The Good Old Stuff (27 page)

“Come on, sister,” he said.

Mick arrived
back at Grouper Island at six with the dozen prints. He found Park, O’Day, and Taffy on the lower terrace. Park stood up at once and they went upstairs.

“He still here?” Mick asked.

“Jittery but still around.”

“How did Carlos do?”

“Too nervous. They threw cushions at him during the first bull. The second bull gave him a slit in the thigh. He’s okay. Now let’s see what you’ve got.”

Park studied the pictures one by one. He laid three aside. “It’s between these three. Nice job, Mick. The beach matches up pretty good. The girl seems a little small, but that man, from the back, is a dead ringer for Branneck. We can’t use the ones with the blanket showing, because we can’t be sure whether or not Branneck shook the sand off it before or after he took her into the water. And we don’t know how he took her out. He could have dragged her by the wrists, hair, or ankles, or even carried her. But I’d bet on wrists or hair. Now let’s see. These two here. The surf blanks it out so he could be holding her either way. We’ll have to take a chance on her being on her back. Did you have enough money with you?”

“Plenty. Twenty apiece to the man and the girl and a ten-buck fee to get ’em developed fast. Am I going to be in on this?”

“It looks that way. Taffy drove Loomis over to Tampa this noon. She ought to be back within the hour. Townsend and O’Day are taking a swim. Branneck is tanking up at the terrace bar, and your good wife is fixing some food. Lew radioed that he’ll be back by seven. You could bring him on up now … no. This’ll be better. I’ve shot my bolt. I’ll be in my room. Send Taffy up as soon as she gets back.”

Taffy sat hunched on the hassock, the picture in her hand. Park finished the story. She said, “Once three of us had an apartment in New York. That was a long, long time ago. We had mice. One of the girls, Mary Alice, bought a mousetrap, a wire thing like a cage. Trouble was, it didn’t kill the mouse. The idea was to catch one and drown him. I remember that first mouse. We got him, and he sat up on his hind legs and begged. He was a nasty little item and I drew the short straw and took him into the bathroom, but I couldn’t do it. We finally got the janitor to do it for us. Then we bought another kind of trap.”

“Laura was taking a nice peaceful sunbath.”

“I know, Park. I know. Don’t worry, I’ll do it.”

“We’ll have the tape recorder on, and for good measure I’ll be in your closet holding a gun on him.”

Branneck came into Taffy’s room and shut the door gently. His smile was very close to a leer. He said, “I’ve been watching you, Miss Angus. You don’t belong here with this crowd of sharpies.”

“I thought that we should get a little better acquainted, Mr. Branneck.”

“Nothing would suit me better, believe me.”

“I suppose, as an important businessman, Mr. Branneck, you have a hobby?”

“Eh? No, I don’t have time for anything like that. Got to keep moving to stay ahead, you know. Say, I’m going to open my new motel in three weeks. Why don’t you take a run over to Biloxi and be my guest? Be the first customer in one of the best suites. What do you say?”

“What would your wife say?”

“Hell, we can use you to take some publicity shots.”

“I’m not as photogenic as I used to be, Mr. Branneck.”

“Call me Carl. Anyway, I can tell the wife you’re there for some photographs.”

“That’s my hobby, Carl. Photographs. I suppose it came from standing in front of so many cameras.”

“Yeah? How about giving me a picture of you? Got any … good ones? You know what I mean.”

“I’ve got one of you, Mr. Branneck. Nobody has seen it but me. I developed it myself. Of course, it isn’t too good of you.”

Branneck beamed. “Say, isn’t that something! A picture of me!”

She walked slowly over and took it from the dresser drawer and walked back to him, holding it so that he couldn’t see it. Her lips felt stiff as she smiled.

“I’ll give you a quick look at it. Here!” She thrust it out. His eyes bulged. As he reached for it, she snatched it back. “This is only a print, Carl.”

“You … you ”

“I used a fine grain. You’d be amazed at how dead she looks when you use a glass on the print.”

Branneck clenched his fists and studied his pink knuckles. He spoke without looking up. “You’re smart, Taffy. I knew that right away. A smart girl. Smart girls don’t get too greedy. They stay reasonable. They don’t ask for too much.”

“Isn’t murder worth quite a lot?”

“Damn it, don’t raise your voice like that!”

“Don’t tell me I used the wrong word.” Her tone was mocking.

