The Way Some People Die (26 page)

“Sunday? About eight o’clock, Joe told me to get out, not to come back for a couple of hours. He let me take the car. How do you know Speed was there?”

“It’s beside the point. He was there, and he did buy the heroin—”

“This heroin you’ve been talking about, did Joe steal it from Dowser?” Her face was intent on mine.

“Apparently.”

“And sold it to Speed?”

“For thirty thousand dollars.”

“Thirty thousand dollars,” she repeated slowly. “Where is it now?”

“It could be in Joe’s club-bag at the bottom of the sea, or making a fat roll in somebody’s pocket.”

“Whose?”

“Possibly Speed’s.” It seemed in retrospect that he’d handed over the heroin to me much too easily. “He might have known Joe’s plans, and been waiting for him on the boat Tuesday morning. He had a motive, in addition to the money. Your sainted husband fingered him for the mob last fall.”

Her eyes dilated. “I thought they were friends.”

“Speed thought so, too. Perhaps he found out different, and decided to do something about it. I say perhaps. There’s another possibility I like better.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Keith Dalling.”

“You’re a quick girl.”

“Not really.” Her smile was one-sided. “I’ve been thinking about him for days, trying to understand why he acted as he did, and why he was killed. He was spying on us in Oasis, you know. I thought he was carrying a torch for me. I didn’t suspect it was money he was after, though God knows he needed it.”

“You saw him Sunday night, I believe.”

“Yes. Did he tell you? He was waiting up the road when I left the house. He pretended to be worried about me. We went to a little place in Palm Springs, and he
drank too much and tried to persuade me to run away with him.”

“Did he know what Joe was carrying?”

“If he did, he didn’t tell me. Frankly, I thought he was naïve, quite a bit of a fool. A nice fool, even.”

“So did I. But it’s pretty clear that he was on the boat, Tuesday morning. He was seen swimming ashore.”

“No!” She leaned forward across the red-checked tablecloth. “That would seem to make it definite, wouldn’t it?”

“Except for a couple of things that bother me. One is the fact that he was shot himself within an hour or two.”

“With your gun.”

“With my gun. It would be a nice irony if Dowser’s men shot him because they thought he was Joe’s partner. But how would they get hold of my gun? You said Joe took it. Are you sure of that?”

“I saw him. He put it in the club-bag along with his own.”

“There is a way it could have happened,” I said. “If Dalling took my gun when he took the money and brought it ashore with him, then Dowser’s men took it away from him in his apartment. It’s an old gang trick, shooting a man with his own iron.”

“Is it? I wouldn’t know.” Her head was sagging again, under the weight of too much information at once.

“It would be a nice irony,” I said, “but a little too neat for real life. And it doesn’t begin to cover the second thing that bothers me. Why did Dalling go to the trouble of talking your mother into hiring me? It doesn’t make sense. Unless he was really schizo?”

“No. I think I know the answer to that one. One possible answer, anyway.”

“If you can figure it out, I’ll give you a job.”

“I could use one. The point is that Keith was deathly afraid of Joe. He wanted you to come out there and make trouble, the worse the better. If both of you got killed, that would be perfect. I’d be there in his house, unencumbered, complete with dowry. He wouldn’t even have to carry me across the threshold. Does it make sense? He’d be afraid to hire you personally for a job like that—too many things to go wrong.”

The waiter set a steak in front of her, and poured beer for me.

“The job is yours,” I said. “The steak is an advance on your first week’s salary.”

She paid no attention to the food, or to me. “It didn’t work out the way Keith wanted it to. Joe survived, and so did you. What did happen was, Joe thought that the gang was closing in, and he had to run for it. Maybe that’s all Keith counted on. Anyway, he was there at the dock, or on the boat, when Joe got there. And he did his own dirty work after all.”

“Very fine,” I said. “But how did he know where Joe was heading? You didn’t tell him?”

“I didn’t know. He might have followed us down here.”

“He might have. Or he might have had an accomplice.”

“Who?” Her eyes burned black.

“We’ll discuss that later. Eat your steak now, before it gets cold. I’ll be back shortly.” I slid out of my seat.

