Talk of The Town (10 page)

He took two deep breaths, and you could see the battle going on inside him. “Get out of here,” he said raggedly, “before I use a gun barrel on you.”

“Wait a minute, Kelly,” Magruder protested. “We can’t let him go till we hear from Mitch—”

Redfield turned savagely and cut him off. “We know where to find him if we want him! Get the son of a bitch out of here!”

Magruder looked at me. “You heard the man.”

“Yes,” I said. I picked my hat up from the floor and dabbed a handkerchief at the blood in the corner of my mouth. “I heard him.” I went out and walked over to Springer to find a cab, not even particularly angry at him. Or not nearly as angry as I knew he was at himself. He was too good a pro to give way to rage that way, with so little provocation. Somewhere inside Redfield a bunch of mice were eating the insulation off his nerves. But what mice? And where had they come from?

Well, when it came to being jumpy, he had company—plenty of it. If there was ever a place that was wired, this was it. It’d be a poor location, I thought, for the type of practical joker who liked to slip up behind people and say “Boo!” He wouldn’t last till the coffee break.

It was ten minutes to five when I paid off the cab in front of the office. One of the Sheriff’s cars was parked in the area and the door of my room was standing open. I walked over and looked in. The big redheaded Deputy was pawing through one of the chest drawers. He looked up at me without interest, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and pushed the drawer shut.

“Looks like you just haven’t got a gun,” he said.

“Where’s your warrant?” I asked.

“I forgot to pick it up. Want me to go back for it and search you again?”

“No,” I said.

“I’d be glad to,” he said helpfully. “No trouble at all.” “Don’t bother,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to monopolize you.”

“You got a great sense of humor,” he said. He looked around for the ashtray, saw it was on the table between the beds, and shrugged. He ground out the cigarette on the glass top of the chest. “Yes, sir, a great sense of humor.”

“How did you get in?” I asked.

“Maid. I told her you wouldn’t mind a bit. Hell, I told her, a man with a sense of humor like that?”

I said nothing. He gave the room another indifferent glance and came out past me. “I guess you’re doing right, friend. You’re from out of town, and that seems to be all it takes.”

I turned and looked at him with my hands shoved in my pockets. He waited a minute, hoping I’d be stupid enough to swing at him, and then stepped off onto the gravel. “Well, give her back the key, huh? Tell her I said you didn’t mind a bit.” He climbed into the cruiser and drove off.

I stepped inside and closed the door, took a deep breath, and lit a cigarette. In a minute or two I simmered down. I went into the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. The bloody clothes were still lying in the tub. Nothing was badly torn up in the room; he’d merely been killing time hoping I’d get back before he left. I finished the cigarette and felt all right again when I went over to the office. I put the key on the desk. Josie heard me and came out, grinning. “Miss Georgia’s awake.”

“Good,” I said. “How is she?”

“Jest fine. You know what was the first thing she asked for?”

“A three-pound T-bone?”

“No, suh. A comb and a lipstick.”

Well, I thought, a psychiatrist would probably score it the same way. “That’s great. Will you ask her if I can come in?”

“Yes, sir. She’s been asking where you was.”

She went in back, and came out almost immediately and nodded. I went through. I still had the hat on and wondered if I could get by without removing it. Probably, I thought, remembering the slob way I’d acted when she came over to the room. She no doubt assumed I slept in it and ate with my feet. When I stepped into the bedroom, however, she solved the problem for me. She was propped up on two pillows with a filmy blue wrap about her shoulders, still too pale perhaps, but damned attractive, and smiling. She held out her hand. Well, I’d been answering questions all day.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she said warmly. “I was afraid you’d gone on without even saying good-bye or giving me a chance to thank you.”

She was the only one in town, I thought, who didn’t know by now that I was her lover, bodyguard, partner, hired goon, sweetheart, private detective, and the father of her three Mongol children. She’d been asleep.

“Josie kept saying that you were still around, that you’d just gone to town—Oh, good heavens, what happened to you?” She broke off, staring at the strips of bandage and tape and the haircut.

“Just a little accident,” I said, glad the other was covered by my shirt sleeve. “Couple of stitches, that’s all. But never mind me. How do you feel? You look wonderful.”

“How did it happen?” she asked firmly.

Maybe a few details would do it. “Your coloring’s a lot better and there’s more light and animation in the eyes—”

“My coat’s shinier too,” she said. “That’s always a good sign.” She pointed to the armchair beside the bed. “Drop the red herring, and sit down, Mr. Chatham. I want to know if you’ve been hurt and why—”

I remembered what the doctor had said about rest and no more emotional upheavals. Except for luck and a good constitution, she could be lying there now picking at the coverlet or staring blankly at the wall. No shotguns.

