Malice in Wonderland Page 6

  Darkness receded to the thin spread of pre-dawn and, as the moment approached, became zero hour near, Miss Fernandez experienced a tension of the little nerves. This was in no manner connected with any heart-restrictive qualities of fear (such as had held the screams unborn in the throat of Mrs. Dean), for she was content that Duggan would never have advanced his semi-subtle suggestion, to speak of it kindly, without having proper guards for her safety in mind.

  The tension was rather that of a prima donna awaiting the cue to bring her on stage, and a band of pale raspberry in the eastern sky warned her that the cue had come. She turned out lights, then stepped into the pastel hush of the patio, and it seemed that she alone in the world was awake, but she knew this was not so.

  Unless Duggan’s calculations and her own were at serious fault, the killer, at this moment masked behind some aspect of nature or the structural jobs of man, would already be giving her the lethal eye.

  She walked leisurely past the black pearl surface of the swimming pool and toward the vaulted passageway leading to the beach. Its tiled flooring was glassy cool, and then the sand was beneath her feet and carpeted before her to the creamy sheet of foam as each comber spent its journey on the shale. She eyed the surf professionally, being an excellent swimmer, and thought it moderate, neither dabble-flat nor undertow-strong.

  Miss Fernandez crossed the dry section pitted with the footprints of yesterday and as yet unraked for the morning, and came to the table-top firmness of the moist, packed shelf, clean-washed by the tide on ebb.

  She assumed the familiar pose, the slight stoop and the downcast look of the seeker after shells. But her eyes were blind, and such few specimens as she gathered were worthless ones picked up for effect at random. She had reached the northern limit of Black’s private beach when she sensed (certainly it was impossible to hear footfalls on the sand) the presence of someone behind her.

  “Good morning,” the voice said pleasantly.

  She permitted the bag of shells to drop and then fumbled for it clumsily, but before she could retrieve it it was picked up.

  “So sorry, Miss Fernandez. I hope I didn’t startle you. Although obviously I must have.”

  She smiled noncommittally. “One is so accustomed to isolation at this hour.”

  “After that ghastly business of last night I thought an early dip might be bracing.”

  She shopped for a platitude. “Sleep is difficult during moments of drama.”

  “Impossible, I found it. Although we often think we’ve stayed awake through the night, when actually we’ve napped.”

  She wondered for how long this prattle would slide on with the balance of a tightrope walker before the hands would initiate their blunt purpose, which was to kill her, to silence her for good.

  At the moment the hands were fumbling with the bag of shells, pressing the contents exploratively through the denim cloth, and pausing (Miss Fernandez could tell the precise instant) when they identified the shape and substance of the paring knife. Then the bag was tossed carelessly down on the sand.

  “Let’s take a plunge, Miss Fernandez. Shall we?”

  “If you wish.”

  Strongly fatalistic by nature, Miss Fernandez glanced fractionally at the shell bag, humped now so uselessly with its improvised stiletto on the beach.

  Companionably they walked, two people alone on this plateau of emptiness that embraced the sands and the surface of the sea and the sky above. A broken wave hissed swift along the shelf. It curled with spent force past their ankles, warm and clean and sharp in this remainder of its former power. They dove through a roller that crested in, emerged into the long smooth troughs and moderate hills, and swam out to the flatter heave.

  They stopped for a breather, treading water, and Miss Fernandez kept, with the careless motion of her arms, a wary space between.

  “You swim well, Mr. Jackson,” she said.

  “Almost as well as you do.” Bert’s eyes turned beachward and found it devoid of life. But you never knew. He gauged the dawn. Pretty bright by now. And soon the sun. “I think we’ve come out far enough,” he said. “Don’t you?”

  Several yards from where the feet of Bert and Miss Fernandez were treading water, and at a slightly lower level, Duggan and Bjorgsen observed the lazy paddlings from their submerged retreat. They were equipped with aqualungs, weighted belts, flippers, and masks from the skin-diving stock of the beach-wear shop.

  The light was strong enough for good vision, sifting down through the ocean ceiling of opalescent amber-grays. As Bert’s legs drifted with barely perceptible purpose closer to the legs of Miss Fernandez, both men, with fishlike ease, came closer too.