“Where are you going?”

“I want to catch the doctor before he leaves. Guard my beer, will you?”

“With my life.”

CHAPTER
33
:     
McCutcheon, assisted by the
man in the striped shirt, was sewing up an incision that ran from the base of the dead man’s throat to his lower abdomen. The doctor was wearing rubber gloves, a white coverall, and a hat that gave him an oddly casual appearance. A dead cigar projected from his mouth.

It didn’t turn in my direction till the sewing job was finished. Then McCutcheon straightened, using his forearm to push the hat back on his head. “Rotten sort of task,” he said. “I shouldn’t kick, I guess. He’s fresher than some.”

“Exactly how fresh, can you tell?”

“It’s a hard question, with bodies found in water. Rate of deterioration depends on water temperature and other factors. We happen to know that this laddie’s been in the water between fifty and sixty hours. If I didn’t know that, I’d say he’d been in longer. Decomposition’s rather far advanced for this time of year.” He started to reach for a pocket under the coverall, then remembered his gloved hands: “Light my cigar for me, will you?”

I gave him a light. “What about cause of death?”

He dragged deep, regarding me through a cloud of blue smoke. “It isn’t definite yet. I need some work from the pathology lab before I stick my neck out.” He pointed a thumb at a row of jars the undertaker was labeling on the adjacent table. “Stomach contents, blood, lung tissue, neck structures. You a reporter?”

“Detective. Private, more or less. I’ve been working on this case from the beginning. And I simply want to know if he was drowned.”

“It’s not impossible,” he said around the cigar. “Some of
the indications are consistent with drowning. The lungs are waterlogged, for one thing. The right side of the heart is dilated. Trouble is, those conditions are equally consistent with asphyxia. There are chemical tests we can use on the blood to determine which it is, but I won’t have a report on them before tomorrow.”

“In your opinion, though, he was drowned or smothered?”

“I don’t have an opinion until the facts are in.”

“No signs of violence?”

“None that I can ascertain. I’ll tell you this: if he was drowned, it was an unusual drowning; he must have died as soon as he hit the water.”

The mortician glanced up brightly from his jars. “I’ve seen it happen, doctor. Sometimes they die
before
they strike the water. Shock. Their poor hearts just stop ticking.” He coughed delicately.

McCucheon ignored him. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get out of here.”

“Sorry. But would you call it murder?”

“That depends on a lot of things. Frankly, there’s something a little peculiar about the tissues. If it weren’t a patent impossibility, I’d say he might have frozen to death. Anyway, I’m making a couple of microscopic sections. So there you have three alternatives. See what you can make of them.” He turned back to the table where Tarantine lay.

I drove to the sheriff’s office and found Callahan. He was huddled over a typewriter that looked too small for his hands, filling out an official form of some kind. He looked pleased when I walked in, providing him with an excuse to leave off typing.

“How was George’s?”

“Fine. I left Mrs. Tarantine there.”

“Did her brother-in-law find you all right?”

“Mario? I didn’t see him.”

“He left here a few minutes ago. He wanted to invite her for overnight—you wouldn’t think a dame with her class would want to stay with them guineas, though. Hell, I wanted to hold him in a cell but the Chief says no. We need the Italian vote in the election. Matter of fact, the Chief is one himself, shut my big mouth.”

“If the vote depends on Mario, you’ll probably lose it. I’ve just been talking to McCutcheon.”

“What did he say?”

“A lot of things. Which boil down to three possibilities: drowning, suffocation, freezing.”

“Freezing?”

“That’s what he said. He also said that it was impossible, but I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me if Mario’s boat had a freezer.”

“I doubt it. The big commercial boats have. You don’t see them on a sport boat that size. There’s an ice plant down near the dock, though. Maybe we better take a look at it.”

“Later. Right now I want to see Mario.”

I was frustrated. When we reached George’s Café, the booth I had occupied was empty.

The old Greek waiter hustled across the room. “I’m sorry, sir, I poured out your beer after the lady left. I thought—”

“When did she leave?”