“Clumsiness,” I said. “And not having a flashlight. I got an anonymous tip that acid was part of the cargo of a hijacked truck and that the rest of it was hidden in an old barn out in the country. I went out there, and while I was poking around in the loft I raked my head on a nail. The acid wasn’t there, either, though I think it might have been at one time.”

She appeared to believe me. “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “It’s my fault.”

“Not at all,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’m partly to blame for their wrecking that room.”

“How could you think a thing like that?”

I told her. “I think he caught onto what I was doing when I was checking those telephone booths. It’s the same man. And probably the same one who sent those two kids out here last night trying to get you in trouble with the police. When I helped you get rid of them, he decided I was meddling too much. The acid was just a hint that I was going to do you more harm than good by hanging around. I don’t know what his object is, but let’s find out.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Yesterday you wanted to hire me as a private detective to look into it. You still can’t, because I have no license to do that kind of work; the minute the Sheriff’s office could prove you were paying me I’d be in jail. But there’s nothing on the statute books that says I can’t take over the direction of this motel simply because you’re a friend of mine and because I’m interested in buying a part of it—both of which are true—”

“You’re going a little too fast for me,” she said.

“We’ll go into the business angle later. Obviously you don’t have to sell me a part interest in it unless you want to, but as of the moment that’s what the status is. We’re considering it. When they call you, tell them that. As a matter of fact, I’ve already taken over the operation of it, and to some extent, the operation of you. I’ve closed the motel because there’s no way in God’s world you can stop them from coming back and doing it to another room as long as you’re open to the public and obviously can’t search your guests’ luggage for acid. And I’ve accepted the responsibility for seeing that the doctor's instructions were carried out, and those instructions were that you were to stay in bed and rest, with this whole thing off your back, until he said you could get out—”

“Ridiculous,” she said. “I’m as healthy as a horse.”

“Sure you are. A horse that hasn’t had a square meal in a month, or a full night’s rest since last year. You’re going to stay right where you are and let me handle it.”

“But—”

“No buts. Ever since I landed in this town I’ve been jockeyed around by some character who thinks I’m on your side. He’s finally convinced me he’s right.”

The telephone rang out in the office. Josie appeared in the doorway. “It’s for you,” she said. “A long distance.”

I went out and took it at the desk. I told the operator we’d accept the charges, and Lane came on. “Mr. Chatham?”

“Yes. How did you make out?”

“Fairly well. Here’s what I’ve been able to round up since you called; so far it’s mostly just the stuff anybody would know who followed the investigation last November. Strader's full name was Albert Gerald Strader, he was thirty-five years old at the time he was killed, and if you were looking around for a good one-word description of him, bum would probably do as well as any. Or lady-killer, except I guess that’s gone out of style.

“Not a crook or a hood, however. He had no previous criminal record as far as they could discover—apart from a few misdemeanors like an occasional assault and battery, and a drunk driving or two—and they went into it pretty thoroughly. The F.B.I, had nothing on him. I gather that what you’re trying to find out—along with everybody else who ever had anything to do with the case—is what the hell he was doing up there in that place, and I don’t think there’s much chance it was anything criminal unless being a compulsive tomcat is a crime. The consensus of opinion is almost a hundred per cent that it was a woman. Probably a married one.

“He was a pretty big guy with an athlete’s build not too far gone to seed. Played football in the military school he went to. Good-looking sort of Joe, dark hair, olive skin, gray eyes, and he knew how to buy and wear clothes. Women—or at least, certain kinds of over-sexed and bored and restless women—went for him in a big way. And let’s face it; women like that usually know what they’re after, so he must have had it.

“He was a salesman. He wasn’t much good at it, oddly enough; you’d think he’d be a whiz with all that appearance and self-assurance, but I guess it takes more than that, like maybe some interest in working at it. From last July up until the time he was killed he was selling real estate, or trying to. Worked for an outfit called Wells and Merritt in the north-east part of town, housing sales and rentals, and had a small bachelor apartment not too far away on North-East Sixty-first Street—”

“How long had he been around Miami?” I asked.

“Off and on since about 1945, when he got out of the Navy. Its spotty, and they don’t have the whole record. During the same period he spent some time down in the Keys, at Marathon and Key West, and for a while I think he was in New Orleans. But he usually came back to Miami. Let’s see, I’ve got some notes here—“

“Let me get something to write on,” I said. I located a sheet of stationery in the back of the desk and undipped my pen. “All right, shoot.”

”Okay. He grew up in a small town in northern Louisiana. His father was a lawyer and later a District Judge. Both parents are dead now, and the only surviving relative at the time he was killed was a married sister three years older who still lives there in the same town. Whitesboro. She was the one who came down to Galicia to claim the body. Strader apparently wasn’t a particularly wild kid, but just useless. Probably nothing on his mind but girls, even then. Managed to get through four years at a military school in Pennsylvania, but was dropped at Tulane before mid-term of his freshman year for poor grades. Went into the Navy in 1942, and after boot camp he got into an electronics school—Treasure Island in San Francisco, I think, and was a Radioman Second when he came out at the end of the war.”

