Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  “I guess that’s what Bloom was thinking.”

  “Or with each other,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “Lovers. Lying with each other. Or on each other, as the case might be.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We were watching television,” she said.

  “So Bloom mentioned.”

  “Did the thought occur to you as well?”

  “Which thought is that?”

  “That Ham and I might be lovers?”

  “Ham?”

  “Hamilton Jeffries. My vet.”

  “Never occurred to me,” I said.

  “Why? Because he’s seventy-five years old?”

  “I didn’t know how old he was until you mentioned it.”

  “But it never occurred to you, when Bloom was filling you in on where everyone was that night, that Ham and I might have been covering for each other? That Ham and I might indeed be lovers?”

  “No, that never occurred to me.”

  “What if I told you we were?”

  “Lovers? Or covering for each other?”

  “Take your choice.”

  “I would say you were suggesting complicity in murder, and you ought to be telling this to the police, not to me.”

  “We were,” she said. “Lovers. Past tense. He was fifty-one, I was thirty-three. Nice age spread, wouldn’t you agree? My husband was more interested in cows than he was in me. Spent a lot of time running around for the Cattleman’s Association, Drew did, while I languished back at the ranch, swatting flies and wondering what the hell I was doing there in the middle of the wilderness.”

  “This was—”

  “Twenty-four years ago. Twenty-four plus thirty-three equals fifty-seven. Elementary, my dear Watson. Fifty-seven is what I am, remember? No, I guess you don’t. You once told me you’d already forgotten how old I was.”

  “I remember how old you are,” I said softly.

  She crossed her legs as though to emphasize the absurdity of discussing chronological age with a woman so emphatically beautiful. The white dress rode up over her knees, and there was a sudden flash of suntanned thigh. Her eyes met mine.

  “Does it embarrass you to hear me talk about my youthful escapades?” she asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “In that case,” she said, “there I was. Thirty-three years old, married for six years, and sitting on a cattle ranch while my dashing husband raced off to Denver and Tallahassee and God knows where else to talk about cows. I hated cows, still do, for that matter. I don’t think I’d even seen a cow till I met Drew. Well, that’s an exaggeration. But it was an alien world to me. My father used to be an investment banker in Dayton, came down here to open his own bank. Calusa was still a fishing village then; you have no idea how beautiful it was, Matthew. Drew borrowed a sizable amount of money from my father. That’s how we met. I was a late bloomer, twenty-seven when I got married, didn’t have any children till I was thirty-four. If I’d been a heifer, they’d have sold me off in a minute. Anyway, there I was, alone on the M.K. one steamy night at the end of September, with a sick calf and Ham there to fix her. And to fix me as well. Am I shocking you, Matthew?”

  “No.”

  “He fixed me, all right. Delivered me straight out of boredom and loneliness into a rapture I hadn’t thought possible.” She sighed deeply. “‘But that was in another country,’” she said. “‘And besides, the wench is dead.’” She paused. “Marlowe,” she said. “The Jew of Malta, circa 1587. I used to read a lot while Drew was off talking cattle.”

  “How long did it last? This...thing with Ham?”

  “Are you checking my alibi, too? Or have I captured your interest?”

  “I find you interesting, yes,” I said.

  “I thought you did,” she said, and smiled over the rim of her glass and uncrossed her legs. There was the briefest flash of thigh. She sat with her legs slightly apart, fully aware of the intimate knowledge we shared: she was wearing nothing under that pristine white dress.

