Wake Up to Murder (5 page)

I’d go to his house or his hotel. I’d give him back his money. I’d explain that I’d been drunk. I’d tell Mantin I wasn’t a big shot. I’d admit I was only a sixty-two-dollar-and-fifty-cents-a-week lawyer’s runner. Without even a job. And that would put me in the clear again. I hoped.

The room phone rang as I reached for a bath towel. I wrapped it around me and opened the bathroom door. As I did, Lou raised on one elbow and picked the phone from its cradle.

“Yes?”

A girl’s voice said, crisply, “Good morning, Mrs. Smith. It is exactly seven-thirty.”

Lou dropped the phone back in its cradle and sat on the edge of the bed, yawning. I toweled myself dry, then ran my fingers through my hair. Funny. The little things that plague a guy. When he’s already worried to death. My hair was getting thin on top. I walked into the other room. Lou had her stockings on.

She said, “Excuse me,” and used the bathroom.

I put on my shorts and skivy and began to work on my socks.

When Lou came out of the bathroom again, her face looked older, harder than it had in the half light. She still was as cute as hell. But there was a cynical twist to her lips. Lou sat on the edge of the bed and put on her open-toed shoes with three-inch spike heels.

“Well, Mr. Smith,” she said. She looked up at me through the cascade of brown hair partially covering her face. “Imagine meeting you here.”

I felt embarrassed. The magic of the night was gone. Even Lou’s voice was different. I could sense the strain in it. I swung a chair away from the wall and straddled it, facing the bed.

Lou looked through her hair at me. Suspiciously. “Now what?”

My head ached. My throat felt constricted. The pound of my heart was making my white skivy jump. “Thanks. Thanks a lot for everything, Lou,” I said. “It was quite a birthday present. But tell me one thing, will you?”

Lou lifted her hair away from her face with the back of one wrist. She had trouble meeting my eyes. “What?”

“Who paid you how much to check in here with me?”

Lou ran a pink tongue between her lips. Her voice was so low I could barely hear it. “That’s a hell of a thing,” she said, “to say to me.”

“But it’s true?”

Lou spread the sheet over her lap. “Get out of here,” she said. “Goddamn it. You hear me? Get out of here, Jim Charters.” Her eyes filled with tears and spilled over. “You think I
like
to feel like a whore?”

I finished dressing and left the room. Without even looking back at her. Making certain the brown manila envelope was safe in my coat pocket.

I was in something up to my neck.

Lou was frightened, too.

Of whom?

THE day had been long and hot. Approaching night was doing little to dispel the heat. Gwen Shelly was watering her petunias as I put the car in the porte. There was a wet, pleasant smell of growing things.

I thought at first Gwen wasn’t going to speak. Finally, she did. “Hey, you, Jim,” she called good-naturedly. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. The next time you give us as a reference, tell the guy to call before midnight, will you? Bob and I had been in bed two hours when Mr. Mantin called last night.”

“I’ll do that, Gwen,” I said. I was almost afraid to ask. “But I hope you gave me a good send-off.”

Gwen bobbed her head. “We did that, Jim. We told him you were one swell guy.”

I said, “Thanks a lot, Gwen.” Feeling, if possible, even more like a heel.

May hadn’t forgotten my birthday. She’d invited the whole gang in. That was why she’d had liver for supper. That was why she hadn’t said anything about it being my birthday. The refrigerator was crammed with sandwiches she’d spent all day making. The cake had been next door at Gwen’s. May had wanted to surprise me. That’s why she’d stopped me when I’d nuzzled her. She hadn’t wanted the whole gang to walk in and catch us proving how much we loved each other.

And what had I done? I’d gotten drunk and in a mess and checked into a hotel with a girl. But at least May knew everything now. That is, with the exception of Lou. I hadn’t had the guts to tell her about Lou.

I walked up on the breezeway. There was a smug hominess about the whole set-up that I’d never really appreciated. So the house was small. So it was GI. It was ours. After a day spent fighting shadows, it was something real and solid.

May was in the kitchen, her face flushed from the heat of the stove. There was a smudge of flour on her nose. May was twice as pretty, May had twice as nice a figure as the distant green pasture in which I had rolled like a hog. And, too, she was twice as nice.