“Okay. The word was right. I killed her because she wasn’t smart, because she wasn’t going to take a cut and shut up. She wanted the whole works. You can call that a warning.”

“Don’t scare me to death, Carl. Did she die easily?”

“You saw her. It didn’t take long. It was too easy. What do you want for the negative?”

“Oh, I’m keeping the negative. I put it in a safety-deposit box in a Tampa bank today, along with a little note explaining what it is. I opened an account there, too. I think you ought to fatten it up for me. Say fifty thousand?”

“Say twenty.”

“Thirty-five.”

“Thirty-two thousand five hundred. And not another damn dime.”

“A deal, Carl.”

He stood up slowly and wearily, but the moment he was balanced on the balls of his feet he moved with the deceptive speed of most fat men. His hard-swinging hand hit her over the ear and she slammed back against the closet door, shutting it. He stood with the recaptured photograph in his hand. He gave her an evil smile.

“For this, honey, you don’t even get thirty-two cents. I thought something was wrong with it. If it was me and Laura, there’d be a towel tied around my neck. Very clever stuff, but no damn good.”

Taffy, realizing that the closet couldn’t be opened from the inside, reached casually for the knob. Branneck, alert as any animal, tensed.

“Get away from that door!”

She twisted the knob. Park started to force his way out as Branneck hit the outside of the door, slamming it shut again. He caught Taffy when she was still four steps from the room door. He held her with her back to him. A small keen point dug into her flesh, and she gasped with the unexpected pain.

“Now walk out. Keep smiling and keep talking. This is only a pocketknife, but I keep it like a razor and I can do a job on that body beautiful before you can take two steps.”

Park put his back against the back wall of the closet and braced both feet against the door. His muscles popped and cracked. There was a thin splintering sound, and then the door tore open so quickly that he fell heavily to the closet floor. There was an alarm bell in Taffy’s room. He pushed it, raced to the side terrace in time to see Mick run out from the kitchens, a carbine in his hand, looking back over his shoulder. The causeway was blocked. Taffy appeared on the sand strip, Branneck a pace behind her, the sunset glinting on the small blade in his hand. Taffy stopped. He kept her in front of him and backed slowly out of sight.

Park cursed softly and raced from the terrace across the house. With a rifle he might have managed it. But the .38 didn’t have a high enough degree of accuracy. Branneck pushed Taffy roughly down onto the cabin floor of the small twenty-one-foot cabin cruiser. As he ran to the bow to free the rope, Park risked a shot. Branneck flinched and scrambled aboard. The marine engine roared into life and Branneck swung it around in the small basin, crouching behind the wheel as he piloted it down the narrow mouth, dangerously close to the causeway where Mick stood. Mick leveled the carbine but did not dare risk a shot. The cruiser sped out in a wide curve in the quiet water between the island and the mainland.

Park gave a shout as Taffy jumped up and went over the side in a long, slanting dive. The cruiser swung back and Branneck stood at the rail, the light glinting blood red on the polished metal of the gaff. Park’s fingernails bit into his palm. Branneck raced to the wheel, adjusted the path of the cruiser, and hurried back to the rail. Taffy turned in the water. Branneck lunged for her with the gaff. Even at that distance, Park saw
her hand reach up and grasp the shaft above the cruel hook. Branneck tottered for a moment, his arms waving wildly. Park heard his hoarse cry as he went overboard. Two heads bobbed in the water in the wake of the cruiser. Taffy’s arms began to lift in her rhythmic, powerful crawl. Branneck turned and began to plow toward the mainland.

Park ran down and out the back of the house, across the patio to meet Taffy. Mick already had one of the cars started. He spun the tires as he yanked it around to head over the causeway and cut Branneck off.

The cruiser, with no hand at the wheel, came about in a wide curve. Park watched it. He saw what would happen. It swept on—and Taffy was the only swimmer. Mick stopped the car and backed off the causeway and parked it again. The cruiser continued on, missed the far shore, swung back, and grounded itself at the very end of Grouper Island.

Park went down into the water over his ankles. Taffy came out, the powder-blue dress molded to every curve. She shivered against him.

“He—he’s swimming to the mainland.”

“He was. Not any more. The
Nancy
swung back and took care of that little detail.”

“He tried to gaff me,” she whispered.

“Come on. I’ll get you a drink.”

