The Corpse in the Cabana Read online

  The Corpse in the Cabana

  Lawrence Lariar

  CHAPTER 1

  5:25 P.M.

  For a while it was a quiet day for me … I rested my tail on the broad terrace of the new Glades Beach Club, admiring a trio of wrens who were testing the pool. There was a tall blonde on the high board who bounced and bumped in the graceful preliminary to the final plunge, a fancy flip that carried her up and out against the evening sky. Then she came down in a slick finish, gently splashing as she cut the water.

  “That was terrific, Jean …”

  “I’ll bet you say that to all the girl divers, Chuck …”

  “Lines, comedy lines …”

  For a while I considered joining Chuck and his girl at the pool-side. But my natural instincts held my butt in the soft chair. It was good to rest and watch. It was good to close my eyes and inhale the salted air from over the Atlantic, to forget my gut-buckling trade in New York. I felt like a fictional dick, the type of investigator who visits the glamor dumps, who sips the fancy drinks and meets the fancy people. A few days of this kind of ease and maybe I could forget the humdrum realities of private investigation in the big town, the twenty-five-buck-a-day fees and the padded expense accounts, the oh-so-interesting hunt for a crummy husband on the lam from a nagging wife and three stupid kids, the divorce routines, the skip-trace assignments.

  For a while I closed my eyes against everything, content to grab a few minutes of shut-eye before the big carnival to come. And when I awoke there was a lemon moon edging over the horizon. The wind shifted, freshened; whipped cooler and saltier from over the white-capped surf. Today this stretch of beach had been closed. But tomorrow The Glades Beach Club would be a news item, a big deal on the entertainment page. They would be yakking and yelping about how well comedian Chuck Bond did with his first-night audience. And tomorrow the resident members from the surrounding area would invade the antiseptic sands. The sun-baked parade of femininity would stroll the beach, preened and primped under the hot sun.

  For a while I meditated and listened. Then there was a stirring behind me, the buzz and hum of diners’ voices, filtering through to me from the club restaurant. A covey of oval lights flicked on in the ceiling. A rhumba band beat out the contagious rhythm of Ziggi’s Latin music.

  I showered and dressed and went in there to the table Chuck Bond had reserved for me. I waved to Ziggi and he gave me his commercial smile, his moon face alert to the swaying couples, bumping and grinding, sliding and stepping. I ordered a drink and watched the cha-cha-cha panorama, the men slick and smooth in formal evening rigs, the women still showing too much of their tanned torsos by way of artfully contrived necklines …

  For a while, sitting under the soft lights, the tall iced drinks pleased my gut. The place was full to overflowing with celebrities out of the never-never land of show business, big business and monkey business. The women seemed dedicated to glamor, a bevy of beauties vying for the sudden flash of the press cameras, preening and posing and knocking themselves out for the catch-penny chance of free publicity and a two-column shot in the tabloids. I made sly faces at a girl nearby, and she returned my glance with enough come-hither to get me up out of my chair, my tail in the air and about to step her way …

  But at that moment it all began.

  I sat down, quick and hard. The man who put the skids under my purpose was hot with trouble. You can read bad news easily on a face like Chuck Bond’s. Chuck had the kisser of a clown, the wide-open, honest, boyish smile of the natural buffoon. But right now the buffoon was worried. It was deeper, heavier than the tension that brought him into my office yesterday. He had begged me to come out here and do him a great service. He was worried about a stray rumor that had been circulating in the theatrical air between Forty-Second Street and the uptown agents. People were saying that he would be cut wide open by Herschel Saxon, the maggoty publisher of the nation’s leading scandal magazine. It had happened to others in the recent past, all kinds of performers. A few of them had found a way to kill the ratty yarns before they saw print. But for the, rest, they were forced to sit around like convicted beef waiting for the slaughterer’s final stab. To prevent this type of reputation mayhem, certain private eyes were growing suddenly fat. For me, however, this would be the first flight into the never-never land of scandal snooping. I had promised Chuck to do my best. I would promise Chuck anything he asked, out of my sentimental memories of his boyhood.