She looked up from the biscuits she was cutting. Her eyes were worried. “No luck, sweetheart?”

I hung my hat on the back of a chair. “Not so far. Most of the places on the beach were closed or the day barmen didn’t know the guy. But Mantin checked on me in half a dozen places. Gwen just said he called her and Bob last night.”

May lifted her lips to be kissed. “Well, don’t worry so about it, sweetheart. We’ll locate him somehow and return the money. It isn’t as if it were a matter of life or death.”

I wasn’t so certain about that. Men of Mantin’s type didn’t pass out ten thousand dollars lightly. They expected value in full for their money. The lump of ice in my stomach froze a little harder every time I thought of Mantin.

What had I contracted to do that was worth ten thousand dollars?

I ate mechanically. Even the strawberry short cake May had splurged on for dessert tasted like so much straw. That, topped with whipped cream at forty cents a half pint.

I asked May what she had done with the money.

May said, “It’s under the mattress in our room.”

Supper over, I helped her with the dishes, killing time before I started on my rounds again. While we were working, May suggested:

“Let’s do what we did this morning. Jim. Start at the beginning. Try to remember as much as you can. Maybe something will give us a clue as to why Mr. Mantin entrusted you with all that money. What was the first thing you did when you left the house last night?”

I said. “I walked up to the drive-in on Country Club Road and drank three beers.”

May brushed a lock of corn-silk colored hair out of her eyes. She blamed herself. “If only I’d had Bob take me to the drive-in instead of the Sand-bar. But I was so sure that you’d gone there. Then what did you do?”

“I took a cab to the Ole Swimming Hole and got really plastered. Shad Collins was tending bar there. He asked me how I was doing. I told him fine. And to prove it I tried to drink up twenty dollars.”

“And then?”

“It gets spotty from there on. I know I went to the Sun Down Club.”

“That’s where you danced with the red-haired girl?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

May put her hand on my arm. “You — you didn’t go anywhere with her, did you, Jim?”

I was indignant. “Of course not.”

May was relieved. “I’m glad. Then what?”

“I remember taking a long ride in a car. With some men.” I closed my eyes and smelled the sweet-sour stench of the tide flats. “Probably along the bay road. And there were roosters crowing at the other end.”

“Roosters?”

“I remember hearing one crow. Distinctly.”

“You went to some farm?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then what?”

I was glad to be able to tell May something definite. “About ten-thirty I showed up at Eddie’s. You know, that fish food house at this end of Seminole Causeway. The one that advertises all the lobster you can eat for a dollar and a half. Eddie says I damn near broke him. I ate two platters of lobsters and then tipped the waitress a fin.”

“You were alone?”

“So Eddie says.”

“Then what?”

I was getting too close to Lou for comfort. I didn’t want to hurt May any more than I had. I said, “Then I don’t remember.”

“Think,” May insisted. “Hard.”

I did. And for the first time I remembered a night spot where the glass muddlers lighted up when you laid them on the bar. Growing green, purple and red. I’d thought it was novel as hell, but some wiseacre tourist sitting next to me had said they’d had similar bars in all the big cities for years.

There’d been a white piano on a raised dais back of the bar. And a horse-faced blonde who sang off-color parodies. One of them on Trees. I remembered the first line.

“I think that I shall never see — a poem lovely as a knee.”

Then I had sat in a booth with four men, lying about what a big shot I was and how I’d run Kendall’s office if I was Matt Kendall.

“Try to see the men’s faces,” May said. “See if one of them was Mantin.”

I tried. But the men’s faces stayed in the shadow of my subconscious mind. All I could see was the waiter. He was a tired little man with a gold front tooth that showed when he smiled.

“It’s no use,” I told May. “I can’t. I just can’t remember.”

“And you don’t remember where you got the extra two hundred and forty-two dollars?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t the least idea.”

“And the next thing you remember you woke up in a motel out on the beach with Mr. Mantin knocking on your door?”

“Yeah. That’s right,” I lied.

“How did he know where to find you?” May asked.

I told her the truth. “I’ve been wondering that all day.”

