by Roy Huggins
It came on the eighth day, that third visit, and he walked in with his shoulders hunched and his mouth pulled into a thin, dyspeptic line. He threw his briefcase on to my cot and fumbled out a cigarette. He said, “You’re going to have to change your story. I’m afraid I never did believe it. A man just doesn’t get friendly with a private detective he hires to tail his wife. But your story doesn’t check out anyway.”
“There’s no way you could have checked my story and I know it.”
“Is that so? Do you get paid to work, Bailey?”
“Not enough, but I get paid.”
“We had Callister’s bank account in Los Angeles gone over. No checks drawn to you, or to anyone else we could account for. Yet you’re supposed to have worked for him for six weeks.”
“Don’t I detect a slight contradiction in your logic? You say a man doesn’t get friendly, et cetera. Then you say he didn’t hire me, anyway. Which is it?”
Holman didn’t answer that right off, but I could see that he was working on it.
“Look,” I went on, “people don’t pay for my kind of work with checks. They pay cash. Callister paid cash.”
I said it simply, like a man pricking a large balloon with a very small pin. And Holman’s face showed me I had touched the business end of the balloon.
AFTER a while he said, “So I can’t persuade you to change your story.”
“Sorry, I can’t do it.”
“What if I tell you I intend to charge you with murder and have the bunch of you before the grand jury?”
“I’d say you were making a big mistake.”
He looked down at me, his left eye twitching a bit. He sat down and offered me a cigarette. I took it, lit it, and we sat some more in a kind of one-sided silence.
“You’re right, of course,” he said hoarsely. “The boys in the also have a full complement of peepholes and midget microphones.
It was a pleasant enough room, high-ceilinged, with busy wall-paper and a balcony. I wondered if Holman had recommended the St. James to the others. I walked over and picked up the phone. “This is Bailey in 506. If any reporters come asking about me, I’m not registered. I flew back to California.”
“Reporters. Yes, sir.”
“Has a Betty Callister registered yet?”
“No sir,” he said, without having to give it a second thought. “Eilene Callister is in 304.”
“Thanks. If Miss Callister registers, will you ask her to call me?”
“Yes, sir.”
I hung up and wondered if there was any point in calling the Widow Callister. I decided there wasn’t and went out to find something to eat. I found it in a restaurant that claimed to be “The Most Magnificent Chinese Food Place in the World.” And it probably was, if you didn’t get lost in one of the yawning caves or waterlogged rock gardens.
The desk clerk handed me a note along with my key when I got back. The note said Miss Betty Callister had asked for me at nine-thirty.
“Did she register here?”
“Yes, room 414, but . . .” He turned to glance at the key rack. “She’s out right now, with Mrs.
Callister.”
“Did Owen Madden check in?” He shook his head. He hadn’t had to check his register for that one either.
I went upstairs and got under the shower, wondering if Owen had enough money on him to find a bed somewhere. I doubted it. The Skylark, would be out of police hands by now, but I also doubted if Owen would sleep there.
I was still wondering about it when I went to bed.
I WOKE up feeling thirsty and hung-over and not in a mood for breakfast or for any of the other activities I had planned for U.S. Attorneys’ office laughed in my face when I suggested we ask for an indictment against one of you. They wanted to know whose hat I was planning to pull the name out of.”
“That’s tough. Does this thing make a difference in your job how you stand?”
“Why?”
“Call it curiosity.”
“No effect whatever,” he said emphatically. “I’m not a local politician, you know.”
He went on mulling it over in gloomy silence, finally coming up with, “The girl inherits most of the dough, but everything indicates she didn’t even know it. The wife comes into a good hunk of cash under the community property laws of California, but she’d have done as well if she’d just divorced the guy. You and Madden I can’t figure any angle for at all, unless one of you had a yen for the wife. Any ideas on that?”
“After eight days in pokey? Naturally.”
“To hell with you, too.”
And, after a little more of the same, he stood up and said. “Well, that’s that. You can go any time. The others will be released in an hour or two.”
