“My sentiments, exactly,” I put in.
“Why, thank you, boys,” Little Manuel said happily. “You are both too, too generous with my well-deserved praise.”
There turned out to be a little better than fifty-three grand in the seabag, and for a little extra icing on the cake, the next day we split twenty thousand more that Little Manuel had gleefully collected from the syndicate for doing in Dixie Dan Shivers and the Dummy. I was so happy that I treated the little feloneer to three days of disportation at Madam Chang’s and almost wore my own self out during the process. But what a wonderful, tired feeling it was.
Monasteria
by David Magil
Inside that gloomy old castle of torture, a helpless man had been done to death. I knew who had done it. But the proof?...
The widow was beside him. She was Swedish and better than anything he’d seen five hours before in the snow in Stockholm.
“The next right, at the cemetery,” Ewa Crop said. “But I don’t want to go there.”
Scape smiled. He was having a good time. He’d arrived in Palma two hours before and he’d picked up the circus vehicle, the SEAT 600, had found and gathered up the widow and the witnesses.
“Mrs. Crop. If you want your husband’s insurance money, I suggest you cooperate. It shouldn’t take long.”
“And then you’ll delay paying because of some other reason. My husband died November 28th, almost one year ago. I’m very tempted to employ an American attorney to make you pay your debts.”
“Not my debts. I’m a business analyst. It was a big policy. I happen to be a friend of the chief of investigations of the company. I was on business in Stockholm and knowing I was coming over, he asked me to drop in and make a quick decision.”
“About what, Mister Scape?”
“Essentially about you. Bluntly, is there any chance you murdered your husband and any hope we might prove it? The law says you can’t profit from a murder. If I think you did it and there’s a chance to get you, then the company has its excuse to go to war.”
They wound around the one and a half lane road, by fields of olive trees that were twisted and gnarled and grotesque, like walking deformed madmen quietly stalking over the earth; and there were the frail little almond trees and everywhere there were rocks.
“Is that the cemetery?” Scape asked, suddenly rounding one more turn and seeing the walled crowded little village of the dead. There were tiny little houses and as they got nearer Scape could see the walls were made of sealed drawers of the dead. No one answered.
“Must be old, huh?” Scape asked. He liked Europe. He liked the age, the history, the time span.
“No. It’s not very old. It’s about late 18th Century,” Ewa Crop replied.
Scape pulled over to the side, making the right turn and then stopping. It was hot, deliciously, uncomfortably hot after the snow and ice of Sweden.
“They have an older cemetery?”
“No, not that I know. I don’t think they do.”
“But they’ve been inhabited for at least a couple thousand years.”
“Yes, but I believe they don’t stay buried. They bury you and then after decomposition, if you don’t pay annual fees, you are reburied or maybe just discarded.”
“No, Ewa,” the young man in the back seat said. His name was Michael Randolf-Wilson, an Englishman. “They have their religion. They can’t be dug up or thrown away. They have to be in sacred or consecrated soil, don’t they?”
“They don’t,” his sister Stephanie said. The brother and sister were the ones who’d found Stanley Crop’s body. “Because none of them or almost none of them are really in the ground. They’re above it.”
“Interesting question. Living here all this time and we don’t know the answer,” Randolf-Wilson said. “We’ll have to ask about it, Scape.”
“Do that. Just along this road,” Scape asked, fiddling with the mushy gear box to probe for first.
“Yes, all the way to the very end,” Ewa Crop said. “Mister Scape, what you were saying before. My husband’s death was investigated by the local authorities. I don’t know what sort of image you may have of them, but they are fully professional. They are as modem as Scotland Yard or your F.B.I. I, obviously, was a suspect and you see that I was not arrested.”
Scape shrugged. “I don’t question their competence. I know they’re good, but nobody’s perfect. I’ve been asked to clear payment or not. Terms of policy state that beneficiary must cooperate in any investigation. Agreed that the company would like to get out of paying you, you might as well go through this with me and get it over with.”
“But why do we have to go out to the house?” the girl in the back seat, Stephanie Randolf-Wilson, asked.
“I understand it’s a ghost story. Haunted house. Everybody scared to death of the place. Police sort of threw the case up and said maybe the ghosts killed him.”
“No they didn’t. Maybe the locals said that,” Randolf-Wilson said. “The police are convinced that somehow a prowler must have done it or maybe some drinking buddy.”
“It’s a lousy road. Always this hot?” Scape asked. The little car was spinning up a cloud of dust. The unpaved road was bone dry.
“No. We have seasons.”
“It’s a nice island. Long way to go?”
“Another five minutes, Mister Scape.”
“Okay Let’s review this. What I know is from a telephone call and the company’s file. Correct me if I’m very wrong. And my apologies if I get offensive’ Crop was poor little rich boy, ne’er-do-well from a family that was degenerating. He lived in the crumbling family mansion and had enough money to keep him in cheap booze. He was pugnacious, a sloppy little drunk. His family, fallen but still living on earlier generations’ money, didn’t like one of their own in the drunk tank every other night and his not upholding their fancies of family name and honor. They got together and made the standard deal. Crop would get a monthly stipend, hopefully to drink himself to death, if he’d get out of the States and stay out. If they didn’t have his agreement they threatened to throw him out.
“So he took the offer, boozed his way around Europe, finally settling here, where there was plenty of sun and unlimited quantities of the cheapest booze. As a joke, drunk and being taken advantage of, he awakened one day file owner of this haunted house. Price was cheap, but the place is unlivable and unsellable. Everybody seems terrified of it. Maids and delivery people refuse to get near it. He thought he wasn’t afraid of ghosts but the d.t.s or something scared him enough to build a new house, a small house out where the gate house had once been. Later, even that scared him and he bought land and built your present house out at, how do you pronounce it, Puerto de Andraitx.
“He drank as fast as he could put it away but instead of killing him it pickled him. He got so rubbery he could stagger into cars and bounce off. So he boozed and aged and cashed his generous check every month.
“You, Mrs. Crop, were on a two-week holiday, a cheap charter. You’d never done anything in Stockholm, called yourself a model, were a spoiled brat who knew the one thing you had going for you were your looks. You traded on them and would have, but then you took that vacation and you ran into drunken, old enough to be your father, Stanley.
“On a small island like this, everybody knows everything about everybody. You heard Stanley’s story, made an estimate of his net worth, decided that it was your big chance. You canceled your flight back to Stockholm, checked into a cheap pension and went after Stanley. One drunken night you befriended him, got him on a plane to Lisbon and another to Gibraltar where you stood him up for the marriage ceremony. When or if he ever sobered up he was probably amused by it all. So back you came and played the good wife. How does that get played in your league? Always have a bottle at hand for the little husband? Put a bottle at his bedside and always see that it’s filled? Funny. There you were feeding him buckets of what — Fundador or some similar rotgut? But Crop’s guts were beyond the rotting stage. Fast as you could pour it into him, he could absorb it and reach for more.”