Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  “Mr. Burrill is willing to settle the matter if Mrs. McKinney pays him an additional five thousand dollars—out of her own pocket—for any damages he may have suffered.”

  “Never mind ‘may have suffered,’” Loomis said. “Burrill lost all his potential buyers ’cause of that boy’s promises.”

  “You know, of course, that Mrs. McKinney herself is not personally responsible for any debts her son may have incurred—”

  “Yes, I know all that,” he said. “A’course, I know it. But I’m figuring somebody with Mrs. McKinney’s kind of money’d be willing to part with a mere five thousand of it just to get us out of her hair. You know how much she’s worth?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “She’s sittin’ on four thousand acres of land worth at least fourteen hundred an acre. That comes to five million six, where I come from. She’s got—what?—a thousand head of cattle on that ranch? Say a good brood cow’s worth seven hundred dollars, and a good bull somewhere between twelve and fifteen hundred. Well, that comes to another six, seven hundred thousand dollars in stock, Mr. Hope. Add the machinery and whatnot, the horses, I’d say she’s worth six, seven million dollars. Don’t know how much of that’s only on paper, but I don’t rightly care. Five thousand ain’t gonna hurt her. You tell her that’s what we want. Five thousand in damages, forfeit of the four in escrow, and all the kid’s personal belongings. The farm stays with us, of course. How does that sound to you?”

  “Rotten,” I said.

  Loomis chuckled.

  “Thought you might say that,” he said. “But maybe your client’ll think different.”

  “Not if I’m advising her,” I said. “Good day, Mr. Loomis.”

  It began raining again the moment I started the long drive back to Calusa—a big surprise here during the summer months, our daily reminder that there was indeed a God. I drove slowly, hunched over the wheel, trying to see through whatever patches of clear windshield the faulty wipers provided. The rain came down as though it were spilling from a huge bloated sack that had ripped open from end to end, unleashing torrents of water that pelted the car and the land outside.

  Great plops of water exploded on the asphalt ribbon, silvery plunks erupting everywhere ahead in the gloom. There was a sudden flash of lightning and then a boom of thunder. I winced, and then remembered that an automobile was supposed to be the safest place you could find in a thunderstorm. It had something to do with the rubber tires serving as conductors—or something. If a bolt of lightning hit your car, it was supposed to travel all around it and down to the tires, which would absorb it—or something. Physics had never been my strongest subject. The road ahead was steaming now, the baked-in heat of the day evaporating rapidly, rising, shifting, dissipating in the fiercely falling rain. I started thinking about that shyster Harry Loomis, and I got angry at him all over again, and then I got angry at the rain, and then at the windshield wipers, and then at God, and then I passed Burrill’s brown mailbox on the right and knew I had crossed over into Calusa County and began to feel a little better until another flash of lightning, very close by, caused my hair to stand on end and I pulled my head into my shoulders like a turtle when the boom of thunder immediately exploded overhead.

  The wind whipped through the palmettos flanking the road, setting up a fearsome rattling in counterpoint to the steady drumming of the rain. I kept pushing the small car through the tunnel of wind and water, flinching each time there was more lightning and thunder, having no real faith in the theory of protective rubber tires. Anyway, my tires were synthetics, weren’t they? Would a combination of rubber, nylon, and steel save me from instant electrocution? I was perhaps three-tenths of a mile past Burrill’s mailbox when I spotted the huge puddle ahead, and tried to brake, and changed my mind for fear of skidding, and ploughed through it like a drunken sailor—and the engine quit.

  I thought, Shit.

  I knew that what you were supposed to do when your battery got wet was wait five or ten minutes before you tried starting the car again. So I sat there in the middle of nowhere for the next ten minutes, listening to the rain. It showed no sign of abating. I looked at my watch, and tried the key again. There was more lightning when I turned it, one of those coincidental happenings that always scare the hell out of me, as if my own hand had unleashed the lightning flash and the following boom of thunder. The car did not start. I tried the key again. And again. And again. I knew I was doing exactly the wrong thing, but I was getting impatient. The starter whined and complained each time, the engine almost catching, encouraging me. I kept trying. And finally, of course, I drained the damn battery of whatever juice it had left in it, and there I was. Some twenty miles from downtown Calusa, with a storm roaring all around me, and a dead battery, and no other pilgrims abroad on the road, and an umbrella with two broken ribs on the back seat—or what passed for a back seat in a Karmann Ghia. I reached over the seat to grab the umbrella, and opened the door on my left, rain lashing in at me immediately, and then took the keys from the ignition and tried to open the broken umbrella before I stepped fully into the storm.

  The wind turned it inside out at once. I said the hell with it and tossed it over the roof of the car into the palmettos lining the road. I stood in the rain, then, and got soaked clear to the skin in the next forty seconds while I locked a car that wouldn’t start.

