Home is the Sailor

by Day Keene

  “You can’t dye it all, honey,” I told her. “In your line of business the dye will wear off where it matters. But I’ll bet you looked cute as hell with red hair.”

  She dropped the glass. “You know.”

  I leaned against the door. “That you’re Sophia Palanka?” I nodded. “Yes. That probably was Yugoslav the lad in the bar in Tijuana was spitting at you. Who was he? An old admirer?”

  Corliss came to the door of the bathroom. “He’d seen me dance.”

  “That’s a new name for it,” Wally said.

  Corliss looked at him, then back at me. “Who knows you’re here, Swede?”

  “You and me, baby,” I told her. “What’s the matter? You don’t seem very glad to see me.”

  She chewed at her underlip. “I’m not.”

  “What you keeping your hand in your pocket for? Wally asked. “You got a gun in there?”

  I pointed the handcuff at him. “What do you think?”

  The big barman began to sweat. As I’d sweated for four days. “I knew you were up to something when you confessed to the cops and offered to lead them to Corliss’ body. I figured you were going to try a break. But I didn’t think you’d be dumb enough to double back.”

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. “What did you expect me to do? Go up to San Quentin, take three deep breaths, and say, ‘Good morning, Warden. My name is Swen Nelson. I’m a seaman. That is, I used to be a seaman. I’d been at sea, off and on, for eighteen years when I decided I’d wasted enough of my life. So I started for Hibbing, Minnesota, to buy a farm and get married and settle down. Maybe even have a half-dozen kids. But I went on a binge instead. During it I met a girl. The girl I’d been looking for all my life.’ž” I looked at Corliss. “ž‘I loved her on sight. I — still love her. I’ll always love her. Even if she didn’t turn out to be all I thought she was.’ž”

  Corliss began to cry.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Wally said. “He’s just trying to make trouble between us.”

  Still looking at Corliss, I asked, “Has Connors been in on this from the start?”

  Corliss stopped crying. Her lower lip thrust out in its familiar pout. “No,” she said coldly. “Oh, he and Meek have known for some time I wasn’t all I pretended to be. They’ve been chiseling pennies from me for a year. But all they were doing was guessing until Palmer’s body was found and Mr. Green came to the court with the information that Jerry Wolkowysk was really Lippy Saltz. Then they both cut themselves in.” Corliss made a gesture of distaste. “Wally all the way last night.” Her voice was small. She refused to meet my eyes. “Because he knew no matter how badly I felt about you, I didn’t dare refuse him.” She squeezed her wet hair to the back of her head and held it there. Her voice was barely audible. “Because I’d been living a lie. Because I wasn’t Corliss Mason. Because I was Sophia Palanka and the F.B.I. wants me — for murder.”

  Connors was smug. “That’s right. If you’ll pardon the expression, Nelson, I cut myself a piece of cake. I liked it. And I’m going to keep right on cutting. Corliss and I are taking the midnight plane to Frisco. From there we’re flying to Bogotá. To hell with the Purple Parrot. Let Meek have it.”

  “The hell you say,” I said.

  I hit him with my left hand. So hard his pig eyes filled with desperation. He sucked in his fat guts against the shot he expected. From the gun I didn’t have. Then, almost slyly, he raised the gun in his hand. I knocked it across the room and under the bed. Then I got my right hand out of my pocket and swung it. My numbed fist missed his face. The handcuff didn’t. His broken jaw gaped. He started to scream in agony. Before he could make much noise I swung my fist again, this time to his head. He went down like a poled steer.

  Corliss hadn’t moved. She was still clutching her wet hair to her neck. It gave her an oddly foreign look.

  I yelled at her. “Don’t just stand there. Get dressed. The police were on their way to the Purple Parrot when I beat this address out of Meek. I stole a car to get here. The car is parked across the street with four smart San Diego cops asking questions about it right now. ‘Did you see the sailor who parked it? Where did he go?’ And I’m wanted for murder, remember? For killing you. Don’t stand there looking at me. Get dressed. In just about four minutes every cop in Southern California is going to bust in here.”

