Start Screaming Murder

by Talmage Powell

  “But I deny what you say.”

  “Then you’re in grave danger yourself.”

  “Equally ridiculous.”

  I shook my head. “The schooner came here with a purpose. The Lessards, Scanlons, Kincaid and Smith were all a part of that purpose. If you’re not planning to put the finger on someone in Cuba, then we have to conclude that the hand which struck your husband down is reaching for you.”

  “Really? Why?”

  I shrugged. “The murderers, the expropriators always fear retaliation. They never feel safe. They are of the blood-purge school.”

  “What are you trying to do, Mr. Rivers? Frighten me into hiring you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry for you, as I’d be sorry for any woman driven half mad by the complete wreckage of her life. Disaster is especially difficult for a queen. But I’m not here for hire, just answers.”

  “Too bad I haven’t got them.”

  Beyond her, the lace curtains ballooned. I felt a breeze across my cheeks. I saw the change in her eyes as she looked past me.

  I turned on eggshells, because I knew that’s the way I’d better turn.

  Kincaid was standing in the doorway that gave to an adjoining room. His eyes were puffy, his shirt rumpled as if he’d been taking a nap. He’d opened the door noiselessly and entered without putting his shoes on.

  He stood with a lithe looseness of body, the sharp angles and planes of his face without expression. His expression was reserved for the eyes under the high forehead. The gun in his right hand was centered on my middle.

  “I’m very tired of you, Rivers,” he said slowly. His gaze moved past me. “How’d he get in, Mrs. Carton? Where is the dog?”

  “Immobilized.”

  “Rivers has a habit of immobilizing his enemies. But he’s all through with that now,” Kincaid promised.

  “I was on the point of calling for you,” Emily Carton said, “when I realized he was coming through the window. I was afraid you wouldn’t be at your best, fogged with sleep, if I revealed you were here. I grabbed the phone to make Rivers think I was alone. I was certain our voices or ensuing commotion would awaken you.”

  “Very clear thinking,” Kincaid said.

  I had to agree. It was no wonder she’d managed an escape from Cuba with the world falling in on her. She was intelligent, capable, accustomed to command.

  “What do I do with Rivers, Mrs. Carton?”

  “We can’t have him found here. Take him to the Scanlon cottage. I’ll call you there. We shan’t be needing the cottage much longer.”

  “We’re going ahead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Half a million is a fortune, Mrs. Carton.”

  Her eyes burned at the thought of the loss. “Don’t remind me, Kincaid! We can’t take any further risks trying to recover the money. We’ll have to accept the loss.”

  “We, Mrs. Carton? When I got in touch and braced you with the idea, the deal was …"

  “I know what the deal was, Kincaid! I have another half million—and another—and another.” She was almost screaming at him. “Does that satisfy you?”

  “Sure, Mrs. Carton. Business is business. If you keep details clear as you go along, there can’t be any misunderstanding.”

  “We won’t have a misunderstanding,” Emily Carton told him, “so long as you do precisely as I say.”

  “Okay, Mrs. Carton. Your word is good enough for me.” He motioned with the revolver. “How about we move out, Rivers? I’m sure Mrs. Carton has looked at your kisser long enough. Mrs. Carton, please take his gun. Then get my shoes.” She lifted my gun, tossed it on a chair.

  She fetched his shoes and jacket from the next room. He slid his feet into the shoes without taking his eyes off me. She kneeled and tied the laces.

  He slipped a flashlight from his jacket pocket when we were outside.

  “To the left, Rivers. The back of the house.”

  A black sedan of a low-priced make was parked behind the house out of sight.

  “You in front,” he said.

  As I slid under the wheel, he eased into the back seat. I felt the muzzle of the revolver touch the back of my neck.

  “Take the bay road, and don’t break any traffic laws.”

  As we rolled along with stars looking at themselves in the vast sweep of bay water, the revolver eased from my neck. But I knew it was there. And how quickly Kincaid would strike.

  “Too bad you went to all that trouble, Rivers, and ended up without the half million bucks.”

