Say It & Murder Read online

  “At the hotel, I suppose.”

  “She isn’t there.”

  He shrugged. “Then on her sloop.”

  “Not there, either.”

  “Wait a minute,” Carmody said. “Anything wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Why should anything be wrong?”

  “Doesn’t anybody know where Irene is?”

  “Paul said he left her here with you. Early yesterday morning, that is.”

  Carmody scowled at the bright glare of sunlight on the curling surf. “She went home. I wanted to take her back, but she didn’t want me to, so I didn’t. Hasn’t anybody seen her since?”

  “I don’t know. Not me.”

  “Maybe she drove back to New York for something.”

  “No. Not without me. Not without telling me. Paul thought she might still be here.”

  “Look, Martha, I don’t—”

  “I’m sure you don’t.”

  “Irene was upset. She may have gone somewhere to cool off instead of returning to the hotel.”

  “All right,” Martha said. “Forget it. She’ll turn up. I’m just worried about her, that’s all. About her state of mind. Because of Paul, naturally. I gather you know a lot about Paul Sloade.”

  She made his name sound like a vile word, the way she spoke it. He was startled by the depth of hatred she managed to express. Carmody looked at her sharply, but her face told him nothing. She stopped walking and waved toward his house.

  “You have company, it seems. I’ll leave you here. If you hear from Irene, let me know, will you, Bill?”

  “I want to see you again, anyway,” Carmody said, not looking at his house.

  “I’m glad. Any time. You can find me at the Crescent.” They shook hands with an odd formality. Her fingers were firm in his. They smiled into each other’s eyes, and he didn’t want to look away and see who had come to his house down the beach.

  He watched her walk toward the Beachcomber Bar, and he felt strangely disturbed, troubled. Then he looked at the car parked on the dune behind the Victorian monstrosity and started that way, scuffing his feet in the sand. Music came from the house in a raucous blast as someone tuned in his radio. It was a Stan Kenton recording. Carmody went up the sagging porch steps at the same time that Sammy Link came out through the front door.

  Sam grinned and yelled. “Hey, Bill! We been lookin’ for you!”

  Carmody felt the other pound his shoulder. Sam Link was a thin man in his thirties, prematurely bald, with false gleaming teeth and huge freckles on his bony face and naked scalp. He wore a long loose jacket of gray rayon cord and slacks the color of coral. His shoes had rubber crepe soles an inch thick.

  “Is Robbie with you?”

  “Sure, he’s in the back,” Link said. “He’s parched.”

  “I’ll say hello.”

  Carmody started into the house, and Link plucked at his sleeve and held him back. They were alone on the porch. Link had big watery gray eyes. They looked worried. “About Robbie, Bill.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s in a jackpot. He’s lookin’ for a cool pad, y’know?”

  “What kind of trouble is he in?”

  “He’s supposed to be at the vet’s hospital today. Checkup. If he don’t show, they look for him. The damned fool picked up a doll, too.”

  Carmody said: “Sam, are you crazy?”

  “No, I ain’t. But Robbie, now—”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  He walked into the house. The sound of the radio was deafening in the old, weatherbeaten living room, the music blasting and thumping and shaking the walls. The drawn shades made the room seem like a gloomy cave after the brilliant glare on the beach outside. A dark-haired girl was dancing to the music, her gestures gracefully eccentric in rhythm with the recording. As she danced, she shed her clothes. She wore only black underthings when Carmody came in, and the Guatemalan skirt and blouse and shoes she bad discarded littered the floor.

  Sitting in one of the colorless gray overstuffed chairs in a corner, a drink in his hand, was the young giant, Robbie Ravelle. He looked enormous, even in the over-sized chair. He had flat yellow hair and a wedged, pale face and eyes that glimmered like pale silver coins, without depth or emotion of any kind. He held two cigarettes in his huge hand. Carmody smelled the smoke that drifted through the room and crossed toward the radio and snapped it off abruptly.

  The sudden silence was almost as bad as the blast of music. A smell like that of scorched wool drifted heavily in the hot, airless room.

