Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  “You wouldn’t have a towel, would you?” she asked, sweeping her wet hair back from her face. “Sorry about using your pool. It got so hot waiting for you.”

  “I’ll get one,” I said, and went back into the house.

  When I came outside again, she was lying full length on her back on the other lounge chair, her eyes closed, her hands clasped behind her head, her legs slightly parted. She looked very blonde.

  She opened her eyes.

  “I’m almost dry already,” she said.

  I handed her the towel.

  She patted herself here and there with it, and then dropped it onto the tiles. It was very difficult to keep my gaze fastened on her face. She seemed to be enjoying my discomfort. A small, wicked smile played about her lips.

  “Is that your Porsche outside?” I asked.

  “The red one, yeah. Well, the M.K.’s, actually—red and black, those are our colors. I didn’t want to block your driveway.”

  “You parked it outside the wrong house.”

  “I was looking for the address. You don’t have one on your mailbox.”

  “I keep meaning to put one on.”

  “You can buy those stick-on numbers at a hardware store,” she said. “You just peel off the backs.”

  “I’ll have to do that.”

  “They glow in the dark, some of them.”

  It occurred to me that I was having this conversation with a woman who was totally naked.

  “Maybe I ought to get you a robe,” I said.

  “What for?” she said.

  I didn’t answer. I went back into the house and into my bedroom. In the closet there, I found a robe that belonged to Dale, decided against taking it out to Sunny, and brought her instead a Japanese-style kimono that was mine, white and sashed and scrawled front and back with black Japanese calligraphy. She was standing naked in front of the television set when I came back into the living room, her eyes glued to the screen, her body flickering with blue electronic light.

  “Oh, Japanese, good,” she said, and took the kimono, but made no move to put it on. Instead, she kept watching the television screen. “Have you got anything to drink?” she asked.

  She was twenty-three years old and very much a woman, legally and physically, but I couldn’t shake the thought that I’d be impairing the morals of a minor if I mixed her a drink. On the television screen, a cop was explaining in detail how he’d been able to reach the screaming lady before she’d had her throat slit.

  “What would you like?” I asked.

  “Gin, if you have any. With a twist.”

  “Ice?”

  “Please.”

  On the television screen, they were showing previews of next week’s exciting show. “Do we need this?” I asked. Sunny shrugged. I snapped off the set, and went to the bar. When I turned to her again, the drink in my hand, she was still naked, walking around the living room, examining the place like a county appraiser.

  “I wish you’d put on that kimono,” I said, and handed her the drink.

  “Oh, relax,” she said, “I won’t bite you. This is nice. You do it yourself?”

  “It came furnished.”

  “Nice,” she said, and nodded. “Aren’t you having one?”

  “In a minute.”

  I went back to the bar and mixed myself what my partner Frank calls a mother-in-law martini: straight up, very dry, and very cold.

  “Cheers,” Sunny said.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  “Mm, good,” she said. “Tanqueray?”

  “Beefeater,” I said.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Why don’t you put on that kimono, okay?”

  “I hate clothes,” she said, but she put her drink down on an end table near the imitation Barcelona chair, and then picked up the kimono and shrugged into it. “Nice fit,” she said. “Your girlfriend’s?”

  “Mine.”

  “Nice,” she said, and tied the sash.

  The kimono seemed slashed in a wider V than I remembered. It also seemed far too short on her. She picked up her drink, sat carelessly—recklessly, in fact—in the Barcelona chair, and said, “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here.”

  “It crossed my mind. How’d you find me?”

  “Your number’s in the phone book. Your address too. I tried to call first, but there was no answer.” She shrugged. “I figured I’d take a chance. It’s not a very long drive.”

  I nodded. She smiled.

  “Aren’t you glad I’m here?” she said, and took a long swallow of her drink.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “I want to talk to you,” she said. “About Jack.”

  “Your brother or your boyfriend?”