  “You think that was my motive?”

  “What else?”

  “How can you be sure I haven’t got the money?”

  “Don’t try to string me,” he said. “If you’d found the money, you’d have stopped sticking your nose in.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “Not interested. If Mrs. Carton’s willing to write off the loss, so am I. Before dawn we’ll be at sea. We won’t care what happens on the mainland after that.”

  He was saying that they’d have no fears from the mainland. I was the only person with the tip-off, the truth about the Sprite’s mission, for the authorities. Kincaid intended to see that the truth wasn’t told.

  “Who is the man?” I asked.

  “Man?”

  “In Cuba.”

  “Oh, there are a lot of head cheeses in Cuba, Rivers. There are big head cheeses and smaller head cheeses. The fellow we’re interested in is pretty much a chief head cheese. He got that way largely through what he did to R. D. Carton. Carton had trusted that guy with his life, too. Can you blame Mrs. Carton for feeling the way she does?”

  I approached the turn-off, slowed at Kincaid’s bidding, and drove past the bait camp on the pot-holed asphalt road.

  The outlines of the Scanlon cottage swam into the edges of the headlight beams.

  As I braked the car in the corner of the sandy yard, Jack Scanlon came around the far side of the house. In the full glare of the headlights, he was sweaty, disheveled. His face had lost its lazy look. His black hair was lank, plastered to his forehead and temples with sweat.

  “Who’s there?” he called, a touch of panic in his voice.

  “Kincaid. Watch it. I’ve got Rivers in the front seat.”

  Scanlon ran to the side of the car.

  Kincaid said, “What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s Maria. She’s off there in a thicket. She won’t come out.”

  “Well, go in and get her. A psycho wife is your problem.”

  “I’ve tried. I can’t catch her.”

  “We’ve too many other things to think about,” Kincaid said, his voice low and savage. “What’s she doing hiding like that?”

  “We had a fight.”

  “What about?”

  “I’m going to leave the stinking cow,” Scanlon said. “I can’t stand her any longer.”

  “You’re going to get her out of there,” Kincaid told him. “That’s what you’re going to do.”

  “Listen, you can’t make me stay with …”

  “I’m telling you, Scanlon.”

  “And I’m telling you,” Scanlon said. “This whole idea has blown up.”

  “No, it hasn’t.”

  “Like hell. And I’m out, see? Count me out. The money’s gone. We can’t find it, and things have been getting hotter with every passing hour.”

  “And your feet have been getting colder. But there’s money. Plenty of money.”

  Scanlon looked at Kincaid’s shadow in the back seat. “What do you mean?”

  “Mrs. Carton is taking the loss. Now you get your wife under control and head for the Sprite.”

  Scanlon stood in an awkward position, forearm half-raised to his sweaty forehead. He turned jerkily, cupped his hands about his mouth. “Maria,” he said in a louder than normal voice, “I didn’t mean it.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Maria … honest … I wasn’t myself. I didn’t mean those things … my
nerves…. They’re on edge from the pressure of the past few days.”

  A rustling sound came from the thicket beyond the front yard.

  “Please, Maria … I’m sorry … I’ll make it up to you, darling …"

  Because she wanted so very much to believe, she believed.

  She came slowly out of the thicket. Blocky, bovine, her drab hair stringing about her face, she came slinking forward. She was on her feet, of course, but she had the attitude of a person crawling on the belly.

  “Jack … I couldn’t stand it without you.”

  “I know, hon. I’m sorry.”

  “When you threw those jewels back in my lap, I thought I’d lost you for good.”

  “What jewels?” Kincaid muttered quickly.

  With a bare turn of his head in the direction of the car, Scanlon said, “She had some jewels in a safe deposit box in New Orleans. She hopped over and back.” To Maria, he said: “I was just shook up, baby, from the waiting and all. You’ll never lose me.”

  She held out her arms then and rushed forward. Scanlon, with a distaste she missed, put his arm about her shoulders.

  “Okay,” Kincaid said. “Get moving.”

  “How about Rivers?”

