He held the fish against the wood and trimmed off the ragged part of the fin. He spread the tail and trimmed that. The fish had stopped squirming.
“Some you can cure,” he said, “and some you can’t. You can’t cure swimming-bladder disease, for instance.” He glanced up at me. “This don’t hurt him, case you think it does,” he said. “You can shock a fish to death but you can’t hurt it like a person.”
He put the razor blade down and dipped a cotton swab in some purplish liquid, painted the cut places. Then he dipped a finger in a jar of white vaseline and smeared that over. He dropped the fish in a small tank off to one side of the room. The fish swam around peacefully, quite content.
The gaunt man wiped his hands, sat down at the edge of a bench and stared at me with lifeless eyes. He had been good-looking once, a long time ago.
“You interested in fish?” he asked. His voice had the quiet careful murmur of the cell block and the exercise yard.
I shook my head. “Not particularly. That was just an excuse. I came a long way to see you, Mister Sype.”
He moistened his lips and went on staring at me. When his voice came again it was tired and soft.
“Wallace is the name, Mister.”
I puffed a smoke ring and poked my finger through it. “For my job it’s got to be Sype.”
He leaned forward and dropped his hands between his spread bony knees, clasped them together. Big gnarled hands that had done a lot of hard work in their time. His head tipped up at me and his dead eyes were cold under the shaggy brows. But his voice stayed soft.
“Haven’t see a dick in a year. To talk to. What’s your lay?”
“Guess,” I said.
His voice got still softer. “Listen, dick. I’ve got a nice home here, quiet. Nobody bothers me any more. Nobody’s got a right to. I got a pardon straight from the White House. I’ve got the fish to play with and a man gets fond of anything he takes care of. I don’t owe the world a nickel. I paid up. My wife’s got enough dough for us to live on. All I want is to be let alone, dick.” He stopped talking, shook his head once. “You can’t burn me up—not any more.”
I didn’t say anything. I smiled a little and watched him.
“Nobody can touch me,” he said. “I got a pardon straight from the President’s study. I just want to be let alone.”
I shook my head and kept on smiling at him. “That’s the one thing you can never have—until you give in.”
“Listen,” he said softly. “You may be new on this case. It’s kind of fresh to you. You want to make a rep for yourself. But me, I’ve had almost twenty years of it, and so have a lot of other people, some of ’em pretty smart people too. They know I don’t have nothing that don’t belong to me. Never did have. Somebody else got it.”
“The mail clerk,” I said. “Sure.”
“Listen,” he said, still softly. “I did my time. I know all the angles. I know they ain’t going to stop wondering—long as anybody’s alive that remembers. I know they’re going to send some punk out once in a while to kind of stir it up. That’s okey. No hard feelings. Now what do I do to get you to go home again?”
I shook my head and stared past his shoulder at the fish drifting in their big silent tanks. I felt tired. The quiet of the house made ghosts in my brain, ghosts of a lot of years ago. A train pounding through the darkness, a stickup hidden in a mail car, a gun flash, a dead clerk on the floor, a silent drop off at some water tank, a man who had kept a secret for nineteen years—almost kept it.
“You made one mistake,” I said slowly. “Remember a fellow named Peeler Mardo?”
He lifted his head. I could see him searching in his memory. The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.
“A fellow you knew in Leavenworth,” I said. “A little runt that was in there for splitting twenty-dollar bills and putting phony backs on them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”
“You told him you had the pearls,” I said.
I could see he didn’t believe me. “I must have been kidding him,” he said slowly, emptily.
“Maybe. But here’s the point. He didn’t think so. He was up in this country a while ago with a pal, a guy who called himself Sunset. They saw you somewhere and Peeler recognized you. He got to thinking how he could make himself some jack. But he was a coke hound and he talked in his sleep. A girl got wise and then another girl and a shyster. Peeler got his feet burned and he’s dead.”
Sype stared at me unblinkingly. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened.
