The Brass Cupcake Read online

  “We went in a little after ten. She was snoring. A real easy one. We got the gag in her mouth and the wrists and ankles tied and a bandage around her eyes. She never saw us. The safe opened on the first try. We cleaned it out and left the cash. The cash was Franklin’s end. The way it was supposed to work, with the bedroom door shut, he would be the one to find her, still tied up, in the morning. She wouldn’t be able to see him. He had some place, I guess, where he was going to hide the cash, in the spare tire of the Buick or something. His wife wasn’t in on it. He was supposed to untie her and yell for the cops. We weren’t in her place over six minutes. Nobody paid any attention to us, going or coming. We went back to our place and looked the stuff over and had a drink and went to bed.

  “The next morning we’re eating breakfast when it comes over the radio. What a mess! We couldn’t figure it. It made no sense. Then we decided that maybe Franklin had come back earlier to check and somehow the old lady had gotten the bandage off her eyes. We were never in a murder deal before. We couldn’t run because we didn’t have the money. We had to sit and go crazy just thinking about it.

  “Then a few nights later Franklin comes over. Some guy is after him. Some guy has talked to his wife. He’s scared to death. We’ve got to give him some of the stuff, he says. He’s leaving the country. We knew he’d be picked up. We knew that if he was picked up, he’d bring us into it, and we knew that once we were in it, our record was so much against us we’d be all through forever. In the meantime we’d been up to Tampa and made a contact with Alfrayda. When Franklin came around in the middle of the night, Wally took him for a walk to talk things over. He didn’t tell me, but I sort of imagined what he would do. He came back trembling so bad he couldn’t even speak. He’d used a piece of broken cinder block and dumped Franklin into the water. Franklin was our only contact and he was dead. I pleaded with Wally. I told him we had to drop the hot stuff in the bay, off the bridge or something, and get out, even if we had to hitchhike, but he thought we could come out right on it and do it in such a way nobody would grab us.

  “I threw the stuff into the car. The money came out and Wally checked it. I shined the light and the car went away. The next thing I knew, people yelled and something hit me on the shoulder and I couldn’t see or hear. I was on the ground and I wasn’t out completely. Just almost. There was a siren and then a needle in my arm and I woke up here this morning in this cast and they told me Wally is dead. You’re right. It was sour. All the way. But the old lady—no, we didn’t.”

  She closed her eyes. Her features were placid with exhaustion, with emotional release.

  I stood up. “That’s enough to go on, Bea. I’m going to see if I can clear you of the old lady’s death. Franklin’s death will be marked up to Wally. Maybe you’ll get off with as little as five.”

  She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling. She smiled. “Me, a tramp from Troy, New York. I was with him three years before I found out he wasn’t spending dough his dad had left him. He taught me to put it on for the people. The right accent and the right words. He was a funny-looking little guy. When I found out what he was, it was join him or leave him, and it was too late to leave him. Do you think I care whether it’s five years or fifty? Get out now. I’m going to sleep.”

  I went out into the corridor and shut the door behind me. The nurse was down by the desk still giggling. I thought of a crook, a funny-looking little guy, standing in a flashlight’s beam, his trembling hands in the air, his woman unconscious and bleeding on the ground. I saw him, the money on the ground beside him where he had dropped it.

  Then the whip crack of the shot, but he didn’t hear it because the slug was smashing through his head by then. A little man standing quick trial by the side of a dark road, found guilty because of what was on the ground beside him, wrapped in white.

  Then the whispers, because guilt always whispers, even when there is no one to hear. The debate. Give it to her, too? A good idea. But no one quite able to pull the trigger. Hell, she was out like a light. How would she know he didn’t run off with the dough? Everybody relieved to have it settled.

  And leave good old Harry to guard the place where the money isn’t.

