The Complete Cases of Stuart Bailey

by Roy Huggins

  “SIT down,” I said. She sat down and I got out my cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head and I lit one from the one in my mouth, snapped the butt away, and blew smoke over my left shoulder.

  “Did you want to say something?” she asked quietly.

  “Only that the longer you let a thing like this ride you, the longer it takes to get clear of it.”

  “Dad’s dead, and there’s nothing I can do to bring him back. I’m not letting it ride me.”

  “That’s good.”

  There was another silence and I was wondering how to get past it when Betty said, “I just can’t stand being on this boat with her, that’s all. If I don’t stay in my room, I-I don’t know what I might do.”

  “You’re sure it’s Eilene now, huh?”

  “Of course. Why else would she cook up that business about Dad’s will?”

  “Maybe it’s the truth—that is, the part about the will.”

  “I hope so. But she didn’t tell me about it.”

  “Maybe she said it just to protect Owen.”

  “Then they’re both in it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I’ve been curious about something. Didn’t you hear the shot?”

  “How could I when there was a silencer on the gun?”

  “How did you know that?”

  She looked at me steadily for a moment and said, just as steadily, “Because I saw the gun when Owen brought it below.”

  “I just wondered if Owen had gone out of his way to tell you.”

  “I don’t think that’s what you were wondering at all. I think you believe Eilene. She hasn’t drawn an honest breath for fifteen years, but you believed her.”

  “Are you saying I think you killed your father?”

  SHE turned and faced me, drawing a sharp breath to say something, and suddenly changed her mind. I could see the pale drawn tension in her face now, the terrible loneliness in her eyes.

  She turned away again and said, “It’s time for me to take over.”

  “Okay, you’ve taken over.”

  “Please, I . . .” And then, for what was possibly the first time since sudden death had overtaken Glen Callister, his daughter began to cry. I sat there for a bit before I put a tentative hand to her shoulder. She didn’t draw away, and when she spoke the words were muffled. She said, “Please. Go below. I’ll be all right.”

  And it was plain enough that Betty meant just that. I went below.

  Eilene and Owen were both in the lounge. Eilene was mixing a drink, Owen was picking at his guitar, and the tension in the room was even more obvious than the silence. I stepped over to the bar and poured myself a glass of ice water, sat down with it, and looked up at Eilene. She turned and walked out of the room, and in a moment her stateroom door closed with flat emphasis.

  I glanced at Owen and said, “Seems upset. Anything I can do?”

  He told me exactly what I could do.

  After another round of silence he shot his fingers sharply across the strings with a discordant whang of sound and tossed the guitar across the room. It» landed safely on the other couch. “Gimme a cigarette, will you?”

  I gave him a cigarette and watched him light it. He dragged deeply, pulled some of the smoke tentatively into his lungs, and blew it out quickly in a white plume.

  “WHAT happens when we hit port?” he asked. “Who does what to who?”

  “I thought you knew all about sea law.”

  “Okay, so I don’t.

  “The Skylark‘s an American registered ship, isn’t she?”

  “Sure.”

  “The F.B.I. handles the investigation and the U.S. Attorney in Honolulu tries the case.”

  “Why? Why not the local authorities?”

  “Did it happen locally?”

  “Who do they try? All four of us?”

  “Just the guilty party.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He scowled at the cigarette, stood up, and walked to the bar to put it out. He stood there with his back to me for what seemed a long time, and then he wheeled abruptly.

  “Bailey. I’m in love with her. I suppose that makes me a prime heel, but there it is. I’m in love with her, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  He was staring down at me with a wide-open look of confusion and despair, and I found myself wondering at the changes that can come over a man, or a face. The raw toughness and the maturity of two days ago had fallen away, and once again Owen Madden’s face belonged to a kid not long past twenty.

  “I’m in love with her and she knows it,” he was saying. “Why won’t she admit it to me?”

  “Admit what?” I asked, and I could feel my lips getting dry as I waited for his answer.

  He blinked once and looked down at me as if I had just reminded him of something important. He turned and began to mix himself a drink. His hands were trembling. I got up and shut the door that led to the passage and stepped over to mix a drink for myself, being careful to keep it reasonably nonalcoholic,

  TWO hours later I was on my eighth drink and cold sober. Owen was on his ninth, and just cold. He had taken on the erect, slow-moving, studied air of a man who likes to think of himself as blessed with an unlimited capacity. As Owen had put it while working on drink number seven, “I can get canned to the crow’s nest and y’d never know it.”

  Well, he was canned to the crow’s-nest and carrying three red lights, but I still hadn’t managed to get him back on to the subject. I was about to give up out of sheer caution—after all, he would have to take us into port in the morning when suddenly he leaned toward me and said, as if we’d been there all evening, “Sure, it made me sick inside at first, knowing she could kill a man like that. But I don’t care now. Don’t care about anything but Eilene ‘cause I’m in love with her and wanta . . . An’ she’s in love me. Crazy for me . . .”

  Hi took an untidy swallow and got lost in his thoughts for a while. This time I didn’t try to steer him anywhere at all.

