Corpus Delectable

by Talmage Powell

  I dropped to one knee, touched her face, turned her head slightly.

  Her neck was swollen almost out to her chin. Across the swelling lay a deep crease. The crease ran around her neck, all the way to the nape.

  That’s where the ends of the loop of wire stuck out.

  Twelve

  “I know how you feel, Ed, but you can’t possibly blame yourself.” Homicide Lieutenant Steve Ivey was speaking while the tech men went about their grim job in Lura Thackery’s apartment.

  “Who said anything about blame?” I asked.

  “Nobody — but it’s in your face.”

  “I was thinking,” I said, “of the little actions in life and the way they always spread out. Specifically, of McJunkin’s visit to my apartment and of my knife throw. This, today, might have never happened, if the throw had been a few inches different.”

  “You did pretty well, Ed, considering the circumstances.”

  “I thought I had hurt him. He went out of my building with the blade in him.”

  “And he’s tough,” Ivey said. “We’ve checked every doctor in town. None has treated a knife wound in a man answering McJunkin’s description. He carried the knife away, and he pulled it out, and he plugged up the hole. It didn’t slow him down, Ed — not enough.”

  Steve watched two ambulance men cross the room with Lura Thackery’s sheet-covered body on a stretcher between them.

  “Death of the innocents,” Steve muttered. “Two girls who never hurt anybody, except themselves. Jean Putnam didn’t want to bring a suspicion into the open without having a private detective confirm it. Killed by her own sense of consideration for her fellow man, you might say. Lura Thackery — killed by her fear.”

  Between the meat-wagon boys Lura Thackery went through the doorway, out of the apartment for the last time.

  Ivey watched the stretcher until it was out of sight in the corridor. “Maybe her fear was too much bigger than her belief that you could help her, Ed. Maybe she got to thinking, after she called you, and made the wrong decision. Maybe she contacted McJunkin, begged him to leave her alone, and tipped him that the pressure was on her.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Or maybe,” Steve shrugged, “McJunkin simply found the opportunity today to carry out the intention that must have been in his mind from the start. Either way, Lura Thackery wrote the first line of her own obituary when she handed Jean Putnam’s diary over to McJunkin. She became a sheep marked for slaughter.”

  Ivey took a final look around the tasteful little apartment. “From the prelim work here,” he said, “we’ve a good idea of how McJunkin did it. He probably came exuding friendliness and reassurance until he’d lulled the girl’s worst fears. Inside the apartment, when she least expected it, he clipped Lura Thackery on the chin — which accounts for the bruise the coroner found. While she was unconscious, McJunkin methodically helped himself to a wire coat hanger, wrapped it around her neck, twisted it tight. He stuffed her in the closet and left as quiet as he had come.”

  “Now you hit the jackpot question,” I said.

  “I know,” Ivey said grayly. “Where did he leave to? What was his destination?”

  I kept trying to pull a mental lever on the jackpot as I drove toward Ybor City. I was bugged with a sense of frustration, a feeling that something, somewhere along the line, had escaped my conscious notice.

  I crept into Ybor City, moving with the massed Gasparilla crowds and traffic.

  In the heart of the Quarter, sidewalk stalls had been set up, gaily decorated. At these stalls señoritas in flowing skirts, drawstring blouses, and lace mantillas were ladling out bowls of free garbanzo soup. Swarms of turistas lapped up the soup and ogled the señoritas.

  I was reminded of the fact of hunger. I stopped at a Spanish restaurant and stoked the engine with the first-rate fuel of crawfish sarapico. A balmy evening was stretching over the Gulf when I returned to the car, got in, and aimed it in the direction of the Señora Isabella hacienda.

  The deceased doña’s castle was brilliant with light when I arrived. Many of the downstairs windows glittered, and paper lanterns had been strung over the courtyard.

  At the outer edge of the courtyard two large outdoor grills had been set up. A suckling pig and chickens were turning on spits, attended by a fat chef. A willowy babe in a scanty excuse for a maid’s uniform was arranging glasses on a table that would serve for a bar near the fountain. In powder-blue dinner jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, a young man with a musical-instrument case in his hand had paused to gas with the barmaid.

