The Bamboo Blonde. Dorothy B. Hughes
sand.
Kew finally smiled. “There goes our swim. I’d better run along.”
“Not at all. Not at all.” Con finished crossing the room, drained his half-filled glass. “I told him we’d be out on the beach and to holler when he arrived.”
2
Captain Charles Thusby was fuzzy bald and porpoise fat. His right leg was wooden. It was not disguised by modern craft but a delightful replica of the kind pirates wore in childhood story books. He should have been dressed as a seaman; he was instead excessively official in his policeman’s blue serge and gold buttons.
He stood on their cat-walk and hollered, “I’m here, Satterlee.”
Con yelled back, “Be with you right away.” He didn’t seem nervous but then he wouldn’t be. He enjoyed scrapes. To him, obviously, this business was no more than one. But to Griselda it was frightening. Her teeth clicked, and Kew said, “I’ll go along.”
“Nothing doing.” Con put a wet arm around Kew’s shoulders. He was overdoing friendliness today. “Come up and have a snort to warm you up. Besides you ought to meet the folks.”
The captain was in the easiest chair when they dripped in. On the couch in policeman’s uniform was an extra-gangly, long-faced lad eating peanuts, putting the shells neatly into his upturned cap. The chief said, “I’m Cap’n Thusby. This is Vinnie. Brought him along to drive the car. I don’t drive. No, nothing to do with the leg, ma’am.”
She had inadvertently glanced at it and it did look exactly like Long John Silver’s.
“Never could learn. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” His face regarded his leg with creased pleasure. “Shark took it off down around Hatteras. Neat as a whistle.”
Vinnie said, “Now, Pa,” but the captain disregarded him.
“Wasn’t much older’n Vinnie here when it happened.” His face was smiles but his faded denim eyes were sharp as an aching tooth. “Which one’s Satterlee?”
“I am.” Con touched Kew’s shoulder. “This is Kew Brent. You’ve heard of him.”
“Heard of both of you.” He rubbed up his curly halo.
“And my wife, Mrs. Satterlee.”
Griselda acknowledged the introduction and said, “I’m freezing. I must get into something warm.” She knew that she must before her teeth chattered out loud. It wasn’t only from the wet bathing suit.
She heard Kew say as she went toward the bedroom, “And I’ll have to run along. I’ll take that drink another time.” He was determined now, making his gracious good-byes. She could hear Thusby as the outer door closed. “Now about this murder, Mr. Satterlee,” and she went swiftly into the bathroom beyond to rough herself warm with a towel. She did it quickly; the voices were silenced in this room, and she was trembling with anxiety. Con’s prints were on that gun. The police couldn’t know it yet they’d come already to him. For him? She dressed rapidly, pullover beige sweater, brown wool slacks. But she took time to open Con’s drawer and wad handkerchiefs over and around the shells.
Con was telling his story, “. . . and I didn’t even know her name until I read it in the paper this morning. I simply offered to give her a lift and when she changed her mind about going to this Seafood place I brought her back to town.”
He wasn’t telling all of it. Griselda emerged to sit quietly beside him, between him and Vinnie.
“Mighty funny,” Captain Thusby was saying.
“Yes, it was,” Con agreed. “She didn’t give any reason for it. Of course she’d been drinking.”
Thusby asked, “Did she have a gun then, Mr. Satterlee?”
Now it was coming. Griselda waited, hands unclenched but tight as guitar strings.
“That’s strange. Why do you ask?”
Thusby said, “On account of her being killed by her own gun. Or at least one she’d brought with her from Hollywood. And so far as anyone knows she hadn’t been back to the apartment after you let her out. Where’d you say you let her out?”
Griselda wanted to warn Con to be careful. She was being absurd; he was always aware. You couldn’t trap Con.
He said now, “I didn’t say, Cap’n. But I can tell you. It was on Ocean by that park.”
“Bixby Park,” Vinnie supplied and flushed at the unexpected sound of his own voice. It was a tenor toot compared to his father’s foggy horn. He put another peanut between his teeth.
“East or west end? Junipero or Cherry?”
Con figured it out. “The Belmont side. That’d be east.”
Thusby nodded. “Junipero.”
Vinnie wasn’t as startled this time. “She was found on the Cherry side, Pa.”
“I know it,” Thusby said placidly. He was as garrulous as the son wasn’t. “This kid, Tip Thenker, has been squirting sodas up a ways on Cherry at a drug store. He goes to college.” That evidently impressed Thusby. “He and a friend were on their way home, going to cut across the park, when they saw her foot there in the shadow under one of those fat palm trees. It sure scared those kids.” He chortled and then his eyes fixed. “They ought to been scared. It’s a wonder they weren’t mowed down too. Whoever killed her couldn’t have been far away. The blood was still running.”
Griselda asked, “What time was this, Captain Thusby?”
“About one-thirty, ma’am. One-thirty-three when they called us. And they didn’t waste no time doing it.” He chortled again.
Con was safe. Even with his fingerprints he was safe. He’d been home by midnight. But she didn’t know how long the blood would run. And he’d gone out again; where, he didn’t say. She moved closer to him. “How did you happen to come to talk to my husband about it?” She didn’t want them to get back to the gun.
He was very polite. “Trying to trace what she was doing last night, ma’am. She left the Bamboo Bar with him. Mr. Alexander Smithery told us that.”
“Chang,” Con informed her, and explained, “I call him Chang.”
Thusby came in again. “Where was that place you stopped?”
“I couldn’t tell you the name,” Con repeated. “On the way to Seal Beach. Ed’s or Ray’s or Andy’s–something like that.”
Griselda inserted, “He was at home by midnight.” She wouldn’t even think of his being called out later.
Both of the Thusbys took that in silence, and the father asked again, “Now about that gun?”
“She had one, yes,” Con admitted. Griselda tightened. “Are you sure she was murdered?”
“Sure,” Thusby stated. “Why?”
“Because she was going to kill herself last night.”
Griselda hadn’t been mistaken in the captain’s eyes. They could snap like mouse-traps. They did. And then he was mild again. “Well, she couldn’t have, Mr. Satterlee. You don’t shoot yourself through the back. Can’t be done.”
Con lit a cigarette easily. “Who identified her?”
“Her cousin. There was a porter first said he thought it was this girl visiting in his apartment house and turned out he was right. We got hold of the cousin and she finished up the identification for us.”
Con let out three perfect smoke rings. “I’m an old newspaperman, Cap’n, and sometimes I get kind of wondering about things.” He drew in smoke again. “Why