77 Sunset Strip

by Roy Huggins

  It was what I had been told was to happen, it was the sole reason I was here, but somehow I wasn’t ready. In some way, perhaps because of last night, or because of his perpetually cheerful attitude, I’d come to believe there was no real danger in Eilene or Madden.

  I reached out and touched the soft flesh below his ear. There was warmth there still, but no pulse of life. I picked up the heavy wrist and held it for a long while. Nothing there but the yielding softness and fleeting warmth that told me it had been only a little while. An hour? Or only ten minutes? Why was the body still aboard? Because I had awakened too early and broken into the middle of things? Or was it Madden who had awakened too early?

  And then I noticed something significant. I hadn’t been looking for it and probably wouldn’t have thought of looking for it. But it was obvious enough. The bullet had come out in the center of his forehead, and had gone in an inch lower at the back of his head. I let my eyes follow back along the line the bullet must have traveled. The gun had been held low, and at an upward angle.

  I started slowly forward, and, more than fifty feet away, lodged behind the anchor and near the rail, I found it—a slender .30-.30 rifle equipped with a custom-made silencer. It was lying there, as if it had been dropped—or thrown. I glanced to the left. The rifle was on a line with the open forward hatch.

  I looked back at Callister and traced an imaginary trajectory from here to the stern, where the old man, his white head bare, sat and grew cold in the warm sun of the morning. I got an ugly picture of someone rising up from the forward hatch, lifting the rifle, and resting it on the ledge. That would give the trajectory, all right. I could see this blank-faced someone, perhaps in panicked haste, throw the gun over the rail. I could see it hit the rail, hold for a moment, and fall back behind the anchor. It must have been there that the plan had been stopped. Had I stopped it? Or had Madden?

  “Hey, Bailey, what gives?” It was Madden, looking up at me through the galley skylight. “You want coffee up there?”

  “No, I’m coming down.”

  I lowered myself down the forward hatch, stepped into the galley, and watched Owen pour steaming coffee into an oversized mug. “Doesn’t he want some more?” he asked.

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Too bad. This morning it tastes like coffee. Made it myself.”

  “I heard that!” It was Betty’s voice, and in a moment her door opened and she came out tying her robe around her. I had seen her hair looking better in a high wind, but otherwise she was her usual dew-bright self.

  “A little more respect and quiet around here for the graveyard shift,” she said. “Suppose there’s enough hot water for a shower?”

  “Bailey had one, and he’s a very big man,” Owen said.

  “I took it cold.”

  “Oh, Spartan, huh?” Betty remarked, squeezing past Owen to step into the lounge and go on down to the shower room. I took the mug of coffee Owen had poured for me and walked over to one of the lounges. Owen followed me in and sat down, leaning back on one elbow.

  “What woke you up this morning?” I said. “Anything special?”

  “I answered that once already. The arm.”

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “Yeah, I thought I heard the old man in the galley. Why?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Say, what’s eating you, Bailey?”

  I heard the door at the end of the passage open, and Eilene appeared in a flowing, ice-blue negligee. She had been up for quite a spell, because when she breezed on over and sat down under the glare of the skylight I could see that her make-up was no haphazard job.

  “I could smell the coffee, Owen, and I knew you’d made it,” she purred. “Pour me some?”

  “Sure.”

  Owen went into the galley.

  Eilene smiled at me and said, “Why don’t you go up and drag Glen away from that fishing pole? I feel like making breakfast myself this morning.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll go up in a second.”

  Owen came back with two coffees, the extra one for Betty, I gathered. She had turned off the shower and was singing Venezuela at the top of her voice.

  Eilene looked at Owen warmly and asked, “How’s the arm?”

  “Lousy, thanks.”

  Betty came in with her hair combed and her face gleaming like a boy soprano, looking wholly unprepared for what was coming. Owen gave her the coffee and she sat down beside me. Eilene turned to me again, a bit impatiently now, and said, “Won’t you go up and . . .”

