Park cursed softly and raced from the terrace across the house. With a rifle he might have managed it. But the .38 didn’t have a high enough degree of accuracy. Branneck pushed Taffy roughly down onto the cabin floor of the small twenty-one-foot cabin cruiser. As he ran to the bow to free the rope, Park risked a shot. Branneck flinched and scrambled aboard. The marine engine roared into life and Branneck swung it around in the small basin, crouching behind the wheel as he piloted it down the narrow mouth, dangerously close to the causeway where Mick stood. Mick leveled the carbine but did not dare risk a shot. The cruiser sped out in a wide curve in the quiet water between the island and the mainland.
Park gave a shout as Taffy jumped up and went over the side in a long, slanting dive. The cruiser swung back and Branneck stood at the rail, the light glinting blood red on the polished metal of the gaff. Park’s fingernails bit into his palm. Branneck raced to the wheel, adjusted the path of the cruiser, and hurried back to the rail. Taffy turned in the water. Branneck lunged for her with the gaff. Even at that distance, Park saw her hand reach up and grasp the shaft above the cruel hook. Branneck tottered for a moment, his arms waving wildly. Park heard his hoarse cry as he went overboard. Two heads bobbed in the water in the wake of the cruiser. Taffy’s arms began to lift in her rhythmic, powerful crawl. Branneck turned and began to plow toward the mainland.
Park ran down and out the back of the house, across the patio to meet Taffy. Mick already had one of the cars started. He spun the tires as he yanked it around to head over the causeway and cut Branneck off.
The cruiser, with no hand at the wheel, came about in a wide curve. Park watched it. He saw what would happen. It swept on — and Taffy was the only swimmer. Mick stopped the car and backed off the causeway and parked it again. The cruiser continued on, missed the far shore, swung back, and grounded itself at the very end of Grouper Island.
Park went down into the water over his ankles. Taffy came out, the powder-blue dress molded to every curve. She shivered against him.
“He... he’s swimming to the mainland.”
“He was. Not any more. The Nancy swung back and took care of that little detail.”
“He tried to gaff me,” she whispered.
“Come on. I’ll get you a drink.”
As they walked up to the house, she smiled up at him. Her smile was weak. “The next time you get me to help in any of your little games”
“Branneck had a capacity for pulling off the unexpected.”
“What will you do?”
“Accidental death. That widow he married may be a nice gal.”
O’Day had left to accompany the girl’s body back to Chicago. Park sat on his private terrace, with Taffy sharing the extra-wide chaise longue.
Townsend came out and said, “Not that I want to be a boor, people, but it is nearly midnight and I’ve got to mark this case off my books and get back to work.”
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” Park said.
“Better luck on the next one. ‘Night.”
He left and Taffy asked, “Who was that man?”
“Internal Revenue. He helped my investigator get a line on Branneck. You see, when Branneck was calling himself by his right name — Krindall — he forgot to declare the money he squeezed out of Cauldfeldt as income. Branneck didn’t know it, but all we were going to do was get satisfactory proof that he was Krindall. Penalties, back taxes, and interest would have added up to six hundred thousand.”
“But Branneck had his own answer.”
After the house was silent, Park Falkner took the woman’s bathing suit, the dozen pictures, the permanent tape off the recorder and put them neatly and gently into a steel file box in the cabinet behind his bookshelves. Once the sticker with the date had been applied to the end of the box, it looked like all the others.
Falkner slept like a tired child.
From Some Hidden Grave
(aka The Lady Is a Corpse!)
Park Falkner took a deep breath, exhaled half of it, squeezed the trigger slowly. The rifle spat, a sound as vicious as an angry wasp. Far out across the dancing blue water of the Gulf the glint of the can jerked, disappeared.
“Enough,” he said. He stood the rifle in the corner of the private terrace that opened off his bedroom, the highest terrace of the vast gleaming-white fortress that dominated the two-mile sandspit called Grouper Island, and sometimes Falkner Island.
He stretched and yawned. He was a tall, spare, rock-hard man in his mid-thirties. A tropical disease had eliminated, forever, hair, eyebrows, lashes. His eyes were a startling pale shade against the sun-glossed mahogany of skin. There was a touch of cruelty in the beaked nose and set of the mouth, and humor as well. He wore a faded Singhalese sarong, knotted at the waist.
“I should think it is enough,” Taffy Angus said, in her hoarse gamin voice.
She stood on her hands, her heels against the wall of the house, her white hair hanging in fluid lines to the terrace tiles. She wore a bandanna as a halter, and the jeans, salt-faded to powder blue, were hacked off raggedly at knee length. The position brought a flush under her tan.
“Does that make you a junior leaguer?” Falkner asked.
“Don’t be nasty, darling,” she said. She dropped onto hands and toes, came gracefully up onto her feet. “I’m an old, old gal, as you well know, and a daily handstand has therapeutic values.”
Falkner looked at her admiringly. “Bless you! You’re my favorite neighbor. When I forget you’re forty-two I feel like a cradle snatcher.”
“In my prime, I came a little after the Gibson Girl, Park. But just to change the subject, how about those people who are coming?”
Park looked at his watch. “The cocktail hour approacheth. Go prettify thyself, wench.”
She bowed low. “Sire!” she breathed. Her lips thinned a little. “Park, just for the record — couldn’t we drop the Mussolini edict about living dangerously and grow fat and happy in the sunshine on your money? These people you ask here...”
They had walked to the hallway door. He opened it and gently shoved her through.
“Okay, okay.” She sighed. “I never opened my fool mouth.”
Falkner shut the door. His smile faded. Taffy knew as well as he did what had happened those times he had tried stagnation. He had grown restless, irritable. There was no point in trying to add to the fund, which was more than he could possibly spend in his lifetime. The company of the equally affluent brought a sickening boredom. And so life had to be spiced by the house parties. An amateur cop or a god of vengeance. Take your choice. Flip a coin. When there’s guilt in the air it can be scented, as an animal scents the odor of fear. He looked along the beach to the spot where one of his houseguests, Carl Branneck, had killed Laura Hale. For a moment there was revulsion in him, and he wanted to call his newest house party off. Then he remembered the report from the New York agency and his interest began to quicken.
He crossed the big room to the built-in record player. He pondered. Atonal stuff would probably help tension along better than anything traditional. He selected two hours of Milhaud, Schönberg, and Antheil, stacked them on the spindle, cut in the amplifiers of the sea-level terrace, where they would have cocktails, and the amplifiers in the east garden, and then adjusted the volume down for background.