Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  I clenched my right fist, extended the forefinger and middle finger stiff and straight, like a horizontal V-for-victory sign, and jabbed them directly at his eyes. He tried to cover his face, but it was too late. My fingers straddled the bridge of his nose and found the jelly of his eyes. I pulled back my hand in horror.

  He roared in pain, both hands covering his face, and then he whirled away from me and banged into the table behind him, knocking glasses and utensils to the floor...

  Don’t just wound him—

  I had pulled back my hand an instant too soon.

  Take him out!

  —flailing with both arms now, windmilling them as he staggered around the room. He collided with one of the walls and knocked a picture to the floor, and then let out a blood-curdling bellow—

  Your most dangerous opponent is a wounded, angry man.

  —and shook his head as if to clear it, and then turned and scanned the room, his eyes bloodshot and watering. He blinked to clear away the tears. He blinked again. And then he got me in focus at last, and he came at me, and everything Bloom had taught me went right out of my head.

  He hit me in the face so hard that I thought he’d broken my neck. I staggered back and away from him, colliding with the chair Hester had been sitting in, knocking it over. Hester screamed. He hit me again, in the gut this time, and when I doubled over, he brought his knee up against my jaw and my head snapped up and I felt myself falling over backward, and then I hit the floor, and he was on me, straddling me, and his hands went for my throat. I tried to remember if Bloom had taught me anything about getting strangled. I tried to break his grip, sliding my hands up between his arms, trying to force open the vise, but pain was sapping all my strength and his hands were tightening and I realized all at once that I was choking. I flailed out with my arms, banging the backs of my hands on the floor, trying to twist away from him, hitting the leg of the table, and then something softer, something yielding, Hester’s leather bag where she’d left it on the floor.

  I always carry a can of Mace in my bag.

  Hester’s words, this time.

  I groped for the bag. I found the opening. I fumbled inside it, Jeff’s hands choking the breath out of me, squeezing the life out of me, my own left hand scrabbling behind my head, inside the bag, searching blindly inside the bag, my fingers tangling in all the debris a woman carries, my fingers closing on something hard and cylindrical—too late. White dots were swimming in front of my eyes, and then the dots turned gray, and the gray spread, and everything started to turn a thick ugly black, and I heard Jeff murmur, “Go, you bastard, go,” and I told myself I did not want to go, and I pulled the can free with my last ounce of strength, and shoved it into his face and pressed down on the push button, pressed, pressed—

  His hands came free.

  I coughed, sucked in a deep breath of air, coughed again, and kept my finger pressed on that button. He was off me now, lurching blindly around the room again, choking and snarling and swearing, and I lay there gasping for breath, the air so fucking sweet, idiotically pressing the button on top of the can, spraying wildly until I realized I was in danger of breathing in the fallout. Take him out, Bloom had said, make sure. I lay there on my back for several moments more, breathing hard, counting the minutes, hearing Jeff raging around the room, and then I stumbled to my feet and grabbed the ketchup bottle from the tabletop and went after him again with the Mace can in one hand and the bottle in the other.

  I hit him only once with the bottle because I remembered Bloom telling me that if I killed anyone, it would be too bad for both of us. I didn’t honestly know whether that was blood spurting from Jeff ’s forehead or only ketchup. Either way, I did not feel too terrific. I stood looking down at him where he lay unconscious on the floor, and I thought, Welcome to the jungle, and then Hester said, with great admiration, “Sheesh, you’d make a terrific pimp.”

  I stopped at the house to shower and change my clothes before heading back to the office. There was blood on the knee of my pants where it had connected with Charlie’s upper lip. There was blood on the cuff from when I’d kicked him in the head. There was blood on the sleeve of my jacket. I took out the bloodstains with cold water. The punch that I thought had broken my neck had instead raised a huge welt under my left cheekbone. It was already beginning to discolor. There were bruise marks on my throat. My jaw was swollen where Jeff had brought his knee up against it, but it wasn’t broken. I decided I did not want another fistfight until I was sixty-two years old. A fistfight every twenty-four years was a decent enough interval.

  Cynthia made no mention of the way my face looked; maybe she was beginning to get used to the idea that one of her bosses was an inveterate brawler. She told me instead that I’d had eight calls while I was out, and that two of them were from Bloom and my daughter. I could not reach Joanna because it was three o’clock and she was still at school, so I called Bloom. First I told him what I had done to Charlie and Jeff. He sounded very proud of me. He asked me if the police had shown. When I told him they hadn’t, he advised me to stay out of Ananburg for the next little while. I told him that we were on the way to settling the Burrill-McKinney mess. He said that was nice.

  “No word on the girl yet,” he said. “That’s why I called. She hasn’t tried contacting the mother, has she?”

  “I haven’t seen Veronica since Wednesday morning,” I said. “Or talked to her.”

  “Oh?” he said.

  “I’ll be calling her this afternoon,” I said. “I need her signature on this release.”

  “Ask her if she’s heard from her daughter, will you?”

  “I will.”