  “My boyfriend is Jackie,” she said. “My brother is Jack.” She shook her head. “Or was, I suppose would be right. No more Jack, is there?” She shook her head again. “How’d you know about him? Jackie, I mean.”

  “I met him this afternoon. Out at the ranch. I understand you were with him the night your brother was killed.”

  “Yeah. Boy, was that ever embarrassing! Having to tell that to the cops.”

  The way she was sitting, I wouldn’t have thought she’d be embarrassed by anything. I suddenly thought of my partner Frank’s dictum on partially clothed women. I looked away. Sunny smiled, as though she had caught me doing something she never would have imagined of a doddering, dithering old man.

  “Men sure are funny,” she said. “I really did come here to talk, you know.”

  “So talk,” I said.

  “Sure,” she said. “Haven’t you been wondering where Jack got that forty thousand dollars?”

  “Do you know where he got it?”

  “I’ve got a few ideas. Mm, this is good,” she said, and gestured with the glass. “Mother disapproves of my drinking, you know. Mother also disapproves of my boyfriend. And my language. Fuck Mother,” she said. “Or have you already thought of that?”

  “Where do you think your brother got that money?” I asked. “Assuming he had it at all.”

  “Oh, I think he had it, all right,” she said. “Where do you think he got it?”

  “I thought inheritance at first, but that doesn’t seem to be—”

  “No, my father didn’t leave him a dime. Me, neither. Everything went to Mother.” She drained her glass and said, “I wouldn’t mind some more of this.”

  I took the glass from her hand. She smiled again, for no reason that I could detect. I refilled it and carried it back to her.

  “Thanks,” she said. Sipping at the gin, she said, “What do the police think? About where he got the money?”

  “You understand, don’t you, that they haven’t yet found any money. For all we know, the forty thousand never even existed.”

  “Well, he gave that farmer four thousand down, didn’t he?” she asked. “That’s what Mother said, anyway.”

  “Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily—”

  “What kind of gin did you say this was? It tastes expensive.”

  “It is,” I said.

  “I love expensive things,” she said. “So what do the police think?”

  “I don’t know what they think now,” I said. “Earlier on, they mentioned narcotics, but—”

  “Narcotics?” she said, and laughed. “My brother once caught me smoking a joint, and he spanked me so hard I couldn’t sit for a week.” She seemed reflective for a moment, recalling the incident. “No,” she said, “dope is definitely out of the question. You wouldn’t have any, by the way, would you? Grass, I mean?”

  “I’m sorry, no.”

  “I should have brought some with me. I’m always afraid to carry it in the car, though. I’m afraid I’ll pass a red light, and next thing you know I’ll be in jail for intent to sell, or whatever they call it. No, Jack didn’t get that money through—what did they think? That he was trafficking?”

  “We didn’t go into it very deeply.”

  “Good th
ing, it’s a dead end. Typical brilliant thought for a Mickey Mouse police department. I can just see Bloom putting it all together, can’t you? This is Florida, so how else would a kid like Jack come into forty thousand dollars? Dope, naturally.” She shook her head. “You can tell your friend Bloom my brother wasn’t involved in dope. No way.”

  “Why don’t you tell him yourself?” I said. “In fact, if you have any real notion of where your brother got that money—”

  “I don’t like talking to cops, and I especially don’t like talking to Detective Bloom,” she said. “The way he went after me and Jackie, you’d have thought we were both ax murderers or something. All we did was sleep together, is that a crime? But Bloom—”

  “A crime was committed,” I said. “Your brother was murdered. Detective Bloom was—”

  “Detective Bloom was getting some weird kind of kick out of it.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “Yeah? Then why’d he want to know where we were doing it, and at what time exactly, and everything but what I was wearing? Your friend’s some kind of closet sex freak,” she said, and smiled again.

  “My friend is a cop,” I said flatly, “who was doing his job.”

