Wake Up to Murder (8 page)

I lit a cigarette with my fingers that shook so badly I fired the cigarette in the middle and had to snuff it and light another.

Then I saw the gun on the floor. Between the shattered bottle of Scotch and the glass wall. It was a special job. From where I was standing, it looked like a Colt .38 hung on a .45 frame. With yellowed-ivory grips and a silver-plated barrel. I crossed the floor and picked it up. Then laid it back where I’d found it. Quick. As if it was something hot. It was. As far as I was concerned.

The police would have to come in this now and I’d already made one bad mistake.

“Who’s the guy?” Lieutenant Bill David would ask me.

I’d say, “He told me his name was Mantin.”

Then David would say, “What did you quarrel about?”

I’d say, “We didn’t quarrel.”

“You didn’t kill him, huh?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

I’d have to say, “I don’t know.”

“You haven’t the least idea?”

“No.”

“He was dead when you walked into the room?”

“That’s right.”

“Then how come,” Lieutenant David would ask, “your fingerprints are on the gun?”

And I’d have to answer, “I picked it up. Instinctively.”

Me and Pearl Mantinover.

I STOOD sucking hot smoke into my lungs, looking down at Mantin. According to Tom Benner he was bad. He was the number one trouble-shooter for the tri-state rackets and gambling combine that did a multi-million dollar business. He was a paid killer. He’d been to Cade Kiefer what I’d been to Mr. Kendall, in a way. Only Kiefer hadn’t said,
Go here — go there. Get me a ham sandwich. Tell Pearl Mantinover that her appeal has been denied.

He said:
‘Put that guy out of circulation, Tony. Get that troublemaker. Close that yokel’s mouth.’

And Mantin did.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He’d had human feelings, a lot of them. The longer I looked at his face, looking under that mask that years had stamped on the face he’d been born with, the more he looked like Pearl Mantinover, I decided he was Pearl’s brother, an older brother. And he’d probably been a pretty good Joe to start with. Until life had gotten in his way. He’d still had a heart — for his own. Whatever Pearl had been to him, he’d been willing to lay ten thousand dollars on the line to save her.

‘And there’s more if you need it, Jim. As much again.’

It was a funny feeling. I felt like I’d failed the guy. Mantin had liked me, too. Now he was dead. His stock in trade had caught up with him.

It was fairly obvious what had happened. When he’d talked to me on the phone, Mantin had been under the false impression that I’d discussed the matter with Kendall and Kendall had advised me to give him back his money and play ball with the local boys. By-passing me for the time being, Mantin had gone directly to Kendall. They’d argued. And Mr. Kendall had killed him. In self-defense. Because he had a guilty conscience. Because he’d thrown Pearl to the wolves.

I walked back through the powder room into the bathroom and through the bathroom into the dressing room, then into the room of mirrors.

The room sickened me more than it had the first time. The police would see it now. Reporters would come with the police. The reporters would play the room up — big. They’d spread it all over the front page of both the morning and the evening newspapers. And a lot of so-called respectable married women, who wouldn’t say ‘spit’ in public, would walk through the next few weeks with their fingers crossed, until they were certain
they
were in the clear.

On impulse, I ripped Lou’s picture off the wall, tore it into little pieces and flushed the pieces into the septic tank. It didn’t belong in the company it was. Lou was like Tony Mantin. In her heart, she was good. Only her body was bad.

My reflections walked across the floor with me. A dozen hands helped me open the door into the hall. I called, “Mr. Kendall.”

There wasn’t even an echo. I thought of a new angle. It could be Mantin had killed Mr. Kendall before he’d sat down in the red chair to die. It could be I was calling a dead man. I crossed the hall and searched the rooms on the other side. None of them looked disturbed. Kendall wasn’t in any of them. I slipped a screen from a sunroom on the north-west corner of the architectural monstrosity and looked out and down.

May was still standing by the car, one small white hand on the open door of the Ford.

“May,” I called.

Her face white in the moonlight, she looked up at me. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I’ve been so frightened. What took you so long, Jim?”

“I can’t find Kendall,” I said. “But Mantin’s in the front room, dead.”

“Dead?” May gasped. “Dead?”

“Shot through the chest.”