  The best way to learn how a cat will jump is by living with cats for a while. They had jumped the way I thought they would. But they didn’t know it yet. They were mentally spending the money. Those fine unmarked bills. One hundred to the inch. Enough for you and you and you and you. Plenty, this time, boys. And the first one of you bastards gets dumb, blossoms out with a big car or a blonde in mink, you maybe get accidentally shot in line of duty. Now Gilman. One extra grand to him on account of me shooting him in the leg so as to make it look good for us to be shooting at the couple. He knows the last thing I wanted to do was get the knee.

  The nurse rustled up so close to me I could smell her breath. It was peppermint. “She’s going to sleep,” I said.

  The nurse nodded. “She’ll be a good patient. Funny, isn’t it? The ones with nothing are the good patients. When they come in with quilted bed jackets and ivory radios to have ingrown toenails worked on, then you’ve got to watch them. They want a nurse every second to wait on them.”

  I gave her my card. “Here. Anything she wants extra, I’m good for it. Scotty, down at the desk, knows me. Tell her. You’ve got a boy in here I wonder about. Kreshak. Know anything?”

  “Men’s ward, that one. He goes out today. He’s the one who always wants to have somebody combing his hair. He gives me the creeps.”

  I patted her starchy shoulder. “If you have to comb it again, you’ve got my permission to use a chair leg.”

  The gag was no good, but according to the giggles that followed me down the corridor, I was working on her bare foot with a feather.

  I went out into the sunlight, but Bea had taken the gold out of it. Get out the books and add up the columns and say, “This woman has sinned against her fellow humans. She has broken the laws of God and the laws of the state. This is her just desert.” You can balance the books that way, but it does nothing to take away the memory of bottomless dark eyes, of a tired voice saying, “Five or fifty.”

  The next stop was the hotel. It had been worth an extra edition. The papers were racked by the newsstand. “POLICE TRAP MURDERERS”; “STEGMAN KILLERS IN GUN BATTLE”; “KILLER SLAIN, COMPANION INJURED”; “GEMS RECOVERED, MONEY MISSING.”

  I took a copy and sat down in the lobby and skimmed through it. The handling was fine. The statement of what had happened was a direct quote from Commissioner Guilfarr.

  My end of it was neatly handled. It was covered in one sentence. “The trap was set when the Frey couple made contact with a representative of the estate, offering to sell back the stones for a substantial payment in unmarked currency.”

  Powy was quoted in words he would never have used: “It is indeed unfortunate that Frey eluded pursuit just long enough to conceal the money, but there is every hope that the hiding place will soon be discovered.”

  The most tragic and comic aspect was covered in another paragraph. “The entire area where the gun battle took place has been sealed by the police and an intensive search has been planned, utilizing volunteers from the American Legion Post and also Troops 3, 18, and 61 of the Boy Scouts, who have been excused from school today in order to participate.”

  As I stood up and tossed the paper on the chair, there was a discreet cough behind me. I turned and looked into Trumbull’s deeply tanned face.

  “I’ve been hoping to run into you, Mr. Bartells.”

  We smiled at each other like a pair of rival car dealers waiting for the luncheon meeting to start.

  “I’m afraid I made a bit of an exhibition of myself the other day. The way it has all turned out, I’m afraid Melody will never forgive me for the things I said to her after I found that silly ring.” His voice turned husky. “But when a man sees the one girl in the world slipping away… I guess you can’t hold him accountable, can you?”

  “Did y
ou come here to see her?”

  He shrugged. “She’s still annoyed with me. She wouldn’t come down to the lobby and she wouldn’t let me go up. Very discouraging.”

  “You haven’t given up?”

  “Why, of course not! She’ll forgive me sooner or later. We have the same background, you know. A great deal in common. Our tastes are the same.” He coughed as though embarrassed. “And she does like lovely and expensive things. She’s been denied them for years. And the terms of the will, of course…” His voice trailed off.

  “Of course,” I said, mocking him gently, “the terms of the will. Dear old Aunt Elizabeth’s wishes.”

  “I’ve been trying to like you, Bartells. But you do make it difficult.”

