Solomon's Vineyard (2 page)

“How did you know ...?”

The pasty-faced cop broke in. “Save the questions. We'll take him
down to the station. Chief'll want to sec him.”

“I don't want to go to jail.”

“Don't get scared. If your nose is clean, nothing'll happen.”

“But my name will be in the papers. I'm a hardware salesman. It'll
hurt my business.”

“That's your lookout,” the young cop said.

We started for the station; but on the sidewalk they decided I'd
better look at the body. They wanted an identification. We went back up
the stairs and into the house. We passed the fat woman, still weeping,
and climbed another flight of stairs. I wondered if Oke had been making
love to her He used to say they were all alike with your eyes closed.
His room was on the second floor. It was a large room with a bay
window, a double bed with a clean white spread, a hand-carved mahogany
dresser, and a couple of mohair chairs. I could see an elm tree out the
window.

The body was in the bathroom under a sheet. “I don't want to look at
him,” I said. “I'll get sick.”

“A big guy like you!” the pasty-faced cop said. I said: “I'm not used
to bodies.”

The young cop pulled off the sheet. “It's time you were.” Oke was
lying on his side in front of the toilet. He looked smaller dead, and
not so fat. He had on a shirt, pants and black silk socks. The pants'
fly was unbuttoned. He had been shot just behind the right ear. There
was a brown smear under his head, and blood had darkened his blond
hair.

“That's Mr. Johnson,” I said.

We looked at him. At the right of the toilet was an open window. The
bullet had come through there. I could sec the back yards of three
houses.

“Hell of a time to shoot a man,” the young cop said. “Just when he
was taking a ...”

“Never mind,” the pasty-faced cop said. The young cop slid the sheet
back over the body. We left the house and got in a green Dodge sedan.
The young cop sat in back with me. They didn't talk. The station, like
everything else, was built of red bricks. We went right into the
chief's office.

He was a fat man with a red face and pale blue eyes, and his name was
Piper. He had a cigar in his mouth. His salt-and-pepper suit looked as
though he had slept in it. An elk's tooth hung from a gold chain on his
vest. “Who's this?” he said, staring at me.

The pasty-faced cop told him. The chief's eyes went over me, and then
they went to the window.

“What's your name?” he asked.

I told him Karl Craven. I pretended to be scared. I told him I knew
Mr. Johnson, but not intimately. I said Mr. Johnson used to bowl and
drink beer with our crowd in St Louis. I said he had worked for a
collection agency. I didn't know what he was doing in Paulton. He'd
come into the bowling alley one day about a month ago and said he was
living in Paulton. He didn't say what he was doing. He'd asked me to
look him up if I ever got there. That, I said, was what I'd been trying
to do.

The chief's pale eyes slid over the two dicks. “Beat it,” he said.

They went out. The chief took the cigar out of his mouth and looked
at it. The end was chewed. He tossed it in a brass spittoon and got
another from his vest. He found one for me, too. I took it, bit off the
end and lit it. It was an expensive Havana. We blew smoke at each other
for a while.

The chief asked casually: “When'd you leave St Louis?”

I found my railway ticket and gave it to him. “This morning.”

He examined the ticket, looking at both sides of it. “Then you
couldn't have killed him,” he said.

“I wouldn't kill him,” I said. “I wanted to drink beer with him.”

The chief stared out the window.

I said: “If I'd shot him, would I come around later in the day?”

He sucked at the cigar. “People do funny things.”

“Not that funny,” I said.

I showed him a card that said I was a representative of the Acme
Hardware Company of St Louis. That seemed to satisfy him about me. He
told me about the shooting. He said somebody had shot Mr. Johnson with
a rifle from the outside of the house. The landlady had heard him come
in about four-thirty in the morning, and a little later she'd heard
something heavy fall in his room. There weren't any other noises so she
didn't worry about it. Mr. Johnson didn't come down for breakfast, but
she thought he was sleeping and didn't call him. When he missed lunch,
too, she went up and found his body.

“Anybody hear the shot?” I asked.

“The rifle must have had a silencer,” the chief said, beginning to
look bored.

