Where Is Janice Gantry? (16 page)

She tucked her hair into a yellow cap and walked into the immature surf.

“More cooperative than I expected,” Peggy said. “But what else could she do?”

“What else indeed, after that motel remark?”

“I guess that was rude. But I’m not their ward, and I’m not a child. Sam … darling. Is that as good to hear as it is to say?”

“Better.”

“Darling, I’ll solve your mystery for you. I’ll be an expert sneak.”

“A careful sneak, please. The broad in the yellow suit is a very hard piece of material, Peggy.”

“There’s something so lost about her.”

“And Mikoyan is probably a very disturbed man. But I wouldn’t try to hold his hand.”

“There’s nothing sinister about Char!”

“She didn’t mean any harm when she destroyed Charlie Haywood’s life. She just did it for the hell of it.”

“Go home to bed, Sam. You’re getting grouchy.”

I walked to the road with her, and walked down the road past Ack’s to my parked car. When I looked back she was still standing there, waiting for me to look back, so she could wave.

7

T
he alarm woke me up at two o’clock on Friday afternoon, and I was in the office by three. I took care of some appraisal reports. No matter what I was doing, Peggy Varden hovered pleasantly over one corner of my mind. Nothing she had been able to tell me about the Webers had been of any help. I wondered if there might be some helpful information on file over at the County Courthouse, some clues in the papers pertaining to the real estate transfer, possibly on the photostat of the recorded deed.

Vince Avery gave me the information on how to find it in the deed books, referring to the government lot line number. I went to the office of the County Clerk in the new wing of the courthouse. I found the photostat of the deed. The previous owner of record was Mr. Jason Hall of Tampa. He had sold that particular piece of property to the Starr Development Company, an Illinois corporation with the address given as a box number in Chicago. The necessary documents had been signed by a Mr. E. D. Dennison, treasurer of the company. I suddenly remembered that Dennison was the name
of the man who had arranged the purchase of the land and the construction of the house.

I arrived at the office of the County Tax Collector at five minutes of five. I learned that the annual property tax bill, amounting to a little over fourteen hundred dollars, was sent each year to the Starr Development Company and was paid promptly by cashier’s check.

I drove back to my cottage, trying to make sense out of what I had learned. It was commonly believed that Weber owned the house and land. He could still own it, less directly, if he owned Starr Development. There might be some tax reason for having a corporation own the house. But, between Ack and Peggy, I was beginning to get a picture of a man who would not be likely to own a corporation.

At least I had some new information, but I didn’t have any idea what to do with it. By the time I had carried a tall drink out onto my small porch I remembered Lou Leeman. He was one of the very, very few who made a human response when I got into the trouble that wrecked my career. He was on the sports desk at the
Chicago Daily Mirror.
When the rumor spread through the Thump and Sprawl Industry, a lot of people heckled me for a statement. The rumors were so much worse than the actuality I wished I could tell them. But I had given my word.

It was Lou who came up to me in an airport terminal and said, “They tell me you won’t talk, Sam.”

“They tell you true.”

“Out like permanent?”

“Forever and ninety-nine years. My idea, you know. I got sick of the game.”

He squared himself away and cocked a smoky blue jaw. “I’ve watched you too long and too hard, boy. You never dog it. You’ve never been cute. It’s like a laboratory demonstration of a kind of character that has to run all the way
through a man. So whatever it was, I would say you’re taking a fall for stupidity, not crookedness.”

“I just happened to give up the game, Lou.”

“If you ever can talk, and … if there was anything to talk about … who would you come see?”

“Some creep name of Leeman.”

I thought about Lou through half a drink, then went in and placed a person to person call. A cooperative long distance operator tracked him down at home.

“A voice from braver days,” he said. “Back when the world was young.”

“Does this long white beard muffle my voice too much, for God’s sake?”

“I guess maybe it’s blubber. What do you scale, Sam? Three hundred?”

“Two seventeen last time I checked it. Lou, you’re the only guy in Chicago who would do me a favor. But I want you to bill me for your time and expenses.”

“All I’ll ask for is a freeload vacation in Florida.”

“It’s a deal!” I told him to check out the Starr Development Company and one E. D. Dennison, treasurer of same. I gave him the post-office box number. He told me to wait while he looked in the phone book.

“No Starr Development and no E. D. Dennison listed, pal. Can you clue me on what I’m looking for?”

“I don’t know, exactly. I want to find out if it’s legitimate or crooked or what the hell it is.”

“But it
is
an Illinois corporation?”

“Yes.”

“Then I know where to start. Right at the capitol, at the Attorney General’s office, I got a good contact there.”

“When can you get on it?”

“Not until Monday morning now. Too late?”

“No. But as soon as you know a thing, Lou, phone me collect.” I gave him both phone numbers. We chatted a little
while longer about other things, and then I went back to my half-drink.

At nine o’clock I stopped the wagon on the road in front of the Weber place. I could see lights through the plantings, but I could not see the house. I gave one genteel beep on the horn. Peggy did not exactly come out at a dead run, but she wasted no time. Yet, just as I started to open the car door on my side to go around and open the door for her, a familiar light blinded me.

“You again,” LeRoy said in a disgusted voice.

“Which part of my head do you want to beat?”

“Smart talk me, mister, and I’ll whip all parts of it up down and around. What you want around here?”

“He came to pick me up,” Peggy said in a flat and deadly tone of voice. “And he may do it quite often.” The light swiveled and steadied on her for a moment and then clicked out.

“I got to check anything that moves around here in the night time,” Luxey said stubbornly. “If’n he stops here forty times a night he gets checked out every time. That’s the orders I got given to me, ma’am. And you worried me all the night through last night, ma’am, the way you went wandering off onto the beach and never did come back. I didn’t know as I should tell anybody because it didn’t come under guarding the place. When I come on tonight I looked in a window and seen you and felt better.”

