Talk of The Town (7 page)

There didn’t appear to be anything in those three to I warrant any further questions at the moment. “Tell me about that night,” I said. “What was it about the fake accident? They figure the two of them were going to leave Langston’s car down there?”

Ollie nodded. “That’s right. Langston had all his tackle and his motor in the station wagon, and was supposed to be going fishing.”

”At four-thirty in the morning?”

“Sure. You fish for bass at daybreak.”

“But what about the fake accident? Are they sure of that?”

“Yes. There was never any doubt of it. You see, Langston was a man about forty-seven years old and not very strong. He’d been sick. Well, there at Finley’s Cut where he kept his boat tied up, there’s a steep climb down about an eight-foot bank to get to the edge of the water. And a big log at the bottom of it that they padlock their boats to. His outboard motor weighed nearly fifty pounds. So you can see yourself what everybody would naturally think when he was found down there with his head busted open against the log with the motor on top of him.”

I nodded. “And what was Strader doing when Calhoun jumped him?”

“He was down there by the water with a flashlight and a piece of the bloody tarp, fixing up the log.”

“There’d have to be more blood than that.”

“That’s right. And Strader knew it. He had his knife out and had just sliced it into the heel of his left hand when Calhoun told him to stand up and turn around.”

I nodded. Ollie went on, his eyes thoughtful. “You see? Strader's a complete stranger around here, and not supposed to know either of the Langstons. So how did he know any of this? Where Langston kept the boat, how to get there, about the steep bank, and the log at the bottom of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It was deadly, all right. It was planned, premeditated murder, and one of them had got away with it. But did it have to be Mrs. Langston? Not so far. Any number of local people would have known all those things. But the really damning part of it was the attempt to make it look like an accident. That meant somebody involved knew he would be, or could be, suspected if it were discovered to be murder. Somebody with a known and provable connection with Langston. And since it didn’t seem to be Strader. . .

“How did Calhoun happen to be down there?” I asked. “He’s one of the town police, isn’t he?”

“Just one of those things,” Ollie replied. “He was on a fishing trip too, camped right below there. The car woke him up.”

“I see. And how do they know it was a woman driving Strader's car?”

“My cook saw the car stop over there and a woman get out.”

“Was he able to describe her?”

Ollie shook his head. “No. It was just a little after five, and that time of year it’s still dark. He’d just come into the dining-room from his room in the back to start coffee, and happened to glance out the window. This car drove into the motel and parked in front of one of the rooms over there on the right. He didn’t pay much attention, of course, and the light wasn’t very good in that spot, but he did notice it was a woman. He thought she had dark hair, but he wouldn’t swear to it. She walked across towards the office, but she didn’t go in. She disappeared into that open space between it and the end of the left-hand wing of the building.”

“And when the police found the car, it was parked in front of the right room? The one Strader was registered in?”

“That’s right.”

I shook my head. “It’s too pat. Do they think she’d be stupid enough to drive the car right back here to the motel?”

He exhaled smoke and studied it thoughtfully. “The theory is that she didn’t know Calhoun got the license number. It’s logical. She couldn’t have seen him chasing her, in the dark, and he didn’t shoot because he fell down and lost the gun. And if she left it somewhere else, she’d have to walk back, with the chance of being seen.”

“But she was seen. And she didn’t go into the office.”

“There’s a rear entrance. Out of sight from here.”

“How soon did they find the car?”

“In less than thirty minutes. As soon as Calhoun could make the town and report it, the Sheriff drove out to tell her, and see if she was all right. He didn’t know but what she’d been killed too. And the first thing he saw when he drove in was that same Dade County license right there in front of Room Fourteen.”

”Was she asleep when he knocked? He’d be able to make a pretty good guess.”

“No. She was in her nightdress and dressing-gown when she came to the door, but she was wide awake.”

“Is that the straight dope? Or gossip?”

“It’s just what was in the papers. That Sheriff keeps his business under his hat. And so does Redfield. Magruder talked a little, but I understand he was stepped on for it.”