  Her white breasts strained against the sheer silk of her dye-spotted slip. “Why should I get dressed?”

  I told her. “I’m taking you out of here.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to figure that out. Anywhere you’ll be safe.”

  “You mean you want me to escape?”

  “I do.”

  “Even if I am — bad?”

  “Even so.”

  Corliss laid a small hand on my chest. Her eyes searched mine. “After what I did and tried to do to you?”

  “After what you did and tried to do to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because I love you.” I tilted her chin. “Why did you cry last night?” I quoted Mr. Lewis. “As if your heart was broken.”

  Her wet eyes continued to search mine. “Maybe because I love you. Maybe because I was ashamed. Maybe because I wanted to be what I’d pretended to be. Instead of what I am.” She cried quietly. “Maybe because I wished I had been born in a small town and had married a rich man’s son. So he could die like the one I made up did and leave me free to marry you.” Corliss buried her cheek against my chest and sobbed. “Instead of being a cheap little South Chicago strip-teaser who listened to Lippy Saltz.”

  Her hand was still on my chest. I kissed the tips of her fingers, then her wet hair. “Get dressed, little sweetheart,” I whispered. “We’ll thrash this all out later. If we make it.”

  Corliss looked into my eyes again. “You really want me to, Swede? You care that much?”

  “I do.”

  She took a deep breath. Her lower lip quivered. “Then, whatever you say, Swede.”

  She rinsed her hair in the basin, then toweled it with her eyes closed, her lips moving as if she was praying. Then she peeled off her sodden slip and stood nude and lovely a moment while she wrapped her dyed hair in a long white scarf, forming a smart white turban.

  As she put on her silver sandals she asked, “How much time have we?”

  I cracked the drawn shade and looked across the street. The four San Diego policemen were standing beside the police car comparing notes. As I watched, one of the plainclothes men looked across the street into the lobby of the hotel.

  I said tersely, “Minutes. But I think we still can make it if we can slip out the back way.”

  I turned from the window. Corliss had pulled a simple white dress over the turban and was reaching her camel’s hair coat from the closet. With a fringe of brown hair showing under the turban, she didn’t even resemble Corliss Mason. She looked smart and expensive and foreign.

  As I started for the door she picked an equally smart overnight case from the floor of the clothes closet and caught at my arm as I passed her.

  “Please,” she said simply. “Kiss me for luck, Swede. So I’ll know.”

  I kissed her. For a long time. Then I released her. “Now do you know?”

  Her eyes shining, she nodded. “Yes.”

  She was nearest the door. She opened it and started out, and stopped as Green blocked the doorway.

  “Hello, Sophia,” he said quietly. “Going somewhere?”

  Corliss whimpered like a kicked puppy. Her nostrils distended. She slammed the door in Green’s face and raced for the open window, screaming at me.

  “Goddamn you, Swede. You tricked me. You meant to turn me in to the law all the time.” She ripped the drawn shade from the window. “That’s why you wanted to get me out of the room. You meant to have me arrested.”

  She straddled the sill, her skirt sliding high on her thigh as Green pushed the slammed door open. Corliss continued to curse me.

&n
bsp; “You big lousy Swede. From Hibbing, Minnesota. You goddamn no-good bastard.” But her eyes didn’t match her words. Corliss’ eyes were shining as brightly as they had when I’d kissed her, when she’d said now she knew.

  “No! Don’t try it,” Green warned her from the doorway.

  Her eyes still caressing me, Corliss reached for the fire-escape ladder with one hand and swung her slim body into space.

  She screamed as her coat caught on a projecting nail. She tried to free it with the hand still clutching the overnight bag. As she did, her left hand let go of the rusted iron ladder, and before either Green or I could reach her she fell backward into space, her terror filling the night with screams.

  I watched from the window, sick. Her body turned over and over. Her outflung arm struck the railing of the landing on the third floor. The overnight case sprang open. And all the money in the world spilled out and formed a fluttering green umbrella over her falling body.