As they walked up to the house, she smiled up at him. Her smile was weak. “The next time you get me to help in any of your little games”

“Branneck had a capacity for pulling off the unexpected.”

“What will you do?”

“Accidental death. That widow he married may be a nice gal.”

O’Day had left to accompany the girl’s body back to Chicago. Park sat on his private terrace, with Taffy sharing the extra-wide chaise longue.

Townsend came out and said, “Not that I want to be a boor, people, but it is nearly midnight and I’ve got to mark this case off my books and get back to work.”

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” Park said.

“Better luck on the next one. ‘Night.”

He left and Taffy asked, “Who was that man?”

“Internal Revenue. He helped my investigator get a line on Branneck. You see, when Branneck was calling himself by his right name—Krindall—he forgot to declare the money he squeezed out of Cauldfeldt as income. Branneck didn’t know it, but all we were going to do was get satisfactory proof that he was Krindall. Penalties, back taxes, and interest would have added up to six hundred thousand.”

“But Branneck had his own answer.”

After the house was silent, Park Falkner took the woman’s bathing suit, the dozen pictures, the permanent tape off the recorder and put them neatly and gently into a steel file box in the cabinet behind his bookshelves. Once the sticker with the date had been applied to the end of the box, it looked like all the others.

Falkner slept like a tired child.

P
ark Falkner
took a deep breath, exhaled half of it, squeezed the trigger slowly. The rifle spat, a sound as vicious as an angry wasp. Far out across the dancing blue water of the Gulf the glint of the can jerked, disappeared.

“Enough,” he said. He stood the rifle in the corner of the private terrace that opened off his bedroom, the highest terrace of the vast gleaming-white fortress that dominated the two-mile sandspit called Grouper Island, and sometimes Falkner Island.

He stretched and yawned. He was a tall, spare, rock-hard man in his mid-thirties. A tropical disease had eliminated, forever, hair, eyebrows, lashes. His eyes were a startling pale shade against the sun-glossed mahogany of skin. There was a touch of cruelty in the beaked nose and set of the mouth, and humor as well. He wore a faded Singhalese sarong, knotted at the waist.

“I should think it is enough,” Taffy Angus said, in her hoarse gamin voice.

She stood on her hands, her heels against the wall of the house, her white hair hanging in fluid lines to the terrace tiles. She wore a bandanna as a halter, and the jeans, salt-faded to powder blue, were hacked off raggedly at knee length. The position brought a flush under her tan.

“Does that make you a junior leaguer?” Falkner asked.

“Don’t be nasty, darling,” she said. She dropped onto hands
and toes, came gracefully up onto her feet. “I’m an old, old gal, as you well know, and a daily handstand has therapeutic values.”

Falkner looked at her admiringly. “Bless you! You’re my favorite neighbor. When I forget you’re forty-two I feel like a cradle snatcher.”

“In my prime, I came a little after the Gibson Girl, Park. But just to change the subject, how about those people who are coming?”

Park looked at his watch. “The cocktail hour approacheth. Go prettify thyself, wench.”

She bowed low. “Sire!” she breathed. Her lips thinned a little. “Park, just for the record—couldn’t we drop the Mussolini edict about living dangerously and grow fat and happy in the sunshine on your money? These people you ask here …”

They had walked to the hallway door. He opened it and gently shoved her through.

“Okay, okay.” She sighed. “I never opened my fool mouth.”

Falkner shut the door. His smile faded. Taffy knew as well as he did what had happened those times he had tried stagnation. He had grown restless, irritable. There was no point in trying to add to the fund, which was more than he could possibly spend in his lifetime. The company of the equally affluent brought a sickening boredom. And so life had to be spiced by the house parties. An amateur cop or a god of vengeance. Take your choice. Flip a coin. When there’s guilt in the air it can be scented, as an animal scents the odor of fear. He looked along the beach to the spot where one of his houseguests, Carl Branneck, had killed Laura Hale. For a moment there was revulsion in him, and he wanted to call his newest house party off. Then he remembered the report from the New York agency and his interest began to quicken.

He crossed the big room to the built-in record player. He pondered. Atonal stuff would probably help tension along better than anything traditional. He selected two hours of Milhaud, Schönberg, and Antheil, stacked them on the spindle, cut in the amplifiers of the sea-level terrace, where they would have cocktails, and the amplifiers in the east garden, and then adjusted the volume down for background.