Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (9 page)

I took the job without even having to think about it.

Frost had already authorized one of his banks to have the ten thousand delivered to him, and a messenger showed up with it a few minutes later. The old man counted the money, returned it to the chain-lock briefcase it had come in and handed it over to me; I was not to let it out of my sight until it was delivered. Then he got on the phone and ordered somebody to make the ticket
bookings with the airlines, to send a wire to Dale letting him know someone was coming. And then he gave me the address of Dale's villa and two hundred dollars in cash for expenses.

He did not say anything else to me, or offer to shake my hand. I left him staring out the bedroom window at the overcast sky, hiding his feelings behind his mask of suffering . . . .

I'd had to clear Spanish Customs in Madrid when I came off the London flight, and I'd been a little worried about it at the time; if they opened the briefcase and saw the ten thousand dollars, there were liable to be questions and delays, even though I had an explanatory letter prepared by Millard Frost for just that reason. But all the Customs officers had checked had been my passport. Here on Majorca, nobody bothered to do even that much, since the Iberia flight was from Madrid and Majorca was a Spanish possession.

I went straight from the plane to the baggage-claim area and picked up the one suitcase I'd had time to pack. At an exchange booth, I traded a fifty-dollar bill for close to 3,500 pesetas. Then I walked out to where a line of taxis waited in front of the terminal. I poked my head through the open passenger window of the first one in line and asked the driver if he spoke English. He said, "A little bit, senor," and I said, "Good enough," and got into the back seat and told him where I wanted to go.

It was pretty hot for October; we rode with the windows rolled down — automobile air conditioning was probably a luxury few people could afford over here—and I took in the sights like any other tourist. Palma Nova was some twenty-five kilometers from the airport, on the western end of the Bahia de Palma. Traffic was heavy, but the Spaniards seemed to drive with a certain amount of disregard for life and limb, and my driver was no exception. We made it out there in about twenty minutes.

It was an attractive if touristy village: streets and galleries lined with expensive souvenir and curio shops, a couple of discos, a profusion of sidewalk bars and cafés, and a dozen or so hotels similar to the ones in Palma. On the left was the beach,
long and narrow and jammed with near-naked humanity ranging in skin tones from pure white to an almost gold-black.

Near the cutout circle that served as the village center, we turned off to the right and climbed up into low brown hills overlooking the sea. The driver made a couple more turns, then swung onto a short, graveled dead-end street. At its end, a small tile-roofed villa, its facade covered with purple bougainvillea, sat partially hidden behind a high stone wall. There was a gate in the wall off to one side, and a silver MG roadster sitting on the drive inside, pointed toward the Street; Millard Frost had told me Dale had bought the MG in England and brought it to Spain on the Southampton-Bilbao car ferry.

I paid the taxi driver a couple of hundred pesetas, added another fifty for a tip and went in through the gate. On the porch, I rang the bell. The door opened right away, and I was looking at a tall, thin youth wearing a mod-design shirt and a pair of flared slacks with a wide and ornate leather belt. His black hair was long and a little unkempt. Eyes like a pair of Spanish olives flicked over me, over the briefcase in my left hand.

I said, "Dale Frost?"

"Yes. You're from my father?"

"That's right." I introduced myself, set down my suitcase and gave him my hand. He took it, released it almost immediately and stepped back a little.

"Did you bring the money?"

"I brought it. Do you mind if I come in?"

"Why?"

"I'd like to talk to you for a minute."

"I've got things to do," he said. "I don't have time to talk."

"Come on, Dale. I won't take up much of your time. And I'll need you to sign a release for the money, to prove that I delivered it."

He hesitated. Then he said, "All right, come in, then," without any enthusiasm for the idea.

Inside, it was dark and a little cooler. The furnishings were sparse; a long refectory table took up most of one-half of the
room lengthwise. Through an archway I could see a terrace, and beyond it in the distance the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean. I said, "You wouldn't happen to have a beer, would you? I could sure use one."

"Sorry, no."

"Well, I'll take anything you've got that's tall and cold."

"I don't have a thing, I'm sorry." He wiped the palms of his hands on his slacks. "Look, mister, I don't mean to be rude or anything, but I really have got things to do. Can we get this over with? You can get a beer or something in one of the cafés down on the strip."

I studied him for several seconds without speaking, watching his eyes; he kept avoiding my gaze. He's not only nervous, I thought, he's scared. "Your father's worried about you, Dale," I said. "He thinks you might be in some kind of trouble."

"I'm not in any trouble."

"Why do you need ten thousand dollars so badly?"

"That's none of your business."

"No," I said, "but it is your father's business."

"I'll discuss it with him when the time comes."

"I think he'd like you to discuss it with me."

"Is that what he said?"

"He wants to be sure everything is all right."

"I told you, everything is fine."

"Then you shouldn't mind telling me why you need so much cash."

"I don't have to tell you anything," he said angrily. "Why don't you just give me my money and leave me alone?"

"My instructions from your father," I said, stretching the truth a little, "were to find out why you need it first."

"I don't believe you. I know my father better than that." He took a step toward me. "Give me my money."

"Look, son —"

He took another step and punched me quick and hard just under the left eye. With his other hand, he plucked at the briefcase and pulled it out of my fingers as I staggered backward. My calves hit the low, hammered-copper top of a coffee table, and I lost my balance and went over it and down. The back of my head cracked into the linoleum flooring; pain erupted behind my eyes, blurred my vision. I rolled over and pushed up onto my hands and knees, shaking my head, hearing the front door slam.

