Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)

by Ed McBain

  She had mixed herself a martini then, and had gone into the kitchen to prepare dinner, sipping at the drink while she heated some stew left over from the night before. She had already eaten and was clearing away the dishes when Bloom called her from here. That must have been a little after nine. She had phoned both Yellow Cab and Blue Cab, the only two taxi companies in Calusa, but both of them had told her it’d be at least a half hour before they could send anyone out there to get her. She had then called Dr. Jeffries to ask if he might be able to drive her here.

  That was how she’d spent her time between five o’clock this afternoon and now.

  “And you didn’t see your daughter at any time today, is that right?” Bloom asked.

  “I haven’t seen my daughter since Monday,” Veronica said, and suddenly burst into tears. I was sure she was thinking she would never see her again. Except in a coffin.

  Bloom and Hopper stood by awkwardly. Jeffries put his arm around her and consoled her. This was where I lived, but I suddenly felt as if I had no right to be here.

  “Well,” Hopper said, “we’ll get out of your way soon as possible.” He seemed suddenly embarrassed. “Boys shouldn’t be too much longer. We’ll need you to come by the morgue to make a positive identification, but that can wait till—”

  “I’ll identify the body,” Jeffries said.

  “We usually prefer next of—”

  “I’ve known Sunny from the day she was born,” he said. “You can at least spare Mrs. McKinney the ordeal of—”

  “I’m sure that’ll be all right,” Bloom said gently. “Do you know where Good Samaritan is?”

  “I know it.”

  “Will tomorrow morning at nine be too early?”

  “I’ll be there,” Jeffries said.

  “Sorry to have bothered you,” Hopper said, as if the police were here not to investigate a murder but instead to answer a complaint about someone playing the radio too loudly. “Better see how they’re doing out there,” he said to Bloom, and they both went out to the driveway, where the technicians were still working on the car.

  The police entourage did not leave until almost midnight. The house and the street seemed inordinately silent now that they were gone. Veronica sat in one of the imitation Barcelona chairs, facing the blank screen of the television set. Jeffries hovered about her, waiting for a signal that she was ready to go.

  “You’d better tell him,” she said abruptly.

  “Veronica...”

  “Tell him,” she said.

  Jeffries sighed heavily. “I’d like a drink,” he said. “Do you have any bourbon? Little water in it?”

  I brought him a bourbon and water. I brought Veronica the gin and tonic she asked for. I poured myself a snifter of cognac. Jeffries sipped at his drink. On the street outside, I heard the sound of an automobile, and wondered if the police were coming back. They had roped off the area around my house. They had put up CARDBOARD CRIME scene signs. I wondered what Mrs. Martindale was thinking in her house next door. I wondered what she’d have to say to me in the morning. I wondered what Jeffries had to say to me now, but he just sat there, sipping silently at his drink. The sound of the automobile engine faded. It had not been the police, after all, unless they were simply cruising the area.

  “If you won’t tell him...” Veronica said.

  Jeffries took a long swallow of bourbon. He sighed again. “Sunny...,” he said, and hesitated. “Sunny was staying with me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At my house,” he said.

  “Since when?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “She’s been at your house since Tuesday?”

  “Yes. She left tonight. At six-thirty.”

  I turned to Veronica. “Did you know this?”

  “Not until tonight. Ham told me on the way here.”

  “But you knew it when Bloom was questioning you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you chose not to reveal it?”

  “That’s what we decided, Ham and I.”

  “That’s what you decided? Your daughter’s dead, the police are searching...”

  “Our daughter,” Jeffries said.

  “What?”

  “Our daughter, Mr. Hope. Veronica’s and mine.”

  So now I listened.

  Now I listened to what I should have heard the first time around: Veronica alone on the ranch one starry night, her husband off in Tampa or Tallahassee or Denver or wherever the hell, Dr. Hamilton Jeffries there to minister to a sick cow and to minister to the lonely Mrs. McKinney as well. Their affair had started in September and ended in February, a short season, easy come, easy go, at least for Jeffries, who unilaterally decided that what they were doing was immoral, and dangerous as well. What Jeffries hadn’t known, and what Veronica hadn’t told him, was that she was already carrying his child. Empirical evidence (Sunny was an August baby, full of rain) later proved that she was just entering her fourth month of pregnancy on the February night when Jeffries decided to take his cautious moral stand. The baby, as Veronica later calculated it, had been conceived sometime in November, when their romance was at the height of its passion, a love child for sure, Hamilton Jeffries’s bastard daughter by any reasonable surmise, since Drew McKinney was in Dallas for most of that month and chose not to entertain his wife on the few occasions when he was home.

  “If I’d known, of course,” Jeffries said now, “it might have been different.”