  And right now he was killing me with his sad pan. He breathed hard as he held me at the table, a frantic hand on my arm, digging in.

  “What happened?” I asked. He was shaking, really shaking. “You want a drink?”

  “No time,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “And just when I was beginning to come alive. That little gal over there, Chuck …”

  “Later,” he said, on his feet and starting away.

  We threaded through the crowded tables, the customers turning to gape at Chuck. He was the big star tonight, the emcee who would make the dump bounce later on when the show began. Opening night at The Glades was always something for the gossip boys. Tonight they were all here, slurping the free liquor, making with the uptown talk, waiting, like bored dogs, for the big, juicy bone to gnaw over in their columns. Chuck was grabbed by many on the way out to the terrace. He shook them off, gently but firmly. He was in need of fresh air and confidential talk.

  Outside, he led me into the shadows of the cabanas. Chuck cased the surrounding area, his head on a nervous hinge. Then he pulled me deeper into the shadows.

  “In my cabana,” he began. Sweat pearled his forehead,

  “A good tune title, Chuck. How about the lyrics?”

  “God, quit with the gags, Steve.” There was more than impatience in his voice. This was the little boy again, frightened and stiff with it. This was the Chuck Bond of a long time ago, when his brother and I got him off the teenage delinquency rap back in Flatbush. Sheer terror made his face a mask of pain. It was hurting him, hurting bad. “I’m in trouble,” he said, his voice as high as one of Ziggi’s flutes. “In my cabana …”

  “You said that before. Inhale deep and finish the sentence, will you?” I took hold of him and held him until the trembling faded and died. My pressure worked to calm him a bit. He shook off the last twitch of fright and mopped his brow and took a deep breath.

  And then he said: “Gloria Clark. She’s in my cabana—dead.”

  “Since when?”

  “I found her there about fifteen minutes ago. She’d been knifed.”

  “What kind of knife?”

  “A kitchen knife, I think … I didn’t stay to examine it, Steve.” The words, once released, rushed from him in pretty much the way he mouthed his comedy patter on stage. It was Chuck’s stock in trade to sling the sharp and crackling banter, rip off the jokes, a little like Bob Hope, but funnier. “I went back to my dressing room. I forgot some of those prop cigars I use in the act. I also needed a little shot for my nerves, and I wanted to take it alone. So I ducked back to the cabana. I found her on my bed.”

  “You didn’t leave her there?”

  “She never came to my cabana,” he said. “Never.”

  “Why would she visit you today?”

  “I wish we could ask her.”

  The last half of his monologue came from behind me. I was running to the easterly section of The Glades, the part reserved for employees and show people. The cabanas back here were isolated, cut off from the main group by a low cherry-sapling fence. Beyond the fence, only an occasional blue light lit the outdoors. The line of cabanas ran close to the edge of t
he patio near the dining hall, a row of small houses hidden by the dunes. Back here, the music was washed out by the wind. Back here it was quiet. Deadly quiet.

  Chuck led me to his cabana, opened the door, flipped on the light without entering. He stood behind me, gawking as I leaned over the beautiful corpse.

  “Better come in,” I suggested. “If anybody takes a gander at this stiff, we’ll draw better than your opening night show.”

  He stepped in behind me, closing the door. What he saw made him go whiter than ever. He tried to hold his eyes on the bloody figure. He failed, skipping to the bathroom, where his retching lasted for quite a while.

  I bounced around on the bed, studying the body. She was nude as a plucked chicken—and twice as cold. Her body, hour-glass and provocative, seemed only sprawled in an attitude of rest, a girl asleep on a beach-blanket, a pretty sun-bather, resting between dunks. Against the white bedspread, her figure seemed strangely alive. Only her bloody back ruined the staging.

  And the knife?

  “The knife?” I asked Chuck, through the bathroom door.

