Home is the Sailor

by Day Keene

  Marks thumbed the safety on and off and on again. “An efficient and a very deadly little weapon.”

  I had to know. “Where did you get it? What has it to do with me?”

  Marks said coldly, “We found it in the glove compartment of the car you were driving when Officers Morton and Thomas arrested you. A green convertible Cadillac coupé, registered in the name of Corliss Mason.” Marks tapped the gun with a pencil. “Fired recently. Only one shell left in the clip.” He walked around his desk and leaned against it, facing me. “All right. Let’s stop beating around the bush. Where is she, Nelson?”

  “Where is who?”

  “Mrs. Nelson.”

  Sweat escaped from the roots of my hair. “Why, she’s home. Back at the Purple Parrot. I suppose.”

  “He supposes,” Flagle said.

  Marks doubled his fist and hit me on the side of the head, his clenched knuckles up, the back of his hand parallel with the floor. “You lying sonofabitch.”

  The blow sent me sprawling on all fours, I scrambled to my feet and the two cops stepped away from the wall.

  “Sit down,” one of them said.

  I sat back in the chair.

  There was a brown paper bundle on the desk, tied with string. Flagle broke the string and took out a bloodstained white dress, a white satin bra, a pair of panties, a garter belt, and a pair of silver sandals. The white panties were unspotted, but the garter belt and the bra were as stained with blood as the dress. The dress looked like the one Corliss had slipped into after our quarrel in the cottage.

  Flagle dug in the paper again and added a white leather purse initialed with a silver C and M to the small pile of clothing on the desk. “Care to identify any of these, Nelson?” he asked me.

  A lump formed in my throat. Almost too big to swallow. My voice had to squeeze around it. “They look like my wife’s clothes. Where is she? What’s happened to Corliss?”

  I got to my feet again.

  “Sit down,” Flagle said.

  I sat down.

  Captain Marks drummed on his desk with his fingertips. “You see, Nelson, when the boys picked you up this morning you were carrying a lot of money. Sergeant Brewer thought it might be worth the price of a phone call to do a little checking on you.”

  “So?”

  “So he called down the coast to Sheriff Cooper of the Palm Grove police, and what Cooper told him was so interesting that Brewer sent the boys back to the police garage to give the car you were driving a thorough check.” He touched the objects as he named them. “They found this gun in the glove compartment. This clothing and this purse were in the trunk.” Marks tried to light the dead cigar he was chewing. It was so wet the match spluttered. He looked over the match at me. “Sheriff Cooper says you and Mrs. Nelson had a little quarrel last night. Is that so?”

  I realized I was sitting on the edge of the chair, gripping my knees. I sat back and tried to relax. “Yes. It is. But—”

  “What did you quarrel about, Nelson?”

  I was damned if I’d tell him. “That’s none of your business.”

  “Did Mrs. Nelson tell you she was through with you, ask you to get out?”

  I said, “Yes, but—”

  “But what?”

  The bloodstained clothes on the desk, Corliss’ remembered white face, Wolkowysk, who wasn’t Wolkowysk at all but a killer by the name of Lippy Saltz for whom the F.B.I. was looking, all suddenly churned in my stomach. Like a ship’s screw out of water. Faster and faster and faster. I gripped the sides of the chair.

  “If you’re going to be sick,” Flagle said, “use the basin.”

  I did. For a long time. Then I filled my hands with cold water and buried my hot face in them.

  Captain Marks beat at my back with his flat voice. “Is it also true that at the completion of this quarrel with your wife — during which, incidentally, according to Sheriff Cooper, she was naked except for a garter belt — you attempted to force her to have relations with you?”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. “Who told Cooper that?”

  Captain Marks said, “The gardener. A man named Meek. As I get the story, Meek is the nosy type and was watching you through a crack between the sill and the Venetian blind.”

  I turned and leaned against the basin, water dripping from my face. “What happened then?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I remember Corliss dressing. I remember walking over to the bar with her. I remember trying to eat and not being able to.”

