Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  “Good,” Veronica said.

  “Good?”

  “She’s packed up and left the little jerk. Maybe there’s hope for her yet.” She smiled and came around the table to where I was sitting. “The hell with the dishes,” she said. “Let the raccoons have a field day.” She kissed me fiercely. “You ready to go?” she asked.

  Pillow talk.

  Privileged communication.

  She told me she was seriously concerned about the difference in our ages. I told her she had the body of a goddess, the intelligence of a computer, the wisdom of a guru, and the passion of a fanatic. She told me that if all that was meant to be flattering, I had a lot to learn about sweet-talking. I told her that in the past two nights she’d taught me more about women than I’d learned in all my thirty-eight years. She said, “That’s exactly what I mean, Matthew. There’s a nineteen-year difference. When will you be thirty-nine?”

  “In February.”

  “God,” she said, “that makes it even worse! I’ll be fifty-eight next month!”

  “The better to eat you,” I said.

  “What on earth does that mean?” she asked, grinning.

  “Pretending to be Grandma,” I said. “Shame on you.”

  “It was the wolf who pretended to be Grandma.”

  “It’s the wolf right here in bed with you,” I said, and bared my teeth.

  “I hate fairy tales; I think they’re designed to frighten children,” she said. “I’d better try Little Red Riding Hood again. It’s almost eleven.” She had tried the number at ten-thirty, and there’d been no answer. She reached over me for the bedside phone. I ran my hand along the smooth curve of her back. “Not while I’m talking,” she said, and dialed the number again. My hand wandered, seeking her out. “Matth-yew!” she warned. She held the receiver to her ear, listening. She let the number ring for a long time. She put the receiver back on the cradle then, and rolled over to her side of the bed again. People had their favorite sides in bed, I’d noticed. Veronica’s side was the right.

  “That’s what the real problem is,” I said. “Never mind our ages.”

  “Am I supposed to be reading your scattergun mind?” she asked.

  “We both prefer the right-hand side of the bed.”

  “Where do you suppose she is? If she really moved out of his apartment...”

  “Well, we don’t know that.”

  “She packed all her clothes, didn’t she?”

  “Maybe she was taking them to the cleaners.”

  “All of them?” She shook her head. “That’s my good profile,” she said.

  “Talk about scattergun minds.”

  “The left one. That’s why I always position myself on the right. In bed.”

  “Is that an intractable position?” I asked. “Or can it be negotiated?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Posit me an alternate position.”

  “How about the missionary position?”

  “You know any good preachers?” she asked, and threw her arms and her legs wide.

  “I prefer practicing to preaching,” I said.

  “Come practice,” she said.

  We were still practicing at midnight.

  “Think we’ll ever get it right?” she asked.

  “We have all eternity,” I said.

  “Until Grandma drops dead on you one night.”

  “Grandma still seems reasonably healthy,” I said.

  “Except for her heart,” Veronica said. “Grandma has lost her heart. And her daughter, it looks like. I’d better try her again.”

  She reached for the phone.

  “Keep your hands where they belong,” she said, and began dialing.

  “Just trying to keep them warm,” I said.

  “You make me jump when you do that.”

  She was holding the receiver to her ear now, listening intently.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “It’s ringing.”

  She let it ring.

  “Where the hell is she?” she said, and slammed down the receiver. “Maybe you ought to call Jackie, find out if she’s there. I hate talking to that little moron.”

  I got out of bed and went to where I’d left my wallet on the dresser.

  “You have a beautiful behind,” Veronica said.

  “US Prime,” I said. “Plenty of fat.”

  “We call it marbleization. And you’re not fat.”

  “A hundred and ninety pounds, live weight. What’d I do with that card?”

  “I’m the one who’s fat,” she said. “Fat and old.”

  “Young and slender,” I said.

  “‘And tall and lovely,’” Veronica sang, “‘the girl from Ipanema comes walking...’”

  “Here it is,” I said.

  “You don’t like the way I sing, huh?”

  “I love the way you sing. Do you know ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’? It’s from a musical called The Light on Daisy’s Dock.”

  “I never know what the hell you’re talking about, do you realize that?”

  “Sex talk,” I said.

  “Big talker,” she said. “Come here and kiss me.”

  “I thought you wanted me to call Jackie.”

  “Jackie can wait. Grandma feels an urgent need.”

  “Grandma’s insatiable.”

  “Grandma’s in Matthew Hope’s bed, that’s what she’s in. Come over here.”

  “Oh my, you have such big eyes, Grandma.”

  “The better to see you,” she said, opening them wide. “God, look at that thing!” she said, and reached for me.

  I didn’t get to call Crowell till almost one o’clock. He sounded fuzzy with sleep when he answered the phone. “Hullo?” he said.

  “Jackie,” I said, “this is Matthew Hope. Have you had any luck?”

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Finding Sunny?”

  “Oh,” he said. “No. I looked everyplace I could think of.” In the background I heard someone ask, “Who is it, Jackie?”

  “She’s not there with you now, is she?” I said.

  “No...uh...that’s the television. I was watching television.”

