Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope)
Page 26
Q: This was when?
A: Yesterday.
Q: What time?
A: When I called? Musta been a little before six o’clock. I think I spooked her. That’s why she ran. I think when I hung up she knew it was me.
Q: What happened then?
A: She was pulling out of the driveway when I got there. Going hell-bent for leather, I’m sure I spooked her with my call. I followed her up the road a mile or two till we came to that long stretch where the citrus groves are, you know where I mean? Just before you hit the M.K., if you’re coming from Ananburg. There’s this long deserted stretch with just orange trees on both sides of the road, not a house in sight. That’s where I cut her off. Pulled in right in front of the Porsche, forced it off the road.
Q: What then?
A: I shoved the gun in her face, told her I wanted my money.
Q: Did she give it to you?
A: Not at first. I had to drag her out of the car, whack her around a little.
Q: Whack her around?
A: Hit her. Back and forth across the face.
Q: With the gun?
A: No, not with the gun, Jesus! I used my hand. Whap, whap, my hand. She finally forked over the money. It was on the bottom of this purple shoulder bag she always carried, buried on the bottom of it. There was also a little plastic bag of grass in there. I took that, too.
Q: What did you do then?
A: I shot her in the face.
Q: How many times?
A: Twice.
Q: Then what?
A: She fell down on the road near the left front wheel. All I could think of was I wanted to get out of there fast, I didn’t want to be nowhere near there, all I wanted to do was get home with my money. But I heard a truck coming. From the west. Coming toward us. Not fast, and it was nowhere near close yet, you could hear everything for miles on the road, it was so still on that road with her bleeding near the wheel of the Porsche. So I picked her up and threw her in the car.
Q: Then what?
A: That damn truck! I figured the driver might remember seeing my white car angled in off the road in front of the Porsche. Or maybe he’d seen the blood on the road, it wasn’t a lot of blood, but it was blood, man! I mean, if I left her there dead in the Porsche, that guy in the truck might remember seeing two cars, you follow? And blood on the road. So I took a rag out of my trunk and wiped up the blood best I could, and then put the rag in the trunk of the Porsche. The road looked okay, I mean a lot of animals get killed on that road, people driving by, I figured if anybody saw the stain, they’d figure an animal got run over. It looked okay, I mean it. So I left my car where it was, and I got in the Porsche and started driving.
Q: Where were you headed?
A: I didn’t know where to go, I mean it. I figured one of the beaches, but it was still light—this was only like seven o’clock, close to seven—there’d still be people on the beaches, you know? So I just kept driving around.
Q: With Miss McKinney on the seat beside you?
A: No, no, she was on the back seat.
Q: Nobody saw her there?
A: One guy looked in the car when I stopped for a traffic light, but he must’ve thought she was asleep or something.
Q: When did you decide to take her to Mr. Hope’s house?
A: That came out of the blue.
Q: You thought it would be a good idea to take her there?
A: Yeah. If nobody would see me, it seemed like a good idea. Drop her in his pool, you know? Little present for him. I was still a little pissed about her swimming there naked. So I figured I’d take her there swimming again. Provided nobody was home. Otherwise...well, I didn’t know what I’d do if he was home. But the lights were out, and I just parked the Porsche in his driveway, carried her out, and dumped her. Simple as that.
Q: No one saw you?
A: Did somebody say he saw me?
Q: I’m asking you.
A: I don’t think so. It was dark, and I was very quiet and careful.
Q: What did you do after you dropped Miss McKinney’s body in the pool?
A: I got out of there. Fast.
Q: Where did you go?
A: I walked to a gas station about ten blocks from the house.
Q: Why’d you go there?
A: To buy a gasoline can and have them fill it for me.
Q: Then what did you do?
A: I called Yellow Cab, told them I’d run out of gas on the Timucuan Point Road, and needed a taxi to take me out there.
Q: What time was this?
A: Nine o’clock? A little after?
Q: Did Yellow Cab, in fact, take you to your car?
A: Yeah. It was already dark when we got out there, you couldn’ta seen the bloodstains even if you were looking for them. I made a big show of putting gas in my tank. The cabbie kept hanging around, wanting to know if I needed a hand. I told him I could take care of it myself. The minute he drove off, I got in the car and headed home.
Q: What did you do when you got back to your apartment?
A: I called Lettie right away, this must’ve been nine-thirty or so, told her to come over. When she got there, I handed her a thousand dollars in fifties. I told her I’d been in a bar on the Trail and some cops came in and a guy threw a bag of weed on the floor, and I ran out when they started taking names. I told her they may have spotted my license plate. I told her if the cops came around asking questions, she should say she’d been with me since six-thirty. She never saw so much money in her life. She had her clothes off in a minute.
