Bring Back Her Body Page 9

  “I’ve always wanted to lie in bed and have my breakfast cooked by a personal maid.”

  “That’s not me,” Cain said. He shut his eyes again.

  “Sniff!”

  It took him a moment to understand. Then he sniffed obediently. He smelled coffee and something that seemed to resemble bacon. “How’d you do that?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I’ve got long arms,” she said. “They reach all the way to the galley.” She stopped and it was her turn to be suspicious. “Say, who do you think’s in here with you?”

  Cain turned his head, grinning lazily. The lips were just under his nose now. Lisa’s eyes were dreamily half open. Since her lips were so convenient, Cain kissed them. Half asleep, he enjoyed the sensation. He kept on enjoying it until he felt an arm reach up and grasp his head and draw his face down hard.

  After a moment he sat up with a yelp. He was wide awake. “Stop that. I was just saying good morning, damn it.”

  “You’re so utterly moral, Cain,” she said. She sounded as if she were wallowing in luxury. “I wonder who’s making those good smells for us.”

  “The cops, probably. They want us to be strong when they give us the works.” Cain lay down again. It was a chilly day, overcast, and the blankets felt good. He snuggled under the covers, enjoying the warmth of Lisa. He wasn’t awake after all or he wouldn’t have just lain there calmly. But after last night, there was no point in running.

  Lisa said, “I suppose you’d better marry me now that we’re so thoroughly compromised.”

  “Coffee and bacon,” she said sniffing again.

  “You’re already married,” he said. Only his forehead was out of the covers.

  “We can go to Idaho. What’s a little bigamy in Idaho?”

  “There aren’t any laws in Idaho,” Cain admitted. His voice was muffled by the blankets. “But that’s no reason to go there and get married.”

  “Married people don’t have to testify against each other.”

  “Uhm,” Cain said. “It’s a thought.”

  “Do you want to marry me, Cain?”

  “No,” Cain said.

  “Do you want to eat breakfast?”

  Cain’s head came out like a gopher out of a hole, the last question having been asked by a different voice. He twisted around and saw the bright, wide-awake features of Honor Ryerson peering down from above.

  “It’s ready, cap’n. And it’s past noon, so get up and eat.”

  Cain looked again at Honor and then felt the comfortable warm lump of Lisa at his side. He said, “Er …” He took a deep breath. “On deck?”

  “Not in bed,” she said flatly. “And the sun is trying to come out.” The doors closed, plunging them into semi-darkness.

  Cain said, “Two tickets to Idaho coming up. Turn around,” and bounced out and grabbed his clothes and wriggled into them. Then he did a broad jump over the bunk, landed in front of the head and popped in. When he came out Lisa was dressed and the bunk was folded back. She took her toothbrush and disappeared. Cain stripped quickly, put on swimming trunks, grabbed a towel, and went on deck. The sun was indeed coming out, burning away the clouds and lying warm and pleasant over the faintly ruffled surface of the water.

  He dived over the railing, splitting the water cleanly, took a few underwater strokes, surfaced, blew, and stroked back to the boat. He climbed on board, towelled himself, and grinned at the bright day. Honor was busily and silently setting breakfast on the portable deck table.

  “Swim always sets me up for breakfast,” he ventured.

  “Other things too, no doubt,” she said icily.

  “Now, look …”

  “I know,” she said. “There’s only one bed and you both were tired and you slept.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  She turned and an impish grin was on her features. “Knowing you, Cain, I couldn’t doubt it. Besides, it’s not my business.”

  Lisa came on deck and Cain went down to dress. He hurried, not knowing quite how Lisa and Honor were going to react on one another after this. Lisa was regally sipping orange juice when he arrived and Honor came up and slammed a plate of toast on the table and sat down.

  The breakfast was superb. Cain commented on the bacon, the eggs, the coffee, until Lisa urgently thrust a piece of toast whole into his mouth. Then she wiped up her plate, lit a cigarette, and leaned back. “What a way to live,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t you like it?” Honor asked sweetly.

