Benny said: "I'm glad it isn't just the money."
"I don't give a damn about the money."
"But others do and that is why it can be dangerous to probe too deeply. What caused death once can cause it again. You must be careful."
Sam felt impatient with the little man's concern. He knew that Benny meant for the best, but he had no use for his advice. He had heard too much of it in a similar vein from Ellen Terhune and he couldn't stop now. He had to go ahead, acting as a fuse to detonate an explosion. He saw Benny hesitating and knew that he had more on his mind.
"Amigo," he grinned, "what else is it that troubles you?"
"Since you ask, it is the girl, Mona Somerset," Benny murmured. "There is so much talk, Sam. She is a bad one."
"No, that's not true."
"You defend her? Then it is as I said," Benny told him reproachfully. "Isla Honda is no longer for you. Ellen agrees with me and Ellen is a sensible girl. A fine business woman. She has a hard, strong mind, Sam. If Charley had listened to her that night, perhaps-"
Benny broke off, confused and bit his lip. Sam stared at him. "What night?"
"The night Charley killed himself. Ellen was there, at Isla Honda. And they had an argument about that money that is missing."
Sam's voice was sharp. "How do you know? I thought you were in Cuba, Benny."
"I was. On routine bank matters. Bill Somerset told me about it right after it happened. He saw her there."
"How come nobody else saw her?" Sam demanded.
Benny shrugged. "I do not know."
"Did you tell the police about Ellen being there?"
"Tell Frye? I would not give him the time of day."
"Did Ellen volunteer any of this to the cops?"
"Not that I know of. No one ever mentioned it."
Sam frowned. "She never mentioned being there to me either." He paused. "Benny, where did she get the money to set up that swanky art shop of hers?"
"I don't know." Benny's hands moved in agitation. "But listen, Sam, don't get all upset about this. It doesn't have to mean anything. I'm sorry I let it slip." He paused again. "Ellen loves you. Don't hurt her, Sam."
He suddenly didn't want to talk about it any more. "I've got to go back," he said. "Will you take care of my car, Benny?"
"Of course. And if you need anything else-"
"Thanks, Benny. I'll keep in touch."
"Please," Benny said.
6
A strong tide was running between the two dark masses of mangrove islands five miles northeast of Isla Honda. The borrowed boat pitched and tossed restlessly at the end of her anchor, deeply embedded in coral. Fifteen feet under the troubled surface of the warm sea, Sam felt the pressure of the water all around him and dismissed the worry from his mind. He had dived under worse conditions than this. He had until midnight, he calculated, to do a little preliminary scouting of the bottom here.
The oxygen tank on his back fed air through a nose clip and his watertight lantern fought the roiled coral sand. The water felt warm, filled with silt. Except for the tank and the lantern, he carried nothing except the shark knife at his belt. He ignored the multicolored fish that swam around the glow of the lantern. He knew he was probably being foolishly impatient to begin the search tonight, but a sense of urgency had driven him here, a feeling that time was not endless and if he waited too long, it would run out.
During the run over here from Key West, he had studied Benny's charts and calculated old tides and currents and wind directions. He knew there was only a faint chance that he could find Gabrilan's boat that had foundered here three years ago. He wasn't even sure it had gone down in that night of storm and violence and if it had, the long workings of tide and wind might have moved the wreckage miles away or disintegrated it entirely. Yet he had hope. He dived again and again, coming up at intervals to rest on the edge of the boat's cockpit, drinking rum from a bottle he had found aboard. The rum warmed him and gave him strength, but he felt no other effect from it. The next time he surfaced it was raining in big, lazy drops that swiftly increased in violence. He gave it up for the night, his efforts fruitless, but still with a satisfaction that he had at last made a beginning.
