The lights of the harbor became a faint haze, astern. Mulcahey regarded his partner and superior with something approaching awe.
“You figure all this before we get back to the pier, Steve?”
“Shucks, no. But if Sundstrom was telling the truth, Max left the houseboat in the dinghy alive. He’d make for the pier and his car. If he didn’t get there, who stopped him? Only other person beside the man he’d left unconscious on the Seabohemia and the girl he thought was floundering around in the water — was the watchman who thought he was so ‘generous’.”
“It still leaves the dame, skipper. How did she get ‘way out there in the Sound?” “That’s the only thing she leveled on, sarge. When she came to, after that sock in the eye, she couldn’t see anything. The tide was going out fast. Only thing she could do was swim with it and yell for help. She didn’t know where she was. She kicked off her slacks and sweater—”
“And when we haul her aboard, what a line of hodelyo she hands us. For why?”
“To keep us from taking her back to the houseboat, discovering the song-piracy setup.”
“But when she does get there? More yatadada!”
“To throw suspicion on Sundstrom, yair. Like you said, Irish.”
“Huh?”
“You told her there must have been a rough party on board. There was. And the female of the species was the roughest of the lot!”
The Kiss-and-Kill Murders
Popular Detective, May, 1953
Chapter I
The car’s headlights probed beyond the curve of the highway to the massed darkness of close-ranked hemlocks. From the safety fence guarding the curve where it crossed the brook a shadowy grotesqueness rose, flapping and floundering into the path of the Cadillac. The man at the wheel braked, cursed.
The girl beside him made a frightened movement to shield her face from the expected impact, but the great bird rose clumsily in time to escape more than a touch by the car.
“For God’s sake,” she murmured, “what was that?”
“Turkey buzzard.” The driver swung back to his proper lane. “Carrion buzzard.”
“Ugh!” She shuddered. In the dim, reflected glow from the instrument board her delicate features seemed suddenly pinched with terror. “It looked like a fugitive from a bad dream. Do they have many of those things down here on the Eastern Shore?”
“They’re common as chickens.” He allowed himself a tight, thin-lipped smile. “Matter of fact, they live on chickens. Dead ones the broiler farms throw out. That’s all they eat — dead things.”
“Brrr. They give me the heebies. This whole country does. Sooner we get out of here, the better it’ll suit me.” She pushed in the cigarette lighter. “How much further is it, to this God-forsaken place?”
“Few miles.” He swung off the through route onto a dirt road. “Don’t worry. I don’t intend to stay long.”
“I don’t see why we had to come down here at all.”
“So you won’t make any dumb mistakes if somebody starts to ask questions about your Maryland estate, the way you did when that salesgirl jumped you about the farm up in Connecticut.”
The girl shifted her position uneasily. “How could I have guessed she had been born right there in Whilton?”
“You couldn’t. But you could have kept your head instead of getting panicky and telling her you’d been living there only a short time when your family was supposed to have owned the place since the Civil War.” He slowed the car at massive brick gateposts, turned in between them to a winding lane guarded by high hedges of box.
“Only thing that saved us was that the salesgirl was dumb, too. She thought you were a phony but she wasn’t bright enough to follow through on her suspicion and notify one of the store detectives.”
“You’re always blaming me.” she retorted bitterly. “Whatever goes wrong is always my fault.”
He brought the car to a stop before the low brick porch of a white-pillared Colonial mansion.
“No. It was my error. I don’t intend to make the same mistake a second time. That’s why I brought you down here to look over the ground.”
She opened the car door on her side. In the wedge of brightness from the headlights red eyes glared from the shrubbery at the side of the porch. “Oh! Look!”
“Rabbit,” he said. “Thick as fleas this time of year.”
“I don’t want to stay here! I’ll bet there are a million snakes—”
He came around the hood of the car, swinging something that glinted a metallic blue-black. “There aren’t any. But this’ll take care of anything that shows up.” He took her arm.
“No!” she cried. “I’m scared! I don’t want to go any further!” She bit hard on the knuckle of her left index finger. “Please don’t make me go where it’s dark! I can see enough from here!”
He pushed her toward the porch. “Suppose you run up against someone who asks you if you’ve had the lovely old staircase fixed up? Don’t be silly. Come on inside. Here, take the flashlight.”
“There’ll be rats!”
“Probably. They won’t hurt you.”
He used a huge, brass key. The white-paneled front door swung open to disclose a hallway full of shrouded chairs, a hooded grandfather’s clock, cloth-covered paintings.
She hung back. “No, please, darling! You wouldn’t make me go in there if you cared the least bit for me!”
He slid an arm around her waist. “Stop worrying, baby. I’m right here with you.”
She stepped inside the musty-smelling hallway. The beam of her flashlight traveled around the hall, poked into a living room where a white and frightened face stared back at her from an enormous pier-glass — her own face.
The sound of the door closing behind her made her whirl, gasping.
“The wind.” He smiled with his mouth; his eyes regarded her with somber calculation.
She found herself unable to do more than whisper, “There isn’t any wind.”
“Go on. Upstairs.” The gun-barrel pointed.
“No!” she managed, stiff-lipped. “I’m not going up there. I–I’m not going to stay in this house one more minute. I—”
“Yes.” The smile remained fixed, unreal.
“You’re staying.”
She retreated from him, backing into the living room. “That’s why you brought me here!”
He followed her, unhurried.
She screamed. “No, no! Don’t! For God’s sake! Wait!”
The gun roared, and she moaned. The flashlight wavered, fell to the floor, went out.
He waited until he heard her fall, until the labored panting ceased. Then he flicked on his cigarette lighter, found the flashlight.
It was an effort to lift the body, sling it over his shoulder. The difficulty of carrying it up the winding staircase to the second floor, up the straight, steep steps to the third floor, finally up the short, vertical ladder to the trap-door in the roof, left him with hammering heart and throbbing temples.
Once out on the square, railing-enclosed roof from which some pioneer builder of the mansion had once watched for sails inbound toward his creek, the man lit a cigar before stripping the clothing from the dead girl. He removed her rings, her wrist-watch.
Then he used the butt of the gun to disfigure the face, to smash the dental work in her mouth.
“Okay,” he muttered after a long time. “Okay, you rats.” He looked out across the wide lawn toward the locust trees and the fringing hemlocks. “Come and get it.”
Chapter II
The Chief of Store Protection scowled down on the umbrella-carrying throngs of New York and the turtling taxis of Fifth Avenue, inching along between red lights and around the high-backed green beetles of the busses. Rain slashed across the avenue in gusty swirls, driving against the third-floor windows of his office in “Nimbletts, The Great Store,” puddling the pavements and sloshing small torrents into the gutters. The March morning suited his mood, which was unpleasantly glum.