Тэлмидж Пауэлл: The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

“No — unless it’s Baxter Osgood. I don’t think he makes all his money out of that beer garden he owns. I think there was something more between him and Buddy than mere friendship.”

“Business deals?”

“Perhaps.”

“All right,” I said, “I’ll do what I can to help you. But get one thing straight. This is murder. Contrary to what the public thinks, private dicks don’t like to get mixed in murder. If we have to wade through murder the cost is high.”

“I know,” Phyllis Darnell said. “I’ll pay.”

“I’m not worrying. After all, I’ll have the letters, won’t I?”

I ushered her out, showered, and went over to Mac’s garage, where my coupe had been laid up with a ring job. Greasy, limp from the heat, Mac had just finished the job. He wiped his hands on a piece of waste and told me the old crate was ready to roll. I made arrangements to see him on the fifteenth and drove down to the office.

The old man was locking his private office, getting ready to leave for the day. I told him to unlock again, explained the case.

He unlocked the door, walked across his office saying, “A murder case? I don’t like it, Lloyd. I never liked a murder case.”

“I know.”

“The official boys have everything to work on a murder case, labs, organization, everything. A private agency small as ours ain’t equipped for it.”

“I know.”

I opened his desk drawer, took out the .38 police special that always nestled there. I pulled out a corner of my shirt-tail, tucked the gun in my waistband, and tucked the shirt back in over the gun. You’d never know it was there. A box of loads was in the corner of the drawer. I dropped a handful of them in my pocket.

The old man was already on the phone, talking long distance.

I sat down and smoked until he finished.

He pushed back the phone, shadows over his rawboned, gaunt face.

“Ben Aiken’s glad we’re going to cooperate,” Fayette said.

“That’s good. He give you much?”

Henry Fayette nodded, his frown deep and sour. He jabbed at his desk blotter with his letter opener. “This Buddy Tomlinson was quite a guy. Convicted once in Miami on a larceny charge. Charged once with blackmail in Baltimore, Maryland, but got off for lack of evidence. Nabbed once in Brownsville, Texas for being mixed in the marihuana racket, but beat that rap too. Miami had his whole previous record.

“Tomlinson came to St. Petersburg almost a year ago in company with an unknown woman who can’t be located. There’s nothing on the St. Pete blotter against him except a charge of driving intoxicated, for which he was fined.

“He was killed between twelve midnight and one o’clock last night, which means that he lay in his bungalow during that time without being found. The murder gun has not been located, but Aiken has got him an important witness. Guy by the name of Baxter B. Osgood. He the one you met over there?”

I nodded. “Osgood owns a beer garden on the beach. He lives in the bungalow next to Tomlinson’s. An athletic, freckled, blond guy. He could be plenty mean, I guess.”

The old man traced a pattern on the desk blotter with the opener. “Osgood says he was awakened last night about twelve thirty. Says he dreamed a backfire woke him, now realizes it must have been the shot in Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow. Osgood says his bedroom window faces the Tomlinson house, and that from that window he saw a woman leaving Tomlinson’s bungalow. There was a bright moon. You know that moon at the beach, turning night into day. Osgood recognized the woman by the red swagger coat she was wearing, and her hat. The hat had a couple of tall feathers sticking up out of it.”

Fayette flung the opener on the desk; his face was gray. “Dammit, I told you she was an old friend of mine.” Accusation flamed on the old man’s face; then he shook his head as if clearing it. “I’m upset. I can’t blame you. I got no reason to blame you, Lloyd.”

“You mean the woman Baxter Osgood recognized leaving the Tomlinson bungalow is Emagine Buford?”

Fayette nodded. In his quiet, flat voice he said, “Ben Aiken’s jailed her — charged her with first degree murder.”

I whistled softly. It didn’t help the old man’s feelings any.

It was pretty late in the day to do anything much, but Fayette insisted on driving over to St. Pete, to talk to Emagine Buford. We took my coupe. The thing I wanted out of this case was those letters of Phyllis Darnell’s. That’s what we’d get paid for. But the letters were somewhere in the pattern of Buddy Tomlinson’s death, and I knew we were going to have to sift through that pattern to find them. I didn’t like a damn thing about the case.

It’s only half an hour’s drive from Tampa to St. Pete by way of Gaudy Bridge, and it was still daylight when we got in the Sunshine City, though the sun had dropped in the Gulf, leaving behind it vast streamers of crimson and gold in the western sky.

We wasted fifteen minutes talking over the case with the St. Pete men. Then we went back to Emagine Buford’s cell.

She had been crying, and her face was swollen, but even so you could see that she had been a raving beauty in her day. As Allene had said of her stepmother, Emagine was well preserved, slim, with a small, unlined face, and hair dyed to a nice shade just darker than auburn. She didn’t look a day over a young forty.

She managed a smile when the old man entered her cell. “It’s unfortunate that you have to visit me here, Henry.”

Fayette said, “We want to help you. This is Lloyd Carter. Mrs. Buford, Lloyd.”

We each said it was a pleasure, and Emagine sank on the edge of her cot. She looked at the old man with hope and trust. They talked for two minutes. She wasn’t able to tell us a thing more than the county men had. She had been home asleep, she claimed, when Buddy Tomlinson had been murdered. She hadn’t seen him since the night before his death. She spoke of him with a mixed tenderness and hot, new-born hatred.

The old man told her that we’d do our best, and we left her.

That was that, for my money. Outside headquarters, Fayette mopped his face with a big red bandanna and said we might as well eat.

We went to eat.

It was just after 8:30 when I got back to my apartment house in Tampa. The place had no garages; so if you owned a car, you left it at the curb. I locked the coupe, and walked in the apartment house. I was halfway up the flight of stairs when the door opened in the lower hall and my landlady’s nasal drawl came to me, “Is that you, Mr. Carter?”

I bent over the stair railing, looking down the hall. She was standing in her doorway. “There’s a woman in your apartment,” she said. “Said she had to see you. I let her in to wait.”

She slammed her door.

I went on up the stairs, down the hall, and opened my apartment door. Allene Buford stood up when I entered.

She’d turned on the small lamp over near the corner, and the soft light silhouetted her. I remembered her as I’d first seen her in the old man’s office earlier in the day: not plain, but not beautiful either. Now, with the light behind her like that, a light not bright enough to glare at her or to show up the room in which she was standing, she almost made the grade. She was almost beautiful.

“Are you mad at me, Lloyd?”

“For coming here? I don’t think so.”

“I’m glad,” she said in her calm, colorless voice. She took a turn up and down the room. I closed the door and stood watching her. “I couldn’t stand it in the empty hotel room any longer,” she said. “I thought I hated her, Lloyd, but she was so pitiful when the police came and took her.”

She came over closer to me. “Emagine and I never got along, but when she was gone I sat in the room there in the Morro for awhile, remembering the fights we’d had. The things I’d said to her. I couldn’t stand the room any longer. I called one of the St. Petersburg detectives. He didn’t know you, but had a buddy who did. So I got your address and drove over.”