  “The girl taking off really bothers me, Matthew. I know she told you she was scared, but where is it written that she wasn’t lying? There’s a game—do you know it?—it’s called Murder, and what you do, you hand out these playing cards to everybody, and the guy who gets the ace of spades is the murderer. You turn out all the lights—this is very popular with teenagers ’cause they get a chance to grope in the dark—and everybody circulates around the house, and the murderer hands the ace of spades to his victim, and the victim has to count to twenty before he yells ‘Murder!’ Then you turn on all the lights, and the guy who’s supposed to be the detective starts asking questions, trying to find out who done it. One of the rules of the game is that everybody has to tell the truth about where he was and what he was doing except the murderer. The murderer’s allowed to say anything he wants, make up any story he wants, lie like a used-car dealer. That’s the game, Matthew.

  “In real life, it doesn’t always work that way; it’s not only your murderer who makes up stories. You get people lying not because they committed a crime but because there’re things they don’t want anybody to know about them. I went to see this chiropractor, for example, because I wanted to nail down where he was the night McKinney got killed. I’m taking the girl’s story for fact, you see, that she heard her brother talking to a guy with a Spanish accent, and that maybe they were discussing rustling. I don’t know how many Spanish people we got here in Calusa, but the victim’s mother is this guy’s patient, and Christ knows there’ve been plenty cases cracked on connections even skimpier than that. So he doesn’t want to tell me where he was on the night of August eighth, and I ask him why, and he says it’s none of my business, and I tell him this is a murder we’re investigating here, and he finally tells me he was with this lady who lives on Sabal Key, but he told his wife instead that he was with some buddies bowling, and if his wife finds out where he really was, he’ll be the next one getting murdered, you see what I mean, Matthew?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “And also, I talked again with this vet who was supposed to have been watching television with Mrs. McKinney the night her son got killed, Hamilton Jeffries, he lives about three miles down the road from her, on the way to Ananburg. ’Cause, you see, if the girl’s story is true about her having heard her brother talking about stealing cows, th
en maybe the mother knew he was robbing her blind, and maybe she decided to put a few dozen puncture wounds in him, do you see? Though, actually, it was only fourteen stab and slash wounds. The point is, if she wasn’t really with Jeffries—”

  “I feel confident she was,” I said.

  “Yeah, but on the other hand, you don’t have Captain Hopper breathing down your neck, do you? Anyway, I went to talk to Jeffries again, and I ran through it all one more time, the television show they were watching, the time it went on, the whole schmeer. And then I asked him if they were doing anything else while watching the show, like maybe holding hands or necking or whatever, and out of the blue he tells me they used to be lovers, but they haven’t been for a long time. Did you know they used to be lovers, Matthew?”

  “Yes, I knew.”

  “But you didn’t tell me.”

  “Only because I felt Veronica was telling the truth, and I saw no reason—”

  “Yeah, but that’s my job, isn’t it, Matthew? To decide whether people are telling the truth or not?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Like, for example, I went to see this twerp again yesterday, the orange-stacker, I find him in back of the store, he’s watering down the produce, wearing an apron all covered with schmutz. I ask him what the McKinney girl was wearing the last time he saw her, and he tells me the purple shorts and shirt, and I ask him what they talked about before he left the apartment that morning, and he says she was going shopping and would see him later, the same thing he said the last time around. Only this time he tells me she seemed scared about something, which is just what you told me—did you happen to mention that to him?”

  “No, I didn’t. I don’t think I did.”

  “So all of a sudden he comes up with her being scared, which makes it reasonable for her to run the way she did, but why didn’t he tell me that before, the night the black girl was in his apartment taking a shower? All of a sudden, Sunny McKinney was scared that morning. So naturally I asked Jackie what she was scared of, and he said she was scared of getting killed like her brother got killed, which is also what you told me, and so it starts to sound even more reasonable that Sunny ran to protect herself. Unless she ran to get away not from the bad guy but from the good guy—me. In which case, she’s maybe got something to hide. So I started questioning Jackie again about the night of the McKinney murder, and he tells me it couldn’t have been Sunny who did it because he was there with her all night; neither one of them left the apartment from the minute they got back from McDonald’s till early the next morning. The point is, I didn’t once suggest to him that Sunny had maybe iced her brother, but he’s coming up with the same alibi again, she couldn’t have done it ’cause he was with her at the time.

  “What I’m saying is, this isn’t the game of murder, it’s the real-life thing. Somebody killed McKinney and somebody killed Burrill too, and maybe it’s one and the same person done it—it sure looks that way, with McKinney owning a thirty-eight and it was a thirty-eight used on the farmer—but it doesn’t have to be just the murderer lying in his teeth, it can be everybody. Including you, Matthew, who when I asked you whether Mrs. McKinney said anything else, you told me no, when all the time you knew she used to have a thing going with Jeffries.”

  “I didn’t feel I was lying,” I said.

  “Withholding evidence, then, okay?”

  “It isn’t evidence unless it has something to do with the murders. Otherwise, it’s just gossip.”

  “If you hear any more gossip, let me know, okay?” Bloom said.

  “Sure.”

  “You sound mad. You mad at me?”

