Say It with Murder Read online

  “I was trying to get up enough nerve to talk to you. Sit down, Bill. Here, beside me. Please.”

  He sat next to her on the grassy dune behind the big ugly house. She was trembling slightly, and she pulled the stole tighter about her shoulders. Carmody said: “I suppose you want me to tell you about Paul.”

  “You’re the only one who can.”

  “There’s nothing you have to know about this. It’s all been a mistake, a foolish grievance that’s best forgotten.”

  “It was something to do with the war, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “What kind of a man is Paul?” she asked.

  “You’re his wife. Don’t you know?” Then he saw the way her mouth stiffened and he said: “I’m sorry. That was thoughtless of me.”

  “But I don’t know,” she said. “He doesn’t love me, you see.”

  Carmody was embarrassed. “Look, let me walk you home.”

  “I don’t want to go home. I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Paul is so strange. How old are you, Bill?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “You’re just a boy. I’m ten years older.”

  “Is it important?”

  “It used to worry me. Growing older, I mean. I wanted to be in love so much. And nobody ever came along who—who seemed right. Not until Paul. I suppose I’m a foolish, stupid woman. I thought he loved me, but he just wants me because of the hotel. Because of the money. When I finally let him have it all, when he gets everything he can, he’ll leave me.”

  “Why are you afraid of him?”

  “I don’t know. Ever since he heard you were in town, he’s been acting oddly. Not himself at all. He used to be very certain, very sure of where he was going. I admired it in him, and needed some of it for myself.” She laughed, and the sound of it was like broken ice against the thin whine of the morning wind. “This is like a confessional, I suppose. It’s because I don’t know you, and yet I feel I do know you, because of the music you play at the Beachcomber. It’s like two strangers sitting on a park bench, telling each other their innermost secrets because each one feels he will never see the other again, so it doesn’t matter what he says. Have you a cigarette?”

  Carmody lit one for her. Long streamers of orange and coral light were shooting up over the eastern horizon, touching the water with pale fingers, setting fire to a long line of fleecy, puffy cumulus clouds low over the ocean to the south.

  “Won’t you tell me about Paul? Why is he so afraid of you? You look like a nice young man.” She laughed self-consciously. “That sounds so awkward. But you know what I mean. You don’t look as if you want to hurt anybody.”

  Carmody didn’t say anything.

  “Was Paul a coward?” she asked. “Is that it?”

  “Please, Irene.”

  “Was he?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not going to tell you any of it.”

  She said calmly: “Sometimes I get the feeling that he’s thinking of killing me. I can see it in his eyes, the way he looks at me. As if he wants to get rid of me so he can have the hotel right away, without the boredom and wasted time of living with me.”

  “Are you serious?” Carmody asked.

  “Oh, yes. I know he hates me.”

  “Then why do you go on with it? Living with him, I mean.”

  “I love him,” she said simply. “Please don’t do anything to hurt him. That’s what I really stayed here for. To ask you to please don’t hurt Paul, because I love him.”

  Carmody got to his feet. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

  “I’ll walk alone. Thank you, just the same.”

  He knew that she meant it from the firmness of her voice, and he did not insist on accompanying her. He watched her small figure move down the beach in the dawn light, her shoulders straight, her back rigid, her head high. She did not look back.

  2

  HE LET the music come out of him in golden notes, a glittering spray of metal against dark velvet, the requiem for a dead man. His fingers found the piano keys of their own will, independent of that part of him that thought; he didn’t want to think any more. Thinking was bad. It made you stay here in this little dive on a little beach, playing a warped box for sad and tired people who were sick under their healthy coats of summer tan.

  A single spot had been rigged against the salt-gray beam over the platform where the piano stood, and the rest of the Beachcomber Bar lay in dark shadow. While he played he could hear the rumble of the surf on the Long Island beach in the three o’clock blackness outside that had made him come in here and play for people who listened and drank and looked at him with eyes that didn’t see him.