“Darn it, that’s so sweet I can’t stay mad at you. But I am mad at you for hitting Mr. Brice on the head, officer.”

“You call me Depity. Depity LeRoy Luxey, ma’am. If’n this Brice weren’t so big he wouldn’t got hit so fast, but the size I am, I can’t stand around on one laig talking polite to a smart-mouth man in the dark what won’t answer questions sensible and comes at me. Frankly, I don’t care if he’s got
hard feelings or not, but I just as soon you wouldn’t, ma’am, being as how you could understand how it is.”

“I got smacked for being stupid, Luxey. And that’s the story of my life.”

“From now on blank your lights on and off twice and I won’t bother you none,” he said, and he faded silently off into the shadows.

I started up as soon as Peggy was beside me. “Find a dark place and whoa this thing, Sam,” she said.

I pulled off to the left under the pines beyond the Turner place, and killed the lights. As I turned toward her, she dug herself into my arms and laced her small fingers together at the nape of my neck. “How’s this for restraint?” she asked with laughter behind her voice. “How’s this for demure and shy?”

“I’ve got to admit it’s efficient.”

After a miraculous darkness of long minutes she plumped back to her side of the seat with a great sigh of satisfaction. “Drive on,” she said. “I had to make sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Where are we going?”

“I thought I’d ask you to name the kind of place and I’ll find it.”

“Sam?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Sam, you know I haven’t made my mind up or anything about you.”

“I know. But you will.”

“One way or the other, Sam?”

“I’m still right here, driving this car, ma’am.”

“You remember what I told you … about how I’m really a very moral kind of person, but people get the wrong idea?”

“I remember.”

“I want to see where you live.” She said it defiantly. I had to laugh at her. She didn’t want any misunderstanding.

“Stop braying, damn it,” she said.

“Peggy, my friend, I try not to spoil anything that’s worth anything. I was going to go through the same routine, only I was going to do it later in the evening, because I’d like you to see the place. I was even going to bring up the moral person bit, so you wouldn’t figure it for a fancy pass.”

We went to the cottage. “Can I prowl?” she asked, “or do I have to be polite?”

“Prowl, please.”

She went through the place like an auditor. The only thing she didn’t do was open the bureau drawers. She was like a pet cat in a new house. She wore a cinnamon blouse, a pale gray skirt, sandals. I made drinks, put a background record on, took the drinks out onto the porch and settled down patiently. She turned the living room light out, on her way out, leaving on the one lamp near the window so that there was a faint light on the porch.

She sat and took a sip of her drink and said, “You alarm me.”

“I’ve tried not to.”

“You’re so darn tidy. I live amid piles of junk. Nice clean junk, but piles of it. And there’s more books and records than I would have guessed.”

“Cultural pretention. To impress girls.”

“Hmmm. No pictures of Judy?”

“Why should there be? Why should I salt a wound?”

“Or of Sis?”

“That would have the flavor of a trophy, and that wasn’t the way it was.”

“Do you mind the prying, Sam? Does it bother you?”

“In anybody else in the world it would. But I have the feeling it’s something you had to do.”

“I wouldn’t do it to anybody else in the world. I have better manners. I think we’d better yank the conversation out of this whole general area. Time for my report, sir.”

“I knew you’d found out something, or you wouldn’t have saved it.”

“I think I must be getting too darn obvious or something. Anyhow, I don’t think it’s much. I flew into Tampa two days ago, on Wednesday, the seventeenth. I flew Eastern down, same as last time. They met me last year at Tampa International. She said they’d meet me again this year. But it was Herman who met me. He said Char had a headache and Maurice was too busy. I don’t know what he’d be so darn busy about. Herman has very little conversation, so it was a dull ride down from Tampa. By the time I arrived, Charity was about three drinks along, but she still looked tired. There is a guest wing with a suite. I turned it down last time. It seemed too grand. It wasn’t even offered to me this time. I got the same room as before, in the main part of the house. And the darn room smelled like cigars. The air conditioning was on, but it still smelled like stale cigars. I didn’t think much about it at the time, I thought Maurice had been in there for some reason. He smokes cigars. Is this getting too involved?”

“Not yet.”

She took something from the pocket of her skirt and handed it to me. I could tell by the feel that it was a packet of book matches. I looked at it by the flame of my lighter. The matches were from a bar on Burgundy Street in the Quarter in New Orleans.

“I found them on the floor of my closet,” she said proudly.

“Proving what?”

“Anna Mahler is a demon housekeeper. She sticks to a schedule. Saturdays she mops and dusts, closets and all. She’d no more miss those matches than she’d miss a dead horse. Cigar smell, plus matches, plus her iron schedule means recent guests.”

“It maybe means something worth checking.”

“That’s what I thought, so I did. I nailed Anna in the
kitchen when she was starting to fix dinner. I scrounged a snack and hung around and engaged her in idle talk, steering it around to the idea that with a house so big she had a lot of work to do, and if there were guests all the time it would be too much for one woman and so on. Finally there was a breakthrough. Two men arrived after dark on the twelfth, just one week ago tonight. They arrived late and Mr. Weber must have known they were coming because he had stayed up, apparently waiting for them, but he hadn’t warned Anna, and she was a little bit miffed at that. They stayed four days, and left after dark on Tuesday. They had a rental car. They have never stayed there before. And Charity was sick all the time they were there. She had her meals served in her room.”

“It’s … very interesting, Peggy.”

“I got just a little bit too inquisitive, and she suddenly closed right up again, so I went wandering off with an air of great indifference. But if your key night is last Monday night, there were a pair of strange men in the house.”