  His words lacked conviction, but I made no comment. What was done was done, all water over the dam and under the bridge, and Jeffries was certainly not the first, nor would he be the last, of the red-hot lovers who abandoned pregnant married women, knowingly or otherwise. I settled down—isn’t that the expression one uses?—and became a faithful wife and mother, not necessarily in that order. Living proof of her fidelity had been her second child, undeniably Drew’s—same dark hair and dark eyes, a spitting image—her husband’s waning interest apparently rekindled by the birth of a daughter he accepted unquestioningly as his own. Jack was born three years later, at the end of June, which meant that Drew McKinney’s passion had reflowered in October sometime; the lady seemed to have a penchant for getting pregnant in the late fall.

  I don’t know why I was getting angry listening to all this. Maybe it was because I remembered that Veronica hadn’t expressed the slightest grief over the death of her husband’s son, and that she’d wanted to strangle the crying little girl sired by her lover. Well, they were both dead now, those offspring by one mate or another, and I couldn’t help wondering how much Veronica had loved either one of them. Or her husband. Or, for that matter, Hamilton Jeffries. I was also annoyed by their joint decision (That’s what we decided, Ham and I) to keep from the police the information that Sunny McKinney had been staying at Jeffries’s house for the past four days.

  “Why’d she come there?” I asked. “Did she know you were her father?”

  “No, no,” Jeffries said. “We decided it was best to keep that from her, Veronica and I.”

  “The way you decided it was best to keep from the police—”

  “We could not afford to open that particular can of peas,” Jeffries said.

  It occurred to me that they’d opened that particular can of peas twenty-four years ago.

  “You saw the way they treated Veronica just now,” he said. “I’m certain they still feel she’s somehow implicated. If we’d told them about Sunny being at my house...”

  “Then you might have become implicated as well, isn’t that right?”

  “Both of us,” he said. “Veronica and I.”

  “I thought Veronica didn’t know she was there.”

  “I didn’t!” Veronica said. “Until tonight.”

  “You didn’t call to tell him she was missing?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “His own daughter? You didn’t pick up the phone to—”

  “I told you I didn’t!”

  I turned to Je
ffries. “Was Sunny in the habit of coming to your house when she was in trouble?”

  “Not often. Sometimes. She thought of me as a good friend.”

  “Some friend. She’s hiding from a fucking killer—”

  “I don’t appreciate such language, young man,” Jeffries said.

  “Did she tell you why she came there?”

  “She was frightened. She said she needed a place to stay for the next few days, until she decided what she was going to do next.”

  “Did she say what she was scared of?”

  “Yes. She thought someone might try to kill her.”

  “Then you knew that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t call Veronica? To tell her that her daughter—your daughter—was with you?”

  “I did not. I felt that would be betraying a confidence.”

  “It never occurred to you that Veronica might be worried about her?”

  “It occurred to me.”

  “Did it occur to you that Veronica might have notified the police of her daughter’s absence?”

  “That occurred to me as well.”

  “But you didn’t call her.”

  “I didn’t call her.”

  “So she was there on the M.K., unaware that her daughter was at your house, and you were three miles down the road, unaware that her daughter was being sought by the police.”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “Didn’t Bloom come to see you yesterday?”

  “He did.”

  “Where was the Porsche? Didn’t he see the Porsche?”

  “It was in my garage.”

  “Then he didn’t see it.”

  “No.”

  “If Sunny told you she was afraid—”

  “She did.”

  “—told you someone might try to kill her—”

  “Yes.”

  “—why didn’t you tell Bloom?”

  “I felt she’d be safe with me.”

  “Did you feel she’d be safe when she left tonight?”

  “I wasn’t there when she left.”

  “Then how do you know she left at six-thirty?”

  “I don’t mean I wasn’t on the premises—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was out back, in the kennels. I treat all sorts of animals, not only livestock. People bring dogs to me, cats...”

  “So you were out in the kennels.”

  “Yes. The phone rang at—oh, I don’t know—it must’ve been a little before six. Either she answered the phone or it stopped ringing. Either way, the next thing I heard was the Porsche backing out of the garage. By the time I came around front, she was gone.”

  “At six-thirty.”

  “Yes, about then.”

  “You didn’t know she was planning to leave?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Before then, did she tell you where she might be going?”

  “No.”

  “All right, what did she tell you?”

  “Only that she was afraid someone might try to kill her.”

  “Did she say who?”

  “The same person who’d killed her brother and Mr. Burrill.”

  “Who?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Didn’t say, or didn’t know?”

  “She was afraid to tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she felt she might be placing me in danger as well.”

  “She comes to you for help, she tells you someone might be after her—”

  “That’s right.”

  “—but she doesn’t tell you who?”

  “She would not reveal his identity to me, that’s correct.”

  “His identity? Did she say it was a man?”

  “I gathered from the pronouns she used that she was referring to a man, yes.”

  “What’d she say about him? Did she describe him?”

  “She did not.”

  “Did she say he had a Spanish accent?”

  “She did not mention a Spanish accent.”

  “What did she mention?”

  “She said he knew about her brother’s scheme.”

  “What scheme?”

  “To buy the farm.”

  “She called it a scheme? How was buying a—”

  “Not the purchase of the land per se,” Jeffries said.

