Jimmy Wing poured the rest of his beer into his glass. He smiled and shook his head and said, “Rough talk, Mr. Durley. This local trade, you put them way in the back units so the cars are out of sight?”
“I got a lot of book work to do tonight, fella, so if you’ll...”
“Wait a minute. You’re in Palm County. I was born and raised here. I know a hell of a lot of people, Durley. I’ve done favors for so many of them, they’d do little favors for me without asking why. I know everybody in the courthouse.”
“Where are you going with it?”
“You got hard with me, right sudden. I don’t know as that’s too smart. This isn’t like Jersey. This is small town around here. Do all your signs conform to county ordinances? How much inspection are you getting on those county licenses you took out? How about sanitation? How about setbacks? All your kitchen help fingerprinted? Maybe it could even be a lot easier than that, Mr. Durley. Maybe a sheriff’s deputy could take a swing through all your parking areas every hour on the hour all night long, with that big red flasher working so nobody would miss him. Now, I’m telling you just as honestly as I can that the biggest mistake you can make right now is to decide I’m bluffing.”
Durley went over to the bar and came back with a drink. He sat quietly for almost a full minute. Finally he said, “I got so much on my mind, sometimes I forget how to be smart.”
“It was a week ago last Wednesday. They were in a unit in the last building in the back. Dark-haired girl, small and pretty. Big husky blond boy. Red Jaguar.”
“They would have checked in in the evening.”
“Probably. And left very early.”
“Let’s go check it with Pritch. He was on.”
They went into a small office beyond the switchboard. The desk clerk could not recall at first, and remembered when Wing said it was the night Gardner had stayed there.
“Oh, I think I’ve got it now. Let me check the cards.”
Pritchard came back with a card in his hand. “The girl came alone and registered right after I came on. Here’s the time stamp. Twelve after four. Haughty as hell. Wanted one way in the back. Went and looked at it and came back and paid cash. Eighteen fifty-four, with tax. She wanted to pay on her way in instead of out because she said she and her husband would be leaving early. Yes, I remember seeing the car out in front. Red Jag. She’s got here on the card Michigan plates.”
“That would be right,” Jimmy said.
“She said they’d take occupancy later on. And she...” He stopped, snapped his fingers, and excused himself again.
Durley examined the card and handed it to Wing. The writing was firm, large, angular, yet unmistakably feminine. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Tannis of Flint, Michigan. Wing was dryly amused to notice that Tannis was Sinnat spelled backward.
Pritchard came back and placed an identical card on the desk between them. “They’re in the house tonight, Frank. I thought it was familiar. But Gil checked them in before I come on. Is there something wrong?”
“Nothing you have to know about, Pritch,” Durley said. “All you have to remember is how Mr. Wing here is a man we’re real good buddies with. We’re such good buddies, you take these two cards in and run off a photo copy for our good friend Mr. Wing.”
The clerk took the cards away. “I appreciate this,” Jimmy said.
“That’s why I’m doing it. So you’ll appreciate it. So if I get in a jam I’ve got a local buddy to turn to. I wouldn’t want anybody thinking of all the things you thought of, and wanting a shakedown.”
“It isn’t likely to come to that around here.”
“That’s nice to know. Funny, the girl doing the check-in.”
“The boy looks too young.”
“If you want to make my damn day perfect, now tell me the girl is fifteen.”
“Nineteen.”
“That’s a small help.”
“Are you going to make it?”
“We’ll make it,” Durley said. “If my wife has to make up every bed herself, and if I have to be desk clerk, bartender, chef and janitor, we’ll make it. We can’t afford not to. The trouble was, we missed the season that would carry us through the first summer.”
“The rates seem high.”
“The rear units have kitchen deals in them. We start at ten for a single. Once we hang out the low, low, summer rates signs, you’ll know we’ve been whipped. We’re not after the shoppers. It has to stay a class operation.”
Pritchard brought him the copies of the registration cards. Durley walked him to the lobby door. Durley said, “I don’t have to tell you what not to talk about and you don’t have to tell me, right? We understand each other. Come out to dinner. Bring a friend. The food is good. It cost a hundred grand over estimate, and it was four months late opening, but the food is good.”
Wing started to drive out, then turned and drove past the registration lobby and the big sapphire pool, back to the last unit. He estimated there were twenty rooms in the building. There were five cars parked in the darkness, faintly illuminated by a parking-area light on a tall pole. The little red car was nosed up to the low shrubbery in front of number sixty-six. The canvas top was up. The windows of sixty-six were dark. The little car looked more patient than furtive.
He turned around and drove out. Durley was standing in the parking area in front of the office watching him as he turned out onto the highway and headed back toward Palm City.
It was quarter after midnight when he knocked at the side door, the office door, of Elmo’s home.
Elmo let him in. “Set, boy. When you phoned I was so far asleep Dellie liked to shook me to death waking me up.” He yawned and leaned against the edge of his desk, looking at Jimmy sitting on the couch. “Saturday night I used to howl till break of day, but I’m slowed a lot. Wish you could have waited until morning.”
“I don’t want to see too much of you in the daylight, Elmo. Here or in public places. It might not be smart. And if I’d waited until tomorrow I might have changed my mind about the whole thing. And you had the idea this was urgent, the last time I talked to you.”
“Everything is urgent, boy. The only un-urgent thing in the world is taking your pleasure, and that’s a sometime urgent thing if you set it off too long. I hope to God you got something worthwhile on Sinnat.”
“I don’t know what it’s worth, but I damn well know it’s about the only thing you’re going to get.”
“Leroy said you’d get nothing at all. He poked around some.”
“When you ask me to do something, I don’t want a lot of other people I don’t know about doing the same thing.”
Elmo chuckled. He hitched himself up onto the desk, reached inside his silk robe and scratched his chest. “You got so many ideas about what you will do and what you won’t do, you leave me confused. So far, Jimmy, right up to now, I can’t see as you’ve done anything yet.”
“Maybe I’ve done something about Dial Sinnat. I don’t know how you can use it, or if you can use it. I don’t want to be mixed up in that end of it. I want that clear before we go into it, Elmo.”
“You keep this up, you’re going to put me in an ugly condition, boy. We’re going to get along fine. I won’t ask anything of you you can’t do. We went into that. I want you for what you can do... better than other people.”
“Sinnat is a tough-minded man. Pushing him the way I have in mind might not work out. By the way, he told Kat Hubble this deal is being handled smarter than any of the five men involved, and he wondered who could be the silent partner with the brains.”
Elmo’s eyebrows went up in wonder. “Well. How about that? So there’s another real good reason to make him stop thinking about any part of it. What have you got?”