  “But why won’ she admit, huh, Bailey? Can’t live with a woman something like that between you. Can you now?”

  “Course not. Won’t she admit it?”

  He shook his head miserably.

  “Fact, she keeps yapping at me admit I did it myself. Can you beat that?”

  I said, trying to make it sound as casual as asking for a match, “And did you do it?”

  His eyes opened a little wider and almost focused on me. “Hell no, she did! Tha’s what I been trying tell you. And I don’ care! If she’d only tell me!” He was shouting now. “If she just look at me and say, ‘Yes, I did it. For you.’ Then it—”

  He broke off abruptly as the door slammed open behind me. I turned to see Eilene standing there in what must have been her flimsiest. She was glaring hotly, across the room at Owen, her neck corded with tension, her fists clenched. And when she spoke the sound was like a file against an edge of glass: “You filthy coward. You filthy, lying, murdering coward. I could have killed him, Owen. For you. Now I wouldn’t walk across the room for you. Not if you were dying. I hope you hang for what you did!”

  She turned and went back to her stateroom, leaving Owen staring blankly at the empty darkness framed by the doorway. And she left me seeing the answer to everything, clearly, completely.

  IT was mid-morning of the fifteenth day of the Skylark‘s singular journey when Diamond Head hove into view.

  I found an American flag in the chartroom and took it up on deck. Owen was at the wheel. “I’m going to run it up,” I said. “Upside down, so we’ll get the quarantine officers out here before we hit port. Any objections, Captain?”

  “Nope.”

  I ran the flag up in distress signal position and Owen eyed the operation silently. “Is the gun Still aboard,” I said, “or did you bury it with the captain?”

  “It’s aboard.”
/>   “Where?”

  “Wrapped in a sheet and put away.”

  “Wrapped . . . Brother, they’re going to love you. If there were ever any fingerprints, they’ve gone now.” He made some kind of an answer to that, but I didn’t hear it. I had to talk to Betty and time was running out.

  It was to be my show from here on, but I can’t say that my heart was really in it. Glen Callister had hired me, had paid me five hundred honest dollars, and I hadn’t succeeded in talking myself out of the idea that I owed him something. Betty was the first step, and I was pretty sure she would also be the toughest.

  I found her in the lounge, sitting at the piano, running her fingers aimlessly over the keys.

  “Where’s Eilene?” I asked.

  “In her stateroom, I suppose.” I closed the door and sat down, waiting a moment in the hope that she would get it started. But she went on playing a simple, melancholy melody that she seemed to like.

  I SAID, “I’d like to talk to you a minute, Betty.”

  She let the melody fade off into nothing and turned to look at me without saying anything.

  “We’ll all be under arrest pretty soon. We’ll be asked to make statements. If they decide to raise a murder charge against one of us, we’ll all be over here for months. Do you know that?”

  “I suppose we will.”

  “What kind of a statement »re you going to make?”

  “How do you mean? The truth, of course.”

  “What’s the truth? And I’m not waxing philosophical.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “Because I’d like to know what you think it is.”

  “That Dad knew one of them intended to kill him. That he told you so, and hired you to . . .”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “I said he didn’t.”

  “But the letter . . .”

  “There isn’t any letter.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Our friend Owen was threatening to lock me up. I just dreamed up the letter lo cool him down.”

  “You’re not a detective?”

  “Yes, in California. I’m not licensed to play sleuth on the high seas.”

  SHE thought that over, and I could see that she didn’t like what it added up to. With an air of faint disgust, she said. “Do detectives post bonds? Big cash bonds?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “they do.”

  “And you’d forfeit it for operating outside California?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You’re a wonderful example of fine citizenship, aren’t you? You might lose a little money, so let’s fix it, let’s allow two corrupt, contemptible . . .”

  “Listen, Betty, this is the story I’m going to tell: Your father hired me sometime ago to find out if there was anything between his wife and Owen Madden. I found there wasn’t, and we became friends. That’s why I was on the trip—as a friend.”

  Betty stood up, staring at me with an expression compounded of cold contempt and fear. “And if you tell them that, and Eilene tells her story about the will, they-they might even—”

  “Yes, they might. But I can get Eilene to forget that story at least that she told you about it. But you’ll have to forget what you think about Owen and her.”

  Slowly she crossed the room and sat down, not looking at me. “All this,” she whispered, “lying, conniving, just to avoid being held up on an island for a while, just to hold onto a grubby way of making a living.” She looked at me. “It’s funny how wrong you can be about people.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I won’t do it. I know they were lovers. I’ve seen them together. I’ve seen her going down to the Skylark when Dad was out of town.”

  I CAME across the room and sat down beside her. “Okay, Betty, it’s a mess then for all of us. We’ll all pay through the nose, but not one of us will ever pay the price they put on murder; there’s too much evidence against the three of you, and not half enough against one.”

  She shook her head in puzzlement and disbelief, her eyes searching my face. “For the three of us,” she whispered, “maybe lying is worth it. But for you it’s cheap. It’s cheap and-and I don’t know. Is there a word for people like you, who can look at murder the way some people look at a traffic violation?”