  “So you drank some more instead.”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long have you been drinking heavily, Nelson?”

  “This is the third or fourth day.”

  “You don’t remember leaving the Purple Parrot with Mrs. Nelson?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t remember getting into her car with her?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you did. And neither of you were seen again until Officers Thomas and Morton crowded you off the road five hours later. You roaring drunk, offering to fight every sonofabitch cop in California.”

  I looked at Thomas and Morton. “You guys beat me up?”

  The younger of the pair shook his head. “Naw. By the time we picked you up you were swinging at air, mate. You made a couple of passes at me and fell flat on your face. Not that you didn’t give us plenty of trouble. You did. You fought every inch of the way to the car. Then when Bill got you in the back seat, you damn near kicked my head off.”

  Flagle picked up the bloodstained dress and dangled it in front of me. “What did you do with her, Nelson?”

  I shook my head at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  His smile was thin. “I think you do. For three days you’ve been leading the life of Reilly. A sailor’s dream. Free booze. Free eats. A woman. You wanted it to go on forever. You hoped it would.” He sunk the knife. “Then when Mrs. Nelson smarted up and told you she was through, you lost your head and killed her.”

  I shouted, “That’s a lie! Corliss isn’t dead. She can’t be dead. Where is she?”

  “That,” Captain Marks said quietly, “is what we want you to tell us. Start talking, Nelson. What did you do with her body?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The day had been hot and long. A lot of things had happened. Most of them to me. None of them nice. The night wind blowing in the windows of the car felt good.

  Captain Marks turned around in the front seat. “Say when, Nelson.”

  I said, “It’s the next tourist court on the left side of the road. Just before you come to the hill. Where you see those spotlighted palms.”

  The driver of the San Mateo squad car hand-signaled to the cars behind us and pulled in in front of the bar. Several men were clustered in the dark under the unlighted neon parrot.

  Captain Marks got out of the car. “Which of you gentlemen is Sheriff Cooper?”

  Cooper detached himself from the group of waiting men. “I’m Cooper. Captain Marks of San Mateo?”

  “That’s right,” Marks said. They shook hands.

  I sat looking at the handcuffs on my wrists. The police cars behind the one in which I was riding swung in off the highway. Uniformed and plain-clothes men got out and joined the group under the parrot. They shook hands. They leaned against the wall and Wally’s Ford, talking earnestly, about me. Big men, little men, fat men, thin men — the law.

  It was too dark for me to see their faces, but now and then I could isolate snatches of conversation. One of them, it sounded like Flagle, brought up the matter of jurisdiction.

  “Forget it,” Sheriff Cooper said. “It will be time enough to worry about that when we find the body.”

  Deputy Sheriff Harris walked over to the car and looked in at me. “I knew you were a no-good bastard the first time I saw you.”

  I said, “You sonofabitch,” and tried to get out of the car.

  One of the two San Mateo detectives sitting besi
de me wrestled me back against the cushion. “Take it easy now, Nelson. Don’t blow your top.”

  There was grit in my eyes. They burned from lack of sleep. Corliss was dead. I’d killed her. A dozen men working in shifts had hammered it into me all day. Now they told me to take it easy.

  Captain Marks walked into the bar with Sheriff Cooper. In the doorway he turned and called, “O.K., boys. Bring Nelson in here.”

  One of the detectives asked me, “Are you going to walk, or do we carry you, Nelson?”

  I said I’d walk. I walked between them to the door. There were no customers in the bar. Wally was standing in back of the wood. Meek was sitting on a bar stool. Cora, the heavy-set waitress, was crying at one of the tables.

  Wally gave me a sour look. Meek wiped his nose on the back of his hand. Cora cried even harder. The bar wasn’t friendly or wholesome now. It reminded me of the night before Corliss and I had been married. With terse whispers crawling the length of the wood like so many excited cockroaches.