  I thought it remarkable that the girl on television knew his name, but I made no comment.

  “You let us know if she comes back there, will you? You have my number.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Crowell said.

  “Whatever time it is, you call, okay?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “You want me to give you the number again?”

  “No, I have it.”

  “Sorry I woke you up,” I said.

  A trick shyster-lawyer ploy. He did not fall for it.

  “I was watching television,” he said, and hung up.

  I put the receiver back on the cradle.

  “There’s a girl with him,” I said.

  “Sunny?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s go there,” she said. “I hate it when she makes me worry this way. If she’s there with him...”

  “We can’t just break in on him in the middle of the night,” I said. “If the girl isn’t Sunny...”

  “Then let’s call the police. Call your friend Bloom.”

  “At one in the morning?”

  “My daughter’s missing,” she said flatly. “If she’s not with that little twerp and she’s not home, then she’s missing. I want a cop to go over there, Matthew. I don’t think Bloom will find that an unreasonable request.”

  “How reasonable will his wife find it?” I asked. “Calling at one o’cl—”

  “Five past one,” Veronica said. “Nobody asked her to marry a civil servant. Call him, Matthew. Will you please call him?”

  I tried the Public Safety Building first, on the off chance that Bloom was working the night tour. The detective who answered the phone told me he was expected at eight tomorrow morning. He amended this to say they usually came in at seven-forty-five to relieve what he called the graveyard shift. T
hat meant that Bloom would have to be up and around by seven at the very latest—and it was now one-ten by the bedside clock. Reluctantly, I dialed his home number. He sounded wide awake when he answered the phone.

  “I was sitting here watching a beer commercial on television,” he said. “I can’t even have a beer till October fifteenth. I’m sitting here counting the minutes. You recovered from all that kicking and scratching this afternoon?”

  “I’m sorry to be calling you at home,” I said, “but—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. What is it?”

  I told him about Sunny McKinney’s visit to my office that afternoon. I told him how frightened she’d seemed at the time. I told him that she’d left Crowell’s apartment and had taken all her clothes with her. I told him she hadn’t gone back to the ranch and Crowell claimed she wasn’t with him now, although I’d heard a girl’s voice in the background when I’d talked to him a few minutes ago. He listened to all of this very patiently.

  “You don’t know if it was her or not, huh?” he asked at last.

  “I couldn’t tell.”

  “If it was her, he would’ve said so, wouldn’t he?”

  “I can’t see any reason for him to have lied.”

  “So then it wasn’t her,” Bloom said. “Which means we got a missing person on our hands.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “And you say she was worried about whoever killed her brother maybe coming after her?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “So she ran,” Bloom said. “Better to run than to end up on a slab. First thing I want to do is go over to Crowell’s place, find out if that was her you heard. If she’s there, we got no problem, right? If she isn’t there...” His voice trailed off. “Well, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Where are you now, Matthew?”

  “Home,” I said.

  “I’ll call you in a little while. Stay put, okay?”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Talk to you later,” Bloom said, and hung up.

  He did not call back until two-thirty. Veronica and I were both sitting in the living room, waiting for his call, sipping cognac. Only the pool lights were on. I was wearing my Japanese kimono. Veronica was wearing one of my shirts. When the phone rang, I went into the kitchen and snatched the receiver from the wall hook.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Matthew? Sorry to have taken so long,” he said. “I just got back from New Town. Here’s how it—”

  “Mr. Bloom?” Veronica’s voice said. “This is Mrs. McKinney, I’m on the extension. I’d like to hear this, if you don’t mind.”

  I turned and looked into the living room. It was empty.

  There was a long silence while Bloom digested the fact that Veronica was at my house at two-thirty in the morning.

  “Sure,” he said at last. “This is the way it looks.” And he proceeded to tell us how it looked.

  He had gone to Crowell’s apartment in the New Town housing development, and had banged on the door and announced himself through the door, and at last Crowell had come to answer it in his undershorts. Bloom had asked if he might come in; a lot of people had gathered in the hallway by then, because a police officer in New Town at 1:30 a.m. could only mean that somebody had either been the victim of a crime or the perpetrator of one. Crowell had let him into the apartment, a tiny little place that looked even more cluttered than it had the last time Bloom was there, with dirty laundry and magazines and newspapers all over the floor, but Bloom supposed that was the way teenagers liked to live, like pigs. He went into a side excursion on teenagers, then, to the effect that they were all really uncivilized barbarians until they reached the age of twenty-four or so (I did not bother to mention that adolescence officially ended at the age of twenty), by which time they began to realize that there was more to life than hot-rodding around the city streets and smoking pot and chasing after ladies old enough to be their mothers. I assumed he was referring to Crowell’s relationship with Sunny McKinney—or perhaps he was referring to mine with Veronica. I was suddenly very aware of her on the bedroom extension.