  Duggan was an immeasurably relieved man. The situation was well in hand. Two witnesses, himself and Bjorgsen, would apprehend the killer in his third and last attack upon a human life. His admiration for Miss Fernandez knew no bounds.

  Gently between the two sets of dangling legs, gently the gap decreased.

  Now the legs of Bert were quite still, and whipcord muscles tensed along their thighs until, with the power crash of a barracuda, Bert dove and, grasping Miss Fernandez by her ankles, yanked her below.

  Not unlike a barracuda himself, Duggan struck.

  In addition to his muscular strength Duggan had the tremendous advantage of shock-tactic surprise. Bert had no conceivable way of knowing what it was that had hit him, and his first impression was that the arm that lashed around his throat, mugging him, was the tentacle of an octopus. He instantly gave up his intentions regarding Miss Fernandez and panicked into a violent effort to shed the strangle hold of this monster of the deep.

  While this was going on, Bjorgsen had gripped and surfaced with Miss Fernandez, when he threw back his mask and asked solicitously, “Are you okay?”

  Miss Fernandez discarded a final mouthful of salt water. Although still a little confused over the incredible rescue by this goggled creature (now identified), she felt as strong as an ox and quite generally fine.

  “A little damp inside, Mr. Bjorgsen. Otherwise okay. But Mr. Duggan—he is, one gathers, below? Should we not create a diversion? Assist?”

  “Why?” Oscar asked reasonably. “Unless they surface by the next ten seconds that Jackson crumb will be a windless cadaver. Duggan’s got a ’lung. One thing—”

  “Yes?”

  “Jackson. His being the killer. To me it don’t make sense.”

  “You will find, Mr. Bjorgsen, that when the evidence and motive for these tragedies are disclosed—the greed, the lust, the knives of fear, the repressions of a caste-hungry soul—it is the only solution that does.”

  Duggan’s masked head broke water first. Then Bert’s sullen good looks emerged too, only to have his jaw get a knockout crash from Duggan’s fist.

  Duggan unmasked. “You two all right?” he asked.

  “Tops, Chief,” Oscar said.

  “Stick together. I’ll tow this squid ashore.”

  They offered an uneventful flotilla-in-quartet on their passage toward the beach. Uneventful, that is, until they struck the line of surf when, towering in its comparative magnitude up behind them, a seventh wave barreled in at express speed.

  Duggan’s reaction to this ever-unpredictable phenomenon of the sea was to find himself upended and his face slammed with piston force down into the ocean floor, while his tow, the flaccid Bert, became galvanized into a dynamo and, with a forceful kick in the small of Duggan’s back, broke loose. The inescapable confusion of the moment held the tumbling uncertainties of earthquake.

  Being unencumbered with aqualungs, weighted belts, and flippers, Bert easily struggled ashore before any of the others got a nose or an eye out of water. He wasted no time but sprinted for the vaulted beach archway, vanishing into its cavern while the rest were still recovering their strength and wits.

  Having finally disentangled herself from Oscar, Miss Fernandez battled the resurgent undertow’s pull and waded ashore. Duggan and Bjorgsen followed.

  “
Where is he?” Oscar asked.

  The three looked, breathing heavily, at Bert’s last known place of residence—the surf.

  “Better see what we can do,” Duggan said, starting to shed his skin-diving paraphernalia.

  Bjorgsen followed suit, and they were on the point of taking a running plunge when Miss Fernandez called their attention to the footprints in the sand.

  “That,” she said, indicating the deep, sharp impacts in the smooth-washed shale, “is the direction in which he went.”

  * * * *

  Dawn by now was in full force, and Bert had what he felt to be the most incredible stroke of good luck. He had pounded at lung-bursting speed through the arched vault and then on toward the parking lot of the motel. He had no thought beyond instant flight and an urge to put as much distance as he could between himself and the law until he could devise some scheme for a more permanent escape.

  It was his intention to use the Jaguar, Ernest’s car, which Bert had parked on his after-midnight return. A spare ignition key was always cached with a magnetized gadget under a fender. He had about reached it when a red Pontiac convertible flashed into the parking lot and headed for an open space alongside the Jaguar. To his confused amazement Bert saw that Jenny Spang was driving it and that Ernest, apparently blotto and out cold, was slumped beside her.