  “Not too very long, I’m sorry to say, Ham and I. We fell in love in September, and it was already over by February. Short season, easy come, easy go. I settled down—isn’t that the expression one uses?—and became a faithful wife and loving mother, not necessarily in that order. Sunny was an August baby, full of rain, cried day and night, I sometimes wanted to strangle her, sometimes wish I had. A lost cause, that girl. Jack came three years later, Drew’s son exactly, same dark hair and dark eyes, spitting image except for the swagger and bravado, in which departments he was sadly lacking. Which is maybe why he got rid of a gun he should have kept—and ended up dead for it. While I was watching television with a former lover.” She smiled wanly. “Why is it that people watch television,” she said, “whereas they go to see movies? Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘Let’s go watch a movie tonight’? Have you ever heard anyone say, ‘Let’s go see television tonight’? It’s peculiar the way language evolves, isn’t it? Or is the choice of words a qualitative one? Do people watch television only because there’s really nothing to see on it?”

  She looked into her glass.

  I had the feeling that the last little verbal exercise had served to transport her safely and easily from her past memories of Hamilton Jeffries and her present concern about a gun her son should have had in his apartment on the night he was killed. She kept staring into her glass.

  “What makes you think he threw that gun away?” I asked.

  “Well, it wasn’t there, was it?”

  “Why would he have got rid of it?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he robbed a bank to get that forty thousand dollars. Maybe he felt the gun would incriminate him. My son was a dip, Matthew—Sunny’s word for him. By the way, Bloom called me today, wanted to know whether Jack was in the habit of spanking Sunny. I couldn’t believe my ears. Spanking? He does come up with some good ones, your Bloom.”

  I didn’t mention that Sunny was the one who’d come up with it.

  “First he gives the third-degree to a pair of former lovers—”

  “Former lovers, Veronica—”

  “Yes, don’t say it. Can lie for each other through force of habit. No, Matthew. We really were watching television when my son let someone he knew into his apartment.”

  “Who do you think the someone was?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Sam Watson didn’t have a Spanish accent, did he?”

  “My former manager?” She shook her head. “No. A Texas drawl, if anything.”

  “How about any of the people you do business with? Your cat-meat man—”

  “No. How do you know about cat-meat men?”

  “Your stocker?”

  “No. Have you been visiting the library?”

  “Do you know anyone at all with a Spanish accent?”

  “What’s all this about a Spanish accent?”

  “Do you?”

  “Well, no. Well, yes.”

  “Who?”

  “We used to have a Mexican cook...oh, ten, twelve years ago, I guess.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He went back to California.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Not that I can think of. This isn’t Miami, you know.”

  She drained what was left in her glass. I thought she might go to the bar for another refill. Instead, she put the glass down and said, “I’m getting tired, aren’t you?”

  I looked at her.

  “Why don’t we go to bed?” she said.

  A smile touched her mouth. She arched one eyebrow.

  “Why don’t we?” I said.

  5

  * * *

  WE WERE both dressed and out of the house by a quarter to nine the next morning, a scant fifteen minutes before Lottie and Dottie were certain to arrive. Lottie and Dottie were the two women who came to clean my house and do my laundry every Tuesday and Thursday. I called them the Speed Queens because, rather than hourly payment, we had set
tled on a flat weekly rate, which gave them license to go through the house like a pair of cyclones. They usually arrived at nine, by which time I was normally at the office. That was why I’d given them a key.

  The widow lady next door was out picking oranges when Veronica and I came out and walked to the Porsche. The widow lady, whose name was Mrs. Martindale, was forty-seven years old, ten years younger than Veronica. Her husband had died of a heart attack at the age of fifty. She told me that this was because he’d refused to drink the orange juice she squeezed fresh each morning from the oranges she picked in her own modest citrus grove of two trees. She was constantly inviting me in for fresh-squeezed orange juice. I was constantly finding excuses. She looked at us now, doubtlessly reflecting on the early morning hour, reflecting as well on the white nylon cocktail sheath and high-heeled slippers Veronica was wearing. I could just imagine what thoughts would be racing through her mind as she squeezed her oranges this morning.

  I opened the door on the driver’s side of the car. Veronica climbed in. I had held her naked in my arms the night before, but I could not resist looking at her legs now as she slid in behind the wheel. She grinned in appreciation. I called a cheery good morning to Mrs. Martindale, went around to the other side of the Porsche, and got in.