“Five minutes, ten minutes, hard to tell. When her friend came in—”

“The man with the bandaged head?”

“That’s him. He sat down with her for a minute, then they got up and left.” He twisted his head towards Callahan. “Is something the matter, sheriff?”

“Huh. Did he threaten her? Show any kind of a weapon?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that.” The old man’s face had
turned a dull white, like bread dough. “I see any trouble, I call you on the telephone, you know that. They just walked out like anybody else.”

“No argument?”

“Maybe they argued a little. How can I tell? I was busy.”

I drew Callahan to one side.

“Did she have her car?”

He nodded. “They’re probably in it, eh?”

“It looks to me like a general alarm, with road-blocks. The quicker the better.”

But the alarm and the road-blocks were too late. I waited in the sheriff’s office for an hour, and nobody was brought in. By ten o’clock I was ready to try a long shot in the dark.

CHAPTER
34
:     
For two hours I drove down the
white rushing tunnel carved by my headlights in the solid night. At the end of the run the unbuilt town lay dark around me, its corners desolate under the sparse streetlights. When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly.

There was light behind the Venetian blinds of the house that Dalling built, the kind of warm and homey light a lonely man might envy as he passed the house. The same light that murderers worked in when they killed their wives or husbands or lovers or best friends. The house was as quiet as a burial vault.

The light was in the living-room. I mounted the low veranda and looked in between the slats of the blind. Galley lay prone on the tan rug, one arm supporting her head, the other outstretched. The visible side of her face was smeared darkly with something that looked like blood. Her visible eye was closed. There was a heavy automatic gun in her outstretched hand. The too-late feeling that had driven me across the desert went to my knees and loosened them.

The front door was standing open and I went in, letting the screen door close itself behind me. From the hall I heard her breathing and sighing in slow alternation. She sounded like a runner who has run a fast race and fallen and broken his heart.

I was halfway across the room toward the prostrate girl when she became aware of me. She rose on her knees and elbows, her breasts sharp-pointed at the floor, the blunt gun in her right hand pointed at me. Behind the tangled black hair that hung down over her face, her eyes gleamed like an animal’s. I froze.

She straightened gradually, rocking back on her heels and rising to her feet; stood swaying a little with her legs apart, both hands holding the gun up. She tossed her hair back. Her eyes were wide and fixed.

“What happened to you?”

She answered me in a small tired voice: “I don’t know. I must have passed out for a while.”

“Give me the gun.” I took a step toward her. Another step would put me within kicking distance, but my feet stuck to the floor.

“Stand back. Back to where you were.” Her voice had changed. It cracked like an animal trainer’s whip. And her hands were steady as stone.

The soles of my feet came unstuck and slid away from
her. Her eyes were blank and ominous, like the gun’s round eye.

“Where’s Mario?”

She shrugged impatiently. “How should I know?”

“You left the café together.”

Her mouth twisted. “God, I despise you, Archer! You’re a dirty little sees-all hears-all tells-all monkey, aren’t you? What difference does it make to you what people do?”

“I like to pretend I’m God. But I don’t really fool myself. It takes a murderer to believe it about himself. Personally, I’m just another fruit fly. If I don’t care what happens to fruit flies, what is there to care about? And if I don’t care, who will? It makes no difference to the stars.” My talk was postponing the gun’s roaring period, but I couldn’t talk it out of her hands and out the window.

“You’re talking nonsense, chattering like a monkey.” Her foot felt for the armchair behind her, and she sat down carefully, cradling the gun on her knee. “If you must talk, we’ll talk seriously. You sit down, too.”

I squatted uncomfortably on a leatherette hassock by the fireplace. Yellow light fell like an ugly truth from the bulbs in the ceiling fixture. Galley was bleeding from a wide cut on one cheekbone.

I said: “There’s blood on your face.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Blood on your hands, too.”

“Not yours. Not yet.” She smiled her bitter smile. “I want to explain to you why I killed Keith Dalling. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

“You have the gun.”

“I know. I’m going to keep it. I didn’t have the gun when I shot Keith. I had to fight him for it.”