  Crowell asked to what he owed the pleasure of Bloom’s visit (those were the exact words Bloom used, but I doubted Crowell had ever uttered them), and Bloom told him he had hoped to find Sunny there, and asked if she was in the bathroom or something, and Crowell said she was not, but Bloom checked out the bathroom anyway, and found in there a black woman in her early thirties who was wearing nothing but a bath towel, and who told him she didn’t know nothing about nothing and she was only there to take a shower ’cause the shower in her apartment wasn’t working.

  Bloom had then looked around the apartment, and had seen no female clothing in it, except for the black woman’s clothes draped over one of the chairs, and a purple bikini bathing suit on the floor. He had asked the black woman how long she’d been there, and she’d told him she’d seen Jackie driving up around eleven and decided to ask him could she use his shower ’cause hers wasn’t working and all. Crowell confirmed that he’d concluded his tour of the local hangouts by then, looking for Sunny in vain, and was parking his car outside when Lettie—the black woman’s name was Letitia Holmes—had come over to him and asked if she could use his shower. Lettie had indeed smelled of soap. So had Jackie Crowell. (“He always smells of soap, did you notice that?” Bloom asked. “He must wash a lot.”)

  Anyway, Bloom had thanked them both, and had apologized for interrupting their showers or whatever it was he’d interrupted, and then had gone down to the street to find a lot of black people sitting out there on the front stoop. In New Town, he explained, where there wasn’t any air conditioning in the apartments, you sometimes found the tenants sitting outside till all hours of the night, hoping to catch a breath of fresh air. The blacks in New Town weren’t overly fond of cooperating with the police, not since a cruising Calusa patrolman had senselessly killed a black businessman two years ago and then got off with nothing but a slap on the wrist. But Bloom took great pride in his color-blindness, and he knew that “attitude” was something black people could sense about a white man. He was not surprised when one of the old guys sitting on the stoop told him he’d seen a young blonde girl coming out of the building around four that afternoon, carrying a suitcase and looking like she was in a big hurry. He’d watched her put the suitcase in a red automobile, and he’d seen her driving off toward US 41. A woman confirmed that she had seen the same thing from her window upstairs; a favorite pastime in New Town was spreading a pillow on the windowsill, and then leaning over it to watch the passing parade downstairs. Bloom had thanked everybody, and then found a phone booth in an all-night billiards parlor down the street. He first called the ranch on the off chance that Sunny had found her way back there, got no answer, and then called his office to have the detective on duty put her name on the missing-persons sheet and send out a BOLO.

  “What number did you call?” Veronica asked on the extension. “At the ranch, I mean.”

  “Well, the number I have for—”

  “But not my daughter’s number? She has her own phone.”

  “I don’t have that number,” Bloom said. “If you’ll give it to me, I’ll try it now.”

  “I don’t want to trouble you,” Veronica said. “I can make the—”

  “I’d rather make it myself, if you don’t mind,” Bloom said. “Tie up all the loose ends.”

  Veronica gave him the number and then asked, “What’s a Bolo?”

  “A be-on-the-lookout-for,” he said. “It isn’t what it sounds like, it’s not only for wanted desperadoes. We usually tack it on to any missing-persons report. It goes out on the computer, covers Florida and six other states.”

  “Then you must consider this serious,” she said.

  “Two people have been killed, and your daughter’s on the run,” Bloom said. “Yes, Mrs. McKinney, I consider this very serious.” He sighed and then said, “I’ll try your daughter’s number now. If I don�
�t get back to you, it means she isn’t there. Matthew?” he said.

  “Yes, Morrie?”

  “What was she wearing when you saw her this afternoon?”

  “Purple shorts, purple sandals, and a purple T-shirt.”

  “Then she changed her clothes before leaving the apartment. The witnesses who saw her go say she was wearing a purple dress and high-heeled shoes. Oh yeah, the red car. Was that her car, Mrs. McKinney?”

  “The ranch’s. It’s registered to the M.K.”

  “What kind of car is it?”

  “A Porsche.”

  “Can you give me the year and registration number, please? I’d like to add those to the BOLO.”

  She gave him the information he wanted. There was a long silence on the line. Then she said, “Tell me, Mr. Bloom. Are you looking for a frightened young girl on the run...or a murderess?”

  “I don’t know yet, Mrs. McKinney,” he said, and sighed again. “All I know is that she’s taken off. I guess she’ll have to tell us why when we find her.”

  “Thank you,” Veronica said.

  “Let’s hope that’s soon,” Bloom said.

  The phone rang early the next morning. Veronica was still in the shower. I was in the bedroom knotting my tie. The air-conditioned temperature in the house was seventy-two degrees. But the thermometer outside the bedroom window read eighty-four, and this was still only eight o’clock in the morning. I picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Dad? It’s me.”

  “Joanna, hi,” I said.

  “Mom said you wanted me to call. The bus’ll be here in a minute, so we’ll have to make this fast.”

  “Honey, I wanted to ask you about this wedding—”

  “Daisy’s mother, you mean?”

  “Yes. Mom says you want to go to it—”

  “She shouldn’t have told you that.”

  “That isn’t the point. If you want to go...”

  “I haven’t seen Daisy in it must be six or seven months. Why would I want to go watch her mother get married? I don’t even remember what her mother looks like.”