She nodded. “My grandmother’s jewelry is in a safety deposit box in a New Orleans bank. As a private detective you’re bonded, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Then it’s simple,” she said. “You’ll go to New Orleans and bring the jewels to me.”
Chapter Eleven
A look of relief had spread over her face. It died by slow degrees, as she read meaning in my silence.
“You mean you won’t do it?” she asked in disbelief.
“That’s right.”
“But — you’re a detective. For hire. You must go.”
“I don’t must anything, lady.”
“Listen, I’ve depended on this!” Her plain face began to grow ugly.
“There are other ways of getting the jewels.”
“No!”
“Go yourself,” I said.
“And leave Jack here alone?” She was stunned, then angry. The ugliness spread.
“Take him with you.”
“And have him find out...” she bit the words off.
“How much there is?” I finished for her. “If he knew, he’d take it all in one grab, right?”
“That’s none of your business,” she said, controlling herself, remembering that she needed me. “Why won’t you go?”
“I’m busy here,” I said.
I stood up. She rose also. She grabbed my arm. “You don’t like me!” she cried, her voice shrilling to a selfish peak.
Her face was sweaty and flushed. For a second I glimpsed an ugly brat, ugly inside as well as out, a slimy little stinker spoiled rotten by parents attempting to fill the gaps in her life, gaps made by her own appearance and personality.
In defeat, her parents had finally let her go with Scanlon and disowned her, perhaps hoping it would bring her to her senses. She might as well get it through her head that the rest of the world wasn’t going to be as long-suffering as parents.
I jerked free of her. The rebuff outraged her. With a dirty word in her mouth, she tried to scratch my face.
I shoved her back on the couch. She flopped like a sack of sand and lay with her eyes burning on me. She was gasping for breath. Sweat clustered in heavy drops on her forehead.
“Damn you,” she whispered. “You’re cruel and evil. I tried to understand you. And now I do. You killed Bucks Jordan. I’ll tell the police...”
I bent over her and said, “You tell the police one single lie and I’ll break your fat, stupid neck.”
She cowered away, as if she would go crawling over the end of the couch like a creeping slug.
I straightened. And saw Jack Scanlon standing in the doorway.
I wondered how much he’d heard and seen and what interpretation he would give it. I didn’t move, and neither did he for about a full minute. Maria got off the couch as if she were barefoot and stepping on broken glass. “Jack...” she said.
“Save it,” he said. Rays of the sinking sun streamed across the screened porch to limn his rangy, rawboned tallness and to glint on his black hair. The result was to put the rugged, lazy, lean features of his face in shadows.
“Seems like every time I see you, Rivers,” he said, “you’re talking to my wife.” He moved into the room. His eyes moved lazily between Maria and me. “How about that?” he laughed without humor. “Big ugly man; dumpy, ugly woman. Just a couple of lonely souls trying to cheer each other up. Well, what about that! Maria, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
She moved toward him cautiously. “Jack, it isn’t...”
“Rivers,” he said, ignoring her pointedly, “if the heifer’s in heat, don’t mind me.”
“Oh, God, Jack!” she cried in such ragged agony that I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.
“Big man,” Scanlon continued to scathe me. “Big private cop. Why don’t you act big, big man?”
“Jack...” Her face was streaming moisture now, partly sweat, partly tears.
He shoved her away from him.
“It’s my house, big man. Move, that’s all. Just flick a muscle at me. I’ll gut-shoot you, big man. Then call the cops. Like that. Tell them I caught a man in my house, with my wife. Maria’ll tell them exactly what I say for her to tell them, all the things you bust in here and done to her.”
Maria was standing tight against the wall where he’d pushed her. She turned her wet face toward me. “Please leave,” she said hoarsely.
“I didn’t tell him to leave yet,” Scanlon said. He was enjoying himself, hugely, twistedly. In him, pleasure had taken the form of a perversion.
“Ain’t every day a man walks in and finds his wife with a big, ugly man,” he went on. He dropped a glance at her. “One thing, Rivers, you sure as hell must be hard up.”
I began to tremble with the effort to control myself. I started for the door. He moved toward me. “Did I say you could leave, big man?” Somebody should have told him better. He mistook the whiteness of my face. He was too sure of himself, and it gave me all the advantage.
When he reached for me, a grin on his face, I snapped his arm up, spun him, grabbed a handful of that black hair, and threw him flat on the floor.
He lay dazed, the wind knocked out of him.
“I ought to kick your teeth in,” I said.
Maria caught my arm, throwing her weight against me. The suddenness of it sent me staggering a few feet from Scanlon.
“Don’t you touch him!” she said viciously.
I pushed her back. She stayed between Scanlon and me.
“It appeared to him,” she said, “that he’d walked in on a man roughing up his wife. An eruption took place inside of him.”
“Sure,” I said sarcastically.
“Don’t you use that tone! Whatever Jack said to me was spoken in heat.”
“Of the eruption,” I said.
Scanlon got to his feet behind her, his eyes hating me, his face no longer pleasant. Unpleasant for keeps, so far as I was concerned.
He touched her shoulder. “It’s all right, Maria.”
“No, it isn’t. I won’t have anyone throwing you down and threatening to kick you...”
“I said it’s all right!”
She pouted, but kept her mouth shut. The pressure of his hand on her shoulder forced her to one side.
“Okay, Rivers, what’s it all about?”
I caught the glint of despair in her eyes as she suspected I was going to mention the last of her resources lying in a New Orleans strongbox.
With a heavy, mechanical motion, she moved to the couch and dropped on its edge in a slumped, sitting position.
“I’m still looking for Kincaid and Smith,” I said.
“You expect to find them here?”
“I thought she might tell me something about them. More correctly, I thought you might, but you weren’t here when I came.”
Her head turned as she ventured a glance at me.
“She don’t know them.”
“You do?”
He shrugged. “No more than you — or her. They worked the boat. Alex introduced us. They got off the boat.”
“You never saw them before they came here?”
“No.”
“Where are they staying?”
“How should I know?” He shrugged.
“Why’d you come here?”
“You go to hell, Rivers.”
“I’ve ways of finding out.”
“Go ahead and use your ways. I got nothing to hide — except of course thirty-three dead men buried under the house. Go right ahead and dig them up.”
“You met Alex Lessard in Latin America,” I said.
“Well, you got to meet your future friends someplace.”
“You were kicked out of one of the countries down there after a revolution misfired.”
His lips grinned. His eyes didn’t. “I see you’ve already been using your ways. So what if I was? That’s in the past. I’m a respectable man now, complete with wife.”