  “Then what?”

  “The use to which he planned to put it.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He was going to plant marijuana on it. He planned to grow and sell marijuana.”

  And now at least that part of it made sense.

  I had given Jack McKinney all the facts and figures that should have proved the foolhardiness of trying to revitalize Burrill’s moribund snapbean farm. I had explained to him that all he could hope to realize was a net of a hundred and twenty-six dollars an acre if he planted a crop that couldn’t possibly turn a profit here on the central west coast of Florida. He had turned a deaf ear to my reasoning. Jack McKinney was planning to grow marijuana, which required no spraying and dusting, no harvesting machinery, no pickers or packers, no brokerage fees, and none of the other costs that had proved such a burden to Burrill. Burrill must have gone dancing in the streets the day a sucker like Jack McKinney came along to relieve him of his fifteen acres of snapbean farm.

  But McKinney had known all along that you could plant marijuana in soil you wouldn’t choose to be buried in, you could plant it in a window box, you could plant it on a bald man’s hairpiece, you could plant it on a goddamn rock, and it would flourish. I supposed you could even plant it among your rows of snapbean bushes so that from the air it would go undetected; the pilot of a Sheriff ’s Department helicopter would only wag his head in wonder at the stupidity of yet another fool trying to grow beans here.

  Some fool, young Jack.

  He’d had us all convinced that he was about to trade his mother’s cows for a handful of beans.

  Instead, he was planning to drop golden nuggets into the soil. I had no idea what the going rate for a bale of marijuana might be; Bloom would know for sure. But I was willing to bet that McKinney’s first harvest would have more than quadrupled his investment in the farm.

  “How’d Sunny find out about this?” I asked.

  “Jack told her,” Jeffries said. “They were very close.”

  “Did he also tell her he’d been stealing his mother’s cows?”

  “No. She figured that out for herself.”

  “And this person she was afraid of—how’d he find out about Jack’s plan?”

  “I assume she mentioned it to him.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as she learned of it. Sometime before Jack was—”

  “Crowell,” I said.

  Bloom wasn’t convinced.

  In the car on the way to New Town, he did the same shadow dance he’d earlier performed for me on the telephone, only this time his silent partners included a detective named Cooper Rawles, a huge black man with wide shoulders, a barrel chest, and massive hands. It was not often that you ran into a person as big as Rawles; he made me feel like a Munchkin. It was even less often that you ran into a black cop with the rank of detective on Calusa’s police force. Maybe his size had something to do with it. Maybe somebody figured it was better to have him on their side than on the bad guys’ side. Rawles sat as silent as a mountain in the back seat. I was sitting up front alongside Bloom.

  “First of all,” Bloom said, “the kid’s got an alibi a mile long. The alibi is Sunny McKinney, who says she was with him all night on the night her brother was killed, am I right, Coop? That’s what the girl told us, that she was with Crowell all night that night, in the sack with him while her brother was getting slashed. So if this is the guy who actually killed her brother, why would she alibi him? That doesn’t make sense to me, does it make sense to you, Coop?”

  Rawles knew an answer wasn’t expected. Bloom was talking to himself out loud, tr
ying to put all the pieces together. Rawles grunted.

  “I mean, this is her brother we’re talking about here—though it turns out now he was only her half brother. Still and all, she thought he was her brother, and you don’t go around alibiing somebody who killed your own brother, however great he may be in the sack—it’s just not something you do. But that’s what she told us, that she was with this Crowell creep from when they got back from McDonald’s till the next morning. So that’s the first thing, the kid’s got an alibi, or at least had an alibi. His alibi’s dead now, same as the brother—why the hell didn’t those two tell us what they knew?”

  He was referring now to Veronica and Jeffries. I knew what he meant. I wasn’t so sure Rawles did, even though he grunted again.

  “Girl’s with him four days,” Bloom said, “he never dreams of calling the police, even though she tells him somebody may be out to get her. Turns out he’s the girl’s father, huh? Some father, he doesn’t recognize his daughter’s in danger, doesn’t call the police, lets her stay there without a peep, and doesn’t even call us when she takes off—six-thirty, is that what Jeffries said?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “And you found her in your pool at a quarter to nine, that means somebody had two hours to shoot her and dump her, that’s more time than you need, you can ice somebody and get rid of the body in what, Coop, ten minutes, you’re really pressed for time?”

  “Five,” Rawles said.

  It was the first time I had heard him speak.

  “So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this Crowell creep is the killer, though I can’t figure out any motive, can you, Coop? But let’s say she heads for his place at six-thirty—I can’t figure out why she’d go there, either, not if she thinks he’s trying to find her and do away with her, but let that pass for a minute. Let’s say she goes there, and Crowell pumps two shots into her head and then carries her down to the car and carts her over to your place—why your place, that’s another thing—but how can he manage that in a place like New Town? You mean to tell me nobody heard shots? You mean to tell me nobody saw him carrying down a body and dumping it in a car? They see and hear everything in that neighborhood, am I right, Coop?”