  The girl stopped dancing and stood in a frozen gesture, one arm uplifted, one knee bent. Her figure was slim and ripe and very young. She had long black hair, cut in a straight Dutch bob across her forehead, and her face was the face of a dissipated angel. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Her underlip thrust out petulantly, and there was a thin shine of perspiration on her smooth ivory body.

  Robbie Ravelle said: “Hey, Billyreeba! Leave the music play.”

  Carmody was angry. “What are you doing with that wire?”

  The big hulk of a man waved the two cigarettes languidly. “A little tea never hurt nobody. You want to get on?”

  The girl lowered her flexed leg and arm and laughed. “I’m Lila, Billyreeba. You look cute when you’re mad.”

  “Get dressed,” Carmody said.

  “Why? I’m cold?”

  “Then you’ll travel naked as you are,” Carmody said. Robbie Ravelle lurched to his feet. He was enormous. His face was flat and expressionless, his pale eyes still without depth. His breathing rumbled in the room.

  “Lila don’t travel anywhere. She’s with me.”

  “Robbie, this is not the place for a girl.”

  The dark-haired girl laughed and flopped into a chair, her legs wide, her face convulsed with her laughter. She took one of the cigarettes from Robbie Ravelle’s fingers and dragged at it

  “There’s no harm in marijuana,” she said.

  Sam Link came into the room, his voice placating. “Now, look, everybody, this ain’t no way to start things off. Bill, I don’t know what’s eatin’ at you. There’s nothin’ wrong with Lila. She’s a friend of Robbie’s. She stays with him, is all. And we all stay here until our business is finished, y’know?”

  Carmody said: “Nobody stays here. We’re all pulling out. There’s no business in Crescent Beach.”

  Robbie Ravelle breathed softly and quietly. The girl laughed again, sipping at the cigarette. Sam Link shook his head. Through the windows came the sound of the surf and the sudden screaming of a gull. Carmody looked at both men, in their new clothes, with their shaven faces, and tried to remember how they were in the tatters and filth and cold of the prison camp they had shared. He found it hard to remember that they had all been friends.

  Misery makes strange bedfollows, he thought, and you picked yourself a pair of real blackbirds. Now, at home and in normal surroundings, there was something ominous and wrong about them.

  Sam Link had always had been the shrewd one. Always figuring an angle, always scheming for an extra portion of their meager rations, calculating how to bait the humorless Chinese guards. And all of them had relied on Robbie’s massive, monolithic strength. It takes all kinds to make up an army, Carmody thought. The good and the bad, the brave man and the coward, the crooked and the straight. You don’t have much choice when you’re in a prison compound for months.

  Sam Link crossed the room as if to go into Carmody’s bedroom, and in the doorway he paused and turned around.

  “I see your bags are all packed, Bill.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Planning to hit and run?”

  “No hit. Just run. I was waiting for you, to tell you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Carmody drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry I have to give it to you like this, Sam. You, too, Robbie. I’ve changed my mind about Paul Sloade. I don’t want any part of it any more.”

  “You don’t want a
ny part of it?” Link repeated flatly.

  “That’s right.”

  “Your scars all healed up where them Reds beat you?”

  “I still have the marks, but they’re outside of me. They don’t bother me any more.”

  “So you forgive and forget?”

  Carmody shook his head. “Neither. I just think we were all a little touched when we figured on evening the score with Paul Sloade. It’s stupid. It won’t buy us anything.”

  “He got them Reds to kill your pal, Lucas Deegan.”

  “So you always said.”

  “Hell, I heard him talkin’ to them. I ought to know.”

  “All right. Maybe it’s true. But the military court cleared Sloade. That doesn’t matter, either. I’m just sick of it, Sam. Sick of the whole business. I don’t care who was sucking up to the Reds and who was not. We were all bad boys, the Chinese said. It’s done and over with, though, and killing Paul Sloade won’t buy us anything but bad trouble today.”

  “Who said anything about killing him?” Sam Link asked blandly.

