying palm up on the spread. I stooped and kissed it. “Hello, baby. How goes it with you?”

She looked at my eyes, then out the window at the night. “All right, I guess,” she said.

I drew up a chair and sat where she had to look at me. “Thanks. Thanks a lot, Mamie.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” she said. Her breasts moved under the sheet. “I heard one of the nurses talking. She said that Corliss is dead.”

I instinctively reached for the cap I didn’t have. “Yeah.”

“What are you going to do now, Swede?”

I moved the chair closer to the bed, talking in a whisper so I wouldn’t disturb the other women in the ward. I knew what Mamie wanted me to say. I wished that I could say it. “I’m going back to sea,” I told her. “I just called Ginty and I’m sailing for Sydney tomorrow night. As skipper of the Sally B.”

“Oh,” Mamie said, without expression.

“But before I left, I wanted to talk to you.”

She said listlessly, “About what?”

I took the little white palm and held it to my cheek. “About the guy you used to think you’d meet someday. Remember?”

Her eyes got wet. “That was a long time ago.”

I nodded. “That’s right. Back in a little town in South Dakota. What’s its name?”

Her voice still toneless, she said, “Murdock. Population, two thousand, four hundred and twenty-one.”

I continued to fondle her hand. “How would you like to go back there, Mamie?”

She tried to shrug her bandaged shoulder and winced. “I suppose it’s as good a place for me to be as any.”

“Fine,” I said. “Fine. I’ll leave some money at the desk tomorrow afternoon. Quite a bit of money. Ten, eleven thousand dollars. Whatever I have left after doing what I can for Corliss. And when they let you out of here, you take the first train back to Murdock. Promise?”

The corners of her mouth turned down. “Why should you give me all that money?”

“Maybe I want to. Promise?”

Mamie’s voice matched the dimly lighted corridor. “All right. What difference does it make?”

I kissed her fingertips, one by one. “A lot of difference. I had a dream, too, kid. Make it come true for me, will you? Get back in that old routine you told me about. You know. A movie on Saturday night, church on Sundays and Wednesdays. And the first thing you know, the right guy’s going to come along. And you’re going to love him like you never loved anyone before in all your life. You can use the dough to buy a farm. And live happy. With this guy you’re going to meet. Maybe have a half-dozen kids. Even name one of them Swen.”

The hovering nurse said crisply, “You’ll have to leave now, Mr. Nelson. The patient is very weak.”

I kissed Mamie’s lips. “Good-by, kid.”

She closed her wet eyes as she kissed me back. Her voice was small. “Good-by, Swede.”

Then I was out on the dark street again, walking along the waterfront, maybe saying a little prayer. For the woman I loved. Smelling familiar smells, hearing familiar sounds.

Smelling a new coiled hawser, tar, the sweet-sour smell of the flats, hearing a ship’s bell strike the watch, hearing the suck of the tide around the pilings: the tide that waited for no man, knowing life would go on, as it has ever since the first amoeba was washed up out of the slime, a microscopic nucleated mass of protoplasm, and began to multiply.

The three words coming out of the dark made me turn my head to look at the girl standing under the street light.

“Hello, sailor. Lonely?”

Her lips were a smear of crimson. She was young. She was pretty. She was mine.

I tucked her hand under my arm. “Why, yes,” I told her. “As it so happens, I am.”

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