Q: The thousand dollars you gave Miss Holmes—was it part of the money you stole from Jack McKinney?
A: Yeah. Sunny spent about five hundred on clothes, there was forty-four-five in the bag when I counted it. I gave a thousand of that to Lettie.
Q: Did she see you take the money out of the bag?
A: You think I’m crazy? I pulled out the thousand before I called her, stuck the bag back in the tank.
Q: Mr. Crowell, I show you this plastic bag containing US currency. Is this the plastic bag to which you’ve been referring?
A: It looks like it. All plastic bags look alike, don’t they?
Q: All plastic bags do not have US currency in them.
A: All US currency looks alike too.
Q: But does this look like the bag of money to which you’ve been referring?
A: It looks like it, yeah. If there’s 43,500 bucks in it, then that’s the bag.
Q: Please have the record indicate that this plastic bag containing US currency was recovered by Detectives Bloom and Rawles from the toilet tank of apartment 202 at 1134 Archer Street at 3:40 a.m. this date, August 27, and tagged as evidence at that time.
A: You’d better count it. You know cops.
Bloom came back into the room a few minutes after I’d finished reading the last page. He took the transcript from me, looked at the blue binder on it for a moment, and then said, “What do you think?”
“Nice,” I said.
“Yeah, it’ll hold up,” Bloom said. He tapped the folder on the palm of his hand. “Looks like the only one gets out of this with a profit is the guy with the Spanish accent. We got as much chance of finding him...” He let the sentence trail off. “I guess the mother’ll come out okay, too. The money Crowell stole from McKinney’ll go back to the estate, and she’s the only one left, ain’t she? In the family, I mean. The only one left.” He shook his head. He looked sad all at once. “Eighteen years old,” he said. He kept shaking his head. “Damn stupid kid.”
Veronica came to see me on the day before I left the hospital. She was wearing white. She looked like one of the nurses. Outside my window, the winds of September were advertising the full onslaught of the hurricane season. She told me that Bloom had called her on the morning they took Crowell’s statement. He had mentioned at that time that I’d been shot. She had not immediately come to the hospital because she wasn’t sure whether or not she’d be welcome. She told me she’d been away. She
said that on the day after her daughter’s funeral, she and Ham Jeffries had driven down to Captiva together. They had only returned yesterday. She had called the hospital late last night to find out if I was still here. She had asked when visiting hours were.
“So here I am,” she said.
“I see.”
“How are you?”
“Much better.”
“Big hero,” she said, and smiled her radiant smile.
I nodded.
“So they got him,” she said.
“They got him.”
There was a long silence.
“I was embarrassed about coming here,” she said. “It took a while to work up the nerve.”
“Embarrassed about what?”
“Ham. And me. We learned a lot about each other in Captiva. Something like this...it draws people together again.” She paused. She looked away. “He’s asked me to marry him,” she said, and turned to look at me again. Her pale eyes reflected the gray of the day outside. The palm trees rattled in the wind. “Do you think I should?”
“That’s up to you,” I said.
“I loved him very much, you know,” she said.
Past tense, I noticed. I said nothing.
“I guess I still do. I guess I’ve loved him all these years, Matthew.”
“Then congratulations,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, and nodded.
We chatted about other things then. The fact that hurricanes were now named after men as well as women, which she guessed was a direct result of the feminist movement. The fact that Calusa in September was even worse than Calusa in August. The fact that I’d lost a little weight during my hospital stay. Just before she left, I told her that the money Crowell had stolen from her son would undoubtedly be considered a part of his estate, and since she was his only living heir, would eventually become hers.
“My cows coming home at last,” she said somewhat sadly.
I did not think it kind to mention that at last her bull was coming home, too.
About the Author
* * *
Photograph © Dragica Hunter
Born in New York, Evan Hunter (1926–2005) wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock’s The Birds in 1963. He received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and is one of three American writers to be awarded the Diamond Dagger for a lifetime of achievement by the British Crime Writers Association.
Under the name Ed McBain, he authored the sprawling 87th Precinct series—the longest, most varied crime series in the world—which includes fifty-five novels about a fictional team of policemen, and thirteen novels in the Matthew Hope series featuring an up-and-coming lawyer in the Florida Gulf Coast. Known for tackling controversial content with a thoughtful eye, he is the author of over eighty novels.