  She was laughing at something he’d said when I walked up. She gave me a cool glance, and the musician, lounging against the table, gave me a languid one.

  “You delivering something for the party?” the girl asked.

  “Nope. Mr. Sigmon or his daughter around?” “I don’t believe they’ve come back yet. Just us people from the catering service.”

  “And the combo leader.” The musician yawned. “I’ll wait,” I said.

  There was traffic in and out of the house as the caterers made ready for the festivities. The musician ambled along as I went inside.

  As we descended to the acreage of the living room, he lighted a cigarette with a suspicious smell. “Dig this pad, Pops!”

  “It’s twenty-three skiddoo, son,” I said.

  He laughed, gave me a second look. “Cool, Pops. Say, aren’t we acquainted?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ve seen you around. Ybor City. Or in the papers. Or,” he snickered, “with a face like that, in here.” He explained where “in here” was by waggling his cigarette.

  His attention drifted. He was looking the room over.

  “They’ll plant us there, by the piano, I guess. Acoustics lousy. But who makes with acoustic trouble, playing for a babe come into all her green? Tell me, Pops, is this Elena Sigmon married?”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”

  “You’re with it, man! Sure, why not?”

  He drifted rather limply toward the piano. He dismissed me from his area of existence the second his back was toward me. The action was mutual. I’d dismissed him from mine by the time I went quietly from the room.

  I was in a corridor with parquet flooring and an arched overhead. As the long porticoes facing the courtyard provided an outdoorsy connection between the three wings of the U-shaped house, I suspected that this hallway was an inside link from the living room to the adjacent wing.

  The first door I passed was a stout oaken portal with a small crucifix attached at head height. I stopped, turned back, remembering that one word — “incense” — which Jean Putnam had spoken as she died.

  I opened the door and gazed at the small private chapel where old Señora Isabella Sorolla y Batione had bent her aged kness and paid homage to her God.

  If Jean Putnam had been trying to direct me to the chapel, I had no idea why. The place was barren, almost cold feeling now. No candles burned. The air was stale. I was of the opinion that the chapel hadn’t been opened since the old lady had died.

  I closed the door, turned, and moved on. The hallway right-angled, paralleling the outside portico. I could look through the windows, under the portico arches, and see the preparations for the festivities going on outside.

  I was in a bedroom wing with southern exposure, the likely location of the old señora’s boudoir. I decided that the old lady would have chosen a large corner room, the one at the end of the wing.

  I moved quickly on the strength of the hunch, tried a door, found it unlocked. I left the door open to admit light from outside and let my eyes get used to the gloom.

  A wheel chair of lightweight aluminum tubing was standing near the tall windows. I decided this was the place. The bed was vast, sheltered by a canopy on its four posters. The other furniture was as solid as carved stone.

  Searching rapidly, I covered the bedroom, the adjoining dressing room and bath, and the little sun-sitting room adjacent o
n the other side of the huge master room.

  Except for the wheel chair, there was no evidence of the old woman’s ever having lived here. Not even a loose hairpin in a drawer. The room was a tomb, musty from being closed, without its corpse.

  I stood in the middle of the room for a few seconds, thinking about it. They’d certainly wiped out the memory of her, leaving not even a portrait on the walls. And yet … neither Keith Sigmon nor Elena had moved into the room. It was almost as if they were afraid of the old woman; or maybe Keith Sigmon was determined to convince himself she had never existed.

  I re-entered the hallway and figured how an old lady would have wanted her household arranged. Her secretary-companion must naturally be placed nearby. So I retraced my way a few yards down the hallway and opened a door on a room that had been converted into a sort of combination study and office. There was a desk, a three-drawer filing cabinet, a typewriter on a small metal typewriter table, a matching couch and chair.

  None of the filing cabinet or desk drawers was locked. All were empty. The same meticulous vacuum had erased every trace of a girl named Jean Putnam ever having worked here.

