Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  I drank two martinis before the meal, had a half-bottle of red wine with the meal, and then sat sipping cognac and reading the newspaper. It was still only eight o’clock, and I was all dressed up with no place to go. There used to be two daily newspapers in Calusa: the Herald-Tribune in the morning and the Journal in the afternoon. They were both owned by the same man, and the editorial viewpoint was identical. In fact, except for the comic strips, they seemed to be carbon copies of each other. Maybe that was why the owner stopped publishing the afternoon paper and sold the morning paper to The New York Times. The paper hadn’t changed much since the purchase, except that it now carried book reviews originally published in the Times. This meant that a greater number of people (including my delighted partner Frank) could be treated to literary criticism, New York style. I skipped over the book review, read the movie ads, and then turned to an item headlined LAW OFFICERS LIST ARRESTS.

  “Calusa County law enforcement authorities announced the following arrests for Wednesday and Thursday,” the article began, and then went on to list the names, ages, and addresses of the men and women who’d been charged with an assortment of crimes ranging through armed burglary, dealing in stolen property, grand theft, possession of marijuana, leaving the scene of an accident, battery on a police officer, possession of cocaine, assault, possession of cocaine again, grand theft again, possession of marijuana again...and again...and again...

  Calusa was getting to be a busy little city.

  I left the restaurant at eight-thirty. It was already dark as I drove back to the house. I spotted the red Porsche in my driveway when I was still only halfway up the street. Sunny, I thought, and remembered what she’d said to me the first time we met—“I’m as mean as a fuckin’ tiger, mister”—and wondered if this was an example of the meanness, coming here instead of going home to her mother. And then it occurred to me that the Porsche may have been driven here by Veronica instead. Maybe Sunny had gone home after all, and maybe Veronica was here now to tell me the good news. I pulled the Ghia in behind the other car, let myself into the house through the kitchen door, and then turned on the house lights and the pool lights. I pulled open the sliding door then and stepped out onto the terrace, ready to welcome either the lady or the tiger.

  It was Sunny, and she was in my pool again.

  She wasn’t naked this time. She was wearing instead a purple dress that billowed around her like a cloud of ink.

  She wasn’t swimming, either.

  She was lying face downward on the bottom of the pool.

  Two police divers wearing scuba tanks, face masks, and wetsuits went down after the body. I did not think the wetsuits were necessary, since the thermometer in the pool registered the water temperature as eighty-eight degrees. But perhaps the Calusa PD had its own set of regulations about the proper attire for recovering a dead twenty-three-year-old girl from the bottom of a swimming pool.

  Captain Hopper supervised the operation.

  The divers brought Sunny to the surface, carried her up the steps at the shallow end, and then placed her down gently on the terrace tiles. The purple dress clung to her. There was a hole in her forehead, and another hole in her left cheek. Bone splinters showed jaggedly behind the hole in the cheek.

  “Shot her first,” Hopper said at once, and looked at me. “What time did you say you found her?”

  “Just before I called the police,” I said. “Quarter to nine, something like that.”

  “And you say you were out having dinner before then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anybody with you?”

  “I was alone.”

  “And you came back here—”

  “Yes.”

  “—turned on the pool lights—”

  “Yes.”

  “—and spotted the body.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’d you turn on the pool lights?”

  “I’d seen the Porsche, I thought someone might be out on the terrace.”

  “You thought the girl might be out on the terrace?”

  “Or her mother. I thought it could be her mother.”

  “Why’d you think that?”

  “I know her mother.”

  “You know the girl too?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Pretty girl,” he said, looking down at her. He raised his eyes to mine again. “Anybody else here when you arrived?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t see anybody, hear anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Just turned on the pool lights and saw the girl, right?”

  Bloom came out onto the terrace.

  “I just phoned the mother,” he said. “She’ll be here as soon as she can. The ranch vehicles are both gone, she’s got to find transportation.”