I got unsteadily to my feet, put a hand up to where he'd hit me; the fingers came away bloody. By the time I got to the front door and threw it open, the silver roadster was just shooting out of the drive with its tires making banshee noises on the pavement. It skidded to the right and was gone behind the high front wall.

I stood there for some time, holding onto the door, until I could no longer hear the MG's engine. Then I went back inside and hunted up the bathroom and inspected my cheek in the mirror. There was a gash in it a half-inch long, trickling blood. I found some antiseptic and a gauze bandage in the medicine cabinet and fixed the cut up so that the bleeding stopped. The place where my head had struck the floor was sore to the touch, and I had a hell of a headache, but there was nothing I could do about that. There weren't any aspirins in the cabinet or anywhere else on the premises.

The villa had five rooms—two bedrooms, the front room, the bathroom and a kitchen. From an old roll top desk in the front room, I dredged up a monthly statement from a Palma Nova café called Senor Pepe's; it was for a substantial sum, and I gathered from the itemization that Dale spent a good deal of his time there. I made a mental note of the address.

One of the bedrooms contained nothing at all. In the other one, on the nightstand beside the big double bed, was a small color photograph in a cardboard frame. It was of a girl about twenty, very blond, with bronzed skin and bright blue eyes; I thought she was probably Scandinavian. Across the lower left-hand corner, written in a neat feminine hand, were the words: For my Dale from his Brita. I slipped the photo out of its frame and put it into the pocket of my slacks.

Back in the front room, I stood looking around one last time without seeing anything I had overlooked. My head throbbed dully. Well, all right. I didn't have much to go on, but I had started with less before. I picked up my bag, moved out into the thick heat that was Majorca in the early afternoon and went to find out what kind of trouble Dale Frost was in.

Senor Pepe's had a rust-colored tile roof, whitewashed stucco walls and a lot of vine-draped arches inside and out. I threaded my way through a cluster of bamboo tables on the promenade in front, all of which were occupied by noisy tourists drinking gin-and-tonics and cuba libres, and went inside.

Behind an L-shaped bar, a short, sandy-haired guy in his late twenties was filling a cooler with bottles of San Miguel beer. He
had a clipped, sandy goatee and an air of sober industriousness. I stepped up to the bar and put my bag down and sat on one of the stools. When the sandy guy looked up at me, I said, "I'll take one of those cold, if you've got it."

"I do," he said. He was British, or maybe Scottish; I couldn't tell which. He pulled another of the bottles from beneath the ice
and popped the cap and poured a glass for me. I drank a third of
it, took a breath and drank another third. It had been a long
walk from the villa, and my throat was parched and my head
felt as if it were full of drums.

I asked the sandy guy, "Are you on here regularly?"

"Aye. I'm the owner."

"Then you probably know a young fellow named Dale Frost.
An American, rents a villa up on Calle Lluch."

"Sure, I know Dale. He used to come in most every night. One
of my best customers."

"Used to come in?"

"Well, I haven't seen much of him lately."

"Why is that?"

He shrugged. "I couldn't tell you. They come and they go."

"How long ago did Dale stop being a regular?"

"About three weeks ago." He gave me a quizzical look.

"Why would you be asking?"

"I represent his father," I said. "There's been a small
misunderstanding—or maybe I should say a lack of
communication."

"Oh, I see."

He didn't see at all, but I was not going to enlighten him. I
said, "Do you have any idea where Dale has been keeping
himself these past few weeks?"

"Sorry, no, I don't."

"Do you know any of his friends?"

"Dale has a lot of friends, mister," the sandy guy said.
"Popular chap, good-looking, plenty of money."

"Anyone in particular?"

"Male or female?"

"Anyone who might be close to him."

He smiled and winked at me. "Dale has been close to several
ladies, if you know what I mean."

I took the snapshot of the young, tanned blond girl out of my
pocket and let him see it. "Is she one of them?"

"Aye," he said. "That's Brita. Quite a bird, that one. Dale
brought her in here a couple of times."

"Where can I find her?"

"She works in a Swedish bar in Magalluf. The Little John."

"Where would Magalluf be?"

"Just up the road. Half a kilometer."

"How do I find the Little John?"

"It's on the main street. You can't miss it."

I paid him for my beer, got him to give me a few other names
of people Dale knew and went out into the heat again. I had
noticed a line of taxis in the village center; I walked back there
and got into the nearest one and had the driver take me to
Magalluf, which looked to be an extension of Palma Nova. He
let me off before a small restaurant-bar set into a line of shops on an esplanade well back from the street.

A young, dark-haired guy with a thick mustache that formed
three sides of a frame for thin lips was behind the bar inside. I asked him if Brita was there.

"Yes, she's here," he said in Swedish-accented English.

"Could I talk to her?"

He shrugged and went away through a door. I walked over to
a row of booths against the right-hand wall, sat down in one of them. I lit a cigarette and rubbed sweat from my forehead with a napkin and wished it wasn't so damned hot. I was not used to this kind of heat in October.

After a couple of minutes the door behind the bar opened and the dark-haired guy came out and held it for the girl just behind him. She was taller than I expected from the photograph, a little fuller in the hips; she wore a miniskirt and a frilly blouse and gold-loop Gypsy earrings. I tried not to stare at her legs as she came from behind the bar and slipped into the booth opposite, but they were very good legs. And a man never stops looking.