Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (30 page)

I don’t know why I was getting angry listening to all this. Maybe it was because I remembered that Veronica hadn’t
expressed the slightest grief over the death of her husband’s son, and that she’d wanted to strangle the crying little girl sired by her lover. Well, they were
both
dead now, those offspring by one mate or another, and I couldn’t help wondering how much Veronica had loved either one of them.
Or
her husband.
Or
, for that matter, Hamilton Jeffries. I was also annoyed by their joint decision (
That’s what we decided, Ham and I
) to keep from the police the information that Sunny McKinney had been staying at Jeffries’s house for the past four days.

“Why’d she come there?” I asked. “Did she know you were her father?”

“No, no,” Jeffries said. “We decided it was best to keep that from her, Veronica and I.”

“The way you decided it was best to keep from the police—”

“We could not afford to open that particular can of peas,” Jeffries said.

It occurred to me that they’d opened that particular can of peas twenty-four years ago.

“You saw the way they treated Veronica just now,” he said. “I’m certain they
still
feel she’s somehow implicated. If we’d told them about Sunny being at my house...”

“Then
you
might have become implicated as well, isn’t that right?”

“Both of us,” he said. “Veronica
and
I.”

“I thought Veronica didn’t know she was there.”

“I didn’t!” Veronica said. “Until tonight.”

“You didn’t call to tell him she was missing?”

“I didn’t.”

“His own
daughter
? You didn’t pick up the phone to—”

“I told you I didn’t!”

I turned to Jeffries. “Was Sunny in the habit of coming to your house when she was in trouble?”

“Not often. Sometimes. She thought of me as a good friend.”

“Some friend. She’s hiding from a fucking killer—”

“I don’t appreciate such language, young man,” Jeffries said.

“Did she tell you why she came there?”

“She was frightened. She said she needed a place to stay for the next few days, until she decided what she was going to do next.”

“Did she say what she was scared of?”

“Yes. She thought someone might try to kill her.”

“Then you
knew
that.”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t call Veronica? To tell her that her daughter—your daughter—was with you?”

“I did not. I felt that would be betraying a confidence.”

“It never occurred to you that Veronica might be worried about her?”

“It occurred to me.”

“Did it occur to you that Veronica might have notified the police of her daughter’s absence?”

“That occurred to me as well.”

“But you didn’t call her.”

“I didn’t call her.”

“So
she
was there on the M.K., unaware that her daughter was at your house, and
you
were three miles down the road, unaware that her daughter was being sought by the police.”

“That’s it exactly.”

“Didn’t Bloom come to see you yesterday?”

“He did.”

“Where was the Porsche? Didn’t he see the Porsche?”

“It was in my garage.”

“Then he
didn’t
see it.”

“No.”

“If Sunny told you she was afraid—”

“She did.”

“—told you someone might try to kill her—”

“Yes.”

“—why didn’t you tell Bloom?”

“I felt she’d be safe with me.”

“Did you feel she’d be safe when she left tonight?”

“I wasn’t there when she left.”

“Then how do you know she left at six-thirty?”

“I don’t mean I wasn’t on the premises—”

“What
do
you mean?”

“I was out back, in the kennels. I treat all sorts of animals, not only livestock. People bring dogs to me, cats...”

“So you were out in the kennels.”

“Yes. The phone rang at—oh, I don’t know—it must’ve been a little before six. Either she answered the phone or it stopped ringing. Either way, the next thing I heard was the Porsche backing out of the garage. By the time I came around front, she was gone.”

“At six-thirty.”

“Yes, about then.”

“You didn’t know she was planning to leave?”

“I didn’t.”

“Before then, did she tell you where she might be going?”

“No.”

“All right, what
did
she tell you?”

“Only that she was afraid someone might try to kill her.”

“Did she say who?”

“The same person who’d killed her brother and Mr. Burrill.”

“
Who?
”

“She didn’t say.”

“Didn’t
say
, or didn’t
know
?”

“She was afraid to tell me.”

“Why?”

“Because she felt she might be placing me in danger as well.”

“She comes to you for help, she tells you someone might be after her—”

“That’s right.”

“—but she doesn’t tell you
who
?”

“She would not reveal his identity to me, that’s correct.”

“
His
identity? Did she say it was a
man
?”

“I gathered from the pronouns she used that she was referring to a man, yes.”

“What’d she say about him? Did she describe him?”

“She did not.”

“Did she say he had a Spanish accent?”

“She did not mention a Spanish accent.”

“What
did
she mention?”

“She said he knew about her brother’s scheme.”

“What scheme?”

“To buy the farm.”

“She called it a
scheme
? How was buying a—”

“Not the purchase of the land per se,” Jeffries said.

“Then what?”

“The use to which he planned to put it.”

“And what was that?”

“He was going to plant marijuana on it. He planned to grow and sell marijuana.”

And now at least
that
part of it made sense.

I had given Jack McKinney all the facts and figures that should have proved the foolhardiness of trying to revitalize Burrill’s moribund snapbean farm. I had explained to him that all he could hope to realize was a net of a hundred and twenty-six dollars an acre if he planted a crop that couldn’t possibly turn a profit here on the central west coast of Florida. He had turned a
deaf ear to my reasoning. Jack McKinney was planning to grow marijuana, which required no spraying and dusting, no harvesting machinery, no pickers or packers, no brokerage fees, and none of the other costs that had proved such a burden to Burrill. Burrill must have gone dancing in the streets the day a sucker like Jack McKinney came along to relieve him of his fifteen acres of snapbean farm.

