I drove back to Tampa and went to the office. The old man wasn’t there and I mumbled talk with the girl behind the reception desk until he came in. He went into his private office and I told Fayette everything that had happened. His chiseled, rawboned face looked gaunt. He sank behind his desk. “What’d you find out about Tomlinson?”
“Nothing, except that now he’s just a dead pretty boy. It ain’t our case. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I caught a bus and rode up through the squalor of lower Nebraska to my apartment. I bought a twenty-five pound block of ice at the ice house on the corner, carried it up to my apartment. I put the ice in a dishpan, set the dishpan on a center table in the bedroom. I plugged in the electric fan and set it behind the pan, so that the air was blowing over the ice, over the bed.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. The air was cool and good for a second or two, until I got used to it. I reached under my left armpit and pulled out the knife. It was long, keen, and gleaming with a six and a quarter inch blade. I knew what was bothering me, now.
A living, breathing, feeling man had been killed.
I slung the knife. It flashed, struck the door jamb, stood out from the wood, quivering I flopped over on the bed and went to sleep.
It was a hell of a hot day.
Chapter Two
Knife for Hire
I didn’t sleep long. I woke with a mouthful of cotton, sweat drenching me, a heat-thickened pulse pounding in my head. I ran my tongue around my gums, realized that somebody was knocking on the door. As I went to answer, I plucked the knife from the door jamb, put it back in its sheath under my armpit. I looked at my watch. It was 4:40 in the afternoon. When I opened the door. Phyllis Darnell had her hand raised to knock again. She’d changed from the white play suit, wearing now a yellow silk dress that really set off her complexion, lazy black eyes, and midnight hair.
“Oh!” she said, as if the opening of the door had startled her. She made vague gestures in the air with her hands. If it hadn’t been for that way she had of using her hands, she’d have been a very beautiful woman.
“You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, Mr. Carter. Are you busy?”
“It depends. I guess you want to hire a detective?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, my looks didn’t bring you here, did they?”
Ice flaked in her eyes. “No, your looks didn’t bring me here. Are you going to ask me in or not?”
“Why not?” I held the door wide. When she came in and I’d closed the door, I said, “You care for beer?”
“No.”
“Well, excuse me a moment. Make yourself at home.”
She followed me out to the kitchen. I opened the ice box, counted the bottles of beer. The girl who’d come in to clean while I’d been out had been thirsty again. I opened a bottle of beer, killed half of it, said, “I’m listening.”
“I really don’t know how to begin, Mr. Carter. I really don’t!” She wrung her hands, real fright coming to life in her eyes. “It’s very awkward.”
“I’ve heard awkward things before. Sit down. Iced tea?”
She shook her head, then nodded. “Yes, I’ll have a glass of tea.”
I put water on to boil.
“How’d you find me, Mrs. Darnell?”
“I asked that sheriff. From the way he talked to you when he arrived at Buddy Tomlinson’s bungalow, I knew you were a detective. He told me where you worked, where you lived. You weren’t in your office, neither was your boss, and the girl at the reception desk...”
“Okay, okay. I guess you wanted to talk to me about Tomlinson?”
“I, yes — no. I mean, in a way I did.” She glanced about the kitchen as if seeking a way out, a way to stall. “I see the water is simmering, Mr. Carter.”
So it was. I took the battered aluminum pot off the flame, dropped in a tea bag, chipped ice and put it in a glass, and poured the tea over it. I set out cream, sugar, and scratched in the back corner of the ice box for the lone, wilted lemon there. Slicing the lemon, I said, “Why don’t you just tell me straight off? Why beat around the bush? Buddy Tomlinson has been murdered and it’s put you on the spot somehow. You want me to remove you from said spot. All right, what is it?”
The way she whitened beneath her deep tan gave her the appearance of wearing a heavy coat of dark powder. Her hands were trembling. “I... I really don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”
I set the tea before her, sat down across the table, and finished my beer. Then I just sat there, not speaking, not moving.
When the silence began to eat away her nerves, she said shrilly, “I lied this morning! I’m married — but I’m not a divorcée. And I had every reason in the world for wanting to kill Buddy Tomlinson!”
She began to cry softly. She took out a wispy handkerchief, made dabs at her eyes.
“I really hate to say this. I really do. You see, Mr. Carter, I have a husband in Augusta, Maine. But we’re not divorced, and never intend to be. I really don’t know how I’m going to explain this to you. Oh, I’ve been a fool! I can hardly explain it to myself.
“I love my husband deeply and I am sure I mean more to him than life itself. I won’t try to excuse myself. But every year I take a vacation, to Florida, the west coast, South America, or Cuba. My poor, trusting husband! His business keeps him tied to his desk, but he insists that I might as well escape a few weeks of northern winter every year. It’s on these trips that I present myself as an unmarried woman or a divorcée. That way one interests a better class of men, than if one admitted being a married woman. Somehow that way it always seemed in my mind to cheapen my husband less.”
She was looking down at her hands, momentarily quiet in her lap, waiting for me to speak. To condemn her, maybe. I opened another cold beer and didn’t say anything.
“Drink your tea,” I said.
It wasn’t very good tea, but she drank it gratefully. I finished my beer and said, “Buddy Tomlinson was one of those men?”
She nodded mutely.
“You certainly made a mistake about classifying men in his case!”
She shuddered under the sentence as if it was a blow of my hand, but she continued to look silently down.
“How’d you meet Tomlinson?”
“Through Baxter Osgood. They seemed to be close friends. Baxter Osgood owns a small beer garden on Coquina beach. I was there one night — he introduced me to Buddy.”
“And you were promptly swept off your feet.”
“You aren’t a woman. You didn’t know Buddy Tomlinson,” she said in a stricken voice. “Now he’s dead, and the letters have disappeared.”
“You made the mistake of writing him some mush notes?”
Her face flooded red. “He was in Bradenton for a week. He begged me to write him every day. He was so sweet, so boyish.” Her voice thickened with a violent anger; her hands played on the table top. “Something I said must have caused him to suspect that I wasn’t really divorced.”
“Can you recall what you might have said?”
“I... no. One night — just before he went down to Bradenton — we drank quite a bit. I was drunk, when he took me to my hotel. I must have talked of my life in Augusta.”
“Afterwards he wanted money for the letters?”
She nodded again, swallowing in such a way her throat constricted with the action. “I gave him almost five hundred dollars — but he didn’t give me the letters back. I knew then that I was in a deadly game, that my life in Augusta depended on what I did. I hoped to wheedle the letters out of him. Now he’s dead. Can’t you see what might be the results, if those letters come to light? My husband’s life ruined, a possible murder charge against me. Mr. Carter, you must help me. I can’t afford to be drawn openly in this kind of mess.”