Эд Макбейн - Beauty and the Beast

“I don’t want to hear about Dale,” Susan said.

“I can assure you she’s a responsible adult,” I said, calmly again, “who will be taking excellent care of Joanna for the remaining length of their stay in Mexico.”

“Where they fertilize their crops with human excrement !” Susan shouted.

“Dale is not a farmer,” I said.

“If anything happens to my daughter—”

“Our daughter,” I suggested.

“A fine father you are,” Susan said, “leaving her alone with a stranger—”

“Dale isn’t a stranger.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that ,” Susan said.

“Susan,” I said, my voice rising, “I called to tell you that I’m home and Joanna is still in Mexico. She’ll be back this Saturday, and that’s all I have to say to you.”

“That’s not all Eliot will have to say to you .”

“I welcome a call from that mealymouthed shit,” I said, and hung up, trembling.

There are people in Calusa who are quick to remind anyone that the blacks here have it much better than the blacks living in big cities like New York and Detroit. They will point out with pride that many of the houses in New Town are in the forty-to fifty-thousand-dollar price range, the equivalent of what a lower-middle-class white might own in any big-city suburb. They do not notice, perhaps, that at Count Basie’s recent personal appearance at the Helen Gottlieb Memorial Auditorium, a hall that seats two thousand people, there were only eight blacks in the audience. I notice such things. So does my partner Frank.

I had not slept much the night before in Puerto Vallarta; Bloom’s call, the knowledge that I would have to begin coping with a travel agent in the morning, and the mariachi band blasting till 2:00 A.M. had combined to render me limp by the time Sam dropped me off at the airport. Neither had the two hours I’d spent on the ground in Houston, or the subsequent bad news from Bloom, or the unsatisfying conversation I’d had with Susan helped much to lift my spirits. As I started up the walk to Sally Owen’s house, three doors up from the Harper house, I was feeling an odd blend of irritability and lightheadedness, rather like what a pugnacious drunk might feel while picking an argument with a benign bartender and simultaneously giggling at his own aggressiveness.

The house was a white clapboard building surrounded by a white picket fence. The police officer standing at the door was also white. Big, burly man wearing a blue uniform, a .357 Magnum holstered at his waist, sweat-stained armpits, fat red face sprinkled with freckles, red hair showing at the sideburns and tufting onto his forehead from under his peaked cap. He watched me suspiciously as I came up the front walk. A Crime Scene sign was tacked to the front door, and a huge padlock hung from a hasp undoubtedly fastened to the door and frame by the police.

“Off limits, buddy,” the cop said, waving me off with his stick.

“I’m Matthew Hope,” I said. “Detective Bloom promised he’d—”

“Oh, yeah, right,” the cop said. “You want to look the place over, right?”

“Right.”

“You from the State’s Attorney’s Office?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then what?”

I didn’t feel like presenting credentials; I sidestepped the question. “Bloom called, didn’t he?”

“Radioed it to the motor patrolman on the beat.”

“Then it’s okay to go in,” I said.

“Sure,” the cop said, and fished a key from his pocket and unlocked the padlock. “Better not touch anything, though.”

I did not bother mentioning that Bloom had told me the police were already finished here, inside and out. For some odd reason, the man’s presence rankled, perhaps because Bloom had said there were redneck law-enforcement officers out there who would as soon shoot a black man dead as give him the right time of day.

I felt the presence of death in that house the moment I stepped through the front door. Something terrible had happened here; the sense of it hung on the pale afternoon light that filtered into the hallway through a small arched window at the far end of it. There was a standing grandfather’s clock in the entry hall, but it had stopped ticking. There was unopened mail on the entry-hall floor, dropped through the door slot by a letter carrier making his appointed rounds come snow, come sleet, come hail — come murder. Through the open kitchen doorway, I could see chalk outlines on the linoleum floor covering. The unmistakable outline of a body. A smaller outline that was clearly meant to represent a hammer, some three feet from the other outline and in a red chalk as opposed to the white that had outlined Sally Owen’s body as she lay in death.

I went into the kitchen, stepping carefully around both outlines.

I tried to visualize George Harper entering this house, surprising Sally as she stood at the kitchen sink, raising the hammer above his head, bringing it down repeatedly on her skull, crushing her skull, and then dropping the hammer before he fled into the night. Why? I wondered. Why kill her? Why leave behind the murder weapon with his initials burned into it and his fingerprints all over it? People panic , Bloom had told me. Even the pros panic . Harper wasn’t a pro, although according to the police he was well on the way to becoming one, two murders in as many weeks, practice makes perfect. And apparently he had panicked twice , leaving behind a gasoline can with his prints on it the first time around, and then a similarly incriminating hammer after the commission of the second murder. Why? I wondered. Had it been panic or sheer stupidity? Was the man careless? Reckless? Suicidal? All three of the above? None of the above?

I moved out of the kitchen and into the entry hall again.

The mail, a dozen envelopes or so, still lay on the floor, touched by a slanting beam of sunlight swimming with dust motes. I moved down the hallway and into a small living room on the left. A sofa and two easy chairs. A green carpet. The drapes open to let in more sunlight than had been in the hallway, the same silent dust motes. Over the sofa, a framed oil painting of a pair of Scottish terriers like the ones in the Black & White whiskey ads, heads cocked, quizzical looks on their alert little faces. I leaned over the sofa and looked for a signature. None. The painting looked like the sort of badly executed representational art one could buy for five dollars or so at any of Calusa’s street fairs during the months of March and April, when the tourists were thickest and the suckers were born one to the minute. Had Sally Owen been an art lover with poor taste? An animal lover who favored dogs? An animal hater who preferred even a lousy representational painting to the real live objects scurrying underfoot and shitting around the house? Or was she a Scotch drinker, and did the painting of the two adorable mutts, one white, one black, serve to remind her that Happy Hour came to Calusa at four-thirty each and every afternoon, rain or shine?

The bedroom was just across the hall.

An unmade water bed. At the foot of the bed, a mattress covered with a rumpled sheet. On the walls, more paintings, undoubtedly by the same untalented artist in the same distinctive style. All of them unsigned. Some of them unframed. Canvases varying in size from what appeared to be three-foot squares to several smaller and several larger rectangles, all of them oils. The subject matter was as banal as the style. Hanging over the water bed was an unframed canvas I estimated to be some four feet wide by six feet long and depicting, of all things, a salt shaker and a pepper shaker standing side by side and magnified a hundred times life-size. To the left of the window on the wall adjacent to the bed was a smaller painting of a pair of chess pieces, one white, one black, intended as the king and queen, if the badly executed crowns were any clue. To the right of the window was another masterpiece by the same artist, this one showing a pair of penguins on an ice floe. On the wall opposite the water bed was another painting executed in the same larger-than-life style as the salt and pepper shakers, this one depicting a pair of dice standing side by side and blown up to some three feet in height. Several unframed canvases were leaning against the wall just inside the entrance door. The top one showed a pair of birds, one presumably a crow, the other a dove. The one under that was a badly rendered painting of a pair of zebras. Over the dresser on that same wall, there was a mirror in a black frame and — just alongside it — a framed and glass-covered copy of the front page of the Calusa Herald-Tribune , the bold headline announcing BLACK BUSINESSMAN SLAIN. I leaned over the dresser and read the story under the headline.