  Green leaned against the windowsill. “The crazy little fool,” he breathed. “She might have known.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The office of the Federal Bureau in San Diego was small but comfortable. Softly spoken, well-dressed, efficient counterparts of Green spoke into phones, made notes, or just sat looking pleased.

  Captain Marks and Flagle and Sheriff Cooper and Harris were there. So were Mr. and Mrs. Lewis. So was Wally. So was Meek. Wally had a towel tied around his jaw. Meek’s head was bandaged.

  A doctor worked on my arm as Green talked.

  “You get the setup now, Nelson?” he asked.

  I said, “Most of it, I think. Corliss was acting a part. She played me for a sucker.”

  Green nodded, well pleased with Green. “That’s right. The girl you knew and married as Corliss Mason was in reality Sophia Palanka, a former entertainer and strip-teaser in a South Chicago night club.” Green lighted a cigarette. “The club was patronized mainly by Yugoslavs and Poles and Bohemians, men from the neighboring steel mills. But now and then a party of ‘slummers’ dropped in. That’s probably how she met Phillip E. Palmer the Third.”

  I fought a desire to be sick.

  “Am I hurting you?” the doctor asked.

  “Not too bad,” I told him.

  Green continued. “As yet we haven’t been able to locate her family. It’s really immaterial now. Probably the usual background. A broken home or a drunken stepfather. The kid wanted some of the pretties of life and set out to get them, by any means she could. With her looks and body, that was easy. Up to a point.”

  The doctor finished with my arm. “Let it rest for a few days, mate. The knife went right through the muscle so it will probably be stiff for a while. But no permanent damage has been done.”

  I lowered my hand to my lap and let the handcuff dangle between my legs. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  Green snuffed the cigarette he was smoking. “There is a lot of the background we still don’t know and probably never will. We do know the Palmer affair was carefully planned. During the entire time she worked at the club, Sophia was a redhead. More, unlike most girls in her profession, she never, to our knowledge, had any pictures taken of herself. All we had to go on was a blurred glossy print of Sophia and Phillip E. Palmer the Third taken on their wedding night, by a night-club photographer, both of them stewed to the gills and Sophia looking away from the camera. In fact, it wasn’t until we located one of her more intimate customers that we realized her red hair might not be natural.”

  One of Green’s fellow agents who had been talking to Washington on the phone hung up, clasped his hands, and shook them at Green. Because a girl named Sophia Palanka was dead.

  Green continued. “We don’t even know the exact date that she tied in with Lippy. But we know that she did, and we have reason to believe that for some months before the Palmer affair they lived together under a mutual-agreement relationship. Of course, what made it so difficult for us was that the case was three years old before we were called in. As murders go, it was clever. If Palmer’s body hadn’t been found by a party of city slickers hunting ducks in a slough where there haven’t been any ducks for fifty years, the State Department would still be demanding that Phillip E. Palmer the Third be returned from behind the Iron Curtain. Because to all intents and purposes Phillip E. Palmer the Third and his blushing bride dropped out of sight in Bucharest. And neither of them was ever seen again.”

  “Are you positive,” Flagle asked, “that Corliss Mason and this Sophia Palanka were the same girl?”

  Green nodded. “Positive. We have been for some hours. Ever since Washington reported that some of the fingerprints the San Mateo technicians took off the car Nelson was driving when he was arrested matched the prints of a thumb and second finger, both of them apparently feminine, that we took off the night-club picture of Palmer and his bride.” Green grinned at Captain Marks. “That’s why I wasn’t too much interested in your case against Nelson or his confession that he had killed his wife. It was too pat a solution. Besides, by then I had my eye on Connors. For a barman in a roadside bar, he was just too good to be true.”

  Wally glowered at him over the towel holding his broken jaw together.

  “As you gentlemen know,” Green said, “in most of these cases it’s the little things that lead to their solution.”

  I sat looking at the dangling handcuff. The little things. Fingerprints on a forgotten night-club picture. A former carnival barker snitching a quick drink instead of being on deck to rent a cottage to Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Lewis of Carbondale, Illinois.

