Dead Low Tide (17 page)

The device of trying to put myself inside his mind had worked so well that I decided to try Mary Eleanor’s.

O.K. I am an insatiable tramp. I don’t care what I do or with whom. I was having a fine and dandy time, and then—Joe trapped me. I don’t know how the damn pictures were taken, but they were taken and there’s no mistake about that. It is certainly hideous to see yourself like I am in those pictures. I thought he was kidding, and I laughed at him when he said he had pictures. Then he sent me a set, right through the mail. First I wanted to kill myself, and then I wanted to
kill him, and then I knew that he’d grabbed me and I couldn’t get out of it and I had to do just what he told me to do, or, like he said, my dull husband would get a complete set in the mail. And that would be a death sentence. John is slow and stolid, but he has so much pride he would have to kill me to get himself halfway clean again if he ever saw those pictures.

I should have thrown them away, burned them. I know that now. God knows why I kept them around. They were safe, I thought. I guess I liked the danger of having them around. And every few weeks, I’d take them out and look at them again. Once I got over the first nasty impression, I found that it could get me sort of excited, looking at them, so I kept them around.

And then I came home and found they were gone. I was frantic. I wanted to pack up and run. Then I thought maybe the maid had found them. It was a slim chance. But John acted queer—damn queer. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t touch me. So I knew he had them. I knew he had looked at them and I could almost guess what it had done to him. I was horribly frightened of what he would do, and the weeks went by and he didn’t do anything, and I began to get my courage back, thinking that maybe he would never do anything. Then I guessed that he must be trying to find out who Joe is. And the envelope being mailed from Miami and all.

I told Joe about it, and he was angry. He said I should have burned them. John acted so strange. I talked McClintock into finding out what John was thinking. I thought John might give him a hint. I couldn’t understand his doing nothing. And then Andy McClintock told me what John had said. He didn’t know what it meant. I did. It meant he knew who
Joe was, meant that he had made up that slow ponderous mind of his, meant that now he was ready, or would soon be ready, to kill us. As soon as McClintock was trained. There was no one to turn to. No one but Joe. I told him right away. He questioned me. He asked me about McClintock. I didn’t know what he was planning. He took that spear thing from McClintock’s house. I don’t know how he got John to meet him out there at Key Estates, or how he managed to surprise him. It was all like a game, somehow. And it didn’t hit me until I heard the words, until I heard Andy say John was dead. He came to me, Joe did, after Andy was arrested. He told me that I had to lie, that I had to protect myself, because I was involved too. And I asked Andy to get the pictures. Where are the pictures? Who has them? Who has looked at them and found out what I am? I can’t help it. I never could help it. But who knows? I wish John were alive. I want him back, now. There is nothing left to do but chase it out of my mind. With bourbon. Stop thinking and feeling and living for a while.

There were still a lot of holes, but it had form now.

I called the mystery man Joe. It made it simpler. He had gone to Taylor Street once in a car that had to be Mary Eleanor’s. It had to be the same man. That made Joy Kenney an accomplice. Two harpies. They’d found a couple to feed on—the Longs. Emotional shock. She hadn’t wanted him to go that far—not as far as murder. She had lucked her way into a job in John’s office. Moving in close to where the money is. I understood more of her tension and her nervousness.

Joe. Man without a head. Shabby, soft-voiced, wearing a
hat. Damp pants cuffs and shoes. Sand and sand spurs. An anonymous automobile.

Why shabby? Why anonymous? Hadn’t he made Mary Eleanor pay off?

And that one question gave me a place to go, and gave me something to do.

Harvey Constanto is a pallid, formless, drifting kind of man. He is the kind you put on obscure committees where the real work is done. Nobody ever slaps his shoulder, and if he hears a dirty joke, it is because he is drifting around the fringe of a group that happens to be exchanging same. His smile is uncertain, his manner half apologetic. It is inconceivable that he could have ever wooed and won his brown, loud, boisterous, flirtatious, popular wife, much less bed her down. Yet there are three handsome healthy teenage kids with Harvey’s unmistakable sharp nose. It is insane to think of Harvey being aggressive, yet he started with nothing, and now owns heavy swatches of the best Gulf-front property.