  Avery Burrill’s farm was just up the road, a short distance back, if three-tenths of a mile could be considered minimal in a raging storm. There was a telephone at the farm, and even if I had to wait forever for the talkative lady on his party line to get off, I could nonetheless eventually contact a service station that might send someone to help me get started, or even tow me if worse came to worst. When you are thoroughly drenched, there is no longer any need to worry about getting wet. I walked through the downpour feeling somewhat lighthearted, in fact, a latter-day Gene Kelly who—while not actually singin’ in the rain—jogged along at a brisk pace broken only once, when I tried to flag down a truck carrying a load of chicken crates. The driver went by me without even slowing, sending up a spray of water that fazed me less than did his disregard. I reached Burrill’s mailbox, and turned left onto his driveway.

  The driveway was a dirt road, potholed and rutted and running with water so that it resembled more a muddy brown stream than it did any manmade thoroughfare. I had no idea how long the driveway might be when I started up it, but after I’d been trudging along for what must have been five minutes and saw no sign of a house anywhere ahead, I began thinking that perhaps this was only a service road that led to where the snapbeans grew, and not to any proper residence. I fought the mud for another five minutes, already convinced that the better part of valor would have been to stay in the car till the storm ended, which—small consolation—it showed no sign of doing in the immediate future.

  The land on either side of the driveway did not seem suitable for growing anything but cabbage palm and palmetto. I wondered where the hell Mr. Burrill planted his snapbeans, and I wondered where the hell his house was, and I wondered what the hell I was doing out here in the middle of a godforsaken landscape lashed with wind and water, and then I saw a rusting yellow tractor some little way ahead, and I figured if there was a tractor there had to be a farm, and if there was a farm there had to be a farmhouse, and there it was at last, a ramshackle structure as gray as the rain, sitting on top of a low rise behind which was a gully rushing with water. Beyond that I saw what appeared to be cultivated land, and still beyond that, a row of slash pines that filled the horizon and screened from view whatever acreage might have been behind it.

  I climbed a pair of rickety steps and was grateful at once for the overhanging roof of the porch, which, however leaky it was, provided welcome shelter from the rain. I looked for a doorbell and found none. I opened the tattered screen door and knocked on the wooden entrance door. No answer. I knocked again. “Mr. Burrill!” I shouted, and a flash of lightning scared the hell out of me, and the following
boom of thunder drowned out my second shouted “Mr. Burrill!” I pounded on the door. “Mr. Burrill, it’s me,” I shouted. “Attorney Hope!” My formal title seemed not to impress either Mr. Burrill or whichever storm-god decided to unleash another bolt of lightning and another boom of thunder.

  I tried the doorknob.

  The door was unlocked.

  I opened it and stepped into the house.

  “Mr. Burrill?” I said.

  The house was dark. Not a light showing anywhere; odd, when one considered the storm. Or had the power failed? And if the power had failed, would the telephone be working?

  “Mr. Burrill?” I said again, and a flash of lightning illuminated something lying just inside the door to the other room, and the immediate boom of thunder drowned out my scream when I realized it was a dead body.

  I actually screamed, that’s right.

  I had never in my adult life screamed until that moment, but that’s what I did when I saw the blood-soaked body. The thunder rolled away and faded. I was in the dark again. I backed away toward the door, tripped on something, caught my balance, and fumbled for a light switch on the wall inside the door. I flicked it up, and a pair of lamps came on across the room. One of the lamps was lying on the floor, overturned. There were overturned chairs, their cushions slashed. There were open books and magazines scattered all over the floor. The body lay just this side of a door leading into a kitchen. There were utensils and pots and pans strewn everywhere on the kitchen floor. The dead man was lying on his back. His face and chest were covered with blood. There was a hole in his face, still dripping blood, and there were several more bloody holes in his white shirt.

  I decided to get the hell out of there.

  I was backing away toward the door again when I saw the phone sitting on a wooden table between two shabby upholstered chairs, their backs and arms slashed, their stuffing pulled out. I went to the phone. I lifted the receiver and got a dial tone. I called Calusa Public Safety then, and asked for Detective Morris Bloom.

  So now there was the ritual and routine of murder.

  The whole grisly entourage arrived in dribs and drabs during the next hour or so: first a pair of uniformed cops coming up the muddy drive in separate City of Calusa police cars, and then Bloom in an unmarked car, with another detective whose name I didn’t catch, and then the captain in command of Calusa’s detective bureau, and then an assistant medical examiner, and then a man from the state attorney’s office whom I happened to know because I’d spoken to him on the phone during the George Harper tragedy, and then the technicians from the Criminalistics Unit, arriving in their Ford Econoline van, and then an intern and two ambulance attendants from Southern Medical.

  The rain had stopped.

  My clothes were drying.

  I stood in the living room and watched the professionals go about their work, and then I explained to the captain in command what I had already explained to Bloom, how I had happened to be the one who’d discovered Avery Burrill’s body on a rainy afternoon in the middle of August. The assistant ME had already pronounced him dead, and the hospital team was carrying him out in a rubber body bag. There was blood all over the floor, inside and around the chalked outline of his body. There were people taking photographs and people dusting for fingerprints. The two patrolmen in their black rain slickers were standing near the entrance door, talking about getting laid. One of the patrolmen laughed. The captain in command seemed satisfied with my story, but he frowned when I told him I’d been handling a real-estate transaction between Burrill and Jack McKinney, who, he remembered at once, had been killed two weeks ago. His face told me that he didn’t like the smell of that. Bloom didn’t like it much, either. He had told me that on the phone, but not in so many words. He had said, “Oh, no,” and then told me to stay right where I was till he got there. He was there now. Everybody was there now, except Burrill himself, who was being loaded into the ambulance outside.