  I got the pattern. I went into the next room, which I guessed had been Jean Putnam’s bedroom, out of force of habit from years of being in my profession.

  The pattern wasn’t broken. The bedroom had the same lack of sign of human habitation. Nothing in this entire portion of the house remained of the days, weeks, and months when an old woman had hired a very nice young woman to do personal chores.

  The honking of a car horn and a burst of laughter drifted to me from outside. I came out of Jean Putnam’s bedroom, walked down the hallway to the el, opened a door, and stepped onto the portico.

  I was in a shadowed corner, not easily seen. Beyond the courtyard, half a dozen cars were pulling to a stop in the driveway. Laughing, chattering people were spilling out. Several were in costume. The men were pirates or Spanish grandees. The sleek dames were something else again, in señorita outfits with cleavage to the belly button, or poured into wispy piratess costumes that looked as if they’d been painted on.

  From the way they were already letting down their hair, I guessed the gang was continuing a party that had started with cocktails someplace else. They paused at the bar and began drifting inside, where the musician had got his combo together and given them a downbeat.

  I didn’t spot Keith and Elena Sigmon right away, and I didn’t hang around to do so. I went down the shadowed portico, skirted the courtyard, and headed toward my car.

  I was within a few yards of the jalopy when a car stopped near by. Two men and a woman got out. One of the men said, “It’s Rivers! … Hello, there.”

  Nervously quick footsteps came toward me. When a man drew closer I saw that it was Van Clavery. Coming forward behind him were his wife and Fred Eppling.

  None of the three was in costume. Clavery and the lawyer wore dark business suits. Natalie Clavery had on an expensively simple cocktail dress that gave her a sleek allure not dependent on the exposure of naked flesh.

  Clavery looked at me hopefully. “Were you looking for me?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t.”

  His lean, tense face went swiftly dismal. His sandy brows pulled together. “Seeing you … I thought you might have found the old señora’s missing brief case.”

  Natalie Clavery and Fred Eppling reached Clavery’s side. We nodded hellos.

  “Not yet,” I told Clavery. “As a matter of fact, the brief case isn’t the only disappearing item.”

  “What else?”

  “A diary,” I said. “It belonged to Jean Putnam. It was handed over to Ben McJunkin by Lura Thackery.”

  Clavery grabbed my arm. “Then you were looking for Lura. Have you talked with her? She might have had a look at whatever Jean had written.”

  “McJunkin had the same idea,” I said. “He reached Lura before I did.”

  Clavery recoiled, jerking his hand from my arm. Fred Eppling gasped. Natalie Clavery’s face turned to carven ivory. In a controlled voice, she said, “Lura is dead?”

  “So recently,” I said, “it hasn’t had time to make the newscasts.”

  “Is there any doubt that McJunkin did it?”

  “I don’t think so. He was the tool, the instrument.”

  “Poor Lura,” Natalie said. Her voice had a strange lack of feeling, as if her inner control were taking her beyond human emotion. “She was the ‘fraidy-cat, Rivers. She died without ever having really lived.”

  Very slowly, the cool, sleek woman turned her head to look toward the house. “The brief case, the meaning of all the violence, is still in there.”

  “You seem very sure,” I said.

  “Where else?” She faced me directly. “There is a way of making sure.”

  Her husband was too immersed in his own nerves to notice the hard sheen on her eyes.

  Thirteen

  Eppling sensed the thing working in her. He glanced at me with concern.

  “Have you been in the house?” he said.

  I hesitated, then admitted that I had.

  “Rivers is a professional,” Eppling told Natalie Clavery. “If Van’s confession and promissory note were still in there, Rivers would have found them.”

  She looked at him with a touch of bitterness and contempt. “The Sigmons wouldn’t leave such things where even Rivers would find them. But there is a way …”

  “I’m not Houdini,” I conceded. Divorced from my words was a thought: Clavery, take notice and have care with this woman. Clavery, for your sake, your wife has reached the point where she is dangerous.

  “Anyway,” I added, “I didn’t have much time.”

  “Why not take a little more?” Clavery said, brightening slightly.