  “Gone?” Hopper said. “What do you mean? Stolen?”

  “No, sir,” Bloom said, “it’s just they’re being used by the people she’s got working for her.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her you’d send a car?”

  “Be a two-way trip that way, sir, out and back again. I thought we ought to get her here as soon as possible.”

  “How well do you know her?” Hopper asked me. “The mother.”

  “We’re good friends, you might say.”

  “Might I?” Hopper said, and stared at me. “How well did you know the girl? Was she a good friend too?”

  “I wouldn’t say so. I knew her only casually.”

  “But not the mother. The mother you know more than casually, is that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Here’s the ME,” Bloom said.

  The medical examiner was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a wild Hawaiian print. He looked oddly out of place in the company of police officers who were wearing either uniforms or business suits. He was a short man with a very red face that clashed violently with the predominant greens and yellows of his shirt. He looked like a neon sign. He nodded curtly, said, “Captain,” and then knelt over the body.

  “Plain to see she was carried here and dumped,” Hopper said. “Those are gunshot wounds in her face.”

  “Well, let’s see,” the ME said.

  “I seen enough gunshot wounds to know a gunshot wound when I see one,” Hopper said.

  The ME didn’t answer.

  “Criminalistics ain’t here yet,” Hopper warned. “You want to be careful.”

  The ME looked up.

  “They’ll want to see there’s anything on that dress. The girl didn’t walk here, that’s for sure. Whoever done this had to’ve carried her.”

  “I’m only here to ascertain that she’s dead,” the ME said dryly.

  “Take a genius to ascertain that,” Hopper said. “You want to show me around the house, Mr. Hope?”

  I showed him around the house. He was very careful not to touch anything. Bloom followed us like a shadow. The Ford Econoline van arrived some five minutes later, and the technicians from the Criminalistics Unit went out to the terrace. By that time the ME was through with the body. He told Hopper the girl was indeed dead and suggested that the cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds. I supposed that in forensic reports, anything more than one was multiple.

  “Gunshot wounds?” Hopper asked. “No kidding?”

  The ME looked as if he’d come straight here from an outdoor barbecue and was eager to get back to it.

  “Better take her to Good Samaritan,” he said. “Southern Medical’s backed up.”

  “I was there last week,” Hopper said. “They’ve got six stiffs decomposing in the freezer room. Place stinks like a Chinese whorehouse.”

  The state’s attorney—Skye Bannister himself, and not one of his assistants—came into the house a few minutes after the ME had left. He was an exceptionally tall man, perhaps six-four or -five, with the appearance of a basketball player, reedy and pale, with wheat-colored hair and eyes the color of his name.

  “Hello, Matthew,” he said.

  “You know each other
?” Hopper asked, surprised.

  “Old friends,” Bannister said, and shook my hand; I guess Hopper stopped thinking of me as a suspect in that moment. “Three in a row, huh?” Bannister said. “Looks like an epidemic.” He turned to Hopper. “Anything I should know, Walter?”

  “Two gunshot wounds in the face,” Hopper said. “Mr. Hope here found the body at the bottom of his pool. The red Porsche outside is the girl’s—”

  “It’s registered to the ranch,” Bloom said, correcting him.

  “What ranch?” Bannister asked.

  “The M.K.,” Bloom said. “Out on Timucuan Point. The mother of the two victims, the McKinney boy, and now—”

  “Right, I remember now,” Bannister said. “Gunshot wounds, huh?”

  “Like the bean farmer,” Hopper said.

  “But the boy was stabbed, wasn’t he?”

  “Fourteen times,” Hopper said, and nodded.

  “Think we’re dealing with the same customer?”

  “Ballistics won’t even have a shot,” Hopper said, making an unintentional pun. “There’s exit wounds at the back of the girl’s head, so we ain’t gonna find no bullets inside her. And if she was carried here and dumped, which it looks like, we won’t find no spent cartridges, neither, if it was an automatic weapon.”

