Тэлмидж Пауэлл: The Girl’s Number Doesn’t Answer

Price unlocked the door and clicked a switch, and long fluorescent lights went on overhead. The newspaper morgue smelled warmly and mustily of newsprint and paste.

Price rolled open drawers and carried a small stack of clippings in manila envelopes and photographs to a table. I sat down and he parked his skinny rump against the edge of a nearby table.

He lighted a cigarette, folded his thin, pale arms, and stood chewing the end of the fag as he smoked.

“This should be good,” he said. “This appeals to the perverted sense of humor you seem to pick up around a newspaper office. Wish I could go every step with you, Ed, until you bust a gut with frustration. Man ought to learn something about the meaning of life, watching a bull beat his brains out charging a wall of nothingness.”

The file on the murder had started lustily and grown fatter as each edition came off the presses. I waded through the gory pictures and details. Most of it I knew. Like all authentic horror, the story was too simple and stark to need much embellishment for effect.

Photographic coverage had been extensive. Price had an innate sense of taste under his cynicism which had kept him from running some of the worst of the pictures.

From a particularly gruesome group, I got one fresh detail. At the time of death, Ichiro, the thirty-year-old son, had been wearing Bermuda shorts, sport shirt, and barefoot sandals. Both parents had been fully clothed in street wear. The garb of the parents jibed with a small detail in one of the stories, to the effect that Mr. and Mrs. Yamashita had had a restaurant reservation for dinner that night but had canceled it.

I added one more small detail. Ichiro had a private apartment in town. My mental camera dollied to give me a glimpse of the afternoon of violence from a new angle. Ichiro choosing the cottage for some purpose of his own, believing he would have privacy until after dinnertime. The parents changing their minds, returning to the cottage, and being murdered for the very simple reason that they showed up at an inopportune moment.

I passed on to the Victor Cameron file. It was thin. There was a shot of him as reporters had broken the news to him the day of his partner’s death.

The photo showed Cameron as a big, gray, tired-looking man. There was some semblance of military bearing and discipline in his shoulders and face, but it was a quality that had almost faded from existence.

I compared the recent shot with one taken over ten years ago when he’d come to Tampa and the import enterprise had been written up in the Sunday business section.

He had changed considerably. Ten years ago even a camera could catch his air of command. He’d looked brisk, efficient, intolerant, and superior. I wondered if in the intolerance and superiority there had been the seeds of inner anxiety and uncertainty, that had grown to bring the change in him.

The spread gave some accounting of his background. He came from an old and well-known New England family. A colonel, he had filled a desk post in Washington during the war. Sent to Japan during the Occupation, he had left his wife and small daughter in the United States. He had returned to the States after the accidental death of his wife. He had brought his daughter to Florida to live, eventually entering the import business with Yamashita.

I assumed that Cameron was valuable to Yamashita as a partner, being an American who also possessed the fine qualification of having good connections in Japan.

Two points itched me. Why Cameron had stayed such a long time in the Orient without his family, and the kind of accident that had killed his wife. The explanations were probably perfectly innocent, but anything that veers from the norm bothers me.

I drove a rented car out to the Cameron address. It was on Davis Islands, the plush development pumped from the bottom of the bay during the boom of the 1920’s.

Across the bridge linking Davis Islands to the mainland boulevard, I cruised down a wide, beautiful street lined with tall royal palms. Behind the neat lawns, the houses were big, Spanish, heavy with wealth.

I came abreast of a pair of white stone pillars hugging a driveway and linked overhead by filigreed ironwork. The number 76 was on one of the pillars, in black block form. I turned into the drive.

A screen of flowering shrubs and Australian pines hid the house until I rounded a bend in the driveway.

I parked the rented heap and got out.

A single light glowed softly in the fore part of the house. I mounted the pillared veranda and pressed the door buzzer.

I tried a second and third time. No one answered. I walked to the edge of the veranda. The moonlit night was quiet. From somewhere back of the house came the sudden sound of a loud splash.

I dropped from the veranda and walked around the side of the house. The short-clipped grass was so luxuriant it was like tiny springs under my feet, a rich green carpet for the shrubs and trimmed hedges of the landscaping.

Rounding the rear corner of the house, I saw moonlight glinting on water. The pool was large enough to have done credit to a small-town country club. It was in pale tile, with a diving board and tower at my end.

The wake of ripples reached the far end of the pool, reversed direction and came back. The strokes of the swimmer were slow, easy, graceful. She came out of the water dripping and gleaming in the moonlight. She stood on the edge of the pool, small, perfectly made, vibrant as a kitten. She took off her bathing cap, taloned her fingers, and scratched her boyish-cut black hair into a careless jumble.

She saw me when she started from the pool’s edge toward the house. She stopped, her manner showing no fright.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “I was looking for Mr. Cameron. I heard your last dive and came around to see if maybe it was him.”

“You might try the doorbell,” she said. She had a lazy, soft voice with boredom and insolence resting in its depths.

“I did. Three times.”

She walked toward me with her careless, abandoned stride. She stopped about four feet away, tilted her head, and studied me. “I’m Rachie Cameron,” she said. “Who are you, ugly man?”

“The name is Ed Rivers,” I said. “When will Mr. Cameron be home?”

“He’s inside now. He said he was going to shower and retire early. You just didn’t give him time to get to the door, that’s all.”

She let her hips swing as she walked ahead of me toward the house. Her one-piece white bathing suit was adequate, even prim, but she managed to transform its lines to something less than bikini.

We crossed a flagstone patio decorated with beach chairs, outdoor grill, white, wrought-iron table and chairs.

She opened twin glass doors, turned on a soft overhead light. We were in a long playroom. She went to the bar at the farther end. “Drink?”

“A beer if you have it.”

She laughed. “Beer, of course. I should have known, looking at you. I’ll have the same.”

She went behind the bar, came across the room with two beers in tall, cone-shaped glasses.

She offered one of the glasses. She didn’t let it go right away, and we both stood holding it for a second.

“What kind of business are you in, ugly man?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“Really?” She seemed interested, but not in my occupation.

She stepped back. The bored, vacant look was gone from her dark eyes for a moment. “Good old plebeian beer,” she said. “Here’s to big, ugly men who drink beer.”

She took a long pull at the beer, set the glass on a table, and reached for a beach robe lying on a rattan chair. She slipped the robe over her shoulders and put her feet in Oriental sandals that were on the floor near the chair.