“Did she explain why she was awake at that time of day?”

“Yes,” Ollie replied. “She said it was a phone call. Just before he got there.”

“Who was it?”

“A wrong number. Or that is, the wrong motel. Some woman that sounded about half-drunk wanted to talk to a party that wasn’t even registered.”

I nodded. “So she had to shuffle through all the cards to be sure?”

“Yeah.”

Just then another customer came in. I went back across the road. Josie had been in to make up the rooms. I switched on the air-conditioner and sat down to see if I could make sense of what I was doing. The only thing that was really apparent was that I was going to get my head knocked off. In less than twenty-four hours I’d been warned by two different sets of people to leave town or get hurt. And since I had no intention of doing it, I must be crazy.

Two
sets of people? Yes. It almost had to be. Redfield was a complex man I didn’t understand at all yet, and potentially a highly dangerous one, but I simply couldn’t believe he was corrupt—or corrupt enough to be at the bottom of all this. Maybe the savagery in him was warping his judgment, but it could be the result of an honest conviction she was guilty and that she had beaten him. Therefore, he probably didn’t even know who the other was, and I did have two separate outfits bent on getting rid of me.

And they might do it. I had no illusions about that. He had all the power of the Sheriff’s office behind him, and some of the things he could do to you with only a slight misuse of it would make your hair curl. And as for the other one—he’d said the acid was only a hint. That was self-explanatory. And ominous.

It always led back to Langston’s murder. And more and more it looked as if somebody had deliberately tried to frame her. The telephone call that morning could have been an honest mistake, but I didn’t think so. It was too convenient. The woman who’d left Strader's car at the motel knew the Sheriff would be knocking on the office door inside half an hour to tell Mrs. Langston her husband was dead, and that flushed and dull-eyed appearance of having just been roused from sleep is too nearly impossible to fake to be anything but genuine. So she had to be awake. Pawing through registration cards and arguing with an apparent drunk would guarantee it.

Then, if you could assume the whole thing tied together, where did I start? There was no lead at all in the acid job. Strader, I thought. It all began with him, and whatever he’d come up here for. So far, nobody had found out what it was, so at least I was starting even. But Strader had come from Miami. Well, that presented no great problem. . . .

The phone rang. When I picked it up, a woman’s voice said softly, “Mr. Chatham?”

“Yes,” I said. “Who is it?”

“You wouldn’t know me, but I might be able to tell you something.”

“About what?”

“About some acid, maybe. If you thought it was worth a hundred dollars—”

She left it hanging there, and then I caught something in the background that made the pulse leap in my throat. It was the rough whirring sound of that fan with the defective bearing.

“Yes,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. “It might be worth that. Where could I meet you?”

“You can’t,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t risk it for a thousand, let alone a hundred. But if you get the money for me, I’ll phone—” She stopped abruptly, gasped, and the receiver clicked as she hung up.

I dropped the instrument back on the cradle and was out the door in three strides. The entrance to the Silver King was in plain sight from here. Nobody came out I almost ran, going across. When I pushed into the lunchroom a lone trucker was at the counter and the waitress was emerging from the kitchen with a tray. I forced myself to slow down and strolled casually into the bar.

It was empty, except for Ollie. He was disassembling and cleaning a big salt-water reel on a newspaper spread out on the bar. I looked stupidly around. He glanced up and sighed. “Corrosion,” he said.

“Where’d she go?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The woman that just used the phone booth.”

“In here?” he stared at me, frowning. “There hasn’t been any woman here. There hasn’t been anybody since just after you left.”

He was telling the truth, or he was one of the great actors of all time. But there had to be some explanation. He went on watching me as if I’d gone crazy as I wheeled and strode to the doorway at the rear beside the jukebox. The rest rooms were on either side of a short, dead-ended hall. They were both empty and there was no way out back here.

