Бретт Холлидей - Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974

“Okay. I parked next to his car and went inside, thinking maybe I’d see something hot going on — you know me, I dig sex, man — or at least get a cup of coffee. At any rate, I could keep a better eye on the fuzz from inside, so in I go. And you won’t believe this, but when I get in there, I hear the fuzz and the broad in the rear room arguing so loud they do not even realize I am arrived.

“Now, from all I can hear, he is the bird that sold the information concerning the bank to the Caser in the first place — I told you wouldn’t believe it — and then, after thinking it over and seeing how easy it was, why, he deciced to do the job himself. He is trying to convince the waitress to blow town with him, but she don’t want no part of it. Stealing is against the Commandments, or something, she says. She was trying to persuade him to put the money back when I decided to get the hell out before they seen me.”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Big Lefty mused aloud. Then: “Lucky, turn this wreck around. We’re going back and get that crooked flatfoot.”

“What for?” Little Manuel said innocently.

“What for, you say? Why, to take his ill-gotten gains away from him, that’s what for!”

“No need for that,” the little libertine announced casually. “Weak as I be and goddam fool that I am, I already got the money.”

“You what?”

“That’s what I said, fester-head. While the bluesuit was still in the back trying to get the dame to leave the straight and narrow, I picked the lock on the trunk of his prowl car. Even now the swag is in the rear of this very wagon under the tarp. There’s a whole seabag crammed full of the beautiful, germ-ridden stuff, and it’s just waiting to be counted.”

Once again Big Lefty and I exchanged surprised looks. Then, beaming now, Big Lefty said: “Manuel, you sweet little bastard, I take everything back. You ain’t weak and you ain’t no goddam fool. You are a fine broth of a man, and I’ll kill the goddam fool as says different.”

“My sentiments, exactly,” I put in.

“Why, thank you, boys,” Little Manuel said happily. “You are both too, too generous with my well-deserved praise.”

There turned out to be a little better than fifty-three grand in the seabag, and for a little extra icing on the cake, the next day we split twenty thousand more that Little Manuel had gleefully collected from the syndicate for doing in Dixie Dan Shivers and the Dummy. I was so happy that I treated the little feloneer to three days of disportation at Madam Chang’s and almost wore my own self out during the process. But what a wonderful, tired feeling it was.

Inside that gloomy old castle of torture, a helpless man had been done to death. I knew who had done it. But the proof?...

The widow was beside him. She was Swedish and better than anything he’d seen five hours before in the snow in Stockholm.

“The next right, at the cemetery,” Ewa Crop said. “But I don’t want to go there.”

Scape smiled. He was having a good time. He’d arrived in Palma two hours before and he’d picked up the circus vehicle, the SEAT 600, had found and gathered up the widow and the witnesses.

“Mrs. Crop. If you want your husband’s insurance money, I suggest you cooperate. It shouldn’t take long.”

“And then you’ll delay paying because of some other reason. My husband died November 28th, almost one year ago. I’m very tempted to employ an American attorney to make you pay your debts.”

“Not my debts. I’m a business analyst. It was a big policy. I happen to be a friend of the chief of investigations of the company. I was on business in Stockholm and knowing I was coming over, he asked me to drop in and make a quick decision.”

“About what, Mister Scape?”

“Essentially about you. Bluntly, is there any chance you murdered your husband and any hope we might prove it? The law says you can’t profit from a murder. If I think you did it and there’s a chance to get you, then the company has its excuse to go to war.”

They wound around the one and a half lane road, by fields of olive trees that were twisted and gnarled and grotesque, like walking deformed madmen quietly stalking over the earth; and there were the frail little almond trees and everywhere there were rocks.

“Is that the cemetery?” Scape asked, suddenly rounding one more turn and seeing the walled crowded little village of the dead. There were tiny little houses and as they got nearer Scape could see the walls were made of sealed drawers of the dead. No one answered.

“Must be old, huh?” Scape asked. He liked Europe. He liked the age, the history, the time span.

“No. It’s not very old. It’s about late 18th Century,” Ewa Crop replied.

Scape pulled over to the side, making the right turn and then stopping. It was hot, deliciously, uncomfortably hot after the snow and ice of Sweden.

“They have an older cemetery?”

“No, not that I know. I don’t think they do.”

“But they’ve been inhabited for at least a couple thousand years.”

“Yes, but I believe they don’t stay buried. They bury you and then after decomposition, if you don’t pay annual fees, you are reburied or maybe just discarded.”

“No, Ewa,” the young man in the back seat said. His name was Michael Randolf-Wilson, an Englishman. “They have their religion. They can’t be dug up or thrown away. They have to be in sacred or consecrated soil, don’t they?”

“They don’t,” his sister Stephanie said. The brother and sister were the ones who’d found Stanley Crop’s body. “Because none of them or almost none of them are really in the ground. They’re above it.”

“Interesting question. Living here all this time and we don’t know the answer,” Randolf-Wilson said. “We’ll have to ask about it, Scape.”

“Do that. Just along this road,” Scape asked, fiddling with the mushy gear box to probe for first.

“Yes, all the way to the very end,” Ewa Crop said. “Mister Scape, what you were saying before. My husband’s death was investigated by the local authorities. I don’t know what sort of image you may have of them, but they are fully professional. They are as modem as Scotland Yard or your F.B.I. I, obviously, was a suspect and you see that I was not arrested.”

Scape shrugged. “I don’t question their competence. I know they’re good, but nobody’s perfect. I’ve been asked to clear payment or not. Terms of policy state that beneficiary must cooperate in any investigation. Agreed that the company would like to get out of paying you, you might as well go through this with me and get it over with.”

“But why do we have to go out to the house?” the girl in the back seat, Stephanie Randolf-Wilson, asked.

“I understand it’s a ghost story. Haunted house. Everybody scared to death of the place. Police sort of threw the case up and said maybe the ghosts killed him.”

“No they didn’t. Maybe the locals said that,” Randolf-Wilson said. “The police are convinced that somehow a prowler must have done it or maybe some drinking buddy.”

“It’s a lousy road. Always this hot?” Scape asked. The little car was spinning up a cloud of dust. The unpaved road was bone dry.

“No. We have seasons.”

“It’s a nice island. Long way to go?”

“Another five minutes, Mister Scape.”

“Okay Let’s review this. What I know is from a telephone call and the company’s file. Correct me if I’m very wrong. And my apologies if I get offensive’ Crop was poor little rich boy, ne’er-do-well from a family that was degenerating. He lived in the crumbling family mansion and had enough money to keep him in cheap booze. He was pugnacious, a sloppy little drunk. His family, fallen but still living on earlier generations’ money, didn’t like one of their own in the drunk tank every other night and his not upholding their fancies of family name and honor. They got together and made the standard deal. Crop would get a monthly stipend, hopefully to drink himself to death, if he’d get out of the States and stay out. If they didn’t have his agreement they threatened to throw him out.