It was after midnight when he brought the boat under the highway bridge and turned it toward the north shore of Isla Honda key. The island was only a half-mile wide, bisected by the highway and on this shore he had built, before being recalled to service in the Marine Corps, the Isla Honda Boatyard. His thoughts touched wryly on his plans of the past. He had designed and built several sport fishing cruisers on these abandoned ways before the debacle. He had done what he had considered to be the right thing after Charley's death, selling the equipment and machinery to a marine outfit in Miami and now all that was left of his hopes was an abandoned sail loft, gaunt and dark in the rainy night and the marine railways, together with a few sheds and cradles here and there in the dark. The money had gone to repay what had been found missing after Charley's debt and with it went his hopes for a successful future.
The funereal remnants of what had been a thriving business tended to depress him and he pushed the thought from his mind, turning the boat toward a mole of coral rock that sheltered the abandoned docks.
Nobody would suspect the boat's presence here. Nobody ever came this way now and with only a reasonable amount of care, his future activities could remain his own secret. He walked quickly past the gaunt height of the sail loft and felt the strength of the rum suddenly, as if it had been saving up a cumulative effect until his exertions were over. He was more than a little drunk, he realized, and he laughed softly, taking pleasure in the cold lash of the rain on his back.
Isla Honda was wrapped tightly in rain and wind. The wind made a racket in the swaying palms and hissed through the shrubbery with a rising, vicious strength. Sam walked along the beach past the boathouse and the pier where Ashton's schooner was tied up. He saw no one and heard nothing except the sounds of the storm. He had changed his clothes and left all the diving gear aboard Benny's boat, but he was soaked to the skin now and thought only of getting dry and warm in his own bungalow. He staggered a little as he walked around the cove toward his house. He thought he saw a light wink in the dark bulk of the main house, but when he turned to stare in that direction, squinting against the rain, he saw nothing but the thick darkness of wind and rain. He went on across the beach and entered the dark bungalow.
The tiled floor seemed to move uneasily underfoot as if it were the deck of a vessel and he blinked at the shadowy dimness of his living room. He leaned back and closed the door behind him, shutting out some of the sound of the rain. An uneasiness touched him, but he could see no reason for it. Yet he suddenly felt as if he were not alone.
He reached for a lamp at his left and squinted in the sudden burst of light as he turned it on. The room was empty. Sam frowned at an ashtray that had fallen to the floor, trying to remember if George had spilled it when he had been here last but unable to recall exactly. The floor still seemed to heave and turn under him. His feeling of unease remained as he walked to the back door and shut it. He wished suddenly that he didn't have so much of the rum in him and remembered Benny's concern, his words that had amounted to a warning. Sam shivered and then laughed silently at himself. It was his nerves and nothing more. Then he wondered why the kitchen door had been open.
He glanced into the bedroom, turned into the bath and started to strip off his wet clothes, then halted abruptly and went back into the bedroom and snapped on the light.
Bill Somerset sprawled on his own bed, arms outflung, legs dangling over the side. For a moment Sam felt a wave of relief, thinking of the open kitchen door. Bill must have wandered down here in his drunken fog and fallen asleep, he thought, and he remembered that the big man had wanted to talk to him earlier in the evening.
"Bill?" he said.
The redheaded man lay face up on the bed, his arms awry, one knee flexed and bent peculiarly. The heel of one shoe rested on the green fl
oor tiles and Sam noted in a moment of peculiar detachment that the soles of the shoes were dry. Bill's eyes were open, staring at him.
"Bill?" Sam said again.
He felt cold. He shivered violently, suddenly. The eyes that stared at him did not see him. He stepped forward, hating to go nearer, knowing what he had to do. The dangling leg grazed his trousers. He suddenly felt stifled, as if he couldn't breathe. There was a pain in his throat, a closure of wind in his lungs. He saw the blood then on the cover behind Bill's left arm and he sighed and felt panic sink deep claws into his tired mind.
There wasn't too much blood, a thin trickle from the big man's ears that stained the crumpled pillow under him. Quite suddenly, Sam saw everything very clearly, in sharp perspective. He saw the matted red hair at the back of Bill Somerset's head, the deep and ugly wound that had crushed through scalp and bone and brain tissue. He saw Bill's slack, open mouth and the shape of his face was like a stranger's face now, changed by the swift impact of death.
He smelled death all around him.