  Harry Corio, the boss, came over and put a drink on top of the piano and said: “You play good, Billy-o. Real good. Different.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Wish I could pay you enough for that playing, Billy-o.”

  “I don’t need much money. I play because I like it,” he said. “Go away, Harry.”

  “You’re a real musician. I mean, it’s mostly your own music you play, huh?”

  “My own music,” he said, nodding, watching his hands move on the keyboard, hearing and seeing the golden music that came out of him like magic. “I’m a little drunk, Harry.”

  “Go home, then.”

  Harry Corio walked away, moving ponderously among the dim tables and the tired tanned people who sat there. Carmody kept on playing, weaving a wall out of the music that kept him from the empty beach and the new night and—that woman. He thought, you’re so damned smart, Bill Carmody, you must have been crazy. Getting mixed up with Robbie and Sam on this thing with Paul Sloade. One way or the other, you’re caught in the middle and they’re going to bounce you like a ball, back and forth, until you burst open and splash all your little musical guts into the dark, dark water out there.

  Through the windows beyond the warped old piano he could see the black inlet and the yacht basin and the white graceful shapes of the yachts at their moorings and the lights and colored streamers of the very fancy and expensive Crescent Beach Inn. Carmody signaled the bartender for a drink, and as he sipped it a man got up from one of the back tables and stood beside him at Harry’s piano. He wore a white summer jacket and dark slacks and a black bowtie. There was silver in his sleek thick hair and interest in his lean face as he bent over toward Carmody.

  “I know you,” the man said. “I’ve been trying to remember where I heard music like that before. You wrote Holiday for Silver Chords. You’re Bill Carmody.”

  “It’s nice to be remembered,” Carmody said.

  “I thought you had been killed.”

  “Not killed. Just a prisoner. Two years, five months.”

  “You’re playing a little differently than you used to.”

  “Everything is different,” Carmody said.

  “But it’s good. I’d like to hear your scores. I’m Markham Dunning.”

  Carmody recognized the name. He looked up at the man’s lean face, at the sureness of success and money behind him. It always shows, he thought.

  “I didn’t think anybody knew about me, Mr. Dunning.”

  The man smiled politely. “Musicals are my business. Will you send me your scores?”

  “Sure. And you know what can be done with them.”

  “Don’t belittle yourself. You have talent, Bill.”

  Carmody laughed. “Where are you staying?”

  “At the Crescent Inn, of course. And you?”

  “I have a shack up the beach.”

  “How long has it been since your return from Korea?”

  “Not long enough,” Carmody said.

  “Are you working at anything in particular?”

  “Just this.”

  Dunning became very definite. “Come see me tomorrow. I mean it. We can work something out. Come for lunch.”

  “Make it earlier, Mr. Dunning. I won’t be here for lunch. I’m leaving town in the morning.” />
  “Will you see me before you go, though?”

  “I’ll try.”

  When Dunning was gone, Harry came back, bellying from among the dark tables. The fat man’s face was smug. “Hey, Billy-o, you make a score with the big impresario?”

  Carmody said: “He wants to hear my music.”

  “I figured. So I call him up from over with the yachts and the summer minks and tell him, hey, Mr. Dunning, you want to hear something for next season’s musicals, you come over here and listen to my boy Billy-o. All right, boy?”

  “Thanks, Harry. He maybe can do me some good.” Carmody got up suddenly and closed the piano. The men and women at the tables were like sleepwalkers, he thought, all of them with the Bomb hidden away in the backs of their heads, pretending it wasn’t there, trying to make movement a substitute for uncertain living before the living ended. Carmody felt sorry for them all.