  “If he’s doing his job so great,” she said, “then why hasn’t he found out where my brother got that money? You think it just might occur to him that if forty thousand dollars is involved—”

  “It has occurred to him. And if you know where your brother—”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t say I knew. I said I had a few ideas, is all.”

  “Then tell them to the police.”

  “No. You were my brother’s lawyer, right? And from what Mother tells me, you’re representing her now, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So who better to talk to?” she said, and shrugged.

  “Whatever you tell me, I’ll repeat it to Bloom,” I said. “If it has any bearing at all on the crime—”

  “Are you really as square as you seem?” she asked, smiling again. “Anybody else I know would’ve been very happy to see me marching around here starkers.”

  I made no comment.

  “I was starkers, you do remember that, don’t you?”

  “I remember.”

  “’Cause memory is the first thing to go, I’m told. Would you mind filling this glass again?”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I told you. It’s nice gin.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to finish the bottle.”

  “I can drink you under the table any night of the week,” she said. “I was raised on a ranch, mister. I’ve spent more time with cowboys...” She let the sentence trail. She extended the glass to me. “Please?” she said, pouting. “Pretty please?”

  I took the glass and poured a little gin into it. She watched me.

  “Don’t be so generous,” she said.

  I poured a bit more, and then carried the glass back to her.

  “Thanks.” She held the glass up to the light. “Are you sure you can spare this?” she said, and shook her head, and drank. “So here’s what I think,” she said. “I think my brother was a thief.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What does that mean, ‘uh-huh’? Does that mean you find the idea inconceivable?”

  Judging from the way she stumbled on the word “inconceivable,” it occurred to me that her speech, although not yet quite slurred, was getting a bit sloppy, and I suddenly wondered how often and how heavily Miss Sylvia McKinney hit the sauce. Her glass was almost empty again. I did not want a drunken twenty-three-year-old on my hands. Or did I?

  Once, back in Chicago while I was still a teenager, I’d tried to get a sixteen-year-old girl drunk so that I could pry her out of her virgin fortress panties. She’d passed out cold on me, and I felt like a burglar as I fumbled around under her skirt. I quit when the shame and the guilt got too heavy for my seventeen-year-old conscience. I never knew whether she was really drunk or not. I did not know whether Sunny was drunk now, but she certainly seemed on the way toward Blotsville.

  “Why are you staring at me?” she asked.

  “No reason.”

  “There’s a reason. I’m a beautiful girl in a loose kimono—do you know who wrote The Open Kimono?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Seymour Hare,” she said, and smiled. “You’re wondering where all this is going to lead, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m wondering if you’re getting drunk.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. Let me reconstruct it for you, okay?” she said, having a little trouble with the word “reconstruct” this time. “My brother Jack needed forty thousand dollars so he could realize his lifelong dream of becoming a goddamn snapbean farmer—”

  “Was that a dream of his?”

  “I’m being facetious. Who knows what was in his head? Ever? So, fine, he wanted to own a snapbean farm. I suppose that’s better than a string of empty stores to rent to gypsies. Listen, do I really have to beg for a little gin around here? Sunny’s very thirsty, Mr. Hope.”

  “Sunny’s getting sloshed,” I said.

  She said nothing. She shoved herself out of the chair, exposing a great deal of smooth suntanned thigh when the kimono parted, and went directly to the bar. “Help yourself, Sunny,” she said. “Thanks, I will,” she said, and poured freely into her glass. “Are you looking at my ass?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I thought you might be,” she said, and turned and smiled and said, “Cheers. Where was I?”

  “Your brother needed forty thousand dollars...”

  “Correct. So he decided that the way to get it was illegally. To great men come great thoughts. All he needed was something to rob.”

  “Which bank did he hold up?”

  “No, not a bank, Mr. Hope. Would you rob a bank if your mother owned a cattle ranch?”

  “I’m not following you,” I said.

  “Cows,” she said.

  “Cows,” I repeated.

  “Yes, sir. My brother was stealing cows.”

