The Corpse in the Cabana

by Lawrence Lariar

  “It was a horrible fight,” Mari said.

  “It was more than a fight. Pazow was browsing.”

  “Was he? I didn’t see him. He must have done it after I fainted in there.”

  “Then you don’t know what he was looking for? He didn’t ask Ziggi for something?”

  “I’ve told you,” she said, “that I fainted.”

  “Stop playing cute,” I said, grabbing her and shaking her up a bit. “Get off the damned-fool stage and level with me, Mari. You heard why Pazow made this visit. He didn’t just bull his way in here and start slugging Ziggi. He’s not the type. Let’s rewrite the scene. Let’s start at the opening curtain again.”

  “How about that cup of coffee?”

  “It can wait. You were about to remember why Pazow came here.”

  “Was I?” She couldn’t take her eyes off the door to the bedroom. She watched it now and then in the pauses, as though she expected Ziggi to come staggering through any minute. She finally closed it, taking a last quick squint at him. Then she became more composed, lit a cigarette and studied me with her electric eyes. “You’re a clever man, Gant. You must have guessed what brought Pazow here.”

  “You’re talking about the typewriter?”

  “What else?”

  “And you’re suggesting that Ziggi writes for Saxon’s cruddy journal?”

  “Not Ziggi,” she said. “Gloria.”

  “Here? Why does she write here?”

  “Because she considers it safer.”

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked. In this mood, there would be no way to check Mari. She was playing every line with theatrical honesty, adjusting her face to the role, batting her eyes at me with a schoolgirl’s frankness. Now she was screwing her pretty face into a more thoughtful expression, responding to my question with the reflex concentration that meant she was plumbing her memory for the facts, the real facts.

  “Not too long,” she said at last. “Gloria’s been doing it for about three months or so.”

  “I didn’t think she was the type.”

  “She considers it fun,” Mari shrugged.

  “And she gets paid well, too?”

  “I’ve never discussed the rates with her.”

  “And her subjects?” I asked. “Ever discuss her victims?”

  “Occasionally.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “That would be crude, Gant.”

  “Crude, schmude,” I yapped, jerking her pretty tail off the edge of the small desk. She had the ability to sail cool and calm over a cataract. Her histrionic poise began to annoy me. There was no time for this kind of nonsense. I shook her again, this time letting her feel my fingers dig in. She screwed up her face as she struggled against me. She had a supple body, but there was strength in her, athletic muscle. She could have given me a hard time if she chose. Instead, she yielded, letting me pull her up close. “I’m trying to find Gloria, remember?” I yelled into her eyes. “And you’re going to help me.”

  “You’re very strong. Please let go.”

  “Gloria’s victims?”

  “She played the field,” Mari said, rubbing the spot where my fingers had bitten. “She planned quite a few articles. She was doing something on Max Orlik. She was doing one on Pazow. And, of course, Chuck Bond.”

  “And Ziggi?”

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  “Why not Ziggi?”

  “Love,” she smiled. “Gloria wouldn’t betray a lover.”

  “She did pretty well with Max Orlik.”

  “That’s different. She’s serious about Ziggi.”

  “She may be serious,” I said, “but she’s not dumb. Are you trying to tell me she’d go for you rolling in the hay with him?”

  “You’re a detective, Gant. Do you think I’d ever tell her about it?”

  “She’s too clever to miss it. And if she suspected it, that would put you on her dung list, wouldn’t it?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And that would mean Mari Beranville might be marked for a spot in Saxon’s dirt sheet. She could butcher you, Mari. She could really knock you off the Broadway stage if she wrote what she knew about you. She could mark you lousy in every producer’s office in town.”

  “It hadn’t occurred to me,” she said brightly, speculatively.

  “Even after you started to hit the mattress with Ziggi?”

  “Don’t be banal. Ziggi doesn’t mean that much to me. Sometimes I get foolish when I’ve had too many. Tonight was one of those nights.”

  “As simple as that?”

