“Then why get so upset?”
“I’m not upset. I’m always cranky early in the morning. Now leave me alone, will you?”
I nodded. Vito lit a cigarette. Vito’s hands trembled. As an undercover man for someone or something he was a bust —or my imagination was running riot and maybe I did have a touch of the sunstroke. “Hey, what happened to you?” Vito, demanded, getting a good look at my head for the first time.
“You won’t believe this,” I said. “I got hit by lightning.”
Vito scowled at me. “No, I won’t.” He climbed into the truck, picked up the carton and then changed his mind. He put the carton down again, went around front, kicked the panel truck over and sped away with a clashing of gears.
Strung out flimsily like paper cut-outs all along the open front, the storm doors which closed Tolliver’s for the night were not locked. I went inside and over to the pizzeria. Vito hadn’t unpacked a damned thing in there.
If I could have found out what was in that carton and the others like it Vito must have taken somewhere inside Tolliver’s, I’d have let them bash my head all over again. I nodded to a clean-up man who shoved a push-broom across the dirty boardwalk floor in front of him.
“Good morning,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Mr. Lucca took his cartons, would you?”
He leaned on the handle of the broom and blinked sweat from his eyes. “His cartons?”
“That’s right.” I took out a fiver and flashed it. Well, it always worked in the private eye books.
“I didn’t see nothing, mister. Some kid came and went a while back.”
Damn. “Anyone else inside?”
“Yessir. Miss O’Keefe, I think. Went down to the pool in a bathing suit. Some looker, you bet.”
“You bet. Would that be Sheila O’Keefe, the dancer?” No one had told me Sheila’s last name, but she was Irish enough to be an O’Keefe.
“The dancer, that’s her. Excuse me, mister. I got to sweep up.”
I found the stairs to the second floor and climbed them. I reached the top of the outside stairs and looked down on the swimming pool. A solo swimmer kicked up a frothy wake out in the middle of the clear blue water which was gushing in from a fountain at the far end of the pool. Otherwise, the place was deserted. Deck chairs stood in neat rows, awnings had been rolled back for the night over long lines of green and yellow benches. The sky was a cool, distant blue and when Sheila stopped swimming and began to tread water, it was so quiet I could hear the distant wail of a siren. The ambulance attendants would find a vacant beach unless the two kids still nudged the sand for clams.
Sheila looked up at the sound of the ambulance and I waved to her. She waved back and did a graceful breaststroke to the edge of the pool, climbed out and shook herself like a terrier. I went down to meet her and terriers never looked so good.
Her short black hair needed no bathing cap. It sparkled wetly in the early morning sunlight and she shook it at me and sprayed me as I reached her. She smiled. She was one big smile from the top of her head clear down to her toes, and I hadn’t realized it yesterday. She wore a one piece bathing suit black and sleek as her wet hair, strapless and hugging her like a lover. There wasn’t a point or an angle on her anywhere. She was just rounded, beautifully rounded and maybe a shade on the plump side but delicious enough to eat.
“I love to swim in the morning when no one’s around, Gideon,” she said, then squeaked like a mouse. “What happened to you?”
“It’s nothing much. It’s…”
But she had bounced away across the sand which must have been carted into the bathhouse at considerable cost and streaked up the stairs and out of sight.
It didn’t take long. Sheila returned with a little brown lunch box, sat me down on the sand and squatted on her heels next to me surveying the damage. “Umm,” she mumbled, cataloging it. “Umm. Take your shirt off.”
I took it off. I was looking at her and grinning and soon she told me to close my mouth. “What are you wearing under your pants?”
“A bathing suit, last I saw. Hey, now—”
She pointed at my belt buckle. “Take ’em off.”
I did so. Sheila opened her lunch box. It didn’t contain lunch. First aid supplies, all kinds of them.
She gave me the full treatment. She cleaned my scalp with some astringent liquid in a medium-sized brown bottle, then applied something from a small brown bottle. It stung so much I yelped, but Sheila said, “Aren’t you the baby?” and kept right on stinging me. “I ought to shave your hair off and bandage it,” she told me next. “You’re lucky. Sit still, darn you!”
I sat still. It wasn’t easy. She squeezed a pale yellow snake of tooth-paste consistency out of a tube and began to rub it on my chest. Her fingers got tangled in the hair there and pulled it and I yelped again but she kept on rubbing. My shoulders and back were next, and my arms. Everyplace she touched with the ointment I felt cool and wonderful. I wanted to object when she squirted another yellow snake on my leg and began to rub it in there, but it felt too good. I sighed and closed my eyes and let her have her way. Presently a lit cigarette got shoved between my lips and I inhaled gratefully.
“AH right,” she said, jamming things back into her lunch box, “now you can tell me what happened.”
“That’s easy,” I said. She was standing up and looking down at me, so I got up too, and wrapped my greasy arms around her and kissed her. “I just fell in love with Florence Nightingale.”
I shouldn’t have done it, I guess. But after feeling so miserable I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me, she came along and in a few minutes made me feel like singing.
“Hey, stop that! Look at me.”
I looked at her. I’d greased up the front of her black bathing suit and the smooth stretch of bronzed flesh that looked out over its top. She brushed herself off and the top of the suit swayed back and forth. The grease stayed put. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was just to say thanks.”
“You’re welcome, but not for what you just did. Have a heart, Gideon. Everyone says I’m an impressionable little girl. You must feel awful, anyway. Just tell me what happened.”
“Someone sneaked up behind me on the beach last night. I never even saw him.”
Sheila scowled at me. She removed a comb from where it was tucked between thigh and bathing suit and ran it through her damp hair, fluffing it with her free hand. “You need a shave,” she said. I could see she was considering what I’d told her.
“I need some food and a long sleep first. Is there anyplace around here we can get some grub this time of morning?”
“Ben Lutz’s bar. Ben lives upstairs, so even if it’s closed…”
“I know Ben. Ben is one of my suspects. So are you, by the way.”
“Me? I don’t know whether to be flattered or scratch your eyes out. Do you think I’d do something like that to you?”
“Search me. Someone did. It was done with a blackjack, usually a man’s weapon. But even a kid could learn to use one.”
“Listen to me, Gideon. Take some advice, will you?”
“What kind of advice?”
“Just get out of here, that’s all. Go far away. Forget all about Tolliver’s and Coney Island. Please, Gideon. You’ll be doing yourself a favor. They killed Bert. Once they’re sure you’re trying to find out why, they’ll try to kill you.”
“They already tried.”
“Can’t you listen to me without poking your two cents in? Please. They didn’t try. They probably just tried to frighten you off.”
“Do you know what’s going on around this place, Sheila?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t try to find out. Gideon, for heaven’s sake. You’re the third guy I’m trying to get out of this thing.”