  Green continued. “When we were called in on the case we were in error in not realizing Sophia and Lippy were as smart as they were. And they were smart. For one thing, they must have dickered to buy the Purple Parrot months before they murdered Palmer, thus confusing the time element completely. Then they only paid twenty-five thousand down, meeting the monthly payments out of income, leaving them” — Green corrected himself — “leaving her almost the entire sum they got from Palmer intact, for getaway money, in case something like this happened.”

  Sheriff Cooper said, “Leaving her? You boys are certain, then, that Saltz, alias Jerry Wolkowysk, is dead?”

  Green looked at me. With thoughtful speculation in his eyes. “Y-yes. Fairly so, Sheriff. As I see it, Lippy had served his purpose, and I imagine the little blonde saw to it that Lippy was in his car when it went over the cliff. He was a loose end that needed tying. He could identify her as his partner in the killing. He also undoubtedly claimed the greatest share of the money, not realizing he had been used, as Sophia used every man with whom she came in contact. Yes. I think we’re safe in assuming Saltz is dead. How about it, Nelson? Can you tell us anything about Wolkowysk?”

  I looked him in the eye. “No, sir.”

  “You’re positive?”

  I looked at Wally and Meek. Neither of them dared to talk. This way they were merely hangers-on. If they talked, if they admitted they had been bleeding Corliss, they automatically tagged themselves with an accessory-after-the-fact charge. No. I was safe enough as far as either of them was concerned. All they wanted now was to get out with as much skin as they could.

  “Yeah. I’m positive,” I said.

  So what could Green prove without a body? I pushed my luck by tapping the handcuff and looking at Captain Marks.

  “Now, how about the jewelry? If you’re convinced by now I didn’t kill my wife, how’s for taking this thing off?”

  So what could he say? He was sorry?

  Captain Marks unlocked the metal and put the handcuffs in his pocket. His face was red. He cleared his throat. I blocked his apology.

  “Forget it.”

  Captain Marks nodded his thanks. Then he asked Green, “Just where did Nelson come in?”

  Green said, “As a patsy, a fall guy. Sophia needed someone to kill her. As I see her, she must have been a bit of a sadist.”

  A bee buzzing on a windshield. Plop.

  “She knew we’d catch
up with her, eventually. So when they read in the papers that Palmer’s body had been found and their perfect murder had a big flaw in it, she sold Lippy a bill of goods. She persuaded him to find a man to ‘kill’ her.” Green got even with me for refusing to tell the truth about Wolkowysk. “Someone not too smart. Someone without any family ties. Someone with his heart below his waist. Someone like Nelson. A sailor with a tart in every port from here to Mozambique. A man who’d fall hard for the sweet young thing she was pretending to be, a chaste yet passionate young widow. That about right, Nelson?”

  I nodded at him. “Right.”

  Flagle said, “I get it. With Saltz in the ocean, Mrs. Nelson presumed to be dead, and Nelson gone to the gas chamber for her murder, she would have disappeared as completely as Phillip E. Palmer the Third.”

  Green nodded, still looking at me. “It may interest you to know that we’ve done considerable checking on you, Nelson. And James Ginty, the San Pedro agent of the line you’ve sailed with for years, gives you a very clean ticket, mister.”

  I said, “Thanks,” tight-lipped.

  “He says you’re a hell-raising squarehead on shore. An overaged juvenile delinquent with a lot of screwball ideas, the last of which was quitting the sea and buying a farm somewhere in Minnesota. But he also says that afloat you’re one of the best officers the line ever had, levelheaded, dependable, sober. And Ginty asked me to tell you, if you were off your binge, that the Sally B. was delayed in port, and you can take her out if you’re willing to sail as skipper.”

  I got to my feet. “Thanks a lot for telling me. Now would you tell me one last thing?”

  “Possibly.”

  “How did you know Corliss was in Room Five-o-one of the Mission Hotel?”

  Green smiled. “That was an exceedingly difficult deduction on my part. I followed Connors when he left the Purple Parrot. I was ready to make the pinch, merely waiting to see if more of the crowd would show up, when you blundered in.” Green transferred his attention to Meek. “What do you know about this, fellow?”