Murder for the Bride (17 page)

“This sounds crazy!”

“Boy, how many men have been strapped into the chair or dropped through the trap thinking, They can’t do this to me? Use your head.”

“What have you got in mind?”

“I’ve got the contacts. It shouldn’t be too much of a trick to send you down the river on a freighter. Venezuela might be all right. You know your way around in Venezuela.”

“Somehow, it doesn’t seem like a good idea. I’m going to have to think about it, Tram. Even so, I don’t think I’ll do it.”

“You better do something.”

“That’s for sure. Look, I want to get in touch with Jill.”

“I don’t think that’s so smart.”

“Hell, Tram. She knows I’m here.”

“I don’t think you should.”

“Look. Thanks a hell of a lot for the refuge and all that. But let me decide who I get in touch with. Getting hold of Jill won’t get you in a jam.”

“Suppose my phone is tapped? What then?”

“Get hold of her yourself. Ask her to come on out here. She’s smart enough not to give anything away on the phone.”

“What good will it do to talk to her?”

“That’s what I mean, Tram. Let me decide that.”

“What are you getting all heated up about?”

“I’m not heated up. This place is fine until it begins to smell like a jail.”

“You don’t understand the risk I’m taking. They might even jail me for hiding you here.”

I took a deep breath. There was a faintly surly look on his broad cupid’s face. “Tram. Listen to me. I want to talk to Jill. The why of it is none of your business. Let me phone her, or you phone her to come out here.”

“Is that some kind of ultimatum?”

“The alternative is that I go in and see her.”

“They’ll pick you up, sure.”

“I’ll take that chance.”

He braced himself on one elbow and gave me a slow lewd grin. “She must be hotter than I thought, boy.”

My own reaction surprised and shocked me. It was totally unexpected. One minute he was grinning up at me and the next instant I had kicked him off the rubberized mattress into his own pool. I wanted to cut my foot off at the ankle.

He floundered up over the edge and stared at me. “What the hell, Dil?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I don’t know why I did it. Believe me.”

He inspected the abrasion on his brown chest. He seemed more shocked than angry. Then, surprisingly, he began to laugh. He laughed so hard he fell down and rolled on the mattress and the tears rolled out of his eyes.

“All right,” he said, when he could get his breath. “I’ll phone the black-haired wench for you.” He grabbed my
wrist and looked at my watch. “Probably won’t get her, but I’ll try.”

“What makes you think you won’t get her?”

“Oh, there’s a party I think she was invited to. We’ll try.”

He padded into the house, leaving damp footprints. I was on his heels. He found the number on his phone pad and dialed. I stood close enough to him so that I could hear it ringing in her apartment. It rang three times.

He took the phone from his ear and smiled at me. “See? You’ll have to—”

I heard an odd sound come over the wire. I snatched the phone out of his hand. There was a thudding sound and a faint weak cry. And the phone in her apartment was carefully replaced.

“She’s in trouble!” I shouted at Tram. “Let’s get down there!”

His eyes were wide and round. “God! Look in the front of the book. Give me the police number. They can get there faster than we can.”

“Dial the operator.”

He did so. He stood close to the table. I jittered with impatience. Then he said, “Sergeant? I just phoned Miss Jill Townsend and heard sounds of a struggle, some sort of trouble at her apartment, I think.” I heard him give the address as I paced nervously back and forth.

There was a mirror at the corner of the hallway. Tram’s back was to me. I happened to glance in the mirror. I saw that he held the phone in his right hand. The thick index finger of his left hand was holding the cradle down. He was talking into a dead line. I looked at his broad, brown wet back and felt a sudden sense of shock and horror stronger even than what I felt in that instant when I saw Talya’s body.

“And I’ll phone back in a while and find out, Sergeant,” he said.

It gave me just time to collect myself, to forcibly restrain myself from spinning him around and smashing him in the mouth. My face wasn’t under control yet. As he hung up, I turned away and walked blindly out toward the patio. He padded along behind me and put his
hand on my shoulder and said soothingly, “That’s the best way, boy. They’ll radio a cruiser. It’s probably heading for her place right now.”

“What do you think it could be?” I asked, keeping my voice as steady as I could.