He walked over, opened the barred gate, and said, “You’ll be looking for a room. I’d recommend the St. James, considering the short notice.” He walked away, leaving the cell door open
I sat there looking at it and not wanting to get up and go out. It was far more pleasant just sitting back watching the gate swing slowly against its hinges, savoring the idea that I could walk out of there any time I wanted.
That evening I checked in at the St. James, a strictly marginal hostelry with a baroque exterior and a Grand, Rapids modern decor. They had a room all right, 506, with bath and a view of the beach. And as I went up in the grille-work elevator, I wondered if 506 didn’t the day. I got dressed and went out on to the balcony to wait for the phone to ring.
It came through for me at ten o’clock—Owen Madden calling from the lobby. I told him to come up.
His clothes were wrinkled and he was wearing a blue stubble of beard on his face and a look Of hostile contempt around his mouth, as if there was something a little indecent about people who slept in beds.
“Mind if I take a shower and borrow your shave kit?”
“Go ahead. Where’d you sleep last night?”
“Under a Koa tree, and how did you sleep?”
He disappeared into the bathroom without waiting for an answer, and half an hour later he was out again looking cleaner but no happier.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what this is all about, would you?” he asked. “You were sort of putting your neck out a long way for people you don’t give a damn about. Why? Did you kill the Old Man?”
“No.”
“Frankly, I didn’t think you did.”
“I thought you had that all figured out.”
“I’m afraid I have. Well, so long. Bailey, it’s been weird knowing you.” He walked toward the door.
“Going anywhere in particular?”
“Over to the Big Island. I can get a job on a boat over—”
HE broke off as a knock sounded daintily at the door I called out a come in, the door opened, and Eilene started in with a kind of half-smile on her face. She stopped abruptly when she saw Owen, and the smile broke like a piece of china.
“I-I’ll come back some—”
“I was just leaving,” Owen said, and he shook my hand and walked out the door striding past
Eilene as if she hadn’t been there and closing the; door firmly behind him.
“He’s going over to Hawaii Island to get a job,” I offered.
“How nice for him. I came up to thank you for-for everything. I’d have come sooner, but the reporters have been at me since dawn.”
“Do they know I’m here?”
“No, they think you flew back.” There was a moment of awkward silence.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.
“Nothing, thanks. What are your plans?”
“I’m going home. I’ve got space on today’s plane.”
“Where’s the Skylark?”
“Why?”
“I’ve got some stuff on it.”
“Oh. It’s at the Oahu Yacht Anchorage. Betty and I decided to put her up for sale.”
“Why not?”
“Yes, why not. Well, good-bye. I’ll never know why, but
you’ve been a good friend.”
“Have I?”
“I think so. And I’ll never forget it. Never.”
I guided her gently toward the door and walked with her down the corridor to the elevator. While we waited for it to wheeze up to the fifth floor, I said, “Who do you think killed him, Eilene?”
“Does it matter?”
“Don’t you think it does?”
“It was Owen, of course,” she said quietly. “I wouldn’t have cared if he’d had the honesty and manhood to face me with it.” She looked at me wide eyed. “I’d have married him, knowing he’d killed to . . . Well, what’s the difference? It’s as dead as poor Glen now. Deader.”
THE elevator got there, and Eilene shook my hand vaguely and stepped in. Her eyes stayed on mine until the cage dropped below the floor level. I walked down the stairs to Betty’s room on the fourth floor. There were no reporters, but there was also no response to my knock. I went back up and tried her by phone. No answer, and the desk clerk had no idea where she might be.
So I went on down to the Oahu Yacht Anchorage and found the Skylark, which was a little like coming home.
It seemed infinitely quiet down in the lounge, and musty. And there also seemed something missing. As I stepped into the galley, it came to me: Owen’s guitar. It wasn’t lying there on the couch as it always had. I had left Callister’s letter under the paper in the galley cupboard; now I took it out and dropped it into a pocket.
I opened Betty’s door. Even the lace spread was gone. I went back to the master’s cabin.
The gun was there, the government’s identification tag still dangling from the trigger guard, the silence gone. Possession of a silencer is against the law. I started opening drawers. Callister’s clothes were still there, and his pipes. And in the bottom drawer I found what I was looking for: a ball of twine, the same one I had noticed vaguely the first day Owen had shown me through the boat.