  “I was just up there,” I interrupted. “He can’t come down. Someone shot him, Mrs. Callister. He’s dead.”

  Eilene stared at me as if I had said something that didn’t make sense. She suddenly turned her eyes to Owen and dropped the hot mug of coffee on the soft gray carpet. I felt a quick movement beside me, and Betty was on her feet, running blindly from the room. I waited for something more from the lovers, but Owen just stood there giving Eilene back her stare and saying nothing at all. Finally Eilene dropped her eyes to the brown stain at her feet and looked at it as if it were the most important event of the day. Owen put his mug aside and took hold of both her arms in a tight and steadying grip. I got up and walked out of the room.

  Betty was up there holding onto the stern rail and looking in dry-eyed wonder and despair at the little man sitting with the pole clutched in his right hand, still waiting for a strike. The wind was blowing gently at his soft white hair and the seat moved slowly with the rolling of the boat.

  I didn’t go to her, but stepped over to the closed skylight over the lounge and leaned down at its edge where my shadow would fall away from the glass. I could hear a frantic sibilance of voices from below, but neither words nor meaning.

  The voices stopped and I moved away, going to Betty and stepping between her and the figure in the chair. After a moment she looked up without really seeing me, and I put an arm around her and drew her away. At the companionway she stopped. “They did it,” she choked. “They killed him.”

  “Betty, listen. Maybe not ‘they.’ Maybe just one, without the other.” Owen was coming up the steps, followed with slow reluctance by Eilene. “Get hold of yourself,” I said.

  We stepped aside and Owen walked over to the body and picked up the left wrist, fumbling clumsily for a pulse. Eilene didn’t come up all the way, just far enough to see him there; then she turned away, her face twisted in an ugly grimace.

  Owen dropped the wrist and looked over at me.

  “He was shot with a .30 .80,” I said. “It’s forward behind the anchor, where I found it.”

  Owen just went on looking at me with a pale fixity for what seemed a long while. “I know Eilene didn’t do this,” he said with careful deliberation. “She just told me. And I know Betty wouldn’t, couldn’t. I also know I didn’t. That leaves you, Bailey. I’m putting you under arrest.”

  “You’re . . .!” I wanted to laugh in his face, but somehow the face didn’t seem to belong to a kid in his twenties, but to a man, and one who wouldn’t go in for loose threats or idle talk.

  “Yes,” he said. “The captain of the ship is dead. I’m captain now, and responsible for the other passengers.

  We don’t know you, but there’s been something phony from the start about your connection with the skipper. I’m going to lock you in your cabin till we hit port. If you try to resist, I’ve got a right to kill you.”

  And he meant every word of it.

  “Look, Owen, you’re in deep enough already. Don’t make it any tougher. I’ve got a letter down in my cabin, from the dead captain. Maybe you ought to read it before you do anything rash.”

  He thought about that, looking at me and waiting for me to go on.

  “Or maybe I’ll just tell you what it says. It’s an offer for a job—to go along on this tea party. I’m a licensed private investigator. The letter states that you and the . . . But maybe you’d rather read it, after all.”

  “Go ahead.
It states what?”

  “That you and Mrs. Callister were having an illicit affair, and that one of you, on this trip, intended to kill him.”

  I could feel the hysteria building and threatening to break in the girl at my side. I took hold of Betty’s hand and gripped it tightly.

  “Where is this letter?” It was Eilene, her voice sounding suddenly very old.

  “I’ll get it for you if you want to see it. As long as our new captain here understands I don’t intend to let him have it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eilene said wearily. “It would be like him to do a thing like that.”

  “I want to see that letter,” Owen said. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  But Eilene didn’t seem to have heard him. She went on, turning her eyes toward Betty. “There’s the one who killed him. Right there.”