“God only knows. Maybe it was just a touch of heat exhaustion. She might have fainted just as she picked up the phone or something.”

I had enough control then to turn around and look at him. His smile was broad and pleasant. My good friend Tram. My buddy.

“Say!” he said. “I better get dressed.”

“I’ll come along and keep you entertained with light conversation.”

“You do that.”

I hadn’t been in his bedroom before. It was the most enormous bed I had ever seen. At least ten feet long and eight feet wide.

“How do you like my skating rink, boy?”

“Very, very fancy.”

He eeled out of the swimming trunks and went into the big bathroom. The shower stall had a glass door. I let him get in and get his head soaped. I took a jar of deodorant from the shelf over the sink and wrapped it in a towel. His back was to the glass door. I yanked it open and swung the towel like a sap. The padded glass chunked against his skull. He swayed, tried to turn, and went down in a flaccid heap. I turned off the shower and dragged him out into the center of the bathroom floor.

I knotted neckties tightly around his wrists and ankles. There was tape in the cabinet. I shoved two more ties into his mouth and crisscrossed the tape across his lips. He was heavy and slippery, but I got him on my shoulder and staggered in and dropped him on the bed. I yanked both sheets from under him, soaked one in the shower, and wrapped it tightly around him. I turned him face down and covered him with the second sheet. Then I found the drapery cords and darkened the room. He had emptied his pockets onto the top of the bureau. I took his car keys, looked at the dwindling state of my own finances, and emptied his wallet into mine.

As I shut the bedroom door quietly behind me, Sammy was coming down the hall. I held my finger to my lips. “He’s got a hell of a headache, Sammy. He’s trying to take a nap. He told me to tell you. If he can get to sleep, he doesn’t want to be awakened for dinner.”

“Not like him, suh,” Sammy said, frowning. “He never feels poorly.”

“He does today. I’ve got an errand in town. I’m borrowing a car. That Ford will be O.K.”

“I’ll bring it around, suh. And you be careful you don’t get caught, Mr. Bryant.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Every foot of the way back to the Quarter I felt as though thousands of eyes were watching me. I circled Jill’s block on Ursulines. Pedestrian traffic seemed normal. There was no sign of her car. I couldn’t see it in the tiny parking lot where she usually leaves it when it isn’t parked in front of her door. I was glad I had forgotten to return her key, and that she had forgotten to ask for it. I parked, got the key in my hand, and walked as casually as I could up to the wooden door. I inserted the key gently, careful to keep out of line of the tiny view hole cut in the door. The lock clicked open. I yanked the door open and went in fast, pulling it shut behind me. I flattened myself against the wall and listened. I could hear the slow drip of a faucet, nothing else.

My heart was hammering and blood was roaring in my ears as I inched forward.

The apartment was empty. A chair had been moved close to the grillework iron door, on the living-room side of it. Two nylon stockings lay knotted and slashed on the floor, one still looping the chair leg. It wasn’t hard to reconstruct what had happened.

Jill had been there, tied to the chair. The phone had rung. Those who guarded her had intended that it should ring unanswered. But the phone was on the other side of the grillework door from the chair. Probably a loop of the wire had sagged through the bars of the door. Somehow Jill had managed to yank on the wire and pull the phone off, had tried to scream for help.

Those who guarded her had no way of knowing who
had heard the cry. So they had immediately cut her loose and taken her away. I went into the bedroom. The folder was gone. I looked carefully around the area of the chair. Near the door, on the floor, I found two spots of blood, each one no bigger than a dime. They were still wet and fresh. It made me feel as though someone had stabbed me in the belly with a broad-bladed knife, turning it with the thrust.

What the hell did they want with her?

The Jills of this world should be kept out of this sort of mess.

I went back down the hallway and looked through the small hole cut through the door. Some scrawny female young fry were skipping a languid rope across the street. A young girl leaned crossed tan forearms on the shaded window sill facing the banquette and talked earnestly to a sultry-looking young man who leaned against the wall beside the window, his face a mask of arrogant boredom. A sway-backed horse clopped slowly down the street, pulling a trash wagon, his sagging skin rippling under the flies.