When I rang their bell, Harvey came and peered at me through the screen in his lean near-sighted way, and said, “Oh, Mr. McClintock. How do you do. Won’t you come in? Ah—please come in, won’t you?”

“Thanks.”

“Ah—Marian is out and I haven’t seen any of the children around, so they must be out, too. Would you—ah—care for a drink?”

“No, thanks, Mr. Constanto. This is—well, a business matter, I guess you’d call it.”

“Then come right in here. This is my den.”

He turned on the desk lamp. It wasn’t what I would call a
den. It looked as austere as his office in the bank. He sat uncertainly behind the desk and put his sharp elbows on the desk.

“I suppose,” he said, “it is something about John. A tragic loss to the community, Mr. McClintock. Tragic. A very—ah—old and beloved friend. You understand, of course, that I’m not authorized to give you confidential information. Financial affairs. That sort of thing.”

“This isn’t directly about John’s financial affairs, Mr. Constanto. I have reason to believe that someone has been blackmailing Mary Eleanor. I thought you might help me confirm that by telling me—off the record, of course—whether she had access to any money.”

“Couldn’t you ask her?”

“People being blackmailed don’t talk too readily.”

“How does it become your business?”

“You can’t live in this town without knowing that I was jailed, released, and I’m still under suspicion. I think the blackmail ties in with the murder. And I’m interested in clearing myself.”

“Why not go to the police and let them investigate?”

“And find out why and how Mary Eleanor was being blackmailed and make it public? Get it in the papers and over the radio, maybe?”

“I—ah—see. A certain moral responsibility.”

He then looked me directly in the eyes. I knew at once that it had never happened to me before, and I guessed also that he seldom looked anybody directly in the eye. His eyes were a singularly pale clear cold blue, and they were as merciless as bookkeeping machinery, or a tax table. He looked away
quickly, but once you had looked into those eyes you understood a lot of things. How the brown wife was won. Why the kids were exceptionally well behaved. How, precisely, he had come up from nothing. You saw how much there was behind that vagueness, how much ambition and arrogance and cold willfulness.

He made a tent of his fingers. “You—ah—understand that if I had known her reason, I would never have assisted her.”

“Of course.”

“Her security, naturally was her stock in John Long, Contractors, Incorporated. Not listed, of course. Not readily marketable. She was evasive as to why she needed the money. She led me to assume that it was for a purchase of land. Speculative, of course. To be a surprise to her husband. Something like that. She wished to use her holdings as collateral for a bank loan. However, I explained to her that it could not be kept a secret from her husband in that case, as he was a director of the bank, and all loans of the size of what she had in mind have to be taken up at the meetings. If John did not happen to attend that one, he would certainly hear about it. That upset her. Then I—ah—suggested, purely as a favor, of course, an alternate suggestion.”

“What was that?”

“I agreed to loan her the money she required, and accept a temporary assignment of the stock holdings as collateral for a personal loan, which no one had to know about, of course. It was—ah—handled in that manner. It took me several days to raise what she required in cash. Thirty thousand. A month later she required another ten. I managed that for her. About
a month ago she wanted ten more. I told her I had gone as far as I cared to go on that amount of collateral. She was more than a bit—unpleasant about it.”

“If she was paying off someone, she couldn’t hope to repay the loan, then.”

“I don’t see how she could. I imagine it was a case of either letting me become the owner of the holding, or else informing John. Of course now she’ll have no trouble. After taxes there’ll be a decent estate. In fact a—ah—small group of which I am one plan to make a firm offer for John’s controlling interest in the firm. That Key Estates project looks healthy—quite healthy. John planned well. A pity he couldn’t live to see it completed.”

“Mr. Constanto, I would think that if you were such a good friend of John’s, you’d have told him about his wife wanting all that money in cash.”

The blue eyes swung on their turrets and aimed at me and for a moment I thought he was going to fire when ready, but he turned, instead, to vagueness, to his apologetic manner. He said, “Ah, in retrospect, yes. We’re always—wise, after the fact, aren’t we?”

You couldn’t pin him down any further, any more than you can drive nails with a wet dishrag. It was obvious that he’d been delighted to buy for forty thousand a thirty per cent interest in a healthy firm that stood to net a very chubby figure from Key Estates. He was an admired and respected local citizen, and yet he gave me the same feeling you get when you run your face through a cobweb.