  I felt Betty stiffen with a quick hard movement, but she made no other move, said nothing. Eilene began to speak, looking at Betty but talking to us, the tone rising slowly and sharpening viciously as she went on:

  “Two days ago Glen and I came to a complete understanding—about . . . everything.” In the brief pause her eyes had gone to Owen for a moment, then back to Betty. “We talked all through one night, and Glen finally told me he had cut me out of his will—left me one dirty dollar. But before the night was over he’d promised to—to change it back again. I made the mistake of telling Betty about it. I had to crow a little. And it cost—”

  “That’s a lie!” Betty’s words lashed out with cold fury and contempt. “This is the first I’ve ever heard of—”

  “Cut it!” It was Owen’s turn to interrupt now. “We’ll be in Honolulu in three days and the cops’ll decide the question of guilt.” He paused and looked at each of us. This was Owen in his new role, and I had to admit, grudgingly, that he played it well, with a genuine ring of authority.

  “Meanwhile,” he went on, “we have a burial service to perform.”

  “Wait a minute! You can’t send him over the side.”

  “Listen, mister,” Owen said, looking at me as if I had just stepped up from steerage, “we’re at least three hot days out of port. We have a dead man aboard. We’re burying him. There’s a book on sea law below. Maybe you ought to read it.”

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s two funerals—his and yours.”

  He started to answer when Betty suddenly choked. She was standing there frozen, staring in blank unholy terror at the body of Glen Callister. I looked at the same moment, as Glen Callister’s right hand, clasping the rod, shot up stiffly, his body lunged forward, hung there for a terrifying moment of sheer madness, and slumped back as the pole left his hand with a jar of sound and disappeared into the sea.

  And over all this came the shrill, mad screaming of Eilene Callister.

  SEVEN

  Glen Clarence Callister was buried at sea . . . We, therefore, commit this body to the deep to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead and the life of the world to come . . .

  Owen Madden read the words in an awkward tempo, but with quiet conviction. Eilene cried silently, but with copious great tears, while Betty stood by with taut face and eyes as dry and hot as desert stones.

  For two days Eilene and Owen closeted themselves from time to time in the master’s cabin, and quarreled. Their voices were low and guarded, but the passion and the pleading somehow carried even though the words did not.

  On the last day before we made port the quarreling stopped, completely, as if with the turning of a switch. It was late afternoon and I was at the wheel when I realized I had heard nothing from them for the entire day. The Skylark was in her Sunday best, and I sat there smoking and listening to her speak. The last time she had moved through the water this way, throwing up foam at her bow, Callister had said she was carrying a bone in her teeth. She was carrying it with a vengeance today, as if she had scented the slips at Oahu.

  There was a sound from below, and I knew Betty would be coming up in a. moment to take over, and I would be seeing her for the first time that day. Whatever she was required to do, Betty Callister did, but the rest of the time she stayed in her cabin, the door locked. When you knocked, she answered. When you told her you just wanted to talk, she answered with silence.

  Her steps sounded on the companionway and in a moment she walked out onto the deck and came over to the cockpit. She stepped down into it and stood there waiting for me to get up.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  She sat down and I got out my cigarettes and offered her one. She shook her head and I lit one from the one in my mouth, snapped the butt away, and blew smoke over my left shoulder.

  “Did you want to say something?” she asked quietly.

  “Only that the longer you let a thing like this ride you, the longer it takes to get clear of it.”

  “Dad’s dead, and there’s nothing I can do to bring him back. I’m not letting it ride me.”

  “That’s good.”

  There was another silence and I was wondering how to get past it when Betty said, “I just can’t stand being on this boat with her, that’s all. If I don’t stay in my room I—I don’t know what I might do.”

  “You’re sure it’s Eilene now, huh?”

  “Of course. Why else would she cook up that business about Dad’s will?”

  “Maybe it’s the truth—that is, the part about the will.”

  “I hope so. But she didn’t tell me about it”

  “Maybe she said it just to protect Owen.”

  “Then they’re both in it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I’ve been curious about something. Didn’t you hear the shot?”

  “How could I when there was a silencer on the gun?”