It was here in the bungalow, in the bedroom with him. He stood very still, knowing he had expected anything but this. It didn't make sense. It should not have happened to Bill. This was the man he had accepted as a friend through college days; yet the man had been a stranger to him and he had coveted his wife; and now, in death, Bill was suddenly someone else again, someone he did not recognize or know. His mind cried out against the lack of reason behind this violence, but he did not move and his lips were silent as he looked down at the dead man.
It was no accident. He knew at once it had to be the other thing. It was murder. And then he saw it was senseless and he was sure of the reason for it. Bill Somerset had known something about Charley and had wanted to tell him about it. He had wanted to tell him about it earlier, but Sam had not waited in his hurry to get Mona from Johnny Capp's fishing camp. Now it was too late and whatever knowledge Bill had was gone with him, lost behind the dead, surprised eyes that stared at him,
He looked for the weapon that had crushed the back of Bill's head, but there was no sign of it either on the floor or on the bed or anywhere. He thought of John Ashton, Bill's uncle. Ashton could have done this, with his heavy, knobbed cane. Or even Mona. For some reason he thought of Ellen Terhune and then of Benny. He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. It had to be someone who knew Isla Honda, who had been connected with Charley's death. Maybe Harry Lundy, he thought. Or even Deputy Sheriff Hank Frye. But Frye was a cop and he dismissed Frye at once and then he thought of him again and somehow he knew that Frye was not entirely divorced from this thing either.
He saw the violence in his bedroom now, as if he had been unable to see anything but the dead man before. His suitcase that had been under the bed had been dragged out and battered open and the few items of clothing still in it were strewn on the tiles beyond the bed, near the glass jalousies of the window. Sam didn't bother to retrieve any of it. Whoever had searched this room earlier had come back to finish the job, that was all. There was a book on navigation that he'd had and he looked for it vaguely, wondering why it mattered and then he saw it in a corner on the floor, looking as if a dog had chewed it up in a hunt for something precious.
He backed away from the bed and stood in the doorway, staring at Bill's heel on the tiled floor. He was conscious of the harsh sound of his own breathing above the quick rattle of rain against the jalousies and the thrashing of wind in the vegetation outside. A shudder went through him. He backed all the way out of the bedroom and started across the living room for the front door. He wanted to run. He forced himself to walk quietly away from the dead man, his footsteps light and careful.
Then he heard the other footsteps and they were neither light nor cautious. They came pounding across the beach up from the water's edge, coming at a headlong run. There was more than one pair of them. He heard a man shout and suddenly he didn't want to be found here like this, with the dead man. Suddenly he was afraid. The panic came back to him, wild and deadly and he smelled the danger all around him like an animal that had just walked into a trap and sensed the presence of ugly death. Space closed in on him and for a moment he didn't breathe.
Voices came to him through the wind and rain outside. One was the boatman's, Harry Lundy's. Sam didn't recognize the other one. He heard the fat man's footsteps on the porch and Sam backed abruptly into the dark kitchen and stood with his hand on the knob to the back door.
The second man said: "Jesus, are you sure he's dead?"
"I'm sure I tell you."
"But what a crazy thing to do!"
"He was crazy for the bastard's wife."
"Ah, hell, I don't think-"
Sam still could not identify the second man's voice. The two men moved across the lighted doorway to the living room, but Lundy's bulk blocked out his glimpse of the second man. He heard Lundy's familiar wheeze.
"I had a hunch he would blow his top. I saw it coming. The girl just ain't worth a damn, but some of these women can cause things like this."
"When did you find him?"
"Fifteen, twenty minutes ago. Still warm. He died while I looked at him. Come on."
Sam stepped outside into the beat of the rain. He stood still, undecided, while the wind pushed against him and he let it thrust him back away from the bungalow after a moment. He wanted to run. His legs trembled with the instinct to get away fast. He saw a pattern formed by Lundy's words and he knew they formed a snare which could trap and kill him. Whatever happened, he must not be found here.
His decision came a moment too late. He heard Lundy's shout and saw the fat man framed in the kitchen door. Lundy had seen him.
Sam ducked and ran.