  “Aaaagh,” he said. “What about it, Steve?”

  “Where is it?”

  “It was—it was—in her back.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Please,” he said, his voice dropping into the panic of recent memory. “How in Hell could I make a mistake on a thing like that?”

  “Happens. People see crazy when they’re in shock. You were in shock. You’re still in shock, Chuck. Come on out of there and start facing reality.”

  He came out, making a brave try at focusing on the girl. After a pause he managed it. I watched him carefully, measuring his reaction. For the past three years he had entered a new trade. He was show-business now. He was no longer the little boy I once knew, Jim Bond’s kid brother. In three years a smart character can learn the stock routines of acting, master the reactions, put on a permanent show for his intimates. Was Chuck that kind of ham? Could it be possible that he might con me, trick me; use me for a patsy? He was working a cigarette in his mouth, rolling it nervously as he gazed down at the girl. His match hand came up, trembling. He made a gallant stab at the end of the cigarette. He missed. Corny histrionics? A stage routine?

  I went over to him and grabbed him by the lapels.

  “Listen, Chuck,” I said. “I’ve got one big question for you.”

  “I didn’t kill her, Steve!” He looked mad. But he was still trembling. “You don’t believe me?”

  “This is the time to tell me, if you killed her.”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “You were nuts about her. You told me so.”

  “That was last week, Steve. I’ll admit I was nuts about her then. Who wouldn’t be? All the boys were anxious to nudge her into the hay.”

  “All? Who?”

  “Almost everybody,” Chuck said nervously. “God, all the musicians, all the single ones. And Pazow.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “Visitors,” he said. “Some I didn’t know. Gloria was fireworks, every minute.”

  “What cooled her off about you?”

  “I was never even close.” He lowered his eyes, his schoolboy eyes. It embarrassed him to confess his failure. “She thought I was too young.”

  “Not in the beginning? She dated you in the beginning?”

  “Lots of times. We used to drink. We used to have long talks.”

  “And then it stopped, suddenly?”

  “It was Ziggi,” he said. “She went for Ziggi. After he made his play, everybody else faded for her.”

  It figured. Gloria Clark had made the big time by way of the mattress route. She was fruit for the newsmen, always hot copy, always messing with big money boys. In the beginning you caught her as the coy model with the ingénue body and head to match. The photogs plastered her pretty puss on everything from Vogue to The Plumbers’ Gazette. Gloria Clark got the highest rates, worked casually for dress money, loaded her wardrobe at Dior’s and Fath and had her chassis inked and printed in every periodical on earth, including Pravda. (Gloria Clark Shown Wearing a Capitalist Bikini, Surrounded by Society Playboys Who Feed off the Sweat of American Workers!)

  She graduated to television next, her wit earning her a permanent seat on the panel of a network quiz show. This joust with the public ended when she was discovered rehearsing with the quizmaster under a satin sheet in an uptown hostelry. The burst of publicity after this peccadillo landed her back in the night club set, where she soon snagged several rich partners for further madcap adventures. She hit the jackpot with a Latin guy named Julio Habiroso, who held her captive in an Antibes chateau until the French police jerked him away to Gallic limbo. Gloria returned to New York, unshaken and undressed, to ply her trade among the local gentry as a featured singer with a fairly popular name band. She had a peculiar voice, one half larynx, one half laryngitis. But the hoarse and sexy pitch charmed the miasmic music lovers who heard her and liked her between shots of rye. She proved herself a definite saloon personality, working her wiles on managers and public alike. Her name soon drew crowds and she could have gone upward to higher salaries and the impresario beds, if her temperament had been normal.

  Gloria arrived at The Glades as a stellar singing attraction, a woman pursued by a variety of lecherous lovers. The addition of Chuck Bond to her roster must have struck her as low comedy. She would have brushed him off with the boredom of a barber brushing dandruff.

  “I saw one of her old boy friends inside,” I said. “Max Orlik. Know him?”