My range of vision was restricted. Across the street I could see a sharp black shadow of a man. I could not see the man who cast the shadow. He leaned against a post. His hat was tilted back off his forehead. He did not move. I weighed my chances. Maybe he was watching the doorway. Maybe he had seen me go in. Maybe he was a guy killing time, or waiting for a girl. Soon the sun would go beyond the cornice of the building, and I would be able to see his shadow no longer. The clothes Tram had lent me were not exactly what you’d call inconspicuous. The white linen trousers were so baggy at the waist that I wore the shirt outside of them. The short-sleeved shirt was pallid green, with dark blue sailfish leaping on it.

It was twenty steps to the car. Probably just a guy waiting for somebody else. Dangerous to stay here too long.

And then his shadow changed. I saw the arms come up, the head dip. It was an odd, suggestive pattern. I thought for a moment he was winding a watch. His right wrist kept turning slowly. And suddenly I realized that
he was cleaning his fingernails. And I knew who he was. I knew Laura had seen him. And Jill. And Talya.

I heard a twanging voice coming up the sidewalk on my side, heard the shuffle of many feet. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, ahead on your left you will see the old Ursulines Convent. The Ursulines of France were the Gray Sisters. They made a contract to educate the young-uns here in Louisiana, and the first of them came over here in 1726. You will notice the architecture, particularly the …”

At the moment when the group was directly opposite the door, I slipped out quickly. I hoped to go along with the group for a few paces, and get into the car quickly enough to get away. I bumped into a stocky perspiring woman who had gloves in one hand and a stringy daughter in the other. She glared at me. I apologized meekly. There were about twenty people in the group, about five of them men. The guide was a withered little man with a peaked motorman’s hat and a penetrating voice. The tourists looked as if they had been trudging around for far too long.

I glanced quickly toward the other curb, toward the post. He was as Jill had described him. A sandy man with a tight, give-nothing face. He wore a pale gray suit, well-pressed, and a brown cocoa straw hat with a maroon band. Late twenties, I guessed—perhaps older. Our eyes met in that instant. He held the match with which he had been cleaning his nails. He was motionless, his elbows outthrust slightly. There was no look of surprise on his face, just a watchfulness. Then with a deft muscular daintiness, somewhat reminiscent of Cagney in moments of anticipated brutality, he tossed the match back over his shoulder and started across the street. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. I began to shoulder my way forward through the slow-moving group.

“The Gray Sisters had a lot of trouble, folks. The ship they came over on hit a rock and nearly sank. They were becalmed. Pirates nearly got them. They got stuck on a sand bar out in the Gulf. All in all, it took them five dreadful months to make the trip from France to the
mouth of the river, and another week to come upriver to New Orleans by canoe.”

I reached the car, and just as I grasped the door handle the man opened the door on the far side of the car and slid behind the wheel. I let go of the door handle and kept on with the group. Twenty paces further on I glanced back. He had left the car and was sauntering along behind us.

“This is all so terribly interesting,” a gaunt woman said at my elbow.

“It certainly is,” I said. She glared at me. She had been speaking to a plump young girl trodding wearily along behind her.

“In those days New Orleans was a pretty fearful place for the Gray Sisters to come to. Imagine it. Damp and miserable. Just a bunch of shacks. Floods coming in over the levees all the time. Alligators belle ring at night.”

I looked back again. The man had casually made himself a part of the group. The guide stopped on the corner. He stared at me. “Fella, are you joining this here tour?”

“If you don’t mind,” I said.

“You missed most of it, but it will still cost you two dollars.”

“I’ll pay for both of us,” a soft, controlled voice said at my elbow. Straw Hat handed over four dollars. He was so close to me I could see a streak of blond stubble on his cheek, stubble that the razor had missed.

The guide took the money and gave us a dubious look. He moved off through the gathering shadows of early evening, the party following him.

The man came up beside me. “This is no good, you know.”

“I always wanted to take one of these tours.”

“You kill me, Bryant.” Yes, Talya had said that he had made himself very American.

“Now, this is Gallatin Street, folks. Once upon a time it was a pretty gay kind of street. Man could get himself knifed here with no trouble at all. Used to be headquarters for the Mafia gangs, this little street did. In ’34, I think it was, they took away part to make room for the new French Market. That’s it over there. Anybody feel like buying any snails today?”