  Lisa cocked an eye at her. “Don’t try to teach grandma to suck eggs, honey. I’d love it. All this sunshine and air and …”

  “It rains here sometimes,” Honor answered.

  “Then it’s so nice and cosy inside, under the covers, snuggled down.”

  “Not inside, below decks,” Honor corrected sweetly.

  Cain glared at them both. “Shut up!” he roared. He glared from Honor’s overly sweet smile to Lisa’s cow-like contentment. “Leave me alone, the both of you.”

  Then he saw the utterly inexplicable take place: the enmity between the two women dissolved; they smiled understandingly at one another, and joined forces. Cain finally had to take his coffee and go forward where he sat and mumbled to himself.

  Honor raised her voice deliberately. “He is awfully bony, though.”

  “All knobs,” Lisa agreed. “And he snorts in his sleep.”

  “He scratches himself, too,” Honor said. “I’ve watched him nap.”

  Cain went back for more coffee. “Have your fun,” he said. “But it just occurred to me that I might be eating breakfast with a murderess.”

  Lisa’s cup clattered to the table. “That wasn’t fair, Cain.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” he said. His eyes moved from one to the other. “Things like bombs wired to motors and knives in people don’t appeal to me, not when I’m this close to them.”

  Honor said, “I heard it on the radio. They found Toby last night. That’s why you were running, wasn’t it?”

  “Where were you going?” he countered.

  “Just riding. I — couldn’t sleep.”

  Cain blew up. When he finally quieted down, he said, “This is no time to play cat and mouse. In Toby’s house — before we found the body — I tangled with a woman who was trying to get away. It could have been Paula. It could have been you.” He stopped. “What color is your underwear?”

  Honor lifted her t-shirt. She wore a pale green brassiere, very filmy. “What size is it, Honor?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  Cain said, “You don’t sound very curious at curious questions.”

  “I thought I was just supposed to answer, not ask.”

  Cain knew that she was still playing with him. Angrily he got up and stalked into the cabin and brought the lavender underwear. He tossed it to her. “Yours?”

  She held them up. “If they were mine, Cain, how would you get them ripped that way?”

  “I tore them off someone in the dark.”

  “You know you wouldn’t have to tear my underwear off, Cain.” She sounded very serious.

  Cain blew up again. Then he sat on the railing, his head in his hands. Finally he looked up. “Honor, that is your underwear. I’ll bet on it. I can take it to a lab and have it tested. No matter how much it’s been washed there’ll be traces of your bath powder and things. Then I’ll have to turn my findings over to the police. This is murder now; it’s no joke any longer.”

  He didn’t know whether or not he was telling the truth about the laboratory test but she appeared to believe it. She said, “It’s mine, Cain.”

  Lisa got up abruptly. “I’m going to walk off some of my breakfast.”

  When she had gone, Cain said, “You’ll have to tell me some time.”

  “I know it.” She reached for a cigarette. “I’ve made a mess of things, I guess, Cain. But I was only trying to help.”

  “What were you doing charging around Toby’s in your — those things?”

  “I wasn�
��t. I didn’t. It was Paula.”

  “What was she doing there? How did she get there?”

  “I took her,” Honor said. “She called me up early in the evening and asked me. I have a private phone. She said there was something at Toby’s she just had to have. I went and got her and took her there and about a hundred yards out the motor began to sputter and then stopped. Paula seemed in an awful hurry and when I couldn’t fix it right away she said she’d swim for it. She did, telling me to go up one dock beyond Toby’s. It’s abandoned. The motor fixed itself and I went there and waited. There’s an old road there and pretty soon she came in your car. Because she didn’t have any clothes on, she took the boat — she hates running one — and I took the car. I drove it home and got her some clothes and brought them here. She was waiting and then I took her back to her place. That’s all.”

  “That doesn’t explain your being out by Toby’s after midnight.”