  “I’m going to kill him,” Kincaid said.

  Maria Scanlon started. Jack tightened his grip on her shoulder.

  “Don’t you think about it, Maria,” Scanlon said. “Kincaid knows what he’s doing.”

  A brief desire to help me showed in her eyes. But she yielded to the pressure of her husband’s arm, and they moved away in the night.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kincaid waited. It seemed to me an incredible amount of time passed. I heard the slow, hard coursing of blood through my head. I felt as if a fog of steam were smothering me. The steam did nothing for the dried-out stiffness of my mouth and throat.

  The gun stayed inches from the back of my head.

  “All right,” Kincaid said, satisfied at last with the utter silence of the night. “Get out.”

  I got out. A brief trembling passed through my knees.

  “There’s a marshy place beyond the yard, Rivers. It will do. They’ll be a long time finding you.”

  He motioned with the gun for me to turn around. “Keep your hands shoulder high. Now move.”

  I walked down the long beam of light from the car with the eerie feeling that my feet weren’t touching the ground.

  We reached the brush, a stand of tough, young pines. The light came through in patches. Plenty for him to cut me down if I tried to run.

  A pine bough, heavy with needles, raked across my face. I barely felt it.

  The second bough made an impression on me.

  I let my right hand lock about the next limb. It was tough as a willow whip. I threw myself forward and down, releasing the pine bough.

  Kincaid was right behind me. My motion held his attention. I heard him start to speak my name like a curse. Then the pine bough slashed him across the eyes.

  I pinwheeled and went in under the bough. He was off-balance, clawing at his eyes. My shoulder hit him in the gut. My hand locked on his gun wrist.

  With a shrill gasp of pain, he went over backward, his leg crumpled under him. I swarmed him, giving him no chance to recover.

  I hit him three times in the face so fast that my fist made almost a continuous sound.

  He tried to wriggle free, kicking, striking at me blindly. The gun slipped out of his hand. We threshed, clawing at the gun. I was unable to get a clean punch. I butted him under the chin. His head snapped back, and I felt the starch go out of him.

  I rolled free, grabbed him by the collar as he tried to flounder to his feet. I hit him twice dead on the chin. His knees knocked together. When I released his collar, he fell face forward in the sand.

  Finding the gun quickly, I thrust it under my belt. With his collar again in my grip, the back of the collar this time, I dragged Kincaid out of the brush and across the yard.

  Inside the cottage, I let him slump in the middle of the living room. I turned on lights as I searched the place. In the kitchen I found what I was looking for, a coil of strong clothesline.

  Kincaid’s loose, unconscious form offered no resistance as I trussed him up, hands behind him, legs drawn backward and connected to his bound wrists by a doubled length of line.

  I dragged him to a bedroom closet and shoved him inside. I wasn’t careful about bruising him. But it was comparatively cordial treatment. As a prison, the closet was nothing like a car trunk.

  Although not listed in Scanlon’s name, there was a phone in the cottage. I left it off the hook, preferring Mrs. Carton to get a busy signal rather than the endless ringing of an unanswered phone.

  No clean towels were in the kitchen or bath. I used my handkerchief to clean the worst of the grit from Kincaid’s gun. Then I turned off the lights and left the cottage.

  In Kincaid’s sedan, I rolled into the parking area of the bait camp. Cutting the lights, I got out of the car and walked to the edge of the water.

  Fiddler crabs scurried across the sand, seeking their holes. No tide was running, the bay lapping softly against the pilings of the pier and the rental boats in their slips.

  The twin masts of the Sprite stood straight and steady against the night sky. In addition to the red points of her navigation lights, the schooner showed a haze of white light on the foredeck.

  I waded into the water beside the bait camp pier, moving gingerly to keep from splashing. When the water was waist deep, I took the gun in my hand and held it above the water level.

  I checked each flat-bottom as I passed it. In the fifth or sixth, I found a pair of kapok life preserver cushions.

  Pushing the bouyant cushions ahead of me, I waded on until the water was neck deep. Then I stacked the cushions, rested my upper chest on them, and continued moving toward the schooner with a silent scissor kick.