  “What else?” she yawned. “A girl would have to be crazy to play Ziggi for permanence. I’m well aware of his reputation. He invited me over for a couple of drinks after the opening at the beach club. I came. I drank. I lost my head. Regrets? I’m no schoolgirl, Gant. Ziggi and I were having fun until our foolish friend Pazow walked in. Maybe I’ll have another try at him, later on. Or maybe I’ll wait until Gloria’s had enough of him. It really isn’t important, don’t you see? Right now it’s important that I get home and have a nap. Rehearsals, later on in the afternoon. But right now, for God’s sake, let’s have a cup of coffee and smell some fresh air.”

  She went on at the same word rate in the car, on the way across town. Something had unlocked the hidden door to her theatrical tongue and she treated me to a meandering dissertation on summer stock, actors, producers and show business in general. I let her talk until we reached her street. The air had sharpened her wit, but her face still looked waxed and tired from the long night’s activity.

  “Goodness,” she cooed, on the sidewalk. “We’ve forgotten all about the coffee, Gant. Care to come in? I’ll brew you a cup.”

  “Not this morning,” I said, “I never drink on an empty head.”

  CHAPTER 18

  7:32 A.M.

  I had my coffee in a container, at the desk of Gurney Gillian, the night editor of The Record. The visit didn’t surprise him. He was accustomed to odd-ball characters, his flibbertigibbet friends from the world of sports, show business and press-agentry. He enjoyed any break in the long pull through the night beat, the dismal grind that shaped the paper during the still hours of early morning. We were old friends, out of my early days after the war when I had held a news job with him, briefly.

  “Still sleeping on your feet, Steve?” He offered me one his eight-cent cigars, a monumental tribute to our friendship. I rejected it, as usual, a monumental tribute to my lungs. “Haven’t seen you since the Mary Ray deal. You retire on your last fee?”

  “No jokes,” I told him. “I need your help, Gurney.”

  “Anything,” he said. “Anything but hard cash.”

  “What do you know about Ziggi?”

  “Ah. Ziggi …” He settled back in his chair and put his skinny hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He had a memory like a vault, an intellect that stored and saved anything important about anybody important. You put the question in his ear and the gears meshed and the brain ground out the facts. He was a living newspaper morgue. “Ziggi Ramirez. The Cuban boy wonder. Began as a piano genius. Scholarship to the Paris Conservatory. Brief concert career. Began to play jazz in 1952. Organized his …”

  “Turn it off,” I said. “I’m not writing his biography. Bring me up to date on the last two years. Money, for instance?”

  “Hungry,” Gurney said. “Ziggi’s hungry. Used to be a big money maker. He had it made in teevee. Until he began to horse around with the producer’s wife. Caught Ziggi in bed with her. Two years ago. Big stink in the trade. Hushed up by the network. Only knew it as a hot rumor. Never printed it. Too risky.”

  “Did Saxon print it?”

  “Phew!” He soured his face at the name. “Not yet. But the vermin will. Somebody will hand it to him. Mark my words.”

  �
��What happened to Ziggi after the video stink?”

  “Faded. Got a new agent. Character named Leo Slumkin. Leo convinced Ziggi to go abroad. Got him dates all over Europe. Ziggi tried to go straight. Took up skin-diving. Tried to promote himself as the boy athlete type. Almost worked, too. He diddled with one of the French movie companies, shooting deep-sea stuff off Africa. You know the bit—“Twenty Fathoms Under the Salty Sea,” that kind of picture. Ziggi dove in it. Did well, too. But the outdoor life palled for him. He got involved with another foreign thrush. Royalty type of dame. He got caught with her in Capri. That killed him in Europe, of course. Leo booked him into a big New York club. No business. Ziggi began to slide. Hard to figure why. Some people think it’s the effect he had on males. The gals get hot pants when they see him. This freezes their escorts. Just a theory, but it could make sense. Nobody likes to see a slick Cuban make time with so many women. Call it masculine envy. Or call it just plain caution. Ziggi’s been dropping fast lately. Even his lady audience seems to have given up on him. But now he gets another big break with Pazow. Credit to Leo for getting him the booking. Or maybe it was Gloria Clark? Who knows? You hear so many cockeyed stories in that business. But Ziggi could make a comeback out there. If he stays away from the mattresses.”