“He wasn’t in subs, by any chance?”

“No. Jeep carriers, it says here. Anyway, in 1946, according to his employment record, he was announcer at a small radio station here in Miami. Stayed there a year or maybe a little longer. Most of 1948 is blank, but I understand a good part of that winter he was shacked up with some racy old girl who owned a string of horses. Then about 1950 he was selling cars. Worked for three or four different agencies here in Miami for the next two years, and was also down in the Keys. In the fall of 1953 he latched onto a traveling job, selling sound-motion projectors to lodges, churches, and schools. He was working for a distributor in Jacksonville, with Florida and parts of southern Alabama and Georgia for a territory. As usual, he didn’t set the course on fire, and apparently quit or was fired after about six months. Seems to be a gap there, and the next thing he was back in Miami in the fall of ‘fifty-four, selling cars again. Then in 1955, and up until about June 1956, another traveling job working for an outfit called Electronic Enterprises with home offices in Orlando. I don’t know what he was selling, but maybe sound systems again. When that fizzled out he managed to pass the examination for a real estate salesman’s license and went to work for this firm I mentioned first, Wells and Merritt. Just a boomer and a drifter, you see. I think women were supporting him a good part of the time.

”There’s no record he ever knew Langston?” I asked.

“None whatever, and they dug into it for weeks. They were in different worlds. Langston was a pretty big wheel, till he smashed up, and Strader was a poor type that couldn’t have bought his way into that crowd.”

“How about the first Mrs. Langston?”

“Another big nothing. You’d think there might be a chance, since she was a pretty gay type, especially since the divorce, and she had a lot of money, but they’ve never found any connection at all. And believe me, they tried. Don’t forget, Miami’s a big place. And of course, where they really went to work was on the second Mrs. Langston, the widow. For obvious reasons. I mean, they had it made. Strader went up there to see a woman, presumably a married woman, and he winds up killing a husband, with a woman known to be with him while he was trying to get rid of the body, so where do you look? We’ll crack this one in an hour, boys. That was seven months ago, and they still haven’t come up with the first lead to indicate the two of them had ever met. She simply wasn’t his cup of tea. The only thing they had in common was the fact they’d both lived a long time in Miami. She was a medical lab technician with no money except her salary, and she didn’t run with any gay or big-money crowd at all. I think the way she met Langston was slipping those wires to him to take an electrocardiogram.”

“Okay,” I said. “So far, so good. I suppose they gave up long ago on the angle that Strader was hired for the job?

“Sure. In the first place, they couldn’t find anybody who’d want Langston bumped off. The insurance went to his twelve-year-old daughter. I mean, even if the junior high crowd is circulating lists of professional triggermen these days, this kid was fond of her father. Langston had never made any particularly bitter enemies in business. He wasn’t a chaser. There was some bad feeling between him and his first wife, but what would she stand to gain? She already had the divorce, a good chunk of the money, and the Cuban player she was after. And even if there’d been anybody who wanted to hire a killer, why Strader? He was no hoodlum, and nobody ever starts out in crime as a professional murderer. You generally work up—or down, depending on your point of view. Also, there’s the way Langston was killed. Being hit on the head. That’s too much work for a pro. No, that one was a dead theory almost before they got through saying it.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“No. That’s about all at the moment. You always come back to the fact it had to be a woman he went up there to see. It wasn’t business, because you couldn’t even give away Miami real estate in that town, let alone sell it. And if it had been business, whoever he’d gone to see would have come forward and said so. So there you are. He drove up there three times in a little over two months, and it’s nearly a thousand miles’ round trip. And with Strader, only one kind of business was that important.”

“Okay,” I said. “Right at the moment I don’t see any lead to follow at all, but take another run at him tomorrow. Maybe you can find out what he was up to during those holes in his employment record. See how many old girl friends you can uncover and where they are now. I gather there were no letters in his stuff at the apartment, but did they check long-distance calls?”

“That’s right; there were no letters. But there were two toll calls from there. And in both cases they were made the day before he drove up. No lead. They originated at call boxes.”

“Smart baby,” I said. “All right. Call me back tomorrow if you get anything new.”

I went back. She was sitting up in bed with her arms around her knees. “Have you had anything to eat yet?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. I just woke up about half an hour ago.”

“How about having dinner with me?”

She smiled. “I thought you weren’t going to let me out of bed.”

“I’m not. Do you like steak? That’s the only thing I know how to cook.”

“A steak sounds fine. But you don’t have to cook it. I can do that, or Josie.”