  “Maybe the size of the wounds’ll tell us something.”

  “A long shot, though,” Hopper said, making another unintentional pun. “I never yet seen a ballistics make from the size of a wound.”

  “Any powder burns?” Bannister asked.

  “Her face is clean as a whistle,” Hopper said. “Pretty girl. It’s a damn shame.”

  “Any blood? From where she was carried? Or dragged?”

  “None around the pool. Criminalistics’ll be checking the car and the driveway. They just got here a little while ago.”

  “Any other marks on her?”

  “None I could see. Bloom? You see any?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why’d he carry her here?” Bannister asked.

  “Dumb,” Hopper said, shaking his head. “Maybe he figured Mr. Hope here’d be blamed for it.”

  He seemed to have forgotten all the questions he’d asked me not twenty minutes ago.

  “Pretty risky, though,” Bannister said. “Driving here with a stiff in the car.”

  “Most of the people driving cars down here are half dead already,” Hopper said. “Who the hell would notice?”

  They all laughed.

  “Got away on foot, then, huh?” Bannister said. “If he drove here in the Porsche...”

  “Way it looks,” Hopper said, nodding. “I’ve got men out canvassing the neighborhood now. It’s a quiet street, maybe somebody noticed him coming or going.”

  “You don’t think a woman could’ve carried her, huh?”

  “I ain’t ruling it out, but it’s unlikely. She’s a big girl.”

  “You get somebody who just done murder,” Bloom said, “they got the strength of an ox sometimes.”

  “I’d sure like to get some real meat on this,” Bannister said.

  “Well, we’re working it,” Hopper said.

  “Three in a row, television’ll have a field day.”

  “If they’re related,” Bloom said.

  “Even if they’re not,” Bannister said.

  “They’re brother and sister,” Hopper said. “Even if they ain’t related, they’re related.”

  They all laughed again.

  I had not realized that Hopper had such a superb sense of humor.

  “Well, I want to take a look outside,” Bannister said. “Get me something that’ll stick, huh? This thing’s been dragging on too long.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears,” Bloom said.

  Veronica arrived about twenty minutes later. I was glad the ambulance had already taken Sunny’s body to the morgue. The Criminalistics Unit was still outside in the Porsche, vacuuming it, going over it for latents. The car she arrived in was a Cadillac Seville. The man behind the wheel got out, went around to the other side of the car, and then opened the door there for her. She was wearing color for the first time since I’d known her. Blue slacks, a blue blouse, blue sandals. Her exquisite face looked very pale against the blue. She came into the house, followed by the man, and Hopper went to her at once and said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry about this terrible tragedy.”

  I had the feeling he had used those words many times before and was repeating them now by rote.

  Veronica nodded.

  The man with her looked to be in his late sixties, taller than either Bloom or I, wearing a sports jacket over dark slacks, an open-throat sports shirt, and loafers without socks. His eyes were a blue almost as pale as Veronica’s, and his white hair was streaked with strands of yellow that told me he’d been blond when he was younger. He was suntanned and lean, a man with a weathered outdoor look about him. I pegged him at once for a neighboring rancher whom she’d called for a lift here. He seemed entirely at ease in the presence of policemen.

  “You made good time,” Bloom said.

  “Ham’s a fast driver,” she said. “Excuse me,” she said, “this is Dr. Jeffries, my veterinarian.” Her eyes met mine for the first time since she’d entered the house. “He was good enough to drive me here.”

  8

  * * *

  I WAS glad it was Bloom, and not Captain Hopper, who began questioning Veronica. In the gymnasium, Bloom had behaved like a thug; in my living room, he behaved like a gentleman. Hopper watched and listened as though he truly appreciated picking up some tips on how it was done up there in Nassau County in the wilds of New York, Bloom’s territory before he’d moved to Florida. Maybe there was yet hope for Captain Walter Hopper.

