As she went slowly down the stairs, sliding her hand on the bannister railing, she wondered if it would be the same one, the tall blonde woman with the beautiful slender tan body, but a very strong woman for all the slenderness, a match and more for the hammering brutishness of him.
Held out this long, you have, she thought. So heat yourself up a mug of warm milk and drink it down and go to your bed like a decent-minded widowed dwarf lady, with three old dogs depending on her. It’s late, Little Maureen. Somewhere around ten or later even. Drink the milk and kneel by the bed and pray to God to take away the gnawing and burning because you are too old now for evil.
“Never again!” she said aloud. She bit the inside of her mouth, tasted blood, groaned, trotted into the dark kitchen and folded the little aluminum stepladder she used to reach the dish cupboards. In her cotton housecoat, carrying the ladder, she slipped out into the dark, hot night and threaded her way in her hump-backed stealthy crouch along familiar paths that led behind the cottages. Moving swiftly and breathing shallowly, she set her ladder up under the lighted window and climbed it and stood upon the top of it, hands against the siding for support. She put her eye to the narrow opening between the shade and the framing of the window screen and looked into the room and into the tumbled emptiness of the sagging bed. Disappointment was as sharp as toothache. She saw a pattern of light on the floor which indicated the bathroom light was on across the hallway.
With an anxious agility she climbed down, folded the ladder, and trotted around the rear of the cottage and, as she set it up under the lighted bathroom window, she had a vivid, sweet, dizzying memory of that pair two years ago and more, ah, how they’d sloshed and strained in the suds, and all the while the girl, plump as a little dumpling, squealing and giggling, had teased the poor rascal shamelessly, giving him such little samples he was near out of his mind with the need of it, a torture Mr. Mooney would not have permitted for an instant.
She climbed up the ladder and put her eye to the opening and stood tiptoe tall so as to look down into the tub. She stopped breathing for two long seconds, then turned and stepped off the top of the little ladder into space. The tilt triggered the old reflexes and skills of the clown years, and she jacked her knees up, tucked her head down, rolled her right shoulder under, and relaxed her body completely at the instant before impact. She rolled over and back up onto her feet, gave a little hop to regain balance, and then leaned against the side of the cottage for a moment, feeling dizzy. Poor old Little Maureen, she thought. One little rollover makes her all shaky inside.
She folded the ladder and raced back to her house along the overgrown paths, the leaves brushing at her. The number to call was in the front of the phone book. “Miz Mooney talking,” she said in a voice like a contralto kazoo. “I got one needs help bad and needs it quick, in my number ten cottage. Maybe he’s breathing, maybe not, anyway in a tub so blood dark I can’t see if it was wrists he cut. What? Sonny boy, there’s no way in hell you can find it unless you stop talking and let me tell you where my place is. So kindly fermay the boosh and get your pencil out...”
At eight o’clock the following morning a brisk young man named Lobwohl sat at a steel and linoleum desk with his back to a big tinted window. He was reading the preliminary reports on the Mooney Cottages business and making notes on a yellow legal pad, and pausing from time to time to sip coffee from a large, waxed cardboard cup.
Two men, heavier and older than Lobwohl, came sauntering in. As one of them sat down, Lobwohl said, “It starts like one of those weeks. Did you get hold of Harv?”
“He should be started on it by now. I told him what you wanted. A complete job on the second time around, right? Every latent, every grain of dust, every thread, every hair. He said to tell you there’s one thing that makes it easier than usual.”
“Nothing ever makes anything any easier.”
“It was empty for two months before that midget rented it to him, and sitting empty and hot as a bakery, so Harv says the oils in all the old prints are dried out, and the way they take the powder, he can tell old from new right off. Anyway, his team should be working there now. He requisitioned one of the big lab trucks with everything on it.”
Lobwohl, nodding approval, continued his note taking. The other man, standing at the window, said, “I’m telling you. That damn Shaeffer. One forty-seven season average, and last night he rolls a six hundred series. Two twenty-eight the last game!”
“Shaeffer in Safe and Loft?” Lobwohl asked as he made a note.
“So they edge us out by five pins,” the man said with disgust.
“Okay, Bert, Barney, let’s get to it,” Lobwohl said. The man turned from the window and sat beside his partner, facing Lobwohl. “We have the make on him as Staniker. So his name was on the check in the bureau drawer and on his discharge from the hospital in Nassau. And the prints match, and he looks like Staniker’s daddy. So we are very clever people. But he is G. Stanley from Tampa as long as we can keep the lid on it.”
“Why should we?” Barney asked.
Bert said, “He likes the bright light they shine on you. He makes those faces. Any minute, CBS signs him.”
“We’ll move faster and better if it’s just another four lines on page forty, at least for now. I checked upstairs. If we start making the big effort, somebody wonders why. So it’s just us. Here’s what we’ve got from medical. Ten o’clock last night, plus or minus an hour. Pretty good load of barbiturates, but hard to tell how much exactly with all the blood gone out of it. But here is the clincher. No false tries on the wrists. One cut each, and as deep as you’ll ever see. The point is this. The cuts went so deep they destroyed the motor ability of the fingers. So he could cut one that way, but not both, unless he held the blade in his teeth, and that’s not very damn possible. Here’s what I go for. Somebody half cute. Wanted him dead. Didn’t figure the wrist business. Forgot to fix the catch so the door would lock itself. Let’s hope he was so sure it would go over he didn’t worry about prints. It’s about time we were due for one where prints would do us some good. How long has it been now?”
“Three years anyway,” Barney said.
“A hundred and fifty dollars in the same bureau drawer. We’ve got two directions to go for motive.”
“What’s with the G. Stanley bit?” Bert asked.
“That leads into one of the motives. The dwarf-lady said he was a one-night customer back in April. At that time he and his wife were living at that marina. The word is that he was stud. This time he signed for two weeks. The layout is fine for a sneak job, if you don’t mind a little squalor. The husband could have showed up instead of the lady and figured it that it would seem reasonable Staniker would be depressed by losing that yacht and those people and his wife and being the only one to get out of it alive.”
“And,” said Bert, “if you go the other way, it’s somebody doing it because he lost the boat.”
“You’re a better cop than a bowler,” Lobwohl said. “I remember a sob story about a girl on that boat. Her boyfriend and her brother came flying over from Texas to be in Nassau while the search was still going on. See if you can get me that clip without anybody smelling anything. Then we see if either or both are in the area, or maybe left the area this morning. I can have that checked out other ways once you get me that article. Meanwhile, you two dig into Staniker’s love life. He got to town Friday. He took that place Friday. I want to know exactly who he was banging before he went cruising. Move fast on it. And quietly.” He tapped one of his phones with his pencil. “And come back to me on this outside line, not through the radio net. Start at that marina and work out from there. Neighborhood. Bars. I don’t have to tell you your business.”