But McKinney had known all along that you could plant marijuana in soil you wouldn’t choose to be buried in, you could plant it in a window box, you could plant it on a bald man’s hairpiece, you could plant it on a goddamn
rock
, and it would flourish. I supposed you could even plant it among your rows of snapbean bushes so that from the air it would go undetected; the pilot of a Sheriff ’s Department helicopter would only wag his head in wonder at the stupidity of yet another fool trying to grow
beans
here.

Some fool, young Jack.

He’d had us all convinced that he was about to trade his mother’s cows for a handful of beans.

Instead, he was planning to drop golden nuggets into the soil. I had no idea what the going rate for a bale of marijuana might be; Bloom would know for sure. But I was willing to bet that McKinney’s first harvest would have more than quadrupled his investment in the farm.

“How’d Sunny find out about this?” I asked.

“Jack told her,” Jeffries said. “They were very close.”

“Did he also tell her he’d been stealing his mother’s cows?”

“No. She figured that out for herself.”

“And this person she was afraid of—how’d
he
find out about Jack’s plan?”

“I assume she mentioned it to him.”

“When?”

“As soon as she learned of it. Sometime before Jack was—”

“Crowell,” I said.

Bloom wasn’t convinced.

In the car on the way to New Town, he did the same shadow dance he’d earlier performed for me on the telephone, only this time his silent partners included a detective named Cooper Rawles, a huge black man with wide shoulders, a barrel chest, and massive hands. It was not often that you ran into a person as big as Rawles; he made me feel like a Munchkin. It was even less often that you ran into a black cop with the rank of detective on Calusa’s police force. Maybe his size had something to do with it. Maybe somebody figured it was better to have him on
their
side than on the bad guys’ side. Rawles sat as silent as a mountain in the back seat. I was sitting up front alongside Bloom.

“First of all,” Bloom said, “the kid’s got an alibi a mile long. The alibi is Sunny McKinney, who says she was with him all night on the night her brother was killed, am I right, Coop? That’s what the girl told us, that she was with Crowell all night that night, in the sack with him while her brother was getting slashed. So if this is the guy who actually
killed
her brother, why would she alibi him? That doesn’t make sense to me, does it make sense to you, Coop?”

Rawles knew an answer wasn’t expected. Bloom was talking to himself out loud, trying to put all the pieces together. Rawles grunted.

“I mean, this is her
brother
we’re talking about here—though it turns out now he was only her half brother. Still and all, she
thought
he was her brother, and you don’t go around alibiing somebody who killed your own brother, however great he may be in the sack—it’s just not something you do. But that’s what she
told us, that she was with this Crowell creep from when they got back from McDonald’s till the next morning. So that’s the
first
thing, the kid’s got an alibi, or at least had an alibi. His alibi’s dead now, same as the brother—why the hell didn’t those two
tell
us what they knew?”

He was referring now to Veronica and Jeffries.
I
knew what he meant. I wasn’t so sure Rawles did, even though he grunted again.

“Girl’s with him four days,” Bloom said, “he never dreams of calling the police, even though she tells him somebody may be out to get her. Turns out he’s the girl’s father, huh? Some father, he doesn’t recognize his daughter’s in danger, doesn’t call the police, lets her stay there without a peep, and doesn’t even call us when she takes off—six-thirty, is that what Jeffries said?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And you found her in your pool at a quarter to nine, that means somebody had two hours to shoot her and dump her, that’s more time than you need, you can ice somebody and get rid of the body in what, Coop, ten minutes, you’re really pressed for time?”

“Five,” Rawles said.

It was the first time I had heard him speak.

“So let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this Crowell creep is the killer, though I can’t figure out any motive, can you, Coop? But let’s say she heads for his place at six-thirty—I can’t figure out why she’d go
there
, either, not if she thinks he’s trying to find her and do away with her, but let that pass for a minute. Let’s say she goes there, and Crowell pumps two shots into her head and then carries her down to the car and carts her over to your place—why
your
place, that’s another thing—but how can he manage that in a place like New Town? You mean to tell me nobody heard shots? You mean to tell me nobody
saw
him carrying down a body and dumping it in a car? They see and hear
everything
in that neighborhood, am I right, Coop?”

“You fart in that neighborhood,” Rawles said, “they hear it three blocks away.”

“So they don’t hear two gunshots, huh?” Bloom said.

“Didn’t shoot her in the car, neither,” Rawles said. “Criminalistics didn’t find no bullets, no expelled cartridge cases.”

“Maybe she met him someplace,” I suggested. “Maybe she was afraid to go to his apartment.”

“Lots of lonely places in Calusa,” Bloom said, nodding. “Maybe she phoned him, said meet me at the beach or something, that’s a possibility. But why? If she knows the guy is after her, why hand herself over on a silver platter? It doesn’t make sense, I don’t buy it. And
another
thing,” he said to himself. “Let’s say Crowell is the killer, okay? Just for the sake of argument. What’s his motive? You see any motive, Coop? He knows about the pot farm, terrific—what’s the going rate for a bale of marijuana, Coop?”

“You mean the cheap Mexican and Jamaican shit?”

“How much is that running?”

“Five, six hundred bucks a pound. You get your better stuff from Colombia, California, and Hawaii, that’ll run you a thousand a pound.”

“How many pounds in a bale?”

“Depends whether it’s packed loose or tight. A hundred, a hundred and fifty.”

“So McKinney was figuring, say, six thousand a bale.”