The life guard jerked a brown hand behind him. “Down that ramp,” he said. “Then turn left. You’ll have to take your shoes off first.”
I unlaced my shoes, then tied them together. I carried them by the strings in one hand, with my shirt under my arm. In the other hand I carried the bathing trunks and the towel and I decided it was high time to find the locker my key fit. So instead of turning left at the bottom of the ramp I went straight ahead, wading through a trough of muddy chlorinated water which was supposed to keep sand out of the locker rooms. I followed the “men” arrow and went left.
The place was deserted except for an occasional old duffer who’d spread a blanket between the aisles of lockers and had sprawled on it with a portable radio, a bag of fruit and a lot of smelly suntan oil.
I’m not very good at these things. I asked someone where locker 1418 was, but he didn’t know, so I kept wandering around with my arms growing heavy, threading my way in and out among the lockers.
I was about to pile my gear in a corner somewhere and change to the bathing trunks without benefit of a locker when I heard something besides the portable radio commercials. The slapping sound of flesh against wet flesh was punctuated by uneven grunting off to the right of the last aisle of lockers, where a sign said I neared the solarium and steam rooms. I entered a roofed-over passageway and the sounds grew louder. My heart thumped as if I’d just run a four-minute mile when I realized Bert had probably died in here someplace. I heard the distant hissing of steam.
The passage opened on a bare-walled room with an archway leading out the other end. A stocky, hair-matted man with a pale white belly lay on one of the three sheet-topped tables grunting and groaning and dripping sweat. A towel like the one I carried was draped across his loins.
Paul Bunyan himself was working the man over, kneading the flesh of his putty-soft belly, gouging strong fingers into the flab of his thighs. Paul Bunyan stood almost six and a half feet tall in shower clogs and a black bathing suit. He made the lifeguard outside look like the before half of a Charles Atlas ad. He was brown as a bar of milk chocolate except for his right forearm, which was yellow-white and scrawny. I’d have bet my separation pay against a free ride on the rollercoaster that he’d worn a plaster cast on that arm until recently.
He looked up but didn’t pause in his kneading. He said, “Have a table, friend. With you in a while.” He really liked his work, did Paul Bunyan. He attacked the soft belly with gusto. I thought his patient would leave the table black and blue.
Paul Bunyan was working up a man-sized appetite, grimacing between cleaver-like strokes of his great hands but grinning when they landed and blinking sweat from his eyes and grunting more than his victim. I did some blinking too. Old Paul Bunyan was having quite a time. The Marquis of Sade had nothing on him, nothing at all, but that was only the half of it. He should have worn gossamer wings on his back and I don’t mean angel’s wings.
CHAPTER THREE
“I ONLY WANTED TO TALK to you,” I shouted over the slap-slap of flesh-on-flesh and the grunting noises.
“With you in a minute.”
“He… wants to… talk,” Pudgy said gratefully. “I can wait… I guess.”
Paul Bunyan wiped his hands on a towel hanging from the side of the table then came over and looked down at me. I’m six feet tall, “Well, talk.”
“This is where Bert Archer died, isn’t it?”
“Huh?” He had a huge brow slung low over eyes so wide spaced he probably could almost see a full three hundred and sixty degrees. His highbridged nose had been broken and smeared against his face over a small, thin-lipped mouth half-pursed as if always on the verge of whistling. “Who wants to know?”
“I’m with Nationwide Insurance,” I said. “We’re trying to ascertain whether the beneficiary gets paid double indemnity or not.” I realized that was a mistake too late. I’d be seeing more of Paul Bunyan and while he didn’t look like the younger generation’s answer to Einstein, he still could put two and two together in a way that would tell him Nationwide Insurance investigators don’t double as money-changers in penny arcades.
“Say, you don’t waste any time.” Nature had broken the illusion with Paul Bunyan’s voice. He sounded more like Mickey Mouse.
“I’ll send a salesman around to see you if you’re interested, Mr….”
“Kellum, friend.”
“That accident with your arm could have been covered by my company, Mr. Kellum.”
“Say, how did you know about that?”
“Company secret. We get around.”
“I’ll say.” Kellum cradled his newly healed arm in his other hand and drummed baseball bat fingers against the bone.
“Sure,” I said. “Could I see the place where Archer died?”
“I wish you could, friend, honest. Only the police closed off that room. But say, if you’re with an insurance company the police will let you in.”
“Hell,” I said confidentially. “Just between you and me, I’d as soon take a swim in your pool. If you could tell me what happened how could the company know? After you’re at this game a while you get to learn all the tricks.” I peeled a five dollar bill off the three hundred dollar roll the government had given me as a token of its appreciation for services rendered and slapped it against Kellum’s big wet palm. “You can start talking anytime.”
“My pleasure, friend. There isn’t much to tell. You see, it was just before noon when it happened. We don’t have our steam rooms open for business till afternoon, but the gang from Tolliver’s can use them any time. That Mr. Soolpovar, he’s number one.”
“You in Korea?” I asked. Number one is strictly a south-side Korea expression.
“Listen, would you believe it? The army wouldn’t have me.” Kellum giggled. “I should worry.” He clop-clopped around the room on his clogs. The pudgy man, who had donned a pair of shorts, winced when he thought Kellum was returning to the wars, but the big guy only wanted a pack of cigarettes from a wall shelf. He lighted two and gave me one, just like I’d do for a girl and I thought I had him tagged right for sure. As for the number one, I guess you come back from a place like Korea and you can’t believe that somehow the expressions picked up there have beaten you back to the States.
“Anyway,” Kellum told me, “it’s not unusual to hear the steam even early in the morning. This was almost noon and it was hissing away and I didn’t think anything of it, not until one of the cleaning men we use to get the rooms ready for the afternoon came rushing in to me and says there’s a guy in there from Tolliver’s and he looks dead.”
“In where?”
“In room three. It’s locked now. If you know where the knobs are you can regulate the steam from inside. We have no secrets from the Tolliver’s gang, you understand? Well, there was this figure inside and so much steam that I couldn’t go in after him right away, even though I opened the door and let the steam out. By the time I got in it was too late, that’s all. He’d turned the nozzles all the way for some reason. I found him on the other side of the door, like he was trying to get out but the steam overcame him first.”
“How do you figure it? We don’t pay anything for suicide.”
“Suicide? Suicide? I hadn’t thought of that. Say, listen, Bert Archer wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“No? Did Archer use these steam rooms very often?”
“Now that you mention it, no. I never remember him taking a steam bath before.”
That was the hunch that might spell a lot of trouble for someone. Bert used to talk about Tolliver’s once in a while, when he wasn’t dreaming of Karen. He never liked steam rooms, couldn’t understand what people saw in them. I said suicide but I didn’t think suicide. And definitely no accident. I thought murder.