  “Paula told me she had to run for it and left two suitcases in the basement. She was awfully upset at having left them. She kept saying, ‘I’ve got to get them. I’ve got to!’ and she looked sort of sick. I know now: she found Toby’s body and it scared her. Anyway, after I took her back, I waited until I thought you’d had time to get away and then I decided to be real smart and get them for her. The motor conked out for good and you rescued me.”

  “I think the cases are safe enough,” Cain said. “But I don’t see what damned good they are.” He got out his pipe and sucked on it. “While you were waiting, how long was the launch left untended?”

  “About an hour.”

  “Did Paula know you were going after her stuff?”

  “No. I thought I’d surprise her.”

  “Did the motor limp between the first time it quit and the last?”

  “Badly,” Honor said. “About half the time. Then it would clear up and be fine.”

  “You can thank the balky motor you’re here,” Cain said. “I haven’t checked the relays for time but apparently every miss gave you that much longer to live. And it was wired poorly, too. Poor wiring could have caused part of the missing — shorting out some of the plugs.”

  “But who could …”

  “I don’t know,” Cain admitted. He filled his pipe and lighted it. “But I still don’t know how Paula got into your underwear nor why it was wet nor why she stopped to take a bath.”

  “It’s very simple,” Honor said. “When she had to swim for it, she took off her clothes and made a bundle of her slacks to keep them dry. But Paula hates being nude in front of anyone — when she’s sober. So she borrowed my underwear because I didn’t really need it. When she got almost to shore, she caught a cramp in one leg and had to use both her hands and her clothes were caught in a wave and went out to sea, I guess. So there she was in my underwear, all wet. She thought she’d get clothes at the house and she bathed to get the salt water off only you came and interrupted her and she tried to shove the cases down the chute, get them into the old cellar and out that old door. Only she didn’t make it.”

  “Is she afraid of me?” Cain demanded. “She couldn’t help seeing who it was when I drove up.”

  “She is.”

  “Why?”

  “She thinks you’ll make her come back. And she doesn’t dare yet.”

  “Why not?”

  Honor said with intense seriousness, “Because she’s afraid she’ll be murdered.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHAT had started out as a beautiful day turned sour for Cain. Getting no more out of Honor, he drove grumpily into town and loaded up with groceries and the various editions of the papers. He returned to find Honor gone and Lisa sitting on deck. He turned the groceries over to her and went through the papers. The murder had made the late morning edition.

  When Lisa returned, Cain read aloud to her. The gist of the story was that the caretakers of Patton’s place had returned from a week’s vacation after midnight to have their headlights light up a coffin in the garage and in the coffin was the owner himself, dead. The house lights had been on but they went out suddenly; someone pulled the master switch and disappeared. The Harkness couple called the police but couldn’t trace the person or persons running away. A window had been forced but they saw no signs of robbery. Friends and acquaintances of the dead man were being questioned.

  The afternoon paper had an interesting item concerning the fact that one Lisa Simms, a business partner of Patton, had disappeared. An eviction notice given her two days before by the aforesaid Patton explained the disappearance in part. She left no forwarding address. The article did not intimate that she was suspected yet.

  “I will be,” Lisa commented.

  Cain discovered that at a party at Pepe’s and later at a continuation of the same party, a fisherman, one Abel Cain (former University All-Coast basketball star) had had altercations with Patton.

  “That came from the friends and associates,” Lisa said. “Now you’re in it, too.”

  “I’m looking for the cops at any time,” Cain said. “But I suppose we can explain and …” He stopped.

  “Lay ourselves open to a charge of breaking and entering,” Lisa said sweetly. “Or getting Paula into it. You’ll have to lie, Cain.”

  “So will you.” He had the uneasy feeling that lying would not be too difficult for her.

  “I’m going to disappear,” Lisa said. “Lend me your dinghy and I’ll go visit Honor for a while.”

  “So I stay and lie to protect you, too, is that it?”

  “Partly. Do you mind, Cain?”