  “Where to?” Veronica asked, and turned the ignition key.

  “My office, please,” I said. “Corner of Heron and Vaughan.”

  She backed the car out of the driveway. Mrs. Martindale was still watching us. I waved as we went by her house. I was hoping she’d realize Veronica was ten years older than she was. I was full of praise for older women this morning.

  “When am I going to see you again?” Veronica asked.

  “Tonight?”

  “Greedy man,” she said, and smiled. “What time?”

  She had smiled a lot last night, too. I had kissed the smile off her mouth more times than I could remember. She had told me that people of her generation were very good kissers. This was because when she was growing up (and here she smiled wickedly), young girls weren’t even allowed to attend the weekly chariot races. “Going all the way” was unthought of back then, when everyone was a vestal virgin, and so there’d been a lot of kissing. Kissing at parties, kissing in the back seats of automobiles, kissing at the movies, kissing on the beach or in the park, kissing whenever and wherever the opportunity presented itself, which seemed to be quite often. The people of her generation had had a lot of practice kissing. They were experts at kissing. The trouble was that when they grew out of their teens, they still thought kissing was all there was to it. It had taken her a long while to learn that kissing, even good kissing—even soul kissing, which she’d learned when she was seventeen—wasn’t the be-all and the end-all of sex.

  “I was a virgin when I married Drew,” she said, “can you imagine? Twenty-seven years old and a virgin! A very good kisser, yes—do you like the way I kiss, Matthew?—but oh, such a late bloomer.”

  It was a well-known fact, I told her teasingly, that women reached the peak of their sexual prowess at the age of thirty-two, and that after that it was all downhill. “Late bloomer,” she said, and pounced on me again. We had pounced on each other a lot last night. When the alarm woke me at eight, I was exhausted. Veronica was still asleep, lying on her back, the sheet pulled to just below her breasts, one arm bent, her hand lying palm upward on the pillow above her head. She looked serene and radiantly beautiful and completely irresistible—but the Speed Queens were due at nine.

  I touched her cheek gently.

  “Mm,” she said.

  “Veronica?”

  “Mm?”

  “My cleaning women are on the way.”

  “That’s right,” she said, and rolled over, turning her back to me.

  “We have to get up,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Veronica?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We really do have to get up.”

  She rolled over again, opened her eyes, and looked at me in surprise. “Matthew?” she said, and grinned, and snuggled into my arms. “Oh, good morning,” she said, and kissed me, and despite the imminent arrival of the wondrous whirlwinds, we lost ourselves completely for the next twenty minutes.

  I kept watching her as she maneuvered the Porsche through the early-morning traffic.

  “You’re staring,” she said.

  “I’m dying to kiss you.”

  “The next light.”

  I kissed her at the next light. I kissed her at the light after that.

  “We’ll get arrested,” she said.

  I put my hand on her knee.

  “Matth-yew,” she warned.

  I began sliding my hand up under her dress.

  “Matthew!” she said sharply, and closed her thighs on my hand, and looked swiftly at the traffic on her right and left. She was blushing. “Where do I turn off?” she asked, flustered.

  “Where are you going after you drop me?”

  “To my chiropractor,” she said, and turned to smile at me. “You weren’t very good for my back, Matthew.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Why?” she said, surprised.

  “I don’t want to leave you yet.”

  “Don’t be silly, you’ll be seeing me tonight.”

  “What time did we say?”

  “We didn’t. How’s eight o’clock?”

  “Why so late?”

  “Seven?”

  “Make it six. No, wait, I have to see Bloom at five.”

  “I’ll be there at seven-thirty.”

  “Too long to be apart,” I said. “I’m coming with you to your chiropractor.”