  “Your mother’s cows?”

  “Yes, sir, my mother’s cows.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I didn’t know it. Until I started piecing it all together. I’m a lot smarter than Mother gives me credit for, you know.” She sipped at her drink, looked at what remained in her glass, and then said, “I guess you know October is a busy time for us—well, from the beginning of October to the middle of November. Busy time on any ranch. We normally put the bulls on the cows come early spring...”

  “Put them on the cows?”

  “Well, yes, put them out for breeding, take them off in the summer sometime. Figure February to June for them to do their work, the bulls. It takes nine months from conception to delivery, same as a human. We’ll have heifers dropping calves all through the late fall and early winter—depending on how well the bulls covered them. That means the calves are ready to be taken off the cows—”

  “Taken off the cows?”

  “Weaned. Usually when they’re ten months old. We separate the cows and the calves in different pastures, put the calves on feed for a week or ten days, till they’re ready to get out there and eat grass on their own. This is usually in October, November sometime. That’s when we run our pregnancy tests, too—did my mother show you our squeeze chute?”

  “Yes.”

  “Front end holds the cow’s head up while we drench her—that’s giving her the medicine she needs. We use a big syringe, the hands do the actual work, no need for a vet there. A vet works the back end, though, wears a long plastic sleeve while he shoves his arm up the cow’s cooze—are you familiar with the word ‘cooze,’ Mr. Hope?”

  “I’m familiar with it.”

  “Feels around up there to see whether there’s the beginning of a calf or not. We hope for an eighty-five-percent pregnancy rate—which varies, of course. But that’s what we hope for. We turn the pregnant cows out to pasture a
gain, put the open cows in another pasture for—”

  “You’re losing me again.”

  “Open cows? The ones that aren’t pregnant. We sell them, Mr. Hope. Simply because we can’t afford to keep them unless they deliver a calf every year. October’s our biggest selling time. Not only for open cows, of course, but for whatever’s ready to move on.”

  “Move on to where?” I asked.

  “Mother’s what’s known as a cow-calf lady, Mr. Hope. Bottom end of the food chain. Next step up is the stocker, he’s a buyer who comes to the ranch to look over the herd, we’ll sell him five, six hundred head at a time, by what we call private treaty. He’ll put the calves out to richer pasture—wheat, oats, rye, what have you. We’ll sell some of the calves at four hundred fifty to five hundred pounds, right off the cow. Some of what we sell are calves we’ve already wintered, they’ll weigh maybe six-fifty, seven hundred pounds. We sell them all at live weight, put them on the scale right in the pens, before they’re loaded. The price will fluctuate, depending on the supply of cattle at the time we’re selling. It’ll vary, oh, from a high of a dollar a pound to a low of fifty-five cents. The current price on steer calves is sixty-eight cents a pound. Anyway, your stocker’ll fatten them up by a couple of hundred pounds, and then sell them to the next man up the line—what we call a feeder, or a feed-lot operator.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Pens them, feeds them from troughs—corn, soybeans, very rich stuff, we’re talking US Choice here, Mr. Hope. He’ll add another few hundred pounds to each of them, and then sell them to the packer. Your average steer going to slaughter will weigh somewhere between a thousand and twelve hundred pounds. Your packer will dress the steer and send it on to your butcher, and he’ll end up as a steak on your dinner table—the steer, not the butcher. End of the food chain.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What makes you think your brother—”

  “Hold on just a second,” she said. “I told you we sell any open cows we find, usually for the going hamburger price of about forty cents a pound. At the same time we sell any cows who aren’t good for breeding anymore. Usually they’re seven or eight years old, in there someplace. You’ve got to remember it takes almost four years for a cow to be worth anything to a breeder. Figure a year for her as a calf, another year as a yearling, a third year as a bred heifer, and then seven or eight months for suckling her calf—almost four years. That’s a sizable investment to carry. This is a business, Mr. Hope. Those cows out there aren’t pets.”