  As the long minutes passed, I began tiring more from the effort and strain of remaining silent and unobserved than from the physical exertion. I moved with my gun hand resting on the upper edge of the kapok, out of the water, my legs driving without breaking the surface.

  Finally, I heard the mumble of their voices, crescendoing now and then in angry peaks of sound. Scanlon was telling Lessard that he was up-to-here with the deal. He was pulling out. Lessard was none too happy.

  “I depended on you, Jack,” he said bitterly.

  “But everything has changed,” Maria put in, “and it’s not the same bargain that Jack entered.”

  “That’s right,” Scanlon said.

  “Let’s all have a little drinkee,” D. D. piped in.

  Alex Lessard paced the foredeck. “Damn it,” he cried in acute frustration, “why does it always have to turn out so rough for me? Everything I touch …"

  “You’re a hard luck guy,” Scanlon said. “Some people are that way.”

  “The old lady is going to be sore,” D. D. said.

  “I can’t help that,” Scanlon said. “I’m going to tell her.”

  “We’ll tell her together, Jack,” Maria said.

  “Oh, shut up!” he told her, his voice heavy with contempt and disgust.

  I moved under the shadow of the Sprite’s hull, inching my way toward the ladder. I grasped it, held on. The kapok cushions drifted away.

  In the water, I was buoyant. I knew my weight would cause a slight list of the hull when I started up the ladder. I drew in a breath, got set, and went up, fast.

  As my head and shoulders cleared the edge of the deck, I snapped the gun toward them.

  “Hold it, Scanlon! The rest of you—stand nice and easy.”

  Scanlon’s hand stopped before it dipped in his rear pocket. They stood unmoving, staring at me as I climbed on deck and stood with water puddling at my feet.

  Then D. D. broke the paralysis with a drunken, senseless giggle. Alex Lessard shot her a dark look.

  “Too bad he didn’t fall for our hopeful little lies and away with me to
Jacksonville, ay, Papa?” she said to Lessard.

  Drawn so tight inwardly he was shaking from it, Lessard said to Scanlon. “You told us Kincaid had taken care of Rivers.”

  “That’s what Kincaid said,” Scanlon stood white-lipped.

  “Ed,” D. D. said, “do you mind if I have a little drinkee?”

  “D. D….!” Lessard said through the swollen veins in his neck.

  “Oh, you fool,” she said quietly. “You miserable, doomed-to-failure fool. Can’t you see it’s all over?”

  “Not yet,” Lessard said. “Not yet!”

  “You never know when to stop banging your head against the wall, do you, father dear? Well, I do. I’m thirsty. I’d like to stay blotto the rest of my life. But since Rivers is too big and real to wish out of existence, I’m going to do the next best thing, for myself. Ed, I’m not guilty of a thing beyond conspiracy and coming along for the ride. You need a state’s witness?”

  “That’s right,” Scanlon said.

  “Bitch!” Maria screamed. “Disloyal bitch!”

  “Go die, cow. You’d be better off. Your brain’s as putrid as the rest of you. You stink. I know it. Your husband knows it. You know it yourself.”

  “Knock it off,” I said. “I do mind about that drink, D. D. You just ease up behind Scanlon and lift the gun from his back pocket.”

  She sighed, then did as she was told, holding the gun carefully away from her where I could see it.

  “That’s the ticket,” I said. “Now drop the gun over the side.”

  D. D. was the usual supple vision in skimpy shorts and halter. Lessard was wearing his faded khaki swimming trunks and nothing else. Neither had much chance of concealing a deadly weapon in what they were wearing.

  As D. D. carried it to the rail and opened her fingers, the gun ker-chugged in the water.

  “Now,” I told her, “frisk Maria.”

  D. D. moved behind Maria. Her hands patted Maria’s sweaty, rumpled cotton dress.

  White-lipped, Maria said, “When we left you with Kincaid, I pitied you, Rivers. I wished for a way to make it easier for you. Now I wish Kincaid had killed you.”

  I let it pass.