The last of the dishes wiped and put away, we sat out on the breezeway. The fragrance of night-blooming jasmine and petunias mingled with the clean smell of wet grass. Gwen and Bob were sitting on their breezeway. I could see the glow of Bob’s cigar. Now and then a neighbor walked by or a car passed. There was nothing unusual about the night. But to me the darkness was peopled with shadows. They crowded up to the screen. I could feel them looking in at me. I expected, momentarily, for Mantin to open the screen door, with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, and say:

‘Well, why don’t you get off your fat ass and do what I paid you to do? You can’t work angles sitting here.’

Angles. Mantin had mentioned angles in the bathroom. What angles? Pertaining to what?

May snuggled closer to me on the glider and took off on a new tack. “How many cases has Matt Kendall in his office now, Jim?”

“Three,” I told her.

“Important cases?”

I said, “That depends on whose corner you’re in. One is that hit-and-run case I told you about. The one on which I spent almost two weeks rounding up witnesses and affidavits proving our client had not been drinking. Actually, he was so stiff when it happened he thought he was in Miami. Then there’s an alienation of affection suit. And, of course Pearl. Although that’s really not in the office now. Now that her appeal has been denied, that’s over.”

“Could you do anything for any of them?” May clarified her statement. “I mean anything for the ones facing trial, anything worth ten thousand dollars?”

“I thought of that,” I said. “But it didn’t get me anywhere. An insurance company is paying Kendall’s fee in the hit-and-run case. And the alienation affair is strictly a civil suit without much money involved.”

May played with my fingers. “How about Pearl? Could you do anything for her, Jim?”

More of the night just past came back. “I talked about it last night. In fact, now I think about it, I know I shot off my mouth about it all over the place. I said Kendall had mishandled her defense from start to finish. Summers was a tough cookie. I know of at least two occasions when he highjacked the bolita book and once when he cut himself in on the crap game out at the Flamingo. There were a lot of guys in Sun City who were glad to see him dead. All the State really had on Pearl was that Summers had allegedly grown tired of her, her admitted statement that she would kill Joe if he ever two-timed her, her fingerprints on the murder gun, and the statement of the blonde tart who lived in the next apartment that shortly before the established time of death, she’d heard Summers and Pearl quarreling bitterly.”

May tightened her fingers around mine. “What did Pearl say?”

“That she loved the guy too much to kill him. That Joe felt the same way about her. And that the blonde next door was lying. That Joe had been lying on the bed dead when she’d walked into the apartment.”

“How did her fingerprints get on the gun?”

“She claimed she picked it up to go and kill whoever had killed Joe, then realized it might be any one of a half-dozen men. So she laid it down again and began to scream. Just about that time, the cops busted in to investigate a shooting some anonymous tipster had phoned in about. What made it first degree was that Pearl had bought the gun a week before. That made it premeditation. And the lab report on Summers didn’t help a bit.”

“How do you mean?”

“It showed an abnormally high alcoholic content. The State charged that he had passed out when Pearl, with premeditated murder in mind, put the muzzle of the gun in his ear and pulled the trigger six times.”

“What do you think, Jim?”

I lighted a cigarette. “It’s a woman’s way of killing. A man would have shot him once or twice and let it go at that. But a dame usually gets hysterical and empties the gun.”

“And you think Pearl did?”

“No. I don’t. I think a holier-than-thou jury convicted her on her reputation and the fact that she told the prosecutor what she thought of him in court. Without pulling her punches. In four-letter words.”

May’s nails bit into the back of my hand. “Could you do anything for her, Jim?”

It seemed to me I could. Or, at least, the night before, my ego bolstered by whiskey, I’d thought I could. Then the lump of ice filled my stomach. Of course. Mantin, Mantinover. The lined-faced little man in the expensive white silk suit was either Pearl’s brother or a former husband. And I’d told him I could save her.

I headed for the bathroom fast. And lost my supper. Strawberry shortcake with whipped cream and all. And the lump of ice swelled to fill the cavity.

May stood in the doorway looking at me. “What happened? What is it?”

I stood panting, looking back at her. “Mantin is some relation to Pearl. Her brother. Maybe a former husband. And big-shot me, I told him I could pry her out of the death house. For ten thousand dollars.”