I waved my cigarette and went on:
“We don’t know how much he told, but the shyster and a girl are in Olympia. Sunset’s in Olympia, only he’s dead. They killed him. I don’t know if they know where you are or not. But they will sometime, or others like them. You can wear the cops down, if they can’t find the pearls and you don’t try to sell them. You can wear the insurance company down and even the postal men.”
Sype didn’t move a muscle. His big knotty hands clenched between his knees didn’t move. His dead eyes just stared.
“But you can’t wear the chiselers down,” I said. “They’ll never lay off. There’ll always be a couple or three with time enough and money enough and meanness enough to bear down. They’ll find out what they want to know some way. They’ll snatch your wife or take you out in the woods and give you the works. And you’ll have to come through… Now I’ve got a decent, square proposition.”
“Which bunch are you?” Sype asked suddenly. “I thought you smelled of dick, but I ain’t so sure now.”
“Insurance,” I said. “Here’s the deal. Twenty-five grand reward in all. Five grand to the girl that passed me the info. She got it on the square and she’s entitled to that cut. Ten grand to me. I’ve done all the work and looked into all the guns. Ten grand to you, through me. You couldn’t get a nickel direct. Is there anything in it? How does it look?”
“It looks fine,” he said gently. “Except for one thing. I don’t have no pearls, dick.”
I scowled at him. That was my wad. I didn’t have any more. I straightened away from the wall and dropped a cigarette end on the wood floor, crushed it out. I turned to go.
He stood up and put a hand out. “Wait a minute,” he said gravely, “and I’ll prove it to you.”
He went across the floor in front of me and out of the room. I stared at the fish and chewed my lip. I heard the sound of a car engine somewhere, not very close. I heard a drawer open and shut apparently in a near-by room.
Sype came back into the fish room. He had a shiny Colt .45 in his gaunt fist. It looked as long as a man’s forearm.
He pointed it at me and said: “I got pearls in this, six of them. Lead pearls. I can comb a fly’s whiskers at sixty yards. You ain’t no dick. Now get up and blow—and tell your red-hot friends I’m ready to shoot their teeth out any day of the week and twice on Sunday.”
I didn’t move. There was a madness in the man’s dead eyes. I didn’t dare move.
“That’s grandstand stuff,” I said slowly. “I can prove I’m a dick. You’re an ex-con and it’s felony just having that rod. Put it down and talk sense.”
The car I had heard seemed to be stopping outside the house. Brakes whined on drums. Feet clattered, up a walk, up steps. Sudden sharp voices, a caught exclamation.
Sype backed across the room until he was between the table and a big twenty or thirty gallon tank. He grinned at me, the wide clear grin of a fighter at bay.
“I see your friends kind of caught up with you,” he drawled. “Take your gat out and drop it on the floor while you still got time—and breath.”
I didn’t move. I looked at the wiry hair above his eyes. I looked into his eyes. I knew if I moved—even to do what he told me—he would shoot.
Steps came up the stairs. They were clogged, shuffling steps, with a hint of struggle in them.
Three people came into the room.
XI
MRS. SYPE came in first
, stiff-legged, her eyes glazed, her arms bent rigidly at the elbows and the hands clawing straight forward at nothing, feeling for something that wasn’t there. There was a gun in her back, one of Carol Donovan’s small .32’s, held efficiently in Carol Donovan’s small ruthless hand.
Madder came last. He was drunk, brave from the bottle, flushed and savage. He threw the Smith and Wesson down on me and leered.
Carol Donovan pushed Mrs. Sype aside. The older woman stumbled over into the corner and sank down on her knees, blank-eyed.
Sype stared at the Donovan girl. He was rattled because she was a girl and young and pretty. He hadn’t been used to the type. Seeing her took the fire out of him. If men had come in he would have shot them to pieces.
The small dark white-faced girl faced him coldly, said in her tight chilled voice:
“All right, Dad. Shed the heater. Make it smooth now.”
Sype leaned down slowly, not taking his eyes off her. He put his enormous frontier Colt on the floor.