The kitchen, then—I came out of the hall, half-running, and then braked to a stop in front of the phone booth. It should have occurred to me before I stepped inside, took down the receiver and held it against my ear. Ollie wasn’t lying; nobody had called from here. It had still been less than a minute, and the handset was as cool as the air-conditioned room.

Then I was going crazy, because the little fan was making exactly the noise I’d heard. And had heard the other time. There was no doubt of it. I shook my head in bewilderment and went over to the bar.

“I owe you an apology,” I said. I told him about it, without mentioning what the woman had called for.

He nodded thoughtfully. “Then there’s another one.”

“Not in this town,” I said. “I checked every booth in it except the phone company and stores. And it couldn’t have been those because I heard a jukebox.”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

I heard the front door of the lunch-room open, and the sound of hard heels behind me. Ollie reached into the ice-box, uncapped a bottle of beer, and placed it on the bar to the left of me. I turned. It was Pearl Talley. He was still wearing the same flamboyant shirt, apparently with a few added food stains. I noticed now he was larger than I’d thought, probably close on two hundred pounds. He looked soft.

“Howdy, men,” he said, and grinned at us with that odd combination of blue-eyed innocence and sly humor, like some precociously lewd but none too intelligent baby.

Ollie introduced us. He stuck out his hand. “Sure proud to meet you,” he said. “Doggone if you ain’t a big one. Like to see you and ol’ Calhoun mix it up.” He pronounced it
Kayul-hoon.

I shook hands with him, wishing the populace of this place would stop trying to match me with Calhoun. He took off the white hat, placed it on the bar beside him, and wiped the perspiration from his brow with his left forefinger, using it like a windshield swipe and giving it a little flip at the end which snapped the moisture onto the floor. He looked older with the hat off. The sandy hair was receding across the top of his head, revealing a large area of scalp as glistening and white as the inner membrane of a boiled egg.

“Doggone if she ain’t a real scorcher out there,” he said.

He had a backwoods Southern accent that might have appeared overdone to the point of burlesque on a stage but seemed perfectly natural in him. Any other time I might have been intrigued with it, but now I paid little attention. My thoughts were still chasing themselves around in a futile and endless circle. I hadn’t imagined the sound of that fan; I’d heard it. That was definite. And there wasn’t another booth in town with a noisy fan. That was equally definite. So where did it leave me?

“You know what them ol’ Coulter boys done to me last night?” Pearl said to Ollie. “They like to lift off me everything I had. With these here rascals—”

He removed two strange objects from the breast pocket of his shirt and placed them on the bar. In spite of my preoccupation, I leaned forward to look. They were small sea-shells, spiraled and rather conical in shape.

“What are they?” I asked.

Ollie grinned briefly. “Hermit crabs.”

“Oh,” I said. I remembered then. The hermit crab ate the mollusk and made its home in the shell. Or found an empty one and moved in.

“Well, sir,” Pearl went on with a sigh, “them ol’ boys found these things down at the beach somewheres, so they come by my place with ’em, and the first thing you know one of ’em says to me: Pearl, he says, why don’t we have a hermit crab race? Like this, he says. You put ’em down real quiet, like I’m doin’ now, and you wait, and you bet on which one is goin’ to move first.”

He took a dollar from his pocket and placed it on the bar. “Now you get out a dollar, and I’ll show you—”

“No, you don’t,” Ollie scoffed. “So one of ’em is dead, or you shot it full of Novocain, or hypnotized it—”

“Why, shucks,” Pearl protested. “You know I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that. And besides, you get your choice.”

“Look, you barefooted shyster,” Ollie said good-naturedly. “I wouldn’t bet you even money the sun’d come up in the morning.”

Pearl shrugged dolefully and dropped them back in his pocket and winked at me. “Heck. Some days a man just cain’t pick up a cryin’ dime.” He took a drink of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Hey, Ollie,” he went on with a jocose grin, “I ever tell you the one about the ol’ country boy that takened up with this here snooty society gal? Well, sir, it looked like he just wasn’t makin’ no time with her at all, so he went to the drugstore and he says to this feller behind the counter—”

I waited for the dreary punch line, and left. A battered pick-up truck I assumed was Pearl’s was parked before the place, its spattered sides attesting that chickens roosted on it at home. Every town has its character, I thought; San Francisco had had its share too. I dismissed him from my mind and took up the rat-race again. Forget the fan for the moment. She wanted to tell me something, for a price. She was afraid to meet me. Something or somebody had frightened her and she had to hang up. Maybe she would try again.