  “Forget me. What is the song and dance you want to give Melody?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? I was still in a state of emotional shock at Elizabeth’s murder. My judgment wasn’t too good. I really didn’t think Melody had anything to do with it, but it seemed a good idea at the time to try to frighten her into marrying me.”

  “You’d be in a wonderful spot, Trumbull, if Melody dropped dead.”

  “You are coarse, Bartells. Do you really think that money would mean anything to me in a world without her?”

  “Do you write those lines, or do you hire a guy?”

  He shifted a little onto the balls of his feet. He looked as if he would be very rough. A natural athlete, a man with nothing better to do for the last fifteen years than keep himself in shape. The anger went out of him.

  “There isn’t much use talking to you, Bartells.”

  “Now, that’s where you’re wrong. I’m the good fairy, ready to tie a ribbon in your curly brown locks. I’m always on the side of true love, I like to see a man get a chance to tell his story. And Melody needs a change of scene. If nothing interferes, I think I’ll take her on a beach picnic tomorrow. If you could sort of casually drop around…”

  He was wary about the teeth on the gift horse. “Where would that be?”

  “A little sand spit with about five palms on it. It’s called Goquina Island. It’s out opposite Marlow Beach, about four miles out. At the Marlow Beach pier you can hire a launch to run you out and pick you up any time you say.”

  “When do you plan to get there?”

  “About ten-thirty in the morning. If you came about eleven-thirty… After all, how can she avoid you on an island a quarter-mile long and a hundred yards wide?”

  “Just the two of you?” he asked.

  “Just the three of us, if you show up. I’m going to try hard to make it. It all depends on whether a certain, uh, business arrangement interferes. You could call it an appointment.”

  He stuck his hand out and showed his teeth. “Old man, maybe I have made the wrong decisions about you.”

  I shook hands with a childish desire to cross the fingers of my other hand.

  After I watched him leave the lobby, pause in the sun, and then head slowly off to the left, I went to the house phones and called Melody.

  Her voice had the glitter of ice in it. “Do come up, Cliff.”

  The first thing I saw when I walked into her room was the paper on the bed. The moment I shut the door behind me she pointed to the paper and said, “Hah! A representative of the estate, are you? I know darn well it wasn’t Rainey.”

  Her eyes had gone almost as green as Guilfarr’s. She wore a brown linen dress and a wide red Mexican belt, studded with red, blue, and yellow glass gems. She had both hands on her hips in fishwife stance, her shoulders thrust forward, her foot tapping ominously.

  “All right, I was the little man who was there on the scene.”

  “You big fool! You big stupid! Who were you showing off for? That little piece that works in your office? Those people were killers. They’d proved that. And so you went off into the brush and played decoy for the police force. A gun battle! Just for the sake of a lot of jewelry that belongs to me! Did it ever occur to you, friend, that I don’t think the jewelry is more important than you?”

  I went to her and put my hands on her wrists. I put both her hands behind her and caught both the wrists in my left hand. She began to squirm. I kissed her and she tried to bite me. I swept the silvery-gold hair across her face and she stamped at my feet with high sharp heels. I shook her until her face was a blur and until she went soft and fell against my chest, moaning softly.

  I kissed her again. “Better,” I said. “Much more reasonable.”

  “Oh, Cliff!”

  “Sit down over there and I’ll be ’way over here, because I want to talk to you and I can’t keep talking if we keep doing this.”

  She sat by the windows and I pushed the paper aside and sat on the bed.

  “I don’t know enough about Aunt Elizabeth.”

  “What!”

  “I want to know more about her. What would it take to panic her?”

  She gave me a lopsided grin. “The H bomb might do it. I don’t think so, though. She had more iron determination than the Marine Corps.”

  “Was she pretty agile?”

  “For her age, very. Why all this, Cliff?”

  “Want to go on a beach picnic tomorrow?”

  “You ask a stir-crazy girl that?” She pounced from her chair and landed beside me on the bed.