“Kick it away from you, Dad.”
Sype kicked it. The gun skidded across the bare boards, over towards the center of the room.
“That’s the way, old-timer. You hold on him, Rush, while I unrod the dick.”
The two guns swiveled and the hard gray eyes were looking at me now. Madder went a little way towards Sype and pointed his Smith and Wesson at Sype’s chest.
The girl smiled, not a nice smile. “Bright boy, eh? You sure stick your neck out all the time, don’t you? Made a beef, shamus. Didn’t frisk your skinny pal. He had a little map in one shoe.”
“I didn’t need one,” I said smoothly, and grinned at her.
I tried to make the grin appealing, because Mrs. Sype was moving her knees on the floor, and every move took her nearer to Sype’s Colt.
“But you’re all washed up now, you and your big smile. Hoist the mitts while I get your iron. Up, Mister.”
She was a girl, about five feet two inches tall, and weighed around a hundred and twenty. Just a girl. I was five-eleven and a half, weighed one-ninety-five. I put my hands up and hit her on the jaw.
That was crazy, but I had all I could stand of the Donovan-Madder act, the Donovan-Madder guns, the Donovan-Madder tough talk. I hit her on the jaw.
She went back a yard and her popgun went off. A slug burned my ribs. She started to fall. Slowly, like a slow motion picture, she fell. There was something silly about it.
Mrs. Sype got the Colt and shot her in the back.
Madder whirled and the instant he turned Sype rushed him. Madder jumped back and yelled and covered Sype again. Sype stopped cold and the wide crazy grin came back on his gaunt face.
The slug from the Colt knocked the girl forward as though a door had whipped in a high wind. A flurry of blue cloth, something thumped my chest—her head. I saw her face for a moment as she bounced back, a strange face that I had never seen before.
Then she was a huddled thing on the floor at my feet, small, deadly, extinct, with redness coming out from under her, and the tall quiet woman behind her with the smoking Colt held in both hands.
Madder shot Sype twice. Sype plunged forward still grinning and hit the end of the table. The purplish liquid he had used on the sick fish sprayed up over him. Madder shot him again as he was falling.
I jerked my Luger out and shot Madder in the most painful place I could think of that wasn’t likely to be fatal—the back of the knee. He went down exactly as if he had tripped over a hidden wire. I had cuffs on him before he even started to groan.
I kicked guns here and there and went over to Mrs. Sype and took the big Colt out of her hands.
It was very still in the room for a little while. Eddies of smoke drifted towards the skylight, filmy gray, pale in the afternoon sun. I heard the surf booming in the distance. Then I heard a whistling sound close at hand.
It was Sype trying to say something. His wife crawled across to him, still on her knees, huddled beside him. There was blood on his lips and bubbles. He blinked hard, trying to clear his head. He smiled up at her. His whistling voice said very faintly:
“The Moors, Hattie—the Moors.”
Then his neck went loose and the smile melted off his face. His head rolled to one side on the bare floor.
Mrs. Sype touched him, then got very slowly to her feet and looked at me, calm, dry-eyed.
She said in a low clear voice: “Will you help me carry him to the bed? I don’t like him here with these people.”
I said: “Sure. What was that he said?”
“I don’t know. Some nonsense about his fish, I think.”
I lifted Sype’s shoulders and she took his feet and we carried him into the bedroom and put him on the bed. She folded his hands on his chest and shut his eyes. She went over and pulled the blinds down.
“That’s all, thank you,” she said, not looking at me. “The telephone is downstairs.”
She sat down in a chair beside the bed and put her head down on the coverlet near Sype’s arm.
I went out of the room and shut the door.
XII
MADDER’S leg was bleeding slowly, not dangerously. He stared at me with fear-crazed eyes while I tied a tight handkerchief above his knee. I figured he had a cut tendon and maybe a chipped kneecap. He might walk a little lame when they came to hang him.