I stopped at the office. Josie said there had been no further call. Back at the room I lit a cigarette and sat down to wait, prodded savagely by frustration and a hundred questions to which I had no answers and no way of gaining access to any. It was an odd sensation, this being utterly alone and without status: I’d always had the prestige and facilities of a metropolitan police force going for me when I wanted to know something, but here I was an outcast. I’d been thrown out of the Sheriff’s office and was under suspicion myself. Anything Langston’s insurance company had turned up was closed to me. I couldn’t even talk to her; she’d be asleep for hours yet.

I came full circle and was back to Strader again. At least the course of action was clear there and I wanted to get started. I checked the money situation. I still had eight hundred in traveler’s checks, three hundred and seventy-something in cash. The bank statement from San Francisco showed a balance of two thousand, six hundred and thirty dollars. I was all right for the moment. The other, the money I had received from my grandfather, a little over twenty-one thousand, was in Government bonds and gilt-edge stock, untouched since they’d settled the estate six months ago.

Apparently she wasn’t going to call again. I waited impatiently for another ten minutes and then drove into town to the telephone office. It was on the street parallel with Springer to the south. I asked for a Miami directory and flipped through the yellow pages to detective agencies. I had nothing to go on, so I chose one at random, a man listed simply as Victor Lane, Investigations. I went into a booth and put through the call, and was lucky enough to catch him in.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Chatham?” he asked, when I’d told him my name and where I was.

“I want all the information I can get on a man named Strader, who was killed here in Galicia last November. He was from Miami. I don’t have the first name, or address, but you can pick up his trai—-”

“Hmmmmm. Wait a minute— In the newspaper files. You’re mining old ground, Mr. Chatham. I remember Strader now and he’s been sifted over pretty thoroughly.”

“I know. But I don’t have access to any of it, even the newspaper stories, and I haven’t got time to come down there and dig it up myself. And there’s always the chance they missed something. Here’s what I want you to do. Hit the newspaper morgues, and any contacts you may have at police headquarters; by five o’clock you should have a pretty good package on him—at least all the stuff that came out during the investigation. Call me here at the Magnolia Lodge motel and give it to me and we’ll see if we can find the angle we want to follow up. What are your rates?”

He told me. “Right,” I said. “I’ll mail you a check for a hundred on account right now. That all right?”

“Sure,” he said. “See you at five.”

Outside again in the sun-blasted street, I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes past one. I went around the corner and found a drugstore about half-way up the block towards Springer. It was an old place, one of the few establishments in town not air-conditioned. Above the screen door a ceiling fan like an airplane propeller seen in slow motion was drowsily warning the flies to stay out but not making an issue of it. There were some marble-topped tables with iron legs and a marble soda fountain, and at the rear another counter and an open doorway leading into the prescription department. No one was in sight; it looked as if everybody had gone up the street to see if there was any more news of the
Titanic
and had forgotten to come back.

There was a telephone booth about half-way back on the right. I stepped inside and called the motel. Josie said nobody had tried to reach me. It was odd, I thought; she wouldn’t have given up that easily with a hundred dollars at stake. Somebody had really given her a scare. And what about the fan I’d heard? I brushed it aside impatiently; there was no point in even wondering about it.

When I stepped out of the booth, the proprietor emerged from the prescription department and looked at me inquiringly. He appeared to be in his sixties, a slight, frail man in a white jacket, with neat gray hair parted precisely in the center, rimless glasses, and serene gray eyes. He found me a dusty packet of envelopes and dug a three-cent stamp out of a drawer in the cash register. I sat down at the fountain, wrote out Lane’s check, and addressed one of the envelopes. I ordered a coke. He stirred it and set it on the counter.