  “And fights,” I added. “He’s still a club brawler.”

  “Ah? He box somebody out there?”

  “Max Orlik.”

  “Old story.” Gurney wrinkled his nose at it. “I wouldn’t give it a line. Publicity crap. Orlik’s as bad as Ziggi. Likes his name in the papers.”

  “Ziggi started the ruckus.”

  “Retrogression. Ziggi always reverts to type. You know something? Ziggi’s probably a mental case. Never fails, the pattern, I mean. He’s always asking for trouble. Manufactures it, you might say. Wherever Ziggi goes, trouble’s with him.”

  “This time it’s big trouble, Gurney.”

  “Ah?” He leaned in, smelling a story. “I knew you had something, Steve. The way you’ve been talking. Holding it back, eh? Saving it for a big sockeroo finish? You’ll never change. You should have been a news man.”

  “It’s all off the record for now.”

  “Off the record, of course.”

  “Murder,” I said. “Gloria Clark’s been butchered.”

  “You don’t say? Well. Spill it, man, spill it.”

  I spilled it. He took it down in the jerky, sweaty way a news pro drops facts on paper. I played the deadline angle because I knew he would use it well in the story. He licked his lips over portions of it, relishing the names of mv cast of characters. He muttered quiet comments about Newberry, remembering him from his New York career. When I was finished, Gurney had it all, including part of my headache.

  “The answers?” he asked. “You think you can crack it by noon?”

  “I can dream, can’t I?”

  “What do you need from me?”

  “Your head, Gurney. Your catalogue brain.”

  He answered my first questions about Gloria in his staccato style, sparing the adjectives, giving me only the meaty tidbits. She was quite a gal. His statistical mind listed her appearances as headline news. She had a flair for the tabloids, all the way back to her hellion days. He remembered her as a model, trapped in a nudist shindig in Poughkeepsie. He recalled the first news photo of her, a back-to-nature strip tease behind a tree, the picture that made her notorious in the nation’s press.

  “Her love life?” I asked.

  “Current?”

  “Immediate. Within the last year.”

  “She narrowed it down lately. The big one? My night life boy reports Max Orlik on top. But she was making a switch. She was about to go Cuban. Big thing in her life. The biggest, as of last week.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” he smiled. “I’m giving you scuttlebutt from the entertainment department. Gloria was interviewed with Ziggi after a rehearsal out at Pazow’s beach dump. She was on the sand with the Cuban, holding his hand. Real love stuff. Maybe they did it for publicity. Who the hell can tell with those whacks? But my man went for it, rigged it for a feature in our Sunday Magazine. We’ll have to kill it now. It won’t look nice after her murder.”

  “Who came before Orlik?”

  “Pazow. An old beau of hers.”

  “Active yet?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But Pazow was her big love a couple of years ago. They were frantic. Named the wedding date and all that kind of turd. Of course, it fizzled. They all fizzled for Gloria. That was what makes Ziggi so impossible. Didn’t make sense for her to settle down with an eel like Ziggi, did it?”

  “Did you ever meet her, Gurney?”

  “Once or twice. Casually.”

  “Would you case her as a reporter for Saxon?”

  He whistled a tuneless item between his teeth. “That’s a new angle. But it’s possible, Steve. I should have mentioned Saxon in the wolf pack. Saxon’s had a yen for her, a long time yen. Saxon used to squire her, back in his pulp days, before he got the idea for his scandal rag. It could figure. Easily. Hell, Gloria knew plenty about the show business group. And why shouldn’t she spill? Saxon’s rates are high. She could very well be an informer for him.”

  “And Ziggi?”

  “Ziggi’d kick his mother for a dollar.”

  “Saxon admits Ziggi writes for him.”

  “A laugh. Whatever Saxon admits, I disbelieve.”

  “They might have collaborated,” I said. “Ziggi and Gloria.”