  His office was on Main Street, a white cinder-block structure wedged between a store selling jeans and a store selling inexpensive kitchenware. A large plastic chiropractic symbol hung on the wall beside a mustard-yellow entrance door; it looked very much like a hybrid between a medical caduceus and a representation of Christ hanging on the cross. The naked man depicted, however, had no beard and no crown of thorns and his arms were spread wide against a pair of oversized wings. In place of the glow of light that normally shimmered above Jesus’ head, the word HEALTH was lettered on a trailing banner that curved serpentinely behind the man’s body and then emerged below his hips to cover his groin with the word CHIROPRACTIC. Hanging horizontally and slightly to the right of the figure was a white plastic sign lettered in blue with the words CHIROPRACTIC CLINIC. Whenever anyone talked about reviving Calusa’s downtown area, they had in mind these one-story cinder-block buildings that lined Main Street like dwarfed Apache pueblos, most of them painted a mildewing white, some of them painted a mildewing pink, which was infinitely worse.

  “I hope you like back-issue magazines,” Veronica said, and pushed open the yellow door. I followed her into a small reception area furnished with a green metal desk and several padded green metal chairs. The cinder-block walls were painted the same white as the exterior walls. A young girl in a white blouse and a black skirt sat behind the desk. She looked up as we came in. The door on this side, I noticed, was painted green, to match the beautiful furniture. There was a calendar advertising feed and grain hanging on one of the walls. Its illustration showed a farm girl in ragged cutoff jeans, a red blouse knotted under her full breasts, a straw hat angled back on her head, a wide grin around a piece of hay tilted rakishly in her mouth. The slogan read FATTEN ’EM WITH SIMMONS FEED AND GRAIN, but the only reference to cattle was a minuscule cow standing against a wooden fence in the far background. This was August, but the calendar had not yet been turned from the month of July. Aside from the calendar, nothing else hung on the spartan white walls.

  “I’m Mrs. McKinney,” Veronica said. “I was just passing by. Do you think he can take me?”

  “Oh,” the girl said. “You don’t have an appointment?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Oh, then this is going to be complicated,” she said, fluttering her hands aimlessly in the air
and conveying the distinct impression that anything more complicated than “run, Spot, run” would naturally be overwhelming to a mere country girl. She studied the buttons on the base of her phone as though they were numbered in Sanskrit, and then—with a bewildered look on her face—pushed down boldly on one of them. “Doctor?” she said into the phone, seemingly surprised that her haphazard stab had produced any result at all. “There’s somebody here doesn’t have an appointment. Her name—” She looked at Veronica, her eyes widening in panic. “What was your name again, ma’am?” she asked. “McDonald, did you say?”

  “McKinney,” Veronica said.

  “I thought you said McDonald.”

  “No, McKinney. I’m a regular patient here, the doctor knows...”

  “Well, let’s not get into that,” the girl said, and rolled her eyes. “Her name’s McDonald,” she said into the phone, “I mean McKinney.” She looked at Veronica again. “Phew, what a name,” she said. Into the phone she said, “Shall I send her in or what?”

  She listened for a moment, cautiously replaced the receiver on its cradle, and then said, “You can go right in, Mrs. McKinley. Through the door there, and then...”

  “I know the way,” Veronica said. “And it’s McKinney. Veronica McKinney.”

  “Yeah,” the girl said. “Right.”

  Veronica winked at me and disappeared through another green door, on the opposite wall. The girl looked in surprise at her electric typewriter, as if discovering that a Martian spaceship had landed on her desk. Placing both hands carefully on the keyboard, she began moving her fingers. Nothing happened. Either to herself or to me, she said, “You have to turn it on first.” She looked for the on-off switch. She looked on the right of the typewriter and then on the left. She lifted the typewriter and looked under it. She found the switch, at last, on the left-hand side of the machine, near the back. She was reaching to turn it on when her eyes opened wide and she said, “Oh!” and looked at me and said, “What’s your name?”

  “Hope,” I said.

  “Come on, that’s a girl’s name,” she said.

  “It’s my last name.”