I went downstairs and stood on the porch looking at the two cars in front, then down the hill towards the pier. Nobody could have told where the shots came from, unless he happened to be passing. Quite likely nobody had even noticed them. There was probably shooting in the woods around there a good deal.
I went back into the house and looked at the crank telephone on the living-room wall, but didn’t touch it yet. Something was bothering me. I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window and a ghost voice said in my ears: “The Moors, Hattie. The Moors.”
I went back upstairs into the fish room. Madder was groaning now, thick panting groans. What did I care about a torturer like Madder?
The girl was quite dead. None of the tanks was hit. The fish swam peacefully in their green water, slow and peaceful and easy. They didn’t care about Madder either.
The tank with the black Chinese Moors in it was over in the corner, about ten gallon size. There were just four of them, big fellows, about four inches body length, coal black all over. Two of them were sucking oxygen on top of the water and two were waddling sluggishly on the bottom. They had thick deep bodies with a lot of spreading tail and high dorsal fins and their bulging telescope eyes that made them look like frogs when they were head towards you.
I watched them fumbling around in the green stuff that was growing in the tank. A couple of red pond snails were window-cleaning. The two on the bottom looked thicker and more sluggish than the two on the top. I wondered why.
There was a long-handled strainer made of woven string lying between two of the tanks. I got it and fished down in the tank, trapped one of the big Moors and lifted it out. I turned it over in the net, looked at its faintly silver belly. I saw something that looked like a suture. I felt the place. There was a hard lump under it.
I pulled the other one off the bottom. Same suture, same hard round lump. I got one of the two that had been sucking air on top. No suture, no hard round lump. It was harder to catch too.
I put it back in the tank. My business was with the other two. I like goldfish as well as the next man, but business is business and crime is crime. I took my coat off and rolled my sleeves up and picked the razor blade backed with adhesive off the table.
It was a very messy job. It took about five minutes. Then they lay in the palm of my hand, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, heavy, perfectly round, milky white and shimmering with that inner light no other jewel has. The Leander pearls.
I washed them off, wrapped them in my handkerchief, rolled down my sleeves and put my coat back on. I looked at Madder, at his little pain and fear-tortured eyes, the sweat on his face. I didn’t care anything about Madder. He was
a killer, a torturer.
I went out of the fish room. The bedroom door was still shut. I went down below and cranked the wall telephone.
“This is the Wallace place at Westport,” I said. “There’s been an accident. We need a doctor and we’ll have to have the police. What can you do?”
The girl said: “I’ll try and get you a doctor, Mr. Wallace. It may take a little time though. There’s a town marshal at Westport. Will he do?”
“I suppose so,” I said and thanked her and hung up. There were points about a country telephone after all.
I lit another cigarette and sat down in one of the rustic rockers on the porch. In a little while there were steps and Mrs. Sype came out of the house. She stood a moment looking off down the hills, then she sat down in the other rocker beside me. Her dry eyes looked at me steadily.
“You’re a detective, I suppose,” she said slowly, diffidently.
“Yes. I represent the company that insured the Leander pearls.”
She looked off into the distance. “I thought he would have peace here,” she said. “That nobody would bother him any more. That this place would be a sort of sanctuary.”
“He ought not to have tried to keep the pearls.”
She turned her head, quickly this time. She looked blank now, then she looked scared.
I reached down in my pocket and got out the wadded handkerchief, opened it up on the palm of my hand. They lay there together on the white linen, two hundred grand worth of murder.
“He could have had his sanctuary,” I said. “Nobody wanted to take it away from him. But he wasn’t satisfied with that.”
She looked slowly, lingeringly at the pearls. Then her lips twitched. Her voice got hoarse.
“Poor Wally,” she said. “So you did find them. You’re pretty clever, you know. He killed dozens of fish before he learned how to do that trick.” She looked up into my face. A little wonder showed at the back of her eyes.
She said: “I always hated the idea. Do you remember the old Bible theory of the scapegoat?”
Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories Page 17
