James Chase - The Guilty Are Afraid

“Did you ever see the girl there?”

“I can’t remember her. There are so many girls working there.”

“From what I’ve heard, I was under the impression the place was just a tourists’ junk shop.”

“Well, in a way, I suppose it is, but Hahn has a room at the back where he keeps all his newest and best work. Only his very special customers can get in there.”

“So he does pretty well?”

“Of course, and he deserves to. He really is a great artist.”

Watching her, I could see she meant it. Her face was alight with enthusiasm.

“I must go out and take a look one of these days. Maybe you would come with me, Miss Creedy? I’d like to look at his best stuff. I’m not a buyer, of course, but good pottery interests me.”

There was a pause. I wasn’t sure if she were hesitating or thinking or what.

“Yes,” she said. “The next time I go I’ll let you know. Will you still be at the Adelphi Hotel?”

“That reminds me. How did you know I was staying there when you called last night?”

She laughed.

She really had beautiful teeth. They were just the right size, even and as white as orange pith. And she didn’t just make a hole in her face the way some girls do when they laugh. Her laugh sent a little prickle up my spine. This girl was certainly getting me worked up. I hadn’t felt this way since my first serious date, fifteen-odd years back into the past.

“I asked Mr. Hammerschult. You must have met him. He knows absolutely everything. I’ve never asked him a thing that he couldn’t answer.”

“That had me a little foxed. I wondered how you knew. To return to the Adelphi: I won’t be there. They’ve asked me to leave. The police have been in and out of my room so often, the management are afraid someone will think there’s a continuous raid on. I’ve got to find a place before tonight.”

“That won’t be easy. It’s right in the season.”

“Well, I’ll have to look.”

I didn’t much like the idea. Usually Jack found our rooms. He had a natural talent for knowing the hotel that had a vacancy. I would call on ten hotels and be told there wasn’t a room to be had. He would pick one and we’d move in straight away.

“You wouldn’t know of any little place that isn’t expensive?” I said, then remembered who I was talking to and laughed. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. That’s not quite in your line, is it?”

“How long are you planning to stay?”

“Until this case is cleared up. It could be cleared up in a week or it may take a month. I don’t know.”

“Could you look after yourself?”

“Why, sure. You don’t imagine I go in for staff back home, do you? Have you something then?”

“It may not be what you want. I have a little bungalow out at Arrow Bay. I had to take it on a two-year lease. I don’t ever go there now. The lease has still a year to run. You could have it if you like.”

I stared at her.

“No kidding?”

“If you want it, you can have it. It’s furnished and there’s everything there. I haven’t been out to look at it for a month or so, but last time I went it was all right. All you need do is to pay the light bills. Everything else is taken care of.”

“That’s pretty nice of you, Miss Creedy.” I was knocked back on my mental heels. “I’ll take it like a shot.”

“If you’ve nothing better to do, we could go out there tonight after dinner. I have a dinner date, but I’ll be free after ten. I’ll have the water and light turned on between now and then, and I’ll bring the key with me.”

“Honest . . . you embarrass me, Miss Creedy. Such service for a stranger. Look, I don’t want to trouble you . . .”

“It’s no trouble.”

I wished I could have got a glimpse of her eyes behind those big goggles. I had a sudden idea I would like to have seen the expression in them. There was something in her voice that told me I was missing something by not seeing her eyes.

She looked at her watch.

“I must go. I’m having lunch with Daddy. He hates to be kept waiting.”

“Better not tell him you’re providing me with a home,” I said, getting to my feet. I watched her slip a short-sleeved dress over her swimsuit. “I have an idea I’m not exactly his favourite man. He might discourage you.”

“I never tell Daddy anything,” she said. “Would you meet me outside the Musketeer Club at ten: then we’ll go on to the bungalow.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Then good-bye for now.”

There was that small smile again that had me practically rolling on my back with my hands and feet in the air. She moved away across the sand and I stood there looking after her.

I thought I had got long, long past the stage of being excited over a girl, but watching the way she moved, the sway of her hips and the way she held her head really did things to me.

II

After I had had a snack lunch, I returned to my hotel and packed my suitcases. I got Joe, the bellhop, to arrange for Sheppey’s things to be sent to Sheppey’s wife. I then wrote her a brief note and included a cheque for a couple of hundred bucks, stressing that this amount would come off the amount I would finally pay her.

By then, it was time for me to attend the inquest. I had my things taken to the Buick and I settled the account. Brewer again apologized for needing my room, but I told him I’d got something else and he needn’t bother his head about me.

I went down to Greaves’s office, where I found him polishing his shoes with a duster.

“You coming to the inquest?” I asked.

“I’ve been told to.” He tossed the duster back in his desk drawer, adjusted his tie and reached for his hat.

“You going to give me a ride down or do I take a bus?”

“Sure, come on.”

On the drive down to the Coroner’s court, I asked him if he had been along to look at Thelma Cousins’ body.

“I wasn’t asked,” he said. “Rankin hasn’t any time for me. Brewer saw her: that’s a laugh, isn’t it? He wouldn’t be able to identify his own mother if they showed her to him on a slab. Not that it would be easy to identify the girl. That hat and the sun goggles she wore made her just any woman in a dark wig.”

I didn’t tell him that he had been wrong about the wig. He wasn’t the type to be told he could be wrong. There were only nine people attending the court. Five of them were the obvious timewasters you always see at inquests, but the other four attracted my attention.

One of them was a girl with rimless glasses with the hard, poker face of an efficient secretary. She was smartly dressed in a grey linen frock set off with a white collar and cuffs. She sat at the back of the court and took down the whole proceedings in rapid shorthand. Then there was a youngish man in a pearl-grey, loose-fitting suit. He had a lot of blond hair that had been crimped in places by a curling iron. Sunglasses completely obscured his eyes.

He sat on one side of the court and looked around as if he were something pretty intellectual. Every now and then he yawned so prodigiously that I thought he would dislocate his jaws. The other two who caught my eye were a couple of glossy, smooth, well-fed men, immaculately dressed, who sat facing the Coroner. I noticed he nodded to them when he came in and again when he finally went out.

The Coroner seemed pretty bored with the whole proceedings. He hurried me through my evidence, listened with a faraway stare in his eyes to Brewer’s stammering statement, didn’t call Greaves and was pretty curt with the attendant of the bathing station. It wasn’t until Rankin got up to say the police were still making inquiries and he would like a week’s adjournment that the Coroner became remotely human. He said hurriedly that he would grant an adjournment, then whisked himself out of sight through a doorway behind his chair.