  Inspirationally, Bert leaped. He pulled open the Pontiac’s door, shoved Jenny along the seat, and said, “We’ve got to get Ernest out of here fast or he’s a cooked goose. I’ve been looking for the kid all night.”

  “In,” Jenny asked with the pent-up irritability of a hideous half dozen past hours, “a pair of wet swim trunks?”

  “Don’t get smart,” Bert said viciously, and shot the Pontiac into reverse. Then he headed for the entrance and gave her the gun, with a lurch that almost caused him to sideswipe the Lincoln coupe of the Cardigan Bags, who were foggily rolling home after having put the Club Sans Souci to bed.

  A word about the Cardigan Bags. They were twin sisters of uncertain age from Akron, Ohio, where their parents had died and left them in the unappetizing role of spinsterhood, but also heiresses to some tons of well-invested pelf derived from the manufacture of tires. Both being alcoholics in a nice, genteel way, they lived in a steamy haze of liquid fun, retaining just enough co-ordination to permit them to drive their car from oasis to oasis without committing suicide.

  It explains why, when they talked with Duggan a few minutes after their brush with the Pontiac, their account of the incident had the dubious cohesion and vague edges of a tired blancmange.

  It was, they told him in counterpoint, a miracle that they had escaped with their lives. Bert Jackson, who was driving and whom they recognized, had shot toward them like a madman, and with him, looking frightened, was Jenny Spang, and on her other side, looking dead, was Ernest Dean.

  “Was this car,” Duggan asked a twin, “a black convertible Cadillac with a lemon top?”

  “We didn’t notice,” the twin said.

  “We didn’t care,” the other twin said.

  “We had no time for lemon tops.”

  “And anyhow, whatever it was, it was down.”

  “The top?” Duggan asked.

  “It must have been, because the three of them were all sticking out in the open.”

  “Like three leaves. That’s the way they went by us. Like three flutted leaves in a great big terrible gale.”

  This was good enough for Duggan, even the “flutted,” whatever that stood for in the dictionary of dipsos. It was a wonder, what with the alcoholic scud through which at the moment they were enjoying life, that they had been able to differentiate between a convertible and an armored tank. It puzzled him briefly that the general alarm had not been effective and the Caddy picked up, but he put it down to the darkness and the fact that the emphasis of search had lain around Palm Beach and, presumably, to the north. Now that daylight was on hand, he felt satisfied that some cruiser would spot and stop the car.

  But would Bert stop?

  Duggan grew cold at the realization that of course Bert wouldn’t. He felt reasonably certain that Bert wasn’t armed, hadn’t paused to gather up some weapon, but the car itself was a weapon with the deadly power of a fatal crash during a chase.

  He hurried to the nearest telephone, which was in the manager’s quarters, and worked himself into a sweat, emending the general alarm to the effect that the people in the black Cadillac convertible with the lemon top now numbered three, that the man at the wheel was a killer in the process both of escaping and of abducting the other two occupants. Extreme caution was to be exercised to prevent crash injuries during apprehension.

  * * * *

  There was almost no traffic, and Bert made good time, crossing the Intracoastal Waterway’s bridge at Dania, then charting his course toward the ultimate destination of a cypress swamp in Collier County as hard as he could shove it. He knew of a hunting shack in one of the savannas, having once visited it with Ernest and one of Ernest’s native bar buddies. It was a dream spot for any angle you could think of. Plenty of sinkholes to swallow things up.

  There was dough in Ernest, dead or alive. Contact the family lawyer—Bert had met him several times at the Deans’—and arrange a foolproof drop for the ransom. Then Mexico, Brazil, Timbuktu—who cares? And the girl. She could be used to keep Dean in line. Make a corkscrew out of her arms, and Dean would be begging him to accept the dough. A laugh.

  Swamp country. Muck, and the fungus-like, rotting smell of water. They said the turkey buzzards pecked your eyes out first.