  Carmody looked at Lila, the dark-haired girl. She still sat in the chair with her long slim legs stretched out in front of her. Her eyes were closed and she seemed to be asleep. Robbie Ravelle stood behind her chair and patted her small head with a huge, clumsy hand. The big man’s eyes were silvery and blank. He was smiling slightly to himself, as if at some inward joke.

  “What do you have in mind?” Carmody asked. “What about you, Robbie?”

  Ravelle said dreamily: “I’m gonna kill him.”

  “Not until the time comes,” Sam Link snapped. “Not until then.”

  “All right. I can wait as long as Lila is with me.”

  “As long as you have wire for me, baby,” the girl said.

  “I got lots of charge, kid. You and me stay on a long time, we make it good, you and me, hey?”

  The girl laughed.

  Carmody watched Sam Link. “What’s on your mind, Sam?”

  “We been checking on Paul Sloade since you come up here, to find out the lay. We learn he’s married to this rich doll, Irene Courtney, and she owns the Crescent Beach Inn and lots of property. So we move in and take over from Paul, is all.”

  “How do you figure on doing that?” Carmody asked.

  “He can be persuaded, y’know?”

  “I don’t buy it.”

  Sam Link grinned. “You want out? You got your bags packed, all set to go?”

  “I’m already out. So is your scheme.” Carmody drew another deep breath. “I told Paul Sloade you two were coming up here to work him over. He’s ready for you. He’ll call the cops if you move in.”

  He expected anything, from violence to screaming curses, but not Sam Link’s soft chuckle. “He won’t call the cops. Neither will you. For one thing, Robbie won’t let you do anything. I told you Robbie needs a cool pad for a while. We lay low enough, he stays out of the clammer. Y’know? They want to investigate his noodle—they say he’s lost some pebbles.” Sam Link laughed loudly and slapped his freckled scalp and looked at the big man. “You lost any pebbles, Robbie?”

  “No,” said Ravelle. “And shut up about that. I’m sore at him,” Ravelle continued, looking at Carmody with his flat coin eyes. “The music-maker gives us a cross and makes it harder. Then he wants out, just like that.”

  “I’m out, all right,” Carmody said.

  “No, you’re not,” Sam Link said. “And I tell you why. Because I check up on you too, music man. I check up good. You ain’t so cool yourself, from what I hear. You got something behind you, too. I figure everybody in this world’s got something followin’ behind them. So I look for what you got, and I find it, and if you don’t play marbles with us, you go to the clammer for the hot squat.”

  For just a little too long Carmody didn’t move or say anything at all. He didn’t even breathe. The room seemed suspended in that brief frozen time and then he knew it was too late, that Sam Link’s shrewd eyes had read his face and seen the truth in it.

  He cleared his throat. “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t have to climb up a wall about it, Bill.”

  “I’m still with you. What about the clammer?”

  “Somebody once heard you talking to Deegan, heard you mention where you used to work over in Jersey. Before the war. I go over and talk. I find out why you enlisted so damned quick, Billy. But it’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Guy name of Monte Bachore.”

  It was no surprise now. “You weasel.”

  “He was anxious to hear about you. So now he’s in this Paul Sloade pot with us. He’s pulling you in, too. I tell him I figured maybe you wouldn’t want to play, when we get here. I know you good, Billy. So Monte came along with the convincer.”

  Carmody’s voice was hoarse. “What convincer?”

  “You go see him, Bill. He’ll tell you. He’s over at the Crescent Beach Inn now, staying there like a guest, too. Shaping it up for when we move in. It’s a big thing. Better than just cutting up Paul Sloade, like kid stuff, like Robbie wants. That can come later.” Sam Link laughed and slapped his head again. “So unpack your bags, music man. You’re staying with us.”

  Lila opened her eyes and laughed and got up languidly, then crossed the room toward Carmody, who stood rooted like stone. Robbie’s silvery blank eyes followed her black-laced figure hungrily. The dark-haired girl put a hand on Carmody’s face.

  “Poor Billyreeba, you look beat. You want to get on? You’ll feel better, getting on the wire.” She turned to Robbie. “Give him a spool, Robbie.”