  “A thought,” Gurney admitted. “A frightening thought.”

  “Or Ziggi and Mari Beranville?”

  “Ah?” Gurney whistled again, this time the wolf-whistle, long and meaningful. “Another crazy dame. Mixed up as a Greek salad. Did you know she was a crack athlete in her balmy days? Came out of a California college as a lady swimming star. Swam in the Olympics eight years ago. After that, something snapped in her. She went for dramatics, hook, line and bustle. She’s been on the verge of success a couple of times. But every show that uses her falls on its face. Kind of sad in a way. She’s not half bad. She’d make the grade if she’d stop laying around. It must have started for her in Europe, after her Olympic appearance. She got fouled up with some Mediterranean divers in the South of France. They caught her skin diving in only her skin. And drunk as a pickled cod. Never forget the pictures we had of her that time, in Nice. Too raw to publish.”

  He laughed at the memory. “Like to see them, Steve? I have them in my personal file.”

  “Personal?”

  “You’re looking at one of the early cods in the skin diving movement. I was a member of an early group of idiots who used to submerge off the coast of Jersey. Mari was one of them.”

  He dug deep into the debris in his desk drawer. He came up with a small bundle of well-thumbed photographs, some of them taken on cheap cameras, others obviously shot by a professional photographer. I went through them until I found a pair featuring Mari Beranville.

  “She was fatter then,” I whistled. The picture showed Mari sitting on a barnacled piling near the sea. She seemed the perfect mermaid type, thicker in the shoulders, sturdier in the midriff. Her basic charms were lost in the costume she wore. She could have been a lady wrestler in the pose.

  “She was an athlete then,” Gurney commented. “She could outswim, out-dive and outlast the best of the bunch.”

  He began to tell me small tales of his adventures with Mari and another diver in the group. His talk was loaded with admiration and high regard for Mari, the testimonial of a man who respects a good woman competitor. He endowed her with many manly qualities, explained how she was able to stay down and move around longer than any other woman he had ever known.

  His talk was sudden fodder for my tired brain. The beach out at Pazow’s club came back into focus for me now. Against th
e background of the long and rocky jetty, the cast of characters appeared, all of them ready for the sea. I counted them off in my memory; Chuck, Linda, Gloria, Mari, Pazow, Jean and Ziggi. They marched toward the curling waves, each of them ready for a bout with Neptune. They paused at the edge of the sand. And only one of them stepped forward for me. She was Mari Beranville.

  The mental picture stabbed at me. I hopped out of my chair.

  “How about Ziggi?” I asked. “Does he do much diving?”

  “Lately? Nothing much. But he was active in Cuba.”

  “Active? Or outstanding?”

  “He was an enthusiast,” Gurney shrugged. “But he couldn’t be put in the Mari Beranville group. Mari’s a devotee. She could be at it today, whenever there’s a convenient body of water to challenge her. But Ziggi? He can take it or leave it. He did it in France for publicity, when he made that undersea picture. Since then, I’d say he conked out on the sport.” He smiled at me curiously. “Why the interest in skin diving, Steve? Does it figure at all in the thing?”

  “It’s beginning to figure big,” I said. “Pazow’s place is lousy with skin divers. Too many for a kind coincidence.”

  “Any others I might know?”

  “There’s a college gal at Pazow’s club,” I said. “Another one of the diving bunch. Her name’s Jean Russicoff. Does it ring any kind of bell?”

  “She hasn’t made it into my memory box,” Gurney said. “But I can check her name in the morgue for you.”

  “Skip it.”

  “Has she done anything to make news?”

  “Not yet, Gurney. But soon, maybe.”

  CHAPTER 19

  8:20 A.M.

  I called Jake Simon.

  The phone rang on the end of the line. It was a dismal buzz, lonely and frustrating. It was a hell of an hour to be ringing any normal citizen, a fine time of day to be asking a favor in the name of friendship. The sweat blossomed on my brow because I didn’t want to fail. But Jake Simon could be a deep sleeper. Jake Simon could be far from his telephone.