  His stomach contracted into knots as he spotted a highway-patrol car up ahead, drawn up lazy on the shoulder at an intersection. He glanced at Jenny, pale and stringy and frightened, and his voice had the threat of a gun at her head.

  “Quit figuring, sister. One move, one yelp out of you as we pass them, and you’ll be deader than most. Just sit still and play it cool.”

  He slowed circumspectly and sweated with relief when the patrol car’s two uniformed occupants gave the Pontiac little more than a cursory glance. He figured how much time had passed. The Cardigan bags had spotted his take-off and, even though they were constantly potted, he could tell they had recognized him. It was a cinch that Duggan would shoot out a general alarm.

  Bert looked at the car’s radio. It had no band for police calls, but the regular channels surely would be carrying an account of the choke job by now, maybe even on-the-spot-stuff from the motel. The Dean name was newsworthy enough for it.

  He tuned in and caught the close of a Miami newscast:

  “…barely missing a Lincoln coupé driven by Miss Evelyn Cardigan, who was returning from a night club with her twin sister, Miss Lily Cardigan. The sisters are from Akron, Ohio, and are the heiresses to Fleetwood Tires. Although slightly suffering from shock, they granted your reporter an interview, and here is a tape recording of their description of the getaway car:

  “‘Did you get a good look at the occupants, Miss Cardigan?’

  “‘Perfect. Positively perfect.’

  “‘After all, they were almost dumped into our laps.’

  “‘No, Lily, we were almost dumped into theirs.’

  “‘Did you identify the make of the car?’

  “‘Absolutely. We gave a detailed description of it to dear Chief Duggan.’

  “‘What make was it, Miss Cardigan?’

  “‘A Cadillac convertible. Black, and with a lemon top.’

  “‘Did you get the license number, Miss Cardigan?’

  “‘We didn’t.’

  “‘We felt too faint.’

  “The Misses Cardigan again succumbed to shock at this point, and the interview closed. We will bring you constant bulletins throughout the morning as they come in, and now, after a brief pause, the weather.”

  Bert clicked off the switch. He said, “Brother, what a break! Those two dipsos are steamed up to the gills.”

  “They always are,” Jenny said.

 
“Black Caddy! Lemon top! It’s a wonder they didn’t dream up six lizards in green pants.”

  He was filled with a terrific exultation and an almost drunken sense of absolute security. He was getting the breaks and all he had to do was to roll with them to keep them coming his way. He felt good. Caesar good, all through. He wished he had a cigar.

  “Bert—”

  In this excess of warm comfortableness he said almost pleasantly, “Well?”

  “The unborn child—all the rest I could maybe understand—”

  He snapped into ice.

  “Cut the string section, sister. What about the kid? It was mine, wasn’t it?”

  A rush of wonder swept Jenny with the feel of mountain streams.

  “Yours—and Miss Sangford’s?”

  “Miss Sangford in the pig’s rear bumper. That tramp was Mrs. Bert Jackson before she took a nose dive into bigamy by becoming Mrs. Ernest Dean. Him—” Bert cast a contemptuous look at Ernest. “That night when we fixed it for her to hook him, Theda told me afterward that he wasn’t even able to kick off his shoes.”

  “Then there was no marriage, legally?”

  Bert blazed impatiently, “Why do you think I killed her? That nitwit brain of hers had it all figured down to a dime. First she figured I was holding out on the take, which I was. Then she figured on selling out. Big pay-off stuff, with me in the ashcan.” “She’d admit to bigamy?”

  “She could play it a number of ways, all of them to her very rosy. And there was nothing I could do. So I did it.” He looked at Jenny with flat, killer eyes. “So be a good girl, Jenny, or I’ll belt you out into left field.”

  * * * *

  The sun rode higher, and County Attorney Oswald Pinker finished packing a bag for a short weekend jaunt to Nassau as a guest of the Tommy Andersons aboard their diesel yacht, Carp II.

  Pinker was a magnetic, energetically agreeable man in his thirties, with a first-rate legal mind and a courtroom manner that could have given Miss Fernandez’s repertoire of histrionics a point or two to think about. He was well regarded, both by the yacht-club set and by his party’s political machine as a smooth, brilliant cookie who was destined to go far.