  Carmody slapped her hand from his face and turned and walked out of the house.

  4

  HE WENT slogging down the beach, close to the water’s edge, and the bright sunlight and glittering spume from the crashing breakers made a giddy kaleidoscope somewhere in his mind behind his eyes that saw nothing. Now and then a long tongue of foamy water came hissing up across the sand in his path and he splashed through it and went on, careless of his shoes. Before he was out of earshot of the big house that leaned toward the sea, he heard the radio going again, louder than before.

  Harry Corio’s place was an unpainted shed structure located where the beach curved north to form one side of the resort inlet. It squatted in picturesque saltiness on the dunes, with a long screened veranda and decorative fishnets and dories painted bright red and yellow and blue hauled up on the beach. Carmody started to walk past it, cutting across the sand to where he could see the piers and the beach and moored yachts in front of the Crescent Beach Inn across the cove, and Harry came out the doorway, bellying the screen aside with his big aproned stomach.

  “Hey, Bill.”

  Carmody stopped and waved and saw that Harry wanted to talk to him. He turned and trudged back toward the entrance to the place.

  “Bill, where you going?”

  “The Inn,” he said.

  Harry’s face was round and red, and he had a white mustache over a puckered mouth and white hair that looked yellow in the sunlight. His voice was hoarse and beery. “You seen Irene Sloade?”

  “No.”

  “They tell me she’s missing,” Harry said.

  “I think she’ll turn up.”

  “Her sister’s here. She was looking for you, before.”

  “She found me,” Carmody said.

  He looked beyond Harry and saw Martha Courtney perched on one of the stools at the bar. She was drinking a glass of milk. In the dimness inside the bar, decorated with green glass net floats and more netting and bright splashes of mural paintings done by summer artists, he saw her smile and wave. He suddenly wished he could go in there and stay there with her and forget everything else. She slid off the stool and came toward him, graceful and firm-hipped in the tight, faded dungarees, her clean tanned face suddenly concerned.

  “What’s the matter with you, Bill?”

  “Nothing,” Carmody
said.

  “You look sick.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Has anything happened?”

  “No, I tell you I’m all right.”

  She looked at the sand, still frowning. “Will you take me for a ride tonight, Bill? Over to Montauk, perhaps. We can have dinner and dance and talk.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “We can use mine.”

  He was on the point of refusing, and then he said: “All right.” Then, recognizing his ungraciousness, he said: “I’ll look forward to it.”

  Harry followed him back to the door.

  “I thought you were checking out of town this morning.”

  “My plans have changed,” Carmody said.

  He walked away from the place, feeling a little better, and he kept his thoughts on Martha and wondered why she churned in him so, liking the feeling and yet disturbed by it. He wanted to keep thinking about her, but he felt a little afraid of her, as if she weren’t for him, somehow. He walked down the beach until a small boardwalk began and he felt the tight wetness of his shoes where he had splashed through the water and he wondered what was the matter with him. Everything would be all right. Monte Bachore would listen to reason. He couldn’t possibly be considering any venture in seriousness with those two men and the girl he had left at his house. There was something oblique and distorted about them that even Monte could recognize as a poor risk. It would be all right, he told himself.

  He wondered what could have happened to Irene Sloade. He remembered the fears expressed last night.

  Crescent Beach Inn dominated the east shore of the inlet, standing on a low bluff overlooking the yacht anchorage and the few scattered gray-shingled houses of the native residents who made up the little village. There was a white-painted yacht club and a large community pier and the boardwalk he was on curved across the shallow, swampy inner end of the anchorage and up a flight of steps built into the bluff. A few small sloops, Lightnings and Stars, bent their white sails before the southerly breeze, criss-crossing this way and that in the inlet, while farther out a few larger yachts were engaged in a race toward Montauk Point. A hard-surfaced road curved up near the inn and then turned inland toward Matachogue. On the parking lot beside the main building of the hotel were Jaguars and MG’s and Cadillacs and a Mercedes-Benz sedan painted a robin’s-egg blue.