  “No.”

  “Sure, you are. Friends are supposed to say what’s on their minds, Matthew. Otherwise, it ain’t worth a shit,” he said, and hung up.

  My daughter called at a little past four.

  “Daddy?” she said. “I tried to get you earlier, but you were out.”

  She rarely called me “Daddy” unless she wanted something. Usually it was “Dad.” Sometimes it was “Pops.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  I waited.

  “About the wedding tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Would you be very disappointed if I went? ’Cause what it is, Daisy called me last night, she was almost in tears, Dad. She said she doesn’t even like this man her mother is marrying, and she wanted me to be there so badly, you know, for support and everything, her mother told her I wasn’t coming, so she was calling to beg me to please come or she didn’t know what she would do.”

  “Well, fine, honey. If that’s what you want—”

  “The thing is, I won’t be able to see you tonight, either, ’cause Mom has to work on this gown we bought for me last year, and which is a little small on me, and I have to be there while she measures it and pins it up and, you know, makes it so it’ll fit.”

  “I understand, honey. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Nor Sunday, either,” she said. “I know Mom told you she could bring me over on Sunday morning...”

  “What’s on Sunday?” I said.

  “Daisy asked me to stay over. Her mother and this man she’s marrying are leaving for their honeymoon right after the wedding, and there’s gonna be this sitter with Daisy while they’re gone, and Daisy hates the sitter, and she begged me to please stay with her after the wedding and all day Sunday. To see her through it, you know what I mean?”

  “Well...sure. If you think Daisy needs you—”

  “Oh, she does, Dad.”

  “I just didn’t know you were such good friends.”

  “Well, we used to wet our pants together, you know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I mean, we go back for centuries, Dad.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So will it be okay?”

  “If it’s what you want.”

  “Yeah, Dad, I really do.” She hesitated. “You are disappointed, aren’t you?”

  “No, no.”

  “I can tell you are. I’m sorry, Dad, I really am. But you know... well...we have all the time in the world to see each other, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, honey, we certainly have.”

  “So will you forgive me this time?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” she said. “Do you remember the dress? It’s the green one I wore to the Sugarcane Hop last year, the one with the big red flower in front.” And she went on to explain how the flower had been necessary last year when she didn’t have any bosom, but one of the first things they were going to do now was take off the flower and see what they could do about the bustline. As she went on to describe in detail the various other alterations she and her mother planned to make, I thought of what she’d said a few minutes earlier, about us having all the time in the world to see each other.

  And I thought of Sunny McKinney out there on her own, alone and running scared, and I wondered how much time Veronica had enjoyed with her as an infant, and then as a little girl, and then as a teenager, before she’d lost her to a world much wider than the ranch’s four thousand acres. The irony, of course, was that we raised them only to lose them, we taught them to fly and they soared out of the nest. A successful parent was anyone whose child had learned to be self-sufficient. Well, fine, then, I was well on the way to becoming a successful parent. But I was also a human being with feelings of my own, most of them mixed, and I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be seeing Joanna this weekend, and a trifle annoyed that she had felt it necessary to preface her decision with a con man’s “Daddy.” I was not, after all, a child.

  But neither was she anymore.

  She was, I realized, someone on the imminent edge of becoming an independent young woman. She had told me what she, in her own right, wanted and needed this weekend, and never mind the technicalities of the settlement agreement. And in her fourteen-year-old view of the eternal universe, she had gone on to assure me we had all
the time in the world to see each other. I wondered now if perhaps I wasn’t seeing her for the first time in my life. Maybe, until now, I’d only been watching her.

  “—up to the Circle this afternoon to get a new pair of shoes,” she was saying, “’cause the green satin ones I wore last year are all scruffy looking.”

  I hesitated a moment, and then I said, “Joanna, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Sure, Dad, what is it?”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Dale and I aren’t seeing each other anymore.”

  There was a dead silence on the line.

  “Gee,” Joanna said.

  The silence persisted.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Dad,” she said. “I know she meant a lot to you.”

  Another silence. And then:

  “Dad, I really have to go, we want to get to the Circle before all the shops close. I love you heaps, Dad, and thanks a lot, you don’t know how much I appreciate this.”

  “I love you too, honey.”

  “You sure it’s okay?”

  “Positive.”

  “I’ll talk to you Monday, then, okay?”

  “Have a nice time, honey.”

  “’Bye, Dad,” she said, and hung up.

  I put the receiver back on the cradle, and sat staring at the phone. I had to call Veronica, of course, but not to tell her that my plans had changed for the weekend and I was now available. I was not a criminal lawyer, but I knew what compounding a felony was, and besides, I had too much respect for her to offer a last-minute prom invitation because the girl I’d originally asked had backed out.

  I called only to inform her of the latest development on the land her son had contracted to buy. Her voice was cool and distant when she realized who was on the phone. She listened patiently while I told her about the release Burrill’s daughter had signed. She consulted her calendar when I asked if she could come into the office on Monday morning to sign the papers and have her signature notarized. We settled on ten o’clock. She thanked me politely for having called, and then hung up.

  I had dinner alone.