I picked it up and held it to my nose. It didn’t have quite the odor I’d expected, but what it had spelled the same thing. For the first time I was absolutely certain I was right, and my hands trembled as I dropped the string into a pocket, picked up the gun, tore off the tag, and took on a cartridge. I pried out the lead, dumped the powder down the drain in the two-by-two head, and put the gutted cartridge into the firing chamber.
UP on deck, I walked forward to where the anchor lay and knelt beside it, putting the barrel of the rifle across the anchor and lining it up carefully with the fishing seat. I stretched on the deck and sighted along it, moving the butt till it rested snugly against the side. That did it: a bullet out of that gun would pass a few inches above the high back of the seat.
My hands were beginning to sweat now. I brought out the ball of string and unwound about fifty or sixty feet, broke it off and put a tight loop twice around the anchor and once around the rifle stock. Keeping the string taut, I put a loop carefully around the trigger, then around the back of the trigger guard, bringing it toward me without slack and making my way, half-crouched, toward the stern.
I straightened slowly when I felt the seat touch the back of my legs. I turned the seat and sat down. The business end of the rifle leered at me with deadly intent.
There was an extra three feet of string. I picked it up and laid it across my lap. Slowly, I fumbled a match out of a pocket, lit it, and held it against the loose end of the string. My left arm, keeping just the slightest tension on the long stretch of string, was beginning to get numb. If the string dropped down from the trigger guard, I’d have to go through all this again. I wondered if Callister had had any trouble. No, he’d doubtless rehearsed it to a fine art.
The first match went out, but with the second the string began to burn and I dropped the loose end off my knees on to the deck. It burned quickly, fuse-like, with a nameless orange glow. I looked at the gun some fifty feet away. I should have had my back turned and my free right hand gripping the pole. But the pole was gone, and I wanted to watch. There were only a few inches of string left to burn before it reached my left hand. Slowly, slowly, I pulled. And the gun fired. The trigger had been filed to take only the slightest pressure. I dropped the string and watched it as it burned, the ash disappearing to a white dust ¡n the quiet movement of the wind across the decks. The gun had held against the anchor, the barrel still pointed at my head.
SO here was the final answer to all the questions but one: Had Callister hoped to hang Eilene and her lover? For me that question had long since been answered, and the answer had made it impossible for me to let the world in on the little secret Glen Callister had thought he was taking with him. The answer was No, because there was no other way to explain his insistence that only one had intended to kill him. The state would have had to prove which one, and he had known they would never be able to do it. But the love affair that had killed him would itself be a long time dead. He had known that, too.
I took his letter from my pocket and tore it to bits, dropping the pieces over the side. The string had burned nearly to the anchor now, and I walked forward and knelt beside it. The string burned around the rifle stock and the rifle turned and thudded to the deck. The gun fell loosely beside it and went on burning, the faint white ash wafting away, rising and vanishing.
And in a moment there was nothing there but a rifle, lying as though it had been thrown from . . . The thought was suddenly broken as a soft voice said, “Now we both know.”
I SWUNG around to see Belly Callister looking at me from the boarding ladder. Only her head and shoulders showed above the deck and she was gazing at me with a gravely speculative air.
“Mow long have you been there?” I asked.
“Long enough to know that Dad . . . killed himself.”
She came up the rest of the way and stepped over beside me. She looked down at the gun and her eyes seemed to darken and a muscle pulled along her jaw.
“How long have you known?” she whispered.
“Almost from the first day.”
“Then it’s no surprise to you that Owen and Eilene have gone their separate ways.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Do you like playing God?”
“No,” I said. “But I’d have liked something else even less: knowing your father had died in vain.”
She looked up at me, holding my eyes steadily with hers for a long while. I felt that it was somehow important to hold, not to look away. And, quite suddenly, her eyes misted and filled, and she turned away and looked out towards the open sea.
After a moment I said, “I found quite a spot last night, in case you’re hungry. The Most Magnificent Chinese Food Place in the World.”
She turned back to me and slowly smiled. “Sounds wonderful,” she said, “Let’s go . . .”
THE END.