  The southeast breeze had freshened and felt cool and wet on his face when he stepped down the sand-gritted wooden boards to the beach. The music had died in him, gone flat and sour like the stale taste of yesterday’s beer. Carmody walked down to the water’s edge and then turned to the right, away from the inlet and the moored yachts, and followed the line of the crashing breakers that flung salt spray with the wind on his face. Two years and five months in a North Korean prison-of-war camp, he thought, where you met Robbie Ravelle and Sam Link and Lucas Deegan, and now it was over, suddenly and irrevocably, and it was time to stop thinking about it and remembering how it was then. It was time to look to the future. But the ghosts of the past had hands on your shoulders, telling you to look back, look back, and in the whispers of the ghosts there was the old acid taste of hatred and grief and remembering of Lucas Deegan and everything he had taught you.

  He didn’t know when he decided that the hatred and the burning urge for revenge that was like a fire in your belly ebbed away, to leave him worried and uncertain about the thing with Paul Sloade.

  Back there in the cold and incredible filth and brutality of the prison camp, everything was simple and elemental, and it was easy to know what had to be done. You had a lot of time to think and to talk and you found Major Lucas Deegan a man who understood. You spilled everything to Lucas Deegan because he was your friend, because he understood you and listened with his calm, bony face pinched with cold and hunger, and looked at you with his eyes deep-sunken by lung sickness but clear as the Texas homeland he came from, saying, “Bill, it’s all in your head, you weren’t responsible for that man getting killed, you shouldn’t have run away from it. Nobody can ever run far enough and fast enough to get away from a thing like that.”

  “Well, I didn’t know any better,” you had said. “All I wanted was to play my music, and Monte gave me the job. I didn’t know about the square with all the play-money until Monte and me and another guy who was Monte’s bouncer got in the car to take him home safely. The only thing, sir, was that Monte Bachore just wanted the money and when the damned fool put up a squawk in the car, Monte hit him and we had to dump him because he was dead. I was scared, Major, I tell you. I was never so scared.”

  “You were just a kid.”

  “A scared rabbit. Monte put it to me straight. I wasn’t to talk. It was an accident, anyway. If the square hadn’t put up a fight, nothing bad would have happened.”

  “Monte was the one who actually hit him?”

  You nodded, looking at the Chinese guards walking back and forth in the frozen filthy snow outside the barbed wire. “Monte killed him, but I was with him, I was driving the car.”

  “Nobody ever went to the police?”

  “The police? Hell, no. I lit out and enlisted for a place to hide and here I am, sir. And I’m still scared. Scared of Monte and how I can burn for what he did…”

  Carmody walked along the beach, remembering how one thing led to another, like the slow cycle of the seasons and the endless waiting in the prison camp, the way the men died and went insane, the way everything ended in the limbo of frozen hills and brutality and hopelessness and degeneration of mind and body. And Lucas Deegan, squeezing it out of you about the New England mill town and the job at the machines while the music kept bursting inside of you until you couldn’t stand it any more and you went to New York and to Monte Bachore and played in the bar of his gambling casino over in Jersey, getting the music out that was bottled up inside you, dancing in your chest and banging around in your head. Just a kid, a kid with golden notes that spilled over and around you, aching to come out. And how it all ended, the day they took Major Deegan away and strapped him to the post and beat him and beat him, in the icy prison yard, screaming for him to confess what he knew about germ warfare, screaming that they knew it was true because one of the other prisoners had told them.

  The word got around. It never missed. Paul Sloade had told them. He wanted favors, better food, the men said; he was a pro-Red, he listened to the lectures all were forced to attend and he wanted a little crumb of comfort denied to the others so he made up the story about Major Deegan and germ warfare, invented it out of whole cloth.

  You didn’t believe it, though. You didn’t think anybody could sink low enough to put Lucas Deegan on a spot like that with their Red jailers. And when Robbie Ravelle and Sam Link and the others lured Paul Sloade into the latrine and were beating him to death, you jumped in to break it up, not to beat him but to stop them all from killing him. The only trouble was that the guards came in the middle of the melee and collared you all, and Paul Sloade thought you were one of them and out of his bleeding face came words that accused you and Sam Link and Robbie, too; all of you. The rest of it you didn’t want to remember. There was Major Deegan dead of his beating, never confessing to anything, and there was the black hole in the ground where you lived for two months, more dead than alive, as punishment for the riot you were trying to stop.