I said: “That's damn queer.”

“I figure,” be said, “that Mr. Johnson was playing around with a
woman. Maybe a married woman.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and
tapped ashes into the spittoon. “What else would keep a man up so
late?”

I laughed heartily. He went on:

“And I figure the husband, or the brother, followed him home and
plugged him from the outside with a rifle while he was undressing.”

I said: “Husbands don't usually have rifles with silencers lying
around.”

“That's so,” the chief said. His eyes met mine for a second, then
went back to the window. “Where're you staying?”

“At the Arkady.”

“If we want you, we'll let you know.”

The pasty-faced cop was waiting outside. He pointed out the way to
the hotel. “It's only five blocks,” he said.

I thanked him and started, out. The sun was low, but it was still
hot. There was no breeze at all. I thought what lousy cops they were,
not even knowing enough to frisk me. I hated cops anyway, especially
dumb ones. I wondered what they'd have done if I had told them Oke
Johnson was my partner.

WHEN I got into my room I wanted a drink bad. Oke Johnson had been a
shock, even though we'd never got on together. You don't have a partner
killed every day. I telephoned for the Negro. He came to the door and I
told him to get me a quart of bourbon and some magazines.
Film Fun
and some of those others with photographs of half-naked babes, and
Black Mask.
I gave him a fin.

The room was like a tent in the sun. I could feel the heat coming
right through the window-shades. I got out of my clothes and put my
revolver in a bureau drawer. On my way to the shower I caught sight of
myself in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door and stopped to
look at my belly. The knife wound was healing fine. There would be a
scar, but what the hell! What's a scar on the belly? I saw I was
getting bigger. Every time I looked at myself naked I saw that. It
wasn't all fat; the flesh seemed hard enough, but it still kept coming.
I thought I'd probably hit the scales at two hundred and forty. That
was twenty pounds too much. I thought, well, maybe the heat will take
it off. Or those baths downstairs. I went to the shower and turned on
the cold water. I got in. It felt fine.

The Negro knocked while I was in the shower. I put a towel around my
middle and let him in. He had a bottle of Old Crow and four magazines.
I gave him the sixty cents change.

“Charles, it would be nice now if you got me that blonde from the
Vineyard.”

He rolled his eyes. “You don't want her, Mister Craven.”

“How do you know what I want?”

“They say that blonde's poison.”

“Listen, Charles, if blondes were poison, I'd have died thirty years
ago.”

He bugged out his eyes at me and left. I mixed a drink and went back
in the shower. I drank under the water. Then I came out and fixed
another drink and lay on the bed and thought about Oke Johnson until I
got tired. In a way I was real sorry he was dead, especially as it put
me on the spot. But I couldn't go after his murderer. There was that
job to do first.

I drank and smoked and looked at the dolls in the movie magazines.
Then I looked at the brassiere ads. Then I tried to read a story in
Black Mask.
It was about a G-man I'd read about before. He was
different from the G-men I'd known. Those had always reminded me of Boy
Scouts. This G-man was wonderful. He had a girl who was always being
abducted by the smugglers spies kidnappers or racketeers he was after.
Then she'd send him a note and he'd come and shoot it out with them.
Sometimes he d have to kill the whole gang to get her loose. It was a
fine system. It's a wonder J. Edgar Hoover hadn't picked it up.

I put the story down and thought some more about Oke. I hadn't had
any reports from him; only the letter saying he had something. He was
one of those guys who liked to be mysterious. He'd wanted to spring it
on me all at once, the dumb Swede! I knew he hadn't put any of it down
in writing. I was completely in the dark, as the saying goes. And it
looked as though I was up against something tough. I had to move
carefully. I thought I'd better look around the town before I let
anybody know who I was. I might pick up something. And people wouldn't
be shooting at me with rifles.

It kept getting darker outside, but it didn't get any cooler. I was
all right naked, but where my skin touched the sheet there was sweat.
Even the part of my neck on the pillow sweated. About eight-thirty I
got in the shower again.