“You’re going to rest. And Josie gets the evening off. I want to talk to you.”

I went out and cleaned up the station wagon with the hose and some detergent, threw a folded blanket across the wet seat, and drove into town. I bought two steaks, an avocado, some French rolls, gin and vermouth, and a bottle of burgundy. Returning to the motel, I shaved and changed clothes, putting on a long-sleeved shirt to cover the dressing on my left arm.

The prescriptions I’d had made up were still in the station wagon. I removed the sleeping pills, though it seemed silly the way she was snapping out of it, and carried the rest of the stuff over to the office. Josie was just leaving.

“Try to be back before midnight,” I told her. “I want you to set up a cot in the living-room and stay with her. She seems to be in a lot better condition than I expected, but it’d be a good idea for tonight, anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” she replied. She left.

I went on into the kitchen and sized up the facilities for cooking the steaks, and found Josie had put two potatoes in to bake. I broke open the gin and vermouth, and while I was stirring the Martinis I heard footsteps behind me and looked around. Georgia Langston was standing in the doorway. She had on slippers and dark blue pajamas, the blue dressing-gown around her. She’d put on a little lipstick, and her hair was freshly combed, the rich mahogany gleam of it contrasting darkly against the pallor of her face and the large gray eyes. Strader would have driven a lot further than five hundred miles, I thought. Except that he’d never seen the day he could play in her league.

“I thought I told you to stay in bed,” I said.

She shook her head with a faint smile. “I won’t be bullied in my own house.”

“You’re not well. The doctor says you’re supposed to rest.”

“I have news for you
and
the doctor. When a woman is well enough to feel uncomfortable about entertaining a man in her bedroom, she’s well enough to be up. It’s a perfectly sound clinical test.”

I shrugged, and measured out the Martinis. “You win. Come to think of it, I don’t believe a woman could be very far under the weather and look as wonderful as you do. So maybe you’re right.”

“Why, thank you,” she said, with the same shadow of a smile. “But, really, hadn’t you better tell me some more about your brutality before I’m misled? You can’t be too careful about that.”

“Ouch,” I said. I carried the Martinis through to the living-room end of the outer room. She sat on the sofa with her legs curled under her. I put the Martinis on the coffee table, sat down across from her, and lit our cigarettes. “I’m sorry about clubbing you over the head with it that way. But I get in those moods. It’s from having too much time on my hands to feel sorry for myself. I need a job.”

She nodded. “But don’t you think you owe me an explanation, after saying a thing like that about yourself?”

“There’s not much to explain. It happens to be true, except that I wasn’t fired. I was suspended, but resigned voluntarily as soon as I realized I didn’t belong in police work. That was what hurt.”

“I realize it’s none of my business,” she said firmly, “but I still think you owe me an explanation. You said a while ago I was a friend of yours, and that can work both ways. Was this man in custody?”

“No,” I said.

“Well,” she said coolly, “that’s quite a different thing, isn’t it? Was it something personal?”

“No,” I said. “But wait a minute. That’s exactly it. It wasn’t personal, but I made it personal. You see, I was no longer a pro; I was a fanatic.”

“What had he done?”

“He was a pusher. A dope peddler.”

“Oh,” she said.

“That doesn’t justify it,” I said. “You can’t. Laws are supposed to be enforced by impersonal people, not by crusaders or fanatics. Actually, I was as cool a cat as any of them until I happened to be assigned to a narcotics detail, but there’s just something about that business that got to me. It’s dirty in a way that nothing else can be dirty, especially where kids are concerned. You may not be familiar with quite all the things that, say, a sixteen-year-old girl will do to get the price of a fix when she has to have one, and if you don’t know, don’t bother to look into it—”

I broke off. “But never mind; I didn’t intend to get on the soap box. It finally drove my wife away. She could see where I was headed, even if I couldn’t, and she had this weird idea I should come home once in a while. And in the end it cost me the job. I was after one particular pusher, a smart punk around twenty-three who was shoving the stuff to kids, and I was too hot-eyed and eager to get him, and I muffed it. When I brought him in I didn’t have a solid case and he beat it. He gave me the horse-laugh and walked out. Inside of three days he was right back in business. Then one night I ran into him in a bar. He tossed me some smart-alec remark, and then didn’t have any better sense than to go back to the washroom.”

I paused, staring at the cigarette in my fingers. “That’s about it. There was a big uproar, of course, but even without the suspension I realized what was happening to me and that I had to get out of it.”

She nodded. “Yes, I suppose it was wrong. But I think you’re too harsh on yourself. Nobody can turn emotion off entirely.”

“No. But a cop is supposed to bring in a case that can be tried in court, not in a locked wash-room with his fists. But let’s change the subject. I wanted to talk business.”