  Hatred burned in your belly and your mind for long months afterward. You were all a little crazy then, whispering together, waiting and hoping and living for the day you catch up with Paul Sloade, the traitor, and kill him the way Lucas Deegan had been killed by the Chinese guards. The crazy plans and gut-burning hate stayed with you for a long, long time.

  Where did it leave you, Carmody wondered. When did it end? In the hospital, or during the truce, or on the ship going home? Or when you put on your civvies again in San Francisco and walked out of the hospital just like any citizen, with over three thousand dollars in back pay in your pocket? Did it end when you saw Robbie Ravelle and Sam Link in New York and listened to their talk about Paul Sloade and saw how they were in ordinary perspective—saw them as men you would never bother with in normal times, men you had no use for, but were obligated to listen to and share things with because of the pain and hate you mutually shared? A revulsion set in, a distaste for remembering any of it. Nobody knew what was true and what was false, now that it was all over.

  All over, and what was the use of carrying on a private war? What did you think you were doing, Bill Carmody, when you agreed to the plan for revenge, when you agreed that Paul Sloade was better off dead? Major Deegan had died bravely, as few men died, and there was no hatred in him. He was good, he saw things clearly; he knew who had betrayed him but he never spoke the name, the name they wanted; so it was Paul Sloade, it had to be Paul Sloade, and Sloade was like a bug that ought to be squashed and wiped off the face of the earth.

  3

  HE AWOKE and rolled over and lay shuddering on the hot sand, the sun in his eyes, blinding him. He remembered leaving the Beachcomber Bar and walking down the beach, then seating himself beside the old jetty pilings to watch the sea. He must have fallen asleep right here on the sand. Yes, that was it, he thought. He pushed sleep away from him.

  He heard a giggle and looked around and saw a girl, a stranger, sitting on the sand beside him.

  “You snore,” she said, smiling. “You have nightmares, too.”

  Carmody sat up. He brushed sand from one side of his jaw and blinked in t
he hot sunlight and looked at his watch. It was after ten o’clock in the morning. The sun was a dazzling glare on the blue Atlantic. Behind the girl, he saw the warped, sagging shape of his house, two hundred yards down the desolate beach.

  “Sleeping in the sun like that is a good way to fry,” the girl said, hugging her knees. “Don’t you have a home, Bill?”

  “You know me?”

  “I’ve heard you play at the Beachcomber. I liked it. I thought I’d like you, too. You look like a tramp, Bill.”

  “It’s my whiskers.”

  He inspected her more closely, aware of a shock in him because he thought he ought to know who she was, but he couldn’t quite place her. She looked very familiar. She wore faded blue denim slacks and a white shirt open at the collar. Her throat was very long and graceful and deeply tanned. Her hair was a dark blonde with a streak of pale ash sweeping back from one temple where the sun had bleached it. Carmody looked at her hands. They were long and delicate and beautiful. She was a beautiful girl. She had everything Irene Sloade lacked in the way of beauty, and she still had the candor and quiet intelligence in her large gray eyes that was Irene’s saving grace.

  “You must be her sister,” Carmody said.

  “Irene’s, yes. Baby sister. Martha Courtney.”

  “Hello, Martha,” he said.

  They looked at each other and laughed and shook hands and he helped her to her feet. Her waist was very tiny and pliant, but there was a sturdy, womanly flare to her hips. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty-one. Carmody looked at her and felt something happen to him and wondered if she felt the same thing, too. He felt a hunger for her that was sudden and sharp and imperative. He felt alarmed lest his thoughts show.

  She said: “Do you make a habit of falling asleep on the beach, Bill? I started out to look for you at your house, but on the way almost stumbled over you in the sand.”

  “Thanks for letting me sleep.”

  “I came to ask you something.” They had started walking back toward his place. He saw that she was barefooted. She had small, patrician feet. “I was wondering,” she said, “if you could tell me where to find Irene.”