  “How did you know that?”

  She looked at me steadily for a moment and said, just as steadily, “Because I saw the gun when Owen brought it below.”

  “I just wondered if Owen had gone out of his way to tell you.”

  “I don’t think that’s what you were wondering at all. I think you believe Eilene. She hasn’t drawn an honest breath for fifteen years, but you believe her.”

  “Are you saying I think you killed your father?”

  She turned and faced me, drawing a sharp breath to say something, and suddenly changed her mind. I could see the pale drawn tension in her face now, the terrible loneliness in her eyes.

  She turned away again and said, “It’s time for me to take over.”

  “Okay, you’ve taken over.”

  “Please, I . . .” And then, for what was possibly the first time since sudden death had overtaken Glen Callister, his daughter began to cry. I sat there for a bit before I put a tentative hand to her shoulder. She didn’t draw away, and when she spoke the words were muffled. She said, “Please, go below. I’ll be all right.”

  And it was plain enough that Betty meant just that. I went below.

  Eilene and Owen were both in the lounge. Eilene was mixing a drink, Owen was picking at his guitar, and the tension in the room was even more obvious than the silence. I stepped over to the bar and poured myself a glass of ice water, sat down with it, and looked up at Eilene. She turned and walked out of the room, and in a moment her stateroom door closed with flat emphasis.

  I glanced at Owen and said, “Seems upset. Anything I can do?”

  He told me exactly what I could do.

  Alter another round of silence he shot his fingers sharply across the strings with a discordant whang of sound and tossed the guitar across the room. It landed safely on the other couch. “Gimme a cigarette, will you?”

  I gave him a cigarette and watched him light it. He dragged deeply, pulled some of the smoke tentatively into his lungs, and blew it out quickly in a white plume.

  “What happens when we hit port?” he asked. “Who does what to who?”

  “I thou
ght you knew all about sea law.”

  “Okay, so I don’t.”

  “The Skylark’s an American registered ship, isn’t she?”

  “Sure.”

  “The F.B.I. handles the investigation and the U.S. Attorney in Honolulu tries the case.”

  “Why? Why not the local authorities?”

  “Did it happen locally?”

  “Who do they try? All four of us?”

  “Just the guilty party.”

  “And who might that be?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He scowled at the cigarette, stood up, and walked to the bar to put it out. He stood there with his back to me for what seemed a long time, and then he wheeled abruptly.

  “Jesus, Bailey, I’m in love with her. I suppose that makes me a prime heel, but there it is. I’m in love with her, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” He was staring down at me with a wide-open look of confusion and despair, and I found myself wondering at the changes that can come over a man, or a face. The raw toughness and the maturity of two days ago had fallen away, and once again Owen Madden’s face belonged to a kid not long past twenty.

  “I’m in love with her and she knows it,” he was saying. “Why won’t she admit it to me?”

  “Admit what?” I asked, and I could feel my lips getting dry as I waited for his answer.

  He blinked once and looked down at me as if I had just reminded him of something important. He turned and began to mix himself a drink. His hands were trembling. I got up and shut the door that led to the passage and stepped over to mix a drink for myself, being careful to keep it reasonably nonalcoholic.

  Two hours later, I was on my eighth drink and cold sober. Owen was on his ninth, and just cold. He had taken on the erect, slow-moving, studied air of a man who likes to think of himself as blessed with an unlimited capacity. As Owen had put it while working on drink number seven, “I can get canned to the crow’s-nest and y’d never know it.”

  Well, he was canned to the crow’s-nest and carrying three red lights, but I still hadn’t managed to get him back on the subject. I was about to give up out of sheer caution—after all, he would have to take us into port in the morning—when suddenly he leaned toward me and said, as if we’d been there all evening, “Sure, it made me sick inside at first, knowing she could kill a man like that. But I don’t care now. Don’t care about anything but Eilene ’cause I’m in love with her and wanta . . . An’ she’s in love me. Crazy for me . . .