  “Yes.” Eppling nodded. “You might go in as we go.” “Drift into any part of the house you like!” Clavery said.

  I looked at the molded perfection of Natalie’s profile. “What do you say?”

  “I don’t think you’ll find what you’re after.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Clavery insisted.

  Natalie continued to look at me. “If Keith Sigmon catches you prowling, he’ll have you jailed.”

  “Fred will get a writ,” Clavery said. “He’d have you out immediately.”

  “After facing a man like Ben McJunkin,” Eppling said drily, “I don’t think jail holds any terrors for Rivers.”

  I studied Natalie a moment longer; then I turned and headed toward the house.

  “Keep it nonchalant,” Clavery said nervously. “Nobody’s paying any attention to you.”

  It was true. Most of the guests were drifting inside, toward the savage throbbing of bongos as the drums provided a background for a sensually wailing saxophone. People in the living room were beginning to beat their hands and chant in time to the music.

  From the inner part of the courtyard, we were able to see the spectacle inside. Elena Sigmon had claimed the center of the floor and was doing a solo. In a piratess costume covering her like a tight bikini, she was answering the tempo of the insistent drums with writhing twists and turns of her slender, long-legged body.

  The beat was gradually and subtly accelerating. Flushed from drink, Elena’s small face grew dewy hot with a vicious excitment. She closed her eyes, threw back her head as a frenzied quivering poured through her lithe, firm muscles.

  Beyond her, Keith Sigmon killed a drink, tossed the glass to one side. He beat his hands together and yelled encouragement to his daughter. “Do it, baby! Do it!”

  Elena responded by pirouetting to tiptoe, arms and body suddenly motionless — except for the unbelievable gyrations of her slender hips.

  The guests began to whistle and stamp their feet.

  “Now’s your chance to slip inside,” Clavery said tightly.

  I nodded and started toward the shadows of the portico. I was almost out of the lighted area when Elena Sigmon went to the next phase of her routine. Her bare legs fl
ashed as her feet began an intricate pattern of movement.

  She spun in a half turn. She suddenly faltered. She jerked to a stop; then whipped back to face again in the direction of the courtyard.

  Beside me, a sound of frustration rasped from Clavery. “Don’t try it, Rivers,” he said, a quick droop in his voice. “Chill it. She’s spotted you.”

  Beyond the tall, open windows, Elena had stood as if recovering from a trance. The lines of her pixie face sharpened, taking the prettiness from the small features. She pushed a couple of people aside as she started from the room, moving toward me. The bongo rhythm hesitated, broke. The high, skirling note of the saxophone dribbled to nothing.

  With glances at her and at each other, the guests became uncertain, less at ease. In foggy bewilderment, the first of them followed her into the courtyard. The remainder followed as she planted herself before me.

  Under the short, tousled, dark-blond hair, her face was that of a little fox with glittering eyes. “It really is you,” she said, getting back her breath after her exertions. “The unforgettable face. When I glimpsed it, I thought for a second I was seeing things.”

  Her glance passed from me, over Van, Fred, and Natalie. “Did you bring Rivers?” Elena asked coolly.

  Equally cool, Natalie said, “We thought the added masculinity would be welcome at your party, my dear.”

  Elena smiled slyly, dropped a glance at Van, and told Natalie, “I’m sure masculinity is a quality you’d appreciate.”

  “The real thing comes in various profiles, sometimes in unsuspected places, my dear.” “Does it really?”

  “Oh, yes,” Natalie said. “Perhaps one day you’ll have the chance to get acquainted with it.”

  Elena’s hand half raised, as if she’d take a dig at Natalie’s eyes with her nails. Then she forced her shoulders to relax and gave a soft laugh. “You know how to make with the fancy words, don’t you?” The upraised hand reached to pat Natalie’s cheek. The suppressed urge to scratch was in the motion. “We’re, after all, neighbors and friends and linked by business ties, Mrs. Clavery.” Elena spoke with the condescension of the very young for the very old. “We really shouldn’t argue, you and I.”