He didn't know if Lundy had recognized him or not. He had to take the chance that the rain had obscured him. He thrashed through waist-high brush and then his feet grated in the coral sand of the path that circled the cove toward Isla Honda. He ran lightly and easily, sure of his wind and strength. There came the thrashing of bodies coming through the brush after him. He looked back and saw Lundy moving fast despite his fat. The second man was a slim shadow seen through the slanting, glittering rain. Ahead lay patterns of light cast by the tall windows of the big house. Floodlights suddenly bloomed over the garage driveway. Sam left the path abruptly, cutting through the darkness of the lawn, angling back toward the beach.
The shot was a hard, flat report behind him. He ducked instinctively, although the bullet went wide. Panic touched him again. Lundy had a gun and suddenly he knew it would please Lundy if he could be taken this way, shot down while running from the scene of murder. He slowed his pace abruptly on the soft, yielding sand. Looking back, he saw a flashlight wavering near the boathouse, tentative and uncertain. They weren't sure of the direction he had taken. The shot had been fired at random.
The white lines of the surf that raced out of the night guided him to the water's edge. He ran on a little farther and then halted, sucking air into his lungs. He was tempted to turn back, to face Lundy and tell them all that he had only just returned to Isla Honda and knew nothing at all about Bill's death. The sensible thing to do was to go up to the house and call the cops. Before he could decide on it, he heard someone call to him through the hiss of the rain.
It was Mona's voice. She stood in the edge of the glare of light in front of the garages. She must have seen his figure moving dimly down along the edge of the beach. Before he could reply, she came running toward him through the rain.
"Sam, wait!"
She was alone. He hesitated, looking back toward his bungalow again and he saw flashlights gathering there, still indecisive. Then the flashlights fanned up toward the house and Mona reached him.
"Sam, please. What happened?"
The surf roared behind him and water surged up over the sand and swirled around his ankles. In the dim light cast over the beach he saw that Mona's face was pale and frightened. The rain had flattened her dark hair and plastered the nylon pajamas she wore tight again
st the soft curves of her body. She wore no makeup and her face looked curiously young and defenseless with the rain shining like tiny jewels on her dark lashes.
"Go on back," Sam said harshly. "Get away from me."
"Why are you running away?" she asked. Her hands plucked at him. "Is it true? Is Bill dead?"
"Don't you know?"
"I heard Lundy wake up Ashton and tell him. And Bill isn't in his room. I looked. Lundy says you killed him. He says you must have had a fight with Bill over me. Is it true?"
"No," Sam said. "Go on back to the house."
She shook her head and held his arm tightly. "Did you see Bill? Is he really dead?"
"He's dead," Sam nodded.
"But why?"
"I don't know. I'm getting out of here, that's ail. Don't try to stop me, Mona."
"Sam, I'm your friend. I owe you a lot. You're the only one around here I can trust. I know you didn't do it. You and Bill were friends, even if Bill was-even if he had changed so much since he was here last." She paused, swallowing air. "Did he say anything to you about-about Ashton?"
"I didn't get a chance to talk to him."
"Are you sure?"
"What are you talking about?" he demanded. "What do you know about it?"
"Nothing," she said. He saw her swallow. Her hands still clung to him, holding him back. "Sam, don't run away. That's what they want you to do. That's what they're hoping for, don't you see? Then they can blame you."
"They're already blaming me. I'm a dead pigeon."
"Don't run away. Don't. I'll call the police, tell them whatever you want me to say-"
He laughed. "Frye is the one who'll get the case. This island is under county jurisdiction. It won't do any good. Frye has just been waiting for a chance to nail me for something big. I didn't kill Bill, but they'll think I did because of you."
She shrank away a little. Her body was completely revealed by the wind and rain that flattened her thin pajamas. He watched her push her wet hair from her eyes. Beyond her, the beach was dark for perhaps a hundred feet and then he saw a flashlight wink, moving slowly toward them. They were following the footsteps he had made in the sand. He looked at Mona with sudden suspicion. It was strange how suddenly he felt nothing at all toward her.
Dark Destiny Page 5