  Captain Marks stopped me halfway down the bar and asked Sheriff Cooper if he had checked on Mrs. Nelson’s clothes.

  Cooper said, “As soon as you phoned the request. That is, I had Mrs. Gilly do it.”

  Meek wiped the back of his hand on his pants. “My wife, Mamie, would have done it, but she’s sick.”

  Captain Marks sat at the table across from Cora. “You’re Mrs. Gilly?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re familiar with Mrs. Nelson’s wardrobe?” Cora wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. “Fairly well, sir. And I’d say nothing is missing but Corliss’ camel’s-hair coat, the white silk shantung dress she was wearing when she ate supper, a pair of silver sandals, and a big white leather purse with a silver C and M on it.”

  One of the San Mateo detectives was carrying a battered director’s case. He opened it on the bar, took out the bloodstained dress, and handed it to Captain Marks. Marks showed the dress to Cora. “Is this the dress Mrs. Nelson was wearing, Mrs. Gilly?”

  Cora examined the top of the dress carefully. “Yes, sir. I remember noticing one of the shoulder straps needed tacking. See? There. I meant to tell Corliss about it. But everything was so upset.”

  “In what way?”

  Cora looked at me, then away. “Well, Mr. Nelson was drinking so heavily and Corliss was crying and telling him she never wanted to see him again, begging him to get out.”

  Wally leaned his weight on the bar. “Why did you kill her, Nelson? Corliss never done you nothing but good.”

  Flagle sat on one of the bar stools. “Had Nelson been drinking all evening?”

  Wally hooted. “All evening? The guy has been stewed for four days. His pockets were dipping sand when he showed up, and he’s been drunk ever since.” Wally added, earnestly, “You wouldn’t believe me, mister, if I told you how much rum he put away.”

  Captain Marks bit the end from a cigar, “When they left here, who was driving?”

  “She was,” Wally said. “Nelson had just passed out on the table, see? I had to help Corliss put him in the car.”

  “Did she say where she was taking him?”

  Wally spread his fat palms on the bar. “Not to me, mister. I just work here. I did have the impression, though, that she was going to drop him somewhere. You know, maybe in some hotel. Anyway, away from here.” He confided, “You know yourself you can’t have drunks passing out on the tables and falling all over the floor. Not in a respectable bar. We have mostly tourist trade. And most of the tourists have children.”

  I caught at a small straw bobbing on white water. I said, “I don’t see how I was physically capable of killing her if I was so drunk I passed out on the table and Wally had to help put me in the car.”

  Flagle asked sarcastically, “It is your contention, then, that Mrs. Nelson is still alive? That having left her clothes and a considerable amount of blood in the back seat of her car, she is wandering around in her stockings and a camel’s-hair coat, has been for twenty-four hours?”

  I said, “I don’t know where she is.”

  Harris asked Captain Marks if the San Mateo technicians had run a paraffin test on my hand.

  Marks lighted his cigar. “Yeah. And it came out positive. The test on his right hand proved conclusively that Nelson fired a gun shortly before he was picked up. What’s more, they found a couple of good prints on the clip.”

  I looked at my right hand. They said it had fired a gun. They said the paraffin test had brought out specks of burned powder.

  Captain Marks got up from the table and leaned against the bar, talking to Sheriff Cooper. “The way we see it, he killed her around eleven o’clock last night. The crystal on his watch was smashed and the watch stopped at five minutes of eleven. What time did they leave here?”

  Cooper said, “I’d judge a little before eight. I dropped in to ask Mrs. Nelson a few questions on another matter a few minutes after eight and Connors told me they’d just left.”

  Marks built his case against me. “She probably parked somewhere along the road to let him sober up a bit before she checked him into a hotel. Nelson came to and got nasty. She put up a hell of a fight. Maybe batted him around with a tire iron or something. That’s where he got those scratches and bruises. Or maybe she used the butt of the gun. He wrestled it out of her hand and shot her.” He pushed his hat back on his head. “But we’re damned if we can figure what he did with the body. Unless he weighted it down and threw it in the ocean. In that case, it may be days, even weeks, before she’s washed up on some beach.”