“Have you been here a long time?” I asked.

He smiled gently. “I bought the place in ‘twenty-seven.”

“Well, tell me something. Why is there so much feeling about that Langston thing? You people haven’t got the only unsolved murder in the world.”

“There are a lot of reasons,” he said. “Langston was well liked. It was brutal, cold-blooded murder, and one of them got away with it. We’re a small town here and everything is more personal; people are not just names in a headline. A lot of people are distrustful and jealous of southern Florida anyway, the big money and the flashy publicity and all that, and the man was a no-good bum from Miami.”

“How long had Langston lived here?” I asked.

“He’d only been
back
about six months, but he was born here.”

“I see. A home-town boy.”

He nodded. “That’s right. Maybe a kind of home-town hero, in a way. A local boy that made good down there in that big-wheeling-and-dealing crowd in south Florida, or at least showed ‘em we could hold our own with ’em. We were always a little proud of him. He played some mighty good football at Georgia Tech. He was officer of a submarine that sank I don’t remember how many thousand tons of Japanese shipping in World War Two. After the war he went into the construction business in Miami—low-cost housing. Made a lot of money. They say he was worth pretty close to a million at one time. But the thing was he never seemed to lose touch like so many kids do when they go away and get successful. Even after his daddy died—he used to be principal of the high school—after he died and there weren’t any Langstons left around here at all, he used to come back and go duck-hunting and fishing and visit with people.”

“But what happened?” I asked. “Why did he retire and buy a motel? He was only forty-seven, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right. He got hit by several things all at once. There was a bad divorce, with a big property settlement—”

“Oh,” I said. “Then how long had he and the second Mrs. Langston been married when he was killed?”

“A little less than a year, I guess. Four or five months before they came up here and bought the motel.”

“What were the other things?” I asked.

“Health,” he replied. “And a business deal that went sour on him. He started a big tract development and then ran into a court wrangle over the title to part of the property. He lost it, and on top of the split-up of community property in the divorce thing it just about wiped him out. But mainly it was his health. He had a mild heart attack somewhere back in ‘fifty-four or -five, and then a pretty serious one, and the doctors told him he had to slow down or he’d be dead before he was fifty. So he came up here and bought the motel with what he had left. It would make him a living, and he could do the things he liked to do—hunt quail and fish for bass and root for the high-school football team in the fall. Then six months later he was butchered in cold blood, like slaughtering a pig. Sure there’s bitter feeling; why shouldn’t there be? Just knock his head in and take him down there to the river bottom and leave him so it’d look like an accident. It’d give you the horrors if you kept thinking about it. What kind of woman could that be, for the love of heaven?”

“Not what kind of woman,” I said.
“What
woman would be a little more to the point.”

The fragile and essentially gentle face went blank, as if he’d drawn a curtain behind it. I was used to it now. “Maybe they’ll never know,” he said, speaking to me from a great distance.

“What about insurance?” I asked. She said she didn’t have any money. “Who was the beneficiary? And was it ever paid?”

He nodded. “Fifty thousand, or something like that. To his daughter. It was paid, or is being paid, rather, into a trust fund. She’s only thirteen.”

“No other policies?”

“No. He couldn’t take out any more when he remarried. He was too poor a risk, with a history of two heart attacks.”

Then, where was the woman’s motive?” I asked. “It wasn’t money.”

“They don’t know who the woman was.” he explained carefully and precisely from behind the drawn blinds. “So naturally they don’t know what her motive was. They don’t know anything about her at all, except that she was with Strader.”

Which answered everything very neatly, I thought. It was a closed circuit, like two snakes swallowing each other: she was a tramp because she was with Strader, and she was with Strader because she was a tramp. How could you argue with that? I went out and dropped the envelope in a postbox and drove back to the motel. When I walked into the office Josie came out of the curtained doorway and said there had been a call for me some ten minutes ago.