  He looked at her. She was not smiling but studying him quizzically. She was, he thought, a very attractive woman. She was a little … He could not quite find the word. She was gay and easy and not coyly modest around him. She was a good companion. But he realized that he didn’t know much about her. Not very much at all.

  “I mind when I don’t know what I’m supposed to be protecting you from.”

  “My own folly. Mistakes I made. Will that do?”

  “Criminal?”

  “That depends on interpretation,” Lisa said. She got up and walked to the rail restlessly and swung back, facing him. “I ask you to trust me, Cain.”

  “Yet you aren’t willing to trust me,” he said.

  She was silent a moment. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she said in surprise.

  “Sure,” Cain said. “I trust you enough to lie for you. That’s my neck we’re perjuring. But you don’t trust me with what you’ve done. I know it’s something pretty big in your mind. Last night you were so scared the police would tag you, you were in a funk. Maybe you killed him. How do I know?”

  “I was with you last night.”

  “I don’t know when he died,” Cain said.

  “Maybe I did it yesterday afternoon when Honor was here and I went for a walk,” she said. “Or maybe the night before — after you went to sleep on my shoulder, Cain.” She took a cigarette from her pocket and her fingers shook a little.

  “I like you a lot, Cain.” Her voice was low, unsteady. “In my apartment when you went to sleep there after inviting Munger’s little apes to kill you — For what? Because you’d taken a job to find someone you dislike and you were going to stick with it. After you’d done that, I decided you were a guy worth helping. And maybe a guy worth wanting — permanently.

  “And there are things I’ve done I’m ashamed of. If they come out you’ll think less of me.”

  Cain didn’t like being crowded this way. But he said, “We’ve all done things we’re ashamed of. I can think back to when I was a kid and I blush right now at my own asininity. I’m not holy enough to make it matter whether I think less of you or not.”

  “That goes on the assumption that you think something of me to start with.”

  “Yes,” Cain said without inflection. “Or I wouldn’t have asked you here.”

  Lisa’s smile was brief and pained. “I’m stubborn, Cain. You can’t get rid of me now without turning me over
to the police.”

  “I have nothing to turn you in for yet,” Cain said. He got up and walked as far away from her as he could get and then returned slowly. He said in his deliberate way, “I haven’t got much respect for the forces of law and order. Not that they aren’t occasionally competent. It’s what they represent: man’s need to police himself against his own nature. It doesn’t speak well for a civilized humanity, does it? That’s why I live alone.”

  “This is no time to get philosophical,” Lisa said.

  “You want to know why I’m doing this. I’ve been called an idealist. But I’m not interested in changing the system. For that we’d have to all get killed off and start with some other organism that didn’t have greed and stupidity bred into it. I’m lazy. So I say to hell with it and crawl into my hole.”

  “And I come and try to get in too and there isn’t room, is there, Cain?” She smiled. “And now the police are coming to pull you out.”

  “Yes,” Cain said, “and I’ll commit one of the human foibles I decry: I’ll lie to get myself back safely into it.”

  “But you can’t lie for yourself without lying for me.”

  Cain laughed aloud. “Trumped my ace. I didn’t intend to, Lisa. I just asked what I’m supposed to be lying to save you from.”

  “Let’s just say that I publicly threatened Toby’s life.”

  “I can imagine a lot of people have.”

  “Lots,” she admitted. “But I don’t know of any but myself who tried and failed and did it so stupidly. Toby got proof.”

  “Blackmail,” Cain murmured. Toby’s set-up had all the earmarks. Too many people who hated him stayed around him, served him.

  “Yes,” she said. “Not money, not me. More subtle uses, you might say.”

  She turned and went into the cabin. Cain stayed where he was, staring at the water and thinking of what she had said. Little ugly things that he couldn’t push away kept crawling through his mind.

  When she came back, she carried her luggage. Cain watched as she got in the dinghy, started the motor, and then sat there, bobbing on the water and watching him.