  “Mrs. McKinney,” Bloom said, “there are some questions I’ve got to ask you, and I hope you’ll forgive me, but they have to be asked.”

  “I just want you to find whoever killed her,” Veronica said.

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s what we want, too,” Bloom said. “Now, ma’am, the last time I spoke to you, you said you hadn’t yet heard from your daughter—this must’ve been close to five o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Veronica said.

  “You didn’t hear from her after we had that telephone conversation, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “She didn’t come back to the house—”

  “No.”

  “—and as far as you knew, she was still out there someplace.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. McKinney, can you tell me how you spent the time between five o’clock, when we talked on the phone—”

  “Why do you want to know that?” Jeffries asked.

  His voice gave away his age. Before I heard him speak, I had to keep reminding myself that he was, in fact, seventy-five years old. But his voice lacked timbre and tone, and I noticed now—clued by the voice—that his neck was leathery and wrinkled and that the backs of his hands were covered with liver spots. Bloom turned to him in surprise, like a stand-up comic unexpectedly heckled from a nightclub floor.

  “Sir?” he said.

  “Sir,” Jeffries said, stressing the word, “why do you want Mrs. McKinney to account for her whereabouts?”

  “Routine,” Bloom said with a slight shrug, falling back on the timeless police explanation. “Her daughter’s been killed, we naturally—”

  “I see nothing routine about your question,” Jeffries said. “It would indicate to me that you consider Mrs. McKinney a suspect, and that, of course, is absurd.”

  I imagined him as a younger man, and I could easily see how he had once swept Veronica off her feet. She seemed, in fact, to respond even now to his spirited defense—a slight nod of her head, a flaring of the pale blue eyes. I felt slightly jealous.

  “Ask your questions,” Hopper said to Bloom. “And I suggest you answer them, Mrs. McKinney.”

  “Then I suggest she be read her rights,” Jeffries said.


  “This is a field investigation,” Hopper said impatiently. “She’s not in custody, Miranda-Escobedo doesn’t apply.”

  “You are nonetheless, by implication—”

  “We are nonetheless only trying to ask a few questions,” Hopper said. “Tell her she isn’t in jeopardy, will you, Mr. Hope?”

  “I think you ought to answer their questions,” I said.

  Jeffries looked at me as though discovering a new enemy in the camp. I suddenly wondered how much Veronica had told him about us.

  “What is it you want to know?” she asked Bloom.

  What he wanted to know was where she’d been and what she’d done between five o’clock this afternoon and nine or thereabouts, when he’d called again to inform her about her daughter. It seemed to me that she accounted for her time believably and with remarkable restraint; however Bloom and Hopper hoped to disguise it, they were nonetheless trying to find out whether she’d had the opportunity to murder her own daughter. She told them that she’d taken the Jeep out to Mosquito Jam Hammock a little after Bloom’s first call, to check out a cow her hand said might be coming down with something. The hand would verify that she was with him until almost six o’clock. She had gone back to the house then, written out a shopping list, and taken the Jeep to the new mall near the interstate highway, where she’d done her grocery marketing for the week. The supermarket manager would remember her because she’d had to go to his office to get a check okayed. That was a rule at the market; any check over a hundred dollars had to be okayed by the manager. She supposed she had got back to the house shortly after seven. Rafe, the ranch manager, had stopped by at around seven-thirty to ask if he could use the Jeep. She’d made no plans to leave the house tonight, and she told him that would be fine. She remembered mentioning that it was low on gas, and that he should fill the tank before leaving the ranch. The hand came by a little later to ask if he could use the pickup; his wife had been listening to one of Calusa’s buy-and-sell call-in radio shows, and a woman had a used porch swing for sale and she wanted to go take a look at it and carry it home with them if it looked all right. Veronica had given him permission to take the pickup. This must have been sometime close to eight o’clock. She was certain that both Rafe and the hand could confirm that she had been there in her own living room between seven-thirty and eight o’clock.