  “Who else was involved in this transaction?” the captain asked me. His name was Harley. I think it was Harley. He hadn’t introduced himself, but I had heard one of the technicians calling to him, and I thought it sounded like Captain Harley. Maybe it was Captain Holly. Either way, he was looking at me very intently now, his sharp blue eyes seeming to linger on the faint discoloration that still showed under my own eyes. He was taking me for the kind of guy who got into fistfights, I thought. He was taking me for a street brawler.

  “No one,” I said. “Just the principals and their attorneys. I’m an attorney,” I said, thinking I’d better make that very clear from the start.

  “McKinney’s attorney, huh?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I don’t know why I called him sir. I think I was thinking he felt I was somehow involved in this. I think I was kissing his ass a little.

  “And the victim’s attorney?” he said, and turned to Bloom. “What’s his name again, the victim?”

  “Burrill,” Bloom said. “Avery Burrill.”

  Harley, or Holly, turned back to me again. “Who was his attorney?” he asked. “The victim’s?”

  “Man named Harry Loomis in Ananburg.”

  “And that’s all the parties to the transaction, is that right?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “not entirely.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not entirely’? Were there just the four of you, or were there some other parties involved?”

  I explained to him in detail that McKinney had died without leaving a will, and that under Florida’s intestate-succession statutes, whatever estate he’d left would go to his mother. I further explained that McKinney had intended to pay for the farm in cash, but that so far—and Detective Bloom would corroborate this—no cash had been found, and therefore the estate could be said to have no assets but the boy’s personal belongings. I went on to tell him that I had been discussing a possible settlement with Harry Loomis today.

  “So there’s a lot more people involved in this than you said at first, is that right?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “You just told me there’s a mother and a sister.”

  “Yes, but there’s no way they can be held responsible for any of McKinney’s obligations. The estate is responsible, and as I just told you, in essence there are no assets in the estate.”

  “Except this cash McKinney was supposed to have had,” Harley said. Holly. Whoever the hell.

  “We haven’t been able to locate that yet, sir,” Bloom said. “I think I ought to tell you, too, that both the mother and the sister had iron-clad alibis for the night McKinney was killed.”

  “Did I see a report on that?” the captain said.

  “I sent it up, sir, I don’t know whether you saw it or not.”

  “Fill me in,” the captain said. “I see a lot of reports.” Which meant he hadn’t even looked at it.

  “The mother was home watching television with a vet who’d come to dinner that night—”

  “Which war?” the captain said.

  “Sir?”

  “This veteran.”

  “A veterinarian, sir,” Bloom said. “She breeds cattle. He was out there looking at a sick cow, and she asked him to stay to dinner, and they sat around later watching television.”

  “Did you check with the vet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And he confirmed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about the sister? Where was she?”

  “In the sack with her boyfriend.”

  “Confirmed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s the boyfriend’s name?”

  “Jackie Crowell. He’s an eighteen-year-old kid, works in the produce department at a supermarket in Calusa.”

  “And he said he was fucking her that night?”

  “In his apartment, yes, sir.”

  “At the time of the murder?”

  “We set the time of death at about nine, sir. She went out to dinner with him—”

  “Where?�
��

  “McDonald’s.”

  “That’s dinner?” the captain said.

  Bloom shrugged. “Had dinner with him at seven, went back to his place, spent the entire night there.”

  “All confirmed, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You think he might be covering for her?”

  “That’s possible. But there’s a kid at McDonald’s who knows them both, and he said he served them hamburgers at a little after seven.”

  “Still, there’s nobody but the two of them to confirm she was with Crowell all night, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Stay on that, Bloom, I want to know more about it.”

  “Yes, sir, we are on it. We’re canvassing Crowell’s neighborhood, trying to find anybody who might have seen him and the girl going in or coming out.”

  “What the hell’s taking you so long?”

  “Big neighborhood, captain. He lives in a housing project in New Town.”

  “He’s a nigger?” the captain said. “She was fucking a nigger?”

  “He’s white,” Bloom said. “There are whites in the project, too. It’s a low-income project.”

  “I thought it was only niggers in New Town,” the captain said, and shook his head.

  “No, sir.”

  “And you say McKinney was killed at nine o’clock?”

  “That’s the coroner’s estimate, sir.”

  “Well, stay with it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Captain Hopper?” someone said.

  So much for total recall.

  The captain walked over to where someone was standing near the telephone I’d used earlier. He handed something to the captain. Hopper looked at it.

  “Some dump here,” Bloom said, looking around. “McKinney was paying forty K for it, huh?”

  “There’s fifteen acres of land,” I said.

  “Must be some land,” Bloom said. “Must be oil on it.”

  “Take a look at this,” Hopper said, handing me a slip of paper. My name and phone number were handwritten on it. “This you?”