When I came out it was still hot. It was going to be hot all night.
I-put on a shirt and the pants to my seersucker suit and my shoulder
holster. Then I put on the coat. The gun made a bulge under the coat,
and I shoved it around until it was almost in my armpit. I went
downstairs. The lobby was still filled with palm trees and old
furniture, and it still smelted of dust and velvet.

I followed the noise of a radio playing dance music and found a bar.
It had been fitted up with red-leather and chromium tables and chairs
and it looked strange in the old hotel. A couple of salesmen were
drinking at a table and a girl was at the bar. It was the redhead I'd
seen in the lobby. I sat down at the other end of the bar. The girl
looked at me and then back at her glass. I didn't impress her much.

I ordered a whisky sour. The salesmen were trying to promote the
girl. They were making remarks about her, but she didn't give them a
tumble. One of them was fresher than the other. He kept saying: “Isn't
she lovely?” She
was
a very good number, except for too much
paint on her face. Her green dress looked expensive, though, and the
colour went well with her red hair. And she had beautiful legs, or did
I say that? She was drinking a Tom Collins.

I had a second whisky sour. The fresh salesman went over to the girl.

“Buy you a drink, beautiful?” he asked.

“Scram!” the girl said.

The salesman was tall and thin. He had on a linen suit. He looked
cocky. “Beautiful doesn't want a drink,” he called to his friend.

“Okay,” the friend said. He was a little nervous.

The salesman leaned over the girl. “Come on, beautiful,” he said.
“It'll make you laugh and play.”

The girl paid no attention to him.

“Give the lady a drink,” the salesman said to the bartender.

The bartender looked at the girl. She shrugged her shoulders. The
bartender made her a Tom Collins. The salesman sat with her while she
drank it. He talked to her, but I couldn't hear what he said. She
didn't play up. Her face looked sullen.

I crooked a finger at the bartender. “A double one,” I told him. I
figured I wouldn't mind the heat so much if I got lit. The salesman and
the girl began to talk louder. He was trying to get her to go to his
table.

“I stay here,” she said.

“Aw, come on,” he said. “We won't hurt you, beautiful.”

“No.”

The bartender was angry, but he didn't do anything. The salesman took
hold of the girl's arm. “Come on, beautiful,” he said.

She jerked her arm away. He began to paw her shoulder. I went over to
them. “Leave her alone,” I said.

The salesman looked at me over his shoulder. “I'm not hurting her.”

“Back to your table,” I said.

“Say, mister!” He slid off his stool and faced me. “What business is
it of yours what I do?”

“Come on, Charley,” the friend called. “What business is it of
yours?” the salesman asked again. I took hold of his coat lapels and
pulled him to me and shook him. I didn't hit him. I didn't want to hurt
him. I lifted him off the floor and tossed him back to his table. He
made quite a noise when he hit. He struck his head against one of the
chromium chairs. His friend sat at the table, staring down at him as
though he didn't believe what he saw.

I grinned at the girl and went to my stool. I kept my back towards
the two salesmen, but I could see them in the mirror. I hoped they
would start something. I've always hated salesmen and cops. The friend
helped the salesman to his feet. He was dazed; the fall had knocked his
wind out.

“Come on, Charley,” the friend said.

The salesman tried to get his breath. He began to brush off his
pants.

“We'll get a cop,” the friend said.

He helped the salesman to the door. “We'll get a cop,” he said again.
He did not speak directly to me. He didn't want a fight. He went away
with his arm around the salesman.

“You'd better watch out,” the bartender said to me.

“Why?”

“They may get the law.”

“No, they won't,” I said.

“The guy'll be awful sore when he comes to.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But he won't call any law. He won't take a chance
on a mashing rap.”

“That's so.” The bartender took my glass and began to make another
sour. “But the next time don't be so rough.” He smiled at me. “You
scared “em so they forgot to pay for their drinks.”

I liked the bartender's face. He was young and decent-looking.

“I'll pay for them,” I said.

The girl came over to me. It was the first time I'd seen her standing
up. It was something to see. She had a million-dollar figure, as they
say. She was tall, and it was nice to see good breasts on a tall babe.