  I made a long reach for the bedside phone. I lay face down, propped on my elbows, until Wilma announced that this was indeed the Security Theft and Accident Insurance Company.

  “This’s Cliff,” I said, trying to fend Melody off with an elbow. “I’m at the Coast Hotel. Calls or company?”

  “Neither,” she said with a note of pleasure. “Your voice sounds funny.”

  “It should. There’s a stupid blonde here chewing on my ear. Ow!”

  “Really!” Wilma said huffily. The line clicked dead.

  I rolled into a startling agility of brown linen, a laughing froth of gold and silver hair.

  17

  MELODY AND I had lunch down in the grill at one. We were talking in half sentences, in words that would mean nothing to anybody else in the world. I had discovered that I could see a pulse in her throat and could, by judicious choice of words, speed it up or slow it down at will. It was a good game.

  Then the waitress came and asked me if I was Mr. Bartells and told me there was a phone call for me. The call was short and to the point. They gave me a big ten minutes to get over to the county courthouse. I went back and told Melody. I requested that she keep her fingers crossed.

  They had done a fast job of collecting an emergency grand jury. It was meeting in Judge March’s chambers. Solid citizens. Sober, solid citizens, wearing those expressions of mixed glee and solemnity that result from the disclosure of something really hot.

  The gaunt man from the Tampa office was there. He gave me twenty seconds’ worth of instructions and led me in. I was seated in an uncomfortable chair facing the long table, sworn in, and told to tell my story.

  I spoke my piece like a little man. A little old man with a face like an embittered monkey asked permission to throw a few questions at me.

  “When you were on the force, Bartells, did you accept monies at any time as a bribe for not doing your sworn duties?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Were monies offered you at any time?”

  “Not directly, sir. Just through hints.”

  “Is the rumor true that you were broken as the result of an argument over the division of protection money paid by one Anthony Lavery, straw owner of the Kit-Kat.

  “No, sir. That rumor is not true.”

  “Is it true that you have aided the federal men in this affair through some idea of revenging yourself against the men who broke you?”

  “I can’t say that I didn’t resent being broken. But I decided to try to nail them to the cross after I took a beating at headquarters last week.”

  “Do you expect us to believe that you were beaten by officers of the law and yet you made no complaint to anyone in authority?�
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  “If that’s a question, I think it’s a little naïve.”

  Judge March smiled wisely and sourly.

  “How much did you get paid for recovering the jewelry, Bartells?”

  “I would prefer not to answer that question. I report that to the Bureau of Internal Revenue. I don’t think it is anyone’s business.”

  “That’s all, Bartells. Thank you.”

  The gaunt man said, “With your permission, I would like Mr. Bartells to remain here for the demonstration. He may be able to give us advice on the preparation of the warrants.”

  March nodded and I took a seat over at the side. The gaunt man opened the outer door and nodded. Two serious young men came in. One was the weather-conscious redhead. He went to the table and placed four dollar bills flat against the table at roughly three-foot intervals. The second young man stood waiting, wearing and carrying a man-from-Mars gizmo that looked faintly familiar to me.

  The gaunt man said, “With the co-operation of the bank, and the cyclotron technicians at the university, a lead box containing radioactive material was taken to the basement of the bank. The money paid to the thieves by Mr. Bartells was placed in the box and bombarded for a three-hour period, thus imparting to it radioactivity that will last for a period of from two to three weeks. One of those four dollars on the table was also rendered radioactive. Do not move back away from it. It is a low radioactivity, harmless to humans. The young man is carrying a Geiger counter. Watch him carefully.”

  The room was so still that everyone could clearly hear the intermittent clicking of the counter. As the young man neared the table the thing began to click more frequently. He held it over the bills and the clicks came so fast that there seemed to be no interval between them. He held it close to one bill and then to the second. But when he held it over the third bill, the clicking merged into a roar. He backed away and the clicking died down immediately.