  “Cheap will do until you think of a better word. The quarantine launch will be alongside any minute. Are you going to do it my way?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Baby, you just haven’t any choice. When I tell them I tailed those two and found there wasn’t anything between them, your story’s going to look like nothing but an alibi.”

  “I’ll take my chance.”

  “Then I’d better take the ace out of my sleeve. That rifle was fired from the forward hatch, just two feet from where you sleep. Do you think they’ll believe anyone else would go up there to do it?”

  “How do you know where it was fired from?”

  “The point is, I can establish that it was.”

  “You’d be lying, of course.”

  “No, Betty, I wouldn’t be.”

  “You-you think I killed him. You’ve thought so all along. Is that why you’re doing all this?”

  “We haven’t got time for reasons. I’ve got Eilene and Owen to tackle yet.”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. She stood up abruptly and said, “You—” and then decided to keep the idea to herself.

  “No Betty. I didn’t kill him. Are you doing it my way?”

  “How many years do you get for perjury?” she asked harshly.

  “This isn’t perjury. You’ll be under arrest on suspicion of murder. Suspects have a right to say as little or as much as they think wise. If this case goes to the grand jury—and you’re lucky enough to be just a witness—then tell the truth. I intend to. But until then you’re going to make a statement that doesn’t implicate anyone just as the rest of us will.”

  “What do I say?”

  “Anything you like—as long as it isn’t about Eilene and Owen.”

  “I’ll tell you something very funny. I’m not doing it because you’ve frightened me. I’m doing it because I’ve still got the silly schoolgirl idea that you’re a nice guy, that you’ve got some decent reason for all this.”

  It took just ten minutes with Eilene to get her to see things my way, and with Owen it was less than five. I’m not sure if it was because he was tractable, or because the quarantine launch was coming up on our starboard bow.

  The special representative in-charge was a blond, pink faced man named Holman. He wore a pleasant smile, a wrinkled seersucker suit, and a one-inch haircut. He was painfully polite, and when he spoke he chose each word as if he’d just coined it himself.

  His office was not in the regular government building, but on the second floor of an ordinary office building not far from the harbor. Otherwise it was typical of every civil servant’s room from here to Nome. One plain desk, some wooden chairs, a bookcase, mud-brown linoleum, and a secretary who didn’t get her job through nature’s bounty, but from her place on a list.

  We sat in a half-circle in front of Holman’s desk and waited for him to get past the polite inconsequentials and down to the business at hand. The Skylark had been impounded and its four passengers were presumably under arrest, although the ugly word had not yet been so much as whispered. A Kona wind was blowing, and when Holman finished telling us what it was and apologizing for it he cleared his throat and said, in a new tone, “The quarantine officer advised me that one of you, acting as captain, reported this . . . murder aboard. Where was the ship when the death occurred?”

  Owen glanced briefly at me before he answered. “Eleven and a half days out of Wilmington. Last Sunday.”

  “Is the Skylark of American registry, Mr. Madden?”

  “Yes. I told the quarantine officer all this.”

  “I know. Well, there’s no question about jurisdiction, which means statements are in order. If y
ou like, we can do it right here, together, or privately, if you prefer.”

  Nobody said anything. “What will it be?” Silence.

  “Well, if there’s no objection, then, we’ll do it now. You were acting as captain, Mr. Madden?”

  Owen nodded.

  “Then I’d like to begin with you, please.”

  I glanced at the secretary. Her freshly sharpened pencil was poised over the pad like a spear fisher waiting for the kill. It shot down swiftly and began to move when Holman asked his first question:

  “What was your relation to the deceased, Mr. Madden?”

  THE whole thing took less than forty minutes, everyone answering questions readily and at length, but pointing no fingers, dropping no innuendos along the way.

  When it was over Holman sat staring out his window while his secretary went over her notes.

  Holman asked of nobody in particular: “You say it was a fishing harness he was strapped in?”

  “That’s right,” I answered.

  “And what side of the anchor was the rifle on? Between the anchor and the fishing seat?”

  Owen answered that one: “No, the other side of the anchor.”

  “Anchor lie flat on the deck?”

  “Yes.”

  Holman went back to his window, his eyes as clouded as the sky the day the squall hit us. Finally he turned back, looked at the four of us with a kind of well-mannered skepticism, and said, “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have wasted our time. We’ll have to take individual statements, of course. Maybe some of you will feel free then to say what’s really on your minds. Frankly, I had supposed you all knew exactly what had happened, that it was an accident, or at most unpremeditated. I hope you all realize I’m forced to have a complaint filed in the District Court against all four of you—suspicion of murder—and to insist on prohibitive bail.”

  He picked up his phone, and two hours later I was making myself at home in one of the local houses of hesitation. I” didn’t know where the others had been taken, but each of us had gone his own way.

  I WAS a Government guest for just eight days, and I was visited by young Mr. Holman three times. Maybe I should say I was visited by young Mr. Holman twice and by old Mr. Holman once, because by the time that third visit rolled around he was an old and tired and harassed man, with blue circles under both eyes and a bad twitch in one of them.