“Who killed him?”

I said, “I don’t know. But this being Kendall’s house, I imagine Kendall killed him.”

“Come down,” May said. “Please. Let’s go home.” I shook my head at her. “We can’t. I’ve got to call the police.”

“Why?”

I told her. “I didn’t know I was going to find a dead man. And my fingerprints are on everything I’ve touched. Both doorbells. The screen door. The front rail. Doorknobs all over the joint. Even on the gun beside the body. If I run now, Kendall can blame Mantin’s death on me. And he’s just rat enough to do it.”

“I’m coming up there,” May said.

She disappeared under the overhang. I walked back the wide middle hall toward the front of the house. I could see now why I hadn’t been able to recognize the living-room door. It was another huge mirror set flush with the wall. Kendall was certainly nuts about seeing his own reflection. So he was a good-looking man. He wasn’t that good-looking.

The lad who’d taught the class in Abnormal and Criminal Psychology had given us a name for that, too. He’d called it a Narcissus complex, explaining that a good many men who were chasers were really emotionally immature, and every time they stayed with a woman they were, psychologically, doing it to themselves. Could be. But it didn’t make sense to me, any more than traumatic amnesia.

I pushed the mirror door open and walked into the living room. Mantin hadn’t gone away. I tried to find a phone. I couldn’t. If there was a phone in the living room, it was disguised as something else or hidden behind a panel.

I squatted beside Mantin’s body and looked across it at the gun. Picking up the gun had been a bad mistake. Wiping it clean of all fingerprints would be as bad. Either way I had a lot of explaining to do.

I lifted my eyes from the gun and sat on my heels a long moment, looking through the glass wall at the lights of Sun City across the bay. That was where I lived. That was where I belonged. Yesterday morning I had gone to work. Nothing to distinguish the morning from any of a hundred others. Now all this had happened.

I realized, suddenly, that it had been a long time since May had said,
‘I’m coming up there.’

The downstairs door was open. She’d had plenty of time to climb the stairs in the open well. I got up off my heels, walked out into the hall and opened one of the opaque glass doors.

May wasn’t on the stairs or at the bottom of the unroofed well. I called, “May!” sharply.

My voice filled the well. There was no answer. The short hairs on the back of my neck came alive and began to crawl. I walked three steps down the stairs. As my foot touched the fourth stair, the light over the door went out. Then the indirect light in the well. Then the light shining against the opaque glass behind me. Squeezing me in darkness. As if someone was pulling the circuits in the fuse box, one by one.

I slipped my gun from my pocket and stood with my left foot lower than my right, my back pressed to the wall, trying to see by starlight. I heard a door open in the bottom of the well, but I couldn’t see anyone.

“You, down there,” I called hoarsely. “Answer, or I’ll shoot!”

The only sound was the shrill of the cicadas and the tree frogs outside the screen door. I stayed with my back against the wall, trying to spot a deeper blob of black in the blackness of the well. I couldn’t. A cloud had sailed over the moon and there wasn’t enough starlight.

I was afraid to call again. Sweat beading my face, I unlaced one of my shoes, the simple ritual taking a long time. Then the gun in my hand lifted, ready to shoot at the fire flash, I tossed the shoe into the well.

There was a thud of leather on flagging. Nothing more. No one shot at the shoe.

I waited a long moment. Then I slipped out of my other shoe and crept down the stairs in my socks, afraid for myself, but more afraid for May.

I tried to see through the dark. I couldn’t. I could look up and see stars, but the bottom of the well was filled with thick, hot night. And fear.

My hand was so wet with sweat I was afraid I’d drop the gun. I could hear the pound of my heart. My breathing bothered me. It was a dead giveaway. I was breathing entirely too loud. You couldn’t miss it.

Whoever had been at the bottom of the well wasn’t there any more. He had climbed the lefthand stairs, crossed in front of the opaque doors and was now on the stairs behind me, breathing in my ears.

I turned on the stairs, too late. The blow smashed my head into the wall. The gun flew out of my hand and over the wrought-iron railing. I heard the butt crash on the flagging below.

An explosion rocked the well. Lead whined around the wall. The gun barrel in the hand of the man behind me slashed through the darkness again. Across my face this time.