  “The fat bundle? I met him before dinner.”

  “She was still seeing him?”

  “Gloria never talked shop with me.”

  “But she had someone? Someone to share her little secrets?”

  “There’s this girl, Mari Beranville,” Chuck said. “She and Gloria split the freight on their New York apartment. Mari’s an actress, the heavy type, you know, dramatic stuff. She’s rehearsing in a show over across the Island, an O’Neill gismo. You’ve probably seen her on T.V. She’s in the club tonight, here to see Gloria open. They came out together.”

  “Tell me more.” He kept his mouth flapping, unloosening all his memories of Gloria out of the recent past, while I continued to tap dance my way around the cabana. It was a professional habit, a routine I learned long ago when every case gave me stomach trouble. In the recent past all this was stale and dull for me, the searching; the prying. You play Dirty Dick for a while and you learn all the bad habits, wetting your nose in the slime of the chase, poking and prodding where no nose should ever prod. Gloria’s body was a challenge. I detoured around it, standing back to measure it, to file away anything that rose up to hit me. Nothing rose.

  Until I happened to touch her hair.

  It was the sheen of it that attracted me—highlighted and damp looking, like one of the cosmetic girls on a wide screen commercial.

  “Funny,” I said. “Her hair’s wet.”

  “What’s so funny?”

  “She was knifed after a shower.” He followed me into the cubicle for showering. It was typical of all cabana layouts, half of the roof open to the air, a tinned closet on a concrete floor, a round spray fixture, a towel, and nothing more. I got down on my knees, sniffing the outlet pipe. There was the stale, stupid smell of old water on steel. I climbed in one jerky leap to the roof of the cabana, standing up there like a foolish weathervane, staring up and down the rooftops. A person could enjoy himself up here on a hot afternoon. A Peeping Tom could snoop all the way along the line, catching the bare and intimate details of his neighbors.

  “Ever been up here?” I asked Chuck. “Nice view.”

  “No gags,” he said. “Listen, Steve. What do I do now?”

  “Call the local police.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “What else? You want to
bury her, maybe?”

  “Jokes,” he said angrily, turning on me. “Don’t you realize what this will do to me, Steve? I’m finished, cooked, if this ever gets out. People will read about it and draw their own conclusions. People will call me a murderer because she was found dead in my cabana. The newsboys will hop on me and butcher me with their stories. I’ll be opening and closing on the same night.”

  He was right, of course. The reporters would grab this story like a cat grabs mackerel. They would find the dossier on Chuck Bond in the news morgues, the whole sticky story of his youth in Brooklyn. Chuck had made headlines in the old Brooklyn Eagle. Chuck came out of a family background of neglect and unhappiness, a case history for the psychiatric workers in juvenile delinquency. He had been raised by his father, an old lush who spent all his time in the bars on Flatbush Avenue. Chuck was left to shift for himself as an adolescent. It followed naturally that he roamed the dark alleys of Brooklyn in search of companionship, in search of some small crumbs of security. He began to slide in his studies at Erasmus Hall High School. He began to prefer the dank pool halls, the gang hangouts; the cellar headquarters of a group of young goniffs who called themselves “The Kings Highway Kings.”

  Who can measure the emotional needs of kids? The egghead psychiatrists work overtime to understand the reason for adolescent wolf-packs, marauding gangs of boys who yearn only for robbery, rape and mayhem. “The Kings Highway Kings” roamed the streets of Flatbush and Chuck Bond became one of the tribesmen. There were cases of clever robbery, prowling and pilfering in the upper middle-class sections of Albemarle Road and Prospect Park. “The Kings Highway Kings” operated with adult skill. The bunch of young punks managed to avoid the local cops. They reveled in their cunning. They mocked the authorities.

  Until the first big mistake.

  There was a garage attendant who spotted two of the young hoods when they stuck up his gas station. His pumps were too close to the high school. He had an active memory of the student body, could identify Chuck Bond and his henchman easily.