“I appreciate your telling me this, Mr. Constanto.”

“Once you stated your interest, I felt it was my moral obligation
to inform you, Mr. McClintock. I hope it will—assist you in your difficulties.”

He walked me gravely and politely to the door. He said, “Perhaps it would be wise for me to give the police the same information, Mr. McClintock. I should not like to be accused of withholding information that might be of interest to them. Yet, by the same token, I do not wish to cause Mrs. Long any—any difficulty.”

“Why don’t you wait a day or so?”

“If you—ah—recommend it, I shall.”

When I drove away I saw him, tall, stooped, framed in the doorway. He would fix your drink, carry your bundles, call you a cab, cash your check, buy your lunch. He was a very obliging kind of man. You were always seeing his name in the paper—as pall bearer.

Now Joe had another facet. Forty thousand dollars had been added.

IT WAS AFTER NINE
, and I felt vaguely uncomfortable and couldn’t decide why until I remembered that breakfast was the only meal I’d had. On impulse I drove out to the restaurant where Joy had worked.

I guess every state in the country is infected with them—greasy-spoon restaurants on the fringe of town. Red imitation leather, badly cracked, on the counter stools. Weary pie behind glass. A stink of frying grease in front, and tired garbage in back. Sway-backed, heavy-haunched waitresses with metallic hair, puffed ankles, and a perennial snarl. A decent toss of one of the water glasses would fell a steer. A jukebox and plastic booths and today’s special is chicken croquettes, with fr. fr. pot. and st. beans—ninety-fi’ cents. And the coffee is like rancid tar.

There were a couple of morose men, who looked like unsuccessful salesmen, sitting at the counter shoveling burned
fat into their maltreated stomachs. I sat in a booth. Their evening rush, if any, had cleared out. Three waitresses sat in a booth. One of them got up reluctantly and slobbed over to me and tossed a menu in front of me.

She was a slat thin blonde with improbable breasts, which looked as real as a display soda in a drugstore window. She had a hacksaw face and mean little eyes.

I tried to smile at her, and said, “Is Joy around?”

“Her—she quit. She’s gone back into office work. She’s smart. She got off her feet. You want something?”

I found one item on the menu that I didn’t think they could spoil. I ordered it and she brought it quickly. They hadn’t spoiled it, but they’d come close.

She brought my coffee, and said, “You been in here before, I guess. I figured you looked familiar, kind of.”

Far be it from me to tell her she’d seen me in the paper. “I’ve been in before. Have you been here long?”

“A lifetime, mister.”

“If you want to get off your feet, why don’t you bring some coffee and sit down and keep me company.”

She glanced at the other booth with the two waitresses in it. She looked with feral quickness and intentness toward the counter. She said, barely moving her lips, “In a minute. The boss is out back. He takes off soon now. When I see his car go down the drive, I can. But until he goes, it could get me in trouble.”

She went back to the other booth. I heard them whispering over there. I heard some giggles. One girl went elaborately over to the counter for nothing at all. She straightened a metal napkin dispenser, turned around and studied me intently as she walked back to the booth. I listened for the
gasps, but I just heard more giggling. They hadn’t recognized me yet.

Just as I finished my meal, a car went down the driveway. One of the girls said, quite audibly, “Good night, Frankie, you big bastard. Sweet dreams.”

The blonde brought coffee over and sat across from me and looked arch. “I’m Cindy.”

“I’m Andy.”

“Hi, Andy.”

“Hi, Cindy.” A sparkling routine.

“Jeez, my feet. He keeps yakking about a new kinda floor. But nothing ever changes in this joint. The floor is like rocks. You ought to walk on it all day.”

“I guess it’s worth it, though, isn’t it? The tips and all.”

Her laugh was a startling explosive bray, which she rendered without changing expression. “Tips? Here? Man, what you take to have those big happy dreams?”

“I always have happy dreams. I dreamed I was going to eat here and have a date with Joy.”

“I guess you don’t know her so good, Andy. Maybe some people would say she’s pretty. I guess maybe she is. But she don’t date. She’s colder than a witch’s—oops, I don’t know you that good. Yet.” The last word was drawled, though the rest was from Hamtramck.