I fell to my knees on the stairs, wrapping my arms around his legs as I fell. A knee smashed against my chin. I fell backwards, pulling him with me.

The weight of my body overbalanced him. He saved himself by grabbing at the rail. I fought back to my feet, beating at him in frenzy, panting:

“Who are you? What have you done with May?”

He slashed with the gun barrel again. Coldly, methodically. Forcing me back step by step.

It was like fighting a madman in a nightmare. The only sound was the thud of blows, an occasional grunt of pain and the rasp of hoarse breathing.

I wanted, desperately, to know who he was. Mr. Kendall? Another one of Cade Kiefer’s men? And what had he done with May?

“Tell me, goddamn you,” I sobbed. “Who are you? What have you done with May?”

I might have saved my breath. I could taste the sweetness of blood in my mouth. I couldn’t take much more of this. I tried to clinch to save my head. He kneed me savagely in the groin. I screamed and tried to give ground. And couldn’t. I was at the bottom of the well. He was two steps above me. He stopped slashing with the gun and used his feet.

I tried to throw myself sideways and slipped. My head hit something a glancing blow as I fell. I realized he was kicking me. I tried to crawl away from the pain. It followed me.

Funny. I mean a man’s mind how it works. In a book or a movie I would have been noble. I would have thought of May and been glad I’d kept up my GI insurance. I didn’t. There in the middle of the well, lying flat on my back, all I thought of was:

“Christ, I wish he’d stop kicking me.”

The intense pain was gone. I was hot, I was wet. I ached. Sand flies and mosquitoes covered my face and hands. I swallowed and tasted whiskey. My clothes reeked of it. I wasn’t far from water. I could hear it lapping gently on a beach.

I opened my eyes. I was lying in a tangle of long grass a few feet from the edge of the bay. I rested my chin on the back of one hand. Across the water, purple and mysterious in the moonlight, glowed the lights of Sun City. There was no mistaking them. There was the Municipal Pier. There was the airport. There were the lights on the causeway, leading to the beach.

I sat up and looked behind me. I was still on Mr. Kendall’s property, on the lawn in front of the house. There were lights in the living room again, over the front door, in the unroofed well.

I bleated, “May!”

My voice was thick with phlegm and blood. I spit it out and called again. The only answer was the lap of the incoming tide.

I’d never been so tired. Every muscle in my body ached. I got to my feet and realized I was clutching a tool of some kind. I leaned on the long wooden handle, looking at the house.

My Ford was still on the drive, but the black Cadillac was gone. I limped toward the house, using the tool as a staff. So I’d taken a beating. It wasn’t the first one I’d taken. It probably wouldn’t be the last. The important thing was May.

I called again, “May!”

The onshore wind had risen. It whipped the word out of my mouth and carried it over the bay. I limped to the ford and looked in. May wasn’t in the car.

I walked back to the front of the house and opened the screen door. There was a splotch of blood on the flagging and a few spots on the stairs. Probably all mine. I doubt if I had done much damage to the party who had attacked me. It had come too suddenly. I’d been too confused.

I looked at the tool in my hand. It was a long-handled garden shovel. I carried it up the stairs with me as a weapon and pushed through the opaque and mirror doors into the living room.

The red plastic chair was still by the window. But the pearl-handled gun was gone. So was Tony Mantin’s body. There wasn’t even any blood on the floor.

I backed out into the hall. The house felt different somehow — empty. There was no need to search it again. I knew. May wasn’t in the house. Whoever had slugged me unconscious and dragged me out on the lawn had taken May with him.

I hobbled back downstairs to the star-roofed well. Where my flesh didn’t ache, it crawled. The whole thing had an air of unreality about it. It was one of those things that could never happen, but it had.

I’d come looking for Kendall. Now this.

I
had
to get to the police. The police
had
to help me. They had to help me find May.

I limped out under the light. Some of the bugs swarming around it left the light and investigated the clotted blood on my face. I brushed them away. Then, still using the handle of the shovel as a staff, I walked toward my car as rapidly as I could. Every moment might count.

The door May had opened was still open. I started to get into the car, stopped as a pair of headlights swung in off the highway. It was a big car, traveling fast.