  “You say there was considerable blood in the car?”

  “A lot of it. Type B, Rh positive.”

  Cooper bobbed his head. Like an old gray rooster pecking corn. “That would seem to do it. I checked with the mobile Red Cross blood bank this afternoon. A fine woman, Mrs. Nelson. She gave blood every ten weeks.”

  Flagle turned me around so my back was to the bar. “How about that, Nelson? After hearing that, do you still insist you didn’t kill your wife?”

  I tried to breathe normally. “If I did, I don’t remember it. All I remember is quarreling with her.”

  “What did you quarrel about?”

  I gave him the last part. “She wanted to call it quits. She told me to get out of her life.”

  Meek ran his coated tongue over his thin upper lip. “I seen you. I seen you through the blinds, trying to make her do it. You tried to force her and Corliss had to kick you in the face with her bare feet.”

  All the men in the bar looked at me as if I was dirt. I tried to find one friendly face. I couldn’t. Then I saw Green, the man from the F.B.I. He was sitting on a stool at the far end of the bar, where Wolkowysk had sat. He looked detached, unbiased, just listening.

  Flagle asked, “What else did Mrs. Nelson say?”

  I told him the truth. “She said she wouldn’t be talked to the way I’d been talking to her. She told me to take the car, take anything I wanted, but get out.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I loved her.”

  “Love her,” Wally sneered.

  Flagle said, “You say she said she wouldn’t stand for the way you had been talking to her. How had you been talking to her?”

  I felt the way I had while I’d waited for Corliss to come back from San Diego. I felt trapped. “I called her a tart.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she acted like one.”

  Flagle took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. “I see. And after you’d called her that she told you to take her five-thousand-dollar Cadillac and anything else you wanted and get out.”

  It sounded silly when he said it.

  “I suppose she forced her ring on you, too?”

  “She asked if I wanted it back.”

  “How about the eleven thousand dollars you had in your pocket when you were arrested?”

  “The money was mine.”

  Flagle lifted one eyebrow, amused. “Where did you get eleve
n thousand dollars?”

  I told him. “I had twelve thousand on me when I came ashore. I’d saved my pay for three years.”

  “Why?”

  “I intended to buy a farm. Near Hibbing Minnesota. Where I was born. I was going to get married and settle down.”

  Flagle drew his hand across his mouth. He didn’t need to say it. I knew what he was thinking. Now he’d heard it all. He turned away from me. “Well, let’s get on with it. I want to see the unit they occupied.”

  The bar and the restaurant were closed, but Meek was still renting cottages. A middle-aged couple was standing outside of Cottage Number 4 beside a green Chrysler with Illinois license plates. As we started across the court I heard the woman whisper, “Go on, Joe. Tell them what we saw when we drove in last night.”

  “No,” the man said flatly.

  Inside the cottage, Flagle fingered through the dresses in the closet. “You’re certain nothing is missing, Mrs. Gilly?”

  “Positive,” Cora said. “Well, almost positive.” She stroked one of Corliss’ evening gowns. “Mrs. Nelson didn’t go away willingly. I know that much. No woman would just walk out and leave all these beautiful clothes.”

  “No,” Flagle agreed with her. “At least, it’s very unlikely.”

  A bright bit of metal under the edge of the bed caught my eye. I stood leaning against the wall, wondering what it was.

  Sheriff Cooper took a fat manila envelope from his pocket and handed it to Flagle. “These are the papers we took from the safe, Mr. Prosecutor. Connors had the combination.”

  “Was there any money in the safe?” Flagle asked him.

  “Seven hundred and eighty dollars,” Cooper said.

  Wally had accompanied us to the cottage. Flagle asked him if I had the combination to the safe. Wally shook his head. “Uh-uh. Just me and Mrs. Nelson.”

  “He didn’t have access to the safe at any time?”